Band of Thebes

Sordid Truths by Aiden Shaw

So there you are in the showers at your gym, after your workout, simultaneously exhausted and energized, and in walks a handsome hardbody positioning himself under the spigot next to yours. That first impression wasn't wrong: He's hot. Beautiful backside. Lean muscle, great face, killer mouth. You're human, when he turns, you look: He's endowed like Harvard. ($35 billion.) Better still, he seems actually friendly. And frisky. All systems say go, yet in these perilous times, that one crucial question hovers over the mating dance: But can he write?

In the case of porn star Aiden Shaw the answer is, Fuck yes. Dubbed by inferior wordsmiths "The Brit with the Big Dick," the London native turned California adult film sensation penned a collection of poems and three novels in his thirties, Brutal, Boundaries, and Wasted. In 2006, when he turned forty, Shaw earned a Masters degree in creative writing and published his first memoir, My Undoing. Apparently that book covers eight years in his porn career, but not sidestepping his Irish Catholic family, his unfulfilling relationships, and his HIV+ status in a sex industry.

Published this month, his new memoir, Sordid Truths, starts earlier and goes longer. I read three chapters and really liked it. Shaw knows about pace and timing, withholding and delivering. And he understands people. Even while dazzling his clients working as an escort, he's alert to the complexities of sexual transactions. On his very first outing he has a mercurial john who morphs through many personalities in their brief time together: fussy old man who addresses baby talk questions to his dog throughout sex, mad scientist, Roman emperor, slavish submissive. On his website Shaw offers an excerpt from what he says is his favorite chapter, about a group of teenagers at the YMCA. You can read the escort chapter on Alyson's site. It also includes the preface, which felt like a weak beginning. Skippable, save for the one line from Shaw's "biggest fan" in a San Francisco bar who tells his idol, "It must be kind of weird being you."

Look at his adorably NSFW work with Pierre & Gilles here.

Born November 21,22,23: Christine Vachon, André Gide, Bruce Vilanch

Listen to Bette Midler: "Bruce was the first man to put something in my mouth that made us both money." She and Vilanch began working together in 1970 after she read his Chicago Tribune review of her show saying she needed more jokes. She called him and said, So write me some. The Oscars head writer and New Hollywood Squares star has also created comic material for Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Diana Ross, David Letterman, Billy Crystal, and Whoopi Goldberg. Vilanch has punched up many, many Hollywood scripts, including films that don't immediately seem to bear his razor humor, like Die Hard 2 and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he has acted in Mahogany, Ice Pirates, and The Morning After. He's also starred on Broadway as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, for which he shaved off his signature thirty-year shaggy blond beard, and off Broadway in his own show Almost Famous. He is the subject of the a-list love explosion Get Bruce! and appears in Laughing Matters. Beyond being funny, Vilanch has been a tireless supporter of many aids and gay rights causes.

On December 10, 1947, at City Hall in Stockholm, a Swedish man spoke to France's ambassador about "the venerable master of French literature whose genius has so profoundly influenced our time." Of course, that was André Gide and he was, at seventy-eight, too ill to receive his Nobel Prize for Literature in person. (Read the academy's citation speech here.) The award capped a rollercoaster career that began with the publication of a novella when Gide was twenty-two in 1891, reached successive peaks with The Immoralist (1902), Strait Is the Gate (1909), and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914); plummeted with the publication of Corydon (1920), his nonfiction book in praise of homosexuality'; soared again with his best novel, The Counterfeiters (1925); and immediately shocked certain segments of the public again with his  autobiography, If It Die (1926) with his joyful memories of teenage masturbating under the dining room table with concierge's son or his adult lovemaking with an Arab youth on a sand dune in Algeria. While in North Africa, Gide had also befriended Oscar Wilde. The following year he published Travels in the Congo, his greatly influential attack on French colonialism. That trip marked the end of his eleven year relationship with Marc Allégret, who had eloped with him when he was fifteen or sixteen and Gide was forty-seven. (Allégret's father had been the best man at Gide's never-consummated wedding and wasn't bothered at all by their affair; Gide's wife, however, didn't like being left behind and burned all of his letters in retaliation. Marc Allégret went on to direct more than fifty films.) After spending the war and post-war years in Tunis, Gide returned to Paris where he died in 1951. In 1952, the Catholic church put all of his works on their Index of Forbidden Books.

Where would Todd Haynes be without Christine Vachon? Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, and I'm Not There -- she produced them all. For that matter, where would independent cinema be if the New York native had chosen another career? Forty-seven today, she's produced more than thirty-seven features. A few highlights: Swoon, Go Fish, Kids, Stonewall, Office Killer, I Shot Andy Warhol, Happiness, Boys Don't Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Storytelling, and One Hour Photo; as well as Robert Altman's The Company, John Waters' A Dirty Shame, The Notorious Betty Paige, Infamous, Party Monster, and A Home at the End of the World. As if producing more than three dozen pictures wasn't enough, in her spare time she's written two books about making meaningful movies with no money, Shooting To Kill and A Killer Life. Next year watch for What's Wrong with Virginia, Dustin Lance Black directing his own script with Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, and Emma Roberts.

Stephen McCauley's True Enough Is French Film La Vérité ou Presque

Proving their superior taste, the French adapted Stephen McCauley's novel True Enough into a Karin Viard - François Cluzet film, La vérité ou presque, two years ago. Last year Variety raved, "the wry, sharply observed script offers some zingy dialogue, delectably delivered by the top-flight cast." And, "Entire ensemble cast displays sophisticated comic timing while etching universally recognizable character types and emotional situations. Production and costume design also do a terrific job of establishing character and setting." Ironically the critic's ultimate judgment was that the movie is "a natural for English-language remake." Not to quibble but then Anne, Vincent, and Lyon could revert to Jane, Desmond, and Boston.

The screen above shows the real trailer, in French, while the clip below shows a couple scenes with subtitles. Two more French clips here. Now that you know about it, you can hunt down the French DVD or demand your local film festival procure the subtitled version.

After five wonderful novels, McCauley is hugely revered in literary circles and by smart readers everywhere. I don't know his sales figures but my hunch is that he hasn't yet gained the vast mass audience or major prizes his wise and funny work deserves. (He is altogether better than Nick Hornby, and more comic than Ian McEwan.) Hard as it is to choose a first among equals, True Enough is his best book. This holiday season buy it for yourself and anyone who reads.

Uganda Protests in New York & DC

This afternoon, dozens of demonstrators gathered in New York and DC protesting Uganda's newly introduced bill that would make homosexuality punishable by death. I joined a crowd of about 50 people outside the Uganda Mission to the UN. The terrific spokesperson, Amanda Lugg of the African Services Committee read a strong letter condemning the legislation and, with an IGLHRC colleague, entered the building attempting to deliver the letter to officials. Returning outside, she explained they could only give it to the head of security, a Ugandan man who said he was unaware of the bill and planned to work for aids prevention when he returns to Uganda in two years. My partner and my father were among the 40 protesters outside the Uganda Embassy in DC, a few of whom are pictured below. 

So You Think You Can Chant? The East Coast Battle Is On!

New York: "The bill is illegal! Don't kill gay people!"

Washington: "Defend the Constitution! No gay execution!"

The Times' (UK) Best 100 Books of the Decade

Difficult as it is to take seriously a 100 best list that excludes The Great Fire, Bel Canto, Snow, and Kafka on the Shore, the Times' attempt is notable for its lgbt books:

16. Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture

28. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

29. Ali Smith, The Accidental

42. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

45. Peter Ackroyd, London

46. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

61. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

62. Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

70. Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

If you grew up in the land of Defoe, Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, Wilde, Wells, Woolf, Welch, Waugh, Pym, etc., etc., would you find it odd that the Times of London top fifteen titles of the decade had only one British story, and that was stuck down at number nine?

As it happens, the Telegraph's top 100 has the same title at number nine, so it really must be the ninth best book of the decade, but their only lgbt titles are The Night Watch at #78 and The Line of Beauty at #58. The Telegraph has more UK spirit: Harry Potter is #1, Zadie Smith is #8, and Katie Price, yes that Katie Price, is #6. (So confusing, because Miss Price is #3 on the Times' five worst list.)

Hank Stuever, Augusten Burroughs on the Madness Known as Xmas

If you live outside the Washington Post's delivery zone, you may be unaware of the trenchant cultural analysis of openly gay staff writer and now television critic, two-time Pulitzer finalist Hank Stuever. Your loss. His insights are surpassed only by his vocabulary. Isn't "hinky" the best word ever to describe mainstream media's problems with lgbt coverage? Promoting his new book about how we live now, by looking at the mall-strom if you will of Christmas overload in Frisco, Texas from 2006 to 2008, Stuever gave a typically brainy, funny interview to MetroWeekly. Discussing de-gayed reportage:

"I was on a panel about this once, when the obituary thing was just out of control -- it was Luther Vandross, Susan Sontag, Ismail Merchant. There was a spate of them where the gayness had been left out, for various reasons. I said that the problem with the obituary thing is that we're talking about the ends of people's lives when, really, what we're bad at is covering gay life. The living, not the dead.

"I'm much more worried about how the Post and other mainstream outlets still approach gay with caution. We still haven't learned about just covering everyday gay, except in the food section and the home section. Washington was sort of the closet capital, and still is in a lot of ways. But the people have changed enough that the Post can at least not look completely unaware of the fact that there are lots and lots of influential, interesting and totally newsworthy gay people and gay things going on in town.

"But here's the thing, and I think this transcends media, and I hate saying this: Straight people, they're not so interested in us. They really aren't. And part of it is that to them gay equals a sexual act. The other part of the problem is gay equals not them, therefore not interested. I find this with my extremely enlightened straight friends, they still don't quite have a handle on the best reason for legalizing gay marriage, which is those thousand civil rights that just automatically transfer with a heterosexual marriage license from state to state. It takes some explaining to them to show how ludicrous it is to set up a crazy quilt America where some states have gay marriage and some states don't, because if I get married and then by some misfortune move back home to Oklahoma, my rights don't come with me.

"But broadly, people don't view gay as a culture, they view it as a sex act. And so the Washington Post gets hinky on it, all mainstream media get hinky on it, because they don't know anything about it. All they know is the idea of gay sex still makes them uncomfortable. Well, the idea of straight sex makes me uncomfortable, but there's a lot of it in our newspaper. We will always need our gay media to make sure that the fullest experience is represented."

Two trusted readers swear Stuever's Tinsel is terrific. With three Frisco families as his focal point, he expands his scope to discuss Christmas as our country's largest communal event and explains how the world economy hinges on holiday spending. Quoting one estimate that the nation's total for presents, decorating, and entertaining is $500 billion, he says, "Many of us dream of simple, 'down home' Christmases that involve togetherness, warmth, laughter--de-emphasizing retail purchases. But if too many of us chose to have a less commercial Christmas and cut our spending on gifts to, say, less than $100 overall, the effect on the stock market, global trade, manufacturing, and jobs would be a downward spiral."

Bestselling phenom Augusten Burroughs has just published his sixth book of nonfiction, seven stories called You Better Not Cry. The Kirkus review starts with, "The high priest of mortifying disaster serves up a fine selection of cringe-inducing yuletide fiasco," and ends by declaring, "Another winner from a master of comic timing and poignant reflection." Although PW and Library Journal had some misgivings about the early pieces, all critics are praising the book's final two essays, “The Best and Only Everything” and “Silent Night.” PW says, "In the former, Burroughs remembers a long-ago Christmas spent with a former lover dying of aids and in the latter, which takes place a decade later, he describes dealing not only with a burst water pipe but also feeling ready to celebrate the season with a tree for the first time since the death of his old boyfriend." Many gay readers will have a horrified curiousity about his blackout morning after, waking up naked next to an equally unclothed roly-poly Santa with a "small, World War II-era erection."

Protest Uganda's Gay Death Penalty Bill, Puerto Rico's Gay Murder

Where do you stand on the issue of killing gay men? If you're against it, consider attending two rallies this week. On Thursday, November 19, a large coalition of demonstrators will gather outside the Uganda Mission to the UN in New York and outside the Ugandan embassy in DC to protest the country's horrific proposed anti-gay legislation. Under the law, anyone guilty of "touch[ing] another person with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality" would be imprisoned for life. "Aggravated homosexuality" earns the death penalty.

(Pictured is John Bosco Nyombi a gay Ugandan who escaped to the UK in 2001 and was illegally deported by the British back to Uganda in 2008. A high court overturned his deportation ruling and he is safely back in Britain.)

Thursday, November 19:

Uganda Mission to the UN, 336 East 45th St. 12:30pm

Uganda Embassy 5911 16th Street N.W. Wash, DC 2:00pm

Someone I love, a former member of the president's aids PACHA, released an open letter to Dr. Eric Goosby calling for a halt of aids funding to Uganda.  Only a tiny fraction of the billions we give them goes to actual medicine; a much larger percentage of the budget funds Christianist "abstinence" programs from anti-gay agencies. Andrew Sullivan and Independent Gay Forum picked up the story.

Last Friday in Cayey, Puerto Rico, the body of Jorge Steven López Mercado, 19, was found burned, dismembered, and decapitated. A 26 year-old man with a history of committing domestic abuse has been charged with the murder and is using the gay panic defense. He hired the teenager for sex and says he did not know the victim was male until they got back to his apartment. Inciting further outrage among the local community, the investigating detective told a television reporter, “These type of people, when they enter this lifestyle and go out into the streets know that this could happen.” Thanks to the brand new legislation, the FBI could investigate it as a hate crime.

New Yorkers will hold a candlelight vigil in memory of Jorge Steven López Mercado and in solidarity with the Puerto Rican gay community on Sunday, November 22 at 8:00, possibly at the Christopher Street Piers. Check here later for confirmation of the location.

Rural Leaders: 10 Year-Old Boy, Dolly Parton Support Gay Marriage

Will Phillips, a 10 year-old in West Fork, Arkansas is refusing to swear the Pledge of Allegiance in his fifth grade class because he says the statement "with liberty and justice for all" is a lie, given that gay people can't get married. He explained to a chortling CNN anchor that he has grown up with a lot of gay friends and he believes everyone should be treated equally. Last year, he was in third grade. He skipped fourth. His classmates have responded to his protest by calling him "gaywad." He wants to be a lawyer. His father is supportive, if slightly less poised than his hyper-articulate son.

Dolly Rebecca Parton, a 63 year-old entertainer in Tennessee, responded to Joy Behar's asking if she supported gay marriage with, "I always say, ‘Sure, why can’t they get married? They should suffer like the rest of us do.'" And when informed that Joel Osteen recently said gays were "not God's best work," Dolly hooted. She explained, "I think God made us who we are and how we are and I don't think that if he was a religious person, that he would be judging people." If he was a religious person? Setting aside the big issue of whether Parton has any closet cleaning to do (and ignoring the "gays = dress up, hair, makeup, lighting" tenor of the soprano's and Behar's comments), these are brave stances. As the owner of a family theme park and a family dinner theater in the recession-hit, deep red, religious strongholds of Tennessee and South Carolina, she has much more to lose than to gain by publicly supporting unpopular issues. If only elected officials had a little more Backwoods Barbie in them...

The New York Public Library Acquires Annie Proulx's Papers

The New York Public Library has acquired Annie Proulx's papers, guaranteeing that generations of scholars will be able to see how arguably the most famous gay love story in American literature developed through twenty-one drafts: Bulldust Mountain, Whiskey Mountain, and Swill-Swallow Mountain before she settled on Brokeback. In addition to early versions of her novels (including 3,662 draft pages of her lesbian inclusive, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning The Shipping News) the archive features her correspondence with editors, agents, translators, and screenwriters, as well as her financial statements. Proulx said, "What writer would not be honored to be in the company of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Thoreau, Saul Bellow, Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, Paul Auster and W. H. Auden? To me there is an odd sense of balance that material dealing with some of the most rural landscapes in North America will reside in our major city."

10 Authors, 4 Playwrights Among Out 100

 

Rudnick, Doty, Burd.

Congratulations to Sarah Schulman and Sarah Waters, the only female authors among the fourteen writers honored in this year's Out 100. Alphabetically, the men are Frank Bruni, Nick Burd, Mark Doty, Thomas Glave, Andrew Holleran, Moises Kaufman, Tony Kushner, Arthur Laurents, Vestal McIntyre, Felice Picano, Paul Rudnick, and Edmund White. The rest of the list is okay, though at times it feels like they're playing catch up with people you won't historically connect with 2009: Cyndi Lauper, Ilene Chaiken, Pam Spaulding, Almodóvar, Jónsi, etc. (Photos by Jason Bell)

Glave & McIntyre; Waters.

Roth's Humbling: Lesbian, 40, Falls for Depressed Man, 65

Calling Philip Roth "a writer unable to resist exploring every tired male fantasy," Kathryn Harrison in the NYTBR is only one of many critics to groan at the premise of his new novel, The Humbling, in which a forty year-old lesbian falls in love with a depressed sixty-five year-old man. The protagonist of Roth's 30th book is Simon Axler, a renowned stage actor who fails colossally as Macbeth and Prospero then retreats to his upstate country house, where lonely, frightened, and self-pitying, he entices Pegeen, the lesbian daughter of a family friend, into an affair, complete with a MFF threeway. Tallying the book's many hackneyed details about Pegeen, Harrison says, "You don’t have to be gay to find such stereotyping offensive." She blasts Roth for

"a vision that doesn’t allow a lesbian to be anything more than a collection of clichés. Representing her sexual orientation — as well as her gender, duplicitous daughter of Eve! — Pegeen is amoral, capricious and cruel."

Michiko complains that the brief 140 pages read more like a short story and that Roth is "simply going through the motions of ticking off plot points on a spindly, ill-conceived outline. The women in Simon’s life are all female caricatures, devoid of any nuance or inner life."

In the Guardian, Alex Clark laments

"Roth's perplexing determination to vulgarise his narrative strips The Humbling of its own power: where he seeks to be nuanced, he too frequently appears trite; where he attempts to be brazen, he comes across as pointlessly crude. Sentences that are dismayingly free of Roth's characteristic humour and mischief pile up in a shakily fabular framework but never manage to animate the story's characters nor foreground its larger intentions."

Calling it "one of Roth's weakest novels," Richard Eder notes, "Quite uncharacteristically, Roth advances the question naked, with only the most cursory and contrived situations and characters to try to dress it."

The Wall St. Journal spent an hour talking with Roth, 76. They never mentioned anything about Pegeen's lesbianism. Responding to a question, Roth included one openly gay man in his list of "peers. Don DeLillo. Ed Doctorow. Reynolds Price. Joyce Carol Oates. Toni Morrison." Asked about new writers, he said, "I don't follow what's going on with modern fiction."

I loved American Pastoral and Everyman among other Roth favorites but haven't read The Humbling. If anyone can say whether Pegeen is or isn't his first lgbt character, please comment.

Born November 14: Adolf Brand

When was the world's first gay journal published? Congratulations if you said 113 years ago, in 1896. That's when Adolf Brand, at twenty-two, started Der Eigene in Berlin. Originally cloaked as a journal of "male culture," its content became exclusively gay culture within two years. In 1900, Brand published Elisar von Kupffer's landmark anthology of gay poems, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe In der Weltliteratur, including works from Ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, 19th century Germany, as well as Arab and Japanese texts. Brand and his colleagues were constantly harassed and frequently prosecuted for their articles and photography, but he never backed down. Indeed, the first of his three prison sentences was for having attacked a member of parliament with a dog whip. His second prison term, eighteen months, was for libel, after reporting the affair between the German chancellor Prince von Bülow and the Privy Councilor Max Scheefer. His third prison term was two months, after he was convicted of violating Paragraph 175 for printing "lewd writings" in Der Eigene. The journal lasted thirty-six years. (Compare that with ONE, nineteen years; The Ladder, sixteen years; or 10 Percent magazine, four years.) His life's work destroyed and left in financial ruin, Brand gave up his activism in the 1930s. He spent two years in the German army and married a nurse, Elise Behrendt, who knew he was gay. He and Elise were killed together on February 2, 1945 when an Allied bomb exploded their home.

Scribner Censored Soldiers' Gay Sex in From Here to Eternity

James Jones' manuscript of From Here to Eternity included detailed subplots about young soldiers having sex with gay men for money, but Scribner censored the material in 1951 and has never restored it. In a startling essay posted Wednesday, novelist Kaylie Jones describes her father's feelings about the naturalness of gay life:

"My father believed that homosexuality was as old as mankind itself, and that Achilles, the bravest and most venerated fighter ever described, was gay, and to take a younger lover under your wing was a common practice among the soldiers of the time. He also believed also that homosexuality was a natural condition of men in close quarters, and that it in no way affected a soldier’s capabilities on the battlefield. What would have amazed him is that the discussion still continues to this day, cloaked in the same hypocrisy and silence as it was 60 years ago."

As for his landmark, bestselling novel:

"The original manuscript goes into great detail about what kind of sexual favors soldiers like Maggio [Sinatra in the movie] are willing to provide. The soldiers act as if it’s simply their company that these older men are paying for, but there’s an underlying, secret understanding that many of them will provide sex. Maggio sees nothing wrong with this at all, since it is a means to an end – a way to make quick money so he can go back and hang out with the whores. Maggio never questions his own sexuality. The number of soldiers who can be found hanging out in the gay bars is also staggering; in fact, there are so many of them that the Army launches a (very quiet) investigation. One soldier, Bloom, realizes he enjoys sex with men, and is so terrified and ashamed of being gay and of being called on it, that he commits suicide. The sin and the shame, it seems, are not associated with the act itself or even in getting paid for it, but in whether or not a soldier enjoys it. My father saw the total hypocrisy and ridiculousness of this and Bloom’s death is portrayed as a tragedy, absurd and unnecessary."

Fifty-eight years later, Scribner is long overdue to redress Burroughs Mitchell's expulsions and restore this classic WWII novel to its original, inclusive vision. Let's call on publisher Susan Moldow and editor in chief Nan Graham to re-publish From Here to Eternity in a corrected, sixtieth anniversary edition in 2011.

Wayne Koestenbaum at 192 Books

After eight years in limbo, Wayne Koestenbaum's brilliant musings Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon are back in print, and to celebrate he read to a rapt crowd last night at 192 Books in Chelsea.

Befitting the book's strand-of-pearls structure, he sampled a perfectly rounded passage from a dozen or fifteen chapters with titles like Silent Jackie, Exotic Jackie, Liz vs. Jackie, Jackie and Money, Jackie as Housewife.

The randomness of deconstructed minutiae accumulates to an unorthodox portrait not only of the most famous woman in the world and her power, but inevitably of Koestenbaum himself and his desire, as well as the layers of lost time through which he's sifting.

Begun when she was still alive, the book was originally intended as an act of diplomacy, to explain Jackie the Icon to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis the person. After she died, Koestenbaum turned it into a sixty page poem addressed to her. That directness was liberating and eventually he was able to return the text to prose. He kept many lines of the poetry in tact and says he still sees the palimpsest.

Questioned afterward about camp, he said his book wasn't ironic: Yes, the voice may be gay but it is emphatically American. 

Koestenbaum wore a red tie and red eyeglass frames the same shade as the lips on Warhol's Jackie.

Of 80 "Low Hanging Fruit" LGBT Fixes, White House Has Done 1

A year ago the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force gave the Obama administration a twelve page executive summary of eighty achievable lgbt action items, almost all of which they could implement without Congress. After ten months in office, the administration has done one. (Mike Signorile uncovered the memo and hosted a show about it. Pam has some things to add.)

Balancing the list of the good gay actions the White House hasn't taken, AmericaBlog offers a long list of the anti-gay actions the administration has taken.

On Monday, AmericaBlog launched a DNC boycott called Don't Ask Don't Give. On Tuesday, Barney Frank suggested repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell would be part of the defense budget bill next year. The bloggers see a connection there.

Born November 12: Roland Barthes

Who, in the mid-1950s, but a closeted, chain-smoking, French homosexual intellectual could look at the Abbé Pierre’s haircut and spark an essay on how personality-driven charity prevented people from seeing the root causes of poverty? Roland Barthes was among the first to bridge high and low culture, showing that absolutely anything anywhere could become a text for him to parse. In his canonical book Mythologies he closely “read” the nuances of topics as varied as wrestling, Einstein, the new Citroën, photography, toys, movies, wine vs. milk, soap vs. detergent, literature, and Garbo’s face. Because he saw so much in everyday objects, French companies tried to hire him to predict consumers’ reactions, work he flirted with then avoided. Among his seventeen books, the most praised are S/Z, his intricate study of Sarrasine by Balzac; Camera Lucida, a study of photography launched by the significance of a single photo of his beloved mother; and his essay “The Death of the Author,” about the irrelevance of writers to their work. After leaving a luncheon given by Francois Mitterrand in February 1980, Barthes was struck by a laundry truck and died one month later, age 64. Published posthumously, Incidents ruefully describes his amorous (mis)adventures with men throughout Europe and Morocco.

The Danish Girl Now Starring Kidman and Paltrow as MTF and Wife

Readers of David Ebershoff's first novel The Danish Girl will be the luckiest members of the audience when the film adaptation is released in 2011. They will already have absorbed the true story of Einar Wegener, a Danish artist who in 1930-31 became the world's first man medically transformed into a woman, Lile Elbe. PW said of Ebershoff's book, "That it comes off triumphantly is a tribute to his taste and restraint and to the highly empathetic quality of his imagination." Although the project was originally announced with Anand Tucker (Hilary and Jackie, Shopgirl), now the movie will be directed by Tomas Alfredson who rocked everyone with his Let the Right One In. The other change is worse: Charlize Theron has been replaced by Gwyneth Paltrow as Greta, the wife. Why couldn't it be Emanuelle Devos, Emmanuelle Béart, or Samantha Morton? Or even Naomi Watts here? Kidman will play Einar.

Veterans Day 2009: DADT To Be History by Veterans Day 2010?

This statue of two naked men illustrating "military instruction" brightens the park across the street from the White House. Barney Frank now says Don't Ask Don't Tell will be repealed as part of the 2011 defense budget bill which will be approved next fall. He's right in saying the budget is the place to do it, not a separate up or down vote. Repealing DOMA is one hundred times more important.

More "Single" Than Ever: Colin Firth Loses His Gay Lovers

Just like a supergerm, Hollywood's de-gaying of film advertising is mutating more rapidly and successfully than predicted. Tom Ford's trailer for A Single Man has been replaced by the Weinsteins' completely straight version which edits out the names of the actors who play his lovers. Peter Knegt reports:

"The new trailer essentially is altered to suggest the core of the film is the relationship between Colin Firth and Julianne Moore’s characters, even removing from the end of the trailer the names of both Matthew Goode and Nicholas Hoult (who play Firth’s love interests). Moreover, in the first trailer, we see Firth’s character kiss both Goode and Moore, in the second we just get Moore.  There’s also a sequence of shots in the first trailer which crosscuts Firth, who plays a professor in the film, staring into the eyes of both a female student and a male student. In the second, as you might guess, we only get the female (in a telling twist, instead of cutting to the male eyes, the trailer cuts to a quote from Entertainment Weekly saying '[Firth’s] performance is bound to win attention in this year’s Oscar race')."

And then there's the Guccification of Isherwood's classic gay novel: so wrong but so pretty.

Born November 10: Roland Emmerich

Three days from now Roland Emmerich's eighth movie 2012 opens and by next week he'll have grossed $1 billion in domestic ticket sales. Already his over the top popcorn spectaculars have taken in $2.46 billion worldwide, making him the eighteenth most successful director of all time. Nobody brings the wow like Roland. The fifty-four year old was born in Stuttgart and, with his sister Ute, runs Centropolis Entertainment, responsible for Stargate, Godzilla, The Patriot, The Day After Tomorrow, and 10,000 BC. He also co-wrote, co-produced, and directed Independence Day, which Hollywood considers the gold standard of contemporary disaster flicks (at one point it was the number two highest grossing film of all time) but which you think of as Harvey Fierstein's widest exposure. (Until he was killed by the Empire State Building toppling onto him. Alas.) Emmerich says he has witnessed plenty of racism in Hollywood (the studio did NOT want to cast Will Smith; nor did they want an interracial couple in TDAT) but no homophobia. An early Hillary Clinton supporter, he is a big donor to lgbt and anti-global warming causes. If you think his movies are an assault on the senses, take this tour of his 1830 townhouse in Knightsbridge. The bank vault door and the airplane wing furniture are nothing compared to the massive Chinese and Russian propaganda murals, not to mention the life-sized wax pope reading his own obituaries or the middle finger Princess Diana portrait. But, really, watch the 2012 trailer for some bizarrely balletic beauty. 

Brokeback at #17 Is Highest Gay Film on Times' Top 100 of Decade

Long before Prada (#100), Emily Blunt was a teenage lesbian in My Summer of Love (#47).

The film critics at the Times of London have compiled a list of the the best movies of the decade, and though their rankings are screwy they've included a lot of favorites: Yi Yi, The Beat that my Heart Skipped, Amores Perros, In the Mood for Love, City of God, Gomorrah, Downfall, Under the Sand, Mulholland Drive, The Incredibles, The Queen, Casino Royale, and the gay or Almodóvar films below.

17. Brokeback Mountain

22. Far from Heaven

47. My Summer of Love

53. Milk

56. Volver

75. Talk to Her

Obviously, lots of unforgivable, lunatic omissions. (I know, you can't believe ______ isn't here! Or _____ !!) Also, they've decided to be flagrantly provocative with their top five. Don't fall for it.

1. Cache

2. Bourne Supremecy & Bourne Ultimatum

3. No Country for Old Men

4. Grizzly Man

5. Team America: World Police

(Thanks to Brian Mulligan for tipping me to this list, since he knew I had NO IDEA another decade was ending.)

Peter Tatchell on Malcolm X and the Lack of Black LGBT Icons

Blasting the UK's Black History Month for excluding lgbt heroes and de-gaying the few who are mentioned, Peter Tatchell wonders where all the black lgbt icons are. He writes:

"Malcolm X's bisexuality is more than just a question of truth and historical fact. There has never been any black person of similar global prominence and recognition who has been publicly known to be gay or bisexual. Young black lesbian, gay and bisexual people can, like their white counterparts, often feel isolated, guilty and insecure about their sexuality. They could benefit from positive, high-achieving role models, to give them confidence and inspiration. Who better than Malcolm X? He inspired my human rights activism and was a trailblazer in the black freedom struggle. He can inspire other LGBT people too.

"Right now, there is not a single living black person who is a worldwide household name and who is also openly gay. That's why the issue of Malcolm X's sexuality is so important. Having an internationally renowned gay or bisexual black icon would do much to help challenge homophobia, especially in the black communities and particularly in Africa and the Caribbean where homosexuality and bisexuality are often dismissed as a 'white man's disease.' "

Malcolm X might be a complicated choice for bi pride because all evidence suggests he never again had sex with men after joining Nation of Islam and getting married. Tatchell argues, "Abstaining from gay sex after his marriage does not change the fundamentals of his sexual orientation." Current Nation of Islam leaders angrily disagree. 

Do you notice anything odd about Tatchell's list of black lgbt people? Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, Luther Vandross, Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes, Johnny Mathis, Alice Walker, Bayard Rustin, Ma Rainey, Alvin Ailey, Josephine Baker, Greg Louganis, Little Richard, Angela Davis, Tracy Chapman, and RuPaul? Every one of them is American.

Born November 9: Anthony Asquith

Everyone knows that Anthony Asquith's father was Prime Minister during WWI but remember too that years earlier he was the Home Secretary who signed the "gross indecency" arrest warrant against Oscar Wilde, so it's lovely, isn't it, that his youngest son should be gay and best known for directing Pygmalion and The Importance of Being Earnest. After graduating from Oxford, Anthony went to Hollywood not to struggle but to live in high style as a houseguest of Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. for six months. Later, back in London, he directed his first feature, a romance called Shooting Stars set among actors at a movie studio. That success launched a career spanning forty films, including three Shaw adaptations and ten collaborations with Terence Rattigan, among them French Without Tears, The Winslow Boy, and The Browning Version. Asquith was at ease in many genres -- war movies, comedies, costume dramas, thrillers -- and directed actors as diverse as Leslie Howard, Laurence Olivier, Michael Redgrave, John Mills, Dirk Bogarde, Rex Harrison, and Richard Burton. Closeted but not shrinking, he was widely believed to be the man in the mask at the orgy in the Profumo affair. That person's "theatrical display of masochism" crystallized the public's notion of the Empire in decay and a government run by degenerates... basically, the gross indecency trial of its day. He remained president of the film technicians union from 1937 to his death from cancer in 1968. The British Academy Award for best music is named in his honor.

Sarah Waters Beats Dustin 'Milk' Black for Stonewall Writer of the Year

Last night the UK's leading gay rights group Stonewall presented their annual awards, naming Sarah Waters "Writer of the Year" for her straight novel The Little Stranger. It's her third consecutive Man Booker finalist. She beat Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black and Geraldine Bedell, Paul O'Grady, and Nicholas de Jongh. In sports, motorbike star Michael Hill triumphed over the Hot Scots Football Club, the Kings Cross Steelers RFC, world billiards champ Allison Fisher, and soccer coach Hope Powell.

The awards are only in their fourth year and garner major mainstream coverage, more than the multi-city GLAAD ceremonies now in their twenty-first year.

• Hero of the Year - chosen by Stonewall thousands of supporters – Reverend Scott Rennie. The Church of Scotland’s first openly gay minister was inducted in July in the face of shrill opposition from some quarters yet backed by his own Aberdeen congregation.
• Broadcast of the Year – Corrective Rape in South Africa. Samira Ahmed’s special report from Johannesburg focused on a horrific phenomenon emerging in South Africa – the targeting of lesbians for ‘corrective rape’. The judges singled out the report as a ‘shocking piece of television, which cast a light on discrimination suffered by lesbians, all too often overlooked in the media.’
• Entertainer of the Year – Boyzone. The Judges noted the huge influence that boy bands have on young people in particular. Stephen Gateley’s brave decision to come out was an important step and the band made pop history with their video featuring a same-sex couple a year ago.
• Journalist of the Year  – Johann Hari and Joan Bakewell. The judges described Joan Bakewell as ‘an institution, who has supported us for decades.’ Johann Hari was described as ‘a force to be reckoned with. He’s quickly established himself as a leading commentator.’
• Politician of the Year – Ben Bradshaw MP. The first person ever elected as an openly-gay politician to reach Cabinet rank, Ben Bradshaw won and held on to his parliamentary seat in the face of strong homophobic opposition.
• Publication of the Year – g3. The leading free magazine for gay and bisexual women g3 this year celebrated its 100th issue.
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• Stonewall Sports Award – Michael Hill. This year saw Michael achieve a season best of sixth place in the British 125cc Motor biking Championship.
• Writer of the Year – Sarah Waters. For her fifth novel, The Little Stranger , which impressed fans and critics and was short-listed for the 2009 Man Booker prize.
• Stonewall & Barclays Community Group of the Year – Allsorts youth project, based in Brighton. Winner of a £5,000 cheque presented at the ceremony.
• Bigot of the Year – Father John Owen (voted by thousands of Stonewall supporters) and Jan Moir. Father John Owen claimed on BBC One’s The Big Questions that the majority of child abuse was carried out by gay men. Jan Moir became a late entrant to the award, following unprecedented requests from Stonewall supporters prompted by her Daily Mail piece on the death of Stephen Gately.

The Hero, Bigot and Community Group of the Year Awards were voted for by 6,000 Stonewall supporters across Britain. All other categories were chosen by a judging panel including Evan Davis, Sue Perkins and John Amaechi.

Born November 6: Michael Cunningham

Surefire prediction: One of the highlights of 2010 will be Michael Cunningham's sixth novel, Olympia. If you didn't get a chance to read the excerpt in Electric Literature this summer, listen up: knockout. After the brave if wobbly experimentation of Specimen Days, he returns to his bedrock themes of A Home at the End of the World and Flesh and Blood, brotherly love and rivalry, furious mothers, sexual frustration, gay life. Peter and Matthew Harris grow up and grow apart in Milwaukee in the 60s and 70s; one of them is dead by 1982. Luxuriating in his versatility, The Hours author is finishing two screenplays: a slasher flick called Beautiful Girl and the Dusty Springfield biopic starring Nicole Kidman. Fifty-seven today, he's still the best person to see outside Spiritus after the bars have closed.

Last week the Free Press published Mentors, Muses & Monsters: 30 Writers on the People Who Changed Their Lives. Cunningham discusses Virginia Woolf. Other gay contributors are Edmund White, who will transfix you with his account of the monstrous Harold Brodkey; and Alexander Chee, who writes about his teacher Annie Dillard.

The Maid by Sebastian Silva

Why didn't the media crown 2009's Sundance the Year of the Grand Jury Gays? Winning the Grand Jury Dramatic prize was the lesbian-inclusive Precious directed by openly gay Lee Daniels, and the winner of the Grand Jury World Cinema prize was The Maid directed by openly gay Sebastian Silva who co-wrote the screenplay with his ex-boyfriend Pedro Peirano. Precious is very good and fairly inventive but overplays its hand. The Maid is spectacular precisely because its touch is so subtle. Forty-one year old Raquel has spent twenty-three years working for an attractive Chilean family of six. Just as the maid's favorite children are growing up and slipping away from her, their mother wants to ease Raquel's burden by hiring a second maid. Threatened on all sides, Raquel is a passive aggressive volcano straight out of a Claude Chabrol film. She burns through the first two helpers; the third one is utterly different. The movie takes a wonderful, believable turn. And amazingly, through it all, upstairs and downstairs, city and country, age and youth, Silva steers clear of every cliche. If you can handle his careful pace and lack of soundtrack, you'll see a marvel. Slate and The Washington Post gave it perfect scores. IndieWire interviewed Silva last month. Trailer below.

A New Literary History of America

To kill time until Larry Kramer finishes his monumental history The American People (said to be twenty years in the making and ranging from the Stone Age to the present) you can read this just published 1,128 page anthology of over 200 all new essays, A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. Spanning 1507 to 2008, topics cover Spanish explorers, the Salem witch trials, and Jefferson's first inaugural address to Alcoholics Anonymous, Malcolm X, and Maya Lin. Obvious icons get their due: Huck Finn, Henry Ford, Jay Gatsby, Mickey Mouse. Essays on Melville and Henry James avoid their sexuality, but Angus Fletcher does acknowledge the homoeroticism throughout Walt Whitman's work. I read the four gay essays, each of which was particularly smart.

Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams

William J. Mann on Some Like It Hot

Maureen McLane on Adrienne Rich

Sarah Bynum on Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story

Because this is a literary history of America rather than a history of literary America, the absence of Stonewall or Aids is glaring. The ratio of essayists is more balanced but their subjects skew too male. And the index is unhelpful; it's more of a concordance. The entry for "Jews" lists exactly five pages excluding most of the Jewish authors discussed like Saul Bellow. Despite the excellent essays above, there's no entry for lesbian or gay or homosexuality or sexuality. Included, but hard to find.

You can read the editors' introduction here.

Scientific Reminder as Maine Repeals Gay Marriage Law

Plenty of recaps and outrage today. National Geographic brings the facts:

"In general sexual intercourse between married partners expends only 25 to 50 calories, about the energy it takes to walk up two flights of stairs."

Born November 4: J.R. Ackerley

At prep school Joe Ackerley was so extremely good looking he was nicknamed Girlie, and decades later he named the love of his life, his Alsatian, Queenie. So why is his classic book called My Dog Tulip? Because the editors of the magazine that bought first-serial rights worried that Queenie would inspire jokes about Ackerley's homosexuality and they insisted he change her name. Other revisions went the right way. In 1952 (after his parents' deaths) he rewrote and expanded his 1932 memoir Hindoo Holiday to be more open about gay exploits in India.

Earlier he had served in two tours of duty in WWI, including two serious injuries, nearly two years as a prisoner of war, and surviving the death of his older brother who had been their father's favorite. Later, he became editor of the BBC magazine The Listener, where he could promote the works of many nascent gay writers including Auden, Isherwood, Larkin, King, and Spender. 

More out than millions after him, Ackerley pined for a longterm relationship with what he called an Ideal Friend. Failing that, he paid for sexual encounters with young guardsmen, laborers, and sailors. E.M. Forster, who had gotten Acklerley his job in India, told him, "Joe, you must give up looking for gold in coal mines," but it was through one of these rough trade lovers, Freddie Doyle, that Acklerley at 49 inherited Queenie (as Doyle was being sent to prison for burglary). Ackerley tells their story in his only novel, We Think the World of You. An animated film version of My Dog Tulip voiced by Christopher Plummer, Isabella Rossellini, and Lynn Redgrave screened at Toronto this year to strong reviews. Trailer below.

Amazon's Best 100 Books List Lacks LGBT Lives

Unfurling Harry Potter's cloak of invisibility over gay books, Amazon's editors released their list of the best 100 works of 2009 which offers only one title primarily about lgbt lives and that's a biography of the miserably married and closeted John Cheever. At number four is openly genius Colm Tóibín's superb novel Brooklyn, a straight love story set in 1950s Ireland and New York. Steig Larsson's seventh ranked Swedish crime thriller The Girl Who Played with Fire again features Mikael Blomkvist and his ex Lisbeth Salander, who this time has a girlfriend; when she's framed for three murders the media hypes her as a “psychotic lesbian SM Satanist.” In ninth place is David Small's desperately bleak graphic memoir Stitches about his botched vocal chord operation leaving him mute at fourteen under the care of his "tyrannically stingy and excessively scolding" mother, a repressed lesbian, and his doctor father who dosed him with so much radiology it gave him cancer. No doubt some lgbt characters appear in other books, but a first look at the top 100 shows a disturbing lack of titles about openly queer lives.

Amazon's Top Ten Books of 2009:

1. Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
2. Strength in What Remains by Tracy Kidder
3. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel
4. Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín
5. Beautiful Creatures by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl
6. Crazy for the Storm: A Memoir of Survival by Norman Ollstead
7. The Girl Who Played with Fire by Steig Larsson
8. The City & The City by China Mieville
9. Stitches: A Memoir by David Small
10. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind: Creating Currents of Electricity and Hope by William Kamkwamba

Click to see the full top 100 or Amazon's 100 bestselling titles of 2009 (through October).

Born November 2: Luchino Visconti, k.d. lang

Born a count in one of northern Italy's six richest families, Luchino Visconti was adrift until he was thirty, when Coco Chanel decided he should work in movies and got him a job as third assistant director on a film by Jean Renoir. His own debut as a director came after seven years, during which time he learned the trade and dated the photographer Horst. Of his twenty films, most praised are The Leopard, which Twentieth Century Fox butchered in its English version, The Damned, which earned him his first Oscar nomination, The Stranger, based on Camus' classic, Rocco and his Brothers, with its open subplot of the boxing coach who pays young fighters for sex, and Death in Venice, from Thomas Mann's number one ranked novel on Publishing Triangle's list of the 100 best lgbt books. At sixty-nine, Visconti died of a heart attack in Rome, survived by his partner of more than ten years German actor Helmet Berger, who appeared in four of Visconti's films, most notably The Damned and Ludwig. (And here bare.) Berger later took a role on  Dynasty and in 2007 earned a special Teddy for lifetime achievement at the Berlin Film Festival.

Before Melissa, before Ellen, before George Michael, before Adam Lambert, k.d. lang came out way back in 1992. Although that was fairly groundbreaking at the time, her coming out did nothing to hinder the sales of her multi-platinum album Ingenue, nor did it prevent her from winning another Grammy, being made an officer of the Order of Canada, or getting named to VH1's 100 Greatest Women in Rock n Roll and CMT's 40 Greatest Women in Country Music. In fact, she sparked a much angrier backlash in rural areas by supporting an vegetarian campaign called Meat Stinks. From 1997 to 2000 she took a break, fell in love with The Murmurs singer Leisha Hailey, moved to Los Angeles, and came back with her happiest album ever, Invincible Summer, quoting Camus: In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. Three years later she won her fourth Grammy for her collaboration with Tony Bennett and also released an album of covers of songs by Canadian composers. In February 2008 she released Watershed, her first album of original material in eight years.

Peter Knegt on How "Oscar's Gay Tendencies" Are All White

IndieWire's Peter Knegt devotes his new column to A Single Man and how three out gay men could be nominated in this year's best director category: Lee Daniels (Precious), Tom Ford (A Single Man) and Rob Marshall (Nine). Of Daniels he says:

If he gets nominated for best director, it would be much more monumental because he is African-American than it would be because he is openly gay.  And this opens up a completely different can of socially injust worms than this article is prepared to properly contexualize.

But in brief, the 2000s have seen scores of African-Americans take home acting Oscars.  Six wins and seventeen nominations - with a good likelihood of additions coming this year.  In terms of wins, this is more than was received in total prior to this decade. Quite disturbingly, “Precious” would be the first best picture nominee ever directed by an African-American, and Daniels only the second black best director nominee. Gays, on the other hand, have received nearly a dozen best director nominations.  But let’s keep in mind the fact that all of them have been white men. In fact, there have been more nominations for gay men for best director than all non-male and non-white people combined. 

...t’s a complex set of politics to simplify in a sentence, but I think it’s reasonable to suggest that in the Hollywood power hierachy, as long as you’re a white male (and let’s face it, straight-acting), being gay is not as much of a disadvantage as say, being female or black.

A Single Man opens in six weeks. Make sure you've read Isherwood's brief novel before December 11.

Marathon 2009

In Queens, around mile 14, a man standing with his child held a sign saying "Run Like a Fat Kid to a Cupcake." That, and the way gentrified Brooklynites encroached several feet into the narrow street to get a better view were among the day's few low points. The highs were many and frequent, especially the Herricks High School band, the djs in the Bronx and Harlem, the guy handing out bakery cookies leaving Brooklyn, the 10 year-old holding a sign with the red circle and slash cross-out symbol over the word "wall," the people holding the sign that said something like "Nadim Rahjama You Can Still Win This!" at mile nine, the mature gay couple waving a large rainbow flag in Sunset Park, the 24 year-old shirtless twins whom I beat by twelve minutes, and the silence on all five bridges as the only sounds were hundreds of very soft footfalls and the papery shuffle of race numbers. 

Crossing the Queensboro Bridge I passed a man about fifty who had lost one leg below his knee and the other leg mid-thigh. He ran without physical assistance though two guides flanked him. For a different kind of inspiration, you might consider Dean Karnaze's books Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner or his 50/50 about running fifty marathons in fifty consecutive days in each of the fifty states. Or try openly gay Chris Bergland's quotation-filled The Athlete's Way: Sweat and the Biology of Bliss which PW called, "both a comprehensive plan and an encouraging partner for longterm, life- changing fitness goals."

The NYT's main pre-marathon stories this year were runners who cheat and runners who die. Safe to say, the number of lgbt runners out of 43,475 finishers far exceeds those who took illegal shortcuts or had heart attacks, but again we weren't mentioned. Nevertheless, a great day.

The International Friendship Run

Standouts among the thousands of foreign runners in yesterday's International Friendship Run were the dozen or so firefighters from Paris. They all wore these red lycra shorts, which said NYC Marathon 2009 on the front. Distracting. A prince from Holland reminded the crowd that 2009 is the 40th anniversary of the marathon and the 400th anniversary of the Dutch sailing into New Amsterdam Bay.