Band of Thebes

The Best LGBT Books of 2011: 92 Authors Select Their Favorites

Click through for the year's queer finest...

Bill Clegg Redux in Ira Sachs' "Keep the Lights On" at Sundance

Mainstream entertainment gatekeepers allow two gay storylines -- coming out or dying (Beginners combined the two plots and the Academy rewarded Christopher Plummer with an Oscar nom) -- so it's rare to see deep and nuanced portrayals of longterm queer relationships. It's infinitely rarer to get the same gay relationship re-examined by both partners, both of whom are wonderful writers in different media. In 2010, literary agent Bill Clegg published his elegant memoir of self-destruction Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man [Kindle]. His true love is the rush he gets from crack, but on every other page is his steadfast, long-suffering boyfriend, filmmaker "Noah," whom he abandons at Sundance. This week at Sundance, Ira Sachs screened his new feature, Keep the Lights On, about a filmmaker's ten-year relationship with a literary lawyer addicted to crack. Their names aren't Ira and Bill but Erik and Paul. As you'd expect from a writer as complex and subtle as Ira, Erik is no simple saint (he's a sexual compulsive) and critics have complained about his "painful, protracted indecision." Some reviewers faulted the lead acting but praised the characters' genuine love and the film's use of music by Arthur Russell who died of aids in 1992. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir flat-out loved it, calling the movie "an instant landmark in gay cinema, and easily the finest dramatic film I saw at Sundance this year." The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney wrote:

"An additional pleasure of Sachs’ film is its immersive portrait of contemporary New York life, thanks in large part to the gorgeous work of Greek cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis. Without over-aestheticizing the city and turning this into a swoony hipster postcard, the film captures its bars, restaurants, streets, apartment buildings and nightspots with a painterly eye and a seductive tonal range that relies extensively on natural light. And the unfettered ease of the filmmakers in capturing male bodies and physical intimacy shows a freedom that is still rare in American movies." 

Bill Clegg continues his story with a new book due April 12, Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery. Keep the Lights On does not yet have distribution. Sundance gives its awards tomorrow night.

Born January 26: Ellen DeGeneres

Comedian, college dropout after one semester, #1 NYT bestselling author, sitcom star, chat show mogul, record company wannabe, vegan, animal lover, and lesbian wife, Ellen DeGeneres was named the funniest person in America by Showtime way back in 1982 when she was twenty-four. Johnny Carson, a big fan, considered her a girl Bob Newhart, though she also cites Steve Martin and Woody Allen as significant influences. Her sitcom Ellen ran from 1994 to 1998 including her character's history making coming out in The Puppy Episode, seen by a record setting 46 million people. In 2003 she voiced Dory in Finding Nemo, Pixar's most successful movie ever. That September she premiered her talk show, which has become a mega hit, dancing its way to thirty-two Daytime Emmys. During the height of the Prop 8 campaign to rescind gay marriage in California, she wed her wife, Portia De Rossi, fifteen years her junior, and screened this video on her show. Do we still have to hear the lie that stars can't be out, vocal in their support of gay rights, and popular with middle America? Ellen has won five consecutive People's Choice Awards as Favorite Daytime Talk Show Host. In 2007, she hosted the Oscars, earning higher ratings and more viewers than Jon Stewart in 2006 and 2008 and Hugh Jackman in 2009. In 2008, at fifty, she became the face of Maybelline's CoverGirl, in 2010 she was a judge on American Idol and appeared as herself on The Simpsons, and in 2011 Hillary Clinton made her a Special Envoy for Global Aids Awareness. Her new book is Seriously...I'm Kidding [Kindle].

ALA's Over the Rainbow Books: Top Ten LGBT Titles of 2011

Separate from the Stonewall Book Awards, the American Library Association's GLBT Round Table annually honors a few dozen queer titles as "Over the Rainbow Books." This year's Top Ten, after the jump, are eight familiar titles and two surprises: Issy Festing's gay Nagpur novel The Bird Keeper [Kindle] and the coffee table book Shades of Love: Photographs Inspired by the Poems of C. P. Cavafy by Edward Albee, with photos by Dimitris Yeros, translations by David Connolly, and an introduction by John Wood. Two of the ten are graphic books, including Howard Cruse's groundbreaking The Complete Wendel.

Their longlist of 74 books includes fiction by Tove Jansson, Colm Tóibín, Matthew Gallaway, Daniel Allen Cox, Bob Smith, Armistead Maupin, Kathleen Winter, Jameson Currier, Tomas Mournian, and Ralph Sassone. An even greater pleasure is finding the unexpected here too, like Rose Tremain's novel of two pairs of adult siblings in southern France, Trespass [Kindle], Heather Newton's gay North Carolina novel Under the Mercy Trees [Kindle], Tony O'Neill's gay Hollywood noir Sick City [Kindle], J.A. Pitts' present-day Pacific Northwest lesbian Norse magic novel Honeyed Words [Kindle], Vicki Weaver's novel about Billie Girl "raised by two women who are brothers," and Andre Carl Van der Merwe's South African novel set during the Angola Bush War, Moffie [Kindle], from the always-reliable Europa Editions.

Among the list's anthologies and short fiction collections is Alex Jeffers' The Abode of Bliss [Kindle], a ten-story cycle told in the sometimes credible, sometimes forced voice of a Turkish student at Harvard. This is a double leap as Jeffers says he's never been to Turkey, but the heartfelt stories are nicely crafted and generous with details. An authentic queer hyphenate experience is found in West Virginia-born Rahul Mehta's fiction of Indian-Americans, Quarantine [Kindle], one of the list's Top Ten. For the other nine...

Born January 25: Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham

Here is the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf. In April 1937 she participated in a BBC lecture series titled Words Fail Me, giving a talk she called "Craftsmanship." She contemplates using new words in an old language, beginning, "Words, English words, are full of echoes, memories, associations. They've been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing today..."

Born in 1882, she published her first novel at 33 and found her real power at 40, with Jacob's Room. Then came a great burst of creativity: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931). Her collected letters fill six volumes, her diaries five volumes, and half her essays (stopping with 1924) are collected in three books. She wrote a play, two biographies, and she finished two more novels before March 28, 1941. Her London home destroyed in the Blitz, her writing in a lull after finishing her last, believing the Nazis would soon invade the countryside, she felt her mental illness was returning and that this time she would not recover. She drowned herself in the river Ouse at 59. Her body was not found for 21 days.

Where would Hollywood be without perennial favorite Somerset Maugham? Just the list of his work that has been adapted into films three or more times each: The Letter, Rain/Sadie Thompson, The Painted Veil, and Of Human Bondage. Beyond that: Secret Agent, Razor's Egde, The Moon and Sixpence, Up at the Villa, and Being Julia, among dozens of others. Rich and randy, Maugham had an affair with a married woman that led to a baby and, later, at 43 in 1917, a marriage he didn't want and grew to despise. Instead, he loved his secretary Gerald Haxton [right], eighteen years his junior, with whom he traveled the world while his wife Syrie stayed home and decorated Cecil Beaton's flat. After ten years he finally got a very expensive divorce and bought twelve acres in Cap Ferrat, called Villa Mauresque, and created "a kind of discreet sexual nirvana for the literary gay man" and one of the great salons of the 1930s. Haxton died in 1944 and was later replaced by a younger version named Alan Searle, whom Maugham's aging friends disliked and distrusted. In old age, Maugham feuded with his daughter, denied paternity, disowned her, adopted Searle, and changed his will. His daughter sued and won, but Searle got the house and copyrights for 30 years. (One of his daughter's grandchildren is the blind, autistic musical prodigy Derek Paravinci.) The only biography you need is Selina Hastings' fantastic The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham [Kindle], a finalist for the NBCC, LA Times, and Lambda awards. It is gay from page one. Villa Mauresque is now a hotel with rooms from 275 to 1300 euros a night. Tumblr's Matinee Idol offers this pic of the property in happier times:

Stonewall Book Awards: Hoffman, Katz, Bronski

In a surprise choice the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Awards gave its top fiction prize to Sweet Like Sugar [Kindle] by Wayne Hoffman. The novel explores the loving friendship between a 27 year old gay Jewish man and an orthodox rabbi in his 80s.

Nonfiction saw its first tie since 1995, for Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States [Kindle] and Jonathan D. Katz's Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.

Runners up, called Honor Books, in fiction are: Annabel by Kathleen Winter, Remembrance of Things I Forgot by Bob Smith, and the play The Temperamentals by Jon Marans. The nonfiction Honor Books are Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories by Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer, Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender by Nick Krieger, and Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme by Ivan Coyote and Zena Sharman.

The awards committee gave a special Honor prize to The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition by Mr. Oscar Wilde.

Born January 24: Hadrian

Born in Italica, Spain 1,935 years ago today, Publius Aelius Hadrianus became, at 41, the third of the Five Good Roman Emperors, following the death of Trajan who was a cousin of Hadrian's father. Overall, his reign was marked by comparable peace, the exception being the second Roman-Jewish War, after which he remained violent in his Anti-Semitism. Without constant military battles he was able to fortify the empire which stretched from north Africa to northern England and from Portugal to Iraq. Along with the wall that bears his name near the Scottish border, Hadrian oversaw several colossal building projects. Most notable are the Pantheon in its current form (entirely rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original) and what is said to have been the largest temple in the ancient capital, The Temple of Venus and Roma. A great traveler, he rarely saw his wife, vastly preferring the culture of Athens to Rome and the company of young men to women. Of course, his greatest love was Antinous, whom he met at thirteen or fourteen in Turkey. After Antinous drowned in the Nile at nineteen, Hadrian's tributes were unparalleled: He had him deified, founded the city of Antinopolis, commissioned dozens of busts and statues of him, built a temple to him at his villa in Tivoli, and put his likeness on money, the only non-Emperor ever honored with a coin. They were not just friends. The Cult of Antinous was extremely popular with a certain kind of man throughout the empire and flourished until later when it was harshly condemned for being based on an 'immoral relationship' and suppressed by the emerging Catholic church. Hadrian died at 62 without any biological children. In his final year, he adopted for the sake of an heir a 51 year-old named Antoninus Pius.

Regardless of whether or not you think you're interested in the ancient world, read lesbian Marguerite Yourcenar's amazing novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, translated into English by Grace Frick, her partner for forty-two years. The book is so good it made Yourcenar the first woman elected to the Académie Française, founded in 1635.

Hollinghurst, Eugenides Lead NBCC Nominees

The National Book Critics Circle announced their nominees in fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, criticism, and poetry. Winners will be crowned on March 8 in New York at a free, public event.

Teju Cole, Open City

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child

Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia

Please note this list has nothing in common with the NYT five best fiction books of the year, and it overlaps with the National Book Award finalists only on Edith Pearlman.

Other categories after the jump.

ALA Announces 18 YA Book Awards, Stonewall to Bil Wright

Carlos Duarte, the fabulously self-assured gay sixteen year-old star of Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy [Kindle] would love to know he's won the Stonewall Book Award for YA fiction. It's the third novel for young people from Bil Wright, whose musical This One Girl's Story was a GLAAD finalist. Wright has also written a novel for adults called One Foot in Love, a la Terry McMillan and Bebe Moore Campbell.

Stonewall YA Award judges also named four honor titles:

Ilike Merey's a + e 4ever [Kindle]. Graphic novel about a gay, high school pretty boy whose life is changed by a tough teen dyke.

Paul Yee's Money Boy [Kindle]. Comfy suburban immigrant teen gets thrown out and must survive on the streets by hustling.

Lili Wilkinson's Pink [Kindle]. Rad lesbian Ava switches to a new high school and toys with going straight to be popular, until musical theater saves her.

Brian Farrey's with or without you [Kindle] Evan and Davis get beaten up for being gay until they're invited to join the Chasers, a solution that might expose Evan's secret boyfriend.

Today's announcement was one of eighteen Children's/YA awards from the American Library Association. The Newbery went to the novel Dead End in Norvelt [Kindle] by nutty Jack Gantos who named his teen protagonist Jack Gantos. The Caldecott Medal for the year's most distinguished picture book was awarded to Chris Raschka's dog drawings in A Ball for Daisy.

The Alex Awards, honoring ten novels for adults that would be of interest to teen readers, this year include David Levithan's The Lover's Dictionary [Kindle].

Read the full list of winners and runners up in all categories.

Gay Teen Suicides Continue

On New Year's Day, Jeffrey Fehr, 18, [left] hanged himself in the front entrance of his family's house in Sacramento. His father said, "For years and years, people knocked him down for being different. It damaged him. It wore on him. He could never fully believe how wonderful he was, and how many people loved him." Nearly 1,000 attended his funeral.

In October, Eric James Borges' "extremist Christian" family disowned him for being gay. Nineteen, he was a volunteer in suicide prevention with the Trevor Project and in December he made this It Gets Better video. He killed himself in Visalia, California on January 13.

Bullying target Phillip Parker, 14, [right] repeatedly told his grandmother he felt like he had a rock on his chest and he just wanted to take the rock off so he could breathe. He was out to his supportive parents who "reported their concerns over their son's bullying to Gordonsville [Tennessee] High School on multiple occasions, but the bullying by a group of students just got worse." Last week he killed himself.

Last month another Tennessean, Jacob Rogers, 18, [left] committed suicide after enduring years of antigay bullying. A friend from school said, "It was like every day, every class." School officials defended their [in]actions, discussed "rumors of previous bullying," and refused to return a reporter's calls. Emotions running high, a school counselor was kicked out of Jacob's funeral. When he was six, Jacob begged for and received an Easy Bake Oven, and the newspaper speculates that no one was surprised when he came out at 14. Obsessed with Gaga, he shared his clothes with girlfriends. His home life was complicated at best. His mother recently moved out of the state and Jacob struggled with an eating disorder, frequent school absences, alcohol, drugs, poor grades, and trouble with health insurance after he turned 18. He shot himself on December 7.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/01/15/4188596/granite-bay-teen-who-committed.html#storylink=cp

Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein

It figures that the Russian supergenius whose innovations in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Oktober (1927) still dictate how movies are shot and edited today would have no trouble creating private visual diversions for himself in an age before internet porn: He drew sketches of gay sex. Re-entering the U.S. from Mexico in 1932, his drawings were discovered by American customs officials who were not "artistic" and not amused. Eisenstein was a Bolshevik after all, and had been run out of Hollywood on his first visit after a campaign against him by fascist Major Pease (and because Paramount hated his treatment of Dreiser's An American Tragedy). The customs debacle capped off a fifteen-month fiasco that was supposed to have been a four-month shoot to restore his reputation. Post-Paramount, Charlie Chaplin had introduced him to Upton Sinclair whose wife Mary Kimbrough financed the Mexican picture, which Eisenstein began filming without a script or even a concept. Complicating matters further, Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the USSR and therefore claimed rights to the film as it was being made, including the right to censor. Ordered home by Soviet authorities angry that he had overstayed his visa, Eisenstein realized that thus removed and having hugely antagonized the Sinclairs, he would never be allowed to edit his Mexican footage. He suffered a nervous breakdown. Worse was on its way. His next film, Bezhin Meadow, was plagued again by his ill-conceived grandiose schemes (this time to shoot simultaneously adult and children's versions) and by his dictatorial style. Soviet officials hated his movie. Eisenstein endured the horror of having his film destroyed, which was mild compared to the fate of the government's executive producer for film, Boris Shumyatsky, who should have been supervising more closely and was executed by firing squad. Eisenstein did triumph again with a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, famous for its beautiful, majestic build up to battle. He followed it with another success, Ivan the Terrible Part I, only to see his Ivan the Terrible Part II confiscated and Part III destroyed. Although he had two wives, historians say neither marriage was consummated. He wrote in his diaries about his endless infatuations with men. He died of a brain hemorrhage at fifty.

Born January 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose [Kindle]. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression."

Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.

Agent 6

Somewhere between Martin Cruz Smith and John Le Carré is Tom Rob Smith, the gay writer of excellent Cold War thrillers that really ought to be considered novels first and espionage books second. His phenomenal debut, Child 44 [Kindle], was longlisted for the Booker Prize, won several thriller awards, and has been optioned by Ridley Scott. His follow-up, The Secret Speech [Kindle], again featured detective Leo Demidov, but, inevitably, could not duplicate the same level of media frenzy. Two weeks ago, Smith released the third novel in the Demidov series, Agent 6 [Kindle], which is partly set in New York. It earned starred reviews in Kirkus, Booklist, and PW. Smith lives in London with his partner Ben Stephenson, the controller of BBC drama commissioning.

First UK Reviews of W.E.

Today is the UK release of Madonna's autobiographical movie about Wallis Simpson which she co-wrote, directed, and sings the closing credit song named, with typical humility, "Masterpiece." By coincidence, we rented Wallis & David's country house in France the week the movie premiered at Venice and missed the initial onslaught of derision. This is the first I've heard of any gay vaguery.

Telegraph: "a stultifyingly vapid film, festooned with moments of pure aesthetic idiocy." The critic mentions "scenes of Wally ogling Wallis’s riches and resenting her infertile, unfaithful, abusive and possibly homosexual husband."

The Mirror: "an abysmal failure. The dialogue is wooden at best and the performances risible."

The Sun: "A royal letdown... deserves to be sent into exile."

Guardian: "The fantastically wooden drama moves in a deafening series of clunks; setpieces are agonisingly orchestrated, and Madonna's historical perspective is eccentric."

Evening Standard: "In essence, there's no soul to this film, just a feeling that we are being manipulated into agreeing with Madonna's view."

Irish Times: "Wallis is nothing more than one ornament in a series of infuriatingly disconnected tableaux."

NAACP Image Award Noms: Finney, Torres, and Seven for Pariah

Congratulations to out lesbian writer/director Dee Rees whose debut, coming out film Pariah today earned an amazing seven NAACP 43rd Image Awards nominations including Best Picture and Best Independent Film. To compare, studio heavyweights The Help had eight nominations and Jumping the Broom earned six. Rees herself was nominated twice, joining her lead actress, supporting actress, and supporting actor. Rees, 34, grew up in Nashville and told the LAT she came out at 27, so don't assume her movie is entirely autobiographical.

The Image Awards also honor excellence in Television, Music, and Literature. Eight categories for books include forty titles, most exciting of which is lesbian, National Book Award-winner Nikky Finney's Head Off & Split and the Thebes' poll favorite We the Animals [Kindle] by Justin Torres.

151 GLAAD Media Award Nominees

GLAAD today announced their nominees for the 23rd GLAAD Media Awards including heaps of television, movies, print journalism, digital journalism, blogs, comic books, and, oddly, music, but, odder still, not books. Sadly, it's because musicians are celebrities who generate media coverage and authors aren't. This year a mere three films make their wide release category: Albert Nobbs, J. Edgar, and the Golden Globe-winner Beginners [above].

The awards will be presented at three fundraising dinners: New York on March 24, Los Angeles on April 21, and San Francisco on June 2. Their website says, the ceremonies "bring celebrities, corporate partners, media professionals, and young adults together in support of GLAAD’s mission." Turning a gigantic blind eye to the blatant baiting of people mature enough to pay $5,000 a table with the promise of young adults, please review which of the remaining three categories would describe GLAAD co-founder Vito Russo?

Congratulations on well-deserved nominations to blogs Towleroad, Rod 2.0, Bilerico Project, Mombian, and The New Civil Rights Project. I wish GLAAD could have included the wonderful Polari Magazine but I suppose UK sites don't qualify. If there's any justice, the spectacular Andy Towle will win.

Born January 19: Patricia Highsmith

European critics consider Patricia Highsmith's twenty-two novels and eight story collections literary descendants of Dostoevsky and Kafka, but American readers know her work mainly as fodder for films: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Ripley's Game. She was most at home in the darker corners of her characters' twisted psyches and as often as not her protagonists expressed themselves through murder. Even in her first full-time job she excelled at creating dual lives, scripting comic book heroes Captain Midnight, Spy Smasher, and the Golden Arrow. Her childhood was divided between Fort Worth and New York and her emotions were split between similar extremes: loving and loathing her stepfather and her mother who claimed to have tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith said her unhappiest year was when her parents abandoned her with her grandmother at 12, yet throughout her life she seemed to seek the intensity of crisis and discord, pushing her friends to fight and her lovers to leave. One former girlfriend, the portraitist Allela Cornell, killed herself by swallowing nitric acid. Another girlfriend was Marijane Meaker, whose work you may know under her pen names Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich, or M. E. Kerr. A woman who didn't become a girlfriend was the frosty smoldering blond young married mother in Bloomingdales who sent Highsmith into a fever of longing and productivity, resulting in her second novel, The Price of Salt [Kindle]. Please let's end the myth that queer visibility began with Stonewall. This lesbian book, published in 1952, sold nearly a million copies. And unlike Gore Vidal's 1948 gay novel The City and the Pillar, hers has a happy ending. (Though, unlike Gore, she used a pseudonym, Claire Morgan.) Sarah Waters thinks so highly of The Price of Salt she said it alone warranted Highsmith's inclusion in the National Gallery show Gay Icons. Alcoholic, anti-American, anti-Semitic, stingy, and racist, Highsmith lived in Switzerland for more than thirty years and died, intentionally alone, at 74. She left her estate of several million dollars to Yaddo, where she had rewritten her first novel, Strangers on a Train, at Truman Capote's urging.

Joan Schenkar's illuminating and entertaining biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith [Kindle] again proves difficult characters often make the most riveting reading. Schenkar also edited Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories. Reader Lori Hahn recommends M.E. Kerr/Marijane Meaker's Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's [Kindle].

400 Pages of Pedro

On the heels of the successes of The Stanley Kubrick Archives and The Ingmar Bergman Archives, the indispensible art publisher Taschen has now released their delayed project The Pedro Almodóvar Archives. Viva gorgeous. The oversized book maintains film's aspect ratio, and the 600 photos are a mix of movie stills, sketches, production shots from the set, and personal photos now made public for the first time. The eighteen chapters cover his complete oeuvre from Pepi, Luci, Bom through The Skin I Live In. It even includes a strip of film from Volver.

Especially today, fighting SOPA, the internet's magic feels stupfying. For proof, you can flip through the first 100 pages of this book by clicking under the pink cover "Leaf Through" and zooming in.

Born January 18: Cary Grant

Cary Grant and Randolph Scott met on the set of Hot Saturday and soon began living together in a house nicknamed Bachelor Hall, which they would share for twelve years, 1932-1944. Their affair has always been spun, desperately, as two stars who lived together merely because both were "tightwads." During that time, Grant was married to Virginia Cherrill from February 1934 to March 1935 and to Barbara Hutton from 1942 to 1945. Two questions: What sort of man keeps his house with his bud even after he gets married, and what sort of tightwad prefers spending the money to maintain two households rather than one? George Cukor confirmed that Randolph Scott talked about their affair to friends, and a slew of recent biographers have also verified their relationship. Grant himself told an interviewer that his first two wives, overlapping with Scott, "accused him of being homosexual," though, of course, he always denied it and was as quick to sue for libel. (He sued Chevy Chase for saying, "What a gal!") Several other men have said they had affairs with Grant, including his chauffeur in 1957 and fashion arbiter Richard Blackwell, who wrote in his autobiography of having sex with both Grant and Scott. Nevertheless, mainstream media continues to portray Grant as the apex of hetero elegance. His fifth and final wife was 47 years his junior. Born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England he died at 82 in Davenport, Iowa in 1986 rehearsing his one-man show.

Ryan James Yezak's 7-Minute Tour of Modern Gay History

Filmmaker Ryan James Yezak is raising money for his $150,000 documentary "Second Class Citizens," about the LGBT rights movement. His 6 minute 52 second video is an instant success. Jezebel says you'll cry.

Jack Holmes and His Friend On Sale Today

Edmund White's new novel about a gay man and a straight man, Jack Holmes and His Friend, goes on sale today in the US and Canada. (It has been available since January 5 in the UK.) White said many quotable things to the Guardian on a great variety of subjects: language, aging, the internet, sex, marriage, monogamy, misogyny, and "shabby heterosexual values." He tells the story of Gore Vidal saying to a publisher, "You want me to die so your writer Edmund White will be King Fag!" Most relevant to this novel are:

"Your best book is always your most recent and I think Jack Holmes is by far the most accomplished novel I've written. Most writers tend to get worse rather than better. I'm determined to be one that gets better."

and

"I've changed my writing style deliberately. My first two novels were written in a very self-consciously literary way. After I embraced gay subject matter, which was then new, I didn't want to stand in its way. I wanted to make the style as transparent as possible so I could get on with it and tell the story, which was inherently interesting."