Band of Thebes

Born October 31: Natalie Barney

Of course Natalie Barney rode astride her horse rather than side-saddle as a child. Decades ahead of her time, she knew she was a lesbian from the age of twelve, in 1888, and considered it unusual but perfectly natural, like being an albino. Born into one of DC's wealthiest families, she refused to hide. In 1900, she published a book of her love poems to women and her mother sketched the illustrations. Alas, when her father found out, he bought up every copy still available and paid the printer to destroy the plates. So she moved to Paris, where she published ten more books and for sixty years held a weekly salon that was the epicenter not only of lesbian life (yes, Mata Hari really did begin her Lady Godiva dance there by entering on a white horse) but also the city's literary culture. Frequent guests included T.S. Eliot, Rilke, Rodin, Ezra Pound, Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Isadora Duncan, Radclyffe Hall, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Janet Flanner, Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Thornton Wilder, Virgil Thomson, Truman Capote, Mary McCarthy, Marguerite Yourcenar, Somerset Maugham, Ford Maddox Ford, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce a few times, but never Hemingway. He was probably jealous that she could keep women longer than he could, and that she kept them enthralled despite juggling multiple long-term open relationships, including one with the painter Romaine Brooks for fifty years, as well as Elisabeth de Gramont and Oscar's niece Dolly Wilde. When she was newly arrived in Paris, she seduced the most famous courtesan by dressing as a page and presenting herself at the woman's house. Not only did it work, but this Liane de Pougy wrote a book about their affair which captivated France and went through 70 printings in its first year, 1901. Such zest kept Natalie Barney going until 1972, when she died at ninety-five.

NYT: There Goes the Gayborhood

Patricia Leigh Brown writes in today's New York Times about the heteroization of many urban gay neighborhoods, primarily the Castro but also West Hollywood. She does include the rising numbers of same-sex couples in smaller cities like Albuquerque, El Paso, Fort Worth, Louisville, and Virginia Beach without saying whether or not they are concentrated in certain neighborhoods, yet because the article is specifically about gay enclaves it's odd that she never mentions Chelsea, Dupont Circle, or Atlanta's Midtown. Maybe the Castro has bigger problems: The Spike has turned into a straight bar, Pottery Barn moved in, and this year the city has canceled the neighborhood's famous Halloween party, where last year nine people were shot. The article is not nearly as trenchant about gay culture and community as it ought to be (after all, it's been thirteen years since "post gay" and ten years since Daniel Harris published The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture), but it does acknowledge problems beyond real estate prices.

“We often clamored for equality where gay and straight could coexist,” said Mayor John Duran of West Hollywood, who is gay. “But we weren’t prepared to give up our subculture to negotiate that exchange.”

and

Doug Sebesta, the group’s executive director and a medical sociologist at the San Francisco Department of Public Health, said, “I’ve had therapists who have told me they are asking their clients to go back to bars as a way of social interaction.”

The Internet is not a replacement for a neighborhood where people are involved in issues beyond themselves, said John Newsome, an African-American who co-founded the group And Castro For All after the Badlands incident. “There are a lot of really lonely gay people sitting in front of a computer,” he said.

Don't be one of them.

Born October 30: Néstor Almendros

Like so many great artists, Néstor Almendros did not follow a straight path to his genius. Born in Barcelona in 1930, he became disgusted with Franco's Spain by age eighteen and followed his father to Cuba, then went to film school in Rome, tried and failed to work in New York, left for France, was ready to give up at thirty-four, and got an absurdly lucky break: He happened to be on set the day the director of photography quit a short project with Eric Rohmer. From there Almendros became one of the world's greatest cinematographers, carefully composing each frame and using natural light like a painter on over fifty films, including, in order, My Night at Maud's, Claire's Knee, Two English Girls, Chloé in the Afternoon, The Story of Adele H., The Marquise of O., his legendary Days of Heaven [above] for which he won an Oscar, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Blue Lagoon, The Last Métro for which he won a Cesar, Still of the Night, Sophie's Choice, Pauline at the Beach, Places in the Heart, Heartburn, Imagine: John Lennon, and Billy Bathgate. For anyone seriously interested in cinema, his book A Man with a Camera is essential reading. Not only does he clarify how the director of photography differs from the cameraman (union rules prohibit the DP from operating the camera) but he devotes a brief chapter to each of forty films, describing the challenges and innovations working with the directors (again and again it's Rohmer, Truffaut, or Robert Benton) to decide what colors they want the costume and set designers to use and how Almendros will light and shoot each scene. They usually start with fine art. Their initial inspiration for Kramer vs. Kramer, set on the Upper East Side of the 1970s, was Piero della Francesca, with a little Hockney and, for the child's bedroom, Magritte. For The Blue Lagoon, he concentrated on Gauguin. For the Meryl Streep - Robert DeNiro psycho-thriller Still of the Night (originally called Stab), he looked to old Fritz Lang movies and Edward Hopper. Remarkably generous with the secrets of his working trade, his autobiography completely ignores his private life. And yet, even though he was closeted, when he had the opportunity to direct his own movie in 1984, he chose to make a documentary about Cuba's persecution of gay men, Mauvaise conduite [Improper Conduct], which won the audience award at Frameline. He died of aids in 1992 at age sixty-one. Human Rights Watch gives an annual film award named in his honor.

Dali and Garcia Lorca in Love on Screen

A forthcoming independent movie from Britain about the young lives of Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali, and Federico Garcia Lorca will include the long-rumored, predictably-refuted love affair between the painter and the poet. Set in Madrid in the 1920s, the film shows the two men in love with each other but Dali is unable to complete the sexual act with Garcia Lorca. As a substitute, they convince a female friend to have sex with Garcia Lorca while Dali watches. The screenplay was written by Philippa Goslett and directed by Paul Morrison whose Solomon and Gaenor was nominated for best foreign film at the 2000 Oscars. The cast features newcomer Javier Beltran as Garcia Lorca and, as Salvador Dali, Robert Pattinson [left], known to billions as Cecil Diggory in the Harry Potter films. It's called Little Ashes, after a Dali painting, and will be released in 2009. The Guardian has the full story.

Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé at Barnes & Noble 82nd St.

A Spanish and Comp Lit professor at Fordham, Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé has written a new book that aims to deconstruct and analyze the tradition of Latino testimonio, queer street life facing poverty, disease, and shame, New York in the 80s and 90s pre- and post-gentrification, Keith Haring as a person, Keith Haring as an artist, Latino gay life, and some serious culture clash. At the intersection of all these themes is Juanito Xtravaganza, a Puerto Rican club kid who was one of Keith Haring's boyfriends. He loves to talk. Cruz-Malavé loves to listen, and he spent ten years connecting Juan's stories to larger issues in cultural studies. Last night he enthralled a surprisingly overflow, SRO crowd with passages from his Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails, just published by Palgrave. The most memorable section was not the young man's practiced indifference to the rich white artist's well-worn methods of impressing him with opulence, but his heartfelt mix of joy and panic when Keith throws him a 30th birthday party at Mr. Chow's where Juan's family and friends finally mingle with Keith's celebrity super-set: Madonna and Sean Penn, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Grace Jones, Tina Chow, Beverly Johnson. After his friends try to humiliate him in front of the famous people, Juan looks over to see his conservative mother sitting on Mike Tyson's lap, which he needs to hide from his jealous father who has been enjoying the open bar's Cristal. The party ends okay; the romance does not. If you want even more of Cruz-Malavé, read his first book, Queer Globalizations: Citizenship and the Afterlife of Colonialism. 

Born October 26: Adam Mars-Jones

Serious readers who admired Adam Mars-Jones excellent short story collection (Monopolies of Loss) and novel (The Waters of Thirst) both dealing with gay life and aids in London in the early 1990s feared the worst when his work stopped appearing. Yes, he had given up fiction. To be a film critic for The Independent, and then The Times. In 1997 he released a collection of essays called Blind Bitter Happiness. He continues to write criticism freelance, and pens introductions to classic novels, including Nigel Dennis's Cards of Identity and Sylvia Townsend Warner's Mr. Fortune's Maggot. He has a magnificent eye for human foibles, as when the married neighbors finally realize the narrator is gay, they continue to be pleasant but the wife will no longer hang her husband's jockstraps on the clothesline to dry in view of a homosexual. Read him if you haven't, and pray that he returns to fiction where he's needed.

Entertainment Weekly: "Brokeback Changed Nothing"

Tomorrow's issue of Entertainment Weekly has Adam B. Vary's reality check on Hollywood's gay problem two years after Brokeback Mountain. It's a smart article as far as it goes. In mainstream movies, gay characters still "have to be the AIDS patient (Philadelphia) or the victim of violence (Boys Don't Cry), the closet case (Far From Heaven), or the tortured serial killer (Monster)." While avoiding the fact that two of Brokeback's cowboys were also victims of violence [the other in Ennis's flashback], the article struggles to end on a hopeful note about Gus van Sant's upcoming Harvey Milk biopic starring Sean Penn and Matt Damon. But let's be clear: It's another historical movie that ends with the gay man being murdered. The article rightly explains that decisions are still based on money: "'Big studio fare is about being as broadly appealing as possible,' says a top exec. 'Having Jason Bourne be gay would [mean having] Jason Bourne's dating life look different from 90 percent of the population's. Where's the upside in that decision?''' Avoided is the question of whether Hollywood believes that same 90 percent is only comfortable with gay movies where the gay character gets killed.

Vary is a little spotty on his history. He's smart to include long-lingering projects like The Front Runner and The Dreyfus Affair but he thinks Chicago relaunched the movie musical when it was Moulin Rouge, and he wrongly claims it was Brokeback that “obliterated an ancient Hollywood phobia that playing gay would kill an actor's career,” when actors as old as Meryl Streep and Daniel Day-Lewis began their careers playing gay and, in terms of A-list action heroes, it’s been twenty-five years since Christopher Reeve made two more Superman movies after playing Michael Caine’s lover in Deathtrap. Vary doesn't mention that Midnight Cowboy was supposed to change everything when it won Best Picture thirty-five years before Brokeback lost, ditto for the watershed, all-gay Boys in the Band in 1970, but he does wisely point out that “Hollywood still treats gay-themed hits as an exception rather than as harbingers of a changing rule.”

The problem with the article is that it examines half of the equation and ignores the other half, namely the gay audience. Despite their talk of the broadest population, studios make and market movies targeted specifically to black, Latino, Asian, or female audiences. Two weeks ago Tyler Perry's Why Did I Get Married was the number one movie in America with a poster featuring eight black actors and no one else. Never mind if the whites liked it or not, it was black, proud, and profitable. The even more apt comparison is how Hollywood has changed in the three years since The Passion of the Christ. Now they scramble to create and sell movies to a hardcore religious audience, non-believers be damned. The question journalists ought to ask is whether studios will ever court the gay audience openly, under the bright marquee lights, or if they'll always only like us if the straights like us too.

Sweetie, Darling: Lagerfeld

Yesterday Film Forum premiered a French documentary called Lagerfeld Confidential. If the couture isn't ironic the title certainly is, because Karl never confides. Instead, he poses and makes pompous pronouncements such as “Fashion is ephemeral, dangerous and unfair.” Perhaps nothing more can be expected from a man who never formally studied dressmaking and says he is “a complete improvisation” and wants to be “an apparition.” So it's surprising that someone so willfully shallow should embody a crucial distinction about gay life, identity versus privacy. Lagerfeld proves celebrities can be out, which is a question of who they are, yet remain utterly discrete on the questions of what they do. The New York Times writes:

To a point, Mr. Lagerfeld is candid about his homosexuality. He says he was aware of it by the age of 13, when he told his parents, for whom it was not a problem. When an older man and woman made passes at him, he recalls, his mother, instead of flying into a rage about child molestation, scolded her son and said such incidents wouldn’t happen if he didn’t behave so provocatively.

Beyond declaring that he was sexually very active as a youth, however, Mr. Lagerfeld avoids mentioning the names of lovers or recalling major relationships. The most he will say is that there have been “a few tragedies I couldn’t possibly talk about.”

Born October 24: B.D. Wong, Emma Donoghue

A fourth generation Chinese-American, B.D. Wong made his Broadway debut in 1988 in M. Butterfly, for which he became and remains the only actor to win the five major theater prizes for the same role. But it was not enough to convince David Cronenberg to cast him in the movie version five years later, when he chose John Lone instead. Wong starred with Margaret Cho in her much praised, quickly canceled series All American Girl, then played a priest on Oz, and a psychiatrist on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He and his partner Richie Jackson, an agent, are parents of a son named Foo, the surviving one of two twins born extremely prematurely. Wong wrote a book about the experience called Following Foo.

The youngest of eight children of literary critic Denis Donoghue, Dublin-born Emma Donoghue is the fourth of “the four,” contemporary U.K. lesbian novelists, along with Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith. In her novels she is equally at home in the present day (Stir-Fry, Hood) and the 1700s (Slammerkin, Life Mask). Her newest novel, published last May, is Landing, about a long-distance love affair between two women in Ireland and Canada, mirroring her own life. She lives in Ontario with her partner Chris, their son Finn, and their newborn daughter Una. Donoghue’s next historical novel, this time about the “desperately respectable middle classes” in 1860s London, is called The Sealed Letter and will be published next year.

Born October 23: Rorem, Strickland, Burroughs

Ned Rorem is a famous composer of two full-length operas (including Our Town, performed last year when he was eighty-three), five one-act operas, five concerti, and four symphonies, of which his No. 3 has been conducted by Maurice Abravanel, Leonard Bernstein, André Previn, and José Serebrier, yet he may be even better known for his diaries, which he began publishing in 1969. Rorem may be a narcissist but he is always accurate, which posed a problem for closeted men who did not expect to see their sexual exploits with him critiqued in print the year of Stonewall: among them, Noel Coward, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson. He has continued the tradition for decades, still today angering some for his candor, or outing, but if people cannot be honest in their own diaries, what's the point.

For over thirty years, Keith Strickland has been the cute one in a group their lead singer used to self-describe as "a tacky little dance band from Athens, Georgia," but now they advertise as "the world's greatest party band," or, The B-52s. From Rock Lobster to Love Shack to the already-finished new album to be released next year, Keith has been blissed, first as drummer then on guitars after Cindy's brother Ricky Wilson died in 1985. The band originally claimed Ricky died of cancer but later acknowledged it was aids. Keith and his partner Mark share houses in Woodstock, New York; Georgia; and Key West. The band plays Roseland in New York on Halloween.

Augusten Burroughs quit his formal schooling after sixth grade, around the time his mother sent him to live with her psychiatrist's family, the subject of his book Running with Scissors. He got his GED at seventeen and became an advertising executive before quitting to write fulltime. His followup memoir Dry, about his struggles with alcoholism, was an instant bestseller, as were his two collections of essays, Magical Thinking and Possible Side Effects. Running with Scissors, boosted by a rather messed-up movie version with some very great performances by Annette Benning, Evan Rachel Wood, and briefly Alec Baldwin, remained on the New York Times bestseller lists in hardcover or paperback for over two and half years. The psychiatrist's family sued Burroughs, his publisher, and Sony, for defamation even though he had changed their names, just as he legally changed his own name from Christopher Robinson. The publisher called the settlement a "total victory" because they did not have to alter any text, only a statement at the beginning of the book. His next memoir, about his father, is called A Wolf at the Table and will be released in May 2008. He and his longtime partner Dennis Pilsits divide their time between New York City and Amherst.

New TV Series: Bitter Old Queens

Russell T. Davies who created Queer as Folk in Britain and is enjoying vast success with his revamped Doctor Who series told the Guardian that he is planning a new gay series for the BBC.

"It's going to be about forty-something gay men and how jealous they are of gay teenagers," Davies said in an interview. "I've been longing to write something for adults."

In the interview, Davies said that the inspiration for the new drama is a friend, a former Mr Gay UK, who split up from his boyfriend.

"He asked me: 'Why are so many gay men so glad we split up?' That remark's stayed with me for six years. I think there's a self-punishing streak in that gladness and I want to explore it."

The series, still untitled, will air in 2010.

Born October 22: Jacobi, Condon, Shaiman

A working class bloke who won a scholarship to Cambridge, Derek Jacobi became one of the University’s best actors and soon after graduation Laurence Olivier asked him to be one of eight founding members of the National Theatre, where his debut role was Laertes to Peter O’Toole’s Hamlet. Thirteen years later, in 1976, he reached his greatest fame with the title role in the BBC’s I, Claudius. As a result, he was able to tour his Hamlet in Sweden, Egypt, Japan, China, and Australia. Renowned for his impeccable performances in productions of the Bard by the RSC, the BBC, and Kenneth Branagh, Jacobi lampooned himself on an episode of Frasier in which he played the world’s worst Shakespearean actor, for which he won an Emmy. Among his numerous other roles are Alan Turing in Breaking the Code, Gracchus in Gladiator, and several characters from Dickens. Knighted by the monarchs of Britain and Denmark, Jacobi is married to Richard Clifford, his partner of twenty-eight years.

Quick, what did Bill Condon direct immediately prior to winning an Oscar for his adaptation of Christopher Bram’s novel Gods & Monsters? That’s right, the horror sequel Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh. Since then he’s also directed the overlooked Kinsey and the overhyped Dreamgirls.

It would be easy to hate the prolific, charmed, music genius Marc Shaiman if it weren’t impossible to dislike him. He wrote Uncle F***a! He played Skip St. Thomas, the Sweeney Sisters’ pianist on SNL. He’s produced hit songs (Wind Beneath My Wings, From a Distance) written the music and lyrics for fifty-one movies (Broadcast News, When Harry Met Sally, The Addams Family, South Park, Bowling for Columbine, Team America) and fifteen theater shows (Bette: Divine Madness, The Odd Couple, Hairspray). He’s won a Tony, a Grammy, and an Emmy, and has been nominated for an Oscar five times. All that, and he has been with his partner Scott Wittman, who is also his music collaborator, since 1979 when Shaiman was twenty. They have never, ever lost their sense of fun, as their music and their wardrobes attest. Their next two projects: The unforgivable Jack Nicholson mawkfest The Bucket List and the Broadway musical version of Catch Me If You Can.

Dumbledore Is Gay, says J.K. Rowling

Cue the Pet Shop Boys' song Hey, Headmaster. Speaking at Carnegie Hall last night, J.K. Rowling confirmed that the beloved master wizard of Hogwarts is gay. According to CNN:

"Dumbledore is gay," the author responded to gasps and applause.

She then explained that Dumbledore was smitten with rival Gellert Grindelwald, whom he defeated long ago in a battle between good and bad wizards. "Falling in love can blind us to an extent," Rowling said of Dumbledore's feelings, adding that Dumbledore was "horribly, terribly let down."

Once again, this revelation only came about as the result of a question from the audience. People, raise your hands and speak up.

Born October 19: George Nader, Robert Reed, Divine

Golden Globe-winning, B-movie beefcake George Nader and his partner Mark Miller met when they both appeared in a musical at the Pasadena Playhouse in 1947 and stayed together for fifty-five years. Though they were not out publicly, they lived openly as a couple, much to the consternation of Universal Studios, which begged Nader to marry and divorce a willing secretary for cover. He refused. The couple was close friends with Rock Hudson from 1951 onward and nursed him through his death from aids in 1985, after which they came out. Hudson left them the bulk of his estate. Following his retirement from movies, Nader wrote Chrome, a love story between a man and a male robot, the first science fiction novel to feature a gay plot and sex scenes, which was surprisingly popular.

Wouldn’t the world have been a better place if everyone had known America’s #1 television dad, Mike Brady, was gay? Although much loved on the set, especially by the child actos, Robert Reed grew increasingly unhappy and resentful that his defining role was beneath his talents as a classical, Shakespearean actor. He fought frequently with the show’s creator, Sherwood Schwartz, which is why he was written out of the series’ finale, although he did return for the reunion shows. He died of aids in Pasadena in 1992, five months shy of his sixtieth birthday. Related: Maureen McCormick (Marcia), whose memoir Here’s the Story is coming out next year, says she made out with her tv sister Jan. You may recall Greg’s memoir from 1992, Growing Up Brady, which described his affair with his tv mom Florence Henderson. Quite the family.

Proving there is order in the randomness of the universe, Divine grew up six houses away from John Waters, who would later help him create his outrageous drag persona and give him starring roles in his movies such as Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, and Polyester with Tab Hunter, whom he was again paired with in Lust in the Dust. Divine released several disco songs and albums, but his greatest fame came with John Waters’ original Hairspray. After that breakthrough role he was chosen to play Uncle Otto on the new Fox sitcom Married... With Children, but his obesity caused a heart attack, killing him at 42 in 1988. Among the many ways Divine’s legacy endures is that he was the inspiration of Ursula the Sea Witch in the Disney animated hit The Little Mermaid. Safe to say he wouldn't have thought much of John Travolta's attempt to reprise Divine's role in last summer's Hairspray.

Turkey Tries To Shut Down Gay Rights Group

Turkish courts will hear arguments from the governor of Istanbul, attempting to disband one of the country's leading gay rights group, Lambda Istanbul, founded in 1993. The governor's office claims the group's objectives are "against the law and morality." In July, the local Prosecutor's Office denied the governor's complaint but a higher court agreed to schedule a hearing for late October. In 2005, Ankara's deputy governor tried a similar move to shut down the capital city's gay rights group Kaos GL but the complaint was dismissed by the Prosecutor's Office. That same year, Parliament drafted an anti-discrimination bill inclusive of sexual orientation, only to see the category eliminated in a later draft. All of this directly contradicts two treaties which Turkey has signed (the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) both of which prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Human Rights Watch has a full summary here. Above, scenes from last summer's gay pride in Istanbul, attended by more than one thousand people.

UPDATE: Yesterday's hearing was only fifteen minutes. The judge ordered the government to prepare a report. Dutch activists from COC, the world's oldest glbt rights group, called on the Dutch government to not support Turkey's bid for EU membership until basic human rights are respected. A member of the Dutch Royal embassy will attend the trial when it resumes on January 31, 2008.

Born October 18: Tim Gill

A total science nerd who was perpetually picked second-to-last for teams in gym class, Tim Gill's first love was computers. His second love turned out to be men, and in college when he called his conservative Republican parents to tell them he was gay, they suggested he see a psychiatrist. (It was 1972 and the APA still treated homosexuality as a mental disorder.) Eventually his parents came around, joined PFLAG, and his mother went back to college for an M.A. in counseling. His parents also lent him $2,000 to start his own software company, Quark, which had an early success, then nearly went bankrupt, forcing him to fire half his staff, but later rebounded nicely, giving him a personal fortune of nearly half a billion dollars. Rather than making ego-stroking donations to have his name splashed across the sides of buildings, he started the primarily gay rights Gill Foundation, whose endowment is now over $220 million and in 2005 was named Foundation of the Year. The political arm, the Gill Action Fund, wisely avoids national political organizations and gives directly to candidates in tight, crucial races. The fund specifically targets anti-gay politicians and gives money to their rivals with considerable success: In 2006, of 70 races they supported, 50 won. Not content with being the nation’s most influential gay philanthropist, Gill travels widely, recently summitted Kilimanjaro, and also runs the lgbt social networking websites connexion.org and outboard.org, whose thirteenth annual gay snowboarders event will be held at Breckenridge April 2-6, 2008. He and his partner Scott Miller have been together since 2002 and share houses in Denver and Aspen. Apparently their parties during Aspen’s gay ski week and for Halloween at the Coors Field parking lot, called Hellywood, are very, very fun.

Born October 17: Montgomery Clift

Montgomery Clift's life was defined by two crashes. After a charmed childhood of long vacations in Europe and the Caribbean, his financier father lost nearly everything in the stock market crash of 1929. The family moved to a modest house in Sarasota, and there Clift discovered acting. By the time he was thirteen he was on Broadway and by the time he was seventeen he was a star. Hollywood wooed him for years and he finally agreed to make his film debut in Howard Hawks' Red River opposite John Wayne, when he was twenty-eight. His second movie, The Search, earned him his first Oscar nomination. He followed that with The Heiress opposite Olivia de Haviland, and was nominated for another Oscar for his scorching pairing with Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun, and nominated yet again two years later for From Here to Eternity, the same year when he starred in Hitchcock's I Confess. He turned down Hitchcock's Rope, uncomfortably about a gay couple who kill a boy, and also turned down the starring roles in East of Eden and Sunset Boulevard. While filming another movie with his best friend Elizabeth Taylor, Clift drove into a telephone pole and nearly died, eight months after James Dean was killed in a similar crash.  Much has been made of Clift's downward spiral after the crash, often called "the longest suicide in Hollywood," but he starred in eight movies before the accident and eight movies after. Wasn't it spectacularly brave for a movie idol whose face was disfigured and partially paralyzed to continue to act? And for a closeted gay celebrity in such a hostile, hypocritical era to navigate the minefield of incessant whispers and threats of exposure? His fourth and final Oscar nomination came for his seven-minute role in Judgment at Nuremberg. Addicted to alcohol and pain pills, he died of a heart attack at forty-five, bitter and unemployable. Yes, he is the inspiration of R.E.M.'s song "Monty Got a Raw Deal."

SF Library Gay Project Asks for Personal Photos

The San Francisco Public Library held a one-day event last weekend to build their archive documenting gay life by asking local citizens to donate their personal photos to the permanent collection. More than fifty people brought photographs, including 82 year-old Sam Thal, seen above holding his already-tagged high school portrait. The Chronicle reported:

The photos will become a part of the public library's inventory, and another set will be archived at the Harvey Milk branch. There are plans for an eventual photo exhibit.

"We're getting the photos, and we're getting the history," said city archivist Susan Goldstein. "We're hearing: 'This is my family. They didn't talk to me because I was gay'; 'This is when I was in the military'; 'This is when I came to San Francisco.' It's a great cross section.

Born October 16: Oscar Wilde

During his tour of the United States in 1882, Oscar Wilde met Walt Whitman and later wrote to him "Before I leave America I must see you again--there is no one in               this wide great world of America whom I love and honour so much.               With warm affection, and honourable admiration, Oscar Wilde." Scholars believe that although Wilde was aware of his own feelings for men since his teens, he did not act on his desires until three years after meeting Whitman, when he was thirty-one.  Making up for lost time, he called sex with younger men, "feasting with panthers." Coincidentally, 1885 was also the year Parliament passed the  Criminal Law Amendment Act which made a crime of "gross indecency," or "homosexual acts not amounting to buggery," and which would ruin Wilde ten years later. England's most celebrated playwright, poet, novelist, and wit, was destroyed by the miserable conditions of hard labor in prison and he died penniless in Paris in 1900, when he was forty-six, quipping to the end. A source of continual fascination since then, last week he was voted Britain's greatest wit of all time. Read any and all of his works, especially The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Portrait of Mr. W.H. here.

Born October 15: Virgil

You would think you would always side with a writer over an emperor meddling in his work, but thank god Augustus overruled Publius Vergilius Maro’s final wish. For ten years, Virgil had been working on an epic poem, the first half of which would be modeled on the Odyssey and the second half of which would be the Roman answer to the Illiad. Traveling with Augustus from Italy to Greece, Virgil became ill with a fever and died at fifty in the harbor at Brundisi, with the instructions that his poem be destroyed because it was unfinished. Instead, Augustus had it published and The Aeniad was immediately recognized as the masterpiece it remains today. Although the epic includes a moving episode between the male lovers Nisus and Euryalus, Virgil’s greatest gay works are in his Eclogues. The second of those poems is Alexis, which begins forthrightly

The shepherd Corydon with love was fired
For fair Alexis, his own master's joy

So ardent is the slave’s desire for his owner’s favorite youth, and so fine is the long poem, that the name Corydon has endured for millennia as a symbol of same-sex love, from the Elizabethan sonnets of Richard Barnfield to the title of Andre Gide’s defense of homosexuality in 1920, twenty-seven years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature (sixty years ago this month). Nearly all distinguished Roman men, regardless of their orientation, took a wife, yet Virgil refused even that. He was known as “The Virgin of Naples” and had sex with two of his male slaves, whom he treated as friends. In the early 1300s, Dante portrayed Virgil as the epitome of human wisdom, guiding him through the Inferno and parts of Purgatory. When they meet the sodomites in the seventh circle, Dante embraces his former teacher but Virgil is uncharacteristically shunted aside, as if he or his author were afraid of him being stuck there. (Virgil’s spirit dwells in a far better Limbo, for having never been baptized, since he died in 19BC.)

Peter Cameron at Three Lives

Last night Peter Cameron read from his new novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, about a very smart, articulate eighteen year-old gay Manhattanite navigating his final summer before starting at Brown, which he thinks he would rather not attend because "I don't like people in general and people my age in particular,"and "people my age are the ones who go to college." Writing in the New York Review of Books, Lorrie Moore said the novel was "a bravura performance" and "a stunning little book," comparing it to Great Expectations, Huckleberry Finn, The Catcher in the Rye, and Indecision. A critic for Publishers  Weekly wrote, "With its off-balance marriage of the comedic and the deeply painful, its sympathetic embrace of its characters and its hard-won hope, this smart and elegantly written novel merits a wide readership." In the brief Q&A after reading, he denied sharing many of his narrator's traits and said one of the pleasures of aging was better understanding and accepting other people. I asked him if he had always wanted to write a YA novel or if FSG foisted it into that category against his wishes, and he said he had thought he was writing another adult novel but they wanted to sell it to young people. Another ridiculous corporate decision, but the good news for you is that the extremely handsome hardcover is only $16.00. Everyone should buy it and read it.

Born October 11: Eleanor Roosevelt

In addition to being one of the most energetic humanitarians of the 20th century, Eleanor Roosevelt was an inexhaustible writer. She wrote her syndicated column My Day six times a week for twenty-seven years, missing only four days when her husband died. Always insightful, she was usually decades ahead of her time and frequently funny. Please, please read her column from sixty years ago, October 1947, about Hollywood and HUAC by clicking here. The relevance of her writing career is that she used words precisely and carefully and she meant exactly what she said. Detractors obfuscate ad nauseum but there is no question that she and Lorena Hickok, her closest friend for thirty years, were lovers. Read excerpts of their correspondence below, remembering that their most intimate letters were destroyed, many by Hickok herself, after Eleanor’s death in 1962.

Hick darling,

All day I've thought of you & another birthday I will be with you, & yet tonight you sounded so far away & formal. Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort to me. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it.
_________________________________________

[Eleanor to Hickok]

I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms.

_________________________________________

[Hickok writing to Eleanor after a long separation...]

Only eight more days . . . Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips. . . .

The website brainyquote.com lists seventy-four of her most memorable sayings. Four examples:

You must do the things you think you cannot do.

Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little.

Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we're in hot water!

I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

Both of the clips below are approx. one minute. Watch her transformation as a public speaker between 1933 and 1943.

National Book Award Nominees

Earlier this morning, the finalists for the National Book Awards were announced. In fiction, the nominees included one much-hyped, much-praised sweeping Big Book (Denis Johnson's Vietnam/CIA novel Tree of Smoke), two first novels (Mischa Berlinski's Fieldwork and Joshua Ferris's Then We Came to the End) and two short-story collections (Lydia Davis's Varieties of Disturbance and Jim Shepard's Like You'd Understand, Anyway). Among the overlooked bigger names were Philip Roth, Don DeLillo, Jane Smiley, Michael Chabon, Annie Dillard, Jim Harrison, Junot Diaz, Andrea Barrett, Jonathan Lethem, Nathan Englander, Marianne Wiggins, Ann Patchett, Kurt Anderson, Amy Bloom, Alice Sebold, Richard Russo, and Ha Jin. Of course no five choices will ever definitively be the best books of the year; but since this year's list is so exceedingly arbitrary and so heavily titled  against the literary establishment insiders, the judges might just as well have gone arbitrary and unexpected with any of this year's novels by writers who are gay:

Edmund White, Hotel de Dream
Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers
David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk
Michael Lowenthal, Charity Girl
Armistead Maupin, Michael Tolliver Lives
James Wilcox, Hunk City
Joe Keenan, My Lucky Star
Bob Smith, Selfish and Perverse
Peter Cameron, Some Day This Pain Will Be Useful to You

The Assisted-Living Center Closet

Mandatory reading. Jane Gross of the New York Times writes a great article today on the dilemma of aging gay people who have been comfortably out in middle age then feel they must re-closet themselves as they enter assisted living facilities. A research fellow at the Williams Institute at UCLA estimates 2.4 million gay Americans are aged 55 or older, and where they are going to live in their later years remains a vexing issue. Many of their contemporaries are not progressive on gay issues, and almost all of the interviewees from various parts of the country reported hostile reactions, being shunned, or receiving lesser care, if their orientation was suspected, so they unhappily chose to hide it. Chief of geriatric psychiatry at Beth Israel, Dr. Melinda Lantz says gay seniors have a harder time for this very reason:

Elderly heterosexuals also suffer the indignities of old age, but not to the same extent, Dr. Lantz said. “There is something special about having to hide this part of your identity at a time when your entire identity is threatened,” she said. “That’s a faster pathway to depression, failure to thrive and even premature death.”

The NYT story also includes two gay men in their 70s who have opted for home care instead, an expensive alternative not available to everyone. Gay assisted living centers have opened or are being built in several states but again can only accommodate a tiny fraction of the demographic. What's more, the Los Angeles Times reported recently, as with every previously neglected neighborhood that gay people have transformed, the straights are moving into the gay senior communities. The people, the conversation, the activities, the food--everything's better at RainbowVision in New Mexico, but the state has laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation for housing, so there is no way to stop the straight invasion.

Oddly, neither article mentions SAGE, the nationwide organization founded in 1978 as Senior Action in a Gay Environment which has since been changed to mean Services & Advocacy for GLBT Elders.

Margot at the Wedding

Ninety-three minutes of family tension and the painful, sometimes funny gap between how people see themselves and how they actually are. The gay pair in an early scene may be the best adjusted couple in the movie. A feral shirtless neighbor boy demands to know if Margot’s sensitive son—the fairly awesome first-time actor Zack Pais, above in black and brown—is “a fruity” and dissatisfied with the answer “No,” tackles him, straddles him, insists that he is a fruity, then bites his neck. The adults interact worse. Sorry to report that in the Q&A after, only Nicole Kidman proved she could answer a question helpfully, yet that came prepackaged with her obligatory praise for the director, Noah Baumbach, and the producer, Scott Rudin, as well as quotes of Rudin’s praise for her. She was worried she couldn’t play a cold, neurotic New York novelist, and had to be frequently dissuaded from hugging or touching her character’s son or sister. Her dress (ruffled hem below the knee) and shoes (silver) were knockouts, unlike her severe hair. Poor Jennifer Jason Leigh must have been tired, and who wouldn’t be, married to the director. He said three times the film was not autobiographical and that they had purposefully used old lenses without digitally correcting the film to give it the feel of old family photographs.

Todd Haynes' I'm Not There

One of Todd Haynes’ points in his kaleido-biopic I'm Not There is that everyone is Bob Dylan [played by six actors, ranging from a black kid to a white woman] and no one is Bob Dylan [all six of the characters have different names—Woody Guthrie, Arthur Rimbaud, Jack Rollins, Jude Quinn, etc.—and the words “Bob Dylan” never appear and are never spoken]. The six episodes span the 1960s but are scrambled within each other without any definitive story arc. Individual images and select scenes are rapturous; only you can make what you will of the whole. Cate Blanchett is exciting; Richard Gere is not. Heath Ledger and Christian Bale are in the middle. Two short scenes with Allen Ginsberg are delightful, as are thirty seconds of tomfoolery with the Beatles. In a Q&A after the screening, Haynes explained he had originally written seven Dylans but he had collapsed the “Chaplin Dylan” into another character. Of all the actors, only the very young talent Marcus Carl Franklin did his own singing. Haynes spoke of the miraculous good luck of getting Dylan to allow them to use his songs and that although they had sent him a finished DVD a while ago they still had no idea what he thought of the movie. The film is dedicated to Haynes’ ex-boyfriend Jim Lyons, the editor of several of his movies, the most handsome actor in Poison, and a longtime aids activist. Lyons died in April and was said in his obituary to be the “devoted partner of Terry Savage.”

Born October 8: Urvashi Vaid

Born in New Delhi, Urvashi Vaid moved with her family to Potsdam, New York when she was eight, in 1966, attended her first anti-war rally when she was eleven, and gave her first political speech, supporting McGovern, when she was twelve. Basically, she's never stopped working for broad issues of peace and social justice, especially for LGBT rights within a larger vision of fairness and equality. After receiving her law degree, she joined the ACLU's prisons project, then began her long association with the NGLTF, whose Policy Institute she headed for many years, both before and after a break to write her essential book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. For five years earlier this decade, she was deputy director of a unit of the Ford Foundation's peace and social justice program. For the past two years she has been Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, which was founded by Michigan billionaire Jon Stryker and last year awarded $16 million in grants. She also is a board member of the Gill Foundation and has been partners for a long, funny time with Kate Clinton.

Seth & Amy on Larry Craig Staying in Senate

Lust, Caution

With Lust, Caution, his followup to Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee has made another film about dangerous desires. This time, it's not gay love. It's not straight love either, though he does film several man-woman sex scenes explicitly enough to have been given a dreaded NC-17 rating. Rather, he's seduced into a fatal case of movie love, showing full-screen black-and-white clips of Ingrid Bergman in Intermezzo, then Cary Grant in Penny Serenade, but the film he's most lusting after is In the Mood for Love. Otherwise, why did he use the same actor, Tony Leung, in the same setting, in the same dapper suits, committing the same adultery, with the same sort of distant woman wearing the same sort of cheongsam dresses, enveloped in the same swirly cigarette smoke listening to the same jazz soundtrack? Tropes they may be, but Ang Lee had to expect the audience to make those connections, and, unfortunately, none of it's the same. Compared with the gorgeous lushness of Wong Kar-Wai's vision and Christopher Doyle's cinematography, everything in Lust, Caution looks drab; the sex scenes (usually) don't have half the erotic power of the other movie's restraint; and young Wei Tang isn't a quarter as talented as Maggie Cheung. On top of it all, it's an old-time, worn out spy story, the lovers on opposite sides, each plotting the other's death. Their relationship is unconvincing, especially when stretched to two hours and thirty-eight minutes given that the source material is only a brief short story by the wonderful Eileen Chang. Slowness is not the problem; the problem is miles of irrelevant backstory including a scene of torture in its purest form: We are forced to watch a college play written by the students. If you can survive that, the movie does offer some treasures. Joan Chen is terrific, Alexandre Desplat's score is romantic and haunting, and the short opening and closing credits by yU+Co are sublime in their simplicity.

Born October 4: Robert Wilson

Nothing about Robert Wilson is easy. He’s a perfectionist to the tiniest detail, spending three hours to choose the stage lighting for a single hand gesture, with a colossal vision, creating a theater piece in the 1970s performed on a mountaintop in Iran lasting seven days, who can’t even be neatly labeled a director because he is also a dancer, a painter, a sculptor, a furniture designer, and an installation artist who won the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice Biennale. He’s created theater works that are twelve hours long and operas that are silent. He uses austere sets, very slow pacing, and has said that the most important actor on the stage is the lighting. He’s never known the easy road. He grew up with a severe speech impediment in Waco, Texas, studied business administration at UT, came out to his disapproving father, moved to Brooklyn, got a degree in architecture, couldn’t cope, moved back to Waco, tried to kill himself, was put in an institution, got help from an understanding psychiatrist, moved back to New York, saw a black boy being beaten by cops in 1968 and ended up adopting him. Wilson also became the world’s leading avant-garde director of theater and opera. Working with Philip Glass in 1976, he created the monumental opera Einstein on the Beach, about “general relativity, nuclear weapons, science and AM radio.” Its huge success made both men famous worldwide, and since then Wilson has been in great demand at the top opera houses around the globe. His frequent collaborators include Jessye Norman, Laurie Anderson, William S. Burroughs, David Byrne, Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Waits.
    Even honoring Wilson isn’t easy. For the 1984 Olympics, he created another twelve-hour opera, about the Civil War, working with six composers from six countries, each scoring a two-hour section to be premiered in their own country, then to be performed all together, on one day, in Los Angeles. Four sections premiered as planned in Cologne, Minneapolis, Rome, and Rotterdam, but the Olympics canceled the event due to lack of funding. The Cologne section was performed in Cambridge, Mass. in 1985 and the Pulitzer Prize jury unanimously chose it for their drama award, only to have the Pulitzer supervisory board overrule them, giving no drama prize that year.
    Recently, in addition to his theater work, he’s been creating video portraits for Voom. (His 2005 shoot of Brad Pitt in boxers in the rain against an electric blue background became the cover of Vanity Fair in December 2006.) The documentary Absolute Wilson was released last November. Please watch the trailer for a glimpse into his world.

Edmund White at Three Lives

Last night at Three Lives bookstore, Edmund White read from his new novel Hotel de Dream, which imagines the final weeks of The Red Badge of Courage author Stephen Crane, dying of tuberculosis at 28 and dictating to his common-law wife Cora a novel about a sixteen-year-old hustler. Was Crane really planning to write such a novel, possibly as a companion to his Maggie, A Girl of the Streets? According to one contemporary, yes, and it was to be called Flowers of Asphalt, a title White considered hideous and changed to The Painted Boy. He reminded the crowd that Crane’s love of prostitutes extended well beyond writing Maggie. In fact, he had married one: Cora previously ran a whorehouse in Florida called Hotel de Dream.
    Asked how difficult it was to imitate Crane’s voice, White said he hadn’t tried very hard—and that some critics had faulted him for that—then explained that because Crane had used, even in his brief career, several different styles, White felt he had some leeway in creating this voice. He said he enjoyed writing Hotel de Dream more than his other historical novel, Fanny, because this one has gay content, and because it is about a novelist so he could insert some of his own observations on writing, and because by the 1890s New York life begins to be somewhat familiar , whereas the other novel had taken place in the far more distant 1820s when America was still so rural.
    The book’s back jacket has truly rave quotes about Hotel de Dream from Kurt Andersen, Dave Eggers, Lorrie Moore, Ann Patchett, and Gary Shteyngart. Just published, the novel has already received strong reviews from The New Yorker, The Globe and Mail,  The Oregonian, and especially  The New York Times Book Review.

Gay Novel Wins 2007 Thurber Prize

Last night at the Algonquin Hotel, Joe Keenan beat Bob Newhart and Merrill Markoe to win the 2007 Thurber Prize for American Humor for his novel My Lucky Star. A sequel to his Blue Heaven and Putting on the Ritz fifteen years ago, Keenan’s third novel again follows the misadventures of Philip Cavanaugh, his wily ex-lover Gilbert Selwyn, and their best friend Claire, this time in Hollywood, where the screwball story revolves around a rivalry between two aging, actress sisters and one’s closeted action-movie star son. Publishers Weekly called it “a comic masterpiece that in intricacy of plotting and brilliance of language rivals the best of Wodehouse.” Keenan was the executive producer and