Band of Thebes

Alex Ross's THE REST IS NOISE

Alex Ross is phenomenal. Don't take my word for it, or Bjork's, or the New York Times', which this week selected his The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century as one of the ten best books of 2007. Read one paragraph yourself, for the scope of his smarts and the elegance of his prose:

The nexus of classical music and gay culture goes back at least to the final years of the nineteenth century, when aesthetes of the Oscar Wilde type gathered at Wagner nights in London and wore green carnations in their lapels. "Is he musical?" gay men would ask of an unfamiliar newcomer. As the century went on, conservatories and concert halls filled up with introverted boys who had trouble fitting in with their fellows. Classical music appealed to some gay youngsters because of the free-floating power of its emotions. While most pop songs explicitly address love and/or sex between modern boys and girls, opera renders romance in an archaic, stylized way, and instrumental works give voice to unspoken passions. Already in the first years of the century, this music had the reputation of being a "sissy" culture--the association troubled Charles Ives, for one--and its cultural decline in the postwar era may have had something to do with the discomfort that the homosexual ambiance caused in the general population.

After saying "somewhere around half of the major American composers of the twentieth century seem to have been homosexual or bisexual," he adds "in Britain too the art of composition skewered gay," and writes an incredible chapter on Benjamin Britten and his life and musical partner, the tenor Peter Pears.

What perplexed Britten was not his sexuality per se--he never concealed himself in a sham marriage, and he sustained a loving relationship with Pears for more than half his life--but his longing for the company of underage males. Although that predicament places him outside most people's experience, the disordering power of desire is a universal theme, and Britten's music is a searing diary of its repercussions.

For anyone interested in music, this is an essential book.

Born November 29: Billy Strayhorn, Peter Cameron

Jazz genius Billy Strayhorn spent his life in a jam: professionally, he couldn’t live with or without Duke Ellington. Gay in an intolerant time and homophobic musical subculture, he was lucky to be able to live and work openly behind the protective band leader. Yet Ellington took credit for Strayhorn’s music and made him work without a contract. Duke’s highest earning number, his signature tune, the “holy grail” of the era, Take the A Train, was, unknown to everyone at the time, written by Strayhorn, who never received any royalties. Ellington got rich. Strayhorn worked mainly to be able to work, without recognition or reward. But what work it is: Lush Life, Day Dream, Rain Check, Satin Doll, Chelsea Bridge, Lotus Blossom, Clementine, Johnny Come Lately, and many songs recorded by his dear friend Lena Horne, including Maybe, Something To Live For, and the double-edged Love Like This Can’t Last. As for his own “love like this,” within his first year in New York he and his boyfriend Aaron Bridgers moved in together and lived openly as a couple in Harlem, brave for 1940, when he was twenty-four. And, after a life of heavy drinking and constant smoking, when he died of cancer of the esophagus at fifty-one, he died not in Lena Horne’s arms as an oft-repeated story has it [she was in Europe], but with his partner Bill Grove. Although that was two years before Stonewall, Strayhorn worked in the early gay rights movement. Proving the depth of the prejudice he struggled against, even now the official Billy Strayhorn website completely degays him. We've had the prestigious biography for eleven years; where is the Hollywood biopic?

 

The only proper way to celebrate Peter Cameron turning forty-eight today is to buy his fifth novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, which continues to garner excellent reviews. Read David Lipsky in the New York Times here. The Toronto Star said it's "considerably more sophisticated, subtle, and rewarding" than Catcher in the Rye. Also, pray that the movie of his fourth novel, The City of Your Final Destination, is eventually released. It stars Laura Linney and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and an unhappy Anthony Hopkins who recently sued Merchant-Ivory for $750,000 for his work in it. While you're shopping, get his novels Andorra and The Weekend. (He's a wonderful writer. Consider how that last title, of a novel about grief, is also The Weakened.) Lastly, treat yourself to his selected stories, The Half You Don't Know, many of which first appeared in The New Yorker.

Born November 28: Rita Mae Brown

How do people reconcile the Rita Mae Brown of the 1960s, 70s and 80s with the Rita Mae Brown of today? Born to an unmarried 18 year-old, adopted by the Browns, expelled from the University of Florida, she seemed destined to be a lifelong hellraiser. She cofounded the Student Homophile League, was at the Stonewall riots, quit her job at NOW to protest Betty Friedan’s anti-lesbian remarks, organized the Lavender Menace zap at the 1970 Congress to Unite Women, and in 1971 cofounded The Furies Collective promoting lesbian separatism (above). In 1973, she exploded the world’s idea of lesbian fiction, taking it from the suicidal, sepia flatland of The Well of Loneliness to the brazen, technicolor 3-D of her Rubyfruit Jungle. (Of course the manuscript had been rejected by every mainstream publisher and ignored by every mainstream reviewer, but Daughters Press paid Brown $1,000 and made her novel a hit through word of mouth. It remains her best known work of thirty-eight books and nine screenplays, one of which was nominated for an Emmy.) From 1979 to 1981 she lived with Martina Navratilova, then wrote a novel, Sudden Death, about a lesbian tennis player. From 1983 to 1991, Martina was with beauty queen Judy Nelson; their breakup was messy and public and Judy sued for palimony, but Rita Mae mediated, kept it out of court, and ended up living with Judy. (Judy wrote a book about her affair with Martina called Love Match, for which Rita Mae wrote the introduction, then later wrote another book, Choices, about her affairs with Martina and Rita Mae, no introduction.) In a 1997 interview with OutSmart magazine, Brown talks about why her great love for Fannie Flagg didn't work out:

because Fannie's "just so homophobic," she says. "Well, you know, Fannie's almost 60, and it's just a different generation's outlook. They were already getting established in their careers when we were in our teens and struggling with the Viet Nam War and civil rights. There's a grand canyon between us."

This is perplexing because Imdb and the NYT give Flagg's birthdate as September 1944 and Brown's is November 1944. Equally vexing is how Brown presents herself on her official website. As the author of fifteen mysteries "coauthored" with her cat Sneaky Pie Brown and six mysteries set in the world of fox hunting, she understandably spends a lot of time extolling animals and country life. She discusses fox hunting at length.She takes pride in her title as Master of the Hounds. She thanks Jesus her horses are generally healthy. Yet in her rambling 2,100 word "About Rita Mae," she never mentions lesbians in any way, dismisses her (gender neutral) affairs, and says she found her past activism boring.

Anyway, there I was now hailed as the Mother of the Feminist Movement, the Gay Movement. Meanwhile, I worked full time and then worked at night on political issues. They bored me if for no other reason that they were about cities and I belong in the country.

Thank god Martina hasn't mellowed this drastically. Nor has Rita Mae entirely lost her spark. She says the difference between Democrats and Republicans "is the difference between syphilis and gonorrhea."

Reasons Why Seward Highway Is a National Scenic Byway

Brokaw Defends Degaying Book Because He Covered Aids on TV

Appearing on CNN's Reliable Source with Howard Kurtz, Tom Brokaw denied trying to "downplay the rise of the gay rights movement" in his Boom. Although his book's timeline extends to August 1974, he claims the movement "came later."

KURTZ: I have heard some criticism of the book saying that you deal with civil rights, you deal with women's liberation, as it was called then, but you don't devote any time or space to the burgeoning gay rights movement. Is that something...

     (CROSSTALK)

BROKAW: I don't, because the gay rights movement came slightly later. It lifted off during that time and I had to make some choices about what I was going to concentrate on. The big issues were the anti-war movement, the counterculture.

I do make some reference to it, but it is only fleeting. And it wasn't any attempt on my part to suppress it. It is just that the gay rights movement really came later after the '60s, it really began to take hold in the '70s.

I did the first television documentary on AIDS in America, and it was because my friend Larry Kramer (ph) had stopped me on the street and said, there is something going on in the gay community that you need to pay attention to. So in this book it was not an oversight on my part to try to downplay the rise of the gay rights movement, which did come later.

Kurtz did not follow up. He did not, for example, press him on his usage of "later" by pointing out that Brokaw includes the movie Dreamgirls and the Duke lacrosse team scandal, both from 2006, while he excludes the White House picketing of 1965, the Stonewall riots of 1969, and the fact that by 1974 cities coast to coast held annual gay pride parades.

Shouldn't someone ask Larry Kramer how he feels about Brokaw using him as his gay cred while deleting our history and making us invisible?

Frank Kameny's Letter to Tom Brokaw and Random House

Yesterday, Charles Kaiser panned Tom Brokaw's "bloodless" Boom in the Washington Post's Book World, and, among other criticisms, cited his ignoring the gay right movements and its heroes like Frank Kameny. Today, Kameny has sent a letter to Brokaw and his editor and publisher at Random House. (Band of Thebes is cc'ed, along with the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, media critic Howard Kurtz, and historian Dudley Clendinen.)

                                                                                 November 26, 2007

Mr. Tom Brokaw
c/o Random House Publishing Group

Ms. Gina Centrello
Publisher
Random House Publishing Group

Ms. Kate Medina
Executive Editorial Director
Random House Publishing Group
1745 Broadway
New York, New York,  10019

Dear Mr. Brokaw and Mmes. Centrello and Medina:

     As a long-time gay activist, who initiated gay activism and militancy at
the very start of "your" Sixties, in 1961; coined the slogan "Gay is Good"
in 1968; and is viewed by many as one of the "Founding Fathers" of the
Gay Movement, I write with no little indignation at the total absence of
any slightest allusion to the gay movement for civil equality in your book “Boom! Voices of the Sixties".  Your book simply deletes the momentous events of that decade which led to the vastly altered and improved status of gays in our culture today.  This change would have
been inconceivable at the start of the Sixties and would not have
occurred at all without the events of that decade totally and utterly
ignored by you.  Mr. Brokaw, you have "de-gayed" the entire decade. "Voices of the
Sixties"??? One does not hear even one single gay voice in your book. The silence
is complete and deafening.

     As a gay combat veteran of World War II, and therefore a member of the
"Greatest Generation", I find myself and my fellow gays as absent from
your narration as if we did not and do not exist. We find Boom! Boom!!
Boom!!! in your book about all the multitudinous issues and the vast
cultural changes of that era. But not a single "Boom", only dead
silence, about gays, homosexuality, and the Gay Movement.

     The development of every other possible, conceivable issue and cause
which came to the forefront in that period is at least mentioned, and is
usually catalogued: race; sex and gender; enthnicity; the environment;
and others, on and on and on -- except only gays.

     In 1965, we commenced bringing gays and our issues "out of the closet"
with our then-daring picketing demonstrations at the White House and
other government sites, and our annual 4th of July demonstrations at
Independence Hall in Philadelphia.  The Smithsonian Institution displayed these original pickets last month, in the same exhibition as the desk where Thomas Jefferson drafted The Declaration of Independence.  The name of the Smithsonian’s exhibition?  “Treasures of American History”. In your book: No Boom; only silence.

    About 1963, a decade-long effort commenced to reverse the psychiatric
categorization of gays as mentally or emotionally ill, concluding in
1973 with a mass "cure" of all of us by the American Psychiatric
Association. No boom in your book; only your silence.

     The most momentous single Gay Movement event occurred at the end of
June, 1969, when the "Stonewall Rebellion" in New York, almost overnight
(actually it took three days) converted what had been a tiny, struggling
gay movement into the vast grass-roots movement which it now is. We had
five or six gay organizations in the entire country in 1961; fifty to
sixty in 1969; by the time of the first Gay Pride march, in New York
one year later in 1970, we had 1500, and 2500 by 1971 when counting
stopped. If ever there was Boom, this was it. In your book, no Boom,
only your silence.

     About 1972, Elaine Noble was elected to the Massachusetts state House of
Representatives as the first elected openly gay public official. I had
run here in Washington, DC, the previous year for election to Congress
as the first openly gay candidate for any federal office. Harvey Milk
was elected to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco. No boom in
your book; only your silence.

     Mr. Brokaw, you deal with the histories of countless individuals. Where are the
gays of that era: Barbara Gittings; Jack Nichols; Harry Hay; Del Martin
and Phyllis Lyons; Randolfe Wicker; Harvey Milk; numerous others? No
booms in your book; only silence and heterosexuals.

     Starting in 1961 a long line of court cases attacked the long-standing
U.S. Civil Service Gay Ban (fully as absolute and as virulent as the
current Military Gay ban, which actually goes back some 70 years and was
also fought in the 60s) with final success in 1975 when the ban on
employment of gays by the federal government was rescinded. In your
book, no boom; only your silence.

     The assault on the anti-sodomy laws, which made at least technical
criminals of all gays (and most non-gays for that matter, although never
used against them) and which was the excuse for an on-going terror

campaign against the gay community through arrests the country over,
began in 1961 and proceeded through the 60s and onward. In your book,
no boom; only your silence.

     In 1972, following up on Stonewall, the first anti-discrimination law
protective of gays was enacted in East Lansing, Michigan, followed by
the much more comprehensive one in D.C. in 1973, starting a trend which
now encompasses some twenty states, countless counties and cities, and has
now reached Congress in ENDA. In your book, no boom; only your silence.

     The Sixties were a period of unprecedented rapid social and cultural
upheaval and change. We gays were very much a part of all that. A
reader of your book would never have the slightest notion of any of
that. In your book, no boom; only your silence.

     At the start of the Sixties gays were completely invisible. By the end, and
especially after Stonewall, we were seen everywhere: in entertainment,
education, religion, politics, business, elsewhere and everywhere. In
BOOM our invisibility remains total.

     The only allusions to us, in your entire book are the most shallow,
superficial, brief references in connection with sundry
heterosexuals. Where are the gay spokespeople? We are certainly there
to speak for ourselves. But in your book, only silence.

     Mr. Brokaw, I could go on, but this should be sufficient to make my point. The
whole thing is deeply insulting. As I said, you have de-gayed an entire
generation. For shame, for shame, for shame. You owe an abject public
apology to the entire gay community. I demand it; we expect it.

     Gay is Good. You are not.

     Sincerely,

     Franklin E. Kameny, Ph.D.

UPDATE: As of noon, the story has been picked up by Queerty and Galley Cat.

Born November 26: John Amaechi

Growing up, John Amaechi always felt different: He was 6'10", mixed-race, with a Nigerian father and a British mother who raised him in Stockport, England, then he was doubly an outsider attending high school in the mid-1980s in Toldeo, Ohio and college at Vanderbilt and Penn State. So being gay was just one more distinction. Of course he played basketball, but he was atypical in professional sports as well. In 2000, Amaechi turned down a $17 million contract with the Los Angeles Lakers in order to play for $600,000 a year with the Orlando Magic. His reason? Three years before, Orlando had been the only team to consider picking him up after his European stint. He also played for the Chicago Bulls, the Houston Rockets, and the Utah Jazz before retiring in 2003. His career stats can be found here. Seven months ago he became the first player associated with the NBA to come out, when ESPN Books published his autobiography, Man in the Middle. He is beautifully articulate. He owns a consulting company that provides motivational speakers and executive training, and he runs the ABC Foundation in Manchester which works to build youth sports centers throughout the U.K.
 

The New York Times Book Review 100 Notable Books of 2007

Forthcoming in their December 2 issue, the New York Times Book Review has released online their 100 Notable Books of 2007. Titles of primary interest include:

André Aciman, Call Me By Your Name
Thomas Mallon, Fellow Travelers
David Leavitt, The Indian Clerk
Colm Toibin, Mothers and Sons: Stories

Titles with some gay content are:

Roberto Bolaño, The Savage Detectives
Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
Ha Jin, A Free Life

Martin Amis's novel House of Meetings is also on the list. In its final pages the narrator says he has always been "queer for his brother." This revelation is just as preposterous as the fact that although the narrator is a poet in his native Russia, he never once mentions Pushkin but quotes from memory many British poets like Wilfred Owen. Coincidentally, British author Amis has never been to Russia.

Also on the list is Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses, which does not have any gay content but should be of interest to all readers for being by far the best novel of the year.

Born November 23: Bruce Vilanch

If you've laughed during the Academy Awards show any time since 1989, chances are you should thank Bruce Vilanch, "the man who the F.U. in funny" and the Oscars head writer since 2000, for which he's won two Emmys. He's also written for Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Diana Ross, David Letterman, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, and, before anyone else, Bette Midler. In 1970 she read a Chicago Tribune review of her show and called the critic, who told her to use more jokes in her act; she asked him to write them and they've collaborated ever since. As the Demure Miss M puts it, "Bruce was the first man to put something in my mouth that made us both money." He 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. Vilanch has become well-known in his own right, especially after his stint on the New Hollywood Squares, and starring 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 documentary Get Bruce! and also appears in Laughing Matters: Gay Comedy in America. Beyond being funny, Vilanch has been a tireless and vocal supporter of many aids and gay rights causes.

Happy Thanksgiving from Alaska

The ranger could not say exactly what these fifty or sixty sea otters were doing in Mud Cove, but she did say they were all males. The females are miles and miles away, with their pups.

Born November 22: André Gide

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 teenage memories of masturbating under the dining room table with concierge's son or his adult lovemaking with an Arab youth on a sand dune in Algeria. He had also befriended Oscar Wilde in north Africa (see inscribed photo). 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.

Born November 21: Christine Vachon

Killer Films' Christine Vachon turns forty-five today, coinciding with the release of Todd Haynes' Bob Dylan movie I'm Not There, which happens to be the forty-sixth movie she's produced. (If only she could have convinced him to cut the awful section starring Richard Gere.) Beyond wondering where Todd would be without her, because she also produced his Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine, and Far from Heaven, you might consider where independent cinema would have ended up without her vision. Just the 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 a couple dozen interesting misses like 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 making forty-six movies 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.

Three Additions to the Blogroll

When you get tired of reading the same sites and need something new, try these:

Fridae, a comprehensive website in English "empowering gay Asia" featuring news, culture, movies, books, and upcoming events throughout the region. Their five most recent articles cover Desmond Tutu, the Hong Kong Gay Film Festival which starts tomorrow, the second novel by Johann Lee, Junior Vasquez's debut in Singapore, and a visitor's look at gay life in Yangon.

Sexual Orientation and the Law Blog,written by two law professors (a woman at the Univ. of Illinois and a man at Emory), the site reviews current LGBTQ legal cases and legislative issues in the United States. Yesterday's entry covered Hammer v. Univ. of Michigan. Of 45 professors considered for tenure at the law school in the past 40 years, Hammer was the first to be denied. He was also the first openly gay professor. The writing is concise, readable, and jargon-free. (Hat tip, Charlene.)

White Crane Journal, "the oldest gay spirituality magazine with a 15 year history of exploring gay spirit, culture and wisdom," offers excerpts of its content online and urges readers to subscribe to the print edition "to keep this conversation going." The most recent issue includes two interviews (check out Egyptologist Greg Reeder on same-sex love portrayed on ancient tombs), five essays (Harry Hay, Walt Whitman, more), four non-fiction book reviews, three poems, and two columns.

Born November 20: Geneviève Pastre

No, Les Mauves isn't a hip new French band, it's the French gay political party founded twelve years ago by activist and lesbian theorist Geneviève Pastre who today turns eighty-four. And, yes, this morning she blogged. Her homepage links to the four other websites she maintains.  She came out officially when she was fifty-six and published her essay "About Lesbian Love." She followed those with books such as Homosexuality in the Ancient World and Athens and the Sapphic Peril, which criticize and go beyond Foucault. Unhappy with mainstream publishing's attitude toward her work, she started her own publishing house which she named Editions de Geneviève Pastre and which publishes much more than her own books. Multimedia before most, she was elected president of France's national gay radio station in 1982 and continued to host a weekly radio show well into her sixties. Among their other accomplishments, Les Mauves helped get the WHO to stop classifying homosexuality as a mental illness and convinced Amnesty to consider gay people for political asylum.

Born November 19: Morris Kight

O, Los Angeles: so forward, so beautiful, so backward. The city needed Morris Kight, who was born in Comanche County, Texas, and arrived in 1958, almost forty and ready to fight for gay rights. He considered the Mattachine Society elitist, and, in reaction, co-founded the third branch of the Gay Liberation Front, after New York and Berkeley. One of their earliest battles was against a West Hollywood diner called Barney's Beanery which had a painted sign and printed matchbooks with the misspelled warning Fagots Stay Out. After three months of protests, sit-ins, and media glare, the owner removed the original sign, but as soon as the attention subsided, he remounted an identical sign and kept it on display until 1984. In June 1970 to celebrate the first anniversary of Stonewall, Kight helped organize Christopher Street West, which was only permitted after he, Troy Perry, and the ACLU sued the hostile police department and reluctant city officials for the right to have a parade. His proudest moment came in October 1971, when he and two other activists opened the nation's first gay and lesbian community center. With his sometimes abrasive strategies and leftist politics, Kight had many detractors within the movement, such as David Goodstein who transformed the Advocate from a newspaper to a magazine and prohibited his reporters from writing about Kight and other people he thought hurt the gay rights image. Kight's protest of anti-gay Coors created a public disaster for Outfest, which had finally convinced the brewery to sponsor their film festival. He was also a vocal critic of 1978's proposed amendment to ban gay teachers from public schools. In January 2003, Kight donated his 3,000-item collection of art, papers, and memorabilia to the ONE Institute. Three days later he died, at 83, survived by his partner of twenty-five years, Roy Zucheran. For more on Los Angeles back in the day, read Lillian Faderman and Stuart Timmon's Gay L.A.

Judith Thurman on Cleopatra's Nose

Thursday night at 192 Books, Judith Thurman discussed her magnificent new collection of thirty-nine essays, thirty-eight of which have appeared in The New Yorker since June 1987 when she wrote about Nadine Gordimer. She sounded a lot like John McPhee had when he sat in the same chair seven months ago discussing the difficulties of their craft. Thurman said, "Writing has never gotten easier. Experience doesn't help. Confidence does not accrue. (You hope your surgeon doesn't feel the same.)" She also spoke about the importance of "letting the inessential go," particularly as a result of last summer's essay about tofu. Rather than reading from it, she read us some of her innumerable false starts from early drafts of the piece. She said she thought it was encouraging to young writers that even an old hand can be so bad and that she had seen many writers' first drafts and they were all terrible. I asked her about Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, whom she cites as the love of Balenciaga's life, but she said she did not have time to research him more. She added, "Balenciaga had an affair with blank but it's not my job to out blank." She told me that what made the Balenciaga piece meaningful to her was getting to the sentence, "A machine doesn't suffer from the terror of failure and exposure inherent in virtuosity." I also asked her what the fashion industry made of her and she was very funny about how far off their radar she is. Don't make the same mistake yourself. Buy Cleopatra's Nose and read every word.

Born November 15: Francois Ozon

How can it possibly be that we've only known Francois Ozon's films for ten years? His talent seems eternal. His first feature, the frothy Sitcom, released in 1998, was selected for Cannes and remains memorable for this scene (stay with it, translation not needed). His second movie, Criminal Lovers, starts as a suburban noir with two teenagers plotting to kill a classmate, but by the time they escape to the country to bury the body it becomes a fable. An ogre traps them, seduces the boy, forces him to have sex, and they fall in love, only to have society intervene with a SWAT team that kills the beast and imprisons the boy. After shooting Fassbinder's Water Drops on Burning Rocks, with its gay kiss and dance sequence, Ozon hit his stride with his three greatest works: the extraordinary Under the Sand, with Charlotte Rampling as a woman whose husband vanishes; 8 Women, a mystery- musical with France's all-star all-female cast of all-time (Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, Fanny Ardant, Virginie Ledoyen, Danielle Darrieux, Ludivine Sagnier); and Swimming Pool, again with Charlotte Rampling as an uptight thriller writer whose life changes while hosting her publisher's seductive, freewheeling teenage daughter. Two smaller films followed, and now Ozon has completed his ninth feature, Angel, his debut in English, adapted from Elizabeth Taylor's novel about the rise and fall of an impetuous British novelist at the beginning of the 20th century, loosely based on Marie Corelli. You can watch four clips here, or simply enjoy the still below. If you ever get the chance to see his 15-minute gay short, A Summer Dress, grab it.

Sindy Felin's Touching Snow

Tonight is the (otherwise lackluster) ceremony for the National Book Awards and you should put on your lucky socks or whatever you do to make certain Sindy Felin wins the YA category. She's not your garden variety black lesbian paralegal first-novelist turned National Book Award nominee and abuse survivor of Haitian descent. Oh, no. She's also pregnant with triplets. Two readers have tipped me to this interview in the Washington Post. It's a great profile for many reasons, especially the naturalness with which it includes her partner, their hunt for a sperm donor, and the "budding lesbianism" of the book's seventh grade protagonist. Apparently Touching Snow contains considerable violence, always handled in a manner sensitive enough for today's young readers. Make sure to support it. Judging from the vague profiles of two other nominees, it's possible we have three runners in this race, but Sindy Felin is the only one who's out. Either way, Brian Selznick's intricate The Invention of Hugo Cabret, about a lonely boy in Paris, looks wonderful. And not just because Martin Scorsese may direct the movie.

Born November 14: Adolf Brand

When was the first gay journal published? ONE began in 1953 but the first was before that. Congratulations if you said 111 years ago, in 1896. That's when a giant of gay history, Adolf Brand, started Der Eigene in Berlin when he was twenty-two. 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, collected from writings from Ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, 19th century Germany, and Arab and Japanese texts. Needless to say, Brand and his publications were constantly harassed and frequently prosecuted for its articles and photography, sometimes nude, 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 ("outing," if you must) 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 allowing "lewd writings" to be published in Der Eigene. He published the journal for thirty-six years. Compare that with ONE, which lasted nineteen years; the Daughters of Bilitis's The Ladder, sixteen years, or the 1990's 10 Percent magazine, which folded within 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.

LGBT History Month UK

Obviously, you can never have too much gay history, so spend some time with the newly revised website for Lesbian Gay Bisexual Trans History Month UK. (For the record, the month is February, but the site is full of news, links, and video clips right now.) As they say, "LGBT people have often hidden themselves in society for their own safety and have also frequently been ignored by others for their achievements and contributions. The month will begin to rectify that." Quite. Last year they tallied more than 800 events honoring LGBT History Month. This year they anticipate even greater participation. Major sponsors include The Metropolitan Police, Transport for London, the Department of Health, and the Ministry of Justice, as well as several corporations and Amnesty International. A sister site is LGBT History Month in Scotland. Although the Brits seem to be enjoying a wider acceptance with their version, LGBT History Month was born in the U.S. in 1994, the brain child of a Missouri high school teacher named Rodney Wilson. Ours is October. How did you celebrate?

Born November 12: Roland Barthes

Ah, le Francais. 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? For that matter, who in the 1960s could argue about the irrelevance of writers to their work? Roland Barthes did. He was among the first to bridge high and low culture, writing for erudite journals and for daily newspapers, showing readers everywhere 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,” mentioned above. His book Incidents, published after his death, ruefully describes his amorous (mis)adventures with men throughout Europe and Morocco. 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.

Breaking from Zagreb: "Fashion Is Ruled By Male Homosexuals"

Don't imagine that the Croatian news portal Javno assigned Borat's smarter sister, or The Onion, to tackle the story of why designing women's clothes "is quite gay in its essence." They're serious. The subhead asks, "Creativity or Trauma?" but the article and experts aren't anti-gay. (Mainly, they posit it's because the designers spent a lot of time around women growing up.) Here's the first paragraph:

It is widely known that male designers rule female fashion, but it is even more known that the fashion designer world is quite gay in its essence. We are not talking about condemning sexual orientation, but pure facts. Competent followers of fashion know that this impulse towards aesthetics plays a large role in life. Why does gay culture rule the fashion world? We have searched for the answers from several expert angles.

You can enjoy the didactic yet earnest tone, the occasional odd usage of English, or the surprisingly thorough slideshow of eighteen leading designers who are gay, including Calvin Klein, who has never come out. Or you can wonder why a top U.S. newspaper would never do a major roundup on a particular industry to remind their readers that virtually every major player in that field is gay.

Born November 9: Anthony Asquith

Everyone knows that Anthony Asquith's father was Prime Minister during the Great War 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. Of course he met everyone, returned to London, and within a few years directed his first feature, a romance called Shooting Stars set among actors at a movie studio. Scholars today consider it almost equal to Hitchcock's famed silent Blackmail, and it was a success at the time too, launching a career that would span 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.

Tom Brokaw De-Gays the Entire Boomer Generation

Two days ago, Random House published Tom Brokaw's Boom!: Voices of the Sixties: Personal Reflections on the '60s and Today, which purports to explain that decade's "profound social, political, and individual changes" and "the impact of the 1960s on our lives today" in exhaustive detail throughout nearly 700 pages. Readers who eagerly anticipate how Brokaw will weave the story of the birth and explosive growth of the gay rights movement into the larger narrative fabric of the times, as well as wondering how he will convey the Boomer generation's catastrophic losses from aids, will be disappointed. He doesn't. His book about the social upheaval of the Sixties, and the Sixties as midwife to emerging and enduring political movements never mentions the Mattachine pickets of the White House (1965) or Stonewall (1969) or annual gay pride parades that began on the first anniversary of Stonewall in New York, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and now span the globe, or any gay political group. No. Instead, 1969 is noted for Woodstock, and 1970 is highlighted as having the first Earth Day. In the context of shifting mores on sex and the changing dynamics of what makes a family, gay life is ignored. Gay death is ignored too, because the index has no entry for aids. The emergence of gay visibility in entertainment, education, religion, and business is completely erased. The book virtually never even  acknowledges gay people. No Harvey Milk, no Frank Kameny, no Barbara Gittings, no Larry Kramer. David Geffen is mentioned, once, simply as a friend of Berry Gordy's. Oh, but there is a recap of Dick Cheney telling Wolf Blizter he was "out of line" to mention Mary.

Where there ought to be an index entry for gay or gay rights it says see homosexuality--a Victorian, not a Sixties, term--whose thirteen subcategories are shown above. Study the names: Buchanan, Cheney, Fallows, Greenhouse, Huerta, and Webb. They're all straight. (Imagine, for a moment, a sweeping social and political history book in which all the names beneath the entry for black were Asian people, or if the entry for Jewish listed only half a dozen Catholics.) Even these arbitrary six heterosexuals offer no true analysis of gay issues; usually their references only include gay rights in a list of political issues or cases before the court. The other subcategories refer to passages that are equally meaningless.  "And the women's movement" might be a springboard for a fascinating, complex comparison of the two movements but in fact page 195 only gives the subject half a sentence, saying, in addition to dealing with tensions over the race, the women's movement was "also divided along ethnic lines and by sexual orientation." Every reference is that shallow. Even for Brokaw's brand of History Lite, the omission is appalling. Gay Boomers, what happened to you? And what are you going to do about it?

Born November 8: Marjorie Hamm

Head-turning firebrand and excellent, excellent sister-in-law. Happy Birthday.

Today's United Nations Panel on LGBTQ Human Rights

Did you realize that before Mary Robinson [above in red] was the President of Ireland, and long before she was the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, she was a lawyer who in 1983 represented David Norris in his case challenging Ireland’s laws that made homosexuality illegal? They took the case all the way to their Supreme Court, which decided against them, 3-2, with the majority arguing that keeping homosexuality illegal served public health and marriage. Undeterred, they took their case to the European Court of Human Rights in 1988, which ruled in their favor, citing Ireland’s law as a violation of privacy. Five years later, the Irish Parliament finally decriminalized homosexuality and when the bill was sent up to be signed into law, guess who was president?

Since then, Mary Robinson has remained a strong advocate of gay equality and she was emphatic today that gay rights are at their core human rights. Although she did say that in the past the UN body “was not sufficiently thoughtful” on these issues, she praised the rightness of the United Nations hosting today’s launch of the Yogyakarta Principles “on the application of international human rights law in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity,” listed here.

Importantly, the event was co-sponsored by three UN missions, not from the Northern, liberal nations you might expect but three South American, Catholic countries: Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay.

Ana Lucy Cabral, of Brazil’s Department for Human Rights and Social Issues, spoke about her government’s landmark program “Brazil Without Homophobia” which was launched in 2003. [Compare that to the campaign of homophobia that marked our government’s 2004 elections.]

Federico Villegas Beltran, of Argentina’s Human Rights Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Trade and Worship, spoke similarly about his country’s progressive agenda to fight all kinds of discrimination with a 200-point plan including civil unions, pension sharing for same-sex couples, and repealing anti-gay provincial codes.

A member of Uruguay’s delegation spoke candidly about the ongoing legacy of horrors facing some lgbtq citizens: torture, execution, mistreatment, job discrimination, and sexual assault. She reiterated the government’s full support of the YP.

Miriam Maluwa of UNAIDS framed the need for equality as one of public health and reminding the crowd that as of 2005, more than 70 countries still outlawed homosexuality.

Sonia Correa from Brazil’s Sexuality Policy Watch said between 150 and 200 people in Brazil were killed each year for being lgbtq and that queer Brazilians were “constant victims” of discrimination, more from their families, friends, and schools, than from health services or at work.

Among the questions and comments:

The mission from Chile wanted advice because they are having a difficult time with the YP solely because of principle 24 which declares a right to adoption and artificial insemination. (The advice was to remind them that the YP does not include same-sex marriage as a basic human right.)

The mission from the Netherlands announced the Dutch government’s intention to make the YP an aspect of their foreign policy.

The chairman of Transgender Europe said in order to get a German passport he had to prove he is sterilized.

The mission from France said, yes, but year after year lgbtq NGOs are suffering discrimination “in this very house,” so how can we change the situation here in the UN?

The moderator said, “That is a difficult situation.”

Ha Jin at the Chelsea B&N

Discussing his new novel and his career for an hour last night in Chelsea, Ha Jin gave what amounted to a crash course in the Western Canon. He talked about Homer and Dante (saying the great literary tradition was to write about exile not immigration, which is only a minor theme in world literature and primarily an American one), Willa Cather (My Antonia being a major book about the immigrant experience, and with O Pioneers, making the land a character, showing how the people who stay on the land will be fine but those who leave it may or may not survive but are likely to be sterile), Henry Roth (whose Call It Sleep provided a “technical map for how to present multiple languages in a story”), Abraham Cohen (for the immigration experience of Russian Jews in his novel The Rise of David Lewinsky), Gish Jen (for being one of his few fellow Chinese-American writers to examine this generation rather than retelling the stories of their parents and grandparents), and his heroes Joseph Conrad and Nabokov, both of whom wrote in English as a second language learned much later in life. (Conrad was Polish, born Teodor Józef Konrad Nalęcz-Korzeniowski.) Remember, Ha Jin did not come to the U.S. until 1985 when he was twenty-nine. Within five years he had published his first book of poems written in English and within eleven years he had won the PEN/Hemingway Award for his first book of stories. Three years later, in 1999, he published his second novel Waiting, a masterpiece of purity that won the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His 2004 novel War Trash again won the PEN/Faulkner Award. The new novel, A Free Life, is his fifth, and it is 630 pages because he wanted it to have a "heft and exuberance that reflect America’s land." I thanked him for his story "The Bridegroom" (about a closeted gay man in China) and asked if any of his novels included characters who are gay. His head shot up and froze, like a pointer, as he visibly, distantly sped through his mental rolodex of his characters. He looked worried, or maybe it was intense concentration. “Yes!” he said with absolute joy. “The new one!”

Born November 6: Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham was brilliant even before he wrote The Hours. As an unknown writer, he submitted an early chapter of his second novel, A Home at the End of the World, to The New Yorker and they published it, then it was included in the Best American Short Stories anthology. His third novel, Flesh and Blood, was an even more ambitious examination of family life, including gay life, covering three generations in the family of a striving, sometimes brutal Greek immigrant, Constantine Stassos, and his wife, Mary. Three years later he published The Hours and won the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Stonewall Book Award. His success is very richly deserved, but is it ruining him? In the nine years since then, he has written only an extended travel essay and one novel, Specimen Days, which frankly was a mess and coincidentally has the least gay content of any of his work. (The final section is a love story between a robot and a lizard from outer space.) And he appears to have gone Hollywood. It's understandable that he was tempted to write the screenplay for A Home at the End of the World, but there was no reason for him to adapt Susan Minot's novel Evening into this summer's all-star flop. The New York Times critic said the movie "fails badly," "burdened with false, labored dialogue," "dialogue laden with forced allusions," and that it proved how "some words that pass muster on the page can sound terribly precious coming out of a real person’s mouth." If you're lucky enough to see Michael Cunningham around New York or Provincetown, with his partner of nineteen years, use your telepathy to get him back to what he does best, writing novels about people. 

It's the First Tuesday in November. VOTE.

No excuses.

Queer Kids Rule: Lesbian Cuties and Gay Princes

Look for yourself. The seniors of Waukegan High School forty miles from Chicago knew what they were doing last week when they voted these two lesbians, Brandy Johnson and Lupe Silva, both 17, “cutest couple” for next spring’s yearbook. Lupe and Brandy met in drama class last year and have been together ever since. Their school does not have a Gay Straight Alliance, but Brandy said, “Our relationship inspired others to be open.” Although students and school officials have not had any problem with the unprecedented queer victory, Lupe admitted, “My mom is OK with it, but only to a certain extent.”  Among the other 25 categories voted on and honored with special pictures in the yearbook are “biggest flirt” and “best body.”

Last month the juniors at Davis High School in California elected a gay couple, two 16 year-old juniors Kiernan Gatewood and Brandon Raphael, as princes to the Homecoming Court. (Only seniors can be King or Queen.) Their school does have a GSA, whose co-president is a senior named Chandler Fox. He said, “I don't know, I just think it's awesome. I want people to know about it so maybe it can happen at another school.” Brandon said, “We wanted to be nominated and win.” Kiernan said, “Just like anybody else.” Other students were quoted as being happy yet nonplussed by the election results but very surprised that the school administration let it stand. The boys rode through town together in the Homecoming Parade and received nothing but cheers.

Died November 5: James Robert Baker

Sorry to say, today is the tenth anniversary of James Robert Baker's suicide. He was prone to depression, went off his meds, and became despondent that for five years he could not get his novels published after the explosive and fairly successful Tim and Pete in 1992. Like all of his books, it takes place in around Los Angeles and begins as a love story but ends with a violent response to indifference about aids. Before that, he had published Adrenaline (1985), Fuel-Injected Dreams (1986), and the novel that Wikipedia cites as his best-selling magnum opus, Boy Wonder (1988). Two novels appeared posthumously, Testosterone and Anarchy. Three more novels remain unpublished. A graduate of UCLA’s film school, he also had written several unproduced screenplays. Testosterone became a movie made by the director of Edge of 17, written by Dennis Hensley of Misadventures in the 213, and starring