Band of Thebes

Born December 31: Joe Dallesandro

In the topsy-turvy, uptight and free-wheeling late Sixties and early Seventies, America was agog over Joe Dallesandro, the openly bi, frequently nude superstar of Paul Morrissey's Andy Warhol films. The most famous of these are Lonesome Cowboys, Flesh with Candy Darling, Heat with Sylvia Miles, and  Trash with Holly Woodlawn (whom George Cukor tried to get nominated for an Oscar via a write-in campaign, unsuccessfully). But Little Joe has worked widely beyond those movies, making over forty films, including eighteen in Europe, as well as Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club, John Waters' Cry-baby, and Steven Soderbergh's The Limey. He is also the cover model for the Rolling Stones' notorious Sticky Fingers and for The Smiths' The Smiths. Thrice married, he turns fifty-nine today and lives with his cat, still in Hollywood, where he manages a motel. His official website has bits of news for his admirers, one of whom has compiled these clips in tribute.

Born December 26: Thomas Gray, David Sedaris

Thomas Gray was the only surviving child of eight born to his parents and when he was nine, in 1725, they sent him to Eton. There, he was literary and lonely, until he formed the Quadruple Alliance with three other bookish boys who avoided athletics: Thomas Ashton, Richard West, and Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister. Later, he and Walpole toured Europe together and after West's early death Gray wrote one of his most famous sonnets to memorialize him. A perfectionist who was tremendously insecure about his work, Gray published only thirteen of his poems during his lifetime, yet he was widely revered and was offered the position of Poet Laureate, which he declined. His Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard gave rise the entire churchyard school of poets and added to the language these phrases: kindred spirit, the paths of glory, celestial fire, and far from the madding crowd. Another ode contains the line, "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise." A professor at Cambridge, he fell in love with one of his students, Charles-Victor de Bonstettin from Switzerland, who rejected him and returned home. All of Gray's ardor is said to have gone into his work. His entire collected poems run fewer than one thousand lines.

Amy's brother turns fifty today, and you can be sure he and Hugh will find something funny about it. Assuming you've read Barrel Fever, Naked, Holidays on Ice, Me Talk Pretty One Day, and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim, you only have to wait until June 3, when he publishes his new collection, Indefinite Leave To Remain. No, you're not mistaken; yes, that's a Pet Shop Boys song.

A Christmas Walk

Born December 24: Bob Smith, Brian Mulligan

Bob Smith was the first openly gay comedian on The Tonight Show so he understands comic timing, but there wasn't too much funny in seeing his publisher go out of business just before the release of his first novel, which he had spent six years writing. Selfish and Perverse covers a few months in the life of Nelson Kunker, a handsome, endearingly hapless television writer from Los Angeles who falls in love with Roy, a salmon fisherman, and spends the summer with him in Alaska. Dylan Fabizak, a hot actor / recovering addict / compulsive flirt wheedles his way into their lives; quips, sex, and danger ensue, sometimes simultaneously. Smith said he would cast Seann William Scott as the actor. Read it now because you know Hollywood.

If you're running the best improv in Los Angeles, or if you have a manuscript that needs a visionary design, or if you want a trenchant movie review before he's even seen it, or if you need to know who the next Missy or M.I.A. is way ahead of anyone else, or if you have any question about your garden or your dog, you only need Brian Mulligan. He might have been the Mayor of Missoula; instead, he's so much more.

Sea Stars and Christmas Anemones

The sea star on the left lived for more than two days in the gut of the Christmas Anemone on the right. [I asked each of them to pose with a blue pencil for scale. You're welcome.] The sea star survived by secreting a protective layer of a substance so disagreeable that after forty-eight hours the anemone spit it out again, whole. But if the sea star had lost a ray [arm] or two in the process it simply would have grown back. In fact, sea stars don't need to bother with all that male - female rigmarole in order to reproduce. If they divide across their central disc each half will regenerate into a complete adult and those two new sea stars will be able to reproduce via eggs or again through this process, fissiparity. Also, they're pretty. They begin life with bilateral symmetry, like humans, then as they develop they leave us far behind and attain radial symmetry. They're always clean and never get barnacles because they are covered with tiny pinching, grasping organs called pedicellariae which function independently from their nervous system. Their mouths are on the bottom, they expel waste from the top, they can have from five to twenty-four rays, and they can live up to twenty or even forty years. (The Christmas Anemone can be as old as sixty or eighty.) However many fun facts you retain or forget, just remember to call them sea stars rather than starfish because they are not fish. And try to attend a discovery lab on the first or third Wednesday of every month, free, at the Kachemak Bay Research Reserve in Homer.

Born December 21: Michael Tilson Thomas

Eight time Grammy winner Michael Tilson Thomas has been music director of the San Francisco Symphony since 1995. Tilson Thomas first conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra at twenty-four, ten days after being named assistant conductor in 1969. Following Boston, he was a conductor with the New York Philharmonic for their Young People's Concerts series, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, before becoming principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Twenty years ago he founded the New World Symphony, the premier orchestral academy, which continues to thrive in Miami. Last year he launched PBS's classical music show Keeping Score. He is known as MTT and according to glbtq.com, he is the first American conductor to achieve great prominence while being openly gay. Among his own acclaimed compositions are Three Songs to Poems by Walt Whitman sung by Thomas Hampson, Poems of Emily Dickinson sung by Renee Fleming, and From the Diary of Anne Frank narrated by Audrey Hepburn.

Perry Moore's List of Gays in Comic Books, Now with Pictures

Back in September, novelist Perry Moore compiled a list of comic books' gay characters or episodes, which while celebrating Northstar and other out superheroes, inevitably also chronicles the genre's stereotypes, double standards, hypocrisy, and homophobia. (Make sure to read the damning "By the Numbers" section at the end.) Apparently men who make their living off muscle men in tight tights and bright capes have issues about their masculinity. Some gay readers objected to Moore's calling the limp-wristed, cliche-riddled Rawhide Kid "offensive" because it's his right to be a flaming queen if he wants to. Now, another blog has reposted Moore's original list, adding images of every character, which is extremely helpful to the nongeek. If you love this subject, check out Cosmo Felton's thesis on minorities in comic books at Lonely Gods, and spend some time at the Gay League website.

Born December 20: Elsie de Wolfe

Baby boomers who act like they invented being young at sixty are forgetting about Elsie de Wolfe who at sixty-one in 1926 attended a costume ball in Paris dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer and made her entrance doing handsprings. When she turned seventy, the world's most famous interior designer wrote her autobiography and noted that her daily exercise regimen still included yoga, headstands, and walking on her hands. Her design style was nearly as dramatic, banishing the dark, heavy Victorian look for new openness, airiness, and light. Starting at forty, she received her first major commission for Stanford White's Colony Club, after which she designed the interiors for the premiere families of her day, the Fricks, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Windsors. Ten years into her success, in her early fifties, she stopped to become a nurse in World War I in France and earned the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. From her late twenties onward she lived with Elisabeth Marbury, one of the first women to work as a theatrical agent, representing Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. After thirty-three years together as a classic butch-femme couple, mentoring a whole generation of younger lesbians including Mercedes de Acosta who would become Greta Garbo's lover, de Wolfe up and married Sir Charles Mendl because she wanted a title. Now Lady Mendl, she expected nothing to change with Marbury, given that her marriage was completely platonic, and the women remained lovers for seven more years, until 1933, when Marbury died. The next time you discuss outing and public figures and privacy, you might bear in mind that in 1926, the New York Times ran a front page story calling de Wolfe's wedding "a great surprise"  because "she makes her home with Elisabeth Marbury at 13 Sutton Place." Not that everything can be explained by early experiences, but the woman who spent her life making things beautiful grew up listening to her mother tell her she was ugly. When she was seventy, Parisian fashionistas named her the best dressed woman in the world. She is immortalized in song lyrics by Irving Berlin and by Cole Porter:

When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up,

Now turns a handspring, landing up-

on her toes

Anything Goes!

Flying over the Kenai Mountains

Born December 19: Jean Genet

Let's look back at 1949. South Pacific opened on Broadway, James Gould Cozzens won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, All the King's Men won the Oscar for Best Picture, and in France, Jean Genet received his tenth  criminal conviction, which meant he would be sent to prison for life. In the five preceding years he had published his five epic novels, as well as three plays and dozens of poems, all of which were greatly esteemed by his European contemporaries despite his focus on petty thieves and his inclusion of gay sex. As news of his dire situation spread, rather than ostracizing Genet, the leading intellectuals rallied to his defense, and with a public push from Cocteau, Sartre, and Picasso, among others, Genet was pardoned by the French president. It is safe to say Harry Truman would not have done the same because at that point Genet's fiction was still banned in the United States. Genet never returned to prison after that, nor did he ever publish another novel, although he continued to write plays, poems, and a memoir, Un Captif Amoureux, published in 1986, the year after he died of throat cancer. For the full story, do yourself a favor and read Edmund White's definitive biography.

Born December 17: Paul Cadmus

Although the controversy over his 1934 WPA painting The Fleet's In! was sparked by homophobia [in this detail many people of the time would have recognized bleached blond hair and a red tie as gay signals] and led Henry Latrobe Roosevelt to remove it from the Corcoran show, Paul Cadmus was always aware that the outcry helped establish him and for the rest of his life he said he was grateful for it. By 1937 his paintings at the Midtown Galleries in New York attracted more than 7,000 visitors. He had grown up in Manhattan and was fascinated by sailors, frequently hanging out at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park, where he was often propositioned by navy men on leave but was too shy to go with them, preferring instead to sit on the benches with them and talk. By his twenties, he was over his shyness and traveled through Europe for three years with his lover Jared French, who urged him to quit advertising and paint fulltime. Back in New York, they formed a circle of prominent gay artists including George Platt Lynes, who used Cadmus as a model, and Lincoln Kirstein, who married his sister, Fidelma Cadmus, and fifty years later wrote the catalog as Cadmus was being rediscovered. He enjoyed more than a decade of increasing interest in his work before he died, eleven days after 300 friends had gathered to celebrate his 95th birthday. He did not suffer any illness but after taking his habitual walk down a country road in Connecticut, returned home to Jon Anderson, his partner of more than thirty-five years, got in bed and never woke up. His paintings hang in most major collections in America.

Watch '60 Minutes' This Sunday

Whatever you do this weekend, make sure to watch 60 Minutes on Sunday night, when the program finally airs their segment on Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Entering the Alice in Wonderland world of military "logic," the show features Sgt. Darren Manzella who told his superiors he is gay, and, after seeing pictures and videos of him kissing his boyfriend AJ, responded by saying they found "no evidence of homosexuality" and sent him back to work. Also prominent is Friend of Band of Thebes [FoBoT?] Cholene Espinoza (left and above right, with her partner Ellen Ratner and Charles "the BF" Francis, at this year's SLDN dinner). A former Air Force U-2 pilot with more than 200 hours of combat flying time, Cholene is currently a Captain for a commercial airline, a boardmember of SLDN, and all-round awesome, which you will quickly realize despite her modesty when you read her book Through the Eye of the Storm.  (Favorite part: After Katrina, she and Ellen left New York, rented a truck, loaded it up with building supplies and handed them out to people in need along the Gulf Coast.) Watch Cholene and Darren in a 1:45 excerpt from 60 Minutes here and make time to watch the show on Sunday.

Born December 14: Bob Paris

Was any person in the 1990s more derided by gay men than Bob Paris or his then-husband Rod Jackson? Both were world champion bodybuilders, frequently photographed naked together cavorting outdoors, and, though married since 1989, were still gushingly in love. Because aids was decimating the population, their frolics may have seemed especially frivolous, yet in a time of tragically gaunt, sick bodies, their obsessive muscle could look like a dream of health and happiness. When they broke up in 1996, there was an unmistakable sense of bitter satisfaction. (Researching his 1999 book on gay marriage, Eric Marcus said invariably straight friends were interested in the topic while gay men dismissed it, quipping it must be a short book.) As for staying power, Paris has been with his current partner, Brian, for eleven years. He is a frequent motivational speaker to students, describing how he went from being a suicidal, homeless teenager to the first openly gay Mr. Universe. He has written seven books, four on fitness, one with Jackson about their relationship, one called Generation Queer: A Gay Man's Quest for Hope, Love, and Justice, and a memoir about bodybuilding, Gorilla Suit, which Kirkus called "unexpectedly eloquent...at once empathetic and scathing." If you're sure you need to see him oiled up and posing against a lavender backdrop to a Tracy Chapman song when he was big, click here, or to Cher when he got huge, try here.

Janet Malcolm on Gertrude Stein & Alice B. Toklas

Last night in Chelsea, Janet Malcolm discussed aspects of Two Lives, her new book about Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein. She came to the subject via Toklas, not Stein, after the New Yorker asked her to write something for their food issue and she chose The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook, which she hadn't touched for nearly half a century. From there, she wondered how two elderly Jewish American lesbians had survived living in occupied France throughout World War II. The answer is only one of many fascinating revelations in the slim book, which manages to say something new and important about the nature of biography, the quirks of writing, the work of reading, the unknowability of human actions, the ways in which biographers "use" their minor characters, and how a scholar's overwhelming fear of not living up to early promise can ultimately prevent him from completing any work. Always engaging, the book is not perfect. Band of Thebes reader and Best Sibling Ever Angela points out that although Malcolm paints a picture of a "repellent" Toklas, referring to her by a very private nickname and suggesting all their friends preferred Stein, a quick survey of several books by Janet Flanner reveals that she felt the opposite. During the Q&A, Malcolm did say she found "something unsympathetic about Alice Toklas' support for [the anti-Mason, Vichy] Bernard Faÿ after the war." Responding to other questions, she also said she considers a failing of her book to be that she did not convey Stein's suffering; she does not think Stein or Toklas experienced survivor's guilt; for this book she did not feel the need to walk the actual landscape as she did in her Reading Chekhov [a wonderful and essential book, along with her The Journalist and the Murderer]; she thinks Alice Munro is "sublime;" and in response to a comment about other writers' grandstanding, she said with a smile, "I'm not aware of other people showing off more than I do."

Two Recent Deaths of Writers

Jane Rule, author of Desert of the Heart way back in 1964 (which became the movie Desert Hearts in 1985), making her one of the first novelists to write favorably about lesbian relationships, died two weeks ago from liver cancer at 76. As a quick reminder of the world she and Helen Sonthoff, her partner of almost fifty years, were up against, the Globe and Mail points out in their giant obituary, "When Ms. Rule immigrated to Vancouver in the middle 1950s, the state still had the legal right to intrude into the bedrooms of the nation and consenting adults could be charged under the Criminal Code and imprisoned for five years for engaging in homosexual activity." When she studied with brilliant but stodgy Wallace Stegner at Stanford, he responded to her lesbian characters by asking why she was writing about "decadent stuff like this?" Of course, she triumphed ultimately. Beyond her many literary legacies, she and Helen found Margaret Atwood her first apartment and lent her the card table on which she wrote The Edible Woman. Always an independent thinker, Rule was strongly opposed to gay marriage. In an essay from 2001, she wrote, "With all that we have learned, we should be helping our heterosexual brothers and sisters out of their state-defined prisons, not volunteering to join them there." Shelagh Day, an activist and close friend, said, "She was not afraid of dying. She thinks she has had a gorgeous life."

Allan Berube was awarded a MacArthur "genius grant" in 1996, six years after publishing his amazing book on lesbians and gay men serving in World War II, Coming Out Under Fire. After you read it, rent Arthur Dong's documentary adaptation, which won a Peabody Award. In 1978, he was one of the founders of the San Francisco Lesbian and Gay History Project. Later, he lived in New York City, which he left ten years ago for Liberty Village, New York. There, he and his partner John Nelson ran a bed and breakfast, a mid-century antiques store, and the Shelburne Playhouse. He died earlier this week, at 61, from complications with two stomach ulcers.

Born December 12: Massimo Consoli

In Italy in the 1960s, Massimo Consoli was so eager for gay activism he subscribed to ONE and The Mattachine Review, despite having only a scant grasp of English. His own pioneering work for gay equality caught the attention of SID, the Italian version of the Stasi, which interrogated his neighbors, cost him his teaching job, and impelled him to move to the Netherlands. From that safe refuge, he published his Manifesto Gay in 1971 and as a result gay activists immediately formed FUORI! with branches in Rome, Milan, and Turin. Consoli attended the Gay May Day events of 1972 and arranged Italy's first commemoration of Stonewall on June 28, 1976, just one of the "hundreds" of political events he organized, ranging from demonstrations to conferences to book lectures. In the early 1980s he lived in New York and became good friends with Vito Russo, but after witnessing the emerging aids crisis he returned to Italy to educate people about the growing pandemic and the importance of safe sex. He was the first person to meet with the Italian police about crimes against gay people; he convinced them to create an office of a liaison to the gay community; and in 1992 he initiated the demonstration at the Vatican against Cardinal Ratzinger's antigay writings which discuss homosexuality in terms of "an intrinsic moral evil." Consoli started the magazine Gay News Rome and wrote forty books, two standouts of which are Homocaust, about the Nazi's persecution of gay men, and an autobiographical novel Andata and Ritorno. Forthcoming is his biography of Kurt Hiller, the early gay German  activist. Consoli led pilgrimages to the tomb, outside Rome, of another German gay pioneer, Karl Ulrichs, annually on his birthday August 28, and this year he helped get a statue of Ulrichs placed at the grave. Consoli himself died last month, of stomach cancer. His papers have been part of the Italian national archives collection since 1998 but still have not been cataloged. As a result, Consoli's papers dating from 1998 have been given to a gay archive. If your Italian is molto buon, you can read more about him qui and qui.

Born December 11: Jean Marais

Smitten in his teens, Jean Alfred Villain-Marais tried to enroll in the Paris Conservatory and was rejected, but he did get to do a little acting in high school: One day he dressed as a girl and flirted with his male teacher, a performance that riotously delighted his classmates and got him expelled. Cast out, he became a newspaper boy and held several odd jobs until he turned twenty and Marcel D'Herbier gave him bit parts in several of his films. At twenty-four he auditioned for Jean Cocteau and they fell in love, becoming romantic partners for the next twelve years and friends for life. Internationally, Marais is best known for his seven collaborations with Cocteau, especially La Belle et la bête and Orphée, whereas in his native France he is remembered as an Errol Flynn-style idol who did his own stunts in swashbuckling epics like the Fantômas trilogy. He adopted a son, Serge, and after his film career slowed, he continued acting on stage into his eighties. Marais wrote several volumes of his memoirs, which are still in print in France. His legendary good looks have never been forgotten: see The Smiths' cover art for This Charming Man.

Gay Assimiliation Debate in the Los Angeles Times

Last month, Los Angeles Times columnist Gregory Rodriguez wrote about demographer Gary Gates' study for the Williams Institute at UCLA Law, which shows a decline in coastal gay enclaves and suggests that gay identity is melting into mainstream culture faster than the glaciers. To be provocative, he called it "Gay--The New Straight." Last week, veteran gay activist and Jungian psychologist Don Kilhefner responded with a deeper, more detailed but no less sweeping essay that tears apart the study. For starters, he makes the reasonable point that the report covers only same-sex couples, ignoring the vast single gay population. Next, he unravels the ancient rivalry between two gay factions: "enspiritment" symbolized by Walt Whitman versus assimilation of the Ralph Waldo Emerson ilk. After that, Kilhefner describes four major movements in the gay community since 1951. His essay is worth a look. The comments section includes a post from John Rechy who can't help but notice that Kilhefner "echoes, at times almost verbatim, several of the arguments presented in" Rechy's 1977 book, The Sexual Outlaw. Better than the usual mainstream puffery.

Born December 7: Willa Cather

After six generations in Virginia, Willa Cather's family moved to Nebraska in the early 1880s, when she was nine. At fourteen, she began dressing as a boy and calling herself William, which continued at least four years, into her studies at the University of Nebraska, for which her parents had had to borrow money from neighbors. So much of her extraordinary career seems to embody opposites. Known for her paeans to life in the Midwest, like O Pioneers! and My Antonia, she lived her entire adult life in New York City, where for more than thirty-five years she lived with her partner Edith Lewis. Although Nebraska is often a starting point, many of her twelve novels cover an incredible range. The Song of the Lark is about an opera singer who travels internationally and Cather won the Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours, her World War I novel in which Claude Wheeler enlists after his wife leaves to do missionary work in China. An independent woman leading a woman-centric life, (her partnership with Lewis was modeled on her mentor Sarah Orne Jewett's relationship with Annie Fields), she nevertheless tended to write mainly about male characters. Many critics cite as her masterpiece Death Comes for the Archbishop, which takes place in New Mexico Territory, and A.S. Byatt recently wrote she felt Cather's greatest work was The Professor's House.

Alex Ross at 192 Books

Impossibly, on Wednesday night, Alex Ross proved himself nearly as articulate off the cuff as he is on the page. He gave a brief biographical background, explaining that as a child he had listened exclusively to classical music, chiefly from Mozart to Brahms, but starting when he was fourteen, his piano teacher gently led him to some early twentieth century composers but the one time he tried to listen to his brother's  Beatles records he was "mystified." Ross then led the overflow, reverent crowd on a tour of his The Rest Is Noise, reading passages from four parts. Discussing the notorious debut of The Rite of Spring in Paris, he said the audience was responding to various factions within the hall as much as they were to the atonal music coming from the pit or Nijinksy's unorthodox dancing, a vocal battle between "snobs, super-snobs, and counter-snobs." He noted that Schoenberg still makes audiences uneasy, whereas by now people have easily accepted abstract art and stream of consciousness fiction, and speculated that the difference was that sound vibrations are physical. Asked to imagine how the music of the twenty-first century will sound, he said we had reached all the extremes we're capable of and discussed the overlap of so many younger composers "speaking the same language." He cited the "collapse of the distinction between classical and pop music" and said he was fascinated by the "blurry boundaries." See under: Sufjan Stevens.

Born December 6: Sylvia Townsend Warner

Over four decades during The New Yorker's glory years, the magazine published 150 short stories by the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, yet, as John Updike says, her work "never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of repute that she deserved." Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1925), concerns a middle-aged woman who is not interested in men and becomes a witch instead. Her second novel, Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927), concerns a middle-aged clergyman who is not interested in women and, while doing missionary work in the South Seas, falls in love with a native young man and loses his faith. Lolly Willowes was the very first selection of the Book of the Month Club, and both novels were major successes in America and the United Kingdom. More novels, collections of stories and poems, a biography of T.H. White followed, though at a slower pace and to smaller sales. Her close, literary friendship with her New Yorker editor and author of the classic gay novel The Folded Leaf, William Maxwell, is immortalized in a collection of their letters from 1938 to 1978. Of course her great love was her partner of thirty-nine years, the poet Valentine Ackland. Although the two women died nine years apart, their ashes are buried together beneath a single stone in a churchyard in Chaldon Herring, Dorset.

The Letters of Noël Coward

Just published by Knopf, The Letters of Noël Coward spans more than sixty years of correspondence by and to the platinum-tongued playwright, and the nastiest bite appears on page 730. The sniping aside isn't from Coward. It isn't written to him. It isn't even about him. It's the book's editor, Barry Day, on gay people.

“To the end of his life — even when the social climate had become more permissive — he remained firmly private in his private life, a decision that one wishes today’s gay community would honor.”

In fact, Coward displayed an inexhaustible delight in gossip about other people's private lives, and includes his many relationships, ranging from brief affairs to his partner for thirty years, Graham Payn. While American critics have gushed over the compilation, the Guardian's reviewer, Peter Conrad, takes a dimmer view of Day, saying the "editor seems to have the brain-pan of a solitary budgerigar." Day is also the compiler of Oscar Wilde: A Life in Quotes.

Nevertheless, for anyone interested in twentieth century theater, the collection provides "squillions" of sparkling bon mots about all the major figures of Broadway and the West End, as well as revealing more serious surprises about Coward's tenacious patriotism, his despair over the abdication, and his work as spy during World War II. “I never had to do any disguises. Except occasionally I had to look rather idiotic — but that wasn’t all that difficult. I’m a splendid actor!” The lighter tone prevails. More samples here.

Darling Marlene, or should that be Darling Achtung? How are you my Prussian cow?

Dear dear Larryboy, Did you not think that Johnny Gielgud was completely underwhelming in Nude with Violin? I hate to be a bitch but it's a shame to see even a moderate talent wasted.

[Lawrence of Arabia started his letters with his military serial number]
Dear 338171 (May I call you 338?)

[To Edward Albee] I have enjoyed sex thoroughly, perhaps even excessively all my life but it has never, except for brief wasteful moments, twisted my reason.

Darling lamb, GBS has been a little tart with me, but I think Hay Fever and the Vortex will show I have talent.

To me, the essence of good comedy writing is that perfectly ordinary phrases such as ‘Just fancy!’ should, by virtue of their context, achieve greater laughs than the most literate epigrams.

All my love, you wicked, grasping old bitch, Noëlie Wolie Polie

Born December 5: Little Richard

The straight, white gods of rock were all copying the same gay, black pioneer, Little Richard.

Elvis: "Your music has inspired me - you are the greatest."
The Beatles: "He was my idol at school. The first song I ever sang in public was Long Tall Sally, at a Butlins holiday camp talent competition! I love his voice and I always wanted to sing like him." "It was all his fault really."
The Rolling Stones: "Little Richard is the originator and my first idol."  "Little Richard is King."
Bob Dylan: in his high school yearbook says his goal is "to join Little Richard."
David Bowie (not so straight): "After hearing Little Richard on record, I bought a saxophone and came into the music business. Little Richard was my inspiration."
Paul Simon: "When I was in high school I wanted to be like Little Richard."
Bob Seeger: "Little Richard - he was the first one that really got to me... I always preferred a high energy vocal, a hard full-force vocal. I liked Little Richard better than Elvis."
Pat Boone: "No one person has been imitated more than Little Richard."

Black superstars too are quick to credit Little Richard, although in following him they never reaped the same rewards as their white counterparts. (For more tributes, see his MySpace page.)

James Brown (who claimed that Little Richard was the first to put the FUNK in the Rock n Roll beat): "Little Richard is my idol."
Otis Redding: "If it hadn't been for Little Richard, I would not be here. I entered the music business because of Richard - he is my inspiration. I used to sing like Little Richard, his Rock 'n' Roll stuff, you know. Richard has soul, too. My present music has a lot of him in it."
Sam Cooke: "I love Little Richard.  He is a great entertainer and he has done so much for our music."
Smokey Robinson: "Little Richard was the beginning of that drivin', never-let-up, funky Rock 'n' Roll."
Ray Charles: Little Richard "started a kind of music that set the pace for a lot of what's happening today."
Rev. Al Green: "I was a little kid when I heard Little Richard. He was playing piano and singing that song [Jenny, Jenny]. Even then, I knew he was a classic, one-of-a-kind. I never heard (a performer) with that kind of enthusiasm."
Jimi Hendrix: "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice."

What makes his lasting importance astounding is that it's all based on two years' work. He released Tutti Frutti in November 1955 and in 1957, while touring Australia, he became born again and quit the music business. His success and influence are even more staggering when you consider how, in the middle of the Eisenhower administration (the summer of '56 when Ike added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and authorized the national motto of "In God We Trust"), Little Richard made the world fall for a high camp, effeminate black man in flashy clothes, crazy hair, wearing heavy pancake makeup and heavier eyeliner. (He based much of his style on another Southern gay black man, Esquerita.) Given the times, none of this should have happened. Given his own background, with his parents disowning him at thirteen for being gay, it should have been impossible.

Starting in the 1960s, he staged many comebacks, easily slipping into caricature but hardly equally his early highs: After Tutti Frutti came Long Tall Sally, Slipin and Slidin, Rip It Up, Lucille, Jenny, Jenny, Keep a Knockin, and Good Golly, Miss Molly. Beyond the music, he has kept the persona relevant for fifty years. Witness his turn with King Ralph and his recent ads for Geico.

Confusingly, the clips below are from the 1960s, when he toned it down a little, but you can still enjoy his hyper keyboards and seeing the shellshocked white kids as their world is rocked.

Born December 4: Samuel Butler, Cornell Woolrich, A. Scott Berg

Born to a family of Anglican clergymen, Samuel Butler attended Cambridge, worked with the poor in London, then cut loose for New Zealand. There, he became a sheep rancher, and in the manner of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, fell into an intense relationship with Charles Paine Pauli. They were so close that when Butler returned to England in 1864, Pauli went with him, and for the next thirty years, as Butler wrote his books, most notably Erehwon and The Way of All Flesh, he supported Pauli financially. Through three decades of playing poor, Pauli was in fact ferreting away a fortune, because he was simultaneously accepting money from several men. His duplicity was revealed only after his death. In 1899, Butler wrote Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered, arguing that the poems are about a sexual relationship between an older writer and the beautiful young man who betrayed him.

Cornell Woolrich's life presents so many cautionary tales that his biography is called First You Dream, Then You Die. A hard-nosed crime writer ranking with Chandler and Hammett, his prolific stories and novels became the movies Rear Window, Phantom Lady, The Bride Wore Black, and Mississippi Mermaid, as well as more than twenty other films. That and his book sales explain why he had nearly one million dollars in the bank when he died at sixty-four in 1968, but why did he live for thirty-five years, with or near his mother, in a seedy residential hotel in Harlem? Although he was already in his fifties when she died, rather than exploring his freedom, he moved in with his aunt in a worse hotel. He had torrid gay affairs, which he described in his diary, discovered by his wife of three months. She learned, among other things, he had a sailor's uniform that he wore to go looking for late night adventures. Their marriage, never consummated, was annulled. In his final years, he moved into a luxury hotel, alone, yet he continued to treat himself badly. After wearing shoes that were too tight and seeing his foot become infected, he ignored it until finally doctors had to amputate his leg. A chronic smoker and alcoholic, he died weighing eighty-nine pounds. Why? His life was full of mysteries.

A. Scott Berg grew up in Los Angeles, his brother is uber agent Jeff Berg longtime CEO of ICM, and his partner is Kevin McCormick, executive producer of Saturday Night Fever and Dying Young, so sure why wouldn't he be the screenwriter of the groundbreaking 1980s gay drama Making Love? Well, because he's literary nerd A. Scott Berg, named for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who geekily attended Princeton because Fitzgerald had gone there, and wrote his senior thesis about Fitzgerald's editor Maxwell Perkins, which he turned into a full length biography that won a National Book Award. His third, Lindbergh, won a Pulitzer. His fourth, a memoir of his long friendship with Katharine Hepburn, held until her death and published eleven days later, was more problematic. Called exploitive by everyone from Robert Gottlieb in the New York Times to official Hepburn friend Liz Smith in her gossip column, Kate Remembered is a soft-focus glance that perpetuates the myths Hepburn wanted to endure. (For a deeper look, including her relationships with women, read William J. Mann's excellent Kate, just out in paperback.) Berg's next biography, scheduled for 2009, is about Woodrow Wilson.

Born December 3: Patrick Angus

The artist Patrick Angus didn't have the happiest day of his life until he was on his deathbed, succumbing to aids at thirty-eight in 1992. It was then that he saw the proofs of Strip Show, a book of forty-seven color reproductions of his paintings, and could finally believe that his art would not be completely forgotten. He had worked in obscurity, defeated by early humiliations from galleries that caustically rejected his depictions of sexual loneliness and the "bad" gay culture of hustlers, tricks, and low clubs. Yet his work always retained a playful wit, a compassionate eye, and a brilliant sense of color and light. Worn down by his failures, Angus gave up hope of exhibiting his paintings, until Robert Patrick wrote an essay about him in Christopher Street. David Hockney bought five of Angus's paintings, and in 1992 three galleries held solo shows, yet without new work the momentum was not sustained. He is included in overviews like  Emmanuel Cooper's The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West and James Saslow's exceptional Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. Much credit is due Douglas Blair Turnbaugh for his steadfast dedication to secure Angus's legacy.