Band of Thebes

Born January 31: Portia De Rossi

What do you do if you're a fifteen year old lesbian named Amanda Rogers who feels destined for something bigger than a suburb a Geelong, Victoria, Australia? It's 1988, you love Shakespeare, you romanticize Italy, you tell your parents Amanda is history and you're legally changing your name to Portia. Not only that, Mr. & Mrs. Rogers suddenly have a high school daughter whose last name is de Rossi. Just because you felt like it. Well, Geelong can't hold you back, and the University of Melbourne Law School can't keep your interest. You land a part in the Australian movie Sirens, then you go Hollywood and appear in Scream 2. Your giant break comes in 1998 when you get the role of lawyer Nelle Porter on Ally McBeal, which you'll play through its end in 2002, without any noticeable difference when your castmates and family learn you're lesbian by seeing tabloid pictures of you and your girlfriend, singer Francesca Gregorini. (Possibly it's connected to your Italian craze because she really was born Countess Francesca McKnight Donatella Romana Gregorini di Savignano di Romagna, daughter of Bond girl Barbara Bach and stepdaughter of Ringo Starr.) After Ally McBeal you star in Arrested Development for three seasons, and by now the whole world has noticed your good looks: You've ranked on the Sexiest Women lists from Maxim, Blender, Stuff and Femme Fatales, then People includes you in their Most Beautiful list. Also by now you've left your Italian for an all-American named Ellen. You've come out. The two of you are named one of TV Guide's A-list Power Couples. Let others say what they will, your frequent appearances on the red carpet together, naturally arm in arm or stealing the occasional happy kiss, do more to promote gay visibility than all the sad, victimy public service announcements combined. Name any American male star who treats his boyfriend like a boyfriend in the celebrity spotlight.

George Chauncey Past and Future

The churlish might ask why is Yale professor and award winning historian George Chauncey wasting his time repeating himself about Manhattan's queer history for Out Traveler. Presumably not all of the people glancing through the spring issue's other articles, such as Palm Springs Pilates Weekend, have read his essential book Gay New York. And of course, even twice told, the story remains compelling:

One of the queerest eras in New York City's history was the Roaring '20s and early '30s, when pansy balls were all the craze, cross-dressing performers were gloriously famous and the sparkling isle that was the Sodom of America was already a major gay travel destination. Traveling in the echoes of this fabulous Manhattan past in the 21st century is easier than you may imagine.

The far better news is that Chauncey's next book, years and years overdue, is nearing completion. Despite its Encyclopedia Brown style title, it promises to be one of the most important books of the year. According to his Yale webpage:

The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Gay Liberation Era, reconstructs the racially-segregated and class-stratified African American, Latino, and white gay male worlds and sexual cultures of postwar New York City, analyzes the generational shift from the culture of the double life to the culture of coming out, and reinterprets the sources of postwar antihomosexualism, the development of gay politics, and the transformation of urban liberalism.

Born January 29: Greg Louganis

In 1988 when he was twenty-eight, at the Seoul Olympics, attempting to repeat his unprecedented double golds from 1984 (springboard and tower), Greg Louganis hit his head on the board during his second to last dive, and now with stitches, on his final dive earned a perfect score. Again, he won both gold medals. Widely hailed as one of the great comebacks of all time, it earned him ABC Wide World of Sports' Athlete of the Year. Three years earlier he had won the Sullivan Award as the nation's most outstanding amateur athlete, and he had been an American favorite ever since winning a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics when he was sixteen. But what a difference one detail makes. Eight months after coming out at Gay Games in New York in 1994, he published his autobiography, Breaking the Surface, in which he revealed he is HIV positive. Suddenly he was no longer the hero of the comeback but the infected villain whose bleeding might have put other divers at risk (not true, according to Anthony Fauci). The doctor who gave him stitches had not worn gloves. His book was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks, and all of his corporate sponsors except Speedo dropped him. Remarkable for its candor, his book showed readers that performing after hitting his head was nothing compared to the stress of being closeted, HIV-positive, and in an abusive relationship. Even his website today says "the highs that came with winning never compensated for the lows." 

A Squirt of Gay History in Honor of the Florida Primaries

Worth a look, despite its glancing approach. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Saturday Morning Gay History

Stick with these, they both have something to offer. The first documentary moves beyond old men insisting they used to be young to examine, with some archival footage, what gay people used to endure just to go to a bar: police harassment, entrapment, and brutality but also the ways the gays outfoxed the LAPD. The second is a young lesbian's critique of queer characters in Australian film, chockablock with clips of Russell Crowe, Terrence Stamp, Radha Mitchell, and many, many more.

Born January 25: Virginia Woolf

Because her genius changed fiction forever, because she was a lesbian, because photographers rarely showed her smiling, and because she killed herself, Virginia Woolf has been saddled with a morose seriousness that overlooks her zest and joy, her expansive view of humanity, and her wonderful sense of humor. No less than Tolstoy's, her novels encompass every aspect of life, including comedy. Try this passage from Jacob's Room (1922), when Jacob Flanders is an undergraduate at Cambridge just beginning to fall for his classmate Timmy Durant.

But this service in King's College Chapel--why allow women to take part in it? Surely, if the mind wanders (and Jacob looked extraordinarily vacant, his head thrown back, his hymn-book open at the wrong place), if the mind wanders it is because several hat shops and cupboards upon cupboards of coloured dresses are displayed upon rush-bottomed chairs. Though heads and bodies may be devout enough, one has a sense of individuals--some like blue, others brown; some feathers, others pansies and forget-me-nots. No one would think of bringing a dog into church. For though a dog is all very well on a gravel path, and shows no disrespect to flowers, the way he wanders down an aisle, looking, lifting a paw, and approaching a pillar with a purpose that makes the blood run cold with horror (should  you be one of the congregation--alone, shyness is out of the question), a dog destroys the service completely. So do these women--though separately devout, distinguished, and vouched for by the theology, mathematics, Latin, and Greek of their husbands. Heaven knows why it is. For one thing, thought Jacob, they're as ugly as sin.
    Now there was scraping and murmuring. He caught Timmy Durant's eye; looked very sternly at him; and then, very solemnly, winked.

To understand her life and her work, delve into the biography by Hermione Lee. Or reread her best books: Jacob's Room, Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, To the Lighthouse, and A Room of One's Own. Then move on to The Waves, Between the Acts, and Three Guineas.

This Week's New Yorker: Shouts & Morons

Patient: So listen to this one. What's the hardest part about rollerblading?
Therapist: I don't know, what?
Patient: Telling your dad you're gay.
Therapist: That's funny.

A writer named John Kenney makes his fifth appearance in The New Yorker this week, with a therapist - patient spoof that seems to have been dialed in from 1968. It reads like something that got rejected from Laugh-In, if not Hee Haw. The "joke" of course is the passive aggressive, co-dependent relationship between the doctor and his client, but the "funny" is predicated on gay being bad. The climax is the doctor asking, "Do you worry about being homosexual?" You can practically hear Rowan & Martin yukking it up to the canned laugh track of forty years ago.

Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein

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

Start with either of these extraordinary clips, depending on your mood: slow (above) or fast (below).

Born January 22: Elaine Noble

Think back to 1974: Patty Hearst was kidnapped, Nixon resigned, ABBA won the Eurovision song contest, Ali won the Rumble in the Jungle, The Godfather II was released and would soon win the Oscar for best picture, and the planet's population reached four billion people, one of whom was Elaine Noble. In November 1974, she won 59% of the vote to the Massachusetts House of Representatives from Boston's Fenway/Back Bay neighborhoods and thereby became the United States' first openly gay person elected to a statewide office. In 1976, she was re-elected. Later she ran for Senate against Paul Tsongas and lost. In 1986, she and Ellen Ratner founded the Pride Institute in Minneapolis to treat gay people battling alcohol and drugs dependencies; it has since expanded to three locations. Although Noble has retired from public life and now lives in Florida, three months ago she gave a great interview to Windy City Times in honor of Lesbian and Gay History Month.

Eight Razzie Nominations for Pretend Gay Movie

Yesterday, on the eve of the Oscar nominations, the Razzie Awards for the year's worst movies announced their nominations for their 28th annual celebration of all things awful. Proving their merit, they heaped eight nominations on the pile of celluloid called I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry, in which two NYC straight firefighters must pretend to be a gay couple in order to receive health benefits. Cue two hours of exaggerated stereotypes for comic effect, nonstop pandering to hetero discomfort, wrapped up with a plea for tolerance. Their nominations:

Worst Picture
Worst Director (Dennis Dugan)
Worst Screenplay (Barry Fanaro and Alexander Payne & Jim Taylor)
Worst Actor (Adam Sandler)
Worst Supporting Actor (Kevin James)
Worst Supporting Actor (Rob Schneider)
Worst Supporting Actress (Jessica Biel)
Worst Screen Couple (Adam & Kevin)

Here's hoping they sweep the awards, given on February 23.

Born January 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga

 
"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'" To comprehend his genius you could inspect each of the three hundred original designs he created every year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could read Judith Thurman's sixteen page essay "The Absolutist," which includes the opening quote here and is the highlight of her brilliant book Cleopatra's Nose. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces...They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression." Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain. Watch the brief, vintage clip below for a glimpse of a more sumptuous time, namely his Spring Summer collection of 1960.

As far as I can tell, in December Judith Thurman became the first National Book Award winner to post a comment on Band of Thebes. She liked it. I had already praised her book before then, so I feel fine repeating my conviction that everyone should read it now.

Born January 18: Cary Grant

 
Cary Grant and Randolph Scott met on the set of a movie called, in something of an understatement, Hot Saturday, and almost immediately they began living together in a house nicknamed Bachelor Hall, which they would share off and on for twelve years (1932-1944). Their affair has always been spun, desperately, as two stars who enjoyed each other's company but shared a house merely because both were "tightwads." Cary Grant was married to Virginia Cherrill from February 1934 to March 1935 and to Barbara Hutton from 1942 to 1945. Two questions: What sort of man keeps his house with his bud even after he gets married, and what sort of tightwad prefers spending the money to maintain two households rather than one? George Cukor confirmed that Randolph Scott would talk about their affair to friends, and a slew of recent biographers have also verified their relationship. Grant himself told an interviewer that his first two wives, overlapping with Scott, "accused him of being homosexual," though, of course, he always denied it and was as quick as Tom Cruise to sue for libel. (He sued Chevy Chase for saying, "What a gal!") Yet somehow the legend factory has made the later wives the authority on his early sexuality. Dyan Cannon, who lasted only 18 months with him, says the "rumors" are "lies" but she wasn't even born until after Grant's first divorce. Grant's fifth and final wife was 47 years his junior. Several other men have said they had affairs with Grant, including his chauffeur in 1957 and fashion arbiter Richard Blackwell, who wrote in his autobiography of having sex with both Grant and Scott. (Totally pointless subtextery, but given the persistence of the whispers throughout his career, look how many of Grant's film titles play off a closety or gay suggestion: I'm No Angel, Born To Be Bad, Topper, The Awful Truth, In Name Only, Suspicion, Notorious, I Was a Male War Bride, Crisis, People Will Talk, Monkey Business, Indiscreet, and Charade.)

Black Gay History in London

Starting February 7, London's Museum in Docklands will host an exhibition called Outside Edge, documenting the experiences of black lesbians and gay men in Britain. If you happen to be there February 23, you're in luck: It's their Study Day, with a series of programs and panels featuring black members of the former Gay Liberation Front, New York's own Stephen Fullwood, project director of the Black Gay and Lesbian Archive at the Schomburg Center, a celebration of black lesbian playwrights, and a look, ten years after his death, at the legacy of Justin Fashanu (above), Britain's first black soccer player to be paid one million pounds, who came out mid-career, on October 22, 1990. In March of 1998, in the United States, a 17 year old male told police that after drinking, he ended up in Fashanu's bed and was sexually assaulted. In September 1998, British police said the U.S. police had ended their investigation for lack of evidence and despite public reports there had never been a warrant for Fashanu's arrest. Redeeming his reputation, they were too late to save Fashanu, who had committed suicide in May. Black History Month begins two weeks from today. How much of it here will include gay history?

Born January 17: Ronald Firbank

English novelist who was a literary innovator of some importance. Greatly indebted to the literature of the 1890s, his is a peculiarly fantastic and perverse, idiosyncratic humour. His wit largely depends upon the shape and cadence of the sentence and upon an eccentric and personal vocabulary.
                                                       -Encyclopedia Britannica

Emerson's immortal dictum, "To be great is to be misunderstood," applies to no one better than English novelist Ronald Firbank, whose work was ignored or, if noticed, attacked, and who was not even paid for his writing until the publication of his ninth of ten novels and his tenth was rejected for being too gay. He died of pneumonia, or alcoholism, when he was forty, in a hotel in Rome. Wrongly accused of being trivial, his books were among the first to reflect the modern world as fragmentary, slightly before James Joyce and Virginia Woolf who read Firbank later with "unstinted pleasure." As Alan Hollinghurst explained a year ago in the Times Literary Supplement,

For Waugh, Firbank was a liberator, the person who had seen how to take the novel forward through a radical reconsideration of technique. This was very different from the Jamesian alternative, the ever-deepening interiorization of the novel through the elaboration of individual consciousness. Firbank achieved his highly complex originality not by expansion but by a drastic compression: instead of putting more and more in, he left almost everything out.

Firbank himself once wrote, “I think nothing of filing fifty pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph." Hollinghurst goes on to argue that what Firbank has really accomplished is to homosexualize the novel, not its story (as Forster, Isherwood, Vidal, and Baldwin would later) but its form. Instead, what people remembered of his maverick style was the camp, exemplified in the extravagant originality of his names: Lady Parvula de Panzoust, Olga Blumenghast, the Countess d'Omptyda, Lady Lavinia Lee-Strange, Mrs. Harold Chilleywater, Mrs. Thoroughfare, the choirboys Tiny and Tibi. Of course camp can be serious, and Susan Sontag placed Firbank in its canon in her seminal essay "Notes on Camp." For whatever reason, his revivals never take root. In 2000 Hollinghurst edited a U.K. collection of three novels, and they were again put out of print within a year. Maybe his work is too short for readers to take seriously (each novel averages about seventy pages of dense type), or maybe he is too gay. The three you need to read are The Flower Beneath the Foot, Sorrow in Sunlight, and Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, which begins with the christening of a week-old police dog and ends with the cardinal's fatal heart attack, as he nakedly chases a choirboy named Chicklet through the church.

Born January 16: Francesco Scavullo

Because he made a career of pushing glamor over the top to tacky, with his models sporting his signature huge windblown hair and Way Bandy's way too much makeup, it's easy to overlook the admirable aspects of Francesco Scavullo's sixty-three as a fashion photographer. He published his first cover shot when he was still in his teens and he died of a heart attack when he was eighty-two on his way to photograph Anderson Cooper in 2004. The man was a workhorse. Born on Staten Island, his family moved to Manhattan when he was six, and his father bought him a carriage house when he was nineteen, which he used as his studio for the rest of his life. Some of his most memorable images are Diana Ross's b&w cover and full-color foldout for diana, the Kristofferson - Streisand poster for A Star Is Born, the Julie Andrews poster for Victor/Victoria, Brooke Shields everywhere, the Bee Gees on the cover of Rolling Stone, Madonna on the cover of Time, and Sting in a loincloth. He shot Beverly Johnson for Vogue's first cover of a black woman, and, garnering far more publicity, he shot Burt Reynolds nude for Cosmopolitan's first centerfold. Hired by Helen Gurley Brown, he defined the Cosmo girl and created her covers for more than thirty years, and while you would never mistake them for art, they reinvented the magazine and made it a low-brow powerhouse. And he was loyal. He launched Gia Carangi's career and after her heroin addiction made her virtually unusable as a model, he continued to find ways to photograph her until 1982 (she died of aids in 1986). He lived for thirty-two years with Sean Byrnes, who not only managed and styled his shoots but nursed him through four nervous breakdowns in his ongoing manic depressive cycles. After the intro in the Scavullo clip below, an older Sean narrates.

Brokaw Still Doesn't Get Gay History, Charles Kaiser Responds

Like a drug-resistant staph infection, the story of Boom!'s gay exclusion won't go away. After objections here and elsewhere, Frank Kameny's letter to Random House, and CNN's soft criticism, Tom Brokaw answers five questons in the current issue of the Advocate saying:

Gays have never been denied the right to vote. They're not told to go to a separate drinking fountain. They were not told they couldn't stay in a motel if they crossed the state line.

Did he not understand his own newscast in June 2003 when the Supreme Court finally decriminalized sodomy with its 6-3 decision on Lawrence v. Texas and for the first time made it legal to be gay anywhere in America?

Brokaw also tries to excuse his ignoring gay rights by citing Charles Kaiser's book 1968 and its sole gay reference. (Kaiser reviewed Boom!, unfavorably, in the Washington Post's Book World.)

Here is Kaiser's response, with permission.

Tom,

         It is true that I make only one reference to gays in my first book. That's because 99 percent of the book takes place in 1968. As I wrote in the preface, my goal was "to make reading the book as much as possible like living through the year." To accomplish that, I almost never jumped ahead, except to mention something as important as the impact of the '60's on gay people. You, on the other hand, were writing twenty years later than I was, and you asked everyone you interviewed to look back and explain the eventual impact of the decade.

        You said to the Advocate, "I mean, we had institutionalized, legalized discrimination against the fundamental rights of citizenship. Gays have never been denied the right to vote. They’re not told to go to a separate drinking fountain. They were not told they couldn’t stay in a motel if they crossed the state line."

        I'm not sure what form of institutionalized discrimination is more fundamental than a legal prohibition to be the person that  you are. Any gay man who had sex with another man in the 1950's could be and very often was deprived of every right as a citizen, since sodomy laws in every state in the 1950's made his very existence illegal. Except for Allen Ginsberg, Gore Vidal and Frank Kameny, there were almost no openly gay people in America for that reason. Blacks were never banned from employment by the entire Federal government and all of its contractors, as gay people were in the 1950's  (with the support, I might add, of the ACLU.) Whatever the barriers blacks faced--and they were huge--they never included an outright ban on being who they were in every state of the union. In the '50's and the '60's any gay person who wanted to be a doctor, a lawyer, a politician, or a journalist--or just about anything else--knew that he or she could only succeed by hiding his or her true identify, for life.

        I'm glad you're adding Stonewall to subsequent editions of the book. If you're making other changes, you might also want to modify your libel of the Columbia students who occupied five buildings in 1968. In Boom! you write that student demonstrators at Columbia in 1968 “occupied and trashed the library and administration building.” [118] Actually, they occupied five buildings, one of which was called “Low Library.” However, Low had ceased to be a library several decades earlier–when Butler Library was built and Low become the administration building. And Butler was not one of the occupied buildings. So no library was ever trashed during that protest. And after the buildings were emptied of the protesters, several professors gave affidavits asserting that it was impossible to know whether it was the students occupying four of those buildings or the New York City policemen who evicted them, who caused most of the damage that was discovered afterwards.

Charles

Really, you must own Kaiser's The Gay Metropolis. Buy it.

Born January 15: Ivor Novello

Why, for the past 52 years, have the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters' annual awards been named the Ivors? (Last year's big winner: Amy Winehouse.) To honor the Welsh star Ivor Novello, a hugely popular composer, singer, playwright, and actor who published his first song at fifteen and had his first smash hit at twenty-one, Keep the Home Fires Burning. Among his twenty-three films were two starring roles in early Hitchcock movies, The Lodger and Downhill. A constant presence on the London stage for decades, he wrote more than a dozen plays, many of which he performed with Robert Andrews, his partner for thirty-five years until his death at fifty-eight. Charged with misusing gasoline during World War II, he was convicted and imprisoned for a month, an experience which permanently tarnished his self-image, even if his fans forgave him. (Some believe the judge's homophobia led to the harsh penalty.) Novello, played by Jeremy Northam, appears in Robert Altman's Gosford Park just as much of the world wants to remember him: dapper, dashing, debonair, and degayed.

Robert Leleux's "The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy"

Of all the forms of Mother Love, is any more ardently supersized than a Texan gay boy's? To prove it, here comes Robert Leleux's first book, The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, of which Kirkus says,

The author's slightly histrionic recollections contain over-the-top set pieces regarding his evangelical school, Mother's hair treatment (she winds up with a cheap wig glued to her bald head) and her impromptu boob and lip augmentations. The text is lush with simile, verdant with metaphor and generally permeated with writerly flair. Though the author calls it a memoir, it reads more like a comic novel with considerable theatrical panache. Addressing his readers as "mes petites," the beautiful boy frequently seems to speak to a special audience. Extravagantly solipsistic.

The story is: His father walks out on them in 1996 when Robert is sixteen, enabling mother and son to devote 100% of their time on their mutual adoration, but also leaving them broke. From their drab house in Petunia they drive each Saturday to Houston's Neiman Marcus to get their hair and nails done. Despite his love of the salon, Liza, Dina, and Lillian Hellman, Robert somehow doesn't realize until he's seventeen that he's gay. His mother says how could you not be? After the ceremony to legally change his name to his partner's, Michael Leleux who was his boyfriend in their hostile high school, Robert's grandfather says, "Better a man than a Yankee girl."

Born January 14: Cecil Beaton

Avoiding sports as a child, Cecil Beaton learned photography from his nanny on her Kodak 3A, and avoiding academics at Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1925, he took his first published photo, printed in Vogue, of one of England's leading Shakespearean scholars dressed in drag: To be exact, George "Dadie" Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as Webster's the Duchess of Malfi. From there Beaton had to go work for his father's timber company, which he suffered for eight miserable days. After that he returned to his rightful place in the world in design, creating book jackets and studying photography until Vogue hired him fulltime in 1927. Although his style is flowery and theatrical, many of his most enduring images are serious people captured at critical times: a tense Churchill in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation portrait, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding portrait. During the war, he volunteered and was posted to the Ministry of Information, capturing images of the Blitz, its young injured on the cover of Life, and RAF pilots in their cockpit. Broadly talented, Beaton designed the lighting, sets, and costumes for many Broadway musicals, winning four Tony Awards, and for several Hollywood extravaganzas, winning the Oscar for best costumes twice, for Gigi and most famously for his high camp creations in My Fair Lady. Although he never consummated his longtime, unrequited love for Peter Watson, a gay art collector whose interests lay elsewhere, Beaton did enjoy possibly the greatest consolation prize of the twentieth century, an affair with Gary Cooper. For his entire life, he kept his childhood diary in which he first realized he was a "terrible, terrible homosexualist" and that shame never fully disappeared, driving him to a few misguided affairs with women later in his life, including one with Greta Garbo, who dumped him and went back to women. When he was seventy he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and though he adapted to drawing and photographing with his left hand, he never recovered his earlier ease. He died six years later, in 1980.

Saturday Morning Dork Closet Pride

Hadrian in London This Summer

Well, it's taken 1,870 years, but the Emperor Hadrian and his beloved Antinous are finally getting their first exhibition, from July 24 to October 26, at the British Museum. Curator Thorsten Opper told the Telegraph, "Hadrian was gay--we can say it now, but the Victorians had problems with it." If only those "problems with it" had vanished with the Victorians a century ago. We know the long list of American museums that would de-gay similar subjects, but even the British media seems to be having some difficulty in reporting the facts. While it's terrific for the museum to cover all aspect's of Hadrian's life accurately, their inclusion of his homosexuality is not an outing. Hadrian was openly gay, the first Emperor to publicly celebrate his male lovers, and because of the dozens of busts he had made to commemorate Antinous, historians have always known their relationship, though of course a few have whitewashed them as "friends." Marguerite Yourcenar's modern classic Memoirs of Hadrian is centered on their love, and has been widely read and studied in schools throughout the U.K., Europe, and the States for more than fifty years. A classics scholar since childhood, Yourcenar is believed to have had the idea for  the novel after seeing the British Museum's massive bronze head of Hadrian, which will be a prominent among the more than 200 loans from 31 countries in the show this summer.

Obviously, firsts and controversies are what make news. That might be one reason why no one reported that the total number of complaints the Smithsonian received for displaying the Kameny gay rights picket signs alongside such family fare as Kermit, R2-D2, and C-3PO was zero. Maybe this, at last, will help American curators become more honest in representing rather than erasing gay lives. One great chance is that British Museum director Neil MacGregor is in the running to replace the retiring Philippe de Montebello at the Met.

Michael Pollan's Manifesto

To a massive, overflow crowd last night, Michael Pollan read from his new book, In Defense of Food, and discussed why we need his manifesto. Anyone would be forgiven for thinking the answer was "To depress us" rather than, as he says, "To return pleasure to eating."

Pollan sees two problems, the more tangible of which is the aggressive food lobby that spends nearly three billion dollars a month basically to give consumers, directly or indirectly, bad information. (He points out that the foods that are best for you, fresh vegetables and fruits, are the only foods that don't carry FDA labels.) The second problem he sees as being worse, and that's "the lens through which we look at food." He is very much against nutritionism. If we believe that nutrients are what matter most, then we necessarily lose control, having no choice but to rely on "experts" because we can't see nutrients. But he repeatedly likened today's food experts to surgeons in the 1600s and offered many examples of them contradicting their new rules about good and bad foods within a few years (e.g., saturated vs. trans fats).

Another example of how little we know: Our digestive tracts have the same number of neurons as our spinal cords; we've mapped and know each one's function on our spinal cords but we're clueless about our guts. More depressing factoids: four of the top ten causes of death in the U.S. are the result of diet, and twenty percent of all food purchased here is consumed in cars. Low fat milk becomes too watery, so dairies have to add dried milk powder to thicken it, which then requires antioxidants to counterbalance that. (A woman in the audience begged him, "Stop!") Because of refrigeration requirements, all supermarkets are laid out the same and Pollan says shop the periphery, the worst items are in the middle.

Reduced to seven words, his manifesto is "Eat food, not too much, mainly plants." (By food he means a food your great-grandmother would recognize, not "food products.") An early, short essay incarnation of the manifesto appears here, curiously suggesting a much older ancestor. When in doubt, act more French: smaller portions of richer foods, eaten together, for pleasure, community, ritual, and family. In response to feverish questions, he said he's not much taken with the raw movement, he loves slow food, and he suspects in years to come we'll all be eating algae. (For the record, the short, lively, older woman in front of me asked, "Do you have any disparaging words about algae or kelp?")

Born January 10: Sal Mineo

Although he was twice nominated for an Oscar, Sal Mineo's career peaked when he was sixteen, playing Plato, Rebel Without a Cause's universal everyman, for who among us g/l/b/t/q/str8/w hasn't at one time harbored an unreciprocated crush on James Dean? As if it wouldn't be equally exhilarating and nerve-wracking enough to be a gay sixteen year-old acting opposite the bi twenty-four year-old susperstar and Miss Natalie Wood, Mineo was also said to be having an affair with the director, Nicholas Ray, who was forty-four. Well, it was all downhill from there. He was praised for his roles on stage and in Exodus and Who Killed Teddy Bear? and he even recorded a couple albums with two Top 40 hits, but he had been typecast and that moment had passed. Unfortunately, the movies' sensitive, gay teen devolved into television's deranged psycho killer, with guest starring roles on Hawaii Five-O, Columbo, S.W.A.T., Police Story, and Ellery Queen. When he was thirty-seven, walking at night through an alley near his home in West Hollywood, he was stabbed once in a botched mugging, and died. John Lennon offered a cash reward to find his killer. Many people, including Mineo's family, believe the courts convicted the wrong man, who had confessed and recanted, was released in 1990, and reincarcerated for parole violations. Two books have been written about Mineo's life and death, the better one is H. Paul Jeffers' biography.

The Best Title Sequences of 2007

Following yesterday's warm up of the best movies, the more important rankings are below. Last year saw a worsening in the pandemic of white type on a black background, now a global crisis in title sequences. (Anything, however, would be preferable to the hideous, ill-conceived pistachio opening of Into the Wild, uncontested as the year's worst.) The seven best were

1. The Kingdom (a four-minute history of Saudi Arabia)
2. 300 (animated Spartans by Garson Yu)
3. Superbad (indebted to Maurice Binder’s 007 dancing)
4. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (x-rays)
5. Enchanted (an animated storybook, again by Garson Yu)
6. The Kite Runner (animated calligraphy by MK 12).
7. The Invasion (microscopic cells gone wild)

Please watch both clips to see the state of the art.

Born January 9: Richard Halliburton

In the 1920s and 30s, three names conjured the glories of adventure and travel: Lindbergh, Halliburton, and Earhart. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Halliburton was a small-framed, sickly child and compensated with a life of pushing himself to extremes. He climbed the Matterhorn, made the first recorded winter summit of Mount Fuji, and took the first aerial photo of Everest. In 1931, with a hired pilot, he circled the globe in an open cockpit biplane, the Flying Carpet, (though they put the plane on ships to cross the Atlantic and Pacific), giving first flights to Crown Princes and Princess in Iran and Iraq, the White Rajah's wife in India, and the chief of the Nyak, who paid him in shrunken heads. He enjoyed several weeks with the French Foreign Legion in Algeria. Always thirsting for adventure, Halliburton bent local laws well past custom and legality: He tried to enter Mecca, was jailed for photographing the guns at Gibraltar, hid within the Taj Mahal to spend an evening alone, savoring the solitude at sunset and swimming in the pool by moonlight. He registered his body as a ship, the S.S. Halliburton, in order to enter the Panama Canal and remains the only person to have swum its length, 48 miles. Thoroughly original, he twice retraced other travelers' trips in tribute, swimming the Hellespont like his hero Byron and crossing the Alps by elephant as Hannibal had in 218 BC. As for pushing boundaries at home, Halliburton was likely lovers with the gay movie star Roman Novarro, and he definitely commissioned an architect to build his cantilevered home, nicknamed Hangover House, in Laguna Beach with three bedrooms: one each for himself, his boyfriend Paul Mooney, and Mooney's boyfriend, the architect. It is the basis for Heller House in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. In March 1939, now enormously famous, Halliburton, Mooney, and an experienced crew left Hong Kong in their custom Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, to make landfall at the San Francisco World's Fair. Exactly three weeks out, they hit a typhoon and perished. Much earlier, he had written to his father,

And when my time comes to die, I’ll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain and thrills—any emotion that any human ever had—and I’ll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed...

Ever mindful of his public persona, Halliburton occasionally peppered his narratives with nameless, entirely made up female love interests, yet he lingers over male beauty, and his private letters are explicitly gay. Many of his seven travel books are back in print, the first of which he dedicated to his roommates at Princeton, whose “sanity, consistency, and respectability” inspired him to flee.

Top Ten Movies of 2007

1.    La Vie en Rose  (France)
2.    No Country for Old Men  (U.S.)
3.    The Diving Bell & the Butterfly  (France)
4.    In the Valley of Elah  (U.S.)
5.    Michael Clayton  (U.S.)
6.    4 Months, 3 Weeks, and 2 Days  (Romania)
7.    Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead  (U.S.)
8.    After the Wedding  (Denmark)
9.    Deep Water  (U.K., documentary)
10.    Superbad  (U.S.)

Do you get the feeling that after the long string of names we’ve used for them so far—moving images, motion pictures, talkies, pictures, films, movies—next we’ll just start calling them disappointments? “Dinner and a disappointment” does have a certain Saturday night ring to it. Such was 2007. Above are ten exceptions, culled from 107 movies seen in theaters. The year was noticeably lacking in Asian movies, gay movies, black movies, nature movies, documentaries (though I missed No End in Sight and Sicko), and interesting roles for women.

One caveat, which might sound strange, given its perch at #2: I think you should avoid No Country for Old Men due to its unrelenting brutality. But it was magnificently crafted and superbly acted, and after many weeks of ruminating I think it's important to recognize that the Coen brothers can still make violence seem truly upsetting, rather than the gory, Roman torturefest or the harmless, caperish fun that murder has become in most movies.

Born January 8: George Passmore

It's almost inappropriate to talk about George without Gilbert because they live their lives jointly, wearing matching business suits, as an ongoing performance piece, thinking of themselves as "living sculptures." Although they see no distinction between their everyday activities around London and their artwork, the world knows them best by their massive black and white photocollages tinted with primary colors and covered in black tape to suggest stained glass. They frequently feature themselves in their work, as well as the occasional banally "shocking" nudity, sex, or bodily fluid. Like Warhol, they have achieved a signature style that is instantly recognizable as theirs alone, no small feat in an era extremely overloaded with images. (Surely there's no greater proof of cultural significance than to be parodied by South Park, or derided by the Evening Standard as "PERV DUO.") Way back in 1985 they won Britain's most prestigious art award, the Turner Prize, and their importance has not faded. Two years ago they were selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. They have been together just over forty years, claiming it was love at first sight when they met while studying sculpture on September 25, 1967, when Gilbert was twenty-four and George was twenty-five.

Born January 7: Jann Wenner

In 1958 when he was twelve, Jan Wenner's parents divorced and their bitter custody dispute was, he claims, over which parent would be forced to take him. Sent off to the Chadwick School, where neither of them ever visited him, he asserted his independence by changing his name to Jann. In college at Berkeley, he took his independence one step further, by dropping out. It doesn't appear to have hindered him. At twenty-one, he founded Rolling Stone; at thirty-one he started Outside; thirty-seven he formed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame; at forty-six he launched Men's Journal; and at fifty-four he turned US magazine into a weekly, which now has eleven million readers. In 1995, many people were surprised to learn he was leaving his wife Jane and their three sons to live with former model/fashion designer Matt Nye, nineteen years his junior -- surprised that he wouldn't just continue to be bi in their open marriage and surprised that the heretofore closeted mogul's private life was being reported against his wishes on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. Despite the fact that he and Jane have never divorced (she owns a large share of Wenner Media and remains on the board), and despite those Neal Boulton rumors, Wenner and Nye are still together. Via a surrogate, they have a fifteen-month old son, Noah Jasper Nye Wenner, and are said to want another child. Two writers, David Weir and Lewis MacAdams, are at work on competing biographies of him. Yes, he looks good for sixty-two, but no, his publications rarely cover gay artists or gay issues.

Deliverance 2: The Kite Runner

If The Kite Runner included two scenes of happy, healthy intercourse between consenting men then its two [brief, no-nudity] scenes of male sexual violations of boys would not be so easy to misread as gay. The way it stands, however, the lessons are: Anyone who would want to initiate male anal sex is the kind of psychotic creep who would rape a child, and anyone who receives it will experience a shame so total that it makes him physically ill for months, destroys his friendships, ruins his family, and condemns his children to the same fate. (The fleeting, faceless, background gay couple holding hands at the flea market in California provided zero compensation.)

On the other hand, the heterosexuals' path to man-woman bliss is a cakewalk. Their courtship, from meeting to marriage, in its entirety:

Him: Hi.
Her: (glancing up from Wuthering Heights) Hi.
Him: Sorry to bother you.
Her: You're not.
Him: That's a sad book.
Her: I heard you write.
Him: Would you read one of my stories?
----
Her: Your story made me cry.
Him: You read it?
Her: Our secret.
----
Him: Dad, will you ask her father for permission to marry her?

Born January 4: Marsden Hartley

"Nomadic" is the polite term to describe Marsden Hartley, who never saw success, never had a family or longterm partner, and was basically a drifter for life. Did his failures keep him moving or did his poverty dictate each leap from cheap housing to free board, or was he not fleeing but actively searching, hoping for the appreciation he knew he was due or possibly seeking the city of friends and love of comrades from his early influences of Emerson and Whitman? The pattern was established in 1885, when he was eight, after his mother died and the family was dispersed to various relatives. Highlights of Hartley's endless odyssey are: Maine, Cleveland, New York, Maine, Boston, Maine, Paris (paid for by Alfred Steiglitz), Berlin, New York, Berlin again, New York, Provincetown, Bermuda, Santa Fe, California, New York, Berlin for two years, the South of France for three or four years, New Hampshire, Gloucester, Mass., Mexico for a year on a Guggenheim grant, Bavaria, Gloucester again, Bermuda again, Nova Scotia twice, then a series of towns in Maine as he was losing his hearing, his eyesight, and his health, until he died in 1943, at sixty-six. Tragedy chased him. The young German officer he loved was killed early in World War I; the strong, handsome sons of the fishing family he stayed with two summers in Nova Scotia were drowned. The recognition he craved and steadfastly believed in finally came decades after his death. In 1969, writing in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer praised  Hartley's portraits as "the boldest paintings of male figures in the history of American art." Click here to see the fishing family, a lifeguard, or a Finnish sauna, or here to see his lovely landscapes of autumn mountains, Maine, or New Mexico.

The Costa Book Awards: Day Over Skin Lane

Earlier tonight in London, the judges of the Costa Book Awards (formerly the Whitbreads) announced their winners. In the novel category, A.L. Kennedy's WWII story Day, which Knopf will publish next week, beat Rose Tremain's migrant tale The Road Home, Rupert Thomson's Death of a Murderer which unfolds during a policeman's twelve-hour watch over the corpse of long-jailed child-killer Myra Hindley, and Neil Bartlett's Skin Lane, which the Guardian critic loved. It's about a repressed gay furrier with an unpleasant recurring dream in London in 1967, just as the U.K. finally decriminalizes sex between men. Lest that sound slow and drab, Will Self calls it "a fiendishly taut little psycho-shocker that recalls Simenon at his most hardboiled and Highsmith at her creepiest." You may have read Bartlett's previous novels, which almost always examine the intersection of gay lives and history: Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall, The House on Brooke Street, Mr. Clive & Mr. Page, or his nonfiction about Oscar Wilde, Who Was That Man?

Born January 3: Dorothy Arzner

In 1929, when Paramount wanted to make their first talking picture, The Wild Party, which director did they trust to do it? The prolific Dorothy Arzner, who had completed four features for them in the preceding two years.  Usually seen wearing men's shirts, suits, and neckties, Arzner was open about being a lesbian and the next year made no secret of the choreographer Marion Morgan moving in with her, a relationship that would last more than four decades. Although her movies were always studio fare, her Pre-Code pictures show a strong feminist streak, examining careers, independence, class, extra-marital sex, pregnancy, and prostitution. She helped launch the careers of or gave breakthrough roles to Katharine Hepburn (playing an Amelia Earhart-style pilot in Christopher Strong), Rosalind Russell (Craig's Wife) and Lucille Ball (Dance, Girl, Dance). After an illness in 1943, Arzner never again directed a feature and no one knows exactly why. She made Army training movies and taught film at UCLA, and she shot some Pepsi commercials, probably at the express request of her longtime friend and rumored lover, Joan Crawford. The Directors Guild of America, which she was the first woman to join in 1936, finally honored her work in 1975, four years before her death. Women in Film gives a directing award named for her, but still today so few women are making features that they've had to open the field to television as well, and even so have only given the award sporadically, seven times since 1993, last year to Nancy Meyers.