Band of Thebes

Born March 31: Barney Frank

It's unfair to make Barney Frank's history a collection of the hate he's had to fend off, but it's good to remember that when his Republican opponents running for his long-held congressional seat have tried to make his homosexuality the key campaign issue, he's won with seventy percent of the vote (1988) or sixty-six percent (1990). He was a vocal and reliable proponent of gay rights, especially for lesbians and gays in the military, even before he came out to the Boston Globe in 1987, and he co-founded the National Stonewall Democrats in 1998. Frank continued undeterred even after his self-described Henry Higgins scandal that resulted in the full House reprimanding him, but not censuring or removing him as certain Republicans wanted. Given that the scandal was a former felon and hustler now as his driver running an escort ring from Frank's DC home, the scene may have been more William Higgins than Henry; but the ethics investigation found no evidence that Frank knew what was happening in his absence and he emerged unscathed. The following November, he was re-elected by a two-to-one margin. He is equally beloved by his constituents as by Hill staffers, who named him the "most eloquent," "brainiest," and "funniest" Member of the House in both 2004 and 2006. It takes an outsider. Twelve years ago he said, "I'm a left-handed gay Jew. I've never felt, automatically, a member of any majority."  Ever on target he said more recently, Mitt Romney "is the most intellectually dishonest human being in the history of politics." Watch him smack down the "contemptible" Republican hypocrisy on Bill Maher.

Born March 28: Dirk Bogarde

After distinguished service as an intelligence officer in the Queen's Royal Regiment during World War II, Dirk Bogarde tried acting and became a huge star. He was Britain's top box office draw of the 1950s. So it was big news in 1961 when he chose to play a closeted, married gay barrister in Victim,  especially considering he was closeted himself. (He and his manager Anthony Forwood lived together for decades.) Two years later, Bogarde played the creepy closety valet in The Servant, and in 1971 he played the tragic gay lead of Death in Venice. Today, the courage of these choices can hardly be imagined. Even in 1971, two years after Midnight Cowboy, Warner Brothers was so terrified of Death in Venice being charged with obscenity in the U.S. they wanted to drop the movie altogether. They changed their minds after Queen Elizabeth and Princess Anne attended the London premiere; it won an Oscar. Yet offscreen in his own life, Bogarde lacked the same bravery. After the anguish of watching his partner suffer a prolonged battle with Parkinson's and liver cancer, he became a vocal proponent of euthanasia. That was 1988, coincidentally the same year that John Gielgud came out quietly and Ian McKellan came out blazingly, as a founder of Stonewall. Bogarde never did. He retired in 1990 and lived till 1999, by which time he had written something like eight volumes of autobiography, none of which tells the full truth of his life. Indeed, he destroyed much of his personal archives. Over the years he supported dozens of charities and spoke out on behalf of animal health, Tibetan refugees, unwed mothers, illegitimate children, and against McDonald's on King's Road and VAT on books, but never for gay equality. Throughout the 90s he persisted in arguing for the right to die, but not the right to love. Victim.

QWien for a Day: Create a Poster for Homo: Foul

In preparation for this summer's massive UEFA Euro championships, host country Austria's gay group QWien Kultur is sponsoring a poster contest to combat homophobia in soccer. As they say,

...But as long as "bending over to pick up the soap in the shower" is still seen as the punch line in a joke, nothing will change. There exists a need for action.

With the event of the UEFA EURO 2008 Qwien Kultur will put a focus on city life, in that it is making a theme out of homophobia in football. By issuing a Europe-wide poster competition we are making an otherwise taboo topic public during the period of the UEFA EURO EM 2008.

Despite their emphasis on it being a "Europe-wide" competition, people from every nation are invited to submit original designs. The top fifty entries will form a public display during the soccer games and will remain on view through gay pride in mid-July. Prizes will be awarded to the best three in June. Channel your boldest inner Alexey Brodovitch or Saul Bass because the jury includes Una Wiener, creative director of Young & Rubicam Austria; Robert Douglas the writer/director of Eleven Men Out about a gay soccer star in Iceland; and Jimmy Sommerville. The deadline is May 30. Complete rules here.

100+ First Responders to Antigay Jay Leno

As you've heard, last week habitual teller of antigay jokes, Jay Leno, asked guest Ryan Phillipe to look into the camera, pretend it was "his gay lover...Billy Bob...who has just ridden in shirtless from Wyoming" and give the lens his "gayest look." Ryan, who says he is straight, wasn't so amused. I don't think this makes people more interested in seeing his Iraq soldier movie Stop-Loss.

In response, Jeff Whitty "a huge homo" and Melissa McEwan "a huge bitch" set up a site where so far more than one hundred kind of amazing people have posted pictures of themselves giving Jay a fully-extended piece of their mind. Make yourself happy by clicking here. There's still time to add your own photo by emailing it to: donate [at] mygayestlook.com

Thank you to Television's Greatest Friend, Brian.

Colm Tóibín on His Story Collection Mothers and Sons

If you ever get the chance to see Colm Tóibín give a reading, seize it. He's a born performer, enormously entertaining, and, even more crucial, he's wonderfully serious about the importance of art. In 1997 he started a novel about a Catholic boys school and sexual abuse but he abandoned it because "the rhythms weren't working." The topic was everywhere, in newspapers, magazines, and television, and he felt his book "wasn't adding anything to the sum of human knowledge." Instead, he addressed the subject in a short story from an eighty year old mother's point of view, "A Priest in the Family," which he read Monday night at B&N. Not just his voice but his face, neck, and shoulders were transformed with each character's dialog. Tóibín said he knew it sounded ridiculous but the initial, unbidden image that sparked the story was of a man sitting opposite a women pulling up one of his socks then checking the other. The bookstore staff allowed only two questions but one did give rise to an extended riff on the elderly in Ireland today, trains being impossibly overcrowded because they ride free at sixty-five and over; how an old woman can say something that's charming on the surface but you get the sense of a "gnarled sensibility" and that she might be a "difficult ticket;" how old Irish men faced with a son in scandal might simply stay silent and refuse to speak, "and in that sense you can see Beckett as a social realist." During the hurried, assembly-line signing I ambushed him by asking which books he turns to when he's in the mood to read about gay characters and he said James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room and, especially, Thomas Mann's diaries. Unless you're just determined to be a difficult ticket yourself, make sure you've read his award winning novel, The Master, these stories, his elegiac novel about an Irish family coping with aids, The Blackwater Lightship, and his novel about a young Argentine coming of age and coming out during the Falklands War, The Story of Night.  For extra insight, track down his out of print nonfiction Love in a Dark Time: Explorations of Gay Lives and  Literature.

Born March 26: Tennessee Williams

Is it a coincidence that the gay playwright the straight world most celebrated in the twentieth century was the one who presented the most tortured view of homosexuality? As academics have pointed out, in Tennessee Williams'  plays, gay life is equated with death: by alcoholism (Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Pulitzer Prize, Tony nomination, six Oscar nominations), suicide (Blanche's first husband in A Streetcar Named Desire; Pulitzer Prize, two Tonys, four Oscar wins of twelve nominations), murder and cannibalism (Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer; three Oscar nominations). Whereas his later work, dealing openly with gay relationships, was not praised, not prized, not adapted, and is not perpetually Brought Back to Broadway in a Major Revival! Does this say more about Williams, who might have needed the safety of the closet and the art of indirection, or about society's comfort levels pre, post, and post-post Stonewall? Of course, straight life in his work is no picnic either. The sole exception is The Rose Tattoo, his only happy ending in twenty-five plays, a heterosexualized version of his romance with Frank Merlo, whose family memories provided many of the details for the fictional Sicilian-American Delle Roses. (The movie was shot in Old Key West; Williams can be glimpsed at the bar, Merlo appears in the fight scene. Elsewhere, Merlo and Gore Vidal have cameos in Suddenly, Last Summer as the doctors watching the lobotomy.) The couple stayed together sixteen years, until Merlo's death from cancer. Williams' other significant partners included George Black and Pancho Rodriquez, pictured above, whom you can read about here. Perhaps cruelly fitting for someone so thwarted in life, after his death from choking on a plastic cap, Williams was interred in a cemetery in St. Louis, about as landlocked as it gets, despite his wish to be buried at sea in the same area as his hero Hart Crane.

Born March 25: Elton John

250 million albums sold, more than 50 hits in the Top 40, 60 performances at Madison Square Garden (a world record), five Grammys, one Oscar, one CBE, and four decades of work that totals nearly 500 songs: Statistics can't begin to convey the phenomenon that is Elton John. When he was eleven, and still named Reginald Dwight, he heard a four-page piece by Handel at the Royal Academy of Music and promptly sat down at the piano and played it like a "gramophone record." In 1970, when he was twenty-three, he recorded his eponymous second album, which included the worldwide smash Your Song written in twenty minutes. By 1980 he had released nineteen albums featuring songs such as Tiny Dancer, Levon, Honky Cat, Rocket Man, Daniel, Crocodile Rock, Philadelphia Freedom, Don't Go Breaking My Heart, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Candle in the Wind, Bennie and the Jets, Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting, The Bitch Is Back, and Someone Saved My Life Tonight . In the 80s he slowed his output to exactly one album each year with the hits Little Jeannie, Blue Eyes, Empty Garden, I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues, I'm Still Standing, Sad Songs Say So Much, and Sacrifice. In the 90s he reinvented himself yet again and, with Tim Rice, wrote the songs for The Lion King, propelling it to become the highest grossing 2-D animated film of all time and winning an Oscar and a Grammy for Can You Feel the Love Tonight?  Remember during this time the openly gay icon was constantly promoting research and education about aids, lobbying for the Ryan White Act, and getting in the face of people who wanted to close their eyes to the disease. He founded the Elton John Aids Foundation when Bush I was still in the White House. In March 1997, he turned fifty and celebrated with five hundred people at a costume party where he appeared as Louis XIV. Four months later his friend Gianni Versace was murdered and Elton sat in the front row of the memorial service with his longtime partner David Furnish and Princess Diana. Six weeks later, she was dead and, in her honor, he released his revised Candle in the Wind 1997, the fastest and bestselling song of all time with 33 million sold copies worldwide. All royalties, estimated to be 55 million pounds, went to the Diana Memorial Fund, and Elton has kept his promise never to play the song again after its only performance at her funeral. Further indicating that he must be a loyal and generous friend: He is godfather to ten children including Sean Lennon and Brooklyn Beckham. His household expenses are $2 million a month and, when needed, he can throw a diva tantrum, but he's never lost his sense of humor. In successfully suing the tabloid The Sun for libel he said, "You can call me a fat, balding, talentless old queen who can't sing — but you can't tell lies about me."

Jell-O or Harissa? Gay Algerian Restaurant in Elkader, Iowa

The very urbane, Algerian born Frederique Boudouani and his boyfriend left Boston and settled in smalltown Iowa to open a restaurant, but, he says, "I didn't move 2,000 miles to serve hash browns." Le snap, non? So there he is, the son of a UN diplomat, serving his boureks, couscous, and cade to local folks scandalized by $19 entrées. Well, it turns out the gay couple aren't the first unlikely pioneers in Elkader. The town of 1500 people wasn't named for elk but rather for Abd el-Kader, an Algerian resistance fighter who battled French Colonials and helped Jews and Christians escape persecution in Syria. Hard to imagine a red state village today naming itself for a contemporary Muslim rebel, but that was 1846. (Later, el-Kader was honored by Lincoln.) If you missed Sunday's Des Moines Register, read the full interview here. Boudouani and Bruening are obviously doing something right; their restaurant has been open a year and a half.

Born March 24: Margarthe Cammermeyer

Resistance and duty might be twin strands of Grethe Cammermeyer's DNA. After all, she was born (sixty-six years ago today) in Nazi occupied Norway, where her parents smuggled weapons and housed rebels of the underground. Following her father's winning a Rockefeller Fellowship as a doctor, the family immigrated to the US when she was nine, not such a great time for a very tall science buff and jock girl in 1951. She became a citizen at eighteen, graduated from the University of Maryland, did her required basic training as part of the Army Student Nurse Program, and within two years had married a serviceman. The next year, 1966, they both volunteered for Vietnam and Cammermeyer went first and was Head Nurse for a division. As their toured ended, she became pregnant and, according to the rules, had to quit the Army as the family relocated to Washington State. She had four sons but was unfulfilled. In 1980 the couple divorced and her husband was awarded custody of their children. In 1987 Cammermeyer was promoted to Colonel and the following year she became Chief Nurse for the Washington State National Guard. She was forty-six, had begun a relationship with her partner Diane Divelbess, and completely honest, so during a standard security clearance interview, she said she was a lesbian. The army didn't like that, but being the army, it took them three years to discharge her, on June 11, 1992. Diane convinced her to sue, and she was eventually reinstated in June 1994 by a Federal Court Judge who ruled the military's Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy violates the Constitution. In 1995, Glenn Close portrayed her in the television movie Serving in Silence, produced by Barbra Streisand and based on Cammermeyer's autobiography. After  retiring from the national guard in 1997, she ran for Congress in 1998 and lost to Republican Jack Metcalf. Always intrepid, she hosted a talk show on the web for two years. She is still with Diane (above, left). Check out her website which carries on her tradition of resisting injustice:

Another responsibility was the need to continue to challenge the anti-gay rhetoric in society, the ignorance, and the notion that, somehow, as gay and lesbian people we should be judged by another's God.

20th Annual Publishing Triangle Award Finalists

Usually gay people have such impeccable timing, it's a little baffling why Publishing Triangle announced their book award finalists Tuesday directly in the wake of the Lambda book award finalists, which most people covered on Monday. It seems to guarantee less attention, which is a shame at a time when people are buying fewer books and mainstream publishers are shying away from gay content. Although the winners are named a month apart (April 28 and May 29), ideally they should be as separated as the National Book Awards in November and the Pulitzers in April.

Finalists for the Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction
André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Peter Cameron, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Felicia Luna Lemus, Like Son (Akashic Books)
Ali Liebegott, The IHOP Papers (Carroll & Graf)
Brian Malloy, Brendan Wolf (St. Martin's Press)
Armistead Maupin, Michael Tolliver Lives (HarperCollins)
Sarah Schulman, The Child (Carroll & Graf)

Finalists for the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
Amy Hoffman, An Army of Ex-Lovers (University of Massachusetts Press)
Janet Malcolm, Two Lives: Gertrude and Alice (Yale University Press)
Sharon Marcus, Between Women (Princeton University Press)

Finalists for The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction
Martin Duberman, The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (Alfred A. Knopf)
Michael Rowe, Other Men's Sons (Cormorant Books)
Michael S. Sherry, Gay Artists in Modern American Culture (University of North Carolina Press)

Finalists for The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction
James Cañón, Tales from the Town of Widows (Harper Perennial)
Myriam Gurba, Dahlia Season (Manic D Press)
Bob Smith, Selfish and Perverse (Carroll & Graf)

The Lifetime Achievement award, which in even years is given to a woman and in odd years to a man, will honor the crime fiction writer Katherine V. Forrest, whose books are here.

For the poetry finalists, click here.

What do you think were the best lgbt books last year? Please post your favorites in the comments.

Born March 21: Zackie Achmat

Born of Indian parents in South Africa in 1962, Zackie Achmat grew up in the "coloured" community and was always a rebel for equality. By the time he was ten he was a total bookworm and gained special permission to use the whites-only library for reading, but he was still prohibited from using its restrooms. When he was fourteen, during the Sowetto Uprisings, he set his school on fire to convince his classmates to join the boycott. As an active member of the illegal ANC for years, he was jailed many times before apartheid ended and the ANC's Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994. That same year Achmat co-founded the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality, and in 1996 South Africa had become the first nation whose Bill of Rights bans discrimination based on sexual orientation. Aggregating everything he had learned from the anti-apartheid movement and gay rights activism, in 1998 Achmat created the Treatment Action Campaign [TAC] to fight aids through prevention, awareness, and getting medicines to the poor. Immediately he gained worldwide attention by announcing he was HIV+ and would refuse to take his medicines until they were available to all South Africans. Among the many ways TAC has changed lives is by helping to erode the shame and stigma of HIV, proclaiming one's positive status with bold t-shirts rather than hiding or lying. Winning numerous legal and public relations victories against the government and international pharmaceutical corporations, Achmat finally resumed his meds when he was very ill in August 2004, anticipating correctly that in November the Ministry of Health would announce its plan to distribute ARVs widely. Since 2001, Achmat has won many honors including the Desmond Tutu Leadership Award, the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights, and the Nelson Mandela Award. Time magazine (European edition)  selected him as one of their Heroes of 2003, when he was also named an Ashoka Fellow. That same year the New Yorker ran an excellent profile of him written by Samantha Power. In 2004, the American Friends Service Committee nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (which went to Kenya's Wangari Maathai). Earlier this year, he married his partner Dalli Weyers, 25, in a terrific wedding where the traditional caketop figures of a bride and groom were replaced by a king and a cowboy. Read it all here.

A Shout-Out from 1931

At Peter Cameron's urging last fall, I finally got into Denton Welch. Most recently I read his Maiden Voyage (1943), which covers his running away from an English boarding school at sixteen in 1931, his reluctant return, and, for the bulk of the book, his visit to his father in China. Other than that, nothing much happens, but everything is wonderfully observed. Whether or not you want to give him a try, please appreciate the scene where the boys from school have an old fashioned Field Day, playing at war. They start on a train:

    One unfortunate in my carriage had his trousers taken off and chewing-gum rubbed in his pubic hair. He screamed a lot but I think he really enjoyed the publicity.
    I sat very still in my corner, drinking my coffee and hoping that nothing like this would happen to me.

At the end of the day:

    We all sang as we marched back, and some of the sergeants and corporals, in outbursts of chivalry, carried the younger boys' rifles as well as their own. I was delighted--it was like knights and squires or the Theban Band.

Awesome.

Born March 20: John Boswell

Four years ago, when the Publishing Triangle judges compiled their list of the 100 Best LGBT Nonfiction Books of all time, they included works by Plato, Freud, Foucault, Faderman, Duberman, Hirschfeld, Symonds, Stein, Kramer, Katz, Shilts, Sedgwick, Chauncey, Butler, Lorde, Isherwood, et al., and their undisputed top choice as the most important work was Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality by John Boswell, a history professor at Yale. He was 33 when it was published in 1980, which was obviously a very different time: Not only did his university press allow him to use this as his author photo, but popular magazines actually reviewed academic books for general readers. Newsweek said it was, "an astonishing work of scholarship that ranges with ease over fourteen centuries...What makes the work so exciting is not simply its content--fascinating though that is--but its revolutionary challenge to some of Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." Specifically, he proved that the Roman Catholic Church hadn't always been antigay, had either been indifferent to or had actually celebrated male - male love until the twelfth century. No surprise, Boswell was attacked by some conservative academics who thought he was promoting a gay agenda and by some gay people who said he was a Church apologist. Ultimately the complaints only added to the book's popularity because it was impeccably researched; indeed, it won the 1981 American Book Award for history and the Stonewall Book Award from the ALA. After writing the first book about the widespread practice of child abandonment in medieval times, Boswell returned to homosexuality and the early Church in another groundbreaking book, Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (1994). This time he argued the Church actually condoned certain male - male relationships with ceremonies that could be seen as precursors to gay marriage. Again, the book was brilliantly researched; again, the uproar; but the public debate was cut short: Boswell died of aids in December 1994 when he was 47. At Yale, he helped start the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center, and his medieval history courses were immensely popular, among the top ten in enrollments. He is said to have written his comments on student papers in perfect medieval calligraphy.

The Lavender World's Fair

Anti-gay religious intolerance, misinformation about the science of homosexuality, gay people busting their moves to dance music, shirtless gay men becoming pantless gay men, clothed gay men cheering shirtless gay men becoming pantless, white lesbians rightly saying it's been too much about gay guys and it's time for more lesbian visibility, black lesbians looking awesome -- are you old enough to remember any of that? Evidently, that's what life was like back in 1976. My favorite USC Film School student ever and his best friend John Dabney drove out to Pomona to document an event called The Lavender World's Fair. Snippets of their filming survived and, thirty-two years later, these clips are being seen for the first time, now. Los Angeles area viewers may recognize the strip contest's MC as Michael Kearns, award-winning playwright, actor, producer, and activist. Dabney, a successful television editor, died of aids in the late 80s.

GLAAD's STAR _ U _ _

In the ninety years since the Pulitzers first gave a prize for the year's best drama, the judges have chosen to give no award fifteen times, including 1997 and 2006. So last night at the first of their four-part 19th Annual Media Awards, why didn't GLAAD take a dignified pass in the category honoring major motion pictures? Instead, they proclaimed the summer flop Stardust to be the year's Outstanding Film in Wide Release. GLAAD knew it was a terrible year for lgbt characters in studio movies; they could only find three films to nominate instead of their usual five. The others were Across the Universe and The Jane Austen Book Club, which actually had a sweet lesbian subplot and should have won. It sounds like Stardust's gay content was limited to Robert DeNiro as a pirate who belowdecks dresses as "a cancan-dancing, boa-twirling Folies-Bergère chorus girl prancing before a mirror." Here's a roundup of what critics said of his performance:

The New York Times: an excruciating embarrassment

The Boston Globe: DeNiro makes a macho-hammy-swishy mess of himself... He's terrible, but he's having, well, a gay old time.

New York magazine: I gazed on Robert De Niro—under the direction of Madonna’s husband’s best man—as a closeted pirate captain prancing to the “Can-Can” in a tutu. I haven’t checked the Rapture Index, but surely this is a cosmic convergence. The end might well be nigh....As that capering pirate, De Niro is god-awful

The Washington Post: Robert De Niro's turn as a cross-dressing pirate, isn't nearly as successful...[he] camps it up -- think less a riff on Keith Richards and more "La Cage Aux Folles" -- in a performance that can only be described as deranged.

The Chicago Tribune: The scene depicting De Niro's closeted pirate mincing around to Offenbach's famous "Orpheus" cancan goes on as well, and it makes you wonder if some things simply weren't meant to be.

Philadelphia Inquirer: a painfully prancing performance from Robert De Niro as a crossdressing pirate

New York Post: Prancing a can-can in petticoats as a swishy swashbuckler who makes Johnny Depp's Captain Jack Sparrow look positively macho, De Niro embarrasses himself at the helm of a floating pirate ship. Worse, his star turn threatens to swamp the entire movie.

The Village Voice: ...and when Stardust does devolve into comedy, it fails miserably. Robert De Niro shows up halfway through as a closeted, cross-dressing captain of a high-flying pirate ship, and he's an utter distraction—a reminder that, hey, this is just a silly movie about silly things starring famous people acting all silly.

TV Guide: The film stumbles painfully when it tries to be funny: Robert De Niro's star turn as the notorious pirate Captain Shakespeare, a mincing, closeted cross-dresser who thinks — mistakenly — that he looks pretty in pink, is cringe-inducing.

The Hollywood Reporter: In a tedious sequence, Robert De Niro hams it up as pirate captain aboard an airborne "lightning" ship. The captain, macho in front of his crew, has a secret predilection for wearing petticoats and dancing the cancan in his private quarters. Straining for camp, his scenes are just plain embarrassing.

As for GLAAD's own criteria for its awards, the first on their list is:

Fair, Accurate and Inclusive Representations – Rather than portraying the LGBT community in broad stereotypes, the project deals with the characters or themes in a fair, accurate, and multi-dimensional manner.

Aside from the obvious problems, honoring a movie like Stardust diminishes the integrity of the other awards, many of which were well deserved for important work. 60 Minutes won for its report on "Don't Ask, Don't Tell," and David France won the magazine award for his article "Dying to Come Out: The War on Gays in Iraq" published by GQ. Jane Gross won the newspaper journalism category for her piece "Aging and Gay, and Facing Prejudice in Twilight," published in the New York Times, which also won Outstanding Newspaper Overall Coverage. AlterElton.com won for a piece called "Gay Newsmen: A Clearer Picture," and Anderson Cooper won for a CNN segment called "The First Casualty," but he was unable to come out in person to accept his award. A full list of winners in the twenty-six categories announced last night can be read here. The remaining fourteen categories will be announced at dinners in South Florida (April 12), Los Angeles (April 26), and San Francisco (May 10).

UPDATE: Commenters, whom I appreciate, disagree with my take on Stardust. My point remains that DeNiro's performance--whether or not it gets laughs--doesn't sound as if it has anything meaningful to say about queer lives. And it appears to contradict GLAAD's goals: How is it not a "broad stereotype?" What about it is "multi-dimensional?"  How does it truly illuminate the lgbt experience for a mainstream audience, which is the purpose of this award. To the charge that I've taken reviews out of context, I think it's clear that Holden's final verdict is "excruciating embarrassment." To see the full quote, with the performance compared to a squawking kazoo solo in a Mozart string quartet, seems to support my view, which is not lessened by Holden's acknowledging that he gets the in joke of DeNiro riffing on Depp's pirate. Providing context is also why I've linked to every review in full. Of course, even criticism, like comedy, can be open to interpretation. It would be terrible if we all agreed all the time. Thanks for the discussion.

Born March 18: Michael Kirby

In November 1998 a new edition of Who's Who in Australia was published with an extensive entry for High Court Justice Michael Kirby detailing his many accomplishments (first president of the Arts Law Centre, the youngest person ever appointed to the federal judiciary, a Companion of the Order of Australia, President of the New South Wales Court of Appeals, a Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, joined the High Court in 1996, etc.) and for the first time  listing as his partner, since 1969, Johan van Vloten. That's how Kirby came out publicly. Except no one noticed for five months. It became news, briefly, in April 1999. As if making up for lost time, since then Kirby has been vocal and active in matters of gay equality at home and abroad. As President of the International Commission of Jurists he urged members to include sexual orientation among basic human rights, just as he has on many panels of lgbt conferences and in his rousing keynote address at Gay Games VI in 2002. Read it here. His compassion and lack of anger in that speech are particularly notable as he had recently endured a senator's widely reported accusations of using government cars to pick up underage hustlers on Easter Sunday. The only evidence, a driver's purported logbook, was soon proved to be a forgery, and Kirby was magnanimous in accepting the senator's limp apology. He is no pushover, however. Last November he attacked Sydney's Catholic and Anglican archbishops for perpetuating homophobia.

Often, it has to be said, it comes from religion. It comes from people's religious upbringing, reinforced even to this day by religious instruction, and it has to be said, religious instruction from the two archbishops of Sydney.

Kirby himself is a committed Anglican, while his partner is a stalwart atheist. Today, turning sixty-nine, Kirby enters his final year on the High Court, from which he must retire at seventy, by law.

20th Lambda Literary Awards Finalists

Depending on whether you're feeling optimistic or otherwise about gay culture these days, you can read the full list of Lambda Literary Award finalists as evidence that a) small presses are finally getting respect or b) mainstream publishers have given up on lgbt books. True, Carroll & Graf garnered seven nominations; then again, they were put out of business by their new corporate owners last year.

Rivaling the Grammys in specificity of classifications and subclassifications, the Lammys give prizes in twenty-one categories. The big ones are:

WOMEN'S FICTION

    * Biting the Apple, Lucy Jane Bledsoe (Carroll & Graf)
    * The IHOP Papers, Ali Liebegott (Carroll & Graf)
    * Greetings from Jamaica, Mari San Giovanni (Bywater Books)
    * The Child, Sarah Schulman (Carroll & Graf)
    * The Kind of Girl I Am, Julia Watts (Spinsters Ink)
    * The Mandrake Broom, Jess Wells (Firebrand Books)

MEN'S FICTION

    * Call Me By Your Name, Andre Aciman (Farrar Straus Giroux)
    * First Person Plural, Andrew W.M. Beierle (Kensington)
    * Dark Reflections, Samuel R. Delany (Carroll & Graf)
    * Fellow Travelers, Thomas Mallon (Pantheon)
    * The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, Manuel Munoz (Algonquin)

WOMEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

    * Comfort Food for Breakups, Marusya Bocurkiuw (Arsenal Pulp Press)
    * And Now We Are Going to Have a Party, Nicola Griffith (Payseur & Schmidt)
    * An Army of Ex-Lovers, Amy Hoffman (University of Massachusetts Press)
    * Two Lives: Gertrude & Alice, Janet Malcolm (Yale University Press)
    * Waiting for the Call, Jaqueline Taylor (University of Michigan Press)

MEN'S MEMOIR/BIOGRAPHY

    * Forgiving Troy, Thom Bierdz (Hudson House)
    * Dog Years, Mark Doty (HarperCollins)
    * The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, Martin Duberman (Knopf)
    * The History of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin's Theory, Kenny Fries (Perseus Books)
    * What Becomes You, Aaron Raz Link & Hilda Raz (University of Nebraska Press)
    * Mississippi Sissy, Kevin Sessums (St. Martin's Press)

LGBT NONFICTION

    * Between Women, Sharon Marcus (Princeton University Press)
    * Pink Harvest, Toni Mirosevich (Mid-List Press)
    * Other Men's Sons, Michael Rowe (Cormorant Books)
    * Gay Artists in Mondern American Culture, Michael S. Sherry (University of North Carolina Press)
    * Imagining Transgender, David Valentine (Duke University Press)

LGBT CHILDRENS/YOUNG ADULT

    * Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, Peter Cameron (FSG)
    * Hero, Perry Moore (Hyperion)
    * Saints of Augustine, P.E. Ryan (HarperTeen)
    * Freak Show, James St. James (Dutton Children's/Penguin)
    * Parrotfish, Ellen Wittlinger (Simon & Schuster)

Among the missing are Noel Alumit, David Leavitt, Brian Malloy, William J. Mann, Armistead Maupin, Bob Smith, Colm Toibin, and Edmund White. Alan Bennett's publisher did not nominate him. In Men's Memoir it would have been great to see Arnaldo Cruz-Malavé for his Queer Latino Testimonio, Keith Haring, and Juanito Xtravaganza: Hard Tails.

Congratulations to the finalists. Winners will be announced in West Hollywood on May 29.

Born March 17: Alexander McQueen

As the world morphs into one global market and the economies of sameness squelch anything special, thank god for risk takers like Alexander McQueen. The youngest person to be named British Designer of the Year, which he had won thrice by age thirty-four, McQueen, unlike many of his fashion contemporaries, is a virtuoso tailor from his years spent as an apprentice on Saville Row beginning at sixteen when he dropped out of school. He is equally a connoisseur of exquisite fabrics, never more so than when showing them tattered, ripped, shredded, or being spraypainted live on the runway. After a couple seasons creating his own line, he added duties as Chief Designer for Givenchy when he was twenty-six. He was rude, they didn't renew. If he seemed in those early years to pursue controversy with blatant shock tactics, at least there was always a base of history behind his ideas. His rebellious streak may also have sprung from his discomfort as the sixth child of an East End taxi driver becoming the new establishment in the poncy world of high fashion. But dressmaking was in his blood from the beginning: As a young child he made clothes for his three older sisters, and even before that, when he was six, he knew he was gay. When he was thirty-one, in 2000, he married George Forsyth, and one of his groomsmen was Kate Moss. Since then he has broken up with Forsyth, but he's still with Moss. In the fall of 2005, after she was sent to rehab for using cocaine and scorned by the suddenly sanctimonious industry, McQueen took his bow wearing a t-shirt emblazoned "We Love You, Kate," and in the spring of 2006 when she was still banned from walking in shows, he used her as hologram. As one indication of how highly regarded he is by the people who best understand that fashion is an art, after showing his now famous Oyster Dress in his  Spring Summer 2003 collection, the Metropolitan Museum immediately raised funds to buy it. The museum added it to their Goddess show, after which the gown toured Greece where the IHT called it sensational. Still Creative Director of his own line, McQueen sold a majority share of his company to Gucci for a rumored fifty-four million pounds. (Sounds like a lot but Giselle earned thirty-three million dollars last year for having her picture taken.) McQueen has successfully licensed his name for jeans, eyeglasses, and two perfumes, as well as designing cosmetics for MAC and sneakers for Puma.

We Disappear: Scott Heim and Chelsea's B&N

Scott Heim fought writer's block and depression for ten years before completing his third novel, and one of the things that brought him out of it was the movie version of his first novel, Mysterious Skin. He said that seeing people take his work seriously and try to adapt it carefully made him want to create again. Everything he said was endearing and quotable. His favorite reading growing up was lurid magazines like True Crime, which his mother brought home from her job as a prison guard because the inmates were not allowed to have them. As a family, they took a road trip from their tiny Kansas town to Holcomb to see the murder site  of In Cold Blood. His literary touchstones are Flannery O'Connor and Joy Williams. He responds to all his fan mail and every customer review on Amazon where the bad ones devastate him; even if someone writes twenty lines of praise but says 'You used the wrong word on page 43" it sends him to bed for two days. He's less interested in memory than what people think they remember. He sometimes wishes he had made movies instead. To the questioner who asked what advice Scott had for writers who hadn't been published yet, he said, "Don't. People don't read anymore. It's so hard. It's really lonely. Write a screenplay. People still go to movies." Another solution to his writer's block was to switch the characters' names to his own and his mother's, which he fully intended to switch back but never did. Ultimately with many details real, it's a merging of fiction and memoir, and he said, "I like the idea of blurring myself with the narrator." The story begins with the discovery of a dead teenage boy in Kansas, which rekindles the mother's obsession with missing youth. Harper has inexplicably chosen to release it as a paperback original. If you're not afraid of the darker themes, please give it a try. Every purchase makes a difference in literary gay fiction.

As Steve Nesselroth, the best read DLister ever, pointed out, Heim's title could not have been more apt. His was the final reading at Chelsea's B&N which has presented so many important writers lately: Rene Steinke,  Marianne Wiggins, Ha Jin, and dozens more. The store is closing at the end of March. According to real estate buzz, the rent is increasing five hundred percent and rumor has it Crate & Barrel is interested for their other line. Chain though it is, this B&N and its excellent staff will be terribly missed. Memo to 192 Books and Three Lives: Step up. 

Born March 14: Kevin Williamson

Kevin Williamson was accepted at NYU Film School but couldn't afford to attend, and after graduating from East Carolina University, and drifting through a series of dead-end jobs in New York then Los Angeles, he wrote his first screenplay in three days so that he would have a sample of his work when applying for tv writing jobs. Instead, his script sparked a bidding war between rival studios and the finished movie, Scream, became the highest grossing horror movie of all time. After the success of Scream 2, Scream 3, and I Know What You Did Last Summer, and after coming out publicly, Williamson tried television. The result was the autobiographical, allusion-packed Dawson's Creek, the generation-defining teenfest that made the WB. So important was the show to the new channel that when the network went off the air in September 2006, the final program they played was the Dawson's pilot. His recent projects, the movies Cursed and Venom and the tv series Wasteland, Glory Days, and Hidden Palms, have not met with the same success, but the man has bank. Apparently his parties are still so crowded with cute it's scary.

The PEN/Faulkner Award 2008

Yesterday, the judges of PEN/Faulkner Award announced that David Leavitt was a finalist for this year's prize for his novel The Indian Clerk. This makes Leavitt one of the few writers to have been nominated twice, his first nod coming in 1985 for his debut book, the story collection Family Dancing. Just as rare is the number of gay writers honored by the prestigious foundation: Peter Cameron was a finalist in 2003 for City of Your Final Destination, Michael Cunningham won in 1999 for The Hours, Allan Gurganus for White People and Paul Gervais for Extraordinary People were finalists in 1992, and John Kennedy Toole was a finalist in the prize's first year, 1981.

This year's PEN/Faulkner winner is the wonderful Kate Christensen for her fourth novel, The Great Man. If you haven't read her second novel, Jeremy Thrane, about a gay underachiever who works for a closeted movie star, give it a try.

Born March 13: Janet Flanner

How did Janet Flanner get the first installment of her famous "Letter from Paris" published in The New Yorker, which would run her column fortnightly for fifty years, and how did she get her pen name Genêt? Both answers: Harold Ross. A restless Hoosier educated in Chicago, Flanner had left Manhattan and her husband to travel in Europe with her lover Solito Solano, and from Paris she wrote to Jane Grant, Ross's wife. In 1925 Ross was still struggling to find the top notch writing he wanted for his new magazine, less than a year old, and he decided to publish Flanner's letter without asking her permission and therefore needed a nom de plume, choosing what he mistakenly thought was French for Janet. Flanner knew every important person in Paris for decades but also wrote about Algeria, Hungary invaded by the Russians, the Sinai War, and dozens of other topics in her signature style. She won a National Book Award in 1966. The center of a far reaching circle of lesbian friends, she was a constant presence at Natalie Barney's salons and Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's living room and with the many other prominent lesbians discussed in Paris Was a Woman and, more obliquely, in her own otherwise wonderful memoir Paris Was Yesterday. She was equally at home with Gide and Cocteau as she was with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she never lost her knack for being at the elbow of history: She was on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer when they had their famous fracas and rather than ducking she came between them. Although they occasionally had separate affairs, Flanner and Solano remained committed to each other and lived together for fifty years. Solano died in 1975, when she was eighty-seven; Flanner died in 1978, when she was eighty-six.

"Please, Talk to Kids About Aids" A Documentary

To what extent are all interviews done on autopilot? The question arises because the responses during this twenty-five minute documentary about aids are alternately as rote or insightful as you'd see on any network news program but here the interviewers are sisters age six and four. It's kind of amazing to see some adults stuck in their habitual interview fatigue mode and some break out to become freshly engaged with their subject, as does Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague (and the only writer ever to win a Polk, Peabody, and Pulitzer). And it's remarkable to realize how much of what we hear we automatically re-edit for the speaker's benefit-- watch how imprecisely scientists and journalists use language. First, one doctor patiently explains that viruses can be transmitted by sneezing, and HIV is a virus; then many people say simply "drugs" to mean medicines or recreational substances. To the filmmaker's credit, the camera stays with each scene until the girls' understandable confusion is cleared up. Regardless of how liberal or otherwise your attitudes are about children's education, you will probably be uncomfortable at least once, be it with the man explaining fornication bluntly, the female sex worker's explanation of sex work and sex workers' rights, or the condom art project. Not to worry. As with you hearing a rapid list of the Kings and Queens of ancient Africa or the science fiction hierarchies of mythical lands, the overload of strange new information just falls away. The girls aren't traumatized, they're bored. But mainly they're awesome. And as the final interviewee points out, the older girl was able to comfort a classmate whose mother has aids in a way no one else could. It's the 21st century. Kids talk, they hear things, they have questions. They need to be told something. As you may recall, Silence equals death.

Watch it here.

Born March 12: Vaslav Nijinsky

By the time Vaslav Nijinsky was nineteen the formerly impoverished youth had already had exquisite teenage affairs with the forty-something Prince Pavel Dimitrievitch Lvov who drenched him in luxury, a rebound fling with Count Tishkievitch, and had begun his great romantic and professional partnership with Sergei Diaghilev, under whose tutelage Nijinsky was early known as the God of Dance. One of the very few male ballet stars to perform en pointe, his reputation in Russia and Paris grew with each successive role in Cleopatra, Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle. At Diaghilev's urging, Nijinsky began to choreograph his own works and the radical results remain the stuff of legend: at twenty-two, Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun which ended with him masturbating, and a year later Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring which ended with the audience rioting. Later the same year, impulsively, stupidly, tragically, he married Romola Pulsky, a Romanian woman who had been chasing him across continents and oceans, finally landing him in Buenos Aires. Enraged, Diaghilev fired him. Nijinsky tried and failed to start his own dance troupe. Stumbling in a new and ill-fitting role, the star who was used to being petted and lavished with gifts now had to support a wife and child with no money and no employment. When his stress was its highest, World War I broke out, and he, a Russian in Hungary, was considered an enemy and held as a prisoner. In 1916 Diaghilev rescued him and got the family to New York, to join his Ballets Russes. From the instant of their joyous kissing reunion, Romola came between the lovers. Unsurprisingly, Nijinsky's mental state declined. Imagine performing on stage with a fear of the other dancers and a uncontrollable terror that the trap doors would open. Diaghilev removed himself back to Europe; Nijinsky was the wrong person to be left in charge of the company. Later Diaghilev again tried to reconcile, and again Romola "protected" her husband from him, thwarting any more reunions. Nijinsky's depression turned to delusions and Romola, with his doctors, had him committed to an asylum in Switzerland. It was 1919 and he was twenty-nine. For the next thirty-one years he was in and out of institutions until his death in London in 1950.

Christopher Rice's Blind Fall

On sale today, Christopher Rice's fourth novel, Blind Fall, is the story of John Houck, a straight marine who only learns that his former captain was gay after he is brutally murdered. His partner may be next to die. Re-examinations of Houck's own prejudices and revenge ensue.

Rice's extensive tour has more than twenty-one stops, including readings in cities that are often overlooked on book tours: Skokie, St. Louis, Kansas City, Cincinnati, Nashville, Jackson, Fort Lauderdale, and Madison, CT. Tonight he's in West Hollywood, tomorrow San Diego. Get full details here.

Dark Scribe, the online magazine devoted to mystery and horror fiction, has a thoughtful interview with Rice in which he shows an impressive appreciation for the lesbian and gay crime writers who paved the way.

Well, let’s not forget trail-blazers like Katherine V. Forrest, John Morgan Wilson, Joseph Hansen and Michael Nava. And then there are a lot of lesbian crime writers who have achieved mainstream acceptance. To be honest, one of the things that drew me to crime fiction was that many of its straight, mainstream writers were depicting fully realized, complicated, and yes, sometimes villainous gay characters in their work. I still remember the day I picked up a Jonathan Kellerman novel on a whim and was blown away by the fact that Alex Delaware’s right hand man, Det. Milo Sturgis, was an openly gay man, and it wasn’t an issue for anyone else in the book. My personal experience has taught me that the mystery writing community can be a very warm and accepting place, regardless of your sales figures or your sexuality.

Born March 11: John Barrowman

Uncomfortably straddling the border of irony and stupidity is this true anecdote: The gay and straight producers of Will & Grace rejected finalist John Barrowman, who's gay, to play the gay character Will Truman, because they said he was "too straight," and instead they hired the less talented, not hot Eric McCormick who is straight but acted "gayer." Our loss. Barrowman, who is Scottish, has a perfect American accent because his family moved to Illinois when he was nine. However he kept his Scots pride, which was not always appreciated in the Land of Lincoln: He arrived to pick up his prom date and she dumped him on the spot because he was wearing a kilt. After losing Will & Grace, he went back to London and was cast in Dr. Who and its spinoff Torchwood, both hugely successful. A frequent star of West End musicals, Barrowman has also released four solo cds, including an album of Cole Porter songs and his most recent, Another Side, in which he cheeses up mid-tempo hits from Carly Simon, Cyndi Lauper, Chicago, Elton John, Eric Carmen, The Police, and, yes, Air Supply accompanied by a full orchestra. Like Celine, he knows what the midcounties swoon to. Perhaps more of an entertainer than an artist, he is gigantically popular throughout the U.K., where he substitute hosts the morning chat shows and had more than one thousand people queue up in Cardiff for him to sign copies of his just released autobiography, Anything Goes. But he is not a gorgeous dunce. He frequently speaks on behalf of gay organizations, hosted London's pride last year, kisses his partner (since 1993) in public, and doesn't mince words about anti-gay discrimination and double standards. He said, "Why would I want a 'marriage' from a belief system that hates me?" He and his statistically improbable partner [equally handsome] of fifteen years, Scott Gill, signed the civil register in December 2006. OK! magazine covered the small, private ceremony rapturously. Barrowman wore a kilt.

Allan Gurganus on Whitman, Eakins at the NPG

"Calling Walt Whitman asexual is like calling Mozart tone deaf," Allan Gurganus said Saturday afternoon at the National Portrait Gallery in DC. He remarked of the gay poet, "From Walt, all blessings flow. He is not simply the Father of American letters, but its Mother, too." The always-quotable novelist lectured for an hour on Thomas Eakins' painting of Whitman which Gurganus explained is actually a "double portrait" of both men, "two renegades so alike" who "came to echo one another." At the time, Whitman was 69, "a Sun God in his senescence," and Eakins was 44, and their many joint endeavors, including Eakins photographing Whitman nude, reflected "the joys of outlaws hanging out together." Luckily for those of us who missed his presentation as I horribly did [quotes and photo via my favorite proxy], Gurganus intends to publish it in a small volume. In the mean time, reread his excellent novel of life in New York, Plays Well with Others, which I've always felt was not given the attention it deserved because its characters are gay, his really wonderful quartet The Practical Heart, especially relevant here as the title novella, which won the National Magazine Prize in 1994, concerns a woman sitting for John Singer Sargent, or return yet again to his sensational debut, Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. His talk was the inaugural address in the gallery's American Pictures Distinguished Lecture series, under the directorship of Adam Goodheart, award winning NYT critic, superstar of Washington College, and friend of Thebes. An equally fascinating pairing comes next Saturday when Laurie Andersen discusses Warhol's Electric Chair. Tickets, free of charge, become available at 3:30 for her lecture at 4:30. Be there.