Band of Thebes

Colm Tóibín on Klaus and Erika Mann

Not because it's Halloween but let's jump into the psychosexual drama of the Mann family. Gay though he was, Nobel Laureate Thomas Mann and his wife had six children. His wife and her brother Klaus had an affair, which Mann used in his novella Blood of the Walsungs about an incestuous twin brother and sister. The Manns named their first son after the wife's brother; that Klaus and his sister Erika had an affair, even though both were gay, as was a third sibling, Golo. When Erika, a popular actress, married a man, Gustaf, they honeymooned in the hotel where she and her girlfriend had stayed when the girlfriend was dressed like man. Klaus slept with Gustaf. Also, their father wanted to have sex with Klaus in high school:

‘Am enraptured with Eissi,’ he wrote in 1920, when Klaus was 14 (Eissi was his nickname), ‘terribly handsome in his swimming trunks. Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son . . . It seems I am once and for all done with women? . . . Eissi was lying tanned and shirtless on his bed, reading; I was disconcerted.’ Later that year he ‘came upon Eissi totally nude and up to some nonsense by Golo’s bed’ and was ‘deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming’. He used some of this same language to describe Jacob’s interest in the young Joseph in Joseph and His Brothers...

Klaus became a successful novelist himself, basing one of his most famous books, Mephisto, on Gustaf. He had also written a play about an incestuous sister and brother. When he was forty-two, Klaus killed himself. His brother Michael, a professor at Berkeley, killed himself at fifty-eight. Two aunts, both Thomas's sisters, had committed suicide earlier, separately.

The whole strange brew is the subject of In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story by Andrea Weiss, author of the book and documentary Paris Was a Woman). I haven't read it but I did read Colm Tóibín's 9,300 word review in the currect LRB. Tóibín is the perfect critic for the subject. Last winter, when I asked him what books he reads when he wants gay lives, he said James Baldwin and Thomas Mann's diaries. 

As for Mann's psyche, Tóibín writes:

In Bluebeard’s Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann (2003), Michael Maar argued, however, that Mann was, for much of his life, especially with his family, his friends, and in his work, unusually open about his sexuality.

Instead, searching for secret elements in his fiction, Maar insisted that one theme impelled and nourished Mann’s imagination more than any other. He found image after image from the beginning to the end of his work of murder, blood, knives and sexual pleasure. He suggested that this was the key to Mann’s work and perhaps to his life. ‘We can venture,’ he wrote, ‘the thought experiment that if Thomas Mann had committed an actual crime and sought to give an account of it in his work, the work would not have taken a different form than it actually has.’ He suggests – almost convincingly – that in Naples, in the mid-1890s, when he was a very young man, Thomas Mann did something, or witnessed something, or was closely implicated in something that involved sex and murder. And that what he did, or what he witnessed, both maimed and energised him and made its way into the work of sixty years.

If you haven't voted yet in After Elton's poll of great gay books (closing today), you might consider adding something by Tóibín or Mann to your list.

Born October 31: Natalie Barney

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

Born October 30: Néstor Almendros

Like so many great artists, Néstor Almendros did not follow a straight path to his genius. Born in Barcelona in 1930, he became disgusted with Franco's Spain by age eighteen and followed his father to Cuba, then went to film school in Rome, tried and failed to work in New York, left for France, was ready to give up at thirty-four, and got an absurdly lucky break: He happened to be on set the day the director of photography quit a short project with Eric Rohmer. From there Almendros became one of the world's  greatest cinematographers, carefully composing each frame and using natural light like a painter on over fifty films, including, in order, Two English Girls, Chloé in the Afternoon, The Story of Adele H., The Marquise of O., Days of Heaven for which he won an Oscar, Kramer vs. Kramer, The Blue Lagoon, The Last Métro for which he won a Cesar, Still of the Night, Sophie's Choice, Pauline at the Beach, Places in the Heart, Heartburn, Imagine: John Lennon, and Billy Bathgate.

For anyone seriously interested in cinema, his book A Man with a Camera is essential reading. Not only does he clarify how the director of photography differs from the cameraman (union rules prohibit the DP from operating the camera) but he devotes a brief chapter to each of forty films. He describes the challenges and innovations of working with directors (again and again it's Rohmer, Truffaut, or Robert Benton) to decide which colors they want the costume and set designers to use and how Almendros will light and shoot each scene. They usually start with fine art. Their initial inspiration for Kramer vs. Kramer, set on the Upper East Side of the 1970s, was Piero della Francesca, with a little Hockney and, for the child's bedroom, Magritte. For The Blue Lagoon, he concentrated on Gauguin. For the Meryl Streep - Robert DeNiro psycho-thriller Still of the Night, he looked to old Fritz Lang movies and Edward Hopper. Remarkably generous with the secrets of his working trade, his autobiography completely ignores his private life. And yet, even though he was closeted, when he had the opportunity to direct his own movie in 1984, he chose to make a documentary about Cuba's persecution of gay men, Mauvaise conduite [Improper Conduct], which won the audience award at Frameline. He also shot ads for Calvin Klein and Armani. He died of aids in 1992 at age sixty-one. Human Rights Watch gives an annual film award named in his honor.

Manuel Muñoz Wins Whiting Writers' Award

Yay! Last night the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation announced this year's recipients of their writers' awards and one of the ten is Manuel Muñoz. His absolutely superb story collection The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue was published by Algonquin in May 2007 and, in a time of ever-shrinking book coverage, did not get the attention it deserves. Possibly hindered here by being a paperback original about gay, working class Mexican-Americans in rural California, the book nevertheless captured the attention of the judges of the world's richest story collection prize, The Frank O'Connor International Story Award in Cork, Ireland, where Muñoz beat out fellow long list nominees Alice Munro, David Malouf, and Mary Gordon for a spot on the short list but ultimately lost to Miranda July. The Whiting Awards are uncanny at honoring significant writers before they've gained widespread success. Now Muñoz joins the ranks of Jeffrey Eugenides, Michael Cunningham, Tony Kushner, Jonathan Franzen, William T. Vollmann, Deborah Eisenberg, Alice McDermott, David Foster Wallace, Alexander Chee, André Aciman, Colson Whitehead, Mark Doty, and Wayne Koestenbaum. He also receives $50,000, but what he really needs is a big publishing house to release his work in hardcover, promoting him with a serious budget as a major writer of immense importance.

Hanna Rosin's Atlantic Article on Trans Children

Somewhere in a deep-South town with no stoplights but lots of Confederate flags, in a double-wide trailer next to an evangelical family with anti-gay bumperstickers on their white van, live the Simms family: Tina, her husband Bill, their daughter Madison, their son Travis, and Tina's child from a previous relationship, an eight-year old biological boy Brandon who has always known he is a girl. Always. As a toddler, he draped towels or scarves on his head to approximate long hair. As soon as he could, he dressed in his mom's clothes, drew himself as a girl, loved Barbie and mermaids, hated his penis which he tucked under himself, and said of being born a boy, "God made a mistake." 

His behavior might be familiar to anyone who saw Ma Vie en Rose, but it knocked his mother Tina for a loop. She started taking him to therapists when he was four. Eventually Tina's mother taped a Barbara Walters 20/20 segment on trans children, and, discovering Brandon was not the only child in the world with gender assignment issues, Tina bought a computer. She joined a listserv for parents of trans kids, and later, she got the whole family to a national conference for parents of young trans people. A seven year-old holding a balloon puppy approaches Brandon:

“Are you transgender?”

“What’s that?” Brandon asked.

“A boy who wants to be a girl.”

“Yeah. Can I see your balloon?”

At the conference Tina meets a host of experts, becomes friends with a lesbian mom from Seattle, and learns about a drug option for Brandon. Puberty blockers stop some of the changes that would have to be reversed with expensive surgery later in his life. Other parents discuss their children's success with the drugs. Huge decisions loom.

Did I mention Tina and Bill are both army vets? And that Bill doesn't see things the way Tina is trying to? He says, "A boy's a boy and a girl's a girl." Also: "You're ruining his f---ing life!" The evangelical neighbors do unto others by refusing to carpool with them anymore. Brandon loses his best friend, a girl.The whole family faces trade-offs between honesty and acceptance.

Hanna Rosin has written a great, comprehensive article on an overlooked subject. Make time to read it. And give the Atlantic more props, following last year's stellar piece "The Kingdom in the Closet" on gay life in Saudi Arabia. 

Toni Morrison's Mercy: Whites, Blacks, Native Americans, and Gays

Nobel laureate Toni Morrison is 77 and her forthcoming A Mercy shows her expanding the boundaries of her work in several directions. The novel is set in Virginia in 1682 and 1690 and its chapters alternate mainly between third person narration of a married white trader and farmer named Jacob Vaark and the first person stream of consciousness of Florens, a sixteen year-old black girl he adopted eight years earlier who has fallen ferally in love with the blacksmith, a freed black man. For the first time in her oeuvre, Morrison includes a Native American woman named Lina and an older-younger gay couple: two "Europes," both indentured servants.

Willard Bond "was getting on in years and was still working off his passage. The original seven years stretched to twenty some" and Scully "young, fine-boned, with light scars tracing his back, had plans. He was finishing his mother's contract." Right away, readers learn "he did not object to lying with Willard when sleep was not the point." Much later: "Scully had no carnal interest in females. Long ago the world of men and only men had stamped him."

In his twenty-two years, Scully had witnessed far more human folly than Willard. By the time he was twelve he had been schooled, loved, and betrayed by an Anglican curate. He had been leased to the Synod by his so-called father following his mother's death on the floor of the tavern she worked in. The barkeep claimed three years of Scully's labor to work off her indebtedness, but the "father" appeared, paid the balance due and sold his son's services, along with two casks of Spanish wine, to the Synod.

Scully never blamed the curate for betrayal nor for the flogging that followed, since the curate had to turn the circumstances of their being caught into the boy's lasciviousness, otherwise he would be not just defrocked but executed. Agreeing that Scully was too young to be permanently incorrigible, the elders passed him along to a landowner who needed a hand to work with a herdsman far away. A rural area, barely populated, where, they hoped, the boy might at best mend his ways or at worst have no opportunity to corrupt others. Scully anticipated running away as soon as he arrived in the region. But on the third day a violent winter storm froze and covered the land in three feet of snow. Cows died standing. Ice-coated starlings clung to branches drooping with snow. Willard and he slept in the barn among the sheep and cattle housed there, leaving the ones they could not rescue on their own. There in the warmth of animals, their own bodies clinging together, Scully altered his plans and Willard didn't mind at all.

I was grateful Morrison included that threat of execution because otherwise her vision of gay life might seem almost too easy for the same state and same era that killed Richard Cornish. Willard and Scully live openly together on the Vaark farm; they are never worried about being caught; they have no fear of townsmen; and they never perceive hostile looks or worse from the wider world. The last glimpse of them is this final sentence of a late chapter: "Perhaps their wages were not as much as the blacksmith's, but for Scully and Mr. Bond it was enough to imagine a future."

Although the novel is in no way equal to Morrison's great work, it's better than her most recent books. John Updike's spoiler-strewn review in this week's New Yorker ends:

...as Morrison moves deeper into a more visionary realism, a betranced pessimism saps her plots of the urgency that hope imparts to human adventures. A Mercy begins where it ends, with a white man casually answering a slave mother’s plea, but he dies, and she fades into slavery’s myriads, and the child goes mad with love. Varied and authoritative and frequently beautiful though the language is, it circles around a vision, both turgid and static, of a new world turning old, and poisoned from the start.

A Mercy, a short 169 pages, goes on sale two weeks from today, November 11. If you love crowds, Morrison will be at the Union Square B&N on November 17.

Vote Now for Your Favorite Gay Books

 
Think hard. You have until Friday to vote in After Elton's poll of the Fifty Greatest Gay Books of All Time. The list is open to any category of books: novels, general nonfiction, story collections, essays, biographies. You can even nominate photography titles, but if pictures of shirtless "straight" guys make the top fifty best books, we're doomed.

Because you're limited to five nominees, my advice is Keep It Gay. I think the book should have obvious gay content; being written by a gay writer isn't in itself enough. Study your shelves. Or refresh your memory with Publishing Triangle's lists of 100 lgbt novels and 100 lgbt nonfiction works, which end with titles from 1999 and 2003 respectively. For more recent books, review the Lambda Literary Awards from 2000-03 or 2004-06 or 2007. Vote here.

"Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture" in DC

The first ever Roman exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington is indeed a convincing trip back in time: to the McCarthy era. The wan written commentary seems designed to reinforce what viewers already believe rather than educate them about what they don't know. Many, many artifacts have no commentary at all. Although the show's subtitle specifically promises the culture of the ancient world, nowhere do the curators acknowledge the prevalence of same-sex relationships. The exhibit is packed with male subjects who exclusively or enthusiastically loved men, yet this aspect of their lives is  whitewashed: Plato, Alexander the Great, Epicurus, Julius Caesar, Caligula, Nero, and Achilles.

Of course the statues, busts, frescoes, pilasters, vases, cups, jewelry and other artifacts are ravishing. [Photography is not allowed.] Their ennobling beauty conveys its own truths, but as for academic enlightenment, you're on your own. Even Carol Mattusch's pretty, 360-page catalog does not have index entries for gay, homosexuality, or sexuality. 

Is the enormous painting above Vesuvius erupting or my mind exploding? The curators' decision to degay their exhibit was twice as painful coming a week after the British Museum's superlative, superior Hadrian show. Just as it was doubly disappointing that this screaming omission was ignored by art critics at the Washington Post and the New York Times.

You must go. It's free, no tickets required, in DC until March 22. Then it's in Los Angeles, at LACMA, from May 3 to October 4.

The Teeny Tiny Universe of Keith Haring

Do you miss New York in the 1980s, a time of synthesizers not Starbucks, when the East Village was still cheap and dirty, and aids was unstoppable? When Madonna's music had an edge but her face didn't? And when a boy from Kutztown dazzled by subway graffiti could chalk and spraypaint his way to international superstardom?

Friday night at Cinema Village, filmmaker Christina Clausen introduced her cheerful, one-note documentary The Universe of Keith Haring, and it doubled my appreciation for the complexity of DFW's eulogists the day before. The film is a loving puff piece. Friends, family, and 80's survivors all say Keith was great. The worst thing he ever did was cruise this really hot Latino guy who was already dancing with David LaChapelle! (Don't worry, David is cool with it; he thought it was funny, ok; and he owns 30 of Keith's paintings.) But viewers would be far better served in deciding about Keith's art if the documentary offered a variety of serious opinion and included at least one critic to explain why some find Haring's work derivative.

The highlights: Keith's mother said following his first gallery show he "finally started making art people could put in their homes." Yoko Ono was kookily moving with her "I'm a psychic. Ghosts and spirits talk to me" story about how at his funeral in New Jersey, with her hand cupping his ashes, Keith told her, Put them in your pocket! She kept them in New York until Keith said, Take them to Paris! Then, zipping through the city one night, she heard him say, There! Put them on the Obelisk in the Place de la Concorde, by the Crillon! But your biggest tears will fall when watching clips of a certain performer -- never interviewed -- on stage fully clothed rolling on a bed and singing "All your suits are custom made in London." Oh, cruel fate! Oh, lost youth!

October 24: The Festival of Antinous

Exactly 1,878 years ago today, Hadrian's nineteen year old boyfriend Antinous drowned in the Nile. They had known each other for five or six years, and possibly they were growing apart. That day was the Festival of Osiris, the god of the Afterlife, and because he also had drowned in the Nile, it seemed too coincidental for Antinous's death to be an accident, which it may have been. Some historians believe he committed suicide, others have darker theories.

Hadrian's outpouring of emotion -- was it pure grief? or was it partly guilt? -- was unprecedented. Six days later, on October 30, the emperor directed his men to begin building a city called Antinopolis there on the banks of the river. Back in Rome, at his Tivoli villa of more than 30 buildings covering 250 acres, Hadrian told his architects to create the Antinoeion, which was only discovered 10 years ago, in 1998, and is still being excavated. Pieces of a colossal statue of Antinous unearthed there are on display in the British Museum's exhibit. The statue above, depicting Antinous as Osiris, was discovered near the site of the Antinoeion in 1738 and is on loan from the Vatican.

Hadrian further stunned his contemporaries by declaring Antinous was a god (making him the last non-Emperor god of the Roman era, in fact), and as a deity people began to worship him. Historians know the festival of Antinous was celebrated annually for at least one hundred years throughout many regions of the Empire and perhaps into the fourth century A.D. Its popularity further sped the creation of dozens of busts and fullbody statues of the handsome teen.

The final sentence below is the most important one I read in London:

"Hadrian built a large temple and set up a festival in Antinous's memory. Other Greek cities began to establish their own cults and festivals in honour of Antinous, led by local and senatorial leaders, who wanted to express their loyalty to Rome and to Hadrian. The cult became popular among the common people, where it seems to have competed with Christianity."

Imagine life today if those common followers of the cult of a gay god, Antinous, had exceeded the other fledgling cult. (They knew he was gay. My BF awesomely started reading Gibbon after the exhibit and even Gibbon matter of factly calls Hadrian and Antinous lovers; and he wrote his little book in 1776.)  Human nature being a constant, it might not have changed much, yet everything would be different. With most Western countries primarily worshiping a gay nineteen year-old muscle twink (a few evangelically; millions quietly and decently; millions more in name only, once a year a so), our world would be, well... Abercrombie?

In fact, a cult of Antinous appears to exist. In Hollywood. Lots of bright, brand new paintings of Antinous in a very excited state [healthy!], but sometimes smoking [unhealthy!]. Their doctrine is eleven pages, illustrated. And, yes, they have a gift shop.