Band of Thebes

Thankful, 2008

 

Born November 26: John Amaechi

Growing up, John Amaechi always felt different: He was 6'10", mixed-race, with a Nigerian father and a British mother who raised him in Stockport, England, then he was doubly an outsider attending high school in the mid-1980s in Toldeo, Ohio and college at Vanderbilt and Penn State. So being gay was just one more distinction. Naturally he played basketball, but he was atypical in professional sports as well. In 2000, Amaechi turned down a $17 million contract with the Los Angeles Lakers in order to play for $600,000 a year with the Orlando Magic. His reason? Three years before, Orlando had been the only team to consider picking him up after his European stint. He also played for the Chicago Bulls, the Houston Rockets, and the Utah Jazz before retiring in 2003. His career stats can be found here. Early in 2007 he became the first player associated with the NBA to come out, when ESPN Books published his autobiography, Man in the Middle. He is beautifully articulate. He owns a consulting company that provides motivational speakers and executive training, and he runs the ABC Foundation in Manchester which works to build youth sports centers throughout the U.K.

Richard Rodriguez on Prop 8 and the Protests

A Pulitzer Prize finalist for his memoir about his complex father issues, openly gay Richard Rodriguez gave a long interview to Salon about Prop 8 and its aftermath. If you're feeling intellectually curious, and calm, you should read it. I'll let him speak for himself but I urge you to follow the link for context:

* What we represent as gays in America is an alternative to the traditional male-structured society. The possibility that we can form ourselves sexually -- even form our sense of what a sex is -- sets us apart from the traditional roles we were given by our fathers.

* But the real challenge to the family right now is male irresponsibility and misbehavior toward women. If the Hispanic Catholic and evangelical churches really wanted to protect the family, they should address the issue of wife beating in Hispanic families and the misbehaviors of the father against the mother. But no, they go after gay marriage. It doesn't take any brilliance to notice that this is hypocrisy of such magnitude that you blame the gay couple living next door for the fact that you've just beaten your wife.

* Religions have the capacity for being noble and ennobling but they are also the expression of some of the darkest impulses in us -- to go after the "other." For Christians, if the other isn't the Muslim, it's the homosexual. That is the most discouraging part.

* I think gay activists should be very careful with this issue. We should not present ourselves as enemies of religion… I was a little concerned about the recent protests outside the Los Angeles Mormon temple. I've seen this sort of demonstration escalate into a sort of deliberate exercise of blasphemy. For example, in the most severe years of the AIDS epidemic, activists from ACT UP went into St. Patrick's Cathedral, took the communion wafer and threw it on the ground. That is exactly the wrong thing to do. One should be respectful of the religious impulse in the world. If we decide to make ourselves anti-religious, we will only lose.

* I am very much concerned with whether or not these religions can be feminized. The desert religions -- Judaism, Christianity and Islam -- are male religions. Their perception is that God is a male god and Allah is a male god. If the male is allowed to hold onto the power of God, then I think we are in terrible shape. I think what's coming out of Colorado Springs right now, with people like Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, is either the last or continuing gasp of a male hierarchy in religion.

Born November 25: Virgil Thomson

This would be impossible to imagine if he were an out teenager today, but the musical prodigy Virgil Thomson was stuck at a Kansas City, Missouri local junior college and was only able to attend Harvard thanks to a Mormon scholarship, awarded because he was friends with one of Joseph Smith's granddaughters. In Cambridge, he thrived. With the glee club he bopped to Paris, at the invitation of Bernard Fay. Fay was a well connected gay man who would later become a Nazi collaborator, sending many to their deaths while saving Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; for that story, read Janet Malcolm's Two Lives.

It was the musical Toklas who from the background guided the partnership of Stein and Thomson when he returned to live in Paris in the 20s. Together they created the landmark opera Four Saints in Three Acts, revolutionary for its all black cast, which finally premiered in 1934 in Hartford. Thirteen years later, just before Stein's death, they created an opera about lesbian icon Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All. By that time, Thomson had already composed music for three films, most memorably Pare Lorentz's The River, and was midway through his fourteen years as music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune. (He hated the work of Britten, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Sibelius, among others.) In 1948, he scored a shambling b&w film about a Cajun boy, his pet raccoon, a hungry alligator, and the threat of an oil rig on the bayou, Louisiana Story, winning 1949's Pulitzer Prize for music.

He lived for another forty years, at the Chelsea hotel with his partner Maurice Grosser, in diminishing circumstances. Of course, times changed, and his compositions were not played by American orchestras as often as he had counted on when he quit his job as a critic. He became something of a father figure to the next generation of gay composers and artists, most prominently Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Frank O'Hara, and Ned Rorem. Thomson penned his autobiography in 1966, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982 for his reader, and was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 1983. He died in 1989, a year after Grosser. Anthony Tommasini has written the definitive biography, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle.

Met's Renaissance "Art & Love" Includes Gay Sex, "Dickhead"

 

Excuse me while I turn cartwheels over babysteps and feast on crumbs, but the Met's new show Art & Love in Renaissance Italy displays several works depicting romances between men. In a significant move forward for an institution that has consistently degayed art history, this major exhibit features works in oil, ink, and ceramics that show male couples or homoerotic scenes created by Parmigianino, Giulio Romano, Perino del Vaga, Giorgio Andreoli, and Salviati. Unlike the identifications in the restored Greek and Roman Galleries, the written descriptions here directly address and illuminate the subjects' obvious homosexuality. In fact, curators have gone out of their way to be inclusive; in order to prove the breadth of Olympian gods' sexual appetites, they even show in reproduction a gay image when they were unable to obtain the original, Apollo and Hyancinth [above].

One problem is that the gay works are confined to the section on Erotica. Any show about art and love in Italy during the Renaissance ought to include, among many other highlights, Michelangelo's love sonnets to the young Tommaso de'Cavalieri, but the exhibit limits gay experience to sex. Luckily, the Erotica section is curated by Linda Wolk-Simon, the author and art historian who has been with the museum for twenty-two years. She sees through the glass closet of the 15th and 16th centuries, writing in the catalog:

...academies, sodalities, and more irreverent cene, or supper clubs... also offered a haven for sodomitic encounters... Modeled after Plato's Academy in Athens, it fostered "intense male friendships." Some of its most celebrated members... were known to practice "aggressive homosexuality," a crime punishable by burning at the stake.

The index has more than a dozen entries for homoeroticism, homosexuality, sodomy, Apollo, Cyparissus, Ganymede, Hyacinth, and Priapus. Inadequate though that is, it must be seen as an improvement. 

I saw the exhibit twice last week, Tuesday and Friday, and on both visits I flew through the early rooms of objects in order to spend more time with paintings by Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, Filippo Lippi, Lo Scheggia, Pollaiuolo, Lotto, Giorgione, and two each by Ghirlandaio, Ercole de' Roberti, Biagio d'Antonio, and Titian.

Of course, I did study the ceramics in the Erotica section particularly some fragments that rival the Warren Cup's frankness, and this ceramic "Phallic-Head Plate" on loan from Oxford. The descriptive card translates the ribbon as saying, "Every man looks at me as if I were a dickhead." Hollywood humor -- or a nightmare Gahan Wilson New Yorker drawing -- fresh from 1536.

Now through February 16.

Milk Ads Degayed

Focus Features ran their big announcement ad in yesterday's papers, the final Sunday before their best shot at an Oscar opens on Wednesday, and it hides any hint of the movie's gay content. Setting aside the problem of an ad campaign that forces the gay activist who insisted on gay visibility back into the closet after thirty years of progress, is it even good marketing? In all seriousness, if you didn't know Harvey Milk, what would you think this movie was about? Wisconsin dairy farmers? The milk lobby? Really bad haircuts? Compare this to the poster for Rob Espstein's documentary, which clearly shows a politician and the tagline says he's gay.

In a country where some people can't say on what date the events the of 9/11 occurred, let's not pretend "everyone knows" the history of a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978. For that matter, let's also not pretend to be too surprised. As soon as Brokeback Mountain proved its crossover appeal, Focus yanked the iconic Heath-n-Jake white hat-black hat ads and replaced them with photos of the men and their wives. Hollywood always aims for the widest common denominator, erasing any sign of otherness. The one sheet for Dreamgirls showed three women in silhouette, with their backs to the camera and swathed in red stage light, so viewers wouldn't see they were black.

Oscar Documentary Short List: No Love for Gay Love

The Academy Awards arbiters announced the fifteen films on their short list for the feature length documentary prize, and one glaring omission is the biggest gay doc of the year, Chris & Don: A Love Story. Other high-profile snubs were Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired, Dear Zachary, The Order of Myths, and Bill Maher's Religulous. Those that made it were:

"At the Death House Door, directed by Peter Gilbert and Steve James
**"The Betrayal" (Nerakhoon), directed by Ellen Kuras
**"Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh", directed by Roberta Grossman
**"Encounters at the End of the World", directed by Werner Herzog [photo above]
"Fuel", directed by Josh Tickell
"The Garden", directed by Scott Hamilton Kennedy
"Glass: A Portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts", directed by Scott Hicks
"I.O.U.S.A.", directed by Patrick Creadon
"In a Dream", directed by Jeremiah Zagar
"Made in America", directed by Stacy Peralta
**"Man on Wire", directed by James Marsh
**"Pray the Devil Back to Hell", directed by Gini Reticker
**"Standard Operating Procedure", directed by Errol Morris
"They Killed Sister Dorothy", directed by Daniel Junge
**"Trouble the Water", directed by Carl Deal and Tia Lessin

The final five will be announced with all the other Oscar nominees [Milk] on January 22. I've narrowed my predictions to seven, marked with **. Feel free to contradict; this is not my category.

Lesbian, Gay Movies Open in NYC and California Today

Festival favorite Were the World Mine opens today in New York, San Francisco, and Berkeley. Reviewing for the NYT, Stephen Holden said the gay puppylove musical set during a Chicago high school's production of Midsummer Night's Dream "is an enchanting, mildly subversive fantasia that reconciles sassy teenage argot with Elizabethan." He added:

Ms. Fogle’s most striking music, especially the title song, sets Shakespearean dialogue in an ethereal Minimalist style that has the entranced intensity of centuries-old sacred music.

and

its charm overcomes the inevitable weaknesses of a musical made on a stringent budget. Like its Disney counterparts, it operates on the assumption that the movie musical is a world unto itself in which ordinary rules of logic don’t apply.

Two weeks ago Shamim Sarif's new movie was released starring Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth as lesbians in love. Today Shamim Sarif's new movie was released starring Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth as lesbians in love. Is this a movie theater or an echo chamber? Why Regent Releasing thought it was smart to put out The World Unseen and I Can't Think Straight fourteen days apart is anyone's guess. It didn't seem to win over NYT critic Jeannette Catsoulis, who wrote:

Will Tala once again dump her betrothed? Will Leyla’s nosy parents find her k.d. lang CD? Before these and other burning questions can be answered, the plot must plod through a confetti storm of obstacles — religion, ethnicity, overbearing mothers — all of which are overcome in dewy, unsmudged close-up. This isn’t a movie, it’s an alternative-lifestyles campaign for Maybelline.

Born November 21: Cherry Jones

Dreaming of it throughout her childhood in Paris, Tennesse and during her ten years with the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Cherry Jones finally made her Broadway debut in 1991 as the angel in Angels in America. Four years later she starred in The Heiress and became an "instant" success. She was also the first out lesbian to win a Tony for Best Actress and in her speech she thanked her partner of nine years, the architect Mary O'Connor. To celebrate her win, which happened on O'Connor's fortieth birthday, they fled the city and drove to their friends' farm, where they walked the land and drank coffee as the sun rose. In Manhattan, they frequently rode bicycles. After a number of supporting roles in movies (Erin Brokovich, Signs, The Village, and best of all Ocean's Twelve), she won her second Tony for her fourth nomination, for the leading role in Doubt. Again, she thanked her partner, this time the actress Sarah Paulson, nineteen years her junior. Love happens. Now they've been together five years, but Jones' life is not 100% perfect (even though Fox of all channels hired her - an out lesbian - to play the president on 24). For the movie version of Doubt, opening next month, she didn't get to reprise the role she originated. Instead, the part will be played by an actress named Meryl Streep. (Variety said Streep "overdoes the melodrama" in a "disconcerting, unsatisfying performance;" Jones says Meryl is magnificent in it.)

P.D. James' New Novel Again Gay Inclusive

Published here two days ago, P.D. James' new Adam Dalgliesh novel The Private Patient again includes gay characters, nicely proving her gay couple in The Lighthouse wasn't a one time whim. The action is divided between London and a 400 year-old manor house in Dorset that has been converted into a private clinic for cosmetic surgery. A well-known investigative journalist, Rhoda Gradwyn, checks in to have a facial scar removed and never checks out. (Not a spoiler; the opening sentence says she'll die in three weeks.) The assisting surgeon, Marcus, is gay but far more closeted than his boyfriend Eric, who wants to go to pride. An endearing, London lesbian couple, Annie and Clara, also appear in a few scenes and, significantly, they are given the book's final words. The short last chapter, almost a benediction, is set at a straight wedding in Oxford, but it slyly ignores the nuptials and concentrates on the lesbians, who embody then discuss the power of love.

Well played, Baroness James!

Oh, something terrible and tragic -- but not fatal -- befalls one of the lgbt characters, as you might reasonably expect in a murder mystery. Longtime James readers will find all the hallmarks of her work: the expertly drawn characters, the magnificent sense of place, and the references to her beloved Austen. The book isn't among her very best but it's still a ripping read. The plot zips right along and if it feels a touch forumlaic, that can probably be forgiven. This is her twentieth book. Remarkably, James is 88 and as tough and unsentimental as ever.