Band of Thebes

Happy New Year's Eve

Hoping your New Year's Eve rocks, safely, from Alaska (though the polar bears are on Fifth Avenue).

Born December 31: Joe Dallesandro

In the Sixties and early Seventies, America was agog over Joe Dallesandro, the openly bi, frequently nude superstar of Paul Morrissey's Andy Warhol films. The most famous of these are Lonesome Cowboys, Flesh with Candy Darling, Heat with Sylvia Miles, and Trash with Holly Woodlawn (whom George Cukor tried to get nominated for an Oscar via a write-in campaign, unsuccessfully). But Little Joe has worked widely beyond those movies, making over forty films, including eighteen in Europe, as well as Francis Ford Coppola's The Cotton Club, John Waters' Cry-Baby, and Steven Soderbergh's The Limey. He is also the cover model for the Rolling Stones' notorious Sticky Fingers and for The Smiths' The Smiths. Thrice married, he turns sixty today and lives with his cat, still in Hollywood, where he manages a motel. His official website has bits of news for his admirers, one of whom has compiled these clips in tribute. On February 13, he will be presented with a special Teddy award, celebrating lgbt movies at the Berlin Film Festival.

Queerty's Ten Best Gay Books of 2008

 

Dubious, but in the spirit of promoting gay books, here's the link to Queerty's "top ten books of 2008 that belong on a gay's bookshelf." At number one is queer friendly straight man Jonathan Ames' roman a clef called The Alcoholic, and more bizarrely at number five is Curtis Sittenfeld's not at all disguised novel about the departing first lady (with no mention of any gay content). The highest ranked of the nonfiction titles is Terrance Dean's Hiding in Hip Hop: On the Down Low in the Entertainment Industry, followed by openly gay John Barrowman's showbiz memoir Anything Goes.

Born December 29: Paul Rudnick

Piscataway's funniest son tripped through several dead ends -- Yale, copy writing, stage set painting, satiric novels for Knopf -- before hitting his stride as a playwright in his 30s with I Hate Hamlet and Jeffrey. At the same time he was an uncredited contributor to The Addams Family and the sole screenwriter of its sequel, Addams Family Values. He also wrote parts of The First Wives Club and all of Sister Act for Bette Midler, though successfully sued to have his name removed when it was rewritten as a Whoopi Goldberg vehicle. His first and only major studio gay movie was inspired by Tom Hanks' Oscar acceptance speech for Philadelphia. Grossing $63.8 million in 1997 In and Out did half the business of The Birdcage the year before. Rudnick's movies since then have been either disappointing or atrocious (Marci X, Isn't She Great, and The Stepford Wives), but he redeemed himself with his faux movie reviews by Libby Gellman-Waxmner. More recently he's written "Shouts & Murmurs" pieces in The New Yorker imagining the Vatican's homosexual screening quiz, obscene books for children, Christian gym bunnies, or gay sheep. Unlike David Sedaris or David Rakoff, Rudnick never met a gay cliché he didn't want to put on a big pink pedestal festooned with glitter, sparklers, and disco lights. Camp is the one thing he's chest-thumpingly serious about. He complained to the New York Times:

''There's a tradition of gay flamboyance that would be shameful to lose. My God, if every gay character has to become the responsible district attorney or the crusading senator, then who will ultimately benefit? Yes, we will prove that gay people can be every bit as dull as everyone else. I guess, on a political level, it could be important to make that point. But certainly not for my entertainment dollar!''

Earlier this year his trio of monologues, The New Century, was hysterical. Watch him on Charlie Rose here.

Season's Greetings from North Pole, Alaska

Taken during our visit in September. (Like so much in Alaska, the town name is a complete misnomer. Obviously.) Today in North Pole, AK the sun will rise at 10:55 am and set at 2:45 pm. That's just over twenty hours of night. The high temperature will hover around 7 degrees, which is above their average. Warm and bright holiday wishes to all readers.

Born December 24: Robert Joffrey, Bob Smith

Born in Seattle to an Afghan father and Italian mother, Adbullah Jaffa Bey Khan had asthma and wore braces on his feet, and, to strengthen his breathing and his legs, began studying dance at twelve. At sixteen he fell in love with a twenty-two year man in the Coast Guard named Gerald Arpino. A few years later they moved to New York together and Joffrey made his debut at "nineteen" with Ballets de Paris. (Probably he was twenty-one; all evidence suggests he lied about being born in 1930.)  Becoming a soloist in May O'Donnell's troupe from 1950-3, he realized at 5'4" his prospects as a dancer were limited, and concentrating on choreography and teaching, he longed to start his own company. With Arpino, he did. The Robert Joffrey Ballet won great acclaim for their originality (especially emphasizing male virtuosity in what had traditionally been a ballerina's world) and they struggled financially. In 1963 President Kennedy invited them to perform at the White House and they toured Russia, sponsored by the State Department, to thunderous applause; upon returning to America they lost their funding. When he was forty-five and still living with (though no longer in a sexual relationship with) Arpino who was co-director of the company, Joffrey fell in love with a twenty-six year-old art gallery manager named Aladar Marberger. Both men contracted HIV and died of aids within months of each other in 1988. Arpino became artistic director of the Joffrey that year and in 1995 moved the company to Chicago. He died this past October, still connected with the company he and Joffrey created.

God bless Bob Smith, the first openly gay comedian on The Tonight Show and the author of the funniest sign at New York's Prop 8 protests. Oh, yes, he's also the author of Selfish and Perverse the Publishing Triangle Award nominated first novel covering a few months in the life of Nelson Kunker, a handsome, endearingly hapless television writer from Los Angeles who falls in love with Roy, a salmon fisherman, and spends the summer with him in Alaska. Dylan Fabizak, a hot actor / recovering addict / compulsive flirt wheedles his way into their lives; quips, sex, and danger ensue, sometimes simultaneously. Smith said he would cast Seann William Scott as Dylan. He's working on his second novel, which will be mandatory reading when it comes out.

After Elton's Best Gay Year Ever

Michael Jensen at After Elton has posted a whopping fourteen-page recap of all things gay in entertainment during 2008. More than a month by month review, it's almost minute by minute. I'm not much of a television user, but did I know that back in January candidate Obama said as his favorite character on The Wire was Omar Little [above], the gay robber who only robs drug dealers and kingpins? How much has changed. (Omar died this season.) Jensen ends with three lists of ups, downs, and a much needed category "sideways" for the likes of Nip/Tuck and Sarah Silverman. Take some time to relive the whole year.

Born December 22: Frank Israel

Six years after winning the Rome Prize for architecture in 1973, Frank Israel went Hollywood and designed sets for the first Star Trek movie and Roger Vadim's Night Games. From there he jumped to designing offices for production companies, and soon catapulted himself to the forefront of architects creating dramatic private residences in southern California. Among his most notable houses were those for Robert Altman, Howard Goldberg, and Joel Grey. In the mid-1990's, when Israel was in his late forties (young in architect years), he was honored with a show of his work at Los Angeles's Museum of Contemporary Art. At the same time he was battling aids. He died at fifty, survived by his partner Thomas Haase. Click here to see a gallery of his work or here to see him on Charlie Rose.

Happy Solstice from Alaska

[click to enlarge] These were taken at 9:35am this morning, when it was 26 degrees. Later today there will be a solstice potluck. On the beach. And no, it won't just be mooseburgers.

Born December 20: Elsie de Wolfe

Baby boomers who act like they invented being young at sixty are forgetting about Elsie de Wolfe who at sixty-one in 1926 attended a costume ball in Paris dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer and made her entrance doing handsprings. When she turned seventy, the world's most famous interior designer wrote her autobiography and noted that her daily exercise regimen still included yoga, headstands, and walking on her hands. Her design style was nearly as dramatic, banishing the dark, heavy Victorian look for new openness, airiness, and light. Starting at forty, she received her first major commission for Stanford White's Colony Club, after which she designed the interiors for the premiere families of her day, the Fricks, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Windsors. Ten years into her success, in her early fifties, she stopped to become a nurse in World War I in France and earned the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. From her late twenties onward she lived with Elisabeth Marbury, one of the first women to work as a theatrical agent, representing among others Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. They spent thirty-three years together as a classic butch-femme couple, mentoring a whole generation of younger lesbians including Mercedes de Acosta who would become Greta Garbo's lover. Then de Wolfe up and married Sir Charles Mendl because she wanted a title. Now Lady Mendl, she expected nothing to change with Marbury, given that her marriage was completely platonic, and the women remained lovers for seven more years, until 1933, when Marbury died.

The next time you discuss outing and public figures and privacy, you might bear in mind that in 1926, the New York Times ran a front page story calling de Wolfe's wedding "a great surprise"  because "she makes her home with Elisabeth Marbury at 13 Sutton Place." Not that everything can be explained by early experiences, but the woman who spent her life making things beautiful grew up listening to her mother tell her she was ugly. When she was seventy, Parisian fashionistas named her the best dressed woman in the world. She is immortalized in song lyrics by Irving Berlin and by Cole Porter:

When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up,
Now turns a handspring, landing up-
on her toes
Anything Goes!