Band of Thebes

Born January 29: Greg Louganis

In 1988 when he was twenty-eight, at the Seoul Olympics, attempting to repeat his unprecedented double golds from 1984 (springboard and tower), Greg Louganis hit his head on the board during his second to last dive. Freshly stitched up, on his final dive he earned a perfect score. Again, he won both gold medals. Widely hailed as one of the great sports comebacks of all time, it earned him ABC Wide World of Sports' Athlete of the Year. Three years earlier he had won the Sullivan Award as the nation's most outstanding amateur athlete, and he had been an American favorite ever since winning a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics when he was sixteen.

But what a difference one detail makes. Seven years later he published his autobiography, Breaking the Surface, cowritten with Eric Marcus, in which he revealed he is HIV positive. Suddenly he was no longer the hero of the comeback but the infected sneak whose bleeding might have put other divers at risk (not true, according to Anthony Fauci). The doctor who gave him stitches had not worn gloves. His book was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks, and all of his corporate sponsors except Speedo dropped him. [He had come out eight months earlier, at Gay Games in New York.] Remarkable for its candor, his book showed readers that performing after hitting his head was nothing compared to the stress of being closeted, HIV+, and in an abusive relationship. Even his website last year said, "the highs that came with winning never compensated for the lows."

Colm Tóibín on Edward Carpenter

One of the few things we can agree on with certainty is that we would all be better people if we read Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham. Jeanette Winterson and Peter Tatchell named it their favorite book of last year and now finally the current London Review of Books has an essay about it by Colm Tóibín. He loved it, particularly because Carpenter's prime decades of promoting homosexuality and socialism and healthy diets and sandal wearing and nudism happened to coincide with the sea change in British life from the mid-Victorian age to the Great Depression.

In 1874 he wrote to Walt Whitman, whose work he had first read six years earlier. ‘Because you have,’ he wrote, ‘given me a ground for the love of men I thank you continually in my heart . . . For you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their nature. Women are beautiful; but to some, there is that which passes the love of women.’ What was strange about Carpenter in these early years was that his homosexuality did not make him timid or fearful; instead, with the help of Whitman’s poetry, it lit a fire in him which made him interested in all kinds of freedom and progress, made him eloquent, outspoken and spiritually curious. It made him seek allies and draw people towards him, including those who had more interest in socialism or trade unionism than in homosexuality. He managed all his life to defeat, or at least to defuse, that tendency in left-wing movements to view homosexuality with more rigid disapproval than any church ever has.

Two excerpts from Carpenter's own work show what a forward and timeless thinker he was. He faulted earlier, Victorian society for its

commercialism in public life . . . cant in religion, pure materialism in science, futility in social conventions, the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart, the denial of the body and its needs, the huddling concealment of the body in clothes, the ‘impure hush’ on matters of sex, class-division, contempt of manual labour, and the cruel banning of women from every natural and useful expression of their lives.

That was written in 1916. Eight years earlier, Carpenter had published a book about homosexuality in which he wrote:

I have said that the Urning men in their own lives put love before money-making, business success, fame and other motives which rule the normal man. I am sure that it is also true of them that they put love before lust . . . I believe it is true that Uranian men are superior to the normal man in this respect – in respect of their love-feeling – which is gentler, more sympathetic, more considerate, more a matter of the heart and less of mere physical satisfaction than that of ordinary men. All this flows naturally from the presence of the feminine element in them, and its blending with the rest of their nature.

Was Tóibín feeling frisky when wrote the review? A long (frankly skippable) preamble mentions how he "set about enticing two nice Catalan boys back to my flat" in Barcelona in 1977, and he relays many sexual details of Carpenter's life, most memorably his randy adventures at night and again the next morning with a young American visitor when he was eighty.

In an act of lunacy, Verso chose to release the U.S. edition of the book three days before Christmas. Six weeks later, this important biography has garnered exactly zero reviews. Don't miss it.

Signs of South Dakota

 

 

 

A Perfect Waiter by Alain Claude Sulzer

Last week while America was busy inaugurating, Bloomsbury released the paperback of A Perfect Waiter. It is the first of Alain Claude Sulzer's eight novels to be translated into English and it received excellent reviews throughout Europe, from A to Z: "A beautifully written and quietly devastating novel" (Attitude) to "Alain Claude Sulzer writes with utterly classical, old-fashioned aplomb" (Die Zeit).

More importantly, it won the 2008 Prix Medicis etranger, one of the world's few literary prizes that pits novels against nonfiction, to honor the year's best book by a non-French writer. Previous winners this decade have been Michael Ondaatje, Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, and Daniel Mendelsohn. It appears that this was the first time the prize was awarded to a gay novel.

PW said

In 1966 Switzerland, self-possessed, middle-aged Erneste is the rock of the Restaurant am Berg, working the lavish Blue Room without missing a shift in 16 years. A letter posted from New York threatens to shatter the orderly cocoon he's built around himself. Claiming to be in a bad way from every angle, Jakob Meier, Erneste's one great love of 30 years ago, pleads with Erneste to track down Julius Klinger, the intellectual whom Jakob followed to America in 1936. Klinger, Jakob tells Erneste, has returned to Europe, been nominated for a Nobel prize and lives near Erneste; Jakob wants Erneste to ask Klinger for money, and to send it. Erneste is immediately torn between his tidy independence and intense longing. Sulzer sure-handedly layers the past on the present, gradually opening windows on both. The pieces fall together like bits of a puzzle, with a full portrait of Erneste and the truth about his relationship with Jakob coming together only at the end, powerfully.

More praise:

"It tells a compelling love story between two men both working in a grand hotel in the 1930s This is elegant writing, perfectly pitched to reflect the sadness and regret attendant on such a liaison." Rodney Troubridge, Booksellers' Choice, Bookseller

"The real perfect waiter of the title is, I suspect, the author himself. Like his hero, he is unobtrusive and alarming in equal measure he does his job not just with great polish, but with real heart." Guardian

"Sulzer carefully walks a tightrope between the tender and the erotic A melancholy, shocking tale." Irish Times

"Sulzer's novel, or rather novella, has great stylistic elegance, and offers many enjoyments and pleasures beyond its subtle abundance of literary allusion. His skill lies more in small observations than dramatic sweep." Suddeutsche Zeitung

"It's as if an opulent Magic Mountain, a memory in fading colours of a mundane love story, has been photographed anew." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Unexpectedly in South Dakota

For a funeral. Back soon.

Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein

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

Born January 22: Elaine Noble

Is it fitting or ironic that the day Milk garners eight Oscar nominations is the birthday of the first openly lgbt politician elected to a state legislature (three years before Harvey, yet not a candidate for a biopic)? Think back to 1974: Patty Hearst was kidnapped, Nixon resigned, ABBA won the Eurovision song contest, Ali won the Rumble in the Jungle, The Godfather II was in movie theaters, and the planet's population reached four billion people, one of whom was Elaine Noble. In November 1974, she won 59% of the vote to the Massachusetts House of Representatives from Boston's Fenway/Back Bay neighborhoods and thereby became the United States' first openly gay person elected to a statewide office. In 1976, she was re-elected. Later she ran for Senate against Paul Tsongas and lost. In 1986, she and Ellen Ratner founded the Pride Institute in Minneapolis to treat gay people battling alcohol and drugs dependencies; it has since expanded to three locations. Although Noble has retired from public life and now lives in Florida, three months ago she gave a great interview to Windy City Times in honor of Lesbian and Gay History Month.

The Gene Robinson Invocation You Didn't See on Sunday

And his funny moment on The Daily Show after the Inauguration.

Born January 21: Cristobal Balenciaga

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect each of the three hundred original designs he created every year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her book Cleopatra's Nose. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces...They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression."

Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.

January 20: The Inauguration

(The shoe throwing in Dupont Circle was January 19.)

You'll find this hard to believe but thousands of people around us left immediately after the inaugural address, before the poem. To my mind, both the speech and the poem were sincere efforts and missed opportunities, without any phrase or imagery that will endure. I did, however, appreciate the Bush/Cheney criticism.

Ultimately I think Obama is a better speechmaker than speechwriter. He creates a lofty, vague mood but nothing specific stays with the listener. If I'm wrong, recite your favorite lines from the Denver speech. Or summarize its thesis.

Understandably, everyone is focused on the new, and thank god for that, but I did think the Official Bush Farewell Poem, released late yesterday morning, was more to the point.

There was a man from Texas
Who was hated by both sexes.
Everything he tried
Depended on a lie,
And he left with no successes.