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First Burmese Fiction To Be Translated into English Is a Gay Novel

Last week when Hillary Clinton made her surprise announcement that our isolationist policies against Myanmar weren't working and it was time to try something new, were you reminded that you really ought to read the first ever Burmese novel to be translated into English? Published here last fall, Nu Nu Yi's Smile as They Bow is also the first Burmese fiction to be nominated for an international literary award (a finalist for the Booker's first Man Asian Prize). And it's entirely gay.

At 146 airy pages, the simple story unfolds over a few days during the annual Taungbyon Festival north of Mandalay: Daisy Bond is an aging transvestite spirit medium, or nat, whose handsome twenty-three year-old lover and assistant Min Min is beginning to stray, possibly with other men, and definitely toward an innocent village girl who doesn't understand his situation.

Much of the novel is narrated by Daisy with a ferocious zing equally fueled by her world-weary wit and her fears of abandonment.

    Really, he sighs, I'm so tired! People wonder what's so tiring about wearing dresses and flowers and makeup just to sit around and talk.

    Amele! Talking's a curse. It's been talk, talk, talk since morning. So many different nats possessed me, I was frothing at the mouth from talking so much. People all want money. And the more froth I spew, the more money I get. But Daisy Bond has her pride. If I don't want to do something, I don't. I refuse. I just go somewhere and lie down. Even when I was young, if I was tired and somebody nagged me, Tell me about my son, tell me about my husband, I'd shout, Enough! I'm all talked out. Here's your damn money back! I came to Taungbyon for fun and sex!

    I've always been brutally honest. Call Daisy Bond a foul-mouthed shit, call me what you will. I never used to spout this Go-and-eat-now sweet talk or act possessed when I didn't feel like it. I may be getting old, but I know a thing or two about Vispassana meditation. I don't need to flatter people for money. I'm happy as I am. If I'm true to myself, people will come to me. Talking too much just means lying.

    This spirit-wife life runs us around the pot of hell.

Later, Daisy Bond reflects:

    Maybe it's just too painful to think about how all my young boys have ended up ditching me. I'm so giving, and they want the shirt off my back. Most boys I've had, when the time comes, they find a real woman and leave. All I know is, they want fresh catch, not smelly old squid. Oh, at first they prattle so charmingly, always staying so close, melting my heart so I'll give them whatever they want. I let them take me for everything--my blood, my body, the nat money I keep in the turban, everything. But then a month or two on, they start acting funny. More and more they're off somewhere fishing, which leaves me on the hook again.

    How's Min Min any different? So far so good, but now after seven years, he's stepping out with his rod.

Although Daisy and Min Min are vivid characters, perhaps this novel's greatest pleasures are the exotic locale and the mosaic of contemporary life glimpsed around the edges of the main action. In his youth Daisy tried to get arrested and jailed in order to visit his friends in prison, then outed more closeted gay people, and reunited made such a racket, the police released them. A rival nat borrows a special skirt from Daisy for one event, then doesn't return it because he's been earning money by renting it out nightly. Rich and poor women alike flock to hear Daisy's serious predictions and saucy pronouncements on sex and men. Almost everyone is nonchalant about gay life. Although the characters have zero exposure to news from the West, Daisy Bond does christen another character her Moneypenny and joke about her Bond girls.

At fifty-two, Nu Nu Yi has written fifteen novels and more than one hundred short stories, making her one of Myanmar's leading authors. She told Reuters Smile as They Bow took three years to research and write, and twelve years to get published. One of the reasons the censors gave for rejecting the book was "unsuitable for these times." When it finally appeared, all references to homosexuality were removed. As a result of such conditions, she explained, "Many authors write about the supernatural to escape from censorship because so many things are prohibited, both explicitly and by unwritten rules. One cannot write about poverty, beggars, sex, rape, and, of course, politics or anything positive about other countries."

In 2004 my partner and I traveled throughout Myanmar, from Yangon to Bagan to Mandalay, up the Irrawaddy river to remote villages of hill people. From my perspective, the novel authentically captures the street life, crowds, sounds, and smells of a town, yet oddly omits its architecture. For the curious, this little window will offer an unprecedented view.

Hat tip, Charlene.

 

Why Rupert Everett Isn't a Movie Star

Is one of the curses of being devastatingly handsome that when you talk piffle, people believe it rather than correct you? In her profile of Rupert Everett on the eve of his Broadway debut in Blithe Spirit, Alex Witchell writes:

You might think times have changed in Hollywood, based on Sean Penn's recent acceptance speech at the SAG Awards for playing the gay activist Harvey Milk. “As actors we don’t play gay, straight . . . , we play human beings,” he said. That may be true if you’ve been married to Madonna in real life. But if you were Madonna’s gay best friend in real life (and on screen in “The Next Best Thing”), you don’t play “human beings.” You play gay.

That's a ridiculous claim for many reasons, especially because like most Madonna movies, The Next Best Thing was a flop that almost no one saw. It grossed $14.9 million, roughly the same as Tom Green's Freddy Got Fingered. Everett voiced a straight prince in the second and third Shrek movies, which grossed $770 million in the U.S. alone. Later, Everett says

“I wanted to be a movie star,” he said. “You can’t say about work that I didn’t try very hard. That really wasn’t true. I’ve always been a great opportunist, but the opportunity was not always there. I had a difficult set of circumstances to deal with, particularly for a movie career.”

Which was?

“Being gay, really. It just doesn’t work.”

I mentioned that a British newspaper accused him of sabotaging his career by coming out just as he was about to click as a romantic lead. Does he think that’s true?

“No,” he said. “I was out before. I was never really in, I don’t think. Everybody sabotages their careers to a certain extent, not consciously, but I don’t think I have more than anyone else. People get distorted ideas of themselves; being in this business, you can’t fail to. Suddenly you think you should be playing the Marlon Brando role in ‘On the Waterfront’ when you should really be playing a Noël Coward role.” He allowed himself a self-deprecating smile.

I love Rupert Everett, but someone needs to tell him that even if he had stayed closeted and married a woman, he was never, ever going to be Tom Cruise. Or Will Smith. Or Brad Pitt. Or even Hugh Grant. To be a male movie star in the 90s and today, you have to be accessible. Friendly, easy going, a little bit dumb not too brainy. A name comprised of two, simple monosylabs helps. (NB: Rupert Graves didn't become a movie star either.) As the psychic in the article says, and as Everett confirms, he's frosty. To be blunt, he's not a movie star because that upperclass faint sneer hasn't left his lips for the past thirty years.

Yes, of course homophobia exists in Hollywood, and no, there aren't any out actors who get leading roles in big studio romantic fare. But Alex Witchell does a disservice by falling for Everett's self-absorption. The question of gay movie stars does not start and end with him, yet her article references no one else. Ian McKellen was a leading star in six movies of two of the biggest franchises in history, X-Men and The Lord of the Rings. That's particularly noteworthy because those movies became ultrahits thanks largely to teenage boys, supposedly the least accepting audience.

I thought Everett's most important quote was about the impossibility of anyone's being happy in Hollywood:

“I think success in show business is a very heady wine when you’re a kid, particularly if it happens small, because you’re always trying to make it grow. There’s no happy moment in it, because you’re just grasping and elbowing, elbowing, elbowing your way to the next stop. And you make lots of wrong decisions because of it.”

He may be talking about younger actors, but of course the elbowing only gets worse with age, as roles diminish.

Ariel Levy on '70s Lesbian Separatists the Van Dykes in the New Yorker

Out New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy has an eight page fact piece in the current issue about lesbian separatists of the 1970s. The women didn't want to use the surnames of their fathers or husbands, and they lived on the road, driving around in a van, so they became the Van Dykes. The article's protagonist is Lamar Van Dyke, whom Levy considers the ringleader even though Lamar wouldn't, because hierarchy is patriarchy. Levy is also feels they more or less based themselves on the Merry Pranksters, as they too are drop-out radicals with a sense of humor. And a sense of loss. They can't believe Ariel's generation has chosen as our two big issues, marriage and the military. Unfortunately, the article is not available online, but The New Yorker does offer an eleven-minute audio interview with Levy.

Fellow New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik selected Levy's piece on her wedding to Amy Norquist for inclusion in this year's Best American Essays. (Available in full, via that link.)

Lance Black's Acceptance Speech, Earlier PEDRO to Screens Soon

Relive Dustin Lance Black's fine speech after last night's totally expected Oscar win for best original screenplay for Milk. Another of his screenplays is Pedro, a biopic of Pedro Zamora, the Cuban-born aids educator on MTV's 1994 The Real World: San Francisco. (Zamora disclosed his hiv+ status to his onscreen housemates in February 1994 and died that November, at age twenty-two.) Black's script, directed by Nick Oceano, will be screened March 8 as closing night of Fusion 2009: The Sixth Annual Los Angeles LGBT People of Color Film Festival. Since writing Milk, Black, 34, has penned nine episodes of HBO's Mormon polygamy series Big Love, of which he is a co-producer. His next feature reteams him with Gus Van Sant, adapting Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. This spring Black will direct Jennifer Connelly in his What's Wrong with Virginia?

Dubai Fest Bans Gay-Inclusive Book; Atwood Withdraws; Will Others?

Dubai's attempt at cultural bridge-building with the West for the region's first ever International Festival of Literature has backfired with their reversal on a British novel set in the Middle East including two minor gay characters, a sheikh and his English boyfriend. The book, The Gulf Between Us, has now been banned in Dubai, and its author, Geraldine Bedell, removed from the event. 

Responding to that censorship, Margaret Atwood has withdrawn her participation in the festival. She wrote to the director, saying:

Dear Isobel Abulhoul,

It is with great regret that I inform you that I cannot attend this year's Emirates Airline International Festival of Literature in Dubai. I know you have put an enormous amount of work into it, I can imagine how many difficulties have had to be overcome, and I am very sad about the regrettable turn of events surrounding The Gulf Between Us.

I was greatly looking forward to the Festival, and to the chance to meet readers there; but, as an International Vice President of PEN -- an organization concerned with the censorship of writers -- I cannot be part of the Festival this year.

I wish you much success. Perhaps in the future I will be able to attend.

With best wishes,

Margaret Atwood

 Ms. Abulhoul responded at length, part of which was to say:

The ambition behind setting up the festival is fueled by our heartfelt belief in actively engaging and helping to bridge the gap between East and West; a belief that authors felt important when agreeing to visit our festival.

We are very disappointed and not a little surprised that it has taken so long for anyone to reconsider their position -- particularly if this reconsideration is linked to Geraldine Bedell’s position which, while communicated to her last September, has come to the public’s attention only now and around the publication of her novel.

In organising any literary festival, wherever it is in the world, one has to take decisions regarding the target audience. In the time that has elapsed since issuing provisional invitations and in confirming attendance, Dubai has not changed its social mores, culture or laws.

Decision-making may be informed by a number of factors and in many cases can be driven by simple attendance imperatives. I would hope that anyone informed and interested in the differing cultures around the world would both understand and respect the path we tread in setting up the first festival of this nature in the Middle East. Indeed, I have been absolutely delighted by the response to our initiative.

Over the next six days, many internationally noted authors confirmed to appear on the festival's panels will have to decide whether or not to attend. Julia Glass and Philippa Gregory have written novels with gay characters far more prominent than Bedell's in The Gulf Between Us. Rachel Billington is herself a former PEN official. Chimamanda Adichie established herself with a novel about overcoming prejudice and division. Also slated to speak at the festival: Frank McCourt, Louis de Bernieres, Terry Brooks, Kate Mosse, Karin Slaughter, and Wilbur Smith.

Homosexuality is illegal in the United Arab Emirates, and since last year, authorities have increased their campaign against "immorality." Foreigners are routinely deported. Two lesbians in their 30s, from Bulgaria and Lebanon, were caught kissing on a beach. The women were arrested, convicted, and jailed for one month, then sent back to their countries.

UPDATE: Atwood will attend the event "virtually," via video uplink, to participate in the panel discussion on censorship.

Body Surfing by Dale Peck

Since the appearance of Dale Peck's shattering first novel Martin and John everything he's done has been important to literary spectators in general and to gay readers in particular: additional literary novels, criticism, travel writing, two books for children, a YA novel, a lucrative forthcoming three-book collaboration with Heroes creator Tim Kring, and now, on sale this week, a thriller. Although Body Surfing sounds too violent for me, the premise is intriguing: a teenage boy dies, becomes a demon, and surfs through centuries borrowing different bodies in different times in an epic chase with other undead. Also, Peck says Body Surfing, "which, page for page, has more sex than any of my other books, and more extreme sex to boot, is probably less explicit than Martin and John."

Josh McCall has conducted an excellent interview with Peck, asking all the right questions. On gay books:

Q: Has the publishing industry’s attitudes changed with regards to GLBT characters and stories over the course of your career?

A: Yes. It got better and then it got worse again. Nowadays, adult books featuring gay lead characters rarely if ever do well. Gay people are more visible certainly, but they’ve been pushed to the side—they’re best friends, hairdressers, decorators, etc., rather like they were in the half century before the big breakout in the 80s, only this time it’s okay for them to be gay. I have to say, that sucks, and I’m not sure whom to blame: audiences, who by and large don’t want to universalize gay themes to their own life, or gay writers, who, I have to say, tend to write pretty awful, petty, cloistered “gay” stories that really aren’t particularly universal. That said, gay YA books seem to be extremely popular right now, so who knows, maybe Sprout will find its audience.

On the new book:

A: Body Surfing is a book that surprised me with its imaginative possibilities. When I originally conceived of the premise, I was looking for something that would take the contemporary urge to sexualize every form of commercial entertainment and push it past the realm of bourgeois propriety. But then, as I got into the world, I found the demons to be increasingly compelling and complex, and the ways in which they could be retroactively imagined into world events was sometimes eerily resonant. Look at Leo, for example. He’s born—which is to say, he dies, and is reborn as a demon—during the reign of Nero, when the Roman Empire was at its zenith. But what a strange place it was: on the one hand, so many of the intellectual, political, and artistic constructions that our own society is based on were being developed, but at the same time it was a society constructed around the idea of mass murder as a spectacle, of grotesque indulgences of the fleshly appetites (at least if you had the money for it) and of massively inflated egos—which, when you get down it, is all a Mogran really is.

And:

A: The initial idea, I have to say, was just one of those inspirational flashes: “What if there was a world in which…?” But in developing it, I did think a lot about early Stephen King novels, of which I was (and am) a huge fan. I’m not the first person to notice that one of King’s greatest strengths as a writer is his insistence on locating horror within the domestic context, and in Body Surfing I wanted to make sure that readers experience Jasper as a real teenager before he became a demon—that the loss of our everyday existence is every bit as big of a loss as the destruction of the world or the universe or life as we know it, which seems to be the stake in so many thrillers these days. I also was inspired to some degree by the relationship between Lestat and Louis in Interview With a Vampire—by the need for companionship, erotic or otherwise, that even immortal beings feel. As wicked as Leo is, I wanted readers to understand why he would be pissed when Jasper rejected the life he offered him. After, what, 1700 years of solitude, all he wanted was a peer, and instead Jasper has to be a goodie-goodie and say no. I’d be pissed too.

If you can handle scary novels, I hope you'll buy it and let me know what you think.

Born February 19: Pim Fortuyn

The conservative-populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was openly gay in a way that seems unimaginable here: On national television he explained that he enjoyed the taste of semen, comparing it to a strong liqueur, and he used his tricks as "proof" that he wasn't racist. Dutch voters, for and against him, were more interested in his ideas. He wanted to reduce government's role in health services and education, he spoke against the "Islamisation of our culture," sounded a warning cry about the dangers of shari'a law superseding the Dutch legal code, and pledged to curtail immigration drastically. Yet he was also for euthanasia, for legalized soft drugs, for same-sex marriage, and for reducing the military by combining the army and air force to save money. Although Fortuyn was riding a crest of widespread popularity with fully fifty percent of voters aged 18-30 supporting him (huge in a multi-party system), the Netherlands did not get to have their first ever openly gay Prime Minister, because they had their first assassination in 330 years, since 1672. A thirty-two year old white Dutch man shot him to stop him from exploiting "the weaker parts of society to gain political power." The motive was unrelated to Fortuyn's being gay. He was fifty-four. Contrarian even in death, Fortuyn was buried twice, first in the Netherlands, then dug up and re-interred in Pordenone, Italy, where he owned a second home.

God's Grace in Gay Sex (and Other Anglican Problems)

Paul Elie has a fascinating, somewhat apologist article in the Atlantic about the Archbishop of Canterbury's devolving views on gay Anglicans. My take: Imagine an Abraham Lincoln who wanted to end slavery, but just not yet, for the sake of holding the Union together.

In 1989, occupying the top theological post at Oxford, Rowan Williams wrote an essay called The Body's Grace in which, Elie says,

Williams took a different approach, focusing on the concept of grace. From a sex scene in Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet, he drew a definition of grace as beautiful and convincing as any I know.

There may be little love, even little generosity, in Clark’s bedding of Sarah, but Sarah has discovered that her body can be the cause of happiness to her and to another. It is this discovery which most clearly shows why we might want to talk about grace here. Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.

From there, the essay has the inevitability of a proof in philosophy. Gay people, too, deserve to be wanted sexually—deserve the body’s grace. The full expression of this grace through sexual relations takes time and the commitment of the partners to come to know each other—through the commitment of marriage or something like it. Sexual fidelity is akin to religious fidelity—“not an avoidance of risk, but the creation of a context in which grace can abound.” For the church to stand in the way of such relationships, straight or gay, is to stand in the way of God’s grace.

After becoming Bishop of Monmouth in 1991 and Archbishop of Wales in 1999, Williams became Archbishop of Canterbury early in 2003. In May, openly gay but celibate Jeffrey John, a longtime friend of Williams', was appointed Bishop of Reading. Williams was surprised by the vehemence of the opposition. Elie writes,

Then the campaign against the gay bishop began, with traditionalists on four continents forming a patchwork alliance. Fraser says those in America and England cared nothing about the views of the bishops of Africa until they saw the chance for an alliance against the progressives. They took up the ordination of gay bishops as a wedge issue, and made a show of unity; they claimed that a pro-gay agenda was a new form of imperialism against the global South. “They drafted the Church of Nigeria, with its numerical strength, as a way of raising a ruckus over it. They got the white man’s guilt going. The Internet sped it along.” And it worked. “Rowan backpedaled,” Fraser said. “He asked Jeffrey John to resign.”

“It was an utter shock—a complete reversal,” the bishop of Washington, D.C., John Bryson Chane, told me. “It emboldened those opposed, because they now knew that this issue was Rowan’s weakness: ‘Now we’ve got him by the neck.’”

Desmond Tutu was dismayed, too. “Most of us would have said that Williams would be ‘kosher’ on the issue,” he told me, “and we thought that he would employ his formidable intellectual and linguistic skills to affirm it. But those who were pulling in the other direction were much stronger than we had thought, and as a deeply prayerful and pastoral person, he wanted to accommodate them as fully as possible.” Tutu recalled a moment in the 1980s when the bishops of South Africa were divided on gay rights, with some favoring a frank affirmation of gay people and others wanting to “go slow” lest a dispute over gay issues shatter the church’s united front against apartheid. But Tutu thought that by 2004, the acceptable time for gay bishops had arrived and that in his good and wise friend Williams they had their champion.

“We did expect a very great deal of him,” Tutu said of Williams, choosing his words carefully. “Maybe our expectations were unrealistic.”

Last summer Williams was still sacrificing what is right in order to appease the angry splinter groups threatening to break away from the church. Since the mid-19th century, the bishops of the Anglican Communion have gathered once a decade at the Lambeth Conference to sort out church issues. Over three weeks ending on August 4, 2008, the "upheld existing moratoria against the ordination of openly gay and partnered people as bishops and against the public church blessing of same-sex unions." U.S. bishop Gene Robinson was unable to make his usual eloquent case for openness because Williams had asked him not to attend.

Coming late in the article is this pithy summary:

“He has traded truth for unity,” one confidant of Williams’s told me, “and you just can’t do that.”

Born February 18: Duane Michals

 
The self-taught photographer turns 77 today and is about to celebrate 49 years with his partner. I love his super longterm relationship and his cover art for the Police's album Synchronicity. Although some of his other work strains contemporary credibility, it must have been important in its time: his use of text, bare men, dramatic juxtapositions, artificial stagings, and nods to gay history -- the image below is from his 1970 Salute to Walt Whitman and was sold five years ago at a Christie's auction of Elton John's art. Among his more recent books is his second work to be based on the Greek poet, The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy.