Band of Thebes

"Stranger" Indeed: No Explicitly LGBT Characters in Sarah Waters Novel

Fans of the terrific, twice Booker-shortlisted writer Sarah Waters will have an eerie sensation as they read her new novel, The Little Stranger, out today. The haunted house story unfolds in Warwickshire at Hundreds Hall just after the war, and with her usual mastery Waters evokes an atmosphere of pervading gloom and declining fortunes. England is still rationing, the Labour government is taxing, and the formerly grand Ayres family -- widowed matriarch, outdoorsy daughter Caroline, injured son Roderick -- is left with not much more than their name and its homonyms: putting on airs, lacking heirs, she who errs. Reduced to employing a single maid, the frightened, fourteen year-old Betty, the family faces more humiliating privations: They turn off the electricity despite the creeping icy fog, they sell off land inside the estate wall to the encroaching developer. Worse is on the way: an angry ghost, madness, suicide, murder.

Enjoyable as that sounds, readers will need time to adjust to the shock of a Sarah Waters novel narrated by a straight man. The plodding Dr. Faraday's mother was once a maid at Hundreds and now he prides himself on having accidentally become the family's physician and only friend. Partly because of his ambling narration, readers may become restless when, by page 100, then 200, then 300, the magnificent Waters plot reversals of Fingersmith or Affinity still haven't arrived. And why doesn't the tomboyish Caroline, who becomes so animated at a dance when she's reunited with her fellow war Wrens, hurry up and come out? Instead, she becomes engaged to a man (for the promise of London). Her sexuality remains obscure -- guessable, but debatable -- to the end. Though the ghostly tricks continue, the only "surprise" twist, long foreseen, doesn't materialize until page 463, in the book's final paragraph.

Novelists like to show their range and they certainly shouldn't feel limited to characters who resemble them. If Waters' decision here seems disappointing, it's primarily because top-notch literary novels of lesbian life are so rare, while scary straight stories seem plentiful. [Insert joke about NYT wedding announcements.] I also found the book long-winded. Even Henry James, who relished the roundabout route, knew to keep The Turn of the Screw short. But I never read spooky fiction and it may well be that it requires ample flesh to make the little bones of the paranormal feel plausible.

Born April 30: Alice B. Toklas

Born in 1877 in San Francisco, educated in Seattle, Alice Babette Toklas’s life might be said to have started when she was thirty and went to Paris, where she met Gertrude Stein the day she arrived. They were inseparable for the next thirty-nine years, surviving two world wars, the heydey of the Lost Generation, and all their famous friends. Their love made them truly partners, with Toklas as Stein’s secretary, editor, critic, and muse. Although a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, their books' titles could be deceptive: Stein’s bestselling The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is really about Stein and Toklas' immortal The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook is as much a reflection on how the French eat and a memoir of feeding Flanner, Picasso, Hemingway, Wilder, Thomson, et al, as it is a collection of recipes, of which there are over three hundred. (The famous brownie recipe was contributed by Brion Gysin, a gay Brit who got a Fulbright to the Sorbonne, developed William Burroughs' "cut up" technique, owned a nightclub in Tangier, and had his ashes scattered in the Caves of Hercules. The recipe was edited out of the US edition but appeared in the UK.) Toklas also wrote an autobiography, What Is Remembered, which self-effacingly, almost self-erasingly, ends with Stein’s death even though she outlived her by two decades. In those final years Toklas was wracked by financial difficulties. She had no recourse after Stein’s heirs took all the famous paintings left to her, and she had no willpower, as a newly converted Catholic, to resist the church's extortion promise that with large enough donations, Toklas could buy Stein's soul out of purgatory and into heaven. Happily, the Jewish lesbians are buried side by side in Père Lachaise cemetery. Celebrate today by rereading their books, or Monique Truong’s much-praised novel The Book of Salt which imagines their lives through the eyes of their gay Vietnamese cook.

John Kelly Trifecta: Escape Artist, Self Portraits, Joni Mitchell Redux

Tonight through Saturday, two-time Obie winner John Kelly will perform The Escape Artist at MTG 10 Jay. Few things are as exciting as an artist of Kelly's caliber making cross-media connections across centuries, so it kills me that the only performance dates overlap with the Tribeca Film Festival and the PEN Festival. The press release describes it as:

New music by John Kelly and Carol Lipnik performed as a work-in-progress with interactive video footage inspired by the Baroque paintings of Caravaggio, shot in Rome, Venice, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, New York, tracing an artist's journey through time. "The Escape Artist" considers the parallels between the unbridled creative spirit of the urban artist of the 17th and 21st centuries.

From May 20 - June 26, Kelly will offer a retrospective of his self-portraits from 1977 to 2009 at Alexander Gray Associates in Chelsea.

In late June, after an long hiatus, Kelly once again will inhabit Joni Mitchell for seven performances of "an entirely new evening of songs and stories," Paved Paradise Redux. Broadway World quotes the Boston Globe saying:

"No less a critic than Joni Mitchell herself has been surprised by the impact of Kelly's cabaret tribute. ‘I was braced for a lampooning,' she told the New York Times after seeing "Paved Paradise" in Manhattan in 1997. ‘I didn't expect to be so touched. I cried in two places.' Mitchell is now one of Kelly's biggest fans."

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You Now in Paperback

Eighteen year-old Manhattanite James Sveck is one of my favorite characters of the past few years, and as of yesterday his wonderful story, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, is available in paperback -- portable and unputdownable. Protectively detached, James spends his summer after high school avoiding almost everyone and every issue (especially his terrifying future at Brown) while politely coping with those he can't ignore: his thrice-married gallery-owning mother, his older sister, their dog Miro, his silver fox alpha father, and his not-fooled shrink, Dr. Rowena Adler. In the fall of 2007 Peter Cameron's fifth novel deservedly earned luminous reviews, like this one from the New York Times:

"...it’s terrific, piercing and funny. The novel demonstrates every kind of strength...He will make a large portion of his audience, especially those who look for relief in books, feel excitingly understood."

Writing in NYROB, Lorrie Moore called it, "vital right from the start...a piece of vocal virtuosity...a bravura performance, and...a stunning little book."

Don't deprive yourself of this permanent pleasure. Buy it. And climb aboard the Cameron train before the rest of the world does upon the eventual release of The City of Your Final Destination. Adapted by Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, the movie stars Anthony Hopkins, Laura Linney, and Charlotte Gainsbourg as artistic expats in Uruguay "protecting" a literary estate from an uncertain biographer.

Scared and defensive James is not at his very most likable in this excerpt, but you can admire Cameron's subtly and dexterity:

We sat for a moment in silence, and then the waiter delivered our meals. My father glanced at my plate of pasta, but said nothing. He cut into his nearly raw beef and smiled at the blood it drooled. “So,” he said, after he had taken a bite, “you’re not going to tell me.”

“Not going to tell you what?”

“Whether or not you’re gay.”

“No,” I said. “Why should I? Did you tell your parents?”

“I wasn’t gay,” said my father. “I was straight.”

“So, what, if you’re gay you have a moral obligation to inform your parents and if you’re straight you don’t?”

“James, I’m just trying to be helpful. I’m just trying to be a good father. You don’t have to get hostile. I just thought you might be gay, and if you were, I wanted to let you know that’s fine, and help you in whatever way I could.”

“Why might you think I was gay?”

“I don’t know. You just seem – well, let’s put it this way: you don’t seem interested in girls. You’re eighteen, and as far as I know you’ve never been on a date.”
 
I said nothing.
 
“Am I wrong? Or is that true?”
 
“Just because I’ve never been on a date doesn’t mean I’m gay. And besides, no one goes on dates anymore.”
 
“Well, whatever – normal kids hang out. They go out. Maybe date isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean.”

“You don’t think I’m normal?”

“James, both of us know you have never been normal. We don’t need to argue about that. Now let’s drop the subject. I’ve obviously struck a nerve. I’m sorry. I was only trying to help you.”

I didn’t say anything.

My father attacked his steak with virility. I daintily ate my pasta.

Cheap Trick: Gael Garcia Bernal & Diego Luna Reunited in Rudo y Cursi

In his directorial debut, the writer of Y Tu Mama Tambien reteams Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna as sparring stepbrothers in a rags-to-riches soccer parable that is paint-by-numbers enjoyable. From the stars to their family on a struggling banana plantation to the Puerto Rican supermodel in Mexico City, all the cast is highly likable and the predictable plot turns are paced briskly. The low-aiming formula worked at home, where Rudo y Cursi is already one of Mexico's all-time top five grossing films. It opens here May 8, against the new, gay-inclusive Star Trek.

I'd say the movie is best seen with your brain turned off. The script strives for realness with the poor people but turns to utter fantasy in depicting the life of an overnight soccer sensation. Fine, it's a movie, but another reason it's hard to engage fully with the story is that it constantly reminds you it is a story, interrupting the narrative with voiceovers from their manager explaining that brothers often fight, or that sports were created to replicate wars, or that fate can be unpredictable. As in so many mainstream Latino movies, the boys display their machismo by frequently calling each other faggot. (You can argue that this is verisimilitude, but the screenwriter doesn't risk offending the international market by including racial epithets or any other slurs.) Laidback viewers may prefer to focus on the character development displayed in two team shower scenes with hazing, ambiguous kneeling in one and unwanted shaving in the other. 

Unlike other sports movies, Rudo y Cursi doesn't show much soccer. Between the undying jokes and the eternal questions -- eight years later -- about their Y Tu Mama kiss, the stars said during the Q&A chat at the Apple Store, that Gael shot his soccer scenes without the ball, which was digitally added in post production. But you do get three exposures to him singing Cheap Trick's oh so relevant lyrics, "I want you to want me, I need you to need me," in Spanish. Below is the video his character makes to launch his singing career after his soccer success; obviously not the style or palette of the rest of the movie, but typical of his goofy charisma.

Ten Articles Defining the New Queer Cinema in Reverse Shot 24

An unexpected bonanza. Jeff Reichert and Michael Koresky have just launched the twenty-fourth issue of their excellent film journal Reverse Shot, now offering ten articles to define the New Queer Cinema. Of course Brokeback, Hairspray, and Milk are here, but did you expect The House of Mirth? As they write in their sober introduction, "In cinemas, things seem as simultaneously hopeful and regressed as they do in the U.S. at large."

The ten articles are:

Acute Boys, Michael Koresky on Broken Sky (Mexico 2008)

High Visibility, Chris Wisniewski on The Wire and the New Golden Age of Television

That Obscure Object of Desire, Andrew Chan on Lan Yu (Taiwan 2001)

Bromicide, Michael Joshua Rowin on I Love You, Man and the Apatow Comedy Factory

Travolta Goes to Camp, Leo Goldsmith on Hairspray (US 1988) vs. Hairspray (US 2007)

Gender Neutralized, Joanne Nucho on Be Like Others (Iran 2007)

Never Say Never, Andrew Tracy on Casino Royale and the new James Bond (UK 2006)

Men of Honor, Matt Connolly on Brokeback Mountain, Milk, and the Queer Prestige Film

Outside, Looking In, Jeff Reichert on The House of Mirth (UK 2000)

The Other Woman, Chris Wisniewski on Far from Heaven

Sex and the City, Michael Koresky on Milk (US 2008)

"Making the Boys" Documentary on Mart Crowley, Emerging Gay Culture

Dori Berninstein, Carson Kressley, Crayton Robey, Mart Crowley, Laurence Luckinbill "Hank" from TBITB, and Michael Musto

Yesterday the Tribeca Film Festival premiered Crayton Robey's documentary Making the Boys which happily turns out to be about much more than the creation of The Boys in the Band. Because Mart Crowley's play opened the year before Stonewall and the movie opened the year after the riots, it stands at a unique pivotal point in gay history. Often cited as the first theater piece to focus exclusively on gay men in their everyday lives, the play was a sensation from its second night. Through terrific interviews with Edward Albee, Robert Wagner, Larry Kramer, Dominick Dunne, Dan Savage, Michael Musto, Tony Kushner, Terrence McNally, Paul Rudnick, Carson Kressley, Michael Cunningham, and Marc Shainman, the documentary gives a surprisingly rich and textured feel for the hostility and euphoria gay people lived with in the 60s and 70s as they emerged from the closet en masse. Archival footage shows the early picket marches led by Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings, New York's first pride parade, and Gay Liberation Front demonstrations, as well as dancing inside Hollywood's private clubs and Studio 54. The most thrilling home movies show Roddy McDowell's lazy Sunday afternoon Malibu beach parties with Rock Hudson, Tab Hunter, Sal Mineo, Lauren Bacall, Judy Garland, and Natalie Wood who became a friend for life after Mart was her assistant on a film.

The documentary isn't hagiography and it isn't all sunny. Albee speaks very thoughtfully about his dislike of The Boys in the Band ("straights were so happy to see people they didn't have to respect"); Kameny is reported to have coined Gay Is Good in part to combat the film's stereotypes of self-hating screaming drunk queens; and fashion flake Christian Siriano is one of many young people shown saying he has no idea who The Boys in the Band are. Beyond that, Robey examines the fallout from the success. Crowley spent years, if not decades, drinking his way around the world. Many but not all of the cast members found it difficult to get work after having played gay in such a defining way and remained bitter about it till death. The cowboy hustler's fate was particularly miserable. Likewise, the documentary shows aids as the catastrophic comedown from the 70s high, killing a generation of gay men including five or six of the cast.

Two significant weakness: The film needs more women. Also, Robey entirely omits Crowley's 2002 attempt at a sequel, The Men from the Boys. No doubt that's considerate, because the play did not flourish and never made it to New York. Acknowledging its demise would have amplified the documentary's themes of the difficulties moving on after a hit and how The Boys in the Band remains very much fixed in a moment in history.

Newly added, Making the Boys screens again Sunday, May 3 at 10:00am. Tickets here.

Larry Kramer's Speech on Gay History and "Yale's Conspiracy of Silence"

In 1997, Yale rejected class of '57 alum Larry Kramer's offer of $7 million to start an lgbt student center or to support gay professorships. Finally in 2001 the university accepted $1 million from Kramer's brother to fund an initiative for gay studies. In 2006, they canceled the arrangement and erased every trace of it. Over the weekend, Yale held its first ever lgbt alumni reunion (300 attended, Rufus sang) and the university's Gay and Lesbian Association bestowed its inaugural lifetime achievement award on Kramer. His speech is reprinted in full.

After rejecting the terms "queer" and gay "studies", Kramer expounded on the need to reclaim gay history, telling his audience:

"That Jamestown was America’s first community of homosexuals, men who came to not only live with each other as partners but to adopt and raise children bought from the Indians. Some even arranged wedding ceremonies for themselves.

"That George Washington was gay, and that his relationships with Alexander Hamilton and the Marquis de Lafayette were homosexual. And that his feelings for Hamilton led to a government and a country that became Hamiltonian rather than Jeffersonian.

"That Meriwether Lewis was in love with William Clark and committed suicide when their historic journey was over and he wouldn’t see Clark anymore.

"That Abraham Lincoln was gay and had many, many gay interactions, that his nervous breakdown occurred when he and his lover, Joshua Speed, were forced to part, and that his sensitivity to the slaves came from his firsthand knowledge of what it meant to be so very different. And that the possibility exists that Lincoln was murdered because he was gay and John Wilkes Booth, who was gay, knew this.

"That Franklin Pierce, who became one of America’s worst presidents, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who became one of our greatest writers, as roommates at Bowdoin College had interactions that changed them both forever and, indeed, served as the wellspring for what Hawthorne came to write about. Pierce was gay. And Hawthorne? Herman Melville certainly wanted him to be.

"That most of the great actresses who endlessly toured America during the 19th century bringing theater to the masses were lesbians and occasionally dressed as men. Just like Katherine Hepburn.

"That the plague of AIDS was allowed to happen because much of the world hates us and most of the world knows nothing about us. They don’t know we are related to Washington and Lincoln."

Kramer is still at work on his epic, revisionist, gay-centric book, The American People.

Outrage: Closeted Gay Politicians Who Vote Against Gay Rights

Friday night at the Tribeca Film Festival, Oscar-nominated director Kirby Dick premiered his new documentary, Outrage, about closeted gay politicians who actively work against gay rights and gay equality. Dick only examines the officials about whom he has gathered significant evidence: Larry Craig, Ed Schrock, Charlie Crist, Ed Koch, Jim McCrery, David Drier, and Ken Mehlman. In several cases he interviews men who've slept with these officials. Even more irrefutable, Dick plays the tape of Virginia GOP Congressman Ed Shrock's audio chat ad looking for male sexual partners. Shrock gets explicit about what he wants. It's not straight.

The many out lgbt interviewees include people who've spent a lot of time in Washington and/or in closets, so they speak with conviction and first-hand authority: Barney Frank, Tammy Baldwin, James Hormel, Jim Kolbe, David Catania, Elizabeth Birch, Mike Rogers, Michelangelo Signorile, Dan Gurley, Hilary Rosen, Rodger McFarlane, Steve Clemons, Kevin Naff, Andrew Sullivan, Jose Antonio Vargas,Patrick Guerro, Neil Giuliano, Tom Sheridan, Kirk Fordham, Rich Tafel, Jim McGreevey, Dina McGreevey, and Tony Kushner.

Important and powerful, the film is very useful viewing even for those who find the subject matter overly familiar. Mike Rogers of BlogActive is consistently impressive in discussing his ongoing work to expose the hypocrisy of closeted gay men who demand the silence and complicity of the community they work to keep unequal and disenfranchised. If you can overlook Jim Greevey's severe political scandals, he is one of the most eloquent speakers about gay equality today.

The film has two shortcomings. One, it fails to get a prominent media figure on camera to say, "We let the closeted hypocrites get away with it. We fail on this issue." (Other pundits note the media's double standard in eagerly reporting on heterosexual affairs but ignoring gay relationships as a matter of "privacy.") Two, the narrative arc is flat. Though the final section on Crist is particularly damning, the movie lacks suspense. It starts with the thesis problem, gives additional examples, and never builds to a climax.

The loudest spontaneous audience applause during the film was after Elizabeth Birch excoriated Mary Cheney for her betrayal of the lgbt community. Even David Letterman, in a clip from his show, wondered aloud with Mary if it would have been more effective if she had "disagreed with her dad" publicly during key lgbt debates rather than waiting until she wanted to sell her book.

In the Q&A following the screening, Kirby Dick agreed with a questioner that he wanted to include closeted lesbians but they couldn't get adequate evidence in on camera interviews. He criticized the Democrats for being much "too safe" on lgbt issues and called Obama's timid approach to Don't Ask, Don't Tell "appalling." He said he hopes his film becomes "a platform, an excuse for the mainstream media to talk about the closet."

Watch the trailer below, ignoring the limp piano music. Outrage opens May 8 in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Washington, and Philadelphia. And, much needed in Florida, it opens May 15 in Fort Lauderdale and Tallahassee. Full list here.

Kate Clinton's I Told You So

Is anything greater than power lesbians supporting each other? Activist comedian Kate Clinton dedicates her new book to her longtime partner Urvashi Vaid, and Rachel Maddow says: "I Told You So is true, terrifying, and coffee-out-your-nose funny. I love Kate Clinton. Buy the book, or I'll sic the NSA on your ass.”

The book collects dozens of bite-sized and biting essays from the past few years. Covering everything from the international (Iraq) to the domestic (home life in Provincetown) Clinton is angry, outraged, rueful, and funny. And she really, really doesn't want to get married. (Luckily neither does Vaid.) 

Always trenchant, still a fan of the one-liner, Clinton is one thousand times more political than David Sedaris, yet she deserves his larger readership for her quick character sketches and wry insights on everyday life. Some might argue you need to read the book right away because the extremely topical references may come to seem dated. But her garbage truck driving lesbian neighbor warning her to get her pets indoors because Coyotes are coming is eternal.

And, yes, feel free to dislike to flat title, which she shares with Count Basie, Randy Travis, Yo Gotti, and Rush Limbaugh.