Band of Thebes

Independent Ranks UK's 101 Power Gays: Mandelson, Fry, McKellan

                                                                                                                                                               (photo The Telegraph)

For readers who count on me to report the obvious: the UK has gone wild for gay 100 lists.

The British newspaper the Independent on Sunday has released its tenth annual Pink List, ranking the 101 most powerful LGBT people in the United Kingdom. Unlike here, the gays in Britain (and in France) hold top cabinet positions in government. This year's number one, Peter Mandelson, is Secretary of State for Business and more recently added the title First Secretary of State which the Independent translates as "Deputy Prime Minister in all but name." Furthermore, they consider Lord Mandelson "arguably the most powerful individual in the country." (Meanwhile, we're expected to be grateful for the Director of OPM.)

Ranked second and third on the 2009 Pink List are actors / activists Stephen Fry and Ian McKellan. Historian and frequent television face David Starkey is fourth. The highest ranked lesbian, in the fifth spot, is post-punk rocker Beth Ditto, a choice that itself is a little punk, considering she's an American.

In sixth place is writer Alan Bennett, seventh is director Phyllida Lloyd (responsible for many English operas, East End plays, and her first movie Mamma Mia!), eighth is Culture Secretary Ben Bradshaw, ninth is poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and tenth is Nick Bowles, head of implementation for the conservative party.

To see all 101 rankings, you have to click through their slideshow person by person.

UK's Lesbian & Gay Foundation Names 100 Best LGBT Blogs in English

Britain's Lesbian and Gay Foundation has released its list of 100 best lgbt blogs. They write: "LGF online have scoured the internet to bring you the most informative, entertaining and inspiring blogs from around the world. The blogs we've chosen cover diverse issues from all sides of the LGBT equation. There's blogs from gay parents, gay conservatives, gay activists, young people coming out, older people coming out, and gay asylum seekers to name but a few."

The list is unranked and not alphabetical, but if you scroll down you'll find some very worthy familiar names including Towleroad, Pam's House Blend, and Joe My God. Read them all and find some new favorites.

Born June 28: Dave Kopay

Thirty-four years ago when Dave Kopay became the first former NFL player to come out, the newspaper that ran the groundbreaking interview (The Washington Star) and tv newscasts that reported the story, received vociferous hate mail. Kopay had played eight years for San Francisco, Detroit, Washington, New Orleans, and Green Bay. Since 1975, he has been an enormous inspiration through his lectures, public appearances, and especially with the publication of his 1977 memoir The David Kopay Story which was a New York Times bestseller. However, the NFL has ignored him. To this day, they will not even hire him to be a diversity speaker to the league. And the total number of former NFL players to come out in the thirty-two years since Kopay said he’s gay is two: Roy Simmons in 1992 and Esera Tuaolo in 2002. Unable to get any sort of coaching job, Kopay worked for twenty years at his uncle’s flooring business, Linoleum City, in Hollywood. He has been involved with several sessions of Gay Games, most recently administering the Participants’ Oath in Chicago. A real hero, he announced he's leaving one million dollars to the University of Washington's Q Center.

Queer and Unavailable Lives Up to Name, and Rocks

Kenny Mellman couldn't show the movie clips he wanted to at Thursday's screening in the 92Y Tribeca's ongoing Queer/Art/Film series because he said he couldn't get them, even when he went directly to the filmmakers. So he presented an evening of tv clips (Queer and Available?), starting with two Pet Shop Boys video clips directed by Derek Jarman, It's a Sin and Rent. Next came scenes from an episode of MTV's series "Andy Warhol's 15 Minutes" starring Debbie Harry, Jerry Hall, a young Lady Bunny, and a really wonderful segment with John Kelly as himself backstage and as Dagmar Onasis in the spotlight. (Be mesmerized by a different clip of him as her here.) (Kelly presented an earlier night in the series, showing Cocteau's Blood of a Poet.) Mellman ran a clip of Wayland Flowers on a cable access show in which Madame could speak uncensored and her exuberantly filthy talk was a camp revelation, as was Flowers' manipulation of her form. Shockingly expressive for a hard plastic puppet. A toned-down but no less sex obsessed Madame also appeared in the night's highlight, a screening of "The Beatrice Arthur Special," filmed in 1979 and aired in 1980, co-starring Rock Hudson and Melba Moore. One skit of a widow talking to her husband's casket featured his two mistresses and ended with the surprise of his male lover, but all the sequences had queer undertones of varying degrees. Check out this gospel revival number by Sistah Love and friends.

The series continues this Thursday withLisa Kron presenting A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, July 16 with Thomas Allen Harris screening Tongues United, and Sarah Schulman showing Chantal Ackerman's overtly lesbian film from 1974, Je, Tu, Il, Elle.

Please turn off your computer, leave your apartment, and support innovative series like this one co-curated by Adam Baran and the superb film director Ira Sachs. The night I attended the audience was five people.

Born June 26: Stephen McCauley

Smartly extending and expanding the tradition of character driven literature and domestic comedies of manners, Stephen McCauley has written five novels, the best of which is True Enough and the best known, The Object of My Affection. You must also read his riveting, knockout piece, "Let's Say," about his uneasy truce with his difficult, antigay father in Patrick Merla's collection Boys Like Us. The anthology features twenty-five writers including Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, Allan Gurganus, Tim Miller, Carl Phillips, and Michael Nava. McCauley took the spring semester off from teaching in order to work on (finish?) his sixth novel. Pray that the fact that he hasn't updated his website since January is a sign that he's been immersed in his fiction. His last posting:

"Have been pissed off at success of beloved yoga studio, which somehow or other seems like bad karma. Classes that once topped off at 10 or 15 students now up 50. Considerable problems with humidity, given that room is heated to 98 degrees. Like being inside steamy, subtropical germ incubator while instructor extols health benefits of exercises. Raised issue of crowding with instructor who shrugged it off. “New Year’s resolutions. It happens every January.” Happy to hear this since most such resolutions have shelf life of about 2 to 3 weeks. Left studio feeling relieved that cigarettes and booze would probably reclaim bulks of the crowd before February. Then had to deal with guilt and bad karma about mean-spirited relief.

"Kindle envy resolved in most satisfactory way. Trollope book arrived in the mail 24 hours after placing order. Started reading it and having trouble putting it down. Amusing, vivid, unaffected, and insightful. Best of all, love the way 900 pages feel in the hand and pleasing creasing of binding as reading progresses.

"Economizing going well, but as this is New Year’s resolution, will undoubtedly meet fate of nonsmoking and stop-drinking resolutions of annoying yoga students. Which could mean will be unable to afford yoga classes at exact moment overcrowding finally subsides. Karma?"

His website also offers in full his story "The Whole Truth," which was longlisted for the Best American Short Stories 1992, his NYT essay on Antwerp, an essay called "In the Greenhouse," and a fourth piece called "At the Threshold."

Gay Liberation Front Reunion at NYPL

 
left to right: Karla Jay, Allen Young, Steven Dansky, Ellen Shumsky, Jerry Hoose, Perry Brass, Jim Fouratt, Michela Griffo, and Fran Winant. Mark Segal participated via Skype. [click to enlarge]

Gay life wouldn't be any fun if it weren't complex, right? Reuniting on stage at the NYPL, ten original members of the Gay Liberation Front shared memories from forty years ago of the Stonewall Inn, the rebellion, and their bold if short-lived activist group. Many took issue with the way the bar "has been so romanticized, especially in David Carter's book," when in fact the place was "dreary, dreadful" or "the worst, a sewer."

The panel's early visions of equality and societal transformation were undeniably inspiring. "Rejection of conventional sex roles" and "GLF defied control and disrupted the patriarchy," were two points Steven Dansky made, and several people quoted the essay "Woman Identified Woman." Yet those ideals only served to depress anyone who contrasted them with the limited talking points of today's lgbt organizations. Perhaps not unrelated, many speakers discussed how the GLF's conflicts in 1969 and the early 70s were not only gay vs. straight but also gay vs. gay.

With a historian's perspective and balance, Karla Jay said they wouldn't be there without their predecessors, naming several earlier gay groups, civil rights leaders, feminists, and especially the anti-war movement. Yet she also recalled that after the first of what would be four nights of riots, it was the Mattachine Society that put up a poster outside Stonewall commanding people to "behave," which was "further infuriating." Jim Fouratt, while praising Harry Hay, said in the aftermath of the riots the dress-code obsessed Mattachine was planning a candlelight walk around the Village "to show what good people we are" whereas he, a Timothy Leary radical, wanted full on revolution. Fouratt said "Mattachine reported us to the FBI" and did not elaborate. Recalling the scary, exhilarating first Christopher Street Liberation Day March on the first anniversary of Stonewall, Michela Griffo said, "Gays turned their backs on us as we walked up Sixth Avenue. It was the straight people who clapped for us." Yet she also said, "We were never supported by any of the groups we supported, like SDS." And reminded the audience, "Don't vote gay friendly, vote gay."

Perry Brass said "for a long time, especially in the 80s, GLF was seen as an embarrassment," but "now they're coming around." Jim Fouratt said GLF had been left out of the library's huge gay rights exhibit in 1994. Jerry Hoose said he was "annoyed" by how much attention is given to Stonewall and how little to what came in the weeks and months after, drawing applause from the packed audience. 

Ellen Shumsky spoke about the Radical Lesbians and about joining GLF because she "needed to heal my divided self" and also with the "self-chosen mission to document it in photography." Luckily for you, those inspired photos are now on display at the Center. Fran Winant read her moving poem, "Christopher Street Liberation Day, June 28, 1970" which she wrote the morning after.

Allen Young dedicated his remarks to Karla Jay and explained the intentional lack of structure in GLF. He also repeated the most important slogan of the last four decades, "Out of the closet and into the streets."

Congratulations to lgbt coordinator Jason Baumann for a great event.

Morrissey Biography Ranks His Lyrics with Byron, Wilde, Firbank, Larkin

Gavin Hopps, of the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, yesterday published a biography of Morrissey that places his work solidly in the tradition of (mainly) British literature. According to the jacket, "In the course of this penetrating study of Morrissey’s oeuvre, Hopps offers close readings of individual lyrics and illuminating comparisons with a range of literary figures – such as Lord Byron, Mary Shelley, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti, Oscar Wilde, Samuel Beckett, Paul Celan and Philip Larkin. Morrissey: The Pageant of His Bleeding Heart, at once erudite and accessible, argues convincingly for Morrissey’s inclusion in the pantheon of literary greats."

With twenty-seven years of lyrics, there's certainly potential for a terrific, serious study. Is Hopps up to it? Publishers Weekly found it slightly unloveable: "But Hopps wants to argue that his hero is more than just a pop star: he's 'a radical subversion of the traditional values of pop music' who restored the genre's ability to give voice to dysfunction and alienation. The argument veers from the defensive to the impenetrably academic; the lyrics of one song, for example, are described as 'an unshackling of the referential function of language,' while another is 'an urban parody of the Liebestod of Tristan and Isolde.' It's not that Morrissey can't be compared, as he is here, to the likes of Oscar Wilde, Ronald Firbank and Christina Rossetti-or, perhaps most extensively, Samuel Beckett. As a singer and a songwriter, he is by just about any standard a significant artist. But Hopps's enthusiastic appraisal is at times so overwrought that it almost feels as if he's trying to convince himself as much as his academic colleagues of the validity of pursuing a thesis that is not nearly as provocative as it hopes to be."

Born June 25: Larry Kramer, Rictor Norton, George Michael

Larry Kramer was nominated for an Academy Award for his screenplay of Women in Love, losing to Ring Lardner Jr., for M*A*S*H, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for his play The Destiny of Me, losing to Tony Kushner for Angels in America. His controversial novel Faggots more or less predicted aids and has sold one million copies, huge for a gay book. He has been hiv+ for more than twenty years (he believes it is thirty years). Kramer is nothing if not a fighter and survivor, although in 1953, as a freshman at Yale, he tried to kill himself by swallowing 200 aspirin. He will be remembered for starting GMHC and ACT-UP, which not only changed the course of aids treatment but utterly transformed the nature of direct action political groups in America. As Michael Specter wrote in his essential profile of Kramer, “Public Nuisance,” in The New Yorker in May 2002, “It is difficult to overstate the impact of ACT UP.” His offer of millions of dollars to endow Yale with a permanent professorship in lgbt studies was rejected, but in 2001 his brother donated $1 million to start the university's Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies. It was shut down in 2006. Kramer's long forthcoming opus, The American People, will reclaim the overlooked gay history of everything from Jamestown, George Washington, and Lincoln, to the present day.

In 1972, when almost no universities endorsed gay studies, Rictor Norton published his doctoral dissertation, The Homosexual Literary Tradition. Since then, he has illuminated gay history through several books including the seminal Mother Clap's Molly House: The Gay Subculture in England 1700-1830, and My Dear Boy, a collection of gay love letters through the centuries. He maintains a terrific website devoted to gay history. Having lived in the United Kingdom since the early 1970s, in 2005 Norton formed a civil union with his partner of thirty years.

Tight jeans, a black leather jacket, blond highlights, one big earring, three days’ stubble, and five or six killer hooks. With these weapons Georgios Kyriacos Panayiotou conquered a decade. As late as 1995 Londoners voted that their favorite song of all time was Careless Whisper. Say what you will but, George Michael knows his way around a pop song. He has had twelve #1 hits in Britain, ten #1 singles in the United States, and has sold more than 85 million records worldwide. Long before Eminem or Justin Timberlake, George Michael was the first white male to top the black music charts, the first white male to duet with Aretha Franklin, and Wham! was the first Western pop act to tour China. His first serious boyfriend was the Brazilian designer Anselmo Feleppa, who died of aids within two years of their meeting. Although George Michael remained closeted to the public, Feleppa’s death spurred him to come out to his family and to write his #1 hit song Jesus to a Child. The entire cd Older is dedicated to Feleppa’s memory. For the past eleven years, George Michael has been in a relationship with Texan Kenny Goss. Although his career may have waned in the United States, he remains hugely popular overseas. Earlier this month he became the first singer to perform at the new Wembley Stadium for 70,000 fans and on New Year’s Eve 2008 he was paid $3 million dollars to perform a one hour set in Moscow for 300 guests of Vladimir Potanin. Allegedly a new album is on its way, though it has been 18 years since he topped the US charts.

Food, Inc., The Proposal, Whatever Works

The important new documentary Food, Inc. isn't sickening in the way you expect: the scenes of chicken coops and slaughterhouses are brief and not as bad as they've appeared in other media. What's stomach turning is the way corporations have gotten the government to make it illegal to criticize, discuss, or even accurately label the way food is made today. Another dark corner we've turned is that for the first time companies can patent their new hybrids of crops, so suddenly for farmers to do the simple, thrifty task of saving their natural seed's from one year's crop to plant the next season is now theft. Monsanto employs a division of 75 people who investigate and prosecute farmers, often ratted out by their neighbors who report them saving seed. These struggling individuals are themselves a vanishing breed. As the Southern woman who on her own raises massive numbers of hormone-fed chickens says, "This isn't farming. It's factory work." Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser provide excellent, articulate commentary throughout, some of which is actually hopeful. Last year Wal-Mart followed Starbucks, Safeway, and Kroger in banning milk from cows injected with a synthetic growth hormone. The use of bovine growth hormones was already illegal in Canada and Europe.

I reached a milestone of sorts in Wyoming over the weekend, seeing myself portrayed on screen by Ryan Reynolds. In the otherwise skippable The Proposal, he plays someone who works in book publishing and divides his time between Manhattan and Alaska. The utter inauthenticity of the Alaskan characters is matched only by the ludicrous fantasy version of the publishing industry. Do not go thinking at least you can enjoy it as a travelogue: the role of "Sitka, Alaska" was played by Rockport, Massachusetts. 

You might reasonably think after my years of criticizing Woody Allen for erasing gay men from his vision of New York that I'd watch Whatever Works just to see Ed Begley's character. Wrong. Not going to endure his contrived romance between Allen-stand-in Larry David and a Soon-Yi stand-in young woman 41 years his junior. (Besides, it sounds like Begley is straight and his coming out is what passes for a punchline.) If you go, let me know.

Seven Minute Clip from PBS's Upcoming Documentary on Stonewall

From left: Susan Bellows, David Carter, David Heilbroner, Kate Davis, Martin Boyce

Last night I attended what was billed as a preview clip of a work in progress of the American Experience's forthcoming documentary on Stonewall. The filmmakers were at pains to say this 7-minute sample of talking heads (Stonewall patrons, the arresting police officer, historians, awesome Virginia Apuzzo) was merely a "pastiche," a "taste" of the 90-minute broadcast planned for April 2010. They also promised that the final version would put the riots in "context," though in amplifying that, the wife and husband directing team of Kate Davis and David Heilbroner mentioned only the "incredible archival trove of homophobia" and pervasive anti-gay views across America at the time. During the clip and the lengthy discussion, no one ever referenced Harry Hay, ONE, Phyllis & Del, Daughters of Bilitis, the Mattachine Society, ECHO, the picketing of the White House and Philadelphia's City Hall, or any other gay history prior to 1969. Stonewall is an essential, explosive midpoint in the timeline of gay rights, but the filmmakers will commit a crushing injustice if they cast it as the birth of the movement.

For seventeen years before the riots, organized gay groups fought for gay equality, published gay magazines, won Supreme Court cases (1958), held national gay conferences (1960), successfully lobbied state legislatures to rescind their sodomy laws (1962), and promoted gay visibility, protesting publicly against anti-gay discrimination (1965). To erase these landmark achievements by claiming that the gay rights movement began with a bar brawl is to disgrace those pioneers and history itself. God knows bravery wears many outfits and symbols are powerful, but the drag queens and Stonewall regulars fighting police and doing chorus line kicks while singing, "We are the Village girls, we wear our hair in curls," mustn't obliterate their less cinematic, more scholarly forerunners.

A main source for the series is David Carter and his book Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, which does acknowledge the earlier activists.

Among director Kate Davis's many documentaries is Southern Comfort about a FTM trans man dying of ovarian cancer who falls in love with a MTF. Rigorously avoiding sensationalism and stereotype, it won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 2001. Her statement for the DVD begins, "This June marks the 40th Anniversary of the Stonewall riots. In June of 1969, for the first time, transgendered and gay youth fought back against the police because they were fed up with oppression..."

American Experience producer Susan Bellows mentioned that the series has created 275 films over the years, and I asked her how many of those dealt with gay life. She said this was the first. She asked if I thought there was a particular event in American history they'd missed. Feeling that 1 in 275 inadequately represents lgbt contributions to society, I said, "Well, there are people--" She nodded. "Right," she said. "We haven't done Harvey Milk." Subjects of previous films are zydeco music and Tupperware.