Band of Thebes

Bait by Alex Sanchez

If there's any justice, this year's National Book Award finalists for children's literature will include Bait, the seventh YA novel from Lammy winning author Alex Sanchez, about a smart, troubled, straight 16 year-old legal Mexican immigrant named Diego MacMann. Constantly at war with himself, Diego wants help but would rather deny his problem ever happened. He wears a shark's tooth on a necklace and when he's overwhelmed, he takes it off and cuts his arms with it. (Hence all the long-sleeved shirts even in hot weather.) Also, he flares into sudden rages and punches holes in his bedroom walls or hits his classmates, particularly a gay boy wearing purple fingernail polish who looks at him "funny." Diego's Irish stepfather forced himself on Diego from an early age and even three years after his stepfather's death, Diego doesn't feel he's escaped him. In the book's measured account, it's clear that the likeliest outcome in this particular case is that Diego will be destroyed by the trauma and self-loathing. Try as he does to behave for his mother who works two jobs and to help his younger half-brother, Diego just can't cope. He thinks about swimming out to sea until he drowns.

The book opens with Diego and his mother meeting the potential probation officer Mr. Vidas, whom Diego initially dislikes but comes to realize might actually be a grownup who will listen to him. Angering all the adults who worked out a deal to avoid probation, Diego interrupts the judge in court to say he wants probation. So begins the two-steps-forward-one-step-back relationship between Diego and the sympathetic but overworked and slightly guarded Mr. Vidas, who Diego does not understand is gay. That unwanted revelation is one of many setbacks on their difficult road. Drawing their sessions deftly and with affection, Sanchez shows perfect command of the territory because he used to be a probation officer. Despite the heavy subject, he gives his characters a good sense of humor and notices quirky details in their lives. (Responding to Mr. Vidas's point-to-your-emotion chart, Diego says, "You should have a smiley face for 'It sucked.'") Subplots with Diego's best friend Kenny and his new girlfriend Ariel add other layers of texture to this moving, memorable novel. Among the year's best.

School Library Journal said, "Unlike most recent fiction that addresses sexual abuse, this story focuses not on the telling of secrets, but on making sense of the experience and building a healthy foundation for moving forward. This groundbreaking novel brings to life an appealing young man who is neither totally a victim nor a victimizer, one who struggles to handle conflicts that derail many young lives. Teens will identify with Diego’s dreams and frustrations, his feeling of difference, his yearning for “normal” life and relationships. High interest and accessible, this coming-of-age story belongs in every collection. For the one in six boys who is sexually abused, it could be a lifesaver."

Kirkus said "Sanchez draws his characters lovingly, making it very apparent that he knows teens like Diego and genuinely understands their peril." But they found other elements of the story "groan-inducing" and "cringeworthy."

PW: "Sanchez does a masterful job explaining the protagonist's complicated emotions as he deals with his past."

Find out more about the six other, more gay-centric books by Sanchez, who divides his time between Florida and Thailand, on his website. And definitely read Bait.

Born July 31: Barbara Gittings

Barbara Gittings deserves a major museum exhibit, a biographer, and a feature film like Kinsey. She was heroic at least since her freshman year at Northwestern (1949-50), when a Chicago psychiatrist proposed to "cure" her lesbianism and, rather than submit, or fall apart, Gittings devoted all her time to studying homosexuality in the medical and legal libraries. The dreadful descriptions ("deviate," "pervert"), the exclusively male focus, and the lack of any mention of love only spurred her on. Typical gusto: When she found the anonymously written book The Homosexual in America, she called the publisher to find out who the author was and arranged to meet him. Later, she met Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, founders of the Daughters of Bilitis in California, and within two years she had begun a New York chapter despite living in Philadelphia. She edited the group's magazine, The Ladder, and became friends with Frank Kameny in Washington. Together they organized the phenomenal picketing of the White House in October 1965 and at Independence Hall, where Gittings carried a sign reading Homosexuals Demand Their Civil RIghts. She and Kameny were instrumental in convincing the APA to de-list homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. With her life partner Kay Lahusen, whom she met at a Daughters of Bilitis picnic in 1961, she never stopped working for gay equality. Several awards are named in her honor, including one from GLAAD. There should be more.

Still Fooled? Obama's Gay Symbols Over Substance Yet Again

In January, when gay people were upset by the lack of any high profile lgbt appointments to the cabinet and the decision to make the moral authority ushering in the new administration anti-abortion, anti-evolution, anti-gay Rick Warren, Obama's team -- breaking down those barriers, for the first time ever -- invited an lgbt marching band to perform in the Inauguration parade.

In June, after five months of inaction on lgbt issues capped by a vigorous legal defense of DOMA that equated gay marriage with incest, to quell the increasingly loud and mainstream outcry, Obama and Michelle -- breaking down those barriers, for the first time ever -- invited a couple hundred hand-picked non-critical lgbt leaders to the White House for cocktails and a speech that offered a lot of rhetoric, few specifics, and no timeline.

Now, after six months of hundreds of dismissals of lgbt servicemembers from the military, comes the news this week that the White House pressured Rep. Alcee Hastings to withdraw his add-on to the defense appropriations bill that would have prohibited the military from spending any money on kicking out gay servicemembers. Furthermore, Hastings says the White House still has not acknowledged or responded to his June letter co-signed by 70 other House representatives concerned about DADT. And today -- breaking down those barriers, for the first time ever -- the White House announced Obama is awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a dead gay man (Harvey Milk) and a living lesbian (Billie Jean King).

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Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces Includes at Least 5 LGBT Directors

Gay couples are winners. Mosher and Palmieri top at Silverdocs.

As bonds that lead to coupledom go, a shared passion for the photographer Helen Levitt is a pretty good one. So it was for Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher, just two of at least five lgbt up and comers named in the eleventh annual "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in Filmmaker Magazine's summer issue, on sale this week. They met in a drag club, talked about Levitt, fell in love, made a movie together, and won the Grand Jury prize at Silverdocs this year. Some of the other lgbt honorees' stories are even more inspiring.

Your gaydar may go off for other directors on the list, but the five out in their bios are:

Morgan Jon Fox's third movie OMG/HaHaHa won the best feature awards at Chicago's lgbt film festival and the Memphis Indie Fest. "He's also in post on This Is What Love in Action Looks Like, a documentary about a Memphis teen who sparked a local protest movement when he wrote on his blog about his parents' decision to send him to Love in Action, a Fundamentalist Christian program that tries to turn gay kids straight."

Tina Mabry's feature Mississippi Damned just won the jury award at LA's Outfest and previously garnered honors from festivals in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and New York, as well as the American Black Film Festival. "I grew up pretty poor in the South," Mabry told Filmmaker. "We didn't have a lot of opportunities presented to us. I wanted to tell a story that would look at my family's struggles in the South and how our community, the landscape and the politics of that community would define our lives." She appeared at the Queer Women of Color Film Festival after co-writing The Itty Bitty Titty Committee.

Nicole Opper's Off and Running about a Brooklyn lesbian couple raising three kids including an adopted black girl, Avery, who excels at high school track while questioning her place in the family. "After stops at Tribeca, NewFest, Silverdocs and Frameline, Off and Running will be broadcast on PBS' doc series POV." Her next doc looks at a home for abandoned boys in Mexico. She said, "I grew up in a very traditional family, with a mom and dad and brother, but I'm a Jewish lesbian who imagines adopting one day, so when I met Avery and discovered her background, I felt that could be my future." She lives in Philadelphia.

Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher: Silverdocs winners for October Country, their feature-length documentary that Filmmaker calls, "a visually seductive, conceptually concise yearlong portrait of director Mosher's own upstate New York extended family, a portrait that imbues these tough and oftentimes sad figures with a haunted poetry...his PTSD-afflicted father, his estranged Wiccan aunt, and a sister whose boyfriends all wind up as absentee fathers." Their next feature, Lab Rats, is about people who get paid to participate in medical trial studies. They live in Portland. 

Fundamentally at Odds with Himself: God Says No by James Hannaham

Despite the stupor-inducing heat and humidity and the region's reputation for long-windedness, a handful of Southern comic masterpieces like Charles Portis's The Dog of the South, Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints or Sportsman's Paradise, James Wilcox's Modern Baptists, or Susan Orlean's nonfiction The Orchid Thief are written with a lightning brevity so that every syllable opens fresh windows. At times in his first novel God Says No, James Hannaham approaches their mastery. Look at his description, from a child's view, of an older man: 

"When Dave smiled, he showed off all his teeth, top and bottom, and he made me guess which one wasn't real. I chose the wrong one. He gave us a lot of advice about how to get divorced, what fishing poles to buy, and how to cheat Breathalyzers and polygraphs."

Or his narrator's mother, who always expected her son to marry a nice black girl, meeting his bride for the first time at their wedding:

Later, in a private moment by the buffet table, my mother leaned toward me, staring at Annie as she fixed my eighty-six year old uncle's boutonniere. "So one of her parents black and the other Chinese?" she asked, a pin between her teeth. Annie's skin had grown tan from our trips to the beach. Timidly, I shook my head.

"What is she?"

"She's from Samoa."

"Sam-who-a?"

"Samoa. It's in the South Pacific."

"And she not mixed at all? I swear that girl is mixed. You mean to tell me with that flat nose--"

"No, Mama, there's no black."

"Samoa," my mother repeated, the way she might have if I'd brought home a girl from another galaxy. "That's a new one."

Hannaham captures many, many such crystalline moments in telling the story of an overweight young fundamentalist, Gary Gray, whose deep religious beliefs are at odds with his desire for sex with men in Orlando in the 1980s. From an abusive upbringing to a zealous Christian college to an ex-gay conversion center, Gary is forever chafing against his institutional identities. In fact, he tries to erase himself altogether, through two quick, botched suicide attempts and the book's long middle section in which he abandons his wife, daughter, and job to move to Atlanta under the alias August Valentine.

The readers who are eager for Gary to let go of his continued insistence that gay sex is wrong (while frequently cruising restrooms for instant anonymous hookups) and those anticipating Hannaham's insights on broader gay culture with characters enjoying a freer, more open life, will be frustrated. When the book seems headed there, after a few months living with man, an abrupt turn sends Gary to an ex-gay conversion therapy compound. It's a mild place and, like all important healing, Gary's progress against his shame is slow. In the novel's final pages he comes closer to being at peace with himself. His journey is important, it's true, and it's literature.

Lesbians Smoke More than Gay Men Do, Both Much More than Straights

A discouraging new report from UNC Chapel Hill confirms earlier findings that gay people are almost twice as likely to smoke than are straights. The numbers come from compiling forty-two studies of smoking habits:

37% of lesbians smoke    18% of straight women smoke
33% of gay men smoke    24% of straight men smoke

The Los Angeles Times quotes the report's lead author as saying, "Likely explanations include the success of tobacco industry's targeted marketing to gays and lesbians, as well as time spent in smoky social venues and stress from discrimination." Read UNC's full press release here.

Steven Lansburg takes on the NPR coverage of the report in his Slate column:

In other words, Varney implicitly assumes that gays are either too stupid to have gotten the message that smoking is bad for you or too irrational to have modified their behavior accordingly. A more inquisitive reporter might instead have raised the obvious question: What good reasons might gays have to smoke more than other people?

"Good reasons to smoke" ought to be a self-canceling phrase yielding the null set, but you can read Landsburg's thoughts on the subject here.

Born July 28: Sarah Schulman

Not sure of the exact math but Sarah Schulman deserves to be at least twelve times more prominent in American Letters than she is now. She's written one play, two nonfiction books, and nine novels, including the award winning After Delores as well as Shimmer, Empathy, and Rat Bohemia, which is one of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels of all time. Her novel People in Trouble was the uncredited basis for the musical Rent. In the legal wrangling, Jonathan Larson's estate agreed that the playwright had lifted Schulman's "setting, themes, characters, plot, and ideas," yet since he did not use her exact words and phrasings, it isn't plagiarism. Schulman was a member of ACT-UP from 1987 to 1992, and  with Jim Hubbard she's making The ACT UP Oral History Project. They are also filming United in Anger, a documentary about ACT UP. In 1992 she founded The Lesbian Avengers with five other women. They started Dyke March, now a global standard the night before gay pride. Her new novel The Mere Future, which imagines a squeaky-clean dystopian NYC where the only job is marketing, will be published on September 1. A new nonfiction book, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences will appear the following month on October 6.

Booker Longlist: Toibin, Waters, Trevor, Byatt, Mantel, Coetzee, 7 More

Judges for Britain's top literary award, the Man Booker Prize, announced their longlist today, including novels by out writers Colm Toibin and Sarah Waters, as well as forthcoming books by superstars A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee, Hilary Mantel, and William Trevor. It's Trevor's turn. (Above. More below.) If you don't spend all day reading London newspapers online, you may not know that Wolf Hall has received stupendous reviews for its look at Henry VIII through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt has earned the best notices of her career since Possession won the Booker in 1990. And Me Cheeta -- also hugely, extravagantly praised by trusted critics -- is indeed the memoir of Tarzan's simian sidekick and his adventures from Liberia to Hollywood in the 1930s.

The thirteen titles to make the longlist are:

A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book, US pub in October
J.M. Coetzee, Summertime, October
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze (no US pub scheduled)
Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man,  September
Samantha Harvey, The Wilderness
James Lever, Me Cheeta
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, October
Simon Mawer, The Glass Room (no US pub scheduled)
Ed O'Loughlin, Not Untrue and Not Unkind, next April
James Scudamore, Heliopolis  
Colm Toibin, Brooklyn
William Trevor, Love and Summer, September
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger 

William Trevor is the only four-time Booker nominee never to have won. If he makes the short list on September 8, he will join Margaret Atwood and Beryl Bainbridge as the only five-time nominees in the prize's forty-one year history. Both women have won the award, as has Iris Murdoch, the sole six-time nominee.

Be wary of people who make a big deal that lgbt writers Toibin and Waters are being lauded now for writing straight novels that contain no overt lgbt characters. Not an issue. Toibin has been shortlisted twice before for gay novels (The Master and The Blackwater Lightship). Waters has also been shortlisted twice for lesbian books (Fingersmith and The Night Watch). Brooklyn is a great achievement but I really hope William Trevor wins.

Born July 27: Troy Perry

In September 1968, when he was twenty-eight, the Rev. Troy Perry put an ad in the Advocate announcing worship services for gay and lesbian Christians. On October 6, twelve people gathered in his living room in Los Angeles for what would become the Metropolitan Community Church, which now has over 300 congregations in eighteen countries.
      Perry was thirteen when he preached his first sermon. His father had died when he was twelve and his new stepfather was violent and abusive to Perry and his four brothers. Perry ran away to stay with relatives in Georgia and Texas and began attending Pentecostal services, then entered their ministry. He married the daughter of pastor, had two sons, came out, was defrocked, divorced, and was barred from seeing his children until a reunion in 1985. He married his partner of twenty-three years, Phillip De Blieck, in Toronto in 2003 at the local MCC. The newlyweds sued California for their marriage to be recognized and won. When the State appealed, the ruling was overturned. Perry retired as Moderator of the church in 2005 and his successor, Nancy Wilson, was installed in a special service held in the Washington National Cathedral. Perry continues preaching, public speaking, writing, and fighting for social change .
      The MCC’s history has been equally tumultuous. Less than two years after opening their Mother Church in Los Angeles in 1971, it was burnt to the ground by arsonists who were never caught. Fires have been set to MCC buildings seventeen additional times. A New Orleans bar that had hosted MCC services was torched fives months after the Los Angeles fire and thirty-two people were killed, among them twelve MCC members including the pastor and assistant pastor. Much more about the MCC’s history can be read here.

Props from Milk, Moulin Rouge, Titanic, Benjamin Button To Be Auctioned

After forty years in Hollywood, Harvey Schwartz, the owner of 20th Century Props is selling his entire inventory of 97,532 items this week and next. The dozens of movies from which props will be sold include Milk, Moulin Rouge, The Godfather, The Aviator, Spider-Man, Ironman, Titanic, Ocean's 11 & 12, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Batman & Robin, Starsky & Hutch, Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Rush Hour, The Changeling, Minority Report, Austin Powers, and the 1934 version of Cleopatra. Props will also be sold from numerous television shows, music videos (by Michael Jackson, Madonna, Britney, Clapton, Fugees, and more), as well as annual specials like the Oscars and the Super Bowl. Anyone can bid in person or online during the live auctions July 28 through August 1. The LA Times has an audio slideshow narrated by Schwartz featuring 71 images of items for sale. More details are available from the auction site and the prop house. Of course you'll look good in Nicole Kidman's dragon armchair from Moulin Rouge, but what is there to covet from Milk? Go for the Aviator desk originally owned by Howard Hughes.