Band of Thebes

Born August 29: Edward Carpenter

Ardent socialist (author of the anthem England Arise, founding member of the Independent Labour Party), feminist (saying, “there is no solution except the freedom of woman,” he considered traditional marriage to be a form of prostitution), gay activist (his ground-breaking books like My Days and Dreams and The Intermediate Sex go far beyond earlier essays by his friend John Addington Symonds), pacifist, nudist, mystic, poet, and the first person to introduce sandals to modern Britain, Edward Carpenter’s greatest legacy may be how he lived his life. Utterly changed after reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1863, he began to dream of a brotherhood of manly love that would erase class lines and give rise to a true democracy. After graduating from Cambridge and leaving a position vacated by Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, Carpenter gave public lectures in Leeds intended for the working class (but attended only by the middle class, who didn’t warm to his ideas) and sought to befriend laborers, unsuccessfully. Finally in 1891, after meeting by chance on a train, he and uneducated George Merrill became lovers. In 1898, when Carpenter was fifty-four and Merrill was thirty-two, they established a house together, absolutely unheard of in an England still widely antigay in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trials. They lived together openly as a couple for thirty years until Merrill’s death, and their cross-class love was the direct inspiration for their friend E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, as well as D.H. Lawrence’s heterosexualized version, Lady Chatterley's Lover. Not all authors were so enamored. In the decade after Carpenter’s death, George Orwell ridiculed “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac” among the Socialists. Yet an American Communist, Harry Hay, credited Carpenter’s writings for galvanizing him to start the first gay rights group, The Mattachine Society, in Los Angeles in 1950. Last year's Lammy winning biography of Carpenter by Sheila Rowbotham was Peter Tatchell's and Jeanette Winterson's favorite book of 2008.

Born August 28: Karl Ulrichs

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had an affair with his riding instructor when he was fourteen, was forced to quit his civil servant job for being gay when he was thirty-four, and began publishing pamphlets explaining and defending same-sex love when he was thirty-seven. Five years later, the day after his forty-second birthday, he addressed the German congress, coming out publicly and demanding they repeal their anti-gay laws. It was 1867, one hundred two years before Stonewall, and he was shouted down before he could finish his speech. Though his books were banned in Saxony and Berlin he continued writing on the subject for the rest of his life. In 1870, he published Araxes, which lays out all of the modern arguments for the rights of gay citizens. In 1879, he published the twelfth volume of his ongoing project, Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love, and moved to Italy, which was more hospitable. Indeed, Ulrichs was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Naples shortly before he died, one month prior to his seventieth birthday. Today, streets are named for him in Bremen, Hanover, and Munich, where this afternoon they will celebrate with their annual street party and poetry reading in Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Platz. In his final years, he wrote

“Until my dying day I will look back with pride that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the spectre which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt.”

Born August 26: Christopher Isherwood

Vastly underappreciated, and largely remembered for the wrong reasons, Christopher Isherwood changed the way fiction is written with his "I am a camera" style of narration. Read his interview in the Paris Review's series The Art of Fiction and make time for one of the best gay books ever, Christopher and His Kind, which is equally enthralling about literary revelations and sexual mores: Rejecting his uptight, upperclass England, Isherwood spent much of his twenties in Berlin where he dated working class teens. Falling in love with young Heinz at a time when living quarters were especially scarce, he moved into Heinz's family's one bedroom apartment; the parents moved out of their bedroom and slept in the living room so the twenty-five year-old Brit could enjoy a double bed in privacy with their fifteen year-old son. Another person he met was Jean Ross, on whom he based Sally Bowles in his The Berlin Stories, which of course became Cabaret. After moving to England and to New York with Auden, and further literary successes, Isherwood settled permanently in Los Angeles, where when he was forty-eight he met sixteen year-old Don Bachardy. They remained partners for over thirty years until Isherwood's death in 1986. Their relationship is the subject of last year's documentary,  Chris & Don. A Love Story. Get on the Isherwood bandwagon now, before designer turned director Tom Ford's adaptation of A Single Man hits theaters following its Venice Film Festival debut next week.

Love Is the Higher Law by David Levithan

An influential executive at Scholastic, David Levithan wrote his first novel for young readers, the much-loved Boy Meets Boy, because he said it was the book he always dreamed of getting as an editor. His Lambda Literary Award-winning, self-described "dippy, happy gay teen novel," was published by Knopf in 2003 and every year since then he's written a new book. Thanks to the enjoyable, low-key Michael Cera movie, Levithan's best known work is Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, one of two books he's co-written with Rachel Cohn. This week is the release of Love Is the Higher Law, about three students (two gay boys and a straight girl) during and after 9/11. PW praised it. This Kirkus review is mixed but offers a better plot summary:
"Claire sees the attack from the windows of her downtown high school. Peter watches the second plane hit while standing in line at Tower Records. Jasper, home from college and hung over, oversleeps and sees the World Towers collapse over and over on television. Emotions swirl and love is found, lost and regained. The characters feel current within the historical setting, but the music and film references read more like 30-something ephemera instead of 2001 teen culture. Levithan stumbles most with voice: Often Peter's and Claire's lose their clarity and pack too much wistful adult wisdom. Though not pitch-perfect throughout, Jasper's feels the strongest, especially when he struggles through a fumbling date with Peter. Their scenes together are the most memorable, probably because love stories are what the author does best. He's got two here: one between the two boys, one between New York City and humanity."

Levithan is in good company. After a fifteen year hiatus from novels, Lorrie Moore returns next week with her book about 9/11 seen through the eyes of a 20 year-old in A Gate at the Stairs.

Read an excerpt from Love Is the Higher Law here.

Born August 25: Rob Halford

Hiding in plain sight for more than twenty years, the closeted lead singer of Judas Priest modeled his look on the gay leather scene which then became a heavy metal mainstay. From 1974 to 1992, Rob Halford fronted the band, wowing fans with his pseudo-operatic style of singing and impressing critics with his nearly four octave vocal range. Offstage, he struggled with alcohol dependency and violent relationships, the worst moment coming after a bad fight: When Halford got a taxi, his boyfriend shot himself and died. After that, Halford improved his life. In 1997, he played gigs with Pansy Division at gay pride parties and the next year he came out on MTV. In 2003, he reunited with Judas Priest. Last year the band released their second post-reunion album, Nostradamus, and played on the Masters of Metal Tour. Halford lives in Phoenix, San Diego, Amsterdam, and his native Walsall, England, hometown also to Boy George. Since coming out, Halford says the support of the metal community has been "tremendous."

Why the Tundra Is Treeless

Why does nothing on the tundra grow higher than four or six inches? It's not the lack of sunlight. As Barry Lopez points out in his National Book Award-winning Arctic Dreams, the extreme north gets the same amount of light annually as the Equator. And it's not the cold. Siberia is among the coldest places on Earth yet it supports the world's largest forests. And it isn't the permafrost. Siberian Larch trees easily grow up to 130 feet high on permafrost because of their very shallow roots. The answer is the lack of heat. E.C. Pielou explains it in her wonderful handbook A Naturalist's Guide to the Arctic:

"Nearly all of its annual growth must be devoted to producing the essentials for life: the leaves without which it would starve, and the roots and other underground parts in which it stores the food made in summer to tide it over the rest of the year. There is nothing left to convert into wood, which is what gives a tree the strength and rigidity to stand upright. In a nutshell, leaves and roots are a necessity, wood is a luxury."

Nevertheless, the tundra yields an immense range of tiny wildflowers. On a short walk I was astonished by the varieties of yellow, pink, and purple blossoms. Below is arctic cotton.

Born August 24: Stephen Fry

Please don't say you still think the initials SF stand for San Francisco: It's Stephen Fry's world. In February of this year, Fry was the second most-followed person on Twitter (after the U.S. president). In 2007 the Independent ranked him the UK's most influential gay. A polymath, a national treasure, a wit, an actor, director, novelist and out activist, he gracefully displays all his talents on his extremely popular blog.

Growing up in a good family in Booton, near Reepham, Fry was expelled from two or three schools, attempted suicide, and dabbled in credit card fraud earning him three months in Pucklechurch Prison when he was 17. Newly motivated, he attended Cambridge, where his closest friends were Hugh Laurie, Emma Thompson, and Kenneth Branagh. Their antics in the Footlights Revue were broadcast on television as The Cellar Tapes in 1982 and from there his career unrolled with steady successes: Blackadder, a Tony award for his Me and My Girl libretto, Jeeves & Wooster, and writing several acclaimed novels such as The Liar and The Hippopotamus. But his private life was unraveling and he had a very public breakdown in 1995, memorably captured in John Lahr's The New Yorker essay about stagefright. (In the first week of a big, new West End show, Fry suddenly couldn't go on, wrote his goodbye letters, went to his garage to kill himself, and instead drove to Jutland. The show had to close, losing 300,000 pounds.) His triumphant comebacks in 1997 included his perfect embodiment of Wilde and his autobiography Moab Is My Washpot. Fry's longtime partner is David Cohen and he is godfather to all three of Hugh Laurie's children. This November, you'll finally be able to buy the US edition of his book Stephen Fry in America, the companion volume to his six-part series in which he visits all fifty states. In an inspired bit of casting, his next role, in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, is the Chesire Cat.

Cambridge Mayor & Her Wife: Nation's First Black Church Gay Wedding

Exactly eight blocks down Harvard Street from Skip Gates' house is St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church, where this Sunday the nation's first lesbian black mayor will marry her partner in America's first same sex wedding in a black church. In terms of actual historical significance, the legal union of Cambridge Mayor Denise Simmons and Mattie Hayes by a black minister in a black church is more important than the wrongful arrest of a black professor in his own house by a white police officer. Monday morning, for the first time ever, lgbt members of black churches nationwide will wake up with the leverage of being able to say to their pastors, "St. Barts will marry us, why won't you?" and conscientious black leaders will have to begin shifting their thinking from "if" to "when." As all houses of worship grapple with degrees of lgbt acceptance and as religious organizations play an increasing decisive role in US politics, this first minority foothold marks a monumental step forward in the march toward equality. It should be a national story, yet it hasn't even appeared in the Boston Globe five days after Simmons sent out her press release. You might ask why the black preachers who speak against homosexuality get so much coverage in the mainstream media while this good news is ignored by everyone: NYT, LAT, WashPo, CNN, even Towleroad and Pam's House Blend haven't mentioned it. Possibly they're waiting until after the nuptials, but it's already big news online in the UK and France. 

Simmons' press release concludes with:

“I believe this may be the very first African-American church to hold a same gender wedding, and that’s something that just wouldn’t have happened years ago. But times are changing, people are becoming more accepting of their fellow citizens, and we are slowly arriving at more of a ‘live-and-let-live’ kind of world. It’s not an easy process, and there have certainly been some detours along the way, but I think all the kind words I’ve received about this ceremony suggest we’re living in a friendlier, more open society. Our society is definitely making progress.”

Really, Simmons and Hayes should be the Cambridge-ites invited to the White House for a beer. Or champagne.

Born August 21: Aubrey Beardsley

Was it his perpetual struggles with tuberculosis, from age nine to his death at twenty-five, that gave Aubrey Beardsley's Nouveau, pre-Raphaelite drawings their stylized touch of the morbid? At twenty he earned his first commission, to create 300 drawings for an edition of Morte d'Arthur. The following year, 1893, Oscar Wilde's publisher hired Beardsley to create the art for the print version of Salome, which very successfully shocked certain segments of society with its sexualized images. If you're picturing a glimpse of stocking, you don't know your Victorian porn: Beardsley's blatant x-rated male drawings are as whimsical as they are erotic. Yet it was his public association with Wilde that got him fired from influential arts journal The Yellow Book following the latter's infamous conviction for gross indecency in 1895. After lesser editorial jobs and more enduring book commissions, Beardsley left the increasingly inhospitable England for his health. In 1898 he died in France, as Wilde would two years later.

Jeanette Winterson's Big Fall for Children: 2 Books, 1 TV Show

"Expect great fun and plenty of zest," said Jeanette Winterson in the press release announcing her new BBC kids show, but the words could just as easily apply to her two forthcoming books for children.

The Lion, the Unicorn and Me (48 pages, October 5) "In this beautifully evocative retelling of the story of the very first Christmas, the humble donkey is chosen amongst all the other animals, including the kingly lion and the proud unicorn. As his journey unfolds, he is touched by the magic and mystery of the Nativity."

The Battle of the Sun (400 pages, November 2) "Jack is the chosen one, the Radiant Boy the Magus needs in order to perfect the alchemy that will transform London of the 1600s into a golden city. But Jack isn't the kind of boy who will do what he is told by an evil genius, and he is soon involved in an epic and nail-biting adventure, featuring dragons, knights and Queen Elizabeth I, as he battles to save London."

Ingenious (BBC) "Una Stubbs will star in Ingenious, the story of 11-year-old Sally, who lives on a farm with her grandmother and friends. The children find a mysterious old glass bottle which leads them on a magical adventure. As the nearby Jodrell Bank telescope picks up curious signs, the children and a local author suspect a dragon could be at large." According to a Guardian story, "The one-off drama, which will air on BBC1 later this year, will also star David Calder, whose credits include The Mummy and Bramwell; Ian Puleston Davies, who appeared in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Waterloo Road's Christine Tremarco."

On her website, Winterson describes how all this happened:

"The strange thing is that the two books were both responses to my complete and utter defeat and depression.

"The Christmas story was originally written for The Times in 2007. I had been in Holland to give a big lecture and I was in such a state that for the first time ever I didn’t think I could perform. I had broken up with my partner [Peggy Reynolds] in the summer and I had reason to hope that we might be making a way back to each other, but the night before the lecture we had had a very bad phone call and it was clear that everything was over.

"I did do the lecture, and rather well, but at great personal cost. When I got back to freezing home – and no milk in the fridge, and no one there, and I had so hoped there would be someone there – I couldn’t even face lighting the fire or cooking, so I put on my old tweed coat, ate cold baked beans with a spoon from the tin, and started the Xmas story.

"I stayed up most of the night writing the story, and in the morning, when it got light, I felt very much better. It was one of those acts of grace, a thing that comes like a gift, and makes you feel you are not alone, not worthless, not lost.

"It turned out to be one of the best short pieces I have ever done, and Kate Wilson, editor at Scholastic, read it to her little girl, and they both loved it, and she emailed me in the new year and asked if they could publish it as an illustrated book.

"But it is only right to say that after that moment of grace things got much worse, impossibly so, until March, when in that early Easter when in snowed, and I had taken to my bed for four days with Mark Doty’s glorious Dog Years, for no reason, I wanted to start writing again.

"What I began was The Battle of the Sun, and I did not know how it would work or what I was writing; it was just necessary to write. So everyday I went to work in my studio and stayed there for about 5 hours, and just went with the process, which became more and more absorbing, and took me back to read Jung: Mysterium Conjunctions, which is his arcane book about alchemy, and not for the faint-hearted, but if you liked AION, you can probably cope with MC. But you don’t have to because The Battle of the Sun will do it for you."