Band of Thebes

Ten LGBT Authors / Subjects on NYT's 100 Notable Books List

This coming Sunday the New York Times will publish its 100 notable books of 2009. Congratulations to eight lgbt authors among the honored, as well as the two straight writers (Kingslover, Bailey) whose books examine closeted lives.

For a more interesting survey of the year's best books, come back on Wednesday.

FICTION

Stacey D'Erasmo, The Sky Below

Peter Ackroyd, The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein

Barbara Kingslover, The Lacuna

Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

NONFICTION

Blake Bailey, Cheever: A Life

Frank Bruni, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater

Dave Cullen, Columbine

Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor

Thomas Mallon, Yours Ever: People and Their Letters

Edmund White, City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s

Uganda Update: UK, Canada Vocal Against Anti-Gay Bill, US Silent

Over the weekend at the Commonwealth conference in Trinidad, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni the UK strongly opposed the African nation's draconian bill that would authorize the death penalty for gay people. Canada's Prime Minister Stephen Harper also attacked the proposed legislation publicly and on the record, saying, "We deplore these kinds of measures." The week before, Museveni had blamed the increase in Uganda's gay population on "European homosexuals" who "are recruiting in Africa."

Also at the conference, Stephen Lewis gave an excellent, widely quoted speech comparing the bill to fascism and apartheid. Peter Tatchell points out 40 of the 53 Commonwealth nations still have laws banning homosexuality and most of these are the legacy of Britain's colonial rule.

Meanwhile, the White House has been silent. So far the only U.S. official to comment has been the mid-level State Department ambassador at large and PEPFAR czar, Eric Goosby. Confronted by Newsweek, he said his role is "not to tell a country how to put forward their legislation." Goosby further diffused the issue by broadening it to a generalism, "I'm very concerned about any decision that any country — including our own — would make to target a group that's in the population, and that's always been in the population, by excluding them from a service or passes legislation that criminalizes their behavior." 

Last week, Terry Gross broke the story on Fresh Air that the Uganda legislation came from the religious political cabal The Family. Read her interview with author Jeff Sharlet and, if you can stand to, study his bestselling book on the fundamentalist powerbrokers like John Ensign and Mark Sanford who are bringing us closer to their goal of complete theocracy.

Yesterday, Rick Warren refused to condemn the anti-gay legislation, saying, "It is not my personal calling as a pastor in America to comment or interfere in the political process of other nations."

Born November 29: Billy Strayhorn, Peter Cameron

Jazz genius Billy Strayhorn spent his life in a jam: professionally, he couldn’t live with or without Duke Ellington. Gay in an intolerant time and homophobic musical subculture, he was lucky to be able to live and work openly behind the protective band leader. Yet Ellington took credit for Strayhorn’s music and made him work without a contract. Duke’s highest earning number, his signature tune, the “holy grail” of the era, Take the A Train, was, unknown to everyone at the time, written by Strayhorn, who never received any royalties. Ellington got rich. Strayhorn worked mainly to be able to work, without recognition or reward. But what work it is: Lush Life, Day Dream, Rain Check, Satin Doll, Chelsea Bridge, Lotus Blossom, Clementine, Johnny Come Lately, and many songs recorded by his dear friend Lena Horne, including Maybe, Something To Live For, and the double-edged Love Like This Can’t Last. As for his own “love like this,” within his first year in New York he and his boyfriend Aaron Bridgers moved in together and lived openly as a couple in Harlem, brave for 1940, when he was twenty-four. And, after a life of heavy drinking and constant smoking, when he died of cancer of the esophagus at fifty-one, he died not in Lena Horne’s arms as an oft-repeated story has it [she was in Europe], but with his partner Bill Grove. Although that was two years before Stonewall, Strayhorn worked in the early gay rights movement. Proving the depth of the prejudice he struggled against, even now the official Billy Strayhorn website completely de-gays him. We've had the prestigious biography for thirteen years; where is the Hollywood biopic?

How to celebrate fifty years of Peter Cameron? Maybe readers should send thank you notes to his formative influences: Pompton Plains, NJ, the American School in London, Hamilton College, and The New Yorker? Definitely everyone ought to re-read his wonderful fifth novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You. The Toronto Star said it's "considerably more sophisticated, subtle, and rewarding" than Catcher in the Rye. Another way to celebrate is to pray that the movie of his fourth novel, The City of Your Final Destination, is released here. It stars Laura Linney and Charlotte Gainsbourg, and an unhappy Anthony Hopkins who sued Merchant-Ivory for $750,000 for his work in it. If we're very lucky, his new novel will be finished and out next year.

Auden and Britten in Alan Bennett's The Habit of Art

Alan Bennett has written a complex new play, directed again by Nicholas Hytner, about an imagined late life meeting between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten adapting Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. (If you're counting, that = gay x 6.) According to the critic for the Times of London, "The Habit of Art is a richly thought-provoking piece about many things, including artistic creation, the vulgarity of biography, sexuality, friendship, the bubble of reputation, but it also has an intriguingly autobiographical feel at times. What sort of artist have I been? Will anything survive?"

Put another way, the Guardian's "What To Say" column said, "Gay creative types moan about getting old."

The Hollywood Reporter summarizes the play within a play structure:

The setting is one day in the rehearsal at the National Theater of a play titled "Caliban's Day," based on a poem called "The Sea and the Mirror" by W.H. Auden. The author, Neil (Elliot Levey), is on hand as stage manager Kay (Frances de la Tour) oversees a run-through.

Richard Griffiths is Fitz, somewhat reluctantly playing Auden, with Alex Jennings as Henry, who is cast as British composer Benjamin Britten. The play within the play deals with the friendship between the two men, both noted homosexuals, and a fictitious reunion late in life.

Britten is grappling with an opera based on Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" and having trouble with the libretto. He doesn't ask Auden outright to write it, but the poet jumps at the chance. The encounter, though, is a kind of audition as the two men's conversation roams over their respective approaches to art and their private natures. There is also an important interruption by a young rent boy named Stuart (Stephen Wight), who shows up for a sex appointment with Auden.

Also in the play within the play is another real-life character, Humphrey Carpenter, who wrote biographies of the two accomplished figures and is used as a kind of voice-over. Bennett has great fun in the back-and-forth between Donald, the actor cast as Carpenter, played by Adrian Scarborough, and the playwright about the purpose of such a device. He also draws many laughs from interplay among the author, the stage manager and the actors.

This is yet another of Bennett's works to star The History Boys' Richard Griffiths who, the NYT critic says, gives "the performance of his career." In the Telegraph, Charles Spencer considers the play, "A smash hit if ever I saw one." The Independent gives it five stars. The Guardian notes, Bennett "has proved that there are big audiences out there for complicated dramas about clever dead people discussing things – provided that they pause from time to time for an archly crafted gag."

As for the 75 year old Bennett's own habit of art, he writes about writing his play in the London Review of Books.

Born November 26: John Amaechi

Growing up, John Amaechi always felt different: He was 6'10", mixed-race, with a Nigerian father and a British mother who raised him in Stockport, England, then he was doubly an outsider attending high school in the mid-1980s in Toldeo, Ohio and college at Vanderbilt and Penn State. So being gay was just one more distinction. Naturally he played basketball, but he was atypical in professional sports as well. In 2000, Amaechi turned down a $17 million contract with the Los Angeles Lakers in order to play for $600,000 a year with the Orlando Magic. His reason? Three years before, Orlando had been the only team to consider picking him up after his European stint. He also played for the Chicago Bulls, the Houston Rockets, and the Utah Jazz before retiring in 2003. His career stats can be found here. Early in 2007 he became the first player associated with the NBA to come out, when ESPN Books published his autobiography, Man in the Middle. He is beautifully articulate. He owns a consulting company that provides motivational speakers and executive training, and he runs the ABC Foundation in Manchester which had hoped to build youth sports centers throughout the U.K.

Sordid Truths by Aiden Shaw

So there you are in the showers at your gym, after your workout, simultaneously exhausted and energized, and in walks a handsome hardbody positioning himself under the spigot next to yours. That first impression wasn't wrong: He's hot. Beautiful backside. Lean muscle, great face, killer mouth. You're human, when he turns, you look: He's endowed like Harvard. ($35 billion.) Better still, he seems actually friendly. And frisky. All systems say go, yet in these perilous times, that one crucial question hovers over the mating dance: But can he write?

In the case of Aiden Shaw the answer is, Yes, or given his career as an award winning porn star of more than fifty adult films perhaps that should be, F--k yes. Dubbed by inferior wordsmiths "The Brit with the Big Dick," the London native turned California porn sensation penned a collection of poems and three novels in his thirties, Brutal, Boundaries, and Wasted. In 2006, when he turned forty, Shaw earned a Masters degree in creative writing and published his first memoir, My Undoing. Apparently that book covers eight years in his porn career, but not sidestepping his Irish Catholic family, his unfulfilling relationships, and his HIV+ status in a sex industry.

Published this month, his new memoir, Sordid Truths, starts earlier and goes longer. I read three chapters and really liked it. Shaw knows about pace and timing, withholding and delivering. And he understands people. Even while dazzling his clients working as an escort, he's alert to the complexities of sexual transactions. On his very first outing he has a mercurial john who morphs through many personalities in their brief time together: fussy old man who addresses baby talk questions to his dog throughout sex, mad scientist, Roman emperor, slavish submissive. On his website Shaw offers an excerpt from what he says is his favorite chapter, about a group of teenagers at the YMCA and a meaningful shower with one of them. You can read the escort chapter on Alyson's site. It also includes the preface, which felt like a weak beginning. Skippable, save for the one line from Shaw's "biggest fan" in a San Francisco bar who tells his idol, "It must be kind of weird being you."

Look at his adorably NSFW work with Pierre & Gilles here.

Born November 21,22,23: Christine Vachon, André Gide, Bruce Vilanch

Listen to Bette Midler: "Bruce was the first man to put something in my mouth that made us both money." She and Vilanch began working together in 1970 after she read his Chicago Tribune review of her show saying she needed more jokes. She called him and said, So write me some. The Oscars head writer and New Hollywood Squares star has also created comic material for Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Diana Ross, David Letterman, Billy Crystal, and Whoopi Goldberg. Vilanch has punched up many, many Hollywood scripts, including films that don't immediately seem to bear his razor humor, like Die Hard 2 and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he has acted in Mahogany, Ice Pirates, and The Morning After. He's also starred on Broadway as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, for which he shaved off his signature thirty-year shaggy blond beard, and off Broadway in his own show Almost Famous. He is the subject of the a-list love explosion Get Bruce! and appears in Laughing Matters. Beyond being funny, Vilanch has been a tireless supporter of many aids and gay rights causes.

On December 10, 1947, at City Hall in Stockholm, a Swedish man spoke to France's ambassador about "the venerable master of French literature whose genius has so profoundly influenced our time." Of course, that was André Gide and he was, at seventy-eight, too ill to receive his Nobel Prize for Literature in person. (Read the academy's citation speech here.) The award capped a rollercoaster career that began with the publication of a novella when Gide was twenty-two in 1891, reached successive peaks with The Immoralist (1902), Strait Is the Gate (1909), and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914); plummeted with the publication of Corydon (1920), his nonfiction book in praise of homosexuality'; soared again with his best novel, The Counterfeiters (1925); and immediately shocked certain segments of the public again with his  autobiography, If It Die (1926) with his joyful memories of teenage masturbating under the dining room table with concierge's son or his adult lovemaking with an Arab youth on a sand dune in Algeria. While in North Africa, Gide had also befriended Oscar Wilde. The following year he published Travels in the Congo, his greatly influential attack on French colonialism. That trip marked the end of his eleven year relationship with Marc Allégret, who had eloped with him when he was fifteen or sixteen and Gide was forty-seven. (Allégret's father had been the best man at Gide's never-consummated wedding and wasn't bothered at all by their affair; Gide's wife, however, didn't like being left behind and burned all of his letters in retaliation. Marc Allégret went on to direct more than fifty films.) After spending the war and post-war years in Tunis, Gide returned to Paris where he died in 1951. In 1952, the Catholic church put all of his works on their Index of Forbidden Books.

Where would Todd Haynes be without Christine Vachon? Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, and I'm Not There -- she produced them all. For that matter, where would independent cinema be if the New York native had chosen another career? Forty-seven today, she's produced more than thirty-seven features. A few highlights: Swoon, Go Fish, Kids, Stonewall, Office Killer, I Shot Andy Warhol, Happiness, Boys Don't Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Storytelling, and One Hour Photo; as well as Robert Altman's The Company, John Waters' A Dirty Shame, The Notorious Betty Paige, Infamous, Party Monster, and A Home at the End of the World. As if producing more than three dozen pictures wasn't enough, in her spare time she's written two books about making meaningful movies with no money, Shooting To Kill and A Killer Life. Next year watch for What's Wrong with Virginia, Dustin Lance Black directing his own script with Jennifer Connelly, Ed Harris, and Emma Roberts.

Stephen McCauley's True Enough Is French Film La Vérité ou Presque

Proving their superior taste, the French adapted Stephen McCauley's novel True Enough into a Karin Viard - François Cluzet film, La vérité ou presque, two years ago. Last year Variety raved, "the wry, sharply observed script offers some zingy dialogue, delectably delivered by the top-flight cast." And, "Entire ensemble cast displays sophisticated comic timing while etching universally recognizable character types and emotional situations. Production and costume design also do a terrific job of establishing character and setting." Ironically the critic's ultimate judgment was that the movie is "a natural for English-language remake." Not to quibble but then Anne, Vincent, and Lyon could revert to Jane, Desmond, and Boston.

The screen above shows the real trailer, in French, while the clip below shows a couple scenes with subtitles. Two more French clips here. Now that you know about it, you can hunt down the French DVD or demand your local film festival procure the subtitled version.

After five wonderful novels, McCauley is hugely revered in literary circles and by smart readers everywhere. I don't know his sales figures but my hunch is that he hasn't yet gained the vast mass audience or major prizes his wise and funny work deserves. (He is altogether better than Nick Hornby, and more comic than Ian McEwan.) Hard as it is to choose a first among equals, True Enough is his best book. This holiday season buy it for yourself and anyone who reads.

Uganda Protests in New York & DC

This afternoon, dozens of demonstrators gathered in New York and DC protesting Uganda's newly introduced bill that would make homosexuality punishable by death. I joined a crowd of about 50 people outside the Uganda Mission to the UN. The terrific spokesperson, Amanda Lugg of the African Services Committee read a strong letter condemning the legislation and, with an IGLHRC colleague, entered the building attempting to deliver the letter to officials. Returning outside, she explained they could only give it to the head of security, a Ugandan man who said he was unaware of the bill and planned to work for aids prevention when he returns to Uganda in two years. My partner and my father were among the 40 protesters outside the Uganda Embassy in DC, a few of whom are pictured below. 

So You Think You Can Chant? The East Coast Battle Is On!

New York: "The bill is illegal! Don't kill gay people!"

Washington: "Defend the Constitution! No gay execution!"

The Times' (UK) Best 100 Books of the Decade

Difficult as it is to take seriously a 100 best list that excludes The Great Fire, Bel Canto, Snow, and Kafka on the Shore, the Times' attempt is notable for its lgbt books:

16. Carol Ann Duffy, Rapture

28. Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

29. Ali Smith, The Accidental

42. Alison Bechdel, Fun Home

45. Peter Ackroyd, London

46. Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex

61. Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty

62. Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

70. Jeanette Winterson, The PowerBook

If you grew up in the land of Defoe, Fielding, Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Eliot, Hardy, Conrad, Forster, Lawrence, Wilde, Wells, Woolf, Welch, Waugh, Pym, etc., etc., would you find it odd that the Times of London top fifteen titles of the decade had only one British story, and that was stuck down at number nine?

As it happens, the Telegraph's top 100 has the same title at number nine, so it really must be the ninth best book of the decade, but their only lgbt titles are The Night Watch at #78 and The Line of Beauty at #58. The Telegraph has more UK spirit: Harry Potter is #1, Zadie Smith is #8, and Katie Price, yes that Katie Price, is #6. (So confusing, because Miss Price is #3 on the Times' five worst list.)