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.)

Hank Stuever, Augusten Burroughs on the Madness Known as Xmas

If you live outside the Washington Post's delivery zone, you may be unaware of the trenchant cultural analysis of openly gay staff writer and now television critic, two-time Pulitzer finalist Hank Stuever. Your loss. His insights are surpassed only by his vocabulary. Isn't "hinky" the best word ever to describe mainstream media's problems with lgbt coverage? Promoting his new book about how we live now, by looking at the mall-strom if you will of Christmas overload in Frisco, Texas from 2006 to 2008, Stuever gave a typically brainy, funny interview to MetroWeekly. Discussing de-gayed reportage:

"I was on a panel about this once, when the obituary thing was just out of control -- it was Luther Vandross, Susan Sontag, Ismail Merchant. There was a spate of them where the gayness had been left out, for various reasons. I said that the problem with the obituary thing is that we're talking about the ends of people's lives when, really, what we're bad at is covering gay life. The living, not the dead.

"I'm much more worried about how the Post and other mainstream outlets still approach gay with caution. We still haven't learned about just covering everyday gay, except in the food section and the home section. Washington was sort of the closet capital, and still is in a lot of ways. But the people have changed enough that the Post can at least not look completely unaware of the fact that there are lots and lots of influential, interesting and totally newsworthy gay people and gay things going on in town.

"But here's the thing, and I think this transcends media, and I hate saying this: Straight people, they're not so interested in us. They really aren't. And part of it is that to them gay equals a sexual act. The other part of the problem is gay equals not them, therefore not interested. I find this with my extremely enlightened straight friends, they still don't quite have a handle on the best reason for legalizing gay marriage, which is those thousand civil rights that just automatically transfer with a heterosexual marriage license from state to state. It takes some explaining to them to show how ludicrous it is to set up a crazy quilt America where some states have gay marriage and some states don't, because if I get married and then by some misfortune move back home to Oklahoma, my rights don't come with me.

"But broadly, people don't view gay as a culture, they view it as a sex act. And so the Washington Post gets hinky on it, all mainstream media get hinky on it, because they don't know anything about it. All they know is the idea of gay sex still makes them uncomfortable. Well, the idea of straight sex makes me uncomfortable, but there's a lot of it in our newspaper. We will always need our gay media to make sure that the fullest experience is represented."

Two trusted readers swear Stuever's Tinsel is terrific. With three Frisco families as his focal point, he expands his scope to discuss Christmas as our country's largest communal event and explains how the world economy hinges on holiday spending. Quoting one estimate that the nation's total for presents, decorating, and entertaining is $500 billion, he says, "Many of us dream of simple, 'down home' Christmases that involve togetherness, warmth, laughter--de-emphasizing retail purchases. But if too many of us chose to have a less commercial Christmas and cut our spending on gifts to, say, less than $100 overall, the effect on the stock market, global trade, manufacturing, and jobs would be a downward spiral."

Bestselling phenom Augusten Burroughs has just published his sixth book of nonfiction, seven stories called You Better Not Cry. The Kirkus review starts with, "The high priest of mortifying disaster serves up a fine selection of cringe-inducing yuletide fiasco," and ends by declaring, "Another winner from a master of comic timing and poignant reflection." Although PW and Library Journal had some misgivings about the early pieces, all critics are praising the book's final two essays, “The Best and Only Everything” and “Silent Night.” PW says, "In the former, Burroughs remembers a long-ago Christmas spent with a former lover dying of aids and in the latter, which takes place a decade later, he describes dealing not only with a burst water pipe but also feeling ready to celebrate the season with a tree for the first time since the death of his old boyfriend." Many gay readers will have a horrified curiousity about his blackout morning after, waking up naked next to an equally unclothed roly-poly Santa with a "small, World War II-era erection."

Protest Uganda's Gay Death Penalty Bill, Puerto Rico's Gay Murder

Where do you stand on the issue of killing gay men? If you're against it, consider attending two rallies this week. On Thursday, November 19, a large coalition of demonstrators will gather outside the Uganda Mission to the UN in New York and outside the Ugandan embassy in DC to protest the country's horrific proposed anti-gay legislation. Under the law, anyone guilty of "touch[ing] another person with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality" would be imprisoned for life. "Aggravated homosexuality" earns the death penalty.

(Pictured is John Bosco Nyombi a gay Ugandan who escaped to the UK in 2001 and was illegally deported by the British back to Uganda in 2008. A high court overturned his deportation ruling and he is safely back in Britain.)

Thursday, November 19:

Uganda Mission to the UN, 336 East 45th St. 12:30pm

Uganda Embassy 5911 16th Street N.W. Wash, DC 2:00pm

Someone I love, a former member of the president's aids PACHA, released an open letter to Dr. Eric Goosby calling for a halt of aids funding to Uganda.  Only a tiny fraction of the billions we give them goes to actual medicine; a much larger percentage of the budget funds Christianist "abstinence" programs from anti-gay agencies. Andrew Sullivan and Independent Gay Forum picked up the story.

Last Friday in Cayey, Puerto Rico, the body of Jorge Steven López Mercado, 19, was found burned, dismembered, and decapitated. A 26 year-old man with a history of committing domestic abuse has been charged with the murder and is using the gay panic defense. He hired the teenager for sex and says he did not know the victim was male until they got back to his apartment. Inciting further outrage among the local community, the investigating detective told a television reporter, “These type of people, when they enter this lifestyle and go out into the streets know that this could happen.” Thanks to the brand new legislation, the FBI could investigate it as a hate crime.

New Yorkers will hold a candlelight vigil in memory of Jorge Steven López Mercado and in solidarity with the Puerto Rican gay community on Sunday, November 22 at 8:00, possibly at the Christopher Street Piers. Check here later for confirmation of the location.

Rural Leaders: 10 Year-Old Boy, Dolly Parton Support Gay Marriage

Will Phillips, a 10 year-old in West Fork, Arkansas is refusing to swear the Pledge of Allegiance in his fifth grade class because he says the statement "with liberty and justice for all" is a lie, given that gay people can't get married. He explained to a chortling CNN anchor that he has grown up with a lot of gay friends and he believes everyone should be treated equally. Last year, he was in third grade. He skipped fourth. His classmates have responded to his protest by calling him "gaywad." He wants to be a lawyer. His father is supportive, if slightly less poised than his hyper-articulate son.

Dolly Rebecca Parton, a 63 year-old entertainer in Tennessee, responded to Joy Behar's asking if she supported gay marriage with, "I always say, ‘Sure, why can’t they get married? They should suffer like the rest of us do.'" And when informed that Joel Osteen recently said gays were "not God's best work," Dolly hooted. She explained, "I think God made us who we are and how we are and I don't think that if he was a religious person, that he would be judging people." If he was a religious person? Setting aside the big issue of whether Parton has any closet cleaning to do (and ignoring the "gays = dress up, hair, makeup, lighting" tenor of the soprano's and Behar's comments), these are brave stances. As the owner of a family theme park and a family dinner theater in the recession-hit, deep red, religious strongholds of Tennessee and South Carolina, she has much more to lose than to gain by publicly supporting unpopular issues. If only elected officials had a little more Backwoods Barbie in them...

The New York Public Library Acquires Annie Proulx's Papers

The New York Public Library has acquired Annie Proulx's papers, guaranteeing that generations of scholars will be able to see how arguably the most famous gay love story in American literature developed through twenty-one drafts: Bulldust Mountain, Whiskey Mountain, and Swill-Swallow Mountain before she settled on Brokeback. In addition to early versions of her novels (including 3,662 draft pages of her lesbian inclusive, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning The Shipping News) the archive features her correspondence with editors, agents, translators, and screenwriters, as well as her financial statements. Proulx said, "What writer would not be honored to be in the company of Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Thoreau, Saul Bellow, Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, Paul Auster and W. H. Auden? To me there is an odd sense of balance that material dealing with some of the most rural landscapes in North America will reside in our major city."

10 Authors, 4 Playwrights Among Out 100

 

Rudnick, Doty, Burd.

Congratulations to Sarah Schulman and Sarah Waters, the only female authors among the fourteen writers honored in this year's Out 100. Alphabetically, the men are Frank Bruni, Nick Burd, Mark Doty, Thomas Glave, Andrew Holleran, Moises Kaufman, Tony Kushner, Arthur Laurents, Vestal McIntyre, Felice Picano, Paul Rudnick, and Edmund White. The rest of the list is okay, though at times it feels like they're playing catch up with people you won't historically connect with 2009: Cyndi Lauper, Ilene Chaiken, Pam Spaulding, Almodóvar, Jónsi, etc. (Photos by Jason Bell)

Glave & McIntyre; Waters.

Roth's Humbling: Lesbian, 40, Falls for Depressed Man, 65

Calling Philip Roth "a writer unable to resist exploring every tired male fantasy," Kathryn Harrison in the NYTBR is only one of many critics to groan at the premise of his new novel, The Humbling, in which a forty year-old lesbian falls in love with a depressed sixty-five year-old man. The protagonist of Roth's 30th book is Simon Axler, a renowned stage actor who fails colossally as Macbeth and Prospero then retreats to his upstate country house, where lonely, frightened, and self-pitying, he entices Pegeen, the lesbian daughter of a family friend, into an affair, complete with a MFF threeway. Tallying the book's many hackneyed details about Pegeen, Harrison says, "You don’t have to be gay to find such stereotyping offensive." She blasts Roth for

"a vision that doesn’t allow a lesbian to be anything more than a collection of clichés. Representing her sexual orientation — as well as her gender, duplicitous daughter of Eve! — Pegeen is amoral, capricious and cruel."

Michiko complains that the brief 140 pages read more like a short story and that Roth is "simply going through the motions of ticking off plot points on a spindly, ill-conceived outline. The women in Simon’s life are all female caricatures, devoid of any nuance or inner life."

In the Guardian, Alex Clark laments

"Roth's perplexing determination to vulgarise his narrative strips The Humbling of its own power: where he seeks to be nuanced, he too frequently appears trite; where he attempts to be brazen, he comes across as pointlessly crude. Sentences that are dismayingly free of Roth's characteristic humour and mischief pile up in a shakily fabular framework but never manage to animate the story's characters nor foreground its larger intentions."

Calling it "one of Roth's weakest novels," Richard Eder notes, "Quite uncharacteristically, Roth advances the question naked, with only the most cursory and contrived situations and characters to try to dress it."

The Wall St. Journal spent an hour talking with Roth, 76. They never mentioned anything about Pegeen's lesbianism. Responding to a question, Roth included one openly gay man in his list of "peers. Don DeLillo. Ed Doctorow. Reynolds Price. Joyce Carol Oates. Toni Morrison." Asked about new writers, he said, "I don't follow what's going on with modern fiction."

I loved American Pastoral and Everyman among other Roth favorites but haven't read The Humbling. If anyone can say whether Pegeen is or isn't his first lgbt character, please comment.

Born November 14: Adolf Brand

When was the world's first gay journal published? Congratulations if you said 113 years ago, in 1896. That's when Adolf Brand, at twenty-two, started Der Eigene in Berlin. Originally cloaked as a journal of "male culture," its content became exclusively gay culture within two years. In 1900, Brand published Elisar von Kupffer's landmark anthology of gay poems, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe In der Weltliteratur, including works from Ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, 19th century Germany, as well as Arab and Japanese texts. Brand and his colleagues were constantly harassed and frequently prosecuted for their articles and photography, but he never backed down. Indeed, the first of his three prison sentences was for having attacked a member of parliament with a dog whip. His second prison term, eighteen months, was for libel, after reporting the affair between the German chancellor Prince von Bülow and the Privy Councilor Max Scheefer. His third prison term was two months, after he was convicted of violating Paragraph 175 for printing "lewd writings" in Der Eigene. The journal lasted thirty-six years. (Compare that with ONE, nineteen years; The Ladder, sixteen years; or 10 Percent magazine, four years.) His life's work destroyed and left in financial ruin, Brand gave up his activism in the 1930s. He spent two years in the German army and married a nurse, Elise Behrendt, who knew he was gay. He and Elise were killed together on February 2, 1945 when an Allied bomb exploded their home.

Scribner Censored Soldiers' Gay Sex in From Here to Eternity

James Jones' manuscript of From Here to Eternity included detailed subplots about young soldiers having sex with gay men for money, but Scribner censored the material in 1951 and has never restored it. In a startling essay posted Wednesday, novelist Kaylie Jones describes her father's feelings about the naturalness of gay life:

"My father believed that homosexuality was as old as mankind itself, and that Achilles, the bravest and most venerated fighter ever described, was gay, and to take a younger lover under your wing was a common practice among the soldiers of the time. He also believed also that homosexuality was a natural condition of men in close quarters, and that it in no way affected a soldier’s capabilities on the battlefield. What would have amazed him is that the discussion still continues to this day, cloaked in the same hypocrisy and silence as it was 60 years ago."

As for his landmark, bestselling novel:

"The original manuscript goes into great detail about what kind of sexual favors soldiers like Maggio [Sinatra in the movie] are willing to provide. The soldiers act as if it’s simply their company that these older men are paying for, but there’s an underlying, secret understanding that many of them will provide sex. Maggio sees nothing wrong with this at all, since it is a means to an end – a way to make quick money so he can go back and hang out with the whores. Maggio never questions his own sexuality. The number of soldiers who can be found hanging out in the gay bars is also staggering; in fact, there are so many of them that the Army launches a (very quiet) investigation. One soldier, Bloom, realizes he enjoys sex with men, and is so terrified and ashamed of being gay and of being called on it, that he commits suicide. The sin and the shame, it seems, are not associated with the act itself or even in getting paid for it, but in whether or not a soldier enjoys it. My father saw the total hypocrisy and ridiculousness of this and Bloom’s death is portrayed as a tragedy, absurd and unnecessary."

Fifty-eight years later, Scribner is long overdue to redress Burroughs Mitchell's expulsions and restore this classic WWII novel to its original, inclusive vision. Let's call on publisher Susan Moldow and editor in chief Nan Graham to re-publish From Here to Eternity in a corrected, sixtieth anniversary edition in 2011.

Wayne Koestenbaum at 192 Books

After eight years in limbo, Wayne Koestenbaum's brilliant musings Jackie Under My Skin: Interpreting an Icon are back in print, and to celebrate he read to a rapt crowd last night at 192 Books in Chelsea.

Befitting the book's strand-of-pearls structure, he sampled a perfectly rounded passage from a dozen or fifteen chapters with titles like Silent Jackie, Exotic Jackie, Liz vs. Jackie, Jackie and Money, Jackie as Housewife.

The randomness of deconstructed minutiae accumulates to an unorthodox portrait not only of the most famous woman in the world and her power, but inevitably of Koestenbaum himself and his desire, as well as the layers of lost time through which he's sifting.

Begun when she was still alive, the book was originally intended as an act of diplomacy, to explain Jackie the Icon to Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis the person. After she died, Koestenbaum turned it into a sixty page poem addressed to her. That directness was liberating and eventually he was able to return the text to prose. He kept many lines of the poetry in tact and says he still sees the palimpsest.

Questioned afterward about camp, he said his book wasn't ironic: Yes, the voice may be gay but it is emphatically American. 

Koestenbaum wore a red tie and red eyeglass frames the same shade as the lips on Warhol's Jackie.

Of 80 "Low Hanging Fruit" LGBT Fixes, White House Has Done 1

A year ago the National Gay & Lesbian Task Force gave the Obama administration a twelve page executive summary of eighty achievable lgbt action items, almost all of which they could implement without Congress. After ten months in office, the administration has done one. (Mike Signorile uncovered the memo and hosted a show about it. Pam has some things to add.)

Balancing the list of the good gay actions the White House hasn't taken, AmericaBlog offers a long list of the anti-gay actions the administration has taken.

On Monday, AmericaBlog launched a DNC boycott called Don't Ask Don't Give. On Tuesday, Barney Frank suggested repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell would be part of the defense budget bill next year. The bloggers see a connection there.