Band of Thebes

The Last Station

You know there's something wrong with a movie if one of its high points is a gay slur. But such is the overwrought, tedious, and misguided The Last Station, that I actually perked up when Helen Mirren screams at sycophantic Paul Giamatti, "YOU CATAMITE!" The screenplay makes her, as Sofia Tolstoy, a caricature grasping selfish shrew and the great Lev a sort of long-suffering saint, when in fact the writer was by all accounts no picnic himself. James McAvoy is growing tiresome retreading yet again his wide-eyed innocent among his dangerous superiors, a la Last King of Scotland and Atonement. He sneezes every time he's nervous. Cue: lots of sneezing! Skip it.

Born January 29: Greg Louganis

In 1988 when he was twenty-eight, at the Seoul Olympics, attempting to repeat his unprecedented double golds from 1984 (springboard and tower), Greg Louganis hit his head on the board during his second to last dive. Freshly stitched up, on his final dive he earned a perfect score. Again, he won both gold medals. Widely hailed as one of the great sports comebacks of all time, it earned him ABC Sports' Athlete of the Year. Three years earlier he had won the Sullivan Award as the nation's most outstanding amateur athlete, and he had been an American favorite ever since winning a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics when he was sixteen.

But what a difference one detail makes. Seven years later he published his autobiography, Breaking the Surface, cowritten with Eric Marcus, in which he revealed he is HIV positive. Suddenly he was no longer the hero of the comeback but the infected sneak whose bleeding might have put other divers at risk (not true, according to Anthony Fauci). The doctor who gave him stitches had not worn gloves. His book was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks, and all of his corporate sponsors except Speedo dropped him. (He had come out eight months earlier, at Gay Games in New York.) Remarkable for its candor, his book showed readers that performing after hitting his head was nothing compared to the stress of being closeted, HIV+, and in an abusive relationship. Even his website last year said, "the highs that came with winning never compensated for the lows."

American Voyeur by Benoit Denizet-Lewis

NYT magazine contributor Benoit Denizet-Lewis pursues interesting often lgbt-related subjects, nabs good details, and bundles them in quick, solid reads. Undoubtedly, Denizet-Lewis is delivering exactly what his editors ask. Literary purists can argue that just because pieces more or less work as magazine articles doesn't mean they will cohere as a book, but readers who missed these profiles the first time could find it helpful to have them gathered in one place. 

Beyond the pandering title American Voyeur, openly gay Denizet-Lewis does cover with sensitivity many aspects of lgbt life: a 13 year-old girl living as a boy, lipstick lesbians, "regular guy" gays, black men on the DL, white men on the DL, Massachusetts gay couples who married relatively young, a group of homeless gay teens at odds with the residents where they hangout, and a look at whatever happened to NAMBLA (excerpt here). The random mix of non-queer stories include a summer camp for pro-life teens, high school hookups, a fraternity pledged to sobriety, tween xtreme sports stars, and an Ohio town that changed a street name from Gay Rd to Green Apple Rd.

A moving profile of two New Hampshire high school brothers (soccer captain, leading actor) who each committed suicide a year apart, using the same gun, shows town residents asking why the boys' father kept the weapon in the house after the first death ("it's not a memento"), and why the school thought it would be cathartic to have the second son, openly suicidal (telling friends he didn't want to live to be older than his brother), play Conrad, the suicidal younger son of an older brother who killed himself, on stage in Ordinary People. (The father basically replies, He was a bright kid determined to die; he would have found another way.)

A Salon interview with Mike Jeffries, the possibly closeted and certainly bizarre CEO of Hollister and Abercrombie (who withdrew his participation in the piece), captures choice details. Jeffries always goes through revolving doors twice and says he does not want fat or uncool kids wearing his clothes. ("Are we exclusionary? Absolutely!") Yet despite the rich opportunities here to explore the mystery of beauty and the industry of fashion, Denizet-Lewis chooses not to delve too deeply into larger questions.

Below, two crabby reviews make points worth noting. Beneath them, lots of praise (copied from the author's website), also noteworthy.

Kirkus: The book is similar in intent to Susan Orlean's The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, but Denizet-Lewis lacks Orlean's provocative blend of distance, commentary and wit. The writing style is adequate but does not dazzle, and the author spends too much space on some topics -- such as the recent crackdown on drinking in fraternities -- at the expense of other subjects that could use more depth of analysis. Although Denizet-Lewis doesn't fulfill his promise to throw wide the doors on secret, largely sexual subjects, there is enough of the underground and the subversive to pique the casual reader's interest... Light reading on often heavy topics.

The AV Club: B-  Denizet-Lewis is better at gaining his subjects’ trust and getting colorful quotes than writing fully immersive profiles. Particularly when restricted by word count, he flits over tiny fragments rather than piecing together a larger picture. The teen-culture pieces are sketchy, bringing together scattered anecdotes punctuated with conflicting quotes from experts on opposing sides of whatever issue’s at hand... he’s on the outside, standing just inside enough to deliver quotes he isn’t ready to place in any kind of framework. It isn’t the lack of moral judgment that irks, just the lack of any kind of ballast. Half of the collection is a real primer; the rest is just a glorified Dateline NBC report, only less hysterical.

Booklist: Denizet-Lewis deftly combines journalism and sociology in these 16 articles… Focusing on youth culture, sex, and sexual identity (often gay and lesbian), the thirtysomething reporter demonstrates a flair for what he calls “immersion journalism” or “wait(ing) around for people to be themselves.” In practice, this means patiently establishing an emotional rapport with people as disparate as homeless gay teens and prepubescent extreme-sport athletes who are fielding more commercial endorsements than they can count. The resulting reports are insightful, entertaining, and often thought provoking… Denizet-Lewis is always an engaging and well-informed guide to some of the farther reaches of contemporary American culture.

Instinct: 4.5 stars. Denizet-Lewis has perfected the art of voyeur journalism, and this collection of his best features gives beautiful glimpses into some very compelling yet everyday lives... Denizet-Lewis takes on topics that make you feel a little uncomfortable but nonetheless intrigued. The bonus to getting to read these awesome works is the introduction—critical reading to better understand the journalist’s mindset throughout the process of writing each story.

Library Journal: Kicky, cutting-edge work to show younger readers who think journalism is dead.

Shadow Groups and "Secret" Meetings: The New LGBT Movement

Two new developments: An NGLTF-adjacent group that strives to duplicate aid the insider work of the Victory Fund, HRC, etc. but anonymously. And a four-day retreat organized by Richard Socarides and Paul Yandura outside Knoxville last weekend for lgbt grassroots / experienced "radical minds" to plan our future.

1. Beginning Monday, Matt Foreman and three staffers will lead a still unnamed project adjacent to the NGLTF's New Beginnings Iniative. According to a story in DC Agenda, their three goals are:

"providing technical assistance for pro-LGBT policy changes in the Obama administration,

ensuring LGBT people are represented in the federal government and

advocating for an LGBT voice in the broader administration agenda."

Alarmed by the prospect of a less friendly Congress after the mid-term elections, the group wants to move fast. Initial donors to the $1.2 million startup kitty include the Gill Foundation and Arcus. The project stresses that it “seeks no attribution for its role.”

2. Last weekend outside Knoxville, forty-five next wave lgbt activists (including organizers from the National Equality March, Join the Impact, PETA, Color of Change, Unite Here, and Greenpeace) were invited by Richard Socarides and Paul Yandura to map a strategy for moving the movement. According to a post by one attendee

"We had one thing on our agenda: Discuss ways to build a national network of activists to demand full equality now. We believe that it is time to escalate our demands through coordinated nationwide nonviolent direct action, and we hope to build a broad base of organizers to work with all who struggle for justice and dignity in their lives."

Another participant, Derek Washington, wrote:

"What we are doing is taking the Bull by the horns and doing something to make our world, our country, a better place for all of us. … We , the grassroots activists are doing it. Are you Gay Inc.?"

The meeting was bankrolled by Jonathan Lewis, the Progressive Insurance heir. Attendee Larry Kramer says it wasn't secret. A few of the participants tweeted from it under the hashtag #radminds. Anyone interested in getting involved can contact kip [at] neworganizing.com.

Cholodenko's Lesbian Moms Comedy Gets Biggest Deal at Sundance

After High Art and Laurel Canyon, Lisa Cholodenko's third Sundance feature sparked a bidding war that ended today with the festival's highest payout: $5 million. (Ryan Reynolds' claustrophobic Buried went for $3.2) The Kids Are All Right stars Julianne Moore and Annette Bening as a lesbian couple whose children search for their birth father. The sperm donor is Mark Ruffalo, an organic farmer, who ends up having an affair with one of the lesbians. And it's a comedy. I know. But after Laurel Canyon -- and the review below -- I trust Cholodenko not to simplify complex middle-aged women's lives, or to play their sexuality for cheap laughs.

The winning bidder was Focus Features, so let the degaying begin. (I imagine their sexual whitewash squads are already speed dialing industry writers to demand they say "two women" rather "lesbian couple.") Focus released Brokeback Mountain, Milk, Taking Woodstock, and A Single Man. Now their marketing question must be, Are lesbian moms less of an ick factor or does America want to see an aging lesbian make out with a younger man?

The Los Angeles Times cautions that other distributors "wondered if the film's sex scenes -- some lesbian, some gay, some straight, all of them R-rated -- might limit its ticket sales." No word yet on who's gay.

Andrew O'Hehir, a Salon critic, shot sky high in his praise of the movie, saying, it "ranks with the most compelling portraits of an American marriage, regardless of sexuality, in film history." He continues:

Even more remarkably, it's an overwhelmingly affirmative warts-and-all portrait, not a Bergman-style descent into the pit of marital darkness. Watching two of our finest actresses playing unglamorous, flawed and complicated women is a rare privilege, and in virtually every moment and every breath of The Kids Are All Right we feel that Nic and Jules have created something that, damaged as it is, must be saved.

He ends by saying, "because it's so real, so sexy, so sad, so honest and so truly, heartbreakingly funny."

For an opposing view, Justin Lowe at Reuters said it's "respectably entertaining filmmaking, it's just not exceptional."

(If you haven't read O'Hehir's mother, Diana O'Hehir, do not go to bed tonight without ordering her novel I Wish This War Were Over. During WWII a funny, wise, not-so-wise-after-all 19 year-old girl travels by train from California to DC. Anne Tyler placed it among her Top 10 of all time, alongside Garcia Marquez, Fitzgerald, Welty, Austen, and Ishiguro.)

Born January 26: Ellen DeGeneres

Comedian, college dropout after one semester, #1 NYT bestselling author, sitcom star, chat show mogul, vegan, animal lover, and lesbian wife, Ellen DeGeneres was named the funniest person in America by Showtime way back in 1982 when she was twenty-four. Johnny Carson, a big fan, considered her a girl Bob Newhart, though she cited Steve Martin and Woody Allen as significant influences. Her sitcom Ellen ran from 1994 to 1998 including her character's history making coming out in The Puppy Episode, seen by a record setting 46 million people. In 2003 she voiced Dory in Finding Nemo, Pixar's most successful movie ever. That September she premiered her talk show, which has become a mega hit, dancing its way to twenty-nine Daytime Emmys. During the height of the Prop 8 campaign to rescind gay marriage in California, she wed her wife, Portia De Rossi, fifteen years her junior, and screened this video on her show. Do we still have to hear the lie that stars can't be out, vocal in their support of gay rights, and popular with middle America? Ellen has won five consecutive People's Choice Awards as Favorite Daytime Talk Show Host. She just won her first Teen Choice Award. In 2007, she hosted the Oscars, earning higher ratings and more viewers than Jon Stewart in 2006 and 2008 and Hugh Jackman in 2009. In 2008, at fifty, she became the face of Maybelline's CoverGirl. Two days ago she had her first taping as the new judge on American Idol.

Oscar's Foreign Film Shortlist: Ribbon, Prophet, But No Maid

Although the five nominees for best foreign film won't be announced until next Tuesday, February 2, the Academy has already pared the original sixty-five qualifying films down to a mere nine. Inexplicably, lost in the first round of voting was Chile did not nominate openly gay Sebastian Silva's The Maid, a recent Golden Globe nominee and my favorite film of 2009. 

But I haven't yet seen Jacques Audiard's Un prophete, which opens here February 26. (If the character above looks somewhat less refined than your usual French film hero it's because he is a 19 year-old convict who can neither write nor read.) Audiard's last feature, The Beat That My Heart Skipped, was my favorite of 2005. More accessible and all-around fantastic is his Read My Lips, absolutely unmissable. And I greatly admired Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, winner of the top prize at everything from Cannes to the European Film Awards to the Golden Globes.

Argentina, “El Secreto de Sus Ojos,” Juan Jose Campanella, director;
Australia, “Samson & Delilah,” Warwick Thornton, director;
Bulgaria, “The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks around the Corner,” Stephan Komandarev;
France, “Un Prophete,” Jacques Audiard, director;
Germany, “The White Ribbon,” Michael Haneke, director;
Israel, “Ajami,” Scandar Copti and Yaron Shani, directors;
Kazakhstan, “Kelin,” Ermek Tursunov, director;
The Netherlands, “Winter in Wartime,” Martin Koolhoven, director;
Peru, “The Milk of Sorrow,” Claudia Llosa, director.

Born January 25: Virginia Woolf

Here is the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf. In April 1937 she participated in a BBC lecture series titled Words Fail Me, giving a talk she called "Craftsmanship." She contemplates using new words in an old language, beginning, "Words, English words, are full of echoes, memories, associations. They've been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing today..."

WSJ Repeats Call for DADT Repeal, While Hearings Are Delayed

At this point, who is so pollyanna as to think Richard Socarides again calling for the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell will spur any action? But it's useful that even the conservative Wall Street Journal is running pieces denouncing the president's failure to act on his promises and highlighting his administration's hyprocrisy on gay equality. Nailing "Mr. Obama's oversensitivity to a dwindling minority of bigots on this issue," Socarides writes:

Many wonder when their president will show the same kind of concern for the constitutional rights of gay American service members as he has for enemy combatants held at Guantanamo Bay. Many wonder what the administration's willingness to treat gay Americans as second-class citizens says to Uganda and other countries that are considering laws that would subject gays to imprisonment and even death.

Gay Americans have been among the president's most ardent supporters. Their enthusiasm, and that of their families and friends, could be crucial in this year's elections. The president's action—or inaction—on Don't Ask Don't Tell will be noticed.

An increasingly frustrated bloc of gay voters—angry over marriage setbacks in California, Maine, New Jersey and New York and emboldened by Ted Olson's and David Boies's high-profile effort to declare unconstitutional laws that prohibit gay marriage—are growing impatient for equality. As Mr. Olson said in federal district court in San Francisco recently, discriminatory laws serve only to "label gay and lesbian persons as different, inferior, unequal and disfavored."

Meanwhile Americablog reports this morning that the Senate Armed Services Committees hearings on DADT "scheduled for this week" have actually not been scheduled. And Kerry Eleveld talks to a congressional insider who states the obvious,“I’m getting the sense they [the White House] will try to ignore this as long as possible and then they will maybe trot out some commission to delay it another year if they are forced to do anything.”

André Téchiné's La Fille du RER / The Girl on the Train

The gay French auteur André Téchiné has made so many compelling films (Ma saison préférée, Wild Reeds, Les Voleurs, Alice at Martin, Strayed, and 2008's excellent, ignored The Witnesses) cineastes can forgive him this well-intentioned jumble that fails to add up. With significantly placed details about the rise of Antisemitic crimes in Paris, the movie follows an aimless suburban daughter Jeanne (above, blond, blue shirt) as she tries for a job with a prominent Jewish lawyer then falls in love with Franck (left, clickable), a charismatic but volatile, tattooed, wife-beater wearing wrestler whose older brother is in prison for crimes he won't talk about. Getting well paid to be caretakers for a shady businessman, Franck and Jeanne live together above an electronics shop until a crime happens. Not what you think. Jeanne's mother (Catherine Deneuve) was once proposed to by the lawyer (Michel Blanc, bald) whose help she now entreats. The lawyer's angry, vagabond son (white shirt) can't get over his searing exwife (black shirt, the awesome Ronit Elkabetz from The Band's Visit). Their son (plaid shirt), the lawyer's grandson, is about to become bar mitzvahed, and the boy repeats that earlier unrequited love by getting a crush on Jeanne.

It's a French art house film; of course you don't expect everything to be "explained." The problem isn't that the many storylines raise more questions than answers, it's that the threads are too short to make a satisfying fabric.

No links to the trailer, which I urge you to avoid. Inexplicably it and the reviews give away the film's one surprise. To my mind, knowing what happens would dispel much of the first half's moody swirl of regret, hope, sexual tension, and underlying dread. The story is loosely based on a real events from 2004.

NBCC Nominees Include White, Gooch, and Cheever Biography

Saturday night at Housing Works the National Book Critics Circle Awards judges announced their nominees for this year's prizes, including Edmund White's City Boy, Brad Gooch's Flannery, and a biography of the miserably closeted Cheever.

The fiction list, announced by Elizabeth Strout, honors five novels, four of them by women. Great to see another nod for the Wayne State University Press novel American Salvage, further proof that New York publishers are missing big talent. Nice also to find excellent Michelle Huneven among the nominees; I admire her tremendously though I'm not tempted by this story of an alcoholic.

Bonnie Jo Campbell, American Salvage
Marlon James, The Book of Night Women
Michelle Huneven, Blame
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall
Jayne Anne Phillips, Lark and Termite

The complete list of six category finalists can be read here. The judges will announce the winners in a free, public ceremony on March 11.

Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein

It figures that the Russian supergenius whose innovations in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Oktober (1927) still dictate how movies are shot and edited today would have no trouble creating private visual diversions for himself in an age before internet porn: He drew sketches of gay sex. Re-entering the U.S. from Mexico in 1932, his drawings were discovered by American customs officials who were not "artistic" and not amused. Eisenstein was a Bolshevik after all, and had been run out of Hollywood on his first visit after a campaign against him by fascist Major Pease (and because Paramount hated his treatment of Dreiser's An American Tragedy). The customs debacle capped off a fifteen-month fiasco that was supposed to have been a four-month shoot to restore his reputation. Post-Paramount, Charlie Chaplin had introduced him to Upton Sinclair whose wife Mary Kimbrough financed the Mexican picture, which Eisenstein began filming without a script or even a concept. Complicating matters further, Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the USSR and therefore claimed rights to the film as it was being made, including the right to censor. Ordered home by Soviet authorities angry that he had overstayed his visa, Eisenstein realized that thus removed and having hugely antagonized the Sinclairs, he would never be allowed to edit his Mexican footage. He suffered a nervous breakdown. Worse was on its way. His next film, Bezhin Meadow, was plagued again by his ill-conceived grandiose schemes (this time to shoot simultaneously adult and children's versions) and by his dictatorial style. Soviet officials hated his movie. Eisenstein endured the horror of having his film destroyed, which was mild compared to the fate of the government's executive producer for film, Boris Shumyatsky, who should have been supervising more closely and was executed by firing squad. Eisenstein did triumph again with a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, famous for its beautiful, majestic build up to battle. He followed it with another success, Ivan the Terrible Part I, only to see his Ivan the Terrible Part II confiscated and Part III destroyed. Although he had two wives, historians say neither marriage was consummated. He wrote in his diaries about his endless infatuations with men. He died of a brain hemorrhage at fifty.

Leaving Alaska

 

All the color has drained out of the top photo but one morning this week the whole sky was soft pink. I won't say the entire animal kingdom bowed down at news of my departure, but I will say I had never before seen a moose eat in this position.

Born January 22: Elaine Noble

Three years before Harvey Milk won his city council race, Elaine Noble became the first openly lgbt politician elected to a state legislature. In November 1974, she won 59% of the vote to the Massachusetts House of Representatives from Boston's Fenway/Back Bay neighborhoods and thereby became the United States' first openly gay person elected to a statewide office. In 1976, she was re-elected. Later she ran for Senate against Paul Tsongas and lost. In 1986, she and Ellen Ratner founded the Pride Institute in Minneapolis to treat gay people battling alcohol and drugs dependencies; it has since expanded to three locations. Although Noble has retired from public life and now lives in Florida, in 2008 she gave a great interview to Philadelphia Gay News in honor of Lesbian and Gay History Month. She's 66 today.

Mendelsohn on Memoir, and Origins of His Own 'Elusive Embrace'

With Ben Yagoda's new book as a starting point, Daniel Mendelsohn offers readers of this week's New Yorker a kaleidoscopic essay on the history of memoir. He says the current craze for introspective writing started a little more than sixteen centuries ago with St. Augustine's Confessions. One of the highlights of the piece is Mendelsohn's disclosure that his own memoir, The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, exists only as a substitute for a different gay book that failed to cohere.

Fifteen years ago, I found myself unable to complete a study of contemporary gay culture that I’d contracted to write. The book was meant be a more or less straightforward examination of the way in which the books, movies, and art that gay people were producing, and the way they partied, shopped, traveled, and dined, reflected gay identity. But the deeper I got into the subject, the harder I found it to isolate just what “gay identity” might be—not least because I and most of the other gay men I knew seemed to be torn between the ostensibly straight identities and values they’d been brought up with (domesticity, stability, commitment, mortgages) and the “queer” habits and behaviors made possible in enclaves that were exclusively gay. Because I didn’t want to suggest that I somehow stood outside those tensions and instabilities, I felt I had to write, in some part, about myself.

Clear-eyed as ever, Mendelsohn ends with a detail about the hazards of recollection. Flying home from Europe where he and his brother were working on Daniel's award-winning book The Lost about his search for exactly what happened to relatives who perished in the Holocaust, a group of high school students in the back of the plane started singing a seventies pop tune.

Matt turned to me with an amused expression. “Remember we sang that in choir?” he asked.

I looked at him in astonishment. “Choir? You weren’t even in the choir,” I said to him. I’d been the president of choir, and I knew what I was talking about.

Now it was his turn to be astonished. “Daniel,” he said. “I stood next to you on the risers during concerts!”

Matt was talking about a shared history from 1978—a comparatively recent past. The people we’d just spent ten days with, struggling to find the keys that would spring the locks of their rusted recollections, had been talking about things that had happened sixty, seventy, even eighty years before. I thought about this, and burst out laughing. Then I went home and wrote the book.

Born January 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect each of the three hundred original designs he created every year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant book Cleopatra's Nose. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression."

Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect each of the three hundred original designs he created every year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant book Cleopatra's Nose. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression."

Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.

Republican Women for Gay Marriage

Obvs, this is too little, infuriatingly late. But Republicans are our biggest problem, and big momentum starts with small steps.

1. Today Cindy McCain announced her support for gay marriage and released her pose for the popular "No H8" series shot by photographer Adam Bouska.

2. Megan McCain continues her outspoken campaign in favor of marriage equality. And she's certainly not backing down just because GW's GOP student group pulled out of hiring her for a speech after they found out she's also talking to the campus gay group.

3. Margaret Hoover, a Fox commentator and great- granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, posted an essay earlier this week called Why I'm Joining the Fight for Marriage Equality urging her fellow Republicans to follow Ted Olson's arguments and endorse gay marriage. 

So, given these conservative women's evolving views, where is Michelle Obama? We know where her husband is. And more and more people are calling him out on it.

Yesterday, Gavin Newsom discussed Obama with the NYT: “I am very upset by what he’s not done in terms of rights of gays and lesbians. I understand it tactically in a campaign, but at this point I don’t know. There is some belief that he actually doesn’t believe in same-sex marriage. But it’s fundamentally inexcusable for a member of the Democratic Party to stand on the principle that separate is now equal, but only on the basis of sexual orientation. We’ve always fought for the rights of minorities and against the whims of majorities.”

Lamenting Maine and Prop 8 ten days ago, Jane Lynch told the Guardian: "Shouldn't there be safeguards against the majority voting on the rights of a minority? If people voted on civil rights in the 60s, it would have never happened. It took somebody like Lyndon Johnson going, 'F all of you! I'm going to do this.'" She pauses for a moment, then says, "Obama won't do it. He's a huge disappointment to me."

Born January 20: Will Young

Wokingham's favorite son Will Young won Pop Idol in February 2002 and the next month released his first single, which became the fastest selling debut in UK chart history. That same month, March 2002, he came out to preempt a tabloid expose. Over the years his popularity has only increased. He's been nominated for ten Brit Awards. (The first song below was nominated for "Best Song of the Past 25 Years," the second won Young his second Brit.) By 2006 voters in a commercial radio poll chose him as the UK's favorite artist ever, a feat he repeated in 2007. Last year he released his greatest hits. Today he turns 31.

Patti Smith on Robert Mapplethorpe: Just Kids

Couldn't put this in a novel: A 19 year-old Jersey girl gives up her newborn baby and moves to New York, where on her first day she goes looking for her friends in Brooklyn who, it turns out, have moved and the person sleeping in that apartment instead is her soulmate. They become friends, roommates, lovers. It's 1967 and they both want to be artists. They live in the smallest room in the Chelsea Hotel. They're so broke they go to art exhibits and can only buy one ticket, the person who sees the show describes it to the one who waited outside. He realizes he's gay, they break up painfully, remain close. She turns from performance art to music, releasing her first album, Horses, in 1975. He takes the cover shot. Fame engulfs her first. She becomes a god of rock n roll, later he becomes a superstar of photography. By the time his work skyrockets, he's dying of aids. He is furious to be cheated out of the life he waited a lifetime for. Twenty-four hours before he dies, fearing his popularity is a temporary flash, he makes her promise to write their story so he won't be forgotten. Twenty-one years later, she does.

Critics everywhere are praising Patti Smith's memoir of her early years with Robert Mapplethorpe, which goes on sale today. Entertainment Weekly gave it an A, the SF Chronicle said, "It is simply one of the best memoirs to be published in recent years: inspiring, sad, wise and beautifully written." The title comes from two middle aged tourists who see Smith and Mapplethorpe in Washington Square Park. The wife thinks the bohemians might be artists, might be somebody. The husband disagrees, saying, "They're just kids."

Chris Kornelis' smart interview with Patti Smith in the Seattle Weekly is full of surprises:

You, Mapplethorpe, and even Andy Warhol--who is discussed at length in your book--were religious people. But I don't think most people associate The Factory or the '70s punk scene with God. Was there more spirituality in those circles than history gives them credit for?

I think that people are so preoccupied with religion. I don't think any of us were religious, in that we weren't attached to any particular church. I think all of us question things as artists through history; especially the story of Christ really lends itself to creative expression. I mean, when you think about it, almost every great artists has brought Christ into their work.

I've always had my own relationship with God. If one is going to judge people by whether they have a specific church, we might have all failed.

After Kurt Cobain's suicide, you evoked Mapplethorpe's fight with AIDS as why you had "less patience" for Cobain's suicide (in an interview). You don't write about Lee Crabtree's suicide the same way in your book. Have your feelings changed in that area?

I didn't feel that I could really comment a whole lot about that. Lee Crabtree [a musician who had worked with The Fugs] has sort of been forgotten in the pantheon of musicians of that period. And the main reason I even spoke about Lee Crabtree, I did work with him, but also so he wouldn't be forgotten.

My reaction to Kurt Cobain was much more emotional. I was heartbroken when he committed suicide. I loved Nirvana. And I knew that Kurt Cobain was very fond of my husband [the late guitarist Fred "Sonic" Smith] and the MC5. We felt so badly. We just wished that we would have known him, and been able to talk to him, and had some positive effect on him. Seeing Robert struggling for his life, and doing everything to live, and then seeing this very gifted boy kill himself was painful to factor.

Also, I'm old enough to be Kurt Cobain's mom. It's like imagining a son do that. It's like having a spiritual son, 'cause I liked his work so much. I felt a kinship with his work.

You speak well and repeatedly of John Coltrane's records from the '60s in Just Kids. Do they possess something that today's records do not?

Well, I feel like Coltrane, of course he was an innovator and invented a whole style and a way of improvisation that we all draw from now. But I think the most interesting thing about Coltrane, besides his tone and his sense of improvisation, was his deep spiritual center. You really felt his relationship with God in his playing.

You can listen to a virtuoso; you might think, "Wow, that person plays really great." But Coltrane has a different dimension. He brought God into his playing. I always feel that when I hear him. There's nobody like Coltrane.

Born January 19: Patricia Highsmith

European critics consider Patricia Highsmith's twenty-two novels and eight story collections literary descendants of Dostoevsky and Kafka, but American readers know her work mainly as fodder for films: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Ripley Under Ground. She was most at home in the darker corners of her characters' twisted psyches and as often as not her protagonists expressed themselves through murder. Even in her first full-time job she excelled at creating dual lives, scripting comic book heroes Captain Midnight, Spy Smasher, and the Golden Arrow. Her childhood was divided between Fort Worth and New York and her emotions were split between similar extremes: loving and loathing her stepfather and her mother who claimed to have tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith said her unhappiest year was when her parents abandoned her with her grandmother at 12, yet throughout her life she seemed to seek the intensity of crisis and discord, pushing her friends to fight and her lovers to leave. One former girlfriend, the portraitist Allela Cornell, killed herself by swallowing nitric acid. Another girlfriend was Marijane Meaker, whose work you may know under her pen names Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich, or M. E. Kerr. A woman who didn't become a girlfriend was the frosty smoldering blond young married mother in Bloomingdales who sent Highsmith into a fever of longing and productivity, resulting in her second novel, The Price of Salt. Please let's end the myth that queer visibility began with Stonewall. This lesbian book, published in 1952, sold nearly a million copies. And unlike Gore Vidal's 1948 gay novel The City and the Pillar, hers has a happy ending. (Though, unlike Gore, she used a pseudonym, Claire Morgan.) Sarah Waters thinks so highly of The Price of Salt she said it alone warranted Highsmith's inclusion in the National Gallery show Gay Icons. Alcoholic, anti-American, anti-Semitic, stingy, and racist, Highsmith lived in Switzerland for more than thirty years and died, intentionally alone, at 74. She left her estate of several million dollars to Yaddo, where she had rewritten her first novel, Strangers on a Train, at Truman Capote's urging.

Do yourself a big favor and buy Joan Schenkar's illuminating and entertaining new biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. As you know, difficult characters often make the most riveting reading.