Band of Thebes

New Directors New Films: Starts with Not-Out 80 Year Old, Ends with Openly Gay 16 Year Old, Has Candy Darling In Between

Yesterday MoMA and the Film Society of Lincoln Center unveiled this year's lineup for New Directors New Films starting on March 24 with the premiere of a documentary about the apparently not out, bicycle riding NYT fashion photojournalist Bill Cunningham, 80, and ending on April 4 with the openly gay Xavier Dolan's award winning, Cannes delighting, autobiographical film I Killed My Mother [above] about a haughty 16 year-old queer Québécois' struggles to cope with his so lame mom.

Exact dates for the other twenty-five features have not yet been announced but somewhere during the two week festival will be Beautiful Darling: The Life and Times of Candy Darling, Warhol Superstar. James Raisin's documentary about the former James Slattery includes interviews with Jeremiah Newton, Jackie Curtis, Holly Woodlawn, Penny Arcade, Paul Morrissey, Fran Lebowitz, and John Waters. Candy’s letters and diaries are read by Chloë Sevigny.

Eleven years after Judy Berlin, Eric Mendelsohn returns with recent Sundance screener 3 Backyards, though the vague description obscures whether or not the one day on Long Island film has any lgbt content. The writeup for Myriam Aziza's feature The Evening Dress sounds like it might possibly veer toward the psycho lesbo cliche, but given the French filmmaker's track record, let's assume it's a more nuanced look at a schoolgirl's teacher crush that turns to obsession.

Many must see international titles, so study the full list. Tickets on sale Sunday, March 14.

NYC Queers Act Up Fight Back Against Monserrate, Ford

A new activist group has formed to defeat the anti-gay politicians who voted against marriage equality. Funded in part by the Gill Foundation and other nonprofits, New York Fight Back's first campaign is against Queens Democrat Hiram Monserrate. Convicted of assaulting his female companion, Monserrate was recently expelled from the NY Senate. He's running in the special election to be held in three weeks. NYFB's scorching brochure includes photos of the disgraced senator dragging his assault victim. It also quotes the NYT editorial urging voters to follow the senate's lead and keep Monserrate out of office. New York Fight Back's website is expected to go live on Thursday.

Queer political pushback was also in full flower last night at the Gay Center [above], when possible US Senate candidate Harold Ford faced a vocal, hostile crowd. Many in the audience waved signs saying LIAR. Two people present said they had been told by Ford's office that he would not support the federal marriage amendment, which in fact Ford voted for twice. In 2006, running for Senate, Ford "loudly stated his opposition to same-sex marriage," according to GCN. Now that he's eyeing a New York run, he suddenly supports gay marriage. Activists are wary of the last minute switcheroo. Lt. Dan Choi asked Ford about Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and when Ford replied he's now for its repeal, "Choi was not convinced," says the NY Daily News. Read more at Gay City News, NY Post, DailyKos, or Talking Points Memo.

Uproar Over French Anti-Smoking / Oral Sex Campaign

Oh, France. Beaucoup de ways to illustrate "To smoke is to be a slave to tobacco," and you choose this one?

Today's NYT reports on the many groups who are unhappy, particularly feminists and advocates for sex abuse victims. (One of the three posters features a girl.) However, the article doesn't give voice to any objections that campaign is trying to scare teens away from smoking with the assumption that the worst thing in the world is to be gay. Which is exactly what the Onion did last year as a joke, including this position. (Clip below has perfect satire of insipid morning chat, and slurs.)

At least Bertrand Dautzenberg, president of the French Office for the Prevention of Smoking, retains some common sense. He says the ads "will shock adults while not scaring kids.”

New Anti-Smoking Ads Warn Teens 'It's Gay To Smoke'

Rendez-Vous with The King of Escape and Ozon's Refuge

This year's Rendez-Vous with French Cinema includes a new drama from François Ozon and a comedy by Alain Guiraudie about a depressed middle-aged gay man who gives heterosexuality a whirl with a sixteen year-old fille he rescues from bullies (by paying them). Nicely atypical for French gay protagonists, Armand, the King of Escape, is an overweight tractor salesman. The girl (Hafsia Herzi, the bellydancer from The Secret of the Grain) falls for her rescuer but her father, a rival salesman, wants to break them up. Reviewers praise the picture's carefree sexuality which evidently extends to the supporting cast; a "well-endowed 70 year old" man named Toscan "describes how during his heterosexual marriage, he used to have five or six guys a night." Embracing spoilers this time, I'm quoting, "by the final scene, Armand is back with a man and everybody is having sex with everybody else."

Speaking of middle-aged Frenchmen succumbing to an amour fou, openly gay François Ozon is going to be fine. After his unbroken high streak of Criminal Lovers, Water Drops, Under the Sand, Eight Women, and Swimming Pool came a number of perplexing choices: 5 x 2, Time To Leave, Angel, and last year's Ricky, his flying baby film that after two months in the US has grossed a total of $3,457. His new movie, The Refuge, is described as "an incisive character drama about a hardened ex-junkie who is visited by the brother of her late boyfriend while recovering at a beachside retreat." Fun as that sounds, it's hardly Erick Zonca territory. Luckily, Ozon has already wrapped his next movie, a comedy about a submissive wife who shines as the temporary head of her husband's umbrella factory during a strike. It stars Catherine Deneuve and Fabrice Luchini, with Jérémie Renier, Karin Viard, and Gérard Depardieu.

Among many other Rendez-Vous highlights are the new movie from Christophe Honoré, Making Plans, the kidnapped businessman thriller Rapt, Michel Gondry's intimate portrait of his aunt The Thorn in the Heart, and the adaptation of a certain runaway bestseller whose title has been shortened to The Hedgehog.

The series runs March 11-21. The King of Escape March 13, 15. The Refuge March 20, 21.

Winterson: Was Suicidal, Dated Men, Not Lesbian, Not Writing Novels

Never short on drama, Jeanette Winterson discusses her awful 2007: Ending their six year relationship, theater and opera director Deborah Warner left her "in an extraordinarily abrupt way." At the same time Winterson discovered she had been brought up and breastfed by her birth mother until she was six months old. Devastated by the news about her mother, she would sit in fields in the Cotswolds "for 12, 14 hours at a time" and was suicidal:

"I rang up friends saying, 'I think I need to kill myself.' I saw myself between two dark spaces. One dark space was suicide. The other was pretending to myself there was nothing wrong and carrying on my life without confronting that darkness. I had to be in that space where suicide was really an option for overcoming unbearable mental pain.

"A lot of people don't do that. They sidestep the pain, by taking pills or moving on or whatever. But I didn't think any of that would work. The pain would come back again and again if I didn't live in the grief. And the thought of it coming back was awful, unbearable. I'd rather have died."

Following that, she got therapy. Also, she dated men. She tells the Guardian, "I like the idea of people being fluid in their sexuality. I don't for instance consider myself to be a lesbian." Now 50, Winterson is dating Susie Orbach, 63, a former therapist to Princess Diana and author of Bodies and Fat Is a Feminist Issue. Orbach was previously in a thirty year relationship with the father of their two children and in seven years plans to retire to Italy. Winterson intends to go with her.

Winterson says she hasn't been writing novels for the past three years but says she'll return to adult fiction in the future. Just now she's contemplating the life of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas for a screenplay. Or a BBC script about the Brontës.

She says, "I have made a lot of mistakes in my life."

Decoding the Gays: Huff Post on Old Sitcoms, Gawker on Men

Huffington Post's Alex Leo offers a slideshow decoding seven old sitcoms that she says were actually about "gay couples who (for some reason) weren't allowed to be gay on TV, so ridiculous back stories and ludicrous plot twists were introduced." Yes, My Two Dads made the list.

Last week, Gawker's Brian Moylan posted a "Handy Guide to All Gay Men." For him, eight is enough: Twinks, Bears, Gay Jocks, Circuit Boys, Gay-Listers, Show Queens, Art Fags, Drag Queens. Unlikely that you'll find yourself here. The arty boy "dresses either in the most current prissy fashions or like a homo version of Terry Richardson, in big glasses, flannels, and jeans that looks so thrown together that it took him hours to put together."

Lesbian Wins Gold and Other True Headlines You Won't See

 

The Netherlands' Ireen Wüst [center] won the women's 1500m speedskating on Sunday, making her a two-time Olympic gold medalist. (She took the 3000m four years ago in Turin.) Typically, now that she's a winner, the mainstream media has forgotten that she's a lesbian.

On Friday the New York Times announced that assistant managing editor Richard Berke will become the paper's national editor on March 22. Berke is openly gay, though it's not mentioned in the release. Longtime lgbt advocate Michael Petrelis says the omission is "a good thing."

Understandably, accomplished people want to be considered for their abilities not their sexuality (which smacks of tokenism, or worse). But consider the cumulative effect of the entrenched dichotomy: When it's bad news, lgbt is highlighted; when it's good news, orientation is irrelevant. Over time this renders gay success invisible and makes defeat the gay norm.

Not only is gay failure widely covered, the failure is specifically blamed on gayness. The received wisdom is that Richard Berke is a great editor who "happens to be gay" rather than a great editor whose outsider experience as a gay man has made him more attuned to the nation's pluralism than are his straight white male colleagues. But why did Johnny Weir fail at the Olympics? He was too gay. Why did Adam Lambert lose American Idol? Too gay. Why did Brokeback Mountain lose Best Picture? Too gay. What was EW's cover headline after Ellen's sitcom was canceled? "Yep, she's too gay." 

(If reaction to orientation really was the deciding factor, the discussion ought to be about the judges', voters', or audiences' homophobia.)

Always, when a right winger gains prominence, we're told, See their clout? We must work with them. Yet when an lgbt person triumphs, no one else is asked to adjust their attitude toward us because our success is degayed.

Born February 22: Christopher Bram

Everything you really need to know about the wonderful novelist Christopher Bram, you can learn from his new nonfiction collection, Mapping the Territory. It's not a memoir but what better insights into a writer's character do you need than essays like "A Body in Books" which reveals the "thirteen reading experiences that helped to make me who I am," and the title piece, which maps the state of gay fiction? The book also features more traditional essays about his grappling with sex at William & Mary or loving his Perry Street front steps. Beyond that, you must immerse yourself in his nine novels. Like Peter Carey, Bram can nimbly, vividly leap in and out of centuries, locations, and characters. His most recent, Exiles in America, is a quartet between a middle aged gay couple in Virginia, an Iranian artist, and his Russian wife. His most encompassing, The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes, begins in the Civil War and traces its interracial couple from fourteen well into adulthood through New York City, Europe, and Istanbul. His most relentless, Gossip, tracks a gay East Villager through a nightmare of the DC political closet, media hypocrisy, and murder. His most humorous, Lives of the Circus Animals, studies the species known as "theater people." His most famous, Gods and Monsters, about director James Whale, his housekeeper, and his ex-marine gardener in 1957, is even better than the Oscar winning movie. These past four years mark the longest time Bram has ever made his fans wait between novels, but with good reason: In addition to pulling together his essay collection, he's nearing completion of his group biography, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. He and filmmaker Draper Shreve are longtime partners.

Teddys 2010: Cholodenko, Franco, Marcello, Stock, & Yuzna

Friday night at the Berlinale, the Teddy Award for best lgbt feature went to Lisa Cholodenko and for best lgbt short it went to James Franco.

Cholodenko's The Kids Are Alright stars Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as longtime lesbian partners whose children search of their sperm donor father and come back with Mark Rufalo who has an affair with one of the moms. The comedy beat runners up Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman's Howl starring James Franco as Allen Ginsberg, and Mine vaganti (Loose Cannons) by Ferzan Ozpetek. The eight person jury praised Cholodenko's film "for being a well-crafted and humorous take on the issues facing contemporary lesbian parents and the complexity of sexuality, relationships and family bonding."

Yes, that James Franco wrote and directed a five minute short called The Feast of Stephen, based on Anthony Hecht's poem. It took the Teddy Award over fellow finalists Covered by John Greyson and Franswa Sharl by Hannah Hilliard. According to the jurists, Franco's film is "a fearless cinematic adaptation of a poem exploring one of the darker sides of adolescent passion and sexual fantasy." Read this recap from Movieline if you doubt the short's gay bona fides.

Pietro Marcello's [left] La bocca del lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf) [above] won best documentary for "its poetic construction of a geographical and personal space and for pushing the boundaries of conventional documentary filmmaking. It is a beautiful meditation of love passing through time." Another finalist was I Shot My Love by Tomer Heymann.

The third documentary finalist, Michael Stock's Postcard to Daddy won the Siegessaeule readers award. The festival statement said, "Of all the films which the jury has seen this year Postcard to Daddy was by far the most moving. The members of the jury were so touched by Michael Stocks haunting documentary about his sexual abuse and the consequences for his life and that of his family that they still sat in silence in their seats minutes after the credits rolled. Through unsparing frankness that never became exhibitonist the filmmaker grants an intimate view of his suffering during and after the abuse. His cinematic self-discovery not only integrates his own story as a victim, but his entire family and even the perpetrator, and thus shows more clearly that sexual abuse is a universal issue. Stock does not mince what happened. No metaphors are used, the supposedly unspeakable is spoken out. The jury felt that Postcard to Daddy is a sad yet always hopeful film finally breaking the silence and the taboos which shows a way out of victimhood into a new life."

Jake Yuzna won the Jury Award for Open, "to give recognition to a brave feature debut exploring the wide spectrum of transgender love and relationships."

David McConnell's The Silver Hearted

A terrific month for atypical gay novels. After Adam Haslett's banking scandal panorama comes David McConnell's thrilling adventure The Silver Hearted. For his distant employer, a nameless narrator must convey 36,000 silver dollars in 24 blue boxes on ships through an anonymous country ravaged by a violent insurrection. Shifting allegiances, uncertain information, hazy recollections, and sudden horrors all contribute to the novel's beautifully rendered dreamlike state. At B&N McConnell spoke about having written an essentially pulp story in a deliberately literary way, and his contemporary text glints with words from a faded time: godowns, hongs, tole jambs, barrel staves, coirs, pourboires, paddle boxes and paddle walks, palanquins, dados, and men "kippered by power."

Readers should not be discouraged by McConnell's overstatement in the video above that his novel "is not about homosexuality at all and has nothing to do with that, and it's much more akin to prison sexuality." In person he said it's not typically gay in that the characters have "no repression, no inhibition." The narrator is entranced with an insecure working class blond teenager named Topher Ammidon Smith, and the story abounds with same sex desire, gay couples, harbor gay bars and gay hustlers. In fact, the sexual thrust slackens a little for being overexplained later in the book. However, nothing can diminish the early erotic tension or the slyness of the narrator's straightforward comment of Topher, "My idea had been to buy his loyalty if he was going to handle my treasure."

The novel has been variously compared to Heart of Darkness, Billy Budd, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson, Graham Greene, Jean Genet, Tom of Finland (from Peter Cameron), Blood Meridian, Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, and the movie Beau Travail. These last three come courtesy of the all-seeing Edmund White who masterfully led a broad discussion of the book with David at B&N earlier this month.

(After David explained his first go at the story was pure plot and he added the literary layer later, White told a wonderful story about being in Key West with James Merrill one morning when Merrill came downstairs with a new poem. White and another friend admired it, yet admitted something seemed missing. Merrill said, "Oh, you're right. I left out the human feeling." He disappeared upstairs and returned half an hour later with a revised version so good it had them "falling on the floor.")

As for this book, White blurbed it, "Sexy, demonic, elusive, The Silver Hearted is a perfect work of art."

For more, see today's review in Book Forum and last week's in Time Out.

Born February 19: Pim Fortuyn

The conservative-populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was openly gay to a degree that's unimaginable here: On national television he explained that he enjoyed the taste of semen, comparing it to a strong liqueur, and he used his foreign tricks as "proof" that he wasn't racist. Dutch voters, for and against him, were more interested in his ideas. He wanted to reduce government's role in health services and education, he spoke against the "Islamisation of our culture," sounded a warning cry about the dangers of shari'a law superseding the Dutch legal code, and pledged to curtail immigration drastically. Yet he was also for euthanasia, for legalized soft drugs, for same-sex marriage, and for reducing the military by combining the army and air force to save money. Although Fortuyn was riding a crest of widespread popularity with fully fifty percent of voters aged 18-30 supporting him (huge in a multi-party system), the Netherlands did not get to have their first ever openly gay Prime Minister, because they had their first assassination in 330 years, since 1672. A thirty-two year old white Dutch man shot Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting "the weaker parts of society to gain political power." The motive was unrelated to Fortuyn's being gay. He was fifty-four. Contrarian even in death, Fortuyn was buried twice, first in the Netherlands, then dug up and re-interred in Pordenone, Italy, where he owned a second home.

Out Olympians: Six Lesbians, Zero Gay Men

Leading the way, as ever, lesbians are the only out Olympians in Vancouver. Before lamenting why gay male sportsmen still cling to the closet, let's celebrate the six lesbians, all from northern countries:

Renate Groenewold, long track speed skating, Norway Netherlands

Erika Holst, ice hockey, Sweden

Vibeke Skofterud [above], cross-country skiing, Norway

Sarah Vaillancourt, ice hockey, Canada

Sanne van Kerkhof, short track speedskating, Netherlands

Ireen Wüst, speedskating, Netherlands

Wüst, 23, and van Kerkhof, 22, are girlfriends. Understandably, they're a tad tired of the press asking them about dating rather than about being world-class champion athletes. If they're going to go for queer trivia, the media really ought to quiz Vibeke about her clothes, or lack.

Meanwhile, Outsports has a rambling article by an anonymous closeted 2006 winter Olympian on why he thinks gay male athletes don't come out. His main points appear to be avoiding the additional stress and staying attractive to sponsors.

"Athletes who are gay have nothing material to gain by coming out publicly. And as an athlete, you must think about things in terms of their utility, especially because sport is now both financially and athletically competitive. No longer is it just, “What else can I do to get that extra edge?” The mantra now becomes, “What else can I do to appease and win over sponsors?”

"While it may seem from the outside that coming out would generate a lot of publicity, I feel that that kind of media attention would be falsely earned, that it wouldn’t be garnered for my athletic success, but for my sexuality. There is a strong dislike held by many elite athletes for the “human interest” stories that come around every Olympics. I think that this sentiment within my Olympic team made me focus completely on my training and results, so that I could earn that media coverage as an athlete, not as a gay man."

One surprise was his claim that many gay athletes delay confronting their sexuality until after their competitive years by concentrating exclusively on their sport. Also, he says many straight Olympians also don't or can't have relationships because of their extensive training and nonstop traveling.

In a similar vein, former NBA player John Amaechi recently disappointed progressive fans by telling the Telegraph:

"I personally have spoken to 10, 12 current professional footballers who are gay, they exist, I promise you. As it happens none of them have asked me if they should come out. But if they did, I would tell them not to. I'm not a gay right activist. I don't insist that they be a Joan of Arc. Why? Because that is what would happen: they would get burned at the stake. And how does that help anyone?"

One amateur who bucked Amaechi's opinion is Andrew McIntonish, a college lacrosse team captain who recently came out before senior year. He says of washing up with his straight teammates after his disclosure: "Life was normal in the showers. When we talked about our dates, I would comment on the nice arms my date had and they would talk about their girlfriends."

Born February 18: Duane Michals, Audre Lorde

Even if you've somehow missed everything else, you know the self-taught photographer Duane Michals, who turns 77 today, for his cover art on the Police's album Synchronicity. Hallmarks of his black and white work are his use of handwritten text, nude men, dramatic juxtapositions, artificial stagings, and nods to gay history -- the horse image is from his 1970 Salute to Walt Whitman and was sold five years ago at a Christie's auction of Elton John's art. Among his more recent books is The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy. Awesomely, Michals and his partner, an architect he met at the gym in 1960, this year will celebrate 50 years together. Old school to the core, Michals is dismayed by "all these kids spewing out of art school photographing their dinner and then making it a 20-foot photograph," and he is not a supporter of gay marriage. From a 2008 interview:

So, you're politically against gay marriage, or just spiritually against it?

"I'm politically against it. I want civil unions. I want all the political advantages, but marriage is a tired vestige of the heterosexual world. I don't know why gay people would want to get married. Of all things! It's a failed institution. It just doesn't make sense. Wedding cake? Oh please!"

Born to Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, Audrey Lorde recognized the power of names and naming early in life, changing hers as a child to Audre to highlight the symmetry of both names ending in e. At 49 her landmark Zami: A New Spelling of My Name confirmed her stature as a great and essential writer and the nation's foremost "black lesbian feminist poet warrior." Still in her twenties, through a year at the National University of Mexico, graduating from Hunter, and getting her advanced degree from Columbia, she began publishing her poems and seeing them anthologized abroad as well as in Langston Hughes' New Negro Poets USA. (In 1997 Norton published her definitive Collected Poems at 512 pages.) A mother of two children from an eight year marriage to attorney Edwin Rollins, she was already enjoying her lesbianism at twenty, during a year at the National University of Mexico, and later had a seventeen year relationship with psychology professor Frances Clayton, as well as shorter relationships with the artist Mildred Thomson and finally with Gloria Joseph. That Clayton is white might be noteworthy because it was during those years, co-mothering the two children, that Lorde attacked the underlying racism of the feminist movement, linking the experience to slavery in essays like "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." Lorde had equally strong insights into the lgbt movement. From a 1980 interview reprinted in the new book I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde:

"...most gay white men are marginal only in one respect. Much of the gay white movement seeks to be included in the american dream and is angered when they do not receive the standard white male privileges, misnamed as 'american democracy.'

    Often, white gay men are working not to change the system. This is one of the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is. Black gay men recognize, again by the facts of survival, that being Black, they are not going to be included in the same way...

    I see no essential battle between many gay men and the white male establishment. To be sure, there are gay men who do not view their oppression as isolated, and who work for a future. But it is a matter of majority politics: many gay white males are being pulled by the same strings as other white men in this society. You do not get people to work against what they have identified as their basic self-interest."

After fighting cancer for fourteen years, Lorde died in 1992 in St. Croix at 58. Jackie Kay is one of many who call Lorde "my hero."

Uganda Bill Expanded To Include Executing Friends of LGBT

Textbook case of how to isolate a dehumanized minority and intimidate the majority into supporting their oppression: The fine print in the Uganda anti-gay bill would authorize the death penalty for anyone with a previous conviction for "homosexuality or related offenses." Two strikes, you're dead. Related offenses are:

·      aiding and abetting homosexuality
·      advocating same-sex relationships or LGBT rights
·      publicizing or funding pro-LGBT organizations
·      using the internet or a mobile phone for homosexuality or its promotion
·      failing to report an offender to the police within 24 hours

International response has been inadequate. Rob Tisinai created the video above.

Born February 17: Robert Dessaix

Which book finally dislodged The Horse Whisperer from the #1 spot on Australia's bestseller lists? Basically its opposite: Robert Dessaix's Night Letters was a surprise sensation, an intellectual novel compromised of twenty letters written in a hotel in Venice in the mid-1990s by an Australian man newly diagnosed with HIV. Echoing literary travelers from Marco Polo and Dante to Casanova and Sterne, contemplating life, death, love, and the passage of time, the narrator R. discourses on cathedrals and museums, seduction and sex, hell and heaven, Venice and Venetians. Despite the character's dire future, critics hailed his "wry, chatty, surprisingly cheerful voice" (NYTBR) finding him "seductive, charming, and always thought-provoking" (Kirkus). The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "luminous gem" and the Cleveland Plain Dealer "a story exquisitely told." Dessaix's second novel, Corfu, also describes gay ex-pats in Europe and again rings with literary echoes: Homer, Sappho, Chekhov, Cavafy. His nonfiction includes a memoir called A Mother's Disgrace about his own adoption and subsequent wanderlust; Twilight of Love, a book about retracing Turgenev's steps as he followed a married opera star and her husband for years; and an anthology, Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing. This April will see the release of On Humbug, his contribution to the Little Books on Big Themes series.

Before this series of tubes called the internets, single people found one another by killing trees placing ads in newspapers. After a failed marriage to a woman, Dessaix wrote a personal ad in 1982 and met Peter Timms, who is still his partner. As for longevity and dedication, Dessaix created a complex language when he was eleven and continues to speak it to himself even now, as he turns 66 today.

233 Reasons To Be Depressed: UK's Most Borrowed Books

Toward the top of my list of Things To Do When I Rule the World is to get America to pay authors royalties on books borrowed from libraries, just as they do in Britain, Canada, and throughout the EU. Following Denmark's enactment of the first PLR in 1946, a UK plan was proposed in in 1951, and finally was initiated in 1979, funded by money from the National Lottery. Last year the UK Public Lending Right program paid just over ten cents per borrow, capping out at $10,348 per author. Not a fortune but a beautiful principle.

Alas, for 2009 only 362 authors earned between $7,840 and the maximum $10,348. A total of 364 authors earned from $3,920 to $7,840. And 17,280 authors earned royalties of between $1.56 and $156. Full chart here.

The PLR has just released its list of the 250 most borrowed books of 2009 and I defy you to find a more depressing book fact than James Patterson owning twenty-two spots on the list including three of the top four. Danielle Steel has five, John Grisham four. J.K. Rowling one. Of course, there is a time in life for thrillers by lesbian Patricia Cornwell (whose six titles appear at #7, 22, 78, 81, 169, and 205) and the gentle comedies of Alexander McCall Smith (#124 and 180). Several of the books and authors are unknown to me, yet even assuming the best, the whole list has too few first rate literary novels. Beyond the roughly ten commercial offerings of Joanna Trollope, Joanne Harris, PD James, John Le Carre, and Khaled Hosseini, seven caught my attention. I was particularly happy to see David Ebershoff whose book may be the list's sole entry by a gay man about a gay character.

76  The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, Rebecca Miller

86  The Welsh Girl, Peter Ho Davies

120  Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

145  Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris

226  Engleby, Sebastian Faulks

227  On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan

229  The 19th Wife, David Ebershoff

Please, more widely read people, comment about which missing titles are essential.

Adam Haslett Reads from Union Atlantic

Despite all the praise and his extremely polished manner in prose and in person, Adam Haslett can still blush. Last night after his second ever reading from Union Atlantic, the second question in his Q&A came from front row friend Jonathan Franzen who asked, "Can you talk about the difference between writing short stories and the longer form?"

Haslett turned red, swallowed a laugh, mastered himself, and said with stories he was "always cutting, cutting, cutting" but in a novel "I can go down this road a while and explore..." He said writing a story you're able to read the entire piece each day as you move forward whereas with the novel the "strain of trying to keep as much of the book live in my head was a little crazy making."

Among the knowing crowd at the Upper East Side B&N, a woman curious about why Charlotte's dogs speak to her in the voices of Cotton Mather and Malcolm X was told "both were rhetorically satisfying" and represented "the superego of American liberalism -- you have too much privilege, give some up."

Returning again to differences between the forms, Haslett, famed for his short story collection You Are Not a Stranger Here, said with the novel he wanted to write a "more outward looking book" with "this social scope." Stories are "positioned between the poem and the novel," they're more lyrical, "a few images and a couple moments," but a novel must "have satisfactions along the way both for the reader and the author." 

Gripping and immensely readable, Union Atlantic has at its core a gay relationship between a ruthlessly handsome ex-marine banker and a besotted high school slacker, which the openly gay Haslett said in a print interview were the novel's hardest scenes to write. In their lead in to running an excerpt, Esquire called it, "the first great novel of the new century."

ALA's Notable LGBT Children's and YA Books of 2009

The American Library Association has announced their annual Rainbow List, naming 46 notable children's and YA titles of lgbt interest published between July 2008 and October 2009. The selection jury said "four stood out for their impact on the body of GLBTQ literature of interest for youth." Two of them (Ash, Finlater) you'll remember from the Band of Thebes survey thanks to the impeccable taste of Nicola Griffith and Evan Fallenberg. The committee also "commended the groundbreaking pair of complementary board books from Lesléa Newman, Daddy, Papa, and Me and Mommy, Mama, and Me."

Newman is one of many Thebes' survey participants to be honored on the full longlist, with Nick Burd, Patrick Ryan, Alex Sanchez, and Rakesh Saytal. Congratulations also to perennial favorites Dale Peck, David Levithan, and Frank Polito. True to their mission of identifying books for readers up to eighteen, the jurists have included several books that may not immediately seem YA such as Pansy Division's singer Jon Ginoli's memoir Deflowered, Alison Bechdel's The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, Mitchell's Gold's Crisis, and Judy Shepard's The Meaning of Matthew.

The ALA Rainbow List's four standouts:

How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity, Michael Cart, editor

Ash, by Malinda Lo

Into the Beautiful North, by Luis Alberto Urrea

Finlater, by Shawn Stewart Ruff

While some titles delicately concentrate on the emotional lives of lgbt teens others confront sex head on. Ellen Hopkins' 627-page Tricks looks at five teens who sell their bodies in Las Vegas. Timothy Carter's Evil? considers the unlucky gay Stuart, whose interrupted shower moment leads to a townwide religious crusade against masturbation.

Born February 16: John Schlesinger

Forty-one years ago this May, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy hit movie theaters and went on to win Oscars for best picture, director, and screenplay. The gay story of the Bronx's own Ratso Rizzo and Texan Joe Buck earned an X rating (which back then meant no one under 17, not porn) and bizarre reviews from the likes of Vincent Canby in the NYT. Schlesinger had previously made one of the first "swinging London" movies, Darling, (winning Julie Christie her best actress Oscar), and later made the bi Sunday, Bloody Sunday, the first widely distributed film to show two men making love. His daring dwindled over the years: The Day of the Locust, Marathon Man, Yanks, The Falcon and the Snowman, Madame Sousatzka, Pacific Heights, and the indie favorite Cold Comfort Farm. His last movie was the regrettable Madonna - Rupert Everett vehicle, The Next Best Thing in 2000. The London-born Schlesinger lived in Palm Springs with his partner of more than thirty years, Michael Childers, until his death in 2003.

France Is First Nation To De-List Transgenderism as Mental Illness

Appalled to learn this, but until last week every nation in the world classified transgenderism as a mental illness. On Wednesday, France became the first country to remove trans from the list of mental disorders and declare it a medical condition. Last May on the eve of International Day Against Homophobia [IDAHO], French Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot promised they would reclassify transgenderism and last week the government made the switch.

In addition to the 194 other nations, the World Health Organization and the American Psychiatric Association still consider transgenderism a mental illness.

Thanks to the tenacity of pioneer activists Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings, the APA finally declassified homosexuality as a mental illness in a dramatic meeting in December 1973. The vote was 13-0 and historians like Charles Kaiser believe "it remains the most important victory of the modern gay rights movement." The WHO did not declassify homosexuality as a mental illness until 1990.

Above left is Coccinelle, a French entertainer who transitioned from male to female in 1958, was legally married to men three times, and remained a trans activist to her death in 2006. On the right is Chevalier d'Éon, who lived as a man (an international spy and quasi ambassador) from 1728 to 1776 and as a woman, officially recognized as such by the crown and given government money for a wardrobe of dresses, from 1777 to 1810. His and her story are explored in the biography Monsieur d'Eon Is a Woman that the Nation calls "terrific."