Band of Thebes

Independent UK's 101 Power Gays: Thomas, Portas, Fry, Davis, Duffy

Two newcomers top this year's Independent on Sunday's annual Pink List of the most powerful lgbt people in the UK: Rugby player Gareth Thomas and Mary Queen of Shops tv star Mary Portas. Although both have been public figures for some time, they only came out this year, Portas when she civilly united her partner Melanie Rickey. The highest ranked writers on the list are Stephen Fry at #3, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy at #5, and then Sarah Waters at #26. In the bottom half of the list are Philip Hensher, Val McDermid, Stella Duffy, Jackie Kay, and Paul Burston.

If there's any doubt that the UK is far ahead of the US in coming out, consider that the top 101 was too crowded for these fancy folk, all omitted: Alan Bennett, Ian McKellan, George Michael, Elton John, Neil Tennant, David Hockney, Jeanette Winterson, Alan Hollinghurst, Rupert Everett, Jasper Conran, Simon Callow, Boy George, and, understandably, Lord Browne.

Do read the entire list. At #22 you'll learn opera director turned Mamma Mia! helmer Phyllida Lloyd's next project is Iron Lady, a biopic of Margaret Thatcher starring Helen Mirren Imelda Staunton Fiona Shaw Joan Plowright Maggie Smith no, Meryl Streep. 

1  (tie) Gareth Thomas; Rugby player
1  (tie) Mary Portas; Broadcaster, PR and Queen of Shops
3  Stephen Fry; Broadcaster and writer
4  Evan Davis; Broadcaster
5  Carol Ann Duffy; Poet Laureate
6  Alan Carr; Comedian
7  Peter Tatchell; Human rights activist
8  Michael Salter; Broadcast adviser to PM
9  Sir Nicholas Hytner; Theatre director
10  Sue Perkins; Comedian

Born August 10: Ellen Hart, Mark Doty

In twenty-two years of writing fiction, Ellen Hart has published twenty-five mysteries, but she didn't always intend to become an author. For fourteen years Hart was a professional chef, which may explain why her two series' sleuths are a restaurant owner and a food critic. Seventeen of her novels feature out lesbian Jane Lawless, food savvy, crime smart, and love jinxed, unlike her creator who has been with her partner for thirty years, having raised two children and now welcomed two grandchildren. Five of the Lawless mysteries have won Lambda awards and two have won Gold Crown awards. The most recent in the series, The Mirror and the Mask, was released last November. Hart's eight other novels feature a married heterosexual foodie named Sophie Greenway. A creative writing teacher and very popular on the mystery lecture circuit, Hart and her partner live in her native Minneapolis. She's 61 today.

A master of the personal memoir (Heaven's Coast, Firebird), as well as the pet memoir (Dog Years), Mark Doty surpasses himself as a poet. In the early 1990s he reached a new level of power with his collection My Alexandria, for which he became the first American to win the T.S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, followed soon after by his stellar Atlantis. Three more collections appeared before his new and selected poems gathered in Fire to Fire won him widespread praise and the National Book Award. A gifted, nurturing, and careful teacher, Doty has collected some of his thoughts on writing into the little wallop of a guide, The Art of Description, out last month from Graywolf. This past spring in Granta, Doty wrote with his habitual candor and insight about his very early marriage to a woman before he fully understood he is gay. Since 1995, he has been with novelist Paul Lisicky.

LGBTQ Presidents in Higher Education Holds Its First Meeting

Nine openly gay presidents of colleges or universities gathered in Chicago recently to form a new organization for lgbt academics in leadership positions. One of the co-hosts, Charles Middleton, president of Roosevelt University, said queer academics "need to be taken off the exclusion list." He and Raymond Crossman, president of the Adler School of Professional Psychology, invited twenty-five presidents, and the nine who attended expect their number to grow significantly in the coming years.

According to a story posted on Inside Higher Ed, "the group will focus on leadership development for those who are gay presidents or who aspire to be, professional development for gay people at all levels of academe, and on education and advocacy to promote equity and diversity." 

President of the University of Maine at Farmington since 1994, Theodora Kalikow said, "My advice is to be out since you are a baby or as soon as possible. But then, the reason we get these positions is by being really excellent at what we do. That's the most important thing. You have to believe in yourself, not set lower expectations, and find the place that's the right match."

Hampshire College president Ralph Hexter acknowledged "there are sectors in higher education where this is a very difficult issue." He said, "we all know there are many, many others who for whatever reasons -- their regions, their personal situations, their institutions -- are not out," adding, "but maybe more people will look at us and say, 'Hey, these people are OK.'" He said, "It's important for gay and lesbian leaders in higher education to see a path."

Having earned degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale, Hexter has been president of Hampshire for five years. Three years ago he married Manfred Kollmeier and celebrated with the campus.

The group has chosen the name LGBTQ Presidents in Higher Education. They will meet again in a few months and at the 2011 American Council on Education conference.

Born August 7-8: Anna Weirauch, Randy Shilts

Nine years before London's 1928 deluge of lesbian fiction (Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Compton MacKenzie's Extraordinary Women, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel, and Djuna Barnes' The Ladies Almanack), Anna Weirauch published The Scorpion in Germany. It was the first of three novels following Mette Rudolph from childhood to adulthood. In the first volume Mette has an affair with Olga, who breaks up with her and kills herself. When Mette's parents enlist a psychiatrist to "cure" her, she dismisses the idea that lesbians are sick or need treatment. In the next two volumes she encounters most of the social ills of Weimer Berlin, including  drug abuse, alcoholism,  and  rampant promiscuity but in the end, she finds contentment by leaving the city. Once she's settled in a rural area, she's ready to really love another woman. An abridged translation, titled Of Love Forbidden, was published in America in 1933.

In 1981, Randy Shilts became the first journalist at a major newspaper to cover the gay community full-time. In 1999, five years after Shilts died from aids, the NYU Department of Journalism ranked his reporting on the disease for the San Francisco Chronicle 44th of the top hundred works of journalism in the twentieth century. His exhaustive, meticulous book on aids, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, is regarded as a modern classic. Gary Wills said Shilts’ book “will be to gay liberation what Betty Friedan was to early feminism and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to environmentalism." It covers what were then believed to be the origins of the disease in Africa in the 1970s [now known to be 1959 in Kinshasa; with the first U.S. death in 1969 in St. Louis] to 1985, when Rock Hudson’s announcement that he had aids finally captured mass culture’s attention. Shilts examines the years between, detailing the ignorance, denial, hostility, and indifference of medical, health, and government officials as the unknown “gay cancer” ravaged America, as well as profiling the pioneering doctors and gay activists who fought for funding, research, and public awareness as tens of thousands died around them. HBO’s 1993 adaptation of And the Band Played On was nominated for twenty awards and won nine, including the Emmy for best made-for-tv movie. Conduct Unbecoming, his next book, again as monumental, examined through thousands of interviews the U.S. military’s treatment of its lesbian and gay servicemembers. At the time of his death in 1994 he was planning a book on homosexuality in the Catholic Church. His groundbreaking first book, a biography of Harvey Milk called The Mayor of Castro Street was to become a film by Bryan Singer but was beaten out by Gus van Sant's Milk.

In 1981, Randy Shilts became the first journalist at a major newspaper to cover the gay community full-time. In 1999, five years after Shilts died from aids, the NYU Department of Journalism ranked his reporting on the disease for the San Francisco Chronicle 44th of the top hundred works of journalism in the twentieth century. His exhaustive, meticulous book on aids, And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic, is regarded as a modern classic. Gary Wills said Shilts’ book “will be to gay liberation what Betty Friedan was to early feminism and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to environmentalism." It covers what were then believed to be the origins of the disease in Africa in the 1970s [now known to be 1959 in Kinshasa; with the first U.S. death in 1969 in St. Louis] to 1985, when Rock Hudson’s announcement that he had aids finally captured mass culture’s attention. Shilts examines the years between, detailing the ignorance, denial, hostility, and indifference of medical, health, and government officials as the unknown “gay cancer” ravaged America, as well as profiling the pioneering doctors and gay activists who fought for funding, research, and public awareness as tens of thousands died around them. HBO’s 1993 adaptation of And the Band Played On was nominated for twenty awards and won nine, including the Emmy for best made-for-tv movie. Conduct Unbecoming, his next book, again as monumental, examined through thousands of interviews the U.S. military’s treatment of its lesbian and gay servicemembers. At the time of his death in 1994 he was planning a book on homosexuality in the Catholic Church. His groundbreaking first book, a biography of Harvey Milk called The Mayor of Castro Street was to become a film by Bryan Singer but was beaten out by Gus van Sant's Milk.

Tschüss

Auf Wiedersehen, Deutschland, and thanks for the laughs. Even though your cinema "comedies" never translate into funny at home, you have a nice sense of public whimsy. These restroom figures, the winged gold car, the gigantic upside-down ice cream cone melting over a building. But naturally it was the Australians who heard Taylor Dayne's Gay Games anthem Facing a Miracle and rechristened it "Facing a Marigold."

In ten days of many conversations, including long meals, with Germans and athletes from four continents, no one ever mentioned Obama to us. Not once. A few did ask about Alaska's half-term governor and, more happily, when they saw I was reading Thomas Mann, they lit up about Buddenbrooks. 

Born August 6: Andy Warhol

For an artist so often dismissed as shallow, Andy Warhol’s work remains a permanent feature of the contemporary life. The way Andy saw the world shaped what the world has become. You can’t say that about Pollock or Motherwell or Rothko or Rauschenberg or Johns (the last two of which—gay, closeted, dating each other—didn’t want to be seen with Andy because he wasn’t butch enough). You might say it about Picasso, but Picasso didn’t make movies (sixty-six shorts and features, many with Paul Morrissey) or start magazines (Interview, still being published today) or produce bands (The Velvet Underground) or have his own show on MTV or coin a phrase as widely-used and enduring as fifteen minutes of fame. Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928, he was an illustrator for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New Yorker before he could support himself by his art. His first submissions to galleries were drawings of male nudes that were deemed too gay; his first solo show, in 1952, was called Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. Within four years his work was shown in a group exhibition at MoMA. In the Sixties he made his silk screens of soup cans, Marilyns, Elvises, and Jackies, and in 1968 he was shot, almost fatally. His death, in 1987, followed routine gall bladder surgery and several hospital missteps such as overloading him with fluids and failing to monitor his condition. He had avoided and postponed the operation because he did not trust doctors and hospitals. For more, read Wayne Koestenbaum's heady appreciation.

Alaska News: ALCU Sues State for Unequal Tax Laws, Homer Chamber Apologizes for PFLAG Snub, Gay Games Medal Sweeps

On behalf of three same-sex couples, the ACLU has sued the state of Alaska for its unequal tax laws. The Anchorage Daily News reports:

The lawsuit asks the court to require the state and the Municipality of Anchorage to apply the tax exemption to three couples represented in the lawsuit as if they were in marriages the state recognizes. Alaska does not recognize marriage between same-sex domestic partners.

Mittman said married couples can apply for a $150,000 tax exemption regardless of whether the home is jointly owned. Same-sex domestic partners, however, are allowed only half the exemption because the state considers them roommates instead of married couples, he said.

In a news story that quotes Band of Thebes' original post on the Homer 4th of July parade emcee's omission of PFLAG's name and statement in his bizarrely abbreviated narration, the ADN writes that the local Chamber of Commerce has finally apologized for the "alleged snub." After the event, PFLAG president Jennifer Baker published this reasoned and elegant letter in the Homer News and Homer Tribune. After which, PFLAG vice president Joseph Lapp had a meeting with Chamber president Paul Daughinais. It appears to have been unsatisfactory, with Daughinais failing to see the problem and deciding not to speak with the emcee Tim White about his spontaneous censorship. Lapp then published this forceful op-ed in the Tribune. Shortly after, Daughinais issued a template apology.

At Gay Games in Cologne this week, Team Alaska's five participants have won a minimum of twelve medals. Congratulations to amazing gold medal Squashist Nathalie Martin the top ranked woman in her sport (above with) multi-gold martial arts superstar Trevor Storrs; multi-medalist Gay Games trustee and fellow martial artist Darl Schaaff; and sports shooter Charles Francis (the sole American in that competition; below, flanked by two members of the Stuttgart Hot Shots) who took three silvers and a bronze in his first ever shooting contest. Exact tally to come.

Thank You, Team Köln

Men's Relay. Team Dallas won gold in the 30-34 age group, host city Team Köln won bronze. Click top and below to enlarge.

Federal Judge Overturns California Ban on Same-Sex Marriage

Full story and lots of analysis at Towleroad, AmericaBlog, and NYT. Judge Walker's 136-page opinion cites in Findings of Fact (Section II) the so-called "Revulsion Letter" from John Macy to the Mattachine Society in 1966 that my partner wrote about on Huffington Post last week.

Born August 4: Sapphire, John August

Thirteen years before Precious stormed Hollywood and won two of its six Oscar categories, the novel it was based upon was just as unlikely a literary sensation: Knopf paid half a million dollars based on half a manuscript. In 1996 The New Yorker ran an excerpt and Push was published to a swirl of fanfare, praise, and criticism. Success had taken the longest, hardest route to get to openly bisexual Sapphire. Born Ramona Lofton in Fort Ord, California, she was an army brat child of a sexual abusive father and an alcoholic mother who eventually abandoned her family. In her earliest years as a writer she cleaned houses, danced topless, and worked as a prostitute to support herself. When she published her explosive poetry in The Portable Lower East Side Queer City (including a work about Central Park "wilding" imagined from the perspective of a 13 year-old rapist) and earned a small NEA grant, she became the bullseye for conservatives targeting "obscene" arts funding. Three years after Push, she brought out another volume of poetry but she has not published any books since 1999. Today she is 60.

When his third grade teacher in Boulder, Colorado told students to write to a famous person, eight year-old John Meise didn't choose President Jimmy Carter or a sports hero; he sent a letter to Roald Dahl. So how excited was he, twenty-odd years later, to write the screenplay for Tim Burton's version of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory? Very! By that point, he had changed his name to John August and had seen six of his screenplays produced, including Go, Titan A.E., both Charlie's Angels movies, and Big Fish. Next came The Corpse Bride. He also runs a no-nonsense website for budding screenwriters, where he is forthright about the eleven finished scripts he can't get made, and, gratis, answers readers' random questions about their work. In June 2008, he married his longtime partner. Earlier, the NYT wrote, "Mr. August said his sexual orientation has helped him notice things others miss," and quoted him saying, "I suspect every gay screenwriter has a big gay-catharsis movie inside them. But then you go to a gay film festival and you see everyone else has done their movie, and there's not a pressing need for you to do yours." This year he inflicted Prince of Persia on moviegoers; upcoming are Preacher, The Thief of Always, and Tim Burton's feature-length Frankenweenie.

Gay Games VIII: Some of the 100m Medalists

Dude, lesbians are fast. And the speediest woman of the day (Dutch Martje Hoekmeijer at 13:66) was from the 30 to 34 race, not the 18 to 29 year olds. The fastest man was Teddy Franciscot from France at 11:03. Full 100m results here, and all Gay Games news here. Apologies for not being able to i.d. the photos but I can say the NYC woman alone below won the 100m dash for the age group 65 to 69. And no, the gold medal winner wearing the towel did not run in the towel. But yes, as a matter of fact, later he did get up from his massage to help carry a tent pole without it. An impressive day all around.

I Curse the River of Time by Per Petterson

Arvid Jansen is Per Petterson's Nathan Zuckerman. The Norwegian novelist's confused alter ego now gets his second book, a much, much better prequel to the underdeveloped In the Wake. As with Petterson's IMPAC Dublin winning masterpiece Out Stealing Horses, here in I Curse the River of Time the placid surface covers great depth and power. At 37 in the tumult of 1989, Arvid is about to endure three incomprehensible losses: the end of his marriage, the death of his mother, and the fall of Communism. After getting her dire prognosis in early winter, Arvid's mother immediately leaves Oslo to go to the family's summer cottage in her native Denmark. (When she, an ardent smoker long worried about lung cancer, hears that she's actually dying of stomach cancer, she says, "What a waste of time.") Uninvited, Arvid follows her and during the all night ferry ride and over next couple days, he thinks about his life, riddled with big and bigger mistakes. The first in his family to attend college, he dropped out at 20 to prove his commitment to Communism by working in a factory, for eleven years. His personal life is no less delusional. But real readers will find a soulmate in him for his consuming devotion to literature. Riding the bus to the hospital after his older brother has had a fatal accident, Arvid thinks of the scene in A Moveable Feast when F. Scott Fitzgerald worries to Hemingway in a Parisian cafe men's room that he's endowed too small, and what a bastard Hemingway must have been to parade that anecdote decades later when Fitzgerald was a drunk and his reputation in decline. At the hospital, Arvid's younger brother reacted to the crisis by going outside and sprinting laps around the building. Arvid arrives after that, looks down from a window and sees him without recognizing him. The whole book abounds with magnificent understatement.

I Curse the River of Time goes on sale today. Read the NPR review, or try an excerpt of the opening chapter.

Born August 3: Rupert Brooke

Yeats called him “the handsomest young man in England” and he was adored throughout Britain for his poetry as much as his legendary looks -- so how could someone as heroic as Rupert Brooke be killed by a mosquito bite when he was only twenty-seven? A star all his life, he blossomed at Cambridge, where he was one of the founders of the Marlowe Society acting club and a member of the Apostles. Throughout his schooling he had deep crushes on his male classmates, particularly Charles Lascelles and Michael Sadleir, and in his twenties dated both women and men, seeming proudest of his seduction of Denham Russell-Smith, the brother of a friend. (See his letters to James Strachey, which Brooke’s executors kept out of print for eighty-three years, until 1998.) His poetry is largely impersonal and, of course, he is most celebrated for his idealistic War Sonnets, having died soon after their publication, before he ever saw battle, en route with his Navy unit to Gallipoli. Two months after Brooke’s death, his younger brother William volunteered with the 8th Battalion London Regiment, known as the Post Office Rifles, and was killed in battle within twenty days. Today, the Rupert Brooke Society alludes to Rupert's "confused love life" on their homepage.

Catholics Antigay Efforts Lead Anne Rice To "Quit Being a Christian"

Bestselling novelist Anne Rice has announced she's "quit being a Christian" over the Catholic Church's campaign against gay equality. On her Facebook page she announced:

"For those who care, and I understand if you don't: Today I quit being a Christian. I'm out. I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being 'Christian' or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to 'belong' to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I've tried. I've failed. I'm an outsider. My conscience will allow nothing else."

Rice discussed her decision, her gay fans, and Christopher with NPR.

Rice says the final straw was when she realized the lengths that the church would go to prevent same-sex marriage.

"I didn't anticipate at the beginning that the U.S. bishops were going to come out against same-sex marriage," she says. "That they were actually going to donate money to defeat the civil rights of homosexuals in the secular society.

"... When that broke in the news, I felt an intense pressure. And I am a person who grew up with the saying that all that is needed for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing, and I believe that statement."

Though the author's son Christopher is a gay rights activist — as well as a bestselling author in his own right — Rice says that his sexuality was not instrumental to her decision to forgo Catholicism.

"From the beginning, I've had gay fans, and gay readers who felt that my works involved a sustained gay allegory," she says. "I didn't set out to do that, but that was what they perceived. So even when Christopher was a little baby, I had gay readers and gay friends and knew gay people, and lived in the Castro district of San Francisco, which was a gay neighborhood. And so my experience with gay people long preceded Christopher coming out of the closet and becoming a gay novelist."

Rice only converted to Catholicism in 1998, when she surprised her millions of fans by announcing she would stop writing vampire books and would devote herself to fiction celebrating the Lord. Now she says she's certainly not going back to vampires but will focus on "new themes, new characters, new stories." Future work "will continue to reflect the optimism and the optimistic viewpoint that I was able to reach when I converted."

Born August 2: James Baldwin

Growing up in Harlem, the oldest of nine children, James Baldwin cared for his eight siblings in the shadow of an abusive stepfather and began preaching sermons in 1938 when he was fourteen. Those years and the dawning realization of the difficulties of being black and gay in America are covered in his autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, which he wrote as an expatriate, having left New York for France when he was twenty-four, with only his typewriter, two Bessie Smith records, some clothes, forty dollars cash, and no comprehension of French. After a stint in London, he finished his novel in Switzerland. Although he had published trenchant essays and reviews in The Nation, The Partisan Review, and Commentary, had won a Rosenwald Fellowship, and had the backing of Richard Wright, American publishers rejected his manuscript. Only after a British publisher accepted the novel did they relent, and its U.S. publication was a success.

Baldwin then wrote a play, The Amen Corner, and published his first of six essay collections, Notes of a Native Son. Critics and readers alike expected his second novel, Giovanni's Room, to illuminate the black experience but all the characters are white and the plot revolves around a gay love affair between an American and his Italian boyfriend who is to be executed in the morning. Shocking for 1956. His next novels, Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone(1968), reflect the broader unrest and violence of the Sixties, with characters black and white, straight, bi, and gay. Between those novels, the New Yorker published, in two oversized issues, Baldwin’s seminal, angry, warning cry, “Down at the Cross” which became the bulk of his essay collection, The Fire Next Time.

Judging the dominant society by its actions rather than its words, Baldwin did not shrink from referring to the “cruel white majority” as “moral monsters,” or from lamenting the new absence of moral authority in Harlem. He considered “urban renewal” to mean "Negro removal." Gore Vidal claims that JFK and RFK (with whom Baldwin’s friends had had a fractious meeting as Attorney General) referred to Baldwin as “Martin Luther Queen.” His FBI file was 1,750 pages by 1987, when he died in Saint-Paul de Vence, having spent much of his life in France and Istanbul. Toni Morrison edited the collections of his works for Library of America and he was honored with a US postage stamp in 2005.

Growing up in Harlem, the oldest of nine children, James Baldwin cared for his eight siblings in the shadow of an abusive stepfather and began preaching sermons in 1938 when he was fourteen. Those years and the dawning realization of the difficulties of being black and gay in America are covered in his autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, which he wrote as an expatriate, having left New York for France when he was twenty-four, with only his typewriter, two Bessie Smith records, some clothes, forty dollars cash, and no comprehension of French. After a stint in London, he finished his novel in Switzerland. Although he had published trenchant essays and reviews in The Nation, The Partisan Review, and Commentary, had won a Rosenwald Fellowship, and had the backing of Richard Wright, American publishers rejected his manuscript. Only after a British publisher accepted the novel did they relent, and its U.S. publication was a success.

Baldwin then wrote a play, The Amen Corner, and published his first of six essay collections, Notes of a Native Son. Critics and readers alike expected his second novel, Giovanni's Room, to illuminate the black experience but all the characters are white and the plot revolves around a gay love affair between an American and his Italian boyfriend who is to be executed in the morning. Shocking for 1956. His next novels, Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone(1968), reflect the broader unrest and violence of the Sixties, with characters black and white, straight, bi, and gay. Between those novels, the New Yorker published, in two oversized issues, Baldwin’s seminal, angry, warning cry, “Down at the Cross” which became the bulk of his essay collection, The Fire Next Time.

Judging the dominant society by its actions rather than its words, Baldwin did not shrink from referring to the “cruel white majority” as “moral monsters,” or from lamenting the new absence of moral authority in Harlem. He considered “urban renewal” to mean "Negro removal." Gore Vidal claims that JFK and RFK (with whom Baldwin’s friends had had a fractious meeting as Attorney General) referred to Baldwin as “Martin Luther Queen.” His FBI file was 1,750 pages by 1987, when he died in Saint-Paul de Vence, having spent much of his life in France and Istanbul. Toni Morrison edited the collections of his works for Library of America and he was honored with a US postage stamp in 2005.

Gerbrand Bakker on The Twin, Argentine Men, Edmund White

Gerbrand Bakker's tremendous IMPAC winning novel The Twin goes on sale today in paperback (also ebook). Any plot summary will reduce the pleasure of discovery in this beautifully paced story, but: In the Netherlands a middle aged single man -- the surviving, less outgoing half of twin brothers Henk and Helmer -- still lives on the family's very small farm with his aged father who forced him to abandon college to tend dairy cows. Helmer finally starts to make changes in his life when he takes in a 19 year-old border connected to their past.

The thoroughly Dutch (polite, reticent) Bakker survived the agony of being interviewed by talking more about books than about himself. He does reveal "I don’t have a wife, or children, or a dog, or a garden.” As for his taste in literature:

“A friend of mine told me what I should read, and I did, Cheever and Ring Lardner, Iris Murdoch, I love Iris Murdoch. The Sea, The Sea is my favourite. In it she shows that the magical can affect the ordinary. I like that. I also love Raymond Carver and John Updike. You know, I only read Winnie the Pooh when I was 20; it is a great book, and also The Wind in the Willows . Hmm, yes, wonderful.”

Bakker also says: “A book that was very important to me was Edmund White’s The Beautiful Room Is Empty. It is the only one of his books I have read. It was enough, it taught me a lot. I read most of Nabokov's work and loved it, but now, no, I can’t read him at all. I am a slow reader. People begin mentioning books and I think . . .”

Last month, Bakker wrote a brief, charming op-ed for the NYT about the Netherlands reaching the World Cup finals. He said, "And in 1978, we lost to Argentina — which left us with no trauma at all, Argentines being people from another continent, across a huge and very deep ocean, who make a lot of noise and are cocky and handsome, and so are nothing like the Dutch at all."

(Photo of Bakker and his translator by Kenneth O'Halloran, Irish Times.)

Born August 1: Yves Saint Laurent

Are any three letters as elegant as YSL? When he was seventeen, Yves Saint Laurent began working for Christian Dior, who referred to him as his dauphin. When Dior died suddenly four years later, Saint Laurent was made head of the fashion house, but soon he was conscripted to serve in the Algerian war. Hazed by his rougher fellow soldiers, the fragile couture artiste lasted twenty days before he had a nervous breakdown. The army tried to cure him with electroshock therapy. When he returned to Dior, he found he had been replaced. He started his own house, giving rise to some of the most famous clothes in history: the Mondrian dress, "le Smoking," the tuxedo for women, the designer leather jacket, the sheath dress, the gold cape. For nearly twenty years he and his business manager Pierre Bergé were lovers, and, because they are French, after they broke up they continued living together for another ten years. In 1983, Saint Laurent became the first living designer to be honored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a retrospective. In 1993, he and Bergé sold the company for $600 million. After his retirement in 2002, Saint Laurent spent much of his time in Marrakech, where he restored and opened to the public the vivid gardens originally designed by French expat Jacques Majorelle. He died in June 2008 (most newspapers degayed his obituary, calling Bergé, who announced his death, "a friend" or omitting him) and his ashes are interred in the garden. At his funeral in Paris, Catherine Deneuve read a poem by Walt Whitman. The Pierre Berge-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation operates his haute couture studio as a gallery showcasing fashion, worth visiting just to see the space.