Band of Thebes

Smithsonian Removes Wojnarowicz Video After Catholics Complain

Ants walking on a crucifix in a 30-second video David Wojnarowicz made to honor his dead lover, photographer Peter Hujar, has been called "hate speech" by the Catholic League, and as a result the Smithsonian has removed it from their Hide/Seek exhibit. (Virginia Rep. Eric Cantor also complained.) As Blake Gopnik writes in today's Washington Post: "Now the NPG, and the Smithsonian Institution it is part of, look set to come off as cowards."

He continues:

"Of course, it's pretty clear that this has almost nothing to do with religion. Eleven seconds of an ant-covered crucifix? Come on.

"This fuss is about the larger topic of the show: Gay love, and images of it. The headline that ran over coverage of the matter on the right-wing Web site CNSnews.com mentioned the crucifix - but as only one item in a list of the exhibition's "shockers" that included "naked brothers kissing, genitalia and Ellen DeGeneres grabbing her breasts." (Through a bra, one might note, in an image that's less shocking than many moves by Lady Gaga.) The same site decries "a painting the Smithsonian itself describes in the show's catalog as 'homoerotic'. "

"The attack is on gayness, and images of it, more than on sacrilege - even though, last I checked, many states are sanctioning gay love in marriage, and none continue to ban homosexuality.

"And the Portrait Gallery has given into this attack."

(The image is Hujar's portrait of Wojnarowicz, not the video removed.)

 

The Best LGBT Books of 2010: 80 Authors Select Their Favorites

This year's Band of Thebes queer lit survey is the biggest ever: 80 authors select their favorite LGBT books of 2010, naming 100 titles. The top pick of 2010 and all the choices...

The Bad Life by Frédéric Mitterrand

If anyone was doing a survey of the year's best gay books and asked me my opinion, I'd somehow work in a mention of Frédéric Mitterrand's strange and amazing memoir, The Bad Life. Nephew of the former president, he is currently France's Minister of Culture, responsible for the nation's museums and monuments, protecting the arts, and "maintaing the French identity." He still has that job even after this book was published, describing in detail how much he enjoys trips to Thailand to hire male prostitutes. Big scandal, squashed by President Sarkozy's steady support of him.

Episodic in the extreme, and withholding almost all the major aspects of a fascinating, public life, the book sinks readers into chapters with no set-up and no typical guidance. You are in his memory. But the writing is outstanding (despite his love of long paragraphs) and the quality of his emotions is absolutely extraordinary: I can't immediately think of any gay book of any genre that goes so deeply and wisely into the joys and contradictions of every stage of a gay man's life from early childhood and puberty through college, young adulthood, and middle-age.

Edmund White said, "Movie stars, famous artists, tycoons, powerful politicians—these characters are all present in this stunning book, which is saved from being a celebrity memoir by its moral depth, its beautiful writing and its relentless honesty. Frédéric Mitterrand (as his name might suggest) has known everyone of importance, but he approaches every subject with sensitivity and a reckless candor."

The always insightful Andrew Holleran wrote one of his best reviews about it in the September - October Gay & Lesbian Review. He liked it a little less than I did, ending his piece:

"The Bad Life is an aloof, revealing, defiant, cringing, brave, intelligent, and melancholy book—a bit affected, more often eloquent—in part a portrait of the sort of character Françoise Sagan wrote about (rich brats), in part the vision of a gay man whose loneliness gave him a sharp and wonderful eye, a moral disgust that brings to mind, somehow, the same sour French taste one finds in another accusatory classic, Hervé Guibert’s To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life."

Born November 29: Billy Strayhorn, Peter Cameron

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

If you think Peter Cameron's contribution to literature is mere brilliance, in two story collections and five novels, you're don't know half of it. Re-read his splendid fifth novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, about which The Toronto Star said it is "considerably more sophisticated, subtle, and rewarding" than Catcher in the Rye. And go back to his fourth novel, The City of Your Final Destination, before you watch the DVD [out now] of the very enjoyable movie version starring Laura Linney, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Anthony Hopkins (as the gay brother). Peter's second literary career is rescuing books like Millen Brand's The Outward Room, just re-released by NYRoB Classics, and publishing his extremely elegant handmade books from Wallflower Press.

NYT 100 Notables, Critics' 2010 Picks Have No Queer Overlap

Congratulations to Joan Schenkar and Justin Spring whose biographies of Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Miss Highsmith / Kindle) and Samuel Steward (Secret Historian / Kindle) have been selected by the NYTBR editors as two of the 100 Notable Books of 2010, forthcoming in the print edition on December 5.

Three NYT critics have each selected their Top Ten of 2010, with Janet Maslin naming Wendy K. Moffat's A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster [Kindle] and Patti Smith's Just Kids [Kindle], and Dwight Garner choosing Kay Ryan's The Best of It: New and Selected Poems [Kindle] and Roland Barthes' Mourning Diary [Kindle]. Michio Kakutani's list has zero lgbt content.

Note the lack of consensus on queer titles: there's no overlap in the lgbt picks.

Five of the six books above are among the nearly 100 titles named in Band of Thebes' biggest-ever annual survey of authors' favorite LGBT books of the year, coming Tuesday. Plan on getting nothing else done that day. Eighty (!) authors have contributed to an amazing LGBT bibliography of deserved frontrunners and stellar underdogs.

Berlin Postcard: Gay Clubs, Christmas Markets, Hitler Again

Christmas markets are up everywhere and now a snowtubing ramp rises over Potsdamer Platz. Free advice: If you arrive on a Saturday night, go directly to the gay blast GMF [video] -- different djs on three high floors of a former East Berlin apartment block -- or, if it's the last Saturday of the month, do not pause on your way to Gayhane, the monthly party for gay Turks and Arabs.

The city's most popular exhibit is Hitler and the Germans: Nation and Crime at the German History Museum (with an expansion by I.M. Pei). This morning it was very crowded, and deservedly so: The curators again emphasize the complementary roles of dictatorship, social institutions (especially the Catholic and Protestant churches), and concurring ordinary citizens. "Hitler was able to assert his unconditional power after the violent actions of his henchmen were legalized" but it was "also possible due to the readiness of ever greater sections of society to give their approval to the Party." They discuss the power of national myth, the "allurement of conformity," and how Germans continued to "approve of the war, as long as they were winning." Crucial reminders for our fractious times, and very forceful in person, but also available in Daniel Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust. One thing you can't get from Goldhagen: Hitler has been on the cover of the national magazine Der Spiegel forty-six times since 1949, and every single year since the 1990s. He still sells.

TSA? What Tea Essay?

If you spend your spare time in airports avoiding Larry Craig's wide stance in order to dream up comic skits for Patsy and Edina, the new TSA is fine fodder. Sweetie darling, what's this tea essay? Also, until further notice, their official theme song is Teenage Dream: Put your hands on me, in my skin tight jeans, Be your TSA tonight! Not sure what happened to the Tom of Finland instruction manual but at DC's leading international airport, absolutely zero groping. Security was unchanged.

On the plane, the Department of Commerce, the Office of Transit and Tourism Industries, and the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs inflict a 15-minute written questionnaire on certain passengers. It asks non-U.S. residents if they were mugged, robbed, or assaulted during their visit and no where does it allow you to fly your gay flag (unless you're gay married). Question #11 lists six options for your travel companion: Spouse, Relatives, Friends, Business colleagues, Travel group, Alone. Throughout, language usage is abysmal. Asked to rate the airline's service in many categories, the options are: Excellent, Good, Average, Fair, Poor. Edina: Oh bloody hell! Fair! Average! What's the difference? Patsy: Please, Eddie, we're stuck in coach! For god's sake, "average" is "poor"!

Hide/Seek Week #4: Grant Wood's Arnold Comes of Age

Hide/Seek is on view at the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery through February 13. See it and get the catalog.

Grant Wood, Arnold Comes of Age, 1930

"...it would be a mistake to see his working in an American vernacular as a simple retreat from modernism. Instead, he inflected traditional forms and subjects with a knowing take on art history and the complexity of social mores; he was a notable satirist, for instance, of American pieties, and his landscapes are so stylized that they become abstractions. In Arnold Comes of Age, the wistful youth set against the homoerotic scene in the background suggest the tension and difficulties faced by gay men who stayed behind in Middle America--or gay men, as was Wood, who returned to their native grounds after realizing they could not find a home in the big cities of America or Europe either."

For much deeper look at this portrait and the artist, read Tripp Evans' revelatory Grant Wood: A Life, newly out from Knopf.

Oscar Narrows Documentary Category to Fifteen Semi-Finalists

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that fifteen films in the Documentary Feature category will advance in the voting process for the 83rd Academy Awards®.  One hundred-one pictures had originally qualified in the category. The surprisingly great Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work and the disappointing Stonewall didn't make the cut.

The fifteen films are:

“Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer,” Alex Gibney, director
“Enemies of the People,” Rob Lemkin and Thet Sambath, directors
“Exit through the Gift Shop,” Banksy, director
“Gasland,” Josh Fox, director
“Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould,” Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont, directors
“Inside Job,” Charles Ferguson, director
“The Lottery,” Madeleine Sackler, director
“Precious Life,” Shlomi Eldar, director
“Quest for Honor,” Mary Ann Smothers Bruni, director
“Restrepo,” Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, directors
“This Way of Life,” Thomas Burstyn, director
“The Tillman Story,” Amir Bar-Lev, director
“Waiting for ‘Superman’”, Davis Guggenheim, director
“Waste Land,” Lucy Walker, director
“William Kunstler: Disturbing the Universe,” Emily Kunstler and Sarah Kunstler, directors

Born November 25: Virgil Thomson

This would be impossible to imagine if he were an out teenager today, but the musical prodigy Virgil Thomson was stuck at a Kansas City, Missouri local junior college and was only able to attend Harvard thanks to a Mormon scholarship, awarded because he was friends with one of Joseph Smith's granddaughters. In Cambridge, he thrived. With the glee club he bopped to Paris, at the invitation of Bernard Fay, a well connected gay man who would later become a Nazi collaborator, sending many to their deaths while saving Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; for that story, see Janet Malcolm's Two Lives.

It was the musical Toklas who, from the background, guided the partnership of Stein and Thomson when he returned to live in Paris in the 20s. Together they created the landmark opera Four Saints in Three Acts, revolutionary for its all black cast, which finally premiered in 1934 in Hartford. Thirteen years later, just before Stein's death, they created an opera about lesbian icon Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All. By that time, Thomson had already composed music for three films, most memorably Pare Lorentz's The River, and was midway through his fourteen years as music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune. (He hated the work of Britten, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Sibelius, among others.) In 1948, he scored a shambling b&w film about a Cajun boy, his pet raccoon, a hungry alligator, and the threat of an oil rig on the bayou, Louisiana Story, winning 1949's Pulitzer Prize for music.

He lived for another forty years, at the Chelsea hotel with his partner Maurice Grosser, in diminishing circumstances. Of course, times changed, and his compositions were not played by American orchestras as often as he had counted on when he quit his job as a critic. He became something of a father figure to the next generation of gay composers and artists, most prominently Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Frank O'Hara, and Ned Rorem. Thomson penned his autobiography in 1966, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982 for his reader, and was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 1983. He died in 1989, a year after Grosser. Anthony Tommasini has written the definitive biography, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle.

Two Views of London's Sex Life Before the 1960s

 

For everyone already tired of a London dominated by either Kate M., it's time to revisit a darker, randier era. Yale has just published Frank Mort's queer-inclusive Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society, which caused the Herald Scotsman critic to confess, "against all expectations, I adored it." He writes:

"It is sensible to dismiss the excesses of the 1950s – and early 1960s-moralisers, especially when their rhetoric crossed over into bigotry. There were many grotesque homophobic outbursts and, in response to the influx of Indians, Pakistanis and Caribbeans, some truly noxious exercises in racist stereotyping. The trick (one that Mort recognises and ably pulls off) is to look beyond the demagoguery and anatomise the true, muddled, anxious 1950s English attitude towards sex.

"It is a fascinating subject and Mort’s analysis is outstanding. He writes very well, he melds broad analysis with telling tales of individuals and, along the way, he punctures more than his share of myths and lazy orthodoxies."

Seeing the book while visiting a friend at Yale Press last week called to mind Matt Houlbrook's amazing Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 published by the University of Chicago a few years ago. For many readers, Queer London inspires the same devotion as Gay New York. Houlbrook's consideration of working-class trade, and the upper-class men who loved/feared/used them, is a major strength. Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, Matt Cook called it:

“A ground-breaking work. While middle-class lives and writing have tended to compel the attention of most historians of homosexuality, Matt Houlbrook has looked more widely and found a rich seam of new evidence. It has allowed him to construct a complex, compelling account of interwar sexualities and to map a new, intimate geography of London."

Born November 23: Bruce Vilanch

Listen to Bette Midler: "Bruce was the first man to put something in my mouth that made us both money." She and Vilanch began working together in 1970 after she read his Chicago Tribune review of her show saying she needed more jokes. She called him and said, So write me some. Thirty-eight years later, in 2008, he co-wrote her Caesars Palace gig The Showgirl Must Go On. The Oscars' head writer and New Hollywood Squares star has also created comic material for Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Diana Ross, David Letterman, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Florence Henderson, and this year Tab Hunter. Vilanch has punched up many, many Hollywood scripts, including films that don't immediately seem to bear his razor humor, like Die Hard 2 and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he has acted in Mahogany, Ice Pirates, and The Morning After. He's also starred on Broadway as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, for which he shaved off his signature thirty-year shaggy blond beard, and off Broadway in his own show Almost Famous. He is the subject of the a-list love explosion Get Bruce! and appears in Laughing Matters. Beyond being funny, Vilanch has been a tireless supporter of many aids and gay rights causes.

Paul Rudnick on Mr. Peanut's Private Partner, Public Pride

Pushing the "out" in Shouts & Murmurs, Paul Rudnick exposes the hidden gay lives of Mr. Peanut, his new sidekick Benson, and a dozen other brand icons: Mrs. Butterworth & Mrs. Paul, Mr. Clean, Buster Brown, the Cracker Jack sailor, and the Keebler elves. He writes:

"After watching Portia de Rossi promoting her new memoirabout her anorexia, her struggle to come out as a lesbian, and her eventual happy marriage to Ellen DeGeneres, I feel emboldened. (Although I regret that, because I am a carbohydrate, Portia may fear me.) And after seeing Ricky Martin discuss his new memoir, about his coming out and his joy in becoming the father of beautiful twin sons, I think it’s time to tell the world that Benson and I will soon be adopting a jumbo cashew and a pair of Jordan almonds; some people will call it bridge mix, but for Benson and me it’s our family.

"As I reveal in my own upcoming memoir, “Right in the Nuts,” I had an agonized childhood. I was born and roasted on a dusty peanut farm down South, and my earliest memories are of being attracted to a macadamia named Jimmy Ray...

"Most of the peanuts I grew up with were destined for brittle or Goobers, but I always had a hankering for show business—maybe it’s the cholesterol. But the fear was always there. Would the Planters people ever hire me as their mascot if they knew my secret? I had no role models; it wasn’t until years later that I found out about Mrs. Butterworth’s decades-long relationship with Mrs. Paul, and even today Christian fundamentalists preach that it’s sinful to pour maple syrup on fish sticks."

Bake! Essential Techniques from Nick Malgieri

Scientists have yet to discover that the gay gene is entwined with the procrastination gene [I was supposed to post this a month ago / how long did you put off coming out], but if you're one of the millions who hasn't quite gotten around to thinking about your Thanksgiving dessert, Nick Malgieri is here to help. The Director of Pastry & Baking at the Institute of Culinary Education, he's the author of ten cookbooks, including the great new Bake!: Essential Techniques for Perfect Baking. Whereas other books leave you stranded with obscure, text-only instructions, Nick's book is packed with helpful photos of him demonstrating the tricky parts. Better still, his relaxed approach is a joy. He says, "Baking needn't be any more difficult than making a phone call."

A tireless teacher and traveler, Nick constantly does delightful cooking demos. Last week was Washington and Calfornia, this week and next it's New York and Connecitcut. Get Bake! and treat yourself to my favorite medicine manual, Cookies Unlimited.

Born November 21, 22: Christine Vachon, André Gide

Where would Todd Haynes be without Christine Vachon? Poison, Safe, Velvet Goldmine, Far From Heaven, and I'm Not There -- she produced them all. For that matter, where would independent cinema be if the New York native had chosen another career? Forty-seven today, she's produced more than thirty-seven features. A few highlights: Swoon, Go Fish, Kids, Stonewall, Office Killer, I Shot Andy Warhol, Happiness, Boys Don't Cry, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, Storytelling, and One Hour Photo; as well as Robert Altman's The Company, John Waters' A Dirty Shame, The Notorious Betty Paige, Infamous, Party Monster, and A Home at the End of the World. As if producing more than three dozen pictures wasn't enough, in her spare time she's written two books about making meaningful movies with no money, Shooting To Kill and A Killer Life. A breast cancer survivor, she lives in the east village with her partner Marlene McCarty and their daughter, Guthrie.

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

Hide/Seek Week #3: Romaine Brooks' Self-Portrait

For anyone visiting the greater DC area over Thanksgiving, a trip to the Smithsonian's Hide/Seek show is mandatory enlightenment.

Romaine Brooks, Self-Portrait, 1923

The must-have catalog by Jonathan Katz and David Ward says the artist

"...deploys a complex set of codes and pictorial conventions to assert her membership in the elite coterie of lesbians living in Paris between the world wars... Her position on a balcony, the threshold between public and private space -- her sleek masculinized attire coupled with her brightly rouged lips and thickly powdered face, the shadow that obscures (but does not mask) her eyes -- all signify, in various ways, her self-conscious performance of a lesbian identity. As a wealthy woman, Brooks never had to sell her paintings to support her art, so she was freer than most artists to accurately portray the largely queer social universe she inhabited."

[Click the image for a closer view, including her eyes.]

Jarid Manos on his Ghetto Plainsman

It's not every despairing seven year-old who blames himself for not being "man enough" to commit suicide by sawing through his own wrist with a breadknife, and it's fair to say most inner-city drug dealers don't end up starting and running a 501(c)3 devoted to restoring the great plains -- within seconds of meeting Jarid Manos you know you're with someone extraordinary. 

In conversation last night with Lou Pizzitola, Jarid discussed his challenges in coming out, his role as a single father, his life as a vegan athlete, a health advocate, and a green leader, while amplifying one of the major themes of his memoir Ghetto Plainsman: His years-long search for "one safe place, one pure place." He left the violence of the ghetto seeking refuge in nature, but he found worse violence in environmental degradation and "genocide" of animal species. He considered it "a Job-like experience" where "every place was filled with vicious, violent chaos." He cited "overgrazed destroyed land," toxic chemicals, "groups of rednecks blowing up prairie dogs for sport," mistreatment of Indians, the extinction of passenger pigeons and decimation of buffalo herds.

A former "teenage drunk," he now helps at risk youth with a second nonprofit called "Restoration Not Incarceration." Their first success was restoring Esteban Park in Houston. As with his Great Plains Restoration Foundation which earned non-profit status in 1999 and has protected 6,600 acres, Jarid has big goals for this new organization: ultimately he's going to expand the prison-work program to other prairie locations. You can make a one-time or recurring donation via those links.

Lou Pizzitola praised the memoir's gripping power and explorations of meaning, identity, and fulfillment. Many people in the audience were in awe of Jarid's prose style, including one literary-looking man who claimed it was the best he'd read. Jarid seemed ready for this level of response and said, "I'm blessed to be a natural writer," though he was quick to add it took him eight years to complete the book.

Read the first two chapters here.

Jarid is working on his next book, a novel called Her Blue Water Streets and You, about a bi-racial single dad's daughter who grows up to be a kick-ass environmental warrior. He described it as a mix of "Foxy Brown and The Old Man and the Sea." I'll be first in line to buy it.

By the Numbers: America Loves Its Lesbian and Gay Entertainment

A lesbian actress and a gay pop star are both in the top five NYT nonfiction bestsellers on the list that will be printed on Sunday. Only Keith Richards and Glenn Beck are more popular than Portia de Rossi's anorexic memoir Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain. And only Jon Stewart separates that book from Ricky Martin's Me at #5.

On the heavily commercial fiction list, Armistead Maupin's eighth Tales of the City novel, Mary Ann in Autumn is #33. David Sedaris is #10 and Emma Donoghue is #18.

Far bigger than books: The all-male, gay rendition of Teenage Dream that Blaine used to serenade Kurt is a record-breaker for Glee. It's the first time a song from the show debuted at #1 on Billboard's digital downloads chart. Even more important, because it's more public and inescapable, the gay version of Teenage Dream is already in the top 10 in radio airplay, the Hot 100, and Pop Songs.

Radio airplay! Americans nationwide are humming along with a cute boy singing to another boy: "Let's go all the way tonight, No regrets, Just love." And, "Let you put your hands on me in my skin-tight jeans, be your teenage dream tonight!" Thank you, Fox Network.

For comparison, Katy Perry's original version is below. To anticpate your question: Josh Kloss.

Speaking of singalongs, and how the world has changed, straight writer Dan Chiasson has an appreciation of The Magnetic Fields' gay braintrust Stephin Merritt on the New York Review of Books blog. He writes: "My children, ages 4 and 6, often ask to hear these songs in the car. (Until you have heard a four-year old boy sing the lines, “Should pretty boys in discos / Distract you from your novel / Remember I’m awful in love with you,” you haven’t approached the full depths of this band’s appeal.)"

Unhappy Traveler Damon Galgut Says "Memory Is Fiction"

Discussing his Booker-shortlisted "more personal and close to home" new work In a Strange Room at Three Lives last night, Damon Galgut admitted he and his editors debated whether to call it a memoir, travelogue, or fiction. Though all the events happened and "I haven't made anything up. I've been true to remembering," he's glad it's labeled a novel. Galgut twice said "memory is fiction." Describing the process of which details stay and which get filtered out, he said, "All of us all the time are constructing the narrative of our lives. That's what I'm doing in fiction."

He says the book's "deeper subject is memory itself" and that he "tried to embody the voice of memory in this book." This explains the shift between "he" and "I" in discussing himself in the more removed and more recent pasts.

No surprise to people who read any part of the book in the Paris Review or the PEN/O Henry Stories, he said "I am not a happy traveler." His "wanderings are fueled more by unhappiness," and are primarily "a desire to go away from where I am."

Yet although the book describes "bleak experiences" he thinks it's "consoling." He said, "There's something about language used well that is a consolation."

One of the reasons for this books marked changed in style compared to his previous work, like his other Booker-shortlisted novel The Good Doctor, is that he "felt I'd written all I had to say about South Africa." During the Q&A he voiced concern about the new government's proposed laws that might lead to censorship. Summing up a comparison with the old government, he said, "Different players, same game."

Galgut resisted a question about literary influences, saying that when he writes, "I try to clear other writers out of the mental attic." However, he was willing to name a few writers he admires: Greene, Beckett, Sebald, and Chekhov.

His own remarks, his interviewer's inquiries, and audience questions all avoided the gay content in his work. David Ebershoff was there and bought the book, so you'll be in great company when you get it.

Responding to a reader's quotation from the powerful, prize-winning middle section, "The Lover," Galgut agreed about its importance and said this passage "is the core of the book to me."

"Jerome, if I can't make you live in words, if you are only the dim evocation of a face under a fringe of hair, and the others too, Alice and Christian and Roderigo, if you are names without a nature, it's not because I don't remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it's for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there is only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it's all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of my life."

To contrast obsessions, you might read In a Strange Room back to back with Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. For art as consolation, compare it with the closing epiphany of Jonathan Strong's new novel.

Patti Smith Wins National Book Award for Mapplethorpe Memoir

The only downside to Patti Smith's win for her memoir about Robert Mapplethorpe is that it means Justin Spring's Secret Historian lost. I really liked the nonfiction judges -- including Blake Bailey and Sallie Tisdale -- chaired by Marjorie Garber, author of Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life.

Like this year's Pulitzer winner Tinkers, Jaimy Gordon's novel Lord of Misrule comes from a very small press. Big publishers gave Patti "thunderous applause" for her plea to save the book but they've largely given up on chancy fiction; more and more of the best work is relegated to marginal presses that struggle for attention. Gordon's third novel, Bogeywoman, a first-person account by a teenage lesbian who gets kicked out of a girls' summer camp in Maine and falls in love with her female psychiatrist, was published by Sun & Moon Press in 1999. Don't infer too much; in 1983, Gordon told an interviewer, "My lovers were male." She then described herself as "a solitary person, indeed, by inclination a solipsist."

The 2010 National Book Award winners are:

Fiction: Jaimy Gordon, Lord of Misrule

Nonfiction: Patti Smith, Just Kids

Poetry: Terrance Hayes, Lighthead

Young People's Literature:  Kathryn Erskine, Mockingbird

Complete list of nominees after the jump.