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Yesterday, on the 150th anniversary of the firing on Fort Sumter, we were in Oxford, Mississippi for a Democratic fundraiser. Of course we made pilgrimages to the indie mecca Square Books, Faulkner's house, and the beautiful university campus. Outside the library they have a statue of James Meredith and inside I was happy to see the school had hosted Patrick Johnson, author of Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South. Several things on Frat Row caught my eye.
You'll flip to hear it's my partner's & my 8th anniversary today.
According to page 66 of Manning Marable's new biography, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention in 1944 when Malcolm Little was 19 he began to act as a "butler and occasional house worker"** at the Boston Back Bay home of 56 year-old Paul Lennon, and part of the work was to undress them both and put talcum powder on Paul until he climaxed. The media is overhyping these "revelations." The weekly sexual sessions are even described in Alex Haley's Autobiography of Malcolm X, though there Malcolm says he was invited along to watch while the treatment was given by 'Rudy' -- who Marable says is a fictitious character Malcolm invented to hide behind. Marable also says, "There is no evidence from his prison record in Massachusetts or from his personal life after 1952 [when he joined the Nation of Islam] that he was actively homosexual." Twenty years ago, in 1991, Bruce Perry published Malcolm: The Life of the Man Who Changed Black America claiming Malcolm enjoyed same-sex encounters throughout his life.
**the only source for "butler and occasional house worker" is Malcolm himself, when he needed to provide employment history on his prison forms in 1946.
Born to an unwed fifteen-year-old waitress in South Carolina, Dorothy Allison was the first member of her family to graduate from high school. Against those odds, she has become an international literary sensation for her novels Bastard Out of Carolina
Playwright and director Charles Ludlam founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967, when he was twenty-four. His plays are a kaleidoscope of high and low art in which the actors each play multiple parts; Ludlam himself usually took the female roles. The Mystery of Irma Vep is his most popular work, featuring two actors (originally Ludlum and his boyfriend Everett Quinton) playing eight characters. It was the most produced play in the United States in 1991 and in 2003 became the longest-running play ever produced in Brazil. A recipient of four Obie Awards, Ludlum was also honored with fellowships from the NEA and the Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundations. He died of aids in 1987.
Amy Ray, 47, is one half of the folk rock duo Indigo Girls, who in twenty years have sold more than twelve million albums and been nominated for seven Grammys, winning Best Contemporary Folk Recording in 1990. The first out lesbian duo on the pop charts, they have never been a couple. Ray is in a relationship with Carrie Schrader, a documentary filmmaker. Indigo Girls most recent album, Despite Our Differences, was released last fall and debuted in the top 50 of the Billboard chart. Amy's solo project has a new concert cd MVP Live.
Former enfant terrible Slava Mogutin, 37, still lives to provoke. Born in Siberia (and, according to Wikipedia, “the first openly gay personality in the Russian media”) now a New Yorker (after Amnesty International and
American PEN helped get him political asylum), the writer and photographer is permanently at war with the establishment. A constant and often vulgar critic of Moscow’s leaders, Mogutin has written seven books in Russian, winning the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize in 2000. He aims for a similar shock value in his hatred of establishment gays and loves to antagonize his audience, describing himself as a "cave-based, homo terrorist, pinko commie fag, and propagandist of brutal violence, psychic pathology and sexual perversions." He brings all that angry energy to his photography, which appears regularly in art, fashion, alt, and porn magazines. His best photo book is Lost Boys
Above, April 5. I'm sparing you the endless mud, fog, drizzle, sleet, slush, and hail. And I won't reinforce stereotypes by claiming this bald eagle is gay but I will say he is extremely fussy about his building materials for interior decor. Every morning he flew onto the same branch of our tallest cottonwood tree, broke off a large twig, and flew off to his distant nest. (Some days a talon grip, other days a beak hold.) Yesterday he brought a "friend." For those of you keeping track, sunset is now around 9:30pm. In June it will be 11:40pm. Click each image to enlarge.
Video proof of Colm Tóibín's endless charms. Chris Castellani interviewed him in Cambridge yesterday afternoon, prior to his evening reading of "Two Women." Discussing straight writers, Toibin says, "They mean no harm." (If the clip doesn't load properly, see it here.)
To watch an earlier interview by Paul Holdengraber at the NYPL, click here.
Or you can read this interview in which Tóibín compares his previous story collection Mothers and Sons [[Kindle
Work and love are the twin hearts of Tove Jansson's Fair Play
Other chapters see them discussing Fassbinder, hauling fishing nets in a sudden fog, debating the "honorable male friendships" of second-rate westerns, a visit from an opinionated 92-year-old puppeteer, a strange trip to Phoenix, coping with the jealousy incited by an adored pupil, hosting a needy former acquaintance who has for decades kept a scrapbook of Mari's mother's life and is still terrified by the glorious storms that roll through. Although the women live in separate flats connected by an attic passage on the top floor of an apartment building, they share a cabin on an isolated island in the far north (that readers will recognize from Jansson's wonderful The Summer Book).
When a lonely woman writes the author Mari to ask the meaning of life, Mari frets over her reply. "I can't say work is the most important thing because she doesn't like her job." "How about simply love?" "Won't do! She's completely alone; no one loves her." After a while, Mari wonders, "Could I write to her about experiencing very simple things...Well, for example, that spring is coming? Or just buying pretty fruit and arranging it in a bowl...Or a great, stately thunderstorm moving closer..."
I've made it easy for you by highlighting the "simplest things" from the first chapter. The answer to her question is the sum of this book, a series of everyday moments made into a perfect work of art.
Written in 1982, Fair Play appears now in America with a fine introduction by Ali Smith. Tove Jansson died at 86 in 2001. She and the artist Tuulikki Pietila were partners for more than forty years.
An instructive and depressing post from Deadline Hollywood about the friends and family of Martin Luther King Jr. stopping two prestige, high-profile MLK biopics. Openly gay Lee Daniels used his clout from Precious to get his Selma in with the Weinsteins. The spectacular Paul Greengrass (Bloody Sunday, United 93, Bourne 2 & 3) is making Memphis for Scott Rudin. Both screenplays include King's adultery. The family objected, and Andrew Young let Hollywood know their concerns, implying the parts they don't like are "fabrications."** Soon after those discussions, Universal said it dropped the Greengrass film because of "scheduling." The article reports, "The studio denied outside pressure played any role in deep-sixing the pic." King is a public figure and the studios don't need permission to tell his life story. The reporter gives the impression the family will blackball any project that includes King's infidelity. On a different point, I'd love to know how much either script credits Bayard Rustin and whether he is visibly gay. Andrew Young says he wants what Attenborough did for Gandhi.
**Although white FBI agents wiretapping King did fabricate evidence to discredit him, his serial infidelities are documented in biographies and in memoirs by black friends such as Ralph Abernathy and Kentucky State Senator Georgia Davis Powers, who discusses her own affair with King.
With an air of his Andorra
"They had been traveling for days, first by plane, and then by train and ferry, for their destination was a place at the edge of the world, in the far north of a northern country. Their journey was like a journey from a prior century, a matter of days rather than hours, the earth serious and real beneath them, constantly insisting on its vastness."
Seamlessly shifting from Daniel's to Alice's thoughts, the story builds to their arrival and a doubly surprising conversation in a cold bed. Earlier, Alice was robbed in a dismal market, and of everything taken from her "she most regretted the loss of the novel" in her bag. Now she's reading an ancient book found abandoned in a train station, Certain Persons by St. John Cyre, which she says is terrible, "But I'm enjoying it."
Peter's website calls this story an except from a novella-in-progress called Certain Persons; which may or may not have morphed into An Odd Marriage, his novel that FSG is pubbing next winter. If all went as planned, two days ago Peter was interviewed on stage at the Rome's Libri come. It's heartening to see Italy recognize him as a major writer of the highest import.
Can we all agree that editors David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell have made Subtropics essential reading three times a year? The current issue has new fiction from Edna O'Brien and a significant novella called "Katherine Mansfield," by John Weir. Wholly original, the long story feels like a companion to his novel What I Did Wrong, remixed. Both are first person narratives by a quippy, self-loathing, commitment-adverse, middle-aged professor in Queens who has written a debut not unlike Weir's The Irreversible Decline of Eddie Socket. In What I Did Wrong the David Feinberg character is "Zack;" here, the brilliant dead writer friend is "David." The teacher's romantic interest in his student Justin Innocenzio from the novel has become, in this story, an affair with an acting class scene partner Phil Innocenzio, 23 to his 42. The novel dwelt on a suave first love Mark; the novella stars an indie singer Marc, who is the successful one-man band called Katherine Mansfield. The novella is like two laps around a Mobius strip: The narrator breaks up with Marc to be with young Phil, inspiring Marc to write genius heartbreak pop songs that quote the narrator; then when music-obsessed young Phil breaks up with the narrator, he unwittingly quotes the pop song quoting him.
Toward the beginning of the story Marc begs the narrator to fly from New York to Los Angeles because he needs him to make him unhappy so he can write better sad songs for "an emo musical called I'm Sick of You."
"He sighed heavily -- a worrisome sigh because he meant it. Normally, Marc was careful not to mean anything. He was all about style emptied of specific content. We were so used to talking to each other in sterling epithets that it took an audible gasp to switch from arch to earnest. Now I was in trouble. He was about to be sincere. Sincerity is my Kryptonite. It strips off my fabulous cape and leaves me feeling stunned and human. Too bad I can't resist it. In spite of myself, I crave the literal-minded. All my life, I have wanted to marry someone prosaic, and the people I have yearned for most have been the ones who don't really get me. They never know when I'm kidding, and so they keep their distance. Ironists like Mac, on the other hand, are drawn to me like groundhogs to the false spring, and I have been loved continuously since high school by failed poets and lapsed Catholics and bitter guys from Boston who died cursing God, but were buried nonetheless clutching their rosary beads."
If editors and juries don't get too distracted by the surface zingers or too annoyed by the characters' self-absorption, watch for Weir's funny, painful depths to be rewarded in next year's best anthologies and magazine prizes.
Workaholic Colm Tóibín guest edits the current issue of Ploughshares, some of which is available free online. His brief introduction gives away a nice anecdote that a stingier writer would have hoarded for fiction. Tessa Hadley
If you're looking for a Tuesday morning hero, why not Belinda Sanchez? The 18 year-old lesbian is a senior at Maywood, Illinois' Proviso East High School, whose student body is 70% black and 24% Latino. Belinda has been out since she was a freshman and says the school, which has a GSA, is very accepting of LGBT students. So she was "just shocked" to hear the principal tell her she had to wear a dress -- not a tuxedo -- to the prom on April 22. Belinda hopes to become a civil rights lawyer, and she knew whom to call: The ACLU. The group's LGBT Project director John Knight said,
"This sends a negative message to other students that they can't express who they are. It's a First Amendment right, a free speech right, and that includes her right to send a message through wearing male clothing that she doesn't think women should be restricted to traditional female clothing."
The ACLU sent a concerned letter to the school board, which overruled the principal's decision. District spokesperson TaQuoya Kennedy praised Belinda for opening "up a new, very interesting and healthy dialogue in terms of our prom review procedures. We support our students in all of their differences and we encourage them to express themselves in various ways as long as it is not disruptive to the school environment."
Belinda told the Chicago Tribune, "I'm happy. I didn't just stand up for myself. I did this for everyone who's in a position like I'm in."
(Photo by Michael Tercha, Chicago Tribune)
Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph Lelyveld has just published a new biography of Gandhi Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India [[Kindle]] making the case that the love of his life was Hermann Kallenbach (seated, right), a German-Jewish bodybuilder and architect. From the Wall Street Journal's review:
"Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might relate to the enemas Gandhi gave himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.
"Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about "how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."
"They were parted when Gandhi returned to India in 1914, since the German national could not get permission to travel to India during wartime—though Gandhi never gave up the dream of having him back, writing him in 1933 that "you are always before my mind's eye." Later, on his ashram, where even married "inmates" had to swear celibacy, Gandhi said: "I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of men and women."
The Indian state Gujarat, birthplace of Gandhi, has already made sale of the biography illegal. Several Indian newspapers have condemned the "predictable," "kneejerk" ban.
You know Paul Rudnick squealed when he heard the news. Today the New Yorker runs his humor piece, "I Was Gandhi's Boyfriend," narrated by a hot dumb blond ice dancer named Kelly:
I first met him when he came to see my ice show in Nepal, which was called “Holiday on Dirt.” Gandhi came backstage and he told me, “I very much enjoyed watching you pretend to ice-skate, in your tight pants.” I asked him, “Um, so why are you wearing a diaper?” And he explained that his outfit was a traditional Indian dhoti, and I said, “Well, you look like the New Year’s baby.” And he said, “You are so handsome when you are not speaking.”
The word homosexual was still two years away from being invented when Oscar Wilde first published The Picture of Dorian Gray in 1890 in the magazine Lippincott's. Nevertheless, the subject of same-sex love was of increasing interest and concern. John Addington Symonds began to circulate his cautiously pro-gay A Problem in Greek Ethics in 1883, yet in 1885 "gross indecency, meaning any kind of sexual activity between men, became a prosecutable offense." The magazine's editor worried about the story's boldness in showing artist Basil Hallward's love for young Dorian Gray. He trimmed the text in phrases here and there, removing a total of 500 words. A sample cut: “There was something tragic in a friendship so colored by romance, something infinitely tragic in a romance that was at once so passionate and so sterile.” A sample change: Hallward worshipped Dorian “with far more romance of feeling than a man should ever give to usually gives to a friend.” A sample deletion: “There was love in every line, and in every touch there was passion.”
The text we know as The Picture of Dorian Gray is the 1891 version, which Wilde reworked for its publication as a stand-alone book, mindful of the reviews that had called the story "poisonous." According to Ruth Franklin's review in the New Republic:
"In response, Wilde himself, in revising and expanding the novel for its re-publication the following year, actually went much further than Stoddart in bowdlerizing his own work. He took out the entire line about Hallward worshipping Dorian and several sentences that followed, including: “Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time.” He took out a line that read, “I quite admit that I adored you madly, extravagantly, absurdly,” and replaced it with, “I was dominated, soul, brain and power by you. You became to me the visible incarnation of that unseen ideal whose memory haunts us artists like an exquisite dream.” More than a surface change, this represents an attempt to alter the fundamental character of the relationship between Hallward and Dorian: Rather than
the controversial and even prosecutable pairing of lover and beloved, they are presented as the much more acceptable artist and muse."
Now scholar Nicholas Frankel has restored the 1890 version to Wilde's original draft and published it with commentary as The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition just out from Harvard's Belknap Press. Readers face a trade-off between seeing this more obviously gay version, and enjoying the expansions Wilde incorporated in the final book form of 1891. Happily, readers of either version will know Basil and Dorian were more than painter and model.
Born Graham Walker in Bandon, County Cork, Ireland, he popped over to London to train as a drama instructor but justly wound up on stage and in front of the camera. His success as a presenter and interviewer was instantaneous, like champagne uncorked. Effortlessly fun and engaging, he often outshines his guests. His childish delights ought to be embarrassing -- as he admits, "Now, this isn't big or clever," -- but those antics are often very, very funny, especially when he employs his best telephone manner. He called a sheriff's office in a Midwestern state about their law prohibiting intercourse with live fish, and, with Roseanne as his witness, rang up the Austrian tourist board to ask about visiting the north central village called Fucking. ("Is Fucking nice in winter?") It oughtn't be funny, you know that, but just try to remain stone-faced during his interview with speed daters. Frodo laughs so hard he kicks his feet up in the air and rolls off the couch. Norton's two books are an autobiography, So Me, and greatest hits from his advice column, Ask Graham.
Children's storytelling colossus Maurice Sendak will release his first picture book in thirty years -- and his first ever as an out gay man -- about a circuit party pig party. Bumble-Ardy
Although it's easy now to suppose a provocateur of such flair and rigor and self-described egomania would always find a platform, Paglia waited nine years to see the publication of her breakthrough book of cultural criticism, Sexual Personae. Five agents and seven publishers rejected it between 1981 and 1985 when Yale finally accepted it. They did not publish until five years later while Paglia taught, tweaked sections, and added new essays. The book sold moderately well before it was named a finalist for a National Book Award. When Vintage released the paperback in 1991, it became a tremendous bestseller and she became a star. Paglia appeared on dozens of talk shows and brought a volcanic pop intellectualism to a nation weaned on the prepackaged chipper inanities of morning television. Read her books Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (1992), Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (1994), and Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (2006). Accompanying Todd Oldham's photos, she wrote the text for a short book about the magazine duo Joseph Holtzman and Carl Skoggard's upstate retreat for artists, Camp Nest.
In clear, unadorned prose Håkan Lindquist's prize-winning short novel My Brother and His Brother [[no Kindle]] tells the story of Jonas Lundberg who, from 13 to 18, tries to understand the life, love, and death of his unknown older brother Paul who was struck by a train at 15, two years before Jonas was born. Adult readers will see some but not all of the answers before the young teenager forms the questions; this only adds to its realism and in no way loosens the story's grip. Foremost among these: Was Paul gay? Is their parents' friend Daniel also gay? Did Paul kill himself? With the discovery of a hidden diary, Jonas can reconstruct Paul's affair and sexual initiation with Petr, a Czech 16 year-old. Typical of Linquist's simplicity in storytelling and beautiful restraint are these few lines that end chapter fourteen:
Petr handed Paul the camera.
"It has to be a profile," Paul said. "I have to get your nose."
Petr laughed. "My nose? What do you mean? Is it that special?"
"It is."
"In what way?"
"It's the only nose I've ever seen halfway into my navel."
Peter laughed so hard he almost fell off the rock. "Well, in that case you must see that my lips are in the picture too."
"Don't worry, your lips will be there."
With the same control and understatement, Lindquist describes a tragedy four pages later. It isn't what you, or Jonas, were expecting. Even as it's unfolding, it isn't what it seems. Such is this novel that makes literature of exploring life's surprises.
Some readers may seek a broader canvas -- throughout his teens Jonas has no friends but his parents (expertly drawn, with their deep love for him and their recurring bouts of grief) and their contemporary Daniel; Jonas barely mentions school or sports or movies or music or books -- while other readers will find the narrow concentration increases the novel's potency and impact.
First published in Sweden in 1993, the book won Le Prix Littéraire Bordelaise de Lunetterie when it appeared in French in 2002. It has been published in seven other countries but has not been released in English until now, by Berlin's Bruno Gmünder. Lindquist has written several more novels and an opera libretto, William, which imagines a love affair between Shakespeare and Marlowe. It has been performed eleven times, always to sold-out audiences.
Thanks to Lawrence Schimel for introducing me to Håkan's work.
Samuel R. Delany has defied expectation from the beginning, sixty-nine years ago. The tenth child born to a Harlem couple in the 1940s, he was not the likeliest boy to prep at Dalton (alongside Wallace Shawn). When he took up writing, some were surprised he chose to work in science fiction. Once he'd made a name for himself in that genre -- his Dhalgren sold a million copies -- some were further surprised by his inclusions of significant sexual content. His has also written erotica that he is happy to call pornography, like Phallos
Delany's twenty-ninth work of fiction appeared in 2007 and many of his fourteen nonfiction books are still in print. He has won the Nebula four times, the Hugo once, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. His novel Dark Reflections won a Stonewall Book Award. A professor at U Mass Amherst for eleven years, Delany has taught at Temple University since 2000. His own work is required reading in many college courses, across multiple departments: literature, black studies, and queer studies. Although he was married to a woman for nineteen years and fathered a daughter, he was openly gay for much of that time and privately identified as gay since his teens. Because he has been an aficionado of XXX theaters and video booths for decades, he estimates his total number of male sexual partners to be 50,000. A documentary covering all aspects of his life, The Polymath, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2007 and has screened at many lgbt festivals, winning the jury award at Philadelphia. The movie shows Jonathan Lethem to be a fan; shouldn't he get David Remnick to let him do a major New Yorker profile of the world's leading black, gay, sci-fi intellectual? Until then, try his autobiography The Motion Of Light In Water, "with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin."
