Band of Thebes

Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo

Two trusted critics, Dean Van de Motter and Doug Ireland, both knew Vito Russo, so heed their high praise of the brand new biography Celluloid Activist by Michael Schiavi. Ireland writes a comprehensive tribute to his friend while also critiquing the book:

"It is the great merit of Schiavi’s meticulously researched book that he restores to us Vito’s exuberant incandescence, his extraordinary charisma, his evergreen sense of indignation, and his unquenchable militancy, as well as his vulnerability and never-ending search for love on his terms (“the only terms any of us ever knows,” as Orson Welles said in “Citizen Kane” — for one cannot write about Vito without dropping in one of those cinematic references that ceaselessly and obsessively peppered his conversation). Vito was a friend of mine, and I do so miss him. Now, thanks to Schiavi’s book, he lives again."

Van de Motter knew Vito from ACT UP. He says,

"Before AIDS defined both his body and his activism, before his participation in the Gay Activist’s Alliance re-defined Queer Identity, Vito Russo was a passionate lover of film. He owned a movie projector as a child and spent most of the rest of his life accumulating films. But more than anything else, he loved screening them.  Perhaps nothing gave him more satisfaction than showing movies to other people. It was of course a natural for him to screen the movies for the GAA’s post-Stonewall Firehouse Flicks series. After the success of the first screening: Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, Vito Russo became convinced that there was value to gays watching movies together. Years before these films–and more–would be re-defined and deconstructed in his classic book The Celluloid Closet, Vito was doing what he was always doing: showing movies to his friends and laughing along with them.

And yet it is impossible to think of him as a film historian who was way ahead of his time without thinking of him as an activist...."

Born May 17: Howard Ashman

Perfectly plotted, gorgeously rendered, Beauty and the Beast is smart, funny, scary, and romantic. Best of all, its protagonist is a sensible, solitary reader who prefers books to almost everything else, and, during the possibly too-sweet happy ending, there’s a beautiful instant when she’s clearly disappointed to see the craggy Beast restored to his blandly handsome visage. Lyricist Howard Ashman was the excutive producer and, working with composer Alan Menken, created the witty, sweeping songs. Also collaborating on The Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin, they won two Oscars, two Golden Globes, two Grammys, and were nominated for two Tonys. Ashman died of aids when he was forty, months before the unprecedented triumph of Beauty and the Beast, which was the first animated movie ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. His partner Bill Lauch accepted his second Oscar on his behalf.

Nick Krieger's Memoir "Nina Here Nor There"

While the mainstream heaps attention on Chaz Bono's memoir, pride yourself on knowing this month's more indie trans autobiography, Nick Krieger's Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender [[Kindle]]. His website identifies him as "author/travel writer/yogi/queer dude." The pleasure deepens when you realize his is not going to be the angsty, tearful, self-loathing, suicidal trans tale you've heard so many times before. Subtract all that from the equation and add humor. Nick's bio begins: "A native of New York, Nick Krieger realized at the age of twenty-one that he’d been born on the wrong coast, a malady he corrected by transitioning to San Francisco."

In his blog post about his qualms with Bono's narrative and the media circus, he says:

"Why do we, as trans people, need to keep proving how awful our lives are in order for people to accept us? What if we modified our bodies, not “amputated” parts of them as Wilson so crudely states, because we thought our lives were so beautiful that we wanted to experience them in a vehicle that allowed us our deepest comfort and truest self-expression?"

Beacon published his memoir last week. PW reviewed the "candid if uneven" book in February:

"Though the early part of Krieger's journey feels like a standard primer on gender identity, didacticism and clunky prose give way to a beautifully rendered and personal account that feels like a fresh addition to trans literature: making a break with the typical transgender narrative, Nick did not feel like she was the trapped inside the "wrong" body; her discomfort with her female identity came much later and was often at odds with her staunch feminism. The narrative especially gathers confidence and momentum in Kreiger's recounting of his parents' efforts (and at times, inability) to understand his transition. And the final discussions of occupying a place somewhere not quite on either extreme of the gender binary are fascinating."

Booklist called it a "humorous, moving, and engagingly authentic journey." Praise from K. M. Soehnlein, Thea Hillman, and Kate Bornstein can be read on Nick's site.

Tomorrow night is Nick's release party at Castro Books Inc in San Francisco, with subsequent northern California events on June 1, 14, and 18. He will read in Philadelphia on June 4 and in NYC on June 7.

Phoenix Suns' CEO Rick Welts Comes Out

The Phoenix Suns' president and CEO, Rick Welts, 58, has become the first NBA executive to come out as gay, in an interview with the New York Times. Closeted for his 40 years in pro basketball, Welts had to hide his grieving when his longtime partner Arnie died of aids in 1994. More recently, Welts' partner of 14 years was no longer willing to hide and broke up with him two years ago. Welts has the full support of NBA commissioner David Stern, who 17 years ago sent Welts a $10,000 check for the memorial fund in Arnie's name. Last month Stern fined Lakers superstar Kobe Bryant $100,000 for calling a ref a faggot. Suns player Steve Nash was surprised at his boss's coming out -- he thought he already was out, because everyone knew. Nash told the Times, "“Anyone who’s not ready for this needs to catch up. He’s doing anyone who’s not ready for this a favor.”

L'Amour Fou: Gay Courage, Power, Nobility, and Love

The fine film L'Amour Fou made in 2009 but just released yesterday in the U.S. is very French, so it's less a hard documentary and more a personal essay, an elegant and melancholy love letter from Pierre Bergé looking back on his fifty years with Yves Saint Laurent. Their early romance, Saint Laurent's replacing  Christian Dior at age 21, being fired after his breakdown during military service in the Algerian War, their joint establishment of YSL's own couture house and subsequent triumphs are nicely sketched with archival clips. The film is framed around the dissembling and selling of their magnificent collection of art and objets, allowing Bergé in a series of interviews to reminisce about key moments in their lives, not omitting Saint Laurent's drinking, drugs, and depression. He says he saw Yves happy only two times a year, at the end of each couture collection, and it lasted not more than 24 hours.

To cheer themselves they had their art, their dog, their house and dazzling public gardens in Marrakech, and a newer chateau in Normandy where Saint Laurent decided to theme each room around a character from Proust. (When traveling, he always used the nom de hotel Swann.) The filmmakers shy away from saying what the men did for amour after their romantic relationship ended, but it does include Bergé's early and enduring work against aids. A high point is seeing footage of ACT-UP Paris staging a die-in on the streets and unrolling a pink condom over the obelisk in Place de la Concorde. Discussing them as a visible gay couple, former Minister of Culture Jack Lang said Saint Laurent and Bergé were symbols "of courage and power, of nobility and love." Fashionistas are forewarned, ultimately viewers will learn more about how Christie's mounts an epic auction -- with gala previews in New York and London before the Olympic-sized event itself in Paris's Grand Palais -- than they will about how a designer creates couture. The movie captures the primal, adrenaline thrill of bidding wars, as when this Brancusi sculpture goes for $26 million Euros, but the filmmakers are too sophisticated to tell you the overall results, or to explain that the proceeds were split between their existing foundation and a new non-profit to fund scientific research to battle aids. In fact, their auction shattered records as the highest-grossing personal collection in history. Guess the total  -- no, higher -- posted after the jump.

Born May 14: Magnus Hirschfeld

I too often run afoul of intelligent LGBT people who claim I'm anachronistically imposing a modern concept of queerness on a pre-Stonewall era and tell me I don't understand 19th century "friendships." As politely as I can, I suggest they reread their Whitman, their Symonds, and their Hirschfeld. In 1896, Magnus Hirschfeld wrote and published a pamphlet on homosexual love called Sappho and Socrates. In 1897—or, 114 years ago—with the leaders of the gay journal Der Eigene, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose motto was “Justice through science.” Their first goal was to overturn the notorious 1871 German law Paragraph 175, criminalizing male homosexuality. Not only did they campaign openly and publicly, they urged prominent people to sign their petition to repeal the law. Among the 5,000 signatories supporting gay rights were Einstein, Tolstoy, Mann, Hesse, and Rilke. When the bill to repeal came before the Reichstag in 1898, it failed, and, infuriated by their hypocrisy, Hirschfeld contemplated outing various members of parliament who had voted against it. Undaunted by the defeat, the committee continued to get the bill reintroduced repeatedly over the next decades. 
        Thirty-four years before Kinsey, Hirschfeld collected detailed information about sexual behavior in surveys from 10,000 people and published the results in his 1914 book Homosexuality in Men and Women. Extending his push for gay rights into other media, in 1919 Hirschfeld wrote and acted in a movie called Different from the Others starring Conrad Veidt, whose character comes out to thwart his extortionist gay ex-lover but then loses his job and kills himself. That same year, the government gave Hirschfeld a former royal palace in Berlin to house his Institute for Sexual Research, which offered medical and psychological consultations, marriage counseling, contraception, sex education, and promoted women’s emancipation and rights for gay and transgender people. The institute’s ongoing success inevitably drew the attention of the Nazis. One of the Nazis' early actions, on May 6, 1933, was to ransack the archives and confiscate names and addresses. On May 10, the Nazis returned to hold a massive book burning in Opernplatz on Unter den Linden, destroying the invaluable collection of 20,000 volumes and 5,000 images depicting “deviants” and ideas that were “un-German.” Hirschfeld was on a lecture tour of the United States and never returned home. In Nice in 1935, on his sixty-seventh birthday, he had a heart attack and died, survived by his partner, colleague, former student, and heir, Li Shiu Tong, who lived until 1993.

The Radiation Network

Information junkies can now monitor radiation levels throughout the U.S., updated every minute at the Radiation Network. The fine print says the Alaska monitor, in Anchorage, is located indoors.

Your interest may be amped by conflicting reports today about Japan's nuclear woes. The Vancouver Sun begins "One of the reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant did sustain a nuclear meltdown, Japanese officials admitted for the first time on Thursday, describing finding a pool of molten fuel at the bottom of the reactor's containment vessel." The NYT puts these facts midway through their brief article -- "That indicated that the exposed fuel has probably melted and slumped to the bottom of the vessel in little pellets" -- and avoids using the term meltdown other than to report the plant did not sustain a "full meltdown." The reporter emphasizes the upbeat, quoting a scientist David Lochbaum from "a nonprofit group usually critical of the nuclear industry," saying, "As bad as things are, they’re getting better." Tepco had earlier said it would take six to nine months to bring the plant under control; now, it will be longer.

Yesterday Greenpeace released a study finding 10 of the 22 seaweed samples they collected 40 miles from the stricken plant contain up to five times the legal limits of Iodine-131 and Caesium-137. Seaweed is a staple of the Japanese diet and the annual harvest begins next Friday.

News: Presbyterian Clergy, Navy Chapels, DADT, Delaware

After 33 years of grappling with the issue of lesbian and gay clergy, the Presbyterian Church (USA) will ordain openly queer people in committed relationships. Since 1997, three similar amendments have passed in the church's general assembly only to fail at the regional level, where a majority of 173 presbyteries must approve it. On Tuesday, the Twin Cities presbytery returned a yes vote, giving the amendment a majority. The Presbyterians join Lutherans, Episcopalians and United Church of Christ members in allowing gay clergy. Combined, those churches have just under 11 million members. The four largest churches that don't allow gay clergy -- Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, and Mormons -- have more than 100 million members.

You have a friend in Rear Admiral Mark Tidd, the head of all chaplains in the US Navy, who issued a directive that as of this summer Navy facilities and Navy chaplains would be available for gay weddings in states that allow it. Predictably, the memo was leaked to a conservative site and Congress freaked friggin out. Yesterday, the Navy released a statement putting the earlier directive in reverse, saying they need more time to consider the matter. Last night, the House Armed Services committee passed an amendment from Rep. Akin (R-MO) demanding that military installations comply with anti-gay DOMA.

The same committee also passed a delaying tactic amendment from young Duncan Hunter (R-CA) to slow-walk the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Hunter argued that the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman and the Secretary of Defense are not qualified to make military decisions because they lack his own level of combat service. While two Republicans voted against it (Gibson-NY, Platts-PA), one Democrat voted for it (McIntyre-NC). It's easy to blame the reactionary GOP, but if the administration hadn't back-burnered DADT for a year and a half, we wouldn't be here now. Gay pundits say it's unlikely the Senate will pass the Hunter amendment; if somehow they do, Obama will have to decide whether or not to veto.

Yesterday, governor Jack Markell signed Delaware's civil unions bill into law. The bill passed both chambers with nearly a 2 to 1 margin. Effective January 1, Delaware will become the eighth state to grant comprehensive same-sex relationship rights.

Chaz Bono Reads from Transition, Stars in "Becoming Chaz"

In her 1998 book Family Outing: A Guide to the Coming-Out Process for Gays, Lesbians, & Their Families Chastity Bono says she knew she was a lesbian since she was 13, was outed by tabloids at 20 in 1990, and came out publicly five years later. Now a year into his transition to male, Chaz Bono told Anderson Cooper in March, "I was never really a lesbian. I just looked like one." His journey has been a learning moment for America with an enormous media blitz, including Oprah and a documentary "Becoming Chaz" which screened last night on Oprah's network OWN. I didn't see it as I was in Tribeca listening to him read from his new book, Transition: The Story of How I Became a Man. Click here for the full prologue, which ends:

"I was blindsided by the full realization that I'm transgender. I felt completely helpless and paralyzed with fear—at an emotional ground zero. Finally summoning the courage to act on the essential truth about myself was a deep, dark and often ugly struggle. I had to relive moments of shame, embarrassment and pain. And yet, though the struggle to start my transition was as frightening and challenging as climbing Mount Everest, I have written this book to show and share with the world something even more remarkable: Ever since my first dose of testosterone, I have never felt so whole, so complete, so happy in my life. And this triumph is what Transition is all about."

Matching Chaz's sincerity, the audience posed many questions similar to that of the older woman seated behind me who said, "I think you're the most honest person I've met, so I'm glad to meet you." Another handful of questions were along the lines of, "I always loved it when you came out at the end of the show with your parents and I want you to know your fans wish you the best." So there is not much to report, other than Chaz was gracious, and Yes, he has been told that he sounds like his father but he doesn't hear it himself. He does some work with a small Los Angeles trans support network and he is still with his girlfriend Jen who has handled the transition well because she had previously dated men and women and identifies as bi. (She is currently finishing her own book proposal on the experience.) But there was this: Asked about surprises in the transition, Chaz said now that he's male "my brain is sharper, crisper, more linear. And I have a harder time listening."

The Washington Post's Hank Stuever reviewed the "stirring yet unsatisfying documentary," saying,

“Becoming Chaz” is one thing — and it’s occasionally fascinating to watch — but being Chaz gets old pretty fast. As his longtime (and long-suffering) live-in girlfriend observes, Chaz’s change has also meant that she [Jen] has become a lesbian with an overweight, temperamental, 42-year-old boyfriend who sits on the couch and plays video games all day. He’s become “a real dick,” she says. Which, to Chaz, sounds like high praise indeed.”

Entertainment Weekly's Tim Stack found it “powerful” and “riveting,” noting that early in the film Chaz says, “I’ve hated my body since puberty,”...So, it’s incredibly moving to watch him finally become comfortable in his own skin.”

Born May 11: Valentino

Jackie Kennedy’s wedding dress when she married Onassis? Valentino. Elizabeth Taylor’s gown for Guy de Rothschild’s Bal Proust? Valentino. Sophia Loren's dress the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. Jane Fonda's dress the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. Julia Roberts’ vintage gown the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. Cate Blanchett’s pale yellow, burgundy-sashed gown the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. The most-worn designer at the 2007 Oscars? Valentino. Fabulousness becomes monotonous, but style is forever. Valentino Garavani has been a top designer since he started, and, come July, Rome will host a three-day extravaganza to celebrate his forty-five years in fashion. For twelve years he and the company’s financial manager, Giancarlo Giammetti, were lovers; they remain business partners, and, says Valentino, they continue to have "a relationship with nothing sexual in it. Yet a great love remains, ancient, surviving." In 1990 they formed an Italian charity to help people living with aids. Since 1982, Valentino has been partners with Bruce Hoeksema, a very handsome American who is sometimes described as his assistant, other times as a jewelry and handbag designer. Embracing opulence, Valentino owns two homes in Rome, one of the largest houses in the Holland Park section of London, an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a chalet in Gstaad, and a castle in France; sold his villa in Capri, but kept his 152' yacht. He retired in 2008; the "must-see" (NYT) "flawless" (Time) "amazing" (NY) film about his life and work, Valentino: The Last Emperor, was released the following year and became the highest grossing documentary of 2009.

Winners of the National Magazine Awards & James Beard Awards

Of note if you still read magazines or eat.

Yesterday The New Yorker lost seven categories at the National Magazine Awards and won one (for Public Interest, for Atul Gawande's "Letting Go"). Winning two awards each were New York, The NYT Magazine, Los Angeles, and National Geographic which was named magazine of the year. Other single winners were Harper's, Vanity Fair, W, Women's Health, Men's Health, Men's Journal, ESPN (for the photography feature "Bodies We Want," above and below), Garden & Gun, and Poetry.

Virginia Quarterly Review won, again, for fiction. The VQR's managing editor Kevin Morrissey killed himself last July, after alleged bullying and harassment from the editor Ted Genoways. The university suspended publication, investigated, couldn't find anything "specific," and invited Genoways to stay on as editor. He accepted, bitterly. The journal is back in publication.

The James Beard Awards have grown so large they require two nights of prize-giving. Last night they honored restaurants nationwide -- with six big wins for New York and chef of the year to Jose Andres at DC's Minibar -- and last Friday they celebrated the finest cookbooks, naming the best of the year Oaxaca al Gusto: An Infinite Gastronomy, from the University of Texas Press, by British legend Diana Kennedy who has lived in Mexico since 1957. Amanda Hesser won the general cooking award for The Essential New York Times Cookbook: Classic Recipes for a New Century. Jessie Price won the healthy focus award for The Simple Art of EatingWell. Grace Young won the international category with Stir-Frying to the Sky's Edge. Mark Bitterman won the reference category for his manifesto with recipes, Salted. James Peterson won the single subject award for Meat: A Kitchen Education. The literature award was presented to Paul Greenberg for his book, Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food. And Harold McGee won the hall of fame award for On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen from 2004.

Born May 9: Alan Bennett

Much of Alan Bennett’s career as a playwright, screenwriter, author and actor been devoted to understanding emotional cripples, inhabiting worlds where happiness is as suspect (very) as it is unlikely (highly) and where unrequited love is a redundancy. His best known works are the adaptation of Prick Up Your Ears (gay playwright Joe Orton murdered by his lover), An Englishman Abroad (gay traitor Guy Burgess), The Madness of George III (crazy king), A Question of Attribution (another gay traitor, Anthony Blunt), and The History Boys (promising students in the 80s ultimately promised stunted adulthoods). Last year reader Gary reminded me about Bennett's highly successful series of humorous and touching monologues, Talking Heads, which can be seen online. (Lovingly spoofed by Stephen Fry in drag.) The son of a Northern butcher, Bennett was accepted at Cambridge but, following a boy who didn’t like him, switched to Oxford where he took a first in history and, in 1960, joined Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller to appear in the instantly famous comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. He also performed in The Secret Policeman’s Ball and The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. Yet throughout his prolific, much-praised television writing and acting, his mainstay has been to find a sad smile or rueful, melancholic laugh in the meekly defeated and the stoically hopeless. Although he has been with his current partner, Rupert Thomas, for eighteen years, only recently has he felt comfortable discussing his gay life. And he's begun to create unqualified delights, such as the one even Michiko called “a completely charming entertainment: a small gem,” his novella The Clothes They Stood Up In, about a middle-aged married couple who return from the theatre to discover their flat has been robbed of absolutely everything, down to their last thumbtack and thimble. His hugely praised novella The Uncommon Reader, about the Queen's newfound love of literature thanks to a gay teenager, is a little perfection. Last month in the UK he published two vaguely saucy, gay-inclusive tales in a short book called Smut. The same week that the British Library paid half a million pounds for Ted Hughes' papers, Bennett announced he is donating all his papers -- including decades of diaries and unpublished manuscripts -- to Oxford's Bodleian Library, in gratitude for his state scholarship.

First Ever Inclusion of Gay Rights Papers in Library of Congress Exhibit

In another historic first, two documents from the Frank Kameny archives are now on display in the Library of Congress's ongoing show "Creating the United States." The inclusion marks the first time the library has displayed papers advocating LGBT equality, and they have not ghettoized the LGBT artifcats but incorporated them as a natural component of the exhibit on the Constitution, which opened in April 2008. My partner was instrumental in getting Kameny's papers into the library's permanent collection and he has the first quote in the AP story out today:

“This inclusion is an epic milestone in the telling of gay history because it places gay Americans’ struggle for equality where it belongs — in the story of the Constitution itself,” Charles Francis, a founder of the Kameny Papers Project, told The Associated Press.

The two documents are Kameny's petition to the Supreme Court -- which we now know was rejected 9-0 fifty years ago this spring -- and John Macy's infamous "Revulsion Letter" to Kameny, establishing the government's antigay policy for decades. The papers will be on display approximately six months.

(Above, Charles' photo of Frank, 85, attending the exhibit.)

Born May 8: Tom of Finland

In an era when merely entering a gay bar could mean jail time and the instant end of a career, Tom of Finland was boldly visualizing a world of healthy, happy, all-male sexual camaraderie that was hot and had a sense of humor. Then again, his fantasies of hyperidealized, turboerotic, uberbuilt masculinity guaranteed that reality would never measure up. For generations of gay men since the mid-1950s, his art has created an endless coupling of inspiration and insecurity. Born in Kaarina, Finland in 1920, Touko Laaksonen moved to Helsinki when he was nineteen and soon was drafted to fight in World War II. Afterward, he worked in an advertising agency while American physique magazines began to publish his drawings of rugged lumberjacks, cops, jocks, sailors, soldiers, prisoners, lifeguards, musclemen, and his enduring character Kake. In 1973, at the time of his first gallery show, in Hamburg, he was able to quit his job to draw fulltime. His second gallery exhibit, in Los Angeles, was not until 1978, followed by shows in San Franciso and New York, where he became friends with another artist whose work explored gay S&M, Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1981, Veli, his partner of twenty-eight years, died; Laaksonen survived him by ten years. The Finnish Culture Institute hosted an exhibit of his work in Paris in 1999, and in 2004 MoMA added several of his drawings to their permanent collection. Taschen's gigantic, oversized Tom of Finland XXL runs almost 700 pages, contains nearly 1,000 images, and includes essays by John Waters, Camille Paglia, Armistead Maupin, and Todd Oldham.

Weekend in Virginia

When lilacs last in the door-yard bloom'd.

Born May 7: Tchaikovsky

Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, Symphonies 4, 5, and 6 — what would the world listen to without Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Unfortunately, his private life was less sublime than his music. At thirty-seven, although he knew he loved men, he agreed to marry a female fan, Antonina Miliukova. Within two weeks of their wedding he tried to kill himself, hoping to catch pneumonia by soaking himself in the Moscow River. At the urging of his doctor, he fled to St. Petersburg and never saw his wife again, although he continued to support her. (The cost of the closet can be seen all around him: Miliukova had several children by other men, gave each infant to an orphanage and spent her final twenty-one years in a home for the certifiably insane. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was also gay, and he too made an unhappy marriage.) Tchaikovsky enjoyed great renown during his lifetime and, among his countless honors, two days before he turned fifty-one, he was the conductor at the opening night of Carnegie Hall. When he died, at fifty-three, sixty thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral, which for only the third time in Russian history was paid for by the Tsar.

Now On Sale: Paul Lisicky's Second Novel, The Burning House

Paul Lisicky follows his much-loved debut novel Lawnboy and memoir Famous Builder with a new novel, The Burning House [[Kindle]], which apparently finds narrator Isidore Mirsky grappling with "an overwhelming new desire—his feelings for his wife's sister." The publisher calls it a "captivating saga" about the disintegration of family and community amid illness and home loss in "a recession-plagued urban town."

The 160-page novel has been praised by Jayne Anne Phillips ("smolders with muscular, beautiful language, and shines with love"), Nick Flynn ('unsettling"), and Robert Olen Butler ("achingly lovely").

The online journal Fwriction published an excerpt last month. Last week Lisicky and Mark Doty gave a reading in Fairbanks. Lucky Alaskans.

Born May 5: Del Martin

Del Martin died in August 2008 at 87, widowing a wife with whom she spent 55 years championing the rights of the denigrated and disenfranchised. In 1955, when homosexuality was illegal, she, her life partner Phyllis Lyon, and six other lesbians founded the Daughters of Bilitis in her native San Francisco. By 1960 DOB chapters were active in nine cities nationwide and their magazine, The Ladder, was thriving despite most readers' need for secrecy. Even in friendly waters, they had to fight the tides against lesbians, both among straight women in NOW and gay men in the queer equality movement. Martin addressed the latter situation in her landmark article, "Goodbye, My Alienated Brothers," which appeared in the Advocate in 1970. Two years later, she and Lyon were instrumental in forming the Alice B Toklas Democratic Club, and they published their seminal book Lesbian/Woman. In 1979 they were honored by a group of medical professionals who wanted to start a clinic for lesbians who lacked health care, and they chose the name Lyon-Martin Health Services. In 1995 they were named separately as delegates to the White House Conference on Aging. Ever the trailblazers, Martin [above right, left left] and Lyon were the very first gay couple to be married in San Francisco in February 2004. If there is anything good about her death, it's that she did not have to see Prop 8 pass three months later. Click here to watch them describes the early hurdles they faced in forming and growing DOB during a time when they could not advertise their existence.

Writer-Director Arthur Laurents Dies at 93

A role model in so many ways, 93-year-old Arthur Laurents planned ahead for his death today, according to his William Morris Endeavor agent Jonathan Lomma who said the famed writer-director "had told him that when he died, he wanted it noted that 'he was predeceased by his partner, Tom Hatcher, with whom he had lived in happiness for more than 50 years.'” Hatcher died in 2006.

The NYT honored Laurents' wishes in a long obituary that includes his triumphs in Hollywood (from Rope to The Turning Point), on Broadway (West Side Story, Gypsy, La Cage aux Folles), and even acknowledges Laurents' many military successes, among others:

"He had also long since cast off whatever remaining doubts he had about his homosexuality and soon lost count of the sexual experiences he had while in the Army. In “Original Story By,” a memoir published in 2000, he was frank about his gay encounters, referring to his partners as “those unremembered hundreds.” Tom Hatcher, a former actor and real estate developer, would be his companion for 52 years."

Laurents had earlier said The Way We Were was partially autobiographical, the Robert Redford character based on Tom [pictured, left, in 1962] and the Barbra Streisand character on himself [right]. 

If you have any interest in the last half-century of Hollywood or Broadway consider his two smart and funny memoirs full of gay anecdotes, Original Story By [[Kindle]] and Mainly on Directing: Gypsy, West Side Story, and Other Musicals [[Kindle]].

The Met Degays Another Queer Icon, Alexander McQueen

The perfectionist in Alexander McQueen would find much to admire in the stunning show of his work, Savage Beauty, which opened today at the Met, while the rebel in him would detest the way he has been softened, defanged, and degayed for rich, conservative fashion matrons/museum patrons. Andrew Bolton's curatorial notes often mention McQueen's "politics" and his complicated relationship growing up in England with Scottish roots yet the discussion of his work completely erases the outsider queer energy that fueled his visionary genius.

Trained as a tailor in Savile Row, McQueen's craftsmanship and obsession with detail (and his vast stable of couture workers, largely ignored in the exhibit) made his clothes technical masterpieces. His shattering originality, always engaging the past to destroy it and reinvent it, raised his work to art. Aiming higher still, he presented each collection in elaborately staged performances reinforcing the season's theme, with the models moving as pieces on a giant chess board, or robotic nozzles spray-painting colors onto a spinning woman's white dress on the runway, or an enormous two-way mirror-box alternately reflecting the audience and revealing his creations. I saw a private preview earlier and was wowed. Brave the stampedes and see it twice before July 31. The show's catalog from Yale Press is already in Amazon's Top 100 bestsellers. Click to enlarge.