Band of Thebes

IHT: 'Lesbians in China Today Are Remarkably Free'

In China, homosexuality was considered a subset of "hooliganism" and the law against it was struck from the criminal code fourteen years ago. Since then, queer visibility and a complicated, silent acceptance have crept forward in major cities, probably more so for lesbians -- or, "lalas" -- than for gay men. Didi Kirsten Tatlow reports in the International Herald Tribune:

"Lesbians in China today are remarkably free, the result of profound social changes over three decades of fast economic growth, and of being female in a society that values men far above women. Invisibility provides lesbians with room to live and love amid the anonymity of China’s millions-strong megacities.

“I think people are more tolerant of female gays than male gays,” said Li Yinhe, a sociologist at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “China is a very patriarchal society, so people feel if a man is gay that’s really shameful.”

“Traditional society basically overlooks women in some ways, and there is a certain freedom in that,” she said. “But that free space isn’t necessarily power.”

Enjoy the full slideshow of eight photos by Gilles Sabrie here.

For an indelible portrait of contemporary China, including two stories about lesbians, read Yiyun Li's amazing Gold Boy, Emerald Girl [[Kindle]]. Or try Ha Jin's collection The Bridegroom [[Kindle]], whose title story is about a gay man.

Afternoon Guests

Yesterday.

Gay Bar Week: The Most Important Queer Bars in U.S. History

 

Yesterday at Slate, June Thomas examined why the LGBT rights movement was "born in a gay bar," but "the gay bar as a locus of political organizing and resistance was short-lived." Her top ten most important establishments are the Stonewall Inn, Julius, Black Cat (SF + LA), Dixie's, Club 82 [above via], Mona's 440 Club, the Eagle's Nest, the Atlantic House, and the Double Header.

Today, Thomas offers a limited discussion on whether or not gay bars can make money anymore. You'd think this would be entirely about the impact of the internet but that topic gets one third of one sentence. Instead, it's about location and gentrification and the rise of mixed straight-gay spots and the high costs bar owners face. The statistics are mainly based on Damron guide listings in 2005 vs 2011 (gay bars down 12%, mixed straight-gay up 42%) which may say more about Damron widening its scope as its core market dwindles. The article does not avoid stereotypes:

Bar owner in Iowa: "A gay will come in; they'll try to figure out how they can get the most booze in that glass for the lowest price. Straight people don't plan it out as much as gay people do."

Bar owner in Seattle: "in gay bars, customers expect cheap, strong drinks in large glasses."

Lesbian party promoter in New York: "Women tend to go out seeking a partner. When they find one, I don't see them for two years. Then all of a sudden they're out—you know, when they break up. You see them every single week at every single party until they find the next [girlfriend], and then they disappear, and the pattern continues." She adds, "Gay men go out a lot more because they cruise. They're more interested in finding fun."

Lesbian bar owner who also ran a straight bar on Long Island: "straight men spend a lot more money. They tip better. They're used to it. Of course, they make more money [than women]."

Also, a lite round-up of things gay bars are named after. 

Cuomo's Courage, Obama's Cowardice

 

Everyone has seen the great NYT report on how Cuomo got gay marriage passed -- a willingness to fight, rather than rehearse speeches -- but New York magazine also has a strong piece with some illuminating quotes from the senators against us. Specifically, "I don’t want to be a bigot, but my church and my priest say I shouldn’t be doing this!" A no vote is still a no vote, but "I don't want to be a bigot" is a great leap forward from "You disgusting deviants are abhorrent to normal society."

Is Obama against the Supreme Court's unanimous decision on Loving vs. Virginia? Because the child of a mixed-race union keeps telling us that marriage laws are best left to the states. Michelle is no better. Today, her communications director rushed to reassure everyone, "Mrs. Obama has never made any public statements about same-sex marriage." 

It's confounding how many people still float on the soap bubble that Obama "can't" support gay marriage. Yesterday's NYT muscular editorial bursts that one:

"After he took office, it became evident that Republicans intended to portray him as a radical, out-of-touch leftist no matter what he did. Supporting same-sex marriage at this point is hardly going to change that drumbeat, and any voter for whom that is a make-or-break issue will probably not be an Obama supporter anyway."

The election is going to ride on the economy. Also, well before New York, the majority of Americans already supported gay marriage. Read the polls. 53%! Now the tide turns faster. Even conservative David Frum demands the spotlight to cry, "I Was Wrong About Same-Sex Marriage."

Obama's problem extends beyond LGBT issues. He wants to discourse on the history, philosophy, and science of swimming, and he wants the gold medal in the 100m freestyle, but he doesn't want to get wet. Maureen Dowd has a list:

In Afghanistan, he wants to go but he wants to stay. He’s surging and withdrawing simultaneously. He’s leaving fewer troops than are needed for a counterinsurgency strategy and more troops than are needed for a counterterrorism strategy — and he seems to want both strategies at the same time. Our work is done but we have to still be there. Our work isn’t done but we can go.

On Libya, President Obama wants to lead from behind. He’s engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi while telling Congress he’s not engaging in hostilities against Qaddafi.

On the budget, he wants to cut spending and increase spending. On the environment, he wants to increase energy production but is reluctant to drill. On health care, he wants to get everybody covered but will not press for a universal system.

Illustrations from Slate's gallery of 239 editorial cartoons on LGBT rights. A mixed bag, like politics.

Born June 27: Cazwell

If you think 39 is a trifle old for a white rapper to be dropping rhymes about facials or finding Beyoncé at Burger King, remember that Cazwell was born the same year as Marshall Mathers III. Raised in Worcester, he started singing with the Boston hip hop band Moreplay, but moved on from the city and the genre. He says, "I know a lot of gay rappers that really consider themselves hip hop and want to be accepted by hip hop producers, and my point of view is, 'Why bother? Why spend all my time and energy trying to make a culture who hasn’t acknowledged my existence for the past twenty years accept me?'" Now a New Yorker, he djs and hosts four weekly club nights downtown. He was an opening act on the Cyndi Lauper/Debbie Harry/Erasure/everybody True Colors tour in 2007, played Dior Hommes after party in 2008, judged RuPaul's Drag Race, and has had his songs played on LoGo and True Blood. To date his biggest hit is the sweet and sweaty ode to all things oral, Ice Cream Truck, with more than 3.3 million views. (If blocked, try here.) The DIY charm of that suckadelic jingle is replaced by hardcore (goof)ballin in his most recent really repetitive release, Get My Money Back. Next month he plays Toronto, L.A., and Houston.

It's Gay Bar Week at Slate

Yesterday June Thomas wrote an essay on whether or not the gay bar is a dying institution: "They make me feel old. But I feel bad about abandoning them... Gay bars are my cultural patrimony and my political heritage." Today, she asks eleven writers to remember their first happy-scary-dreary visit. Among them are Alison Bechdel, J.D. McClatchy, Susie Bright, Simon Doonan, Dan Savage, Mart Crowley, Pam Spaulding, and the unerring human wonder called David Rakoff who says:

"...I came fairly late to gay bars, since I came fairly late to alcohol, not until my mid-20s, when job hatred medically required that I develop a taste for spirits. Before then, I loathed booze—beer in particular—and lived in fear of the abandon it augured. Gay bars were a perfect storm of liquor's fetter-loosening powers of disinhibition and the scrutiny of men; things most desired and therefore most dangerous.

"... Intermittently smoking, fake-sipping my beer, and employing the old stage trick of becoming invisible by simply not moving, I probably stayed all of 45 minutes. I understood even then that this was a boil that needed lancing. It would be easier the next time, and the time after that, until eventually it became so devoid of importance that the experience of going out to a gay bar would be virtually indistinguishable from the experience of not going out to a gay bar, which, of course, is exactly what happened."

(I must undergo hypnosis to remember if my first was Badlands or J.R.s. At least I know my all-time best experience started at Le Palace and moved on to Queen in Paris and my second best was opening night of Junior Vasquez's Arena.)

Gay Bar Week continues through Friday at Slate. Photo from New York's pride gallery.

Famous Novelists Shun Fiction

 Philip Roth, 78, in the Financial Times, June 24:

“I’ve stopped reading fiction. I don’t read it at all. I read other things: history, biography. I don’t have the same interest in fiction that I once did.” How so? “I don’t know. I wised up.”

Booker winner John Banville, 65, in the Irish Times, June 4:

“I find I have no use for fiction any more,” he says. “Indeed, I write far more fiction than I read these days. I think it is one of the great losses of age. And yet I did not know what other riches awaited me. Now I read histories, letters, biographies, poetry, philosophy, which offers a rich cleansing of the mind. But I don’t seem to need stories the way I used to."

Meanwhile, Salman Rushdie, 64, is, for the first time in his adult life, not working on a novel. Instead, he's writing a sci-fi tv series for Showtime called The Next People.

Guardian Roundtable Asks, "Glad To Be a Gay Writer?"

Two discussions from London: First, an interview with Lambda finalist Max Schaefer, then a roundtable with Stella Duffy, Paul Burston, and Neil Bartlett on their feelings about gay novels' influence and being labeled gay writers. The 44-minute conversation is available on a free podcast. The Guardian says:

"We continue our inquiry into the politics of fiction by asking if the gay novel can make a difference. We head off to Soho to ask people about the books that changed their lives, and talk to Max Shaefer, whose word-of-mouth success Children of the Sun looks at homosexuality in the National Front.

"With us in the studio are three of today's gay novelists. Stella Duffy explains why, though she's happy to be out, she hates to be pigeonholed, and why feminism is more important to her than sexual identity. Neil Bartlett and Paul Burston explain why they keep returning to historical themes – whether it's Burston's new romantics or Bartlett's innocents from the 1960s."

Whatever else these writers share in common, all four participated in Thebes' queer lit survey.

Born June 26: Stephen McCauley, Branwell Brontë

Stephen McCauley doesn't need cheap tricks. Other writers rely on brassy scenarios and embarrassingly trumped-up plots to hold their readers, but McCauley just digs deeper into his characters' lives and finds literary gold. On tour last year for his funny, sad, and moving sixth book, Insignificant Others [[Kindle]] he said he felt he had taken the comedy of manners as far as he could go and was working on a historical novel set in the first part of the 20th century. Until then, revisit his superb True Enough, his effervescent debut, The Object of My Affection, and all the books in between. You must also read his riveting, knockout piece, "Let's Say," about his uneasy truce with his difficult, antigay father in Patrick Merla's collection Boys Like Us. A couple as handsome as they are talented, McCauley and longtime partner Sebastian Stuart (a Ferro-Grumley Award winner for The Hour Between) live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

 

Is it unforgivable to call Branwell the fourth Brontë sister? Born a year after Charlotte, a year before Emily, and three years prior to Anne, Patrick Branwell Brontë was kept home for schooling while the girls were sent off to boarding school. A child of great promise, he trained as a painter and, not surprisingly given how things turned out, his most important work is a portrait of his three writer siblings. (That bizarre gap in the portrait is where Branwell put himself; following a quarrel, his father rubbed him out.) To support himself, Branwell took a job tutoring a Lancashire family's sons, a railway clerk position, and another job tutoring a boy named Thorp Green. From each employment Branwell was dismissed. He returned home, drank heavily, contracted tuberculosis, and died at thirty-one. For a "marvelous free and direct telling" of his life, read the novel Branwell by Douglas A. Martin. PW says the book "offers a tender, tragic portrayal of a doomed artist and homosexual avant la lettre" and "this volume's beautiful declarative sentences are perfectly fitted to this famously imaginative, headstrong family; they bring Branwell Brontë's world to light."

Anchorage Pride 2011

 

The morning parade was canceled just as it began because the grand marshal car, driven at slow speed by Edith Bailey, a 70 year-old woman from Eagler River who may have been unfamiliar with the convertible's stick shift operation, ran over a 50 year-old banner-carrier, James Crump, killing him. (I saw the failed CPR and the EMT crew putting the white sheet over him.) Crump was a nurse at HHS and attended the now defunct Anchorage MCC. Bent Alaska has much more.

Though delayed and somewhat subdued, the afternoon rally went ahead as planned. Senator Mark Begich, an Alaskan Democrat, spoke between musical numbers, telling the crowd about his work on the Armed Services Committee repealing DADT. He also discussed pending legislation to require any school that accepts federal money to adopt an LGBT-inclusive anti-bullying policy; news to me. Begich is a long-time pride supporter, dating back to his years as mayor of Anchorage. The current Anchorage mayor vetoed a gay rights ordinance that narrowly passed the city council, exactly as his father had vetoed a similar law when he was mayor decades earlier.

The mixed crowd of several hundred people was very open and friendly. More of my photos here.

Last year, an arsonist burned a parade float the day before the Anchorage parade. No arrests have been made in that case. Unrelated, in Chicago vandals slashed the tires on 51 floats overnight prior to today's pride parade.

(Just Another Night at) The Eagle

If you think Hollywood doesn't make big budget gay romances, you didn't subject yourself to the third-rate Gladiator knockoff The Eagle, out this week on DVD. Give or take, it's about two pretty dancers in 140 A.D. (the stars of Step Up and Billy Elliot) both of whom are into leather (thus the title) and fight about who's going to be whose slave. In the first half, the buffer, more built 30 year-old muscle stud Marcus rescues the skinnier, cuter 24 year-old Esca from a brutal top in a helmet mask and makes him his slave. Fine. Lucky them. But -- and this is always a mistake -- they decide to go to Scotland a Burning Man Festival except they don't have a car or a place to stay and it rains a lot and everybody's high and howling and covered with mud or blue paint and mohawks or really dirty long hair and the bonfire isn't that much fun and the food is bloody awful, so nerves are frayed, right? When they could have gone to Rome? Well, Esca's not having it. He totally flips and is all NO, you're MY slave now! So hot, hot Marcus gets tied up and led around on a leash by a twink. Fine. Lucky them again. Then it's sort of confusing, because you don't think of Burning Man as having gift bags or raffle prizes, but suddenly everybody's chasing after some gold accessory in the shape of a bird and instead of just going on eBay and buying one, they call all their old tricks and band together to fight these gnarly dudes and, surprise, the more attractive people win. Triumphant, the happy couple goes back home only to face their biggest challenge of all: prejudice! And even though it violates his traditional values that every couple should be a strict top and bottom, Marcus's commander can see how much the boys love each other and he gives them his blessing to live not as an old school master and slave but as a modern, versatile couple. The boys walk away, down an aisle together, planning their next vacation and grinning into their sunny future. The End. The plot never bothers with the pretense of a girlfriend or wife for either of them. In fact, the entire movie is devoid of women except for a few lady druids left over from a Qkumba Zoo video. [Junior's remix.] Much more startling, The Eagle was somehow scripted and directed by the Oscar-winning team who made The Last King of Scotland. Check the trailer.

Wladimiro Guadagno moved from Foggia to Rome in 1985 when he was twenty, and twenty years later she ran for a seat in the Italian Parliament. Now Vladimir Luxuria, she won, becoming the world's second trans MP, after New Zealand's Georgina Beyer. Prior to her victory she had been an actress, cabaret entertainer, and party promoter, organizing Rome's first gay pride in June 1994. A member of the Communist Refoundation Party, she lost her re-election bid in 2008 and bounced back from defeat by appearing on "the Italian answer to Survivor," a celebrity reality tv contest show called L'Isola dei Famosi which took place in Honduras. Faced with fierce competition from this supermodel dating this soccer star, Luxuria triumphed, winning the hearts of Italy in the decisive public poll. Required to make a charitable contribution of fifty-percent of her 200,000 euro winnings, she did not choose a T, B, G, or L nonprofit but instead selected UNICEF because she won't have children herself. Although she exclusively uses the feminine pronoun, has had rhinoplasty and partial breast construction, and "lives as a female," she has chosen not to have sex reassignment surgery and "remains physically and legally male." She lost her re-election bid in 2008 and has written three books, most recently romance/fantasy.

The Borrower by Rebecca Makkai

Do you know Rebecca Makkai's work? I think you should. Her fiction has been included in the Best American Short Stories 2008 and 2009 and 2010 and the forthcoming 2011. Now her just-out first novel The Borrower [[Kindle]] has this wonderfully hopeless premise: Lucy Hull, a single 26 year-old children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, befriends Ian Drake, a bookish 10 year-old who is clearly gay. Indeed, Ian is so obviously queer that his concerned religious parents make him go to weekly therapy sessions with an ex-gay minister married to an ex-lesbian. Eventually, sensible Ian runs away to live at the library, and, uh, Lucy, um, sort of invites him on a spontaneous roadtrip. He is THRILLED, the happiest time of his life. I know, you know, and Lucy knows, that kidnapping is always wrong. Nevertheless, it kills her to think of delightful little Ian being brainwashed by the ex-gays and, well, off they go...

According to The Book Frog, "If you get all the book references ("Where's Papa going with that ax? said Fern"), then so much the better, but you'll enjoy this wonderful novel either way."

Born June 23: Alan Turing, David Leavitt

Anyone calculating the cost of Britain's horrific homophobia must include all the things Alan Turing didn't solve or invent because he killed himself at 41. The brilliant mathematician had already broken the Germans' Enigma code during WWII, become an OBE, laid the groundwork for the modern computer by designing the Automatic Computing Engine, and devoted himself to a field of mathematical biology called morphogenesis (specifically, discerning the Fibonacci numbers in plant structures). In 1952 his home was burgled by two men, one of whom was a 19 year-old Turning had slept with, and as a result of their break-in he was charged with gross indecency under the same 1885 law that felled Oscar Wilde. To avoid prison, he was forced to undergo painful injections of estrogen as a form of chemical castration. He died by eating a poisoned apple. His mother strongly believed the cyanide in the fruit was accidental, owing to her son's legendary carelessness, but his death was ruled a suicide. Timothy Ferris points out that Turing's favorite fairy tale was Snow White. The best short biography of him is The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt.

Raised in Palo Alto, David Leavitt graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale at 21, by which time he had already published a gay themed short story in The New Yorker. His first collection, Family Dancing, appeared the following year and was nominated for an NBCC (losing to Louise Erdrich) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (won by Tobias Wolff). Since then he's published seven novels, the most recent of which, The Indian Clerk, was also a PEN/Faulkner finalist (won by Kate Christensen); three other collections of stories or novellas; his collected stories; a brief book on Florence; and, because karma is king, the short biography mentioned above of gay birthday-mate Alan Turing. He is a professor at the University of Florida, where he and his partner Mark Mitchell co-edit the excellent literary journal Subtropics whose fiction is regularly gay and often selected among the year's best. Leavitt and Mitchell also co-edited an anthology of gay fiction from 1748 to 1914, Pages Passed From Hand to Hand. They divide their time between Florida and Tuscany and in their spare time have co-written two other books about Italy. Today Leavitt is 50.

Johann Hari on Bronski and the Great Gay/Queer Divide

How can the equality movement reach our destination if we don't agree on where we should go? The perpetual splits -- gay/queer, same/different, assimiliationist/ separatist -- are at the heart of today's thought-provoking 2,700-word essay by Johann Hari [right] in the Independent. After the most comprehensive review yet of Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States [[Kindle]], fluidly parsing 500 years of American history though he is a 32-year-old Swiss-Scot raised in London, Hari plunges into the divide:

"The most decisive turning point arrived when gay people began to band together to demand to be treated decently. The Mattachine Society was founded in 1950...but it couldn't agree on its central goal. The battle in that society – which created a deep split in the group within three years – runs through gay history from that point on and eventually breaks apart Bronski's book. It boils down to this. Is the point of the gay struggle to say we are essentially the same as straight people, or is it to say we are different and glad to be so?

"My view – since reading Andrew Sullivan's masterpiece Virtually Normal [[Kindle]] when I was a teenager – is that the point of the gay-rights struggle is to show that homosexuality is a trivial and meaningless difference. Gay people want what straight people want. I am the same as my heterosexual siblings in all meaningful ways, so I should be treated the same under the law, and accorded all public rights and responsibilities. The ultimate goal of the gay-rights movement is to make homosexuality as uninteresting – and unworthy of comment – as left-handedness.

"That's not Bronski's view. As he has made more stridently clear in his previous books, he believes that gay people are essentially different from straight people. Why is his book called a "Queer History" and not a "Gay History"? It seems to be because the word "queer" is more marginal, more edgy, more challenging to ordinary Americans.

"He believes that while the persecution in this 500-year history was bad, the marginality was not. Gay people are marginal not because of persecution but because they have a historical cause – to challenge "how gender and sexuality are viewed in normative culture".

"Their role is to show that monogamy, and gender boundaries and ideas like marriage throttle the free libidinal impulses of humanity. So instead of arguing for the right to get married, gay people should have been arguing for the abolition of marriage, monogamy and much more besides. " 'Just like you' is not what all Americans want," Bronski writes. "Historically, 'just like you' is the great American lie."

Two problems with the very, very premature 'left-handed' view are that it degays 3,000 years of queer culture and ignores the reality that centuries of animus creates a separate, identifiable class of people. So while I bristle at calling the gay/straight difference "meaningless," I do think Hari's essay is worth reading.

Michael Bronski reads tomorrow, Thursday, June 23, at the Strand at 7:00pm.

Midnight on the Solstice

Back in Alaska in time for 20 hours of daylight. The other four hours are a hazy blue.

Born June 22: Kevin Aviance

There was a moment in nightclub life when Kevin Aviance, so inventive, so ahead of his time, seemed he might be the next Josephine Baker. His sensational song “Din Da Da” is timeless, as fresh today as the first time he performed it while Junior Vasquez was spinning at Arena. It was #1 on the Billboard dance chart, as were four of his subsequent singles, “Rhythm Is My Bitch,” “Alive,” “Give It Up,” and “Strut.” He has appeared in the movies Punks and Flawless, as well as America’s Next Top Model, The Tyra Banks Show, and in a leopard-print bodystocking in Madonna’s oh so smooth Harlem-based video for “Secret.” In June 2006, leaving the Phoenix after midnight, Kevin was brutally attacked by four young men ages 16, 18, 20, and 20, yelling anti-gay slurs. Two weeks later, fiercer than ever, Kevin appeared in the pride parade wearing a white top hat with his broken jaw wired shut. He was unable to sing for months. In March 2007, his four attackers plead guilty and were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to fifteen years. Last year he sang at Fort Lauderdale Pride along with Jennifer Holliday.

Gay Author, Partner Generously Endow Biggest U.S. Literary Prize

Novelist and memoirist Donald Windam is about to become some writers' favorite author. His and his partner's estate has established an annual literary prize administered by Yale, awarding $150,000 to seven to nine writers of fiction, nonfiction, or plays. The first of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes will be given in 2013. The NYT reports:

"The judging for the new prizes will happen in two stages, Mr. Kokot explained: a steering committee will solicit recommendations from a group of nominators, and  the final selection will be made by a panel consisting of Mr. Kokot; Jeffrey Peabody, his co-executor; and two longtime friends of Mr. Windham, Robert A, Wilson, a rare-book dealer, and Bruce Kellner, a retired English professor. They will be aided by a group of additional judges. The prizes are meant to reward both established and promising writers, and Mr. Windham, who never went to college himself, specifically requested that writers with no academic affiliation be considered."

Windham's best available books are the wonderful short novel Two People about a middle-aged American man's romance with an Italian 17 year-old lad, and his memoir Lost Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote Tennessee Williams and Others. Needless to say, these were never huge bestsellers so you might ask, how did two men who lived so modestly leave an estate able to dole out a million dollars a year in prize money? Inheritance, investing, and a very simple lifestyle. Carl Van Vechten photographed the couple in 1955. Click to enlarge.

For comparison, the Whiting Awards annually give ten writers $50,000. The Bolligen Prize, given every other year, awards $100,000 to one poet.

1949: Tanaquil Le Clercq, Windham, Buffie Johnson, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal

Remembrance of Things I Forgot by Bob Smith

If you're closer to New York than Wyoming, cancel whatever you're doing and attend tonight's launch of Bob Smith's second novel, Remembrance of Things I Forgot [[No Kindle]] at Barnes & Noble on Broadway at 82nd. Bob will be joined on stage by Susan Blackwell, Lea DeLaria, and Eddie Sarfaty for a reading of his funny, ranty book. Like many works involving magic or science fiction, in this case a twenty-year leap of time travel, Bob's novel is really two books. One is a wry and moving account of a 46 year-old going back in time to meet his 26 year-old self and the lost world of New York in the 80s in an attempt to avert one or both of the tragedies that befell his family in the intervening years. The other is an exuberant acid spray against Dick Cheney and George Bush. In 2006, comic book dealer John is ready to break-up with his longtime boyfriend Taylor who has become a republican and has invented a time machine for Cheney, who pushes a button and sends John back to 1986. Teaming up with his younger self, Junior, he hopes to prevent his beloved sister Carol's suicide some years hence and his father's subsequent death from alcoholism. In one of the book's very best scenes, John nervously telephones his future boyfriend, who is such a science geek he seemingly readily accepts that he built a time machine, but is in fact is so perpetually frisky he thinks John is role-playing for phone sex. Together the three of them embark on a cross-country road trip to warn their family and save Carol. Possibly the book's very best character is their mother, a blunt, comic mix of anger, confusion, and love. Readers will not want the visit home to end, but the characters decide they have to prevent Bush from becoming president and detour to Midland, Texas for brain-bending hysteria involving one wasted young W and double Dicks, double Johns, Taylor, and an awesome lesbian. Some readers may find the intrusion of abhorrent politicians into the sacred world of fiction like plutonium: a little goes a long way. But Bob is a natural born comedian and laughs are laughs. Eventually, of course, the lads make it to Carol in California. Not everything goes to plan but a wise John says it's not the failing you mind, it's never trying. Bob Smith aims high and succeeds.

Born June 20: E. Lynn Harris

In 1990, no publisher would take a chance on a first novel about a man torn between his girlfriend and his secret boyfriend, all of them black. Undaunted, the author, a successful IBM salesman who was used to breaking barriers, having been the first black editor of the yearbook at the University of Arkansas and the first black male Razorbacks cheerleader, decided to publish it himself. At black bookstores, book clubs, and beauty salons around Atlanta, he sold thousands of copies to gay men and straight women. A local sales rep mentioned the book’s popularity to the publisher of Anchor/Doubleday, which quickly republished that novel, Invisible Life, and ten subsequent books by the phenomenal E. Lynn Harris. Nearly all of his books have been NYT bestsellers. His sixth and seventh novels, Not a Day Goes By and Any Way the Wind Blows both debuted at #2 on the New York Times list. His author events regularly attracted 900 people or more. Upbeat, optimistic, and romantic, his stories never gloss over life’s struggles and pain. His memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, included his own coming out story as well as bouts with depression, drinking, low self-esteem, and a suicide attempt just before he decided to start writing. His novel Basketball Jones confronted homophobia and double lives in the NBA. His final novel was In My Father's House was about Bentley Dean III, who ran a modeling agency in Miami:

"Strapped for cash, Bentley reluctantly agrees to supply gay, bi or very open-minded eye candy for a VIP party hosted by Prosperity Gentleman's Club, which is run by Emperor Seth Sinclair, a closeted gay celebrity. When Jah, an 18-year-old student Bentley's been mentoring, covers for a no-show model and begins an affair with Seth, big trouble looms. Harris's wry tale about second chances highlights what readers have long loved about his work: his ability to depict the pursuit of love and self-respect, regardless of societal and family pressures."

While on a business trip in Los Angeles in July 2009, Harris died of heart disease at age 54. To date his books have sold more than four million copies.