Band of Thebes

The Anti-Pride Issue: NYT Mag on Ex-Gays, Devout Closets

Hungry for articles that will make your brain explode? This Sunday's NYT magazine delivers a double dose. Mimi Schwartz writes a massive piece, Living the Good Lie, about gay therapists and gay psychologists and some straights who help their deeply religious clients stay in the closet in order to remain in their anti-gay faith. You know, lying to your wife and community as a form of being honest with yourself. Worse:

"In professional parlance, his sexual orientation was gay, but his sexual identity — the way he saw himself, and the way he wanted to be seen — was as a straight man."

So now the term "sexual identity" is synonymous with "wishful thinking." And apparently this travesty is widely accepted:

"In the final document, the A.P.A. clearly stated its opposition to conversion therapy and unequivocally described homosexuality as normal. But it also offered a nuanced view of religious gay people who did not want to come out. The A.P.A. considered the kind of identity therapy proposed by Throckmorton and Yarhouse to be a viable option. No effort needed to be expended trying to change a client’s religion or sexual orientation. Therapy, in fact, was to have no particular outcome either way, other than to guide the client closer to self-acceptance, whatever the client believed that to be. The difference between sexual orientation and sexual identity was microscopically parsed. “Acceptance of same-sex sexual attractions and sexual orientation may not mean the formation of an L.G.B. sexual-orientation identity,” the report stated. “Alternate identities may develop instead.” It further stated that acting on same-sex attractions might not be a fulfilling solution for everyone."

Yes, there's a shred of nuance between orientation and identity. But seriously. White people who completely immerse themselves in African-American culture cannot say their "racial identity" is black.

Schwartz has the good sense to end her article with the quote, “He’s actually pretty happy,” Flanigan said, “except for a nagging voice in his head that tells him he’s not being honest about who he should be.”

In the other article Benoit Denizet-Lewis profiles Michael Glatze, 36, a former XY colleague and cofounder with his then-boyfriend Ben of the magazine Y.G.A. Young Gay America, who is now virulently ex-gay:

"Homosexuality came easy to me, because I was already weak,” he wrote in the opening line of an article for the far-right Web site, WorldNetDaily.com. He went on to renounce his work at XY and Y.G.A. “Homosexuality, delivered to young minds, is by its very nature pornographic,” he claimed. In a second WorldNetDaily article a week later, he said that he was “repulsed to think about homosexuality” and that he was “going to do what I can to fight it."

Once again, the gay stories are exclusively about white men. Impossible to imagine that these are the two most important or most interesting queer stories to be told.

Wyoming Postcard

So far, two days, two amazing hikes, and no coyote snares. Plenty of big horns.

Hannah Tinti and Rigoberto González Read at the KBWC

 

Watch out for Sam Holly. If you thrilled to the Dickensian, Stevensonesque adventures of the young, one-handed orphan Ren in Hannah Tinti's beloved and just the right amount creepy, award-winning first novel The Good Thief [[Kindle]] you may fall even harder for the protagonist of her untitled work-in-progress. At the closing night of the Kachemak Bay Writers' Conference she read a dazzling chapter in which an older friend and seventeen-year-old Sam rob gold and silver from a clock-filled summer house with fifty rooms, and Sam gets shot in the back by a caretaker. Guns also figured prominently in Rigoberto González's funny and moving essay about a long ago family outing in which he was ridiculed for being afraid of everything and a hopeless shot. Rigoberto, the only out gay man on the conference faculty and a participant in Band of Thebes' queer lit poll, said with this memoir-in-progress he could finally see the humor in his difficult relationship with his father, whereas in his earlier prize-winners like Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa he had been more angry.

Born June 16: Jaime Manrique

Born illegitimately in Colombia of an adulterous union, Jaime Manrique was not publicly acknowledged by his rich, prominent father who soon moved on to another mistress. His childhood struggles are just one facet of Manrique's landmark queer Latino Lit book Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. Some of the same early memories also surface in his book of poems, My Night with Federico García Lorca. His mother moved the family to Florida, where she became a domestic servant and Jaime excelled at school, earning his BA in English from the University of South Florida. After two more or less bisexual novels that got a lot of attention in Colombia, Manrique's first openly gay novel Latin Moon in Manhattan made a splash here in 1992. Five years later he edited Besame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction, which features seventeen short stories. He's won a Guggenheim for his nonfiction and three years ago he made a foray into Isabel Allende and Tomas Eloy Martinez territory with Our Lives Are the Rivers, his long-promised novel about Manuela Saenz, Simón Bolívar's mistress. It won the International Latino Book Award for best historical novel. His next novel is called Cervantes Street.

Bob Mould's Memoir "See a Little Light"

Is the world still full of Hüsker Dü [or Sugar?] fans, or is the mainstream media just hungry for a memoir by an 80s [90s] indie star who knew he was gay at age five but hid his sexuality from most people until his 30s? On sale today, Bob Mould's See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody [[Kindle]] is getting widespread, favorable coverage for his backstage stories and tales of sleeping with men from every branch of the military. After two longterm relationships he gives in to his more promiscuous side and describes himself as a "thoughtful whore" ready with an eternal family pack of Costco toothbrushes. Also, he gets high and throws knives with William S Burroughs in Kansas.

NYT: "an audacious and moving account of Mr. Mould’s coming of age as a (mostly closeted) gay man in the macho alternative rock scene of the 1980s and 1990s. The book is impressive, too, for its author’s radical unwillingness to ingratiate himself. He was famously severe onstage; mostly, that’s what he is here."

LAT: "Thorny, earnest and intense, he nonetheless elicits sympathy as he figures out how to deal with people and with his own nature."

Washington Post: "captures Husker Du’s sonic gravity and its notorious infighting in fine detail. But it also recounts the traumatic childhood that came before and the fascinating career that came after — one in which Mould would leap from project to project with a fearlessness that belies the anxi­eties that mutated out of his struggles with his family, his addictions and his sexuality."

Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "He had a steady live-in boyfriend in Minneapolis through much of the 1980s, when his band Husker Du was making a name for itself, but Mould said his gayness was “an open secret” at that time, something that he neither hid nor advertised. Mould’s reluctance to be openly gay in his twenties and early thirties stemmed less from being in a hardcore rock world that he claimed was macho but not homophobic, and more from “my own ignorance,” skewed portrayals of gays in the media that made him feel he didn't belong, and a Catholic small-town upbringing in upstate New York. Those factors, along with the AIDS crisis, led Mould to “hate the fact that I was gay.”"

Happily into his third longterm relationship, Mould lives in San Francisco and djs around the country.

Novels Without Words, Now Shakespeare's Plays Without Words

More evidence of the erosion of language and our quickening slide toward communication that is entirely visual. The growing trend to consider picture books a fom of "novel" gains further acceptance with the august Library of America reissuing six of Lynd Ward's marvelous, dramatic woodcut stories collected in this handsome, slipcased edition. Not such a new fad, considering Ward published his books in the 1920s and 30s. And for the past nine years the Synetic Theater company has mounted award-winning adaptations of Shakespeare that are performed without any words. So far they've done Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Anthony and Cleopatra, Othello, and King Lear. They crank up expressive music, and, instead of memorizing any lines, the actors move across the stage and emote. Done correctly, this used to be called dance. Done badly, mime. Now it's a play. Because audiences really like "Shakespeare" but it was sort of hard to listen to all that.

My question: How long until the new sanctioned laziness permits people to call photographs "poems"? Students won't have to learn Browning or Byron or Bishop, they can come to class and say their favorite love poem is this, and hold up a postcard by Annie Leibovitz. Or an Abercrombie bag.

Rita Dove Reads from Sonata Mulattica

Former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer winner Rita Dove gave the keynote address at the 10th Kachemak Bay Writers Conference, reading from several of her collections including her most recent book, Sonata Mulattica, about virtuoso violinist George Augustus Polgreen Bridgetower. The biracial son of a Polish woman and a West Indian servant (who later claimed to be an African prince), Bridgetower was a student of Haydn's and became friends with Beethoven. On stage together in May 1803, playing violin and piano forte, B and B premiered Beethoven's famous Violin Sonata No. 9, originally dedicated to Bridgetower. After a spat over a joke about a woman's morals, Beethoven switched the dedication to the more famous Kreutzer, who never performed the piece and didn't particularly like Beethoven's music. Thomas Jefferson attended a Bridgetower concert in Paris and the Prince of Wales became a patron. Mark Doty says Rita Dove's "richly imagined book has the sweep and vivid characters of a novel."

During the Q&A, Dove said she writes from midnight to 6:00am. She and her German husband are avid ballroom dancers, survived the calamity of their house burning down from a lightning strike, and eight years ago drove an RV to Alaska. Fun couple.

Previous keynoters of the conference are:

2002    Russell Banks
2003    Tobias Wolfe
2004    Maxine Hong Kingston
2005    Billy Collins
2006    Jeffrey Eugenides
2007    Amy Tan
2008    Anne Lamott
2009    Li-Young Lee
2010    Michael Cunningham

Born June 12-13: Henry Scott Tuke, Siegfried, Djuna Barnes

Born in York in 1858, Henry Scott Tuke grew up in Falmouth where he discovered the pleasures of nude swimming that become the core subject of his en plein air paintings until his death at 70 in 1929. Moving to London when he was sixteen to attend art school, he graduated six years later, then toured Italy and Paris. His friends and acquaintances of the time included Symonds, Wilde, and Sargent (whose many, secret paintings of male nudes were numerous enough to fill this book). But by 1886 he was back near Falmouth, spending £40 to buy a two-masted sailboat which he converted to a floating studio and living quarters. Initially the only models he could get to pose were from London but before long he and the local youth had become friends for life, though many of them died in WWI. An avid traveler, in the 1890s Tuke returned to Italy, adding Corfu and Albania to his list and a new, vibrant light to his palette. Later he ventured to the Caribbean and Central America, further brightening his colors. Critics emphasize the innocence of his art, stressing that if anything the depictions are sensual not sexual, and making obvious comparisons to Eakins. Among Tuke's big collectors is Elton John. His work fills many books like Catching the Light.

How’s this for meeting cute? Two German teenagers escape postwar strife by working on a cruise ship. One is a waiter who, when his bosses aren’t looking, performs magic tricks for the passengers, which proves so popular he’s given his own show. The other is an enraptured bellboy who becomes his onstage assistant and, to spice up the disappearing animal act, smuggles a cheetah on board. So began Siegfried & Roy. They fell in love, toured Europe, played Princess Grace’s Red Cross benefit in Monaco, then the Lido in Paris, and by 1970 it was Vegas, baby. They began to use more exotic animals in their illusionist show and, in 1989, when Steve Wynn opened the Mirage, they were so popular he guaranteed them a minimum of $57.5 million a year. In 2000, they were the ninth highest-paid celebrities in the United States, just behind Steven Spielberg. Audiences adored their exotic white tigers and their camp theatrics, which featured hooded musclemen, capes, ultra tight leggings, and Roy's ludicrously oversized codpieces described as “certainly more frightening” than the tigers. Their last performance was October 3, 2003, when it was widely reported that a tiger “bit” Roy. Siegfried disputes this, saying if the tiger intended to harm Roy he would have snapped his neck and vigorously shaken him. Instead, Montecore, a seven year-old tiger who had been in the show for six years, wanted to help. Roy fell, possibly attempting to intercept a woman in the front row who may have been reaching out to touch Montecore, and the tiger was trying to rescue him, carrying him in his mouth as a mother tiger would her cubs. Roy suffered severe blood loss and critical injuries that kept him in rehabilitation for years. In April 2010, they gave a final benefit performance, with Montecore, lasting ten minutes. Siegfried and Roy continue to share a west Las Vegas eight-acre estate called the Jungle Palace, though they maintain separate living quarters. They are big boosters of the College of Magic (not Hogwarts) in perfectly named Cape Town, South Africa.

If Djuna Barnes lived in our age of the dysfunctional, harrowing memoir, she could outsell Mary Karr, Augusten Burroughs and James Frey combined. Her father believed in polygamy and moved his mistress into their house in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York when Djuna was five. He had eight children but no interest in supporting them; his mother had to write letters begging money from friends. Djuna was never sent to school and was raped at sixteen by a neighbor, with her father’s consent. For years Djuna shared a bed with her grandmother, whose sexually explicit letters much later suggest they were intimate. When Djuna was seventeen her father and grandmother forced her to marry his mistress’s brother, Percy Faulkner, who was fifty-two. After two months, Djuna fled and later, confronted with financial ruin, the family split up. Djuna, her mother, and three of her brothers moved to Manhattan, wher she was thrilled to study at the Pratt Institute, but within six months she was forced to leave to help support her family. She was a fulltime reporter and freelanced hundreds of articles to bring in more money. When she was twenty-three she moved to her own apartment in Greenwich Village, where she befriended bohemians, joined the Provincetown Players, and had many affairs with men and women. She became engaged to Ernst Hanfstaengl who reacted to the increasingly anti-German sentiment in America by breaking up with Djuna in favor of a German wife. (He later moved to Germany and became a close associate of Hitler.)

Djuna rebounded by falling deeply in love with fellow journalist and Provincetown Player Mary Pyne, who caught tuberculosis and died in 1919. Two years later McCall’s sent her to Paris, where she also interviewed James Joyce for Vanity Fair. By winter of the following year, she was

If Djuna Barnes lived in our age of the dysfunctional, harrowing memoir, she could outsell Mary Karr, Augusten Burroughs and James Frey combined. Her father believed in polygamy and moved his mistress into their house in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York when Djuna was five. He had eight children but no interest in supporting them; his mother had to write letters begging money from friends. Djuna was never sent to school and was raped at sixteen by a neighbor, with her father’s consent. For years Djuna shared a bed with her grandmother, whose sexually explicit letters much later suggest they were intimate. When Djuna was seventeen her father and grandmother forced her to marry his mistress’s brother, Percy Faulkner, who was fifty-two. After two months, Djuna fled and later, confronted with financial ruin, the family split up. Djuna, her mother, and three of her brothers moved to Manhattan, wher she was thrilled to study at the Pratt Institute, but within six months she was forced to leave to help support her family. She was a fulltime reporter and freelanced hundreds of articles to bring in more money. When she was twenty-three she moved to her own apartment in Greenwich Village, where she befriended bohemians, joined the Provincetown Players, and had many affairs with men and women. She became engaged to Ernst Hanfstaengl who reacted to the increasingly anti-German sentiment in America by breaking up with Djuna in favor of a German wife. (He later moved to Germany and became a close associate of Hitler.)

Djuna rebounded by falling deeply in love with fellow journalist and Provincetown Player Mary Pyne, who caught tuberculosis and died in 1919. Two years later McCall’s sent her to Paris, where she also interviewed James Joyce for Vanity Fair. By winter of the following year, she was

All Night Relay for Life

Relay for Life went from 6:00pm to 3:00pm "because cancer never sleeps." The 193 runners/walkers raised $83,851 (American Cancer Society) or over $86,000 (Facebook). Either way, we collected more money than Fairbanks, whose population is seven-fold our 5,000. If you're wondering why the photo is so dark, it's not because I went at 1:00am, a lively time of cookouts and campfires; it's because it was cloudy and drizzling. The high school track was encircled with hundreds of luminarias, each one colorfully inscribed, many in tribute to a someone who survived or succumbed to the disease. Below, midnight last week.

Gay Spain: Balenciaga Museum and Almodóvar's Mapplethorpes

A favorite Spain-watcher tipped me to the grand opening of the Balenciaga Museum in the designer's tiny hometown of Getaria, a seaside village near the French border. The massive 54,000 square foot museum displays (only?) 90 dresses, including gowns worn by Princess Grace and Belgium's Queen Fabiola. A gala preview with Queen Sofia and Givenchy preceded the public opening on Friday. Worldly readers may be unsurprised to learn the museum's foundation is beset with financial irregularities and the original budget of 6 million euros somehow ballooned to 30 million euros. Difficult to imagine the master of the uninterrupted line loving this awkward mash-up building, but his art inside will more than compensate. Spanish Vogue offers some highlights of a magnificent career.

In Madrid on Wednesday the Galeria Elvira Gonzalez opened a show of twenty-eight Robert Mapplethorpe photographs curated by Pedro Almodóvar. It appears to be a cavalcade of strong men, delicate flowers, a kitten, and a young naked Patti Smith.

Patrick Leigh Fermor Dies at 96

The Guardian has never published a truer sentence than this, from polymath Patrick Leigh Fermor's obituary today: "A Time of Gifts is not only a great travel book (a term he disliked), but one of the wonders of modern literature."

The magic of the memoir began decades earlier, in 1933 when the 18-year-old Paddy decided not to attend college but instead to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. He waited 44 years to write about the first section of the journey, and the second section needed nearly another decade. He is said to have held onto the proofs to that follow-up book Between the Woods and the Water for "several years." Needless to say, he could never relinquish his manuscript covering the final third of his epic journey, but he was seen earlier this year "working on corrections to a finished text" and his biographer Artemis Cooper says, a "draft of the third volume has existed for some time, and will be published in due course." Even if he had never embarked on his long trek, his stellar reputation would rest on his two books about Greece, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese and Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece. He and his wife Joan lived in Greece for half a century. Before that he fought with the Crete resistance in the war, spending two years disguised as a shepherd and living in high caves. His valor earned him medals and a dull, flattened-out movie in which he is played by Dirk Bogarde. He was an inspiration to generations of writers, travel writers, and LGBT travel writers, most especially Jan Morris and Bruce Chatwin.

UPDATE: A tribute from Jan Morris.

Stephen McCauley's Insignificant Others Now in Paperback

One reason the past-centric selections on the list of all-time best queer books below are interesting is that they suggest some writers do not rank too highly a desire to see, anywhere in the mix, reflections of gay people in our own time fully integrated and finally enjoying the widespread freedoms that previous generations suffered without. Certainly, the classics are timeless, and it's thrilling to watch early queer characters find individual freedom, yet part of the tension is that they are still constrained by a hostile world. Even in cross-class fantasy, Maurice and Alec have each other but the price they pay is sacrificing career, family, friends, and society. Maybe people find tragedy sophisticated and consider happy endings to be tacky, but a compass whose four points are isolation, rejection, depression, and death won't lead you to a healthy destination.

If we still have literary scholars in the future, they're going to laugh at us for not making a bigger deal over the enormous talent of Stephen McCauley (who did, in fact, get a mention on the lgbt list). USA Today crowning him "the master of the modern comedy of manners" is true but not enough. Just one of the many and important pleasures of his work is the way in which gay characters naturally inhabit contemporary life. His insights into behavior are always astute, and often funny, with grace notes of melancholy, never more so than in his most recent novel, Insignificant Others [[Kindle]], out in paperback this week. Of its origins he says, "I think a lot of us build our lives on a cherished fiction about ourselves and go through life making elaborate contortions to avoid facing the truth." That is the stuff of literature every bit as much as innocent Billy Budd hanging from a rope. Read him.

Born June 9-10: Terrence Rattigan, Cole Porter

After the full-blown success at twenty-five of his first solo play, the light-hearted French Without Tears (1936), Terrence Rattigan wanted to write a more serious work. He created the satirical drama After the Dance (1939), attacking the apolitical generation of Bright Young Things for their failure to stop another war. For the prolific Rattigan, success followed success, among them: The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, and Separate Tables, all of which became popular movies. He was twice nominated for both a BAFTA and an Oscar. Yet just as he had earlier attacked the older generation, now in 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger exploded all the hallmarks of the Rattigan generation: the staid, repressed, older and old-fashioned characters who never paraded their emotions. Overnight, Rattigan was deeply out of favor with the critics who had adored him, and the timing could not have been worse. In 1957 he wrote his first play that directly addressed his homosexuality, Variation on a Theme, and it was panned. Rattigan's father had been a career diplomat whose habitual dalliances eventually got him fired by the Home Office. Not surprisingly, Rattigan learned to keep his own relationships well hidden, perhaps to the point of being emotionally cut off even from his partners. Completely out of step with London's mod, Swinging Sixties, he decamped for Bermuda. There, he wrote for Hollywood and for a time was the world's highest paid screenwriter. His first bout of leukemia in 1962 went into remission two years later, only to recur in 1968. He died of cancer in 1977 still in Bermuda.

The zenith of sophistication, Cole Porter wrote the wittiest, worldliest love songs ever recorded and a good part of his genius emanated from his experience as a gay man. Born to a rich family in Indiana, a graduate of an East Coast prep school and Yale, married to a famed, older socialite for thirty-four years, Porter was utterly at ease in the highest society, yet his constant sexual relationships with men allowed him permanent outsider status. His art depended on his double life. Unable to express gay love openly, his lyrics are far more original and memorable for their necessary codes and double entendres. If you still don't understand You're the Top with its refrain "But if, Baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top," please see me after class. Porter is peerless at hiding in plain sight, subverting the scandalous into showstopping "innocent" fun, as in Let's Do It (1928), You Do Something To Me (1929), Love for Sale (1930), All Through the Night (1934), Anything Goes (1934), I've Got You Under My Skin (1936), Let's Misbehave (1937), My Heart Belongs to Daddy (1938), I've Got My Eyes on You (1939) Well Did You Evah! (1939) Let's Be Buddies (1940) You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To (1942), Something for the Boys (1943), He's a Right Guy (1943), I'm In Love With a Solider Boy (1943), Too Darn Hot (1948), All of You (1954) Mind If I Make Love To You? (1955) and You're Just Too, Too (1956), among countless others.

Openly closeted, Porter enjoyed affairs with Ballets Russes librettist Boris Kochno, Boston hotshot Howard Sturges, architect Ed Tauch, actor Robert Bray, choreographer Nelson Barclift, and director John Wilson, as well as innumerable shorter interludes with servicemen and chorus boys at weekend all-male parties. Remarkably, he kept his spirits up (ditto his libido) despite a crippling leg injury from a 1937 riding fall which necessitated thirty-four operations over the rest of his life and ended in amputation. When he died in 1964, Porter left half his royalties to the children of his longtime friend and ex-lover Ray Kelly. He was decidedly de-gayed in the Kevin Kline movie De-Lovely, but not in William McBrien's "complex and groundbreaking" biography, whose "most startling scholarship is on the subject of Porter's homosexuality."

Last year, Sandy Leonard offered this illuminating comment: "I wonder if 'Love for Sale' informed in any way his later masochistic attraction and ongoing (if not "constant") sexual relationship with actor, husband (Shirley Jones) and father (David, Shaun, et al.), Jack Cassidy. Capote's got a story about this in his Gerald Clarke biography."

30 Queer Authors Name Their All-Time Favorite LGBT Books

What have LGBT fiction writers been doing for the past 15 or 20 years? For the most part, not all-time wowing their contemporaries, it seems, given today's post from the Good Men Project in which thirty authors each select her/his five favorite queer books ever. Ordinarily, these all-time lists tilt heavily toward the present, but the fiction in the queer survey overwhelmingly bends backward.

Looking only at the fiction choices: The most recent of Adam Haslett's picks is from 1906. Alan Gurganus's newest all-time favorite is from 1927, Andrew Solomon's most recent choice is from 1951, Stacey D'Erasmo's latest is 1956, Brad Gooch's most recent is 1971, Peter Cameron's is 1978, Patricia Nell Warren's is 1982, John Waters' 1983, and Michael Cunningham chose nothing after 1985. Several writers -- Eileen Myles, Keith Boykin, Edmund White, Sarah Schulman, Kevin Sessums, Bernard Cooper -- found one all-time favorite as recent as the early 90s, roughly twenty years ago. Five other authors named a book as recent as the late 90s or the year 2000 -- Scott Heim, Randall Kenan, Paul Lisicky, Christopher Bram, and Ali Liebeggot -- and many other writers did choose at least one of their five from the past decade. Especially noted were The Line of Beauty and Grief.

Random questions to consider:

These days are queer authors writing more post-gay than gay?

Do people remember more fondly books they read when they were younger?

Did eras that valued words and writing more than our time of mass media images simply produce better writers?

Considering that a dragonfly's wing is thicker than other writers' egos (not you!), is it just plain easier to choose dead authors?

Regardless, it's thrilling to see multiple votes for Denton Welch alongside thundering greats like Baldwin, Genet, Woolf, Melville, Isherwood, and Proust.

Téa Obreht wins Orange Prize over Emma Donoghue, "Annabel"

Téa Obreht has won the 16th Orange Prize, awarded to the year's best fiction written by a woman, for her first novel, The Tiger's Wife, "set amid the horrors and aftermath of Balkan civil war, mixing magic, myth and folklore with intense, tough realism." Orbeht, born in Yugoslavia, raised in Cyprus and Egypt before coming to the U.S. at 12, finished the novel at 22 and is now 25. The five judges needed four hours of debate to reach their decision, which was not unanimous. The other finalists were:

Emma Donoghue (Canadian/Irish) - Room; 7th novel
Aminatta Forna (British/Sierra Leonean) - The Memory of Love; 2nd novel
Emma Henderson (British) - Grace Williams Says It Loud; 1st novel
Nicole Krauss (American) - Great House; 3rd novel
Kathleen Winter (Canadian) - Annabel; 1st novel

The Guardian notes

"If this year's Orange prize shortlist has been striking for anything, it is the dark and difficult themes that have been mined by the six writers on the shortlist. Donoghue's Man Booker shortlisted Room grippingly tells the Josef Fritzl style story of an imprisoned child and mother while in The Memory of Love Forna tackles the horrors of Sierra Leone's civil war and Krauss weaves together terribly sad stories of loss and suffering in Great House. The other two nominated novels, both debuts, were Kathleen Winter's Annabel, about a hermaphrodite child growing up in back-of-beyond Newfoundland; and Emma Henderson's Grace Williams Says It Loud, about love and abuse in a home for the severely mentally and physically disabled.

"They have been called "issue novels", though Hughes said they preferred the phrase "important novels". "They were books that demanded we care about them, but they were all written with a real skill and a kind of joie de vivre."

After the jump, all fifteen previous winners.

The Last Deployment, Bronson Lemer's Gay Iraq War Memoir

When you hear that Bronson Lemer, a closeted gay midwestern soldier, had to wear pantyhose in Iraq you envision another god-awful straight military drag show, but no, he had to wear them to thwart the ever-present sand fleas. It wasn't what he had planned for his twenties. After five and a half years as a carpenter in the North Dakota National Guard, he thought he was nearly done with his service; then he was deployed to Baghdad for a year. Dodging landmines, hiding his sexuality, he endures his tour of duty thanks to the lessons of his father and discovering his own core strength. According to his publisher, Lemer's memoir The Last Deployment is: moving, provocative, often funny, sometimes anguished, and deeply personal.

Born June 5-8: Yourcenar, Keynes, Compton-Burnett, Orman

By the time she was eight, Brussels-born Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour was reading Aristophanes. By ten she was learning Latin, and at twelve, Greek. In 1929, when she published her first novel, Alexis, about a closeted gay man leaving his family, she chose to write under an anagram of her surname, Yourcenar. In 1937, she and her American translator, Grace Frick, fell in love and remained together forty-two years until Frick’s death in 1979. The following year, Yourcenar became the first woman ever elected to the French Academy, established in 1635, suppressed in 1793, and restored in 1803. To date, 710 people have been elected “immortals,” four of them women. Among the many renowned French writers who were never elected to the Academy are Moliere, Balzac, Zola, and Proust. Yourcenar was a consummate woman of letters, writing novels, stories, poems, essays, a book-length study of Mishima, and three volumes of her autobiography, yet her exalted reputation is based mainly on her masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian. Like Mary Renault, Yourcenar chose to address homosexuality in her work through male characters, especially those in antiquity, and her novel fully describes Hadrian’s great love for Antinous, a youth of astonishing beauty and athletic grace. Some critics consider it the best historical novel ever written. She and Frick first vacationed on Mount Desert Island, Maine, in 1942, and moved there full-time in 1950, in a house they called Petite Plaisance, which today survives as a museum.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.

Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of seven children. Her beloved father died suddenly in 1901 when she was sixteen; three years later a favorite brother Guy died of pneumonia; twelve years later her other favorite brother Noel was killed in the battle of the Somme; and the following year, 1917, her two youngest sisters, aged eighteen and twenty-two, locked the door of their bedroom on Christmas Day and killed themselves by swallowing veronal. The year after that Compton-Burnett caught the Spanish Influenza and nearly died herself; and the year after that she and her partner Margaret Jourdain began living together, a happy relationship that lasted thirty-two years, until Jourdain’s death in 1951. Compton-Burnett was knighted in 1967, by which time she had published nineteen of her twenty novels. From the start, her oblique style rendered almost exclusively in dialog had divided critics. Leonard Woolf rejected her manuscript for the Hogarth Press saying “She can’t even write!” while the critic for the New Statesman said, “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." She thought her two best novels were A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant. Her two novels that include homosexuality are both set in single-sex schools staffed by closeted lesbians (More Women Than Men, 1933) or gay men (Two Worlds and Their Ways, 1949). As ever, her method is to inform the reader indirectly, so nothing is any more overt here than in the rest of her work.

As she approached her thirtieth birthday, Suze Orman, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s south side, was a waitress in a bakery in Berkeley, California. Then she trained as an Account Executive at Merrill Lynch, became a Vice President at Prudential Bache, and in 1987 founded her own business, The Suze Orman Financial Group. Now she hosts The Suze Orman Show on CNBC and Suze Orman’s Financial Freedom on QVC and has won two daytime Emmy awards. She writes a monthly money column in O, Oprah’s magazine, and has written ten books including The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying, The Road to Wealth Revised, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny, and The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream. She does not invest in the stock market. In 2007 she came out in a New York Times interview, noting the unfair tax burdens that same-sex couples shoulder. In 2008 and 2009, she was named one of the Time 100, and in 2010 she was one of Forbes' most powerful women in the world. Last September she married her longtime partner and co-producer of her show, Kathy Travis, in a ceremony in South Africa. Now, she's 60.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.

Gay Indian-Americans in Rahul Mehta's Quarantine

Two years ago, Madison Smartt Bell edited New Stories from the South 2009, selecting, alongside work from Wendell Berry and Jill McCorkle, "Quarantine," a piece by Rahul Mehta about a young Indian-American bringing home his boyfriend to meet his parents in West Virginia. (Mehta was born and raised there.) Last year, his collection of stories, Quarantine [[Kindle]], all of them about gay Indian-Americans, was published in hardcover in India to much acclaim, some fuss, and surprisingly strong sales. Now, at last, Harper has released Mehta's book here as a paperback original. Praising the richness and depth of his characters and observations, Madison Smartt Bell calls it "the best first collection I have read in twenty years." Pankaj Mishra considers Mehta's voice "gentle, even tender, but powerful." Manil Suri says the stories are "insightful and compellingly readable." I haven't seen the collection and am greatly anticipating reading the stories.

Mehta gave a long interview to The Hindu Literary Review in which he discussed how long the collection took to write (nine years), the amount of sex included (readers: not enough, his mother: too much), and writers he admires (Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, and Mohsin Hamid, among others).

UK Scouts Recruiting Gay Boys and Gay Men

Britain's Scout Association has launched a new campaign to increase its ranks of gay scouts and gay leaders, being "keen to dispel the myth that homosexuals cannot join the organisation." That was never the case in Britain and now they've created a document called "It's OK to be gay and a Scout!" The association's UK chief commissioner Wayne Bulpitt has filmed a low-tech video warning that "bullying is wrong on every level, not just for the person being bullied, but for the bully too," and welcoming "all young people, irrespective of their sexuality, gender, race, creed or background." Scouts and leaders will be allowed to wear their uniforms in gay pride parades.

Atheists and agnostics are still banned.

Founded by Robert Baden-Powell in 1907, granted a charter from Parliament in 1910, the Boy Scout Association shortened their name to the Scout Association in 1967.

Born May 3: Wilfred Thesiger

A leading figure of the golden age of exploration, it's highly appropriate that Sir Wilfred Thesiger was awarded the Lawrence Medal and the Burton Medal, not least because they were all gay. Born in 1910 to a British diplomat in Abssynia, Thesiger was educated at Eton and Oxford where his only happy times were vacations (and beating Cambridge as captain of the boxing team). On his first college break he worked for his passage on a steamer to Constantinople. Returning, he found a personal invitation from Haile Selassie to attend his coronation as Emperor. On his second summer break, he worked a fishing trawler off Iceland. At 23 he went back to Africa, became assistant district commissioner in the Sudan, and learned to fast ride camels with the local men, adopting their clothes and diet. Said to call any invention more modern than the steam engine "an abomination," he hated the first world's intrusion on remote wilderness and peoples. In WWII, he fought with the Sudan defense force against Mussolini's Italians and with the Syrians against the Vichy French. A job with what became the United Nation's anti-locust program took him to the Arabia's famed Empty Quarter prompting his best work, Arabian Sands (now with an introduction by Rory Stewart), which the Guardian recently called "probably the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever." Thesiger's other masterpiece, The Marsh Arabs (introduced by Jon Lee Anderson), covers the seven years he lived off and on with the people of southern Iraq. His travels in Asia with the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and the Pamirs, are recounted in Among the Mountains. Chances are his autobiography Life Of My Choice avoids his homosexuality, but it is fully integrated in Alexander Maitland's forthcoming Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer, released to acclaim in the UK four years ago and finally pubbing here at the end of the month. Thesiger died at 93 in 2003, leaving 23,000 negatives of his photographs to Oxford. See 59 of his images here and one below.