Band of Thebes

Born August 12: Radclyffe Hall

Ignored from infancy by her mother and stepfather, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was educated at Kings College London and in Germany, where, when she was twenty-seven, she began a relationship with a singer named Mabel Batten, who was fifty-one and a grandmother and had once been painted by John Singer Sargent. They moved in together as soon as Batten's husband died; several years later Hall fell in love with Batten's cousin, Una Troubridge, and after Batten died the following year, they began living together. Their partnership lasted more than twenty-five years and weathered Hall's many short and longer term affairs as well as her success and scandal as a writer. Her second novel, The Forge (1924), a comedy of social manners, was published before her first, The Unlit Lamp (1924), about a young woman's thwarted wish to become a physician and set up house with another single woman. Her fourth novel, Adam's Breed (1926), concerns an Italian restaurateur in London who embraces spirituality, renounces the world, and lives hermit-like in the woods. It won two major literary prizes and became a bestseller.

So The Well of Loneliness (1928) was naturally anticipated by literary London. For the first three weeks, reviews were mixed but critics accepted its sympathetic portrayal of lesbians. Then the editor of the Sunday Express whipped up a frenzy, saying he would rather give healthy children a vial of prussic acid than the novel and demanding it be withdrawn. The nervous publisher sent a copy to the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, known as Jix, offering to suppress it if he disliked it. Despite his hip nickname and his kept promise to give women the vote in 1928, Jix was sixty-three and deeply conservative and had strenuously objected in Parliament to planned revisions to The Book of Common Prayer, successfully preventing the changes twice. No surprise then that he hated The Well of Loneliness and intended to sue the publisher unless they canceled the book immediately. They did, but they had already licensed the rights to an English publisher in France. When the book was imported, Jix ordered it seized, over the objections of the Chairman of the Customs Board who admired the novel. It became a matter for the Metropolitan Police, and the subsequent trial for obscenity depended solely on the judge's opinion without any expert testimony. For those of you who haven't read the 500 page novel lately, here are the sex scenes unabridged:

She kissed her full on the lips.

also

and that night they were not divided.

The case drew wide protest from other newspapers, dozens of famous people, the National Union of Railwaymen and the South Wales Miners' Federation. Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw defended Hall in letters to the editor. The judge ordered all copies of the book destroyed. He said that no reasonable person could claim that a call for tolerance or acceptance of homosexuality was not obscene. Kipling agreed to testify on behalf of the novel at the appeals trial. He appeared at court and was refused. The twelve magistrates took five minutes to uphold the original obscenity verdict. Eighteen years later, after Hall had died, after World War II, Troubridge tried again to get The Well of Loneliness in print in England and the Home Secretary said the publisher would be prosecuted. In America, the book faced two obscenity trials (garnering letters of support from Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mencken, Sinclair, Dos Passos, St. Vincent Millay, and more) and both times the book triumphed. Its first year it sold more than 100,000 copies. It was finally published in the U.K. in 1949.

When Lambda Rising closed and sold their rarities, my boyfriend bought me a signed copy of the 1928 U.S. first edition.

Finalists for PEN American and O'Connor International Awards

The PEN American Center has announced their awards in seventeen categories, adding still more honors for Justin Spring's Secret Historian [[Kindle]] and Wendy Moffat's A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster [[Kindle]], the only two biography finalists to Stacy Schiff's winning Cleopatra [[Kindle]]. The New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross was a finalist for his book Listen to This in the essay category won by Mark Slouka for Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations.

FYI, the top award, the PEN/Bingham Prize was shared by the hugely talented Danielle Evans for her story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and Susanna Daniel for her debut novel Stiltsville about a married couple living just above Biscayne Bay.

Read the full list of finalists and winners in drama, poetry, science writing, sports writing, translation and more at the PEN American site.

In Dublin, judges of one the world's premiere literary prizes, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, have announced their six finalists for 2011. You already know Tóibín's magnificence and that The Empty Family is mandatory reading. If you don't know Yiyun Li's work, start with this superb collection which includes two queer stories and was a favorite book of 2010 for both Lucy Jane Bledsoe and A.S. Byatt.

Yiyun Li, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

Alexander Macleod, Light Lifting

Edna O'Brien, Saints and Sinners

Suzanne Rivecca, Death Is Not an Option

Colm Tóibín, The Empty Family

Valerie Trueblood, Marry or Burn

The winner will be announced September 18 at the close of the Cork Short Story Festival.

Born August 9: Tove Jansson

In Helsinki in 1914, Tove Jansson was born into a family that were doubly outsiders: they were part of Finland's Swedish-speaking minority and they were artists, her father a sculptor, her mother a graphic designer, her brothers Per and Lars would become a photographer and a cartoonist. Depressed by the war in 1945, the young painter yearned for a happy naivete, creating a clan of round white trolls called Moomins who live a carefree, bohemian life in Finland's valley forests. The first book was ignored, the next two were sensations. Altogether Jansson's nine chapter books and five picture books have spawned at least six different tv series in Europe, Russia, and Japan, a long-running British comic strip, a theme park, an opera, and many movies, the most recent of which debuted at Cannes in 2010. That film, Moomins and the Comet Chase, features music by Bjork who is a lifelong fan of the creatures' funny/sad innocence and mischief, their anti-authority non-conformity, and their harmony with nature. The Moomin character Tooticky is based on Jansson's partner Tuulikki Pietilä, a graphic artist. They were together at least fifty years and their relationship is the heart of the brief, elegant Fair Play, the second-best of her six adult novels. Her finest is The Summer Book. Her darkest is The True Deceiver. She also wrote six collections of short stories. With mountains of money from Moomin royalties, Jansson never wavered from her belief in simplicity. She and Tuulikki spent much of their time in this one-room cabin in the remote Pellinki Islands. She died at 86 in 2001. See her beautiful website.

Choose Movie Poster for Black Lesbian Coming Out Drama, Pariah

   

Week after week you scream yourself hoarse berating Hollywood marketers. So many obvious flops and bombs and epic fails, when clearly they ought to have asked you how to sell their movie. Now, they are. After releasing a string of queer hits (Brokeback, The Kids Are All Right, but not Precious), Focus is ready to roll out the Sundance buzz pic Pariah, about Alike, a 17 year-old coming out to her supportive best friend and her upset family in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Too often, black movies are sold in a way that obscures their characters' race (see Dreamgirls' poster, shot in silhouette from the back), so I don't like the cloud option, whose airy bright palette is sharply at odds with the subdued, interior tones of the trailer, after the jump. And I hate the noir killer look below left. At full size I prefer the subway shot above center for, among other things, reflecting her dual struggle and placing her in the physical world.

Design geeks this is your moment: Vote for your favorite  *daily* through August 12.

London's Gay Bookstore Vandalized

Last night in London, a day after major riots in Tottenham, a gang of youths on bicycles vandalized one of the world's great queer bookstores, the 33 year-old Gay's the Word near Russell Square. The marauders first egged two businesses on Marchmont Street, went away, and returned ten minutes later with a rock and bottle to smash GTW's large front window. The vandals did not break any other windows on the street, and they did not raid the shop. Assistant manager Uli Lenart told Pink News, “They were apparently laughing their heads off as they smashed the window. One can’t jump to conclusions but the facts are there.” He added: “We are just relieved that the rock wasn’t followed by a match.”

NYTBR: Bloomsbury's Greatest Love Story Is Vita and Violet

Toni Bentley pens a manic, messy review of Michael Holroyd's new Bloomsbury biography A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers [[Kindle]] but if you can get beyond her inane ramblings his book sounds a winner. And apparently it's fully queer, with the centerpiece of a long look at Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefusis' legendary relationship:

"...Part II of “A Book of Secrets” explores the Violet-Vita story and its ­bodice-ripping affair — though Vita liked to dress as “Julian” when they checked into hotels as husband and wife. “I felt like a person translated, or reborn,” she wrote of her transvestite forays. Theirs was a liaison dangereuse if ever there was one, complete with all the operatic melodrama of “Tosca,” the vituperation of Edward Albee — though here, no one is afraid of Virginia Woolf — all culminating in a Feydeau farce, complete with gender-­bending, cross-dressing, occasionally bisexual lesbians, their bewildered husbands, their outraged mothers and one small rented airplane. The plot contains such frequent scenes of sex, confrontation, cruelty and humiliation, set across Europe, from Cornwall and London to Paris and Monte Carlo (for gambling, dancing and novelizing), that it suggests some Hollywood executive has been sleeping on the job — or has succumbed to sequel-itis — in not turning their story into a film. Their passion makes Henry and June look lame, and, in the role of chronicler, Anaïs Nin should be afraid of Virginia Woolf.

"Both Vita and Violet themselves, however, were also industrious scribblers, and in their respective romans à clef they even provided, between them, the script. Vita wrote “Challenge” during their affair, with considerable input from Violet, and the characters were named Julian and Eve. Vita’s mother paid the British publisher to cancel the book for fear of scandal, and it first appeared in print in America in 1924, not receiving a British release until 50 years later. Violet in turn wrote, in French, the delightfully vengeful “Broderie Anglaise” (“English Embroidery”), in which Vita is Lord Shorne, Violet is Anne Lindell, and Virginia Woolf — who had since become Vita’s other, more famous lover — is the acidic Alexa Harrowby Quince, “one of those women,” Violet writes, “who, having no bloom to lose, improve with age.” Ouch! The book was published in France in 1935 but not translated into English until 1985. And of course Virginia wrote the spectacular “Orlando,” with Orlando as Vita and Sasha, a Russian princess, as Violet. How ironic that the most sexually reticent lady of the three should write not only the best book, but the one that dares to explore most deeply the profound subject of amorphous gender. These three very different novels provide a fascinating “Rashomon” of the Violet-Vita affair.

"The real-life story, that mystery called the truth, which Holroyd narrates so expertly, stars two brilliant, young, beautiful, rich, hypersexed lesbians. The film, of course, would adhere strictly to the truth — please, no Portman-Kunis off-with-her-panties scenes; this coupling requires some actual ardor. And Nicole Kidman could don her Cyrano proboscis again for a vital cameo, composing at her desk while the girls gallivant across the Continent providing her with scandalous copy."

Holroyd has also written biographies of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John, and a three-volume opus on Bernard Shaw. He has been ill and, at 76, says this is his final book.

Latino Trans Teen Film Opens Today in Manhattan, Bronx

  

You might not guess from its butch-as-hell title that Gun Hill Road is about a sixteen year-old Latino trans, and, according to critics' raves, you definitely wouldn't guess this is its young star Harmony Santana's first time acting. Ever. During filming, she was just beginning her own transitioning, now completed. Critics have complained the feature focuses on the least interesting character, the disapproving father just home from prison, and the plot is "borderline-contrived," or "overwrought and cliched." Last week the NYT did a story on Harmony and other trans actresses, of whom they could only find two. Laverne Cox [right] said casting directors tell her she looks too feminine to play convincingly someone who was born male, as she was. Harmony, in her "early 20s," still lives at the nonprofit Green Chimneys group home in Harlem for LGBTQ youth. (Photo: Béatrice de Géa NYT)

Publishers' Follies: Hasty Paperbacks and Harper's 99-cent eBooks

If you're planning a website called THAT Didn't Take Long to share your thoughts on Democrat concessions, indie band sellouts, the melting Arctic, superstrains of bacteria that have adapted to resist antibiotics, celebrity divorces, superstrains of weeds that have adapted to resist RoundUp, your own aging, and sex with premature ejaculators, please save space for the masterminds of mainstream publishing.

They're reducing the gap between a hardcover's publication and its paperback from the standard delay of a year to as little as five months. Good luck pitching publicity again 20 weeks later, especially to magazines with a 26-week lead time. One major reason for the acceleration is to compete with the e-book's lower price. Take Swamplandia, hardcover February, paperback July. You could pay $24.95 + tax at your local shop or you could download it for $9.99 no tax. But wait! cries publishing. Don't destroy our centuries-old model with your convenient new technology. We'll make you a deal! Just wait five little months, then pay $14.95, okay?

Meanwhile, shouting, "Me too! I can do that!" in the pricing sandbox, Harper Perennial launched an August-only sale of these 20 e-Books at 99 cents each, matching the wildly popular superstars of self-publishing John Locke and Amanda Hocking. Try Josh Kilmer-Purcell's gay memoir of the mid-90s I Am Not Myself These Days or Dennis Cooper's story collection Ugly Man, or 18 other titles.

Anyone can smell the desperation in a 93% price cut.

Quick reminder, Locke's and Hocking's super success isn't simply because they slapped a 99 cent sticker on their e-books. A huge part of it is that they started, respectively, with seven and nine novels. Then, when readers liked one book, they could immediately splurge on half a dozen more, still for less money than a single mainstream e-book. Listen to me: Scientists will engineer a politician with actual, functioning integrity before physical bookstores will stock seven novels by a debut author. Arthritic old publishing does not have that flexibility to roll that way, period. Hocking endured "hundreds" of rejections from publishers who wouldn't even take a chance on one book.

Wayne Koestenbaum's Humiliation

After dazzling readers with his deconstructions of exalted subjects like opera, Warhol, and Jackie, cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum brings his high style to a look at people at their lowest. Humiliation [[Kindle]] tackles the famous, the infamous, the everyman. Among them: Oscar Wilde, Judy Garland, Michael Jackson, Anita Bryant, King Lear, the Marquis de Sade, the prison at Abu Ghraib, Eliot Spitzer, Jesus, Genet, Sontag, Bjork, Basquiat, Borat, Alec Baldwin, porn stars, Rosa Parks, Frantz Fanon, Anne Carson, Anne Sexton, American Idol, YouTube, and his own many misadventures masturbating, from an hours-long repeat session one night in 7th grade that left him swollen and unable to attend school the next day, to jerking off over nude internet photos of a former college student of his. (Photos not included.)

So far, the best interview about the book is a long one with Salon, including this exchange:

"You make a point about how seeing a man being humiliated seems to be less bothersome, more just, than when a woman is being humiliated.

"...But, for me, I feel like I have a grudge against men in power. I just do. Call me an anarchist or something, or a May '68 kind of guy. So that when I see the shallowness and shabbiness of male power revealed, I get a kind of thrill.

"How much of that has to do with being a gay man.

"Probably a lot.

"Gay men internalize humiliation a lot.

"I think, at least in my generation, being gay involved traveling a long, often illegible, and very badly marked trail of shame. Really without signpost, except for knowledge of what to avoid. So that just to arrive at anything close to a salvageable identity is to experience that hot-cold shiver of humiliation along the way. And I also think that, at least in my aesthetic sensibility, we've made an art out of finding humiliation sometimes reparative. I'm thinking of John Waters very specifically, and I think that what I just said was a little too formal. But, you know, in terms of enjoying watching a man deposed, watching a many deprived of his power -- what happens in John Waters' movies is the trappings of normality get removed and [the people in power] turn out to be filthy. And that there's some sort of poetic justice in that reversal, relishing that seems like a kind of gay sensibility that I espouse."

Coincidentally, John Waters blurbed Humiliation saying, "This literary ‘topping from the bottom’ is the funniest, smartest, most heartbreaking yet powerful book I’ve read in a long time."

Born August 2-3: James Baldwin, Rupert Brooke

Growing up in Harlem, the oldest of nine children, James Baldwin cared for his eight siblings in the shadow of an abusive stepfather and began preaching sermons in 1938 when he was fourteen. Those years and the dawning realization of the difficulties of being black and gay in America are covered in his autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, which he wrote as an expatriate, having left New York for France when he was twenty-four, with only his typewriter, two Bessie Smith records, some clothes, forty dollars cash, and no comprehension of French. After a stint in London, he finished his novel in Switzerland. Although he had published trenchant essays and reviews in The Nation, The Partisan Review, and Commentary, had won a Rosenwald Fellowship, and had the backing of Richard Wright, American publishers rejected his manuscript. Only after a British publisher accepted the novel did they relent, and its U.S. publication was a success.

Baldwin then wrote a play, The Amen Corner, and published his first of six essay collections, Notes of a Native Son. Critics and readers alike expected his second novel, Giovanni's Room, to illuminate the black experience but all the characters are white and the plot revolves around a gay love affair between an American and his Italian boyfriend who is to be executed in the morning. Shocking for 1956. His next novels, Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone(1968), reflect the broader unrest and violence of the Sixties, with characters black and white, straight, bi, and gay. Between those novels, the New Yorker published, in two oversized issues, Baldwin’s seminal, angry, warning cry, “Down at the Cross” which became the bulk of his essay collection, The Fire Next Time.

Judging the dominant society by its actions rather than its words, Baldwin did not shrink from referring to the “cruel white majority” as “moral monsters,” or from lamenting the new absence of moral authority in Harlem. He considered “urban renewal” to mean "Negro removal." Gore Vidal claims that JFK and RFK (with whom Baldwin’s friends had had a fractious meeting as Attorney General) referred to Baldwin as “Martin Luther Queen.” His FBI file was 1,750 pages by 1987, when he died in Saint-Paul de Vence, having spent much of his life in France and Istanbul. Toni Morrison edited the collections of his works for Library of America and he was honored with a US postage stamp in 2005.

Last year, Randall Kenan gathered Baldwin's uncollected writings in The Cross of Redemption.

Yeats called him “the handsomest young man in England” and he was adored throughout Britain for his poetry as much as his legendary looks -- so how could someone as heroic as Rupert Brooke be killed by a mosquito bite when he was only twenty-seven? A star all his life, he blossomed at Cambridge, where he was one of the founders of the Marlowe Society acting club and a member of the Apostles. Throughout his schooling he had deep crushes on his male classmates, particularly Charles Lascelles and Michael Sadleir, and in his twenties dated both women and men, seeming proudest of his seduction of Denham Russell-Smith, the brother of a friend. (See his letters to James Strachey, which Brooke’s executors kept out of print for eighty-three years, until 1998.) His poetry is largely impersonal and, of course, he is most celebrated for his idealistic War Sonnets, having died soon after their publication, before he ever saw battle, en route with his Navy unit to Gallipoli. Two months after Brooke’s death, his younger brother William volunteered with the 8th Battalion London Regiment, known as the Post Office Rifles, and was killed in battle within twenty days. Today, the Rupert Brooke Society alludes to Rupert's "confused love life" on their homepage. He is, of course, one of the prevailing spirits behind Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, The Stranger's Child.

Alex Ross on Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray Rewrites

In this week's New Yorker, music critic, sometime DJ, and married gay Alex Ross looks at Oscar Wilde's full career and zeroes in on the pivotal changes he made prior to submitting The Picture of Dorian Gray: "Even before Wilde sent his manuscript to the typist, then, he was hesitating over its homoerotic content, and especially over the pages devoted to Basil’s desire." He says the downshifting revisions "betray a rising anxiety, an urge to lower the emotional temperature."

Ross finds the two recent biographies to be "almost comically contradictory portraits."

Thomas Wright's Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde presents "Wilde is an intellectual dreamer who rarely steps outside the literary realm" and "even suggests that Wilde discovered his sexuality in the pages of Plato."

Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde presents him as "a largely sexual being who reads in order to find a language for his desire and writes in order to speak that desire aloud...McKenna, by fixating on Wilde’s sexual life, arrives at an oddly unflattering portrait. Preying on young literary fans, paying off rent boys, picking up lads as young as fifteen—Wilde is stripped of his charm."

Later, Ross argues:

"The gay strain in Wilde’s work is part of a larger war on convention. In the 1889 story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” a pseudo-scholarly, metafictional investigation of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a boy, Wilde slyly suggests that the pillar of British literature was something other than an ordinary family man. In the 1891 play “Salomé,” Wilde expands a Biblical anecdote into a sumptuous panorama of decadence. Anarchists of the fin de siècle, especially in Germany, considered Wilde one of their own: Gustav Landauer hailed Wilde as the English Nietzsche. Thomas Mann expanded on the analogy, observing that various lines of Wilde might have come from Nietzsche (“There is no reality in things apart from their experiences”) and that various lines of Nietzsche might have come from Wilde (“We are basically inclined to maintain that the falsest judgments are the most indispensable to us”). Nietzsche and Wilde were, in Mann’s view, “rebels in the name of beauty.”

Readers may find the timing of the piece curious, as if the editors had sidelined it until the slower August stupor. Parsing these Dorian Gray changes was a literary pasttime four months ago, with the April publication from Harvard of the "uncensored" version, which alas only restores 500 words. Music fans may wonder how Ross can work in Neil Patrick Harris and Tony Kushner while excluding The Smith's many references to Wilde and, most important, Pet Shop Boys' quote from his sentencing, And I, my Lord, may I say nothing? in "DJ Culture." Devastating and danceable.

Lite and Liter: To Discuss Literature Is To Compile Lists with Photos

Slight, but since gay books is what we do: Huffington Post offers a feature comically called "7 Great Gay Couples in Literature." Sure, yes, of course, Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, but who would place Robin Vote and Nora Flood in their all-time top seven? We'll never know because the flimsy piece has no byline.

Slight on steroids: Time did a splashy showcase of twenty-three prominent writers telling you what to read this summer. Great, except the print edition was six or eight pages of huge glam photos of the authors with teeny squibettes about the actual books. LGBT representation included Sapphire; Emma Donoghue on Neal Stephenson's Anathem; and Edmund White on The Lazarus Project. Some promising other mentions: Deborah Eisenberg suggested the NYRB Classic Skylark and Ann Patchett promoted a "strange and original and hysterically funny" novel, The Family Fang [[Kindle]].