Band of Thebes

New York Story

I took these photos Friday and Monday on the UWS. Alas, not unlike OWS.

For more elegant devastation in Manhattan, consider The New York Stories of Henry James [[Kindle]] selected and with a marvelous introduction by Colm Tóibín.

James Hormel's Memoir, Fit To Serve

Tomorrow is: the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Mattachine Society of Washington, Frank Kameny's memorial service, and the pub date of James Hormel's memoir, Fit to Serve: Reflections on a Secret Life, Private Struggle, and Public Battle to Become the First Openly Gay U.S. Ambassador [[Kindle]]. Hormel told the Bay Area Reporter, "I had originally conceived the book as a political memoir. The more I talked with [co-author] Erin Martin, I realized it had to be much more autobiographical." Nonetheless, it covers his historic breaking of what he calls "the pink ceiling" through his multiple attempts to become an ambassador: first to Fiji which rejected him for being openly gay, then he rejected the consolation prize of general consul to Bermuda, then Clinton nominated him for Luxembourg, only to face a firestorm of Republican tizzies, blocking, and delays. How far we've come.

Heir to a Spam fortune, Hormel grew up in the Midwest, married, had five kids, came out, and moved out. He is an active philanthropist; among many other endeavors, he co-founded HRC in 1981 and funded the formation of the Hormel Center at the San Francisco Public Library in 1995. He turns 79 in January. His partner graduated from Swarthmore in 2008.

Born November 14: Adolph Brand

When was the world's first gay journal published? Congratulations if you said 115 years ago, in 1896. That's when Adolf Brand, at 22, started Der Eigene in Berlin. Originally cloaked as a journal of "male culture," its content became exclusively gay culture within two years. In 1900, Brand published Elisar von Kupffer's landmark anthology of gay poems, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe In der Weltliteratur, including works from Ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, 19th century Germany, as well as Arab and Japanese texts. Brand and his colleagues were constantly harassed and frequently prosecuted for their articles and photography, but he never backed down. Indeed, the first of his three prison sentences was for having attacked a member of parliament with a dog whip. His second prison term, eighteen months, was for libel, after reporting the affair between the German chancellor Prince von Bülow and the Privy Councilor Max Scheefer. His third prison term was two months, after he was convicted of violating Paragraph 175 for printing "lewd writings" in Der Eigene. The journal lasted thirty-six years. (Compare that with ONE, nineteen years; The Ladder, sixteen years; or 10 Percent magazine, four years.) His life's work destroyed and left in financial ruin, Brand gave up his activism in the 1930s. He spent two years in the German army and married a nurse, Elise Behrendt, who knew he was gay. He and Elise were killed together on February 2, 1945 when an Allied bomb exploded their home.

PW's Best of 2011: Smith, Hollinghurst, Linmark + The Call

Great to see Brit lesbian Ali Smith's new novel There But For The [[Kindle]] chosen as one Publisher's Weekly's Top 10 books of the year. Joining her on the longer fiction list are Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child and Zamora Linmark's second novel, Leche [[Kindle]]. Leche is about a young gay Filipano-American returning to the country where he was born and coping with his dual identities. Critic Nicholas Boggs said, the book "is a riotous ride through modern day Manila featuring encounters with a larger-than-life cast of characters including a (perhaps) bisexual cabbie, an activist nun, an acclaimed movie director, and President Corazon Aquino’s actress daughter, also known as the “Massacre Queen of the Philippine Cinema.”

The list also honors one of my favorite novels of the year, Yannick Murphy's wonderful, overlooked The Call, about a New England veterinarian and his family. See all the selections, or, if you're into that sort of thing, nonfiction. Both have some gems and some shameless populist pandering befitting an industry in a steep sales decline.

J. Edgar

Absolutely not. My partner saw it Wednesday and said it was "just terrible." The movie currently has a middling 59 on Metacritic. Plenty of critics thought it was okay but I'm inclined to agree the several who hated it, like Andrew O'Hehir (because his mother Diana wrote one of the best novels ever and) because he highlights my longtime worry on the subject:

"J. Edgar turns out to be one of the worst ideas anybody’s ever had, a mendacious, muddled, sub-mediocre mess that turns some of the most explosive episodes of the 20th century into bad domestic melodrama and refuses to take any clear position on one of American history’s most controversial figures.

"I’ll get to the historical and political insults of J. Edgar shortly, and they are legion. But most of all it’s a boring and silly movie... It’s like a combination of acting-school exercises and the History Channel, with all the production values and dramatic intensity that suggests. Hoover’s longtime deputy director and presumed lover, Clyde Tolson, is played by Armie Hammer as — how do I put this delicately? — an absolute flaming queen, who uses the term “fashion-forward” during a department-store shopping expedition set in about 1930. For just a minute there, it looks as if J. Edgar is about to become Queer Eye for the FBI, and I’m profoundly sorry it doesn’t...

"But when we get back to the question of how Hoover’s psychology affected his exercise of power, J. Edgar goes from being just a minor melodrama about a conflicted and closeted gay man to being simultaneously stupid, offensive and random...

But in all honesty, I’d much rather see a vigorous, propagandistic, right-wing defense of Hoover as a bastion of true Americanism than this tepid, long-winded and phony-looking exercise, which sort of implies that, on the one hand, he wasn’t a very nice man but, on the other, he was an actual human being who suffered pain..."

Born November 10: Ruth Davidson

Yesterday, Ruth Davidson turned 33. Six days earlier, the Glaswegian lesbian was elected leader of the Scottish Conservative Party. That's right, a tartan Tory dyke. If you're wondering where she falls on the oldfashioned, outdated butch-femme spectrum, she served three years in the all-volunteer Territorial Army before being sidelined by an injury during training exercises. She is also an avid kickboxer. Most of her politics may or may not be awful but like fellow conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, she supports same-sex marriage. She and her partner live in Partick.

Annie Leibovitz's Pilgrimage

Last night I shot Annie. Did she reciprocate?

Lesbian partners Susan Sontag and Annie Leibovitz planned to collaborate on something they called the Beauty Book, which Annie says, “was going to provide an excuse for us to travel around to places we cared about and wanted to see. For me it meant going back to taking pictures [only] when I was moved to take a picture. When there wasn’t an agenda… After Susan died, I knew I couldn’t do the Beauty Book, although as time passed, I realized that I might do a different book, with a different list of places. The list would, inevitably, be colored by my memory of Susan and what she was interested in, but it would be my list.”

The result is Pilgrimage, by far her most personal book and, shockingly, her first collection without any people. While images like the cover have obvious lasting power, some of the other pictures feel like casual snapshots. Annie’s list ended up being twenty-seven subjects and she conveys them solely through landscapes, buildings, and objects. They include three natural features (Niagra Falls, Gettysburg, Old Faithful), many famous homes (Graceland, Monticello, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s Charleston Farmhouse), and the mesmerizing or heartbreaking personal artifacts of Emily Dickinson, Thoreau, Emerson, Lincoln, Lewis & Clark, Louisa May Alcott, Julia Margaret Cameron, Darwin, Freud, Eleanor Roosevelt, Virginia Woolf, Marian Anderson, Martha Graham, Georgia O’Keefe, John Muir, and Ansel Adams. The only living subject is Pete Seeger, whose Hudson Valley workshop redefines “cluttered.”

Deeply felt in its admiration, the book never spills over into hagiography. It even punctures a few myths. Of Emily Dickinson she says, “The legend of the isolated, retiring poetess is misleading.” Discussing Georgia O’Keefe’s cook and staff at Ghost Ranch, Annie writes, “O’Keefe didn’t really live alone out there in the desert. There were always people around her. But she retained a certain kind of isolation to the end. She was solitary the way Thoreau was solitary. And she was steadfast in her work. The simplicity of her single bed with the theadbare linens and the horizon line says it for me. You can tell what was important to her. I’ve seen some ways I wish I could live, and on some level Georgia O’Keefe sets the bar.”

As for other ways she’d like to live, she said, “If I had a second, or third, or fourth life, I would love to be Lynn Davis.”

Last night in Manhattan I saw Leibovitz give a long slideshow, screening and explaining every image in the book. The huge scale was more dazzling than the printed form, which for some unnecessarily high-art reason presents many of its treasures at 3-5/8” wide.

When I had two seconds with her, I couldn’t ask a queer question because I used my one shot on behalf of my partner. Happily, it hit the bullseye and I was rewarded with a long, friendly discourse… and the piqued jealousy of hundreds of onlookers wondering who I was to make the exhausted photographer so anniemated.

For a look behind some of her most famous images, read her excellent previous book, Annie Leibovitz at Work.

Edmund White's Sacred Monsters

In his recent interview with Curt Weber, Alan Hollinghurst praised Edmund White first and most when asked about American gay writers, singling out A Boy's Own Story ("a very important book") and My Lives ("really his masterpiece perhaps, a really wonderful book"). Today, the versatile White publishes a new collection of nonfiction, Sacred Monsters. The more than twenty essays examine Martin Amis, Paul Bowles, Mary Cassatt, John Cheever, Marguerite Duras, Ford Maddox Ford, E.M. Forster, Allen Ginsberg, David Hockney, Christopher Isherwood, Henry James, Vladimir Nabokov, Reynolds Price, Marcel Proust, John Rechy, Auguste Rodin, John Singer Sargent, Patti Smith, Andy Warhol, Edith Wharton, and James Whistler.

It should be a huge year for Edmund White, with his new novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend, coming from Bloomsbury on January 17. I loved the passage he read at 192 Books from this story of a gay man's longtime friendship with a straight man. Check out the jacket after the jump.

Born November 8: Roy Simmons

After three seaons with the NY Giants, 6'3" 290 lb. offensive lineman Roy "Sugar Bear" Simmons quit the team in 1982 to concentrate on drinking and smoking crack. He worked as a baggage handler at JFK. Months later he went to rehab, wanted his job back, and was traded to the Redskins where he played special teams to block kickoffs, all the way to the 1984 Super Bowl. Among the twenty family and friends he'd invited to Tampa for that game, each staying separately in the same hotel, were his three lovers: two women and a man. The night before the Super Bowl, Simmons snorted coke and got laid three different times, which is not the reason the Redskins were destroyed by the Raiders (38 - 9) but it is typical of the chaos that got him cut from the team the next year. He moved to San Francisco and disappeared from the extended family he had supported on his player's salary. In 1992, accepting a free trip back east to appear on Donohue, he impulsively came out on national television to the great surprise of former teammates, family, and his female girlfriend on the show with him. Then he really disappeared. He amped up his drug use, his sex addiction, became homeless, and in 1997 discovered he was HIV+. Making that announcement to the NYT six years later on the eve of World Aids Day 2003, he hoped to reach other struggling closeted, self-destructive athletes engaging in high-risk-activities. In 2006, he published a truly unflinching memoir Out of Bounds, that begins with him blowing a stranger who introduces him to a friend willing to swap Simmons' clock, jewelry, and table lamps for a few grams of crack. When it's gone, he trades his big-screen TV. As PW said, "Unlike recently celebrated and bestselling rehab memoirs, Simmons's story has no happy ending. Nor is there a happy beginning or happy middle." He says he has low self-esteem and wonders if he became gay because a married neighbor in Georgia raped him when he was eleven. His shocked family learned of the assault and ignored it. Simmons, 55 today, still lives in the Bay area. To date, only three NFL players have come out.

Dennis Cooper's The Marbled Swarm

No wonder Dennis Cooper has set his ninth novel in France. Since his last novel in 2005, he has spent a great deal of time in Paris; he won the Sade Prize; and he's been asked to co-curate next year's Un Nouveau Festival at the Pompidou. They take him more seriously there, yet he can't complain that he is ignored by serious literary culture here. This month the prestigious Art of Fiction series honors him with their interview #213, appropriate for a writer from L.A.

The free excerpt offered online is vexing because this one glimpse sounds like DC is saying you, gay reader, are shallow about sex but he's much more complex:

...My novel The Sluts, for instance, which has a lot of sex in it, brought a mainstream gay audience back to my work that had largely abandoned it in the early nineties, but there was a lot of complaining that the boner the novel’s premise seemed to offer wasn’t delivered. I think when many gay guys seek out things that have sex in them, they want to get off, period. When they see an attractive guy, they want to fuck him. When they watch porn, they imagine teleporting themselves onto the set, into the action. To me, desire and sex are much more complex than that. I’m as interested by what sex can’t give you as by what it can. I don’t see lust as a dumbing-down process. Most people fear confusion, but I think confusion is the truth and I seek it out. Sex is such a confusing situation that your ability to communicate what you’re thinking and feeling in the moment is severely hampered. If you try to articulate your thoughts and feelings in words, you’re reduced to saying the quickest and easiest epithets you can come up with—porn language, ­essentially, or the same CliffsNotes expressions of affection that have rushed from a million other enraptured people’s mouths—because objectivity and rational thought are the enemies of lust...

According to critics, despite the new setting Cooper's signature transgressive violence, sex, and anesthetized young teens remain in The Marbled Swarm [[Kindle]], released six days ago. The full menu includes cannibalism, which gives rise to lines like, "Dead boys aren’t exactly wheels of brie, however much they might smell the same eventually." Narrated by a wordy 22 year-old, the action unfolds at a chateau some distance from Paris, where, Harper politely explains, "a man secretly influences his son to commit a grisly act." 

The much, much nominated Patrick deWitt says, “Disquieting, humbling, and sadly beautiful in the way only Dennis Cooper can be, The Marbled Swarm is a mystifying and courageous novel that represents his finest work to date.”

Superstar Eileen Myles will read with Dennis Cooper at McNally Jackson in SoHo on November 14.

Green Carnation Prize Shortlist

Judges of the UK's newly co-ed Green Carnation Prize for LGBT books have announced their shortlist of six:

The Strange Case of the Composer and His Judge – Patricia Duncker

The Proof of Love – Catherine Hall

Red Dust Road: An Autobiographical Journey – Jackie Kay

Remembrance of Things I Forgot – Bob Smith

Ever Fallen in Love – Zoe Strachan

The Empty Family – Colm Tóibín

Those who didn't make it from the longlist to a spot among the finalists include several giants: Michael Cunningham (By Nightfall), Ali Smith (There But For The), John Waters (Role Models), and Jeanette Winterson (Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?).

The winner will be crowned on December 7.

Shenandoah Sunday

Llots of llamas and lleaves. (Like being in a Todd Haynes movie.)

Stonewall Award Winners: Hollinghurst, Hysen, Hazelgrove

Last night in London at Stonewall's annual awards, Alan Hollinghurst won writer of the year for his novel The Stranger's Child [[Kindle]]. The UK's leading rights group also gave prizes to sportsman of the year, Anton Hysen, the 20 year-old shirtless Swede who is the world's only openly gay professional soccer player, and to entertainer of the year, lesbian Jane Hazelgrove for her five years on Casualty playing Dixie Dixon. Broadcast of the year went to the BBC's expose about Uganda called "The World's Worst Place To Be Gay." Politician of the year was openly gay Chris Bryant, and hero of the year was Roger Crouch, the antibullying crusader whose 15 year old son Dominic Crouch killed himself in 2010. Bigot of the year was Melanie Phillips, a columnist for the Daily Mail who accused the government of trying to "brainwash" children into gay tolerance.

Born November 4: J.R. Ackerley

At prep school in the 1910's Joe Ackerley was so extremely good looking he was nicknamed Girlie, and decades later he named the love of his life, his Alsatian, Queenie. So why is his classic book called My Dog Tulip? Because the magazine editors who bought first-serial rights worried Queenie would inspire jokes about Ackerley's homosexuality, they insisted he change her name. Other revisions went the right way. In 1952 (after his parents' deaths) he rewrote and expanded his 1932 memoir Hindoo Holiday to be more open about gay exploits in India.

Earlier he had served in two tours of duty in WWI, with two serious injuries, nearly two years as a prisoner of war, and surviving the death of his older brother who had been their father's favorite. Later, he became editor of the BBC magazine The Listener, where he could promote the works of many nascent gay writers including Auden, Isherwood, Larkin, King, and Spender. 

More out in his homosexuality than many after him, Ackerley openly pined for a longterm relationship with what he called an Ideal Friend. Failing that, he paid for sexual encounters with young guardsmen, laborers, and sailors. E.M. Forster, who had gotten Acklerley his job in India, told him, "Joe, you must give up looking for gold in coal mines," but it was through one of these rough trade lovers, Freddie Doyle, that Acklerley at 49 inherited Queenie, as Doyle was being sent to prison for burglary. Ackerley tells their story in his only novel, We Think the World of You. The animated movie of My Dog Tulip is a quiet charmer, with voice work by Christopher Plummer and Lynn Redgrave.

Met's Renovated Galleries Dazzle with Art of the Arab Lands

How high on your list of time travel destinations is Iran in the 16th century? It should leap several ranks after you see the Metropolitan Museum's spectacularly renovated galleries of Art of the Arab Lands. (Make what you will of the switch away from the former term "Islamic Art.") The 15 rooms contain 1,200 objects spanning 1,000 years. Highlights are the ravishing textiles; the unfortunately placed Moroccan court [below] constructed on site by workers flown in from Fez; the 16th-century Moorish ceiling above (previously owned by William Randolph Hearst); and a large reception room from Damascus circa 1707. Lost in the critical gushing is the recurrent sense of humor or whimsy in many of the intricate folio illustrations or artifacts, like a vase spout in the shape of a rooster or a chair leg carved like a griffin. Other images are open to homoerotic interpretation. New to me was a version of the seven men of Ephesus, who slept together in a cave for 309 years, getting rescued by the bisexual Alexander the Great riding a white stallion. For a more recent take on gay whites discovering Arab men, read the long-delayed biography Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer, just released here last week, or his classics Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs.

Related nonfiction of note:

The anthology Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature

Scott Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam

Afdhere Jama, Illegal Citizens: Queer Lives in the Muslim World

Michael Luongo, Gay Travels in the Muslim World

Joseph Massad, Desiring Arabs

Brian Whitaker, Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East

and

The documentary film A Jihad for Love

 

The museum somehow spent $40 million on construction alone for a project that took 8.5 years.

Anonymous Degays Oxford, Southampton & Shakespeare

 

Plunging viewers into multiple intrigues in Tudor England, openly gay Roland Emmerich's entertaining new yarn Anonymous has something for everyone...to complain about. You can resent the case for Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford as the author of Shakespeare's works, or be angry that the Virgin Queen is portrayed as having had two children, or flame out that everyone except Christopher Marlowe has been degayed. Funny that we live in a time when it's an okay plot twist to have a mother enjoy a long sexual affair with her (unknown) grown son, but not to say the man who wrote 126 love poems to a young man might have been bi or gay. Most scholars accept the Earl of Southampton as a leading candidate for the Fair Youth of the sonnets; here, the older playwright's interest in the handsome young man [together, above] is explained by his secretly being his father, thereby rewriting Sonnet 18 to Shall I compare me to Darth Vader? Nevertheless, the movie is not awful. It's pretty good all around. Roger Ebert says the wrongheaded claims are "no reason to avoid this marvelous historical film," which is "a splendid experience: the dialogue, the acting, the depiction of London, the lust, jealousy and intrigue." Other critics liked it less, and it flopped at the box office. If you're interested, better hurry.

Born November 2: Luchino Visconti, k.d. lang

Born a count in one of northern Italy's six richest families, Luchino Visconti was adrift until he was thirty, when Coco Chanel decided he should work in movies and got him a job as third assistant director on a film by Jean Renoir. His own debut as a director came after seven years, during which time he learned the trade and dated the photographer Horst. Of his twenty films, most praised are The Leopard, The Damned, The Stranger, Rocco and his Brothers, with its open subplot of the boxing coach who pays young fighters for sex, and Death in Venice, from Thomas Mann's #1 novel of the all-time 100 best lgbt books. At sixty-nine, Visconti died of a heart attack in Rome, survived by his partner of more than ten years German actor Helmet Berger, who appeared in four of Visconti's films, most notably The Damned and Ludwig. (And here bare.) Sandy Leonard, an expert on such matters, says Visconti worked through his opening-night jitters at Covent Garden by making out in an elevator with Alain Delon. 

Before Melissa, before Ellen, before George Michael, before Adam Lambert, k.d. lang came out way back in 1992. Although that was fairly groundbreaking at the time, her coming out did nothing to hinder the sales of her multi-platinum album Ingenue, nor did it prevent her from winning another Grammy, being made an officer of the Order of Canada, or getting named to VH1's 100 Greatest Women in Rock n Roll and CMT's 40 Greatest Women in Country Music. In fact, she sparked a much angrier backlash in rural areas by supporting a vegetarian campaign called Meat Stinks. From 1997 to 2000 she took a break, fell in love with The Murmurs singer Leisha Hailey, moved to Los Angeles, and came back with her happiest album, Invincible Summer, quoting Camus: In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. Three years later she won her fourth Grammy for her collaboration with Tony Bennett and also released an album of covers by Canadian composers. In April she released Sing It Loud, a cd with her Siss Boom Band. In September, Tony Bennett released Duets II, featuring another cover with k.d., this time "Blue Velvet."

Lost Story and Passion by Brane Mozetič

After eleven volumes of poetry, Slovenian author Brane Mozetič today publishes his third book of fiction, Lost Story. Praised by the Italian edition of Rolling Stone, the gay novel is "a terrifying, fascinating, authentic account of the 'coolness' of a relaxed and fatalistic generation," according to Austria's gay magazine Lambda Nachrichten. 

If it sounds like his work might be influenced by Dennis Cooper, a commenter on DC's blog strongly agrees. The hunch is reinforced by the jacket copy on Mozetič's collection of short fiction, Passion: "aching with the sexuality and confusion of the modern experience" and "tracing the geography of modern sexuality both devoid of affection or sentimentality and obsessed with issues of power and control." Kevin Killian wrote a long Amazon review, which ends, "It isn't always pretty and at times gets pretty morbid, but if you want a walk on the wild side of Maribor, Velenje, or Celje I can recommend no harder-hitting nor more beautiful a book than Mozetic's Passion."

Take a chance. Your time invested will be minimal. Lost Story is 148 pages, Passion is 126 pages.