Band of Thebes

Trashy

Not all the pieces are as successful as their best work, but I love couples creating together.

Born February 24: Winslow Homer, Judith Butler

Born in Boston in 1836, Winslow Homer moved to Paris in 1867 where he lived with his close friend and fellow painter, Albert Kelsey. Their exact relationship is unknown because the intensely private Homer kept no diary, journal, saved no letters, and, unusual for an artist of his time, never completed a self portrait. He did, however, keep a photo of them on the back of which he wrote "Damon and Pythias." According to Richard Mann, the lifelong bachelor artist used a boy as his model for several of his famous paintings of women, as in Reading, above. For the final fifteen years of his life, until 1910, his closest companion at his estate in Prouts Neck, Maine, was Lewis Wright. Whatever their precise relationship, it disturbed some of Winslow's friends and neighbors, apparently beyond Wright's being black. Homer's work is celebrated throughout the splendidly reburbished galleries of American art at the Met. A must for everyone.

Already an academic to watch out for, Judith Butler became a star at thirty-four with the release of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990. The queer studies/ feminist pioneer/ icon has published new books every few years since, still sparking waves of devotion, debate, and derision. In 2008, she received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award with prize money of $1.5 million going to her Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley. Two years ago, Utne Reader named her one of 25 Visionaries Changing Your World. Today, she's 56.

PEN/ Faulkner Finalists 2012

The PEN/Faulkner judges have announced the finalists for this year's prize. Banks' book has impressed almost every critic with its humane look at a group of strangers living under a bridge in Florida because each has been tagged a sex offender. It is his seventeenth novel. Julie Otsuka's novel is her second, and is the list's only overlap with the National Book Award nominees.

Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin [Kindle]

Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda: Stories [Kindle]

Anita Desai, The Artist of Disappearance [Kindle only $5.99]

Steven Millhauser, We Others: New and Selected Stories [Kindle]

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic [Kindle]

Deborah Eisenberg won in 2011 and Sherman Alexie in 2010.

Wildness by Wu Tsang

You know it's a good night when you feel you've stepped into a Maira Kalman drawing. MoMA's Documentary Fortnight crowd showcased crazy style for the world premiere of Wu Tsang's Wildness about a pivotal year in the life of an aging gay bar, the Silver Platter, serving the queer Latinos in a poor corner of Los Angeles. Race, gender, sexuality, safe spaces, anti-trans crime, community, gentrification, and the fear of hipster popularity mingle with even more amorphous issues like the essence of beauty and the passage of time. "Original" is an understatement. For starters, the bar narrates. She speaks in a wise, melancholy, semi-magical voice that would be at home in an Isabel Allende novel. At precisely the moment when the interviews with Mexican men, in L.A. legally and otherwise, who like "to dress" [as women] run their course, the outsider djs/artists who run Tuesday night's renegade party surprise you by deciding to start a free legal clinic next door to assist the trans ladies in their dealings with the law. The shocks continue with a fight with L.A. Weekly and a death that leaves the club padlocked and coworkers of 22 years suing each other. Wildness screens at SXSW in March and Wu Tsang's installation recreating the bar will appear in the Whitney biennial in May.

Bush-Appointed Judge Strikes Down Key DOMA Provision

Jeffrey S. White, a federal judge appointed by George Bush, yesterday "declared the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act unconstitutional and ordered the federal government to ignore the statute and provide health benefits to the wife of a lesbian federal court employee." 

The NYT says:

'Judge White ruled that the act did not provide “a justification that is substantially related to an important governmental objective” which would be necessary for a law that is aimed at one specific group of people, in this case gay men and lesbians.

“The imposition of subjective moral beliefs of a majority upon a minority cannot provide a justification for the legislation,” he said in his 43-page ruling.'

In marriage news:

Today, Maryland's senate votes on the gay marriage bill that the house passed last week. Governor Martin O'Malley, who previously supported only civil unions, actually said the three words unknown in political circles -- "I was wrong" -- and has promised to sign the bill.

Early last week, Washington State Governor Chris Gregoire signed their gay marriage bill into law. Immediately, equality foes said they would file court cases to stop the law from taking effect June 7. They are gathering signatures to kill the law in a statewide referendum, a strategy that was horribly successful in California and Maine.

Late last week, New Jersey's legislature finally passed their gay marriage bill only to be vetoed by Governor Chris Christie who wants to put civil rights to a vote. Instead, the repugnant Christie deserves to face a recall election. Compounding the insult, he actually makes a semi-valid point that he has been consistent on the issue while Obama, who was for gay marriage before he was against it, straddles the unicorn fence:

"The President is silent on this like he’s silent on every issue that’s difficult for him. [...] Let’s have the President of the United States show some courage, come on this program, look into the camera like I’m looking into the camera, and state his position. He won’t because he wants to have it both ways. I’m not looking to have it both ways, I vetoed the bill. That’s my position."

Sad when the president's cunning timidity allows the true bigot to create the false illusion of having the moral upper hand.

Born February 21-22

Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet. Read Nancy Milford's Savage Beauty.

W.H. Auden, poet and critic. Read R.P.T. Davenport-Hines' Auden or John Fuller's W. H. Auden.

Barbara Jordan, three-term Congresswoman from Texas, never acknowledged her nearly 30-year relationship with Nancy Earl. Read Jordan's own Speaking the Truth with Eloquent Thunder.

Christopher Bram, 60, novelist, essayist, author of Eminent Outlaws.

Isaac Julien, 52, filmmaker (Looking for Langston) and artist (Turner Prize finalist).

Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. Read Tim Jeal's Baden-Powell.

Felice Picano, 68, novelist and memoirist.

David Geffen, 69, mogul. Newly single after ending multi-year relationship with Jeremy Lingvall, 28. Read Tom King's The Operator.

Watergate by Thomas Mallon

If the world worked as it should, Tom Mallon's fizzy, madcap tale of a Jazz Age men's magazine Bandbox would have seen the champagne sales and rich movie deal of Tom Rachman's recent newspaper novel The Imperfectionists [Kindle]. Now Mallon deserves for fate to flip his way: Following the flop of Ann Beattie's comeback book Mrs. Nixon, maybe America's most literary historical novelist will score a breakaway bestseller with his new novel, Watergate [Kindle], which has earned terrific early reviews.

Readers wary of revisiting the Nixon era through the eyes of a self-confessed Republican writer will be reassured to find, as the WSJ says, "The most perceptive and wittiest members of Mr. Mallon's cast are the women." Specifically, says the NYT, "the book’s uncontested star is Alice Roosevelt Longworth... who is never at a loss for a scorching one-liner. 'I believe she’s to be released back into the wild after the benediction,' she says of the singer Ethel Merman." The LAT says, "as Joan Kennedy bends to kiss the old woman's cheek, Longworth recoils: 'That's why I usually wear a wide-brimmed hat.'"  Are we not all counting the minutes until a videographer compiles the ultimate quipfest pitting the Dowager Countess of Grantham's worst against Alice Longworth's most withering?

Watergate is Mallon's first fiction since his only gay novel, the McCarthy era Fellow Travelers. Can't wait to see if he's continued to include queer content in his work.

Daniel Allen Cox for Freedom To Read

Fans of Daniel Allen Cox's daring, original work, Shuck [Kindle] and Krakow Melt [Kindle], knew he'd make a beautifully inventive choice in creating an anti-censorship video for Canada's Freedom To Read week. It's about the words. The two minutes you spend here will bring you that much closer to the April release of his new novel, an atypical Hollywood noir called Basement of Wolves.

Ira Sachs Wins Teddy Award for Best Queer Film at Berlinale

Congratulations to Ira Sachs whose Keep the Lights On won Best Feature at the 26th Teddy Awards celebrating queer film at the Berlinale. Over ten years, a New York gay couple's relationship is threatened by competing addictions.

Zuschauerpreis der Siegessaeule: The bigger winner might be The Parade [above]. From Serbia, the turbulent farce follows homophobic mafia hitmen forced to defend the flaming queers at a fractious gay pride parade, with additional comedy/conflict among Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovo-Albanians and Croatian war vets. The cliche-riddled movie equally lampoons nellie fags and moronic machismo in the name of ultimately affirming gay acceptance. Amazingly, it became a monster box office smash success across the Balkans, becoming the #1 movie of 2011 with double the ticket sales of the number two movie, The Smurfs. The optimistic, solipsistic director expects this year's gay pride parade to be the region's first ever without anti-gay violence, thanks to his movie.

Best Documentary: Call Me Kuchu, a film by Katherine Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worral, about Uganda's first openly gay activist, David Kato, who was murdered. More here.

Best Short: Loxoro. A mother in Peru searches for her teenaged daughter and her best friend, both transsexuals.

Special Jury Prize: Jaures

Special Teddy I & II: Ulrike Ottinger, Mario Montez

As for the main jury prizes at the Berlinale, the Golden Bear went to Caesar Must Die by 80 and 82 year-old brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. (Last year's Golden Bear winner, which also swept the acting awards, was the Iranian drama A Separation. It has an impossible 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and truly is as good as everyone says. See it before it wins on Sunday.)

Gushing

An alum of the sensational Dieux du Stade series, photographer Francois Rousseau has released a new coffee table book, Wet Men. With nary a twink in the sight, the pictures celebrate a mix of the lean muscle stallions you've come to admire in Rousseau's work. This time, drenched.

Your admiring, jealous friends: So, what are you reading? I bet it's another obscure European I've never even heard of! (Sigh)

You, the soul of modesty: No, no, just the new Francois Rousseau, really. It's very good. He has such a feel for his characters. (Pause.) What about you? Still The Marriage Plot, is it? 

Born February 19: Pim Fortuyn

The conservative-populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was openly gay to a degree that's unimaginable here: On national television he explained that he enjoyed the taste of semen, comparing it to a strong liqueur, and he used his North African and Arab tricks as "proof" that he wasn't racist. Dutch voters, for and against him, were more interested in his ideas. He wanted to shrink government's role in health services and education, he spoke against the "Islamisation of our culture," sounded a warning cry about the dangers of shari'a law superseding the Dutch legal code, and pledged to curtail immigration drastically. Yet he was also for euthanasia, for legalized soft drugs, for same-sex marriage, and for reducing the military by combining the army and air force to save money. Although Fortuyn was riding a crest of widespread popularity with fully fifty percent of voters aged 18-30 supporting him (huge in a multi-party system), the Netherlands did not get to have their first ever openly gay Prime Minister, because they had their first assassination in 330 years, since 1672. A white Dutch man shot Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting "the weaker parts of society to gain political power." The motive was unrelated to Fortuyn's being gay. The killer, thirty-two, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Fortuyn was fifty-four. Contrarian even in death, Fortuyn was buried twice, first in the Netherlands, then dug up and re-interred in Pordenone, Italy, where he owned a second home.

Everyday Ghosts by James Morrison

Readers dazzled by the moment in Suite Francaise when the narration switches to the point of view of the cat will have one more reason to admire James Morrison's touching new novella Everyday Ghosts [Kindle only $4.99] which at a key moment beautifully glides into the thoughts of a donkey. Such is Morrison's grace that the shift feels natural. Equally believable is the arrival of a knowing stranger who may or may not embody the book's title more than the other offbeat characters at a faltering abbey on the edge of an unnamed city. The best of them is the protagonist, Brother Pete, a gay, young doubter who has spent two years there not taking vows and hiding from life, wasting his time on an affair with a egotistical former child star whose self-absorption perfectly skewers vanity in general and Hollywood in particular. Except for overplaying one mans fear of ants, Morrison expertly balances the comic and the moving. A very, very brief mass funeral for the town's 1,400 indigent deceased is a marvel. Like Jonathan Strong in Drawn From Life, he proves himself a wide-ranging master of compression.

Morrison gives a fine interview to the Michigan Quaterly Review in which he says the tone he wanted for the book was "a kinder, gentler Muriel Spark" with a little Thomas Merton.

MoMA Hosts World Premiere of ACT UP Doc "United in Anger"

Someday, someone will write a definitive history of 20th century activism and protest, and ACT UP will get credit for changing the world. Until then, there's Jim Hubbard's awesome, imperfect documentary United in Anger, which MoMA screened as opening night of its Documentary Fortnight on Thursday. From 1987 to roughly 1992, with a coda bringing it up to today, the film shows one inspired, phenomenal, queer zap after another: the FDA, the New York Stock Exchange, Grand Central, CBS News, and St. Patrick's where up to 8,000 people rallied against the church's policies. Brazen successes that upended the power dynamic, sped drug approvals, lowered prices, and saved lives. The movie is excellent on women's essential part in the coalition and gives much, deserved time to the always-quotable media godsend Ann Northrop. She points out their goal was visibility and effecting change, not to be liked. A distinction lost on the cozy assimilationists of the past twenty years, I'd say. Among the writers on screen are Sarah Schulman (who co-produced), John Weir, K.M. Soehnlein, Larry Kramer, Urvashi Vaid, and an angry, early '90s Michael Cunningham speaking out against the government more forcefully than he has lately. Of course people might mellow with age and success, and, obviously, the pandemic while still deadly has become more manageable. My point is the movie captures a moment that is gone and you should see it. 

If you can help, please give via Kickstarter.

United in Anger has the sweep I wanted from the widely-praised, more intimate aids doc We Were Here. I'm still looking forward to Sundance's How To Survive a Plague, which has just been picked up for theatrical distribution.

Born February 17: Friedrich Alfred Krupp, Robert Dessaix

Heir to a 300 year-old dynasty and a newer steel, ammunitions, and weapons empire, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, known as Fritz, preferred marine biology but took over the family firm in 1887 when he was thirty-three. Also against his inclination, he married a woman. He spent as much time as he could in Capri, pursuing his first loves of oceanography and men. For the times when he had to be in Germany, he arranged for his favorite Italian youths to work at a luxury hotel in Berlin, where he often stayed for their service and where other guests complained about the noises coming from his inner sanctum. Accustomed to enormous power -- by the turn of the century he had built Krupp into the largest company in Europe -- he ignored others' objections. This may be why his wife was institutionalized. The media, however, could not be quelled forever. An Italian newspaper was preparing to print accounts of his famous island orgies, with photos. Vorwärts, the Social Democrats' magazine, beat them to it, outing the forty-eight year-old Fritz on November 15, 1902. Seven days later he killed himself. Emperor Wilhelm II blasted his political opponents and defended Fritz against the "slander," and his wife immediately "recovered" to continue raising their two daughters. The eldest inherited the firm which became a Nazi juggernaut. The dynasty endures as does fascination with them; someone filmed their story, including dandified Fritz flaunting his rough trade. Photos after the jump.

Which book finally dislodged The Horse Whisperer from the #1 spot on Australia's bestseller lists? Basically its opposite: Robert Dessaix's Night Letters was a surprise sensation, an intellectual novel compromised of twenty letters written in a hotel in Venice in the mid-1990s by an Australian man newly diagnosed with HIV. Echoing literary travelers from Marco Polo and Dante to Casanova and Sterne, contemplating life, death, love, and the passage of time, the narrator R. discourses on cathedrals and museums, seduction and sex, hell and heaven, Venice and Venetians. Despite the character's dire future, critics hailed his "wry, chatty, surprisingly cheerful voice" (NYTBR) finding him "seductive, charming, and always thought-provoking" (Kirkus). The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "luminous gem" and the Cleveland Plain Dealer "a story exquisitely told." Dessaix's second novel, Corfu, also describes gay ex-pats in Europe and again rings with literary echoes: Homer, Sappho, Chekhov, Cavafy. His nonfiction includes a memoir called A Mother's Disgrace about his own adoption and subsequent wanderlust; Twilight of Love, a book about retracing Turgenev's steps as he followed a married opera star and her husband for years; and an anthology, Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing. Last April he published On Humbug. After a failed marriage to a woman, Dessaix wrote a personal ad in 1982 and met Peter Timms, who is still his partner. As for longevity and dedication, Dessaix created a complex language when he was eleven and continues to speak it to himself even now, as he turns 68 today.

Scotty Bowers' Full Service

"I was proud of my dick and I was happy to share it," writes 88 year-old former marine Scotty Bowers of his long, long success fixing trysts with and for men and women of glamor's golden age. The super-sized list of people he bedded includes Cary Grant and Randolph Scott (together, many times), George Cukor, Noel Coward, Tennessee Williams, Anthony Perkins, Roddy McDowall, Brian Epstein, Spencer Tracy (excerpt), Vincent Price, Walter Pidgeon, Edith Piaf, Vivien Leigh, and the Duke of Windsor.

On the Windsors, "Bowers' line is that Wallis and Edward were both essentially gay and that the reason for Edward abdicating the throne was that their marriage gave him the freedom he needed to satisfy his urges in private. During a visit to Hollywood, Bowers says he arranged all manner of pretty dark-haired girls for the duchess and boys for the duke, as well as offering his own body for the duke to do with what he liked."

Although the married, "straight"/bi/"little bit of everything" Bowers says he had been tricking constantly since he was 11 or 12, his memoir Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars [Kindle] more often details his talents for arranging encounters for others: Errol Flynn, Somerset Maugham, Charles Laughton, Tyrone Power, Bob Hope, Desi Arnaz, Howard Hughes, even J. Edgar Hoover. He insists he was not a pimp and never made money on his matchmaking. Over 49 years he says he procured "more than 150 women" for Katharine Hepburn.

The mainstream has always denied gay history for lack of "proof." Make of this first person account what you will. Gore Vidal says, "Scotty doesn't lie."

Edward St. Aubyn in New York

At last night's taping for B&N’s webcast, the master stylist, must-read author Edward St. Aubyn said he didn’t force humor into his semi-autobiographical and sometimes harrowing novels but that in writing about families and class “satire inevitably cropped up.” Just as you do, he finds “the world heartbreaking and ridiculous in rapid alteration.” He said, “I write about things I can’t get off my mind,” with a goal “more toward understanding not blame.” He makes an enormous distinction between confession and truth-telling. Asked by the moderator why at least two of his five books unfold during just part of a single day, his thoughtful reply included, “I was always very impressed by Racine, you know,” and “I’m obsessed with compression.” He said a good mimic no doubt indicates “an unstable sense of self.” You should be so fortunate to hear him do Princess Margaret from his novel Bad News [Kindle].

If he sometimes surrenders to the easy choice (as with the sitcom timing of the waiter returning with a flourish just as Patrick is to reveal the secret of a lifetime), he more than compensates with his exquisite prose and elegant bon mots: “To the man of the world, the universe is a suburb.”

St. Aubyn’s new novel is At Last [Kindle], concludes the cycle of the "staggeringly good" Patrick Melrose Novels [Kindle], which the N.Y. Observer says "are among the smartest and most beautiful fictional achievements of the past 20 years." 

He was paired with singer Joe Arthur who is also a painter. In fact, his sole Grammy nomination is for his own art on his album cover. He dropped the night’s biggest stunner: Peter Gabriel’s first choice for the duet Don’t Give Up wasn’t Kate Bush but Dolly Parton.

Mars-Jones Wins Hatchet Award for Slaughtering Cunningham

Gay vs. gay won the day as Adam Mars-Jones took home The Omnivore's Hatchet Job of the Year Award for his sharp review of Michael Cunningham's novel By Nightfall [Kindle]. The Golden Hatchet prize is sincere and based on literary merit. One of the four judges, Sam Leith, praised the winner, saying, “Mars-Jones’s review of Michael Cunningham had everything a reader could hope for in a hostile review. It was at once erudite, attentive, killingly fair-minded and viciously funny … Every one of his zingers – ‘like tin-cans tied to a tricycle;’ ‘it seems to be the prestige of the modernists he admires, rather than their stringency;’ ‘that’s not an epiphany, that’s a postcard’ – is earned by the argument it arises from. By the end of it Cunningham’s reputation is, well, prone.”

Readers will recall that, in a very respectful review, Alan Hollinghurst also was disappointed by Cunningham's book, "a slender donnée has been bulked up to make a novel" and the "slight air of factitiousness in the novel, of an author very capably treading water."

Read the Hatchet award's full Manifesto, which says in part, it "aims to raise the profile of professional critics and to promote honesty and wit in literary journalism. Newspaper book pages are on borrowed time. Readership is dwindling, review space is shrinking, reviewers are paid half what they were twenty years ago. The professional critic has yet to draw his last breath, but there’s no mistaking the death rattle."

Mars-Jones' review is free at the Guardian. Among the eight shortlisted finalists were Geoff Dyer on Julian Barnes and David Sexton on Carol Ann Duffy.

Gay Italia

Sponsored by Arcigay and AGEDO, this video of a gay couple who get married and a lesbian couple who get engaged at their wedding took four months to make. It will take you four minutes to watch.

Born February 15: Bill T. Jones

The cruel vagaries of aids: In 1984, both Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, professional partners running their jointly named dance troupe and boyfriends for thirteen years, since college at SUNY Binghamton, were diagnosed with HIV. Zane died in 1988; last June, after twenty-six years of being HIV+, Jones added another Tony Award (for the smash hit Fela!, which he co-created, directed, and choreographed) to his many, many honors including a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1994 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2010. His more than one hundred maverick dance pieces, which frequently incorporate same-sex attraction, eroticism, anger, and nudity, have been seen worldwide and he often collaborates with the era's leading artists, from Toni Morrison and Max Roach on Degga to Jessye Norman for How! Do! We! Do! Confronting the perceived death sentence of aids, he traveled the country interviewing many kinds of terminally ill patients before creating his celebration of living, Still/Here, which many have loved and some have hated, like the New Yorker's former dance critic Arlene Croce, who refused to see "victim art." In 1995, Jones published his autobiography Last Night on Earth, happily misnamed. In 2010 he was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient alongside Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey. (photo: Lois Greenfield)

Third Man on the Mountain

What did you do in Mission: Impossible--Ghost Protocol, when hot, butch Jeremy Renner demanded, "Next time, I get to seduce the rich guy." After spending a quality moment imagining that scene, you no doubt flashed back to a wonderful old Disney movie called Third Man on the Mountain, in which a thirtyish hiking guide complained to his friend, "Why was there never a rich Englishman waiting for me in a crevasse?" Based on the novel Banner in the Sky, the movie tells the story of a restless Swiss teen dishwasher Rudi who one fateful afternoon rescues a famous climber, John Winter [played by 6'4" Michael Rennie], and, perfectly naturally, the fatherless teen develops a major mancrush on the handsome captain. The wealthy alpinist buys the boy the best boots, ropes, and harness and takes him higher than ever before; Rudi forgets all about his tomboy girlfriend. The movie is the perfect valentine for gearheads turned on by pitons and crampons, or for anyone who wants to spend 100 minutes with a not very veiled romance in the shadow of the Matterhorn. Filmed on location in Zermatt in 1959.

UPDATE: Jeff Kurtti sends two new links from the Walt Disney Family Museum about the making of the movie and its young star (who also appeared in Kidnapped, Swiss Family Robinson, and 11 years on Hawaii Five-0). Third Man on the Mountain was the museum's January film.