Band of Thebes

Naples Declared by Ben Taylor

After two wonderful novels with gay protagonists, Tales Out of School and The Book of Getting Even [Kindle], Ben Taylor turns his wise eye to a great city in Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay [Kindle]. 

Pulitzer winner Stacey Schiff calls the book "splendid" and the critic for the Jewish Journal says it's "superb," noting Ben "deftly sums up more than 3,000 years of history, ranging from the establishment of a Mycenaean entrepôt in 1800 B.C.E. to the signal event of 2011: 'Renewed garbage crisis.'" He also praises Ben's literary taste, in particular his appreciation for Norman Douglas [gay]: "Without him, figures such as Robert Byron [gay], Peter Fleming [dashing brother of James Bond creator Ian Fleming], Norman Lewis, Patrick Leigh Fermor, Jan Morris [trans], Bruce Chatwin [gay], Colin Thubron, and Pico Iyer are unthinkable." Kirkus mentions what promises to be my favorite part, an encounter with longtime resident Shirley Hazzard.

Philip Lopate writes, "There is no more witty, worldly, cultivated or amiably candid observer imaginable than Benjamin Taylor. This book belongs on the shelf of the very best literary travel guides."

Olympic Hopeful Josh Dixon Comes Out

Rather than air kissing celebrities, maybe GLAAD could pressure NBC now about not again degaying the LGBT athletes at this summer's Olympics, as the network did with gold medal gay Matthew Mitcham in Beijing in 2008. Mitcham [below] hopes to repeat his win in London and he is unlikely to be the only out male Olympian among several lesbians. Stanford class of 2011 gymnast Josh Dixon is in excellent position to score a spot with the US team, and he just came out. Dixon [top] says his teammates' response to his dating another Stanford varsity male athlete was, "Oh that's cool." He also says since coming out publicly he has received no negative reaction. Before your crush on the half-Japanese, half-black, 5'9" Californian goes too far, his team bio claims the best book he ever read is Angels & Demons. I hope he meant Angels & Insects.

Gideon and Tom Walk with Irony

Gideon Lewis-Kraus has Daddy issues because his father, a rabbi, ditched his family to go live with his gym bunny boyfriend Brett. Gideon was nineteen, which is a little old to be an abandoned child but a good age to worry that his very existence stems from a miserable lie. At twenty-seven, he's still drifting and invites a Big Bro figure, the writer Tom Bissell, to walk the 420-mile circuit of the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. They use irony the way lame pilgrims used crutches -- constantly. And in place of Patrick Leigh Fermor's encyclopedic memory, they carry laptops. Endless emails ensue. Sometimes their new friendship falters. Critics say it's the best third of A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful [Kindle].

Later, Gideon makes a longer hike, alone, to the eighty-eight temples around the Japanese island Shikoku. The circuit is over 700 miles long and, apparently, this second section feels like it.

For the third part, Gideon invites his dad and his brother with him to make a Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to the grave of Rebbe Nachman in the Ukraine. The WSJ claims "Gideon's father understands the symbolism but is ever on the lookout" for a gay hookup. 

Two years ago, Gideon sent one hundred pages about that trip to Choire Sicha for the gay seal of approval and now Choire weighs the whole endeavor for Slate. I don't see how the book could be as trenchant and entertaining as his review, one paragraph of which is:

"There is something quite disturbing in the way in which Gideon writes about his father, who is a bundle of secrets and half-muttered truths and glancing drive-bys of information. This is Gideon's chief complaint about his father's behavior — but also the way that he chooses to inform us about the man. Because of this delivery method, the picture of his father is looming and monstrous but vague. He sketches a menacing Big Dad figure: He threw things, was capricious and prone to rage, was eccentric and frightening, was charming and hilarious but moreover unknowable in the way of fathers. What's striking is that Gideon was unable to lay this out more directly: He cannot bring himself to sit down and write direct pages to relay what kind of menace his father was, and how that changed over time. In part this was likely to protect his father and/but also this is a 6-year-old's depiction of a parent. (Five cents please!)"

A Sense of Direction rides the current vogue for walking books, with Damon Galgut's Booker finalist In a Strange Room and Cheryl Strayed's NYT bestseller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

Visualize Gay Equality

The Guardian did. Check out their pretty, amazing interactive infographic of gay rights in the U.S. The seven concentric colored circles show which states have which rights, by region. The South is dismally pale. You can click on each state for more facts.

Geeks should read how the designer, Feilding Cage, created the graph here.

Gone Surfing

I'm in Pacific Palisades this week with one of my all-time favorite people. Back soon.

Born May 9: Alan Bennett

Much of Alan Bennett’s career as a playwright, screenwriter, author and actor been devoted to understanding emotional cripples, inhabiting worlds where happiness is as suspect (very) as it is unlikely (highly) and where unrequited love is a redundancy. His best known works are the adaptation of Prick Up Your Ears (gay playwright Joe Orton murdered by his lover), An Englishman Abroad (gay traitor Guy Burgess), The Madness of George III (crazy king), A Question of Attribution (another gay traitor, Anthony Blunt), and The History Boys (promising students in the 80s ultimately promised stunted adulthoods). Last year reader Gary reminded me about Bennett's highly successful series of humorous and touching monologues, Talking Heads, which can be seen online. (Lovingly spoofed by Stephen Fry in drag.) The son of a Northern butcher, Bennett was accepted at Cambridge but, following a boy who didn’t like him, switched to Oxford where he took a first in history and, in 1960, joined Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller to appear in the instantly famous comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. He also performed in The Secret Policeman’s Ball and The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. Yet throughout his prolific, much-praised television writing and acting, his mainstay has been to find a sad smile or rueful, melancholic laugh in the meekly defeated and the stoically hopeless. Although he has been with his current partner, Rupert Thomas, for eighteen years, only recently has he felt comfortable discussing his gay life. And he's begun to create unqualified delights, such as the one even Michiko called “a completely charming entertainment: a small gem,” his novella The Clothes They Stood Up In, about a middle-aged married couple who return from the theatre to discover their flat has been robbed of absolutely everything, down to their last thumbtack and thimble. His hugely praised novella The Uncommon Reader, about the Queen's newfound love of literature thanks to a gay teenager, is a little perfection. Last year he published two gay-inclusive tales in a short book called Smut [Kindle]. The same week that the British Library paid half a million pounds for Ted Hughes' papers, Bennett announced he is donating all his papers -- including decades of diaries and unpublished manuscripts -- to Oxford's Bodleian Library, in gratitude for his state scholarship.

The Hunger Angel by Herta Müller

In 1945 in Romania, 17 year-old ethnic German Leo Auberg was enjoying regular public park and bathhouse trysts with a 34 year-old married man until the police deport him to a Soviet labor camp. Of The Hunger Angel [Kindle]’s 280 pages of very short chapters, 250 pages cover Leo’s five years in the work camp, minutely describing nearly freezing and almost starving and the other prisoners’ strategies for survival in poetic yet detached prose.

You don’t need me to tell you that a Nobel Prize winner’s new book is brilliant, but you could use a friend to encourage you to stick with Herta Müller to the end. A gay novel, and a totalitarian novel, the book manifests the closet and political silence -- meaning, the narrator is too scared to address its themes directly.  Physically, emotionally, linguistically, everything reflects displacement:

“You’re not allowed to talk about hunger when you’re hungry.”

and

“I carry silent baggage. I have packed myself into silence so deeply and for so long that I can never unpack myself using words.”

In the middle of his camp years, there’s this sole paragraph, all the more meaningful for being the only mention of his desire: 

“Discreetly, after work, I look at the young Russians on duty taking a shower. I’m so discreet I forgot why I’m looking. They would kill me if I remembered.”

How elegantly Müller links political and sexual repression to self-suppression and self-preservation! After his release in 1950, Leo still lives behind the Iron Curtain and, later, even after he abandons his wife and escapes to Austria, society keeps him closeted. Earlier he has described the complicated dance of former camp inmates recognizing and refusing to acknowledge one another on the street, but here it’s queers:

“I remain unattached. Wild animal crossings, nothing more.

“The urgency of lust and the fickleness of luck are now long past, even if my brain still lets itself be seduced at every turn. Sometimes it’s a certain way of walking on the street, or a pair of hands inside a shop. In the streetcar it’s a certain way of looking for a place to sit. In the train compartment the prolonged hesitation when asking: Is this seat taken, and then a certain way of stowing the luggage that confirms my intuition. In the restaurant it’s a certain way the waiter has of saying: Yes, sir, no matter what his voice is like. But to this day nothing seduces me so much as cafes. I sit at a table, sizing up the customers. With one or two men it’s certain way of slurping their coffee. And the way their lips glisten on the inside like rose quartz when they put down their cups.  But only with one or two men.”

In an afterword, Müller says she took notes during six years of conversations with a Soviet work camp survivor, the poet Oskar Pastior, who died in 2006. She herself lived in Romania with difficulty until 1987 when she escaped to Berlin. Müller won the IMPAC Dublin prize in 1998 for The Land of Green Plums and was awarded the Nobel in 2009.

The Hunger Angel [Kindle] has been translated in 47 languages.

John Irving Says His Gay Son Did Not Influence His New Bi Novel

John Irving says the fact that his son Everett is gay had no bearing on his new novel about a bisexual man, In One Person [Kindle]. A just plain terrible article in Canada's National Post reports:

“I didn’t write In One Person because I have a gay son,” the storyteller says outright in One when asked just that — outright — by fellow grand novelist (and good, good friend) Edmund White.

"Indeed, according to Irving, the notes for the new tale began long before he knew his son, Everett, leaned that way. He confesses now, “I told Everett I was worried how some journalists will seize upon the story of my having a gay son as the only story, how they will make it a cause-and-effect tale — the familiar laziness that believes everything in fiction is autobiographical.”

"But some things are, well, more autobiographical than others — as White makes clear in his own latest novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend, that is … OK … “based a bit” on Irving’s son!"

Irving's novel goes on sale today. If you're inclined to buy it, get it from an indie bookstore or chain or online retailer that feeds the NYT bestseller list. In a rare show of bravery, and despite that jacket, Random House actually plays up the bi aspect on the flap copy. It would be nice if the book doesn't flop.

Born May 8: Tom of Finland

In an era when merely entering a gay bar could mean jail time and the instant end of a career, Tom of Finland was boldly visualizing a world of healthy, happy, all-male sexual camaraderie that was hot and had a sense of humor. Then again, his fantasies of hyperidealized, turboerotic, uberbuilt masculinity guaranteed that reality would never measure up. For generations of gay men since the mid-1950s, his art has created an endless coupling of inspiration and insecurity. Born in Kaarina, Finland in 1920, Touko Laaksonen moved to Helsinki when he was nineteen and soon was drafted to fight in World War II. Afterward, he worked in an advertising agency while American physique magazines began to publish his drawings of rugged lumberjacks, cops, jocks, sailors, soldiers, prisoners, lifeguards, musclemen, and his enduring character Kake. In 1973, at the time of his first gallery show, in Hamburg, he was able to quit his job to draw fulltime. His second gallery exhibit, in Los Angeles, was not until 1978, followed by shows in San Franciso and New York, where he became friends with another artist whose work explored gay S&M, Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1981, Veli, his partner of twenty-eight years, died; Laaksonen survived him by ten years. The Finnish Culture Institute hosted an exhibit of his work in Paris in 1999, and in 2004 MoMA added several of his drawings to their permanent collection. Taschen's gigantic, oversized Tom of Finland XXL runs almost 700 pages, contains nearly 1,000 images, and includes essays by John Waters, Camille Paglia, Armistead Maupin, and Todd Oldham.

 

New Books: Mantel, Morrison, and Burroughs

The gay literary lovechild spawned when narcissism got drunk with solipsism, Augusten Burroughs is fascinated by no one more than Augusten Burroughs. Plumbing new depths of self-absorbtion, the popular memoirist tomorrow publishes his seventh book about himself. The excuse this time is that it's a self-help book for you, dear mirror, as long as you face the problems he faced. This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike. [Kindle]. Amazon's editors chose it as a Best Book of May, saying "Burroughs delivers prescriptions for handling life's most pernicious problems. Don't let the snake-oil-salesmannish title put you off: this is raw, hard-knock-life advice, veering from brutal to hilarious to deeply compassionate. Burroughs doesn’t really believe in "happiness" or "healing." He’s honest about the limits of recovery..."

Toni Morrison's very short new novel Home [Kindle] is about a 24 year-old black Korean War vet re-adjusting to American life after a stint in a psych ward. Ron Charles in the Washington Post hails the book as "powerful" and "surprisingly unpretentious," a phrase that bears pondering. The Independent's critic says, "this is a less dazzling, more incomplete novel, though it is fast and fluid in its storytelling. The sibling migration... seems all too brief and anticlimactic, lacking the complexity we have come to expect of Morrison."   

After her Booker-winner Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantel continues her Tudor trilogy with Bring Up the Bodies[Kindle]. Margaret Atwood reviewed it for the Guardian: "The ambiguous Cromwell is a character who fits Mantel's particular strengths. She's never gone for the sweet people, and is no stranger to dark purposes... She relies on the same talent for intricacy in Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies. There are a lot of people lurking around in Henry's court, all of them on the make or trying to sidestep the axe, and helping the reader keep track of them is a special craft."

Born May 7: Tchaikovsky

Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, Symphonies 4, 5, and 6 — what would the world listen to without Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Unfortunately, his private life was less sublime than his music. At 37, although he knew he loved men, he agreed to marry a female fan, Antonina Miliukova. Within two weeks of their wedding he tried to kill himself, hoping to catch pneumonia by soaking himself in the Moscow River. At the urging of his doctor, he fled to St. Petersburg and never saw his wife again, although he continued to support her. (The cost of the closet can be seen all around him: Miliukova had several children by other men, gave each infant to an orphanage and spent her final twenty-one years in a home for the certifiably insane. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was also gay, and he too made an unhappy marriage.) Tchaikovsky enjoyed great renown during his lifetime and among his countless honors two days before he turned 51, he was the conductor at the opening night of Carnegie Hall. When he died at 53, sixty thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral, which for only the third time in Russian history was paid for by the Tsar.

David Leddick's Meaningless

Author of last year's picture book Escort: 40 Profiles with Photographs of Men Who Sell Sex and the  nonfiction How To Be Gay in the 21st Century [Kindle], David Leddick may or may not be back with a fluctuating in and out of print new fiction title Meaningless Hugs, Meaningless Kisses. 

I have vague, mostly fond memories of his light novel My Worst Date, whose 16 year-old hero Hugo emerges in the south of France in a later novel, Love in the Loire.

Leddick has edited at least three collections of photos of naked guys, like The Male Nude Now: New Visions for the 21st Century, which may explain his willingness to pose for this photo.

Born May 4: Keith Haring

Keith Haring’s graffiti-style art became iconic when he was in his mid-twenties. Instantly recognizable and associated with the 80s New York street scene, his work often featured short lines radiating out from exuberant figures rendered in black and white or bright, flat colors. A great believer in public art, particularly inspired by Christo’s Running Fence, Haring was invited to create murals in Japan, Australia, South America, and throughout Europe, notably on a western section of the Berlin Wall. In 1986, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, he painted a mural working with 900 children. Haring created art for many public health campaigns, including anti-drug posters and most famously a series of ads promoting safe sex that, like much of his work, was explicitly homoerotic. Yet his art was also playful and humorous, as when he painted Grace Jones' enormous skirt in Grace Jones' video I'm Not Perfect. See it all in the documentary, The Universe of Keith Haring or read his journals, reissued this year with previously unpublished drawings. He died of aids in 1990 at age thirty-one.

Eytan Fox Revisits Yossi Ten Years Later

Even though of course it ended with the tired trope of one of two young gay lovers dying, Yossi & Jagger was one of the best indie movies of 2002. Now, director Eytan Fox returns to the surviving character, Yossi, a depressed, closeted workaholic doctor who ten years later is still mired in grief. One of the best scenes is his garbled visit to Jagger's parents. Also nicely observed, and cringeful, is this scene of a late night, grindr hookup [top]. Mining another familiar trope, Fox has Yossi brought back to life by the love of a hot young openly gay soldier who reminds him of Jagger. It's easy to see why Yossi is hesitant and repeatedly rebuffs him. The movie is perhaps a little less successful in convincing us why the party boy is so persistent in pursuing the middle-aged melancholic who sits by the pool refusing to swim and hiding behind his book, Death in Venice. After one mournful, tender night of sex, they're already discussing quitting their careers and staying at the tacky resort together "forever"? Oy!

Born May 3: May Sarton

May Sarton published more than a dozen volumes of poetry, nine collections of her journals, and nineteen novels. Born in Wondelgem, Belgium, but a U.S. citizen from the age of two, she remained something of an outsider, which no doubt made her a better observer. One of her strongest books is Journal of a Solitude, about the joys and terrors of living alone year-round on a remote stretch of the Maine coast before the internet. In 1965 she published her tenth novel Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing which describes a woman’s quest to belong in the world as an artist and a lesbian. After that, her published journals were more open about her own love for women and she wrote about the courage it had taken to create “a novel about a woman homosexual who is not a sex maniac, a drunkard, a drug-taker, or in any way repulsive, to portray a homosexual who is neither pitiable nor disgusting, without sentimentality . . . ." Critics were not as progressive as Sarton but eventually her work found its place in college cirriculae. She died of cancer at 83 in 1995. Two years later, Margot Peters published May Sarton: A Biography. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing became a movie in 2004.

[Photo by Susan Sherman]

Alison Bechdel on Tour for Are You My Mother?

After 25 years of drawing Dykes to Watch Out For, the awesomatomic Alison Bechdel was “losing my mojo” and found there’s “not as vital a drive to show lesbians in the world.” Her “youngish passion for subcultural community” has been surpassed by her greater interest in “my own experience.” Laughing, she guessed this was probably the reverse of the normal progression. “I really want to write about families,” she said. “How the system of the family works.” (My corner of last night’s nearly 200-person audience was divided whether or not she was joking when she said her next memoir would be about her brothers.) Asked what comics she likes, she said her one desert island book would be The Calculus Affair because she’s a huge fan of Hergé, and that she follows Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant online.  

Her fascinating slideshow reveals her perfectionist borderline OCD process for each frame, which Judith Thurman explained in The New Yorker: She makes many pencil sketches on successive overlays of tracing paper; photographs herself in the position of each character; makes a tight sketch; draws a final pencil draft on her light box; inks the pencil lines on her drawing board; scans that into her Mac, corrects it, and prints it out; adds spot color with magic markers; puts that on her light box under a sheet of watercolor paper on which she creates a wash of India ink; then, in Photoshop, combines the four separate elements — text, line art, spot color, and ink wash.

Go see her. She's touring Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama in Cambridge, Philadelphia, DC, Toronto, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Berkeley, SF, LA, Seattle, Portland, and Chicago.

Kate Bornstein on Village Voice Cover for 'Queer & Pleasant Danger'

Yesterday Kate Bornstein released her new book A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology and leaves twelve years later to become the lovely lady she is today [Kindle] and the Village Voice gives her a massive cover story:

"There's a whole new generation of radical trannies coming up who won't let me use the word 'tranny,'" she says with a laugh.

"Kate ruffled feathers when she would write that even though she had gender-reassignment surgery, she's still not a woman. "This was a big blow to trans people—trans women mostly—whose identity was legitimized by all those medical hoops. So what I said was taken as a direct attack on the validity of their identities as real women," she says.

"I got hit by lesbian feminists, then trans feminists hit me." For years, Kate says, queer and trans activists tried to separate sex from their activism in the post–AIDS epidemic era. But that's changing. "The scene has changed. It's not who's fucking whom; it's how cool can you be about people fucking each other."

Much of her memoir describes her changing ideas about her own body and the sexual politics she encountered as she transitioned. But this is not just another one of her books about gender.

"The number-one reason she wrote the book (and she's clear about it in the book itself) was for her daughter and grandchildren. "I want them to see if they want to look. Writing the book has allowed me to let go of the need to reach out to them," she says.

"Kate hasn't seen her daughter, Jessica, since 1980. She has never seen her two grandchildren. She's hoping that her book is popular enough that a copy will fall into their hands and provide them with a detailed explanation of how she got to be who she is today—a transsexual, Jewish, lesbian, bipolar, masochistic cutter.

"I told her that it did seem like an odd strategy—that in order to reach out to a daughter who has shunned her for more than 30 years, she would do so with graphic descriptions not only of her gender transformation, but also of her s&m adventures.

"She nodded, knowingly, and smiled. "It's not the transgender issue she would have a problem with—it's that I left Scientology."

A hefty portion of the article, and apparently the book, deals with his experience in the cult in the 70s (when he was Al) and its ongoing strict rules now. You get kicked out for, among other things, being queer, and members are not allowed to have any contact with anyone who's been kicked out. Kate, of course, has triumphed post-Scientology. She met her girlfriend Barbara Carrellas through Annie Sprinkle in 1997. Last year she won a Publishing Triangle award and was a Lammy finalist for Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation.

Born May 2: Howard Cruse

Last year, Rizzoli published Howard Cruse's 80's comic strip The Complete Wendel with an introduction by Alison Bechdel who says, "It's a little shocking to me as I re-read Wendel from this vantage point to see the extent to which my own cartoon characters took their cues from Howard's." Bechdel also praises Cruse's professional coming out in a hostile time with the path-breaking annual anthology Gay Comix and his Wendel strip, "a radical act that both paved the way and set the bar for successive generations of queer cartoonists." Born and raised in Springville, Alabama in 1944, Cruse didn't get to New York until 1977, where two years later he met his partner Eddie Sedarbaum. In 2003 they said goodbye to all that and moved to North Adams, Massachusetts, where they later got married. In 1995, a few years after Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer for Maus, Cruse published Stuck Rubber Baby a graphic novel about his growing up and coming out to himself in the South of the 1960s. The book has won the top graphics prizes in the US (the Eisner and Harvey awards), as well as similar honors in the UK (Comics Creators award), Germany (Luchs award), Spain, and France. Needless to say, when The Comics Journal compiled their list of the 100 Best Comics of the Century, they included Stuck Rubber Baby, ranking it five spots above Alan Moore's Watchmen. Read it.

Are You My Mother? by Alison Bechdel

Six years after the firestorm of praise for her groundbreaking book about her closeted father, Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel triumphs again with Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama [Kindle]. The new book lacks the propelling plot of the first memoir, but it's more daring and its issues are more interesting. The overall subject is the development of the self, created primarily from three strands: being queer, struggling as an artist, and unraveling the mother-daughter bond. Frequent text quotes are woven in from four authors who become characters in the narrative as well: Virginia Woolf, Adrienne Rich, Donald Winnicott, and Alice Miller. (Bechdel's working title was The Drama of the Gifted Mother.) She portrays her prickly, disappointed mom with a fraught sympathy and a groping understanding. The book spends possibly a little too much time at her therapy sessions but the jargon is minimal and the insights are great. And those scenes are enlivened by surprises like this exchange:

Carol: "So when you see this gay cartoonist's work in The New Yorker."

Alison: "Oh, God. It's the worst feeling in the world."

I was suffering at this time from nearly unbearable spasms of professional envy.

Alison: "I feel, annihilated."

Of other cartoonists, of other gay and lesbian writers, of anyone who was at all like me or doing anything remotely similar to what I was doing.

Alison: "I'm not making enough money. The newspapers my strip runs in keep folding or merging."

Alison: "People don't need cartoons about lesbians anymore! You can watch them on tv!"

Alison: "I'm spending more than half my time on this crazy book about my dad and I don't even know if it'll ever get published."

Alison: "So, yeah. When all of the sudden The New Yorker starts running these blase, post-gay cartoons, I feel like, Fuck! What have I been doing with my life?" "Am I going to have to get a job?"

Carol: "Hmm. Your own achievements get erased by other people's."

Alison: "Isn't that how it works?"

Carol: "All this makes me think that in your family there wasn't enough room under one roof for several geniuses. You've reversed your own aggression. You feel guilty for wanting to annihilate others, so you turn it on yourself."

Alison: "Whoa!"

Serious as her subject is, Bechdel hasn't lost her goofball sense of whimsy. The complex drawings perfectly convey her skewered perspective, as when she and her girlfriend are stargazing, lying in a field, and the frame shows the mountains upside down. Even if you never read graphic books, you'll want to own this original, boundary-busting, and altogether marvelous memoir.

Born May 1: Romaine Brooks

The painter Romaine Brooks lived with her husband, a gay man, for one year and stayed with her life partner, Natalie Barney, for more than half a century. Both strong-willed heiresses, they built a summer house together called the Hyphenated Villa (Villa Trait d’Union) and slept in separate wings with shared living space. Neither woman believed in monogamy. Brooks’ career as a portrait painter peaked from 1910 to 1925. Her subjects were often lesbians, including Elisabeth de Gramont; Elizabeth Eyre de Lanux; Renatta Borgatti; Elsie de Wolfe; Radclyffe Hall’s partner Una, Lady Troubridge; the painter Gluck; Natalie Barney of course; and her most frequent subject, her ex-girlfriend, Ida Rubinstein formerly of the Ballets Russes. An online gallery of her work can be seen here. Brooks completed many self-portraits, the best-known of which shows her in the men’s attire she favored. That painting hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Their website's biography of Brooks dwells on her family’s mental illness, then not only ignores her 50-plus years with Natalie Barney and avoids any mention of lesbians, but outrageously makes the claim that she “while resisting companionship, was the object of violent passions.” Brooks died at 96.