Band of Thebes

"You Find the Language."

Epitomizing how people hide their homophobia, the Catholic Diocese of Worcester has been caught lying to prevent selling their Northbridge, Massachusetts mansion to a gay couple who planned to rent it out for local events, including same-sex weddings. Monsignor Thomas Sullivan in charge of the property told a reporter the deal collapsed because the couple couldn't get financing, but the reporter had a copy of Sullivan's email to his real estate agent:

"I just went down the hall and discussed it with the bishop. Because of the potentiality of gay marriages there, something you shared with us yesterday, we are not interested in going forward with these buyers. I think they're shaky anyway. So, just tell them that we will not accept their revised plan and the Diocese is making new plans for the property. You find the language."

In Massachusetts it is illegal to discriminate against buyers based on sexual orientation. The gay couple, James Fairbanks and Alain Beret, who have been together 35 years and married in 2004, plan to sue. Their lawyer points out that gay weddings could have happened in the event space regardless of the orientation of the buyers.

Because a news story about the Catholic Church being antigay and breaking the law isn't shocking, the real stunner is this: The deal for the 44-room mansion on 6 acres was $550,000 plus a sprinkler upgrade for $240,000.

Born July 31: Barbara Gittings

Barbara Gittings deserves a major museum exhibit, a biographer, and a feature film like Kinsey. She was heroic at least since her freshman year at Northwestern (1949-50), when a Chicago psychiatrist proposed to "cure" her lesbianism and, rather than submit, or fall apart, Gittings devoted all her time to studying homosexuality in the medical and legal libraries. The dreadful descriptions ("deviate," "pervert"), the exclusively male focus, and the lack of any mention of love only spurred her on. Typical gusto: When she found the anonymously written book The Homosexual in America, she called the publisher to find out who the author was and arranged to meet him. Later, she met Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, founders of the Daughters of Bilitis in California, and within two years she had begun a New York chapter despite living in Philadelphia. She edited the group's magazine, The Ladder, and became friends with Frank Kameny in Washington. Together they organized the picketing of the White House in October 1965 and at Independence Hall, where Gittings carried a sign reading Homosexuals Demand Their Civil RIghts. She and Kameny were instrumental in convincing the APA to de-list homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. With her life partner Kay Lahusen, whom she met at a Daughters of Bilitis picnic in 1961, she never stopped working for gay equality. She died in 2007. Several awards are named in her honor, including one from GLAAD and the top ALA Stonewall Book Award, this year won by Wayne Hoffman for Sweet Like Sugar [Kindle], last year by Barb Johnson for her New Orleans stories More of This World or Maybe Another [Kindle only $1.99].

Thank Lesbian Jennifer Cast for Jeff Bezos' Huge Gay Marriage Support

Like most of us, Jennifer Cast said she figured her former boss, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was well aware of the threat to gay marriage in Washington State by the upcoming the ballot iniative and wrote to him, "I figured that if you felt the desire to support marriage equality, you would do it." But, unlike many of us, this time she spoke up with a direct ask, and for the first time in twelve years working on the issue, Cast, 50, partners of 20+ years with Liffy Franklin, 63, emailed Bezos, "I beg you not to sit on the sidelines and hope the vote goes our way. Help us make it so." She wrote, "We need help from straight people. To be very frank, we need help from wealthy straight people who care about us and who want to help us win." She asked the billionaire for a contribution of $100,000 to $200,000. Within thirty-six hours he replied, "Jen, this is right for so many reasons. We’re in for $2.5 million. Jeff & MacKenzie"

This is the largest ever donation in support of marriage equality and it only happened because a lesbian spoke up and asked for it. Learn from her. The announcement also inspired other gifts, according to the Seattle Times, which reports, "Cast said she has received hundreds of emails since news of Bezos' gift broke early Friday from well-wishers and those who suddenly wanted to give. One donor pledged $25,000."

Jeff Bezos is worth $18.4 billion. Although William Lynch, the CEO of Barnes & Noble, isn't a billionaire, his compensation last year was $10 million, going up to $15.3 million this year. He doesn't have a connection to Washington State, but some of the Amazon haters need to ask Lynch for a significant donation. He can give to Maryland's or to Maine's campaign.

What she said: I beg you not to sit on the sidelines and hope the vote goes our way. 

Contribute here.

Born July 28: Colin Higgins

So your Australian-American pool boy/chauffeur wants to show you his screenplay. His first screenplay. But these are groovy times -- the tail end of the 60s -- and the kid is a Stanford dropout who hitchhiked to NYC, failed to become an actor, joined the army like his dad, wrote for Stars & Stripes in Germany, hung out in Paris for six months, went back to Stanford to finish his B.A., then got his M.F.A. in screenwriting from UCLA, so you say, Sure, okay, I'll read the damn script, how bad could it be? Well, it's crazy brilliant. You think. Maybe just crazy. So you show it to Robert Evans at Paramount and he agrees. Of course -- who couldn't see this coming -- the kid is dying to direct it himself. Give him seven grand for test shoot but... no chance. Forget it. Give the picture to Hal Ashby, get Ruth Gordon, and release it when? What's the right time of year for an old lady/suicidal nerd movie? Christmas! And... Total flop. Nonetheless, his debut Harold and Maude, allowed Colin Higgins to write the smash Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Jill Clayburgh 1976 superhit Silver Streak, which enabled him to direct his next screenplay, the Goldie Hawn, Chevy Chase 1978 success Foul Play, which he followed with the Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton 1980 megahit 9 to 5. Colin followed that with the Burt Reynolds, Dolly Parton 1982 spectacle The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Gay, childless, and drowning in money, in 1986 he established the Colin Higgins Foundation for humanitarian concerns. He directed the tv miniseries based on Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb and in 1988 he died of aids. This year's recipients of Colin Higgins Foundation Youth Courage Awards include 17 year-old Oklahoma queer activist Tempest Cartwright, and 11 year-old Jazz, born a boy, insisting since age 2 she is a girl, who is credited with starting the Transkids Movement. Harold and Maude and 9 to 5 are ranked #45 and #74 on AFI's list of the 100 funniest films of all time.

The 21 Out Olympians Are 18 Women and 3 Men

  

Yay, lesbians! Of the 21 openly queer Olympians, the eighteen women are mainly Europeans, with an Australian beach volleyball player and two from the US: basketball player Selmone Augustus and tennis player Lisa Raymond. Two of the French triathletes are a couple, Carole Péon and Jessica Harrison [below]. But, uh... fellas? Only blond boys? Returning gold medalist diver Matthew Mitcham, and two horsey dudes, the UK's Carl Hester and the Dutch Edward Gal.

Outsports offers a guide of 103 out Olympians since 1928's Otto Peltzer.

Booker Longlist: Barker, Brink, Eng, Frayn, Mantel, Self

The big event in London this week, the Man Booker Prize announced its longlist of twelve titles:

Nicola Barker, The Yips

Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident

André Brink, Philida

Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists

Michael Frayn, Skios

Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

Deborah Levy, Swimming Home

Hilary Mantel, Bring Up the Bodies

Alison Moore, The Lighthouse

Will Self, Umbrella

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis

Sam Thompson, Communion Town

Absent are Zadie Smith (NW, her first novel in seven years), John Lancaster (Capital), Ian McEwan (Sweet Tooth), Martin Amis (Lionel Asbo), Peter Carey (The Chemistry of Tears), Rose Tremain (Merivel), John Banville (Ancient Light), Pat Barker (Toby's Room), Howard Jacobson (Zoo Time), Philip Hensher (Scenes from Early Life), James Kelman (Mo Said She Was Quirky), William Boyd (Waiting for Sunrise), Sebastian Faulks (A Possible Life), Irvine Welsh (Skagboys), and Jeanette Winterson's witch trial novel (The Daylight Gate). Not sure about timing qualifications for Colm Tóibín in October (The Testament of Mary) and Alice Munro in November (Dear Life).

Rockumentary of Openly Gay "American Bowie" Jobriath

Although selling Jobriath as an "American Bowie" was wishful thinking, the story of openly "fairy" glam rocker Jobraith in 1973 and 1974 should make a fascinating documentary. Jim Farber, a talking head in the film, which screens Saturday night at Walter Reade, writes in today's Daily News:

"Jobriath (ne Bruce Wayne Campbell) recorded two albums in 1973 and ’74 that both benefited, and suffered, from historic hype. As you might expect from an aspiring rocker of the day, his albums sounded like David Bowie aping Mick Jagger, but with enough classical and theatrical flourishes to give it an original twist. Many New Yorkers of the era will remember the garish advertizing for Jobriath’s self-titled debut. Gigantic posters of the man not only adorned city buses, they occupied a looming billboard in Times Square, depicting him as an ancient Roman statue, dyed blue, and in the nude, no less.

"Suffice it to say, they were as discussed, and giggled over, as the muscled Marky Mark posters that appeared in that same space, courtesy of Calvin Klein, more than two decades later.

"Music fans may also remember the star’s famous self-description - “I’m rock’s truest fairy,” a banner meant to distinguish him from the rush of pseudo-gay, and faux-bisexual, stars who ruled the glam-rock trend of the early to mid-’70s.

"The original idea was to provide a more outrageous, U.S. answer to the sexually equivocating David Bowie, a notion advanced by Jobriath’s scheming manager, Jerry Brandt.

"The P.R. backfired spectacularly, not only because America wasn’t quite ready for such a creature, but also because of the hard sell behind it. Though Jobriath crafted his inventive music with esteemed classic rock producer Eddie Kramer, and while he got good reviews from Rolling Stone, Esquire spoke for many when it dubbed him “the hype of the year.”

(Hat tip and thanks to J "Ziggy" K.)

Born July 25: Thomas Eakins

The cost of the closet, and the personal price of society's antigay strictures, are everywhere in the unhappy life of Thomas Eakins (1844-1916). Reviewing a recent biography of him by Pulitzer Prize winner William McFeely, Publishers Weekly wrote 

Eakins had a fortunate early life, with art studies in Paris and Spain, a sympathetic wife and a promising career at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Nevertheless, he suffered from a sense of failure, bouts of depression and conflicted feelings about his attraction to men. McFeely sees the painting Swimming [top], in particular, as indicative of Eakins's unfulfilled longings, but also of more than that: the image of the artist and five of his male students swimming in the nude embodies Eakins's Thoreauvian conviction that happiness can be found in freedom from society's constraints, in living at one with nature. Eakins never achieved this freedom, however. In 1886, he was asked to resign from the academy, probably because of his homosexuality and his insistence on using nude models in his life drawing classes, and his life became one of increasing despair.

Eakins was one of the first painters to take an interest in photography and especially liked shooting male nudes, so in their 19th century sepia way, many of these clickable images are NSFW. Included are nude boxers, the nude tug-of-war, and the infamous full frontal nude of an aged Walt Whitman.

Sandy Leonard on The Absolutist by John Boyne

You're right to be ill over the state of publishing -- Fifty Shades of Grey accounted for one in five physical fiction books sold this spring -- but the literary world just got better because at last Sandy Leonard has returned to book reviewing. Sandy is the only non-author in Thebes' annual queer lit poll because he is an exceptional reader. Lambda invited him to critique John Boyne's new novel The Absolutist [Kindle]. Three bites from the full review are:

"Is it true that behaviors we dislike in others are the very ones we detest in ourselves? The characters in John Boyne’s The Absolutist (Other Press) would vehemently deny this. But actions speak louder than lies in this atmospheric novel that tracks a handful of guilt-ridden and self-questioning characters from the trenches of World War I to the poseur-filled publishing houses of Thatcher-era London.

"Boyne has, through nine novels, established a reputation as an accomplished stylist. And indeed it is style that buoys this book along beautifully through a sometimes predictable plot.

"This voice and tone of an earlier time layered over a constant simmer of sexual suggestion bring to mind the masterful literary edging of Denton Welch."

You should also read his daily travel photo blog, Sandy Leonard Snaps.

Spain's Firefighters Demonstrate Proper Way To Protest Austerity

 

Angry Greeks, take note. First in Bilbao, above. And last Thursday in Meires, Asturias, below, where their declining salary is 1,500 euros a month.

   

Sally Ride, First Lesbian in Space, Dies at 61

Pioneering astronaut Sally Ride has died of pancreatic cancer at 61. Did I miss her coming out or did it happen today in her obituary? Her partner of 27 years, Dr. Tam O'Shaughnessy, does not mention their personal relationship in her long bio on Sally Ride Science. Sally's obit posted today to the site does include their partnership; her official NASA bio doesn't. Before this afternoon, her wikipedia page had no LGBT tags.

Our community has faced many challenges in the 29 years since her first space shuttle mission. The visible support and leading example of a national hero could only have helped. She chose to stay closeted and silent.

Even more stressful than being lovers, Sally and Tam were co-authors; their books include Voyager: An Adventure to the Edge of the Solar System and the award-winning The Third Planet: Exploring the Earth from Space. 

UPDATE: Brian points to this article in which the astronaut's sister Bear Ride, also gay, says Sally "never hid her relationship with Tam," and "Sally didn't use labels." Bear adds, "I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them." Maybe yes, and that's great. Or maybe queer kids today want their heroes to be out.

Born July 23: F. Holland Day

Although F. Holland Day is remembered (some say imitated after this) as an early pioneer of art photography, he was also an influential book publisher whose 100+ titles included works by Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. The sole inheritor of a fortune from his father, a Boston merchant, Day was able to indulge his artistic pursuits with abandon. He amassed a large collection of ephemera connected to John Keats and he built a summer camp in Little Good Harbor, Five Islands, Maine where he hosted other artists and youths who modeled for him. The lads were usually from Boston’s immigrant slums where Day often tutored poor children in reading. One of his young models was Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant, whom Day encouraged in his literary ambitions and achieved fame with his book of poetic essays, The Prophet, published in more than twenty languages. (Gibran is the source, often paraphrased, for everything from Beatles’ lyrics to Kennedy’s “Ask not...”) Day also photographed adults, notably himself as Christ, as well as prominent artists and gay leaders such as Edward Carpenter. A fire in 1904 destroyed Day’s studio and most of his negatives. He later lost interest in photography and died in 1933 at sixty-nine. Read Patricia Fanning's Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day for many revelations about turn of the century Boston. [The bio says FHD was born July 8. Next year, I will too.]

Although F. Holland Day is remembered (some say imitated after this) as an early pioneer of art photography, he was also an influential book publisher whose 100+ titles included works by Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. The sole inheritor of a fortune from his father, a Boston merchant, Day was able to indulge his artistic pursuits with abandon. He amassed a large collection of ephemera connected to John Keats and he built a summer camp in Little Good Harbor, Five Islands, Maine where he hosted other artists and youths who modeled for him. The lads were usually from Boston’s immigrant slums where Day often tutored poor children in reading. One of his young models was Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant, whom Day encouraged in his literary ambitions and achieved fame with his book of poetic essays, The Prophet, published in more than twenty languages. (Gibran is the source, often paraphrased, for everything from Beatles’ lyrics to Kennedy’s “Ask not...”) Day also photographed adults, notably himself as Christ, as well as prominent artists and gay leaders such as Edward Carpenter. A fire in 1904 destroyed Day’s studio and most of his negatives. He later lost interest in photography and died in 1933 at sixty-nine. Read Patricia Fanning's Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day for many revelations about turn of the century Boston. [The bio says FHD was born July 8. Next year, I will too.]

Swift Cuts

Reacting to Chick-Fil-A's increasingly vocal antigay rhetoric, The Muppets have severed ties with the fast food chain. Founder's daughter and current co-CEO Lisa Henson, a strong supporter of gay marriage, directed the fuzzy puppets in the accounting department to forward Chick-Fil-A's final royalty check to GLAAD.

Also, Boston's mayor Tom Menino says he will block Chick-Fil-A from opening a franchaise in the city.

Highlighting the mental in fundamentalist, Mike Huckabee is organizing a Chick-Fil-A APPRECIATION DAY for August 1. Evil queers plan gay kiss-ins at the restaurants nationwide on August 3.

I, alone and unheard, continue to protest the moronic spelling of Fil-A.

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The week after the Boy Scouts unanimously upheld their antigay policy, Major League Soccer announced they are ending their partnership with the BSA.

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After conflicting responses from commanders, on July 19 the Pentagon for the first time ever granted permission for military servicemembers to wear their uniforms in a gay pride parade. The exemption was limited to one time, on Saturday in San Diego [below], while the chiefs review their policy prohibiting uniforms in civilian parades. If next year the soldiers and sailors have to march out of uniform... not complaining.

 
photo via San Diego Union Tribune

Born July 21: Hart Crane

Son of a successful candyman, child of divorce, Hart Crane dropped out of his Ohio high school in 1917 and escaped to New York. For seven years he moved back and forth between the city and Cleveland, writing poems published in literary journals and working in his father's factory. Tortured by his love of men far more than was Whitman decades before him, Crane did have one joyous affair with a Danish merchant mariner named Emil Opffer who inspired his epic, erotically charged verse, Voyages. That poem was one of the highlights of his first book, White Buildings (1926), celebrated for the zest and fire of his lyrics and criticized, as was all his poetry, for its impenetrable confusion. Quoted in this New Yorker essay about Crane, he said he was “more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness . . . than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations.”

While Crane struggled to write his monumental work, The Bridge (1930), he suffered miserable affairs and worsening alcoholism. Although initial critical reception was weak, he won a Guggenheim fellowship to Mexico the following year. Returning from that sojourn aboard the SS Orizaba in April 1932, he hit on a working shipmate and was beaten up. Crane said, "Goodbye, everybody!" and jumped overboard to his death. One of many later writers who revered his work, Tennessee Williams left instructions that his body be buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico where Crane drowned. (Instead, Williams' family buried him in Missouri.) Crane's legacy influenced gay painters as well, inspiring art by Marsden Hartley, Eight Bells Folly, and by Jasper Johns twice: Diver and Periscope. Get his Complete Poems or the Library of America edition with selected letters.

David Wojnarowicz Biography: Fire in the Belly

Just out from Bloomsbury, Cynthia Carr's bio of essential artist / writer David Wojnarowicz takes its name from his work censored at the Hide/Seek exhibit, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz [Kindle]. PW chose it as a Pick of the Week, writing "In this lucidly composed, skillfully contextualized first complete biography of David Wojnarowicz, former Village Voice reporter Carr reveals how the controversial artist’s life experience shaped his art and politics. Tracing his early life as a withdrawn, unstable student, sometime hustler, and store clerk in the troubled New York of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Carr reveals the artist’s struggle to express his emerging gay identity and the violent intensity of his family life."

The NYT says, "Ms. Carr’s biography is both sympathetic and compendious; it’s also a many-angled account of the downtown art world of the 1980s... The author braids small, unlikely narratives among the large ones. There’s an account of the art store clerk who gave away free supplies to poor artists he admired, and one of Redden’s, the sole funeral home in Manhattan that would accept AIDS patients in the early days of the crisis, winning the loyalty of many gay men. Ms. Carr, by lining Wojnarowicz in her sights, has seized upon a vivid and peculiarly American story."

The knowing cover photo is by friend and mentor Peter Hujar, whom David called "the parent I never had," except they did sleep together. See Peter's nsfw portrait of David's nude handwork.

If you haven't already, read David's journals and diaries.

All We Know: Three Lives by Lisa Cohen

Just out from FSG, Lisa Cohen's triple queer bio All We Know: Three Lives [Kindle] is a PW Pick of the Week:

"This informative, gossipy, and entertaining biography traces three intersecting lives: Esther Murphy, a brilliant talker; Mercede de Acosta, a seductress who saved every scrap of memorabilia; and Madge Garland, the witty aesthete and style icon. Cohen, a professor at Wesleyan University, fully delineates the conventional biographical matters of ancestry, parents, schooling, marriages, affairs, friendships, breakups, work, and death. All We Know is a wonderful portrait of how three women made and remade themselves in a time when gender roles irrevocably shifted."

PW degays it but all three women were lesbians, despite marrying men.

Hilton Als adored it, writing on the New Yorker blog back in March:

"Like all great books, it will reverberate and eventually become essentially 'languageless' in my mind as it continues to live as a profound thing in my heart. All We Know is an intensely humbling and troubling read. Cohen’s remarkable, sui generis study about three modernist figures is, in part, about dread, which is to say failure and fear of self-exposure, and how we accommodate our lives to suit the various shadows splashed by the sun of occasional triumph.

"As a brilliant biographer, one who marries scholarship to literature in a totally unprecedented way, Cohen is of course in love with images herself. And the images that fascinate the openly gay writer have to do with those women whose queerness is part of their opera of being in a pre-Proposition world, the glamour of their subterfuge, the pathos in their efforts to cope."

Karen Long of the Plain Dealer absolutely loved it, calling Cohen's work "sophisticated, droll and astute," and concluding

"At its core, All We Know coaxes us to ponder our assumptions about failure, in its American capitalist context, and alongside the old presumption that male-centric diversions --sports -- are vital while female-centric preoccupations -- clothing and fandom and conversation -- are insipid and frivolous... This splendid biography unsettles us, as its subjects do, by disturbing 'what we think we know about the superficial and the profound.'"

Born July 18: Michael Luongo

What's the only gay American book ever translated and published in Arabic? The collection of eighteen essays Gay Travels in the Muslim World edited by Michael Luongo. Again and again your assumptions will be shattered as the writers take you beyond the simplistic shortcuts of Western media. Gay author actor playwright Marine antiwar peace activist Jeff Key writes about being cruised by local Iraqis while on duty. In other chapters, Arab writers tell their own stories. Michael's essay is about Afghanistan, which he finds welcoming even during war, and he also maintains a separate site called Photos of Afghanistan. In a terrific interview from 2008, he says the most gay-friendly countries are Lebannon, Israel, and sort of Jordan and Morocco, while reiterating this is a book of cultural experience not a travel guide. He has also written a novel called The Voyeur and compiled two other travel anthologies: thirteen adventures in Looking for Love in Faraway Places: Tales of Gay Men's Romance Overseas and eighteen quick shots in Between the Palms: A Collection of Gay Travel Erotica.

Boy Scouts Unanimously Reaffirm Anti-Gay Bigotry

After a two-year secret review of their policy excluding gay people, the Boy Scouts of America yesterday announced the organization reaffirms that ban. A mouthpiece claimed the unidentified eleven-person panel represented "a diversity of perspectives and opinions," and yet the antigay vote was unanimous. The LAT quotes Jay Mechling, a professor at UC Davis and author of On My Honor: Boy Scouts and the Making of American Youth, calling it "a business decision based on religious pressure." Of 2.7 million scouts, an estimated 400,000 are Mormons.

The announcement also kills a new resolution from May's annual meeting to consider allowing individual local chapters to accept gay leaders. The issue received widespread media scrutiny in April after Jennifer Tyrrell [left] was ousted as a den mother in Ohio for being a lesbian. A petition to overturn the ban soon gained more than 300,000 signatures, spurred by support from Iowa Eagle Scout and incessant publicity hound Zach Wahls, 20, author of My Two Moms: Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family.

Offering a shred of hope, two BSA board bigshots, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson and Ernst & Young CEO James Turley, have said it's time to change the policy and welcome gay people. They are in the minority now but Stephenson becomes president of the BSA board in 2014.

The Girl Scouts, Boys & Girls Clubs, and Big Brothers Big Sisters all have vowed to not exclude gay and lesbian people. 

Born July 17: Fred Halsted

Born in Long Beach in 1941, Fred Halsted said that although they were working class and he had to help with agricultural jobs to earn money for his mom, he grew up in "paradise. A life of being free. As a kid I was able to run naked through a hundred miles of orange groves in fragrant bloom." He maintained his joy in plants -- majoring in botany at L.A. State, owning a nursery in El Monte, doing gardening work for Joey Heatherton and Vincent Price -- but he couldn't yet regain that youthful sexual freedom. He said he was a petit bourgeois and "the biggest closet queen you can be" and even a raw entrapment by the vice squad in 1967 didn't change him. What finally shattered him was RFK's assassination. After that, he decided he wanted to make the world a better place, and make a lot of money, through porn, including the first ever depictions of certain hardcore S/M acts.

Long before video and digital, Halsted spent three years shooting film for L.A. Plays Itself. It was 1972 and he says his was the first gay porn to be told from a sadist's point of view. It was definitely the first to be screened like an art film for big name New York critics. And surely the first to have a sex scene with no sex -- just shots of WeHo traffic while you hear the voice of an older top and young hayseed negotiating their needs. Halsted also arranged a screening for "all these gay liberationists, writers and other artists." Guess what? Hated it! He said "they expected me to give them a poem to sexual virginity... I thought they’d been around, but they acted like they’d never seen a cock before." Soon enough, financial success and critical acclaim caught up with him; his vision helped define the macho man gay look of the 1970s and still today the only hardcore movies in the Film Collection of MoMA are Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself and Sex Garage. But the 80s were a bad time for him, with more commercialized, video porn, his worsening alcoholism, and the advent of aids, which killed his long-time lover, onscreen co-star, and tormentor, Joey Yale, in 1986. Halsted shot himself in the head in 1989. Read William E. Jones' book Halsted Plays Himself published last year by Semiotext(e).

Where the Heart Beats by Kay Larson

Published by Penguin two weeks ago, Kay Larson's Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists [Kindle] integrates gay life into the narrative better than did a recent Cage biography, which received far more attention. If you have any interest in the composer, his circle of friends, Eastern religion, or the making of art, seek out this book. The Boston Globe critic writes:

"For much of his life, like a Zen disciple, Cage sought to make art that honored the transitory sounds and events of everyday life. His rule-breaking forays into what became known as installation, performance and conceptual art paved the way to the avant-garde movements that still perplex audiences today.

"Consider his friends and followers: Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Morton Feldman, Yoko Ono, Bruce Nauman and his longtime partner Merce Cunningham, to name a few. Larson convincingly argues that they walked on a shining path blazed by Cage."