Band of Thebes

Why Is Obama Praising Bush on His Global HIV/AIDS Program?

Pathetic. Of all the half-straws to grasp at in his remarks at yesterday's dedication of the Bush Library in Dallas, why did Obama highlight Bush's global hiv/aids initiative? And why did NPR use this as their soundbyte? Bush's PEPFAR program took money away from NGOs and threw billions to antigay evangelical groups whose solution to the crisis is to promote "abstinence until marriage." Deaths from the disease are said to have decreased under the program but infection rates remain the same. Or new infections are rising. Some close observers have felt the faith-based approach was more about promoting religion and recruiting non-Christians than about teaching prevention to those most at risk. Cary Alan Johnson cites officials' "stunning disregard for the needs of men who have sex with men and other hiv-vulnerable groups." Read his 2007 report "Off the Map: How HIV Programs Are Failing Same-Sex Practicing People in Africa" or Scott Everertz' 2010 paper, "How Ideologogy Trumped Science: Why PEPFAR Has Failed To Meet Its Potential." 

Other point: It's time to end the nonsense of individual presidential libraries. A president's papers belong to nation and ought to be housed in the Library of Congress or the National Archives, not these expensive shrines to vanity.

Born January 6: Juan Goytisolo

Praised by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Edmund White, and according to the Guardian, "widely acknowledged as Spain's greatest living writer," Juan Goytisolo has lived in self-imposed exile in Marrakech since the 1960s. (He is 82 today and now spends part of each year in Paris.) His more than 30 books make clear why he left his native land: Franco, the post-Franco government, the Catholic church, middle class bourgeois attitudes, and homophobia. Also, he loves Arabs, particularly illiterate or uneducated men whose gayness is not marked by effeminate behavior but a hyper virility. Depending on which critics you ask, his masterpiece is either his two-volume memoir, groundbreaking for among other things its frankness about gay sex, or his trilogy Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. Goytisolo's 2005 novel, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, recounts in his typically subversive style the ribald sexual antics of a gay priest. His most recent book is Exiled from Almost Everywhere [Kindle]. Last year he was awarded the $65,000 Prix Formentor.

Gale and Van Der Merwe Tie for Green Carnation Prize

Ultimately, even with their delay, the Green Carnation Prize judges couldn't agree on a single winner, so the 2012 award is a tie between veteran Patrick Gale's A Perfectly Good Man and newcomer Andre Carl van der Merwe's Moffie [Kindle].

Gale's sixteenth novel looks at the life of an Anglican priest in Cornwall who apparently assists in the suicide of a paralysed former rugby player.

Van der Merwe's debut novel is about a sensitive, gay nineteen year-old conscripted into the Angola Bush War.

 The shortlist was:

• Carol Anshaw, Carry the One [Kindle]
• Patrick Gale, A Perfectly Good Man
• Philip Hensher, Scenes from Early Life
• Kerry Hudson, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma 
• Andre Carl Van Der Merwe, Moffie [Kindle]
• Edmund White, Jack Holmes and His Friend [Kindle]

Previous winners are Catherine Hall's The Proof of Love last year and Christopher Fowler's Paperboy in 2010.

The New Yorker Profiles Frank Mugisha

Finally getting the international recognition he deserves after winning an RFK Human Rights award last fall, Ugandan gay activist Frank Mugisha is profiled in the current double issue of The New Yorker. It's another chapter in staff writer Alexis Okeowo's forthcoming book about LGBT Africa. Two weeks ago she compiled a brief list of the 8 Most Fascinating Africans of 2012, mandatory reading for anyone stuck in an all-US/Europe news cycle. Meet Malawi's lady president, Nigerian pop star twin brothers, Cameroon's gay rights lawyer Alice Nkom, and a 19 year-old college girl who, between classes, is a member of Parliament. 

Abstract says: "LETTER FROM UGANDA about activist Frank Mugisha. On a breezy October night two years ago, Frank Mugisha was having a beer with friends in Kampala when he was shown a local tabloid called Rolling Stone, which had outed him and ninety-nine other gay Ugandans. The next morning, Mugisha—who leads Sexual Minorities Uganda, orSMUG, the country’s largest gay-rights organization—scanned the article and e-mailed it to other gay-rights activists and lawyers. The fallout had been immediate. David Kato, at that time Uganda’s best-known gay activist, began receiving threats, and was murdered three months later. In 2009, a year before the article was published, David Bahati, a Ugandan politician, had introduced an anti-homosexuality bill to parliament. When the Rolling Stone article came out, LGBT activists, feeling under attack from the bill, which had not yet been put to a vote, decided to sue the paper for defamation and inciting violence. SMUG led the initiative. In the past two years, SMUG has documented more than fifty cases of discrimination, harassment, and violence against LGBTs in Uganda. In May, gay-activist groups, under SMUG’s leadership, opened the country’s first LGBT health clinic. Ugandans have traditionally been indifferent to homosexuality, as long as it stays in the closet. International disapproval of the Bahati bill has allowed Mugisha and his fellow-activists to strengthen the Ugandan gay-rights movement. The efforts of anti-gay advocates like Bahati are partly informed by outside forces—in particular, by American evangelical missionaries."

Born November 12: Damon Galgut

Damon Galgut had major life experiences earlier than you: Cancer at age six, with prolonged hospital stays in intense pain; his first published novel written at seventeen; and South Africa's premiere literary award, previously won by Brink, Coetzee, and Gordimier, before he was thirty. It was not until he was forty, in 2003, that he broke out internationally, with his fifth novel The Good Doctor, shortlisted for the Booker and the IMPAC Dublin. He followed that with The Impostor, and in 2010 published a lovely "novel" recounting three of his long solo walking trips, In a Strange Room, again shortlisted for the Booker. The typical Galgut protagonist is an intelligent, isolated man struggling to connect and so is this one, named Damon Galgut. In last year's Band of Thebes poll, Sarah Waters wrote, "One of the most impressive and affecting books I've read in the past couple of years is Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room. Three linked short narratives follow a restless protagonist across a series of African and Asian landscapes as he continually searches for and fails to find an attachment to people and to places. A beautiful, powerful novel about longing and loss, of opportunities missed and desire endlessly thwarted." 

Green Carnation Prize Shortlist: Anshaw, Gale, Hensher, Hudson, White

The Green Carnation Prize for LGBT fiction has announced the 2012 shortlist spanning three continents:

• Carry the One, Carol Anshaw (American, 4^th novel)
• A Perfectly Good Man, Patrick Gale (British, 16^th novel)
• Scenes from Early Life, Philip Hensher (British, 8^th novel)
• Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, Kerry Hudson (debut)
• Moffie, Andre Carl Van Der Merwe (South African, debut)
• Jack Holmes and His Friend, Edmund White (American, 10^th novel)

Cut from last month's longlist of thirteen are Alison Bechdel, Bill Clegg, Stella Duffy, Patrick Flannery, Jess Richards, Keith Ridgway, and Sandi Toksvig.

The winner will be announced in London on December 12.

Colm Tóibín Criticizes Vargas Llosa's Casement, Gay Sex

At last. World's most apt critic for the material, Colm Tóibín reviews Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Dream of the Celt [Kindle] about queer Irish rebel Roger Casement and he brings a slicing clarity to the gay question:

"Vargas Llosa’s views on what are known as the Black Diaries do more damage to the novel, however, than his heavy-handed treatment of Casement’s Irish dreams and his German sojourn does.

"In his careful appendix to the diaries Séamus O Síocháin writes:

If one accepts the existing evidence from outside the diaries for Casement’s homosexuality … if one accepts that the type of homosexual lifestyle depicted in the diaries conforms to what today is a recognisable variant; and if one accepts that Casement directed his moral wrath not at sexual behaviour but at individuals or institutions he considered to be oppressive of individuals or communities, then we begin to see many of the references to Casement’s ‘dividedness’ in a new light. Claims that the author of the diaries is ‘subhuman’, ‘moronic’, ‘schizoid’, can then be seen for what they are: reflections of the moral positions of those making the judgments rather than of Casement’s morality.

"Vargas Llosa strongly believes that Casement was ‘divided’, his body ‘sometimes at odds with values he espoused’. He is, of course, entitled to take whatever moral position on Casement’s sexual activities he wishes to take; if he wants to read the entries in the Black Diaries as ‘noxious obscenities’ then he is free to do so. But the idea that Casement wrote the entries ‘but did not live them, at least not integrally, that there is in them a good deal of exaggeration and fiction, that he wrote certain things because he would have liked to live them but couldn’t’ does not stand up to much scrutiny. More important, it means that Vargas Llosa as a novelist is writing about a reduced fictional figure. In his version of the story the Casement travelling in the Congo and the Putumayo is a great humanitarian, a man filled with zeal, with deep and horrified concern, a more passionate and effective Kofi Annan. In most of the narrative, Casement is not only simplified, which any novelist has a right to do with a figure from history, but he is simple, not of much interest – which is a different matter.

"Were the diary entries written about things that didn’t happen, but belonged instead in the realm of the wishful, then they would surely have a much greater erotic charge than the scribbled notes that Casement wrote. Most of the entries merely record the transaction, sometimes with a reference to the size of the companion’s penis, the amount of money paid and the location where the sex took place. Sometimes there is another cryptic comment; occasionally an entry is entirely cryptic. Vargas Llosa’s question in his epilogue about the possibility of these notes having been ‘falsified’ is hardly worth asking. O Síocháin, having considered all the evidence, concludes that ‘the various pieces of evidence, positive and negative, suggest that the Black Diaries are the work of Roger Casement’ and could not have been forged."

But disappointed readers hunting for magnificence, take heart: Tóibín praises Vargas Llosa's 1981 novel, saying "In The War of the End of the World [Kindle], in Helen Lane’s translation (which the author, perhaps with his tongue in his cheek, asserts ‘may be better than the original’), there is a sweeping confidence in the rhythms, a brilliance in the choice of detail and the analysis of motives; a wonderful complexity is given to character and event. Something emerges from the book that not only soars above the sources Vargas Llosa used, but also above his own careful structuring and narration, and it has a rare tragic force that is grave and deeply affecting." 

Born August 22: László Almásy

To the long line of queer lives stolen, degayed, and straightened by writers and filmmakers craving a broader audience, add László Almásy [seated], the Hungarian aristocrat, desert explorer and Nazi smuggler who may have spied for both sides in WWII, and is the protagonist of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient. Almásy was gay and certainly didn't have a soaring romance with anyone's wife; he and a young German soldier named Hans Entholt were lovers and letters unavailable to the public offer proof that he also had sex with Egyptian princes. Born in what is now Austria, educated in England, he joined the Hussars in WWI, was shot down over Italy, continued as a flight instructor, and after the war was a winning speed racer. After driving along the Nile from Egypt to the Sudan in 1926, Almásy became interested in the area and led expeditions in search of the mythic Zerzura. His sponsor died and his wife perished in a mysterious plane crash the following year. In 1934 or 35, Almásy and another adventurer became the first whites to establish contact with the Magyarab tribe and earned the title Abu Ramla [Father of the Sand] from his Bedouin friends, developing desert skills then that would come in handy during WWII as part of Operation Salaam when he smuggled Nazi spies across enemy lines and drove 4,200 km across the Sahara. Yet when he returned to Budapest, he helped hide and save several Jewish families from being deported to death camps. After the war, he was arrested in Hungary, sent to a Soviet prison, was acquitted thanks to a bribe allegedly paid by MI6, was smuggled to Austria by British officials on a fake passport, and sent to Egypt where King Farouk got him named the technical director at the new Desert Research Institute. Visiting Austria in 1951, he contracted dysentery and died at 55.

The English Patient won the Booker Prize and the movie version won nine Oscars, including best picture. For a more accurate portrayal, read John Bierman's The Secret Life of Laszlo Almasy: The Real English Patient.

Uganda's First Gay Pride

Unthinkable two years ago, now look: Uganda celebrated its first gay pride last weekend. On assignment covering LGBT rights in Africa, Alexis Okeowo reports for the New Yorker blog: 

“Can you imagine that the worst place in the world to be gay is having Gay Pride?” Kasha Jacqueline Nabagesera asked a crowd of cheering gay men, lesbians, transgendered men and women, and queers somewhere in between. It was Saturday afternoon, and we were on the shores of the giant, cloudy Lake Victoria in the Ugandan city of Entebbe, where L.G.B.T. activists had decided to stage the country’s first Pride Parade. Nabagesera, a lesbian activist covered, for the occasion, in glitter and neon spray paint, with homemade angel wings, was being half-sarcastic. A barrage of media coverage has painted the country as a hell for gays—a place where they are suffering and being attacked constantly—and, despite the need to combat such threats, L.G.B.T. Ugandans were tired of hearing a story that ignored their nuanced experiences of both joy and hardship."

The rainbow sashed sailor is Frank Mugisha, the pioneering activist who recently won an RFK Human Rights Award and the 2011 Rafto Prize.

Gay in Africa: The Hairdresser of Harare by Tendai Huchu

Why do the Americans who follow international news know the names Aung San Suu Kyi, Elena Bonner, and Thich Quang Do but not Frank Mugisha? Why do they know Uganda is considering a law to punish homosexuality with the death penalty but they're unaware of the nation's heroic gay rights leader? Other people know Mugisha. Last year he won the Rafto Prize, the Norwegian global award for human rights, previously given to Suu Kyi, Bonner, and Thich, and he won the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award.

Our conflict-obsessed media leaves too many people with the impression all of Africa north of Joburg is a wasteland of ignorance and intolerance. Signs of gay progress are invisible here. The news stories are not balanced by, for example, the success of Kenya's first LGBT film festival last September. Social media was a driving force in the Arab Spring, but reporters never deign to mention the thriving online world of gay Africa, from the continent-spanning Behind the Mask to more local magazine's such as Morocco's Mithly, and, launched just last month, Rainbow Sudan.

Unfiltered, firsthand experience is best. Short of a long trip to see for yourself, you can immerse your senses in the Zimbabwean novel The Hairdresser of Harare [Kindle] by Tendai Huchu who now lives in Scotland. Told in the breezy style of another Edinburgh author who writes about Africa, Alexander McCall Smith, Huchu's book is full of surprises. Would you ever have guessed a struggling, 26 year-old single mom hairdresser would have a live-in maid? Funny, smart, and sensible, the narrator Vimbai is the queen of Khumalo Hair & Beauty Treatment Salon. That is, until she's gently dethroned by the salon's first male stylist, the charming, handsome 22 year-old Dumisani Ncube. He rents a spare room from Vimbai, allowing her a peek at his amazing abs but still blind to what Western readers will see instantly, he's gay.

Postponing this revelation until the end of the book is one of a couple of sticky decisions, but plot really isn't the point. The immense pleasure of The Hairdresser of Harare is its window into another world, where the characters display enviable insouciance in coping with delusional customers who want to look like Beyonce, massive currency devaluation, unreliable men, severe rationing, disapproving parents, official bribes, demanding children, military jackboots, family rifts, electricity blackouts, stale rap music, corrupt politicians, hellfire preachers, and worries about what to wear. To them, it's just life.

Although this is his first novel, Huchu is nimble in depicting every layer of social strata. The working-class girls style the hair of a dragon lady government Minister, and after she's (unwittingly) been Dumi's beard at his brother's wedding, Vimbai enters his family's life of immense privilege. Newly comfortable with infinity pools, armed guards, and a sister schooled in America, she struggles at dinner with the knife and fork, having always eaten rice with a spoon and chicken with her hands. It's a dazzling moment, telling the reader far more than the narrator knows. Similarly, we see all of Dumi's anguish and excitements as a closeted gay young man through details that Vimbai notes without understanding. Flawed in its final pages by sudden character reversals and re-reversals, the novel is still a rewarding and necessary read.

International Contradictions

Pink News, Towleroad, and others are reporting a Star story that Malaysia is banning all LGBT characters from state television with similar restrictions against private television stations to follow:

"The Information Department has banned shows featuring gay characters, Deputy Information, Communications and Culture Minister Datuk Maglin Dennis D'Cruz confirmed. He said the ban was effective immediately but would only start with state-owned TV and radio stations.

"If it means canceling some of the shows, so be it," he told The Star Friday, adding that the decision was to curb the "influence" of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) community."

Predictably the story is whipping up a frenzy of anti-Muslim, anti-Malay comments. Just one thing. Free Malaysia Today says it's not true.

"...speaking to FMT, Information, Communications and Culture Deputy Minister Maglin Dennis D’Cruz said that his ministry had not ordered gays to be taken off the air.

“There is no directive. Only the minister (Rais Yatim) can (issue) a directive. Because if it was a directive, it would have come to us, and all the senior officials (in the ministry) immediately… I think it was (done) by an individual,” he said.

"At the same time, Maglin added that the ministry had no intention of stopping gays, transsexuals or effeminate men from appearing on radio or television.

“These people are everywhere, and they’re also human beings. Nobody has the right to stop them or anything, because we also respect them as human beings.

“Don’t humiliate them. Who says they can’t act in movies? Nobody says that they can’t act… If they want to be an engineer, lawyer, actor, whatever they want to do, we (will) help them,” he said.

"Later in the day, Maglin’s boss, Rais Yatim was quoted by Bernama as saying that no ban existed on the portrayal of LGBT characters on state-owned television channels."

Yesterday, the PBS NewsHour aired a report:

"In Uganda, Gays Face Growing Social, Legal Hostility."

The day before yesterday, Voice of America ran this story:  

"Gay Activists Say Uganda Becoming More Tolerant."

Last month AP filed a similar story Uganda's Gays See Progress in Public Opinion War.

One irrefutable positive step is that Uganda's LGBT community has filed a lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts against antigay American evangelist Scott Lively for promoting violence against them. Among other complaints, they say on his 2009 visit Lively helped draft the notorious Kill the Gays legislation. Lively dismisses the case as "frivolous."

(Photo: AP)

An Arab Melancholia

As the mainstream notes Omar Sharif Jr.'s [the actor's grandson] coming out as half-Jewish and all gay, literary readers celebrate today's release of An Arab Melancholia. The hotly anticipated novel is the second to appear in English from North African author Abdellah Taïa, "the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco." His debut in translation,  Salvation Army,earned a passionate following in 2009 with acclaim from Edmund White, Alistair McCartney, Kevin Killian, David McConnell, and David Ebershoff who praised it as "a fresh kind of gay story – the young man navigating the complex currents of poverty, Islam, colonialism, and individual vs. national identity." 

The new book is 144 pages and Semiotext(e) says:

"Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he’s out of breath. He’s running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He’s running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who’s out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood--which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco.

"Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa’s identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery."

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.)

Born January 6: Juan Goytisolo

Praised by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Edmund White, and according to the Guardian, "widely acknowledged as Spain's greatest living writer," Juan Goytisolo has lived in self-imposed exile in Marrakech since the 1960s. (He is 81 today and now spends part of each year in Paris.) His more than thirty books make clear why he left his native land: Franco, the post-Franco government, the Catholic church, middle class bourgeois attitudes, and homophobia. Also, he loves Arabs, particularly illiterate or uneducated men whose gayness is not marked by effeminate behavior but a hyper virility. Depending on which critics you ask, his masterpiece is either his two-volume memoir, groundbreaking for among other things its frankness about gay sex, or his trilogy comprised of Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. Goytisolo's most recent novel, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, recounts in his typically subversive style the ribald sexual antics of a gay priest.

International Gay Euphoria

Now that the glitter has settled after Hillary's gay speech and Obama's memo, IGLHRC actually read the new policy. Exec Director Jessica Stern said,

"Significantly, neither...said that LGBT rights would become a condition for foreign assistance. Their message, initially misinterpreted in online discussions and by the media, stated clearly that, 'agencies involved with foreign aid…shall enhance their ongoing efforts to…build respect for the human rights of LGBT persons.' To be clear, there were no indications of tying aid to conditions or of cutting aid."

So, we're telling homophobes, Don't worry, nothing will change, you'll still get our money; while telling long-suffering LGBT activists in the developing world, Don't worry, big changes coming. This style of governing used to be mocked as the Queen of Hearts but now is celebrated as Team of Rivals. Toothless and legless, because as merely a presidential memo, it can be instantly undone by the next administration.

The Geneva speech was nice but rather than Do-as-I-Say-Not-as-I-Do grandstanding abroad, we need actual results at home. Clinton said, "gay rights are human rights and human rights are gay rights," yet she and Obama continue to oppose marriage equality -- based on their personal beliefs. The White Rabbit already explained this: When bad African leaders have personal beliefs that's prejudice, and a violation of international human rights law, and an easy target in an election year.

The true cause for transatlantic euphoria this week is Elio di Rupo, above. Following lesbian Johanna Sigurdardottir as Iceland's PM in 2009, Di Rupo becomes the first openly gay male Prime Minister of a European country. The nation of Tintin and Poirot had been without a federal administration for 541 days. Di Rupo is part of Belgium's French-speaking minority, he's a Socialist, and he came out professionally fifteen years ago in response to a reporter's question as he was getting into a car. He said, "Yes, so what?" He is also an atheist. Rick Warren had no role at his swearing in.

Born November 22: André Gide

On December 10, 1947, at City Hall in Stockholm, a Swedish man spoke to France's ambassador about "the venerable master of French literature whose genius has so profoundly influenced our time." Of course, that was André Gide and he was, at seventy-eight, too ill to receive his Nobel Prize for Literature in person. (Read the full citation here.) The award capped a rollercoaster career that began with the publication of a novella when Gide was twenty-two in 1891, reached successive peaks with The Immoralist(1902), Strait Is the Gate (1909), and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914); plummeted with the publication of Corydon (1920), his nonfiction book in praise of homosexuality'; soared again with his best novel, The Counterfeiters (1925); and immediately shocked certain segments of the public again with his  autobiography, If It Die (1926) with his joyful memories of teenage masturbating under the dining room table with the concierge's son or his adult lovemaking with an Arab youth on a sand dune in Algeria. While in North Africa, Gide had also befriended Oscar Wilde. The following year he published Travels in the Congo, his greatly influential attack on French colonialism. That trip marked the end of his eleven year relationship with Marc Allégret, who had eloped with him when he was fifteen or sixteen and Gide was forty-seven. (Allégret's father had been the best man at Gide's never-consummated wedding and wasn't bothered at all by their affair; Gide's wife, however, didn't like being left behind and she burned all of his letters in retaliation. Marc Allégret went on to direct more than fifty films.) After spending the war and post-war years in Tunis, Gide returned to Paris where he died in 1951. In 1952, the Catholic church put all of his works on their Index of Forbidden Books.

August 1920: William Butler Yeats, Marc Allégret, and Gide photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell

UK Threat Prompts First Steps Toward Tolerance in Antigay Africa

Nine days after Britain's PM David Cameron threatened to cut funds to antigay nations, Botswana's former president Festus Mogae told BBC correspondent Letlhogile Lucas that homosexuality should be decriminalized, in order to help fight the spread of HIV. He said:

"I don’t understand it [homosexuality]. I am a heterosexual. I look at women. I don’t look at other men. But there are men who look at other men. These are citizens. To protect them and their clients from being infected [with HIV], you have to assist them to protect themselves. I don’t think by arresting them you help them."

The former president saying this now is like Bill Clinton's support for gay marriage only after he was safely out of office and powerless to undo the antigay bigotry he signed into law.

It's more relevant to hear from incumbents, like Zimbabwe's PM Morgan Tsvangirai. Last year Tsvangirai said "I totally agree with the president," referring to notorious homophobe Robert Mugabe's fierce opposition to LGBT protection in the new constitution. Yesterday, in a total reversal, Tsvangirai told the BBC's Gavin Esler, "My attitude is that I hope the constitution will come out with freedom of sexual orientation." He added,"To me, it's a human right."

Notice these sudden conversions come in chats with the BBC. It would be more meaningful to see the same remarks made at home to their own political parties and constituents.

Of course, many believe conservative Cameron's newfound gay support itself hovers between insincere lip service and sheer cynicism. Speaking of which, the photo of Festus and Julianne Moore at a 2009 "private, pre-Oscar dinner celebrating diamonds in Africa" is by Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images.

David Cameron's Pro-Gay Conservativism

Last week, Britain's Prime Minister David Cameron gave the keynote address at his party's conference in Manchester, telling reluctant Tories to get on board with full marriage for same-sex couples:

“And to anyone who has reservations, I say this: Yes, it’s about equality, but it’s also about something else: commitment. Conservatives believe in the ties that bind us; that society is stronger when we make vows to each other and support each other.

“So I don’t support gay marriage in spite of being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I am a Conservative.”

If only we had similar leaders. If only we had moderators at presidential debates who would form a question citing this argument, or candidates who would actually answer.

Yesterday, Cameron announced the UK would slash foreign aid to nations with anti-gay policies, starting with Malawi whose funds were reduced by $30 million for jailing two men who married each other in private. Antigay Uganda and Ghana may be next. Critics point out that the government is only targeting African antigay nations whilst ignoring the religious-based bigotry of, say, Pakistan. Others reject his whole premise, arguing that the broke government had to make cuts somewhere and the claim it's for moral reasons is "rubbish."

Meanwhile, Hugh Grant says Cameron still has a lot to answer for in the wake of the News Corp phone hacking scandal.

(photo: Carl De Souza/AP)

Captain Harding's Six-Day War

Elliott Mackle's third novel Captain Harding's Six-Day War gains traction in its second half with the crash of an F-105 near Wheelus Air Base five miles east of Tripoli in June 1967. The pilot, a married major, attempted an unauthorized loop and instead hit the sand. The wreck underscores the anxieties of the closeted narrator, Captain Joe Harding, 26, who comes to believe the accident was a suicide and the major intended for his wingman, who may have been going down on him, to go down with him. The very distraught lieutenant survives, yet rather than accept help from someone "like us," he threatens to expose "Captain Cocksucker" to the base's ranking, already suspicious homophobes. The novel links Harding's fear of being outed with his fear of intimacy, all the way back to his abusive father. By that point, he's juggling three suitors: the bald, "muscular pug" Major Hal Denman, 35, who limits their encounters to rubdowns and handjobs; the far more flexible, and needy, nurse Duane Hayes, also 35, who takes him to an all-male sex party and wants to settle down; and Cotton Boardman the puppyish, Shakespeare-quoting, high school tennis star who says he's "seventeen, AAALLL-most." Women in minor roles, Cotton's mother who is the U.S. ambassador, and a straight black nurse, Merlene Williams, are nicely sketched. Mackle, a USAF vet once stationed at Wheelus in the 1960s, keeps his eye trained on the many intrigues at the base and opts not to explore any possible parallels of closeted life and/or secret subcultures in Tripoli. The Libyan characters are an undelineated chauffeur and a one-dimensional blackmailing murderer. Lethe Press classifies the novel as "gay romance" so the hopeful ending is assured. Check out his previous books, Hot off the Presses and It Takes Two.

Born May 3: Wilfred Thesiger

A leading figure of the golden age of exploration, it's highly appropriate that Sir Wilfred Thesiger was awarded the Lawrence Medal and the Burton Medal, not least because they were all gay. Born in 1910 to a British diplomat in Abssynia, Thesiger was educated at Eton and Oxford where his only happy times were vacations (and beating Cambridge as captain of the boxing team). On his first college break he worked for his passage on a steamer to Constantinople. Returning, he found a personal invitation from Haile Selassie to attend his coronation as Emperor. On his second summer break, he worked a fishing trawler off Iceland. At 23 he went back to Africa, became assistant district commissioner in the Sudan, and learned to fast ride camels with the local men, adopting their clothes and diet. Said to call any invention more modern than the steam engine "an abomination," he hated the first world's intrusion on remote wilderness and peoples. In WWII, he fought with the Sudan defense force against Mussolini's Italians and with the Syrians against the Vichy French. A job with what became the United Nation's anti-locust program took him to the Arabia's famed Empty Quarter prompting his best work, Arabian Sands (now with an introduction by Rory Stewart), which the Guardian recently called "probably the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever." Thesiger's other masterpiece, The Marsh Arabs (introduced by Jon Lee Anderson), covers the seven years he lived off and on with the people of southern Iraq. His travels in Asia with the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and the Pamirs, are recounted in Among the Mountains. Chances are his autobiography Life Of My Choice avoids his homosexuality, but it is fully integrated in Alexander Maitland's forthcoming Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer, released to acclaim in the UK four years ago and finally pubbing here at the end of the month. Thesiger died at 93 in 2003, leaving 23,000 negatives of his photographs to Oxford. See 59 of his images here and one below.