Band of Thebes

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.

African Pride

The fantastic new nature documentary African Cats is a dual portrait of two kinds of motherhood, a pride of female lions raising their cubs in a group, and Sita, a single cheetah rearing her five cubs alone. Gorgeously filmed, the movie has riveting twin plots as the cheetah struggles to feed and protect her too-many offspring from relentless hungry predators, and the group of lions deals with Fang, the snaggletoothed male who protects them but steals the zebra they have jointly cornered and taken down. A rival male, Kali, who travels surrounded by his four glorious and resentful sons, wants to kill Fang and all the baby cubs Fang sired to impregnate each female lion in the pride himself. Be careful of the subtext A stranger will kill your father, marry your mother, and murder you and be amazed at the persistence of the notion that only the males of the species are hunters. Awesome as this movie is, it is not recommended for gay adults with abandonment issues or any children under the age of 22. Kids 14 and under will burst into sobs whenever one of the moms gets dinner and children 14+ will use their parents' credit cards to order an adorable baby cheetah over the internet.

The brutal tension is perfectly broken by moments of beauty (storms sweeping across Kenya's savannah) or humor (an ostrich scaring off a full-grown cheetah).

The Jack Bank by Glen Retief

Like male aggression itself, young schoolboy bullying is everywhere this season, playing a central part in the indie documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, the Oscar winning foreign film In a Better World, those ubitiquous YouTube videos for the It Gets Better campaign which is now a book [[Kindle]], and bullying is the troubled heart of Glen Retief's new autobiography The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood [[Kindle]]. Toward the end of aparthied, white Glen lives in bliss at Kruger National Park, until at 12 he is sent to a hellish boarding school where older boys make younger boys strip nude, jump up and down and receive swattings with cricket bats or electrical shocks to their genitals. Trouble is, when Glen is older he derives "enormous, surprising pleasure" from administering the beatings to younger boys. He connects the Boer system of abuse and torture to South Africa's greater ills, and he struggles to reconcile the shameful experiences that he considers "life's defining moment" with his homosexuality.

Not my kind of book but those who've read it are impressed:

“A remarkable memoir with the deeply resonant literary power of the finest fiction. The Jack Bank  is an important book by a supremely gifted writer.”—Robert Olen Butler

“One of those books that you never forget and never stop talking about.  Retief belongs in the pantheon of white African writers Alexandra Fuller, Peter Godwin, Coetzee, and Gordimer.”—Bob Shacochis

“Glen Retief’s Jack Bank is a transgressive, harrowing and illuminating work of literary art.  In a language marked by a brutal childhood in the last years of the apartheid regime, and with uncommon wisdom, Retief’s epiphanic narrative draws us into regions of  cultural importance beyond the scope of traditional memoir.  Thus, he changes what we imagine this genre to be, allowing it to become something truer.”—Carolyn Forché

"Eloquent...readers everywhere will be caught by the searing detail about family, friendship, sex and love."—Booklist

"Visceral and emotionally complex--an impressive first book."—Kirkus Reviews

Born March 20-22: John Boswell, Zackie Achmat, Stephen Sondheim

Native New Yorker Stephen Sondheim, the winningest composer in Broadway history, has earned eight Tonys, eight Grammys, seven Drama Desk awards, an Obie, an Oscar, and a Pulitzer Prize. Last year he turned 80 and was feted with major special concerts by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, and assorted stage and screen legends at benefits by the Roundabout Theatre Company and the New York City Center. Also, they renamed the former Henry Miller Theatre on 43rd Street in his honor. Arlington Virginia's acclaimed Signature Theatre created the Sondheim Award, of which Sondheim was the premiere recipient, Angela Lansbury the second, and next will be Bernadette Peters. Last October, Knopf published Sondheim's Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes, this coming October they'll release Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Wafflings, Diversions and Anecdotes. A great lover of puzzles and games, he contemplated giving up theater to write mysteries, and did co-author two whodunnit screenplays; The Last of Sheila, co-written with Anthony Perkins, won them an Edgar. Sondheim did not have a live-in boyfriend until 1992, when he was 61; he and dramatist Peter Jones lasted seven years.

Born of Indian parents in South Africa in 1962, Zackie Achmat grew up in the "coloured" community and was always a rebel for equality. By the time he was ten he was a total bookworm and gained special permission to use the whites-only library for reading, but he was still prohibited from using its restrooms. When he was fourteen, during the Sowetto Uprisings, he set his school on fire to convince his classmates to join the boycott. As an active member of the illegal ANC for years, he was jailed many times before apartheid ended and the ANC's Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994. That same year Achmat co-founded the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality, and in 1996 South Africa had become the first nation whose Bill of Rights bans discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Building on lessons from the gay rights and anti-apartheid movements, in 1998 Achmat created the Treatment Action Campaign [TAC] to fight aids through prevention, to increase awareness, and to get medicines to the poor. Immediately he gained worldwide attention by announcing he was HIV+ and would refuse to take his drugs until they were available to all South Africans. Among the many ways TAC has changed lives is by helping to erode the shame and stigma of HIV, proclaiming one's positive status with bold t-shirts rather than hiding or lying. Winning numerous legal and public relations victories against the government and international pharmaceutical corporations, Achmat finally resumed his meds when he was very ill in August 2004, anticipating correctly that in November the Ministry of Health would announce its plan to distribute ARVs widely. The New Yorker ran an excellent profile of him written by Samantha Power in 2003, and the following year the American Friends Service Committee nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (which went to Kenya's Wangari Maathai). In 2008, he married his partner Dalli Weyers, 25, in a terrific wedding where the traditional caketop figures of a bride and groom were replaced by a king and a cowboy.

When Publishing Triangle ranked the 100 Best LGBT Nonfiction Books of all time, they included works by Plato, Freud, Foucault, Faderman, Duberman, et al., and their undisputed choice at #1 was Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality by John Boswell, a history professor at Yale. He was 33 when it was published in 1980. Newsweek said it was, "an astonishing work of scholarship that ranges with ease over fourteen centuries...What makes the work so exciting is not simply its content -- fascinating though that is -- but its revolutionary challenge to some of Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." Specifically, he proved that the Roman Catholic Church hadn't always been antigay, had either been indifferent to or had actually celebrated male - male love until the twelfth century. No surprise, Boswell was attacked by some conservative academics who thought he was promoting a gay agenda and by some gay people who said he was a Church apologist. Ultimately the complaints only added to the book's popularity because it was impeccably researched; it won the 1981 American Book Award for history.

After writing the first book about the widespread practice of child abandonment in medieval times, Boswell returned to gay topics and the early Church in another groundbreaking work, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. This time he argued the Church actually condoned certain male - male relationships with ceremonies that could be seen as precursors to gay marriage. Again, the book was brilliantly researched; again, the uproar; but the public debate was cut short: Boswell died of aids in December 1994 when he was 47. At Yale, he helped start the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center, and his pre-modern history courses were immensely popular, among the top ten in enrollments. He is said to have written his comments on student papers in perfect medieval calligraphy.

Born February 5: William S. Burroughs

Around 1930, when he was sixteen, William S. Burroughs was expelled from the New Mexico high school where he was keeping a journal of his make out sessions with another boy and taking chloral hydrate, thereby cementing the major themes of his life: writing, drugs, gay sex, travel, and trouble with authorities. Twenty years later, fleeing a drug arrest in Louisiana, Burroughs established himself in Mexico with his common law wife Joan. Drunk, he and Joan thought it would be a good idea to re-enact the William Tell escapade, but rather than shooting the apple he killed his wife. The tragedy seemed to jolt Burroughs into action, and in 1953 with the help of Allen Ginsberg he published his first novel, Junky. He wandered in South America, then Palm Beach, then New York City, then Rome, then Tangier, where he lived in a gay brothel and experimented with new drugs and new styles of writing. One result was that in 1958 the Chicago Review published sections of Naked Lunch, immediately called obscene. The U.S. Postal Service ruled copies could not be sent through the mail. The controversy got the full novel published in 1959, and in 1960 Massachusetts was the first state to prosecute on grounds of obscenity. Six years later, in the nation's last case obscenity case involving only words, not images, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled the novel was not obscene. Although Burroughs had been the cover story of Life magazine, and championed by critics like Mary McCarthy, he continued to struggle for another twenty years. Finally in 1983 Ginsberg succeeded in nominating Burroughs to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 literary agent Andrew Wylie began to represent Burroughs, procuring a deal for Queer, Burroughs' unpublished novel from 1953 and a contract for six additional books. Burroughs appeared in Gus van Sant's 1989 movie Drugstore Cowboy, and in 1991 David Croenenberg filmed a much praised adaptation of Naked Lunch starring Peter Weller and Judy Davis. He died in 1997.

Among the many artists who consider Burroughs to be an important influence on their work are: Peter Ackroyd, Laurie Anderson, J.G. Ballard, Charles Bukowski, Angela Carter, Kurt Cobain, Dennis Cooper, Ian Curtis, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Ken Kesey, John Rechy, and Patti Smith. As for Burroughs, he said the greatest influence on his own writing was the shy and delicate Englishman Denton Welch.

Gay Ugandan Featured in Article Demanding Gay Executions Is Killed

Months after gay rights activist David Kato, 43, appeared on the cover of a Ugandan tabloid article listing the addresses of local LGBT leaders and calling on readers to murder them, he has been killed in his home. Kato had quit his job as a schoolteacher to work fulltime for LGBT rights. Ugandan police say they do not think his murder, from blows to his head with a hammer, was a hate crime. In the past two months, ten other people have been killed in the area during robberies, according to police.

Val Kalende, chairwoman of one of Uganda’s gay rights groups, said, “David’s death is a result of the hatred planted in Uganda by U.S. evangelicals in 2009. The Ugandan government and the so-called U.S. evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood.”

The U.S. government has yet to condemn the murder. Instead, Johnnie Carson, America's top diplomat for Africa said via Twitter, "We are horrified and saddened by the murder of prominent human rights activist David Kato in Uganda yesterday afternoon." UPDATE: See comments for links to statements from the State Department ("profoundly saddened") and the White House ("deeply saddened"), thanks to Mel P.

European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek said, "David Kato was a man that fought for the rights of people to live freely regardless of their sexual orientation in Uganda. I call for the perpetrators of this crime to be brought to justice He was a remarkable human rights defender." Buzek called on Uganda to legalize homosexuality, adding, "I underline that sexual orientation is a matter falling within the remit of the individual right to privacy in the framework of universal human rights and fundamental freedoms."

Tangier Memories of Bowles, Genet, and Williams by Mohamed Choukri

Collected for the first time, Mohamed Choukri's Moroccan memories of Paul Bowles, Jean Genet, and Tennessee Williams have just been collected as In Tangier. Born in 1935, Choukri was illiterate until he was twenty, taught himself to read and write, published many novels, and became the chair of Arabic languages at Ibn Batuta College. He gained international attention in 1973 when Bowles translated his short novel For Bread Alone about an impoverished family whose father is driven to violence while the son pursues petty thieving, and, in jail, discovers the power of poetry. The young protagonist agrees to have oral sex with an old man from Spain for fifty pesetas but the gay Arab site Al-bab warns the episode "is described in extremely crude terms obviously calculated to disgust." Tennessee Williams said the novel was "shattering in its impact." As for translations the other way, Choukri was the one to explain to Williams that his play appeared in Arabic as A Cat on the Fire.

Unhappy Traveler Damon Galgut Says "Memory Is Fiction"

Discussing his Booker-shortlisted "more personal and close to home" new work In a Strange Room at Three Lives last night, Damon Galgut admitted he and his editors debated whether to call it a memoir, travelogue, or fiction. Though all the events happened and "I haven't made anything up. I've been true to remembering," he's glad it's labeled a novel. Galgut twice said "memory is fiction." Describing the process of which details stay and which get filtered out, he said, "All of us all the time are constructing the narrative of our lives. That's what I'm doing in fiction."

He says the book's "deeper subject is memory itself" and that he "tried to embody the voice of memory in this book." This explains the shift between "he" and "I" in discussing himself in the more removed and more recent pasts.

No surprise to people who read any part of the book in the Paris Review or the PEN/O Henry Stories, he said "I am not a happy traveler." His "wanderings are fueled more by unhappiness," and are primarily "a desire to go away from where I am."

Yet although the book describes "bleak experiences" he thinks it's "consoling." He said, "There's something about language used well that is a consolation."

One of the reasons for this books marked changed in style compared to his previous work, like his other Booker-shortlisted novel The Good Doctor, is that he "felt I'd written all I had to say about South Africa." During the Q&A he voiced concern about the new government's proposed laws that might lead to censorship. Summing up a comparison with the old government, he said, "Different players, same game."

Galgut resisted a question about literary influences, saying that when he writes, "I try to clear other writers out of the mental attic." However, he was willing to name a few writers he admires: Greene, Beckett, Sebald, and Chekhov.

His own remarks, his interviewer's inquiries, and audience questions all avoided the gay content in his work. David Ebershoff was there and bought the book, so you'll be in great company when you get it.

Responding to a reader's quotation from the powerful, prize-winning middle section, "The Lover," Galgut agreed about its importance and said this passage "is the core of the book to me."

"Jerome, if I can't make you live in words, if you are only the dim evocation of a face under a fringe of hair, and the others too, Alice and Christian and Roderigo, if you are names without a nature, it's not because I don't remember, no, the opposite is true, you are remembered in me as an endless stirring and turning. But it's for this precisely that you must forgive me, because in every story of obsession there is only one character, only one plot. I am writing about myself alone, it's all I know, and for this reason I have always failed in every love, which is to say at the very heart of my life."

To contrast obsessions, you might read In a Strange Room back to back with Orhan Pamuk's The Museum of Innocence. For art as consolation, compare it with the closing epiphany of Jonathan Strong's new novel.

Difficult Journeys and Missed Connections: Galgut's In a Strange Room

The care and delicacy of Damon Galgut's muffled yet extraordinary In a Strange Room call to mind the works of other great solo travelers: Bruce Chatwin (The Songlines, In Patagonia), Patrick Leigh Fermor (A Time of Gifts), and Rory Stewart (The Places In Between). Like those nonfiction classics, the first of this novel's three pieces, "The Follower," lovingly details a difficult long walk. And like Chatwin and Stewart, Galgut's "Damon" remains isolated regardless of whom he's with. On an earlier hike in the African bush he meets a handsome, domineering German called Reiner who, after a brief exchange in the wild, asks the manager back at the otherwise empty hostel to put him in Damon's room, to Damon's confused surprise on his return. The sexual tension mounts, unfulfilled. Two years later Reiner returns to hike Lesotho with him:

They do not talk. There is, yes, occasional conversation, but about practical things, where will we sleep, should we have a rest, otherwise they walk, sometimes next to each other, sometimes apart, but always alone. It's strange that all this space, unconfined by artificial limits as it spills to the horizon, should throw you back so completely into yourself, but it does, I don't know when I was last so intensely concentrated into a single point, see me walking on that dust road with my face washed clean of all the usual emotions, the strains and strivings to link up with the world.

This time the tension is worse, wearing on the men until one of them breaks. The emotional aftermath is more poignant than the eruption.

The book's high point is its second section, "The Lover," which won a National Magazine Award and was a PEN/O Henry story this year. Again, Damon's separateness is key:

He takes the overnight train to Victoria Falls. He lies in his bunk, hearing the breathing of strangers stacked above and below him, and through the window sees villages and sidings flow in and out of the dark, the outlines of people and cattle and leaves stamped in silhouette against the lonely light, then flowing backward again, out of sight into the past. Why is he happiest in moments like these, the watcher hiding in the dark. He doesn't want the sun to rise or this particular journey to end.

On a trip through Tanzania, Malawi, and Kenya, Damon meets a man his age on holiday with the much younger Jerome who "has from up close a beauty that is almost shocking, red lips and high cheekbones and a long fringe of hair" and Jerome's sister Alice. Again the yearning romance is thwarted by restraint and hesitation, until Damon decides to make an impulsive trip to see Jerome in Switzerland where that fringe of hair has been shorn for his compulsive military service. Underneath, nothing has changed.

The final section, "The Guardian," is an arresting change, describing Damon's trip to India with a selfish, self-destructive lesbian/bi woman named Anna. For any reader who dreamed of less indecision and more action in the first two pieces, Anna is a nightmare come true. Yet it's her terrible drama that finally brings forth an English widow's catharsis, through the act of telling her story, then later, remembering it causes Damon's catharsis. Story/telling and story/travelling unify the book, as when earlier Damon thinks, "The story of Jerome is one he's lived through before, it is the story of what never happened, the story of travelling a long way while standing still." Later he thinks, "A journey is a gesture inscribed in space, it vanishes even as it's made." But as great literature attests, it's the telling that endures.

In a Strange Room is the second of Galgut's novels to be shortlisted for the Booker. His first, The Good Doctor, which also explores the tensions of straight male friendships, is more traditional and accessible. This one is more daring, elusive yet deeper, and better.

Damon Galgut tours tonight at 192 Books, tomorrow night at Three Lives, and this weekend at the Miami Book Fair.

Sacha Baron Cohen's Freddie Mercury Biopic To Avoid AIDS

The world's first major rock star to die of aids won't have aids in his first major biopic. Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Sacha Baron Cohen has signed a deal to play Freddie Mercury in a film written by Golden Globe winner and two-time Oscar nominee Peter Morgan who penned The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland, and Eastwood's forthcoming Hereafter.

Producers already have said the movie will not deal with Mercury having aids. Opting for a simpler, happier ending, they are stopping their story at Live Aid, in 1985, where Queen's performance rocked the world and continues to be voted the best rock gig of all time. Mercury tested positive for HIV in 1987 yet despite frequent speculation in the British press, he did not acknowledge having aids until one day before he died in November 1991.

Screenwriter Morgan could again mine the complexities and tensions between public/private persona, this time through a man who was less than forthcoming about the extent of his gay sex life and perhaps less than eager to discuss his 100% Parsi background. (Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, he did not change his surname until he was 24 in England. How, for example, did being born and raised in Africa affect Mercury's much-condemned decision in 1984, to break the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa and play Sun City?) Then again, the script may go soft, yielding another give-the-masses-what-they-want movie. In that case, expect a lot of Mercury's early 1970s relationship with Mary Austin, who remained his best friend for life. Mercury left Mary his mansion, most of his estate, and all his royalties; while giving Jim Hutton, whom he'd been with six or seven years at the time of his death, a mere half million pounds.

Sacha Baron Cohen played gay, awesomely, in Talladega Nights and flamboyantly in Bruno. His one song was a good reason to wake up from the otherwise sleepy Sweeney Todd.

This marks the first time the remaining members of Queen have licensed their songs for a movie about the band. Production on the film starts next year.

IGLHRC Fails To Win UN NGO Status in 6-8 Committee Vote

After a three-year wait, the excellent International Gay & Lesbian Human Rights Commission lost its bid for NGO status at the United Nations. In a big change from the anti-gay days of the Bush administration and John Bolton, the US pressed for a vote by the NGO committee but Egypt proposed a block on giving the rights group consultative status. Joining the US were the UK, Israel, Colombia, Peru, and Romania. Standing with Egypt against IGLHRC were Russia, China, Angola, Burundi, Sudan, Qatar, and Pakistan. Turkey, anxious to appear tolerant enough to join the EU, abstained.

Following the failed vote, the UK expressed "deep regret." The US, UK, and other nations will try to circumvent this committee and get IGLHRC accredited by the UN's Economic and Social Council. Other lgbt rights groups have succeeded in getting NGO status, including a Spanish group and the Netherlands' COC, which was founded in 1946 and won accreditation in 2008. Earlier, ILGA had it then lost it in 1993.

In possibly even more grotesque international antigay news, Towleroad and Joe My God report that the Family Research Council paid $25,000 to muzzle criticism of Uganda's Kill the Gays bill. They set two lobbyists working against a US resolution condemning the Ugandan bill authorizing the death penalty for being gay. The bill passed the Senate in April but is suspiciously stalled in the House's Foreign Affairs Committee.

UN Sec General Brings Ray of Light to Malawi Gay Couple

For the first time in his life UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, 65, is being widely confused with Madonna, 51. The joyful news of Tionge Chimbalanga and Steven Monjeza's full pardon and release from jail in Malawi is being characterized worldwide, especially online, as the Malawi president bowing to general international pressure, aided by Madonna's influence. The singer adopted a boy from Malawi and is financing a school there; very late to cause, she finally condemned the gay couple's 14 year prison sentence and started an online petition calling for their release, which 30,000 people signed. Lost in many news accounts are the details of the very specific pressure brought by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on his trip to Malawi, his private meeting with the president, and his watchful presence at their joint press conference where the president announced the gay couple's pardon and freed them. The active participation in lgbt rights at the extreme highest level of the United Nations is an enormous breakthrough and deserves great credit, universal acclaim, and its own episode of Glee.

According to South Africa's Sunday Independent,

When a Malawian journalist took Ban to task for putting pressure on Mutharika to violate Malawi's own customs, Ban said that although he respected national customs, leaders had a responsibility to make them consistent with international human rights law.

However, Ban also made it clear that Mutharika had issued the pardon in direct response to his appeal at yesterday's meeting.

He said Mutharika had first responded that he would consider a pardon but Ban had then told him it would be "better for his leadership" if he did so immediately.

Ban added that it would be better for Malawi to be known internationally as a country which was pursuing Millennium Development Goals.

Blessing-Miles Tendi on Africa's Homophobia

A frequent writer on topics relating to his native Zimbabwe, Blessing-Miles Tendi has a brief essay in yesterday's Guardian about the origins of Africa's widespread but not unanimous homophobia. He argues that although a standard argument is Europeans introduced gay sex to Africa with colonialism,

"late 19th-century records on Africa and African oral history show that homosexual practices existed in pre-colonial Africa. One case in point are the Azande people in the north-east of modern-day Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where it was acceptable for kings, princes and soldiers to take young male lovers."

Tendi suggests the more accurate depiction is that Europeans brought homophobia, criminalizing same sex relations that had been legal before. Imported religion has and continues to further vilify homosexuality there.

Africans males' emasculation by colonialism and slavery also complicates the issue, says Tendi. He explains,

"The response of many Africans and African-Americans to European colonialism, racism and slavery was the construction of a black masculinity pitted against white supremacy. The enduring legacy of this is that black Africans and African-Americans often interpret homosexuals and white males alike as synonymous with femininity and vulnerability. From my experience as a black boy growing up in a white Zimbabwean neighbourhood and during my higher education in the west, I am all too conscious of how my masculinity is partly formed by continuing racial stereotypes of black men as sexually rapacious solely towards women. There is no scope for black male homosexuality in this pigeonhole."

Send Letters of Support to Jailed Gay Couple in Malawi

Do this. IGLHRC is asking everyone to send words of support to the Malawi gay couple awaiting trial for having held a wedding party in their home. They face up to 14 years in prison with hard labor.

Tiwonge Chimbalanga         Steven Monjeza
Chipiri Prison                          Chipiri Prison
P.O. Box 30117                       P.O. Box 30117
Chipiri, Blantyre                      Chipiri, Blantyre
Malawi                                   Malawi

They're being held separately so you have to send two cards. U.S. postage rates to Malawi are: 98 cents for a postcard. Letters are 98 cents for 1 oz. and $1.76 for 2 oz. Add 20 cents for perfectly square envelopes.

English is the official language of Malawi. If, however, you know someone who needs to write in another language, that's fine. IGLHRC assures me the men will greatly appreciate the gesture.

No excuses, send them something today. It's fairly amazing that we have their address and that IGLHRC believes the letters will reach them. Signing petitions, protesting outside embassies, donating money to international nonprofits, all that is essential. But this is your best chance for directly showing brave gay Africans that you care about their plight and that amid such deplorable injustice they are not forgotten.

The bad news from Malawi keeps coming. The Centre for the Development of People reports that their administrator Dunker Kamba has been arrested on charges that the group's HIV prevention materials are pornographic.