Band of Thebes

Born May 8: Tom of Finland

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

Born April 12: Slava Mogutin

Former enfant terrible Slava Mogutin, 39, still lives to provoke. Born in Siberia (and, according to Wikipedia, “the first openly gay personality in the Russian media”) now a New Yorker (after Amnesty International and American PEN helped get him political asylum), the writer and photographer is permanently at war with the establishment. A constant and often vulgar critic of Moscow’s leaders, Mogutin has written seven books in Russian, winning the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize in 2000. He aims for a similar shock value in his hatred of establishment gays and loves to antagonize his audience, describing himself as a "cave-based, homo terrorist, pinko commie fag, and propagandist of brutal violence, psychic pathology and sexual perversions." He brings all that angry energy to his photography, which appears regularly in art, fashion, alt, and porn magazines. His best photo book is Lost Boys followed by NYC Go-Go.

Born March 23: J.C. Leyendecker

In the early 20th century when Arrow had 94% of market share, much of the shirtmaker's success could be laid with illustrator J.C. Leyendecker -- he used his chiseled boyfriend as the model for the archetypal Arrow Collar Man. Born in Germany in 1874, Leyendecker moved with his family to Chicago when he was eight. He and his brother enrolled at the city's Art Institute before studying art nouveau at the Académie Julian in Paris. They returned to Chicago early in 1899 and by May Leyendecker received his first commission for a cover of the era's most famous magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Throughout his career he would draw 321 more covers for them, creating the genre of "adorable" domestic chaos, stirring patriotism, family holidays, lovers' foibles, and youthful high spirits (with scrawny nudity) that today we associate with his Eve Harrington protege and successor Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker was slight and disliked confrontation; when his friends warned him Rockwell was stealing his style, he didn't protest. (Being a gay man and an immigrant in the early 20th century may also have amplified his instincts to avoid trouble.) One area in which he maintained preeminence was the blatant homoerotic. Leyendecker's men eternally give one another penetrating looks inside, outdoors, and on deck, and they're always thrusting elongated objects at happy angles from their bodies. He never met a muscle that didn't need to beef up, ripple, or glisten under his expert touch. As his biographers   explain, “Neighboring artists shared models with the brothers, which meant a seemingly endless train of attractive Greenwich Village lads parading through their chilly studio in the buff.” One was named Charles Beach. He was 17 and Leyendecker was 28. By all accounts Beach was both hot and not, given to self aggrandizing claims that he did Leyendecker's work (despite not being able to draw), along with the more typical fits of jealousy, insecurity, and tyranny. Margo Channing Norman Rockwell complained he never heard Beach say anything intelligent and called him "stupid." Nevertheless, Leyendecker and Beach moved into a New Rochelle mansion together and threw luxe parties attended by the jazz age set including Scott and Zelda. Inevitably, times changed, the commissions dwindled, and the money ran out. They had to dismiss their staff yet they stayed together a total of 49 years, until Leyendecker's death in 1951 when he instructed his private papers be destroyed. For more, read J.C. Leyendecker.

Leyendecker's artist brother F.X. Leyendecker also had an eye for masculine muscle, as with this barechested blacksmith, and for strategically placed missiles between shirtless swabbies (compare below). He became addicted to drugs and killed himself at 47.

    

    

Born February 24: Winslow Homer, Judith Butler

Born in Boston in 1836, Winslow Homer moved to Paris in 1867 where he lived with his close friend and fellow painter, Albert Kelsey. The depth of their connection is unknown because the intensely private Homer kept no diary, journal, saved no letters, and, unusual for an artist of his time, never completed a self portrait. He did, however, keep a photo of them on the back of which he wrote "Damon and Pythias." According to Richard Mann, the lifelong bachelor artist used a boy as his model for several of his famous paintings of women, as in Reading, above. For the final fifteen years of his life, until 1910, his closest companion at his estate in Prouts Neck, Maine, was Lewis Wright. Whatever their precise relationship, it disturbed some of Homer's friends and neighbors, apparently beyond Wright's being black. Homer painted 700 watercolors, the finest of which are reproduced in this book from Yale and that book from Norton. Or stick with the classic oils in Winslow Homer: An American Vision.

Already an academic to watch out for, Judith Butler became a star at thirty-four with the release of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990. The queer studies/ feminist pioneer/ icon has published new books every few years since, still sparking waves of devotion, debate, and derision. In 2008, she received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award with prize money of $1.5 million going to her Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley. Two years ago, Utne Reader named her one of 25 Visionaries Changing Your World. Today, she's 57.

Born February 13: Grant Wood

   

Read Tripp Evans' breakthrough biography, Grant Wood: A Life [Kindle] exploring how the artist's coded work was influenced by being closeted in Iowa in an unfriendly era. Evans reprints in color many of Wood's paintings that are more interesting and more beautiful than his more famous American Gothic. The book's revelations extend beyond Wood's life and times; it may change the way you look at paintings, period. In awarding Evans the 2010 Marfield Prize for Arts Writing, the judges said

"Grant Wood: A Life examines the ways in which collective national identity emerges from the unstable ground of myth.  In this case, that of a presumably all-American, homespun artist whose life and art, most famously American Gothic, have become stubborn icons for traditional small-town American values.  Evans explores the contradiction between Wood’s folksy public image as “America’s Painter” and the realities of his European training, sophisticated use of art-historical sources, complex family relationships and his closeted homosexuality."

Born January 4: Marsden Hartley

         

Although appreciated by some of his peers (Stieglitz gave him his first gallery show in 1909, George Platt Lynes photographed him several times, including this glum portrait) the painter Marsden Hartley never saw financial success, never had a family or longterm partner, and was basically a drifter for life. Did his failures keep him moving or did his poverty dictate each leap from cheap housing to free board; or was he not fleeing but actively searching, hoping for the appreciation he knew he was due and seeking the manly love of comrades from his beloved Whitman? The nomadic pattern was established in 1885, when he was eight, after his mother died and the family was dispersed to various relatives. He moved incessantly throughout North America and Europe, then lived a series of towns in Maine as he was losing his hearing, his eyesight, and his health, until he died in 1943, at sixty-six. Tragedy chased him. The young German officer he loved was killed early in World War I; the strong sons of the fishing family he stayed with two summers in Nova Scotia were drowned. The recognition he craved and steadfastly believed in finally came decades after his death. In 1969, writing in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer praised Hartley's portraits as "the boldest paintings of male figures in the history of American art." Click to see a wrestler, another wrestler, or a Finnish sauna, or here to see his landscapes of Maine or New Mexico.

Get Yale's 304-page catalog Marsden Hartley: American Modernist or Hartley's own autobiography Somehow a Past.

Born December 17: Paul Cadmus

 Paul Cadmus was part of Hide/Seek with his epic "What I Believe," [above] titled after E.M. Forster's 1938 essay, available in his thumping Two Cheers For Democracy. Cadmus's 1947 heavy-handed painting depicts happy gay life on the left and miserable heteros on the right. (So yet again, let's eradicate the falsehood that there was no gay identity before Stonewall.) On the bright gay side, lush fecund green grass supports loving couples and great artists like Forster and Kirstein. On the dark straight side, there is no grass at all, only bleakness, horror, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and, terribly, miscegenation. It's from the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas.

Although the controversy over his 1934 WPA painting The Fleet's In! was sparked by homophobia and led Henry Latrobe Roosevelt to remove it from the Corcoran show, Cadmus was always aware that the outcry helped establish him. For the rest of his life, he said he was grateful for it. By 1937 his paintings at the Midtown Galleries in New York attracted more than 7,000 visitors. He had grown up in Manhattan and was fascinated by sailors, frequently hanging out at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park, where he was often propositioned by navy men on leave but was too shy to go with them, preferring instead to sit on the benches with them and talk. By his twenties, he was over his shyness and traveled through Europe for three years with his lover Jared French, who urged him to quit advertising and paint fulltime. Back in New York, they formed a circle of prominent gay artists including George Platt Lynes, who used Cadmus as a model, and Lincoln Kirstein, who married his sister, Fidelma Cadmus, and fifty years later wrote the catalog as Cadmus was being rediscovered. He enjoyed more than a decade of increasing interest in his work before he died, eleven days after 300 friends had gathered to celebrate his 95th birthday. He was survived by Jon Anderson, his partner of more than thirty-five years.

Prior to his success with Secret Historian [Kindle], Justin Spring wrote Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude.

YMCA Locker Room, 1931.

Fire in the Belly: The Life of David Wojnarowicz

 

I couldn't attend last night's event at the LGBT center for Cynthia Carr and her Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz [Kindle], but the book deserves another boost, both for its remarkable artist and how his story is told. [Above: works from 1988, 1989, and 1982]

The NYT calls it "thorough and sensitive...a smart match of author and subject...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...Ms. Carr, by lining Wojnarowicz in her sights, has seized upon a vivid and peculiarly American story."

The New Yorker's Hilton Als says the biography is "outstanding...Carr analyzes those impulses, but never at the expense of conveying her subject’s spirit and the energies he applied to becoming himself, loving a few people, and making a difference."

Born December 3: Patrick Angus

The artist Patrick Angus said he didn't have the happiest day of his life until he was on his deathbed, succumbing to aids at thirty-eight in 1992. It was then that he saw the proofs of Strip Show, a book of forty-seven color reproductions of his paintings, and could finally believe that his art would not be completely forgotten. He had worked in obscurity, defeated by early humiliations from galleries that caustically rejected his depictions of sexual loneliness and the "bad" gay culture of hustlers, tricks, and low clubs. Worn down by his failures, Angus gave up hope of exhibiting his paintings, until Robert Patrick wrote an essay about him in Christopher Street. David Hockney bought five of Angus's paintings, and in 1992 three galleries held solo shows, yet without new work the momentum was lost. He is included in overviews like Emmanuel Cooper's The Sexual Perspective: Homosexuality and Art in the Last 100 Years in the West and James Saslow's exceptional Pictures and Passions: A History of Homosexuality in the Visual Arts. Much credit is due Douglas Blair Turnbaugh for his steadfast dedication to securing Angus's legacy. Kudos also to film director Ira Sachs for including Angus in his prize-winning short about NYC artists lost to aids, Last Address.

Stripped: The Story of Gay Comics

Three months after Justin Hall's No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics comes Markus Pfalzgraf's compilation, Stripped: The Story of Gay Comics.

The publisher says, "Comics for gay men have become enormously popular within the past couple of years. You can find everything from witty and humorous (Ralf König) to strong and hung (Patrick Fillion), from cheeky youngsters (Tom Bouden) to adorable twinks who are deeply in love (Mioki). Markus Pfalzgraf is a real afficionado of the colorful genre. With Stripped he has compiled a stunning collection, which offers an overview for beginners and also contains some delightful treasures for those who think they’ve seen it all."

Born November 8: Charles Demuth, Roy Simmons

Born frail but rich in 1883, Charles Demuth was free to follow his aesthetic inclinations, partly shaped by Beardsley and Wilde, without having to please the market to make a living. Attending the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, he lived in the same boarding house with William Carlos Williams, a lifelong friend whose poem "The Great Figure" inspired Demuth's most famous work, The Figure Five in Gold. In 1912 he had his first exhibitions, found another lifelong friend in fellow gay artsit Marsden Hartley, and began dating his most significant partner, Robert Locher. More than a decade before Paul Cadmus, Demuth painted gay men cruising, embracing, and having sex. Two favorite subjects were all-male baths, where patrons enjoyed relaxing, massage, or more [after the jump, in a 1918 self-portrait, see the upper right corner]; and salty sailors galore, dancing (above), with their pants open, with a john, with a woman, or nude with each other. When he died of diabetes at 51, he left his watercolors to Locher and his oils to Georgia O'Keefe.

In American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America, Robert Hughes writes, "Demuth was not a flaming queen, in fact he was rather a discreet gay, but if he could not place his deepest sexual predilections in the open, he could still make art from them. Seen from our distance, that of a pornocratic culture so drenched in genital imagery that sly hints about forbidden sex hardly compel attention, the skill with which he did this might seem almost quaint... [he] took a special delight in sowing his work with sexual hints. To create a secret subject matter, to disport oneself with codes, was to enjoy one's distance from (and rise above) "straight" life. The handlebar of a vaudeville trick-rider's bicycle turns into a penis, aimed at his crotch; sailors dance with girls in a cabaret but ogle one another."

For more, read Jonathan Weinberg's Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde from Yale.

 

After three seaons with the NY Giants, 6'3" 290 lb. offensive lineman Roy "Sugar Bear" Simmons quit the team in 1982 to concentrate on drinking and smoking crack. He worked as a baggage handler at JFK. Months later he went to rehab, wanted his job back, and was traded to the Redskins where he played special teams to block kickoffs, all the way to the 1984 Super Bowl. Among the twenty family and friends he'd invited to Tampa for that game, each staying separately in the same hotel, were his three lovers: two women and a man. The night before the Super Bowl, Simmons snorted coke and got laid three different times, which is not the reason the Redskins were destroyed by the Raiders (38 - 9) but it is typical of the chaos that got him cut from the team the next year. He moved to San Francisco and disappeared from the extended family he had supported on his player's salary. In 1992, accepting a free trip back east to appear on Donohue, he impulsively came out on national television to the great surprise of former teammates, family, and his female girlfriend on the show with him. Then he really disappeared. He amped up his drug use, his sex addiction, became homeless, and in 1997 discovered he was HIV+. Making that announcement to the NYT six years later on the eve of World Aids Day 2003, he hoped to reach other struggling closeted, self-destructive athletes engaging in high-risk-activities. In 2006, he published a truly unflinching memoir Out of Bounds [Kindle], that begins with him blowing a stranger who introduces him to a friend willing to swap Simmons' clock, jewelry, and table lamps for a few grams of crack. When it's gone, he trades his big-screen TV. As PW said, "Unlike recently celebrated and bestselling rehab memoirs, Simmons's story has no happy ending. Nor is there a happy beginning or happy middle." He says he has low self-esteem and wonders if he became gay because a married neighbor in Georgia raped him when he was eleven. His shocked family learned of the assault and ignored it. Simmons, 56 today, still lives in the Bay area. To date, only three other NFL players have come out.

Whatever Happens, We'll Always Have Art

Don't say Spencer Tunick. The Berlin art duo Diego Agullo, 32, and Dmitry Paranyushkin, 30, who share a background in dance, don't want you to compare their all-male Humping Pact video work with its emphasis on thrusting movement to the American co-ed nude still photographer, 45. Some of their "missions" can seem cold but in later scenes the graphic compositions are startling. Currently on view in Brussels at Beursschouwburg through November 24.

Support them starting at 99 cents or participate in future humps by contributing 200 euros. Upcoming: Vienna, Frankfurt, the Moroccan desert, and Norwegian fjords.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

June Elbus, a 14 year-old in Westchester, grieves for her favorite uncle, Finn, a successful, reclusive artst in Manhattan, who dies of aids at the start of Carol Brunt's debut novel Tell the Wolves I'm Home [Kindle]. It's 1987 and the suburbs' reaction to the pandemic is ignorance, hostility, fear, and indifference. June's family says Finn's longtime partner, a wayward hiv+ Brit named Toby whom they've never met, murdered Finn by infecting him to inherit his apartment and expensive art, and they hound him away from the funeral. Finn has left June and Toby notes begging each to take care of the other and the bulk of the story is their wary then warm secret friendship. June's problem isn't hiding it from her clueless, accountant parents but from her suspicious, jealous sister Greta, who plays Bloody Mary in the school production of South Pacific and is offered a role in Annie on Broadway. Finn's final painting was a double portrait of June and Greta which is featured in the NYT then lands on the cover of Newsweek. Skeptics of these rosy plot points may balk at the novel's lite grasp of aids, whose side effects are mainly thinness and a little shivering before death, but the book is surer of its sense of teen girl confusion and drama.

Born October 2: Annie Leibovitz

Sixty-three, mother of three young girls, and the world's most famous photographer: Given the boldness and confidence of her pictures, you might expect Leibovitz to be brash and overbearing, but in public she's very thoughtful and, despite her decades of success, she can sound uncertain about her work. Giving a slideshow of her images at a Chelsea gallery in November 2006, many times she looked at the screen and said, "I'm not sure that even is a photograph," saying instead it was simply a record of the moment. After Susan Sontag, her partner of fifteen years, died at the end of 2004, Leibovitz worried that she had never truly captured her on film. (Her favorite photo of Susan is this one by Peter Hujar.) She told wry stories about Susan complaining that Annie never took any pictures of them at home or on vacation, and how Susan always ended up mad when they did a shoot for her book jacket photos. Leibovitz gave birth at 51 to her first child, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz, whom she named in honor of pioneering photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Via a surrogate mother, five months after Sontag's death she had twin daughters, Susan and Samuelle, in honor of her father Samuel. Of her many books, the one with the most text and the best stories is Annie Leibovitz at Work.

Met Museum's "Regarding Warhol" Includes Queer Section

  

No major artist has worked a gayer persona than Andy Warhol, but of course the Metropolitan Museum can't bring itself to say so outright in the opening text of their fun, lumpy, ultimately unconvincing new show Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years. Instead, the curators cough out some bland morsel about "human sexuality in all its forms." 

After that introductory choking, more silence, as room after room of commentary on sixty artists' work fails to acknowledge what alert viewers will see on their own: Following Andy's ascent, gay art -- not just gay artists, many of whom are included here -- reached a tipping point after which even straight artists began to reflect a gay sensibility. The curators can't even find the courage to say gay while discussing the aids art of Silence = Death Project and Gran Fury.

Because an (unspoken) arc of the whole show has been about the gay effect, it comes as a surprise to enter a late gallery titled “Queer Studies: Camouflage and Shifting Identities.” Although bland and boilerplate, the text is wonderful to see, but it's also confusing. This is where the queer begins? With Avedon? But not, in earlier galleries, Mapplethorpe? And not Jeff Koons' ceramic Michael Jackson and Bubbles? 

Nevertheless art critic Blake Gopnik says the queer section is the best room in the show: 

"Looking at a Warhol painting, you feel a mix of someone just being himself—the star-struck Warhol; Warhol rubbernecking at tabloid death—and someone wrapping that “natural” persona in complex artifice. The best room in Regarding Warhol gives a hint at the origins of his art’s double state. It sets Warhol in the context of art by and about gays and lets us see that the doubleness that’s in almost any Warhol may be there already in the simple fact of being gay in a homophobic world—where you’re seen as not just being gay but as playing gay too. Warhol couldn’t simply act however he wanted, be as limp-wristed as he chose; he was always also viewed as acting the “swish,” as being that character known as the Limp-Wristed Man. In his paintings, he doesn’t simply express a stargazer’s love of Marilyn, the way an outsider fan artist might. He also expresses an arch awareness of his own fandom, a remove from it, an awareness of the social performance it counts as. And he uses the artifacts of painting—the crudeness of silk screen, the harshness of unblended color, the vacancy of blank fields of paint, the endless repetition of subjects—to evoke the “unnatural” state of his tastes. He doesn’t merely depict Marilyn. Like a drag queen, he makes sure that we notice the way that he’s capturing her."

New York magazine's Jerry Saltz calls Regarding Warhol "a shallow, pandering fecklessness to the pseudo-extravaganza" with "the unusual distinction of being a very bad show with very good work." He's right insofar as the show is filled with masterpieces well worth your visit, and that the curators fail to make much of a point beyond Andy was influential.

The show opens to the public today and runs through December 31. Click here for a list of the sixty artists and a few highlights. Or get the catalog.

No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics

The truer visual record of gay life and relationships doesn't come from teams of overpaid Los Angeles tv writers creating advertiser-friendly characters on the likes of Soap, Dynasty, Ellen, Will & Grace, Modern Family, and this week's debut The New Normal; it comes from obsessive queer geeks working alone all night in little apartments in strange cities and odd towns to make strips that they worry no one will see. Without the privileges and pressures of working for the mainstream, queer cartoonists have been far more free to follow their vision anywhere it leads them, including bed. Forty years ago depictions of gay sex and gay dating -- indeed, gay happiness -- were radical and empowering. So one can reasonably make the case that Justin Hall's new No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics isn't just a fine cartooning anthology, it's a secret history book. 

Says Hall (left), "My worry was that the literary queer comics were going to vanish, that there was no one looking out for that work. Especially with the gay publishers and the gay bookstores dying out."

The collection of course honors giants Howard Cruse, Alison Bechdel (with "Oppressed Minority Cartoonist" and her trip to the womyn's music fest in "My Own Private Michigan Hell"), Eric Orner, and Ralf Konig, as well as some personal favorites like the splendid Tim Fish (below), Steve "Shirtlifter" MacIsaac, and Eric Shanower (above). But the book also surprises with graphic stories by other queer titans, like David Wojnarowicz.

You will see your life everywhere in the funny, touching, absurd, and honest episodes. And you may discover some new favorites, like the beautiful work of French cartoonist Fabrice Neaud. 

A partial list of the other artists included: Craig Bostick, Paige Braddock, Jennifer Camper, Burton Clarke, Tristan Crane & Ted Naifeh, Diane Dimassa, Kris Dresen, Michael Fahy, Edie Fake, Joyce Farmer, Ellen Forney, Roberta Gregory, Andy Hartzell, Joan Hilty, Victor Hodge, David Kelly, Rupert Kinnard, Robert Kirby, Ed Luce, Steve MacIsaac, Jon Macy, Lee Marrs, Jerry Mills, Erika Moen, Annie Murphy, Andrea Natalie, Nazario, Francois Peneaud & Roger Zanni, Trina Robbins, Roxxie, Joey Alison Sayers, Travis Scott, Robert Triptow, Ivan Velez, Maurice Vellekoop, and Mary Wings.

Born September 1: Tomlin, Casement, Stebbins, King

Detroit's funniest daughter, Mary Jean Tomlin was featured on Merv Griffin when she was twenty-six and landed a spot on Laugh-In when she was thirty, creating the telephone operator Ernestine. Wanting to expand another character, Edith Ann, the bratty child in the big chair, Tomlin found the Peabody winning after school special writer Jane Wagner. They clicked. They've been life partners and collaborators for forty-one years. Compared to other longterm couples, say, Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, their output has been phenomenal. Wagner wrote and directed Tomlin projects ranging from Grammy winning comedy albums and Emmy winning tv specials to hit movies (The Incredible Shrinking Woman) to super flops (Moment by Moment, co-starring John Travolta) to Tony-winning Broadway megahits (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe). Beyond her endeavors with Wagner, Tomlin most frequently worked with Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts, A Prairie Home Companion), and gave star performances in 9 to 5, All of Me, Big Business, and Flirting with Disaster. She's had recurring roles on many top television shows Murphy Brown, The West Wing, Will & Grace, Desperate Housewives, and Damages. In March 1977, when Time was still a news magazine, Tomlin was its cover story; Wagner is identified first as "a friend" but later the article says they share a house off the Sunset Strip. Tomlin co-produced and narrated The Celluloid Closet, an act many took as her coming out. She's a hysterical actress, of course, but is she also a little hysterical? Her meltdowns on the set of I Heart Huckabees are more than a little salty, yet minor compared to the tantrum thrown by the director. Remember, nothing is harder than comedy.

Also born today: Roger Casement, the gay Irish rebel hanged by the Brits in 1916 and subject of Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa's fine new novel The Dream of the Celt [Kindle]; Emma Stebbins, sculptor of the Central Park landmark Angel of the Waters, which you know as Bethesda Fountain, and girlfriend of actress Charlotte Cushman; and Dave King, author of the 2005 indie hit novel The Ha-Ha [Kindle] and husband of Franklin Tartaglione.

Born August 21: Aubrey Beardsley

Was it his struggles with tuberculosis, from age nine to his death at twenty-five, that gave Aubrey Beardsley's Nouveau, pre-Raphaelite drawings their stylized touch of the morbid? At twenty he earned his first commission, to create 300 drawings for an edition of Morte d'Arthur. The following year, 1893, Oscar Wilde's publisher hired Beardsley to create the art for the print version of Salome, which very successfully shocked certain segments of society with its sexualized images. If you're picturing a glimpse of stocking, you don't know your Victorian porn: Beardsley's blatant x-rated gay drawings are as whimsical as they are erotic. Yet it was his public association with Wilde that got him fired from the influential arts journal The Yellow Book following the latter's infamous conviction for gross indecency in 1895. After lesser editorial jobs and more enduring book commissions, Beardsley left the increasingly inhospitable England for his health. In 1898 he died in France, as Wilde would two years later.

 

George Bellows at the National Gallery of Art

There's so much more to George Bellows' homoeroticism than those boxing paintings. Above is a detail from his 42 Kids, which is basically the first oil you see upon entering the excellent show at the National Gallery of Art in DC. Later you see his bathhouse sketch, which was a memorable part of Hide/Seek. Obviously, the married Bellows gravitated toward masculine venues, but beyond that I think a case can be made that he sought queer spaces even in his gorgeous depopulated landscapes of New York at its edge and its fringe. Probably it's just me and my jetlag, but doesn't his wife Emma look like she knows something? The exhibit stays up through October 8. If you can't go, get the catalog, whose cover says a lot.

 

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.