Band of Thebes

What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam

Today is the US release of gay expat Steven Amsterdam's first novel What the Family Needed [Kindle], which has already been longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Prieze and has earned an A from Entertainment Weekly, whose reviewer said, ""Remarkable ... at once magical and very normal, a wishful fantasy about the strength it can take to love one's family members well."

"What the Family Needed is a wonderful novel: imaginative, intelligent, empathetic. It's like a cross between The Corrections and The Slap, except without any of the gloom or rage and with the addition of something that may or may not be either a form of magic realism or simply that old staple of the literary art, metaphor."  -Sydney Morning Herald

"Every now and then, a novel arrives that conveys not only wisdom and understanding but also offers a dose of magic. Part fable, part dreamscape, part family drama, What the Family Needed can be read in several ways. Some of the delight is that nothing is lost in choosing one way over another; in fact, each reading contains all other possible readings." -Brisbane Courier Mail

"Amsterdam has a gift for switching reality about: in his sharp and engaging fiction, life seems ordinary but radically unsettling. It's not even clear what species of fiction we are dealing with... Exhilarating." -The Australian

In last year's Thebes' queer lit poll, Neel Mukherjee called it "a smart, magical (literally), wry mosaic of a novel about the bonds that constitute a family. His angle of vision is new and the resulting work witty, fresh and original."

Steven Amsterdam's book of linked stories, Things We Didn't See Coming [Kindle], was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won The Age's Book of the Year award.

A native New Yorker, Amsterdam has lived in Melbourne for 10 years. Tonight he reads at Three Lives.

Born February 17: Robert Dessaix, Fritz Krupp

Which book finally dislodged The Horse Whisperer from the #1 spot on Australia's bestseller lists? Basically its opposite: Robert Dessaix's Night Letters was a surprise sensation, an intellectual novel compromised of twenty letters written in a hotel in Venice in the mid-1990s by an Australian man newly diagnosed with HIV. Echoing literary travelers from Marco Polo and Dante to Casanova and Sterne, contemplating life, death, love, and the passage of time, the narrator R. discourses on cathedrals and museums, seduction and sex, hell and heaven, Venice and Venetians. Despite the character's dire future, critics hailed his "wry, chatty, surprisingly cheerful voice" (NYTBR) finding him "seductive, charming, and always thought-provoking" (Kirkus). The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "luminous gem" and the Cleveland Plain Dealer "a story exquisitely told." Dessaix's second novel, Corfu, also describes gay ex-pats in Europe and again rings with literary echoes: Homer, Sappho, Chekhov, Cavafy. His nonfiction includes a memoir called A Mother's Disgrace about his own adoption and subsequent wanderlust; Twilight of Love, a book about retracing Turgenev's steps as he followed a married opera star and her husband for years; and an anthology, Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing. In April 2011 he published On Humbug. Last August he published As I Was Saying: A Collection of Musings [Kindle]. After a failed marriage to a woman, Dessaix wrote a personal ad in 1982 and met Peter Timms, who is still his partner.As for longevity and dedication, Dessaix created a complex language when he was eleven and continues to speak it to himself even now, as he turns 69 today.

Heir to a 300 year-old dynasty and a newer steel, ammunitions, and weapons empire, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, known as Fritz, preferred marine biology but took over the family firm in 1887 when he was thirty-three. Also against his inclination, he married a woman. He spent as much time as he could in Capri, pursuing his first loves of oceanography and men. For the times when he had to be in Germany, he arranged for his favorite Italian youths to work at a luxury hotel in Berlin, where he often stayed for their service and where other guests complained about the noises coming from his inner sanctum. Accustomed to enormous power -- by the turn of the century he had built Krupp into the largest company in Europe -- he ignored others' objections. This may be why his wife was institutionalized. The media, however, could not be quelled forever. An Italian newspaper was preparing to print accounts of his famous island orgies, with photos. Vorwärts, the Social Democrats' magazine, beat them to it, outing the forty-eight year-old Fritz on November 15, 1902. Seven days later he killed himself. Emperor Wilhelm II blasted his political opponents and defended Fritz against the "slander," and his wife immediately "recovered" to continue raising their two daughters. The eldest inherited the firm which became a Nazi juggernaut. The dynasty endures as does fascination with them; someone filmed their story, including dandified Fritz flaunting his rough trade. Photos after the jump.

Naomi Watts in The Impossible 2

 

Of all Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's stories, director Anne Fontaine chose to film The Grandmothers,about two sexy moms who each start sleeping with the other's hot son. In the story, the affairs last from the time the lads are in their late teens to their 30s, when the moms finally break it off and the hurt young men never forgive them. Looks like the movie collapses time to a shorter span. For fun, imagine how the gay dad version of this "daring," "brave," "surprising love story" would be greeted by studios, stars, and critics.

The Australian movie starring Naomi Watts and Robin Wright Penn opens in France on April 3 under the title Perfect Mothers. It releases in the US with the title Two Mothers. In any language, the music is so awful you'll think it's a parody, a la the Samberg - Timberlake Mother Lover.

Born August 16: Dennis Altman, Wolfgang Tillmans

Forty-one years ago, way back in 1971, Australian gay rights pioneer Dennis Altman published his groundbreaking book Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. While teaching at the University of Sydney, La Trobe, and Harvard, he has continued to publish "savvy, energetic" work, including Gore Vidal's America, AIDS in the Mind of America, and Global Sex, about which PW said: "Altman is best when he... compares Bangkok's current reputation with Vienna's as "the global brothel" circa 1900; when he traces the dissemination of U.S. gay culture around the world; or when he discusses how Reagan and Thatcher used traditional "moral panics" to promote their agendas. Drawing upon a wide range of sources and cultural artifacts including Playboy, U.N. Development Programme reports, Sharon Stone's famous leg crossing in Basic Instinct, and La Cage aux Folles, as well as the theories of Freud, Herbert Marcuse, William Reich and Franz Fanon Altman ranges outside the usual boundaries of academic research."

Born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968, photog phenom Wolfgang Tillmans made it to England as an exchange student when he was fifteen in 1983, just in time for the queerish alt rock explosion led by Depeche Mode, the Smiths, the Cure. After stints in Hamburg, and a year in New York where he met his German partner Jochen Klein, they settled in London in 1995. Two years later Klein died of aids. Three years after that, in 2000, Tillmans became the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win the UK's prestigious Turner Prize. Two years later he filmed the video for Pet Shop Boys' "Home and Dry." In 2006, he opened Between Bridges gallery space in London to promote overlooked political art. But what's his own style? All over the map. New York mag tried to nail it last year: "A Tillmans has slackerlike beauty and nonchalance; a color sense that is more like that of a monochrome painter who works in large or otherwise unbroken fields; an accidental and uncontrived appearance; an attraction to the abstract and fragmented; and a sense of the photograph as an object that (usually unframed) occupies wall space more like a sheet than like a piece of art." Taschen has a three-volume, 556-page retrospective of his work.

Born July 28: Colin Higgins

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

Born July 2: Daniel Kowalski

Australian Daniel Kowalski won his first three Olympic medals in swimming (two bronze for 200m, 400m and a silver for 1500m) at the '96 Atlanta games two weeks after he turned 21. He won his first and only Olympic gold at the Sydney 2000 games for a relay event in which he did not swim in the finals (but medaled nonetheless because he swam in the qualifying rounds) when he was 25. Two years later chronic shoulder problems and a series of unsuccessful surgeries forced him to retire. What followed were "literally years of torment, denial and very, very dark times," not because he had failed to achieve his goal of solo golds but because he was suffocating in the closet. Eight years after retiring, Kowalski finally came out in this April 2010 essay in The Age. He is 37 today. Fellow Aussie Matthew Mitcham was already out at 20 when he won the gold for 10m platform diving with the highest single-dive score in Olympic history at the Beijing games in 2008. Many athletes say the stress of the closet keeps them from performing at their peak. Kowalski, now a coach, was inspired by Welsh rugby superstar Gareth Thomas who came out in December 2009.

Rory Stewart on Bruce Chatwin

Rory Stewart, who turned his solo walk across Afghanistan into the recent travel masterpiece The Places In Between [Kindle], has written the introduction to complicated closet case Bruce Chatwin's classic book blending fiction and nonfiction covering his (few) treks in the Outback and his (many) thoughts on Aboriginal culture, The Songlines. Much of the essay can be found at the NYRB blog:

"Today, however, Chatwin’s fictions seem more transparent. We may not be too surprised to discover the journeys with nomads for which he “quit his job,” and which John Lanchester admired, were brief interludes in a period more accurately described as Chatwin getting married and becoming an undergraduate at Edinburgh University. And the passages, suffused with symbolic and literary resonances, that once seemed most impressive, no longer seem the most satisfying. His personality, his learning, his myths, and even his prose, are less hypnotizing. And yet he remains a great writer, of deep and enduring importance.

"The magic of The Songlines lies for me today in the central section, which records what Chatwin observed on February 8, 9, and 10 in 1982 with Toly Sawenko in Ti-Tree, Stirling, and Osborne Bore. The account is precise, understated, beautifully written, and, in an important sense, truthful. Someone as mythically inclined as Chatwin must have been tempted to portray Aborigines either as tragic victims or noble savages. But in his first glimpse of an Aboriginal settlement, he immediately shows us that he is better than that—much better than that. This is not an idyllic grove..."

Both Stewart and Chatwin are champions of another gay, pioneering travel memoirist Robert Byron, whose marvelous The Road to Oxiana greatly influenced their own work.

At a formative age I loved Chatwin's novel On the Black Hill. Some literary types may be inclined to read the story of two Welsh brothers who share a bed for forty-two years as a more acceptable stand-in for the kind of domestic male-male relationship Chatwin could not bring himself to create.

Gay Lives by Robert Aldrich

Robert Aldrich, a professor of European history at the University of Sydney, has compiled eighty biographical sketches of LGBT people from ancient to modern times in his new book, Gay Lives, released stateside this week by Thames & Hudson. He told a local paper:

“It’s hard to talk about gay and lesbian history without covering the Christopher Isherwoods and the Harvey Milks and all of that, but once you move past that, it’s interesting to learn how there were people involved in same-sex activities in all walks of life – the book has a lesbian nun, a criminal, painters, explorers… I wanted to take a lot of less well-known figures from across continents and around the world to show diversity, because in many ways diversity is the theme of the book.”

The handsome, heavy book includes 56 color illustrations and 72 in black and white. 

Aldrich's previous book is Gay Life & Culture: A World History.

Born February 17: Friedrich Alfred Krupp, Robert Dessaix

Heir to a 300 year-old dynasty and a newer steel, ammunitions, and weapons empire, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, known as Fritz, preferred marine biology but took over the family firm in 1887 when he was thirty-three. Also against his inclination, he married a woman. He spent as much time as he could in Capri, pursuing his first loves of oceanography and men. For the times when he had to be in Germany, he arranged for his favorite Italian youths to work at a luxury hotel in Berlin, where he often stayed for their service and where other guests complained about the noises coming from his inner sanctum. Accustomed to enormous power -- by the turn of the century he had built Krupp into the largest company in Europe -- he ignored others' objections. This may be why his wife was institutionalized. The media, however, could not be quelled forever. An Italian newspaper was preparing to print accounts of his famous island orgies, with photos. Vorwärts, the Social Democrats' magazine, beat them to it, outing the forty-eight year-old Fritz on November 15, 1902. Seven days later he killed himself. Emperor Wilhelm II blasted his political opponents and defended Fritz against the "slander," and his wife immediately "recovered" to continue raising their two daughters. The eldest inherited the firm which became a Nazi juggernaut. The dynasty endures as does fascination with them; someone filmed their story, including dandified Fritz flaunting his rough trade. Photos after the jump.

Which book finally dislodged The Horse Whisperer from the #1 spot on Australia's bestseller lists? Basically its opposite: Robert Dessaix's Night Letters was a surprise sensation, an intellectual novel compromised of twenty letters written in a hotel in Venice in the mid-1990s by an Australian man newly diagnosed with HIV. Echoing literary travelers from Marco Polo and Dante to Casanova and Sterne, contemplating life, death, love, and the passage of time, the narrator R. discourses on cathedrals and museums, seduction and sex, hell and heaven, Venice and Venetians. Despite the character's dire future, critics hailed his "wry, chatty, surprisingly cheerful voice" (NYTBR) finding him "seductive, charming, and always thought-provoking" (Kirkus). The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "luminous gem" and the Cleveland Plain Dealer "a story exquisitely told." Dessaix's second novel, Corfu, also describes gay ex-pats in Europe and again rings with literary echoes: Homer, Sappho, Chekhov, Cavafy. His nonfiction includes a memoir called A Mother's Disgrace about his own adoption and subsequent wanderlust; Twilight of Love, a book about retracing Turgenev's steps as he followed a married opera star and her husband for years; and an anthology, Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing. Last April he published On Humbug. After a failed marriage to a woman, Dessaix wrote a personal ad in 1982 and met Peter Timms, who is still his partner. As for longevity and dedication, Dessaix created a complex language when he was eleven and continues to speak it to himself even now, as he turns 68 today.

That Awesome Aussie Ad for Gay Marriage

Warning: You might cry. He writes in pen in a hardcover book.

After 33 Years, Sydney Degays Mardi Gras

Two facts: The Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras is among the most-watched televised events in Australia each year and as a condition of sponsorship all corporations had to give an explicit statement of support for the LGBT community. Last week, the mardi gras board removed Gay and Lesbian from the event's name. A furious former SG&LMG president Richard Cobden told Same Same:

“This morning’s Sydney Morning Herald front page sums it up: Mardi Gras goes straight.

“Neither the organisation, and especially not this Board or staff, had any permission or mandate to make Mardi Gras straight. Peter Urmson says ‘this is our gift to the city’. It was not his to give.”

“For 20-plus years we have been able to force the mainstream media to call it the GAY AND LESBIAN MARDI GRAS. They had to say the words. For a long time they did not want to but we made them. That has been thrown away.”

“Even major sponsors had to do that [give a message of queer support]. How can the organisation possibly ask for that now when they themselves have dropped an explicit gay and lesbian message?

“Finally, sponsors had to use the words ‘gay and lesbian’ when associating themselves with Mardi Gras. Making them do so was a powerful force for liberation. Now they don’t have to use those words. Easier for marketing people to get sponsorship dollars and keep their jobs; a big step backwards for gay and lesbian rights.”

The men responsible for putting the name back in the closet use inclusivity as their excuse, saying they want to emphasize that Mardi Gras is for everyone.

Born August 16: Dennis Altman, Wolfgang Tillmans

Forty years ago, way back in 1971, Australian gay rights pioneer Dennis Altman published his groundbreaking book Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. While teaching at the University of Sydney, La Trobe, and Harvard, he has continued to publish "savvy, energetic" work, including Gore Vidal's America, AIDS in the Mind of America, and Global Sex, about which PW said: "Altman is best when he... compares Bangkok's current reputation with Vienna's as "the global brothel" circa 1900; when he traces the dissemination of U.S. gay culture around the world; or when he discusses how Reagan and Thatcher used traditional "moral panics" to promote their agendas. Drawing upon a wide range of sources and cultural artifacts including Playboy, U.N. Development Programme reports, Sharon Stone's famous leg crossing in Basic Instinct, and La Cage aux Folles, as well as the theories of Freud, Herbert Marcuse, William Reich and Franz Fanon Altman ranges outside the usual boundaries of academic research."

Born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968, photog phenom Wolfgang Tillmans made it to England as an exchange student when he was fifteen in 1983, just in time for the queerish alt rock explosion led by Depeche Mode, the Smiths, the Cure. After stints in Hamburg, and a year in New York where he met his German partner Jochen Klein, they settled in London in 1995. Two years later Klein died of aids. Three years after that, in 2000, Tillmans became the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win the UK's prestigious Turner Prize. Two years later he filmed the video for Pet Shop Boys' "Home and Dry." In 2006, he opened Between Bridges gallery space in London to promote overlooked political art. But what's his own style? All over the map. New York mag tried to nail it last year: "A Tillmans has slackerlike beauty and nonchalance; a color sense that is more like that of a monochrome painter who works in large or otherwise unbroken fields; an accidental and uncontrived appearance; an attraction to the abstract and fragmented; and a sense of the photograph as an object that (usually unframed) occupies wall space more like a sheet than like a piece of art." Hang on till next March, when Taschen will release a three-volume, 556-page retrospective of his work.

 

Four Australian Writers Debate Queer Literature

Sophie Cunningham moderates a panel of Benjamin Law, Fiona McGregor, and William Yang discussing the usual issues -- labels, semantics, ghettoization, gender issues, generation gaps, and the "death knell" of queer books -- all done with charming Aussie accents. Fiona says, "Sex is at the heart of any decent writer, going back to Sappho and Homer."

It's part of the Big Gay Week at Melbourne's leading literary spot, the Wheeler Centre. Other videos feature coming out stories and a lecture by Helen Razer arguing against funding gay art which she says is “as desperately needed as promoting white men in politics.”

Sydney's Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras 2011

Sydney's Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras isn't on Mardi Gras, and isn't just gay and lesbian lifeguards running the streets in speedos, or gay and lesbian surfers strolling the streets showing off their longboards. The event began two weeks ago with a day called Queer Thinking, which featured an exhibit of old gay photos, new gay authors, a lecture by Judith Halberstam, a panel on race and sex, a lecture by Peter Tatchell, and a discussion by Lauren Berlant about Scott Heim's Mysterious Skin [[Kindle]] and a "cultural style of underperformed emotion that's post-melodramatic." Other nights offered a performance by Lily Tomlin and a reading at the opera house by Armistead Maupin. Below, the gay waterpolo team from the parade on Saturday night.

Born February 15-17: Bill T. Jones, Robert Dessaix

The cruel vagaries of aids: In 1984, both Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, professional partners running their jointly named dance troupe and boyfriends for thirteen years, since college at SUNY Binghamton, were diagnosed with HIV. Zane died in 1988; last June, after twenty-six years of being HIV+, Jones added another Tony Award (for the smash hit Fela!, which he co-created, directed, and choreographed) to his many, many honors including a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1994 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2010. His more than one hundred maverick dance pieces, which frequently incorporate same-sex attraction, eroticism, anger, and nudity, have been seen worldwide and he often collaborates with the era's leading artists, from Toni Morrison and Max Roach on Degga to Jessye Norman for How! Do! We! Do! Confronting the perceived death sentence of aids, he traveled the country interviewing many kinds of terminally ill patients before creating his celebration of living, Still/Here, which many have loved and some have hated, like the New Yorker's former dance critic Arlene Croce, who refused to see "victim art." In 1995, Jones published his autobiography Last Night on Earth, happily misnamed. (photo: Lois Greenfield)

 

Which book finally dislodged The Horse Whisperer from the #1 spot on Australia's bestseller lists? Basically its opposite: Robert Dessaix's Night Letters was a surprise sensation, an intellectual novel compromised of twenty letters written in a hotel in Venice in the mid-1990s by an Australian man newly diagnosed with HIV. Echoing literary travelers from Marco Polo and Dante to Casanova and Sterne, contemplating life, death, love, and the passage of time, the narrator R. discourses on cathedrals and museums, seduction and sex, hell and heaven, Venice and Venetians. Despite the character's dire future, critics hailed his "wry, chatty, surprisingly cheerful voice" (NYTBR) finding him "seductive, charming, and always thought-provoking" (Kirkus). The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "luminous gem" and the Cleveland Plain Dealer "a story exquisitely told." Dessaix's second novel, Corfu, also describes gay ex-pats in Europe and again rings with literary echoes: Homer, Sappho, Chekhov, Cavafy. His nonfiction includes a memoir called A Mother's Disgrace about his own adoption and subsequent wanderlust; Twilight of Love, a book about retracing Turgenev's steps as he followed a married opera star and her husband for years; and an anthology, Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing. Last April he published On Humbug. After a failed marriage to a woman, Dessaix wrote a personal ad in 1982 and met Peter Timms, who is still his partner. As for longevity and dedication, Dessaix created a complex language when he was eleven and continues to speak it to himself even now, as he turns 67 today.

Born January 31: Portia De Rossi

What do you do if you're a fifteen year old lesbian named Amanda Rogers who feels destined for something bigger than a suburb a Geelong, Victoria, Australia? It's 1988, you love Shakespeare, you romanticize Italy, you tell your parents Amanda is history and you're legally changing your name to Portia. Not only that, Mr. & Mrs. Rogers suddenly have a high school daughter whose last name is de Rossi. Just because you felt like it. Well, Geelong can't hold you back, and the University of Melbourne Law School can't keep your interest. You land a part in the Australian movie Sirens, then you go Hollywood and appear in Scream 2. Your giant break comes in 1998 when you get the role of lawyer Nelle Porter on Ally McBeal, which you'll play through its end in 2002, without any noticeable difference when your castmates and family learn you're lesbian by seeing tabloid pictures of you and your girlfriend, singer Francesca Gregorini. (Possibly it's connected to your Italian craze because she really was born Countess Francesca McKnight Donatella Romana Gregorini di Savignano di Romagna, daughter of Bond girl Barbara Bach and stepdaughter of Ringo Starr.) After Ally McBeal you star in Arrested Development for three seasons, and by now the whole world has noticed your good looks: You've ranked on the Sexiest Women lists from Maxim, Blender, Stuff and Femme Fatales, then People includes you in their Most Beautiful list. Also by now you've left your Italian for an all-American named Ellen. You've come out. The two of you are named one of TV Guide's A-list Power Couples. You get married when you can, a couple months before Prop 8, and you make this video of the happy day. Your memoir of earlier misery, Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain about your eating disorder, is a NYT bestseller.

Gay Bookshelf: Celebrity Edition, Portia, Ricky, Sal

 

Portia De Rossi's memoir Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain [Kindle] is about her anorexia, which she calls "my first love." Although they are mentioned in its pages, the book is not about coming out as a lesbian and finding her later love, Ellen. Apparently fear of coming out / being outed contributed to her overwhelming anxiety, which she battled through dangerous dieting to feel in control. Two early fans are Jonathan Safran Foer (“Breathtakingly honest, brutal and beautiful.”) and Augusten Burroughs (“Possibly the best book on the subject ever written”).

Ricky Martin is not your biggest problem. Generalizing, it does seem harder for superstars to come out in Latin America than in England, and undoubtedly he's helped those still struggling with the closet by saying he's gay (this past March, via Twitter), however overdue. Yet he is remarkably unhelpful in saying he felt Barbara Walters was "beating me up" by asking in 2005 why he didn't put an end to the gay rumors by stating either, Yes, I am, or No, I'm not. Journalism is already catastrophically timid (go see Fair Game), the last thing we need is another famous voice denouncing the media for asking honest, relevant questions. If he thinks journalists should pose only questions that the interviewee likes, he's Sarah Palin on Fox. Every fifth grader knows the pact with the devil for megastardom is total loss of privacy. His memoir, Me [Kindle], also discusses his poor childhood, his early success joining Menudo at twelve, his local solo career, his starring roles in telenovas, his global takeover with his first American CD, his first gay love, the birth of his twin sons, and the iron walls of the entertainment industry closet. (To his semi-credit, he did not lie to Barbara Walters. He said, his voice rising through a panicked grimace, "I just don't feel like answering that." Probably his most honest words on the subject.)

Michael Gregg Michaud's Sal Mineo: A Biography [Kindle] looks at the short, closeted, tragic life of the actor who never got over being the boy with the crush on James Dean, for which he earned an Oscar nomination. According to pre-pub reviews, "Especially revealing are the intimate insights of Mineo' s fiancée, Jill Haworth, and his male lover Courtney Burr." He was murdered in a West Hollywood alley at 37 with a single stab wound, either by a robber or a trick.

Born July 2: Daniel Kowalski

Australian Daniel Kowalski won his first Olympic medals in swimming (two bronze for 200m, 400m and a silver for 1500m) at the '96 Atlanta games two weeks after he turned 21. He won his first and only Olympic gold at the Sydney 2000 games for a relay event in which he did not swim in the finals (but medaled nonetheless because he swam in the qualifying rounds) when he was 25. Two years later chronic shoulder problems and a series of unsuccessful surgeries forced him to retire. What followed were "literally years of torment, denial and very, very dark times," not because he had failed to achieve his goal of solo golds but because he was suffocating in the closet. A decade after his last Olympics, eight years after retiring, Kowalski finally came out three months ago in this April 2010 essay in The Age. He is 35 today. Fellow Aussie Matthew Mitcham (of the adorable double-handed wave) was already out at 20 when he won the gold for 10m platform diving with the highest single-dive score in Olympic history at the Beijing games in 2008. Many athletes say the stress of the closet keeps them from performing at their peak. Kowalski was inspired by current Welsh rugby superstar Gareth Thomas who came out last December at 35 and continues to rule the field. Kowalski coaches swimming now and has 2,100 followers on Twitter.

The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas Finally Out in U.S.

Indie film lovers know Christos Tsiolkas through the surprise hit Head On, an explicit movie about a restless gay Greek guy living in Melbourne. Adventurous readers know him for his autobiographical novel upon which that movie was based, Loaded, and for 2005's award winning novel Dead Europe.

Last week, Penguin published as a paperback original Tsiolkas's 2008 novel, The Slap, one of Australia's most lauded books of recent years. It won the Commonwealth Prize, the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal, the Nielsen Booksellers' Choice Award, the Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction, and was a finalist for last year's Miles Franklin Award (won by Tim Winton's Breath).

Exploring the reverberations of a man's hitting someone else's ill-behaved child who was threatening his own son at a neighborhood barbecue, the book shifts third-person points of view through eight witnesses, four women and four men, ranging from a gay high school student to the slapper's 71 year-old uncle. According to PW, the many viewpoints show "generational and philosophical differences regarding family life and the complex political, social, and ethnic milieu of contemporary Australia."

As you can see on the jacket, Colm Toibin praises the novel's "immense power and scope" comparing it to The Corrections and Underworld. Critics too have loved the book if not all of the rough edged Aussie characters.

The Washington Post: "But finally the novel transcends both suburban Melbourne and the Australian continent, leaving us exhausted but gasping with admiration."

Library Journal: "While there is not a lot to admire about most of the players in this exceptionally well-written story, their intertwined lives and slowly revealed connections make for a singular reading experience."

Booklist: "Tsiolkas’ in-your-face style is sure to alienate some readers—the child’s parents, for example, are among the book’s most unlikable characters—but his novel fairly radiates with vitality as it depicts the messy complications of family life."

Buy The Slap.

New Gay Magazine Launches: Out There

If you were launching a new glossy magazine for the discerning international gay man, would your four areas of content be: Features, Spotlight, Travel, and Style? That's how they roll at the just released Out There, with their cover story on Alan Cumming, interviews with Peter Tatchell and (straight?) actor Michael Fassbender, as well as quickies with photographers Markus Bollingmo and Eiki Mori, singer Ezra Axelrod, and novelist Paul Burston. It costs £10 an issue (twice yearly, for now) and competes with Attitude, Britain's bestselling gay mag, which costs £3.50.

Until proven otherwise, the world's best lifestyle magazine for les gays is the French Têtu, which manages to be smart without stridency and sexy without pandering. The magazine began after Gai Pied failed and is "directed" by Pierre Bergé, YSL's longtime partner. They are generous with their free online content, far beyond the culturally significant slideshows of their cover models. Recently they ran a short piece and fifteen photos of Australian rugby players' campaign for diversity acceptance, memorably translated as «footy contre l'homophobie.»