Band of Thebes

Born May 21: Liz Feldman, Raymond Burr

Comic Liz Feldman has shared in four daytime Emmy wins for Ellen's talk show but many lesbians love her best for her own no-budget web broadcasts from her kitchen table, This Just Out. The delightful amateurism has entinced big indie stars like Tegan and the ladies of the L Word to be interviewed with goofy, earnest questions. No surprise, her manner is several parts Ellen, along with some Michael Cera, a little Rachel Maddow, and a snatch of Sarah Silverman. The internets hasn't seen much of Liz lately because after a stint with Leno, she's gone from success to success: writer-producer on Hot in Cleveland and writer-supervising producer on 2 Broke Girls. Last year she proposed to singer-songwriter Rachael Cantu, who accepted. 

It wouldn't take Perry Mason to figure out Raymond Burr was "acting" when he invented heterosexual details about his life in order to hide his gay relationships. His alleged first wife, "Annette Sutherland," was supposedly a British actress who died in the plane crash that killed Leslie Howard, but, as you've already guessed, British Equity has no record of an actress with that name and the fatal plane had only three women on it, all of them otherwise accounted for. Later Burr claimed to have had a son who died at ten of an incurable disease, possibly leukemia, and he even said he took a year off to travel the country with him as his dying wish. Yet his publicist at the time said Burr was working steadily that entire year, 1953, and that Burr "never mentioned any wife or son." However, one short-lived marriage can be documented.

Happily, Burr did have a very long relationship with fellow actor Robert Benevides. They met on the set of Perry Mason, together bought an island in Fiji where their passion for orchids eventually became a business back in California, sold their Fiji land in 1983, and spent their time on their farm in Sonoma, where they later started a vineyard. Among his many movie roles, his menacing turn as the killer in Rear Window came three years before his beloved television series Perry Mason which ran for 271 episodes from 1957 to 1966, and remained so popular it was later revived in 26 tv movies. Burr's next series, Ironside, ran for 195 episodes from 1967 to 1975 and it too spawned a tv movie comeback in 1993, the year Burr died of cancer. One of his nieces fought with Benevides over Burr's vast estate, questioning his right to it. They were together thirty-one years. Read Michael Starr's Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr.

Born May 19: Daniel Guérin

Born in 1904, the upper class Parisian Daniel Guérin became an ardent leftist and socialist in part by having sex with tough guys. He said, "It was there, in bed with them, that I discovered the working class, far more than through Marxist tracts." In the 1930s he became a political and union organizer after hating the colonialism he saw during his travels in Southeast Asia and the Mid-East. In the late 1940s he lived in the United States and was appalled by the treatment of black Americans and, back in France, he fully supported the Algerian drive for independence. Of his many books best known is Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, published in 1965, with later editions carrying an introduction by Noam Chomsky. He did not begin his activism on behalf of gay rights until the 1970s, especially as part of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire [FHAR], a group from which he later broke. People discouraged by today's apolitical comsumerist gays may do well to remember that a quarter-century ago Guérin was disgusted by the apolitical hedonist gays whose "superficial pursuit of pleasure" was "a million miles from any conception of class struggle." Which is not to say he became anti-sex in his later years. His last significant relationship was with a man sixty years his junior. He died at eighty-three in 1988.

Born May 15: Barbara Hammer

Just since 2009 when she turned 70, pioneering queer filmmaker Barbara Hammer has had a retrospective of her work at MoMA in New York, the Tate in London, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris; her short called "A Horse Is Not a Metaphor" won a Teddy at the Berlinale; her brilliant and inspiring book Hammer!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life [Kindle] won a Publishing Triangle Award, won a Lammy, and was a favorite on Thebes' queer lit poll; and this year she won a Guggenheim. All deserved, and all infinitely more gratifying when you remember she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2006. Her decades of creating dozens of experimental work to record queer lives (Dyketactics, A Gay Day, Superdyke Meets Madam X, etc.) reached a new high in 1992 with her first feature documentary Nitrate Kisses, acclaimed at Sundance, festivals worldwide, and at the Whitney Biennial. She says, “I choose film and video to make the invisible visible. I am compelled to reveal and celebrate queer and other people whose stories have not been told. I make a multi-level cinema that engages audiences viscerally and emboldens them intellectually. My current work has turned towards recovering missing histories of lesbian artists and is inspired by the words of Gayatri Spivak who cautions against an uncritical archivism leading to nostalgia.” The MoMA curator wrote:

... she came out as a lesbian, an act that helped radicalize her approach to directing. Galvanized by the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, she soon became a pioneer of queer cinema. Hammer has since directed more than eighty films, using avant-garde strategies to explore lesbian and gay sexuality, identity, and history, along with other heretofore unrepresented voices. In the 1970s her films dealt with the representation of taboo subjects through performance, and in the 1980s she began using an optical printer to make films that explore perception. In the 1990s she began making documentaries about hidden aspects of queer history.

Barbara was born in Hollywood, graduated from UCLA, and earned two masters degrees at SFSU. She has lived in New York City for many years and still teaches each summer at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Born May 14: Magnus Hirschfeld

The next time people claim the gay rights movement is a recent invention or that you’re anachronistically imposing a modern concept on a pre-Stonewall era that could not possibly have supported the idea, remind them of Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1896, he wrote and published a pamphlet on homosexual love called Sappho and Socrates. In 1897 with the leaders of the gay journal Der Eigene, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose motto was “Justice through science.” Their first goal was to overturn the notorious 1871 German law Paragraph 175, criminalizing male homosexuality. Not only did they campaign openly and publicly, they urged prominent people to sign their petition to repeal the law. Among the 5,000 signatories were Einstein, Tolstoy, Mann, Hesse, and Rilke. When the bill to repeal came before the Reichstag in 1898, it failed, and, infuriated by their hypocrisy, Hirschfeld contemplated outing various members of parliament who had voted against it. Undaunted by the defeat, the committee continued to get the bill reintroduced repeatedly over the next decades. 
        Thirty-four years before Kinsey, Hirschfeld collected detailed information about sexual behavior in surveys from 10,000 people and published the results in his 1914 book Homosexuality in Men and Women. Extending his push for gay rights into other media, in 1919 Hirschfeld wrote and acted in a movie called Different from the Others starring Conrad Veidt, whose character comes out to thwart his extortionist gay ex-lover but then loses his job and kills himself. That same year, the government gave Hirschfeld a former royal palace in Berlin to house his Institute for Sexual Research, which offered medical and psychological consultations, marriage counseling, contraception, sex education, and promoted women’s emancipation and rights for gay and transgender people. The institute’s ongoing success inevitably drew the attention of the Nazis. One of the Nazis' early actions, on May 6, 1933, was to ransack the archives and confiscate names and addresses. On May 10, the Nazis returned to hold a massive book burning in Opernplatz on Unter den Linden, destroying the invaluable collection of 20,000 volumes and 5,000 images depicting “deviants” and ideas that were “un-German.” Hirschfeld was on a lecture tour of the United States and never returned home. In Nice in 1935, on his sixty-seventh birthday, he had a heart attack and died, survived by his partner, colleague, former student, and heir, Li Shiu Tong, who lived until 1993.

Born May 13: Armistead Maupin, Bruce Chatwin, Rupert Smith, Alan Ball

Growing up in a prominent conservative Southern family in North Carolina, Armistead Maupin always knew he was gay yet his natural reserve kept him from acting on those feelings until after college, after serving in the Navy, when he was twenty-six. He came out the year he turned thirty. Good thing, because 1974 is also when he began publishing his panoramic observations about San Francisco and its pansexual inhabitants in the Marin paper, The Pacific Sun. In hindsight the next steps look obvious -- move the column to the Chronicle in 1976, morph them into a novel called Tales of the City in 1978, repeat, repeat, and achieve literary renown as the creator of one of the most cherished character driven book series of the century. The film adaptations in the early 90s starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis were widely praised and greatly loved, and, inevitably, vociferously attacked by conservatives, especially because the first film was shown on PBS. Several state legislatures in the South officially condemned the series. No surprise, the frightened suits at PBS ignored the record breaking ratings and awards, instead opting to cancel the sequel. Enter Showtime, which produced the next two adaptations and earned a total of six additional Emmy nominations. Maupin's bravery in print was matched in action, fighting aids and for gay rights. Author of three other novels (Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener, Michael Tolliver Lives), he has written the screenplays for four adaptations of his work and wrote the excellent narration for The Celluloid Closet. After a twelve-year relationship with Terry Anderson, Maupin met and is now married to Christopher Turner. Last year they left their beloved San Francisco and moved to Santa Fe, where he is working on a new novel. (photo by sfleo67)

A contemporary heir to Patrick Leigh Fermor's genius in travel writing, Bruce Chatwin's literary talent was matched by his personal panache. So brilliant, so handsome, so acclaimed, so willing to buck British convention, yet so tormented by his own prejudices. Unable to accept that he was gay, he married a woman, Elizabeth Chanler, in 1965, when he was twenty-five, and exclusively pursued men throughout their fifteen years of marriage. (She didn't mind, although she did ask for a separation in 1980.)

Chatwin's reflex for making up cover stories appears to have extended into his nonfiction. The local people of his marvelous travel books like In Patagoniaand The Songlines disputed the accuracy of some of his writing, claiming he embellished or created characters and conversations described as fact. Many episodes in those essays only make sense if you realize he is sleeping with the men he meets. Although there's nothing outright gay in his much loved first novel On the Black Hill, it concerns two long-time bachelor brothers who sleep in the same bed for decades. Even when he was dying at forty-eight in 1989, he remained so closeted he said he had a rare, fatal blood disease contracted in China from a bat bite, rather than say he had aids. One of his lovers was Jasper Conran; Chatwin died in the South of France in a house owned by Jasper's mother, Shirley Conran, and his ashes were scattered near Leigh Fermor's home in the Peleponnese.

Rupert Smith's output is so big and versatile he needs three names to cover it. His own literary fiction includes most recently the award-winning Man's World which follows two storylines of gay Londoners decades apart, both revolving around a trio of similar types made memorable by individual quirks: a quieter man whose best friend is screamingly camp and whose off-again-on-again lover is a hot bloke with serious self-acceptance issues. As in The Swimming-Pool Library, the historical characters (and the old men they become) are more interesting than the funnier but shallower contemporary club denizens. Rupert James is his name for swift, swirly commercial Jackie Collins-ish fiction like Silk and Step Sisters. And James Lear delivers gay erotica in clever settings with actual wit: a country house whodunit (The Back Passage), a murder on a long journey aboard the legendary train The Flying Scotsman (The Secret Tunnel), a Civil War romance between a spoiled white heir and a runaway slave (Hot Valley), and a Robert Louis Stevenson-style romp through Scotland in the 1750s (The Low Road). A brand new James Lear book comes at you next month. Generously, Rupert has posted on his site a list of his 101 favorite novels with a wonderfully opinionated paragraph about each. At #17 is Arnold Bennett's 1908 classic The Old Wives' Tale.

Could a plastic bag caught in the wind on a lower Manhattan street change your life? Alan Ball watched one float for ten minutes and made it a hallmark of his first movie script, American Beauty, which won five Oscars including best picture, best director, best actor, and his own best screenplay. He parlayed that success into writing and directing his gay-positive mortuary series Six Feet Under, for which he earned an Emmy, a DGA, and a PGA. It lasted five seasons and won a total of 46 awards. Ball returned to feature films in 2007 with Towelhead, and continued his partnership with HBO with the supremely sexy, bloody, metaphorical, vampires as minorities ("God Hates Fangs"), Emmy-winning True Blood that launches its sixth season next month. Ball and his partner live next door to another Oscar winning writer-director, Quentin Tarantino, who sued Alan in March 2011 over the "obnoxious pterodactyl-like screams" of their exotic bird aviary. 

Born May 9: Alan Bennett

Much of Alan Bennett’s career as a playwright, screenwriter, author and actor been devoted to wry or gently comic emotional cripples, inhabiting worlds where happiness is as suspect (very) as it is unlikely (highly) and where unrequited love is a redundancy. His best known works are the adaptation of Prick Up Your Ears (gay playwright Joe Orton murdered by his lover), An Englishman Abroad (gay traitor Guy Burgess), The Madness of George III (crazy king), A Question of Attribution (another gay traitor, Anthony Blunt), and of course The History Boys. In 2011 reader Gary reminded me about Bennett's highly successful series of humorous and touching monologues, Talking Heads, which can be seen online. (Lovingly spoofed by Stephen Fry in drag.) The son of a Northern butcher, Bennett was accepted at Cambridge but, following a boy who didn’t like him, switched to Oxford where he took a first in history and, in 1960, joined Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller to appear in the instantly famous comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. He also performed in The Secret Policeman’s Ball and The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. Although he has been with his current partner, Rupert Thomas, for nearly 20 years, only recently has he felt comfortable discussing his gay life. And he's begun to create unqualified delights, such as the one even Michiko called “a completely charming entertainment: a small gem,” his novella The Clothes They Stood Up In, about a middle-aged married couple who return from the theatre to discover their flat has been robbed of absolutely everything, down to their last thumbtack and thimble. His hugely praised novella The Uncommon Reader, about the Queen's newfound love of literature thanks to a gay teenager, is a slender perfection. Since then he's published a memoir about his parents, A Life Like Other People's, and a pair of gay-inclusive tales in a short book wittily titled Smut [Kindle]. The same week that the British Library paid half a million pounds for Ted Hughes' papers, Bennett announced he is donating all his papers -- including decades of diaries and unpublished manuscripts -- to Oxford's Bodleian Library, in gratitude for his state scholarship. 

Born May 7: Tchaikovsky

Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, Symphonies 4, 5, and 6 — what would the world listen to without Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Unfortunately, his private life was less sublime than his music. At 37, although he knew he loved men, he agreed to marry a female fan, Antonina Miliukova. Within two weeks of their wedding he tried to kill himself, hoping to catch pneumonia by soaking himself in the Moscow River. At the urging of his doctor, he fled to St. Petersburg and never saw his wife again, although he continued to support her. (The cost of the closet can be seen all around him: Miliukova had several children by other men, gave each infant to an orphanage and spent her final twenty-one years in a home for the certifiably insane. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was also gay, and he too made an unhappy marriage.) Tchaikovsky enjoyed great renown during his lifetime and among his countless honors two days before he turned 51, he was the conductor at the opening night of Carnegie Hall. When he died at 53, sixty thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral, which for only the third time in Russian history was paid for by the Tsar.

Born May 5: Del Martin

Del Martin died in August 2008 at 87, widowing a wife with whom she spent 55 years championing the rights of the denigrated and disenfranchised. In 1955, when homosexuality was illegal, she, her life partner Phyllis Lyon, and six other lesbians founded the Daughters of Bilitis in her native San Francisco. By 1960 DOB chapters were active in nine cities nationwide and their magazine, The Ladder, was thriving despite most readers' need for secrecy. Even in friendly waters, they had to fight the tides against lesbians, both among straight women in NOW and gay men in the queer equality movement. Martin addressed the latter situation in her landmark article, "Goodbye, My Alienated Brothers," which appeared in the Advocate in 1970. Two years later, she and Lyon were instrumental in forming the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, and they published their seminal book Lesbian/Woman. In 1979 they were honored by a group of medical professionals who wanted to start a clinic for lesbians who lacked health care, and they chose the name Lyon-Martin Health Services. In 1995 they were named separately as delegates to the White House Conference on Aging. Ever the trailblazers, Martin [above right, left left] and Lyon were the very first gay couple to be married in San Francisco in February 2004. If there is anything good about her death, it's that she did not have to see Prop 8 pass three months later. Click here to watch them describes the early hurdles they faced in forming and growing DOB during a time when they could not advertise their existence.

 

Born May 2: Howard Cruse

In 2011 Rizzoli published Howard Cruse's 80's comic strip The Complete Wendel with an introduction by Alison Bechdel who said, "It's a little shocking to me as I re-read Wendel from this vantage point to see the extent to which my own cartoon characters took their cues from Howard's." Bechdel also praises Cruse's professional coming out in a hostile time with the path-breaking annual anthology Gay Comix and his Wendel strip, "a radical act that both paved the way and set the bar for successive generations of queer cartoonists." Born and raised in Springville, Alabama in 1944, Cruse didn't get to New York until 1977, where two years later he met his husband Eddie Sedarbaum. In 2003 they said goodbye to all that and moved to North Adams, Massachusetts. In 1995, a few years after Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer for Maus, Cruse published Stuck Rubber Baby a graphic novel about his growing up and coming out to himself in the South of the 1960s. The book has won the top graphics prizes in the US (the Eisner and Harvey awards), as well as similar honors in the UK (Comics Creators award), Germany (Luchs award), Spain, and France. Needless to say, when The Comics Journal compiled their list of the 100 Best Comics of the Century, they included Stuck Rubber Baby, ranking it five spots above Alan Moore's Watchmen. Last July he released uncollected work in The Other Sides of Howard Cruse. Today, he's 69.

Born April 25: Andy Bell

After co-founding and leaving Depeche Mode, after co-founding Yaz and leaving Alison Moyet, Vince Clarke advertised in Melody Maker for a singer for his new duo and plucked a gay meatpacker (literally) born in Dogsthorpe. With his high voice, high energy, and high style, Andy Bell put the disco in Erasure's discography: Who Needs Love Like That, Oh, L'amour, Sometimes, It Doesn't Have To Be, Victim of Love, Chains of Love, and A Little Respect, among many other singles that have, since 1985, propelled them to record sales of 25 million worldwide. Openly out while others cowered, Andy appeared on many gay charity albums like Red Hot + Blue, events like Red Hot + Dance, the True Colors Tour, the No H8 photo campaign, and he's headlining St Louis Pride in June. Though the Brit lives in Spain, the day of the US Supreme Court's DOMA hearing, he tweeted the video of A Little Respect. Middling interest in Erasure's recent albums of 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2011, have led to... a Christmas album coming in November. Andy is 49 today. His partner of 25+ years, Paul Hickey, died at 62 last April.

Born April 24: Patty Schemel

You think Courtney was the only complicated chick in Hole? Drummer Patty Schemel refused to take part in the March 1994 intervention to get Kurt off drugs because she was addicted to heroin and didn't want to be hypocrite. (Patty had been Kurt's first choice to replace Nirvana's original drummer Chad Channing, until Kurt heard Dave Grohl's audition, when she was bumped to second choice.) Famously, she split from Hole before their recording of Celebrity Skin -- maybe because of the drugs, maybe because the producer wanted her gone -- but she still appears on the album cover because she co-wrote many of the songs, even though she doesn't perform them. She was supposed to be in the video for the first single, but didn't show up. That break didn't end her relationship with Courtney. Later they formed the short-lived band Bastard, and she co-wrote and performed song's on Courtney's solo album America's Sweetheart. Patty lives with her wife Christina Soletti and their daughter in Los Angeles.

Patty is the subject of the documentary Hit So Hard, which features interviews with all four Hole members. Its premiere at New Directors New Films got them all in same room together for the first time in thirteen years. Director David Ebersole's next doc is about Cher's mom, Georgia Holt, which premieres on Lifetime next week, May 6.

Born April 22: John Waters

The oddball joy of his movies extends to real life: Last May, at 66, John Waters hitchhiked alone from Baltimore to San Francisco. Fifteen rides with total strangers took him eight days, and he says of his drivers, “Pot smokers, cops, I got everybody. And everybody was lovely.” An exercise in giving up control from his over-scheduled life, the trip will be the heart of his next book, tentatively titled Carsick. He explains, "The first half is a little novella. I imagine the 15 best rides that could ever happen, and I did the 15 worst rides that could ever happen."

His trashy yet sweet movies are part of the permanent collection at MoMA, but beyond the films John Waters has written four books, published three volumes of photographs, and his artwork has been shown in many museums and galleries internationally. As for the movies, he's made sixteen, with his best work clustered from 1972 to 1988: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, Polyester and Hairspray starring the incomparable Divine [also pictured] who was his special ally since their shared childhood in Maryland. Johnny Depp fans might insist on including 1990's Cry Baby, but the four movies since then seem like lesser efforts, or at least they are more mainstream. His children's Christmas movie starring Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey, endearingly titled Fruitcake, has been canceled, as has the sequel New Line convinced Waters to write, Hairspray 2: White Lipstick, imagining Tracy in the late 60s during the British Invasion and Vietnam. His wonderful memoir Role Models was the best LGBT book of 2010 according to Bill Clegg and Sebastian Stuart.

Born April 17: Chavela Vargas

A late bloomer, perhaps, but what an extraordinary flower -- Mexican singer Chevela Vargas did not release her first album until she was 42, didn't come out as a lesbian until she was 81, and didn't debut at Carnegie Hall until she was 83. What was she doing all those years before recording Noche de Bohemia in 1961? Well, she dressed as a man, often in her signature red jorongo, smoked cigars, drank heavily, and packed a pistol, so obviously she was busy with more than singing rancheras in the streets. And maybe she had an affair Frida Kahlo (as Josephine Baker had). Since that first record, she has released more than eighty albums. Her great fame of the 1960s and 70s subsided when she retired to battle her alcoholism. She returned to performing at 72 in 1991 in Mexico City. Since then her music has been widely used in films and she has appeared singing in several movies including Almodovar's Flower of My Secret, Taymor's Frida, and Innartu's Babel. All I can say is buy her, beware: The first time you hear Chavela unleash her power midway through the quiet Paloma Negra you might drop whatever you're holding. She died last year at 93.

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 April 11: Glenway Westcott

Expat American literary young men colliding in Gertrude Stein's orbit in Paris, Hemingway took an immediate dislike to gay novelist Glenway Wescott for his artificial affectations [from Wisconsin, he acquired an English accent] and his "fake" fiction. In The Sun Also Rises he lampooned Wescott as Robert Prescott until Max Perkins made him change the overly obvious last name to Prentiss. Wescott's major novels, before he ceased writing them at 44, are The Grandmothers, based on his own family, Apartment in Athens [Kindle], about a Greek family forced to host a German officer, of which Susan Sontag said in The New Yorker it is “among the treasures of 20th-century American literature” (and recently was made into a movie), and The Pilgrim Hawk [Kindle], which David Leavitt chose as a favorite of 2011.One area in which Wescott trumped Hemingway: His relationship with MoMA curator Monroe Wheeler lasted 68 years, from 1919 to his death at 85 in 1987. After you read the novels, try Jerry Rosco's Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography.

Reader Daniel recommends the really wonderful When We Were Three: Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescot 1925-1935.

Born April 7: Harry Hay, R Zamora Linmark

He was born in England, came to America at seven, and, in his twenties, had an affair with Grandpa Walton when that actor was in his thirties: Even now there's so much we don't remember about Harry Hay who started The Mattachine Society in 1950 in Los Angeles. To understand the terror and bravery of such an act, remember, it was illegal for homosexuals to gather in public. A woman accompanied them for cover, or they met in private. Along with Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, Barbara Gittings and Kay Lahusen, and Frank Kameny, Harry Hay is one of the major reasons we have what we have today. Depending on your view, Hay is the most interesting or the most difficult of the movement's founders because he was permanently opposed to gay assimilation. He was a cofounder of Radical Faeries, and, drawing on his leadership as an eighteen year member of the Communist Party, he was a founding member of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. He met his life partner when he fifty-one and died at ninety in 2002. To learn more, read a collection of his own writings, Radically Gay : Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder or his biography, The Trouble With Harry Hay.

Today he would be 101. Last April for his centenary, Los Angeles dedicated a staircase "The Mattachine Steps" in his honor.

 

A favorite on Thebes queer lit survey, R Zamora Linmark's Leche [Kindle] is about a young gay Filipano-American returning to the country where he was born and coping with his dual identities. Or, as Kevin Killian says, the novel "takes that old exile-returns cliché and fucks with it till it cries out in ecstasy." Critic Nicholas Boggs said, the book "is a riotous ride through modern-day Manila featuring encounters with a larger-than-life cast of characters including a (perhaps) bisexual cabbie, an activist nun, an acclaimed movie director, and President Corazon Aquino’s actress daughter, also known as the Massacre Queen of the Philippine Cinema.” A two-time Fulbright recipient, Linmark has also written poetry and plays and has taught at the University of Miami and the University of Hawaii. 

Born April 6: Rob Epstein

 Rob Epstein is out and makes groundbreaking gay films, yet rather than being shunned by Hollywood, he's won two Academy Awards, three Peabodys, four Emmys, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honors. And let's not pretend his work was somehow easy just because his subjects are so important; his timing has always been ahead of the zeitgeist. He made The Times of Harvey Milk when people wanted to avoid gay rights; then, with Jeffrey Friedman, Common Threads - Stories from the Quilt when many wanted to demonize aids; The Celluloid Closet when
most wanted to ignore Hollywood's hypocrisy, and Paragraph 175 when some would have rather overlooked the fate of gay men in the Holocaust. Despite the hurdles, the co-directors convinced stars to narrate those last three films: Dustin Hoffman, Lily Tomlin, and Rupert Everett. Following their first narrative feature, Howl, Epstein and Friedman return this year with their first-ever non-gay subject, a biopic on June 28: Lovelace, starring Amanda Seyfried as the 70s queen of porn. Based on reviews from its screening at Sundance, the film has an 83% on Rotten Tomatoes.

Born April 4: Anthony Perkins, Graham Norton

A troubled teen coming of age in the 40s and 50s, Anthony Perkins escaped into acting. He told an interviewer, "There was nothing about me I wanted to be, but I felt happy being somebody else." Uncomfortably gay all his life, he had affairs with Nureyev, Sondheim, Tab Hunter, Christopher Makos, and a six-year relationship with choreographer Glover Dale. At 21 he got his first film role from George Cukor (The Actress written by Ruth Gordon) and he was 28 when Hitchcock cast him as Norman Bates in Psycho. A superstar terrified of being outed and unhappily typecast as a homicidal maniac, he fled to Europe where he worked with Ingrid Bergman in an adaptation of a Francoise Sagan novel and with Orson Welles in his rehash of Kafka's The Trial. Perkins was 39 before he finally had sex with a woman, his co-star Victoria Principal. When he was 41, he married Marisa Berenson's sister Berry on Cape Cod and they had two sons, named Oz and Elvis, though he continued to have sex with men. Having never been tested, he was horrified in 1990 to learn he was HIV+ from a headline in the National Enquirer, which had obtained a sample of his blood. Still closeted, he worked with aids charities, recorded an epilogue to And the Band Played On, and issued this statement, released upon his death from aids on September 12, 1992: "There are many who believe this disease is God's vengeance. But I believe it was sent to teach people how to love and understand and have compassion for each other. I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of aids than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life." Returning from a vacation on Cape Cod on September 11, 2001, his wife died aboard AA flight 11. Their sons are an actor and a musician. Two biographies are Anthony Perkins: Split Image and Anthony Perkins: A Haunted Life.

Born Graham Walker in Bandon, County Cork, he popped over to London to train as a drama instructor but justly wound up on stage and in front of the camera. His success as an interviewer was instantaneous, like champagne uncorked. Effortlessly fun and engaging, he often outshines his guests. His childish delights ought to be embarrassing -- as he admits, "Now, this isn't big or clever," -- but those antics are often very, very funny, especially when he employs his best telephone manner. He called a sheriff's office in a Midwestern state about their law prohibiting intercourse with live fish, and, with Roseanne as his witness, rang up the Austrian tourist board to ask about visiting the north central village called Fucking. ("Is Fucking nice in winter?") It oughtn't be funny, but just try to remain stone-faced during his interview with speed daters. Frodo laughs so hard he kicks up his feet and rolls off the sofa. Norton's two books are a memoir, So Me, and greatest hits from his advice column, Ask Graham.

Born April 2: Camille Paglia

Sixty-six today, queer firebrand Camille Paglia finally released a new book last fall, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars [Kindle]. Typically eclectic and audacious, it covers 5,000 years of art history by looking closely at 29 works. Critics mainly loved the book ("A magisterial, poetically composed, and masterly study," said the Philadelphia Inquirer) even if they did not all agree with her ultimate assessment that "that the avant-garde is dead and that George Lucas is our greatest living artist." 

Separated from her partner of 14 years, Alison Maddex, Paglia is still co-parenting their child. She tells the Independent her romantic life is "is non-existent. Except that, for the past four years, I've had a kind of cult for a Brazilian superstar," the 47 year-old married singer Daniela Mercury.

Although it's easy now to suppose a provocateur of such flair and rigor and self-described egomania would always find a platform, Paglia waited nine years to see the publication of her breakthrough book of cultural criticism, Sexual Personae. Five agents and seven publishers rejected it between 1981 and 1985 when Yale finally accepted it. They did not publish until five years later while Paglia taught, tweaked sections, and added new essays. The book sold moderately well before it was named a finalist for a National Book Award. When Vintage released the paperback in 1991, it became a tremendous bestseller and she became a star. Paglia appeared on dozens of talk shows and brought a volcanic pop intellectualism to a nation weaned on the prepackaged chipper inanities of morning television. Read her books Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (1992), Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (1994), and Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (2006). Accompanying Todd Oldham's photos, she wrote the text for a short book about the magazine duo Joseph Holtzman and Carl Skoggard's upstate retreat for artists, Camp Nest.  (uncredited photo via)

Born April 1: Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany has defied expectation from the beginning, seventy-one years ago. The tenth child born to a Harlem couple in the 1940s, he was not the likeliest boy to prep at Dalton (alongside Wallace Shawn). When he took up writing, some were surprised he chose to work in science fiction. Once he'd made a name for himself in that genre -- his Dhalgren sold a million copies -- some were further surprised by his inclusions of significant sexual content. His has also written erotica that he is happy to call pornography, like Phallos which takes place during Hadrian's reign. Norman Mailer said of his most transgressive work of brutal sexual violence, narrated by an 11 year-old, "There is no question that Hogg by Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit."

In 2010 it seemed the mainstream literary world was finally catching up with him when he was selected to judge the fiction prize of the National Book Awards. But last year's publication of his first new novel in five years, Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders [Kindle], failed to gain widespread attention or readership, despite high praise from Michael Cunningham, Andrew Holleran, Ed White, and Lonely Christopher, who emphatically declared it the best novel of the 21st century.

Delany remains science fiction star having won the Nebula four times, the Hugo twice, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. His novel Dark Reflections won a Stonewall Book Award. A professor at U Mass Amherst for eleven years, Delany has taught at Temple University since 2000. His own work is required reading in many college courses, across multiple departments: literature, black studies, and queer studies. Although he was married to a woman for nineteen years and fathered a daughter, he was openly gay for much of that time and privately identified as gay since his teens. Because he has been an aficionado of XXX theaters and video booths for decades, he estimates his total number of male sexual partners to be 50,000. A documentary covering all aspects of his life, The Polymath, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2007 and has screened at many lgbt festivals, winning the jury award at Philadelphia. The movie shows Jonathan Lethem to be a fan; shouldn't he get David Remnick to let him do a major New Yorker profile of the world's leading black, gay, sci-fi intellectual? Until then, try his autobiography The Motion Of Light In Water, "with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin."