Band of Thebes

Born July 24: Gus van Sant

In the early 80s, Gus van Sant worked in a New York advertising firm and saved $25,000 to make his first feature, the ground-breaking, darkly shot Mala Noche, about a young man’s crush on a Mexican hustler and the other Mexican hustler who sort of has a crush on him. (Best moment: When the second hustler is learning to drive on a deserted rode, he crashes the guy’s car directly without swerving or turning the wheel into a telephone pole. As they walk back to town the guy yells at him, “You drive like you f---!”) Van Sant followed that with Drugstore Cowboy, reviving Matt Dillon’s career with a role as an addict struggling to get clean, and My Own Private Idaho, more hustlers, this time white, reciting passages of Henry IV, but salvaged by being River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. Next came the bizarre Even Cowgirls Get the Blues with Uma Thurman and k.d. lang, followed by the terrific To Die For, Nicole Kidman’s first great role as an ambitious small-town newscaster who enlists two wayward teens to help kill her husband. Wanting a mainstream hit and an Oscar, van Sant then made Good Will Hunting but at least he had the grace to parody himself counting his cash from that in the first Silent Bob movie. He used his new status in Hollywood to film a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, followed by a retread of Good Will Hunting called Finding Forrester, only this time the student was an athlete / writer and black. He’s made four smaller, more indie movies since then, usually infatuated with beautiful mopers and depressed youth: The improvised Gerry (Matt Damon & Casey Affleck lost in a desert), Elephant (thinly disguised Columbine), Last Days (thinly disguised Kurt Cobain), and the recent Paranoid Park (teen skateboarder accidentally kills security guard).

Although he has mainly ignored gay stories since his third film, van Sant did make the sweet Marais episode in Paris, je t’aime (shown in full here) and, as you've read many times, he's just finished filming one of this year's Oscar contenders, Milk. Sean Penn stars as Harvey Milk, with a supporting cast that includes James Franco as his lover and Josh Brolin as his killer, along with Diego Luna, Emile Hirsch, and Stephen Spinella. Tom Ammiano  plays himself, which either means there's a present day sequence or the make-up department had to work hard, as the movie takes place thirty years ago. While I'm obviously thrilled by the idea of a high profile, big budget feature about gay history, I can't help but notice that the first major gay story since Brokeback Mountain again takes place in the past and ends with the more out man getting murdered. Name a Hollywood queer drama with a happy ending. It's either gay = tragedy (Wilde), or the narrative is degayed (Capote). Also, for a story set in the free and easy San Francisco of the 1970s, Milk's cast list is strangely devoid of women. All in all, of the two competing Harvey Milk projects, maybe the anointed one should have been Bryan Singer's The Mayor of Castro Street. Milk opens November 26 in limited release and widens December 5.

Van Sant has also shot fifteen music videos, among them: David Bowie's Fame '90, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Under the Bridge, Tracy Chapman's Bang Bang Bang, Chris Isaak's San Francisco Days, Elton John's The Last Song, STP's Creep, and Hanson's Weird.

Born July 23: F. Holland Day

The pioneering photographer (1864-1933) with an eye for the Greek ideal.

Born July 22: Rufus Wainwright

Don't even try to resist Rufus Wainwright and his midtempo, art school melancholy. He came out when he was fourteen and after DreamWorks records automatically degayed his bio for his debut album when he was twenty-four, he insisted his official press kit say he is out. That self-titled cd made him the year’s critical darling, and Rolling Stone named him Best New Artist. His follow-up effort, Poses, was again a critical favorite, followed by Want One in 2003 and Want Two in 2004. His fifth studio album, Release the Stars, executive produced by Neil Tennant, was number two on the UK charts. In June 2006, he made history at Carnegie Hall by recreating, song by song, Judy Garland's famous 1961 concert there. Response was so ecstatic he was invited to repeat the show in London, Paris, and at the Hollywood Bowl, yet the sales of the subsequent live cd were lackluster, peaking at #171 in both the US and UK. Keeping his sense of humor, he titled the dvd of the concert Rufus! Rufus! Rufus! Does Judy! Judy! Judy! His several different performances of Hallelujah on YouTube have been viewed a total of more than five million times. Watch it below or, for more, take a look at his website.

Born July 21: Hart Crane

Son of a successful candyman, child of divorce, Hart Crane dropped out of his Ohio high school in 1917 and escaped to New York. For seven years he moved back and forth between the city and Cleveland, writing poems published in literary journals and working in his father's factory. Tortured by his love of men far more than was Whitman decades before him, Crane did have one joyous affair with a Dutch merchant mariner named Emil Opffer who inspired his epic, erotically charged verse, Voyages (performed below by Charles Bryant). That poem was one of the highlights of his first book, White Buildings (1926), celebrated for the zest and fire of his lyrics and criticized, as all his poetry was, for its impenetrable confusion. As told in this comprehensive New Yorker essay about Crane, he said he was “more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness . . . than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations.” While Crane struggled to write his monumental work, The Bridge (1930), he suffered miserable affairs and worsening alcoholism. Although initial critical reception to his now revered achievement was weak, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Mexico the following year. Returning from that sojourn aboard the SS Orizaba in April 1932, he hit on a working shipmate and was beaten up. Crane said, "Goodbye, everybody!" and jumped overboard to his death. The most devoted of later writers who revered him, Tennessee Williams left instructions that his body be buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico where Crane drowned. (Instead, Williams' family buried him in Missouri.) Crane's legacy influenced painters as well, inspiring works by Marsden Hartley, Eight Bells Folly, and by Jasper Johns twice: Diver and Periscope.

Born July 17: Berenice Abbott

Ahead of her time all her life, Berenice Abbott was raised by her single, divorced mother and dropped out of Ohio State to move to Greenwich Village. That was 1918, and the following year she nearly died from the influenza pandemic. Two years later she moved to Europe to study sculpture, and two years after that she fell in love with photography when Man Ray hired her as his assistant specifically because she didn't know anything about it and therefore would do exactly as told. (He captured her, at left.) By 1926 she had her own studio on the rue du Bac before moving to rue Servandoni the next year. While quickly achieving renown for her own work, Abbott tirelessly promoted other photographers, particularly Eugene Atget, whose images she championed for forty years until 1968, when she convinced the curators at MoMA to buy the archive of his photos. Although she was extremely sought after in Paris, taking portraits of everyone from Jean Cocteau and James Joyce to Coco Chanel and Janet Flanner, a quick trip back to New York caused her to abandon France and return to Manhattan in order to photograph the city. For six years she worked without any support, rejected by organizations and individuals who failed to see any value in her vision. In 1935, however, the Federal Art Project hired her to continue her series, now called Changing New York. These are her most enduring images. During this time she fell in love and began living with Elizabeth McCausland, a critic, and they remained together more than thirty years until McCausland's death in 1965. Abbott lived on until 1991, not only widening her subjects to include antebellum architecture, U.S. 1, and Maine, but also inventing photography gadgets like the distortion easel and the forerunner to the autopole. The video below contrasts Abbott's iconic views of New York in the 30s with the same locations as they looked in the 1990s.

Born July 16: Reinaldo Arenas

In his searing memoir Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas recalled his impoverished childhood in Cuba and his early memories of being so hungry he ate dirt. He also described his vivid and prolific sexual adventures beginning at a very young age with a male cousin, and later with his uncle, a domesticated animal, and countless men, all told with an unvarnished honesty that shocked some readers. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of the 1993, but Arenas could not enjoy its success. His hard luck was a constant. In his teens he became besotted with and then disillusioned by the Castro regime, which eventually imprisoned him, prohibited him from publishing, and threatened him with death. He attempted to escape from Cuba on an inner tube, was caught, and was sent to a far worse prison. Even when he was officially forbidden from having paper, he managed to write and  got his work smuggled out of the country and published abroad. Released from prison in 1976 after renouncing his fiction and essays, Arenas was, by a fluke, part of the Mariel boatlift to Florida in 1980. Exploding with the boundless freedoms of writing and gay sex in New York, he entered his most fertile phase. Seven years later he got aids. Ravaged by the unstoppable disease and depressed by the lack of attention paid to his work, he intentionally overdosed on his medicine on December 7, 1990. His memoir was published in Spanish in 1992 and in English the following year. In 2000, Before Night Falls was adapted by Julian Schnabel into the award winning film starring Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp [below, as Bon Bon], Olivier Martinez, Diego Luna, and Sean Penn, further securing Arenas's lasting importance.

Born July 14: Arthur Laurents

Arthur Laurents turns eighty today, and really the man has a lot to celebrate. Born in the Jewish section of Flatbush, he wrote the book for the musicals West Side Story, Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle, and Hallelujah, Baby!; the novels and the screenplays for The Way We Were and The Turning Point, the screenplay for Rope (starring his then-love Farley Granger); the play that became the movie Summertime; and he directed I Can Get It for You Wholesale, La Cage Aux Folles, Anyone Can Whistle, and the Broadway versions of Gypsy in 1974 and this year's triple Tony winning revival starring the Patti Lupone. Laurents was openly gay even during the McCarthy era, when he received less work but avoided being blacklisted. Smart people can discuss the obvious and subtle gay substitutes and outsider figures who run through all of Laurents' work. His candid autobiography is called Original Story By. He and his partner Tom Hatcher lived together fifty-one years, mainly in Quogue, Long Island, until Hatcher's death in 2006.

Born July 11: Tab Hunter, Vito Russo

The blond movie star and the brilliant movie watcher.

Born July 10: Marcel Proust, Neil Tennant

What a week! Wall to wall towering genius, with the gods of literature (Proust), pop music (Tennant), painting (Hockney), and film (Cocteau).

Born July 8: Philip Johnson

Soon after graduating from Harvard in 1930, Philip Johnson became the first director of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design. He did not study to become an architect himself until ten years later. When built in 1948, his master degree thesis, Glass House, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and remains one of the most important designs of the century. His two best known other works are the Seagrams Building (with Mies van der Rohe) and the AT&T Building with its controversial Chippendale top, completed when he was seventy-eight.  His many other projects include the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, the Amon Carter Museum, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, PPG Place in Pittsburgh, the IDS Tower in Minneapolis, the Boston Public Library's 1972 addition, 101 California in San Francisco, 190 South LaSalle in Chicago, 191 Peachtree Tower in Atlanta, Das Amerikan Business Center in Berlin, Puerta de Europe in Madrid, and the Tata Theater in Mumbai. Considered by many to be among his greatest designs is the lgbt Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, a soaring structure "without right angles or parallel lines." Although the ambitious cathedral remains a dream, the church finally broke ground on the Interfaith Chapel in 2007. You can learn more about it and take a virtual tour here. Johnson lived with his partner, curator David Whitney, from 1960 to his death in 2005.

Born July 7: George Cukor

You might make the case that Katharine Hepburn owed her career to George Cukor. He gave Hepburn her first movie role in A Bill of Divorcement, then cast her as Jo in Little Women, then as Sylvia Scarlett. Their last collaboration was 47 years after their first, when Cukor directed her in The Corn Is Green for television. He famously paired her with Cary Grant in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, and perfected the Hepburn - Tracy subgenre with Adam's Rib and, less so, with Pat and Mike. According to William J. Mann's biography Kate, she was also indebted to Cukor for the way he perpetuated the fabled Hepburn - Tracy offscreen romance, which Mann says was fabricated to mask the never married star's lesbian affairs. Cukor was much more open in his own gay pursuits, hosting weekly Sunday afternoon pool parties where Hollywood's brightest mingled with aspiring actors and rough trade. Depending which version you choose, Cukor's being fired from Gone with the Wind after two years of prep and three weeks of filming was either because Clark Gable refused to be directed by a "fairy" or because Gable was terrified Cukor knew about his own past gay relationships. Nevertheless, even after Victor Flemming took over, Cukor continued to coach Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland on their roles. As for his way with male actors, no director has coaxed more performances winning the Oscar for Best Actor than did Cukor. Among his other great achievements are Dinner at Eight, David Copperfield, Camille, Romeo and Juliet, The Women, Gaslight, Born Yesterday, A Star Is Born, It Should Happen to You, Travels with my Aunt and My Fair Lady.
 

Born July 1: Farley Granger

Early last year, the 1940s and 50s movie star Farley Granger finally confirmed his many same sex affairs in his autobiography with the Goldwyn catchphrase title Include Me Out. Bravo, for someone about to turn eighty-two, and yes he can be included out as of 2007. Yet like so many people who wait too long to be honest, Granger wants to rewrite the past to cast himself as braver than he really was. Of his sexual life, he claims, "I never hid it or felt guilt about being who I was, but I didn't blare it either." I never hid it? An interview in The Villager with Granger and Robert Calhoun, his co-author and partner for the past 45 years, offers an even more delusional exchange:

It seems to me you’ve never actually been in the closet, the journalist said to the actor. “No, I never was.” Granger quietly replied.
“That’s why he resents labels,” Calhoun said. “And ‘gay’ — in itself, destruction of a perfectly good word — is just another way of saying faggot.”

Granger's breakthrough role, in Rope, was based partly on the real life Leopold and Loeb case from 1924 in which two bright gay homophile lovers, 19 and 18, committed a murder apparently for the excitement of seeing if they could get away with it. In the movie the debonair killers are in their twenties, played by Granger and John Dall, also gay Uranian in real life. As filming began Granger had just fallen in love with the screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, and the couple would soon move in together. If no one were hiding anything, a studio flack just might find a publicity hook in all this. No chance. Granger and Laurents told everyone they were merely roommates, and publicly, in order to go out together, they dated women. (Laurents wrote about this in his own autobiography, As Written By, which Knopf published in 2000.) Granger's greatest role, again directed by Hitchcock, was in Strangers on a Train, and it too had a strong gay Sodomite subtext and pedigree, coming from the much more explicit novel by Patricia Highsmith, a lesbian Sapphist. Obviously in the era of McCarthy witch hunts, a movie star could no more be openly gay Pederast than openly Communist. Granger would earn more respect if he admitted, "I felt I had to hide it," and he might have done more good if he had been more open when it really mattered.

Born June 26: Stephen McCauley

Cancel your plans and spend all day in gratitude for the novelist Stephen McCauley. Reread his best book, True Enough, or his best known, The Object of My Affection. Buy them and give them as gifts to any decent reader you know. (Also, resist the temptation to get depressed that he is so brilliant, so funny and wise, yet never classified with the straight literary giants he modestly surpasses.) He posts entries on his website about once a month, most recently in May after visiting New Orleans for a gay writers' festival. He's right about Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints. But then he's right about everything. Read him.

Found French Quarter interesting but depressing with drunken tourists staggering around clutching giant alcoholic drinks in glasses shaped like bongs. Silly T-shirts abound and faint odor of vomit wafts down Bourbon Street at dawn. Repeatedly warned of crime and advised against walking at night alone. Even so, intense humidity and smell of rot add glamorous haze to seedy streets. Rotting buildings and crumbling plaster make it all lurid and beautiful. Thanks to literary representations, almost every street corner iconic. Reminded repeatedly of Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints, favorite New Orleans novel and one of my favorites in general. Repetitious and hilarious and prose so fever-dreamy it makes you ache.

Reminded, too, of B, former student from New Orleans who committed suicide two years after Katrina, on anniversary of father’s suicide. Talented, disturbed writer. Kept spotting places from his stories and eccentric types I assumed he had made up. Alligator collecting drag queens and sloppy antique dealers wielding guns. All there. Longed to call him up and discuss his work again.

Streetcar ride, Garden District, café au lait, and man with blood running down his face strolling slowly along promenade overlooking Mississippi at midnight. Strip joint, of course. Pleasure derived from lapdancing bartender with perfect ass and bad hair yet one more indication of age. "How undignified, how age-inappropriate of me," were first thoughts, before numb acceptance of the fact that, at this stage, stuffing dollar bills into the straps of a thong to purchase groping rights IS age-appropriate behavior.

Born June 25: Larry Kramer, Rictor Norton, George Michael

Wouldn't it be awesome if Larry and Rictor joined George on stage tonight for his concert at the Forum in Los Angeles? The pop superstar turns 45 today and says this will be his last tour. Unlikely. But other things he said in a recent interview sounded more true: "The nature of being gay is that you are forced to challenge the general perception, otherwise you have to accept that something is wrong with you. Maybe that gives gay men the perspective that many have turned into art."

Born June 17: Barry Manilow

When you think of early Bette Midler, singing for the gay men at the Continental Baths, do you think of Barry Manilow? He was her piano accompanist, helped produce her first two albums, and directed the music on her Divine Miss M Tour. At the time, he was a successful advertising jingle writer and musical director of the CBS show Callback. On tour, during Midler's intermission Manilow performed three songs from his first album, but it wasn't until Clive Davis saw him open for Dionne Warwick that his luck really changed. Davis and a reluctant Manilow fought about including Mandy on his second album; Davis won; hit after superhit followed: It's a Miracle, I Write the Songs, Tryin To Get the Feeling Again, Looks Like We Made It, Can't Smile Without You, Even Now, and of course Copacabana, which was so popular it inspired a made for TV movie starring Barry ("His name was Tony...") Twenty-odd years later Manilow still enjoys a large and devoted following. He headlines a Vegas act and in 2004 Oprah announced he is one of her most requested guests. On the other hand, when Australian police wanted to clear out a heavy gang area of kids ignoring the curfew, they blasted Manilow's songs. (Barry was funny about it in a wry statement.) Two years ago, his album Greatest Songs of the Fifties debuted on the Billboard chart at number one. Last year his album of Seventies hits reached number four. Brooklyn's own has still got it, ok? If you don't understand his impact on contemporary culture, his preeminence as whipping boy / guilty pleasure, watch these snippets from Family Guy, Friends, and Colbert with Jon Stewart. Manilow has lived with his manager Garry Kief for more than twenty years in homes they share in Bel Air and Palm Springs.

Born June 13: Siegfried Fischbacher

The half of the white tigers Vegas couple who wasn't injured. They will finally return to the stage on February 9, 2009.
 

Born June 12: Djuna Barnes

The Nightwood author.

Born June 10: Terrence Rattigan

After the full-blown success at twenty-five of his first solo work, the light-hearted French Without Tears (1936), Terrence Rattigan wanted to write a more serious work. He created the satirical drama After the Dance (1939), attacking the apolitical generation of Bright Young Things for their failure to stop another war. For the prolific Rattigan, success followed success, among them: The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, and Separate Tables, all of which became popular movies. He was twice nominated for both a BAFTA and an Oscar. Yet just as he had earlier attacked the older generation, now in 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger exploded all the hallmarks of the Rattigan generation: the staid, repressed, older and old-fashioned characters who never paraded their emotions. Overnight, Rattigan was deeply out of favor with the critics who had adored him, and the timing could not have been worse. In 1957 he wrote his first play that directly addressed his homosexuality, Variation on a Theme, and it was panned. Rattigan's father had been a career diplomat whose habitual dalliances eventually got him fired by the Home Office. Not surprisingly, Rattigan learned to keep his own relationships well hidden, perhaps to the point of being emotionally cut off even from his partners. Completely out of step with London's mod, Swinging Sixties, he decamped for Bermuda. There, he wrote for Hollywood and for a time was the world's highest paid screenwriter. His first bout of leukemia in 1962 went into remission two years later, only to recur in 1968. He died of cancer in 1977 still in Bermuda. David Mamet had a modest hit with his adaptation of The Winslow Boy in 1999, and this decade has seen a major Rattigan revival in the West End.

Born June 9: Cole Porter

The summit of sophistication, Cole Porter wrote the wittiest, worldliest love songs ever recorded and a good part of his genius depended on his experience as a gay man. Born to a rich family in Indiana, a graduate of an East Coast prep school and Yale, married to a famed socialite for thirty-four years, Porter was utterly at ease in the highest society, yet his constant sexual relationships with men allowed him permanent outsider status. His art depended on his double life. Unable to express gay love openly, his lyrics are far more original and memorable for their necessary codes and double entendres. If you still don't understand You're the Top, please see me after class. Porter is peerless at hiding in plain sight, subverting the scandalous into showstopping "innocent" fun, as in Let's Do It (1928), You Do Something To Me (1929), Love for Sale (1930), All Through the Night (1934), Anything Goes (1934), I've Got You Under My Skin (1936), Let's Misbehave (1937), My Heart Belongs to Daddy (1938), I've Got My Eyes on You (1939) Well Did You Evah! (1939) Let's Be Buddies (1940) You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To (1942), Something for the Boys (1943), He's a Right Guy (1943), I'm In Love With a Solider Boy (1943), Too Darn Hot (1948), All of You (1954) Mind If I Make Love To You? (1955) and You're Just Too, Too (1956), among countless others. Consider this verse:

If I invite
    A boy, some night
To dine on my fine finnan haddie,
    I just adore
His asking for more,
But my heart belongs to Daddy.

Openly closeted, Porter enjoyed affairs with Ballets Russes librettist Boris Kochno, Boston hotshot Howard Sturges, architect Ed Tauch, actor Robert Bray, choreographer Nelson Barclift, and director John Wilson, as well as innumerable shorter interludes with servicemen and chorus boys at weekend all-male parties. He left half his royalties to the children of his longtime friend and ex-lover Ray Kelly.

When very old gay people say the younger generations of queer activists ruined it by being too open, I suspect, in part, they are mourning the lost glamor of Porter's world. Certainly the exuberant directness of same-sex makeout songs like Franz Ferdinand's Michael can't beat the sly ruses of Porter's tunes. But a life of elegant hiding, however clever, was still a life of hiding. In Porter's heyday, gay men who were not part of the jet set endured perpetual fear of harassment, blackmail, arrest, and prison. Compared with our ability to get married and live equally, those days are nothing to sing about.

Born June 6: Thomas Mann, Harvey Fierstein, Sandra Bernhard

Quite the trio.

Born June 5: Keynes, Compton-Burnett, Garcia Lorca, Orman

Economist John Maynard Keynes, novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, poet Federico Garcia Lorca, and financial guru Suze Orman, all here.

Born May 30: Bertrand Delanoë, Colm Tóibín

The mayor of Paris who is widely considered a likely presidential candidate in 2012 and the brilliant critic and novelist who wrote The Master. Two superstars.

Born May 28: Patrick White

When you think of gay Nobel Prize winning novelists, do you only think of André Gide and Thomas Mann? Remember also the Australian writer Patrick White, born in 1912, who won the award in 1973 and lived with a former Greek soldier his same age, Manoly Lascaris, who was his ballast and partner for forty-eight years. Although he never forgave his parents for shipping him off to a detestable boarding school in England, White inherited their conservatism and did not discuss his sexuality nor did he include openly gay characters in his work until 1979's The Twyborn Affair, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. (After winning the inaugural Miles Franklin Award for his enduring Voss, White declined that award a second time for Riders in the Chariot and refused all other prizes, asking the Booker judges to remove his name from their shortlist to give younger writers a chance. Obviously, he made an exception for the Nobel, but he sent his friend the painter Stanley Nolan to Stockholm to accept the prize on his behalf.) White finally came out when he was sixty-nine with the publication of his memoir, Flaws in the Glass. He died at seventy-eight in 1990, and Lascaris survived him thirteen years.

Born May 23: Allen Barnett

The absolutely terrific writer Allen Barnett, who died of aids at thirty-six in 1991, is in danger of being lost. His only book is out of print and he has no entry on Wikipedia. His New York Times obituary said:

Mr. Barnett was the author of The Body and Its Dangers (1990), a collection of stories in which many of the characters are afflicted with AIDS. The book was a winner of the PEN/ Ernest Hemingway Citation. Mr. Barnett worked for the Gay Men's Health Crisis, helped to establish the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and taught AIDS education to students of English as a second language at the 23d Street Y.M.C.A.

He is survived by his mother, Margaret Barnett of Joliet, Ill.; four sisters, Debby, Cindy, Donna and Rhonda, and two brothers, Dale and Ricky.

This is woefully inadequate for someone so talented. In addition to the PEN award, his book also won the Lambda award for fiction. Publishers Weekly said,

Barnett's willingness to venture into explosively emotional terrain with empathy, candor and balance is perhaps best revealed in his stunning "The Times As It Knows Us," where men sharing a summerhouse appear to have created family within the gay community--yet even this proves illusory.

Reviewing it for the Times Meg Wolitzer wrote,

The urgency of Mr. Barnett's characters, and their simple good will toward all that is human, carry considerable weight. He portrays their awareness of fragility with such candor and melancholy that they almost seem to be holding their own hearts in their hands.

You may be able to find a used copy here.

Born May 22: Morrissey

Cue Unhappy Birthday, for the 49th time. The bible of British indie music, NME, called Morrissey's band The Smiths  "the most influential artist ever."  Can't argue with facts.  They released four studio albums and three compilations between 1984 and 1987 and pretty much changed the world with the songs This Charming Man, William It Was Really Nothing, Heaven Knows I'm Miserable Now, The Boy with the Thorn in His Side, Sheila Take a Bow, Shoplifters of the World Unite, Ask, Panic, Unlovable, Girlfriend in a Coma, Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before, There Is a Light that Never Goes Out and How Soon Is Now?  Morrissey has released eight solo albums since then, not all of them as good as the life-changing Viva Hate, Bona Drag, or Vauxhall & I. The ninth is said to be coming in late 2008 or early 2009. Even sooner, June 2, he will release his new single, All You Need Is Me. The song will be available with two new b-sides Children in Pieces and My Dearest Love, both recorded with Gustavo Santaolalla, whom you know for his (haunting? much-parodied?) music for Brokeback Mountain.

Born May 21: Raymond Burr

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. He claimed to have had three wives and a son. 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." One marriage, short-lived, 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.

Born May 19: Daniel Guérin

Ah, France, where strange bedfellows make good politics. 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. Mais non, pas de tout! His last significant relationship was with a man sixty years his junior. He died at eighty-three in 1988.

Born May 16: Adrienne Rich, Liberace

Here.

Born May 15: Jasper Johns

Coincidently, Jasper Johns turns 78 today. Two years ago his False Start from 1959 became the most expensive painting by a living artist at $80 million. Maybe he's never discussed his relationship with Rauschenberg, but Johns has kept his sense of humor. He appeared as himself on The Simpsons and was revealed to be a raging kleptomaniac.

Born May 14: Magnus Hirschfeld

The German Jewish physician began advocating for gay rights in 1896. In 1933, Nazis destroyed his institute for sexual research, burning the thousands of books in his library, filmed for widely seen newsreels. He is a colossus. Last week, Berlin officials renamed a portion of the promenade along the Spree River in his honor.

Born May 13: Bruce Chatwin

The only 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 admit he was gay, he married a woman in 1965, when he was twenty-five, and pursued men throughout their fifteen years of marriage. (She was English; she didn't mind, though she did ask for a separation in 1980.) Many episodes in his travel books only make sense if you realize he is sleeping with the men he meets, and his much loved first novel concerns two long-time bachelor brothers who sleep in the same bed for decades. Yet 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 Patrick Leigh Fermor's home in the Peleponnese. If you've never read him, you must. Start with In Patagonia or The Songlines [aborigines in Australia], if you want travel, or On the Black Hill, if you want a wonderful Welsh novel.

Born May 12: Ross Bleckner

Writing in Vanity Fair, Edmund White called Ross Bleckner, the New York neo-abstractionist who turns fifty-nine today, "the first serious painter since Degas to be all at once so social, so relentlessly frivolous, and so gifted." The New York Times called him, among many other things over the years, "the gay powerbroker and ubiquitous partygoer." Look at a gallery of his paintings on his website, and read the full Edmund White profile of Bleckner here. Yes, Dolly Parton is a fan. 

Born May 8: Tom of Finland

The king of male erotic drawings.

Born May 7: Tchaikovsky

The original Nutcracker, poor Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Born May 5: Del Martin

Del Martin turns eighty-seven today and everyone should thank her for more than fifty years of inspired heroism. Like other great American figures, she has spent her adult life championing the 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 there were DOB chapters 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, left] and Lyon were the very first gay couple to be married in San Francisco in February 2004. Below, Martin describes the early hurdles they faced in forming and growing DOB during a time when they could not advertise their existence.

Born May 2: Lorenz Hart, Stephen Daldry

Lorenz Hart, songwriting superstar and private wreck.
Stephen Daldry, still a silver fox, still married to a woman, still gay, and still prepping the amazingly delayed Kavalier & Clay. In the meantime, he's directed Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes in an adaptation of The Reader, coming in time for this year's awards. Refresh.

Born April 22: John Waters

He's a visionary, he's unique, and his bizarro, vulgar yet sweet movies are part of the permanent collection at MoMA, so of course you think of John Waters as a filmmaker. But he's more: He has written three books, published three volumes of photographs, and his artwork has been shown in many museums and galleries internationally. As for the movies, he has made sixteen, with his best work clustered from 1972 to 1988: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, Polyester, and Hairspray, starring the incomparable