Band of Thebes

Born March 28: Håkan Lindquist, Dirk Bogarde

Is it the mild gay content that prevents the international literary community from adding Håkan Lindquist to the working list of great living Nothernish writers like Gerbrand Bakker, Peter Stamm and Per Petterson (all of them indebted to the magnificent simplicity of lesbian Tove Jansson)? Or is it merely because only two of Håkan's five novels are available in English, and those two were long-distance efforts from a German publisher? Rest assured, his time will come. Until then, you can pride yourself on getting to know this dashing Swede (who splits his time between Stockholm and Berlin) before IMPAC Dublin discovers him. His short, domestic novels tackle eternal themes of family secrets, the nature of love, and the passage of time, with a fresh perspective and a modern, gay naturalism. My Brother and His Brother follows Jonas as he tracks down and uncovers surprising details about Paul, his older brother who died at sixteen the year before Jonas was born. On Collecting Stamps is a beautiful look back, from middle age, as Mattias reconsiders his unconventional friendship, starting at twelve, with a lonely middle-aged stamp collector, Samuel. Notice in both cases the complex double layering of time: At eighteen, Jonas is now older than his "older" brother, and Mattias has reached the same stage of life Samuel was when they met. Brilliant. Read him. (Photo by Yuna Yagi.)

After distinguished service as an intelligence officer in the Queen's Royal Regiment during WWII, Dirk Bogarde tried acting and became Britain's top box office draw of the 1950s. So it was big news in 1961 when he chose to play a closeted, married gay barrister in Victim, especially considering he was closeted himself. (He and his manager Anthony Forwood lived together for decades.) In 1963, Bogarde played the creepy, closety valet in The Servant, and later played the tragic gay lead of Death in Venice. Today, the courage of these choices can hardly be imagined. Even in 1971, two years after Midnight Cowboy, Warner Brothers was so terrified of Death in Venice being charged with obscenity in the U.S. they wanted to drop the movie altogether. They relented after Queen Elizabeth and Princess Anne attended the London premiere; it won an Oscar. Yet offscreen in his own life, Bogarde lacked the same bravery. After the anguish of watching his partner suffer a prolonged battle with Parkinson's and liver cancer, he became a vocal proponent of euthanasia. That was 1988, coincidentally the same year that John Gielgud came out quietly and Ian McKellan came out blazingly. Bogarde never did. He retired in 1990 and lived till 1999, by which time he had written something like eight volumes of autobiography, none of which tells the full truth of his life. In fact, he destroyed much of his personal archives.

Born March 27: Denton Welch

Even if you weren't part of the Shanghai scene in the 1920s, you'll feel like you're remembering and reliving it as you sink into the splendor of Denton Welch's fictionalized memoir Maiden Voyage. Born in China to English parents, the young aesthete Welch collected art objects as a child and intended to be a painter before, at twenty, a car struck him while he was cycling in Surrey and rendered him unfit for anything but the writing life. The injury and its complications left him in pain until his death at 33. (He did manage to paint this self-portrait, which hangs in the National Gallery London.) His short novel In Youth Is Pleasure is essential reading, and a close second is A Voice Through a Cloud. Spoiler alert: Nothing happens. Artistic, sensitive Orvil Pym copes with athletic, bullying older brothers and spends his fifteenth summer, um, having feelings? Noticing things? Against all logic he makes it absolutely compelling.

As proof of Welch's alchemist talents to transform empty days into gold, here's William S Burroughs, who often cited Welch as his "greatest literary influence," explaining, "Whenever a student tells me he has nothing to write about I refer him to Denton Welch. He makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes..." That magic is evident everywhere in Welch's collected stories; Bob Smith said "At Thirteen" was his all-time favorite short fiction by a gay author. Long ago when Peter Cameron inscribed my copy of Andorra he wrote, "Read Denton Welch." One of the ten thousand enduring charms of Peter's marvelous novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You [Kindle] is his teen protagonist's love of Welch's work.

Born March 23: J.C. Leyendecker

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

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

    

    

Born March 19-20: Garth Greenwell, John Boswell

Garth Greenwell grew up in Louisville, graduated from high school in Michigan, did his undergraduate work at SUNY Purchase, got his masters from Harvard, and somewhere along the way was classically trained as an opera singer, which he credits with giving him "a sense of the physicality of language." In 2009 he moved to Bulgaria where he teaches at the America College of Sofia and where he found gay cruising spots that reminded him of Kentucky in the 90s. He told the Rumpus interviewer those places and the local men "were nearly identical in their expectations and mores" including "a secrecy and shame about them." Eloquence, profundity, and surprise, about culture, about sex, and about human experience, are a few of the unending pleasures of his knockout novella Mitko. Describing a nameless American in a nameless foreign city and his creepingly complex relationship with a hustler named Mitko, it was a finalist for Publishing Triangle's debut fiction prize and for a Lammy. A perennial favorite, the book garnered multiple mentions on Thebes' queer lit polls in 2011 and 2012. Mitko is timeless; now Garth is 35.

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

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

Born March 16: Sybille Bedford

How close did the exquisite writer Sybille Bedford come to being killed by the Nazis? Born in 1911 outside Berlin and raised a Roman Catholic, she lived with her aged father, Baron Maximilian Josef von Schoenebeck, when her mother, his second wife, Elizabeth Bernard, Anglo-German Jewish, rich, and beautiful, was off with another man. At 22 Sybille blasted the Nazis in an essay for Klaus Mann's literary journal and they subsequently discovered her heritage and seized her bank accounts. She couldn't renew her German passport and couldn't stay abroad once it had expired, and without an income. That could
have led to the end. Enter Aldous Huxley's wife Maria who knew gay Auden had just gallantly wed Erika Mann to solve her citizenship problems. Said Maria, “We must get one of our bugger friends to marry Sybille.” They didn't need to look far; Auden's butler had been having an affair with an English army officer Terry Bedford, who agreed to be used. Now a British citizen, Sybille spent the war in America with the Huxleys and wrote three unpublishable novels imitating Aldous' style. After the war, she traveled to Mexico, found her exceptional voice, and wrote her legendary A Visit to Don Otavio. An absolute must read. Bruce Chatwin said of another book, “When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Mrs. Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.” Bedford became friends with another wanderlust writer, Martha Gellhorn, and lovers with Eda Lord. She spent the 1950s to 70s loosely based in France, Italy, Britain, and Portugal.

She also wrote four novels, one of which was a Booker nominee. The best is A Legacy, covering two Austrian-German families leading up to WWI. The queerest is A Compass Error, about a teenage girl's affair with a married woman. The most commericial is Jigsaw, again mining her formative years for a story about a girl shuttled between her unconventional mother in Italy and her father's uptight family in England. In her 90s she finally wrote her memoir, Quicksands, which nearly as obliquely covers a lot of the same ground as her autobiographical novels, including her lesbian relationships. V. S. Pritchett praised her mind as “radiant.” The finest essay about her is Joan Acocella's appreciation in the New Yorker. Bedford could be blunt; in that spirit, you're a bloody fool to skip her work.

Born March 13: Lori Ostlund, Janet Flanner

Growing up in a Minnesota town of 413 people, Lori Ostlund became a traveler in earnest after grad school in 1991 when she moved to Spain and frequently crossed over to Morocco. She has since lived in Albuquerque, Malaysia, and Chapel Hill where she was the Kenan Visting Writer at UNC, and now she and her partner Anne are back in San Francisco. Her smalltown upbringing and various journeys are all reflected in her outstanding first book, The Bigness of the World [Kindle]. It won a Flannery O'Connor Award, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and a Publishing Triangle Award for debut fiction. Two of its stories appeared in the Best American Stories 2010 and the PEN/O. Henry Stories 2011. In a starred review, PW said, "Each piece is sublime." She says on her site, "I find a lack of curiosity unforgivable." Read her.

How did Janet Flanner get the first installment of her famous "Letter from Paris" published in The New Yorker (which would run her column fortnightly for fifty years) and how did she get her pen name Genêt? Both answers: Harold Ross. A restless Hoosier educated in Chicago, Flanner had left Manhattan and her husband to travel in Europe with her lover Solito Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson) and from Paris she wrote to Jane Grant, Ross's wife. In 1925 Ross was still struggling to find the top notch writing he wanted for his new magazine, less than a year old, and he decided to publish Flanner's letter without asking her permission and therefore needed a nom de plume, choosing what he mistakenly thought was French for Janet.

Flanner knew virtually every important person in Paris for decades but also wrote about Algeria, Hungary invaded by the Russians, the Sinai War, and dozens of other topics in her signature style. She won a National Book Award in 1966. The center of a far reaching circle of lesbian friends, she was a constant presence at Natalie Barney's salons and in Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's living room and with the many other prominent lesbians discussed in Paris Was a Woman and, more obliquely, in her own otherwise outstanding memoir Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939. She was equally at home with Gide and Cocteau as she was with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she never lost her knack for being at the elbow of history: She was on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer when they had their famous fracas and rather than ducking she came between them. Although they occasionally had separate affairs, Flanner and Solano remained committed to each other and lived together for fifty years. Solano died in 1975, when she was eighty-seven; Flanner died in 1978, when she was eighty-six. Last fall she was the cover girl for the Hide/Seek catalog.

Born March 10: John Rechy

Although Scottish-Mexican-American John Rechy doesn't want to be ghettoized as a gay writer, his most important work pioneered a new type of literature honestly depicting men who have sex with men. In 1963 his first novel, City of Night [Kindle], followed the aimless encounters of a nameless hustler turning tricks in New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, crosscut with memories of his childhood in El Paso. By making his protagonist anonymous and introducing a succession of minor characters seen only briefly, Rechy re-emphasized the sensation of hustling for the reader. (He knew his trade: He continued to work as a prostitute on Santa Monica Blvd even after the book became a surprise hit, even after he became a professor at UCLA, even after he turned forty.) Decades later in 2003, a NYT critic called City of Night a "bona fide cult classic," "deservedly considered a milestone of transgressive fiction." That was not the consensus when it first appeared. And after thirteen books, his literary awards are limited to an NEA grant and lifetime achievement recognitions from PEN West, Publishing Triangle, and the ONE Foundation.

Rechy's second novel, Numbers [Kindle], trod the same path as City of Night but from another direction: a slightly older Johnny Rio returns to L.A. for a ten day binge not as an escape but to recapture his previous glory; some readers see Johnny Rio as using sex not merely to confirm his desirability but also as a means to find a greater connection and begin to forge a gay identity. For 1967, that was a big step. Among Rechy's ten other novels are Rushes, Bodies and Souls, The Coming of Night, Marilyn's Daughter (about a girl who believes herself to the love child of Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy), and his much-praised The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. His three works of nonfcition are The Sexual Outlaw [Kindle], Beneath the Skin: Collected Essays, and from 2009 his memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman [Kindle]. Seventy-nine today, Rechy lives in West Hollywood with Michael, his partner of thirty years.

Born March 5: Pier Paolo Pasolini

Poet, philosopher, novelist, newspaper columnist, playwright, painter, actor, and atheist, Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a communist until he was kicked out of the party in 1949 for being gay, which they discovered when he was charged with corrupting minors and obscene acts in public. He was twenty-seven and he was not convicted, but he had to leave their small town northwest of Trieste and, with his mother, moved to Rome. Enduring difficult years being unemployed or underemployed, he published his first important collection of poems in 1954, followed the next year by his first novel, Ragazzi di vita [Boys of Life], which caused a sensation for its raw look at the aimless lives of petty criminals and sometimes hustlers in Rome's roughest neighborhoods.

In 1957 he helped write Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, and three years after that he landed his debut acting role. The following year, 1961, he directed Accattone, the first of his twenty films. In Teorema, Terrence Stamp plays a stranger who moves in with family in Milan and one by one has sex with everyone: the religious maid, the artistic son, the frigid mother, the wallflower daughter, and lastly the father, then leaves and they all fall apart. That was an original screenplay, but many of his later and most celebrated films were adaptations of classics, often infused with nudity and sex: Oedipus Rex, Medea (starring Maria Callas, not singing), The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, and 120 Days of Sodom. Several of his movies featured Ninetto Davoli, his boyfriend since 1963 when he was fifteen.

Throughout the summer of 1975, as he was trying to complete his version of de Sade, Pasolini warned friends he would be killed by the mafia. In November, he picked up a seventeen year-old hustler and was murdered by being run over by his own car. In 2005, the hustler recanted his confession and said three men with Southern Italian accents killed Pasolini. Key details of the crime make it seem impossible to have been perpetrated by a lone person. A longtime friend, the artist Giuseppe Zigaina, is just one of many who believes the always theatrical, always contrarian Pasolini organized his own death. He was fifty-three. Forty-one years after its release, 120 Days of Sodom was named by Time Out's Film Guide as cinema's all-time most controversial film. Steve N. says you must experience Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma.

Born March 3: James Merrill

One of the greater gifts banking has given the world is James Merrill. Second son of a founder of Merrill Lynch, James was brought up in rarefied luxury and intellect: His governess taught him German and French, his father published a book of his early literary efforts when he was sixteen, his Amherst professor (and lover) published a book of his poems at twenty. Over his long career, Merrill won every major American prize for his formal, slightly old-fashioned, rhyming poetry: two National Book Awards, the NBCC, the Library of Congress's Bobbitt National Prize, Yale's Bollingen Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Although his two early novels are more muted on the subject, his poetry and his 1993 memoir A Different Person openly celebrate gay life.

Merrill and his partner David Jackson were together forty years, dividing their time annually between Stonington, Connecticut and Athens. Later they traded Greece for Key West where their long relationship frayed. Merrill started the Ingram Merrill Foundation in honor of his divorced parents and gave generous, often anonymous grants to struggling writers, including his friend Elizabeth Bishop. A later friend, Pulitzer winning novelist and Key West resident Alison Lurie, wrote a memoir of Merrill and Jackson called Familiar Spirits, alluding to their love of ouija board seances memorialized in his postmodern, free verse 560-page epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. He died in 1995 of an aids-related heart attack while visiting Arizona one month shy of his sixty-ninth birthday. His New York Times obit omits Jackson.

Born February 28: Stephen Spender

Even though Stephen Spender delayed publication of his fine first novel, The Temple, for fifty-nine years (until 1988, when he was seventy-nine), you shouldn't expect its gay content to be as important as in E.M. Forster's Maurice (delayed fifty-eight years, until his death). The protagonist doesn't like his same-sex encounters in pre-War Germany, and much of the book's focus is political. In real life, after a series of affairs with men, Spender married twice and began to renounce his gay past, although the photo above, in which he is flanked by Auden and Isherwood on Fire Island, was taken six years into his second marriage. Later, he began to rework the past by rewriting selected lines from his eighteen books of poetry. He changed

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution.

to

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution.

In a similar vein, he became increasingly sensitive to how other people portrayed him, even when it might not have been him. In 1994, he sued David Leavitt and Viking for the novel While England Sleeps, which he claimed was based on his life and charged that the gay scenes were "pornographic." They settled out of court, and Leavitt altered certain passages for subsequent editions. Spender died the next year. Among his other legacies were twenty books of nonfiction (biography, criticism, travel, memoir), two plays, and two children. His daughter Lizzie married Dame Edna.

Born February 27: Derren Brown

Derren Brown has made a career of doing tricks on stage for money. Since 2000, he has been on British television annually blowing viewers' minds and effing with their senses through his signature mix of "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship." The forty-one year-old professional illusionist, mentalist, and skeptic makes no claims of psychic or paranormal ability; indeed, he scoffs at those who do so. Beyond his seven tv series and eight specials, he has created five stage shows including the last year's Svengali, which the Daily Mail critic called "the eeriest, most captivating, brain-baffling show I’ve ever seen." He has published four books, the best-reviewed of which is Tricks of the Mind. In his spare time, Brown paints oversized, exaggerated portraits of famous people and has gathered more than one hundred of them in this book. Let's leave to romance writers the humid analogy that the most mysterious magic of all is love, but after coming out in 2007, Brown has finally found it for himself. He says, “I spent a lot of time thinking about me and working on what I wanted to be before I came into a relationship. In some ways, it’s bad because you come into relationship quite late without a lot of experience and you have a lot to learn. But that can also be exciting. Certainly, it’s lovely to have somebody love you and it’s lovely to love someone else.”

Born February 26: Robert Byron

Upon his debut in 2006, critics rightly hailed Rory Stewart’s book about his walk across Afghanistan, The Places In Between [Kindle], a “flat out masterpiece” but too few explored the full extent of his debt to gay travel writer Robert Byron. The book’s tone, observations, humor, and history lessons follow the template established by Byron’s classic The Road to Oxiana (reissued with a preface by Stewart). Bruce Chatwin considered Byron's book "a sacred text," and Patrick Leigh Fermor's writing also reflects Byron's tremendous influence. At Eton and Oxford he nurtured the love of architecture so evident in his work, but at university he was perhaps more known for his impersonation of Queen Victoria. His “hedonistic” life ultimately got him expelled. Undaunted, he traveled. His first great trip was to Mount Athos in Greece, scene of the pig tickling above. Five years after his Greek book,Byron wrote First Russia, Then Tibet: Travels through a Changing World. In Peking, he lived with Desmond Parsons and developed a terrific crush on him before Desmond was stricken with Hodgkin’s Disease and left for a Swiss clinic where he died at twenty-six in July 1937. Devastated, Byron published his magnum opus that year and never wrote another major work. In 1941 he set sail for Egypt, where he was to work for the Times, and his ship sank in a torpedo attack by a German U-Boat. His body was never found. He was thirty-five.

An excerpt after the jump.

 

Born February 25: Severo Sarduy

Why Reinaldo Arenas and not Severo Sarduy? Born six years apart, the gay Cuban exile novelists died of aids in within three years of each other. In death, Arenas became a star, then, with Julian Schnabel's film , a superstar, whereas the twenty years since Sarduy's passing in 1993 have largely erased the memory of his accomplishments. His novel Cobra won France's Prix Médicis étranger in 1972, immediately followed by four literary heavyweights, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortazar, Steven Millhauser, and Doris Lessing, but for some reason his win did not propel him to their level of international acclaim, possibly because his novel is about a kitschy trans cabaret performer at the Lyrical Theater of Dolls.

Born in 1937 in Cuba's third largest city Camagüey, he left at 23 to study in Madrid but within a month diplomatic ties frayed between Spain and Cuba, and Sarduy had to move to Paris. Ultimately, he stayed there for the rest of his life, though he traveled throughout Europe and met his longtime companion François Wahl on vacation in Italy. His two volumes of essays are Written on a Body and Christ on the Rue Jacob, which Booklist called, "a special book of thrilling ideas excitingly expressed."

Next week, wonderful Archipelago (forever blessed for bringing Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin to American readers) is publishing Sarduy's novel Firefly [Kindle]: "For the first time in English, Severo Sarduy's most autobiographical work, centered on two transvestites who undergo oppositional sexual surgeries (one is castrated, the other is given a new member). This convention-defying, scatological, and very funny novel is a paradise of words, 'paradisic by plenitude' (Roland Barthes)."

Born February 24: Winslow Homer, Judith Butler

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

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

Born February 18: Duane Michals, Audre Lorde

Born to Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, Audrey Lorde recognized the power of names and naming early in life, changing hers as a child to Audre to highlight the symmetry of both names ending in e. At 49 her landmark Zami: A New Spelling of My Name confirmed her stature as a great and essential writer and the nation's foremost "black lesbian feminist poet warrior." Still in her twenties, through a year at the National University of Mexico, graduating from Hunter, and getting her advanced degree from Columbia, she began publishing her poems and seeing them anthologized abroad as well as in Langston Hughes' New Negro Poets USA. (In 1997 Norton published her definitive Collected Poems at 512 pages.) A mother of two children from an eight year marriage to attorney Edwin Rollins, she was already enjoying her lesbianism at twenty, during a year at the National University of Mexico, and later had a seventeen year relationship with psychology professor Frances Clayton, as well as shorter relationships with the artist Mildred Thomson and finally with Gloria Joseph. That Clayton is white might be noteworthy because it was during those years, co-mothering the two children, that Lorde attacked the underlying racism of the feminist movement, linking the experience to slavery in essays like "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." Lorde had equally strong insights into the lgbt movement. From a 1980 interview reprinted in the book I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde:

"...most gay white men are marginal only in one respect. Much of the gay white movement seeks to be included in the american dream and is angered when they do not receive the standard white male privileges, misnamed as 'american democracy.'

    "Often, white gay men are working not to change the system. This is one of the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is. Black gay men recognize, again by the facts of survival, that being Black, they are not going to be included in the same way...

    "I see no essential battle between many gay men and the white male establishment. To be sure, there are gay men who do not view their oppression as isolated, and who work for a future. But it is a matter of majority politics: many gay white males are being pulled by the same strings as other white men in this society. You do not get people to work against what they have identified as their basic self-interest."

After fighting cancer for fourteen years, Lorde died in 1992 in St. Croix at 58. Jackie Kay is one of many who call Lorde "my hero."

Even if you've somehow missed everything else, you know the self-taught photographer Duane Michals, who turns 81 today, for his cover art on the Police's album Synchronicity. Hallmarks of his black and white work are his use of handwritten text, nude men, dramatic juxtapositions, artificial stagings, and nods to gay history -- the horse image is from his 1970 Salute to Walt Whitman and was sold five years ago at a Christie's auction of Elton John's art. Among his more recent books is The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy. Awesomely, Michals and his partner, an architect he met at the gym in 1960, this year will celebrate 53 years together. Old school to the core, Michals is dismayed by "all these kids spewing out of art school photographing their dinner and then making it a 20-foot photograph," and he is not a supporter of gay marriage. From a 2008 interview:

So, you're politically against gay marriage, or just spiritually against it?

"I'm politically against it. I want civil unions. I want all the political advantages, but marriage is a tired vestige of the heterosexual world. I don't know why gay people would want to get married. Of all things! It's a failed institution. It just doesn't make sense. Wedding cake? Oh please!"

Thirty years of his portraits appear in Album.

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.

Born February 16: John Schlesinger

Forty-four years ago this May, John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy rode into movie theaters and later won Oscars for best picture, director, and screenplay. The gay story of the Bronx's own Ratso Rizzo and Texan Joe Buck earned an X rating (which back then simply meant no one under 17, not porn) and bizarre reviews from the likes of Vincent Canby in the NYT. Schlesinger had previously made one of the first "swinging London" movies, Darling, (winning Julie Christie her best actress Oscar), and later made the bi Sunday Bloody Sunday, the first widely distributed film to show two men making love. His daring dwindled with the passing decades: The Day of the Locust, Marathon Man, Yanks, The Falcon and the Snowman, Madame Sousatzka, Pacific Heights, and the indie favorite Cold Comfort Farm. His last movie was the regrettable Madonna - Rupert Everett vehicle, The Next Best Thing in 2000. The London-born Schlesinger lived in Palm Springs with his partner of more than thirty years, Michael Childers, until his death in 2003. Read William Mann's biography Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger or Ian Buruma's Conversations with John Schlesinger.

Born February 15: Bill T. Jones

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. In 2010 he was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient alongside Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey. (photo: Lois Greenfield)

Born February 14: Kevyn Aucoin

The world's most famous makeup artist "married" his much younger boyfriend in an unofficial ceremony in Hawaii in July 2000 and after that Kevyn Aucoin referred to Jeremy Antunes as his husband. In less than two years, the man who easily earned $10,000 a session doing makeup for superstar celebrities' magazine cover shoots or Oscar appearances, the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers about beauty, the only makeup professional ever honored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and the founder of a new line of beauty products bearing his name, was dead at forty, without a will. His husband was locked out of their two shared homes without any legal recourse. Aucoin's estate went to his adoptive parents back in Louisiana who embody more than their share of contradictions: Initially repelled by homosexuality, they started the first PFLAG chapter in Lafayette yet refuse to give their son-in-law even the bed he shared with Kevyn.

It's possible that Kevyn and Jeremy were on the verge of breaking up, or experiencing a typical rough patch in what might have been a long marriage. Jeremy had left a sick and hurting Kevyn to go to Paris for a week alone, which sounds selfish and indulgent but could be seen as a tough ultimatum to someone ruinously addicted to many kinds of pain killers and sleeping pills, who had in the preceding six months dropped out of two programs to overcome substance abuse, and who had screwed up his friend Cher's "Song for the Lonely" video shoot (needing to be hospitalized twice) so notoriously that not one star had asked him to do her makeup for the Oscars that spring. In any case, Jeremy's trip was cut short by Kevin's final hospitalization. Those pills were to relieve Kevyn's intense suffering from acromegaly, a pituitary gland disorder that causes excessive growth and had given him an ever enlarging brain tumor, undiagnosed since he was nine years old, at which time he had already discovered makeup.

From childhood, his ambition for glamor and success was matched by his generosity of spirit. Two ex-boyfriends continued to work closely with him and even after he had achieved his own fame, he took enormous pleasure and considerable time to do makeup for shopgirls, neighbors, and even the homeless teenage drag queens of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, of which he was a vociferous supporter. Topping the wildly devoted praise by Cher, Janet, Tina, Tori, Gwyneth, Liza, Courtney, and Celine, Mary Tyler Moore said, "There were three men in my life I met who had the ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the world just by looking at you, just with their eyes: One was Sinatra, the other was Pope John Paul II, and the third was Kevyn." Despite his instructions that his ashes be scattered in Hawaii where he was married, Kevyn's parents are keeping his cremated remains in Louisiana because they like to visit him.

Born February 13: Grant Wood

   

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

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