Band of Thebes

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."

Born March 12: Randall Kenan

Randall Kenan dazzled the literary world with his 1989 debut novel, A Visitation of Spirits, about the inhabitants of a Southern rural black community, including a gay man whose internalized homophobia leads him to tragedy. Three years later his first collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, earned even greater acclaim for another empathetic look at the townsfolk of his imagined Tims Creek, North Carolina. Kenan has won a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Writers award, a John Dos Passos award, a Sherwood Anderson award, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but he hasn't published any other books of fiction in 18 years. Instead, he wrote a short YA biography of his idol James Baldwin, collected 200 interviews for his 688-page oral history Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, riffed on Baldwin in a 149-page essay called The Fire This Time, and edited Baldwin's uncollected writings in The Cross of Redemption. Fifty today, he teaches at his alma matter, UNC Chapel Hill.

Two or Three Gay Authors Among Five PEN/Faulkner Finalists

Congratulations to Benjamin Alire Sáenz, who came out at 54 in 2009 and is having a spectacular year now, honored with three awards at ALA for his gay novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, and yesterday earned double Lammy nominations and became a PEN/Faulkner finalist. 

Thomas Mallon, 61, told an interviewer after the publication of his first mainly gay novel Fellow Travelers in 2007, "I have always been openly gay, but to put homosexuality front and center in the book was different..." 

The five PEN/Faulkner finalists are:

• Amelia Gray, Threats (FSG)
• Laird Hunt, Kind One (Coffee House Press)
• T. Geronimo Johnson, Hold It 'Til It Hurts [Kindle] (Coffee House Press)
• Thomas Mallon, Watergate [Kindle] (Pantheon)
• Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (Cinco Puntos Press)

The winner will be announced March 19.

Wise Men

Spoiler Alert. An indie favorite, Stuart Nadler's baggy first novel Wise Men is problematic throughout and freefalls on its final page with a revelation that the protagonist's father, Arthur Wise, and his longtime lawyer partner, Robert Ashley, were gay lovers all along. The decision to withhold the information will doubly perplex readers who have spent 330 pages wondering why the author has chastely ignored the sexuality of the obviously gay Robert. Moreover, the surprise claim that the two men were in a clandestine relationship rings false, exactly like the last-page, out-of-nowhere announcement at the close of Martin Amis' House of Meetings that the narrator was "queer for my brother." As it happens, both novels aim for Big Themes, fall short, and attempt too late to recast their tales in a gay light. Nadler is a serious and thoughtful writer who wants to address major issues: family, race, religion, money, fame, rescue, love at first sight, and the passage of time. He needed a tight editor to help shape his long-winded story of 17 year-old, Jewish Hilly Wise who rejects his newly super-rich ambulance-chaser father Arthur during the summer of 1952 on Cape Cod and instantly falls for a poor black girl named Savannah, whom he can't forget and pursues in Iowa in 1972 and sees again on the Cape in 2008.

After faulting the book's "whopping blandness" and sentimentality, Janet Maslin observes:

As he grows up on the page, Hilly likes to overexplain himself to the reader. “Time does that,” he says, as an older man looking backward; “it kills the mystique, replaces the boundlessness of wishing and hoping with some well-earned, necessary clarity.” Talk kills mystique too, and by some lights Wise Men talks too much about too little. 

A quick internet search yields no answers as to whether or not Nadler is another straight writer whose lgbt characters are queer in name only. He covers every other topic in several likable interviews here, here, and here.

Lesbian "Ladder" in Smithsonian's American Stories

In 1956, thirteen years before Stonewall, the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis began publishing a monthly journal called The Ladder and one issue from 1968 now appears in the Smithsonian's new exhibit American Stories. Over 100 artifacts on display cover just shy of 400 years of history, from the Pilgrims to Obama, so the queer presence is significant. Seeing the inclusion this weekend made me doubly proud because it might never have happened without my partner's spearheading the effort to get Frank Kameny's papers in the Smithsonian's collection in 2006 and his subsequent public criticism in 2010 when they were far too slow in putting any of the artifacts on view. 

Unfortunately, in conveying four centuries of American history too much of the exhibit is entertainment: Kermit the Frog, a witch cloak from Wicked, Archie Bunker's chair, Dorothy's ruby slippers, which are the welcoming object in the display area and the only artifact on the webpage.

Happily, another exhibit celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington features a big wall of Bayard Rustin which does mention his homosexuality and later has LGBT rights marches as part of the legacy of the 1963 march. The exhibit is created by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History, still on schedule to open near the Washington Monument in 2015.

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 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)

Forget White Girls, Go Back to Women

Readers who rely on Lambda Literary's excellent weekly emails shouldn't get too excited about their announcement of Hilton Als' long-awaited new book, White Girls, said to be out today. It's not. The book was previously scheduled for July 2012, October 2012, and January 2013. Whenever it happens -- likely late 2014, according to McSweeney's publicist -- grab it because the always, always interesting Als includes among his 'white girls' Truman Capote and Malcolm X.

Instead, revisit Als' first book The Women [Kindle], again with Capote, though he primarily studies three figures: a Radcliffe graduate named Dorothy Dean who largely ignored other black people and women to concentrate on her circle of white gay male artists and authors in Cambridge and New York; his Barbadian mother Marie; and the Harlem Renaissance poet and playwright Owen Dodson who was Als' mentor and lover.

For the lasting impact of Als' debut, here's an excerpt from a 2011 essay Jenny McPhee wrote in the wake of Bridesmaids' surprise success:

"In his mind-blowing 1994 essay "The Women", about Truman Capote's fluid sexuality and the beguiling constellation of sex, power, and authorship, Hilton Als describes Norman Mailer and CBS chairman William Paley, who represented for Capote the entire heterosexual male cultural apparatus, as: "Men, who, by all accounts, did not want to be fucked by any idea of femininity that had fucked them up but to fuck their idea of femininity." In other words, men at society's helm are so terrified of the devouring-mother brand of femininity, they impose on women through cultural stereotyping a subservient femininity, one demanding women be passive and adoring, their sole ambition in life to look on intently with pride and desire whenever a man says, "Look at me, look at what I can do." ...

"Furthermore, according to Capote, via Hilton Als, the real power of the "dark fat mouth-watering dick" lies not so much in its power as phallic symbol per se, but in women identifying that dick "to be the source of their power." Through examining Capote's ability as an author to identify both as female and male, Als provides a succinct, if inelegant, analysis of our society's psychosexual dynamic, or stalemate."

Born February 12: Jacqueline Woodson

In fourteen novels for young readers and seven picture books, Jacqueline Woodson has given voice to characters usually ignored or silenced in mainstream stories, and in doing so she's been a finalist for or won the National Book Award, the Newbery Honor Medal, the Caldecott Medal, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the ALA Notable Book Award, the Parents' Choice Award, the Booklist Editors' Choice Award, and many, many regional prizes. She most often writes about friendship, especially across racial and class lines, and family or first love. Her girls are strong and her boys are caring, and she has included glbtq characters as adults and children, sometimes as the primary storyline. She's created a complete bibliography of her novels, with plot summaries and where and why she wrote each book. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner and their two children, loves pizza, hates artichokes, and wisely doesn't believe in writer's block. The ALA's 2009 list of great lgbt reads for young readers included her novel After Tupac and D Foster about a trio of 11 to 13 year-olds coping with a tough neighborhood and the homophobia aimed at one of their brothers. Her most recent book is the story of brave girl coping, badly, with serious loss after Hurricane Katrina, Beneath a Meth Moon, and her next is This Is the Rope: A Story From the Great Migration, coming in August.

Lesbian Autobiography Beats Clinton, Obama for Spoken Word Grammy

In a surprise vote, Bill Clinton (Back to Work), Michelle Obama (American Grown), Rachel Maddow (Drift), and Ellen DeGeneres (Seriously...I'm Kidding) lost last night's Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album to by far the least-known of the five nominees, lesbian folkie Janis Ian for her new reading of her 2008 memoir Society's Child: My Autobiography [Kindle]. The story covers her music and early fame, of course, as well as her bad marriage to a brilliant but abusive man, her coming out in 1993, and her happy marriage to a woman, Patricia Snyder, celebrating their tenth anniversary this year.

Out gay Frank Ocean's much-nominated channel ORANGE won only Best Urban Contemporary Album. He lost Best New Artist to FUN. Jay-Z and Kanye won Best Rap Collaboration for "No Church in the Wild" which also features Frank Ocean.

Born February 9: Alice Walker

Born to sharecroppers in Georgia in 1944, Alice Walker was eight years old when her brother shot her with a BB gun, leaving her right eye blind. The doctor who operated on her swindled her parents. She escaped to Spelman, where she studied with Howard Zinn, then transferred to Sarah Lawrence, but after graduating in 1965 she went to Mississippi to work for civil rights. Two years later, on St. Patrick's Day in New York City, she married a liberal, white, Jewish lawyer named Mel Leventhal. They moved to Jackson, Mississippi and had a baby. The Klan gave them death threats. They divorced after nine years.

Male violence and exploitation of women have been frequent themes in Walker's thirty books of poems, stories, novels, and nonfiction, as have women's triumphs by forging strong, supportive relationships with one another, including lesbian love. The Color Purple won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1983. Steven Spielberg's adaptation was largely degayed and memorable mainly for introducing Oprah Winfrey to the world. The movie was nominated for eleven Oscars and won zero. Exactly twenty years later, Oprah produced the musical version on Broadway. It was nominated for eleven Tonys and won one. The novel endures, and it still incites: According to the ALA, it ranked 18th on the list of books patrons most frequently seek to ban from libraries.

Like Susan Sontag, Walker is an outspoken critic of social injustice who chooses to concentrate her energies on current topics other than gay issues and rarely discusses her own same-sex relationships. In 2006, she finally spoke about dating Tracy Chapman, saying, "it was delicious and lovely and wonderful and I totally enjoyed it and I was completely in love with her but it was not anybody's business but ours." As for Chapman, she titled her 2000 album Telling Stories, with cutting lyrics about fiction and lies:

Leave the pity and the blame
For the ones who do not speak
You write the words to get respect and compassion
And for posterity
You write the words and make believe
There is truth in the space between

There is fiction in the space between
You and everybody
Give us all what we need
Give us one more sad sordid story
But in the fiction of the space between
Sometimes a lie is the best thing
Sometimes a lie is the best thing

That's mild compared to Rebecca Walker's feelings about her "self-absorbed" parents, who, after their divorce, traded her back and forth at two year intervals. Rebecca shared some anger in her highly praised memoir Black, White & Jewish. Mother and daughter are vividly estranged. Rebecca identifies as bi. Now she lives with her son's father; earlier she dated the singer Meshell Ndegeocello.

Alice Walker's recent memoir consists of 38 chapters, each addressed to one of her "girls" -- which sounds promising until you realize she means the chickens on her Northern California farm. The teaser copy from The New Press connects her activist work in Gaza for justice and peace to her chicken-rearing but of course avoids lgbt rights. The full title is The Chicken Chronicles: Sitting with the Angels Who Have Returned with My Memories: Glorious, Rufus, Gertrude Stein, Splendor, Hortensia, Agnes of God, the Gladyses, & Babe: A Memoir.

Born February 3: Gertrude Stein, James Bridges, Marlon Riggs

By the time she was four, Gertrude Stein had lived in Pennsylvania, Vienna, Paris, and Oakland. By the time she was seventeen, both her parents were dead and her eldest brother took over the successful family business. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1897 and spent the summer studying embryology at Woods Hole, then attended Johns Hopkins Medical School, which she left after two years. In 1903 she moved to Paris where she would stay until she died forty-three years later. Unlike writers who withdraw to contemplate, Stein engaged with the world head-on across the arts. She wrote novels, plays, essays, autobiography, and libretti, sometimes in collaboration with close friends. Mocked for her modernist use of repetition ("A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"), Stein could be perfectly succinct, as when naming the Lost Generation, or saying, "Hemingway, remarks are not literature." A bold collector of new art, she and Alice Toklas, partners for almost forty years, hosted legendary weekly salons in which the best of Paris came to see the paintings and stayed for the conversation. Among their regular attendees were Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Derain, Rousseau, Hemingway, Wilder, Anderson, Appolinaire, Thomson, Bowles, Pound, and Bernard Fay, the gay Nazi informer who protected Toklas and Stein, a Jewish lesbian after all, throughout WWII. Although they were great travelers (it was they who tipped Bowles to Tangier), Stein and Toklas perversely stayed in France through the war. Although she wrote her coming out memoir, Q.E.D. before she was thirty, it was not published until 1950, four years after her death at 72. Despite thirty-nine years together, Stein left Toklas very little. Nieces and nephews grabbed the fortune in art. Stein and Toklas are buried side by side in Père Lachaise. Get the essential Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories by Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer. 

Two-time Oscar nominee James Bridges wrote and directed The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, Urban Cowboy, Mike's Murder, and Perfect, among other films. It's not hard to guess a queer subtext in his September 30, 1955 starring Richard Thomas as Jimmy, a college kid who "goes berserk" the day his idol James Dean dies. To say nothing of John Travolta's aerobic thrusts in Perfect. Bridges got his start writing The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. His life partner was television's Jimmy Olsen in the Superman series, Jack Larson. Bridges died at 57 in 1993.

Speaking of Harvard (from which he graduated with honors in 1978, followed by his MA in journalism from Berkeley), and speaking of 80s queer dancing, here's a clip from Marlon Riggs' famous Tongues Untied. The best part is the poem by Essex Hemphill. Riggs' 1989 documentary about black gay culture was funded by an NEA grant and shown on PBS, making it a prime target for right wing attack groups. But its breakthrough honesty (and snap lessons) also made it perfect for Cannes and Berlin, as well as the many American events where it won awards: San Francisco's Frameline, Atlanta's film fest, and New York's documentary festival. His next work, Color Adjustment, examined television's "unflattering" portrayal of black characters from 1948 to 1988. After that he made Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, interviewing HIV+ black men. When he was doing preproduction on his Black Is...Black Ain't (viewable in three parts starting here), he died of aids. He was 37.

John Gordon's Colour Scheme

Not getting enough "gay urban Afro-boho interracial romance" in your literary diet? John Gordon's new novel Colour Scheme [Kindle] will do the trick. According to his publisher, the story unfolds "over one sweaty summer following a night of shocking violence in a post-9/11 London of vinyl records, video-cassettes and mix-tapes, seething with passion and oil-paint, music and dance. Meet bebop-cool Malcolm, wigger rudeboy Luke, Jamaican choreographer George and schizophrenic African artist Ziggy, seekers for love, on the run from buried truths that by the summer's end they all must face. Murder, bereavement, Vodou, twins and madness: new love on the rack. Will it survive?"

You probably know John Gordon best for his work on the tv show Noah's Arc and the feature Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom, but this is his fifth novel. Exactly a year ago he published his high-octane story of a Jamaican raggae producer chased by gangstas in London, Faggamuffin [Kindle]. His 1993 debut, Black Butterflies, is a healing romance between Wesley and Paul in south London. His second novel Skin Deep, follows best friends Ray (into white guys) and Chris (into leather). His third novel Warriors and Outlaws explores a broader canvas of London life as the young leader of the Panther Posse with political aspirations, Jazz, shoots a policeman and hides out with a drag queen he has previously ignored named Carly.

Is it interesting or irrelevant to know John Gordon is white and lives in Shepherd's Bush? He has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award and won a New London Writers' Award. National Book Award finalist Susan Straight is another white author who in eight novels has written exclusively about protagonists who are black (seven books) or Latino (one).

   

Born February 1: Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Langston Hughes

In a fair literary universe, adventure lesbian author Lucy Jane Bledsoe's books would outsell Pam Houston and Cheryl Strayed. Instead, Lucy's vivid exploration of three women's relationships and the meaning of home, set in an Antarctic research station conjured so astutely you'll think you've lived there yourself, The Big Bang Symphony, was released in May 2010, became a finalist for four book prizes, but still is not available in paperback or as an eBook. Lucy's first novel, Working Parts, about adult literacy, won the Stonewall Book Award in 1998. She is a five-time Lammy finalist, for those two books, her two other novels, This Wild Silence and Biting the Apple, and her anthology Lesbian Travels. Her own trips are collected in a wonderful book called The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic, and she's also written half a dozen titles for kids. Maybe 2013 is her year. Last month she won the top prize in the Saturday Evening Post's Great American Fiction Contest for her story "Wolf," about a couple in Yellowstone. Editorial Director Steven Slon says, "This terrific story is a tribute to human passion and to the American adventurer spirit. It's also a powerful evocation of the call of the wild." 

 

Celebrating "Langston Hughes, poet," as we must, neglects the bulk of his creative work: eleven plays, the screenplay of Way Down South (released the same year as Gone with the Wind), novels (starting with Not Without Laughter), forty-seven short stories (which often paid his rent), a series of books showcasing famous black Americans' accomplishments, six children's books, bold political writings, and two volumes of autobiography that as much as anything focus on Langston Hughes, traveler. His first memoir covers Harlem and Paris (after his scattered Midwestern childhood with visits to his father, an attorney who left the family to live in Mexico); and his second, I Wonder as I Wander, recounts his journeys in Russia, Turkmenistan, China, Japan, Cuba, Haiti, and Spain during their civil war. Of course his genius most often reveals itself in his poetry, which emphasizes a purity and simplicity like Whitman's, but unlike Whitman his directness of language does not extend to openness about his sexuality. Hughes's most cited homoerotic poems such as "Young Sailor" and "Joy", safeguarded with women or "she," are more cautious than the Calamus cycle. Below, listen to him read his response to Whitman's "I Hear America Singing." He died at 65 in 1967 and his ashes are interred beneath the lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th St. Long degayed, Hughes' homosexuality is the centerpiece of Isaac Julien's film on historical black gay experience amid entrenched homophobia, Looking for Langston.

Stonewall Book Awards: Ellis Avery, Keith Boykin

    

Three days after the Rainbow & Over the Rainbow Lists, two days after the Stonewall YA award, the adult Stonewall Book Awards were announced today:

FICTION: Ellis Avery's novel The Last Nude [Kindle] about an American woman's involvement wth the Russian painter Tamara de Lempika in Paris in 1927.

NON-FICTION: The anthology For Colored Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Still Not Enough: Coming of Age, Coming Out, and Coming Home [Kindle] edited by Keith Boykin

The Stonewall committee of the ALA's GLBT Round Table also named eight honor titles.

Fiction honor titles:

• Paul Russell, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov winner of the Ferro-Grumley
• Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles winner of the Orange Prize
• John Boyne, The Absolutist
• Charles Rice-Gonzalez, Chulito

Non-Fiction honor titles:

• Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?
• Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
• Jeanne Cordova, When We Were Outlaws, Publishing Triangle & Lambda winner
• Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws

Many of these are excellent books -- especially the Avery, Russell, Winterson and Cordova -- and I'm grateful for the committee's hard work. Nevertheless, some huge omissions raise the perennial vexation of attracting the right submissions. When I judged a literary award and the best books were missing, we fought with the publicist, the director of publicity, and ultimately the publisher to wrangle additional nominations. After I criticized another award, the organizer responded they could only choose from what they had. Passive judging hurts everyone because it diminishes the award to merely the Finest Available rather than the Finest of the Year. LGBT writers deserve better, and interested readers deserve the best of the best.

Man Booker International Shortlist

    

Judges of the Man Booker International Prize have broken through from a parallel universe where these ten writers are their finalists for a newish lifetime achievement award given only every other year. You'll note the complete absence of authors who are Spanish, Latino, African, or Arab:

U R Ananthamurthy (India)

Aharon Appelfeld (Israel)

Lydia Davis (USA)

Intizar Husain (Pakistan)

Yan Lianke (China)

Marie NDiaye (France)

Josip Novakovich (Canada)

Marilynne Robinson (USA)

Vladimir Sorokin (Russia) 

Peter Stamm (Switzerland)

Unedited, expat judge Tim Parks said to the press, "Ten wonderful authors, nine of whom I didn't know before I started reading for this prize." Yikes, dude.

If you don't know Yan Lianke, his Dream of Ding Village [Kindle] is an aids novel that was shortlisted for the Asia Booker and his most recent Lenin's Kisses [Kindle] was named a best book of 2012 by The New Yorker, MacLeans, and Kirkus. I was as happy as you when a black woman won the Prix Goncourt in 2009, and last summer Knopf finally brought out the English translation of Marie NDiaye's Three Strong Women [Kindle]. Readers of a certain bent may be able to queer their experience of Lydia Davis's novel The End of the Story about an unnamed narrator's obsession with a much younger male ex-lover. And fans of northern wonders Tove Jansson, Gerbrand Bakker, and Per Petterson should certainly seek Peter Stamm's short novel Unformed Landscapes about Kathrine, a woman who has never been below the Arctic Circle until she abandons her husband and son.

The winner of the Man Booker International will be announced May 22.

Born January 5: Alvin Ailey

Growing up in Texas, Alvin Ailey hid his dancing from his disapproving mother for two years and when she first saw him backstage in make-up, she slapped his face. His terror of her homophobia lasted decades, to his final days, so much so that when he was dying of aids at fifty-eight in 1989 he asked his doctor to lie about the cause on his death certificate. That fear outlives him. A CBS profile from August 2008 celebrates the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater's 50th anniversary with great dancing and an American success story of a black troupe thriving in a typically white corner of the arts. It omits any mention that he was gay, or gay people's contribution to dance, that he died of aids, or aids' toll on the arts. It also erases the more complicated aspects of Ailey's life, like his devastating arthritis, his addiction to cocaine, or his dependence on lithium. His private demons never obscured his public genius. One of the seventy-nine dances he choreographed, Revelations, set to spirituals and gospel music, is among the most popular and most seen ballets of the twentieth-century.

Frank Ocean: Man of the Year, Album of the Year & Six Grammy Noms

Remember last July 4 when 25 year-old New Orleans R&B hip-hop singer Frank Ocean came out -- via tumblr, of course -- and you said, Who? Understandable, because his debut album Channel Orange didn't come out until a week later. Last month it was voted Album of the Year at the Soul Train Awards, and by the music critics at USA Today, and now the album has topped the UK's 12th annual Poll of Polls (Jack White was second, Tame Impala third). Earlier this month Ocean was named MTV's Man of the Year. Channel Orange is nominated for six Grammys, including Album of the Year, Best New Artist, Best Urban Contemporary, and Record of the Year for this gay song, "Thinking About You."

Born December 24: Kevin Killian, Lee Daniels

Queer national treasure Kevin Killian is 60. A native of New York, a survivor of Catholic schooling, he moved to San Francisco in 1980 and by the end of that decade published two novels Shy (readers of which, said PW, "will be richly compensated by its intellectually stimulating and emotionally gripping prose") and Bedrooms Have Windows. Seven years later he released his debut collection of stories, Little Men, and the following year came his third novel, Arctic Summer. His second collection, I Cry Like a Baby, appeared in 2001. His third collection, the brilliant Impossible Princess, won a Lammy in 2010, the same year he published his fourth novel, Spread Eagle. He shared an American Book Award for co-editing My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. A co-founder of the Poets Theater, he is said to have written more than 30 plays. Queering matrimony, he is married to lesbian Dodie Bellamy.

In 2003, when Halle Berry had her Oscar moment for Monster's Ball, as the first black Best Actress, it was also the first time an Academy Award-winning film was solely produced by a black person: Lee Daniels, 43. He followed it in 2004 with the triple-Independent Spirit Award nominated, Kevin Bacon child molester movie The Woodsman. In 2005 he produced and acted in his directoral debut, Shadowboxer, starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Helen Mirren, Macy Gray, and Joseph Gordon-Leavitt. Then came Precious. Nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, it won two, supporting actress and adapted screenplay. It was nominated for five major Independent Spirit Awards and won all five. It won awards from the Golden Globes, BAFTA, and the NAACP, among many others. Daniels' followup, this year's pulpy, violent, Zac Efron starrer The Paperboy, was largely panned, though it was selected for Cannes and Nicole Kidman's performance is nominated for SAG and Golden Globe awards. Brace yourself for next year when he releases The Butler, in which Forest Whitaker is a real-life White House servant whose career spanned six First Families: the Eisenhowers (Robin Williams, Melissa Leo), the Kennedys (James Marsden, Minka Kelly), the Johnsons (Liev Schreiber), the Nixons (John Cusack), the Carters, and the Reagans (Alan Rickman, Jane Fonda). Amping the star power, the film also has roles for Vanessa Redgrave, Alex Pettyfer, Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, and Oprah.

Daniels was partners with longtime casting director Billy Hopkins and together they adopted and raised Daniels' niece and nephew. Since their breakup Daniels has been with Andy Sforzini (in purple), still raising their children.

Born December 5: Little Richard

He's 80 today. The straight, white gods of rock were all copying the same gay, black pioneer, Little Richard.

Elvis: "Your music has inspired me - you are the greatest." 

The Beatles: "He was my idol at school. The first song I ever sang in public was Long Tall Sally, at a Butlins holiday camp talent competition! I love his voice and I always wanted to sing like him." "It was all his fault really."

The Rolling Stones: "Little Richard is the originator and my first idol."  "Little Richard is King."

Bob Dylan: in his high school yearbook says his goal is "to join Little Richard."

David Bowie (not so straight): "After hearing Little Richard on record, I bought a saxophone and came into the music business. Little Richard was my inspiration."

Paul Simon: "When I was in high school I wanted to be like Little Richard."

Bob Seeger: "Little Richard - he was the first one that really got to me... I always preferred a high energy vocal, a hard full-force vocal. I liked Little Richard better than Elvis."

Pat Boone: "No one person has been imitated more than Little Richard."

Black superstars too are quick to credit Little Richard, although in following him they never reaped the same rewards as their white counterparts.

James Brown (who claimed that Little Richard was the first to put the funk in the rock beat): "Little Richard is my idol."

Otis Redding: "If it hadn't been for Little Richard, I would not be here. I entered the music business because of Richard - he is my inspiration. I used to sing like Little Richard, his Rock 'n' Roll stuff, you know. Richard has soul, too. My present music has a lot of him in it."

Sam Cooke: "I love Little Richard.  He is a great entertainer and he has done so much for our music."

Smokey Robinson: "Little Richard was the beginning of that drivin', never-let-up, funky Rock 'n' Roll."

Ray Charles: Little Richard "started a kind of music that set the pace for a lot of what's happening today."

Rev. Al Green: "I was a little kid when I heard Little Richard. He was playing piano and singing that song [Jenny, Jenny]. Even then, I knew he was a classic, one-of-a-kind. I never heard (a performer) with that kind of enthusiasm."

Jimi Hendrix: "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice."

What makes his lasting importance astounding is that it's all based on two years' work. He released Tutti Frutti in November 1955, and in 1957, while touring Australia, he became born again and quit the music business. His success and influence are even more surprising when you consider how, in the middle of the Eisenhower administration (the summer of '56 when Ike added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and authorized the national motto of "In God We Trust"), Little Richard made the world fall for a high camp, effeminate black man in flashy clothes, crazy hair, wearing heavy pancake makeup and heavier eyeliner. (He based much of his style on another Southern gay black man, Esquerita.) Given the times, none of this should have happened for Richard Penniman. Given his own background, with his parents disowning him at thirteen for being gay, it should have been impossible.

Starting in the 1960s, he staged many comebacks, easily slipping into caricature and never equaling his early highs: After Tutti Frutti came Long Tall Sally, Slipin and Slidin, Rip It Up, Lucille, Jenny, Jenny, Keep a Knockin, and Good Golly, Miss Molly. Beyond the music, he has kept the persona relevant for fifty years. Witness his turn with King Ralph and his ads for Geico.