Band of Thebes

Born February 21-22

Edna St. Vincent Millay, poet. Read Nancy Milford's Savage Beauty.

W.H. Auden, poet and critic. Read R.P.T. Davenport-Hines' Auden or John Fuller's W. H. Auden.

Barbara Jordan, three-term Congresswoman from Texas, never acknowledged her nearly 30-year relationship with Nancy Earl. Read Jordan's own Speaking the Truth with Eloquent Thunder.

Christopher Bram, 60, novelist, essayist, author of Eminent Outlaws.

Isaac Julien, 52, filmmaker (Looking for Langston) and artist (Turner Prize finalist).

Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts. Read Tim Jeal's Baden-Powell.

Felice Picano, 68, novelist and memoirist.

David Geffen, 69, mogul. Newly single after ending multi-year relationship with Jeremy Lingvall, 28. Read Tom King's The Operator.

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 1: Langston Hughes

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.

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.

"Festa Barocca" photo by Andrea Mohin/NYT

Salon Series of Minority Youth Coming Out Stories: Pariah Personals

Cross-promoting the movie, this week Salon is running a series called Pariah Personals in which minority and immigrant teens write about coming out to their families. Some critics say the movie suffers from an over-familiar story, but all of these blessedly brief first-person essays have fresh, unexpected details:

Monday, Jamilah King's mother offered to attend a pride parade with her at a time when neither was comfortable with it.

Tuesday, Jean Melesaine [below], a Samoan Mormon lesbian, learned at five years old that she would go to hell and started jacking cars when she was seven and robbing apartments at ten.

Wednesday, Andres Garcia, 17, [above] avoided telling his family because he "just figured they'd be close-minded," and his coming out did spark a fight -- because his brother was hurt to be the last to know and his father felt awful for all the suffering Andres would face in a prejudiced world.

Pariah Opens Today, Expands Next Week

For whatever reason, the debut Brooklyn black teen lesbian coming out movie Pariah doesn't have quite as strong buzz as the white lesbian family film The Kids Are All Right (big stars, known director) or the Harlem black teen film Precious (Sundance winner, backed by Oprah and Tyler Perry). Pariah opens today in New York, Hollywood, and San Francisco to solid reviews. On January 6 it expands to Cambridge, Chicago, Dallas, DC, San Diego, and Seattle. This is your triple chance to support women directors, black film, and queer movies, all wildly underrepresented at the box office.

Born December 27: Wilson Cruz

In 1992 when he was 19, Wilson Cruz told his Afro-Puerto Rican parents he was gay, shocking and "hurting" his mother, and enraging his father, who banished him from their Brooklyn home. For two months, Wilson stayed with friends or lived in his car. He moved to Hollywood, determined to be an out actor of color, and within two years he was cast as Ricky, the gay teen on the critically acclaimed series My So-Called Life starring Claire Danes. Oliver Stone cast him as Hoover's servant Joaquin in Nixon, and he appeared in 11 episodes on the sixth and final season of Party of Five. In the decade since then, he has guested on many series and had small roles in big films (He's Just Not That Into You) and larger roles in smaller films, like The Ode, co-directed, co-produced, and adapted by Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla from his debut novel Ode to Lata [Kindle]. Wilson Cruz reconciled with his parents long ago and is a tireless advocate for LGBTQ youth. He is also, apparently, always on Twitter, where he asked ppl to support The Trevor Project for Christmas and donate to GLSEN for his birthday. Today he's 38 and celebrating in Puerto Vallarta.

Born December 5-7: Little Richard, Townsend Warner, Cather

In Nebraska at fourteen Willa Cather began dressing as a boy and calling herself William, which continued at least four years, into her studies at the state university. So when she could choose a fictional world to live in, she tended to write about male characters. Although known for her paeans to life in the Midwest, like O Pioneers! and My Antonia, she spent her entire adult life in New York City, where for more than 35 years she lived with her partner Edith Lewis. Although Nebraska is often a starting point, her twelve novels cover an incredible range. Song of the Lark is about an opera singer who travels internationally. One of Ours (for which she won the Pulitzer Prize) features a man enlisting to fight in World War I after his wife leaves to do missionary work in China. Death Comes for the Archbishop takes place in New Mexico Territory and is her masterpiece, according to many critics, although A.S. Byatt, Bob Smith, and Peter Cameron prefer The Professor's House.

 

 

During four decades of The New Yorker's glory years, the magazine published 150 short stories by the English writer Sylvia Townsend Warner, yet, as John Updike says, her work "never quite won her the flaming place in the heavens of repute that she deserved." Her first novel, Lolly Willowes (1925), concerns a middle-aged woman who is not interested in men and becomes a witch instead. Her second novel, Mr. Fortune's Maggot (1927), concerns a middle-aged gay clergyman who while doing missionary work in the South Seas falls in love with a native young man and loses his faith. Lolly Willowes was the very first selection of the Book of the Month Club, and both novels were major successes in America and the United Kingdom. More novels, collections of stories, poems, and a biography of T.H. White followed, though at a slower pace and to smaller sales. Much has been made of her close, literary friendship with her New Yorker editor and author of the classic gay novel The Folded Leaf, William Maxwell, immortalized in a collection of their letters from 1938 to 1978. Less discussed is her greatest love, her partner of thirty-nine years, the poet Valentine Ackland. Although the two women died nine years apart, their ashes are buried together beneath a single stone in a churchyard in Chaldon Herring, Dorset.

 

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 ought to 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 recent ads for Geico. Today he is 79 and lives in Lynchburg, TN. He is still single.

Born November 29: Peter Cameron, Billy Strayhorn, Simon Amstell

Not to imply that movie adaptations are the ultimate yardstick of artistic merit but of Peter Cameron's five novels, three have been made into feature films. The stories he tells resonate deeply with other types of storytellers. And with readers. And with critics. The New York Times Book Review said, "The Weekend [[Kindle]] echoes Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose brilliant narrative critiques of material culture open, again and again, to the metaphysical, to that dimension where the known world cedes to mystery." The London Times wrote, "If The City of Your Final Destination were eligible for the Man Booker Prize I would be pressing for it to be on the shortlist. It has all the qualities currently undervalued on the literary scene: understatement, humour, and a dispensing with pedestrian naturalism... it has the dream-like mistiness of somewhere in one of Shakespeare's late plays." The Philadelphia Inquirer hailed Andorra [[Kindle]] as "a nearly perfect book . . . a work of remarkable and sustained invention and imagination." The Toronto Star said Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You [[Kindle]] is "considerably more sophisticated, subtle, and rewarding" than Catcher in the Rye. Peter has also written a play, two marvelous collections of short stories, and in his spare time he publishes extremely elegant handmade books in very limited editions at his Wallflower Press. His disquieting, engrossing, and beautiful sixth novel, Coral Glynn, will be published next March. I read it in October and am still enslaved to its understated power.

Jazz genius Billy Strayhorn spent his life in a jam: professionally, he couldn’t live with or without Duke Ellington. Gay in an intolerant time and homophobic musical subculture, he was lucky to be able to live and work openly behind the protective band leader. Yet Ellington took credit for Strayhorn’s music and made him work without a contract. Duke’s highest earning number, his signature tune, the holy grail of the era, Take the A Train, was, unknown to everyone at the time, written by Strayhorn, who never received any royalties. Ellington got rich. Strayhorn worked mainly to be able to work, without recognition or reward. But what work it is: Lush Life, Day Dream, Rain Check, Satin Doll, Chelsea Bridge, Lotus Blossom, Clementine, Johnny Come Lately, and many songs recorded by his dear friend Lena Horne, including Maybe, Something To Live For, and the double-edged Love Like This Can’t Last. As for his own “love like this,” within his first year in New York he and his boyfriend Aaron Bridgers moved in together and lived openly as a couple in Harlem, brave for 1940, when he was twenty-four. And, after a life of heavy drinking and constant smoking, when he died of cancer of the esophagus at fifty-one, he died not in Lena Horne’s arms as an oft-repeated story has it [she was in Europe], but with his partner Bill Grove. Although that was two years before Stonewall, Strayhorn worked in the early gay rights movement. Proving the depth of the prejudice he struggled against, even now the official Billy Strayhorn website completely de-gays him. We've had the prestigious biography for fifteen years; where is the Hollywood biopic?

Do you think Simon Amstell knew he was gay before or after he knew he was funny? At fourteen he appeared on a British morning chat show impersonating Dame Edna. The sweetness and malice stuck. Now 32, Simon's humor is sometimes branded "mean" or "horrible." (He prefers "cheeky.") True, he teased Amy Winehouse about her drinking, but as the host of Popworld from 2000 to 2006 he was often criticized for asking famous singers exactly what viewers wanted to know. One "notorious" incident was when Britney Spears appeared on the show long after rehab, court hearings to determine her stability, and public displays of erratic behavior, like shaving her head. Simon asked if she thought she'd "gone a bit nuts?" Britney cried, and people attacked Simon. To closeted Savage Garden singer Darren Hayes, Simon asked, "So, when are you going to come out, then?" Hayes said, "Excuse me?" Simon said, "You're obviously gay. Why won't you come out?" This was cut from the aired version. Hayes calls the incident pivotal in his finally coming out two years later and still refers to Simon as a "total prick." From October 2006 to January 2009, he hosted the comedy quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, winning top category prizes from the Royal Television Society, the British Comedy Awards, and the Broadcast Awards. The Times named the show (during Simon's era) one of the best forty programs of the decade. In 2010 he co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in Grandma's House, an award-winning sitcom in which his hapless, neurotic, adorable character, a former quiz show host named Simon, returns to live with his cheerful, middle class family. It's now filming its second season.

Below, John Barrowman challenges him to a gay-off on Buzzcocks and a clip from Grandma's House. Click through for cheekier clips lampooning acting coaches and Ben Whishaw.

 

Nikki Finney's National Book Award Acceptance Speech

She arrives at 4:40. Worth it.

Born November 17: Rock Hudson, RuPaul

Winnetka's Roy Scherer Jr was renamed and remade by a Hollywood gay impresario and total mess whom you can read about in dastardly detail in The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson. Although in his first movie, Fighter Squadron, the 6'5" hunk needed 38 takes to nail his only spoken line, with coaching he became an affable, natural superstar. He reached a new high with Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession in 1954 and the next year barely dodged certain doom: The tabloid Confidential threatened to report his secret gay affairs. Instead, Willson gave them dirt on two of his other, less lucrative clients, Rory Calhoun (prison stint) and Tab Hunter (arrested at a gay party five years earlier), and shoehorned Hudson into a sham marriage with his secretary. In 1956, Hudson and fellow closet case James Dean both earned Oscar nominations for Giant opposite Elizabeth Taylor, who would 29 years later be galvanized by Hudson's death to force an unwilling nation to confront AIDS. As much as his public acknowledgement finally "gave a face" to the disease that had already killed thousands, it also fueled a panicked distrust of all gay men because he had hidden his status from his sex partners like Marc Christian and his kissing co-stars like Linda Evans. Succumbing just before he turned 60, he would have been 86 today. He lives on in celluloid glory and in the pages of his friend Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City as the virile icon Blank Blank.

Like any other future drag star born in 1960, RuPaul Andre Charles spent his childhood in San Diego lipsynching Supremes songs, being called names, avoiding sports, and winning the two most important prizes in junior high: Best Dancer and Best Afro. High school didn't go as well (he was expelled for not attending), until he moved to Atlanta with his brother and sister-in-law at sixteen. He began to blossom, thanks largely to drama class, though his attendance in every other subject was still a problem. Eventually he dropped out, got his GED, started community college, and quit. When he was twenty-two he appeared on the American Music Show with two girls as RuPaul and the U-Hauls. When he was thirty-two, the nation was coming down from twelve years of Reagan-Bush, grunge was peaking, and RuPaul put on her best blond wig, her brightest jewels, her fiercest heels, and taught the whole world to sing, "Sashay, chante!" "Work it, girl!" and "You better work!"

Oddly, that hit, Supermodel, only reached #45 on the pop charts, but it remained in heavy rotation on MTV forever and became a cultural moment. Whereas most drag representations before her were catty and bitchy, RuPaul's message was love everybody; everybody, love! Subsequent singles milked the same bouncy vibe but failed to catch on with the masses, though Back to my Roots is an essential history of black hairstyles in three danceable minutes. Adding to her list of drag queen firsts, RuPaul became the face of MAC cosmetics and sang a duet with Elton John. She co-hosted KTU's popular morning show for two years and hosted her own tv show on VH1. Season four of her popular RuPaul's Drag Race begins on Logo in January 2012 with 13 contestants and more episodes (18) than ever before.

Born November 8: Roy Simmons

After three seaons with the NY Giants, 6'3" 290 lb. offensive lineman Roy "Sugar Bear" Simmons quit the team in 1982 to concentrate on drinking and smoking crack. He worked as a baggage handler at JFK. Months later he went to rehab, wanted his job back, and was traded to the Redskins where he played special teams to block kickoffs, all the way to the 1984 Super Bowl. Among the twenty family and friends he'd invited to Tampa for that game, each staying separately in the same hotel, were his three lovers: two women and a man. The night before the Super Bowl, Simmons snorted coke and got laid three different times, which is not the reason the Redskins were destroyed by the Raiders (38 - 9) but it is typical of the chaos that got him cut from the team the next year. He moved to San Francisco and disappeared from the extended family he had supported on his player's salary. In 1992, accepting a free trip back east to appear on Donohue, he impulsively came out on national television to the great surprise of former teammates, family, and his female girlfriend on the show with him. Then he really disappeared. He amped up his drug use, his sex addiction, became homeless, and in 1997 discovered he was HIV+. Making that announcement to the NYT six years later on the eve of World Aids Day 2003, he hoped to reach other struggling closeted, self-destructive athletes engaging in high-risk-activities. In 2006, he published a truly unflinching memoir Out of Bounds, that begins with him blowing a stranger who introduces him to a friend willing to swap Simmons' clock, jewelry, and table lamps for a few grams of crack. When it's gone, he trades his big-screen TV. As PW said, "Unlike recently celebrated and bestselling rehab memoirs, Simmons's story has no happy ending. Nor is there a happy beginning or happy middle." He says he has low self-esteem and wonders if he became gay because a married neighbor in Georgia raped him when he was eleven. His shocked family learned of the assault and ignored it. Simmons, 55 today, still lives in the Bay area. To date, only three NFL players have come out.

Paul Russell Reads from The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

Tonight at the B&N on Broadway at 82nd St., Paul Russell reads from The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov [[Kindle]], his sixth novel and his first to reimagine the life of a gay historical figure. From St. Petersburg to England to Paris to Berlin, Sergey meets Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Magnus Hirschfield, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Cocteau, and Picasso, yet remains eternally overshadowed by his brother Vladimir. PW said, "With compelling characters and steady prose, the reader will breeze through this pleasurable, heart-breaking account of the other Nabokov." Fifteen authors have blurbed the book, including Christopher Bram who knows a thing or two about using fiction to rescue forgotten gay figures of the 1920s-50s: "A miraculous novel, witty, sexy, dramatic, and profound, the deeply involving story of a young man who experiences too much love, beauty and history in the first half of the twentieth century. It is Paul Russell's masterpiece."

 

If you can clone yourself, also see Chic superstar Nile Rodgers tonight at the Union Square B&N reading from his memoir of writing, producing, and performing megamonster hits with Diana Ross ("Upside Down"), David Bowie ("Let's Dance"), Peter Gabriel ("Walk through the Fire"), Duran Duran ("The Reflex"), Sister Sledge ("We Are Family") and Madonna ("Material Girl," "Like a Virgin"). Rodgers says he was in a Manhattan bar's restroom with five Diana Ross impersonators when he realized he should write a song specifically for her gay fans. The result was "I'm Coming Out." His book is called Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny [[Kindle]].

Born October 13: Kele Okereke

Liverpool born, London raised Kele Okereke was twenty-three in 2005 when Bloc Party released their million-selling debut Silent Alarm which peaked at #3 on the UK charts. Although by that point Kele had been in bands for five or six years, he kept his musical exploits secret from his "super Catholic" Nigerian parents until the album's release. Despite his newfound fame, he continued to study at university, specializing in English literature. Through two more successful albums and subsequent touring, Kele kept his gay life largely hidden, though he did compare himself to Bowie, Molko, and Morrissey. Bloc Party went on hiatus on Halloween 2009 and Kele came out in a March 2010 interview with Butt. Three months later he released his solo album The Boxer. In a few weeks he'll release his second solo effort, The Hunter. Said to be shy, it hasn't stopped him from publicly feuding with Oasis, "the most pernicious band of all time." Today, he's thirty.

Born September 12-13: Nell Carter, Leslie Cheung

Black, Jewish, lesbian, Republican Bush supporter...Gimme a Break! star Nell Carter fit a lot into her 4'11" frame. Her NYT obit quotes her wanting to be ''Judy Garland without the tragedy.'' She must have meant on stage, where she exuded a sunny, sassy, saucy persona in musicals like Ain't Misbehavin, for which she won a Tony and later an Emmy. Cast as Effie in the original production of Dreamgirls, she quit in preproduction to take a role on the soap opera Ryan's Hope, leaving all the accolades for Jennifer Holliday. Two months before that musical opened, Carter's famous sitcom debuted and lasted six seasons of Carter playing housekeeper and de facto mother to the white family of a widower police chief. Stephen Holden wrote it "revived the archetype of the mammy," and Carter had a fractious relationship with the show's producers who were eventually replaced. In the final season, the cast included a young Rosie O'Donnell, who was still closeted, and apparently things were quite frosty on set between the two comediennes. In the 1990s Carter was cast as Miss Hannigan in the revival of Annie and publicly suggested it was racism that caused the producers to use a television commercial featuring a white actress in that role. In her private life, her struggles were vast. At sixteen she was raped and became pregnant, giving birth to her daughter Tracy. Later when she wanted to conceive, she had three miscarriages. Trying to adopt, she was twice thwarted at the very end of the process, once by a young woman who changed her mind and wanted to keep the baby, once by seeming amateur extortionists. She succeeded in adopting two boys. She battled a cocaine addiction. In the early 80s, she attempted suicide. In the late 80s, her brother died of aids. In 1992, she divorced her husband, had two aneurysms, and married her second husband, whom she divorced the next year. In 1995 and in 2002 she declared bankruptcy. She died of heart disease, complicated by diabetes, in 2003, at 54. She is survived by her partner Ann Kaser, who became guardian to Carter's children.

Leslie Cheung was a pop superstar, a movie idol, and he had a loving boyfriend named Hok-Tak Tong, so his millions of fans were stunned on April 1, 2003 to learn he had jumped off a twenty-fourth floor balcony of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong. His suicide dominated the headlines of Asian tabloids for more than a month, searching every aspect of his life for clues. The youngest of ten children of a Kowloon tailor, he was educated in England and returned to Hong Kong to sing. He released more than twenty-five very successful albums and his hit “Monica” was named Song of the Century. Two years after his death, China Central Television named him The Most Favorite Actor In 100 Years of Chinese Cinema for his work with directors John Woo, Kaige Chen, and Wong Kar-Wai, among others. Unlike many closeted actors in America, Cheung enthusiastically played gay characters, notably in two of his most famous films, Farewell, My Concubine and Happy Together. He came out in 1997 and his career thrived. His albums from that year on were extremely popular, as were his concerts, and many of his movies. He tried to kill himself in 2002 and succeeded the next year, when he was forty-six. His suicide note read,

"Depression! Many thanks to all my friends. Many thanks to Professor Felice Lieh-Mak [his psychiatrist]. This year has been so tough. I can't stand it anymore. Many thanks to Mr. Tong. Many thanks to my family. Many thanks to Fei-Fei. In my life I did nothing bad. Why does it have to be like this?"

Major Bayard Rustin Profile as MLK Memorial Opens

Congratulations to Steve Hendrix and the Washington Post for running a long article about unsung hero Bayard Rustin and the challenges he faced for being gay, both from people inside and opposed to the civil rights movement. Hendrix writes:

"In 1960, Adam Clayton Powell, the minister-congressman from Harlem, threatened to float a rumor that King was one of Rustin’s lovers if King didn’t exile him from his inner circle. King pushed him away, reluctantly, and Rustin resigned from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

“Bayard had a lot of baggage — communist youth member, conscientious objector,” says Walter Naegle, Rustin’s partner for the last decade of his life. “But being gay was the one thing that was still unforgivable to a lot of civil rights leaders.”

"But others never abandoned him, most notably A. Philip Randolph, a dean of the movement and Rustin’s longtime mentor. When the moment came for an unprecedented mass gathering in Washington, Randolph pushed Rustin forward as the logical choice to organize it.

“The details for him had real meaning,” Horowitz says. “It had to be well organized, nonviolent and peaceful, because nobody believed that black Americans could organize a march of this size. Even liberals said there would be riots.”

"In mid-August, with the march looming over Washington as a growing juggernaut, it was then-Sen. Strom Thurmond who took aim at the man steering it. Speaking on the Senate floor, the South Carolina segregationist, then a Democrat, filled eight pages of the Congressional Record with detailed denunciations of Rustin as a draft-dodging communist homosexual and a convicted “sex pervert.” Thurmond had the entire Pasadena arrest file entered in the record."

For more, read John D'Emilio's biography Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin or watch the documentary Brother Outsider.

Finalists for PEN American and O'Connor International Awards

The PEN American Center has announced their awards in seventeen categories, adding still more honors for Justin Spring's Secret Historian [[Kindle]] and Wendy Moffat's A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster [[Kindle]], the only two biography finalists to Stacy Schiff's winning Cleopatra [[Kindle]]. The New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross was a finalist for his book Listen to This in the essay category won by Mark Slouka for Essays from the Nick of Time: Reflections and Refutations.

FYI, the top award, the PEN/Bingham Prize was shared by the hugely talented Danielle Evans for her story collection Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self and Susanna Daniel for her debut novel Stiltsville about a married couple living just above Biscayne Bay.

Read the full list of finalists and winners in drama, poetry, science writing, sports writing, translation and more at the PEN American site.

In Dublin, judges of one the world's premiere literary prizes, the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, have announced their six finalists for 2011. You already know Tóibín's magnificence and that The Empty Family is mandatory reading. If you don't know Yiyun Li's work, start with this superb collection which includes two queer stories and was a favorite book of 2010 for both Lucy Jane Bledsoe and A.S. Byatt.

Yiyun Li, Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

Alexander Macleod, Light Lifting

Edna O'Brien, Saints and Sinners

Suzanne Rivecca, Death Is Not an Option

Colm Tóibín, The Empty Family

Valerie Trueblood, Marry or Burn

The winner will be announced September 18 at the close of the Cork Short Story Festival.

Choose Movie Poster for Black Lesbian Coming Out Drama, Pariah

   

Week after week you scream yourself hoarse berating Hollywood marketers. So many obvious flops and bombs and epic fails, when clearly they ought to have asked you how to sell their movie. Now, they are. After releasing a string of queer hits (Brokeback, The Kids Are All Right, but not Precious), Focus is ready to roll out the Sundance buzz pic Pariah, about Alike, a 17 year-old coming out to her supportive best friend and her upset family in Fort Greene, Brooklyn.

Too often, black movies are sold in a way that obscures their characters' race (see Dreamgirls' poster, shot in silhouette from the back), so I don't like the cloud option, whose airy bright palette is sharply at odds with the subdued, interior tones of the trailer, after the jump. And I hate the noir killer look below left. At full size I prefer the subway shot above center for, among other things, reflecting her dual struggle and placing her in the physical world.

Design geeks this is your moment: Vote for your favorite  *daily* through August 12.

Born August 2-3: James Baldwin, Rupert Brooke

Growing up in Harlem, the oldest of nine children, James Baldwin cared for his eight siblings in the shadow of an abusive stepfather and began preaching sermons in 1938 when he was fourteen. Those years and the dawning realization of the difficulties of being black and gay in America are covered in his autobiographical first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, which he wrote as an expatriate, having left New York for France when he was twenty-four, with only his typewriter, two Bessie Smith records, some clothes, forty dollars cash, and no comprehension of French. After a stint in London, he finished his novel in Switzerland. Although he had published trenchant essays and reviews in The Nation, The Partisan Review, and Commentary, had won a Rosenwald Fellowship, and had the backing of Richard Wright, American publishers rejected his manuscript. Only after a British publisher accepted the novel did they relent, and its U.S. publication was a success.

Baldwin then wrote a play, The Amen Corner, and published his first of six essay collections, Notes of a Native Son. Critics and readers alike expected his second novel, Giovanni's Room, to illuminate the black experience but all the characters are white and the plot revolves around a gay love affair between an American and his Italian boyfriend who is to be executed in the morning. Shocking for 1956. His next novels, Another Country (1962) and Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone(1968), reflect the broader unrest and violence of the Sixties, with characters black and white, straight, bi, and gay. Between those novels, the New Yorker published, in two oversized issues, Baldwin’s seminal, angry, warning cry, “Down at the Cross” which became the bulk of his essay collection, The Fire Next Time.

Judging the dominant society by its actions rather than its words, Baldwin did not shrink from referring to the “cruel white majority” as “moral monsters,” or from lamenting the new absence of moral authority in Harlem. He considered “urban renewal” to mean "Negro removal." Gore Vidal claims that JFK and RFK (with whom Baldwin’s friends had had a fractious meeting as Attorney General) referred to Baldwin as “Martin Luther Queen.” His FBI file was 1,750 pages by 1987, when he died in Saint-Paul de Vence, having spent much of his life in France and Istanbul. Toni Morrison edited the collections of his works for Library of America and he was honored with a US postage stamp in 2005.

Last year, Randall Kenan gathered Baldwin's uncollected writings in The Cross of Redemption.

Yeats called him “the handsomest young man in England” and he was adored throughout Britain for his poetry as much as his legendary looks -- so how could someone as heroic as Rupert Brooke be killed by a mosquito bite when he was only twenty-seven? A star all his life, he blossomed at Cambridge, where he was one of the founders of the Marlowe Society acting club and a member of the Apostles. Throughout his schooling he had deep crushes on his male classmates, particularly Charles Lascelles and Michael Sadleir, and in his twenties dated both women and men, seeming proudest of his seduction of Denham Russell-Smith, the brother of a friend. (See his letters to James Strachey, which Brooke’s executors kept out of print for eighty-three years, until 1998.) His poetry is largely impersonal and, of course, he is most celebrated for his idealistic War Sonnets, having died soon after their publication, before he ever saw battle, en route with his Navy unit to Gallipoli. Two months after Brooke’s death, his younger brother William volunteered with the 8th Battalion London Regiment, known as the Post Office Rifles, and was killed in battle within twenty days. Today, the Rupert Brooke Society alludes to Rupert's "confused love life" on their homepage. He is, of course, one of the prevailing spirits behind Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, The Stranger's Child.

Born June 22: Kevin Aviance

There was a moment in nightclub life when Kevin Aviance, so inventive, so ahead of his time, seemed he might be the next Josephine Baker. His sensational song “Din Da Da” is timeless, as fresh today as the first time he performed it while Junior Vasquez was spinning at Arena. It was #1 on the Billboard dance chart, as were four of his subsequent singles, “Rhythm Is My Bitch,” “Alive,” “Give It Up,” and “Strut.” He has appeared in the movies Punks and Flawless, as well as America’s Next Top Model, The Tyra Banks Show, and in a leopard-print bodystocking in Madonna’s oh so smooth Harlem-based video for “Secret.” In June 2006, leaving the Phoenix after midnight, Kevin was brutally attacked by four young men ages 16, 18, 20, and 20, yelling anti-gay slurs. Two weeks later, fiercer than ever, Kevin appeared in the pride parade wearing a white top hat with his broken jaw wired shut. He was unable to sing for months. In March 2007, his four attackers plead guilty and were sentenced to prison terms ranging from six to fifteen years. Last year he sang at Fort Lauderdale Pride along with Jennifer Holliday.