Band of Thebes

Born January 11: Eva Le Gallienne

In 1960, when Mercedes de Acosta published her tell-all memoir Here Lies the Heart revealing her affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Great Garbo, Ona Munson, and Isadora Duncan, none was an angrier, exposed ex than the English/French/Danish actress Eva Le Gallienne. They had a five-year affair, beginning in 1920 when Eva, 21, was making a big splash on Broadway, and Mercedes was 27. Four years after being outed by that book, Eva was given a special Tony Award, celebrating her 50th year of acting and her extensive theater work, founding and sustaining several rep companies. In 1977 she won an Emmy for playing Fanny Cavendish in George Kaufman's comedy The Royal Family, and in 1980, she became the world's oldest Oscar nominee in acting for her role in Resurrection starring the also- nominated Ellen Burstyn. She died of natural causes at 92. Six years later her record was broken when 87 year-old Gloria Stuart was nominated for Titanic.

Five Finalists for the Great Gay Play & Musical Contest

Broadway World reports Pride Films and Plays has announced the five finalists in the 2012 Great Gay Play and Musical Contest:

At The Flash by Sean Chandler and David Leeper, Woodland Hills, CA
    At The Flash is a multi-character history of a fictitious gay bar called The Flash as seen through the eyes of five specific, yet universal characters whose stories are told through a series of inter-woven scenes representing LGBT history from the 1960s to today. One actor plays all the roles in this theatrical tour-de-force.

Hello Norma Jeane by Dylan Costello, London, UK
    Joe has his life turned upside-down when his grandmother admits her deepest secret - that she is in fact Marilyn Monroe, coming out of hiding 50 years after faking her death in 1962. Can Joe really be the gay grandson of Marilyn Monroe? Joe's search for the truth, his self-worth, and his love for his grandmother are tested to the limit in this funny drama that is full of surprises.

Lost in History by Adam Siegel, Maplewood, NJ
    In Lost in History, we meet Ben Goldfarb, a man who is caring for his demanding father while trying to have a baby through a surrogate. When his father gets a new roommate at the nursing home where he is living, Ben learns it is Isaac Strauss - the famous psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. What will Ben learn about his father, about Isaac, and about himself in this new powerful new drama of family and history?

Mr. Teddy by George Smart, Quincy, MA
    Mr. Teddy explores the sexy and complex dynamics of a long-term relationship between three men who are a part of the gay subculture where role playing is the norm and a way of life. 'Daddies' Alex and Marc have enjoyed 10 years together with their 'son' Teddy, until their friend Joan instigates a confrontation that tests the very definition of family.

Under A Rainbow Flag by Leo Schwartz, Chicago, IL
    Navy Medical Corpsman Jon Philips finds himself in the company of other gay men, both stateside and on the battle field in World War II. As we follow Jon and his friends from 1943 to 1951, we learn of love, joy, and loss in this brand-new musical. Under A Rainbow Flag is based on actual events in the life of Navy corpsman, Jon Philips, resident of Evanston, Illinois, and is the first musical to be named a finalist in this competition.

Born December 16: Kanako Otsuji, Noël Coward

Born in Kobe in 1974, Kanako Otsuji was a junior karate champion in Asia, opting to attend university in Korea to study tae kwon do. Although she failed to make the Japanese olympic team in 2000, three years later she became one of only seven women -- and the youngest person ever -- elected to the 110-member Osaka Assembly. She came out the day before Tokyo Pride in 2005 by publishing her memoir. That same year she succeeded in changing the law that previously allowed only married couples to rent public housing in Osaka; now lgbt couples can too. In April 2007 she did not stand for re-election and two months later she married her partner Maki Kamura in an outdoor, public ceremony, although Japan does not recognize same-sex marriage. (Adorable wedding photos here and here.) In 2009, filmmaker Naomi Hiltz premiered her documentary about Otsuji at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Today she's thirty-six.

 

At fourteen in 1913 Noël Coward began an affair with Philip Streatfeild, a thirty-four year old society painter whom he met only because his mother was Streatfeild's charwoman. Two years later, Streatfeild was dying of tuberculosis and urged Mrs. Astley Cooper to nurture the "delicate" Coward, which she did. He began appearing in plays, was discharged from WWI service for ill health, and had his first writing success at twenty-five with The Vortex, scandalously popular in London and New York for its wit and veiled hints of drugs and gay life. While the times changed, Coward did not; he kept that veil cemented in place for the next five decades.

Although many of his sophisticated camp comedies play peekaboo with the closet, especially the bi threesome in Design for Living (1932) and less popular later works like Song at Twilight (1966), the urbanely glamorous Coward never actually came out. A friend of King George, Coward traveled widely to perform for WWII troops and secretly worked as a spy, hiding behind his high life persona. The press attacked him for his excesses during wartime. The king suggested a knighthood, but Churchill disliked his "flamboyance" and blocked it. After the war, Coward fell in love with the actor Graham Payn and they stayed together nearly thirty years. In the 1956 they became tax exiles, landing first in Bermuda then in Jamaica where they were neighbors to the constantly bickering Mr. & Mrs. Ian Fleming. Coward enjoyed a revival in the 1960s and finally was knighted in 1970. He died in Jamaica in 1973, still with Payn. You can read his biography or go right to his diaries, letters, plays, or the brand-new The Noël Coward Reader.

Second Volume of Sondheim Lyrics Now on Sale

Last week Stephen Sondheim published Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anecdotes and Miscellany. This completes the project launched last year with Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes. If you want both, get the pair in a slipcovered case inevitably called, Hat Box.

He offers this lose-lose perspective on critics:

"It takes a long time to learn not to pay attention to critics, or at least not to let them distract you. For the young writer, critics have a number of destructive effects. If they praise you, you suffer afterwards by disappointing them; few writers who have a smash hit the first time out survive to be more than one-trick ponies. When the critics pan you, your confidence is shattered, but you gain a certain resilience, if for no other reason than there's nowhere to go but up. It isn't necessarily the criticism that hurts, of course, because you can choose not to believe it; it's the fact that it's out there in public, that thousands of people are witnessing your humiliation.

"When you're a young writer, critics have you both ways. The praise makes you overestimate yourself, whereas anything less can often leave you disappointed, or angry and impotent. Writing a letter to the newspaper or magazine that has wounded you will only – and always – sound like the whine of a sore loser, again in public. Worse, it encourages critics to think you take them seriously. In either case, you subsequently find yourself brooding, briefly but often, over the unjustified indignities you've suffered, dwelling on everything negative published about you in the past – especially when you hit a snag while working. That's the most pernicious thing about critics: they cause you to waste your time."

Read his smart conversation with Malcolm Jones about the book.

Born October 24: Emma Donoghue, B.D. Wong

Emma Donoghue, 42 today, is so much more than the author of Room [[Kindle]], her runaway bestseller that last year was shortlisted for the Booker, the Orange Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Galaxy International prize, and won the Rogers Writers' Trust prize. Four months before Room, Knopf published her essential and immensely entertaining, decade-in-the-making exploration of lesbians in literature, Inseparable [[Kindle]]. In six previous novels she proved herself equally at home in the present (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing) and the past (Slammerkin, Life Mask, The Sealed Letter). She has also written three collections of stories, four plays, and five radio plays. Ordinarily she lives with her partner Chris and their children, Una and Finn, in Ontario but this year they're in Nice. Don't envision her lollygagging on the beach. She's completing the screenplay of Room, a book of short stories about travel called Astray (pubbing September 2012), and a historical novel about an 1870s frog catcher named Jeanne Bonnet who was frequently arrested in San Francisco for wearing men's clothes and was murdered at 27.

A fourth generation Chinese-American, B.D. Wong made his Broadway debut in 1988 in M. Butterfly, for which he became and remains the only actor to win the five major theater prizes for the same role. But it was not enough to convince David Cronenberg to cast him in the movie version five years later, when he chose John Lone instead. Wong starred with Margaret Cho in her much praised, quickly canceled series All American Girl, then played a priest on Oz, and for ten years running Dr George Huang on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He and his ex-partner Richie Jackson, an agent, are parents of a son named Foo, the surviving one of two twins born extremely prematurely. Wong wrote a book about the experience called Following Foo.

Born October 4: Robert Wilson

Nothing about Robert Wilson is easy. He’s a perfectionist to the tiniest detail, spending three hours to choose the stage lighting for a single hand gesture, with a colossal vision, creating a theater piece in the 1970s performed on a mountaintop in Iran lasting seven days, who can’t even be neatly labeled a director because he is also a dancer, a painter, a sculptor, a furniture designer, and an installation artist who won the Golden Lion at the 1993 Venice Biennale. He’s created theater works that are twelve hours long and operas that are silent. He uses austere sets, very slow pacing, and has said that the most important actor on the stage is the lighting. He’s never known the easy road. He grew up with a severe speech impediment in Waco, Texas, studied business administration at UT, came out to his disapproving father, moved to Brooklyn, got a degree in architecture, couldn’t cope, moved back to Waco, tried to kill himself, was put in an institution, got help from an understanding psychiatrist, moved back to New York, saw a black boy being beaten by cops in 1968 and ended up adopting him. Wilson also became the world’s leading avant-garde director of theater and opera. Working with Philip Glass in 1976, he created the monumental opera Einstein on the Beach, about “general relativity, nuclear weapons, science and AM radio,” touring again next year. Its huge success made both men famous worldwide, and since then Wilson has been in great demand at the top opera houses around the globe. His frequent collaborators include Jessye Norman, Laurie Anderson, William S. Burroughs, David Byrne, Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Waits.
    Even honoring Wilson isn’t easy. For the 1984 Olympics, he created another twelve-hour opera, about the Civil War, working with six composers from six countries, each scoring a two-hour section to be premiered in their own country, then to be performed all together, on one day, in Los Angeles. Four sections premiered as planned in Cologne, Minneapolis, Rome, and Rotterdam, but the Olympics canceled the event due to lack of funding. The Cologne section was performed in Cambridge, Mass. in 1985 and the Pulitzer Prize jury unanimously chose it for their drama award, only to have the Pulitzer supervisory board overrule them, giving no drama prize that year.
    Recently, in addition to his theater work, he’s been creating video portraits. (His 2005 shoot of Brad Pitt in boxers in the rain against an electric blue background became the cover of Vanity Fair in December 2006.) The documentary Absolute Wilson was released in 2006. Today, he's 70 and tonight BAM celebrates with the US premiere of his Three Penny Opera with the Berliner Ensemble.

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?"

Wendy & the Gay Boys

Wendy Wasserstein's lifelong friendships with, and failed crushes on, gay men are explored in the new biography Wendy and the Lost Boys: The Uncommon Life of Wendy Wasserstein [[Kindle]], a work that Francine Prose calls an extended magazine article:

"The book is obviously longer than what you might find on the newsstand, but no more fastidiously written, as tightly focused but no more incisive. Still, it’s highly readable in the way profiles are, spinning a colorful narrative of failure and fame, disappointment and satisfaction, while hitting all the right marks: the fun vacation near Noël Coward’s former island retreat, the shopping and real estate, the socially validating guest lists, like this one from Wasserstein’s 2006 memorial service at Lincoln Center: “Many luminaries spoke or performed: playwrights Terrence McNally, William Finn and Christopher Durang; actors Meryl Streep, Joan Allen and Swoosie Kurtz; and directors Daniel Sullivan, ­André Bishop and James Lapine.”

The book does not go so deep as to discover who fathered Wendy's child (born when she was 48) which has never been revealed. Obviously that's not the most important thing about the Pulitzer-winning playwright, but one might expect a biographer to acknowledge the question. Evidently, secrets of parentage are a family thing: Wasserstein's mother decided "not to tell her younger kids that her first husband was their uncle, and that their two older siblings (half siblings, it turned out) were his offspring."

Wendy's comic novel Elements of Style [[Kindle]] got good reviews pubbing three months after her death from cancer at 55.

Born July 14: Jane Lynch, Arthur Laurents

Jane Lynch is a current Emmy winner, nominee, and host this year, and she's a double mythbuster: In 2000, she was (1) a forty year-old (2) out lesbian when her career was jumpstarted by a bowl of Kellogg's Corn Flakes. She did a cereal commercial directed by Christopher Guest, who then cast her in Best in Show, where she and Jennifer Coolidge more or less steal the movie as blonde on blonde lovers who plan to publish a magazine, American Bitch, to "focus on the issues of the lesbian purebred dog owner." Before that movie, Jane had been stuck in the typical long slog to success: Born and raised in Dolton, schooled in Normal, she left Illinois for graduate school at Cornell, came back to Chicago, starred on stage as Carol Brady, toured to New York and Los Angeles, returned home, became restless and boomeranged back to L.A., where she lived on lots of rejection and a few bit parts in tv shows and movies. After Best in Showshe's played one inspired nutjob after another: The porn star turned folk singer in A Mighty Wind, the randy boss in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Ricky Bobby's mom in Talladega Nights, Cindy in For Your Consideration, and Gayle, the ex-addict running the Sturdy Wings mentoring program in Role Models. Having had her scenes as Amelia Earhart deleted from the final cut of The Aviator, she got to play Julia Child's / Meryl Streep's sister in Julie & Julia. Then came Glee on 09/09/09 with her instantly immortal Sue Sylvester. Today, she's 51.

Two-time Tony winner Arthur Laurents died this year at ninety-two. Born in the Jewish section of Flatbush, he wrote the book for the musicals West Side Story, Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle, and Hallelujah, Baby!; the novels and the screenplays for The Way We Were and The Turning Point, the screenplay for Rope (starring his then-lover Farley Granger); the play that became the movie Summertime; and he directed I Can Get It for You Wholesale, La Cage Aux Folles, Anyone Can Whistle, and the Broadway versions of Gypsy in 1974 and the recent triple Tony winning revival starring the Patti Lupone. Laurents was openly gay even during the McCarthy era, when he received less work but avoided being blacklisted. Smart people can discuss the obvious and subtle gay substitutes and outsider figures who run through all of Laurents' work. His two memoirs are Original Story By and Mainly on Directing. He and his partner Tom Hatcher lived together fifty-one years, mainly in Quogue, Long Island, until Hatcher's death in 2006. It was Hatcher's idea as he was dying to re-invent West Side Story as a bilingual musical to give Laurents something to do as a new widower. The revival earned four Tony nominations, winning best featured actress in a musical.

Born July 1: Charles Laughton, Farley Granger

The brilliant, heavy, Yorkshire star who appeared in 38 plays, 52 films, countless television shows and reading tours, directed the creepy gem The Night of the Hunter, and was the first Brit to win the Oscar for best actor, Charles Laughton's longest performance was that of husband to Elsa Lanchester. For 33 years they supported, attacked, ignored, admired, and undermined each other, while sharing two great passions, flowers and sex with other men. So successful were they in projecting marital harmony (or so cynical was the Hollywood media) that the press named them "the screen's happiest couple" in 1962, the year Laughton died of cancer. Elsa says she learned he was gay in 1931, two years after their wedding, when they came home one night to find a policeman at their door with a young tough loitering to get money from Laughton who had cruised him earlier that day in Hyde Park. She didn't care. (A free spirit, she had formerly earned money by pretending in court to be the adulterous other woman for couples who needed a legal reason to divorce.) Laughton did care, and would always live in a stew of self-doubt and self-loathing, about his talent, his weight, and his sexuality. Though he perpetually feared exposure, he brought his handsome young lovers on set with him as his masseur or assistant. When Laughton was directing a play in 1954, his star Henry Fonda snapped at him, "What do you know about men, you fat faggot?" In 1960, he and Elsa bought a Santa Monica house next door to pioneering gays Isherwood and Bachardy and the four became friends, somewhat easing Laughton's own homophobia. His final film role was a Southern senator in the gay blackmail suicide drama Advise and Consent.

According to his autobiography, Include Me Out, midcentury movie star Farley Granger joined the Navy at 19 and on his first voyage, from San Francisco to Honolulu, was seasick the whole way, losing 23 pounds and needing to be hospitalized when they reached land. Thus it was that the almost too pretty Granger spent the war onshore in Hawaii, working the enlisted men's club on Waikiki Beach or helping entertain the troops under the command of the never-married Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans best known as Samantha's campy warlock father on Bewitched. Granger claims that while in Honolulu, in one memorable night, he had his first sexual experiences with a woman (a "hostess" a private club) then with a man (an enlisted officer who picked him up at that club). Obviously a star, within four years he had a lead role in Alfred Hitchcock's gay film Rope, based on the Leopold - Loeb murder and written by awesome Arthur Laurents, whom he dated for the year during filming and after. Later Granger had affairs with Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein, and filmed his biggest hit,

 

Born June 9-10: Terrence Rattigan, Cole Porter

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

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

Openly closeted, Porter enjoyed affairs with Ballets Russes librettist Boris Kochno, Boston hotshot Howard Sturges, architect Ed Tauch, actor Robert Bray, choreographer Nelson Barclift, and director John Wilson, as well as innumerable shorter interludes with servicemen and chorus boys at weekend all-male parties. Remarkably, he kept his spirits up (ditto his libido) despite a crippling leg injury from a 1937 riding fall which necessitated thirty-four operations over the rest of his life and ended in amputation. When he died in 1964, Porter left half his royalties to the children of his longtime friend and ex-lover Ray Kelly. He was decidedly de-gayed in the Kevin Kline movie De-Lovely, but not in William McBrien's "complex and groundbreaking" biography, whose "most startling scholarship is on the subject of Porter's homosexuality."

Last year, Sandy Leonard offered this illuminating comment: "I wonder if 'Love for Sale' informed in any way his later masochistic attraction and ongoing (if not "constant") sexual relationship with actor, husband (Shirley Jones) and father (David, Shaun, et al.), Jack Cassidy. Capote's got a story about this in his Gerald Clarke biography."

Writer-Director Arthur Laurents Dies at 93

A role model in so many ways, 93-year-old Arthur Laurents planned ahead for his death today, according to his William Morris Endeavor agent Jonathan Lomma who said the famed writer-director "had told him that when he died, he wanted it noted that 'he was predeceased by his partner, Tom Hatcher, with whom he had lived in happiness for more than 50 years.'” Hatcher died in 2006.

The NYT honored Laurents' wishes in a long obituary that includes his triumphs in Hollywood (from Rope to The Turning Point), on Broadway (West Side Story, Gypsy, La Cage aux Folles), and even acknowledges Laurents' many military successes, among others:

"He had also long since cast off whatever remaining doubts he had about his homosexuality and soon lost count of the sexual experiences he had while in the Army. In “Original Story By,” a memoir published in 2000, he was frank about his gay encounters, referring to his partners as “those unremembered hundreds.” Tom Hatcher, a former actor and real estate developer, would be his companion for 52 years."

Laurents had earlier said The Way We Were was partially autobiographical, the Robert Redford character based on Tom [pictured, left, in 1962] and the Barbra Streisand character on himself [right]. 

If you have any interest in the last half-century of Hollywood or Broadway consider his two smart and funny memoirs full of gay anecdotes, Original Story By [[Kindle]] and Mainly on Directing: Gypsy, West Side Story, and Other Musicals [[Kindle]].

Born April 11-12: Allison, Ludlam, Ray, Mogutin

Born to an unwed fifteen-year-old waitress in South Carolina, Dorothy Allison was the first member of her family to graduate from high school. Against those odds, she has become an international literary sensation for her novels Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Cavedweller (1998). Published in more than twelve languages, her work has been awarded  the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, three the American Library Association Prizes for Lesbian and Gay Writing, several Lambda Literary Awards including the Ferro Grumley Prize, been named a New York Times Notable book of the year, and she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Lillian Smith prize. Her short fiction, collected in Trash has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and Best New Stories from the South. Both of her novels have been made into movies. Bastard Out of Carolina was directed by Anjelica Houston, and Cavedweller was directed by Lisa Cholodenko. Allison lives with her partner Alix Layman and teenage son Michael Wolf in Northern California. Riverhead will eventually publish her next novel, She Who.

Playwright and director Charles Ludlam founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967, when he was twenty-four. His plays are a kaleidoscope of high and low art in which the actors each play multiple parts; Ludlam himself usually took the female roles. The Mystery of Irma Vep is his most popular work, featuring two actors (originally Ludlum and his boyfriend Everett Quinton) playing eight characters. It was the most produced play in the United States in 1991 and in 2003 became the longest-running play ever produced in Brazil. A recipient of four Obie Awards, Ludlum was also honored with fellowships from the NEA and the Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundations. He died of aids in 1987.

Amy Ray, 47, is one half of the folk rock duo Indigo Girls, who in twenty years have sold more than twelve million albums and been nominated for seven Grammys, winning Best Contemporary Folk Recording in 1990. The first out lesbian duo on the pop charts, they have never been a couple. Ray is in a relationship with Carrie Schrader, a documentary filmmaker. Indigo Girls most recent album, Despite Our Differences, was released last fall and debuted in the top 50 of the Billboard chart. Amy's solo project has a new concert cd MVP Live.

Former enfant terrible Slava Mogutin, 37, still lives to provoke. Born in Siberia (and, according to Wikipedia, “the first openly gay personality in the Russian media”) now a New Yorker (after Amnesty International and American PEN helped get him political asylum), the writer and photographer is permanently at war with the establishment. A constant and often vulgar critic of Moscow’s leaders, Mogutin has written seven books in Russian, winning the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize in 2000. He aims for a similar shock value in his hatred of establishment gays and loves to antagonize his audience, describing himself as a "cave-based, homo terrorist, pinko commie fag, and propagandist of brutal violence, psychic pathology and sexual perversions." He brings all that angry energy to his photography, which appears regularly in art, fashion, alt, and porn magazines. His best photo book is Lost Boys followed by NYC Go-Go.

Born March 26: Tennessee Williams

Although the media largely ignored Tennessee Williams' centennial on Saturday, his 100th birthday was marked by a festival in New Orleans and one at Georgetown University, called "Tenn Cent," including separate discussions with Edward Albee and Christopher Durang and solo performances by Kathleen Chalfant, Doug Tompos, and John Waters who says Williams saved his life.

Is it a coincidence that the gay playwright the straight world most celebrated in the twentieth century was the one who presented the most tortured view of homosexuality? As academics have pointed out, in Tennessee Williams'  plays, gay life is equated with death: by alcoholism (Skipper in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Pulitzer Prize, Tony nomination, six Oscar nominations), suicide (Blanche's first husband in A Streetcar Named Desire; Pulitzer Prize, two Tonys, four Oscar wins of twelve nominations), murder and cannibalism (Sebastian in Suddenly, Last Summer; three Oscar nominations). Whereas his later work, dealing openly with gay relationships, was not praised, not prized, not adapted, and is not perpetually brought back to Broadway in a major revival! Does this say more about Williams, who might have needed the safety of the closet and the art of indirection, or about society's comfort levels pre, post, and post-post-Stonewall?

Granted, straight life in his work is no picnic either. The sole exception is The Rose Tattoo, his only happy ending in twenty-five plays. It's a heterosexualized version of his romance with Frank Merlo, whose family memories provided many of the details for the fictional Sicilian-American Delle Roses. The couple stayed together sixteen years, until Merlo's death from cancer. Williams' other significant partners included George Black and Pancho Rodriquez, pictured above, whom you can read about here. Perhaps cruelly fitting for someone so thwarted in life, after his death from choking on a plastic cap, Williams was interred in a cemetery in St. Louis, about as landlocked as it gets, despite his wish to be buried at sea in the same area as his hero Hart Crane.

Tony Kushner's New Gay Play Now in Previews at the Public

After premiering two years ago at Minneapolis's Guthrie Theatre, Tony Kushner's new play began previews last night at the Public, one day later than planned, "to provide the cast and crew with an additional dress rehearsal." Kushner has a brilliant mind but someone should have convinced him this mashup is not a title, The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, especially not for the fraction of the audience who know their Shaw and Eddy. The New York Observer says it concerns:

"a retired longshoreman in Brooklyn, Gus Marcantonio, who asks his three children, an academic, a labor lawyer and a laborer, and his sister, a nun, to come home (some of their partners in tow) to discuss his decision to end his life. One suicide attempt, in the brownstone's upstairs bath, has already gone awry.

"The family fights and roars, negotiates and accuses; all their skeletons, and some cast members, come out of the closet. Suicide is a major theme in the timely show, but so is the sorry state of America, the prospects for continuing social revolution, the institution of marriage, the allure of prostitution, parenthood, sex, the real estate bubble and more."

The length of the title forecasts its running time, more than three and half hours. TIHGTCASWAKTTS opens May 5 with performances through June 12. Tickets are $75.

Born March 20-22: John Boswell, Zackie Achmat, Stephen Sondheim

Native New Yorker Stephen Sondheim, the winningest composer in Broadway history, has earned eight Tonys, eight Grammys, seven Drama Desk awards, an Obie, an Oscar, and a Pulitzer Prize. Last year he turned 80 and was feted with major special concerts by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, and assorted stage and screen legends at benefits by the Roundabout Theatre Company and the New York City Center. Also, they renamed the former Henry Miller Theatre on 43rd Street in his honor. Arlington Virginia's acclaimed Signature Theatre created the Sondheim Award, of which Sondheim was the premiere recipient, Angela Lansbury the second, and next will be Bernadette Peters. Last October, Knopf published Sondheim's Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes, this coming October they'll release Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Wafflings, Diversions and Anecdotes. A great lover of puzzles and games, he contemplated giving up theater to write mysteries, and did co-author two whodunnit screenplays; The Last of Sheila, co-written with Anthony Perkins, won them an Edgar. Sondheim did not have a live-in boyfriend until 1992, when he was 61; he and dramatist Peter Jones lasted seven years.

Born of Indian parents in South Africa in 1962, Zackie Achmat grew up in the "coloured" community and was always a rebel for equality. By the time he was ten he was a total bookworm and gained special permission to use the whites-only library for reading, but he was still prohibited from using its restrooms. When he was fourteen, during the Sowetto Uprisings, he set his school on fire to convince his classmates to join the boycott. As an active member of the illegal ANC for years, he was jailed many times before apartheid ended and the ANC's Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994. That same year Achmat co-founded the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality, and in 1996 South Africa had become the first nation whose Bill of Rights bans discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Building on lessons from the gay rights and anti-apartheid movements, in 1998 Achmat created the Treatment Action Campaign [TAC] to fight aids through prevention, to increase awareness, and to get medicines to the poor. Immediately he gained worldwide attention by announcing he was HIV+ and would refuse to take his drugs until they were available to all South Africans. Among the many ways TAC has changed lives is by helping to erode the shame and stigma of HIV, proclaiming one's positive status with bold t-shirts rather than hiding or lying. Winning numerous legal and public relations victories against the government and international pharmaceutical corporations, Achmat finally resumed his meds when he was very ill in August 2004, anticipating correctly that in November the Ministry of Health would announce its plan to distribute ARVs widely. The New Yorker ran an excellent profile of him written by Samantha Power in 2003, and the following year the American Friends Service Committee nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (which went to Kenya's Wangari Maathai). In 2008, he married his partner Dalli Weyers, 25, in a terrific wedding where the traditional caketop figures of a bride and groom were replaced by a king and a cowboy.

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. He is said to have written his comments on student papers in perfect medieval calligraphy.

Shakesqueer, Edited by Madhavi Menon

Nothing says the Ides of March like a bit of the Bard, and now in one whopping volume you can get a queer take on every play and the sonnets, thanks to Madhavi Menon's new anthology Shakesqueer: A Queer Companion to the Complete Works of Shakespeare, just out from Duke University Press. Today of course you'd want Bethany Schneider's "Thus, Always: Julius Caeser and Abraham Lincoln," but Thursday with your green beer you may need "Same-Saint Desire," Paul Morrison's exploration of Measure for Measure. The weekend is the best time for the orgy of Alan Sinfield's "The Leathermen and the Lovely Boy: Reading Positions in Troilus and Cressida," coupled with Mario Digangi's "Wounded Alpha Bad Boy Solider" [Henry VI, Part I], before taking in "Othello's Penis: Islam in the Closet" by Daniel Boyarin and climaxing with James Kuzner's "Skepticism, Sovereignty, Sodomy" [Timon of Athens].  Alas, the morning after it might be "desire vomit emptiness: Cymbeline's Marriage Time" by Amanda Berry. I don't see how any reader could wait all the way till June for Richard Rambuss's Midsummer Night's Dream essay "Shakespeare's Ass Play."

Complete list of Shakesqueer contributors: Matt Bell, Amanda Berry, Daniel Boyarin, Judith Brown, Steven Bruhm, Peter Coviello, Julie Crawford, Drew Daniel, Mario DiGangi, Lee Edelman, Jason Edwards, Aranye Fradenburg, Carla Freccero, Daniel Juan Gil, Jonathan Goldberg, Jody Greene, Stephen Guy-Bray, Ellis Hanson, Sharon Holland, Cary Howie, Lynne Huffer, Barbara Johnson, Hector Kollias, James Kuzner , Arthur L. Little Jr., Philip Lorenz, Heather Love, Jeffrey Masten, Robert McRuer , Madhavi Menon, Michael Moon, Paul Morrison, Andrew Nicholls, Kevin Ohi, Patrick R. O’Malley, Ann Pellegrini, Richard Rambuss, Valerie Rohy, Bethany Schneider, Kathryn Schwarz, Laurie Shannon, Ashley T. Shelden, Alan Sinfield, Bruce Smith, Karl Steel, Kathryn Bond Stockton, Amy Villarejo, Julian Yates.

And Furthermore by Judi Dench

Fans of Judi Dench will be surprised in her new memoir And Furthermore to discover the deep actress's shallowest role is Judi Dench. I only read the movie chapters, the book's second half, where she never plumbs the craft of acting, the decisions of how to play a role, the interior struggles of the character. Instead, you'll get Parade-magazine anecdotes that her gown for playing Elizabeth I weighed so much she couldn't move for lunch and each morning's make-up took four hours; the pony in Mrs. Brown had tummy trouble; the hotel room in Rome for Tea with Mussolini was an outrage and she, Joan Plowright, and Maggie Smith, using their titles, demanded suites at the Eden. She loves playing M in the Bond films but she's hopeless with technology so it's a bit of work to appear competent and she never got to go to any of the exotic locations so they wrote a scene for her in Nassau. She thinks Cate Blanchett was wonderful in Notes on a Scandal. On working days, the car takes her to the set at 5:00 am and she leaves at 8:00 or 9:00 pm or later, which is why filming in winter is so hard: Arrive in the dark, leave in the dark, you miss daylight altogether.

On the plus side, lots of photos. And she's fairly moving about her husband, the actor Michael Williams, who died in 2001. And the book does sound like Judi Dench, possibly because she didn't write it. She spoke, and John Miller tidied the transcripts into paragraphs. At 76, she seems to be playing to a bygone generation of "simple folk." Who else could accept a woman who has been party to the media machine for 54 years of professional acting now announcing with wide-eyed surprise and righteous disdain, "It seems as if when journalists don't have a story they will just make anything up, to try and cause trouble."

And wouldn't it take a simpleton to believe this claim, when she was dressed as Queen Victoria for Mrs. Brown: "As I walked down the path a bus full of tourists was coming along the drive to Osborne House, and they got a terrible fright because they thought they had seen a ghost."

Or the overdone underlining and exclaiming (!!!) about the cost of her borrowed jewels for the Oscars. Unreality check: Anne Hathaway's necklace this year was $10 million; Gloria Stewart's necklace when she was up for Titanic was $20 million. Judi's borrowed loot was worth $50,000. She doesn't need to feint a faint for our benefit. Now that's acting.

I still love her, always will, and I can't wait to see her in Jane Eyre, which opened in two cities this weekend with the highest per screen average of any speciality film this year.

Michael Zam, Jack Lechner, Andy Monroe Win Larson Grant for The Kid

Michael Zam (with his MacBook), Andy Monroe (seated), and Jack Lechner (bearded), the team that transformed Dan Savage's memoir of gay adoption, The Kid, into a successful musical, have just won a 2011 Jonathan Larson Grant from the American Theatre Wing, founder of the Tonys. The trio writes, "We want to make musical theatre history. We want to tackle subject matter that no one else has touched; to break ground in formal, structural, and musical ways; and leave our audiences challenged and entertained. We can't understand why anyone would work in musical theater with any other goals than these."

The two other winning teams are Michelle Elliott and Danny Larsen for Cloaked, and Joshua Cohen and Marisa Michelson for Tamar and the River.

(Photo by Fred Conrad for the NYT.)

Born February 15-17: Bill T. Jones, Robert Dessaix

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. (photo: Lois Greenfield)

 

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. Last April he published On Humbug. 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 67 today.