Band of Thebes

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

  

Celebrate with the brilliant biography of cultural impresario, founder of the Ballets Russes, and Nijinsky lover Sergei Diaghilev [Kindle] who turns 141 today, or with Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 73, or a memoir by the Beverly Hills native and long-closeted mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 79, or a cd from a lesbian comic who came out early, Suzanne Westenhoefer, 52.

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)

Big Gay DVD Release Day

Yesterday was the DVD release of: 

Bad Boy Street, Gay director Todd Verow's Parisian film about a middle aged Frenchman, Yann, who finds a younger American passed out on rue des Mauvais-Garçons and takes him home. The next morning, this Brad dude thanks him orally, the start of a beautiful friendship. While Yann wonders if it's love or just sex, Brad harbors a major secret.

Keep the Lights On, Gay director Ira Sachs' drama based on his longterm relationship with literary agent and then-crack-addict Bill Clegg is nominated for four Spirit Awards including Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor.

The Paperboy, Gay director Lee Daniels' violent adaptation of Pete Dexter's novel stars Matthew McConaughey as a gay masochist and Zac Efron as his little bro who learns a lot from hot mess Nicole Kidman. Selected for Cannes, nominated for a Golden Globe, the movie couldn't connect with American critics, who found it lurid.

Pina, The 2011 dance spectacle and Oscar nominated doc finally comes home.

Born January 13: Alger, White, Bourne, Torres

Although in the 114 years since his death, Horatio Alger's stories have become synonymous with "rags to riches," the hard working boys in his novels don't amass fortunes. A typical plot is that a rich older man notices a plucky orphaned lad, witnesses his act of bravery or honor, and sets him up with a decent low-level job in a company, giving him security but not wealth. Often the older man gets the boy to live with him. Alger himself was a bright youth, entering Harvard at 16 and studying with Longfellow. (At left, his graduation photo at 20.) He became a minister but at 34 fled his Unitarian parish in Brewster, Massachusetts after church officials discovered he was having sex with two teenagers. Or, as they said, committing the "most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys." By that time, 1866, Alger had already written nine books for children; he moved to New York City and over the next 33 years wrote 120 more. Despite his prolific production he never became rich. Besotted with bootblacks and street scruffs, he ate often meals and / or slept at the Newsboys Lodging House and gave away his earnings or was conned out of them by the young men he so admired. Except for Ragged Dick, his books did not become bestsellers until years after his death in 1899 at 67 at his sister Augusta's house in Natick. She destroyed all his papers.

Edmund White works a variety of locales, languages, time periods, and literary genres: fiction, travel, memoir, biography, criticism, drama, and cultural observation. In 2009 you learned that he is the contemporary writer John Irving re-reads most often and whose new books he most anticipates. Irving called White's recent fiction, Hotel de Dream [Kindle], "flawless" and said that White's 1982 landmark gay novel A Boy's Own Story far outshines Cather in the Rye. Readers of all stripes owe White thanks for rescuing Jean Genet with his NBCC award-winning biography, and gay readers in particular are indebted to his honesty about sex and his longtime HIV+ status. Generous with his time and influence, he equally promotes gay literature's forgotten gems (Belchamber) and emerging voices (Salvation Army). A professor at Princeton, White has been made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. His popular memoir City Boy was a NYT notable book and a NBCC finalist. Next month sees the paperback release of Jack Holmes and His Friend [Kindle]. He's 73.

In 1995 Matthew Bourne cast male dancers as the swans in Swan Lake and became a sensation throughout the world. Writing in The New Yorker years later, Joan Acocella said, "it made an old love story romantic again, by making it seem dangerous." Other critics called it "a miracle." Contrary to some purist's grumblings, his Swan Lake is not a gimmick. The rigid establishment has embraced it, adding it to the standard A Level syllabus for dance majors in Britain. Extremely in demand to choreograph other people's big West End musicals, Bourne's goal with his own productions is to make dance interesting to people who ordinarily would avoid it. He enlivened the stale favorite The Nutcracker; created a version of Bizet's Carmen called The Car Man with plenty of shirtless greasemonkeys and a homoerotic subplot adapted from The Postman Always Rings Twice; transformed Edward Scissorhands into a full-length dance; and created a piece called Play Without Words, based on the 60s movie The Servant. Acocella's fact piece on Bourne from March 12, 2007 remains the best profile of him, in part because she directly addresses the gay aspect. He says he specifically wants his work to make homosexuality acceptable. He is still planning an all-male version of Romeo & Juliet called Romeo, Romeo and in 2010 unveiled a dance production of The Picture of Dorian Gray. He's 53.

Years before he unleashed his fiery family novella We the Animals [Kindle] in 2011, Justin Torres was already collecting literary honors like a Truman Capote Fellowship at Iowa, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and a United States Artists Rolón Fellowship in 2009. His instant classic is now published in twelve languages and was a finalist or winner of many prizes including those from the NAACP, Publishing Triangle, VCU Cabell, Pitt's Fred Brown Award, and the Indies Choice Book Award, all topped by Justin's being named Salon's fourth sexiest man of 2011, sandwiched between Aloe Blacc and Thom Yorke. This fall he was selected as one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35, chosen to speak at the National Book Festival, and he currently holds a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard where his only job is to work on his second novel, about a gay Puerto Rican hustler in New York City. Two chapters of that book have appeared in Harpers and The New Yorker [free access]. He will read from it at Fay House on Garden St in Cambridge on May 8. He's 33.

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.

Born January 1: Forster, Hoover, Haines, Béjart, Hormel, Orton, De la Iglesia, Stefano

E.M. Forster (1879-1970) After you've finished the novels (Howards End, A Passage to India, A Room With a View, Maurice), and his openly gay story collection The Life To Come, your mandatory reading is Wendy K. Moffat's NYT notable A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster [Kindle]. Biographer Tripp Evans wrote: "Not only is this a truly groundbreaking study of Forster's life and work -- and an eye-opening read for any student of twentieth-century gay social history -- but it's also beautifully written.  Moffat is one of those rare writers able to combine elegant prose with a style that engages the reader in an intimate conversation (she is, in other words, the very best sort of company).  By illuminating the previously underexamined terrain of Forster's private life, Moffat has restored an important figure, along with his era, to a deeply satisfying wholeness.  It is a remarkable achievement."

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) American FBI director and closet case of unsurpassed twistedness.

William Haines (1900-1973) Hollywood hero, one of the top five grossing movie stars annually from 1928 - 32 for charming films like The Smart Set, The Duke Steps Out, and Just a Gigolo. In 1933 he was busted for picking up a sailor and taking him to a YMCA, prompting his studio to demand a sham marriage to a woman. Haines refused to betray his partner of seven years Jimmie Shields that way, and quit films for a very successful career as an interior designer. Read William Mann's extraordinary biography, Wisecracker.

Maurice Béjart (1927-2007) French-Swiss choreographer who directed maverick ballets and all-male homoerotic dances long before Matthew Bourne. Watch this at least until 2:20.

James Hormel (1933 -) The grandson of SPAM, American philanthropist, ambassador, gay rights activist, and current political hot potato is 80 today. His partner Michael P. Nguyen graduated from Swarthmore in 2008.

Joe Orton (1933-1967) randy British playwright of explicitly gay hits like Entertaining Mr. Sloane and What the Butler Saw, murdered by his unstable lover. Subject of Stephen Frears' fine biopic Prick Up Your Ears starring Gary Oldman and Vanessa Redgrave.

Eloy de la Iglesia (1944-2006) Spanish writer - director of the gay festival favorites like Bulgarian Lovers [right].

Joey Stefano (1968-1994) Porn superstar. After you've satisfied yourself with his film acting, read Wonder Bread & Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano.

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

 

Celebrate with biographies of cultural impressario Sergei Diaghilev [Kindle] who turns 140 today, and Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 72, or a memoir by mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 78, or a cd from comic Suzanne Westenhoefer, 51.

Born March 12: Vaslav Nijinsky, Randall Kenan

By the time Vaslav Nijinsky was nineteen the formerly impoverished youth had already enjoyed exquisite teenage affairs with the forty-something Prince Pavel Dimitrievitch Lvov who drenched him in luxury, a rebound fling with Count Tishkievitch, and had begun his great romantic and professional partnership with Sergei Diaghilev, under whose tutelage Nijinsky was early known as the God of Dance. One of the very few male ballet stars to perform en pointe, his reputation in Russia and Paris grew with each successive role in Cleopatra, Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle. At Diaghilev's urging, Nijinsky began to choreograph his own works and the radical results remain the stuff of legend: at twenty-two, Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun which ended with him masturbating, and a year later Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring which ended with the audience rioting (possibly at Stravinsky's prompting, for the publicity).

Later the same year, impulsively, stupidly, tragically, Nijinsky married Romola de Pulszky, a Hungarian countess who had been chasing him across continents and oceans, finally landing him in Buenos Aires. Enraged, Diaghilev fired him. Nijinsky tried and failed to start his own dance troupe. Stumbling in a new and ill-fitting role, the star who was used to being petted and lavished with gifts now had to support a wife and child with no money and no employment. When his stress was its highest, World War I broke out, and he, a Russian in Hungary, was considered an enemy and held as a prisoner. In 1916 Diaghilev rescued him and got the family to New York, to join his Ballets Russes. From the instant of their joyous kissing reunion, Romola came between the lovers. Predictably, Nijinsky's mental state declined. Imagine performing on stage with a fear of the other dancers and a uncontrollable terror that the trap doors would open. Diaghilev removed himself back to Europe; Nijinsky was the wrong person to be left in charge of the company. Later Diaghilev again tried to reconcile, and again Romola "protected" her husband from him, thwarting any more reunions. Nijinsky's depression turned to delusions and Romola, with his doctors, had him committed to an asylum in Switzerland. It was 1919 and he was twenty-nine. For the next thirty-one years he was in and out of institutions until his death in London in 1950.

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, and riffed on Baldwin in a 149-page essay called The Fire This Time. Forty-nine today, he teaches at his alma matter, UNC Chapel Hill.

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 January 13: Horatio Alger, Edmund White, Matthew Bourne

Although in the 113 years since his death, Horatio Alger's stories have become synonymous with "rags to riches," the hard working boys in his novels don't amass fortunes. A typical plot is that a rich older man notices a plucky orphaned lad, witnesses his act of bravery or honor, and sets him up with a decent low-level job in a company, giving him security but not wealth. Often the older man gets the boy to live with him. Alger himself was a bright youth, entering Harvard at 16 and studying with Longfellow. (At left, his graduation photo at 20.) He became a minister but at 34 fled his Unitarian parish in Brewster, Massachusetts after church officials discovered he was having sex with two teenagers. Or, as they said, committing the "most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys." By that time, 1866, Alger had already written nine books for children; he moved to New York City and over the next 33 years wrote 120 more. Despite his prolific production he never became rich. Besotted with bootblacks and street scruffs, he ate often meals and / or slept at the Newsboys Lodging House and gave away his earnings or was conned out of them by the young men he so admired. Except for Ragged Dick, his books did not become bestsellers until years after his death in 1899 at 67 at his sister Augusta's house in Natick. She destroyed all of his personal papers.

If the phrase "man of letters" isn't too fusty, it applies to no American writer more than Edmund White. He's equally accomplished in a variety of locales, languages, time periods, and literary genres: fiction, travel, memoir, biography, criticism, drama, and cultural observation. In 2009 you learned that he is the contemporary writer John Irving re-reads most often and whose new books he most anticipates. Irving called White's recent fiction, Hotel de Dream [Kindle], "flawless" and said that White's 1982 landmark gay novel A Boy's Own Story far outshines Cather in the Rye. Readers of all stripes owe White thanks for rescuing Jean Genet with his NBCC award-winning biography, and gay readers in particular are indebted to his honesty about sex and his longtime HIV+ status. Generous with his time and influence, he equally promotes gay literature's forgotten gems (Belchamber) and emerging voices (Salvation Army). A professor at Princeton, White has been made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. His popular memoir City Boy was a NYT notable book and a NBCC finalist. Next Tuesday, Bloomsbury publishes his new novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend.

In 1995 Matthew Bourne cast male dancers as the swans in Swan Lake and became a sensation throughout the world. Writing in The New Yorker years later, Joan Acocella said, "it made an old love story romantic again, by making it seem dangerous." Other critics called it "a miracle." Contrary to some purist's grumblings, his Swan Lake is not a gimmick. The rigid establishment has embraced it, adding it to the standard A Level syllabus for dance majors in Britain. Extremely in demand to choreograph other people's big West End musicals, Bourne's goal with his own productions is to make dance interesting to people who ordinarily would avoid it. He enlivened the stale favorite The Nutcracker; created a version of Bizet's Carmen called The Car Man with plenty of shirtless greasemonkeys and a homoerotic subplot adapted from The Postman Always Rings Twice; transformed Edward Scissorhands into a full-length dance; and created a piece called Play Without Words, based on the 60s movie The Servant. Acocella's fact piece on Bourne from March 12, 2007 remains the best profile of him, in part because she directly addresses the gay aspect. He says he specifically wants his work to make homosexuality acceptable. He is still planning an all-male version of Romeo & Juliet called Romeo, Romeo and in 2010 unveiled a dance production of The Picture of Dorian Gray. Today he's 52.

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

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

 

Celebrate with recent biographies of cultural impressario Sergei Diaghilev [[Kindle]] who turns 139 today, and Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 71, or a slightly older memoir by actor Richard Chamberlain, 77, or a cd from comic Suzanne Westenhoefer, 50.

Two Vancouver Schools Flashmob Against Bullying

In Vancouver, the kids at an elementary school and a secondary school pulled on the pink and pulled off a giant flashmob to dance their way to acceptance... acceptance of you, gay viewers!

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.

Born January 13: Horatio Alger Jr., Edmund White, Matthew Bourne

Although in the 112 years since his death, Horatio Alger's stories have become synonymous with "rags to riches," the hard working boys in his novels don't amass fortunes. A typical plot is that a rich older queen man notices a plucky orphaned lad, witnesses his act of bravery or honor, and sets him up with a decent low-level job in a company, giving him security but not wealth. Often the older man gets the boy to live with him. Alger himself was a bright youth, entering Harvard at 16 and studying with Longfellow. (At left, his graduation photo at 20.) He became a minister but at 34 fled his Unitarian parish in Brewster, Massachusetts after church officials discovered he was having sex with two teenagers. Or, as they said, committing the "most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys." By that time, 1866, Alger had already written nine books for children; he moved to New York City and over the next 33 years wrote 120 more. Despite his prolific production he never became rich. Besotted with bootblacks and street scruffs, he ate often meals and / or slept at the Newsboys Lodging House and gave away his earnings or was conned out of them by the young men he so admired. Except for Ragged Dick, his books did not become bestsellers until years after his death in 1899 at 67 at his sister Augusta's house in Natick. She destroyed all of his personal papers.

If the phrase "man of letters" isn't too fusty, it applies to no American writer more than Edmund White. He's equally accomplished in a variety of locales, languages, time periods, and literary genres: fiction, travel, memoir, biography, criticism, drama, and cultural observation. In 2009 you learned that he is the contemporary writer John Irving re-reads most often and whose new books he most anticipates. Irving called White's recent fiction, Hotel de Dream,"flawless" and said that White's 1982 landmark gay novel A Boy's Own Story far outshines Cather in the Rye. Readers of all stripes owe White thanks for rescuing Jean Genet with his NBCC award-winning biography, and gay readers in particular are indebted to his honesty about sex and his longtime HIV+ status. Generous with his time and influence, he equally promotes gay literature's forgotten gems (Belchamber) and emerging voices (Salvation Army). A professor at Princeton, White has been made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. His popular memoir City Boy was a NYT notable book and a NBCC finalist. He has more or less finished his next novel, about a long friendship between a gay man and a straight man.

In 1995 Matthew Bourne cast male dancers as the swans in Swan Lake and became a sensation throughout the world. Writing in The New Yorker years later, Joan Acocella said, "it made an old love story romantic again, by making it seem dangerous." Other critics called it "a miracle." Contrary to some purist's grumblings, his Swan Lake is not a gimmick. The rigid establishment has embraced it, adding it to the standard A Level syllabus for dance majors in Britain. Extremely in demand to choreograph other people's big West End musicals, Bourne's goal with his own productions is to make dance interesting to people who ordinarily would avoid it. He enlivened the stale favorite The Nutcracker; created a version of Bizet's Carmen called The Car Man with plenty of shirtless greasemonkeys and a homoerotic subplot adapted from The Postman Always Rings Twice; transformed Edward Scissorhands into a full-length dance; and created a piece called Play Without Words, based on the 60s movie The Servant. Acocella's fact piece on Bourne from March 12, 2007 remains the best profile of him, in part because she directly addresses the gay aspect. He says he specifically wants his work to make homosexuality acceptable. He is still planning an all-male version of Romeo & Juliet called Romeo, Romeo and last year unveiled a dance production of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

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.

Glasgay! Festival and "Lip Service," Glascow's Answer to The L Word

 

Every autumn since 1993, the queer culture festival Glasgay! has been rocking the UK's third largest city with LGBT events in literature, film, theater, music, dance, art, comedy, spoken word, and lectures. What had been a mere fortnight with 3,000 people has grown into a month-long extravaganza attracting more than 35,000 fans. Filling twenty venues, this year's many highlights include:

a crossdressing version of Jean Genet's The Maids

movies old and new -- Orlando, Prayers for Bobby, Stonewall Uprising, and City of Borders, a documentary about Jerusalem's only gay bar

the orchestra-infused arty pop group The Irrespressibles (above live, or enjoy the video version with nudity, pearls, and car washing)

the dancetastic Big Loud & Proud Ceilidh

a lecture by the Glasgow Women's Library Archivist Hannah Little on the hidden treasures of the national lesbian archive

a reading by Jackie Kay (left), whose Trumpet deserves a much wider readership here. The novel was inspired by Billy Tipton, a jazz musician and biological woman who lived as a man for 50 years

 

For anyone unable to attend the events now through November 13 but still in need of your queer Glaswegian fix, BBC 3 answers your prayers with a new series called Lip Service, much like The L Word. The Guardian's Claudia Cahalane loves it. Meet two characters below, the sweet mess Cat and sexy trouble Frankie (she cruises a book thief and offers cigarettes to small children in front of their mom!).

 

A New Biography of Diaghilev, The Man Who Made Ballet Gay?

Diaghilev with one of his dancing lovers, Serge Lifar

 Crowding a shelf already heavy with at least eight biographies of the Russian impresario, Oxford last week published Sjeng Scheijen's 552-page Diaghilev: A Life. Happily, Scheijen gives Diaghilev's homosexuality the attention it warrants because as a ballet master sleeping with his principal dancers, art, self, and sex were always entwined. NYT critic Alastair Macaulay argues

"Ballet was not Diaghilev’s first, second or third love. But he found in it the ideal vehicle to bring other arts together. It’s also likely that it stimulated, and sublimated, his sexuality. As he developed a taste for younger men, so ballet brought him the male beauties he desired; and his status gave him maximum casting-couch power.

"In several cases, his lovers — who included, successively, the star dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Anton Dolin and Serge Lifar — needed no seduction from him; they were ambitious. And this gay Pygmalion was most galvanized when he could turn these male Galateas into artists the world would worship. Ballet had hitherto been essentially a heterosexual art glorifying femininity, but now a long series of Diaghilev ballets cast more luster on hero than heroine, while at least two of them (“Jeux,” “Les Biches”) actively encouraged homosexual nuances."

Sjeng Scheijen divides his time between Amsterdam and Moscow where he is cultural attaché at the Netherlands Embassy. Read an excerpt of his first chapter here.

London's Victoria & Albert Museum is hosting a massive exhibit, Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballet Russes, from September 25 - January 9.

Born March 12: Vaslav Nijinsky, Randall Kenan

By the time Vaslav Nijinsky was nineteen the formerly impoverished youth had already enjoyed exquisite teenage affairs with the forty-something Prince Pavel Dimitrievitch Lvov who drenched him in luxury, a rebound fling with Count Tishkievitch, and had begun his great romantic and professional partnership with Sergei Diaghilev, under whose tutelage Nijinsky was early known as the God of Dance. One of the very few male ballet stars to perform en pointe, his reputation in Russia and Paris grew with each successive role in Cleopatra, Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle. At Diaghilev's urging, Nijinsky began to choreograph his own works and the radical results remain the stuff of legend: at twenty-two, Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun which ended with him masturbating, and a year later Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring which ended with the audience rioting.(Possibly at Stravinsky's prompting, for the publicity.)

Later the same year, impulsively, stupidly, tragically, he married Romola Pulsky, a Romanian woman who had been chasing him across continents and oceans, finally landing him in Buenos Aires. Enraged, Diaghilev fired him. Nijinsky tried and failed to start his own dance troupe. Stumbling in a new and ill-fitting role, the star who was used to being petted and lavished with gifts now had to support a wife and child with no money and no employment. When his stress was its highest, World War I broke out, and he, a Russian in Hungary, was considered an enemy and held as a prisoner. In 1916 Diaghilev rescued him and got the family to New York, to join his Ballets Russes. From the instant of their joyous kissing reunion, Romola came between the lovers. Predictably, Nijinsky's mental state declined. Imagine performing on stage with a fear of the other dancers and a uncontrollable terror that the trap doors would open. Diaghilev removed himself back to Europe; Nijinsky was the wrong person to be left in charge of the company. Later Diaghilev again tried to reconcile, and again Romola "protected" her husband from him, thwarting any more reunions. Nijinsky's depression turned to delusions and Romola, with his doctors, had him committed to an asylum in Switzerland. It was 1919 and he was twenty-nine. For the next thirty-one years he was in and out of institutions until his death in London in 1950.

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, and riffed on Baldwin in a 149-page essay called The Fire This Time. Forty-seven today, he teaches at his alma matter, UNC Chapel Hill.

Born January 13: Horatio Alger Jr., Edmund White, Matthew Bourne

Although in the 111 years since his death, Horatio Alger's stories have become synonymous with "rags to riches," the hard working boys in his novels don't amass fortunes. A typical plot is that a rich older queen man notices a plucky orphaned lad, witnesses his act of bravery or honor, and sets him up with a decent low-level job in company, giving him security but not wealth. Often the older man gets the boy to live with him. Alger himself was a bright youth, entering Harvard at 16 and studying with Longfellow. This is his graduation photo at 20. He became a minister but fled his Unitarian parish in Brewster, Massachusetts and quit the cloth forever at 34 after church officials discovered he was having sex with two teenage males. Or, as they said, committing the "most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys." By that time, 1866, he had already written nine books for children; he moved to New York City and over the next 33 years wrote 120 more. Despite his prolific production he never became rich. Besotted with bootblacks and street scruffs, he ate often meals and / or slept at the Newsboys Lodging House and gave away his earnings or was conned out of them by the young men he so admired. Except for Ragged Dick, his books did not become bestsellers until years after his death in 1899 at 67 at his sister Augusta's house in Natick. She destroyed all of his personal papers.

If the phrase "man of letters" isn't too fusty, it applies to no one better than Edmund White, 70 today. He's equally accomplished in a variety of locales, languages, time periods, and literary genres: fiction, travel, memoir, biography, criticism, drama, and cultural observation. Last year you learned that he is the contemporary writer John Irving re-reads most often and whose new books he most anticipates. Irving called White's recent fiction, Hotel de Dream,"flawless" and said that White's 1982 novel A Boy's Own Story far outshines Cather in the Rye. Readers of all stripes owe White thanks for rescuing Jean Genet with his NBCC award-winning biography, and gay readers in particular are indebted to his honesty about sex and his longtime HIV+ status. Generous with his time and influence, he equally promotes gay literature's forgotten gems (Belchamber) and emerging voices (Salvation Army). A professor at Princeton, White has been made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. His memoir City Boy was a NYT notable and by far the most cited nonfiction on the survey of authors' favorite lgbt books of 2009.

In 1995 Matthew Bourne, 50 today, cast male dancers as the swans in Swan Lake and became a sensation throughout the world. Writing in The New Yorker years later, Joan Acocella said, "it made an old love story romantic again, by making it seem dangerous." Other critics called it "a miracle." Contrary to some purist's grumblings, his Swan Lake is not a gimmick. The rigid establishment has embraced it, adding it to the standard A Level syllabus for dance majors in Britain. Extremely in demand to choreograph other people's big West End musicals, Bourne's goal with own productions is to make dance interesting to people who ordinarily would avoid it. He enlivened the stale favorite The Nutcracker; created a version of Bizet's Carmen called The Car Man with plenty of shirtless greasemonkeys and a homoerotic subplot adapted from The Postman Always Rings Twice; transformed Edward Scissorhands into a full-length dance; and created a piece called Play Without Words, based on the 60s movie The Servant. Acocella's fact piece on Bourne from March 12, 2007 remains the best profile of him, in part because she directly addresses the gay aspect. He says he specifically wants his work to make homosexuality acceptable. He is still planning an all-male version of Romeo & Juliet called Romeo, Romeo and earlier this year unveiled a dance production of The Picture of Dorian Gray.