Band of Thebes

Born July 24: Gus van Sant

In the early 80s, Gus van Sant worked in a New York advertising firm and saved $25,000 to make his first feature, the ground-breaking, darkly shot Mala Noche, about a young man’s crush on a Mexican hustler and the other Mexican hustler who sort of has a crush on him. (Best moment: When the second hustler is learning to drive on a deserted rode, he crashes the guy’s car directly without swerving or turning the wheel into a telephone pole. As they walk back to town the guy yells at him, “You drive like you f---!”) Van Sant followed that with Drugstore Cowboy, reviving Matt Dillon’s career with a role as an addict struggling to get clean, and My Own Private Idaho, more hustlers, this time white, reciting passages of Henry IV, but salvaged by being River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves. Next came the bizarre Even Cowgirls Get the Blues with Uma Thurman and k.d. lang, followed by the terrific To Die For, Nicole Kidman’s first great role as an ambitious small-town newscaster who enlists two wayward teens to help kill her husband. Wanting a mainstream hit and an Oscar, van Sant then made Good Will Hunting but at least he had the grace to parody himself counting his cash from that in the first Silent Bob movie. He used his new status in Hollywood to film a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho, followed by a retread of Good Will Hunting called Finding Forrester, only this time the student was an athlete / writer and black. He’s made four smaller, more indie movies since then, usually infatuated with beautiful mopers and depressed youth: The improvised Gerry (Matt Damon & Casey Affleck lost in a desert), Elephant (thinly disguised Columbine), Last Days (thinly disguised Kurt Cobain), and the recent Paranoid Park (teen skateboarder accidentally kills security guard).

Although he has mainly ignored gay stories since his third film, van Sant did make the sweet Marais episode in Paris, je t’aime (shown in full here) and, as you've read many times, he's just finished filming one of this year's Oscar contenders, Milk. Sean Penn stars as Harvey Milk, with a supporting cast that includes James Franco as his lover and Josh Brolin as his killer, along with Diego Luna, Emile Hirsch, and Stephen Spinella. Tom Ammiano  plays himself, which either means there's a present day sequence or the make-up department had to work hard, as the movie takes place thirty years ago. While I'm obviously thrilled by the idea of a high profile, big budget feature about gay history, I can't help but notice that the first major gay story since Brokeback Mountain again takes place in the past and ends with the more out man getting murdered. Name a Hollywood queer drama with a happy ending. It's either gay = tragedy (Wilde), or the narrative is degayed (Capote). Also, for a story set in the free and easy San Francisco of the 1970s, Milk's cast list is strangely devoid of women. All in all, of the two competing Harvey Milk projects, maybe the anointed one should have been Bryan Singer's The Mayor of Castro Street. Milk opens November 26 in limited release and widens December 5.

Van Sant has also shot fifteen music videos, among them: David Bowie's Fame '90, Red Hot Chili Peppers' Under the Bridge, Tracy Chapman's Bang Bang Bang, Chris Isaak's San Francisco Days, Elton John's The Last Song, STP's Creep, and Hanson's Weird.

Samuel R. Delany: The Polymath

Samuel R. Delany has defied expectation from the beginning, sixty-six years ago. The tenth child born to a Harlem couple in the 1940s, he was not the likeliest preppy at Horace Mann and Dalton (alongside Wallace Shawn), and when he took up writing, some were surprised he chose to work in science fiction. His twenty-ninth work of fiction will be published this fall and many of his fourteen nonfiction books are still in print. A professor at U Mass Amherst for eleven years, Delany has taught at Temple University since 2000. His own work is required reading in many college courses, across multiple departments: literature, black studies, and queer studies. Although he was married to a woman for nineteen years and fathered a daughter, he was openly gay for much of that time. Because he has been an aficionado of XXX theaters and video booths for decades, he estimates his total number of male sexual partners to be fifty thousand. A documentary covering all aspects of his life, The Polymath, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April and has screened at many lgbt festivals since. Friday night, it's Philadelphia's turn, and Delany will attend the Q&A, in case you have any questions not covered by this week's City Paper interview. The movie shows Jonathan Lethem to be a fan; shouldn't he get Remnick to let him do a major New Yorker profile of the world's leading black, gay, sci-fi intellectual?

I can't find a trailer for The Polymath online. If you can, please let me know.

Born July 14: Arthur Laurents

Arthur Laurents turns eighty today, and really the man has a lot to celebrate. 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-love 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 this year's 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 candid autobiography is called Original Story By. He and his partner Tom Hatcher lived together fifty-one years, mainly in Quogue, Long Island, until Hatcher's death in 2006.

Born July 11: Tab Hunter, Vito Russo

The blond movie star and the brilliant movie watcher.

Born July 7: George Cukor

You might make the case that Katharine Hepburn owed her career to George Cukor. He gave Hepburn her first movie role in A Bill of Divorcement, then cast her as Jo in Little Women, then as Sylvia Scarlett. Their last collaboration was 47 years after their first, when Cukor directed her in The Corn Is Green for television. He famously paired her with Cary Grant in Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, and perfected the Hepburn - Tracy subgenre with Adam's Rib and, less so, with Pat and Mike. According to William J. Mann's biography Kate, she was also indebted to Cukor for the way he perpetuated the fabled Hepburn - Tracy offscreen romance, which Mann says was fabricated to mask the never married star's lesbian affairs. Cukor was much more open in his own gay pursuits, hosting weekly Sunday afternoon pool parties where Hollywood's brightest mingled with aspiring actors and rough trade. Depending which version you choose, Cukor's being fired from Gone with the Wind after two years of prep and three weeks of filming was either because Clark Gable refused to be directed by a "fairy" or because Gable was terrified Cukor knew about his own past gay relationships. Nevertheless, even after Victor Flemming took over, Cukor continued to coach Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland on their roles. As for his way with male actors, no director has coaxed more performances winning the Oscar for Best Actor than did Cukor. Among his other great achievements are Dinner at Eight, David Copperfield, Camille, Romeo and Juliet, The Women, Gaslight, Born Yesterday, A Star Is Born, It Should Happen to You, Travels with my Aunt and My Fair Lady.
 

Chris & Don: A Love Story

Novelist Christopher Isherwood was born in 1904, dropped out of Cambridge, enjoyed the excesses of Weimar Germany, fled the Nazis, moved to Hollywood, became an American citizen, and, on Valentine's Day when he was 48 met on the Santa Monica beach a group of young men including Don Bachardy, 16, who later became his partner for thirty-five years until his death. Bachardy, now in his 70s, discusses their life in the new documentary Chris & Don: A Love Story. They went everywhere as a couple, openly, except the joke is their age difference provided such perfect camouflage that when they were in Monument Valley, John Ford and his movie crew assumed throughout their visit they were father and son. Later, as Bachardy grew up, they attended Hollywood parties and scandalized many conservatives like Joseph Cotten who loudly complained about the "half men."

Of course the vast imbalance in their relationship was tilted in Isherwood's favor, yet as the years added up, Bachardy grew restless in his shadow and had affairs that terrified Isherwood, who feared being abandoned late in life and dying alone. Bachardy had become an artist; his best works are his drawings. The couple stayed together and Bachardy devotedly nursed him through years of cancer until he died in 1986. The movie has played several festivals, is still at the Quad, and will tour many cities throughout the summer. To see the schedule, click here then choose Playdates. Although the distributor has chosen to market the chickenhawk element in their movie poster, it's inaccurate. The movie is not narrated by a grinning boy, but by a widowed man older than their ages in that photo combined.

Born July 1: Farley Granger

Early last year, the 1940s and 50s movie star Farley Granger finally confirmed his many same sex affairs in his autobiography with the Goldwyn catchphrase title Include Me Out. Bravo, for someone about to turn eighty-two, and yes he can be included out as of 2007. Yet like so many people who wait too long to be honest, Granger wants to rewrite the past to cast himself as braver than he really was. Of his sexual life, he claims, "I never hid it or felt guilt about being who I was, but I didn't blare it either." I never hid it? An interview in The Villager with Granger and Robert Calhoun, his co-author and partner for the past 45 years, offers an even more delusional exchange:

It seems to me you’ve never actually been in the closet, the journalist said to the actor. “No, I never was.” Granger quietly replied.
“That’s why he resents labels,” Calhoun said. “And ‘gay’ — in itself, destruction of a perfectly good word — is just another way of saying faggot.”

Granger's breakthrough role, in Rope, was based partly on the real life Leopold and Loeb case from 1924 in which two bright gay homophile lovers, 19 and 18, committed a murder apparently for the excitement of seeing if they could get away with it. In the movie the debonair killers are in their twenties, played by Granger and John Dall, also gay Uranian in real life. As filming began Granger had just fallen in love with the screenwriter, Arthur Laurents, and the couple would soon move in together. If no one were hiding anything, a studio flack just might find a publicity hook in all this. No chance. Granger and Laurents told everyone they were merely roommates, and publicly, in order to go out together, they dated women. (Laurents wrote about this in his own autobiography, As Written By, which Knopf published in 2000.) Granger's greatest role, again directed by Hitchcock, was in Strangers on a Train, and it too had a strong gay Sodomite subtext and pedigree, coming from the much more explicit novel by Patricia Highsmith, a lesbian Sapphist. Obviously in the era of McCarthy witch hunts, a movie star could no more be openly gay Pederast than openly Communist. Granger would earn more respect if he admitted, "I felt I had to hide it," and he might have done more good if he had been more open when it really mattered.

Every Day Is Lesbian Day

Quick hi from Wyoming, where at the lodge's breakfast this morning a white haired gent wore a t-shirt emblazoned with, "Even duct tape can't fix stupid." Did you realize Wyoming's motto is "Equal Rights" and that it is the least populous of all fifty states?

Which brings us to the epic short story, Tits-up in a Ditch, by Annie Proulx in The New Yorker's fiction double issue (June 9 & 16). It's mandatory reading and not just because it coolly decimates contemporary Wyoming and includes a lesbian soldier and two (off-screen) lesbian goat farmers. A comment by a rancher in Tits-up in a Ditch gives Proulx's third collection of Wyoming stories its title, Fine Just the Way It Is, to be published in September. Her first such collection, Close Range, contains Brokeback Mountain.

As for another PEN/Faulkner Award winner, Kate Christensen's novel The Great Man, recently out in paperback, is about three women connected to a deceased famous portraitist in New York: his mistress, his wife, and his sister, a butch lesbian abstract painter. One of Christensen's earlier novels, Jeremy Thrane, is about a gay man in a longterm relationship with a closeted movie star.

An adaptation of a knockout novel with 100% lesbian themes, which takes place in the world of clairvoyants and gentle ladies who charitably visit women's prisons in Victorian London, Sarah Waters' Affinity, is the opening night film of Frameline tonight in San Francisco.

Another international film, The Edge of Heaven, playing across America this summer, features a lesbian couple at the center of its multiple storylines crisscrossing Germany and Turkey. Made by Fatih Akin, the director of Head-On, it has garnered rave reviews and many awards: best screenplay at Cannes, best screenplay at the European Film Awards, and it won four top prizes at the German Film Awards including Best Picture and Best Director.

The Hollywood Reporter: Why Gay Films Fail

Writing in The Hollywood Reporter, Gregg Goldstein examines the failure of gay films to find audiences in theaters. Last year, Strand Releasing put twenty-two movies in art house cinemas and their total gross, combined, was $462,000. Even the New Fest's director, Basil Tsiokos, says most lgbt film festivals have devolved from launching theatrical runs to launching direct to DVD releases. But no one knows why. The photo above is from C.R.A.Z.Y. the internationally praised movie that swept eleven Genie Awards (Canada's Oscars) in 2006 but still can't find a U.S. distributor because it's g.a.y.

NewFest Award Winners 2008

            JURY PRIZES

Feature: The Lost Coast

International Feature: The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela

Showtime Vanguard: The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela

Documentary: Be Like Others

Short: No Bikini

Documentary Short: Odd One Out, Very Normal Really: From Lucas to Luus

            AUDIENCE AWARDS

Feature: Pageant

Short: Cowboy [no link, photo above]

Snowing in hell yet? First, gay marriage in California, and now consensus among queer film juries? You'll remember The Amazing Truth About Queen Raquela won the Teddy Award for Best Feature at the Berlin Film Festival this year, and last night it won two awards from The New Festival. A chipper, harrowing story of a drag queen in the Philippines who longs to live in Paris, and her New York sex website employer who may or may not realize her dreams. Last night's documentary winner about gay life in Iran, Be Like Others, was nominated for the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance and won three Teddys this year. All of the winning feature-length films will be at Frameline, which starts Thursday night.

Yesterday my partner and I saw Cowboy, and we're still reeling. It's German, so of course the sex is followed by gruesome, folk-tale-ish brutality. A yuppie real estate investor becomes ensnared with a shirtless, briefless, low-slung jeaned, ripped, cocky but lonely teen farmhand in an abandoned house. After their highly successful game of cat and mouse horse, the disapproving locals extract their biblical revenge in a wheat field. Blood and missing body part notwithstanding, it has a happy ending. Figuratively, director Till Kleinert is one to watch; the same can be said literally about star Pit Bukowski.

Saturn in Opposition

Who wouldn't want to spend 113 minutes eavesdropping on this group of nine Italian friends, especially in a movie directed and co-written by Ferzan Ozpetek? Once again someone dies; but after the stabbing at the end of Steam: The Turkish Bath or being struck by a car at the beginning of His Secret Life, maybe the death from natural causes in the middle of Saturn in Opposition suggests Ozpetek is mellowing. The story revolves around two couples: the gay men in the red and black shirts above, and the man in the blue shirt married to the blond woman on the left and having an affair with the blond woman on the right. The women on either end are a gorgeous single cokehead and a short, angry, big-hearted, heavyset acerbic wit married to a tall cop who is equally in love and afraid of her. Not at the level of Almodovar, or even L'Auberge Espagnole, but as ensemble movies go, this one is worth your while. You might not realize how rare it is for a movie's gay storyline to be about adults comfortably and openly themselves, rather than young people, coming out, aids, or victimization. Go see it later this summer.

Mulligans

The Mulligans  poster advertises itself as "The Graduate for a New Generation."  Aside from all the other ways in which that's a preposterous claim, it's depressing to see that The Graduate's original trailer from 1967 was completely open about the "scandalous" older - younger, college boy - girlfriend's mom affair, and forty-one years later Mulligans' trailer artlessly obscures the "scandalous" older - younger, college boy - buddy's dad relationship.
    If you ever have to sit through this Canadian golfing / coming out movie, wear your iPod. The film will make more sense if you never hear the dialog. You would be spared the jarring disconnect of 27 year-olds playing college kids Tyler [above, left] and Chase and 37 year-olds playing Tyler's parents, Stacey and Nathan [above, right]. Your iPod would also save you from the movie's weepy, emo score and soundtrack, but you would still be left to wonder why all these people cry so much. Why is Nathan sniffling before he leans in to kiss Chase? (Mrs. Robinson was the sexual aggressor! She'd kick this dad's ass for crying.) Did you fall asleep and wakeup back at home watching a Lifetime movie from the 70s? Because that's the level of mournful "affirmation." Their one melancholy night together slowly, for the rest of the film, destroys the marriage, breaks up the family, wrecks the boys' friendship, and leaves Chase no longer on speaking terms with Nathan. But they're all a little wiser. The end.
    It's a shame because the movie offers a lot to enjoy visually. Alice Brooks' lush cinematography makes the waterfront cottages of Victoria, British Columbia look heavenly. Jackie Adamthwaite, Diane Kanstrup, and  Aileen Lubiniecki each deserve an award for perfectly capturing the summer house vibe, right down to the too-new, matchy-matchy quilts (the wife, trying too hard) and envy-inducing ancient, wooden, library card catalog bureau in the boys' room (the husband, moneyed and casual).
    The problem, of course, is that the Mulligans script never goes deeper than a J. Crew summer catalog photo shoot. I didn't realize until I got home that the actor who plays Chase, the college buddy, wrote it.
    Someone from the production company has posted this excerpt on Imdb presumably trying to entice you with the movie's best lines.

Stacey Davidson: I'm just trying to talk about something other than golf. There are other people at this table. Maybe you'd like to know what Birdy has planned for the day. Would anyone like some more waffles?
Birdy Davidson: We haven't even started yet.
Stacey Davidson: Well, we'd best get started then shouldn't we?
Nathan Davidson: Your mother is right. It's polite to show interest. Otherwise we can seem cold or frigid.
Stacey Davidson: Sometimes that's what people do when the actions of others seem erratic or unusual.
Nathan Davidson: It's difficult for a person to attempt spontaneity if they are greeted with ridicule.
Stacey Davidson: If you don't tend your chickens, they'll never produce a golden egg.
Tyler Davidson: Okay, okay, I get it. Show a little interest. Birdy, what do you have planned for the day?
Birdy Davidson: Mom doesn't like that I saw a penis so I'm going to start playing tennis.
Tyler Davidson: That's great. Great waffles Mom, really great.

Clandestinos

Sorry, can't talk, in a hurry as I am moving to Madrid right now.
    Suddenly needing to emigrate is the only danger of the really satisfying Spanish movie Clandestinos, about three lads who escape from a juvenile detention center. The love triangle that develops is not among the teens (a Basque, a Mexican, and a Moroccan), but features Xabi caught between his unreachable lover, a Basque rebel in his 50s, and Germán, an undercover cop, also in his 50s. Touchingly, when Germán takes Xabi home after picking him up from a row of (unrealistically?) stunning hustlers at the mall, what he really wants to do is cook for him, though of course they do that other thing, too: sleep. Xabi's fellow escapees are straight and their girlfriends are awesome in the way that the smaller roles in Almodóvar are such standouts. (Think Lola Dueñas or Rossy de Palma.) Warning: the trailer below is a little lame and its ratio aspect is distorted. Also, there's frontal nudity, in case you're at work. Look for Clandestinos at your upcoming film festival.

Born June 10: Terrence Rattigan

After the full-blown success at twenty-five of his first solo work, 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. David Mamet had a modest hit with his adaptation of The Winslow Boy in 1999, and this decade has seen a major Rattigan revival in the West End.

Born June 9: Cole Porter

The summit of sophistication, Cole Porter wrote the wittiest, worldliest love songs ever recorded and a good part of his genius depended on 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 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, 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. Consider this verse:

If I invite
    A boy, some night
To dine on my fine finnan haddie,
    I just adore
His asking for more,
But my heart belongs to Daddy.

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. He left half his royalties to the children of his longtime friend and ex-lover Ray Kelly.

When very old gay people say the younger generations of queer activists ruined it by being too open, I suspect, in part, they are mourning the lost glamor of Porter's world. Certainly the exuberant directness of same-sex makeout songs like Franz Ferdinand's Michael can't beat the sly ruses of Porter's tunes. But a life of elegant hiding, however clever, was still a life of hiding. In Porter's heyday, gay men who were not part of the jet set endured perpetual fear of harassment, blackmail, arrest, and prison. Compared with our ability to get married and live equally, those days are nothing to sing about.

Born June 6: Thomas Mann, Harvey Fierstein, Sandra Bernhard

Quite the trio.

"A Jihad for Love"

Tired of your queer movies being about white Pottery Barn gays in Los Angeles? Get into the lives of devout gay Muslims trying to reconcile their faith and their sexuality in Parvez Sharma's documentary A Jihad for Love. Nathan Lee, writing in the New York Times, noted the film "ranges from Johannesburg to Istanbul, from doubt to despair (with a happy detour among the drag queens of India). He does manage to locate a headstrong lesbian in Paris, albeit one whose face, like those of many of the subjects here, has been digitally blurred." Playdates into September are:
New York   IFC Film Center   May 21 - June 4
Salt Lake City   SLC Film Center    June 15
Norfolk   Naro Cinema    June 18 - 22
Houston   Angelika Houston    June 20 - 26
Ft. Lauderdale   Sunrise Gateway    June 27 - July 3
Brookline    Coolidge Corner Theatre   June 27 - July 3
San Francisco   Frameline Film Festival   June 28
Los Angeles   Outfest    July 17
Santa Rosa  Rialto Lakeside July 17
Chicago   Siskel Film Center     July 25 - 31
Columbus   Wexner Center     July 25 & 26
Los Angeles    Laemmle Sunset 5   August 1 - 7
Palm Springs    Camelot Theaters   August 1 - 7
Denver    Starz Denver    August 1 - 7
San Diego  Landmark Ken   August 8 - 14
San Francisco   Landmark Lumiere   August 22 - 28
Philadelphia  Landmark Ritz at Bourse   August 22 - 28
Washington DC   Landmark E Street   September 5 - 11
Seattle  Landmark Varsity     September 5 - 11
Berkeley    JCC of the East Bay     September 18, 2008

Born May 21: Raymond Burr

It wouldn't take Perry Mason to figure out Raymond Burr was "acting" when he invented heterosexual details about his life in order to hide his gay relationships. He claimed to have had three wives and a son. His alleged first wife, "Annette Sutherland," was supposedly a British actress who died in the plane crash that killed Leslie Howard, but, as you've already guessed, British Equity has no record of an actress with that name and the fatal plane had only three women on it, all of them otherwise accounted for. Later Burr claimed to have had a son who died at ten of an incurable disease, possibly leukemia, and he even said he took a year off to travel the country with him as his dying wish. Yet his publicist at the time said Burr was working steadily that entire year, 1953, and that Burr "never mentioned any wife or son." One marriage, short-lived, can be documented. Happily, Burr did have a very long relationship with fellow actor Robert Benevides. They met on the set of Perry Mason, together bought an island in Fiji where their passion for orchids eventually became a business back in California, sold their Fiji land in 1983, and spent their time on their farm in Sonoma, where they later started a vineyard. Among his many movie roles, his menacing turn as the killer in Rear Window came three years before his beloved television series Perry Mason, which ran for 271 episodes from 1957 to 1966, and remained so popular it was later revived in 26 tv movies. Burr's next series, Ironside, ran for 195 episodes from 1967 to 1975 and it too spawned a tv movie comeback in 1993, the year Burr died of cancer. One of his nieces fought with Benevides over Burr's vast estate, questioning his right to it. They were together thirty-one years.

New York's NewFest 2008 Announces 200+ Films

In June, New York's LGBT film festival now known as NewFest and celebrating its 20th Anniversary, will include adaptations of Sarah Waters' Affinity and Jim Grimsley's Dream Boy, but where is Michael Downing's Breakfast with Scot? (Click, watch, love.) Opening night June 5 is the lesbian movie Tru Loved, starring Jane Lynch and Marcia Wallace, and the closing night film June 15 is Were the World Mine, an expansion of the short Fairies. Were the World Mine earlier this spring closed Miami's LGBT film festival (when the Miami Herald gave it two and a half stars), and goodness knows I hope you like the idea of a high school musical version of Midsummer Night's Dream but, golly, did I have a tough time getting through the minute and a half of breathy crooning: What angel wakes me from my flowery bed/I pray thee gentle mortal sing again. Several of the documentaries look great, especially the recent TriBeCa Film Festival's SqueezeBox!, the Iranian Be Like Others, and, most of all, the awesome, Oscar winner Debra Chasnoff's update It's STILL Elementary. The NewFest website is stuck on the 2007 schedule, but this year's list of features can be found here. All films will be shown at the AMC Theater on 34th Street.

Born May 2: Lorenz Hart, Stephen Daldry

Lorenz Hart, songwriting superstar and private wreck.
Stephen Daldry, still a silver fox, still married to a woman, still gay, and still prepping the amazingly delayed Kavalier & Clay. In the meantime, he's directed Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes in an adaptation of The Reader, coming in time for this year's awards. Refresh.

Born April 22: John Waters

He's a visionary, he's unique, and his bizarro, vulgar yet sweet movies are part of the permanent collection at MoMA, so of course you think of John Waters as a filmmaker. But he's more: He has written three books, published three volumes of photographs, and his artwork has been shown in many museums and galleries internationally. As for the movies, he has made sixteen, with his best work clustered from 1972 to 1988: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, Polyester, and Hairspray, starring the incomparable Divine who was his special ally since childhood. Johnny Depp fans might insist on including 1990's Cry Baby, but the four movies since then seem like lesser efforts, or at least they are more mainstream. Hope rebounds with next feature, which, I swear, is a children's movie called Fruitcake.

Born April 21: John Cameron Mitchell, Steve Nesselroth

Today the whirling mass of originality known as John Cameron Mitchell turns forty-five. He's been exceptional at least since eleven, when he made his stage debut as the Virgin Mary. Later, his New York roles included Huck Finn (Big River), Dickon (The Secret Garden), and The Young Thing (Hello Again). Then came Hedwig. Born of childhood memories and the queer rock energy of Squeezebox, Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered on February 14, 1998 with music and lyrics by Stephen Trask and directed by Peter Askin. It won multiple awards, played for two years before the original team took it to Boston, Los Angeles, and London. Since then Hedwig has been mounted hundreds of times throughout the world, spawning eight different recordings (most recently by the Peruvian, Korean, and Australian casts) and two tribute albums. Mitchell directed the film version himself, then made Shortbus, which is constantly referred to as his authentic sex movie but is just as much his valentine to alt New York. It premiered at Cannes in 2006, was released in twenty-five countries, winning several festival awards, and grossed just under two million dollars in the U.S. He has directed at least two music videos: The Scissor Sisters' "Filthy/Gorgeous" which proved too hot for MTV, and the simple, adorable "First Day of my Life" by Bright Eyes.

Speaking of capturing the full magic of New York, no one embodies  it more than Steve Nesselroth, long reigning champion as the best and most discerning reader in the East Village and beyond.

        I Dream'd in a Dream (1855)

I dream'd in a dream I saw a city invincible to the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth,
I dream'd that was the new city of Friends,
Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love, it led the rest,
It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of that city,
And in all their looks and words.

Movie Roundup: Nim, Counterfeiters, Band, Blindsight

A word of warning to the Jodie Foster fans who haven't yet gotten around to seeing her new movie Nim's Island: Strong, Rope-Swinging Jodie appears on the island for the final four minutes. During the ninety-two minutes before that, the story concentrates on the beach life of Nim (Abigail Breslin) and her scientist dad (Gerard Butler) who gets lost at sea, then the movie crosscuts with Jodie as a reclusive adventure novelist given to panic attacks and unable to leave her apartment in San Francisco. Her many fears and phobias are exaggerated for laughs because this is a kids' movie, but it may or may not make Jodie fans uncomfortable to see her hamming up being weak, helpless, and screaming at the sight of a spider, while her male fictional alter ego is a brave hardass who gets to wear knock-off Indiana Jones costumes even when it's not Halloween in the Castro. Also, she does a lot of product placement for Progresso Soup and Purell hand sanitizer. On the plus side, Nim is a fairly awesome tomboy/science nerd who swims with dolphins.

If you can remember back to February, you know the The Counterfeiters won the Oscar for best foreign language film. It's well done, well acted, and effectively told, aiming for greatness and just missing the mark. Public intellectuals can debate whether or not there's something inappropriate about a happy ending Holocaust movie that shows well fed, relatively well dressed, marginally well housed prisoners -- because the Nazis needed them in good form to counterfeit pounds and dollars, based on a true story -- as if studio executives knew audiences wouldn't pay to see skeletal victims tortured by hunger, cold, and labor. A gay man is included in a Wiemar  bar scene, but the camera never fully shows any prisoner with a pink triangle. (It's possible that one pink triangle appears fleetingly, for a nanosecond in a busy scene, but it's much too fast to know, and frankly it's not enough.)

Enough complaining. If it's still in your area, make sure to see the wonderful, wonderful feature The Band's Visit, about eight musical Egyptian policemen stranded for one day and night in the wrong town in Israel. And, definitely, no matter what, when it comes to your favorite art house, go to the documentary Blindsight, about six blind Tibetan teenagers climbing a mountain in the shadow of Everest with sighted guides, their hero, Erik Weihenmayer (the first blind person to climb the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent), and their teacher, Sabriye Tenberken. She went blind at twelve in her native Germany, moved to Tibet, invented braille for the Tibetan language and founded the country's first school for the blind by the time she was twenty-six. As the climb progresses into more demanding terrain, some of the kids clearly won't be able to make it to the 23,000 foot summit, and the adults split into opposing views on what to do. Of the 396 films shown at the Berlinale in 2007, Blindsight was voted the audience favorite. Please watch the trailer.

Born April 9: Cynthia Nixon

Well, she's lasted longer than Anne Heche. After a fifteen year relationship with a man who fathered their two children, Cynthia Nixon fell in love with a woman. Some might say she was a little late in the self discovery department considering that her first movie role was in Little Darlings with Kristy McNichol and Tatum O'Neal as tomboy/baby dyke softball players back in 1980. She won an Emmy in 2004 (the third time she was nominated for Sex and the City) and a Tony in 2006 (for her leading role in Rabbit Hole). She's a breast cancer survivor, and she is still with her partner Christine Marinoni.

"A Vocal Surprise:" Julie Andrews at B&N

After standing listlessly, stuporishly for more than half an hour among a massive throng of fans of all ages who did not get lucky yellow wristbands, I perked up when the B&N events coordinator approached the podium to make some announcements.

1. Only people with yellow wristbands could get books signed. Only yellow wristbands, not green wristbands. Only books, not movie memorabilia.  Only signed, not inscribed. Only two.

2. All you people in the back with no wristbands, I'm sorry. No standby lines, no additional signing.

3. Julie Andrews will not read from the book.

4. Julie Andrews will not answer questions.

5. Julie Andrews will not be interviewed on stage.

6. Julie Andrews will not address the public in any way.

7. Julie Andrews will only sign copies of the book, then leave. She's on a very tight schedule.

8. Julie Andrews has asked that there be NO PHOTOGRAPHY.

In response, the people around me had some announcements of their own.

"As a fan, a former fan--"

"--the stupid book, anyway--"

"If she doesn't sign it, I'll return it. I'll return it!"

"I'm gonna write them a letter!"

"I'll buy it someplace else."

"--sue B&N--"

"She's lucky she's wealthy."

"I might just 'forget' to pay!"

"You'll go to jail."

At that point it was 6:40, twenty minutes until her appearance. No one budged. Several voiced their belief that the events coordinator must be wrong and that she would sign more books.

7:00 No Julie Andrews.

7:10 Still no Julie Andrews. People begin to announce to one another, "She's late."

7:15 Mr. Announcements returns to the podium to say Julie Andrews is "on her way."

7:20 No. Julie. Andrews.

7:26 If you've ever been at Lourdes when the Virgin Mary appeared, in person, to give autographs, then you don't need me to describe what comes next.

Applause breaks out in the back, rolling wave-like through the crowd. OMG JULIE ANDREWS!!!! She strides briskly, smiling, amid a small pack of B&N security and publishing staff. Approx. eight million flashbulbs go off. She waves. Cheers of "We love you, Julie!" Followed by, "Sign Our Books!"

She makes her way to the front where a very, very smiley B&N girl grins and beams from the podium. Blessedly brief non-introduction and Julie Andrews takes the stage and walks to the podium. (She's going to break Rule #6! See, she really is as impetuous and free and anti-authority as Maria!)

Meltingly charming, she avoids any sugary gushing over the crowd and immediately speaks about the book. She found she couldn't write it and tried to give her advance back to Hyperion. Then she found she couldn't break her contract and buckled down to try to give some impression of what it was like in the days of British vaudeville theater and her early years in general.

A new man reminds the crowd that they really do request No Flash Photography, at which Julie Andrews smiles tightly and says, "Too late!" That smile says, They've already taken my vocal chords, why not my retina too?

The maniacal smiler reappears to say she would now ask Dame Julie four questions submitted earlier from fans. (Doublekill, breaking Rule #5 and Rule #4.)

1. Which event from the book is your favorite memory?

[Elegant stalling,] then says "too many" and emphasizes how lucky she's been, how blessed, fortunate. She mentions only one film by name, Victor/Victoria and the crowd cheers loudly.

2. What was the most challenging part of writing your memoir?

Time. "Because I do have a day job." So much researching, the war, once she found certain dates or facts those would prompt so many other memories.

3. What image comes to mind when you say the word home? [book's title]

[Quickly swallowing her dismay that evidently all questions will be insipid,] Family. We have five children and seven grandchildren. Cites different meanings of home in the book, especially the theater.

4. What do you want readers to take away from your book?

"Well, I do hope they will enjoy it. That would be wonderful." And she hopes it conveys "what it feels like on a stage, or to learn to sing." "Even if you think you're not worth very much, as I did, if you just put one foot in front of the other" you can make something of yourself.

She moves to the signing table and the permanently smiling girl pops up again to say, "Now, Dame Julie, we have a surprise for you!"

At which my blood turns to ice water.

The girl says, "But it's just a Vocal Surprise!"

At which my blood turns to solid ice. My heart slows and I die a little. Because it sounds for all the world like the B&N staff has arranged for something that involves singing to Julie Andrews, a legendary singer who can no longer sing because bad doctors botched the operation on her nodes.

Not good.

Julie Andrews is 72 years old. She's been awake since at least 4:00am or 5:00am because she was on a morning talk show; she's been rushed from one media event to another all day, being asked the same questions, trying to provide fresh and engaging answers; and now she's facing a room of 700 fans, of whom the 550 wristbandless have just proved themselves to be astonishingly fickle. (Does all stardom and hero worship hang by so fragile a thread? Poor Marilyn. Poor Kurt.) And these people are peering very closely, as television cameras have been all day, to see how she's aged, and naturally she has aged. It must be tiring. Does she really deserve to be sung at?

But the bookstore girl has horrendous vocabulary skillz, thank god. She meant a verbal surprise. She announces that Home is #5 on B&N's national bestseller list. She smiles. 

And Julie Andrews prepares to face the adoration and scrutiny of 150 lucky yellow wristbanders, and to sign her name 300 times very quickly because she is late for her next event.

---

Reviews have been great: The Times of London called Home "magic," and the NYTBR said it was "painfully shrewd and written with real delicacy and pathos." 

Born March 28: Dirk Bogarde

After distinguished service as an intelligence officer in the Queen's Royal Regiment during World War II, Dirk Bogarde tried acting and became a huge star. He was Britain's top box office draw of the 1950s. So it was big news in 1961 when he chose to play a closeted, married gay barrister in Victim,  especially considering he was closeted himself. (He and his manager Anthony Forwood lived together for decades.) Two years later, Bogarde played the creepy closety valet in The Servant, and in 1971 he played the tragic gay lead of Death in Venice. Today, the courage of these choices can hardly be imagined. Even in 1971, two years after Midnight Cowboy, Warner Brothers was so terrified of Death in Venice being charged with obscenity in the U.S. they wanted to drop the movie altogether. They changed their minds after Queen Elizabeth and Princess Anne attended the London premiere; it won an Oscar. Yet offscreen in his own life, Bogarde lacked the same bravery. After the anguish of watching his partner suffer a prolonged battle with Parkinson's and liver cancer, he became a vocal proponent of euthanasia. That was 1988, coincidentally the same year that John Gielgud came out quietly and Ian McKellan came out blazingly, as a founder of Stonewall. Bogarde never did. He retired in 1990 and lived till 1999, by which time he had written something like eight volumes of autobiography, none of which tells the full truth of his life. Indeed, he destroyed much of his personal archives. Over the years he supported dozens of charities and spoke out on behalf of animal health, Tibetan refugees, unwed mothers, illegitimate children, and against McDonald's on King's Road and VAT on books, but never for gay equality. Throughout the 90s he persisted in arguing for the right to die, but not the right to love. Victim.

Born March 26: Tennessee Williams

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? Of course, straight life in his work is no picnic either. The sole exception is The Rose Tattoo, his only happy ending in twenty-five plays, 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 movie was shot in Old Key West; Williams can be glimpsed at the bar, Merlo appears in the fight scene. Elsewhere, Merlo and Gore Vidal have cameos in Suddenly, Last Summer as the doctors watching the lobotomy.) 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.

Born March 25: Elton John

250 million albums sold, more than 50 hits in the Top 40, 60 performances at Madison Square Garden (a world record), five Grammys, one Oscar, one CBE, and four decades of work that totals nearly 500 songs: Statistics can't begin to convey the phenomenon that is Elton John. When he was eleven, and still named Reginald Dwight, he heard a four-page piece by Handel at the Royal Academy of Music and promptly sat down at the piano and played it like a "gramophone record." In 1970, when he was twenty-three, he recorded his eponymous second album, which included the worldwide smash Your Song written in twenty minutes. By 1980 he had released nineteen albums featuring songs such as Tiny Dancer, Levon, Honky Cat, Rocket Man, Daniel, Crocodile Rock, Philadelphia Freedom, Don't Go Breaking My Heart, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Candle in the Wind, Bennie and the Jets, Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting, The Bitch Is Back, and Someone Saved My Life Tonight . In the 80s he slowed his output to exactly one album each year with the hits Little Jeannie, Blue Eyes, Empty Garden, I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues, I'm Still Standing, Sad Songs Say So Much, and Sacrifice. In the 90s he reinvented himself yet again and, with Tim Rice, wrote the songs for The Lion King, propelling it to become the highest grossing 2-D animated film of all time and winning an Oscar and a Grammy for Can You Feel the Love Tonight?  Remember during this time the openly gay icon was constantly promoting research and education about aids, lobbying for the Ryan White Act, and getting in the face of people who wanted to close their eyes to the disease. He founded the Elton John Aids Foundation when Bush I was still in the White House. In March 1997, he turned fifty and celebrated with five hundred people at a costume party where he appeared as Louis XIV. Four months later his friend Gianni Versace was murdered and Elton sat in the front row of the memorial service with his longtime partner David Furnish and Princess Diana. Six weeks later, she was dead and, in her honor, he released his revised Candle in the Wind 1997, the fastest and bestselling song of all time with 33 million sold copies worldwide. All royalties, estimated to be 55 million pounds, went to the Diana Memorial Fund, and Elton has kept his promise never to play the song again after its only performance at her funeral. Further indicating that he must be a loyal and generous friend: He is godfather to ten children including Sean Lennon and Brooklyn Beckham. His household expenses are $2 million a month and, when needed, he can throw a diva tantrum, but he's never lost his sense of humor. In successfully suing the tabloid The Sun for libel he said, "You can call me a fat, balding, talentless old queen who can't sing — but you can't tell lies about me."

GLAAD's STAR _ U _ _

In the ninety years since the Pulitzers first gave a prize for the year's best drama, the judges have chosen to give no award fifteen times, including 1997 and 2006. So last night at the first of their four-part 19th Annual Media Awards, why didn't GLAAD take a dignified pass in the category honoring major motion pictures? Instead, they proclaimed the summer flop Stardust to be the year's Outstanding Film in Wide Release. GLAAD knew it was a terrible year for lgbt characters in studio movies; they could only find three films to nominate instead of their usual five. The others were Across the Universe and The Jane Austen Book Club, which actually had a sweet lesbian subplot and should have won. It sounds like Stardust's gay content was limited to Robert DeNiro as a pirate who belowdecks dresses as "a cancan-dancing, boa-twirling Folies-Bergère chorus girl prancing before a mirror." Here's a roundup of what critics said of his performance:

The New York Times: an excruciating embarrassment

The Boston Globe: DeNiro makes a macho-hammy-swishy mess of himself... He's terrible, but he's having, well, a gay old time.

New York magazine: I gazed on Robert De Niro—under the direction of Madonna’s husband’s best man—as a closeted pirate captain prancing to the “Can-Can” in a tutu. I