Band of Thebes

Born May 19: Daniel Guérin

Born in 1904, the upper class Parisian Daniel Guérin became an ardent leftist and socialist in part by having sex with tough guys. He said, "It was there, in bed with them, that I discovered the working class, far more than through Marxist tracts." In the 1930s he became a political and union organizer after hating the colonialism he saw during his travels in Southeast Asia and the Mid-East. In the late 1940s he lived in the United States and was appalled by the treatment of black Americans and, back in France, he fully supported the Algerian drive for independence. Of his many books best known is Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, published in 1965, with later editions carrying an introduction by Noam Chomsky. He did not begin his activism on behalf of gay rights until the 1970s, especially as part of the Front Homosexuel d'Action Révolutionnaire [FHAR], a group from which he later broke. People discouraged by today's apolitical comsumerist gays may do well to remember that a quarter-century ago Guérin was disgusted by the apolitical hedonist gays whose "superficial pursuit of pleasure" was "a million miles from any conception of class struggle." Which is not to say he became anti-sex in his later years. His last significant relationship was with a man sixty years his junior. He died at eighty-three in 1988.

Born April 30: Alice B. Toklas

Born in 1877 in San Francisco, educated in Seattle, Alice Babette Toklas’s life might be said to have started when she was thirty and went to Paris, where she met Gertrude Stein the day she arrived. They were inseparable for the next thirty-nine years, surviving two world wars, the heyday of the Lost Generation, and all their famous friends. Their love made them truly partners, with Toklas as Stein’s secretary, editor, critic, and muse. Although a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, their books' titles could be deceptive: Stein’s bestselling The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is really about Stein and Toklas' immortal The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook is as much a reflection on how the French eat and a memoir of feeding Flanner, Picasso, Hemingway, Wilder, Thomson, et al, as it is a collection of recipes, of which there are over three hundred. (The famous brownie recipe was contributed by Brion Gysin, a gay Brit who got a Fulbright to the Sorbonne, developed William Burroughs' "cut up" technique, owned a nightclub in Tangier, and had his ashes scattered in the Caves of Hercules. The recipe was edited out of the US edition but appeared in the UK.) Toklas also wrote an autobiography, What Is Remembered, which self-effacingly, almost self-erasingly, ends with Stein’s death even though she outlived her by two decades. In those final years Toklas was plagued with financial difficulties. She had no recourse after Stein’s heirs took all the famous paintings left to her, and she had no willpower, as a newly converted Catholic, to resist the church's extortion promise that with large enough donations, Toklas could buy Stein's soul out of purgatory and into heaven. Happily, the Jewish lesbians are buried adjacent to each other in Père Lachaise cemetery. Celebrate today by rereading their books, or Monique Truong’s much-praised novel The Book of Salt which imagines their lives through the eyes of their gay Vietnamese cook.

Cannes: Ozon, Coens, Polanski, Payne, and Liberace in Competition

The full line-up of the 66th Cannes Film Festival includes the gay glitterbomb Behind the Candelabra and a new new movie from Francois Ozon (whose old new movie opens tomorrow in the US), and many other treats in and out of competition. Speaking of the glitters that aren't gold: I think the revamped Gatsby trailer is among the worst I've ever seen.   

Opening film: The Great Gatsby, dir: Baz Luhrmann
Closing film: Zulu, dir: Jérôme Salle

Competition
Only God Forgives, dir: Nicolas Winding-Refn
La Grande Bellezza, dir: Paolo Sorrentino
Behind The Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh
The Immigrant, dir: James Gray
Venus In Fur, dir: Roman Polanski
Straw Shield, dir: Takashi Miike
Nebraska, dir: Alexander Payne
Jeune Et Jolie, dir: Francois Ozon
The Past, dir: Asghar Farhadi
Inside Llewyn Davis, dir: Joel & Ethan Coen
Jimmy P., dir: Arnaud Desplechin
Heli, dir: Amat Escalante
Grisgris, dir: Mahamat-Saleh Haroun
Like Father Like Son, dir: Hirokazu Kore-Eda
La Vie D’Adèle, dir: Abdellatif Kechiche
Borgman, dir: Alex Vann Warmerdam
A Touch Of Sin, dir: Zhangke Jia
Michael Kohlhaas, dir: Arnaud Despallières
Un Château En Italie, dir: Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi

Un Certain Regard

The Bling Ring, dir: Sofia Coppola (Opening film)
Omar, dir: Hany Abu-Assad
Death March, dir: Adolfo Alix, Jr
Fruitvale: dir: Ryan Coogler
The Bastards, dir: Claire Denis

Born April 11: Glenway Westcott

Expat American literary young men colliding in Gertrude Stein's orbit in Paris, Hemingway took an immediate dislike to gay novelist Glenway Wescott for his artificial affectations [from Wisconsin, he acquired an English accent] and his "fake" fiction. In The Sun Also Rises he lampooned Wescott as Robert Prescott until Max Perkins made him change the overly obvious last name to Prentiss. Wescott's major novels, before he ceased writing them at 44, are The Grandmothers, based on his own family, Apartment in Athens [Kindle], about a Greek family forced to host a German officer, of which Susan Sontag said in The New Yorker it is “among the treasures of 20th-century American literature” (and recently was made into a movie), and The Pilgrim Hawk [Kindle], which David Leavitt chose as a favorite of 2011.One area in which Wescott trumped Hemingway: His relationship with MoMA curator Monroe Wheeler lasted 68 years, from 1919 to his death at 85 in 1987. After you read the novels, try Jerry Rosco's Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography.

Reader Daniel recommends the really wonderful When We Were Three: Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescot 1925-1935.

Born March 13: Lori Ostlund, Janet Flanner

Growing up in a Minnesota town of 413 people, Lori Ostlund became a traveler in earnest after grad school in 1991 when she moved to Spain and frequently crossed over to Morocco. She has since lived in Albuquerque, Malaysia, and Chapel Hill where she was the Kenan Visting Writer at UNC, and now she and her partner Anne are back in San Francisco. Her smalltown upbringing and various journeys are all reflected in her outstanding first book, The Bigness of the World [Kindle]. It won a Flannery O'Connor Award, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and a Publishing Triangle Award for debut fiction. Two of its stories appeared in the Best American Stories 2010 and the PEN/O. Henry Stories 2011. In a starred review, PW said, "Each piece is sublime." She says on her site, "I find a lack of curiosity unforgivable." Read her.

How did Janet Flanner get the first installment of her famous "Letter from Paris" published in The New Yorker (which would run her column fortnightly for fifty years) and how did she get her pen name Genêt? Both answers: Harold Ross. A restless Hoosier educated in Chicago, Flanner had left Manhattan and her husband to travel in Europe with her lover Solito Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson) and from Paris she wrote to Jane Grant, Ross's wife. In 1925 Ross was still struggling to find the top notch writing he wanted for his new magazine, less than a year old, and he decided to publish Flanner's letter without asking her permission and therefore needed a nom de plume, choosing what he mistakenly thought was French for Janet.

Flanner knew virtually every important person in Paris for decades but also wrote about Algeria, Hungary invaded by the Russians, the Sinai War, and dozens of other topics in her signature style. She won a National Book Award in 1966. The center of a far reaching circle of lesbian friends, she was a constant presence at Natalie Barney's salons and in Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's living room and with the many other prominent lesbians discussed in Paris Was a Woman and, more obliquely, in her own otherwise outstanding memoir Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939. She was equally at home with Gide and Cocteau as she was with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she never lost her knack for being at the elbow of history: She was on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer when they had their famous fracas and rather than ducking she came between them. Although they occasionally had separate affairs, Flanner and Solano remained committed to each other and lived together for fifty years. Solano died in 1975, when she was eighty-seven; Flanner died in 1978, when she was eighty-six. Last fall she was the cover girl for the Hide/Seek catalog.

Born February 25: Severo Sarduy

Why Reinaldo Arenas and not Severo Sarduy? Born six years apart, the gay Cuban exile novelists died of aids in within three years of each other. In death, Arenas became a star, then, with Julian Schnabel's film , a superstar, whereas the twenty years since Sarduy's passing in 1993 have largely erased the memory of his accomplishments. His novel Cobra won France's Prix Médicis étranger in 1972, immediately followed by four literary heavyweights, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortazar, Steven Millhauser, and Doris Lessing, but for some reason his win did not propel him to their level of international acclaim, possibly because his novel is about a kitschy trans cabaret performer at the Lyrical Theater of Dolls.

Born in 1937 in Cuba's third largest city Camagüey, he left at 23 to study in Madrid but within a month diplomatic ties frayed between Spain and Cuba, and Sarduy had to move to Paris. Ultimately, he stayed there for the rest of his life, though he traveled throughout Europe and met his longtime companion François Wahl on vacation in Italy. His two volumes of essays are Written on a Body and Christ on the Rue Jacob, which Booklist called, "a special book of thrilling ideas excitingly expressed."

Next week, wonderful Archipelago (forever blessed for bringing Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin to American readers) is publishing Sarduy's novel Firefly [Kindle]: "For the first time in English, Severo Sarduy's most autobiographical work, centered on two transvestites who undergo oppositional sexual surgeries (one is castrated, the other is given a new member). This convention-defying, scatological, and very funny novel is a paradise of words, 'paradisic by plenitude' (Roland Barthes)."

Two Gay Views of Swann's Way Centenary

Writing on the NYRB site, Colm Tóibín unpacks the Morgan Library's new exhibit celebrating the 100th anniversary of Swann's Way:

"Proust’s handwriting is bad; it is the handwriting of a novelist rather than a dandy... In a letter to a publisher, as Proust seeks to explain what his novel is about, one word, however, stands alone and is written with a rare exactitude. In a letter to Alfred Vallette, editor of Le Mecure de France, in 1909 Proust described his work-in-progress: it “is a genuine novel and an indecent one in places. One of the principal characters is a homosexual.” The handwriting is that of a man in a hurry. Most of the words can be made out because of the context. But the word “homosexual,” as it is written in his hand here, stands alone; it is very clearly written, each letter perfectly made and totally legible. There is a feeling as you look at it that it was a word Proust did not often write, or that perhaps he enjoyed writing, or that it was a term he now wanted to take his time over, and he needed Vallette to be able to see it clearly.

"Or perhaps it was written to be the most easily deciphered word in the entire exhibition so that maman, watching from the sky, could make it out and rest in peace, worrying her way happily into eternity, with plenty to feast on, as indeed visitors to the Morgan will have as they ponder the makings of Proust’s great work."

Earlier this week, the Guardian ran a headline: How LGBT Is Proust? Newbie Sam Jordison cherry-picks his way through generations of smart critics confronting the gay question -- Andre Gide, Germaine Greer, Edmund White, Rick Whitaker -- before he gradually winds down to a limp finish:

"Perhaps, finally, we might say it doesn't matter. The book is what it is and we should accept it as such. If any novel can speak for itself, it's this one."

The Morgan Library exhibit is up through April 28.

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

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

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

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

Stonewall Book Awards: Ellis Avery, Keith Boykin

    

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

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

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

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

Fiction honor titles:

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

Non-Fiction honor titles:

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

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

Man Booker International Shortlist

    

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

U R Ananthamurthy (India)

Aharon Appelfeld (Israel)

Lydia Davis (USA)

Intizar Husain (Pakistan)

Yan Lianke (China)

Marie NDiaye (France)

Josip Novakovich (Canada)

Marilynne Robinson (USA)

Vladimir Sorokin (Russia) 

Peter Stamm (Switzerland)

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

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

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

Born January 25: Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham

Here is the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf. In April 1937 she participated in a BBC lecture series titled Words Fail Me, giving a talk she called "Craftsmanship." She contemplates using new words in an old language, beginning, "Words, English words, are full of echoes, memories, associations. They've been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing today..."

Born in 1882, she published her first novel at 33 and found her real power at 40, with Jacob's Room. Then came a great burst of creativity: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931). Her collected letters fill six volumes, her diaries five volumes, and half her essays (stopping with 1924) are collected in three books. She wrote a play, two biographies, and she finished two more novels before March 28, 1941. Her London home destroyed in the Blitz, her writing in a lull after finishing her last, believing the Nazis would soon invade the countryside, she felt her mental illness was returning and that this time she would not recover. She drowned herself in the river Ouse at 59. Her body was not found for 21 days.

Where would Hollywood be without perennial favorite Somerset Maugham? Just the list of his work that has been adapted into films three or more times each: The Letter, Rain/Sadie Thompson, The Painted Veil, and Of Human Bondage. Beyond that: Secret Agent, Razor's Egde, The Moon and Sixpence, Up at the Villa, and Being Julia, among dozens of others. Rich and randy, Maugham had an affair with a married woman that led to a baby and, later, at 43 in 1917, a marriage he didn't want and grew to despise. Instead, he loved his secretary Gerald Haxton [right], eighteen years his junior, with whom he traveled the world while his wife Syrie stayed home and decorated Cecil Beaton's flat. After ten years he finally got a very expensive divorce and bought twelve acres in Cap Ferrat, called Villa Mauresque, and created "a kind of discreet sexual nirvana for the literary gay man" and one of the great salons of the 1930s. Haxton died in 1944 and was later replaced by a younger version named Alan Searle, whom Maugham's aging friends disliked and distrusted. In old age, Maugham feuded with his daughter, denied paternity, disowned her, adopted Searle, and changed his will. His daughter sued and won, but Searle got the house and copyrights for 30 years. (One of his daughter's grandchildren is the blind, autistic musical prodigy Derek Paravinci.) The only biography you need is Selina Hastings' fantastic The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham [Kindle], a finalist for the NBCC, LA Times, and Lambda awards. It is gay from page one.

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 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose [Kindle]. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the recent Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression." The California native and current New Yorker Alexander Wang, 28, will replace Ghesquière as creative director, the company announced last month.

Despite his success and his peerless status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.

Vive les Livres

The French Embassy is trying to open a French bookstore on the Upper East Side, which would stock imported titles and books in translation. Fear not if you live beyond the 10022 because they will also sell online. Please help by taking this survey [in English or French], which asks how important it is to vous that the new bookshop offer "a quiet room for reading and reflection." You have two blank places in the survey to write in that you want LGBT French books like Hate: A Romance and smart gay magazines like Tetu. I also demanded French editions of translations of American novelists like Stephen McCauley's La vérité ou presque and Peter Cameron's Un jour cette douleur te servira.

Le Figaro has just published its annual list of France's 10 bestselling novelists, based on total sales of each author's books. So it's all the more impressive that young Joël Dicker (above) made #5 based on four months' sales of his prix-winning literary mystery thriller La verite a propos de l'affaire Harry Quebert about a hotshot debut novelist in New York who visits an older, blockbuster novelist in New Hampshire. The top three spots are unchanged from last year's list. The sum of top ten, roughly seven million books, represents 23% of contemporary French fiction sold last year. (Most of the links below are to English translations.)

1. Guillaume Musso: 1.710.500 exemplaires
2. Marc Levy: 1.433.000 exemplaires 
3. Katherine Pancol: 705.000 exemplaires
4. Françoise Bourdin: 512.500 exemplaires  
5. Joël Dicker: 496.000 exemplaires
6. David Foenkinos: 473.000 exemplaires
7. Laurent Gounelle: 471.000 exemplaires
8. Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt: 427.000 exemplaires
9. Grégoire Delacourt: 421.000 exemplaires
10. Amélie Nothomb: 405.000 exemplaires

Born January 11: Eva La Gallienne, Marc Acito

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

Author of the cult favorite comedic novel How I Paid for College [Kindle] and its sequel Attack of the Theater People [Kindle], Marc Acito hasn't published a new book since 2008, so what did he do all last year? In March, the Old Globe in San Diego premiered his and Jeffrey Stock's musical adaptation of A Room with a View. In April, he won a Helen Hayes Award in Washington DC for his play about gay penguins, Birds of a Feather. In September, the premiere of his musical Allegiance, starring George Takei and Lea Salonga as Japanese-Americans held in US internment camps during WWII, broke the all-time box office record at the Old Globe. And in December, he saw the premiere run of his one-man-monologue-with-songs adaptation of How I Paid for College. This year he preps Allegiance for Broadway. A former opera singer, Marc sometimes performs singing commentaries on NPR. He is married to Floyd Sklaver and lives in New York City, of course.

Born January 10: Sal Mineo, Dennis Cooper

Although later he was twice nominated for an Oscar, Sal Mineo's career peaked when he was sixteen, playing Rebel Without a Cause's geeky Plato, a universal touchstone for anyone who's ever harbored a crush on James Dean. As if it wouldn't be exhilarating and nerve-wracking enough in 1955 to be a gay Sicilian sixteen year-old acting opposite the blond, bi twenty-four year-old superstar and Natalie Wood, Mineo was also having an affair with the director, Nicholas Ray, who was forty-four. Well, it was all downhill from there. Mineo was praised for his stage roles and for his work in Exodus and Who Killed Teddy Bear? and he recorded a couple albums with two Top 40 hits, but he had been typecast and his moment had passed. Unfortunately, the movies' sensitive, gay teen devolved into television's deranged psycho killer, with guest starring roles on Hawaii Five-O, Columbo, S.W.A.T., Police Story, and Ellery Queen. When he was thirty-seven, walking at night through an alley near his home in West Hollywood, he was stabbed once in a botched mugging, and died. John Lennon offered a cash reward to find his killer. Many people, including Mineo's family, believe the courts convicted the wrong man, who had confessed and recanted, was released in 1990, and was reincarcerated for parole violations. A few books have been written about Mineo's life and death; Kevin Killian recommends Michael Michaud's' biography.

In 1968, when he was fifteen, Dennis Cooper read 120 Days of Sodom and wrote his own de Sade-like 1,000 page novel set in high school. Thirty-nine years later, Cooper was award the Prix Sade in France for his tenth novel, The Sluts. We'll never know how that first fiction compares to his mature work with his signal interest in transgressive behavior and exploited boundaries (alienated youth, predatory gay men, child abuse, sexual torture, eroticized murder, mutilation, satanic sacrifice, snuff porn, and drugs) because he was so afraid his mother would find his manuscript he burnt it. His George Miles cycle of novels -- Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, Period -- has been translated into seventeen languages. A child of Pasadena, Cooper divides his time between the US and Paris. His most recent novel The Marbled Swarm [Kindle], which many readers feel is among his very best, is his first to be set in France. The New Yorker said, "Provocative...Cooper’s interest in the darkest corners of the human experience...has not dimmed with age. The novel’s contradictory narratives intentionally echo the secret passageways in which the narrator’s predatory activities take place, creating a baroque, voyeuristic effect." His eclectic blog is essential daily reading.

Born January 8: Winnaretta Singer, David Bowie

Isaac Merritt Singer, father of the modern sewing machine, also sired 24 children, the 20th of whom was music patron and lesbian Winnaretta Singer. When Isaac made his first fortune of $200,000 in 1839 with an invention that drilled rock, he retired and returned to acting, touring with his own theater troupe for five years. In 1849 he developed a wood carving machine and in 1851 he obtained a patent for improvements on someone else's unwieldy sewing apparatus. Winnaretta was born in Yonkers, but the family soon moved to Paris, then to London, before settling in Devon where Isaac built a 115-room mansion modeled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles. When she was ten her father died and their mother moved them back to Paris, where, in her late teens, Winnaretta was open about her lesbian relationships. At 22 she married Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard and within hours established a no-sex rule: On their wedding night she is said to have climbed atop an armoire and informed her surprised husband that she would kill him if he came nearer. She continued her affairs with women and within five years their marriage was annulled. Among her many lovers were goddaughter (or daughter) of Edward VII, Olga de Meyer, painter Romaine Brooks, pianist Renata Borgatti, and novelist Violet Trefusis.

When she was 29 Winnaretta agreed to marry happily and platonicly the 59 year-old Prince Edmond de Polignac who shared her deepest love of music and, it seems, her homosexuality. Their famous salon in their mansion on what is today Avenue Georges-Mandel hosted first performances of new work by Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel with frequent guests Proust, Cocteau, Colette, Diaghilev, Monet, and Isadora Duncan, who had a baby by one of Winnaretta's brothers. Eight years into their marriage, the prince died and Winnaretta commissioned more than seven compositions in his honor including works by Stravinsky, Satie, and Weill. Winnaretta played the piano and organ, and she painted, but her greatest contributions to the arts were as patron to individuals, ballets, operas, and symphonies. In 1911 she built a public housing project and during WWI she and Marie Curie transformed private limousines into rolling radiology units to aid the injured at the front. Born in New York during the Civil War she died in London during WWII, in 1943 at 78 living with her lover Alvilde Chaplin, 34. Winnaretta is included in Diana Souhami's Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art and is the subject of Sylvia Kahan's biography Music's Modern Muse.

Light years ahead of the pack in his androgyny, bisexuality, theatricality, and his music, David Bowie today turns 66 and releases his first single in 10 years, Where Are We Now?, a midtempo lament, below. His legendary Carnegie Hall debut in 1972 was only his third show ever in the U.S. The critic Robert Christgau called Bowie "an English fairy" and complained that songs like "Andy Warhol" weren't manly enough for American rockers. Of course, Bowie had sunk to his knees in front of guitarist Mick Ronson and simulated oral sex. Bowie's son Duncan, 42 this year, directed the movies Moon and Source Code. Bowie's daughter Lexi is 12.

French Sahib by Pierre Fréha

In the storied tradition of gay travelers' romantic adventures and cross-cultural relationships, comes Pierre Fréha's novel French Sahib. His publisher writes,

"What happens when a Frenchman falls in love with a young Indian guy? Set in India with a French protagonist, and written by a Frenchman, French Sahib is a French-Indian love story revealing the taboos of Indian society and the hypocrisies of French milieu. On his arrival in India Philippe is confronted with the traditional Indian values which are very unlikely from the country he hails from. When young Dipu wants to marry Philippe it is the stereotyped social values that become the stumbling block in their romance. How can they confront the unbridgeable gulf between the traditional East and the modern West? In French Sahib Pierre Fréha tells that amusing tale of identity, individuality, love and universal human need for connection and belonging."

Fréha, born in colonial Algeria, is a freelance writer based in Paris.

Born December 19: Cyril Collard, Jean Genet

Cyril Collard [above, right] adapted, directed, and starred in the vividly bisexual film Les Nuits Fauve (Savage Nights), based on his second novel. The autobiographical story examines the life of a thirtyish aspiring director, Jean, engaged in simultaneous affairs with an 18-year-old French girl and a young, "straight" Spanish rugby player, Samy, who develops a taste for S&M and moves in with him, while Jean still (compulsively?) enjoys frequent, rough anonymous hookups, all of which is further complicated by his being HIV+. Heralding the start of a dazzling career, the movie won four Cesar Awards in 1993, including Best Film, but Collard did not attend. Three days earlier he died of aids at 35.

Flashback to 1949: South Pacific opened on Broadway, James Gould Cozzens won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, All the King's Men won the Oscar for Best Picture, and in France, Jean Genet received his tenth criminal conviction, which meant he would be sent to prison for life. In the preceding seven years he had published his five groundbreaking novels -- Our Lady of the Flowers, Miracle of the Rose, Funeral Rites, Querelle, The Thief's Journal -- as well as three plays and dozens of poems, all of which were greatly esteemed by his European contemporaries despite his focus on petty thieves and his inclusion of gay sex. As news of his dire situation spread, rather than ostracizing Genet, the leading intellectuals rallied to his defense, and with a public push from Cocteau, Sartre, and Picasso, among others, Genet was pardoned by the French president. It is safe to say Harry Truman would not have done the same because at that point Genet's fiction was still banned in the United States. Genet never returned to prison after that, nor did he ever publish another novel, although he continued to write plays, poems, and a memoir, Un Captif Amoureux, published in 1986, the year after he died of throat cancer. For the full story, read Edmund White's definitive Genet: A Biography.

Born December 14: Hervé Guibert

In his teens Hervé Guibert lied about his age to work at the magazine 20 ans and in his very early 20s he got a job with Le Monde. He published several books and, at 28, won a César Award for his gay screenplay L'Homme blessé, co-written with its director Patrice Chéreau. It tells a Genet-like tale of young man's doomed first love for a manipulative thief/hustler/pimp whom he later kills. Open about his same-sex affairs since high school, Guibert avoided mainstream gay culture and had significant affairs with Michel Foucault, 29 years his senior, and Thierry Jouno, who was living with a woman, Christine, and their two children. In 1988, four years after Foucault's death, Guibert was diagnosed with aids and began to document his decline, giving rise to his most famous books, including the barely veiled novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life which describes/betrays secrets about Foucault's S&M and attacks former friend Isabelle Adjani for backing out of a purported promise to film one of his screenplays. Guibert married Christine, who was also HIV+, so that she and Thierry's children would inherit his royalties. Blind and ravaged by the disease, Guibert tried to kill himself the day before he turned 36. He died two weeks later. Thierry followed within six months.