Band of Thebes

Born December 8: Norman Douglas

Like clockwork, roughly every twenty years, in 1896, 1916, and 1937, novelist and travel writer Norman Douglas had to flee another nation in the wake of another gay scandal. After two years in the British foreign service, he was forced to leave St. Petersburg in 1896. He was 27. At loose ends the next year, he bought a villa outside of Naples. Still bored the year after that, he married his first cousin, had two sons, and divorced his wife within five years on the basis of her infidelity. Working at Ford Maddox Ford's literary journal The English Review he met, befriended, and feuded with D.H. Lawrence whose revenge was to render him a character, James Argyle, in Aaron's Rod. Amid the frenzy of the Great War in 1916, Douglas at 45 was charged with "indecent assault" on a 16 year-old lad. Douglas later explained it was "for kissing a boy and giving him some cakes and a shilling," but the youth was angry enough to press charges and Douglas was anxious enough to skip bail and live in exile in Capri. It's the setting of his best known novel, published the next year, a hedonistic farce called South Wind whose purported lightness I found a touch heavy. David Higdon says, 'The novel stands in a tradition of such works as Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, the Marquis de Sade's Justine, Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, and W. H. Mallock's The New Republic." His travel books include Siren Land: A Celebration of Life in Southern Italy and Old Calabria. Unreformed in his late sixties, Douglas faced another sex scandal and left Italy for France in 1937. Was he on schedule to have still another scandal in his late eighties? Unknown, because he died in 1952 with the last words, "Get these f---ing nuns away from me." His language was even saltier in his book of limericks, for years said to be among the most pirated writings in English.

Photo by Carl van Vechten, Florence, 1935

Born November 22: André Gide

On December 10, 1947, at City Hall in Stockholm, a Swedish man spoke to France's ambassador about "the venerable master of French literature whose genius has so profoundly influenced our time." Of course, that was André Gide and he was, at seventy-eight, too ill to receive his Nobel Prize for Literature in person. (Read the full citation here.) The award capped a rollercoaster career that began with the publication of a novella when Gide was twenty-two in 1891, reached successive peaks with The Immoralist(1902), Strait Is the Gate (1909), and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914); plummeted with the publication of Corydon (1920), his nonfiction book in praise of homosexuality'; soared again with his best novel, The Counterfeiters (1925); and immediately shocked certain segments of the public again with his  autobiography, If It Die (1926) with his joyful memories of teenage masturbating under the dining room table with the concierge's son or his adult lovemaking with an Arab youth on a sand dune in Algeria. While in North Africa, Gide also befriended Oscar Wilde. The following year he published Travels in the Congo, his greatly influential attack on French colonialism. That trip marked the end of his eleven year relationship with Marc Allégret, who had eloped with him when he was fifteen or sixteen and Gide was forty-seven. (Allégret's father had been the best man at Gide's never-consummated wedding and wasn't bothered at all by their affair; Gide's wife, however, didn't like being left behind and she burned all of his letters in retaliation. Marc Allégret went on to direct more than fifty films.) After spending the war and post-war years in Tunis, Gide returned to Paris where he died in 1951. In 1952, the Catholic church put all of his works on their Index of Forbidden Books.

August 1920: William Butler Yeats, Marc Allégret, and Gide photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell

Born November 15: François Ozon

As diverse as he is prolific, by the time he was 36 François Ozon had made the frothy Sitcom; the suburban noir-cum-folktale closet allegory Criminal Lovers; Fassbinder's Water Drops on Burning Rocks; fthe extraordinary Under the Sand, with Charlotte Rampling as a woman whose husband vanishes; 8 Women, a mystery-musical with France's all-star all-female cast of all-time (Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, Fanny Ardant, Virginie Ledoyen, Danielle Darrieux, Ludivine Sagnier); and Swimming Pool, again with Sagnier and Rampling as an uptight thriller writer whose life changes while hosting her publisher's seductive, freewheeling teenage daughter. In the past nine years he's made seven other films: 5 x 2, Time to Leave, the costume drama Angel, the flying baby fable Ricky, something called Hideaway; a semisweet 70s sexism comedy Potiche with Catherine Deneuve as an ignored matron who triumphs when she must take over her husband's umbrella factory but ends up alone; and this year's Dans la Maison, with Kristen Scott Thomas, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Denis Menochet. Today he's 45.

Born November 10, 12: Roland Emmerich, Roland Barthes

Nothing says "a Roland Emmerich film" like the two words "global smash." The auteur of the apocalypse has been so phenomenally successful worldwide at destroying the Earth in Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow, by the time he made 2012, he negotiated for one-fourth of the gross. Twenty-five percent of the total box office is $192 million. Overall, his movies have grossed $3.2 billion. The 57 year-old was born in Stuttgart and, with his sister Ute, runs Centropolis Entertainment, also responsible for Stargate, The Patriot, and 10,000 BC. Emmerich says he has witnessed plenty of racism in Hollywood (the studio did NOT want to cast Will Smith in ID; nor did they want an interracial couple in TDAT) but no homophobia. His historical drama Anonymous, arguing that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare's work, was roundly panned yet earned an Oscar nom for best costume design. An early Hillary Clinton supporter, Emmerich is a big donor to LGBT and anti-global warming causes. If you think his movies are an assault on the senses, wait till you see his 1830 townhouse in Knightsbridge. Yes, that's a life-size wax replica of the pope reading his own obituary. And, yup, Princess Di is flipping you her middle finger. Embracing controversy, next year on Pride weekend he'll release an action movie, White House Down, in which Channing Tatum saves a black president (Jamie Foxx) from a white paramilitary coup.

Who, in the mid-1950s, but a closeted, chain-smoking, French homosexual intellectual who lived with his mother could look at the Abbé Pierre’s haircut and spark an essay on how personality-driven charity prevented people from seeing the root causes of poverty? Roland Barthes was among the first to bridge high and low culture, showing that absolutely anything anywhere could become a text for him to parse. In his canonical book Mythologies he closely “read” the nuances of topics as varied as wrestling, Einstein, the new Citroën, photography, toys, movies, wine vs. milk, soap vs. detergent, literature, and Garbo’s face. Because he saw so much in everyday objects, French companies tried to hire him to predict consumers’ reactions, work he flirted with then avoided. Among his eighteen books, the most praised are S/Z, his intricate study of Sarrasine by Balzac; Camera Lucida, a study of photography launched by the significance of a single photo of his beloved mother; and his essay “The Death of the Author,” about the irrelevance of writers to their work. After leaving a luncheon given by François Mitterrand in February 1980, Barthes was struck by a laundry truck and died one month later, age 64. Published posthumously, Incidents ruefully describes his amorous (mis)adventures with men throughout Europe and Morocco. His Mourning Diary was published in 2010.

Julie Otsuka Wins Prix Femina Étranger

A National Book Award finalist last year, Julie Otsuka's second novel The Buddha in the Attic [Kindle] won the PEN/Faulkner in March, and earlier tonight in Paris she was awarded the Prix Femina Étranger. The brief, poetic novel about Japanese war brides is told in the first person plural. Some previous winners of the prize are Edward St. Aubyn, Nuala O'Faolain, Rose Tremain, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, David Malouf, Amos Oz, and J.M. Coetzee.

The winner of the Prix Femina itself was Patrick Deville for his novel Peste et Choléra, yes, plague and cholera, about the bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943). The prize has been given annually since 1904, except during WWI and WWII.

Born October 31: Natalie Barney

Of course as a child Natalie Barney rode astride her horse rather than side-saddle. Decades ahead of her time, she knew she was a lesbian from the age of twelve, in 1888, and considered it unusual but perfectly natural, like being an albino. Born into one of DC's wealthiest families, she refused to hide. In 1900, she published a book of her love poems to women and her mother sketched the illustrations. Alas, when her father found out, he bought up every copy still available and paid the printer to destroy the plates. So she moved to Paris, where she published ten more books and for sixty years held a weekly salon that was the epicenter not only of lesbian life (yes, Mata Hari really did begin her Lady Godiva dance by entering on a white horse) but also the city's literary culture. Frequent guests included T.S. Eliot, Rilke, Rodin, Ezra Pound, Colette, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Djuna Barnes, Isadora Duncan, Radclyffe Hall, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Janet Flanner, Andre Gide, Jean Cocteau, Peggy Guggenheim, Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson, Thornton Wilder, Virgil Thomson, Truman Capote, Mary McCarthy, Marguerite Yourcenar, Somerset Maugham, Ford Maddox Ford, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce a few times, but never Hemingway. She kept her lovers enthralled despite juggling multiple long-term open relationships, including one with the painter Romaine Brooks for fifty years, as well as Elisabeth de Gramont and Oscar's niece Dolly Wilde. Newly arrived in Paris, Natalie seduced the most famous courtesan by dressing as a page and presenting herself at the woman's house. Not only did it work, but this Liane de Pougy wrote a book about their affair which captivated France and went through 70 printings in its first year, 1901. Such zest kept Natalie Barney going until 1972, when she died at ninety-five. You tell me why there's never been a biopic of her.

Beautiful Young French Gay Lovers circa 1749

“Here on earth, one always suffocates a little, for one reason or another, even at moments of great happiness.” 

But of course. Oh, l'amour. Fifteen year-old peasant Sébastien Faure, "a skinny boy with hair like frozen hay," is a loner, a dreamer, perpetually bored tending his goats. Until three strapping young noblemen ride into his life, one falls, and Sébastien saves Balthazar de Créon. In return, Balthazar saves Sébastien by bringing him to his estate. And by awakening his passions. But in homophobic 1749, as ever, what saves us, dooms us, n'est-ce pas? 

Daniel Arsand's new novel Lovers [Kindle], out this summer from the always interesting Europa Editions, unfolds in one hundred micro chapters, often only a couple paragraphs long. It's effective to convey the elusive nature of overwhelming emotions. The staccato style may also free Arsand from having to paint too much period detail. But he thrives on the past. His Prix Femina-winning debut The Land of Darkness describes a Venetian merchant's caravan trip from Armenia to Peking in 1298.

Jhumpa Lahiri said, "I dream of writing a book like Lovers some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression."

Justin Torres also loved it, calling the novel “brilliant... I fell in love with it by page two and knew I would see it through to the end that same day.”

Born August 18: Marcel Carné

Directing a film is hard enough in the best circumstances, yet Marcel Carné made his three-hour epic period piece Les Enfants du Paradis in France under Nazi occupation. All materials were rationed and electricity was, at best, sporadic. Some of the huge cast were Resistance fighters using the filming as their sole way of meeting during daylight and constantly dodging the Nazis and collaborators put on the production by Vichy officials. The music and the sets were designed by two Jewish men who worked from hiding. Some of the 1,800 extras were starving and stole food from the banquet scenes before it could be filmed. Although there was nothing overtly queer in the plot, gay viewers could probably sympathize with the story of a beautiful woman in the 1830s, Garance, who was torn between four lovers: an aristocrat, a thief, an actor, and a mime. Instantly adored when it premiered in March 1945, the movie played in Paris for more than a year and its prestige has endured. The movie theater at Centre Pompidou is named Salle Garance in honor of the heroine, and in the late 1990s a poll of six hundred critics and movie people in France named it the greatest French film of the twentieth century. Carné was thirty-nine when he directed Les Enfants du Paradis, his seventh movie, and over the next thirty years he made ten more features, some of which starred his partner Roland Lesaffre. He died at ninety in 1996.

Born August 1: Yves Saint Laurent

Are any three letters as elegant as YSL? When he was seventeen, Yves Saint Laurent began working for Christian Dior, who referred to him as his dauphin. When Dior died suddenly four years later, Saint Laurent was made head of the fashion house, but soon he was conscripted to serve in the Algerian war. Hazed by his rougher fellow soldiers, the fragile couture artiste lasted twenty days before he had a nervous breakdown. The army tried to cure him with electroshock therapy. When he returned to Dior, he found he had been replaced. He started his own house, giving rise to some of the most famous clothes in history: the Mondrian dress, "le Smoking," the tuxedo for women, the designer leather jacket, the sheath dress, the gold cape. For nearly twenty years he and his business manager Pierre Bergé were lovers, and, because they are French, after they broke up they continued living together for another ten years. In 1983, Saint Laurent became the first living designer to be honored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a retrospective. In 1993, he and Bergé sold the company for $600 million. After his retirement in 2002, Saint Laurent spent much of his time in Marrakech, where he restored and opened to the public the vivid gardens originally designed by French expat Jacques Majorelle. He died in June 2008 (most newspapers degayed his obituary, calling Bergé, who announced his death, "a friend" or omitting him) and his ashes are interred in the garden. At his funeral in Paris, Catherine Deneuve read a poem by Walt Whitman. In 2009, Bergé sold most of their possessions at a record-shattering auction earning $484 million.

Born July 10: Fiona Shaw, Marcel Proust

How nimble is that Fiona Shaw. Last year she appeared in Terrence Malik's The Tree of Life and twelve episodes of True Blood. Born in County Cork in 1958, she earned her degree from University College there, then trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Long a star of the West End, she broke out to select American audiences in a small role in the very best of all Jane Austen adaptations, Persuasion, in 1995 and the following year wowed New York with her one-person performance of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land for which she won a Drama Desk Award. The year prior she had amazed and angered London audiences when she played Richard II, directed by Deborah Warner, also a lesbian. Collaborating frequently with Warner, notably in the National Theatre adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook, Shaw co-starred with former model Saffron Burrows as lesbian lovers, just as they were in real life. And Warner was partners with Winterson. Both couples have since separated. Shaw still lives in Primrose Hill.

Years before Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner’s novels, contemporary with Braque, Gris, and Picasso’s cubist paintings, and with Einstein’s shattering theories of physics, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust created a work of art whose central concern is time. Published over fourteen years, the seven volumes of his epic novel A la recherche du temps perdu radically reshape conventional narrative to recreate the sensation of memory, the past co-existing in thought simultaneous with the present, as each moment of the present becomes the past. Many, many critics, including Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, consider the work as a whole to be the greatest novel of the century or of all-time. It is also a landmark in gay literature. Volume Four is titled Sodom and Gomorrah and contains lengthy essays on homosexuality (often seen as a rebuttal to Andre Gide's recent Corydon), but every volume encompasses gay characters, observations, and experiences -- the majority of which are negative. One rationale for this dark view is that Proust had co-opted his own happy memories of gay love in trying to imagine heterosexual love for his characters, leaving him only bitter reminiscences when he wrote about aspects of gay life. Another theory is that he himself was uncomfortable with his sexuality, which manifested itself always with the lower classes and especially with his own servants. His deepest relationship was with his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, who lived with his wife in Proust’s townhouse. Proust also had an affair with his secretary, Albert Nahmias, the namesake for the novel’s love interest, Albertine. When he went to sex clubs, Proust liked to be whipped and humiliated. Very, very rich from an inheritance, he typically slept during the day and wrote at night, both while lying in his blue bed, in his bedroom cork-lined for silence, now permanently on display in Paris’s Musée Carnavalet.

Born July 5: Richard Labonté, Amélie Mauresmo, Jean Cocteau

If you like to read, you owe the thoroughly awesome Richard Labonté a big thank you. A co-founder and eventual manager of the A Different Light bookstores, he for many years wrote the essential column Books To Watch Out For. A brilliant, nonstop reader with exquisite taste, his annual best of the year choices are mandatory for the rest of us. Since 2010, Richard has outperformed Hercules coordinating the judging of the Lambda Literary Awards -- three or four judges in each of 20+ categories. He is himself a multiple Lammy winner for some of the thirty anthologies he has edited or co-edited, most recently Best Gay Romance 2012 and Best Gay Erotica 2012. Forthcoming later this year are Wild Boys and Young Bucks: Novellas of Twenty-Something Lust & Love. Read this interview with him conducted by mystery writer John Morgan Wilson.

In 1999 unseeded 19 year old Amélie Mauresmo beat the world's #1 female tennis player and became only the third Frenchwoman to make it to the finals of a Grand Slam event. That's also when Amélie came out, and within five years she was herself ranked #1 in the world, yet she still hadn't won a Grand Slam. No one questioned her talent but they noticed her nerves; often she would lead in a championship match only to sputter and lose. At the Athens Olympics in 2004, she fell in the finals to Justine Henin and settled for a silver medal. In January 2006, at 26, she finally won the Australian Open. Six months later, she won Wimbledon, the first Frenchwoman to do so since Suzanne Lenglen in 1925 and the first out lesbian since Martina's ninth win in 1990. Here's how tennis has changed in the past two decades: Martina had 158 career titles (including 18 Grand Slam singles titles) and earned $21 million in prize money (not endorsements); Amélie had 25 career titles (2 Grand Slams) and earned $15 million in prize purses. Amélie retired at 30 in December 2009.

He published his first volume of poetry at nineteen, with thirty more volumes throughout his life. He published seven novels (the best of which is his fifth, Les Enfants Terribles. He wrote twenty-four plays (his twentieth, Le bel indifférent, was created for Edith Piaf and became a towering success). He wrote eleven ballets (his second, Parade, was produced by Diaghilev and designed by Picasso). He wrote six operas. He was a graphic designer, a clothes designer, and an interior designer. He painted. He drew. He photographed. He managed a professional boxer, who became the sport's first Hispanic world champion. He was an actor. And he made six feature films, two of which happen to be among the most lauded in the history of cinema, La belle et la bête and Orphée, both of which star his boyfriend, superstar idol Jean Marais. God only knows where Jean Cocteau found the inspiration, or the time. He also dated Edouard Dermit, whom he adopted, the boxer “Panama” Al Brown, whom he managed, a few women including Natalie Paley, whom he impregnated, and the fifteen-year-old writing prodigy Raymond Radiguet, who may or may not have been something of an opportunist when it came to dating. Cocteau died in 1963 from complications of a heart attack, at seventy-four, an hour after learning of Edith Piaf’s death. The Cocteau Museum finally opened last fall in the south of France.

IPPY Awards: Paul Russell, Larry Closs, Joan Opyr, Sally Bellerose

The Independent Publisher Book Awards announced their top three medalists in a ridiculous, self-defeating total of 94 categories (72 genres plus 22 additional regional honors) yet in the most important race, Literary Fiction, sense and sensibility triumphed: Paul Russell's The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov [Kindle] took the silver right behind the gold for Jaimy Gordon's National Book Award winner, Lord of Misrule. Is Paul's heavy title or the dim, creepily eyeless cover keeping people away from this fine novel? Trust me, you needn't know or care about any of the Nabokovs to relish the feast.

The IPPYs have a separate ghetto for every kind of book, including LGBT, for which the winners are:

Gold: Beatitude by Larry Closs

Silver: Shaken and Stirred by Joan Opyr

Bronze: The Girls Club by Sally Bellerose

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.

Rub Out the Words: Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1975

Nineteen years after the publication of the first volume of William S. Burroughs' letters, this second volume, Rub Out the Words: 1959-1975 [Kindle], spans the publication of Naked Lunch (which was the last fiction text to face an obscenity trial in the U.S.) through Port of Saints and The Wild Boys (which Bowie says was his inspiration for Ziggy Stardust).

Burroughs lived abroad the years of this correspondence, first in Paris after leaving Tangiers, then in London. Obviously, his letters address or discuss every major player of the Beat generation and, thankfully, his prodigious drug use and gay affairs have not been edited out. Nor has his temper. Having despised In Cold Blood, he wrote Truman Capote in 1970 accusing him of killing his talent. 

Cannes 2012: Great Men, No Women

The Cannes Film Festival's movies in competition feature an incredible array of male directors but no women: Jacques Audiard, David Cronenberg, Lee Daniels, Matteo Garrone, Michael Haneke, Abbas Kiarostami, Ken Loach [above], Claude Miller, Cristian Mungiu, Alain Resnais, Walter Salles, and Thomas Vinterberg, among others.

Reality check: Zac Efron is in a Cannes movie [The Paperboy, from the Pete Dexter novel, by gay director Lee Daniels]. Rob Pattinson is in a Cannes movie [Cosmopolis, from the DeLillo novel]. Kristen Stewart is in a Cannes movie [On the Road, from the classic  Kerouac]. And Matthew McConaughey is in two.

Movies out of competition are Philip Kaufman's Hemingway & Gellhorn, Bernardo Bertolucci's Me and You, and Madagascar 3.

Full list after the jump. 

Born April 11: Glenway Wescott

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 last year.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.

An Arab Melancholia

As the mainstream notes Omar Sharif Jr.'s [the actor's grandson] coming out as half-Jewish and all gay, literary readers celebrate today's release of An Arab Melancholia. The hotly anticipated novel is the second to appear in English from North African author Abdellah Taïa, "the first openly gay autobiographical writer published in Morocco." His debut in translation,  Salvation Army,earned a passionate following in 2009 with acclaim from Edmund White, Alistair McCartney, Kevin Killian, David McConnell, and David Ebershoff who praised it as "a fresh kind of gay story – the young man navigating the complex currents of poverty, Islam, colonialism, and individual vs. national identity." 

The new book is 144 pages and Semiotext(e) says:

"Salé, near Rabat. The mid 1980s. A lower-class teenager is running until he’s out of breath. He’s running after his dream, his dream to become a movie director. He’s running after the Egyptian movie star, Souad Hosni, who’s out there somewhere, miles away from this neighborhood--which is a place the teenager both loves and hates, the home at which he is not at home, an environment that will only allow him his identity through the cultural lens of shame and silence. Running is the only way he can stand up to the violence that is his Morocco.

"Irresistibly charming, angry, and wry, this autobiographical novel traces the emergence of Abdellah Taïa’s identity as an openly gay Arab man living between cultures. The book spans twenty years, moving from Salé, to Paris, to Cairo. Part incantation, part polemic, and part love letter, this extraordinary novel creates a new world where the self is effaced by desire and love, and writing is always an act of discovery."

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, San Francisco, and now Chapel Hill where she is the Kenan Visting Writer at UNC. 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.

27 Rue du Fleurus at the Metropolitan Museum

The first thing I did upon my return to New York this weekend was to travel back to Paris in 1903. The Met's amazing exhibit The Steins Collect showcases room after room of early works by Matisse, Picasso, and their contemporaries gathered by the Stein family. Although the museum continually hypes Michael's wife Sarah's contributions, it dismisses Alice Toklas in a single sentence that refers to her only as Gertrude's "companion." However, the lesbian couple's famous salon at 27 Rue du Fleurus is brought wonderfully to life in a large "room" created by three enormous screens on which are projected photos creating a time-lapse effect of how the art was displayed during the decades they lived there. 

(For another view of life at 27 Rue du Fleurus, read Monique Truong's novel narrated by Gertrude and Alice's gay Vietnamese cook, The Book of Salt [Kindle].)

Predictably, the Met erases all the gay influences in the show, but thankfully you still have Wanda Corn and Tirza Latimer's book from their groundbreaking exhibit Seeing Gertrude Stein which specificly emphasized the queer content of Gertrude and Alice's collections. Some of their gay friends -  Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Carl Van Vechten, Virgil Thomson, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Platt Lynes, Francis Rose, Frederick Ashton, Kristians Tonny - are in the Met show, including film clips from the black opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Unlike the Corn-Latimer show, the Met's description doesn't mention that choreographer Ashton had sex with at least two of the company's male principals. Degaying aside, you'll still love the art, particularly the works from private collections that you've never seen in person.

If you make it to the Met by Sunday, you'll also see Renaissance Portraits. Or, through the glory of the web, you can look at all 147 works online.

Born February 24: Winslow Homer, Judith Butler

Born in Boston in 1836, Winslow Homer moved to Paris in 1867 where he lived with his close friend and fellow painter, Albert Kelsey. Their exact relationship is unknown because the intensely private Homer kept no diary, journal, saved no letters, and, unusual for an artist of his time, never completed a self portrait. He did, however, keep a photo of them on the back of which he wrote "Damon and Pythias." According to Richard Mann, the lifelong bachelor artist used a boy as his model for several of his famous paintings of women, as in Reading, above. For the final fifteen years of his life, until 1910, his closest companion at his estate in Prouts Neck, Maine, was Lewis Wright. Whatever their precise relationship, it disturbed some of Winslow's friends and neighbors, apparently beyond Wright's being black. Homer's work is celebrated throughout the splendidly reburbished galleries of American art at the Met. A must for everyone.

Already an academic to watch out for, Judith Butler became a star at thirty-four with the release of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990. The queer studies/ feminist pioneer/ icon has published new books every few years since, still sparking waves of devotion, debate, and derision. In 2008, she received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award with prize money of $1.5 million going to her Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley. Two years ago, Utne Reader named her one of 25 Visionaries Changing Your World. Today, she's 56.