Band of Thebes

Gay Hadrian at the British Museum

In London, the British Museum's exhibit Hadrian: Empire and Conflict opens today. The show may be a first in that it accurately downplays the Roman emperor's empty marriage and shows the central and abiding love of his life to be Antinous. On October 2, Paul Roberts will give a lecture called "Sex and the Emperor," described online:

Hadrian’s loveless marriage and his passion for a young man were perhaps nothing unusual for an emperor, but his unprecedented grief after his lover Antinous died, and his exceptional commemoration of him, suggest a relationship far from the imperial ‘norm’.

The show is expected to be a blockbuster, especially popular with families, which makes the museum's focus on Hadrian's gay life all the more impressive to those of us living in a country of cowardly curators. In addition to the museum's interactive fare, the Guardian offers this tour of the exhibit, which runs through October 26.
 

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.

Commercial Closet's 4th Annual Images in Advertising Awards

You still have time to get tickets to the Commercial Closet's 4th Annual Images in Advertising Awards ceremony Monday night in New York. Among the nominees in ten categories, listed here, are Orbitz, D&G, Wrigley, Chemistry.com,  and Levi's, whose spot is below. Nominees for best print ads include Macy's, Washington Mutual, and BMW. But why did the Commercial Closet discontinue their "Clean Up Your Act" anti-award, which this year would have seen stiff competition by homophobic ads from Snickers to Nike?

Born July 23: F. Holland Day

The pioneering photographer (1864-1933) with an eye for the Greek ideal.

Born July 22: Rufus Wainwright

Don't even try to resist Rufus Wainwright and his midtempo, art school melancholy. He came out when he was fourteen and after DreamWorks records automatically degayed his bio for his debut album when he was twenty-four, he insisted his official press kit say he is out. That self-titled cd made him the year’s critical darling, and Rolling Stone named him Best New Artist. His follow-up effort, Poses, was again a critical favorite, followed by Want One in 2003 and Want Two in 2004. His fifth studio album, Release the Stars, executive produced by Neil Tennant, was number two on the UK charts. In June 2006, he made history at Carnegie Hall by recreating, song by song, Judy Garland's famous 1961 concert there. Response was so ecstatic he was invited to repeat the show in London, Paris, and at the Hollywood Bowl, yet the sales of the subsequent live cd were lackluster, peaking at #171 in both the US and UK. Keeping his sense of humor, he titled the dvd of the concert Rufus! Rufus! Rufus! Does Judy! Judy! Judy! His several different performances of Hallelujah on YouTube have been viewed a total of more than five million times. Watch it below or, for more, take a look at his website.

Born July 21: Hart Crane

Son of a successful candyman, child of divorce, Hart Crane dropped out of his Ohio high school in 1917 and escaped to New York. For seven years he moved back and forth between the city and Cleveland, writing poems published in literary journals and working in his father's factory. Tortured by his love of men far more than was Whitman decades before him, Crane did have one joyous affair with a Dutch merchant mariner named Emil Opffer who inspired his epic, erotically charged verse, Voyages (performed below by Charles Bryant). That poem was one of the highlights of his first book, White Buildings (1926), celebrated for the zest and fire of his lyrics and criticized, as all his poetry was, for its impenetrable confusion. As told in this comprehensive New Yorker essay about Crane, he said he was “more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness . . . than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations.” While Crane struggled to write his monumental work, The Bridge (1930), he suffered miserable affairs and worsening alcoholism. Although initial critical reception to his now revered achievement was weak, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Mexico the following year. Returning from that sojourn aboard the SS Orizaba in April 1932, he hit on a working shipmate and was beaten up. Crane said, "Goodbye, everybody!" and jumped overboard to his death. The most devoted of later writers who revered him, Tennessee Williams left instructions that his body be buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico where Crane drowned. (Instead, Williams' family buried him in Missouri.) Crane's legacy influenced painters as well, inspiring works by Marsden Hartley, Eight Bells Folly, and by Jasper Johns twice: Diver and Periscope.

New Novels, New Orientations

 

Is there something about writing a thirteenth book that makes authors want to switch teams?

Before this week, openly gay writer E. Lynn Harris had published twelve books, all of which examined the lives of gay or bisexual black men and strong, smart, beautiful black women. According to AP, he's sold four million copies, so he's obviously struck a chord with readers. On Tuesday, Doubleday published his thirteenth book, Just Too Good To Be True, which is his first heterosexual novel. He says it took him four years to write. Here's the plot: A college quarterback falls in love with a cheerleader. Except it's really about a son's obsessive, co-dependent relationship with his mother, so maybe it's not such a departure after all.

Louise Erdrich's thirteenth novel, The Plague of Doves, is dazzlingly original. In 1911 in Pluto, North Dakota, four Ojibwe men are lynched for a murder they didn't commit; one of them survives the hanging; the lives of their descendants and the descendants of the white vigilantes intertwine throughout the twentieth century. Told like As I Lay Dying from many multiple points of view, the novel covers nearly the whole town over several decades, with some episodes seemingly less relevant (or more far fetched) than others, yet every story adds to the themes of history, love, betrayal, and redemption. Late in the book, the primary narrator, the surviving lynched man's granddaughter Evelina Harp, who has long nursed a crush on the blond grandson of one of the lynch mob, discovers she's a lesbian. She's nineteen. Her coming out romance takes place in a mental institution, which literary readers will either find objectionable or deftly subversive. Philip Roth calls The Plague of Doves a "masterpiece" and even Michiko raved.

Born July 17: Berenice Abbott

Ahead of her time all her life, Berenice Abbott was raised by her single, divorced mother and dropped out of Ohio State to move to Greenwich Village. That was 1918, and the following year she nearly died from the influenza pandemic. Two years later she moved to Europe to study sculpture, and two years after that she fell in love with photography when Man Ray hired her as his assistant specifically because she didn't know anything about it and therefore would do exactly as told. (He captured her, at left.) By 1926 she had her own studio on the rue du Bac before moving to rue Servandoni the next year. While quickly achieving renown for her own work, Abbott tirelessly promoted other photographers, particularly Eugene Atget, whose images she championed for forty years until 1968, when she convinced the curators at MoMA to buy the archive of his photos. Although she was extremely sought after in Paris, taking portraits of everyone from Jean Cocteau and James Joyce to Coco Chanel and Janet Flanner, a quick trip back to New York caused her to abandon France and return to Manhattan in order to photograph the city. For six years she worked without any support, rejected by organizations and individuals who failed to see any value in her vision. In 1935, however, the Federal Art Project hired her to continue her series, now called Changing New York. These are her most enduring images. During this time she fell in love and began living with Elizabeth McCausland, a critic, and they remained together more than thirty years until McCausland's death in 1965. Abbott lived on until 1991, not only widening her subjects to include antebellum architecture, U.S. 1, and Maine, but also inventing photography gadgets like the distortion easel and the forerunner to the autopole. The video below contrasts Abbott's iconic views of New York in the 30s with the same locations as they looked in the 1990s.

Kay Ryan, Out Lesbian, To Be Named U.S. Poet Laureate

How awesome is that? Tomorrow James Billington, the librarian of Congress, will announce Kay Ryan, 62, as the nation's 16th poet laureate. She lives modestly in Marin County with her longtime partner Carol Adair, whom she married in San Francisco in 2004. You may recognize her name from The New Yorker, where her poems frequently appear. She describes her work as, “An almost empty suitcase, that’s what I want my poems to be, few things. The reader starts taking them out, but they keep multiplying.” Of her early beginnings as a poet, she tells this story:

Ryan decided to pursue writing seriously after having an epiphany while bicycling up the Rocky Mountains while on a 4,000-mile, cross-country bicycle trip in 1976. When she returned home, she set to work. She began using a deck of Tarot cards as an exercise, forcing herself to write a poem about the subject of whichever card she drew at random. Some of the subjects were harder than others.

She follows in the literary footsteps of Elizabeth Bishop (brilliant, less out) who held the position from 1949-50 when it was called Library of Congress Consultant Poet. A great interview with Kay Ryan can be found here.

Love Is a Cannibal at Sloan Fine Art

Raising the internet hookup to an art form, Jesse Finley Reed photographs men he meets from online communities in Berlin and New York. His striking, backlit, jumbo portraits (40" x 50") are part of a three man show curated by Becky Smith (Bellwether) opening tonight at Sloan Fine Art on Rivington. Jesse graduated from Tufts in 1998 and earned his MFA in photography from Yale in 2004. He has had solo or group shows in Athens, Berlin, New Zealand, Los Angeles, and New York. His artist statement discusses the "disjunction with quotidian representations of my subject:"

nightclubs are brightly light, rather than dark and sexy; soap is wet and dirty, rather than fresh and clean; unremarkable male bodies are superficially transformed into hyper-masculine models.

There is an implication of queerness that plays an important role in the reading of my work, not only as a suggestion of strangeness or difference, but also in the work's relationship to sexual orientation.

The other two artists are Tyler Coburn and David Benjamin Sherry. Coburn is a contributing editor to ArtReview and his photography has been included in group shows in London, Berlin, and New York. Sherry earned his MFA last year and has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Berlin, and Vienna. Love Is a Cannibal "looks at the variety of ways these artists depict gay-male longing by using staged, constructed and manipulated photography." Tonight's reception is from 7:00 to 9:00; the show runs through September 13.

Born July 16: Reinaldo Arenas

In his searing memoir Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas recalled his impoverished childhood in Cuba and his early memories of being so hungry he ate dirt. He also described his vivid and prolific sexual adventures beginning at a very young age with a male cousin, and later with his uncle, a domesticated animal, and countless men, all told with an unvarnished honesty that shocked some readers. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of the 1993, but Arenas could not enjoy its success. His hard luck was a constant. In his teens he became besotted with and then disillusioned by the Castro regime, which eventually imprisoned him, prohibited him from publishing, and threatened him with death. He attempted to escape from Cuba on an inner tube, was caught, and was sent to a far worse prison. Even when he was officially forbidden from having paper, he managed to write and  got his work smuggled out of the country and published abroad. Released from prison in 1976 after renouncing his fiction and essays, Arenas was, by a fluke, part of the Mariel boatlift to Florida in 1980. Exploding with the boundless freedoms of writing and gay sex in New York, he entered his most fertile phase. Seven years later he got aids. Ravaged by the unstoppable disease and depressed by the lack of attention paid to his work, he intentionally overdosed on his medicine on December 7, 1990. His memoir was published in Spanish in 1992 and in English the following year. In 2000, Before Night Falls was adapted by Julian Schnabel into the award winning film starring Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp [below, as Bon Bon], Olivier Martinez, Diego Luna, and Sean Penn, further securing Arenas's lasting importance.

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.

Andrew Sean Greer Talks to The Guardian

Shortish interview with the author of The Story of a Marriage, about a black couple in San Francisco in the 1950s and the husband's affair with a rich white man. A reader I revere and trust unreservedly really liked the novel. I haven't read it but I really liked the interview because it incorporates Greer's being gay as an important though not overwhelming aspect of his writing. But after this exchange shouldn't the interviewer have asked if he's in a longterm relationship?

At one point Pearlie reflects on marriage, to my mind harrowingly: "At the time, my sense was that marriage was like a hotel shower: you get the temperature right and someone just beyond the wall turns on his shower and you're stung with ice water, you adjust the heat only to hear him yelp from pain, he adjusts his, and so on until you reach a tepid compromise that both of you can endure."

Isn't this a gay writer's scathing critique of heterosexual marriage - at least as it was once practised - where secrets and lies fester unexamined for decades? "You may think so," laughs Greer. "But I thought there was something true about it that applies to all long-term relationships. Not the whole truth of course."

Oh, hey: Good on The Today Show for selecting two gay themed books among their ten Summer Picks, The Story of a Marriage and Augusten Burroughs' A Wolf at the Table.

Born July 10: Marcel Proust, Neil Tennant

What a week! Wall to wall towering genius, with the gods of literature (Proust), pop music (Tennant), painting (Hockney), and film (Cocteau).

Born July 8: Philip Johnson

Soon after graduating from Harvard in 1930, Philip Johnson became the first director of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design. He did not study to become an architect himself until ten years later. When built in 1948, his master degree thesis, Glass House, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and remains one of the most important designs of the century. His two best known other works are the Seagrams Building (with Mies van der Rohe) and the AT&T Building with its controversial Chippendale top, completed when he was seventy-eight.  His many other projects include the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, the Amon Carter Museum, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, PPG Place in Pittsburgh, the IDS Tower in Minneapolis, the Boston Public Library's 1972 addition, 101 California in San Francisco, 190 South LaSalle in Chicago, 191 Peachtree Tower in Atlanta, Das Amerikan Business Center in Berlin, Puerta de Europe in Madrid, and the Tata Theater in Mumbai. Considered by many to be among his greatest designs is the lgbt Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, a soaring structure "without right angles or parallel lines." Although the ambitious cathedral remains a dream, the church finally broke ground on the Interfaith Chapel in 2007. You can learn more about it and take a virtual tour here. Johnson lived with his partner, curator David Whitney, from 1960 to his death in 2005.

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.
 

In Honor of the First Amendment

Are you a First Amendment Gay? (No acronyms, please.) If so, enjoy these two really crass, tasteless, totally NSFW clips from the new Onion DVD. Climb aboard the all gay cruise ship the Queen Nathan II, or call the experts when you get stuck.

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.

Proud

My governor is better than your governor. And not just because he was rocking Under Armor. Yesterday David Patterson became the first New York governor to march in pride, walking with City Council Speaker and open lesbian Christine Quinn. It wasn't another case of political tokenism; he gets it:

The most significant move Mr. Paterson has made toward broadening gay rights in New York was an order he issued in May that directed state agencies to recognize same sex marriages performed outside of New York.

That order built on the policies of the Spitzer administration, which had been planning to issue the same directive before Mr. Spitzer resigned in March. David Nocenti, who was Mr. Spitzer’s legal counsel and now holds that role in Mr. Paterson’s administration, drafted the order earlier this year. It was to be issued once the state’s highest court ruled on a February decision by an appeals court in Rochester that said the state must recognize same-sex marriages performed in other jurisdictions, even though New York does not itself allow gays and lesbians to marry.

Responding to the purely evil Arizona group's attempt to sue to prevent the order from going into effect in New York, Paterson defended his actions to the New York Times

“It is the law and it is the right thing to do. I stand by it,” he said. “If someone would like to go to court and waste their money and prove me wrong, they can do that. And I welcome that.”

Compare that with Obama, who "doesn't believe in gay marriage." The Times neglected to mention crowd size, which British press reports put at one million. A nice warmup for next year, the 40th anniversary of Stonewall.

Elsewhere: San Francisco celebrated with renewed passion thanks in part to legalized same-sex marriage, Seattle's parade drew 400,000, Paris had at least half a million, and Berliners took a harder, longer pounding of rain than we had. Also at a million spectators, Toronto's pride included active duty Canadian servicemembers in uniform for the first time; nice, but by far the day's bigger firsts belonged to Bulgaria and to India, which saw Delhi's first ever gay pride parade as 500 people marched through the city of 14 million. Remember, homosexuality is still illegal for the 1.1 billion people who live in India, another legacy of the British Empire, which introduced a "crimes against the order of nature" law with its infamous Section 377. It was drafted in 1860. On Wednesday, India's High Court will finally hear a challenge to it. Long time coming.

Right wing extremists urged followers to disrupt pride parades by throwing eggs and fireworks at the legal gay marches in the Czech Republic, where police in the second largest city Brno had to use tear gas on the crowd, and in Sofia, where marchers celebrated Bulgaria's first ever gay pride. Let's make sure we spend less time promoting the intolerance of the sixty skinheads arrested and take more time to celebrate the pioneering bravery of the one hundred fifty Bulgarians marching for their pride.

Gay Men and Their Widowed Parents' "New Old Age"

   
Two new books A Place Called Canterbury and Assisted Loving tell the story of gay men coping with aging widowed parents, and at that point the stories diverge in opposite directions.

Dudley Clendinen, whom all readers revere as the co-author of the essential gay history tome Out for Good, elegantly faces down life's hard choices as his mother enters an assisted living apartment tower in Tampa and slowly weakens after a stroke. For a time he moved there himself, so his observations are as immediate as they are poignant. In the dining room, jackets and ties are obligatory, wheelchairs are outlawed. Nagging annoyances mask far more daunting fears, yet the overall mood is a sort of jovial "dottiness." Astute critics love the book's many layered, wise, and clear-eyed examination of what Clendinen calls "the new old age," an extra decade at the end of life, unprecedented on such a large scale across society. The Baltimore Sun's reviewer said

It is a book that stands apart from so much of what is being written about aging in this country because of its confounding juxtaposition of screwball comedy and inexorably fading life; of the capacity for love in the human heart and the harsh rejection of anyone who is skittering down life's last slope too fast for the group.

And Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, wrote

Mr. Clendinen made a smart decision in structuring his book as something other than a story of decline. His mother’s health did fail at Canterbury, and he conveys his own worry and grief at seeing this happen. But he finds graceful, subtle ways to slip between the past and present, so that his mother remains a wonderfully imposing figure even at her weakest moments. And he populates the book with brightly drawn characters who give the place its reigning mood, “a slow, good-humored dottiness and dignity.”

Bob Morris's many fans from his eight years writing the New York Times column The Age of Dissonance, will immediately recognize his comic foibles even if the situation is wholly new: He attempts to pimp and Queer Eye his eighty year old father, Joe, who wants to start dating after the death of his wife following a ten-year debilitating illness. But Joe is a touch slovenly, a tad Republican, and a lot picky: He rejects one elderly woman with "She's no Dinah Shore!" because she doesn't smile enough. Another woman is dubbed "the Jewish Shirley MacLaine," because she announces she used to be a Socialist; Joe responds by signaling their waiter for the check. Bob, forty-four, gay, and single, never actually double dates with his father as the subtitle claims. You might say he "parallel dates." Helping Joe find love again makes him confront his own commitment fears and relationship phobias as he looks for a man for himself. Ultimately, their story delivers double happy endings.

As far as I'm aware, Assisted Loving has the seriously most awesomest book promotion website ever (created by Martin Zager); pump up your volume and slide your cursor over "Contacts," "Kvetch & Blab" and "Get the Book" to feel the love. One last thing: The tanned lothario on book's jacket is purely the fantasy invention of a misguided art director. The real Joe, miles more dignified, can be seen in the sweet clip below.

Born June 26: Stephen McCauley

Cancel your plans and spend all day in gratitude for the novelist Stephen McCauley. Reread his best book, True Enough, or his best known, The Object of My Affection. Buy them and give them as gifts to any decent reader you know. (Also, resist the temptation to get depressed that he is so brilliant, so funny and wise, yet never classified with the straight literary giants he modestly surpasses.) He posts entries on his website about once a month, most recently in May after visiting New Orleans for a gay writers' festival. He's right about Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints. But then he's right about everything. Read him.

Found French Quarter interesting but depressing with drunken tourists staggering around clutching giant alcoholic drinks in glasses shaped like bongs. Silly T-shirts abound and faint odor of vomit wafts down Bourbon Street at dawn. Repeatedly warned of crime and advised against walking at night alone. Even so, intense humidity and smell of rot add glamorous haze to seedy streets. Rotting buildings and crumbling plaster make it all lurid and beautiful. Thanks to literary representations, almost every street corner iconic. Reminded repeatedly of Nancy Lemann’s Lives of the Saints, favorite New Orleans novel and one of my favorites in general. Repetitious and hilarious and prose so fever-dreamy it makes you ache.

Reminded, too, of B, former student from New Orleans who committed suicide two years after Katrina, on anniversary of father’s suicide. Talented, disturbed writer. Kept spotting places from his stories and eccentric types I assumed he had made up. Alligator collecting drag queens and sloppy antique dealers wielding guns. All there. Longed to call him up and discuss his work again.

Streetcar ride, Garden District, café au lait, and man with blood running down his face strolling slowly along promenade overlooking Mississippi at midnight. Strip joint, of course. Pleasure derived from lapdancing bartender with perfect ass and bad hair yet one more indication of age. "How undignified, how age-inappropriate of me," were first thoughts, before numb acceptance of the fact that, at this stage, stuffing dollar bills into the straps of a thong to purchase groping rights IS age-appropriate behavior.

The Onion's Gay Pride Roundup

Exploding with pride, The Onion this week gathers all their gay stories from recent years. Among the SFW highlights are:

Bisexual's Parents Half Understand
Pentagon: Gay Equals Crazy
KY Legislature Bans Gay Pet Weddings
Homoerotic Overtones Enliven NRA Meeting
Anti-Homosexuality Sermon Suspiciously Well Informed
Dance-Club Bathroom Left Out of Gay Couple's Meeting Story

Born June 25: Larry Kramer, Rictor Norton, George Michael

Wouldn't it be awesome if Larry and Rictor joined George on stage tonight for his concert at the Forum in Los Angeles? The pop superstar turns 45 today and says this will be his last tour. Unlikely. But other things he said in a recent interview sounded more true: "The nature of being gay is that you are forced to challenge the general perception, otherwise you have to accept that something is wrong with you. Maybe that gives gay men the perspective that many have turned into art."

Broadway Bares XVIII

On Sunday night, while some people were freezing in depleted sleeping bags high in the Rocky Mountains, thousands of New Yorkers warmed their hearts at Broadway Bares XVIII. The show is always the year's cultural zenith, bar none, and this time it raised over $870,000 to fight aids and support people living with HIV. To see what you missed or to relive your joy, you can thank a photographer named Tomas Vrzala who captured the action in hundreds of photos and posted them here. Even better, buy the book, Backstage Pass: Broadway Bares, for 160 pages of pictures from the beginning through last year.

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.

Born June 17: Barry Manilow

When you think of early Bette Midler, singing for the gay men at the Continental Baths, do you think of Barry Manilow? He was her piano accompanist, helped produce her first two albums, and directed the music on her Divine Miss M Tour. At the time, he was a successful advertising jingle writer and musical director of the CBS show Callback. On tour, during Midler's intermission Manilow performed three songs from his first album, but it wasn't until Clive Davis saw him open for Dionne Warwick that his luck really changed. Davis and a reluctant Manilow fought about including Mandy on his second album; Davis won; hit after superhit followed: It's a Miracle, I Write the Songs, Tryin To Get the Feeling Again, Looks Like We Made It, Can't Smile Without You, Even Now, and of course Copacabana, which was so popular it inspired a made for TV movie starring Barry ("His name was Tony...") Twenty-odd years later Manilow still enjoys a large and devoted following. He headlines a Vegas act and in 2004 Oprah announced he is one of her most requested guests. On the other hand, when Australian police wanted to clear out a heavy gang area of kids ignoring the curfew, they blasted Manilow's songs. (Barry was funny about it in a wry statement.) Two years ago, his album Greatest Songs of the Fifties debuted on the Billboard chart at number one. Last year his album of Seventies hits reached number four. Brooklyn's own has still got it, ok? If you don't understand his impact on contemporary culture, his preeminence as whipping boy / guilty pleasure, watch these snippets from Family Guy, Friends, and Colbert with Jon Stewart. Manilow has lived with his manager Garry Kief for more than twenty years in homes they share in Bel Air and Palm Springs.

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.