Band of Thebes

The New Yorker on Gay Mumbai

Celebrating ten years, Mumbai's all-male lavani dance group is twice as old as the city's gay pride parade, which last month happened for the fifth time. Bin Baykancha Tamasha (or, Performance Without Women) is growing in popularity. In a long post on The New Yorker's blog, Sonia Faleiro, author of Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars [Kindle], reports on Men in Saris: Mumbai's New Lavani Dancers. Briefly:

"The city’s gay culture is dominated by young, English-speaking men, many of who work in call centers and find partners online. Financial independence makes it easier for them to live separately from their parents—still a cultural anomaly in India—and to express their sexuality more openly. In contrast, Mumbai’s working-class gay men live in chawls (or tenements), in single rooms that they share with as many as a dozen family members. They start work while still in high school, and marry within a few years of graduating. Family pressure to have children is fierce. Fearful of being ostracized, they keep their sexual identity secret. Most of these men don’t have the money or confidence to visit gay clubs, and they find partners in public parks and have sex in public toilets.

"These men speak the local language, Marathi, and reject the term “gay.” Instead, they prefer the concepts of kothi and panthi, depending on whether they see themselves as feminine or masculine, respectively. “Kothis,” said Vikram Doctor, a journalist and organizer of the pride parade, “are queens—flamboyant, bitchy, and out to shock people.” Thepanthis are their consorts. It is the kothis, effeminate men, who are drawn to lavani as performers, while panthis form a core part of their audience.

Despite favorable court rulings and changing attitudes, the dance troupe is "not willing to publicly associate with L.G.B.T causes" and, as Faleiro writes:

"Arranged marriage is the norm for kothis, according to Naz Foundation International, an advocacy group on male sexuality. Even kothis who were aware of their attraction to men since they were very young marry to avoid social stigma, and to fulfill their obligation to produce heirs. It isn’t clear whether their wives know of their husbands’ sexuality when they get married. For those who find out later, divorce is still economically and socially damaging enough that it’s not really an option."

Of course the Olympus of all Mumbai reporting is Katharine Boo's National Book Award winner and NBCC champ, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity.

(Photo, from a previous Mumbai Pride, via Groovy Ganges.)

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.

Hitchcock, Hyde, Pi

Why are critics complaining so much about Hitchcock? It's a zippy, solid B with entertaining perfs by Anthony Hopkins as Hitch and Helen Mirren as his wife Alma who was his boss on his first film job. Even Scarlett J as Janet Leigh is less annoying than usual. James D'Arcy plays Anthony Perkins, whose homosexuality, and Hollywood's homophobia, the script acknowledges, though it could be more. Ever the imp, Hitchcock rattles him on set by responding, "It's just Hitch. Hold the cock." Literary readers expecting aspects of Manuel Munoz's elegant novel What You See in the Dark [Kindle] may be surprised to learn Psycho was shot on a studio lot, not in Bakersfield as Manuel has it, which could be another reason why he chose to leave the film unnamed and call his characters the director and the actress. Film buffs might want to try Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho [Kindle].

Life of Pi is no Kon-Tiki [film], but some viewers haven't minded watching half-clad teen Suraj Sharma adrift on a raft for 227 days. My favorite nanosecond was the interviewer asking the middle-aged Pi, "You're married?" in the perplexed tone you might use to say, "You telegraph?"

At this year's New York Film Festival I didn't like Lincoln but I *hated* the other presidential movie, Hyde Park on Hudson, opening tomorrow. Every character is a one-note dud. The political genius FDR is just a jolly horny goat. Eleanor is a burr and her lesbianism isn't given its due. Laura Linney's character undergoes a ridiculous overnight transformation to lock the false happy ending. I look forward to a chipper, Oscar-buzzed Hollywood movie about a powerful man married to another man that celebrates his sexual liaisons with five accepting, enabling boytoys as Oh, that lovable old tomcat! Open relationships can work but this phony, straight male fantasy says smart, miserable women are happy as long as their shared man is satisfied.

Born September 5: Freddie Mercury

Whose band has spent more weeks on the UK album charts than any other musical act, meaning more than the Beatles, Pink Floyd, or the Rolling Stones? Who wrote the song chosen by the Guinness Book of Records poll as the greatest song of all time? Who wrote a different song chosen as the best ever by another major poll conducted by Sony? That’s right, Farrokh Bulsara, born in Zanzibar. As founder and frontman of Queen he wrote most of their hits including those two greatest, Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions. The band is said to have sold more than 300 million albums worldwide. Never a darling of the critical press, Queen was universally considered to be electrifying in concert, in part because of their high camp and theatrics, but also because of Mercury’s mighty four-octave range and mesmerizing flair. They were the first band ever to play South American stadiums and the first to play behind the Iron Curtain (in Budapest), yet they also played Sun City, which put them on the United Nations’ blacklist. Their gig at Live Aid 1985 was later voted by music industry honchos to be the greatest live performance in the history of rock. Below, watch one gay man —in complete clone gear, ultra tight jeans, tank top, and studded armband proudly signaling that the pop charts are the only thing he’ll top—transfix 72,000 people and get all of them waving and singing in unison.
       Exuberantly gay in everything his band did from its name onward, Mercury was not out offstage. He also tried to hide his one-hundred-percent Indian ethnicity—both his parents were Parsis from India—even from his bandmates, and he denied having HIV, for which he tested positive in 1987—until the day before his death on November 24, 1991, when he was 45.

Stephen Frears, who has worked complex gay themes in My Beautiful Laundrette and Prick Up Your Ears, as well as regal Brits in The Queen, is set to direct the biopic starring Sacha Baron Cohen slated to start filming next year. In June NME reported that Katy Perry wants to play Mercury's longtime beard Mary Austin, to whom he left his mansion, noticeably not his partner Jim Hutton who died in 2010. Brace yourself for a globally mainstream story that will likely portray the girlfriend as his one good stable relationship, and his stray gay wanderings as what killed him.  

India Spends $1.3 Million To Prevent Auction of Gandhi's Gay Letters

As you read last year, Pulitzer winner Joseph Lelyveld's biography Great Soul exposed Gandhi's relationship with German bodybuilder/architect Hermann Kallenbach [left]. Now, the government of India has made it their "highest priority" to acquire a collection of more than 1,000 letters and documents the two friends exchanged. They've succeeded in buying the trove outright, for $1.28 million, preventing it going to auction in London. One potential scenario is that the gayest letters will disappear and the government will parade the remaining letters as proof that the men were platonic acquaintances. 

The Wall Street Journal's review of Lelyveld's book cited these quotes from other correspondence:

"Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about "how completely you have taken ­possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love ... such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."

Born November 18: Klaus Mann, Emanuel Sandhu

Novelist (Mephisto), memoirist (Turning Point), and playwright (Anja and Esther), Klaus Mann could never outrun his father's preeminence as a writer, but could he also never get over his father's love? Colm Tóibín notes the many times in Thomas Mann's diaries when he expresses sexual interest in Klaus, nicknamed Eissi, here at fourteen:

"‘terribly handsome in his swimming trunks. Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son . . . It seems I am once and for all done with women? . . . Eissi was lying tanned and shirtless on his bed, reading; I was disconcerted.’ Later that year he ‘came upon Eissi totally nude and up to some nonsense by Golo’s bed’ and was ‘deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming’"

Far quicker than his father to grasp the evil of the Nazi ascent, Klaus left Germany for Paris in 1933 when he was 26. He was granted Czech citizenship and came to America in 1936, the year of Mephisto, dividing his time between Princeton and New York. The following year he met his partner, Thomas Quinn Curtiss, who would become a critic for the IHT and Variety and wrote the screenplay for The Iceman Cometh. Klaus wrote one more novel, Der Vulken, about German exiles during WWII, published in 1939; his autobiography; and one nonfiction work Andre Gide and the Crisis of Modern Thought. As Tóibín says, Klaus "was fluid and generous and flighty. He kept nothing in reserve, and this, despite his obvious literary talent, or maybe because of it, made him melancholy...instead of writing about death as his father did obsessively, he allowed the aura of death to enter his own spirit." He was also addicted to heroin. He killed himself with an overdose of pills, in Cannes, in 1949. Curtiss lived until 2000. Andrea Weiss illuminates it all in her fascinating dual biography, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, including their mainly queer circle of friends: Gide, Isherwood, Cocteau, Brecht, McCullers, and Auden, whom Erika married for citizenship.

 
Half Italian and half East Indian, Toronto native Emanuel Sandhu enrolled in dance school when he was three and won a spot in Canada's National Ballet School when he was eight. He stayed for ten years before devoting himself full-time to ice skating, winning his first Canadian Men's Skating Championship three years later with a perfect score. He has won it twice more, placing first or second each of the nine years between 1998 and 2006. In 2007 he was third. The clip from his audition for So You Think You Can Dance Canada shows his coach saying, "The ego! Sometimes too big!" followed by Sandhu announcing, "Dancing is my favorite language. It's body language. And I love it." Sandhu un-retired and tried for a skating comeback earlier this year but was sidelined by an injury. Today, he's 31.

Gay Indian-Americans in Rahul Mehta's Quarantine

Two years ago, Madison Smartt Bell edited New Stories from the South 2009, selecting, alongside work from Wendell Berry and Jill McCorkle, "Quarantine," a piece by Rahul Mehta about a young Indian-American bringing home his boyfriend to meet his parents in West Virginia. (Mehta was born and raised there.) Last year, his collection of stories, Quarantine [[Kindle]], all of them about gay Indian-Americans, was published in hardcover in India to much acclaim, some fuss, and surprisingly strong sales. Now, at last, Harper has released Mehta's book here as a paperback original. Praising the richness and depth of his characters and observations, Madison Smartt Bell calls it "the best first collection I have read in twenty years." Pankaj Mishra considers Mehta's voice "gentle, even tender, but powerful." Manil Suri says the stories are "insightful and compellingly readable." I haven't seen the collection and am greatly anticipating reading the stories.

Mehta gave a long interview to The Hindu Literary Review in which he discussed how long the collection took to write (nine years), the amount of sex included (readers: not enough, his mother: too much), and writers he admires (Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, and Mohsin Hamid, among others).

Love of Gandhi's Life Was German-Jewish Bobybuilder; Cue Paul Rudnick

Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph Lelyveld has just published a new biography of Gandhi Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India [[Kindle]] making the case that the love of his life was Hermann Kallenbach (seated, right), a German-Jewish bodybuilder and architect. From the Wall Street Journal's review:

"Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some ­reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might ­relate to the enemas Gandhi gave ­himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.

"Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about "how completely you have taken ­possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."

"They were parted when Gandhi ­returned to India in 1914, since the German national could not get permission to travel to India during ­wartime—though Gandhi never gave up the dream of having him back, writing him in 1933 that "you are always ­before my mind's eye." Later, on his ashram, where even married "inmates" had to swear celibacy, Gandhi said: "I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of men and women."

The Indian state Gujarat, birthplace of Gandhi, has already made sale of the biography illegal. Several Indian newspapers have condemned the "predictable," "kneejerk" ban.

You know Paul Rudnick squealed when he heard the news. Today the New Yorker runs his humor piece, "I Was Gandhi's Boyfriend," narrated by a hot dumb blond ice dancer named Kelly:

I first met him when he came to see my ice show in Nepal, which was called “Holiday on Dirt.” Gandhi came backstage and he told me, “I very much enjoyed watching you pretend to ice-skate, in your tight pants.” I asked him, “Um, so why are you wearing a diaper?” And he explained that his outfit was a traditional Indian dhoti, and I said, “Well, you look like the New Year’s baby.” And he said, “You are so handsome when you are not speaking.”

Born March 20-22: John Boswell, Zackie Achmat, Stephen Sondheim

Native New Yorker Stephen Sondheim, the winningest composer in Broadway history, has earned eight Tonys, eight Grammys, seven Drama Desk awards, an Obie, an Oscar, and a Pulitzer Prize. Last year he turned 80 and was feted with major special concerts by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, and assorted stage and screen legends at benefits by the Roundabout Theatre Company and the New York City Center. Also, they renamed the former Henry Miller Theatre on 43rd Street in his honor. Arlington Virginia's acclaimed Signature Theatre created the Sondheim Award, of which Sondheim was the premiere recipient, Angela Lansbury the second, and next will be Bernadette Peters. Last October, Knopf published Sondheim's Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes, this coming October they'll release Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Wafflings, Diversions and Anecdotes. A great lover of puzzles and games, he contemplated giving up theater to write mysteries, and did co-author two whodunnit screenplays; The Last of Sheila, co-written with Anthony Perkins, won them an Edgar. Sondheim did not have a live-in boyfriend until 1992, when he was 61; he and dramatist Peter Jones lasted seven years.

Born of Indian parents in South Africa in 1962, Zackie Achmat grew up in the "coloured" community and was always a rebel for equality. By the time he was ten he was a total bookworm and gained special permission to use the whites-only library for reading, but he was still prohibited from using its restrooms. When he was fourteen, during the Sowetto Uprisings, he set his school on fire to convince his classmates to join the boycott. As an active member of the illegal ANC for years, he was jailed many times before apartheid ended and the ANC's Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994. That same year Achmat co-founded the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality, and in 1996 South Africa had become the first nation whose Bill of Rights bans discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Building on lessons from the gay rights and anti-apartheid movements, in 1998 Achmat created the Treatment Action Campaign [TAC] to fight aids through prevention, to increase awareness, and to get medicines to the poor. Immediately he gained worldwide attention by announcing he was HIV+ and would refuse to take his drugs until they were available to all South Africans. Among the many ways TAC has changed lives is by helping to erode the shame and stigma of HIV, proclaiming one's positive status with bold t-shirts rather than hiding or lying. Winning numerous legal and public relations victories against the government and international pharmaceutical corporations, Achmat finally resumed his meds when he was very ill in August 2004, anticipating correctly that in November the Ministry of Health would announce its plan to distribute ARVs widely. The New Yorker ran an excellent profile of him written by Samantha Power in 2003, and the following year the American Friends Service Committee nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (which went to Kenya's Wangari Maathai). In 2008, he married his partner Dalli Weyers, 25, in a terrific wedding where the traditional caketop figures of a bride and groom were replaced by a king and a cowboy.

When Publishing Triangle ranked the 100 Best LGBT Nonfiction Books of all time, they included works by Plato, Freud, Foucault, Faderman, Duberman, et al., and their undisputed choice at #1 was Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality by John Boswell, a history professor at Yale. He was 33 when it was published in 1980. Newsweek said it was, "an astonishing work of scholarship that ranges with ease over fourteen centuries...What makes the work so exciting is not simply its content -- fascinating though that is -- but its revolutionary challenge to some of Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." Specifically, he proved that the Roman Catholic Church hadn't always been antigay, had either been indifferent to or had actually celebrated male - male love until the twelfth century. No surprise, Boswell was attacked by some conservative academics who thought he was promoting a gay agenda and by some gay people who said he was a Church apologist. Ultimately the complaints only added to the book's popularity because it was impeccably researched; it won the 1981 American Book Award for history.

After writing the first book about the widespread practice of child abandonment in medieval times, Boswell returned to gay topics and the early Church in another groundbreaking work, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. This time he argued the Church actually condoned certain male - male relationships with ceremonies that could be seen as precursors to gay marriage. Again, the book was brilliantly researched; again, the uproar; but the public debate was cut short: Boswell died of aids in December 1994 when he was 47. At Yale, he helped start the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center, and his pre-modern history courses were immensely popular, among the top ten in enrollments. He is said to have written his comments on student papers in perfect medieval calligraphy.

Joan Acocella on J.R. Ackerley

Today's New Yorker features a comprehensive essay by the always, always insightful Joan Acocella on gay writer J.R. Ackerley, author of an early play, a barely disguised novel, and three memoirs, the most famous of which is My Dog Tulip. A bit of a perfectionist, Ackerley spent 34 years working on his final book about his father, who was a closet bigamist (having three children by his other wife) and secretly was a gay hustler during his years in the Guards. When, late in life, Ackerley tried to come out to him, his father interrupted with, “It’s all right, old boy. I prefer not to know. So long as you enjoyed yourself, that’s the main thing.”

In his writing, Ackerley refused to be cut off and insisted on over-sharing. For one, his sexual relations -- "fantastically promiscuous," always with himself fully clothed and the young Guardsman, soldier, or cop fully naked, never ever oral -- were ruined by premature ejaculation. Acocella ponders the moral dimensions:

"How do you survive the humiliation of always having your body go against your will? Do you have to succeed at sex in order to feel that you have succeeded in life? And how do you tell your partner, who at that moment is innocently taking off his clothes, that the act for which he is preparing has already been completed?"

More importantly, she realizes, "The real fruit of Ackerley’s candor, however, is the power it lent his writing: the richness of characterization, the tartness of metaphor, the protection that honesty gives against sentimentality, or just a stupid simplicity." She is just as wise about the works themselves. Don't miss Hindoo Holiday about his six months in 1923 as secretary to a gay maharaja in Chhatarpur. But first read Acocella's essay. After the books, go on to his biography by Peter Parker which she calls "superb."

Vote for Neel Mukherjee in The Times/South Bank Sky Arts Award

Following the praise of Vestal McIntyre, Steven Amsterdam, and A.S. Byatt -- all of whom named A Life Apart the best novel of the year -- the judges of The Times of London/ South Bank Sky Arts Breakthrough Award have chosen Neel Mukherjee as the only nominee in literature. Good show for a gay novel about an illegal alien from Calcutta in London, by way of an Oxford scholarship and King's Cross hustling. In Thebes poll, Vestal noted the protagonist ultimately secures "a position as a live-in nurse for a woman in her nineties. Ritwik's relationship with woman, the brilliantly depicted Anne Cameron, gives rise to some of the most tender and genuinely moving scenes I've read in recent years."

Neel's competition for the Breakthrough award are the pop band Everything Everything, dancer Brian Maloney, tv actress Michelle Dockery, stage actor Andrew Scott, conductor Nicholas Collon, doc filmmaker Clio Barnard, opera soprano Pumeza Matshikiza, comedian Gregg Davies, and installation artist Simon Fujiwara. Obviously your heart, mind, and vote are with the gay book. Click here before midnight [UK time!] January 12.

Although the printed book is not available in the U.S. [Kindle only], someone's bear cache in Alaska boasted a hardcover this morning. Amazing.

13 Arrested in Raid on Private Gay Party in India

If you'd crossed India off your worry list while celebrating last year's legal victory overturning the Colonial anti-sodomy laws in Delhi, remember that the court's ruling did not legalize homosexuality nationwide. Parvez Sharma reflects in this essay about the recent arrest of thirteen men at a private gay party in the conservative town of Saharanpur where he grew up.

"The location of the dharamshala is just two miles from my old school, where I was mercilessly bullied for being too effeminate when I was a boy.

"There are quotes from the police officer who organised the raid, in which he talks about finding "used condoms" and guests in a "compromising position". Saharanpur is described as an "ultra-conservative" town and a college teacher called Ayub Qureshi is quoted expressing his indignation: "This is certainly unheard of in Saharanpur. I don't know where are we heading to."

"Thirteen men were arrested, though according to police the party was attended by more than 100. The arrests should be condemned. These "gay" men probably have nowhere else to meet and many perhaps still live with their families, where discussing their sexuality would not be an option."

Sharma is the director of A Jihad for Love, the documentary covering his five-year journey through the Muslim world interviewing gay/bi/curious followers of Islam.

(Photo via Bilerico.)

Born Oct. 30 - Nov. 4: Almendros, Barney, lang, Visconti, Ackerley

After the jump, author J.R. Ackerley, director Luchino Visconti, singer k.d. lang, expat hellcat Natalie Barney [above on bearskin, and later with her 50-year partner painter Romaine Brooks], and cinematographer Néstor Almendros.

Born October 8, 11: Urvashi Vaid, Eleanor Roosevelt

In addition to being one of the most energetic humanitarians of the 20th century, Eleanor Roosevelt was an inexhaustible writer. She wrote her syndicated column My Day six times a week for twenty-seven years, missing only four days when her husband died. Always insightful, she was usually decades ahead of her time and frequently funny. Please, please read her column from sixty years ago, October 1947, about Hollywood and HUAC by clicking here. The relevance of her writing career is that she used words precisely and carefully and she meant exactly what she said. Detractors obfuscate ad nauseum but there is no question that she and Lorena Hickok, her closest friend for thirty years, were lovers. Read excerpts of their correspondence below, remembering that their most intimate letters were destroyed, many by Hickok herself, after Eleanor’s death in 1962.

Hick darling,

All day I've thought of you & another birthday I will be with you, & yet tonight you sounded so far away & formal. Oh! I want to put my arms around you. I ache to hold you close. Your ring is a great comfort to me. I look at it and think she does love me, or I wouldn't be wearing it.
_________________________________________

[Eleanor to Hickok]

I wish I could lie down beside you tonight & take you in my arms.

_________________________________________

[Hickok writing to Eleanor after a long separation...]

Only eight more days . . . Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot just north-east of the corner of your mouth against my lips. . . .

The website brainyquote.com lists seventy-four of her most memorable sayings. Four examples:

"You must do the things you think you cannot do."

"Sometimes I wonder if we shall ever grow up in our politics and say definite things which mean something, or whether we shall always go on using generalities to which everyone can subscribe, and which mean very little."

"Women are like teabags. We don't know our true strength until we're in hot water!"

"I once had a rose named after me and I was very flattered. But I was not pleased to read the description in the catalog: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall."

Obviously, the place to start is Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884-1933, then Eleanor Roosevelt: Volume 2 , The Defining Years, 1933-1938. When Blanche Weisen Cook won Publishing Triangle's lifetime achievement award, she promised she was about to finish volume 3.

Born in New Delhi, Urvashi Vaid moved with her family to Potsdam, New York when she was eight, in 1966, attended her first anti-war rally when she was eleven, and gave her first political speech, supporting McGovern, when she was twelve. Basically, she's never stopped working for broad issues of peace and social justice, especially for LGBT rights within a larger vision of fairness and equality. After receiving her law degree, she joined the ACLU's prisons project, then began her long association with the NGLTF, whose Policy Institute she headed for many years, both before and after a break to write her essential book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. For five years earlier this decade, she was deputy director of a unit of the Ford Foundation's peace and social justice program. From 2005 until earlier this year she was Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, whose dual missions are, I kid you not, rights and protections for Great Apes and LGBT humans. This academic year (2010-11) she's a visiting scholar at CUNY's Graduate Center’s Department of Sociology and writing a new book. She also is a board member of the Gill Foundation and was recently one of OUT's 50 most influential lgbt people. For a long, funny time she's been partners with Kate Clinton, dividing their time between Manhattan and Provincetown. Read the texts of her speeches on her site. (Photo by Don Hamerman.)

Sacha Baron Cohen's Freddie Mercury Biopic To Avoid AIDS

The world's first major rock star to die of aids won't have aids in his first major biopic. Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Sacha Baron Cohen has signed a deal to play Freddie Mercury in a film written by Golden Globe winner and two-time Oscar nominee Peter Morgan who penned The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland, and Eastwood's forthcoming Hereafter.

Producers already have said the movie will not deal with Mercury having aids. Opting for a simpler, happier ending, they are stopping their story at Live Aid, in 1985, where Queen's performance rocked the world and continues to be voted the best rock gig of all time. Mercury tested positive for HIV in 1987 yet despite frequent speculation in the British press, he did not acknowledge having aids until one day before he died in November 1991.

Screenwriter Morgan could again mine the complexities and tensions between public/private persona, this time through a man who was less than forthcoming about the extent of his gay sex life and perhaps less than eager to discuss his 100% Parsi background. (Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, he did not change his surname until he was 24 in England. How, for example, did being born and raised in Africa affect Mercury's much-condemned decision in 1984, to break the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa and play Sun City?) Then again, the script may go soft, yielding another give-the-masses-what-they-want movie. In that case, expect a lot of Mercury's early 1970s relationship with Mary Austin, who remained his best friend for life. Mercury left Mary his mansion, most of his estate, and all his royalties; while giving Jim Hutton, whom he'd been with six or seven years at the time of his death, a mere half million pounds.

Sacha Baron Cohen played gay, awesomely, in Talladega Nights and flamboyantly in Bruno. His one song was a good reason to wake up from the otherwise sleepy Sweeney Todd.

This marks the first time the remaining members of Queen have licensed their songs for a movie about the band. Production on the film starts next year.

Thank You, India. Thank You, Consequence.

India's high court finally overturned the 1861 law banning homosexual acts between consenting adults. Although technically the ruling applies only to Delhi it will have enormous consequences throughout the nation. In the best scenario, the government now will repeal the law for the entire country. Read the reports from the Times of London and the NYT.

When you hear the phrase "gay activists" do you think of the women above? Adnan Abidi captured their jubilation in this Reuters photo, my new favorite picture.

In anticipation of the such an outcome, in May India's only gay magazine, Bombay Dost, went back in print after a seven year hiatus. The big comeback issue includes a year in review section, stories about bloggers, bi people, "the lesbian continuum," possible arranged gay marriages, something called "straights' corner," and a list of 100 gay Indian films.

Bollywood Award for Best Couple Goes to Gay Pretenders

Wednesday night in Mumbai the 15th Star Screen Awards marked a first for Southeast Asian cinema as the Best Couple award was won by two male actors whose characters pretend to be gay. That's news, given that homosexuality is still illegal in India. And it signals a shift in the homophobic society that two major Bollywood stars agreed to play the roles. Since the movie's release in November, superstar John Abraham's yellow swim trunks have become nearly as popular as that blue pair, and apparently he even appeared in them during the black tie ceremony on Wednesday. (Since 2002, he's been dating a female co-star from his first movie, Jism.) The other actor, Abhishek Bachchan, is married to international icon Aishwarya Rai who was nominated in the same category. Dostana aims to be a frothy, over the top comedy that good naturedly pokes fun at all stereotypes including gay cliches. While I'm not a fan of the "OMG! They're Gays!!! But Not Really!" storyline, I did laugh once during this trailer, which is a giant leap from my reaction to previews for Boat Trip or I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

Lesbian, Gay Movies Open in NYC and California Today

Festival favorite Were the World Mine opens today in New York, San Francisco, and Berkeley. Reviewing for the NYT, Stephen Holden said the gay puppylove musical set during a Chicago high school's production of Midsummer Night's Dream "is an enchanting, mildly subversive fantasia that reconciles sassy teenage argot with Elizabethan." He added:

Ms. Fogle’s most striking music, especially the title song, sets Shakespearean dialogue in an ethereal Minimalist style that has the entranced intensity of centuries-old sacred music.

and

its charm overcomes the inevitable weaknesses of a musical made on a stringent budget. Like its Disney counterparts, it operates on the assumption that the movie musical is a world unto itself in which ordinary rules of logic don’t apply.

Two weeks ago Shamim Sarif's new movie was released starring Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth as lesbians in love. Today Shamim Sarif's new movie was released starring Lisa Ray and Sheetal Sheth as lesbians in love. Is this a movie theater or an echo chamber? Why Regent Releasing thought it was smart to put out The World Unseen and I Can't Think Straight fourteen days apart is anyone's guess. It didn't seem to win over NYT critic Jeannette Catsoulis, who wrote:

Will Tala once again dump her betrothed? Will Leyla’s nosy parents find her k.d. lang CD? Before these and other burning questions can be answered, the plot must plod through a confetti storm of obstacles — religion, ethnicity, overbearing mothers — all of which are overcome in dewy, unsmudged close-up. This isn’t a movie, it’s an alternative-lifestyles campaign for Maybelline.

Born November 18: Emanuel Sandhu

Half Italian and half East Indian, Toronto native Emanuel Sandhu enrolled in dance school when he was three and won a spot in Canada's National Ballet School when he was eight. He stayed for ten years before devoting himself full-time to ice skating, winning his first Canadian Men's Skating Championship three years later with a perfect score. He has won it twice more since then, placing first or second each of the nine years between 1998 and 2006. In 2007 he was third. In the Q&A on his official website, four of his first ten answers are Madonna (music, movie, hero, desert island companion), so don't be surprised that on his MySpace page Sandhu identifies himself as "future pop superstar of the world." Both sites play his song Burn Up the Floor. Today he turns twenty-eight.

The clip from his audition for So You Think You Can Dance Canada features his coach saying "The ego! Sometimes too big!" followed by an earnest Sandhu announcing, "Dancing is my favorite language. It's body language. And I love it."

Born October 8: Urvashi Vaid

Born in New Delhi, Urvashi Vaid moved with her family to Potsdam, New York when she was eight, in 1966, attended her first anti-war rally when she was eleven, and gave her first political speech, supporting McGovern, when she was twelve. Basically, she's never stopped working for broad issues of peace and social justice, especially for LGBT rights within a larger vision of fairness and equality. After receiving her law degree, she joined the ACLU's prisons project, then began her long association with the NGLTF, whose Policy Institute she headed for many years, both before and after a break to write her essential book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. For five years earlier this decade, she was deputy director of a unit of the Ford Foundation's peace and social justice program. For the past three years she has been Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, whose dual missions are, I kid you not, rights and protections for Great Apes and LGBT humans. She also is a board member of the Gill Foundation and has been partners for a long, funny time with Kate Clinton.