Band of Thebes

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

  

Celebrate with the brilliant biography of cultural impresario, founder of the Ballets Russes, and Nijinsky lover Sergei Diaghilev [Kindle] who turns 141 today, or with Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 73, or a memoir by the Beverly Hills native and long-closeted mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 79, or a cd from a lesbian comic who came out early, Suzanne Westenhoefer, 52.

Wise Men

Spoiler Alert. An indie favorite, Stuart Nadler's baggy first novel Wise Men is problematic throughout and freefalls on its final page with a revelation that the protagonist's father, Arthur Wise, and his longtime lawyer partner, Robert Ashley, were gay lovers all along. The decision to withhold the information will doubly perplex readers who have spent 330 pages wondering why the author has chastely ignored the sexuality of the obviously gay Robert. Moreover, the surprise claim that the two men were in a clandestine relationship rings false, exactly like the last-page, out-of-nowhere announcement at the close of Martin Amis' House of Meetings that the narrator was "queer for my brother." As it happens, both novels aim for Big Themes, fall short, and attempt too late to recast their tales in a gay light. Nadler is a serious and thoughtful writer who wants to address major issues: family, race, religion, money, fame, rescue, love at first sight, and the passage of time. He needed a tight editor to help shape his long-winded story of 17 year-old, Jewish Hilly Wise who rejects his newly super-rich ambulance-chaser father Arthur during the summer of 1952 on Cape Cod and instantly falls for a poor black girl named Savannah, whom he can't forget and pursues in Iowa in 1972 and sees again on the Cape in 2008.

After faulting the book's "whopping blandness" and sentimentality, Janet Maslin observes:

As he grows up on the page, Hilly likes to overexplain himself to the reader. “Time does that,” he says, as an older man looking backward; “it kills the mystique, replaces the boundlessness of wishing and hoping with some well-earned, necessary clarity.” Talk kills mystique too, and by some lights Wise Men talks too much about too little. 

A quick internet search yields no answers as to whether or not Nadler is another straight writer whose lgbt characters are queer in name only. He covers every other topic in several likable interviews here, here, and here.

Man Booker International Shortlist

    

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

U R Ananthamurthy (India)

Aharon Appelfeld (Israel)

Lydia Davis (USA)

Intizar Husain (Pakistan)

Yan Lianke (China)

Marie NDiaye (France)

Josip Novakovich (Canada)

Marilynne Robinson (USA)

Vladimir Sorokin (Russia) 

Peter Stamm (Switzerland)

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

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

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

National Jewish Book Award Winners

  

Congratulations to Joy Ladin, born Jay Ladin, for her trans memoir Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders [Kindle] today named one of two biography finalists for the National Jewish Book Awards. The winner in biography is Howard Fast: Life and Literature in the Left Lane.

The fiction winner is a contemporary, London-set reworking of Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence, The Innocents [Kindle] by Francesca Segal. Widely praised, the novel earlier this month won a Costa Award (formerly Whitbread). The NJBA winner for debut fiction is Daniel Torday for his novella The Sensualist [Kindle] about a 17 year-old boy in the 1990s.

The Jewish Book of the Year is City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York, a three-volume boxed set. Fancy.

Read the full list of winners and finalists.

Born January 7: Chester Kallman

In 1939 Chester Kallman was an eighteen year-old blond Jewish kid from Brooklyn when he met W.H. Auden, the thirty-two year-old English, Anglican poet. Auden had thought he would be forever excluded from any semblance of marriage and his joy at finding himself in a romantic, erotic relationship even led him to wear a wedding ring. For a few months. Kallman's inability to stay still and his infidelities wounded Auden, and his naked grief can be seen in every line of his famous essay on Shakespeare's sonnets to a beautiful lad. As Adam Kirsch writes, "The younger man was considered Auden’s inferior in every way by most of his friends, and [Auden's] biographers continue to be puzzled by the attachment. (Richard Davenport-Hines, whose 1995 biography, Auden, is psychologically very acute, can find nothing nicer to say about Kallman than that 'it was impossible to be indifferent about' him.)" Despite public fights, affairs, and separations, they were still together in their way thirty-four years later at Auden's death at 66 in 1973. They collaborated on several opera libretti including The Rake's Progress (1951), Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), and Love's Labor's Lost (1973). Kallman published three volumes of poetry, Storm at Castelfranco (1956), Absent and Present (1963), and The Sense of Occasion (1971). Although he remained a New Yorker, they summered in Ischia, Italy from 1948 to 1957, and began spending winters in Athens circa 1963, by which time they had switched to summering in Kirchstetten, Austria. Kallman died in Greece in 1975, two weeks after turning 54. American Thekla Clark was a friend for twenty-four years and wrote a short, clear-eyed memoir about the couple, Wystan and Chester.

Born December 28: F.W. Murnau, Manuel Puig, Socalled

After studying art history at the University of Heidelberg and flying as a combat pilot in WWI, F.W. Murnau directed his first film The Boy in Blue in 1919 when he was thirty-one. Before his death in a car crash at forty-two, he became one of cinema's early giants -- (said to be 6'9" tall) -- with a prodigious output in Germany, most famous of which is Nosferatu from 1922. After four years and many more successes (The Last Laugh, Faust) Murnau moved to Hollywood and made what many critics consider one of the greatest films ever, Sunrise, which shared the top prize at the first Oscar ceremony. Sunrise is #82 on the AFI 100 Greatest Films list but in 2002 the British Film Institute ranked it #7 of all time. He made two more movies -- Four Devils (lost) and Our Daily Bread (released as City Girl) -- before his final picture, Tabu, a loincloth romance shot in Tahiti that won a cinematography Oscar for Floyd Crosby (father of David Crosby who is biologically the father of Melissa Etheridge's children). He died a week before Tabu's premiere. Because humans are easily titillated, and because some are snickering homophobes, the baseless rumor persists that Murnau's fatal car crash was the result of his performing oral sex on his chauffeur.

Born in central Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig first wanted to be an architect then became a film archivist with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. His love of movies infuses his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, published when he was thirty-six. Praised in Latin America as that work was, his international reputation rests on his fourth novel, published in 1976, about a gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell: Kiss of the Spider Woman [Kindle] also became an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 1993. The buoyancy of his early books, mixing high literary art with the low-brow style of telenovas, gave way to a bitterness in later books that reduced their popularity. A leftist exile in Mexico City for decades, he died there at fifty-seven suffering a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

 

 

Who brings the funk, da noise, and the klezmer? That's right, the super original Jewish Canadian rapper Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. If you think Ukrainian music from the 1930s won't mesh with drum n bass, you haven't heard his Ghettoblaster. His trippy "You Are Never Alone" video became a YouTube sensation with 2.5 million views, and last year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel. In a world of timid, homogenized, market-driven art, Socalled is a standout. Which doesn't mean everything he tries works, but when he hits, he's genius. I met him and loved him after the NYC screening of the documentary. Not to brag, but after talking a while I did the very best thing one man can do for another... insisted he read Tatyana Tolstaya. Next month he rocks Banff, Calgary, and Edmonton.

Born November 29: Peter Cameron, Billy Strayhorn, Simon Amstell

Not to imply that movie adaptations are the ultimate yardstick of artistic merit but of Peter Cameron's six novels, three have been made into feature films. The stories he tells resonate deeply with other types of storytellers. And with readers. And with critics. The New York Times Book Review said, "The Weekend [Kindle] echoes Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose brilliant narrative critiques of material culture open, again and again, to the metaphysical, to that dimension where the known world cedes to mystery." The London Times wrote, "If The City of Your Final Destination were eligible for the Man Booker Prize I would be pressing for it to be on the shortlist. It has all the qualities currently undervalued on the literary scene: understatement, humour, and a dispensing with pedestrian naturalism... it has the dream-like mistiness of somewhere in one of Shakespeare's late plays." The Philadelphia Inquirer hailed Andorra [Kindle] as "a nearly perfect book . . . a work of remarkable and sustained invention and imagination." The Toronto Star said Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You [Kindle] is "considerably more sophisticated, subtle, and rewarding" than Catcher in the Rye. Peter has also written a play, two marvelous collections of short stories, and in his spare time he publishes extremely elegant handmade books in very limited editions at his Wallflower Press. His ravishing sixth novel, Coral Glynn [Kindle], is a top favorite on this year's queer lit poll. Tuesday night he stabbed my heart with an icicle, announcing two years after finishing Coral he still has no ideas for his next novel.

Jazz genius Billy Strayhorn spent his life in a jam: professionally, he couldn’t live with or without Duke Ellington. Gay in an intolerant time and homophobic musical subculture, he was lucky to be able to live and work openly behind the protective band leader. Yet Ellington took credit for Strayhorn’s music and made him work without a contract. Duke’s highest earning number, his signature tune, the holy grail of the era, Take the A Train, was, unknown to everyone at the time, written by Strayhorn, who never received any royalties. Ellington got rich. Strayhorn worked mainly to be able to work, without recognition or reward. But what work it is: Lush Life, Day Dream, Rain Check, Satin Doll, Chelsea Bridge, Lotus Blossom, Clementine, Johnny Come Lately, and many songs recorded by his dear friend Lena Horne, including Maybe, Something To Live For, and the double-edged Love Like This Can’t Last. As for his own “love like this,” within his first year in New York he and his boyfriend Aaron Bridgers moved in together and lived openly as a couple in Harlem, brave for 1940, when he was twenty-four. And, after a life of heavy drinking and constant smoking, when he died of cancer of the esophagus at fifty-one, he died not in Lena Horne’s arms as an oft-repeated story has it [she was in Europe], but with his partner Bill Grove. Although that was two years before Stonewall, Strayhorn worked in the early gay rights movement. Proving the depth of the prejudice he struggled against, even now the official Billy Strayhorn website completely de-gays him. We've had the prestigious biography for fifteen years; where is the Hollywood biopic?

Do you think Simon Amstell knew he was gay before or after he knew he was funny? At fourteen he appeared on a British morning chat show impersonating Dame Edna. The sweetness and malice stuck. Now 32, Simon's humor is sometimes branded "mean" or "horrible." (He prefers "cheeky.") True, he teased Amy Winehouse about her drinking, but as the host of Popworld from 2000 to 2006 he was often criticized for asking famous singers exactly what viewers wanted to know. One "notorious" incident was when Britney Spears appeared on the show long after rehab, court hearings to determine her stability, and public displays of erratic behavior, like shaving her head. Simon asked if she thought she'd "gone a bit nuts?" Britney cried, and people attacked Simon. To closeted Savage Garden singer Darren Hayes, Simon asked, "So, when are you going to come out, then?" Hayes said, "Excuse me?" Simon said, "You're obviously gay. Why won't you come out?" This was cut from the aired version. Hayes calls the incident pivotal in his finally coming out two years later and still refers to Simon as a "total prick." From October 2006 to January 2009, he hosted the comedy quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, winning top category prizes from the Royal Television Society, the British Comedy Awards, and the Broadcast Awards. The Times named the show (during Simon's era) one of the best forty programs of the decade. In 2010 he co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in Grandma's House, an award-winning sitcom in which his hapless, neurotic, adorable character, a former quiz show host named Simon, returns to live with his cheerful, middle class family. It's now filming its second season.

Below, John Barrowman challenges him to a gay-off on Buzzcocks and a clip from Grandma's House. Click through for cheekier clips lampooning acting coaches and Ben Whishaw.

 

Telegraph Avenue Continues Chabon's Gay Streak

Isn't Michael Chabon a writer perpetually teetering between impressive bright kid and intolerable showoff for the grownups? His spiraling, tender, funny, overlong new novel Telegraph Avenue [Kindle] admirably tackles race relations in Oakland in 2004 as friends Nat Jaffe (Jewish) and Archy Stallings (black) run indie Brokeland Records threatened by the invasion of a superstore. But then -- Mom! Dad! Look! -- he goes and writes a sentence that stretches twelve pages. Stunts like this, and an unnecessary appearance by Senator Obama, take you out of the characters' lives and remind you you're being entertained by A Very Talented Author Who Can Do Anything He Tries! As Andrew O'Hehir says,"Chabon is not a writer to let one metaphor suffice when two (or five) will do the job, but his style is so joyful and his dialogue so contagious that once I got in the swing of Telegraph Avenue I never minded the florid effusion of verbiage." F.E. of V., indeed. There's also an effusion of cray cray plot and coincidence. Their wives, Aviva and Gwen, run a midwife service called Berkeley Birth Partners, and the men's adorable film geek sons, gay Julius and "not gay" Titus have sex together. (Gwen is unaware of Titus' existence; for a while Archy doesn't know Titus is back in the Bay Area.) If you include the victim in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, this marks the fifth of Chabon's five major novels to feature a prominent gay male character, after: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Wonder Boys, and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Marco Roth's Memoir of Closeted Dad Dying of Aids and Its Aftermath

The only child of Central Park West intellectuals, Marco Roth grew up with La Fontaine's fables and Norse myths and a family lie. The story went that his scientist father didn't wear latex gloves in the lab and from a stray needle prick he contracted aids. Not so. Typical for such a literary family, Marco found the truth, that his father dated men, by reading a galley of his paternal aunt Anne Roiphe's memoir 1185 Park Avenue. Thirteen years later, Marco says he started his book The Scientists: A Family Romance [Kindle], out this week from FSG, as an act of revenge against her but it grew into something far more complicated. One review explains, "As part of his puzzling-out project, or as a literary conceit, Roth starts reading and rereading the books his father gave him, including Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Goncharov's Oblomov, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Revisiting the classics and a father's secret gay life ought to call to mind Alison Bechdel's brilliant Fun Home. If he's lucky.

Born September 19: Brian Epstein

After the Beatles were honored with an MBE in 1965, George Harrison said the initials stood for Mister Brian Epstein. Later Paul McCartney said, "If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian." The gay, Jewish Liverpudlian had been an acting student at RADA with Peter O"Toole and Albert Finney but quit soon after his arrest for "persistent importuning" at a well-known cottaging site. He was 27 in January 1962 when the unknown John, Paul, George, and Ringo signed a contract for Brian to manage them. With zero previous management experience, he developed their onstage look and demeanor, including their collarless German suits and their signature synchronized bow. More importantly, after every major label in London turned them down, he got them a contract with George Martin at EMI's Parlophone. Epstein also managed several other acts, including Cilla Black ("Anyone Who Had a Heart") and Gerry & the Pacemakers. Fans are divided over whether or not his intense relationship with John was sexual; their famous trip to Barcelona was potrayed in the movie The Hours and Times. In August 1967, while the Beatles were in Wales with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Brian took his usual six Carbitral pills to help him sleep but, mixed with alcohol, the dose killed him. His death, at 32, was ruled accidental. That same summer homosexuality was finally decriminalized in England and Wales. Needless to say, Brian did not discuss his gay affairs in his 1965 autobiography A Cellarful of Noise [Kindle $5.99], which clever John said should be called A Cellarful of Boys. For a more revealing look, try In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story [IKindle].

"Good Friend"

Many of you greatly respect privacy in the lives of famous people, like Sally Ride, but this is a blog that loiters at the corner of literature and queer, and it needs to report what's being said there. 

A well-known lesbian / novelist re-posted this photo on Facebook with its original caption, Fran Lebowitz and good friend Toni Morrison out on the town. Her only commentary was to repeat the words "good friend" in quotes. Most readers interpreted this to imply the two writers share more than wild hair and nighttime sunglasses. Others say they're not convinced, asking why the two pictured authors can't both be lesbians but not dating each other. The best comment explores this question about legitmate scholarship: 

"How am I supposed to write about sexual politics in the work of someone who insists this is her 'good friend'? This is similar to the problem of not being able to quote Willa Cather's letters. 'I can't tell you what's really up with TM, but, trust me, something's up with TM.' It's childish."

[Savvy readers, please let me know if FB posts are generally considered public speech and may be quoted in the same way as an author's website.]

Born May 20: Lisa Kron

One of Five Lesbian Brothers and a Guggenheim Fellow, Lisa Kron mixes comedy and tragedy in a way that comes naturally to a Jewish gay girl raised in the Midwest. She says, “…Judaism, you know, is viewed in the Midwest as kind of an accessory that you wear on top of your Christianity.” Her breakout work as a playwright and actress was 2.5 Minute Ride, juxtaposing a visit to Auschwitz with her family's annual trips to an amusement park in Ohio. The play received an OBIE Award, Drama Desk and Outer Critics Circle nominations, and an L.A. Drama-Logue Award. Her autobiographical work Well earned two Tony nominations including one for her as best actress. Her queer mix of solemnity and laughs makes her ideal for adapting, with Jeanine Tesori, Alison Bechdel's Fun Home as a musical. Do whatever you must to attend the sneak peek performance at the Public in September. A New Yorker since 1984, Kron teaches playwrighting at the Yale Drama School. 

Eytan Fox Revisits Yossi Ten Years Later

Even though of course it ended with the tired trope of one of two young gay lovers dying, Yossi & Jagger was one of the best indie movies of 2002. Now, director Eytan Fox returns to the surviving character, Yossi, a depressed, closeted workaholic doctor who ten years later is still mired in grief. One of the best scenes is his garbled visit to Jagger's parents. Also nicely observed, and cringeful, is this scene of a late night, grindr hookup [top]. Mining another familiar trope, Fox has Yossi brought back to life by the love of a hot young openly gay soldier who reminds him of Jagger. It's easy to see why Yossi is hesitant and repeatedly rebuffs him. The movie is perhaps a little less successful in convincing us why the party boy is so persistent in pursuing the middle-aged melancholic who sits by the pool refusing to swim and hiding behind his book, Death in Venice. After one mournful, tender night of sex, they're already discussing quitting their careers and staying at the tacky resort together "forever"? Oy!

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

 

Celebrate with biographies of cultural impressario Sergei Diaghilev [Kindle] who turns 140 today, and Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 72, or a memoir by mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 78, or a cd from comic Suzanne Westenhoefer, 51.

Born January 7: Chester Kallman

In 1939 Chester Kallman was an eighteen year-old blond Jewish kid from Brooklyn when he met W.H. Auden, the thirty-two year-old English, Anglican poet. Auden had thought he would be forever excluded from any semblance of marriage and his joy at finding himself in a romantic, erotic relationship even led him to wear a wedding ring. For a few months. Kallman's inability to stay still, and his infidelities, wounded Auden and his naked grief can be seen in every line of his famous essay on Shakespeare's sonnets to a beautiful lad. As Adam Kirsch writes, "The younger man was considered Auden’s inferior in every way by most of his friends, and [Auden's] biographers continue to be puzzled by the attachment. (Richard Davenport-Hines, whose 1995 biography, Auden, is psychologically very acute, can find nothing nicer to say about Kallman than that “it was impossible to be indifferent about” him.)" Despite public fights, affairs, and separations, they were still together in their way thirty-four years later at Auden's death at 66 in 1973. They collaborated on several opera libretti including The Rake's Progress (1951), Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), and Love's Labor's Lost (1973). Kallman published three volumes of poetry, Storm at Castelfranco (1956), Absent and Present (1963), and The Sense of Occasion (1971). Although he remained a New Yorker, they summered in Ischia, Italy from 1948 to 1957, and began spending winters in Athens circa 1963, by which time they had switched to summering in Kirchstetten, Austria. Kallman died in Greece in 1975, two weeks after turning 54. American Thekla Clark was a friend for twenty-four years and wrote a short, clear-eyed memoir about the couple Wystan and Chester.

Born December 28: F.W. Murnau, Manuel Puig, Socalled

After studying art history at the University of Heidelberg and flying as a combat pilot in WWI, F.W. Murnau directed his first film The Boy in Blue in 1919 when he was thirty-one. Before his death in a car crash at forty-two, he became one of cinema's early giants -- (said to be 6'9" tall) -- with a prodigious output in Germany, most famous of which is Nosferatu from 1922. After four years and many more successes (The Last Laugh, Faust) Murnau moved to Hollywood and made what many critics consider one of the greatest films ever, Sunrise, which shared the top prize at the first Oscar ceremony. Sunrise is #82 on the AFI 100 Greatest Films list but in 2002 the British Film Institute ranked it #7 of all time. He made two more movies -- Four Devils (lost) and Our Daily Bread (released as City Girl) -- before his final picture, Tabu, a loincloth romance shot in Tahiti that won a cinematography Oscar for Floyd Crosby (father of David Crosby who is biologically the father of Melissa Etheridge's children). He died a week before Tabu's premiere. Because humans are easily titillated, and because some are snickering homophobes, the baseless rumor persists that Murnau's fatal car crash was the result of his performing oral sex on his chauffeur.

Born in central Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig first wanted to be an architect then became a film archivist with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. His love of movies infuses his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, published when he was thirty-six. Praised in Latin America as that work was, his international reputation rests on his fourth novel, published in 1976, about a gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell: Kiss of the Spider Woman [[Kindle]] also became an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 1993. The buoyancy of his early books, mixing high literary art with the low-brow style of telenovas, gave way to a bitterness in later books that reduced their popularity. A leftist exile in Mexico City for decades, he died there at fifty-seven suffering a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

 

Who brings the funk, da noise, and the klezmer? That's right, the super original Jewish Canadian rapper Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. If you think Ukrainian music from the 1930s won't mesh with drum n bass, you haven't heard his Ghettoblaster. His trippy "You Are Never Alone" video became a YouTube sensation with 2.5 million views, and last year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel. In a world of timid, homogenized, market-driven art, Socalled is a standout. Which doesn't mean everything he tries works, but when he hits, he's genius. I met him and loved him after the NYC screening of the documentary. Not to brag, but after talking a while I did the very best thing one man can do for another... insisted he read Tatyana Tolstaya. Check his upcoming tour in February and March.

So Says Sendak

The part of you that's weary of tiptoe diplomacy and cheap politeness may find a friend in 83 year-old Maurice Sendak, recently out after a nearly-fifty-year relationship with a psychoanalyst named Eugene. On the publication of his new book, Bumble Ardy, the Guardian's wonderful Emma Brockes stopped by his Connecticut farm for a friendly visit. Sendak spoke about

Childhood: "I refuse to lie to children. I refuse to cater to the bullshit of innocence."

Ebooks: "I hate them. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book."

Publishers: "They're all in trouble. They're all terrible."

The far right: "These Republican schnooks would be comical if they weren't not funny."

Where the Wild Things Are: not his favorite

His favorite: Outside Over There

Stephen King: "Bullshit."

Salman Rushdie: "That flaccid fuckhead. He was detestable."

Gwyneth Paltrow: "I can't stand her."

Roald Dahl: "Scary guy. I know he's very popular but what's nice about this guy? He's dead, that's what's nice about him."

His love of Middlemarch and his disappointment with Daniel Deronda: "Oy gevalt! She put aside her hard hat and was determined to be sweet and understanding. That won't get you anywhere, honey."

His parents: "They led desperate lives. They should have been crazy."

His partner: "He was a man who loved music and reading. He never smoked and he died of lung cancer, utterly ridiculous."

Being closeted and taking his partner home to his parents: "Of course, they knew. Especially my father. My mother was so bewildering and strange and lived in another world, I don't know what she knew. Nothing was said, but if something had been said, I would have been thrown out of the house. And yet they met him and respected him. Strange."

His dog Herman [Melville]: "He's German. He doesn't know I'm Jewish."

Himself 1: "I'm a lucky buck."

Himself 2: "I'm totally crazy, I know that. I don't say that to be a smartass, but I know that that's the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that's fine. I don't do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can't not do it."

Himself 3: "I can't believe I've turned into a typical old man. I can't believe it. I was young just minutes ago."

Read the full article for more, including his painful barmitzvah story, his work with Isaac Bashevis Singer, his loneliness without Eugene, and his wish to die like William Blake.

(photo via)

Postcard from Wyoming

I've been to the [straight] cowboy dance bar in Cody many times but never before have I ended up talking with America's first gay Jewish Republican presidential candidate. Like us, Fred Karger is in town for the weekend's non-politcal events. Ten days ago he published his memoir, co-authored with Steve Fiffer, FRED WHO? Political Insider to Outsider. Among other topics, it covers his acting days in Hollywood, his closeted decades, and his leading fight against the Mormon funding of Prop 8, as well as "lessons learned working for the likes of Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush." At the bar a 55 year-old woman, a painter from Jackson, urged me and my partner to dance together to the band playing George Jones and Pat Benatar because "no one gives a s**t."

Brooklyn Book Festival

Among the 260+ authors at yesterday’s Brooklyn Book Festival were LGBT stars David Rakoff, Edmund White, Jacqueline Woodson, and newcomer Justin Torres, and a highlight was the triple bill of Deborah Eisenberg, Wallace Shawn, and Fran Lebowitz discussing why Americans feel such anxiety these days. An overriding theme was that the very rich and a handful of mega-companies have run off with the country in their pocket, to astonishing little outcry from the nation at large. 

WS: “Most people in the United States feel the political system is not really a democracy as far as they personally can observe… People feel, in a Chinese way, ‘I go about my business but I don’t have much say in how things are run.’ The Chinese, at least, are bought off by a rising economy.” He also lamented the “de-educated population” “distracted by trivial arguments while really important issues are not even discussed.”

FL: “I have the solution: Privatize the private sector. The private sector is drowning in public money.” She decried that possessions and purchasing choices have come to substitute for personality. She also did an old school curmudgeon riff that in the past thirty years the Left has done nothing but ban smoking, and get gay marriage, and called both issues trivial.

DE: (continuing WS’s point about people being surprised, having elected a Democrat expecting a reversal of the egregious practices of Bush/Cheney, only to see Obama continue them.) “Those practices have been ratified, made irreversible. Political discourse stopped and a great silence has fallen.” She expressed dismay about the “incredibly compliant populace” and later said she was “really, really shocked by how timid, intimidated, how afraid people are to speak out.”

WS: shocked at how the majority of Americans’ “self-definition has changed from friendly to mean so quickly. Meanness is who we like to be.” He said the transition began with Reagan “who was both friendly and mean.”

FL: after NAFTA, the US factories have disappeared and been replaced by meth labs. “There’s New York. Meth labs. Megachurches. And L.A. That’s it.”

Born June 5-8: Yourcenar, Keynes, Compton-Burnett, Orman

By the time she was eight, Brussels-born Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour was reading Aristophanes. By ten she was learning Latin, and at twelve, Greek. In 1929, when she published her first novel, Alexis, about a closeted gay man leaving his family, she chose to write under an anagram of her surname, Yourcenar. In 1937, she and her American translator, Grace Frick, fell in love and remained together forty-two years until Frick’s death in 1979. The following year, Yourcenar became the first woman ever elected to the French Academy, established in 1635, suppressed in 1793, and restored in 1803. To date, 710 people have been elected “immortals,” four of them women. Among the many renowned French writers who were never elected to the Academy are Moliere, Balzac, Zola, and Proust. Yourcenar was a consummate woman of letters, writing novels, stories, poems, essays, a book-length study of Mishima, and three volumes of her autobiography, yet her exalted reputation is based mainly on her masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian. Like Mary Renault, Yourcenar chose to address homosexuality in her work through male characters, especially those in antiquity, and her novel fully describes Hadrian’s great love for Antinous, a youth of astonishing beauty and athletic grace. Some critics consider it the best historical novel ever written. She and Frick first vacationed on Mount Desert Island, Maine, in 1942, and moved there full-time in 1950, in a house they called Petite Plaisance, which today survives as a museum.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.

Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of seven children. Her beloved father died suddenly in 1901 when she was sixteen; three years later a favorite brother Guy died of pneumonia; twelve years later her other favorite brother Noel was killed in the battle of the Somme; and the following year, 1917, her two youngest sisters, aged eighteen and twenty-two, locked the door of their bedroom on Christmas Day and killed themselves by swallowing veronal. The year after that Compton-Burnett caught the Spanish Influenza and nearly died herself; and the year after that she and her partner Margaret Jourdain began living together, a happy relationship that lasted thirty-two years, until Jourdain’s death in 1951. Compton-Burnett was knighted in 1967, by which time she had published nineteen of her twenty novels. From the start, her oblique style rendered almost exclusively in dialog had divided critics. Leonard Woolf rejected her manuscript for the Hogarth Press saying “She can’t even write!” while the critic for the New Statesman said, “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." She thought her two best novels were A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant. Her two novels that include homosexuality are both set in single-sex schools staffed by closeted lesbians (More Women Than Men, 1933) or gay men (Two Worlds and Their Ways, 1949). As ever, her method is to inform the reader indirectly, so nothing is any more overt here than in the rest of her work.

As she approached her thirtieth birthday, Suze Orman, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s south side, was a waitress in a bakery in Berkeley, California. Then she trained as an Account Executive at Merrill Lynch, became a Vice President at Prudential Bache, and in 1987 founded her own business, The Suze Orman Financial Group. Now she hosts The Suze Orman Show on CNBC and Suze Orman’s Financial Freedom on QVC and has won two daytime Emmy awards. She writes a monthly money column in O, Oprah’s magazine, and has written ten books including The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying, The Road to Wealth Revised, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny, and The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream. She does not invest in the stock market. In 2007 she came out in a New York Times interview, noting the unfair tax burdens that same-sex couples shoulder. In 2008 and 2009, she was named one of the Time 100, and in 2010 she was one of Forbes' most powerful women in the world. Last September she married her longtime partner and co-producer of her show, Kathy Travis, in a ceremony in South Africa. Now, she's 60.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.