Band of Thebes

Husbands, The Outs, Hunting Season & Where the Bears Are

Last Wednesday an online poll to rank viewers' favorite web series of all orientations put the gay L.A. series Husbands (The New Normal minus the baby) at #3 with 2,249 votes and the gay Brooklyn series The Outs (Girls minus the females) around #40 with 52 votes. Back when it started, NPR's Ira Glass called Husbands "the future -- of tv, of America." It has the better pedigree, particularly in the form of co-created Jane Epenson, a veteran writer of Buffy, Firefly, Gilmore Girls, the O.C., Game of Thrones, and Warehouse 13, which she created. Also, that funny cameo from Joss Whedon. And a visit from Jon Cryer. It was not so far-fetched for Husbands to boast it was "the most critically successful show ever to emerge in new media," with strong reviews from mainstream critics like Time ("more complex and interesting...than The New Normal") and The New Yorker ("totes adorbs").

This Wednesday, the Atlantic profiled The Outs, citing cooler mags like Interview calling it "the most accurate and essentially human portrayal of young gay men today" and Paper insisting it's "the best web series ever." The article has gotten some attention for quotes from the show's creator and star, Adam Goldman:

"I'm not necessarily knocking what's on television," Goldman says. "I just think there is always room for more well-rounded stories."

"The democratization of media is really exciting," Goldman says. "Particularly for minorities or underrepresented people. You don't have to wait for a studio to say now we are going to make your show. You can look to everyone and say, don't we need this? And if they say yes we do, then you get to make it."

"...But Goldman bristles at being lumped in with a wave of 'gay shows.'

"What's a gay show?" he says, seeming annoyed. "It just doesn't mean anything. There aren't definitions of these things. I don't think of every other show as a straight show. Is it gay because I suck dick? Or is it gay because it's about two gay men? It just doesn't mean anything.

"As soon as people give the label that you are speaking for a whole group, there's just too much pressure. There are black gay people, Asian gay people, trans people...There's no such thing as the voice of a generation for the gay community."

What's a gay show? If you really don't know, try Hunting Season, based on the unshy blog-to-novel, The Great Cock Hunt. The series is co-written by the excellent Adam Baran who curates Queer/ Art/ Film with Ira Sachs.

Or find Where the Bears Are, an amusing romp as familiar types juggle jokes, tricks, and a mystery. They describe the show as The Golden Girls meets Murder, She Wrote. Season two starts next month.

Watch Husbands here. Get into The Outs here.

Los Angeles Times 2012 Book Prize Winners

    

Announced last night, the 2012 LAT Book Prize winners are

FICTION:  Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk [Kindle]

FIRST FICTION:  Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements

GRAPHIC WORK:  Sammy Harkham, Everything Together: Collected Stories

CURRENT INTEREST:  Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers

BIOGRAPHY:  Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

HISTORY:  Fergus M. Bordewich, America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union

SCIENCE:  Florence Williams, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History

MYSTERY/THRILLER:  Tana French, Broken Harbor

YA:  A.S. King, Ask the Passengers

POETRY:  Louise Glück, Poems 1962-2012

Born April 7: Harry Hay, R Zamora Linmark

He was born in England, came to America at seven, and, in his twenties, had an affair with Grandpa Walton when that actor was in his thirties: Even now there's so much we don't remember about Harry Hay who started The Mattachine Society in 1950 in Los Angeles. To understand the terror and bravery of such an act, remember, it was illegal for homosexuals to gather in public. A woman accompanied them for cover, or they met in private. Along with Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, Barbara Gittings and Kay Lahusen, and Frank Kameny, Harry Hay is one of the major reasons we have what we have today. Depending on your view, Hay is the most interesting or the most difficult of the movement's founders because he was permanently opposed to gay assimilation. He was a cofounder of Radical Faeries, and, drawing on his leadership as an eighteen year member of the Communist Party, he was a founding member of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition. He met his life partner when he fifty-one and died at ninety in 2002. To learn more, read a collection of his own writings, Radically Gay : Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder or his biography, The Trouble With Harry Hay.

Today he would be 101. Last April for his centenary, Los Angeles dedicated a staircase "The Mattachine Steps" in his honor.

 

A favorite on Thebes queer lit survey, R Zamora Linmark's Leche [Kindle] is about a young gay Filipano-American returning to the country where he was born and coping with his dual identities. Or, as Kevin Killian says, the novel "takes that old exile-returns cliché and fucks with it till it cries out in ecstasy." Critic Nicholas Boggs said, the book "is a riotous ride through modern-day Manila featuring encounters with a larger-than-life cast of characters including a (perhaps) bisexual cabbie, an activist nun, an acclaimed movie director, and President Corazon Aquino’s actress daughter, also known as the Massacre Queen of the Philippine Cinema.” A two-time Fulbright recipient, Linmark has also written poetry and plays and has taught at the University of Miami and the University of Hawaii. 

Born March 10: John Rechy

Although Scottish-Mexican-American John Rechy doesn't want to be ghettoized as a gay writer, his most important work pioneered a new type of literature honestly depicting men who have sex with men. In 1963 his first novel, City of Night [Kindle], followed the aimless encounters of a nameless hustler turning tricks in New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, crosscut with memories of his childhood in El Paso. By making his protagonist anonymous and introducing a succession of minor characters seen only briefly, Rechy re-emphasized the sensation of hustling for the reader. (He knew his trade: He continued to work as a prostitute on Santa Monica Blvd even after the book became a surprise hit, even after he became a professor at UCLA, even after he turned forty.) Decades later in 2003, a NYT critic called City of Night a "bona fide cult classic," "deservedly considered a milestone of transgressive fiction." That was not the consensus when it first appeared. And after thirteen books, his literary awards are limited to an NEA grant and lifetime achievement recognitions from PEN West, Publishing Triangle, and the ONE Foundation.

Rechy's second novel, Numbers [Kindle], trod the same path as City of Night but from another direction: a slightly older Johnny Rio returns to L.A. for a ten day binge not as an escape but to recapture his previous glory; some readers see Johnny Rio as using sex not merely to confirm his desirability but also as a means to find a greater connection and begin to forge a gay identity. For 1967, that was a big step. Among Rechy's ten other novels are Rushes, Bodies and Souls, The Coming of Night, Marilyn's Daughter (about a girl who believes herself to the love child of Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy), and his much-praised The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. His three works of nonfcition are The Sexual Outlaw [Kindle], Beneath the Skin: Collected Essays, and from 2009 his memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman [Kindle]. Seventy-nine today, Rechy lives in West Hollywood with Michael, his partner of thirty years.

Born January 10: Sal Mineo, Dennis Cooper

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

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

Born January 9: Richard Halliburton

In the 1920s and 30s, three names conjured the glories of adventure travel: Lindbergh, Halliburton, and Earhart. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Halliburton was a small-framed, sickly child and compensated with a life of pushing himself to extremes. He climbed the Matterhorn, made the first recorded winter summit of Mount Fuji, and took the first aerial photo of Everest. In 1931, with a hired pilot, he circled the globe in an open cockpit biplane, the Flying Carpet, (though they put the plane on ships to cross the Atlantic and Pacific), giving first flights to royalty in Iran and Iraq, the White Rajah's wife in India, and the chief of the Nyak, who paid him in shrunken heads.

Always thirsting for adventure, Halliburton bent local laws well past custom and legality: He tried to enter Mecca, was jailed for photographing the guns at Gibraltar, hid within the Taj Mahal to spend an evening alone, savoring the solitude at sunset and swimming in the pool by moonlight. He registered his body as a ship, the S.S. Halliburton, in order to enter the Panama Canal and remains the only person to have swum its length, 48 miles. Thoroughly original, he twice retraced other travelers' trips in tribute, swimming the Hellespont like his hero Byron and crossing the Alps by elephant as Hannibal had in 218 BC.

As for pushing boundaries at home, Halliburton was likely lovers with the gay movie star Ramón Novarro, and, even more openly, he commissioned an architect to build his cantilevered home, nicknamed Hangover House, in Laguna Beach with three bedrooms: one each for himself, his boyfriend Paul Mooney, and Mooney's boyfriend, the architect. It is the basis for Heller House in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead [Kindle].

In March 1939, now enormously famous, Halliburton, Mooney, and an experienced crew left Hong Kong in their custom Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, to make landfall at the San Francisco World's Fair. Exactly three weeks out, they hit a typhoon and perished. Much earlier, he had written to his father:

And when my time comes to die, I’ll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain and thrills—any emotion that any human ever had—and I’ll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed...

Ever mindful of his public persona, Halliburton occasionally peppered his narratives with nameless, entirely made-up female love interests, yet he lingers over male beauty, and his private letters are explicitly gay. His many travel books include The Royal Road to Romance and Seven League Boots. He dedicated his first adventure book to his roommates at Princeton, whose “sanity, consistency, and respectability” inspired him to flee.

Los Padres National Forest

One million seven hundred sixty-two thousand acres is only enough to rank Los Padres the 30th largest national forest in the US. (The biggest is Tongass with 16,576,303 acres in Alaska.) As you can see, in pockets it is still autumn. A glorious topper to a day that began with this sunrise over Sunset and continued with a visit to the Getty Villa in Malibu with two of my all-time favorite people ever.

Superpod

Who was saying only yesterday he wouldn't exist as himself without his camera? Santa Cruz Island's landscapes (after the jump) were trumped by a superpod of more than 1,000 Common Dolphins surrounding our ferry last night on the way back. Click to enlarge.

Interviewed by Francis Xavier

How am I like Eddie Redmayne? No, not that. Specifically: ER answered his interview questions with Brooks Barnes of the NYT in the restaurant of the Sunset Tower Hotel and I answered my interview questions for 'fringe culture fanatic' Francis Xavier of the Examiner in Room 509 of the Sunset Tower Hotel. And frankly Xavier asked better Qs than did Brooks. Check it out and for goodness sake leave a comment about LGBT books on the Examiner's site so they know readers still read.

These Things Happen, a Bestseller in Los Angeles

McEwan, Diaz, Eggers, Munro, Kramer, Mantel, and Smith. Over the weekend, on a visit to the venerable L.A. indie Book Soup, I was delighted to see Richard Kramer's gay novel These Things Happen [Kindle] at #6 on their bestsellers list. If you haven't yet met Wesley (age fifteen) and George (Wesley's dad's partner), make reading their story another of your resolutions.

A Visit to the ONE Archives in Los Angeles

Saturday morning we researched a project at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles. Highly recommended for their historic holdings, as well as a wonderful sale of duplicate books. If you haven't read it, try Lillian Faderman's and Stuart Timmons' history Gay L. A..

Born August 26: Christopher Isherwood

Vastly underappreciated, and remembered largely for the wrong reasons, Christopher Isherwood changed the way fiction is written with his "I am a camera" style of narration. Read his interview in the Paris Review's series The Art of Fiction and make time for one of the best gay books ever, Christopher and His Kind*, which is equally enthralling about literary revelations and sexual mores: Rejecting his uptight, upperclass England, Isherwood spent much of his twenties in Berlin where he dated working class teens. Falling in love with young Heinz at a time when living quarters were especially scarce, he moved into Heinz's family's one bedroom apartment; the parents moved out of their bedroom and slept in the living room so the twenty-five year-old Brit could enjoy a double bed in privacy with their fifteen year-old son. Another person he met was Jean Ross, on whom he based Sally Bowles in his The Berlin Stories, which of course became Cabaret. After moving to England and on to New York with Auden, and further literary successes, Isherwood settled permanently in Los Angeles, where when he was forty-eight he met teenager Don Bachardy. They remained partners for over thirty years until Isherwood's death in 1986. Their relationship is the subject of the documentary,  Chris & Don. A Love Story. After more than 1,100 pages of Diaries: 1939-1960 and another 800 pages of The Sixties, in November comes 928 pages of Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983.

*not sure about this BBC2 film

Born July 17: Fred Halsted

Born in Long Beach in 1941, Fred Halsted said that although they were working class and he had to help with agricultural jobs to earn money for his mom, he grew up in "paradise. A life of being free. As a kid I was able to run naked through a hundred miles of orange groves in fragrant bloom." He maintained his joy in plants -- majoring in botany at L.A. State, owning a nursery in El Monte, doing gardening work for Joey Heatherton and Vincent Price -- but he couldn't yet regain that youthful sexual freedom. He said he was a petit bourgeois and "the biggest closet queen you can be" and even a raw entrapment by the vice squad in 1967 didn't change him. What finally shattered him was RFK's assassination. After that, he decided he wanted to make the world a better place, and make a lot of money, through porn, including the first ever depictions of certain hardcore S/M acts.

Long before video and digital, Halsted spent three years shooting film for L.A. Plays Itself. It was 1972 and he says his was the first gay porn to be told from a sadist's point of view. It was definitely the first to be screened like an art film for big name New York critics. And surely the first to have a sex scene with no sex -- just shots of WeHo traffic while you hear the voice of an older top and young hayseed negotiating their needs. Halsted also arranged a screening for "all these gay liberationists, writers and other artists." Guess what? Hated it! He said "they expected me to give them a poem to sexual virginity... I thought they’d been around, but they acted like they’d never seen a cock before." Soon enough, financial success and critical acclaim caught up with him; his vision helped define the macho man gay look of the 1970s and still today the only hardcore movies in the Film Collection of MoMA are Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself and Sex Garage. But the 80s were a bad time for him, with more commercialized, video porn, his worsening alcoholism, and the advent of aids, which killed his long-time lover, onscreen co-star, and tormentor, Joey Yale, in 1986. Halsted shot himself in the head in 1989. Read William E. Jones' book Halsted Plays Himself published last year by Semiotext(e).

Born May 18: Don Bachardy

Once and for all, Don Bachardy isn't just Christopher Isherwood's much younger partner. Look at his nuanced, revealing sketches of their famous friends. Among his oil paintings, Bachardy's official gubernatorial portrait of Jerry Brown hangs in the California State Capitol. In the documentary Chris & Don. A Love Story he thoughtfully discusses his life as an artist and the power imbalances of a 30+ year relationship that began when he was southern California teenager and his new English bf in his late forties was already an international literary star. Still living in Santa Monica, today Bachardy turns 78. (This August Isherwood would have been 108.)

Gone Surfing

I'm in Pacific Palisades this week with one of my all-time favorite people. Back soon.

Basement of Wolves by Daniel Allen Cox

        

One of our most original and most interesting writers Daniel Allen Cox last week published his third novel, Basement of Wolves. Daniel's first novel Shuck [Kindle], which drew loosely on his experiences posing nude for photographers such as Richard Kern, Stanley Stellar, and Reed Massengill, and his few appearances in adult film, was nominated for a Lammy. His second novel, Krakow Melt [Kindle], which drew loosely on his year living in Poland, was nominated for a Lammy and the Ferro-Grumley. Daniel describes his new novel, about an actor spending a week in a hotel with a younger hustler, as his "most mainstream book, whatever that means." Arsenal Pulp Press says:

"Michael-David is a paranoid actor who feels that fame has ruined him. When a film shoot with wolves for co-stars takes a troubling turn, he disappears shortly before the premiere and barricades himself in an L.A. hotel, convinced that he’s cursed and must ride it out in hiding. He begins to explore the hotel’s secret passageways with the help of a young skateboarder he befriends, away from the glare of the spotlight. Meanwhile, the film’s director, suspicious that Michael-David is having an affair with his ex, is trying to find him in time for the premiere. A long-dormant nicotine addiction leads him closer to the target and into the path of danger, while the wolves also sniff out Michael-David for one final scene. A work of dream logic, Basement of Wolves is a haunting and cinematic romp through the minefields of identity crisis."

 Daniel reads in NYC on April 25 at B&N 82 + Bway, in Montreal on April 21, and at the Ottawa Writers Festival on April 29. His next project is a screenplay with Bruce La Bruce about a romance between a teenager and an 80 year-old.

For Harry Hay Centenary, L.A. Dedicates Mattachine Staircase

East Coast queers like to believe the gay rights movement was born on their turf but nineteen years before Stonewall and eleven years before Frank Kameny started the DC chapter, Harry Hay co-founded the Mattachine Society in Los Angeles in 1950. (Before him, Henry Gerber created the Society for Human Rights in Chicago in 1924, which suffered a quick demise after members were arrested.) 

Harry Hay would be 100 today. He is a forgotten hero of American history who deserves far greater recognition; you could make a case that his contributions were more important than Harvey Milk's. Yet it's easy to see why Gay Inc. prefers to ignore him -- he wasn't mediagenic, he was a Communist, he was strongly anti-assimilationist, and he and his longtime partner John Burnside also co-founded the Radical Faeries. So kudos today to Silver Lake for renaming the Cove Steps in his honor, The Mattachine Steps. Though I'm obliged to point out the sign omits the word gay and does nothing for queer visibility for passersby who don't know the Mattachine Society.

The play The Temperamentals has gotten plenty of press. Read Stuart
Timmons' newly updated biography or try the Hay collection, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder. On Sunday April 15, the ONE Archives culture series will host a panel discussion about Harry Hay with film clips and readings. Or, shut up and dance: PJ DeBoy, John Cameron Mitchell, Amber Martin, and Paul Dawson host monthly party Mattachine, now in its fourth year at Julius. 

Below, an amazing trifecta: Vito Russo interviews Barbara Gittings and Harry Hay, circa 1983.

(Hay photo via. Sign photo: Anthea Raymond)

Born March 10: John Rechy

Although Scottish-Mexican-American John Rechy doesn't want to be ghettoized as a gay writer, his most important work pioneered a new type of literature honestly depicting men who have sex with men. In 1963 his first novel, City of Night [Kindle], followed the aimless encounters of a nameless hustler turning tricks in New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, crosscut with memories of his childhood in El Paso. By making his protagonist anonymous and introducing a succession of minor characters seen only briefly, Rechy re-emphasized the sensation of hustling for the reader. (He knew his trade: He continued to work as a prostitute on Santa Monica Blvd even after the book became a surprise hit, even after he became a professor at UCLA, even after he turned forty.) Decades later in 2003, a NYT critic called City of Night a "bona fide cult classic," "deservedly considered a milestone of transgressive fiction." That was not the consensus when it first appeared. And after thirteen books, his literary awards are limited to an NEA grant and lifetime achievement recognitions from PEN West, Publishing Triangle, and the ONE Foundation.

Rechy's second novel, Numbers [Kindle], trod the same path as City of Night but from another direction: a slightly older Johnny Rio returns to L.A. for a ten day binge not as an escape but to recapture his previous glory; some readers see Johnny Rio as using sex not merely to confirm his desirability but also as a means to find a greater connection and begin to forge a gay identity. For 1967, that was a big step. Among Rechy's ten other novels are Rushes, Bodies and Souls, The Coming of Night, Marilyn's Daughter (about a girl who believes herself to the love child of Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy), and his much-praised The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. His three works of nonfcition are The Sexual Outlaw [Kindle], Beneath the Skin: Collected Essays, and from 2009 his memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman [Kindle]. Seventy-eight today, Rechy lives in West Hollywood with Michael, his partner of thirty years.

"8"

After the jump, watch that much-buzzed 90-minute staged reading in Los Angeles of Dustin Lance Black's documentary play about Prop 8. Directed by Rob Reiner, it stars Brad Pitt as Judge Vaughn Walker, George Clooney as David Boies, Martin Sheen as Ted Olson, and Jane Lynch as Maggie Gallagher. Other participants include Kevin Bacon, Jamie Lee Curtis, Christine Lahti, John C. Reilly, Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Matthew Morrison. The one-time event raised $2 million for the American Foundation for Equal Rights. The play premiered last September with a reading in New York.

   

Wildness by Wu Tsang

You know it's a good night when you feel you've stepped into a Maira Kalman drawing. MoMA's Documentary Fortnight crowd showcased crazy style for the world premiere of Wu Tsang's Wildness about a pivotal year in the life of an aging gay bar, the Silver Platter, serving the queer Latinos in a poor corner of Los Angeles. Race, gender, sexuality, safe spaces, anti-trans crime, community, gentrification, and the fear of hipster popularity mingle with even more amorphous issues like the essence of beauty and the passage of time. "Original" is an understatement. For starters, the bar narrates. She speaks in a wise, melancholy, semi-magical voice that would be at home in an Isabel Allende novel. At precisely the moment when the interviews with Mexican men, in L.A. legally and otherwise, who like "to dress" [as women] run their course, the outsider djs/artists who run Tuesday night's renegade party surprise you by deciding to start a free legal clinic next door to assist the trans ladies in their dealings with the law. The shocks continue with a fight with L.A. Weekly and a death that leaves the club padlocked and coworkers of 22 years suing each other. Wildness screens at SXSW in March and Wu Tsang's installation recreating the bar will appear in the Whitney biennial in May.