Band of Thebes

Born May 31: Walt Whitman

There's nothing we need to add about the quintessential American writer and his love of comrades, his manly love of comrades, but you might celebrate today by rereading his Calamus poems. [His beloved Peter Doyle appears with him, center.]

Or celebrate by listening to Whitman himself read from "America." The best 34 seconds of your day. [Link fixed.]

Or by reading his journals, in his handwriting, flipping through page by page online at the spectacular Library of Congress site.

Or by reading Gary Schmidgall’s Walt Whitman: A Gay Life.

           We Two Boys Together Clinging

We two boys together clinging,    
One the other never leaving,    
Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making,    
Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,    
Arm’d and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving,            
No law less than ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving, threatening,    
Misers, menials, priests alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on the turf or the sea-beach dancing,    
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,    
Fulfilling our foray.

Delos Ruins

Delos was home to people for a thousand years before Olympian Greek mythology made it the birthplace of Artemis and Apollo. But things really got interesting in the sixth year of the Peloponnesian War, around 425 BC, when a Delphic Oracle decreed that because Delos was so sacred, all the buried corpses had to be disintered and moved to a nearby island and henceforth no one could be born or die on Delos, birth and death being impure events. At their peak, they had a population of 30,000 people on an island 5km wide and 1.3km long. The city was sacked in 88 BC by a rival army and again in 69 BC by pirates. Decline came quickly. The excavation of the ruins has so far lasted 134 years.

Born May 30: Bertrand Delanoe, Colm Toibin

Before 2001, the largest city to elect a gay mayor was Winnipeg. Then, in the spring of that year, came Paris, Berlin, and Hamburg. French Socialist Bertrand Delanoe had come out in 1998, in a televised interview when a journalist asked if he was gay. As a member of the Paris city council and a member of Senate, he had always supported glbt rights, and had often marched in Paris’s pride parade. As mayor, he has been a great inventor in ways to improve the quality of free, public, communal life in the city, which he does not want to become a museum. In 2002 he began the hugely popular Paris Plage, turning two miles along the Seine into a beach. That same year he also initiated La Nuit Blanche, slang for sleeplees night, a sundown-to-sunrise festival of the arts in museums and public spaces throughout the city. About 2:30 AM, as he was greeting people in the crowded Hotel de Ville, he was attacked and stabbed by Azedine Berkane. Delanoe insisted the events should continue, though his wound was more serious than initially reported and he was hospitalized for two weeks. Berkane’s act was not premeditated—Delanoe had been scheduled to be at Hotel de Ville—but when he found himself with his five-inch knife close to the mayor, Berkane felt it his duty as “the weapon-bearing arm of the Koran” to stab Delanoe because “the Koran advocates the execution of homosexuals.” Berkane was sentenced to a psychiatric hospital. Last month, doctors suggested he be allowed a three-month trial release. Instead, he fled and, despite an all-points bulletin manhunt, is still at large.

After being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Colm Toibin’s first novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his wonderful novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros. Three books he considers major influences on his work are The Sun Also Rises, Giovanni’s Room, and Go Tell It On the Mountain, and he told B&N his ten favorite novels, not in order, are: Company, Beckett; A Book of Common Prayer, Didion; Doctor Faustus, Mann; Daniel Deronda, Eliot; Age of Iron, Coetzee; Amongst Women, McGahern; The Portrait of a Lady, James; The Trial, Kafka; Things Fall Apart, Achebe; Island, McLeod; and The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul.

Santorini Snapshots

   

 

Essential Viewing

Watch the awesome deleted scene about Brokeback Mountain from this weekend’s Knocked Up. Very, very vulgar but perhaps endearingly so.

Born May 29: Melissa Ethering, Rupert Everett

When her friend k.d. lang invited her on stage at the Triangle Ball celebrating Clinton’s inauguration, Melissa Lou Etheridge was so happy she blurted out, “I just want to say how proud I am to be a lesbian!” It was big news. Eight months later she released Yes I Am which catapaulted her into radio’s top 10 with the songs “I’m the Only One” and “Come to My Window,” which won her her second Grammy the following year. To date it remains by far her best-selling album, six-times platinum. So much for coming out being a career ender. In total, her nine album have sold more than twenty-seven million copies making her approximately the 125th most successful artist of all time. She has four children, two by Julie Cypher and twins born last year by Tammy Lynn Michaels. When she married Tammy Lynn Michaels in 2003, their mothers were their ring bearers. In October 2004 Etheridge was diagnosed with breast cancer, and four months later she appeared bald at the Grammys to sing Janis Joplin’s "Piece of my Heart," a performance that remains legendary. Earlier this year, she won an Academy Award for best song and naturally thanked Tammy Lynn as her wife. There was nothing remotely ironic about the out, proud, gay-rights activist rocker accepting her statue from Queen Latifah and John Travolta.

Rupert Everett was sent off to boarding school when he was seven and ran away to London when he was fifteen to become an actor. When he was twenty-three he starred with Kenneth Brannagh in the play Another Country and two years later made the film version with Colin Firth. He came out when he was twenty-nine and didn’t get any roles for a while, possibly as much from having starred with Bob Dylan in the bomb Hearts of Fire as for his openness about his sexuality. He appeared in Pret-a-Porter and The Madness of King George, but his breakout came in 1997 when he starred opposite Julia Roberts in My Best Friend’s Wedding. It remains one of the few Hollywood roles in which a gay character is happily partnered, out, not a victim, not dying, and not played for laughs, though clever and charming. The following year he appeared as a degayed Christopher Marlowe in Shakespeare in Love, followed by An Ideal Husband, Inspector Gadget, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Next Best Thing, The Importance of Being Earnest, and Stage Beauty. Now he voices Prince Charming in the Shrek movies, one of Hollywood’s most successful family franchises, again disproving the notion that out actors can’t get work. Writing in last week’s New Yorker, David Denby panned Shrek the Third but called Everett “quite splendid.” Everett has written two novels and a memoir that some found a bit bitter in which he revealed he had had a six year affair with Paula Yates, the former Mrs. Bob Geldof and Mrs. Michael Hutchene.

Postcard from Thebes

We trusted the Athens station clerk that we were really on our way to Thebes, even though our ticket said OHBAI. (Athens was AOHNAI.) It was Sunday, May 20, and we had combed our hair to have our picture taken by the monument to the Sacred Band of Thebes erected in 338 BC and discovered in pieces and restored in 1818. Forty-five minutes later we arrived and immediately we noticed three things: We were a long way from the town center, there were no taxis, and the WC had squat toilets. A friendly young woman from Athens, the only other passenger to get off the train at Thebes, offered to call a taxi for us on her cell phone. While we waited she told us ever since the 2004 Olympics people from other parts of Greece, and from other countries, especially Albania, have been flooding to Athens assuming there are jobs, but there aren’t enough. We asked if that created any tension with the Albanians and she looked very sorry to have to have to say yes. When our taxi arrived she translated Archeological Museum for the driver. At the museum, the woman in the little hut twenty feet from the shut gate spoke just enough English to tell us the museum is closed for five years. We walked uphill just as church was getting out and found a long, lively town square with an internet café off one end. Of the twenty-six computer terminals, twenty-three were taken by boys playing video games. We googled our monument and discovered it is in a field near a town 53 kilometers away, where they died in battle. Outside, it began to drizzle. Many of the crowded cafes appeared to be only for drinking. We found a restaurant where inside thirty-two dressed-up people were dining together at a table that ran the length of the room. We ate outdoors, under a large awning, and the table next to ours was headed by a man whom at least fifty percent of the constant passersby greeted with enthusiasm. Among the people who ignored him were three young boys, all smoking. We returned to what had been a crowded taxi stand, when church was over, now empty. In a deli the man behind the counter happily called a taxi for us. The scenery on the trip back was lovely.

Last Minute Loose Ends Before Greece

                                    Book Bag

Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi. Recommended by Lawrence Durrell in his fine book The Greek Islands, and by Patrick Leigh Fermor in his great Mani, and by our kind, eavesdropping gray-haired waiter at Marseilles who this summer will be making his 28th trip to Greece.

Edith Hamilton, Mythology

Homer, The Odyssey

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

And because we’ll be on ferries and hydrofoils so often, it seems like the perfect time to indulge in two shipwreck novels that we've never read:

Defoe, Robinson Crusoe

J.M. Ballantyne, The Coral Island. How could we not love a novel that begins, "Roving has always been, and still is, my ruling passion."

And secretly tucked in the back of the bag, as a sort of sure-thing security blanket even though this will be the first read, Christina Stead’s The Little Hotel

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Our last errand was to go to Kiehls on Columbus to buy one of everything. Kiehls is closed for renovations. We are going to Greece without shampoo, conditioner, Soothing Nourishing Face Cream for Men with SPF15, or adequate lip balm. So we’ll be more like Odysseus than we imagined. But at least we have new sunglasses.

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We called our two credit card companies to say we’re going to Greece. (This is important. On our Naga trip, Charles’s credit card company “noticed” his card being used in Bangkok and shut down that account as a security precaution. He was denied everywhere he tried to use his card, regardless of the amount, and finally had to call Washington from Bagan.)

With American Express, we reached an eager young man somewhere in Southeast Asia who announced, “Greece is a beautiful country.” And then, as if perhaps remembering that the calls are recorded and monitored by his supervisor, he added, “I have never been there. But I have seen a picture.”
    We said we have never been there either.
    He said, “Greece. It is a historic place, yes?”
    We said yes.
    He audibly beamed at being correct, “Yes. It has historic.”
    We thanked him very much and wished him a good day.

With MasterCard, we reached a young black woman who said, “Oooooh, nice.”

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Patrick Leigh Fermor says that in Greek the word for stranger and the word for guest is the same.

Born May 17: Howard Ashman

We still think for sheer enjoyment Beauty and the Beast is among the most satisfying movies ever made. Perfectly plotted, gorgeously rendered, it’s smart, funny, scary, and romantic. Best of all, its protagonist is a sensible, solitary reader who prefers books to almost everything else, and, during the possibly too-sweet happy ending, there’s a beautiful instant when she’s clearly disappointed to see the craggy Beast restored to his blandly handsome visage. Lyricist Howard Ashman was the excutive producer and, working with composer Alan Menken, created the witty, sweeping songs. Also collaborating on The Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin, they won two Oscars, two Golden Globes, two Grammys, and were nominated for two Tonys. Ashman died of aids when he was forty, months before the unprecedented triumph of Beauty and the Beast, which remains the only animated movie ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. His partner Bill Lauch accepted his second Oscar on his behalf.

Fellow Travelers Book Party

The sole downside of co-hosting last night’s book party for Thomas Mallon’s universally-praised new novel Fellow Travelers is that journalism ethics and simple good manners prohibit saying it was a tremendous success. The crowd of 100 people—ages ranging literally from 18 to 82—was so intelligent and fun it was hard to remember it was D.C., except that Charles Francis’s triplex apartment rocked with D.C.-area authors and shakers: Last week’s Triangle Awards’ Lifetime Achievement Award winner Andrew Holleran whose most recent novel is Grief; newscaster Jim Lehrer, whose 16th novel The Phony Marine came out last November; public relations guru Bob Witeck, whose savvy and essential Business Inside Out was published last September; the Washington Post’s Hank Stuever, author of the “personal and profound” [PW] Off Ramp: Adventures and Heartache in the American Elsewhere; Chris Bull, author of Perfect Enemies and editor of Come Out Fighting; Michael Barone, whose Our First Revolution was published last week; San Francisco Chronicle Washington correspondent Carolyn Lochhead; essayist and frequent NYTRB critic Adam Goodheart , whose book on slavery is forthcoming from Knopf, and Dale Carpenter , whose book Sex, Lies, and the Law: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas, will be published next year by Norton.

After the charming/disarming Mallon’s remarks about the world’s progress with democracy and America’s ongoing quarrel over gay equality—two of the novel’s three themes, with faith—he invited legendary activist Frank Kameny to join him on the staircase. Kameny’s long and ultimately successful battle with the government over sexual orientation as grounds for dismissal or denied security clearances has provided protection for two generations of gay employees since the McCarthy-era witch hunts faced by Mallon’s characters in Fellow Travelers. Kameny thanked the crowd and reassured everyone that although the next issue of the Advocate magazine will include a report of his death from aids, the issue after that, two weeks later, will carry a correction.

Charles quoted reviews of Fellow Travelers that, nationwide, have been extremely good to great to euphoric, especially here, here, and here.

Born May 16: Liberace, Adrienne Rich

Denial wears many faces, and six gaudy rings. Liberace’s titanic flamboyance and volcanic success as a popular pianist—with his tv show outranking I Love Lucy, selling more than two million albums in 1953 alone, his entry in the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's highest paid musician and pianist, and his two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame—was punctuated by his repeated protestations, in court, that he was not a homosexual and had never engaged in a homsexual act. In 1957, he sued a British tabloid for libel for implying he was gay and won $22,000. In 1982, when his live-in boyfriend/chauffeur Scott Thorson sued him for palimony, Liberace continued to claim he had never had sex with a man. Even as he was dying of aids in 1987, he stridently denied he had aids (instead blaming his drastic weight loss on a watermelon diet) and he still maintained he had never had gay sex. In his final months, somehow still believing that his fans were ignorant of his homosexuality, he worried to his manager that if they knew, “that’s all they’ll remember about me.”

Truly at the other end of the spectrum, Adrienne Rich will be remembered for the integrity of her ideas and the power of her poetry, currently sixteen volumes, which include Diving into the Wreck, The Dream of a Common Language, The Fact of a Doorframe, and The School Among the Ruins. Since the 1970s, her work has reflected her life as a lesbian and has been awarded many distinguished prizes: the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a MacArthur Fellowship, and two Guggenheim Fellowships. In 1997, she refused to accept the National Medal of Arts because of “the cynical politics of this [Clinton’s] administration,” and in 2003 she refused to attend a White House symposium on poetry to protest the impending Iraq War. (In fact, so many poets refused to attend, the event was canceled.) Since 1976, Rich has lived with her partner, writer Michelle Cliff.

Born May 15: Jasper Johns, Andy Towle

After serving two years in the army, Jasper Johns returned to New York in 1953 and worked in a bookstore while trying to decide whether he wanted to be a poet or a painter. Within two years he had created iconic images such as Flag and White Flag, and three years after that four of his paintings were in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. From 1955 to 1961, widely considered to be the period of his greatest work, Johns and Robert Rauschenberg were lovers. Although they never spoke about their relationship, they were invited everywhere as a couple. (Despite the anti-gay atmosphere of the McCarthy era, the 1950s saw a great flowering of art by men whose orientation was an open secret: Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, George Hoyningen-Huene, Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden, James Merrill & David Jackson, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, Lincoln Kirstein, Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Ned Rorem, Langston Hughes, Philip Johnson, Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and James Dean.) According to Jonathan Katz, Johns’ and Rauschenberg’s relationship was the deepest of their entire lives and “the after-effects were so powerful that both artists left New York for their native South, changed their pictorial styles radically, and neither saw nor spoke to one another for a decade or more.” Indeed, Johns has never talked about it, though Rauschenberg finally discussed it with Interview magazine in 1990. Both artists continue to paint, and both exhibited new work in 2005.

Before he became king of the gay bloggers, Andy Towle was editor in chief of Genre magazine and before that he was a bartender and manager at the epicenter of Chelsea muscle, Splash. A double major at Vassar and winner of a Wallace Stegner graduate fellowship at Stanford, he has published poems in Poetry Magazine and The Paris Review. When he lived in Hong Kong he was partners for several years with Chip Arndt (who later won The Amazing Race with Reichen Lehmkuhl), and for the last three years he has lived in Chelsea with his partner David Grant. 

Non, Jamais, Oui, et Magnifique

Four French Films:

1. THE VALET.  At its rare best moments, it's mildly amusing to see a supermodel milk 20 million Euros from billionaire Daniel Auteuil in order to save his marriage by pretending she's not having an affair with him but rather with a hapless car parker. At it's far more frequent worst, the movie is an unfunny reminder that Francis Veber's main talent is squandering comic potential and wasting the talents of Auteuil (as he also did in THE CLOSET), Gad Elmaleh, Virginie Ledoyen, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Alice Taglioni.

2. PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES. Awful. Adapted from a London stage play, the script is utterly unconvincing in making us see the star-crossed characters as French, or British, or Earthlings.

3. PARIS JE T'AIME is largely as unoriginal as its title, yet among the 18 shorts, there's enough of the city to make it worthwhile for Francophiles.  Several, including Gus van Sant's gay soulmates in the Marais, are charming and the odd disasters (Christopher Nolan) are thankfully brief. The New Yorker considers Alexander Payne's contribution about a middle-aged postal carrier from Denver fulfilling her lifelong dream of going to Paris, then walking around and dining alone, to be "a masterpiece,"  and maybe it is, but it declaims outright what Chekhov would have only barely hinted. The bigger question is What exactly made the Coen Brothers hate the French so much?

4. LA VIE EN ROSE. Coming in June, an absolutely staggering look, from birth to death, at Edith Piaf. Beautiful, unflinching, inventive, and illuminating, the movie is unmissable.

Born May 14: Magnus Hirschfeld

The next time people try to tell you the gay rights movement is a recent invention or that you’re anachronistically imposing a modern concept on a pre-Stonewall era that could not possibly have supported the idea, remind them of Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1896, he wrote and published a pamphlet on homosexual love called Sappho and Socrates. The next year—one hundred ten years ago—with the leaders of Der Eigene, a gay journal, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose motto was “Justice through science.” Their first goal was to overturn the notorious 1871 German law Paragraph 175, criminalizing male homosexuality. Not only did they campaign openly and publicly, they urged prominent people to sign their petition to repeal the law and collected 5,000 signatures, many from vastly famous men including Einstein, Tolstoy, Mann, Hesse, and Rilke. When the bill to repeal came before the Reichstag in 1898, it failed, and, infuriated by their hypocrisy, Hirschfeld contemplated outing various members of parliament who had voted against it. Undaunted by the defeat, the committee continued to get the bill reintroduced repeatedly over the next decades.
        Thirty-four years before Kinsey, Hirschfeld collected detailed information about sexual behavior in surveys from 10,000 people and published the results in his 1914 book Homosexuality in Men and Women. Extending his push for gay rights into other media, in 1919 Hirschfeld wrote and acted in a movie called Different from the Others starring Conrad Veidt, whose character comes out to thwart his extortionist gay ex-lover but then loses his job and kills himself. That same year, the government gave Hirschfeld a former royal palace in Berlin to house his Institute for Sexual Research, which offered medical and psychological consultations, marriage counseling, contraception, sex education, and promoted women’s emancipation and rights for gay and transgender people. The institute’s ongoing success inevitably drew the attention of the Nazis and one of their early actions, on May 6, 1933, was to ransack the archives and confiscate names and addresses. On May 10, the Nazis returned to hold a massive book burning in Opernplatz on Unter den Linden, destroying the invaluable collection of 20,000 volumes and 5,000 images depicting “deviants” and ideas that were “un-German.” Hirschfeld was on a lecture tour of the United States and never returned home. In Nice in 1935, on his sixty-seventh birthday, he had a heart attack and died, survived by his partner, colleague, former student, and heir, Li Shiu Tong, who lived until 1993.

Born May 11: Valentino, Judge, Bean

Jackie’s wedding dress when she married Onassis? Valentino. Elizabeth Taylor’s gown for Guy de Rothschild’s Bal Proust? Valentino. Sophia Loren's dress the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. Jane Fonda's dress the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. Julia Roberts’ vintage gown the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. Cate Blanchett’s pale yellow, burgundy-sashed gown the night she won her Oscar? Valentino. The most-worn designer at this year’s Oscars? Valentino. Fabulousness becomes monotonous, but style is forever. Valentino Garavani has been a top designer since he started, and, come July, Rome will host a three-day extravaganza to celebrate his forty-five years in fashion. For twelve years he and the company’s financial manager, Giancarlo Giammetti, were lovers; they remain business partners, and in 1990 they formed an Italian charity to help people living with aids. Since 1982, Valentino and Bruce Hoeksema, an American who designs handbags and jewelry, have been life partners. Embracing opulence, Valentino owns two homes in Rome, one of the largest houses in the Holland Park section of London, an apartment on Fifth Avenue, a chalet in Gstaad, and a castle in France; but he recently sold his villa in Capri. His website is elegance  pixelated.

A Catholic priest, a Franciscan, a man of seemingly endless energy and compassion, Mychal Judge’s inner life was fueled by his faith, Alcoholics Anonymous, and Dignity. He told Bill Clinton he thought the founders of AA had  done more for humanity than Mother Teresa, and he was buried on the twenty-third anniversary of his sobriety. At his funeral, attended by more than 3,000 people, Malachy McCourt repeated the story that Judge said if he was given money from right wingers, he passed it on to gay groups. Always a friend to outsiders, Judge ministered tirelessly to aids patients and performed their funeral Masses when some Catholic churches were unwilling to do so. As one of five chaplains of the Fire Department of New York, he rushed to the World Trade Center on September 11 and was killed there, though not while giving last rites as is often claimed. Nine months later, Congress passed the Mychal Judge Act, authorizing federal death benefits to anyone listed on the insurance policy of a police officer or firefighter killed in the line of duty. Previously only spouses, parents, or children could receive federal benefits but for the first time this entitled gay and lesbian partners to equal compensation. (John Ashcroft urged Bush to veto it; he didn't.) Although the Church has resisted efforts to canonize Judge as a saint, his legacy continues to grow. One biography was published in 2002, another will be published this September, and last year he was the subject of a documentary, The Saint of 9/11, narrated by Ian McKellan. 

Former baseball player Billy Bean took the long road to coming out. Working his way through many forms of denial, including marrying a woman, he was almost thirty before he had the sex he wanted, with a man. While playing for the Padres, he bought a house in Del Mar, California with his first boyfriend, Sam Madani, an Iranian-American from Washington, D.C., and when teammates dropped by unexpectedly, to celebrate his first major league home run, he asked Madani—who had prepared a gourmet dinner his honor—to hide in the garage. Two years later Madani died of aids and Bean could not reveal the nature of his grief to anyone. That was his final year in the major league. Late the following year, when he was thirty-two, he finally came out to his supportive mother, who was hurt he had hidden it from her. He had begun a long-distance relationship with restaurateur Efraín Veiga and moved to Miami to be with him. In advance of their opening a restaurant together in 1999, Lydia Martin, a Miami Herald writer, asked if she could report that they were a couple as well as business partners. They agreed, and Bean’s coming out was news nationwide, including a front page story in the New York Times. In the years since then he’s said, “It has been a long, hard journey to me, and I want people to learn from my mistakes, not share them.” Read more from his autobiography, co-written with Chris Bull, Going the Other Way.

ASA Announces the U.K.'s Top 10 for 2006

In London earlier this morning, the Advertising Standards Authority announced 2006’s Ten Most Complained About Ads in the U.K. Three were gay related.

Coming in at number one, with 553 complaints, thanks to a church-sponsored campaign, was the Gay Police Association’s print ad (above) suggesting that anti-gay religious rhetoric inspires anti-gay attacks. The ASA upheld the complaints that the ad was offsensive and misleading.

Coming in at number six, with 127 complaints, was French Connection’s tv ad showing two women fighting—Fashion v. Style—in a martial arts competition then kissing each other. The ASA determined that the complaints were not justified. And, at number ten with 89 complaints, was a Dolce & Gabanna television spot that briefly showed two men kissing. Again the ASA ruled the complaints were unjustified. Both tv ads had been approved for broadcast only outside of prime time.

In the enduring spirit of There Will Always Be An England:  The number one most complained about ad of 2005, with more than three times as many objections (1,671), was a television spot for KFC, which, according to the BBC, “featured people in a call centre singing with their mouths full.” The ASA ruled the complaints that this would teach children bad manners were not justified.

For comparison, after Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction with Justin Timberlake at the 2004 Super Bowl, the FCC received between 550,000 and 963,000 complaints, of which the FCC said 99.9% were brought by the Parents Television Council, an activist organization. Viacom paid $3.5 million in fines.

The U.K.'s Top 10 Most Complained About Ads of 2006

1. Gay Police Association, 553 complaints/ offensive, misleading/ upheld

2. HM Revenues and Customs, 271 complaints/ implies plumbers evade taxes/ 
not upheld

3. Dolce & Gabbana, 166 complaints/glamorises knife violence; socially irresponsible and offensive/ upheld

4. Motorola Ltd, 160 complaints/ mobile phone ads condoning knife-related violence and glamorising sexual violence/ not upheld

5. Carphone Warehouse, 145 complaints/ lack of clarity, potentially misleading statements on its claim to be '˜free forever'/ upheld

6. French Connection, 127 complaints/ women kissing/ not justified

7. Channel 5 Broadcasting, 99 complaints/ perceived as racist towards Americans and socially irresponsible in that it could incite racial violence/not upheld

8. Kellogg Company, 96 complaints/ portrayed cruelty to animals (man riding a dog) and would encourage viewers to try the same stunt at home. Kelloggs said the ad was clearly surreal in nature, no dog was actually ridden during filming and that the ad also featured a 'Don't try this with your dog at home' warning/ not upheld

9. National Federation of Cypriots, 93 complaints/ offensive to the Turkish community and likely to incite racial hatred/ upheld

10. Dolce & Gabbana, 89 complaints/ men kissing/ not upheld

Gore Vidal Sounds Off

Equal parts exasperation and erudition, the fiery cocktail that is Gore Vidal never fails as a mood alterer.  Take a long drink from the Gay & Lesbian Review's full exchange, which ends with a lovely musing on Iago.

On gay identity:

Only a country like this one could have thought up [the idea] that sexual tastes, whatever they may be, dictate identity. Only a bunch of morons would have come to that conclusion.

On religion, race, and gender:

I always find that to use religion or race or sex as identification is folly. After all, once you isolate yourself in a category, Adolf Hitler will come along and say, “I don’t like this category. They’re not voting right so we better get rid of them.”

On how he and his partner Howard Auster lived together for more than fifty years but never had sex with each other:

No sex. But nobody believes that. This is America where everybody must have a full sex life all day long. Fifty percent of heterosexual marriages end in divorce. Where does that come from? Exclusivity. “You’re mine, you’re mine. You swore, Agnes, when I married you, that you’d be true to me.” Come off of it. This is a bunch of BS.

On popularity politics:

“Oh he’s a nice man; I trust him with everything”—this is for the barbarians. Not that we have progressed very far from that state; and we’ve done some regression of late.

On Bush:

It’s the first time we’ve ever had a president that I can think of who was literally a fool. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He doesn’t understand what the words mean.

On Robert Altman:

He was wonderful. His films are great. I’ve never seen a bad one. I’ve seen ones that were not as good as others.

On American book critics:

We haven’t had a decent literary critic in my lifetime. We’ve had good critics who bury themselves in the academy and are never seen again, particularly by their students. We occasionally have great explainers like Edmund Wilson, who stopped reviewing novels around 1945. Just when my generation really needed a critic, he’s doing the Iroquois Indians—which is probably far more useful. So we are adrift. Even the worst newspaper in England has better book reviewers than The New York Times.

On how book critics ought to work:

The most difficult thing on earth, and most people don’t know how difficult it is, because most people can’t do it: describe what it was that you read. If you do that properly you don’t have to throw adjectives around and make cute noises. Just describe it. The words that you use for the description will lead the criticism. Now if you can plow that into some heads, you will have done great work.

Born May 9: Alan Bennett

Has Alan Bennett’s entire career as a playwright, screenwriter, author and actor been devoted to emotional cripples, inhabiting worlds where happiness is as suspect (very) as it is unlikely (highly) and where unrequited love is a redundancy? His best known works are Prick Up Your Ears (gay playwright Joe Orton murdered by his lover), An Englishman Abroad (gay traitor Guy Burgess), The Madness of George III (crazy king), A Question of Attribution (another gay traitor, Anthony Blunt), and The History Boys (promising students in the 80s ultimately promised pathetic, stunted adulthoods). So it’s important to remember the man used to be funny. The son of a Northern butcher, Bennett was accepted at Cambridge but, following a boy who didn’t like him, switched to Oxford where he took a first in history and, in 1960, joined Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller to appear in the instantly famous comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. He also performed in The Secret Policeman’s Ball and The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. Yet throughout his prolific, much-praised television writing and acting, his mainstay has been to find a sad smile or rueful, melancholic laugh in the meekly defeated and the stoically hopeless. Although he has been with his current partner, Rupert Thomas, for fourteen years, only recently has he felt comfortable discussing his gay life. Previously he avoided questions about his sexuality, responding it was like asking a man dying of thirst to choose between Perrier and Malvern bottled water. One unqualified delight—which even Michiko called “a completely charming entertainment: a small gem”—is his novella The Clothes They Stood Up In, about a middle-aged married couple who return from the theatre to discover their flat has been robbed of absolutely everything, down to their last thumbtack and thimble.

Winners of the 2007 Triangle Awards

Fiction: Women
      Rebecca Brown, The Last Time I Saw You (City Lights)
      WINNER Lisa Carey, Every Visible Thing (William Morrow)
      Ivan E. Coyote, Bow Grip (Arsenal Pulp Press)

Fiction: Men
      WINNER Christopher Bram, Exiles in America (William Morrow)
      Martin Hyatt, A Scarecrow’s Bible (Suspect Thoughts Press)
      Stephen McCauley, Alternatives to Sex (Simon & Schuster)

Debut Fiction
      WINNER Martin Hyatt, A Scarecrow’s Bible (Suspect Thoughts Press)
      Alex McLennan, The Zookeeper (Alyson Books)
      Eduardo Santiago, Tomorrow They Will Kiss (Little Brown)

Lesbian Nonfiction
      WINNER Alison Bechdel, Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin)
      Catherine Friend, Hit by a Farm (Marlowe & Company)
      Marcia Gallo, Different Daughters (Carroll & Graf)

Gay Nonfiction
      Bernard Cooper, The Bill from My Father (Simon & Schuster)
      Rigaberto Gonzalez, Butterfly Boy (University of Wisconsin Press)
      WINNER Kenji Yoshino, Covering (Random House)

Last night, New York’s Publishing Triangle presented their 19th annual literary awards. The men’s fiction prize went to Christopher Bram, breaking a recent trend of lesser-known winners: Barry McCrea (2006), Adam Berlin (2005), and Trebor Healey (2004). Bram, who has been honored by the Triangle twice before, beat Stephen McCauley, who has never won an award from this group but is still in the running for the 2007 Lambda Literary Awards to be presented May 31. McCauley wrote a funny post on his website about the many people in his orbit who let him know they like his first novel best; even his mother tells him this though he’s certain she has never read any of his six books. Interestingly, in the Lambda category of gay male fiction he is competing against last night’s winner for the lesbian fiction. The Triangle Awards are given by the writer’s orientation; the Lambda Awards are categorized by the protagonist’s orientation.

Both of this year's nonfiction awards were especially well-deserved: Alison Bechdel for her breakout graphic memoir about her childhood and coming out, particularly contrasted with her father’s closeted life and his early, accidental death; and Yale professor Kenji Yoshino’s trenchant look at the shades of self-closeting and various degrees to which one is out, especially in reaction to subtle pressures in more-or-less accepting surroundings.

The Lifetime Achievement Award was presented to Andrew Holleran for his six books, from his famous debut, Dancer from the Dance, to last year's Grief.

Born May 8: Tom of Finland

To look at Tom of Finland’s drawings is to need both hands. On the one hand, at a time when merely entering a gay bar could mean jail time and the instant end of a career, he was boldly visualizing a world of healthy, happy, all-male sexual camaraderie that was hot and had a sense of humor. On the other hand, his fantasies of hyperidealized, turboerotic, uberbuilt masculinity guaranteed that reality would never, ever measure up. For generations of gay men since the mid-1950s, his art has created an endless coupling of inspiration and insecurity. Born in Kaarina, Finland in 1920, Touko Laaksonen moved to Helsinki when he was nineteen and soon was drafted to fight in World War II. Afterwards, he worked in an advertising agency while American physique magazines began to publish his drawings of rugged lumberjacks, cops, jocks, sailors, soldiers, prisoners, lifeguards, musclemen, and his enduring character Kake. In 1973, at the time of his first gallery show, in Hamburg, he was able to quit his job to draw fulltime. His second gallery exhibit, in Los Angeles, was not until 1978, followed by shows in San Franciso and New York, where he became friends with another artist whose work explored gay S&M, Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1981, Veli, his partner for twenty-eight years, died; Laaksonen survived him by ten years. The Finnish Culture Institute hosted an exhibit of his work in Paris in 1999, and in 2004 MoMA added several of his drawings to their permanent collection.