Band of Thebes

Born February 29: Willi Smith

Willi Smith always said he was more interested in what pimps wore than businessmen in gray flannel suits. Unfortunately, he lacked their knack for business and his first clothing company, started with his sister Touki when he was twenty-five, quickly failed. Three years later, in 1976, with Laurie Mallet, he tried again and despite not having enough money to buy buttons, and certainly not advertising, their inexpensive WilliWear was a success from the start. After his achievements in women's wear he began to design for men, and his fresh, relaxed style became known as "street couture." But his influence rose to the highest levels of fashion and the top echelons of society. He designed the costumes for Bill T. Jones' dance "Secret Pastures" at BAM in 1984, the volunteers' clothes for Christo and Jean-Claude's wrapping of Pont Neuf in 1985, the groom's and groomsmen's suits for Caroline Kennedy's wedding in 1986, and the costumes for Spike Lee's movie musical School Daze in 1987. That same year his company did $25 million in sales. He could keep his clothes reasonably priced because he used inexpensive fabrics from India, where he spent a month or more each year. On a business trip there in 1987 he contracted shigella and pneumonia, and back in New York, he died of those diseases combined with aids, which he may not have known he had. He was thirty-nine.

Born February 28: Stephen Spender

Even though Stephen Spender delayed publication of his first novel, The Temple, for fifty-nine years (until 1988, when he was seventy-nine), you shouldn't expect its gay content to be as important as in E.M. Forster's Maurice (delayed fifty-eight years, until his death). The protagonist's same-sex encounters in pre-War Germany repulse him, and most of the book's focus is political. In real life, after a series of affairs with men, Spender married twice and began to renounce his gay past, although the photo above, in which he is flanked by Auden and Isherwood on Fire Island, was taken six years into his second marriage. Later, he began to rework the past by rewriting selected lines from his eighteen books of poetry. He changed

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution.

to

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution.

In a similar vein, he became increasingly sensitive to how other people portrayed him, even when it might not have been him. In 1994, he sued David Leavitt and Viking for the novel While England Sleeps, which he claimed was based on his life and charged that the gay scenes were "pornographic." They settled out of court, and Leavitt altered certain passages for subsequent editions. Spender died the next year. Among his other legacies were twenty books of nonfiction (biography, criticism, travel, memoir), two plays, and two children. His daughter Lizzie married Dame Edna.

Caption This

Really, if you can't write the punchline to this photo from yesterday morning, I pity you.

Philip Hensher on Changing Attitudes Toward Gays, Deceivers

In April Philip Hensher's massive sixth novel, The Northern Clemency (736 pages, inspired by Tolstoy, covering 1974 to 1996) will be published in his native Britain. He's gay but his fiction tends to focus on everyone. This is relevant when reading his recent commentary in The Independent. In his world, the news is good:

The moral argument has shifted its ground, clearly. In the past, being gay appeared to be grounds for disapproval on its own. These days, the grounds for moral disapproval are not being gay on its own, but the dishonesty of concealing it, and living a life of clear hypocrisy.

Read it here. Not sure about his reasoning that labeling someone gay who is straight is no longer grounds for legal action, but I am sure about his fiction. So is A.S. Byatt. She's a big fan of his novels.

Looking Down Over the Atlantic, Miami Beach

As always, click on the photos to enlarge.

Born February 26: Christopher Marlowe

The Elizabethan dramatist and poet will get what he deserves, tomorrow. (Traveled all day, arriving in Miami just in time for the traffic pandemonium from the blackout before driving south.)

Jacques Nolot's Avant que j'oublie (Before I Forget)

Writer director actor Jacques Nolot's third film in his trilogy about gay life feels less like a movie than a collection of diary entries of a person of no accomplishment and no particular interest. Banal and quotidian events are captured dutifully, dispassionately (at a slowness approaching Tsai Ming-liang's), then out of nowhere a scene will leap to life. Almost sixty, not working, taking many medications with a variety of side effects, Pierre is a former hustler who spends his time paying current hustlers for joyless encounters or complaining with his aging friends about ailments, money, and the young. The scant plot arrives after the death of a vastly rich former client of Pierre's, a friend for thirty-five years, who left him everything and whose family circumvents the will. A subplot about another former hustler, now in his early forties and just released from nineteen years in prison, echoes Pierre's confined life. The movie's truthfulness is its power, precisely because it does not pretty up its portrait of a segment of society and gay culture usually left invisible. While not blindly hopeful or reassuring, Before I Forget might be useful as a warning or cautionary tale. And it does have a wry humor, as when Pierre is recounting how his rich lover's family rejected him for his inferior social position, telling their son, "You can go down a floor, but not to the basement."

Born February 22: Robert Baden-Powell

Look, there's never going to be a DNA test for descendants of probable gay people to determine if their ancestor ever engaged in gay sex; people do not write notes to their anonymous tricks thanking them for the homosexual intercourse; closet cases do not record their activities in any decipherable ways in diaries that might be read; and surviving relatives tend to destroy any evidence of same-sex attraction to "save" their reputation. (Beyond which, one does not need to engage in gay sex to be gay, just as a straight teenage boy can know himself to be heterosexual even before he ever achieves 11 seconds of bliss with a girl. For more scientific fieldwork, see American Pie and The 40 Year-Old Virgin.) Which brings us to Robert Baden-Powell, founder of the Scouts. His strongest and most enduring personal attachment was to the exceptionally handsome Kenneth McLaren, whom Baden-Powell called "The Boy," throughout their lives. His recent biographers think their relationship was sexual. Despite preferring all-male society, Baden-Powell married a woman in 1912. He was fifty-five and she was twenty-three. He seems to have convinced himself that because she was thirty-two years his junior and outdoorsy, a leading Girl Guide, their marriage could be like his deep bonding with athletic young men. He was wrong. Immediately, he began to suffer intense headaches, which did not go away until he moved into a separate bedroom, permanently. So the raging debate about whether gay leaders have anything to offer scouting carries a rucksack packed with irony. And do not fool yourself that the debate is over. Last week, Rick Perry published a book called On My Honor: Why the American Values of the Boy Scouts Are Worth Fighting For, which a certain Eagle Scout who read it calls a 241-page attack on gay people. Even as Perry pays late and scant lip service to tolerance, his discussion of gay scout leaders becomes an expose of NAMBLA. This is the most pressing job for the governor of Texas? And for Ross Perot, who wrote the introduction? The message seems to be resonating with book buyers. On My Honor is #135 on Amazon (where it nicely carries tags for BSA but also for hate, Falwellsim, pandering, and jackboots.) To compare, John Rechy's memoir is #18,186. 

Alaska Last Week, Central Park This Morning

This is almost as bad as comics explaining why their jokes are funny, but the image is small and you need to know that although the water on the right is liquid, everything center and left that looks like surf is ice. All the boulders on the beach were also iced over. Obviously, then, the black rock was a recent arrival. How?  So maybe the photo has something to say about flux vs. permanence, or maybe it's just dark and light shapes on another "severe clear" day of about zero degrees.

Born February 21: David Geffen

David Geffen's entertainment career began with a lie, fabricating family connections to famous people and claiming a college degree, in order to get a job in the William Morris Agency mailroom, but his success is indisputable. Having triumphed three times starting record companies from scratch, backing blockbuster musicals on Broadway (Cats, Dreamgirls), financing extremely successful movies (Risky Business), and co-founding DreamWorks, the boy from a humble corner of Brooklyn sold his first company for $7 million, sold his second for $540 million, and now is worth more than $6 billion. According to Forbes' list last September, he's the 52nd richest person in America. How did he do it? With an uncanny sense of what would be popular, he signed The Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Linda Rondstadt, Jackson Browne, John Lennon's comeback album, Asia, Aerosmith, Guns n Roses, XTC,  Sonic Youth, Blink-182, Peter Gabriel, Neil Young, Nirvana, and Cher. He's been equally prescient about the art market and in the fall of 2006 he sold a de Kooning for $63 million, a Jasper Johns for $80 million, and a Jackson Pollock for $140 million, the most expensive sale of a painting ever. Ditto, his real estate investments. Hit hard by the death of his friend Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell, Geffen began making multi-million dollar donations to aids foundations in the late 80s, yet he was criticized for remaining in the closet. In 1992, he finally came out. In the years since, his philanthropy has kept pace with his wealth. He gave an unrestricted gift of $200 million to the UCLA medical school. Geffen turns 65 today and still suffers from what he told the New York Times fifteen years ago, when he was fifty:

If Geffen has had one conspicuous failure, it is a personal one: his inability to maintain a long-term relationship. Although Geffen is remarkably candid, he winces and struggles when talking about his current personal life. "I aspire to have a relationship with somebody," he says. "I haven't always been successful at it. But being gay is very different from being straight in the area of relationships. Of course, there are gay people who've had a long-term relationship for 50 years, but they're not the rule. And it's difficult to be in a relationship with someone as well known and wealthy as I am. There's a disparity that works in heterosexual relationships that doesn't work in homosexual relationships."

Balderdash.

John Rechy's About My Life and the Kept Woman

    
How could the pioneering writer of such direct, memorable, and gay titles as City of Night, Numbers, Rushes, and The Sexual Outlaw call his memoir About my Life and the Kept Woman? Banal, disjointed, and  straight-sounding. Worse still, for the autobiography of a Mexican-American gay man who early on embraced his sexuality for fun and profit, Grove inexplicably put a photo of a 1940s escandalosa alone on the cover. (The photo above is Rechy at 40; picture a cover photo of him in his 20s.) Not to worry, the best read man on DList says it's good. And finally the media is beginning to give it some attention. Rechy, 74 next month, granted interviews to the Los Angeles Times and Bay Windows, and reviews appeared this week in the Daily News and the Chronicle. He says the theme of the book is "accepting your identity," and he also says he made details up, inventing what wasn't there in order to clarify what was. For the record, the woman of the title was a notorious local mistress, and a beacon of glamor and independence (or, sex and freedom) to an extremely poor kid coming up in El Paso.

Born February 19: Pim Fortuyn

Just to stretch your mind into the fourth dimension, picture the 2002 Dutch conservative-populist sensation Pim Fortuyn among the GOP candidates for president. Like them, he wanted to reduce government's role in health services and education, he spoke against the "Islamisation of our culture," sounded a warning cry about the dangers of shari'a law superseding the Dutch legal code, and pledged to drastically curtail immigration. Now picture him at a debate with Romney, Huckabee, McCain, Thompson, and Giuliani, as he expressed his other views: for euthanasia, for legalized soft drugs, for same-sex marriage, and for reducing the military by combining the army and air force to save money. If that isn't enough, steady yourself and envision a conservative candidate on national television explaining that he enjoyed the taste of semen, comparing it to a strong liqueur. Governors Romney, Huckabee, you have one minute to respond. In any case, though Fortuyn was riding a crest of widespread popularity (fully fifty percent of voters 18-30 supported him, huge in a multi-party system), the Netherlands did not get to have their first ever openly gay Prime Minister, because they had their first assassination in 330 years, since 1672. A thirty-two year old white Dutch man shot him to stop him from exploiting "the weaker parts of society to gain political power." The motive was unrelated to Fortuyn's being gay. He was fifty-four. Contrarian even in death, Fortuyn was buried twice, first in the Netherlands, then dug up and re-interred in Pordenone, Italy, where he owned a second home.

André Téchiné's The Witnesses (Les Témoins)

Just go. Stop reading, brush your teeth, grab your keys, and go see The Witnesses. What more do you need in terms of establishing characters than to watch eager, teenage Manu (above left) flirt with the much older, much enamored Adrien (not pictured) at a public cruising area in Paris, accidentally insult him, ignore Adrien's diatribe against ageism in the gay community, wander into the trees to join a friendly trio, then disengage and run back to Adrien... to ask him to hold his jacket while he has sex. They become friends. They visit a writer, Sarah (Emmanuelle Béart, stunning even with a bad 1984 haircut), and a vice cop, Mehdi (above right), who've just had a baby they haven't yet named and call "the kid," just as Adrien sometimes refers to Manu. For the rest of the movie, every divide is bridged by these four main characters: age and youth, work and idleness, passion and rejection, women and men, France and Morocco, responsibility and freedom, straight and gay, out and closeted, illness and health, authority and rebellion, honesty and deceit, art and life, bliss and death. You will not see anything more gorgeous in a movie this year than a row of yellow bushes against the azure sea. But this is Téchiné (of Ma Saison Préférée and Wild Reeds) so you must watch attentively: As the always pithy Nathan Lee points out in his excellent Village Voice review, when we see Adrien rubbing sun block on his bald head adoringly watching Manu scramble up a tree, we're being shown two opposite responses to risk. I'm intentionally talking around the heart of the movie, which becomes more serious and profound, because it's better if the plot developments are surprising. Just go.

Born February 15: Bill T. Jones

How's this for the cruel vagaries of aids: In 1984, both Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, professional partners running their jointly named dance troupe and boyfriends for thirteen years, since college at SUNY Binghamton, were diagnosed with HIV. Zane died in 1988. Last June, after twenty-three years of being HIV+, Jones added a Tony Award for Spring Awakening's choreography to his many, many honors including a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1994. His more than one hundred maverick dance pieces, which frequently incorporate same-sex attraction, eroticism, anger, and nudity, have been seen worldwide and he often collaborates with the era's leading artists, from Toni Morrison and Max Roach on Degga to Jessye Norman for How! Do! We! Do! Confronting the perceived death sentence of aids, he traveled the country interviewing many kinds of terminally ill patients before creating his celebration of living, Still/Here, which many have loved and some have hated, like the New Yorker's dance critic Arlene Croce, who refused to see such "victim art." In 1995, Jones published his autobiography Last Night on Earth, happily misnamed.

Iran Sweeps Teddy Awards at Berlin Film Fest

Last night at the Teddy Awards, celebrating queer movies at the Berlin Film Festival, four of the five major prizes went to movies about Iranians. The fifth prize, for the best feature, was awarded to a Filipino film for the second time in three years, after Auraeus Solito's win in 2006 for The Blossoming of Maximo Oliveros.

Best Feature: The Amazing Truth about Queen Raquela trans woman from Pinoy must decide between a trans woman in Iceland and a New York man in Paris

Jury Prize: Be Like Others documentary about queer life in Iran

Best Documentary: Football Under Cover soccer match between women's teams from Iran and Germany

Audience Award: Football Under Cover soccer match between women's teams from Germany and Iran

Best Short: Ta, from Brazil, "a sharp and funny look at a brief encounter between two teenage boys."

Readers' Award: Be Like Others 

Born February 14: Kevyn Aucoin

The world's most famous makeup artist "married" his much younger boyfriend in an unofficial ceremony in Hawaii in July 2000 and after that Kevyn Aucion referred to Jeremy Antunes as his husband. In less than two years, the man who easily earned $10,000 a session doing makeup for superstar celebrities' magazine cover shoots or Oscar appearances, the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers about beauty, the only makeup professional ever honored by the Council of Fashion Designers of America, and the founder of a new line of beauty products bearing his name, was dead at forty, without a will, and his husband was locked out of their two shared homes without any legal recourse. His estate went to his adoptive parents back in Louisiana who embody more than their share of contradictions: They are unsophisticated but full of heart; initially repelled by homosexuality, they started the first PFLAG chapter in Lafayette yet refuse to give their son in law even the bed he shared with Kevyn. It's possible that Kevyn and Jeremy were on the verge of breaking up, or merely experiencing a typical rough patch in what might have been a long marriage. Jeremy had left a sick and hurting Kevyn to go to Paris for a week alone, which sounds selfish and indulgent but could be seen as a tough love ultimatum to someone ruinously addicted to many kinds of pain killers and sleeping pills, who had in the preceding six months dropped out of two programs to overcome substance abuse, and who had screwed up his friend Cher's "Song for the Lonely" video shoot (needing to be hospitalized twice) so notoriously that not one star had asked him to do her makeup for the Oscars that spring. In any case, the trip was cut short by Kevin's final hospitalization. The pills were to relieve Kevyn's intense suffering from acromegaly, a pituitary gland disorder that causes excessive growth and had given him an ever enlarging brain tumor, undiagnosed since he was nine years old, at which time he had already discovered makeup. From childhood, his ambition for glamor and success was matched by his generosity of spirit. Two ex-boyfriends continued to work closely with him and even after he had achieved his own fame, he took enormous pleasure and considerable time to do makeup for shopgirls, neighbors, and even the homeless teenage drag queens of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, of which he was a vociferous supporter. Topping the wildly devoted praise by Cher, Janet, Tina, Tori, Gwyneth, Liza, Courtney, and Celine, Mary Tyler Moore said, "There were three men in my life I met who had the ability to make you feel like you were the only person in the world just by looking at you, just with their eyes: One was Sinatra, the other was the current pope, and the third was Kevyn." Despite his instructions that his ashes be scattered in Hawaii where he was married, Kevyn's parents are keeping his cremated remains in Louisiana because they like to visit him.

Gay Highlights from the Berlin Film Festival

Somewhere in the world is there an office so cool that they skip the tired yet addictive Oscar pool and instead try to guess the winners of the Teddy Awards? Tomorrow night the 22nd Teddys will be presented to honor queer cinema at the 58th Berlin Film Festival. Among the contenders for the features prizes are:

Corroboree, In Australia, a dying director hires actors to recreate scenes from his life.
Dream Boy, based on the much loved novel by Jim Grimsley, about a fifteen year old boy who falls in love with his seventeen year-old school bus driver in a religious community in Louisiana.
Drifter, a twenty-five year-old hustler befriends two younger hookers, all of whom turn tricks in the Zoo train station to buy drugs.
Drifting Flowers, from Zero Chou, winner of last year's feature award, a story about lesbians in Taiwan, including the tomboyish lead singer of a band and her blind girlfriend and her jealous little sister.
Hatsu-koi (First Love) In Japan, a student's unrequited crush on a classmate and his relationship with a gay couple.
Otto, or, Up with Dead People, more craziness from Bruce La Bruce, this time centering on a young zombie in Berlin discovered by a filmmaker trying to finish a "political porno zombie movie" called Up with Dead People.
The Amazing Truth about Queen Raquela, a transsexual in the Philippines must choose between Valerie, "Iceland's only transsexual," and Michael, a web porn producer in New York.
Women's Hearts, an Italian bride-to-be and the Moroccan transvestite making her wedding gown travel to Casablanca for surgery to "restore" the woman's virginity, until their feelings change.

The festival's documentary section looks particularly strong with

A Jihad for Love examines the lives of gay Muslims in seven countries.
Be Like Others looks at being queer in Iran where homosexuality is punished by death but transsexuality is legal, leading many young people toward gender reassignment
Darling! The Pieter-Dirk Uys Story South Africa's answer to Dame Edna is Evita Bezuidenhout, who uses humor to fight apartheid and aids in performances seen by more than one million school children.
Dead Gay Men and Living Lesbians, Rosa von Praunheim reconsiders gay history from the Third Reich to today with many original interviews with survivors of Nazi persecution.
Derek, Isaac Julien's portrait of director Derek Jarman features Tilda Swinton who starred in seven of his films.
East/West Sex & Politics, looks at contemporary gay life in Russia, especially the ongoing fight to legalize their annual pride parade in Moscow, scene of violent confrontations with police and anti-gay protesters.
The Other Side of Istanbul shows the constant contradictions of the thriving gay culture in Turkey's most cosmopolitan city.
Suddenly, Last Winter was made by a gay couple who traveled their native Italy in 2006  interviewing people about gay rights as the country debated a national law for domestic partnerships.
Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell rediscovers the classical musician who nevertheless pioneered New York's garage funk of the 1970s and 80s before dying of aids.
With Gilbert & George a former model of theirs began filming the art stars eighteen years ago.

To refresh your memory, last year's winners were Zero Chou's Spider Lilies for best feature and Esther Robinson's A Walk into the Sea: Danny Williams and the Warhol Factory for best documentary. Take a look at the huge, spiffed out ceremony (bits are in English), which included Berlin's gay Mayor Wowi and Almodovar star and current Oscar nominee Javier Bardem who celebrated by wearing false eyelashes. Just to ponder, not to complain, but why don't our film festivals look like this?

Born February 12: Jacqueline Woodson

In fourteen novels for young readers and seven picture books, Jacqueline Woodson has given voice to characters usually ignored or silenced in mainstream stories, and in doing so she's been a finalist for or won the National Book Award, the Newbery Honor Medal, the Caldecott Medal, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the ALA Notable Book Award, the Parents' Choice Award, the Booklist Editors' Choice Award, and many, many regional prizes. Although she most often writes about friendship, especially across racial and class lines, she is equally adept in her studies of family or love. She writes about strong girls and caring boys and she has included glbtq characters as adults and children, sometimes as the primary storyline. A complete list of her novels, her descriptions of them, where she wrote them, and a brief explanation of why she wrote each one, can be found here. She lives in Brooklyn with her partner, loves pizza, hates artichokes, named her daughter for the singer Toshi Reagon who happens to be the girl's godmother, and she doesn't believe in writer's block.

Born February 11: Tammy Baldwin

Who is the only Baldwin better than Alec? Tammy. Technically, she was the first openly gay person elected to Congress in U.S. history. (Before her, Gerry Studds, Barney Frank, Jim Kolbe, and Steve Gunderson were elected as closeted men, were forced out by ignoble circumstances or came out, and except for Gunderson were re-elected as openly gay incumbents.) With her victory in 1998, Baldwin also became the first out lesbian in Congress and the first woman elected to Congress from Wisconsin. Despite anti-gay smear campaigns by her Republican opponents, she has won each of her most recent three elections by two-to-one margins. Representing Madison, she voted against the Iraq invasion in 2003, and last August she cosponsored two separate resolutions to impeach Cheney and Gonzales. She has been progressive at least since she was nine in 1971, when her mother married a black man and Tammy was struck by the injustice of what became a frequent occurrence, white adults stopping her stepfather to ask what he was doing with a blond, blue-eyed girl. She graduated first in her class at Madison West High School, then attended Smith College and the University of Wisconsin Law School. This year she and her partner Lauren Azar celebrate their twelfth anniversary. Just a thought, but since she has Hillary's haircut and Obama's mixed parentage, maybe she could be President then everyone would be happy.

Saturday Morning International Dance Diplomacy

It started seven years ago as a spoof on a Japanese comedy show, mocking the inanity of boy bands and the government's blind optimism in the face of a severe recession (suggesting people stay happy even when they've lost all their clothes but a fig leaf). An instant classic, Yatta! was released as a single by the Leaf Squad in April 2001, reached #6 on the Japanese pop charts and went triple platinum. Because there is no greater universal truth than underwear dancing, Yatta became a global phenomenon. You can compare the contrasting styles of French boys outdoors in Lyon, French boys indoors at CMF, California boys on stage at UC Santa Barbara, Southern boys in a male beauty pageant (with the Japanese version projected behind them), Seattle boys in green shorts rather than the mandatory fig leaves, German boys in a basement in Marburg, a kind of awesome animated version shot in Star Wars Galaxies by SOE, and the original Leaf Squad recreating their sensation live on Jimmy Kimmel. By far the best version comes from eight Swedish boys from the Katedral school in Vaxjo, found by Brian.