Band of Thebes

Another Gay Sequel

Attempting to continue the age-old tradition of big hearted, brainless, no budget, sex spoof movies so terrible they're ultimately enjoyable, Another Gay Sequel: Gays Gone Wild! opens today at the Quad in New York, the Sunset 5 in Los Angeles, and the Gateway in Fort Lauderdale. Apparently this sequel is remarkably similar to the moronic sexual lunacy of first one, Another Gay Movie (2006), except that three of the four returning main characters, now on spring break in Florida, are played by new actors. A change the movie addresses in its first minutes. Last time the cameos were by Graham Norton, Matthew Rush, and Richard Hatch; this time it's Lady Bunny, RuPaul, Amanda Lepore, Colton Ford, Michael Lucas, and Perez Hilton. So you know what to expect, which puts you ahead of the critics from The New York Times and Variety, who were shocked! by the sheer! stupidity! of it all!

It opens September 5 in San Francisco and Chicago, September 12 in Philadelphia and Palm Springs, September 19 in DC and Boston, and September 26 in Dallas and Atlanta.

Born August 29: Edward Carpenter

Ardent socialist (author of the anthem England Arise, founding member of the Independent Labour Party), feminist (saying, “there is no solution except the freedom of woman,” he considered traditional marriage to be a form of prostitution), gay activist (his groundbreaking books like My Days and Dreams and The Intermediate Sex go far beyond earlier essays by his friend John Addington Symonds), pacifist, nudist, mystic, poet, and the first person to introduce sandals to modern Britain, Edward Carpenter’s greatest legacy may be how he lived his life. Utterly changed after reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1863, he began to dream of a brotherhood of manly love that would erase class lines and give rise to a true democracy. After graduating from Cambridge and leaving a position vacated by Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, Carpenter gave public lectures in Leeds intended for the working class (but attended only by the middle class, who didn’t warm to his ideas) and sought to befriend laborers, unsuccessfully. Finally in 1891, after meeting by chance on a train, he and uneducated George Merrill became lovers. In 1898, when Carpenter was fifty-four and Merrill was thirty-two, they established a house together, absolutely unheard of in an England still widely antigay in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trials. They lived together openly as a couple for thirty years until Merrill’s death, and their cross-class love was the direct inspiration for their friend E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, as well as D.H. Lawrence’s heterosexualized version, Lady Chatterly’s Lover. Not all authors were so enamored. In the decade after Carpenter’s death, George Orwell ridiculed “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac” among the Socialists. Yet an American Communist, Harry Hay, credited Carpenter’s writings for galvanizing him to start the first gay rights group, The Mattachine Society, in Los Angeles in 1950.

Born August 28: Karl Ulrichs

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had an affair with his riding instructor when he was fourteen, was forced to quit his civil servant job for being gay when he was thirty-four, and began publishing pamphlets explaining and defending same-sex love when he was thirty-seven. Five years later, the day after his forty-second birthday, he addressed the German congress, coming out publicly and demanding they repeal their anti-gay laws. It was 1867, one hundred two years before Stonewall, and he was shouted down before he could finish his speech. Though his books were banned in Saxony and Berlin he continued writing on the subject for the rest of his life. In 1870, he published Araxes, which lays out all of the modern arguments for the rights of gay citizens. In 1879, he published the twelfth volume of his ongoing project, Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love, and moved to Italy, which was more hospitable. Indeed, Ulrichs was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Naples shortly before he died, one month prior to his seventieth birthday. Today, streets are named for him in Bremen, Hanover, and Munich, where this afternoon they will celebrate with their annual street party and poetry reading in Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Platz. In his final years, he wrote

“Until my dying day I will look back with pride that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the spectre which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt.”

Born August 27: Jeanette Winterson

Feisty Jeanette Winterson wrote her landmark first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, in two months because she needed money. It won the Whitbread Prize for best first book in 1985 and has become a modern queer classic. (The television version, adapted by Winterson, won the BAFTA for best drama in 1990.) Her finest novel is The Passion, which takes place in France and Venice during the Napoleonic Wars, and her most ambitious novel is Sexing the Cherry, which touches down in several centuries but is most firmly rooted in the Restoration. All of her fiction combines elements of history, religion, myth, and magic realism to form a sort of quicksilver anti-reality, and her real life is equally exciting. From 1988 to 2000, she  was partners with Margaret Reynolds, notwithstanding Winterson's affair with Pat Kavanagh, who is still married to London literary star, Julian Barnes, and happens to be Winterson's agent. Many believe that relationship to be the inspiration for her novel about an affair, Written on the Body, published in 1992 and dedicated "to Peggy Reynolds with love." When asked by an influential British newspaper to name the best book of the year, she chose her own. More recently she has published Gut Symmetries, The Powerbook, which she adapted as a play for the Royal National Theatre, and Lighthousekeeping. Her website, with frequent updates and a monthly letter, is among the best of any writer's. In 2006, she received an OBE. Her latest novel is The Stone Gods and her next will be The Battle of the Sun. Earlier this year she wrote an essay for the Times about the 80th anniversary of two novels: Orlando (loves) and The Well of Loneliness  (loathes).

True 10: Gay Australian Diver Wins Olympic Gold

Earning four perfect 10s on his final dive, 20 year old Matthew Mitcham, the only openly gay male athlete at the Olympics, won the gold medal in men's 10m platform diving. Via Brian, Outsports, and Queerty, here's the delightful video of him talking to the Aussie press and alongside his mother and his partner in Beijing.

Despite their love of background stories on the athlete's personal lives, NBC entirely degayed Mitcham in their coverage. Think Progress and Daily Kos weren't happy.

Meanwhile, a lesbian athlete who competed in judo at the Sydney Olympics told gay people to "shut up." Outsports has the quote:

The GLBT community should let gay athletes deal with gay issues off of the podium. In the name of the Olympic spirit and humanity… shut up and let gay athletes focus on the endeavors that they have worked so hard to reach.

In honor of Mitcham, and all openly gay athletes who give it their best, here's a handsome devil ready to bestow laurels on the winners at the Olympic stadium in Athens, a beautiful 1920s replica the exact size and location of the original.

Too Gay or Not Too Gay, That Is the Question: Hamlet 2

Like Threesome? Love Dick? You can thank openly gay, hugely mustached movie director Andrew Fleming who also made last year's Nancy Drew, The In-Laws, and The Craft. Today he unleashes Hamlet 2, the spoof he wrote with frequent South Park collaborator Pam Brady. Here's the plot: Hapless failed actor and bumbling high school drama teacher (Steve Coogan) slowly losing his acerbic wife (Catherine Keener) leads his students in a time-machine musical, Hamlet 2, which includes original numbers like Rock Me Sexy Jesus and also features the "Tucson" Gay Men's Chorus (actually played by the Albuquerque Gay Men's Chorus) singing Maniac from Flashdance. The school tries to shut down the show; lawyer Amy Poehler arrives to say, basically, they can't stop the beat. (What she actually says is, "The so-called Supreme Court can suck my balls.") One of the student actors, cracking under pressure of the closet, puts the evil back in high school drama queen. He's a little bit awesome in the trailer below, saying "Yessss!" and "Thank you for your candor!" while interviewing Elisabeth Shue.

After Elton's Brian Juergens loved the movie and covers the gay aspects other critics ignore. Mainstream reviews have been mixed. Everyone seems vexed by how to convey the loopy hilarity of the film's nonstop vulgarity, always too extreme to quote. That may have thwarted the trailer too. I haven't seen the movie, and it does look as though the jokes could become wearing, but it has to be funnier than last week's Tropic Thunder, in which Coogan again plays a delusional director.

Born August 21: Mart Crowley

The pageant of quips, caricature, self loathing, and internalized homophobia known as The Boys in the Band opened off Broadway in 1968, caused a sensation, and ran for 1,002 performances. The play was groundbreaking for its visibility and its frank look at a certain kind of Greenwich Village queer life a year before Stonewall, yet its most famous line is, "Show me a happy homosexual and I'll show you a gay corpse." In 1970 the movie adaptation, again written by Mart Crowley, starred all of the same actors from the play and was directed by William Friedkin (immediately prior to his making The French Connection and The Exorcist, and, later, Cruising.) Crowley wrote several more plays, none of which really captured audiences. In 2002, he premiered a sequel to The Boys in the Band called The Men from the Boys. It opened in San Francisco, and also ran in Los Angeles, but never made it in New York. Today he turns seventy-three.

Mamma Mia! Here I Go Again

If Manhunt is the third horseman of the apocalypse destroying gay culture, isn't the fourth and final horseman the straightening of ABBA? The movie Mamma Mia ought to feel like Sydney's Mardi Gras filmed like Moulin Rouge. In 2008, wouldn't the freshest way to handle lyrics like "Does your mother know that you're out?" be as an ode to young closet cases? Yet at every turn the film chooses the safest, straightest path. 

Look, it's summer, the movie is fun, the second half is really enjoyable, you should go; Meryl, Christine, Julie, and Colin all have terrific nanoseconds; but I sat in the theater dismayed that the gayest pop hits this side of YMCA were being played out in a story entirely devoid of gay content. Except for Pierce Brosnan, there's not even good eye candy. Pretty colors yes, but the camera seems terrified of flesh. In his swim trunks the fiancee is mainly shot from the shoulders up (the cocky bastard from The History Boys). The dock dance is shot too far back, the guys are thirty-five and wearing flippers so they can't dance and some are cloaked in hideous Tommy Bahama short sleeve shirts unbuttoned. In Greece! I was on several Greek islands last summer and, happily, I can report that at beach dances everyone was shirtless and no one was over twenty-four, except my partner and I who moved invisibly through the crowds like Scrooge (me) and the Ghost of Christmas Past (him).

Then, in the movie's final moments, one of the girl's three potential fathers announces he's gay. It's extremely muddled but apparently he only realized his orientation the night before. He's almost fifty. At least he chose a very attractive man with whom to make up for lost time, but again the camera hurries past them.

It's disappointing because the director is an out lesbian, Phyllida Lloyd. Making her feature debut with a global franchise property she obviously wouldn't have had much autonomy, yet it's also clear given her background in English opera, she's closer to Wagner than HSM.

But, you know, The history book on my shelf is always repeating itself. No surprise that timid Hollywood still lags behind America on gay issues. We haven't had a major gay movie since Brokeback, and the next one, Milk, is another historical pic in which the main out character gets murdered for being gay. The tired lie that multiplex moviegoers "aren't ready" for the gays is refuted on this week's newsstand: The main cover of middlebrow, middle America People is Ellen and Portia's wedding, not the straight, goldenboy swimmer's eight Olympic medals.

If you need further proof that ABBA has been irrevocably usurped by the straights, help comes from John McCain. Blender asked both candidates for their top ten lists. (Worth the click to see all ten.) McCain's number three is Take A Chance on Me, and his number one favorite song of all time is Dancing Queen. Gay culture, we loved you; now, RIP.

John McCain's Top Five Songs

1. Dancing Queen, ABBA
2. Blue Bayou, Roy Orbison
3. Take a Chance On Me, ABBA
4. If We Make It Through December, Merle Haggard
5. As Time Goes By, Dooley Wilson

Barack Obama's Top Five Songs

1. Ready or Not, Fugees
2. What's Going On, Marvin Gaye
3. I'm On Fire, Bruce Spingsteen
4. Gimme Shelter, Rolling Stones
5. Sinnerman, Nina Simone

Born August 19: Renée Richards

Richard Raskind was the captain of the tennis team at Yale, a Lt. Commander in the Navy, a successful eye surgeon, a husband and a father before becoming a woman, Renée Richards, at forty. So why are pre-op trans people always portrayed as weak, marginalized sadsacks whose "confusion" overwhelms them and prevents them from making much of their lives? Richards moved to California and began competing in women's tennis tournaments, without disclosing her past. A reporter accused her of being a man in drag, and she was refused entry in the 1976 US Open for not having been born a woman. She considered accepting their decision, received more than two thousand letters urging her to fight, and she sued. Bizarrely, she asked evil homophobe closet case Roy Cohn to be her lawyer. The New York Supreme Court ruled in her favor. She played in the next year's US Open and lost in the first round. She won a 35-and-over championship. She coached Martina to two of her Wimbledon victories, then retired from tennis and returned to ophthalmology. In 2000, she was inducted into the Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame. Two decades after her first memoir, Second Serve, early last year she published a sequel called No Way Renee, in which she was candid about her many regrets. And her conservative views. In an interview with the New York Times in February 2007, she didn't cheer the IOC's' 2004 landmark decision to allow transgendered athletes to compete in the Olympics; she called the ruling "particularly stupid." She's also against gay marriage, though for civil unions. She is seventy-four today and her great love is golf. Now in Putnam County, she has lived platonically for twenty-five years with her divorced former medical office manager Arleen Larzelere, who seems very sweet.

Varla Jean Merman Explains Stonewall

Born August 18: Marcel Carné

It's hard enough to direct a movie in the best circumstances, yet Marcel Carné made his three-hour epic period piece Les Enfants du Paradis in France under Nazi occupation. All materials were rationed and electricity was, at best, sporadic. Some of the huge cast were Resistance fighters using the filming as their sole way of meeting during daylight and constantly dodging the Nazis and collaborators put on the production by Vichy officials. The music and the sets were designed by two Jewish men who worked from hiding. Some of the 1,800 extras were starving and stole food from the banquet scenes before it could be filmed. Although there was nothing overtly queer in the plot, gay viewers could probably sympathize with the story of a beautiful woman in the 1830s, Garance, who was torn between four lovers: an aristocrat, a thief, an actor, and a mime. Instantly adored when it premiered in March 1945, the movie played in Paris for more than a year and its prestige has endured. The movie theater at Pompidou is named Salle Garance in honor of the heroine and in the late 1990s a poll of six hundred critics and movie people in France named it the greatest French film of the twentieth century. Carné was thirty-nine when he directed Les Enfants du Paradis, his seventh movie, and over the next thirty years he made ten more features, some of which starred his partner Roland Lesaffre. He died at ninety in 1996.

Hike to Skilak Lake

A moderate trail leads to a 360 degree overlook above Skilak Lake that could be mistaken for Interlaken.
Two other groups were hiking: A German family who pointed to a mushroom and asked me, "Do you know what this is being called?" and a young woman and her boyfriend who was wearing a holster with a large shotgun.

Meet America's Cox

As the U.S. men's eight rowing team prepares to defend their Athens gold on Sunday, you should get to know America's coxswain. The 5'4" 119lb 27yo is Marcus McElhenney who lists these details on the team's official U.S. Rowing website: His favorite singer is Maria Callas. He reads music, plays the piano, likes opera and classical music, is an avid reader who prefers the classics, also enjoys 80s music, techno, and house, his favorite movie is My Big Fat Greek Wedding and describes himself as "not a hobby guy but a creature of knowledge." According to the site, "He says 'life is about doing new things,' so he always likes to try new things." Reflecting our nation's rich diversity, the all-white boat also includes Steve Coppola, a 6'8" 215lb 24yo sales associate at Home Depot whose favorite singer is Toby Keith. He too is an avid reader whose favorite authors include Jimmy Buffett. He describes himself as "politically conservative." Entertaining as it may be to imagine an epic David and Goliath, or Tom and Jerry, feud between teammates confined to a boat 18 inches wide, I hope they're friends. 

Born August 14: Horst P. Horst

Seeming to exist outside of mortal, linear time, Horst patriotically joined the U.S. army as a photographer in July 1943, three months before he became a U.S. citizen. (He was German, born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann but chose to be Horst P. Horst because he was known by his first name and to distance himself from the Nazi officer Martin Bormann.) By then he had been famous for eleven years, thanks initially to Janet Flanner's New Yorker review of his Paris show in 1932, and he had already shot Dietrich, Davis, Crawford, Coward, Schiaparelli, Chanel, and Garbo, as well as his most famous photograph, The Mainbocher Corset. He had already had an affair with his mentor George Hoyningen-Huene, who took the above photo of Horst age twenty-five in 1931 and had dated future-filmmaker Luchino Visconti; and he was five years into his relationship with former British diplomat Valentine Lawford, with whom he would stay for sixty-one years. Together, they adopted and raised a son, Richard J. Horst. Out of favor and largely ignored in the 70s, Horst made a comeback starting in 1980 when Life hired him to shoot nine photos. In 1990, David Fincher used Horst's signature light and deep shadow style to create Madonna's video Vogue, even reenacting his Mainbocher Corset shot. Horst continued to work until close to his death at ninety-three in 1999. Discussing style, fashion, glamor, and chic, Chanel called Horst "the queen of the whole thing." Watch a montage of his images, including his striking male nudes from 1952, here.

Daniel Mendelsohn's How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

If you're in New York, cancel your plans and go to the B&N at Broadway & 82nd at 7:00 tonight to hear brilliant Daniel Mendelsohn read from his new collection of essays, How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken. Wherever you are, whoever you are, buy it and read it. He's phenomenally smart. Yes, really. He has twice won the National Book Critics Circle Award, once for his reviews and again for his international bestseller on searching for clues about six distant relatives who were killed in the Holocaust, The Lost, which won four other literary prizes in America and the top prize in France for foreign books as well as being named Book of the Year by Lire. Best of all are his essays, where he displays a very accessible genius on topics from Hollywood letdowns to classic Greek texts, which he taught at Princeton for six years. He's funny, too. And unlike some gay scholars who can be a tad prim, Mendelsohn doesn't avoid sex. All in all, he is the perfect avenging angel. Never did I love him more than when he smote James Schamus's absurd denial in NYROB after Focus Features degayed all the Brokeback Mountain ads as soon as it proved its crossover potential. Mendelsohn's analysis of that movie and the media's reaction is itself worth the price of the 480 page book.

Early reviews are suitably ecstatic.

Booklist: "Drawn to literature, theater, and films with a link to Greek and Roman culture, however subterranean, Mendelsohn reaches an exhilaratingly high level of discourse as he grapples with Oliver Stone’s Alexander, The Lovely Bones, Truman Capote, films about 9/11, and Tony Kushner’s Angels in America. This impressive volume’s poetic title is from Tennessee Williams and provides the catalyst for Mendelsohn’s own profound musing over the timeless bond between the beautiful and the broken. These are works of brilliant and soulful criticism."

Publishers Weekly starred review: "...springboards for Mendelsohn’s agile mind to examine subjects like gender, homosexuality, war and peace. In “Victims on Broadway I” he eloquently peels back layer after layer of Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and criticizes not only the 2005 Broadway production as “stripped of the nuances of character and sensibility” but also the audience for what he sees as their inability to perceive pathos. In a magisterial essay, Mendelsohn finds the same flaw in the blockbuster movie Troy that he believes marred the ancient, lost Greek epics the Cypria and the Little Iliad: unlike Homer’s Iliad, they have not “a single unifying action, but a single unifying notion” lacking in epic grandeur. These essays richly repay the time readers spend in their company."

Mendelsohn will be reading in Sydney August 17-19, at Washington DC's Politics and Prose on September 2, and in Paris on October 5. Next April he will publish his translations of Cavafy. Awesome.

Born August 13: Herb Ritts

A classicist in the tradition of George Platt Lynes, Herb Ritts' elegance was always overshadowed by his popularity. His friendships with superstars were somehow more newsworthy than his ability to capture the iconic instant and transform mortals into myth. Those friendships began early; he grew up in Brentwood, next door to Steve McQueen who on Sundays would take Herb riding on his motorcycle in the desert. As much as any other photographer, Ritts defined style for the ten years from 1982 to 1992 on the covers of Vanity Fair, Vogue, Rolling Stone, GQ, as well as in countless ad campaigns, the apex of which was the Marky Mark Calvin Klein underwear shoot. Ritts also directed commercials and more than a dozen music videos such as Wicked Game, Cherish, and Ain't It Funny. Yet because his subjects were celebrities and supermodels he was often deemed shallow and superficial. I think in those early years straight critics found it easier to dismiss him rather than confront their discomfort with his work's homoeroticism. Openly gay throughout his career, he was a major force in fundraising for aids groups like Amfar long before it was fashionable. Forthright about his own hiv-positive status, he died of pneumonia six years ago and is survived by his partner, Erik Hyman.

Here's his video for Love Will Never Do (Without You). With his eye for talent, Ritts hired a young model for his first onscreen appearance, Djimon Hounsou who has gone on to be nominated twice for an Oscar, and Antonio Sabato Jr. when he was eighteen. The video helped make the song Janet's fifth number one single from Rhythm Nation, a first for any singer. On lists of the 100 best videos of all time, this one has ranked #13 (Rolling Stone), #72 (VH1), and #88 (MTV).

Born August 12: Radclyffe Hall

Ignored from infancy by her mother and stepfather, Marguerite Radclyffe Hall was educated at Kings College London and in Germany, where, when she was twenty-seven, she began a relationship with a singer named Mabel Batten, who was fifty-one and a grandmother and had once been painted by John Singer Sargent. They moved in together as soon as Batten's husband died; several years later Hall fell in love with Batten's cousin, Una Troubridge, and after Batten died the following year, they began living together. Their partnership lasted more than twenty-five years and weathered Hall's many short and longer term affairs as well as her success and scandal as a writer. Her second novel, The Forge (1924), a comedy of social manners, was published before her first, The Unlit Lamp (1924), about a young woman's thwarted wish to become a physician and set up house with another single woman. Her fourth novel, Adam's Breed (1926), concerns an Italian restaurateur in London who embraces spirituality, renounces the world, and lives hermit-like in the woods. It won two major literary prizes and became a bestseller.

So The Well of Loneliness (1928) was naturally anticipated by literary London. For the first three weeks, reviews were mixed but critics accepted its sympathetic portrayal of lesbians. Then the editor of the Sunday Express whipped up a frenzy, saying he would rather give healthy children a vial of prussic acid than the novel and demanding it be withdrawn. The nervous publisher sent a copy to the Home Secretary, William Joynson-Hicks, known as Jix, offering to suppress it if he disliked it. Despite his hip and sexy nickname and his kept promise to give women the vote in 1928, Jix was sixty-three and deeply conservative and had  strenuously objected in Parliament to planned revisions to The Book of Common Prayer, successfully preventing the changes twice. No surprise then that he hated The Well of Loneliness and intended to sue the publisher unless they canceled the book immediately. They did, but they had already licensed the rights to an English publisher in France. When the book was imported, Jix ordered it seized, over the objections of the Chairman of the Customs Board who admired the novel. It became a matter for the Metropolitan Police, and the subsequent trial for obscenity depended solely on the judge's opinion without any expert testimony. For those of you who haven't read the 500 page novel lately, here are the sex scenes unabridged:

She kissed her full on the lips.

also

and that night they were not divided.

The case drew wide protest from other newspapers, dozens of famous people, the National Union of Railwaymen and the South Wales Miners' Federation. Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells, and George Bernard Shaw defended Hall in letters to the editor. The judge ordered all copies of the book destroyed. He said that no reasonable person could claim that a call for tolerance or acceptance of homosexuality was not obscene. Kipling agreed to testify on behalf of the novel at the appeals trial. He appeared at court and was refused. The twelve magistrates took five minutes to uphold the original obscenity verdict. Eighteen years later, after Hall had died, after World War II, Troubridge tried again to get The Well of Loneliness in print in England and the Home Secretary said the publisher would be prosecuted. In America, the book faced two obscenity trials (including letters of support from Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Mencken, Sinclair, Dos Passos, St. Vincent Millay, and more) and both times the book triumphed. Its first year it sold more than 100,000 copies. It was finally published in the U.K. in 1949.

Marking the 80th anniversary of the trial, Hall biographer Diana Souhami writes a new essay about the case in the current issue of the Gay & Lesbian Review.

Sports Roundup: Gay Olympians, Outsports '09, Gay Games '10

Sports people tend to like stats, so here goes: Rather than being 1 in 10, or 1 in 100, at the Beijing Olympics we're 1 in 1,071. Thank god for the nine out lesbians (especially Norwegians Gro and Katja above, who are a couple) because the official statistic of out gay men at the Olympics is 1 in 10,708. According to the essential website Outsports, with big help from Malinda Lo at AfterEllen, the ten are:

Judith Arndt (Germany, cycling
Linda Bresonik (Germany, soccer)
Imke Duplitzer (Germany, fencing)
Gro Hammerseng and Katja Nyberg (Norway, handball)
Natasha Kai (U.S., soccer)
Lauren Lappin (U.S., softball)
Matthew Mitcham (Australia, diving)
Rennae Stubbs (Australia, tennis)
Victoria "Vickan" Svensson (Sweden, soccer)

Why so few? It's probably not just dreams of bigger endorsement money. You could say that despite their claims, the IOC is not so welcoming to homosexuality. They prohibit same sex pairs in skating, endlessly reinforcing the notion that a pair can only be one man and one woman. It would be great to know if the spouses of the ten athletes above are granted the same access and privileges in Beijing as are heterosexual partners.

You might have forgotten that Gay Games was originally called the Gay Olympics. Olympics is a generic term and given its provenance as an all male event in ancient Greece, frankly it's more our word than the IOC's or the USOC's. It is used by many other groups including the Special Olympics, the Junior Olympics, the Explorer Olympics, and the International Police Olympics. But at the idea of Gay Olympics, the USOC freaked out and hired Edward Bennett Williams. They went so far as to place a lien on founder Tom Waddell's house. The case ended up in the Supreme Court which decided 5-4 against Gay Games in June 1987. Waddell died sixteen days later. A comprehensive account of the case can be found in Deb Price and Joyce Murdoch's mandatory colossus, Courting Justice, which notes this decision as part of the Supreme Court's "continuing refusal to treat anti-gay discrimination as an injustice."

Coincidentally, registration for Gay Games VIII is mere days away. Taking place July 31 to August 7, 2010 in Cologne, the games offer 34 sports including new additions of field hockey, shooting, and cheerleading.

For those of you who can't wait two years, next summer is the second World Out Games, from July 25 to August 2 in Copenhagen. The event hosts 38 sports and you can save 300 Danish Kroner by registering for yours before October 1.

And for instant gratification, join this new Yahoo! group for LGBT track athletes.

More Gro et Katja below.  Is the mainstream media giving them superstar attention they deserve?

Born August 8: Randy Shilts

In 1981, Randy Shilts became the first journalist at a major newspaper to cover the gay community full-time. In 1999, five years after Shilts died from aids, the NYU Department of Journalism ranked his reporting on the disease for the San Francisco Chronicle 44th of the top hundred works of journalism in the twentieth century. His exhaustive, meticulous book on aids, And the Band Played On, is universally regarded as a modern classic. Gary Wills said Shilts’ book “will be to gay liberation what Betty Friedan was to early feminism and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to environmentalism." It covers what were then believed to be the origins of the disease in Africa in the 1970s [now known to be 1959 in Kinshasa; with the first U.S. death in 1969 in St. Louis] to 1985, when Rock Hudson’s announcement that he had aids finally captured mass culture’s attention. Shilts examines the years between, detailing the ignorance, denial, hostility, and indifference of medical, health, and government officials as the unknown “gay cancer” ravaged America, as well as profiling the pioneering doctors and gay activists who fought for funding, research, and public awareness as tens of thousands died around them. HBO’s 1993 adaptation of And the Band Played On was nominated for twenty awards and won nine, including the Emmy for best made-for-tv movie. Conduct Unbecoming, his next book, again as monumental, examined through thousands of interviews the U.S. military’s treatment of its lesbian and gay servicemembers. At the time of his death in 1994 he was planning a book on homosexuality in the Catholic Church. His groundbreaking first book, a biography of Harvey Milk called The Mayor of Castro Street, was to become a film by Bryan Singer but was beaten out by Gus van Sant's Milk.

Born August 7: Anna Weirauch

Nine years before London's 1928 deluge of lesbian fiction (Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Compton MacKenzie's Extraordinary Women, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel, and Djuna Barnes' Ladies Almanack), Anna Weirauch published The Scorpion in Germany. It was the first of three novels following Mette Rudolph from childhood to adulthood. In the first volume Mette has an affair with Olga, who breaks up with her and kills herself. When Mette's parents enlist a psychiatrist to "cure" her, she dismisses the idea that lesbians are sick or need treatment. In the next two volumes she encounters most of the social ills of Weimer Berlin, including  drug abuse, alcoholism,  and  rampant promiscuity but in the end, she finds contentment by leaving the city. Once she's settled in a rural area, she's ready to really love another woman. An abridged translation, titled Of Love Forbidden, was published in America in 1933. A facsimile edition is available from Ayer Company, a reprint publisher of rare titles.