Band of Thebes

Jim Grimsley's Jesus Is Sending You This Message

Jim Grimsley is a prolific playwright, and his several novels -- among them Winter Birds, Dream Boy, My Drowning, Comfort and Joy, Boulevard -- have won the Sue Kaufman Prize, an ALA Stonewall Book Award, a Lila Wallace-Readers' Digest Award, and a Lammy. Now comes his first collection of short stories, Jesus Is Sending You This Message, again peeling back the layers of life around his southern, gay characters. The sixteen stories average about twelve pages each, so don't expect the full Alice Munro immersion, but listen to Dorothy Allison rave about the book in her introduction:

"Here are the gorgeous, sexy, startling, and completely mesmerizing creations of the remarkable Jim Grimsley. Take a deep breath and get ready. You need what you're going to find here."

and

"Yes these are southern stories, gay stories, romances, and lyric realism that will show you a grace of insight made even more startling by the everyday, matter-of-fact people whom Jim Grimsley renders with compassion. You will find too those flashes of that wry, wonderful sense of humor that I treasure."

Equally exciting is the blurb from Ha Jin:

"Jim is one of the very best Southern novelists of his generation. His books achieve an elegance and intensity of language that is very different from most prose writers."

Oddly, the publisher has omitted the copyright information and acknowledgments that ought to cite where these stories first appeared. A casual reader could wrongly infer that the stories were rejected everywhere. In fact, the title story was published in Ontario Review and picked up to appear in the annual anthology, New Stories from the South 2001, selected by Lee Smith.

Grimsley will read from the book in Manhattan on October 29 at the 82nd & Broadway Barnes & Noble.

Born September 30: Truman Capote

When he was eleven he began writing three hours a day and when he was nineteen he won an O. Henry Award for his short story "Shut a Final Door." His first published novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, is the autobiographical story of a thirteen year-old in rural Alabama coping with his mother's death and his budding homosexuality. Typical of the rest of his career, the book equally impressed and scandalized its readers, not least for Capote's calculated, overtly sexual author photo. It spent nine weeks on the NYT bestseller list and brought him the fame he craved. Ten years later, after several books, a play, a screenplay, and a Broadway musical, Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffanys, a smash success. The following year, 1959, he saw a brief article about a family murdered on a farm in Kansas and embarked on what would become a years-long odyssey into the lives of everyone involved, including the killers. The New Yorker serialized In Cold Blood in 1965 and it became an international bestseller when it appeared as a book in 1966. Capote's genius legitimized the true crime genre and invented the "nonfiction novel." Later that year he hosted the Black and White Ball, what many consider to be the party of the century. Adding to residences on Park Avenue, Long Island, and Switzerland, he bought a house in Palm Springs, downgraded his relationship with Jack Dunphy, and sank into heavy abuse of alcohol and drugs for the next eighteen years. Claiming to be writing an American version of Proust's epic, Capote never finished more than four chapters of his endlessly delayed Answered Prayers. When they finally appeared in Esquire as short stories in 1975-6, his betrayal and mockery of the society wives he had swanned among for so many years cost him most of his friendships. His alcoholism and drug addictions worsened, as did his judgment: He often appeared on talk shows drunk, erratic, and boring. In 1980 he published Music for Chameleons to surprising acclaim but the renewal was short-lived. He talked big, hyping the nonexistent Answered Prayers and a revival of the Black and White Ball in Los Angeles, but nothing happened. He died in 1984 at fifty-nine. His royalties supported Dunphy until his death, then established a literary prize in honor of a former boyfriend, Newton Arvin, the brilliant National Book Award winning biographer and professor whose life was destroyed when he was fired from Smith College for being gay.

Newman & Woodward Gave to First Gay Congressional Candidate

Here's one thing you didn't read in the weekend's obituaries and tributes to peerless legend Paul Newman. Way back in 1971, Frank Kameny became the first openly gay candidate to run for Congress. Out of the blue, Kameny received a $500 check from Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. Very, very awesome.

Only in Wyoming: The Garage Door Blog

Before the internets and the google came along, Americans had garage doors to express their thoughts and feelings. That proud tradition lives on in the Equality State.

Born September 26: Scott Heim

Scott Heim grew up in a tiny town in Kansas and he gave up on junior high school football tryouts the second day, after the coach made the 13-year-old boys run 100-yard dashes with their mouths full of raw liver. He spent the rest of his teens listening to alt bands, dyeing his hair, getting unrequited crushes, trying goth eyeliner, getting a death threat, and, out of ten guys in his senior class, being elected prom king. When he was twenty-eight, he published his first novel, the brilliant, painfully disturbing exploration of childhood trauma called Mysterious Skin. It got rapturous reviews (as did Gregg Araki’s movie version in 2005), but it didn’t get him health insurance, and after falling on ice in Central Park and breaking his right arm, his medical bills cost him almost half his advance. Two years later, in 1997, Harper published his second novel, In Awe, to mixed reviews. It is out of print. Later in 1997 he began work on his third novel, We Disappear, about a group of teen boys who were murdered in Kansas and their bodies discovered but never identified. It was published earlier this year. Reviewing it for the Los Angeles Times, Sarah Weinman wrote:

We Disappear ventures down a twitchy, discomfiting path, with small disturbances blowing up into larger ones, like a film camera zooming in for a high-definition close-up... We Disappear is more honest, and thus more troubling, for it reflects the stark knowledge that truth is only an amalgam of experience, a collection of individual shards that don't coalesce into a pleasing whole. As Heim suggests, the search for truth invites the Hansels and Gretels of the world to follow the wrong adult home, the Alices to peer down the rabbit hole—and fantasy to cover up the nasty grime of reality.

 

Thursday Afternoon Hike in Yellowstone

Quick trip to Wyoming, reconfirming that September is the best time to travel. No bugs, very few people, dazzling colors, and perfect weather.

Born September 25: Pedro Almodóvar

Genius. No, supergenius. The son of an adoring mother and a barely literate father who hauled wine by mule in a small town in La Mancha, Pedro Almodóvar was sent to Catholic boarding school when he was eight, attended a good college, worked as an assistant in the Spanish telephone company for twelve years, and did not make his first movie until 1980, when he was thirty-one. In the twenty-eight years since Pepi, Luci, Bom, he has made sixteen other features and is universally considered a master of contemporary cinema. (Time magazine called Talk to Her the best film of the past decade, and it won the Oscar for best original screenplay despite not being in English.) Almodóvar’s vision is unique. No one working in any media has been able to corral so many incongruous moods—from bathetic despair to camp hilarity, mixing trashy telenovas with an austere sorrow in what’s been called “screwball tragedy”—to create such profoundly affecting art, even across cultural and linguistic chasms. He writes his own screenplays, balancing complicated, almost absurdist plots with complex thematic symmetries. Like many gay directors, he excels at showing strong women in tough circumstances, yet he’s equally at ease with the twisted tough guys of noir. Similarly, he overpacks his images with obsessive visual splendor. His movies are instantly recognizable by their saturated colors and bold compositions: like his stories, they have wacky, dazzling patterns. (You could write a book on his use of red.) The same attention to detail is evident from the opening credits, usually by the graphic genius Juan Gatti, to the haunting closing music, usually by Alberto Iglesias. Almodóvar’s brother Augustin produces all of his films.

His next was supposed to be a movie called La Piel Que Habito, “in which an unhinged plastic surgeon exacts terrifying revenge on the men who raped his beloved daughter.” Now come reports that he has finished filming Broken Embraces with Penelope Cruz in Madrid and the Canary Islands. According to Variety it's a four-way romantic thriller with very dark touches. Figuratively and literally, because it's also about a man who has to avoid bright lights, inspired by Almodovar's six months in a dark room felled by migraines after Volver. THR has the full cast. Maybe it's the same story. It's said to be released "early next  year" but why wouldn't they wait for Cannes, which loves him?

Read his diary entries about shooting in the dark here.

Pineapple Express & The House Bunny

1.) If you can't go to R movies, because you're too sensitive or not the right age, stop reading. The quotes from the movies are unabridged and NSFW.

2.) Yes, it is still August, because I was away.

PINEAPPLE EXPRESS

The mix of stoner comedy and violent killing worked for Roger Ebert but not for me. I laughed some. I stayed awake by counting just a few of these, uh, jokes for you.

In the opening scene, a b&w flashback: Bill Hader tells his commanding officer, "This is your dick!" then pantomimes holding it and performing oral sex from three different angles.

Friendly, buff high school senior saying farewell to Seth's girlfriend: "Time to suck today's dick!"

James to Seth: "What if I gave you a handjob?"

Somebody: "Bro-mosexual."

Hitchhiking, to attract a ride James sticks his thumb out through his fly and wiggles it. They get picked up by an older man.

Girlfriend's angry dad to Seth and James: "Or I will take you outside and fuck you in the street!"

James to Seth: "They say Don't Dip Your Pen in Company Ink, but I'm totally glad I dipped in your ink."

Police officer, describing students: "Eyes as red as the devil's dick."

Extended visual prank of James rubbing his wrists tied behind him against Seth's belt buckle as they both hump up and down for friction, moaning. Switches to Seth using his mouth.

Killer Asian: "Prepare the suck the cock of karma!"

Other Killer Asian: "Suck my balls twice!"

Seth or Red: "Is that a boner coming on?"
Red or Seth: "Is that us getting an apartment together?"

Seth to Red, who may fall asleep: "That's ok, we won't put our piece in your mouth."

Danny McBride's character, Red, talks about his wife in prison but he might mean "wife" because after he drives over someone and shoots him, he says, "You just got killed by a gay [inaudible]!"

Some bloggers say Craig Robinson's hitman character is gay. Maybe I missed more than that inaudible.

THE HOUSE BUNNY

Great idea badly realized. Effervescent Anna Faris rises way above the weak script (by the Legally Blonde duo) as a ditsy Playboy Playmate who becomes house mother to cliched sorority losers. The bizarre casting includes a spawn of Tom Hanks, a spawn of Bruce & Demi, a star from American Idol, and the star of The All-American Rejects. In a better world, Anna might have been full of daffy but spot-on observations about men, but here she gets only one.

"Boys like what other boys like."

"The eyes are the nipples of the face."

"My heart is pounding like a nail!"

"You're a butterfly! You're not an earthworm anymore!"

Friend: "What if he's one of those guys who wants to have a conversation before he hooks up?"
Anna: "Wait, he's gay?"

Born September 24: William Dobell

Of all of Australia’s arts awards, the most prominent is the Archibald Prize for portraiture, and William Dobell, the youngest of six children of a working-class builder, won it three times. His first win, in 1944 when he was 45, was for his painting of Joshua Smith and gave rise to the prize’s greatest controversy. Dobell’s detractors brought a lawsuit claiming the painting was caricature, not portraiture, and thus ineligible. The public debate rampaged through every aspect of the portrait, including the artist’s relationship to the sitter. Dobell, intensely private and deeply closeted, was nearly destroyed by the case, which the Supreme Court of New South Wales found in his favor. He fled to his sister’s home in Wangi Wangi and painted landscapes, though he returned to portraiture and won the Archibald again in 1948 for his painting of Margaret Olley. Dobell won it yet again in 1959 for his Dr. E.G. McMahon. The Queen awarded him an OBE in 1965 and he was knighted in 1966. He died at Wangi in 1970.

Guestwritten: Past Plural (The 19th Wife by David Ebershoff)

A longtime reader submitted this piece on David Ebersoff's recently published third novel, The 19th Wife, which is getting spectacular reviews everywhere and hit the NYT extended bestseller list. It's great to see Ebershoff again making gay lives central in his work, as he did in The Danish Girl and his story collection The Rose City, but did not in his bestselling second novel, Pasadena.

---------------------------

    Past Plural

   “It’s not that I actively dislike the Mormons, it’s just that they actively dislike me,” says twenty year old Jordan Scott, a modern-day, gay Huck Finn, caught in a world of plural marriage and violence going back two hundred years. Jordan is abandoned, emotionally and physically abused, outcast, nearly murdered, and damned by everyone from his Mom to his Prophet, in David Ebershoff’s powerful novel, The 19th Wife. But Jordan Scott remains strong and funny as all hell. He lives there. 

"I am telling you all this because people always get me wrong. I know what they see— hustler, twink, whatever. But I’m not some precious stone… I’m just a guy who got totally screwed when he was fourteen, and by all odds should be in jail, or dead, or both, but actually is managing just fine.”

    The 19th Wife ties the knot between historical Mormonism, creation of seer-Prophet Joseph Smith, with the modern day horrors of the fundamentalist Mormon church (FLDS) in what Jordan calls a “little slice of Saudi America.” “Polygamy is at the center of everything they believe,” writes the 19th wife of Brigham Young, Ann Eliza Young, in the Preface to the revised edition of her memoir, rewritten as part of this time machine of a novel. The original sin of Mormonism is polygamy, and it's frightening  precisely because it is neither dead nor historically removed. It is alive and very much among us in its unintended consequences from Mesadale, Arizona to Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. The unintended bloody consequences of Joseph Smith’s “revelation” are the core of this story for the “sister-wives” wearing their “prairie burka” dresses, the young girls who are “child-mothers”, and the “lost boys” like Jordan , excommunicated and gay -- all stalked by the past.   

     Connecting the past and the present, Ebsershoff creates parallel stories of two women two centuries apart, both of whom embody the title. Both are runaways. Both are deeply enmeshed in the violent dramas of their families and faiths; and both are seeking to reinvent themselves as individuals in the Americas they inhabit. In the 1800s, Ann Eliza Young stopped being Brigham Young's willing wife and became a radicalized runaway, writing two memoirs [Wife No. 19 was published in 1875] and speaking widely across the United States about the evils of polygamy. Ann Eliza Young actually did play a significant role in ending polygamy in the Mormon Church, and she was likely murdered for her apostasy. A forgotten feminist emancipator, Young vanished without a trace sometime after 1908, with no death certificate, police report, estate papers or obituary.

    “To some she [Ann Eliza Young] was a real hero,” says Kelly Dee a fictional descendant researching Ann Eliza’s life. “But a lot of Saints, even today, they’re angry at her. Some people, like Brigham’s descendants, won’t even say her name. Young has been “Edited out of history!,” exclaims Dee. She is edited back into history by Ebershoff, who employs a dazzling range of memorabilia and documents  including journals, legal filings, letters, handbills, university research papers and news stories, all fictional, but all based on his serious research.

    Contrasting Ann Eliza's saga, the other titular character is Jordan's mother, a present-day 19th wife in a fundamentalist Mormon desert cult, a theocratic hell called Mesadale. She abandons Jordan when he is fourteen on a highway at 2:00am, on orders of the cult's Prophet. Six years later she is accused of murdering her husband. Now Jordan must prove her innocence after having survived, against all odds, every type of horror and indignity endured by all his fellow lost boys.

   “You know what makes me angriest?” Kelly Dee asks Jordan. “That someone has put them through this in the name of God.  That’s the saddest part, these kids come out and they’ve been robbed of everything. Their childhoods, their families, but, worst of all, they’ve been robbed of God. And most of them never find him again.”

    Jordan is saved by Kelly, now running the Ann Eliza Young House in modern day Salt Lake City. There she helps abandoned and shattered Mormon kids victimized by the Fundamentalists’ polygamy and the LDS homophobia. According to Jordan, Kelly saves him because “….she wasn’t just helping, assisting, offering a hand.  No, she was researching, reading, learning, talking, understanding.  Working hard to understand, wanting to understand, telling herself that’s the most important thing she can do.  And it meant more to me than anything else.  She got it… She got me. She knew I had been completely totally royally screwed.”

    Jordan survived his abandonment by learning and understanding, and the novel tells us this is the best we can hope for. What makes all this so moving today is that getting dumped on the highway does “mess you up” (and rile you just a bit). Gays are now in a full-throated, direct confrontation with the LDS in California. 

     The Wall Street Journal reported that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has contributed more than any other donor toward the passage of Proposition 8 in California to ban same–sex-marriage, bundling more than 40% of the dollars to support its passage. That’s one man and one woman. As Jordan and his friends in the novel ask, if Joseph Smith and Brigham Young himself were wrong with the divine revelation of polygamy, “How can the Mormons go around editing God?  If you ask me, it proves the whole thing, whether LDS or Firsts or whatever, is a piece of crap,” writes the 5th daughter of a plural marriage. 

       The Mormons are stuck with “an untenable theological problem,” writes Dee Kelly in a letter to her professor. As if speaking for Ebershoff, she questions: “If polygamy was no longer a divine doctrine, many in and out of the Church asked, “what about the Doctrine & Covenants as a whole? And what about the Book of Mormon itself?  Could it too be edited, revised, trimmed, amended and otherwise altered by Church Leaders in Salt Lake?  Brigham Young’s nineteen wives and fifty-seven children are the root of the problem for Ann Eliza Young, who probably lost her life fighting polygamy and its subjugation of women; for Jordan Scott, a young gay man who escapes with dignity intact a hundred years later; and gay Americans, like Jordan, who also need to understand this original sin of Mormonism. The plural past stalks us, too.

Born September 23: Louise Nevelson

Although she was determined from childhood (spent in her family's timber mills) to be a sculptor (working in wood), Louise Nevelson needed nearly sixty years to find her place in the art world. Born Louise Berliawsky in Kiev in 1899, raised in Rockland, Maine, she suffered an early, unhappy marriage to Charles Nevelson for eleven years, then left him in 1931 to devote herself to her work. She did not have her first exhibit until 1941. The show failed, as did another one two years later in which nothing sold; nothing survives either, because she took every piece back to her studio and burned them. Finally, in 1958, she changed her methods and created Sky Cathedral which equally appalled and awed art critics. Collectors lagged behind. In 1962, when she represented the US at the Venice Biennale, she still lacked a steady income from her work but she was at last happier at home: Diana MacKown, a twenty-three year old artist, moved in with her. Coincidence or not, professional success and deeper artistic vision followed. The entire span of Nevelson's greatest genius was spent with MacKown -- twenty-six years -- yet MacKown is edited out of history. She is not even mentioned in Nevelson's extensive NYT obituary, which frankly increases doubts that their relationship really was platonic, as Nevelson publicly claimed. Two days after Nevelson's death her son and sole heir installed a metal door blocking MacKown from the personal rooms they shared above the studio. He had been raised by other family and was estranged from his mother most of his life, but she did not make provisions for MacKown in her will. Filing her lawsuit a year later, MacKown was supported by Jasper Johns, Edward Albee, John Cage, and Merce Cunningham. At that point Albee told the Times, "Diana was very important to Louise." Indeed. So why wasn't she in the obit?

Bart Yates' The Distance Between Us

In 2004, the winners of the American Library Association's Alex Award for the ten best books written for adults but having special merit for teen readers included (one my favorites) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, The Kite Runner, The Time Traveler's Wife, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, Persepolis, and the coming out novel Leave Myself Behind by Bart Yates. Critics loved his seventeen year old protagonist Noah as he struggled to fit in after moving from Chicago to a small town in New Hampshire. The Cleveland Plain Dealer said:

Ever since J.D. Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye, authors have been hoping to create the next Holden Caulfield and critics have hoped to crown a character with that distinction. The latest temptation for comparison is surely Leave Myself Behind, a debut by Bart Yates. Yates' main character and narrator, Noah York, has Caulfield-style teenage authenticity. Noah's voice is more than just honest or original; it's real. The tone of his observations will ring true for anyone who has been around teenagers. This isn't just a novel about a boy dealing with discrimination and fighting for acceptance. Nor is Noah a character for whom sexual orientation is the only developed personality trait. We don't see Noah as simply a gay teen or fatherless child. We see him as a character dealing with life. That's what makes Leave Myself Behind so great.

Yates' second novel, The Brothers Bishop, appeared in 2005 and his third is published this month. Although the story again features a young gay man, The Distance Between Us marks a change for Yates as it is narrated by a seventy year old grandmother. The promising first sentence is:

I spend a great deal of time admiring my hands, but that's only because they belong to another woman.

Hester Parker's memories of her illustrious career as a pianist, its sudden end, the breakup of her family , and her attempts to reconcile are interspersed with the present-day story of her growing friendship with her young gay attic lodger, Alex, who has troubles of his own, ranging from alcohol to wanting too much from his straight bud Eric. In a recent interview, Yates discussed the novel's themes of gratitude, forgiveness, and the burden of great talent. Yates is also a musician in a jazz group. Publishers Weekly called his book "absorbing" and said his "family melodrama brims with quiet intensity."

Emma Donoghue's The Sealed Letter on Giller Prize Longlist

Included on the longlist for the Giller Prize, Canada's top literary award, is The Sealed Letter, a novel by out Irish lesbian Emma Donoghue. Like her bestselling, much praised Slammerkin about a murder in Wales in the 1760s, her new novel is inspired by actual events. In London in the 1860s, a spirited feminist and independent publisher, Emily Faithful, runs into her former dearest friend, Helen, now married and embroiled in an affair with a young army officier. Reluctantly, Emily is drawn into their "sensational" divorce trial which transfixes Victorian society. Publishers Weekly loved it:

...a colorful tapestry of spiraling intrigue, innuendo, speculation and mystery. Characters indulge in pleasures at which Victorian novels could only hint, and which Donoghue renders with aplomb. Period details—etiquette, typesetting, dress, medical treatments, public amusements, shipping and jurisprudence—are rendered with a spare exactitude organic to the story. Donoghue's latest has style and scandal to burn.

It's impossible to tell if the coy hints about forbidden love refer to the adultery or possible lesbianism, which Donoghue has written about in most but not all of her books. Wouldn't the ideal reviewer for this be Sarah Waters? Officially The Sealed Letter pubs here next Tuesday but actually it seems to be on sale everywhere already.

The longlist of fifteen titles will be narrowed to a shortlist of five titles on October 7 and the winner will be announced on November 11. This year's judges are Margaret Atwood, Colm Toibin, and Bob Rae.

Donoghue is married to a Canadian woman and they live in Ontario with their two children. And, yes, she was named for Emma Woodhouse.

Born September 18: Greta Garbo

Was Garbo a control freak because in her early years she was so often blindsided by the unexpected? When Greta Lovisa Gustafsson was fourteen, her beloved father, a janitor, died and she had to quit school to work fulltime in a barbershop. She became a salesclerk in a department store in Stockholm, also modeled for them, made a promotional short film, a feature, and was discovered by a gay director, Mauritz Stiller, who gave her the name Greta Garbo. Louis B. Mayer saw their Gosta Berlings Saga in Berlin and brought them both to Hollywood. By the next year, 1926, she was a major star, with silent movies like The Temptress and Flesh and the Devil, and when her only sister died of cancer at twenty-three, MGM wouldn't let Garbo go back to Sweden for the funeral.
    She had an affair with her co-star John Gilbert; they moved in together; and he proposed to her three times. In a reverse of the cliched ultimatums, Garbo wanted to quit working if they got married, he wanted her to continue making movies. She finally agreed to a wedding; the day came; and she left him at the altar. The next year, after dinner with Garbo, her former co-star and fellow Swede, Einar Hanson, died in a car crash driving home. Delaying the inevitable, knowing it had ruined many careers, she finally made the transition from silents to talkies with Anna Christie in 1930 and again she was a towering success, earning her first Academy Award nomination. Her second Oscar nod came with her second movie, Romance. In 1931 she had four starring roles, including the lead in Mata Hari, and began her relationship with actress Mercedes de Acosta. (She also had affairs with Louise Brooks and Marlene Dietrich.) The following year she made Grand Hotel. In 1933 she used her clout to get Laurence Olivier removed from Queen Christina and replaced by her ex-fiancee John Gilbert, now fading. Her stardom skyrocketed throughout the 1930s with Anna Karenina, Camille, and Ninotchka (whose original poster said, "Don't Pronounce It -- See It!") In 1941 she made Two-Faced Woman, her second movie with Cukor, then took a break from acting. In 1949 Garbo did test shoots for a comeback in Walter Wanger's La Duchesse de Langeais, which couldn't get financed and was never made. She turned down every other role she was offered. She left Hollywood for New York (450 East 52nd St.) but was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1955. She furiously shunned Mercedes de Acosta when she published her memoir including her lesbian affairs, Here Lies the Heart, in 1960; survived breast cancer; survived People magazine publishing photos of her swimming nude in 1976; and died at eighty-four in 1990. Famously frugal, she left $20 million to her niece.
    For the record, she never said, "I want to be alone." Her character said, "I want to be let alone," which was true of Garbo offscreen as well: She avoided interviews, never attended premieres, did not reply to fan mail, never signed autographs, and elaborately eluded paparazzi. Obvs, the mystery increased people's fascination. The Guinness Book of World Records named her the Most Beautiful Woman Who Ever Lived. In 1950, she was voted Best Silent Film Actress of the Century, and in 1999 AFI named her the fifth greatest film actress of all time.

Annie Proulx on Her Good Brokeback Fan Mail

Eleven days ago, The Wall Street Journal posted an interview with Annie Proulx complaining about misguided Brokeback fan fiction in which devoted readers send her their stories imagining other, usually "pornish" outcomes for Jack and Ennis. Since then, dozens of websites and newspapers have picked up the quote, blaring her words "sick" and "constant irritation" often with sloppy headlines making her appear bitter about Brokeback fan mail, or even Brokeback fans, rather than the fan fiction. Now seems like a good time to remember her 2005 interview with Planet Jackson Hole, when she said:

In the years since the story was published in 1997 I have received many letters from gay and straight men, not a few Wyoming-born. Some said, "You told my story," some said "That is why I left Wyoming," and a number, from fathers, said "Now I understand the hell my son went through." I still get these heart breaking letters.

To my mind, the most interesting aspects of the interview were her thoughts on women who run ranches and her partial list of favorite fiction writers: "Aidan Higgins, James Welch, J. F. Powers, Barbara Baynton, Dermot Healy, Nathaneal West, Tim Gautreaux, Graham Greene, William H. Gass, George Higgins, Michael Ondaatje, Cathie Pelletier and many, many more."

There's still time to buy her new collection, Fine Just the Way It Is, which she says marks the end of her Wyoming fiction. Uneven as it is, the book is essential for "Them Old Cowboy Songs" and "Tits-Up in a Ditch."

Born September 17: Bryan Singer

Adopted at two months, an only child, a child of divorce, Jewish in a largely Catholic neighborhood, and gay, Bryan Singer has often spoken about feeling like an outsider as he grew up and how that awareness has made him a better filmmaker. His first movie to be widely released, The Usual Suspects, won two Oscars. His next was Apt Pupil, and after that he made the record-shattering X-Men, in which all kinds of minority moviegoers saw an allegory about themselves. Openly gay, he often hires family, giving bit parts to his mother, father, and stepmother, and major roles to Ian McKellan, Patrick Stewart, and Kevin Spacey. His next film stars Tom Cruise with Stephen Fry and Eddie Izzard. It is Singer's second Nazi movie and it looks as awful as its abysmal buzz. Officially, it has had five different release dates, from June 08 to February 09, and is currently scheduled for December 26. Although his movies have homoerotic moments, homo-friendly subtexts, and a really serious uniform fetish, Singer has yet to make a gay movie. He was attached to direct The Mayor of Castro Street but was beat out by Gus van Sant's Milk. He is also executive producer of the smash hit tv show House, the most watched series of the 2007-08 season.

The Independent's Best, Worst, Most Improved Places To Be Gay

Britain's The Independent wakes up today with a triple case of homo-listomania, offering three quick glances at gay life around the globe. Their rationale for selecting the best places teeters between flimsy and whimsy: It reads more like a shallow travelogue than a balance sheet of rights, openness, tolerance, and hate crimes. Any city in Belgium, Iceland, Switzerland, Scandinavia, or South Africa would be a much better place to live than Mykonos. The newspaper's worst list is more grounded but excludes some other countries that still carry the death penalty for homosexuality and really ought to include Egypt. The list of the most improved places seems the most accurate. Click on each header to launch the article or slideshow.

Ten Best Places for Gay People To Live
San Francisco
Sydney
New York City
Mykonos
Paris
Barcelona
Amsterdam
London
Copenhagen
Berlin

Five Least Gay Tolerant Places
Saudi Arabia
Iran
Jamaica
Afghanistan
Nigeria

Five Most Improved Places for Gay Tolerance
Delhi
Shanghai
Tel Aviv
Cape Town
Havana

On Sale Today: The Indian Clerk, Two Lives

If you missed them in hardcover, two popular books from last fall are available in paperback today. David Leavitt's historical novel, The Indian Clerk, tells the story of a closeted Cambridge don who encourages a poor, straight mathematics genius in Madras to emigrate to England in 1913. While some reviewers found the novel too ambitious, The New Yorker said Leavitt used the math metaphor "to superb effect, demonstrating how the most meaningful relationships can defy both logic and imagination." Janet Malcolm's Two Lives, about Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein, is, in critic Meryle Secrest's words, "not so much a joint biography as a meditation on literature and morality, built around the disquieting fact that Stein and Toklas, both Jewish [and lesbians], remained in Europe throughout World War II without either hiding or being swept up in the Holocaust." How they lived openly in such catastrophic times is interesting; while Malcolm's ruminations on biography, biographical sleuthing, and biographers "using" their subjects are fascinating. The good news is she doesn't degay anyone in the book, including the villains. The bad news is she seems to stack her deck against Alice. The book won the Publishing Triangle award for nonfiction and was a NYT notable book of 2007.

GQ Titles Cover Story "Megan Fox Was a Teenage Lesbian!"

If Megan Fox, now 22, somehow didn't become an icon to lesbians after Transformers, in which she fixed cars and wielded powertools while looking ultra hot, she might now. She told GQ about her affair with a female stripper, when she was 18, and they called their cover story "Megan Fox Was a Teenage Lesbian!" She also listed some other women who turn her on.

"Look, I'm not a lesbian," said Fox. "I just think that all humans are born with the ability to be attracted to both sexes. I mean, I could see myself in a relationship with a girl -- Olivia Wilde is so sexy she makes me want to strangle a mountain ox with my bare hands. She's mesmerizing. And lately I've been obsessed with Jenna Jameson, but ... oh boy."

The "I could see myself in a relationship with a girl" statement is no reflection on her total commitment to 35 year-old actor Brian Austin Green, to whom she is engaged.

Born September 16: Wilhelm von Gloeden

In 1876, when he was twenty and suffering from what was likely tuberculosis, Wilhelm von Gloden left Germany for a life in Taormina, Sicily where--depending on your view--he became a great photographer, a pornographer, or a pioneer of sexual tourism. Setting up his young male models, usually nude or half-clothed outdoors, often in pairs or groups, in poses to suggest ancient Greece and Roman, he made over 3,000 glass plate negatives between 1890 and the start of the Great War. In 1936, five years after his death, Mussolini's police destroyed more than 2,500 of the negatives, which he had left to his lover Pancrazio Buciuni, who had been one of his models. The images that survive are startling for their technical accomplishment and their sexual tension. They became popular as postcards in Europe, Britain, and America. Von Gloeden was already rich and shared the profits with his models and he helped fund many small businesses in the region, which critics say may explain why the locals tolerated his homosexuality and the increasing tourist trade. Many of his photographs are posted at this online gallery of his work.