Band of Thebes

Born January 29: Greg Louganis

In 1988 when he was twenty-eight, at the Seoul Olympics, attempting to repeat his unprecedented double golds from 1984 (springboard and tower), Greg Louganis hit his head on the board during his second to last dive. Freshly stitched up, on his final dive he earned a perfect score. Again, he won both gold medals. Widely hailed as one of the great sports comebacks of all time, it earned him ABC Wide World of Sports' Athlete of the Year. Three years earlier he had won the Sullivan Award as the nation's most outstanding amateur athlete, and he had been an American favorite ever since winning a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics when he was sixteen.

But what a difference one detail makes. Seven years later he published his autobiography, Breaking the Surface, cowritten with Eric Marcus, in which he revealed he is HIV positive. Suddenly he was no longer the hero of the comeback but the infected sneak whose bleeding might have put other divers at risk (not true, according to Anthony Fauci). The doctor who gave him stitches had not worn gloves. His book was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks, and all of his corporate sponsors except Speedo dropped him. [He had come out eight months earlier, at Gay Games in New York.] Remarkable for its candor, his book showed readers that performing after hitting his head was nothing compared to the stress of being closeted, HIV+, and in an abusive relationship. Even his website last year said, "the highs that came with winning never compensated for the lows."

Colm Tóibín on Edward Carpenter

One of the few things we can agree on with certainty is that we would all be better people if we read Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham. Jeanette Winterson and Peter Tatchell named it their favorite book of last year and now finally the current London Review of Books has an essay about it by Colm Tóibín. He loved it, particularly because Carpenter's prime decades of promoting homosexuality and socialism and healthy diets and sandal wearing and nudism happened to coincide with the sea change in British life from the mid-Victorian age to the Great Depression.

In 1874 he wrote to Walt Whitman, whose work he had first read six years earlier. ‘Because you have,’ he wrote, ‘given me a ground for the love of men I thank you continually in my heart . . . For you have made men to be not ashamed of the noblest instinct of their nature. Women are beautiful; but to some, there is that which passes the love of women.’ What was strange about Carpenter in these early years was that his homosexuality did not make him timid or fearful; instead, with the help of Whitman’s poetry, it lit a fire in him which made him interested in all kinds of freedom and progress, made him eloquent, outspoken and spiritually curious. It made him seek allies and draw people towards him, including those who had more interest in socialism or trade unionism than in homosexuality. He managed all his life to defeat, or at least to defuse, that tendency in left-wing movements to view homosexuality with more rigid disapproval than any church ever has.

Two excerpts from Carpenter's own work show what a forward and timeless thinker he was. He faulted earlier, Victorian society for its

commercialism in public life . . . cant in religion, pure materialism in science, futility in social conventions, the worship of stocks and shares, the starving of the human heart, the denial of the body and its needs, the huddling concealment of the body in clothes, the ‘impure hush’ on matters of sex, class-division, contempt of manual labour, and the cruel banning of women from every natural and useful expression of their lives.

That was written in 1916. Eight years earlier, Carpenter had published a book about homosexuality in which he wrote:

I have said that the Urning men in their own lives put love before money-making, business success, fame and other motives which rule the normal man. I am sure that it is also true of them that they put love before lust . . . I believe it is true that Uranian men are superior to the normal man in this respect – in respect of their love-feeling – which is gentler, more sympathetic, more considerate, more a matter of the heart and less of mere physical satisfaction than that of ordinary men. All this flows naturally from the presence of the feminine element in them, and its blending with the rest of their nature.

Was Tóibín feeling frisky when wrote the review? A long (frankly skippable) preamble mentions how he "set about enticing two nice Catalan boys back to my flat" in Barcelona in 1977, and he relays many sexual details of Carpenter's life, most memorably his randy adventures at night and again the next morning with a young American visitor when he was eighty.

In an act of lunacy, Verso chose to release the U.S. edition of the book three days before Christmas. Six weeks later, this important biography has garnered exactly zero reviews. Don't miss it.

Signs of South Dakota

 

 

 

A Perfect Waiter by Alain Claude Sulzer

Last week while America was busy inaugurating, Bloomsbury released the paperback of A Perfect Waiter. It is the first of Alain Claude Sulzer's eight novels to be translated into English and it received excellent reviews throughout Europe, from A to Z: "A beautifully written and quietly devastating novel" (Attitude) to "Alain Claude Sulzer writes with utterly classical, old-fashioned aplomb" (Die Zeit).

More importantly, it won the 2008 Prix Medicis etranger, one of the world's few literary prizes that pits novels against nonfiction, to honor the year's best book by a non-French writer. Previous winners this decade have been Michael Ondaatje, Philip Roth, Orhan Pamuk, and Daniel Mendelsohn. It appears that this was the first time the prize was awarded to a gay novel.

PW said

In 1966 Switzerland, self-possessed, middle-aged Erneste is the rock of the Restaurant am Berg, working the lavish Blue Room without missing a shift in 16 years. A letter posted from New York threatens to shatter the orderly cocoon he's built around himself. Claiming to be in a bad way from every angle, Jakob Meier, Erneste's one great love of 30 years ago, pleads with Erneste to track down Julius Klinger, the intellectual whom Jakob followed to America in 1936. Klinger, Jakob tells Erneste, has returned to Europe, been nominated for a Nobel prize and lives near Erneste; Jakob wants Erneste to ask Klinger for money, and to send it. Erneste is immediately torn between his tidy independence and intense longing. Sulzer sure-handedly layers the past on the present, gradually opening windows on both. The pieces fall together like bits of a puzzle, with a full portrait of Erneste and the truth about his relationship with Jakob coming together only at the end, powerfully.

More praise:

"It tells a compelling love story between two men both working in a grand hotel in the 1930s This is elegant writing, perfectly pitched to reflect the sadness and regret attendant on such a liaison." Rodney Troubridge, Booksellers' Choice, Bookseller

"The real perfect waiter of the title is, I suspect, the author himself. Like his hero, he is unobtrusive and alarming in equal measure he does his job not just with great polish, but with real heart." Guardian

"Sulzer carefully walks a tightrope between the tender and the erotic A melancholy, shocking tale." Irish Times

"Sulzer's novel, or rather novella, has great stylistic elegance, and offers many enjoyments and pleasures beyond its subtle abundance of literary allusion. His skill lies more in small observations than dramatic sweep." Suddeutsche Zeitung

"It's as if an opulent Magic Mountain, a memory in fading colours of a mundane love story, has been photographed anew." Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Unexpectedly in South Dakota

For a funeral. Back soon.

Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein

It figures that the Russian supergenius whose innovations in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Oktober (1927) still dictate how movies are shot and edited today would have no trouble creating private visual diversions for himself in an age before internet porn: He drew sketches of gay sex. Re-entering the U.S. from Mexico in 1932, his drawings were discovered by American customs officials who were not "artistic" and not amused. Eisenstein was a Bolshevik after all, and had been run out of Hollywood on his first visit after a campaign against him by fascist Major Pease (and because Paramount hated his treatment of Dreiser's An American Tragedy and had never warmed to his idea of a Jack London story). The customs debacle capped off a fifteen-month fiasco that was supposed to have been a four-month shoot to restore his reputation. Post-Paramount, Charlie Chaplin had introduced him to Upton Sinclair whose wife Mary Kimbrough financed the Mexican picture, which Eisenstein began filming without a script or even a concept. Complicating matters further, Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the USSR and therefore claimed rights to the film as it was being made, including the right to censor. Ordered home by Soviet authorities angry that he had  overstayed his visa, Eisenstein realized that thus removed and having hugely antagonized the Sinclairs, he would never be allowed to edit his Mexican footage. He suffered a nervous breakdown. Worse was on its way. His next film, Bezhin Meadow, was plagued again by his ill-conceived grandiose schemes (this time to shoot simultaneously adult and children's versions) and by his dictatorial style. Soviet officials hated his movie. Eisenstein endured the horror of having his film destroyed, which was mild compared to the fate of the government's executive producer for film, Boris Shumyatsky, who should have been supervising more closely and was executed by firing squad. Eisenstein did triumph again with a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, famous for its beautiful, majestic build up to battle. He followed it with another success, Ivan the Terrible Part I, only to see his Ivan the Terrible Part II confiscated and Part III destroyed. Although he had two wives, historians say neither marriage was consummated. He wrote in his diaries about his endless infatuations with men. He died of a brain hemorrhage at fifty. His legacy is eternal.

Born January 22: Elaine Noble

Is it fitting or ironic that the day Milk garners eight Oscar nominations is the birthday of the first openly lgbt politician elected to a state legislature (three years before Harvey, yet not a candidate for a biopic)? Think back to 1974: Patty Hearst was kidnapped, Nixon resigned, ABBA won the Eurovision song contest, Ali won the Rumble in the Jungle, The Godfather II was in movie theaters, and the planet's population reached four billion people, one of whom was Elaine Noble. In November 1974, she won 59% of the vote to the Massachusetts House of Representatives from Boston's Fenway/Back Bay neighborhoods and thereby became the United States' first openly gay person elected to a statewide office. In 1976, she was re-elected. Later she ran for Senate against Paul Tsongas and lost. In 1986, she and Ellen Ratner founded the Pride Institute in Minneapolis to treat gay people battling alcohol and drugs dependencies; it has since expanded to three locations. Although Noble has retired from public life and now lives in Florida, three months ago she gave a great interview to Windy City Times in honor of Lesbian and Gay History Month.

The Gene Robinson Invocation You Didn't See on Sunday

And his funny moment on The Daily Show after the Inauguration.

Born January 21: Cristobal Balenciaga

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect each of the three hundred original designs he created every year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her book Cleopatra's Nose. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces...They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression."

Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.

January 20: The Inauguration

(The shoe throwing in Dupont Circle was January 19.)

You'll find this hard to believe but thousands of people around us left immediately after the inaugural address, before the poem. To my mind, both the speech and the poem were sincere efforts and missed opportunities, without any phrase or imagery that will endure. I did, however, appreciate the Bush/Cheney criticism.

Ultimately I think Obama is a better speechmaker than speechwriter. He creates a lofty, vague mood but nothing specific stays with the listener. If I'm wrong, recite your favorite lines from the Denver speech. Or summarize its thesis.

Understandably, everyone is focused on the new, and thank god for that, but I did think the Official Bush Farewell Poem, released late yesterday morning, was more to the point.

There was a man from Texas
Who was hated by both sexes.
Everything he tried
Depended on a lie,
And he left with no successes.

January 19: OMG! The Crowds! You'll Never Be Able To Get To DC!

Born January 18: Cary Grant

Cary Grant and Randolph Scott met on the set of a movie called, in something of an understatement, Hot Saturday, and almost immediately they began living together in a house nicknamed Bachelor Hall, which they would share off and on for twelve years (1932-1944). Their affair has always been spun, desperately, as two stars who lived together merely because both were "tightwads." During that time, Grant was married to Virginia Cherrill from February 1934 to March 1935 and to Barbara Hutton from 1942 to 1945. Two questions: What sort of man keeps his house with his bud even after he gets married, and what sort of tightwad prefers spending the money to maintain two households rather than one? George Cukor confirmed that Randolph Scott would talk about their affair to friends, and a slew of recent biographers have also verified their relationship. Grant himself told an interviewer that his first two wives, overlapping with Scott, "accused him of being homosexual," though, of course, he always denied it and was as quick as Tom Cruise to sue for libel. (He sued Chevy Chase for saying, "What a gal!") Several other men have said they had affairs with Grant, including his chauffeur in 1957 and fashion arbiter Richard Blackwell, who wrote in his autobiography of having sex with both Grant and Scott. Grant's fifth and final wife was 47 years his junior. He died at 82 in 1986.

Goodbye, Alaska

Born January 17: Tom Dolby

Early last week I promised to write about Tom Dolby today, but the only Trouble Boy I'm having now (traveling in oddly balmy Anchorage) is with the internets. Instead, you can amuse yourself by looking at his West Village apartment, which he told the New York Times reminds him of a Doris Day movie.

Lambda Awards Submissions Posted and Missing

Charles Flowers has posted an updated list of titles publishers submitted to this year's Lambda Awards, and the good news is you have a lot of browsing to do in twenty-two categories of lgbt books. Particularly gratifying is the inclusion among the gay men's titles of friend and former colleague Elizabeth Maguire's posthumous novel about Henry James and Constance Woolson, The Open Door. (Liz died of ovarian cancer in April 2006.) While not a year overloaded with marquee names, the 2008 list offers several familiar authors: Scott Heim, Jim Grimsley, Jay Quinn, Bart Yates, Joseph Olson, Chris Adrian, Gary Zebrun, Stewart Lewis, Jameson Currier, Tom Dolby, and Rich Merritt, among others. The lesbian list features Alison Bechdel, Emma Donoghue, and Stephanie Grant.

I look forward to further updates, said to be coming "in the next few days," because to be blunt the fiction winner won't mean much if the competition doesn't include Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage, Benjamin Taylor's The Book of Getting Even, or Alain Claude Sulzer's A Perfect Waiter. It would be a capital crime if FSG, Steerforth, and Bloomsbury didn't submit these books. The same goes for Atlas Books and Edmund White's missing biography Rimbaud. The Lambda website says the deadline was six weeks ago, December 1, 2008.

Finalists will be announced by March 15. The awards dinner will be held in New York City on May 28.

Born January 16: Francesco Scavullo

Because he made a career of pushing glamor toward tacky, with his models sporting his signature huge windblown hair and Way Bandy's way too much makeup, it's easy to overlook the admirable aspects of Francesco Scavullo's sixty-three years as a fashion photographer. He published his first cover shot when he was still in his teens and he died of a heart attack when he was eighty-two on his way to photograph Anderson Cooper in 2004. The man was a workhorse. Born on Staten Island, his family moved to Manhattan when he was six, and his father bought him a carriage house when he was nineteen, which he used as his studio for the rest of his life. Some of his most memorable images are Diana Ross's b&w cover and full-color foldout for Diana, the Kristofferson - Streisand poster for A Star Is Born, the Julie Andrews poster for Victor/Victoria, Brooke Shields everywhere, the Bee Gees on the cover of Rolling Stone, Madonna on the cover of Time, and Sting in a loincloth. He shot Beverly Johnson for Vogue's first cover of a black woman, and, garnering far more publicity, he shot Burt Reynolds nude for Cosmopolitan's first centerfold. Hired by Helen Gurley Brown, he defined the Cosmo girl and created her covers for more than thirty years, and while you would never mistake them for art, they reinvented the magazine and made it a low-brow powerhouse. Scavullo lived for thirty-two years with Sean Byrnes, who not only managed and styled his shoots but nursed him through four nervous breakdowns in his ongoing manic depressive cycles. (Scavullo is seen above with Stephen Sprouse.)

Bollywood Award for Best Couple Goes to Gay Pretenders

Wednesday night in Mumbai the 15th Star Screen Awards marked a first for Southeast Asian cinema as the Best Couple award was won by two male actors whose characters pretend to be gay. That's news, given that homosexuality is still illegal in India. And it signals a shift in the homophobic society that two major Bollywood stars agreed to play the roles. Since the movie's release in November, superstar John Abraham's yellow swim trunks have become nearly as popular as that blue pair, and apparently he even appeared in them during the black tie ceremony on Wednesday. (Since 2002, he's been dating a female co-star from his first movie, Jism.) The other actor, Abhishek Bachchan, is married to international icon Aishwarya Rai who was nominated in the same category. Dostana aims to be a frothy, over the top comedy that good naturedly pokes fun at all stereotypes including gay cliches. While I'm not a fan of the "OMG! They're Gays!!! But Not Really!" storyline, I did laugh once during this trailer, which is a giant leap from my reaction to previews for Boat Trip or I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry.

Born January 15: Ivor Novello

Why, for the past fifty-three years, have the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters' annual awards been named the Ivors? To honor the Welsh star Ivor Novello, a hugely popular composer, singer, playwright, and actor who published his first song at fifteen and, at twenty-one, had his first smash hit, Keep the Home Fires Burning. Among his twenty-three films were two starring roles in early Hitchcock movies, The Lodger and Downhill. A constant presence on the London stage for decades, he wrote more than a dozen plays, many of which he performed with Robert Andrews, his partner for thirty-five years until his death at fifty-eight. Charged with misusing gasoline during World War II, he was convicted and imprisoned for a month, an experience which permanently tarnished his self-image, even if his fans forgave him. (Some believe the judge's homophobia led to the harsh penalty.) Novello, played by Jeremy Northam, appears in Robert Altman's Gosford Park as much of the world wants to remember him: dapper, dashing, debonair, and degayed.

Jean Keene, The Eagle Lady, Dies at 85

Tuesday night at her home on the Spit, Jean Keene, 85, died of natural causes after a long illness. Each year from late December to March Keene fed eagles 500 lbs of fish a day, a practice the city council three years ago voted to end in 2010. Volunteers will continue the feedings for the rest of this winter. I was outside her little house last Friday, when I took the top picture, which captures roughly 88 eagles. This morning I went back and was more about the close-up. Click to enlarge.
 

Born January 14: Cecil Beaton

Avoiding sports as a child, Cecil Beaton learned photography from his nanny on her Kodak 3A, and avoiding academics at Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1925, he took his first published photo, printed in Vogue, of one of England's leading Shakespearean scholars dressed in drag: To be exact, George "Dadie" Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as Webster's the Duchess of Malfi. From there Beaton had to go work for his father's timber company, which he suffered for eight miserable days. After that he returned to his rightful place in the world in design, creating book jackets and studying photography until Vogue hired him fulltime in 1927. Although his style is flowery and theatrical, many of his most enduring images are serious people captured at critical times: a tense Churchill in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation portrait, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding portrait. During the war, he volunteered and was posted to the Ministry of Information, capturing images of the Blitz, its young injured on the cover of Life, and RAF pilots in their cockpit.

Broadly talented, Beaton designed the lighting, sets, and costumes for many Broadway musicals, winning four Tony Awards, and for several Hollywood extravaganzas, winning the Oscar for best costumes twice, for Gigi and most famously for his high camp creations in My Fair Lady. Although he never consummated his longtime, unrequited love for Peter Watson, a gay art collector whose interests lay elsewhere, Beaton did enjoy possibly the greatest consolation prize of the twentieth century, an affair with Gary Cooper. For his entire life, he kept his childhood diary in which he first realized he was a "terrible, terrible homosexualist" and that shame never fully disappeared, driving him to a few misguided affairs with women later in his life, including one with Greta Garbo, who dumped him and went back to women. When he was seventy he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and though he adapted to drawing and photographing with his left hand, he never recovered his earlier ease. He died six years later, in 1980.