Band of Thebes

Bait by Alex Sanchez

If there's any justice, this year's National Book Award finalists for children's literature will include Bait, the seventh YA novel from Lammy winning author Alex Sanchez, about a smart, troubled, straight 16 year-old legal Mexican immigrant named Diego MacMann. Constantly at war with himself, Diego wants help but would rather deny his problem ever happened. He wears a shark's tooth on a necklace and when he's overwhelmed, he takes it off and cuts his arms with it. (Hence all the long-sleeved shirts even in hot weather.) Also, he flares into sudden rages and punches holes in his bedroom walls or hits his classmates, particularly a gay boy wearing purple fingernail polish who looks at him "funny." Diego's Irish stepfather forced himself on Diego from an early age and even three years after his stepfather's death, Diego doesn't feel he's escaped him. In the book's measured account, it's clear that the likeliest outcome in this particular case is that Diego will be destroyed by the trauma and self-loathing. Try as he does to behave for his mother who works two jobs and to help his younger half-brother, Diego just can't cope. He thinks about swimming out to sea until he drowns.

The book opens with Diego and his mother meeting the potential probation officer Mr. Vidas, whom Diego initially dislikes but comes to realize might actually be a grownup who will listen to him. Angering all the adults who worked out a deal to avoid probation, Diego interrupts the judge in court to say he wants probation. So begins the two-steps-forward-one-step-back relationship between Diego and the sympathetic but overworked and slightly guarded Mr. Vidas, who Diego does not understand is gay. That unwanted revelation is one of many setbacks on their difficult road. Drawing their sessions deftly and with affection, Sanchez shows perfect command of the territory because he used to be a probation officer. Despite the heavy subject, he gives his characters a good sense of humor and notices quirky details in their lives. (Responding to Mr. Vidas's point-to-your-emotion chart, Diego says, "You should have a smiley face for 'It sucked.'") Subplots with Diego's best friend Kenny and his new girlfriend Ariel add other layers of texture to this moving, memorable novel. Among the year's best.

School Library Journal said, "Unlike most recent fiction that addresses sexual abuse, this story focuses not on the telling of secrets, but on making sense of the experience and building a healthy foundation for moving forward. This groundbreaking novel brings to life an appealing young man who is neither totally a victim nor a victimizer, one who struggles to handle conflicts that derail many young lives. Teens will identify with Diego’s dreams and frustrations, his feeling of difference, his yearning for “normal” life and relationships. High interest and accessible, this coming-of-age story belongs in every collection. For the one in six boys who is sexually abused, it could be a lifesaver."

Kirkus said "Sanchez draws his characters lovingly, making it very apparent that he knows teens like Diego and genuinely understands their peril." But they found other elements of the story "groan-inducing" and "cringeworthy."

PW: "Sanchez does a masterful job explaining the protagonist's complicated emotions as he deals with his past."

Find out more about the six other, more gay-centric books by Sanchez, who divides his time between Florida and Thailand, on his website. And definitely read Bait.

Born July 31: Barbara Gittings

Barbara Gittings deserves a major museum exhibit, a biographer, and a feature film like Kinsey. She was heroic at least since her freshman year at Northwestern (1949-50), when a Chicago psychiatrist proposed to "cure" her lesbianism and, rather than submit, or fall apart, Gittings devoted all her time to studying homosexuality in the medical and legal libraries. The dreadful descriptions ("deviate," "pervert"), the exclusively male focus, and the lack of any mention of love only spurred her on. Typical gusto: When she found the anonymously written book The Homosexual in America, she called the publisher to find out who the author was and arranged to meet him. Later, she met Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, founders of the Daughters of Bilitis in California, and within two years she had begun a New York chapter despite living in Philadelphia. She edited the group's magazine, The Ladder, and became friends with Frank Kameny in Washington. Together they organized the phenomenal picketing of the White House in October 1965 and at Independence Hall, where Gittings carried a sign reading Homosexuals Demand Their Civil RIghts. She and Kameny were instrumental in convincing the APA to de-list homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973. With her life partner Kay Lahusen, whom she met at a Daughters of Bilitis picnic in 1961, she never stopped working for gay equality. Several awards are named in her honor, including one from GLAAD. There should be more.

Still Fooled? Obama's Gay Symbols Over Substance Yet Again

In January, when gay people were upset by the lack of any high profile lgbt appointments to the cabinet and the decision to make the moral authority ushering in the new administration anti-abortion, anti-evolution, anti-gay Rick Warren, Obama's team -- breaking down those barriers, for the first time ever -- invited an lgbt marching band to perform in the Inauguration parade.

In June, after five months of inaction on lgbt issues capped by a vigorous legal defense of DOMA that equated gay marriage with incest, to quell the increasingly loud and mainstream outcry, Obama and Michelle -- breaking down those barriers, for the first time ever -- invited a couple hundred hand-picked non-critical lgbt leaders to the White House for cocktails and a speech that offered a lot of rhetoric, few specifics, and no timeline.

Now, after six months of hundreds of dismissals of lgbt servicemembers from the military, comes the news this week that the White House pressured Rep. Alcee Hastings to withdraw his add-on to the defense appropriations bill that would have prohibited the military from spending any money on kicking out gay servicemembers. Furthermore, Hastings says the White House still has not acknowledged or responded to his June letter co-signed by 70 other House representatives concerned about DADT. And today -- breaking down those barriers, for the first time ever -- the White House announced Obama is awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom to a dead gay man (Harvey Milk) and a living lesbian (Billie Jean King).

Watch the video:

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Filmmaker Magazine's 25 New Faces Includes at Least 5 LGBT Directors

Gay couples are winners. Mosher and Palmieri top at Silverdocs.

As bonds that lead to coupledom go, a shared passion for the photographer Helen Levitt is a pretty good one. So it was for Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher, just two of at least five lgbt up and comers named in the eleventh annual "25 New Faces of Independent Film" in Filmmaker Magazine's summer issue, on sale this week. They met in a drag club, talked about Levitt, fell in love, made a movie together, and won the Grand Jury prize at Silverdocs this year. Some of the other lgbt honorees' stories are even more inspiring.

Your gaydar may go off for other directors on the list, but the five out in their bios are:

Morgan Jon Fox's third movie OMG/HaHaHa won the best feature awards at Chicago's lgbt film festival and the Memphis Indie Fest. "He's also in post on This Is What Love in Action Looks Like, a documentary about a Memphis teen who sparked a local protest movement when he wrote on his blog about his parents' decision to send him to Love in Action, a Fundamentalist Christian program that tries to turn gay kids straight."

Tina Mabry's feature Mississippi Damned just won the jury award at LA's Outfest and previously garnered honors from festivals in Philadelphia, Atlanta, and New York, as well as the American Black Film Festival. "I grew up pretty poor in the South," Mabry told Filmmaker. "We didn't have a lot of opportunities presented to us. I wanted to tell a story that would look at my family's struggles in the South and how our community, the landscape and the politics of that community would define our lives." She appeared at the Queer Women of Color Film Festival after co-writing The Itty Bitty Titty Committee.

Nicole Opper's Off and Running about a Brooklyn lesbian couple raising three kids including an adopted black girl, Avery, who excels at high school track while questioning her place in the family. "After stops at Tribeca, NewFest, Silverdocs and Frameline, Off and Running will be broadcast on PBS' doc series POV." Her next doc looks at a home for abandoned boys in Mexico. She said, "I grew up in a very traditional family, with a mom and dad and brother, but I'm a Jewish lesbian who imagines adopting one day, so when I met Avery and discovered her background, I felt that could be my future." She lives in Philadelphia.

Michael Palmieri and Donal Mosher: Silverdocs winners for October Country, their feature-length documentary that Filmmaker calls, "a visually seductive, conceptually concise yearlong portrait of director Mosher's own upstate New York extended family, a portrait that imbues these tough and oftentimes sad figures with a haunted poetry...his PTSD-afflicted father, his estranged Wiccan aunt, and a sister whose boyfriends all wind up as absentee fathers." Their next feature, Lab Rats, is about people who get paid to participate in medical trial studies. They live in Portland. 

Fundamentally at Odds with Himself: God Says No by James Hannaham

Despite the stupor-inducing heat and humidity and the region's reputation for long-windedness, a handful of Southern comic masterpieces like Charles Portis's The Dog of the South, Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints or Sportsman's Paradise, James Wilcox's Modern Baptists, or Susan Orlean's nonfiction The Orchid Thief are written with a lightning brevity so that every syllable opens fresh windows. At times in his first novel God Says No, James Hannaham approaches their mastery. Look at his description, from a child's view, of an older man: 

"When Dave smiled, he showed off all his teeth, top and bottom, and he made me guess which one wasn't real. I chose the wrong one. He gave us a lot of advice about how to get divorced, what fishing poles to buy, and how to cheat Breathalyzers and polygraphs."

Or his narrator's mother, who always expected her son to marry a nice black girl, meeting his bride for the first time at their wedding:

Later, in a private moment by the buffet table, my mother leaned toward me, staring at Annie as she fixed my eighty-six year old uncle's boutonniere. "So one of her parents black and the other Chinese?" she asked, a pin between her teeth. Annie's skin had grown tan from our trips to the beach. Timidly, I shook my head.

"What is she?"

"She's from Samoa."

"Sam-who-a?"

"Samoa. It's in the South Pacific."

"And she not mixed at all? I swear that girl is mixed. You mean to tell me with that flat nose--"

"No, Mama, there's no black."

"Samoa," my mother repeated, the way she might have if I'd brought home a girl from another galaxy. "That's a new one."

Hannaham captures many, many such crystalline moments in telling the story of an overweight young fundamentalist, Gary Gray, whose deep religious beliefs are at odds with his desire for sex with men in Orlando in the 1980s. From an abusive upbringing to a zealous Christian college to an ex-gay conversion center, Gary is forever chafing against his institutional identities. In fact, he tries to erase himself altogether, through two quick, botched suicide attempts and the book's long middle section in which he abandons his wife, daughter, and job to move to Atlanta under the alias August Valentine.

The readers who are eager for Gary to let go of his continued insistence that gay sex is wrong (while frequently cruising restrooms for instant anonymous hookups) and those anticipating Hannaham's insights on broader gay culture with characters enjoying a freer, more open life, will be frustrated. When the book seems headed there, after a few months living with man, an abrupt turn sends Gary to an ex-gay conversion therapy compound. It's a mild place and, like all important healing, Gary's progress against his shame is slow. In the novel's final pages he comes closer to being at peace with himself. His journey is important, it's true, and it's literature.

Lesbians Smoke More than Gay Men Do, Both Much More than Straights

A discouraging new report from UNC Chapel Hill confirms earlier findings that gay people are almost twice as likely to smoke than are straights. The numbers come from compiling forty-two studies of smoking habits:

37% of lesbians smoke    18% of straight women smoke
33% of gay men smoke    24% of straight men smoke

The Los Angeles Times quotes the report's lead author as saying, "Likely explanations include the success of tobacco industry's targeted marketing to gays and lesbians, as well as time spent in smoky social venues and stress from discrimination." Read UNC's full press release here.

Steven Lansburg takes on the NPR coverage of the report in his Slate column:

In other words, Varney implicitly assumes that gays are either too stupid to have gotten the message that smoking is bad for you or too irrational to have modified their behavior accordingly. A more inquisitive reporter might instead have raised the obvious question: What good reasons might gays have to smoke more than other people?

"Good reasons to smoke" ought to be a self-canceling phrase yielding the null set, but you can read Landsburg's thoughts on the subject here.

Born July 28: Sarah Schulman

Not sure of the exact math but Sarah Schulman deserves to be at least twelve times more prominent in American Letters than she is now. She's written one play, two nonfiction books, and nine novels, including the award winning After Delores as well as Shimmer, Empathy, and Rat Bohemia, which is one of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels of all time. Her novel People in Trouble was the uncredited basis for the musical Rent. In the legal wrangling, Jonathan Larson's estate agreed that the playwright had lifted Schulman's "setting, themes, characters, plot, and ideas," yet since he did not use her exact words and phrasings, it isn't plagiarism. Schulman was a member of ACT-UP from 1987 to 1992, and  with Jim Hubbard she's making The ACT UP Oral History Project. They are also filming United in Anger, a documentary about ACT UP. In 1992 she founded The Lesbian Avengers with five other women. They started Dyke March, now a global standard the night before gay pride. Her new novel The Mere Future, which imagines a squeaky-clean dystopian NYC where the only job is marketing, will be published on September 1. A new nonfiction book, Ties That Bind: Familial Homophobia and Its Consequences will appear the following month on October 6.

Booker Longlist: Toibin, Waters, Trevor, Byatt, Mantel, Coetzee, 7 More

Judges for Britain's top literary award, the Man Booker Prize, announced their longlist today, including novels by out writers Colm Toibin and Sarah Waters, as well as forthcoming books by superstars A.S. Byatt, J.M. Coetzee, Hilary Mantel, and William Trevor. It's Trevor's turn. (Above. More below.) If you don't spend all day reading London newspapers online, you may not know that Wolf Hall has received stupendous reviews for its look at Henry VIII through the eyes of Thomas Cromwell. The Children's Book by A.S. Byatt has earned the best notices of her career since Possession won the Booker in 1990. And Me Cheeta -- also hugely, extravagantly praised by trusted critics -- is indeed the memoir of Tarzan's simian sidekick and his adventures from Liberia to Hollywood in the 1930s.

The thirteen titles to make the longlist are:

A.S. Byatt, The Children's Book, US pub in October
J.M. Coetzee, Summertime, October
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze (no US pub scheduled)
Sarah Hall, How to Paint a Dead Man,  September
Samantha Harvey, The Wilderness
James Lever, Me Cheeta
Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall, October
Simon Mawer, The Glass Room (no US pub scheduled)
Ed O'Loughlin, Not Untrue and Not Unkind, next April
James Scudamore, Heliopolis  
Colm Toibin, Brooklyn
William Trevor, Love and Summer, September
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger 

William Trevor is the only four-time Booker nominee never to have won. If he makes the short list on September 8, he will join Margaret Atwood and Beryl Bainbridge as the only five-time nominees in the prize's forty-one year history. Both women have won the award, as has Iris Murdoch, the sole six-time nominee.

Be wary of people who make a big deal that lgbt writers Toibin and Waters are being lauded now for writing straight novels that contain no overt lgbt characters. Not an issue. Toibin has been shortlisted twice before for gay novels (The Master and The Blackwater Lightship). Waters has also been shortlisted twice for lesbian books (Fingersmith and The Night Watch). Brooklyn is a great achievement but I really hope William Trevor wins.

Born July 27: Troy Perry

In September 1968, when he was twenty-eight, the Rev. Troy Perry put an ad in the Advocate announcing worship services for gay and lesbian Christians. On October 6, twelve people gathered in his living room in Los Angeles for what would become the Metropolitan Community Church, which now has over 300 congregations in eighteen countries.
      Perry was thirteen when he preached his first sermon. His father had died when he was twelve and his new stepfather was violent and abusive to Perry and his four brothers. Perry ran away to stay with relatives in Georgia and Texas and began attending Pentecostal services, then entered their ministry. He married the daughter of pastor, had two sons, came out, was defrocked, divorced, and was barred from seeing his children until a reunion in 1985. He married his partner of twenty-three years, Phillip De Blieck, in Toronto in 2003 at the local MCC. The newlyweds sued California for their marriage to be recognized and won. When the State appealed, the ruling was overturned. Perry retired as Moderator of the church in 2005 and his successor, Nancy Wilson, was installed in a special service held in the Washington National Cathedral. Perry continues preaching, public speaking, writing, and fighting for social change .
      The MCC’s history has been equally tumultuous. Less than two years after opening their Mother Church in Los Angeles in 1971, it was burnt to the ground by arsonists who were never caught. Fires have been set to MCC buildings seventeen additional times. A New Orleans bar that had hosted MCC services was torched fives months after the Los Angeles fire and thirty-two people were killed, among them twelve MCC members including the pastor and assistant pastor. Much more about the MCC’s history can be read here.

Props from Milk, Moulin Rouge, Titanic, Benjamin Button To Be Auctioned

After forty years in Hollywood, Harvey Schwartz, the owner of 20th Century Props is selling his entire inventory of 97,532 items this week and next. The dozens of movies from which props will be sold include Milk, Moulin Rouge, The Godfather, The Aviator, Spider-Man, Ironman, Titanic, Ocean's 11 & 12, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Batman & Robin, Starsky & Hutch, Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Rush Hour, The Changeling, Minority Report, Austin Powers, and the 1934 version of Cleopatra. Props will also be sold from numerous television shows, music videos (by Michael Jackson, Madonna, Britney, Clapton, Fugees, and more), as well as annual specials like the Oscars and the Super Bowl. Anyone can bid in person or online during the live auctions July 28 through August 1. The LA Times has an audio slideshow narrated by Schwartz featuring 71 images of items for sale. More details are available from the auction site and the prop house. Of course you'll look good in Nicole Kidman's dragon armchair from Moulin Rouge, but what is there to covet from Milk? Go for the Aviator desk originally owned by Howard Hughes.

Born July 25: Thomas Eakins

The painter Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) is a classic case of the cost the closet. Reviewing a recent biography of him by Pulitzer Prize winner William McFeely, Publishers Weekly wrote 

Eakins had a fortunate early life, with art studies in Paris and Spain, a sympathetic wife and a promising career at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Nevertheless, he suffered from a sense of failure, bouts of depression and conflicted feelings about his attraction to men. McFeely sees the painting Swimming [top], in particular, as indicative of Eakins's unfulfilled longings, but also of more than that: the image of the artist and five of his male students swimming in the nude embodies Eakins's Thoreauvian conviction that happiness can be found in freedom from society's constraints, in living at one with nature. Eakins never achieved this freedom, however. In 1886, he was asked to resign from the academy, probably because of his homosexuality and his insistence on using nude models in his life drawing classes, and his life became one of increasing despair.

Eakins was one of the first painters to take an interest in photography and especially liked shooting male nudes, so in their 19th century, sepia way, many of the clickable images from 2007's post are NSFW. These include the nude boxers, the nude tug-of-war, and the infamous full frontal picture of an aged Walt Whitman.

E. Lynn Harris Dies at 54

Very sad news about the much too early passing of E. Lynn Harris, 54, who died last night in Los Angeles of unknown causes. (One report said he was "stricken" on a train a few days ago, briefly passed out, then appeared to fine.) No NYT obit yet, but CNN reports,

Harris wrote a series of novels that exposed readers to characters rarely depicted in literature: black, affluent gay men who were masculine, complex and, sometimes, tormented.

"We have a 'don't ask, don't tell' policy in the black community," [Keith] Boykin said. "E. Lynn Harris encouraged people to ask and to tell."

CNN also gives some backstory and acknowledges critics who considered his commercial brand of writing formulaic.

Another appreciation, in the Atlanta Constitution Journal, aims to capture his broader significance:

"Along with Terry McMillan’s ‘Waiting to Exhale,’ E. Lynn Harris’ ‘Invisible Life’ helped to create a bigger space for us,” [Pearl] Cleage reflected. “Those two books helped to not only define but also to broaden what African-Americans wanted to read. They also informed New York publishers that these voices were out there. He made an important impact on American letters.”

That article also tries to convey his devotion to his readers. A former cheerleader, Harris enthusiastically shared the joy of his success at his beyond-capacity events.

“African-American women became his most devoted readers because he made them aware of a world that could prove dangerous to them,” explained [Valerie] Boyd. “He became our big brother.”

Despite inking a series of lucrative publishing deals and becoming a frequent fixture on the New York Times best-seller list, Harris’ approach with readers never changed over the years.

“He would get up and hug each person in line,” recalled Boyd. “He personalized each book and he took the time to make that connection with each reader.”

He is also said to have answered up to 200 fan emails a day. Having struggled to get his voice heard, he never ceased being grateful for interest in his work. He self-published his first novel, Invisible Life, and sold 10,000 copies door to door in Atlanta beauty salons before a Doubleday sales rep brought the book to the attention of Anchor publisher Martha Levin.

His memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, discusses his early struggles with being gay and his suicide attempt. His thirteenth novel, Mama Dearest, was scheduled for October but expect that to move earlier.

Born July 23: F. Holland Day

Although F. Holland Day is remembered (some say imitated) as an early pioneer of art photography, he was also an influential book publisher whose 100+ titles included works by Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. The sole inheritor of a fortune from his father, a Boston merchant, Day was able to indulge his artistic pursuits with abandon. He amassed a large collection of ephemera connected to John Keats and he built a summer camp in Little Good Harbor, Five Islands, Maine where he hosted other artists and youths who modeled for him. The lads were usually from Boston’s immigrant slums where Day often tutored poor children in reading. One of his young models was Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant, whom Day encouraged in his literary ambitions and achieved fame with his book of poetic essays, The Prophet, published in more than twenty languages. (Gibran is the source, often paraphrased, for everything from Beatles’ lyrics to Kennedy’s “Ask not...”) Day also photographed adults, notably himself as Christ, as well as prominent artists and gay leaders such as Edward Carpenter. A fire in 1904 destroyed Day’s studio and most of his negatives. He later lost interest in photography and died in 1933 at sixty-nine.

Orwell and Beyond: The Future of Not Really Owning What You Buy

Amazon had been selling electronic versions of Orwell novels that they didn't have the rights to, then recently, without any warning, they deleted those files from everyone's Kindle. Amazon refunded customers' payment but anyone who had highlighted passages or made margin notes in the file lost their work forever. Imagine if B&N had the power to take back every copy of a certain book from readers' shelves nationwide within sixty seconds. The company that does have that power is the company whose purported technical glitch de-ranked all its gay books earlier this year, effectively rendering them invisible.

As more and more products exist only in electronic format, the ramifications of bad decisions become increasingly dire. Writing in Slate, Farhad Manjoo predicts judges ruling in libel or copyright cases will order the files deleted, then the work will simply not exist anymore. I think obscenity trials are also cause for concern, especially because pornography and community standard laws vary state by state. 

Manjoo reports that this is at least the fifth or sixth time Amazon has deleted titles from Kindles, and many, many other programs operate the same way:

"Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren't really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or whomever else. Steve Jobs has confirmed that every iPhone routinely checks back with Apple to make sure the apps you've purchased are still kosher; Apple reserves the right to kill any app at any time for any reason."

After years and years of stacking the courts with judges who put corporations ahead of individuals and faced with government officials too timid to hinder business "in this economy," we're barreling toward a world in which colossal companies own a larger and larger portion of our lives, which we lease from them strictly on their terms of service. Because our art and our entertainment and our lives are deemed objectionable more often than others', gay people need to be especially vigilant about this creeping control. And I don't think we are.

Born July 22: Rufus Wainwright

Having come out when he was fourteen, Rufus Wainwright wasn't about to let DreamWorks records automatically degay his bio for his debut album ten years later; he insisted his official press kit say he is out. That self-titled cd made him the year’s critical darling and Rolling Stone named him Best New Artist. His follow-up effort, Poses, was again a critical favorite, followed by Want One in 2003 and Want Two in 2004. His fifth studio album, Release the Stars, executive produced by Neil Tennant, was number two on the UK charts. In June 2006, he made history at Carnegie Hall by recreating, song by song, Judy Garland's 1961 concert there. Response was so ecstatic he was invited to repeat the show in London, Paris, and at the Hollywood Bowl, yet the sales of the subsequent live cd were lackluster, peaking at #171 in both the US and UK. His first opera, Prima Donna, had its world premiere in Manchester twelve days ago. The NYT had some reservations about it, but click through to see the slideshow.

Turf Negotiations Continue

As predicted, we're continuing our discussions about whose property this is. Someone showed up with reinforcements. Adorable baby twin reinforcements. Click to super enlarge.

Born July 21: Hart Crane

Son of a successful candyman, child of divorce, Hart Crane dropped out of his Ohio high school in 1917 and escaped to New York. For seven years he moved back and forth between the city and Cleveland, writing poems published in literary journals and working in his father's factory. Tortured by his love of men far more than was Whitman decades before him, Crane did have one joyous affair with a Dutch merchant mariner named Emil Opffer who inspired his epic, erotically charged verse, Voyages. That poem was one of the highlights of his first book, White Buildings (1926), celebrated for the zest and fire of his lyrics and criticized, as was all his poetry, for its impenetrable confusion. As told in this comprehensive New Yorker essay about Crane, he said he was “more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness . . . than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations.”

While Crane struggled to write his monumental work, The Bridge (1930), he suffered miserable affairs and worsening alcoholism. Although initial critical reception to his now revered achievement was weak, he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to Mexico the following year. Returning from that sojourn aboard the SS Orizaba in April 1932, he hit on a working shipmate and was beaten up. Crane said, "Goodbye, everybody!" and jumped overboard to his death. The most devoted of later writers who revered him, Tennessee Williams left instructions that his body be buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico where Crane drowned. (Instead, Williams' family buried him in Missouri.) Crane's legacy influenced later gay painters as well, inspiring works by Marsden Hartley, Eight Bells Folly, and by Jasper Johns twice: Diver and Periscope. If you don't already own them, you need his Complete Poems or, if you can, the Library of America edition which includes selected letters.

Katha Pollitt Calls Out Edna O'Brien on Ignoring Byron's Gay Life

In an accurate world, any book called Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life would be a catalog of the great poet pursuing teenage boys. His many, many, many romps with women could fill another book called Byron Biding His Time Between Boys. I love Edna O'Brien's fiction, I've stood in line to have her sign my books, and I was flattered when she flirted. (Trust me, on her side it was purely from book tour boredom.) But I never, ever thought that she -- she who talks about her writing coming from a deep gloomy place, with her oeuvre's mainstay the lives of rural Irish Catholic women -- was temperamentally suited to write about the love life of the manic London lothario who bedded his way through Europe and died exiled in Greece. Thank god, here is Katha Pollitt confirming my hunch. She says of the book:

"It's fun to read, but I could have done with more digging and thinking. Unlike Fiona MacCarthy's terrific Byron: Life and Legend, Byron in Love makes little of Byron's homosexuality, which was far more extensive than O'Brien chronicles. For MacCarthy, indeed, his frenetic heterosexuality was due at least partly to British sodomy laws, which carried the death penalty; his passions for women were brief, and his behavior to them cruel and capricious, because he really wanted to be with teenage boys."

Born July 20: Roberta Achtenberg

Wrong again, Jesse Helms. It turns out Roberta Achtenberg sort of is "your garden-variety lesbian,” at least for those born in 1950. The daughter of immigrants (from Russia and Quebec) who had not gone high school, she attended UCLA and graduated from Berkeley. She met a man there and married him. She followed him on his fellowship, then attended law school herself. She divorced him. She found herself attracted to women. She became partners with a high-profile lawyer, Mary Morgan, who became a judge. They had a son, Benjie. He grew up. They broke up. Along the way, Achtenberg ran for a California Assembly seat and lost, then was elected a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Having originally supported Mario Cuomo for the 1992 election, she campaigned heavily for Bill Clinton and helped draft the Democrats’ platform. Early in 1993 Clinton nominated her for Asst Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. Despite Helms’ kerfuffle, she easily became the first openly lesbian or gay public official whose appointment was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, voting 58 to 31. Two years later, she left that position in order to run for mayor of San Francisco, losing by a smaller than expected margin. In 2000, Gray Davis appointed her to the Board of Trustees of California State University, and in May 2006 she was voted its chair.

Mental: Funny in the Head by Eddie Sarfaty

Continuing the tradition of funny gay memoirs by David Sedaris, David Rakoff, Kate Clinton, Bob Smith, Ellen Degeneres, Michael Thomas Ford, Wade Rouse, Hanns Ebensten, and Augusten Burroughs, Eddie Sarfaty's Mental: Funny in the Head takes a fresh tour through the familiar haunts of contemporary life. In nine chapters, he affably chronicles his misadventures with family, friends, fellow comics, hookups, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, a few deranged men, a ferocious drag queen, and one crazy kitty. Sarfaty convincingly recreates the tilt-a-whirl of emotions from college vacation secret trysts; the joys and burnout of longtime performing in Provincetown and a new gig teaching stand-up in DC; bartending in a place a lot like The Townhouse; meeting fantasists and fetishists from a site a lot like Manhunt; loving an older partner whose appalling lies are matched by his colossal cheapness (he steals women's clothes from his job and tries to return them to stores for cash, he refuses to pay for condoms because, "It's the bottom's job to protect himself."); and Eddie's adopting an anti-social cat whose addiction to pawing Christmas tree ornaments extends to scratching a defenseless pair of dangling treasures while Eddie and his boyfriend are romantically breaking in a new chair. Stitches required. A recurring highlight throughout the book is Eddie's family. His mother is abrasive, beleaguered, resilient, and always entertaining, even with coping with her husband's decline from Pick's disease on a family trip to Paris and London. Eddie's grandmother is ninety-five and sweet and undeterred in her quest to find out what two men could possibly do in bed together without a vagina. That comes later. First, she asks Eddie if he's gay and he says yes.

"Well, I thought you were, and I made up my mind I was gonna ask you!"

"Well, how do you feel?"

"It's a shock!"

Two days later, he calls her.

"Hi, Granny, how are you?"

"How do you think I am?"

Pin drops.

"What are you doing? Watching TV?"

"No, just thinking."

Crickets.

"Well, what are you thinking about?"

"What do you think I'm thinking about?"

Those are beautifully efficient passages, but at other times Sarfaty has a tendency to overexplain. However, his observations are consistently smart, as when he notices the 90-something and 30-something mothers of two of his comedy students 60-something and eleven talk about their sons in exactly the same way. You can read his essay Lactose Intolerant in full on his website, where you'll also find stellar blurbs for Mental from Michael Cunningham, Edmund White, Christopher Bram, Bob Smith, Eric Orner, Michael Thomas Ford, Patrick Moore, and Eddie's mom.

YouTube has a nine-minute short based on his five-page piece "Second Guessing Grandma." It stars Kathleen Chalfant from Angels in America and Wit. The movie's tone seemed off to me, but it's already gotten more than 330,000 views.