Band of Thebes

Banned Books Week: 3 of Top 10 Most Challenged Titles Are Gay

This is Banned Books Week and the American Library Association has released its list of 513 challenges against books that were reported to the Office of Intellectual Freedom in 2008. Once again, the title that inspired the most objections was the children's book And Tango Makes Three about the gay penguins in Central Park's zoo.

A new title on the list is Sarah S. Brannen's 32-page picture book Uncle Bobby's Wedding which celebrates same-sex marriage portrayed by two male guinea pigs in tuxedos trading vows.

The third gay title in the top ten is Stephen Chbosky's The Perks of Being a Wallflower, a perennial favorite and an annual target. People really love this novel. With nearly 1,300(!) reader reviews on Amazon it has an average rating of 4.5 stars. (For comparison, another cherished title, Lorrie Moore's Birds of America, published a year earlier, has 86 customer reviews and averages 3.5 stars.) Last February marked the 10th anniversary of Perk's publication and it is still a brisk seller nationwide, yet Chbosky has never written another book. A graduate of USC Filmic Writing Program, he concentrates on movies now.

Just to be clear why the complaints are so troubling: Books are challenged not simply for sexual content but because some people object to "positive portrayals of homosexuals."

For a map of the complainers' locations, click here. It's not precisely what you'd think. Conservative hotbeds Utah, Alaska, and South Dakota don't have any.

New Barney Frank Biography Skims His Longterm Relationships

Long ago when the University of Massachusetts Press signed Stuart Weisberg to write Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, neither side could have guessed the prominence he would have now as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. That's a mixed blessing. His higher profile is good for sales but there's no escaping the fact that this is the summary of a football game written in the 3rd quarter.

Despite the years of research and more than 150 interviews including Frank himself, the book has no chance of becoming the definitive biography because the crucial part of his career is still unfolding. And from the early reports, maybe it's just as well that this won't be the lasting portrait of America's most important gay politician. According to Carlos Santoscoy in On Top Magazine, "An 11 year relationship with Herb Moses gets little more than a footnote, and his current boyfriend, Jim Ready, is mentioned only once in passing." In fact, Moses and Sergio Pombo after him, do get a middling amount of attention, with some decent quotes, but far, far more time is spent on Steve Gobie and the scandal about the escort ring he ran from Frank's apartment. What does this imbalance tell readers about gay life? Weisberg can't claim space limitations prevented him from providing a more meaningful view of Frank's longterm relationships; his biography is nearly 600 pages.

Those of you seeking an in-depth study of a fascinating and very, very funny political creature midcareer should buy it. Cokie Roberts and Nancy Pelosi blurbed it nicely. Anyone looking for full insights into the private man might want to wait. So far the biggest news from the bio is that Frank wants a cabinet position. Hope he gets it.

After Cologne... Cleveland: Gay Games 2014 in Ohio

Cleveland beat fellow finalists Boston and D.C. to host Gay Games IX from August 9 to 16, 2014. The judges cited the Ohio city's excellent venues, savvy financial plan, and "widespread community support." If you're so inclined, you can watch a replay of the announcement here. Next summer's games in Cologne have already registered 1,700 athletes.

1982: San Francisco
1986: San Francisco
1990: Vancouver
1994: New York
1998: Amsterdam
2002: Sydney
2006: Montreal Chicago
2010: Cologne
2014: Cleveland

On the south shore of Lake Eerie, Cleveland boasts the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Playhouse Square Center (the nation's second largest arts complex after Lincoln Center), and the Cleveland Museum of Art, home of this Flandrin portrait and 40,000 other treasures.

You Know I Always Look

The vaguely Ewan Mcgregor-ish guy across from me flying out of Yellowstone was reading Russian Prison Tattoos. (The subtitle is Codes of Authority, Domination, and Struggle and it's heavily illustrated.) The woman next to him had Mary Higgins Clark. I was engrossed in Edmund White's City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s, prepping to review it for you because it goes on sale today.

After Big Vote, Gay Westerwelle Likely To Be Germany's Foreign Minister

Yesterday openly gay Guido Westerwelle led Germany's Free Democrat party to their best election results in sixty years, coming in second behind Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democrats. As a result, the 47 year old blond from Bonn is tipped to become the country's next foreign minster. A former lawyer, Westerwelle has been leader of the FDP since 2001, five years after winning his seat in the Bundestag. The FDP is libertarian and pro-business, with a "skepticism" of both conservative and socialist policies. Westerwelle came out in 2004, at Angela Merkel's 50th birthday party.

Spiegel assesses his impressive showing by noting, "Westerwelle now embodies the other, better, more hopeful half of Germany's coalition government. Rarely has a vice chancellor received such a clear mandate from voters. Westerwelle's party performed particularly well in the country's high-grown regions -- in North Rhine-Westphalia, Rhineland-Palatinate, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria, the states where the majority of Germany's gross domestic product is generated."

Those western and southern states are home to agriculture, big pharma, and Germany's huge automobile industry -- not necessarily the areas you'd expect to embrace a gay leader with a flair for flamboyant stunts. He once painted the FDP's voting goal, 18%, on the soles of his shoes.

His unprecedented win makes more material for Berlin's Schwules Museum, exclusively devoted to gay history in Germany. Last week my family, my partner, and I admired their extensive permanent collection and their current exhibit of really lovely but virtually unknown paintings by the photographer Herbert List.

Westervelle's win also brings to mind Katharine Hepburn's pluck in The African Queen: "If a German can do it, so can we."

He is shown above with his lebensgefährte Michael Mronz.

Weekend in Wyoming: Yellowstone Fire

Of all my visits to Yellowstone, I'd never seen a forest fire until yesterday. It burned along the top of a ridge just outside the east gate. Later it was lit from the side by the setting sun, and then the helicopter flew through the smoke.

NYT Magazine on Coming Out in Junior High School

Must reading in today's NYT Magazine.

“When I first realized I was gay,” Austin [left] interjected, “I just assumed I would hide it and be miserable for the rest of my life. But then I said, ‘O.K., wait, I don’t want to hide this and be miserable my whole life.’ ”

I asked him how old he was when he made that decision.

“Eleven,” he said.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis examines the ups and downs of coming out in junior high. Happily, some of the article is centered around young people in conservative Tulsa, which proves to be more accepting than you thought.

Despite a frequent kneejerk reaction against children declaring their orientation so young, the adults in the article acknowledge their responsibility to helping and protecting these kids.

"A middle-school counselor in Maine ... conceded that her school was 'totally unprepared' for openly gay students. 'We always knew middle school was a time when kids struggle with their identity,' she told me, 'but it was easy to let anti-gay language slide because it’s so imbedded in middle-school culture and because we didn’t have students who were out to us or their classmates. Now we do, so we’re playing catch up to try to keep them safe.'"

Even the executive director of the Christian Educators Association International says, “I certainly don’t believe school districts should force a sexual agenda on the community, but we can’t just put our heads in the sand and ignore the kind of harassment that’s going on.”

Denizet-Lewis writes, "When a 12-year-old boy matter-of-factly tells his parents — or a school counselor — that he likes girls, their reaction tends not to be one of disbelief, dismissal or rejection. “No one says to them: ‘Are you sure? You’re too young to know if you like girls. It’s probably just a phase,’ ” says Eileen Ross, the director of the Outlet Program, a support service for gay youth in Mountain View, Calif. “But that’s what we say too often to gay youth. We deny them their feelings and truth in a way we would never do with a heterosexual young person.”

Last year, Denizet-Lewis memorably wrote about gay marriage while excluding lesbians and unable to find couples of color. This article is better, with lesbians Lala and Tina and bi Kera, though still lopsided toward white males.

Read it.

Stonewall UK Award Nominees: Sarah Waters vs. Dustin Lance Black

The leading UK lgbt rights group Stonewall has announced their nominees for this year's awards in politics, journalism, sports, and entertainment. Strangely, the writing award pits novelists and memoirists against the playwright Nicholas de Jongh for Plague Over England and Milk screenwriter Dustin Lance Black. (Black's nomination at the UK awards is baffling because he is American.) Even more bizarrely, favorite lesbian Sarah Waters is up for her entirely heterosexual book, The Little Stranger, which is also shortlisted for the Booker, yet favorite gay Colm Toibin is not nominated for his all straight Brooklyn, which coincidentally is also not shortlisted for the Booker. Three of the seven categories are:

Politician of the Year
John Bercow MP
Ben Bradshaw MP
Chris Bryant MP
Lynne Featherstone MP
Baroness Turner of Camden

Writer of the Year
Dustin Lance Black, Milk
Geraldine Bedell, The Gulf Between Us
Paul O’Grady,  At My Mother’s Knee…
Nicholas de Jongh, Plague Over England
Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger

Entertainer of the Year
Stephen K Amos
Boyzone
Beth Ditto
Mary Portas
Russell Tovey

Among the many contrasts with HRC's annual dinners is money. It's said that roughly half of the money HRC raises at their dinners goes to the next year's dinner. At Stonewall, every pence of the £150 ticket price goes to funding their awareness campaigns.

Born September 25: Pedro Almodóvar

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-nine years since Pepi, Luci, Bom, he has made seventeen 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. Two weeks from now, his Broken Embraces will close the New York Film Festival. It opens in NY on November 20 and in LA on December 11. The movie once again stars his current muse Penelope Cruz, who had the good sense to spend more time in her Oscar acceptance speech thanking Pedro than Woody after winning for the ridiculous Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

New U.N. President: "Majority of the Countries" Find Gays "Unacceptable"

On Friday, opening the 64th session of the UN General Assembly with a press conference, new U.N. President Ali Abdussalam Treki answered a question about last session's bill to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide. The Libyan official said:

"That matter is very sensitive, very touchy. As a Muslim, I am not in favor of it . . . it is not accepted by the majority of countries. My opinion is not in favor of this matter at all. I think it's not really acceptable by our religion, our tradition.

“It is not acceptable in the majority of the world. And there are some countries that allow that, thinking it is a kind of democracy . . . I think it is not.”

The State Department has not responded but in a typically strange bit of political bedfellowship, our loudest ally is a Republican Congresswoman from Florida who was born in Havana. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen blasted Treki's comments, saying, "The anti-gay bigotry spewed by this Qaddafi shill demonstrates once again that the UN has been hijacked by advocates of hate and intolerance."

I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, & Jersey by Paul Rudnick

Published last week, Paul Rudnick's collection of fifteen humor pieces I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey earned an glittery review from the NYT. Alida Becker called them "uproariously self-deprecating essays about being gay and Jewish in suburban New Jersey and downtown Manhattan, and about his career as a playwright and script doctor in Hollywood and on Broadway." She praised his "irresistible screeds against the indignities of modern urban life," which "introduce us to a despotic enforcer of rigid codes of conduct, an affronted citizen eager and willing to see the most extreme, even lethal, measures used to combat cellphone addicts, people who wield credit cards to pay for cabs, and Brooklyn hipsters intent on imposing “outsider” Christmases on their hapless offspring... these rants are proof that Rudnick is in firm control of a hilariously large-scale personality."

Generous David Sedaris blurbed it with, "Paul Rudnick is a champion of truth (and love and great wicked humor) whom we ignore at our peril. There is no book wiser than or half as funny as I Shudder."

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."

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

In March 1933 while Isherwood was still enjoying life with his teenage Heinz in the Schöneberg neighborhood of Berlin, the Nazis opened a concentration camp for political prisoners just across the street from the pretty houses of the Oranienburg suburb. What exactly do the words "political prisoners" conjure for you? Here's how it started around Oranienburg. In their first local election the Nazis won five of twenty-five seats. After the next election they had thirteen seats of twenty-five, and with their new majority they voted to imprison the other twelve councilmen who weren't Nazis. Those people were their lifelong neighbors, their classmates, their colleagues. Then they disappeared simply for being from another party.

Throughout Sachsenhausen the many displays written in German and English include statistics and profiles of gay people imprisoned and murdered at the camp. One feature discusses a ballet dancer named Fritz Heilscher who was jailed, released, and expelled from his union the Association of Artists for being gay. Unable to dance, he took a job in a shoe shop, was arrested again for being gay, jailed again, transferred to this camp, and murdered. Roughly 1,000 lgbt people were killed here, of approximately 50,000 lgbt people murdered in all the camps. That's almost the same number of Americans that were killed in Vietnam.

Walking the grounds, a woman pushing a wheelchair stopped to ask us directions in German. My sister spoke with her. The man in the wheelchair had been imprisoned at the camp by both the Nazis during the war and by the Russians after the war. This is the same fate that befell gay survivors of the camps. While others were liberated, gay prisoners had to finish out their sentences in jail, as decided by the British and American officials newly in charge.

Another telling post-War detail is below.

Born September 18: Greta Garbo

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.
    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 she 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 1960 memoir including her lesbian affairs; she survived breast cancer; she survived People magazine publishing photos of her swimming nude in 1976; and she died at eighty-four in 1990. Famously frugal, she left $20 million to her niece.
    Garbo 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.

Afternoon in Berlin: Bundestag Dome and LGBT Holocaust Memorial

Yesterday after we climbed to the summit the Bundestag dome (whose layers of spiral walkways and mirrored core really ought to be the star of a Daniel Craig 007 set piece), my sister, my partner, and I walked to the Holocaust memorial commemorating the more than 50,000 lgbt people, primarily gay men, murdered by the Nazi Third Reich. Give or take, it's the same number as U.S. soldiers who died in Vietnam, yet the injustice is largely overlooked in history. Accordingly, we were doubly impressed by the last two paragraphs of the official statement near the installation (which was vandalized twice last year and has been seamlessly repaired). Imagine if a U.S. memorial were phrased this way.

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. 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.

Colin Firth Wins Best Actor at Venice for Ford's Version of A Single Man

Sunday night at the closing of the Venice Film Festival, Colin Firth won the best actor award for his portrayal of a gay professor mourning his lover's death in A Single Man. Designer Tom Ford adapted the movie from Christopher Isherwood's 1964 slim novel which takes place in southern California. The cast also includes Julianne Moore, Matthew Goode from Match Point and last year's Brideshead Revisited, and Ginnifer Goodwin from He's Just Not That Into You.

Speaking about his film, openly gay director Ford said, “When I see someone who sees the film and says, 'It's a gay story,' I don't even know what they are thinking, it just seems to me a human story.” Although he obviously intended to emphasize the universality of love, it's increasingly tiresome to hear yet again this false distinction that something is "not gay... it's human."

According to IMDB, the movie still doesn't have a U.S. release date commenter Mel P quoting Variety, TWC will release it in a limited run before December 31 then go wider early in 2010.

Born September 16: Wilhelm von Gloden

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 Greek or Roman scenes, 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.

Heather Havrilesky Really, Really Likes You

Salon's heterosexual Heather Havrilesky is a human wave of gay affirmation:

"Gay people are just like straight people, only they're smarter and funnier and more interesting.

"Also, they smell better. They've read more books, sure. And they have more friends -- that part isn't surprising. Because they're better educated, generally speaking, and also a little wiser. Like blondes, they have more fun.

"When people talk about homos taking over the planet, my heart races a little faster. A planet ruled by gays! Imagine how good the scones will be!

"Plus, there'll be prettier yards, less crime, more funding for the arts but less bad poetry, fewer rude, disheveled dogs roaming loose on the streets, and less weak coffee. I'm guessing there aren't many gay Hummer owners. McMansions would surely fall out of fashion, along with miniblinds, vinyl siding and Applebee's.

"Everyone would be grumpier and bossier on the outside, but more kindhearted deep down inside. Complaining about your crappy day would become an acceptable form of filibustering in Congress. Neglecting your houseplants would become punishable by law."

Ostensibly her post is about the coming television season, "where token gay characters have replaced token black characters as the marginalized peoples du jour." She worries,

"By depicting gay people as they really are -- intelligent, attractive, self-possessed -- modern-day televisual narratives run the risk of misinforming the public about the fact that many gay people are slovenly, slow-witted and boring. I would personally launch a public awareness campaign to inform the populace that Gay People Are Stupid And Uninteresting, Too -- I just can't find any stupid, uninteresting gay people to help me enlighten the masses."

Taking Woodstock

Taking Woodstock is Ang Lee's third movie to focus on a gay man and while that storyline certainly isn't as central to the plot as it is in The Wedding Banquet or Brokeback Mountain, it isn't quite as de-gayed as some reviews have implied. Based on Elliot Tiber's memoir of his role in making the 1969 happening happen, the movie has a nice vibe of beautiful youthquake shaking up a sleepy little town and awakening in particular the repressed Elliot and his depressed father. High points are Imelda Staunton as his difficult mother and Tony-nominated twenty-four year-old Jonathan Groff [center] as festival organizer Michael Lang. Eugene Levy, Liev Schreiber, and Paul Dano are typically okay. Unfortunately, the script toggles between the amateur and the awful. Constant collaborator and frequent screenwriter James Schamus may or may not be a great producer but he's no Diana Ossana and Larry McMurtry. His big domestic story thread breaks climaxes with this exchange reprinted in full:

"Dad, how can you stand it?"
"I love her."

All the characters are underdeveloped, none worse so than Emile Hirsch's Billy, who suffers from Vietnam flashbacks and high school dialogue. Notably, every one of Ang Lee's missteps credits Schamus with screenwriting: Ride with the Devil, Hulk, and Lust, Caution, while only two of his successes do: The Ice Storm and -- shared with two other writers -- Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. [And yes, the girl in the hat is Meryl Streep's daughter Mamie Gummer.]