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After Elton has posted the results of its readers' poll, naming the top author and director of the decade David Sedaris and Ang Lee. In order, the six highest ranking authors, taking ninety percent of the votes, are:
The top three directors earned ninety-two percent of the votes: Ang Lee, Gus van Sant, and Pedro Almodovar.
Readers also named their favorite studio and independent films. Bruno, I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, and Wild Hogs slugged it out for worst movie of the decade.
The much quoted line from Jesse Green's interview with Larry Kramer about his twenty-years in the making gay history, The American People, is that "His idea of history is that everyone was gay: Joe Louis, De Gaulle, anybody," according to his joking straight Yale classmate Calvin Trillin. Don't get excited. The 6,000 word piece offers zero new names. All the historical figures Kramer has "queered" and reclaimed as gay, you've heard dozens of times before: Washington, Hamilton, Lafayette, Lewis (not Clark), J. Edgar Hoover, Sumner Welles, Ed Koch, and Lincoln. But where are the women?
In fact it's Lincoln's relationships with Joshua Speed and other men that sparks the most interesting part of the article. Tony Kushner spent three years writing the screenplay for Steven Spielberg's long-planned Lincoln biopic and Kramer wanted to make sure Kushner either made honest Abe fully gay or created "a character in which this was possible." Instead, Kushner " disappointed me mightily."
Kushner responds, “I don’t submit my work for political preapproval to anyone,” and “I’ll be happy to discuss my thoughts about Lincoln, if and when my screenplay—not one word of which Larry has seen—is filmed. Until then, perhaps he should drop his unhealthy obsession with my writing and concentrate on his own.”
The interviewer suggests, "there are things about Lincoln more important than his being gay, if he was."
The article also covers other, far less significant tussles with Edmund White and Michael Cunningham.
As for Kramer's book, it is currently 4,000 manuscript pages. His publisher hopes to cut twenty percent and bring it out in 2011.
What is it about being born around December 25 that makes gay boys grow up funny?
December 29: Paul Rudnick, I Shudder: And Other Reactions to Life, Death, and New Jersey
December 26: David Sedaris, David Sedaris: Live For Your Listening Pleasure
December 24: Bob Smith Selfish and Perverse
In a new short book out from FSG this month, Concerning E. M. Forster
Writing in The New Criterion, Brooke Allen says
The one thing everyone seems to know about Forsterian values is the mantra “only connect,” but, as Kermode points out, he did not always “connect” so well himself, either in his fiction or in his life:
and quotes Kermode opining:
In general he saw the poor as different from “us,” unless they qualified as boys who might be available for sex or were Italian peasants or Indians, and he had no real understanding of them.
Thomas Mallon's new book on letter writing, Yours Ever
The letters Forster sends home are suddenly alive with joy and discovery. If his love is something he cannot confess to his mother, it is something he must confide to his friend Florence Barger: "I want it to be known if ever I should die...I was resting my head on him all the time...and his hands were stroking it." Realizing that he will not, after all, die only having guessed at the intimacy he's always sought, he exults in his luck: "I wish I could convey to you what I feel at this unique time...It isn't happiness; it's rather -- offensive phrase -- that I first feel a grown up man."
Mallon says, "It's hard to think of another collection of letters that describes the finding of love more delicately or movingly." This fine literary feast includes many, many favorite straight writers as well as W.H. Auden, David Bowie, William S Burroughs, Byron, Colette, Noel Coward, John Gielgud, Allen Ginsberg, Harold Nicolson, Kim Philby, Proust, Vita Sackville-West, Dan Savage, Lytton Strachey, Evelyn Waugh, Tennessee Williams, and Virginia Woolf.
On Monday the Mexico City assembly voted to legalize gay marriage in the capital by a vote of 39 - 20. Catholic legislators in Albany, take note. Mayor Marcelo Ebrard says he will sign the bill. Conservatives from the president Calderón's National Action Party vow to challenge the new law in court. Same-sex married couples will be allowed to adopt children but won't be entitled to federal benefits like social security, pension, or inheritance.
Peru's Constitutional Court has ordered the National Police Technical School to reinstate a cadet who was kicked out for being gay. Their ruling also stated, “an individual's sexual orientation cannot be a prerequisite or a condition to determine his capabilities or professional aptitude.”
The Miami Herald reports on at least 18 murders of gay and trans people in Honduras during the past six months, since the coup ousting president Manuel Zelaya. The most recent to be killed is Walter Tróchez, a prominent gay rights activist who was kidnapped and beaten last week. Days after he escaped, he was shot by a gunman in a moving vehicle. According to Human Rights Watch, these recent murders exceed the total number of trans killings in Honduras from the past four years, 2004 to 2008.
Two panels of the five shots I took of the view south from the Homestead Trail. (The view east includes the banner shot, and two volcanoes.) Later five moose came to our yard, the most we've seen at once here. More after the jump.
Peter Knegt offers a helpful if depressing list of the decade's domestic box office gross for lgbt films. In these past ten years only 38 queer movies topped $1 million compared to 50 movies that did so in the 90s. The 90s' top ten included eight films released by studios whereas the 00s' list has only three major studio releases in its top ten:
1. Brokeback Mountain, 2005 $83,043,761
2. Bruno, 2009 $60,054,530
3. The Hours, 2002 $41,675,994
4. Monster, 2003 $34,469,210
5. Milk, 2008 $31,841,299
6. Rent, 2005 $29,077,547
7. Capote, 2005 $28,750,530
8. Frida, 2002 $25,885,000
9. Notes on a Scandal 2006 $17,510,118
10. Far From Heaven, 2002 $15,901,849
If you identify titles that IndieWire overlooked, post them in their comments.
The final ten titles of the list [more than 25% of the top 38] grossed less than $2 million each. Compare those to a few movies in which the main character pretends to be gay.
1. I Now Pronounce You Chuk & Larry, 2007, $120,059,556
2. Boat Trip, 2003, $8,600,126
3. The Closet [Le Placard], 2001, $6,678,894
4. Happy, Texas, 1999 strictly for comps, $1,955,000
Yesterday while you were brewing with Wiccans and dancing with druids, I embarked on my fourth itinerary attempting to cross the country post-blizzard. (I took this photo over Ohio.) The goddess smiled on me, through these people:
1. My Chinese cab driver to LGA, straight out of Ha Jin's fine new story collection, A Good Fall, said, "They should build runways in tunnels underground so the planes can fly in and out in any weather. Save more money." He told me about Israeli army jets that fly in and out of tunnels in mountains. I told him about the Chunnel shut down.
2. Woman next to me from Indianapolis to Phoenix: "Oh! It's like a movie!" Me: "What?" She: "Your life!" (Me: Not Kristen Bjorn surely? Oh, this one.)
3. Woman in her mid to late 80s going from Phoenix to Anchorage because her son, 65, had just died. She would have preferred to be with her other son in Virginia, as planned, and worked through her grief by listing the deceased's every fault. Starting with pack rat, even as a child. Recently retired, he told her, "I used to look forward to having four days off, but now every day is off. I don't have anything to look forward to." She responded, "Oh, poor you!"
Essential reading from Frank Rich on America's "wholesale flight from truth." Dissecting our national magical thinking he reminds readers, "We keep being fooled by leaders in all sectors of American life, over and over." Rich nails Enron, Bush, Iraq, Rove, "reality" tv, Barry Bonds, Ted Haggard, Edwards, Kerik, Spitzer, Madoff, the financial meltdown, balloon boy, Tiger, and Obama. Discuss among yourselves why it's an all male essay.
And the list grows longer every day. Late last week the administration / OPM (headed by openly gay John Berry who previously talked strong but may be morphing into a Barney Frank apologist careerist) has "concluded that it does not have the legal authority" to follow a judge's ruling that they must provide benefits to a lesbian employee's partner. OPM is splitting hairs over the judge's capacity as arbiter rather than ninth circuit judge, presposterously overlooking the fact that this is their own system for settling disputes. Lambda Legal blasts them. Yet again.
Baby boomers who act like they invented being young at sixty are
forgetting about Elsie de Wolfe who at sixty-one in 1926 attended a
costume ball in Paris dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer and made her
entrance doing handsprings. When she turned seventy, the world's most
famous interior designer wrote her autobiography and noted that her
daily exercise regimen still included yoga, headstands, and walking on
her hands. Her design style was nearly as dramatic, banishing the dark,
heavy Victorian look for new openness, airiness, and light. Starting at
forty, she received her first major commission for Stanford White's
Colony Club, after which she designed the interiors for the premiere
families of her day, the Fricks, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Windsors.
Ten years into her success, in her early fifties, she stopped to become
a nurse in World War I in France and earned the Croix de Guerre and the
Legion of Honor. From her late twenties onward she lived with Elisabeth
Marbury, one of the first women to work as a theatrical agent,
representing among others Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. They
spent thirty-three years together as a classic butch-femme couple,
mentoring a whole generation of younger lesbians including Mercedes de
Acosta who would become Greta Garbo's lover. Then de Wolfe up and
married Sir Charles Mendl because she wanted a title. Now Lady Mendl,
she expected nothing to change with Marbury, given that her marriage
was completely platonic, and the women remained lovers for seven more
years, until 1933, when Marbury died.
The next time you discuss outing and public figures and privacy, you might bear in mind that in 1926, the New York Times ran a front page story calling de Wolfe's wedding "a great surprise" because "she makes her home with Elisabeth Marbury at 13 Sutton Place." Not that everything can be explained by early experiences, but the woman who spent her life making things beautiful grew up listening to her mother tell her she was ugly. When she was seventy, Parisian fashionistas named her the best dressed woman in the world. She is immortalized in song lyrics by Irving Berlin and by Cole Porter:
When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up,
Now turns a handspring, landing up-on her toes
Anything Goes!
Flashback to 1949: South Pacific opened on Broadway, James Gould Cozzens won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, All the King's Men
won the Oscar for Best Picture, and in France, Jean Genet received his
tenth criminal conviction, which meant he would be sent to prison for
life. In the preceding five years he had published his five
groundbreaking novels, as well as three plays and dozens of poems, all
of which were greatly esteemed by his European contemporaries despite
his focus on petty thieves and his inclusion of gay sex. As news of his
dire situation spread, rather than ostracizing Genet, the leading
intellectuals rallied to his defense, and with a public push from
Cocteau, Sartre, and Picasso, among others, Genet was pardoned by the
French president. It is safe to say Harry Truman would not have done
the same because at that point Genet's fiction was still banned in the
United States. Genet never returned to prison after that, nor did he
ever publish another novel, although he continued to write plays,
poems, and a memoir, Un Captif Amoureux, published in 1986, the year after he died of throat cancer. For the full story, treat yourself to Edmund White's definitive Genet: A Biography
Although the controversy over his 1934 WPA painting The Fleet's In!
was sparked by homophobia and led Henry Latrobe Roosevelt to remove it
from the Corcoran show, Paul Cadmus was always aware that the outcry
helped establish him. For the rest of his life, he said he was grateful
for it. By 1937 his paintings at the Midtown Galleries in New York
attracted more than 7,000 visitors. He had grown up in Manhattan and
was fascinated by sailors, frequently hanging out at the Soldiers' and
Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park, where he was often propositioned
by navy men on leave but was too shy to go with them, preferring
instead to sit on the benches with them and talk. By his twenties, he
was over his shyness and traveled through Europe for three years with
his lover Jared French, who urged him to quit advertising and paint
fulltime. Back in New York, they formed a circle of prominent gay
artists including George Platt Lynes, who used Cadmus as a model, and
Lincoln Kirstein, who married his sister, Fidelma Cadmus, and fifty
years later wrote the catalog as Cadmus was being rediscovered. He
enjoyed more than a decade of increasing interest in his work before he
died, eleven days after 300 friends had gathered to celebrate his 95th
birthday. He was survived by Jon Anderson, his partner of more than
thirty-five years.
Two disappointments that could swap titles with no discernible comedown. Lonely middle aged depressed white men in nice suits rattled by attractive upstarts 25+ years younger whom they are unequally attracted to yet never kiss. In this case Colin Firth (English professor) is a better actor than George Clooney (corporate hatchet man), but here Vera Farmiga (the "girlfriend") far outshines Julianne Moore (the "friend who's a girl," flapping around lost in a pastiche of Todd Haynes heroines). As stories go, Isherwood's
While western gay rights watchers are diverted by Uganda's antigay law (voting is today on the original version with the death penalty still part of the bill), the Rwandan parliament is poised this week to consider a law that will make gay sex illegal and will criminalize encouraging or sensitizing people to homosexuality. Penalties of up to ten years in prison and fines of up to four times the average annual income await "any person who practices, encourages or sensitizes
people of the same sex, to sexual relation or any sexual practice." Since 2005, Rick Warren (shown here with President Paul Kagame) has been working toward making Rwanda the first "purpose drive nation."
Although many of his sophisticated camp comedies play peekaboo with the closet, especially the bi threesome in Design for Living (1932) and less popular later works like Song at Twilight (1966), the urbanely glamorous Coward never actually came out. A friend of King George, Coward traveled widely to perform for WWII troops and secretly worked as a spy, hiding behind his high life persona. The press attacked him for his excesses during wartime. The king suggested a knighthood, but Churchill disliked his "flamboyance" and blocked it. After the war, Coward fell in love with the actor Graham Payn and they stayed together nearly thirty years. In the 1956 they became tax exiles, landing first in Bermuda then in Jamaica where they were neighbors to the constantly bickering Mr. & Mrs. Ian Fleming. Coward enjoyed a revival in the 1960s and finally was knighted in 1970. He died in Jamaica in 1973, still with Payn.
Announced this morning, the Golden Globe nominations include The Maid for best foreign film. It's a rare moment of cinematic justice to find openly gay Sebastian Silva's neglected gem honored next to Almodovar, Haneke, and Audiard where he belongs. ("Neglected" because after two months in release its widest distribution was only 19 theaters, grossing $444,000.)
As expected, A Single Man earned acting nominations for Colin Firth and Julianne Moore (and also for music), but not for picture, director, or screenplay.
Television nominations include Modern Family, Glee, and Sigourney Weaver as the religious intolerant mother who tormented her teenage son about his homosexuality then, after his suicide, became an outspoken voice of compassion and gay rights activist. Prayers for Bobby is Weaver's first tv movie. It aired on Lifetime in January 2009. Many of you may have heard the real mother, Mary Griffith, speak at gay marches on the mall. Despite / because of her terrible past, she's very moving.
Glenn Ligon, 49, is the youngest of the artists whose work has been selected to hang in the private quarters of the White House. His paintings usually incorporate text, sometimes from James Bladwin or Jean Genêt. Ligon is African-American and gay.
Simon Doonan was brought to the White House early in the administration to “go over the general concept of how the holiday theme constructed by Mrs. Obama and our staff would be interpreted creatively." Doonan, the design god of Barneys, is British-American and gay.
Jason Wu designed Michelle Obama's clothes for, among other events, the Inaugural balls, her Vogue cover shoot, and her meeting with Queen Elizabeth II. He's Taiwanese-American and gay.
Johnny Wright is Michelle Obama's hair stylist. He's been doing women's hair since he was twelve. When he was a freshman he convinced the most popular girl in high school to let him do her hair, after which he had 150 clients. He's African-American and if he's not gay, then gaydar is a total myth.
The White House gets an A+ on using gay talent to make their world more pretty.
The administration still hasn't said killing gay people is wrong.
(Even Rick Warren finally condemned Uganda's proposed bill, though Rachel Maddow wasn't having it, titling her segment "Uganda be kidding me!" and showing how Warren helped to create the hostility in the first place.)
Last week, ABC News reported that global aids groups scored the Obama administration at D+.
