Band of Thebes

My Kind of Fun

After three and a half hours sleep following the Publishing Triangle Awards, I flew to Wyoming. Within one hundred minutes of landing I was hiking in the Shoshone National Forest amid the sage along this river when I was thrown. My foot was trapped in a wire snare. Because it was inches from a steep embankment ledge, it could have been a tricky hanging upsidedown there. As it was, just funny.

Born April 30: Alice B. Toklas

Born in 1877 in San Francisco, educated in Seattle, Alice Babette Toklas’s life might be said to have started when she was thirty and went to Paris, where she met Gertrude Stein the day she arrived. They were inseparable for the next thirty-nine years, surviving two world wars, the heyday of the Lost Generation, and all their famous friends. Their love made them truly partners, with Toklas as Stein’s secretary, editor, critic, and muse. Although a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, their books' titles could be deceptive: Stein’s bestselling The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is really about Stein and Toklas' immortal The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook is as much a reflection on how the French eat and a memoir of feeding Flanner, Picasso, Hemingway, Wilder, Thomson, et al, as it is a collection of recipes, of which there are over three hundred. (The famous brownie recipe was contributed by Brion Gysin, a gay Brit who got a Fulbright to the Sorbonne, developed William Burroughs' "cut up" technique, owned a nightclub in Tangier, and had his ashes scattered in the Caves of Hercules. The recipe was edited out of the US edition but appeared in the UK.) Toklas also wrote an autobiography, What Is Remembered, which self-effacingly, almost self-erasingly, ends with Stein’s death even though she outlived her by two decades. In those final years Toklas was plagued with financial difficulties. She had no recourse after Stein’s heirs took all the famous paintings left to her, and she had no willpower, as a newly converted Catholic, to resist the church's extortion promise that with large enough donations, Toklas could buy Stein's soul out of purgatory and into heaven. Happily, the Jewish lesbians are buried adjacent to each other in Père Lachaise cemetery. Celebrate today by rereading their books, or Monique Truong’s much-praised novel The Book of Salt which imagines their lives through the eyes of their gay Vietnamese cook.

Publishing Triangle Award Winners: Stuart, Ostlund, Brown, Davidson, Cassarino, Wilson

l to r: presenter Laura Flanders, Michele Karlsberg, (presenter Kate Clinton), Blanche Cook, treasurer Trent Duffy, poetry winner Ronaldo Wilson, fiction winner Sebastian Stuart, chair Carol Rosenfeld

In a night of shoo-ins and upsets, the Publishing Triangle presented their awards for the year's best lgbt books. Congratulations to all and particularly happy kudos to Lori Ostlund, James Davidson, and the adorable, ageless, sixty year old Sebastian Stuart. Buy their books. Although four of the six winners were absent, the ceremony was lively with speeches by lifetime achievement winner Blanche Cook (who swears volume three of her Eleanor Roosevelt biography finally will be completed by the end of summer) and Kate Clinton introducing the equally entertaining Michele Karlsberg.

The Ferro-Grumley Award for Fiction: Sebastian Stuart, The Hour Between

Debut Fiction: Lori Ostlund, The Bigness of the World

Lesbian Nonfiction: Rebecca Brown, American Romances: Essays

Gay Nonfiction: James Davidson, The Greeks and Greek Love

Lesbian Poetry: Stacie Cassarino, Zero at the Bone

Gay Poetry: Ronaldo V. Wilson, Poems of the Black Object

My Queer War by James Lord, Out Now

Cannot wait to read the memoir on sale this week by art historian James Lord about his WWII service. I loved the chapter excerpt in Granta's new issue, for the vicarious time travel to the 1940s, the excitement of Lord's romantic adventures, and the sheer pleasure of his speedy prose. He gets right to it. An engaging and positive review by Christopher Benfey appears in the current New Republic. 

Benfey quotes Lord:

"I suddenly saw like an appalling sunburst, fatal and final, that what I really wanted to do with the good-looking boys whose best pal I longed to be was not just horsing around in the locker room but doing freely with them in bed after lights out everything I had always till then been compelled to do in solitude with myself. In short, the creature I’d suddenly seen was that abnormal, that abominable thing called a homosexual, a loathsome mistake of nature, a cultural criminal whom any feeling person would naturally put in prison."

Then Benfey writes:

"It is to avoid this fate, both inner and outer, that Lord flees to the Army. Later, he contrasts his own cowardly flight from reality with his younger brother’s motivations for joining up. “Teddy had heroically sought out danger and achieved the merit of dying,” shot by a Japanese sniper on Luzon, “whereas I had miserably run away from the inconvenience of being queer.” Lord’s ambivalence, one foot in the closet, leads to predictable misunderstandings during his early posting in a chemical warfare unit near Reno. He tells one of his superiors that he’s in love with him. “Don’t tell me,” the officer replies. “Don’t even think about telling me.”

"Lord gets a more encouraging, if lingeringly ambiguous, response from a mysterious young soldier named Johannes Friedrich Kessler, who goes by the name of Hanno, just like “the last of the Buddenbrooks in Thomas Mann’s novel.” Lord and Hanno embark on romantic excursions to ghost towns and silver mines in the Nevada outback, all the while discussing Tonio Kröger and young Werther. (“Guy in a story by Goethe,” Hanno explains. “Hopelessly in love. He kills himself.”) They reveal everything to one another except the one big secret, the “lurid, shaming, guilty secret,” that might seal their Burschenherrlichkeit, rendered by the well-hung and camera-shy Hanno as “glorious fellowship,” forever.

"Hanno emerges as the great might-have-been in Lord’s story, an embodiment of ideal masculinity, “the superior shiver of high culture,” and “another Germany.”

Buy My Queer War now.

Canary: Dramatic Comedy Covers Forty Years of UK Gay History

How long ago were the 1990s? Jonathan Harvey says London theaters wouldn't produce his 1993 play Beautiful Thing because, "Everyone told me the ending [in which two boys slow-dance to the music of Mama Cass] would never work. No one believed a gay love story could actually end happily." His revised 1996 movie adaptation was a crossover hit (and one of my all-time favorites).

For other ways in which the 90s seem strangely behind the times, see Harvey's new dramatic comedy with music, Canary, which covers roughly four decades of lgbt history in the UK. The Guardian reports:

"Canary depicts the triumphs and setbacks of the gay community in Britain, from the 1967 legalisation of homosexuality to the equalisation of the age of consent 10 years ago. Its title comes from something a character says: "We're still the litmus test of whether a society respects human rights. We're the canaries in the mine."

"Harvey explains: "Everything is based on true events, such as the story of a man forced to undergo aversion therapy to 'cure' him of his homosexuality in the 1960s, who re-encountered his therapist in a gay club 20 years later. And I had to find a place for former Tory health minister Norman Fowler. He actually stood up against Margaret Thatcher's belief that Aids was an exclusively gay problem – but still had difficulty pronouncing the word 'vagina' and apparently believed that oral sex meant talking dirty."

"Harvey, having turned 40, now finds himself in the unexpected position of having become an elder statesmen. "I think of the play as a cautionary tale. Aids has almost come to be regarded as an old man's disease, while the gay community has become increasingly fragmented. I think there's a responsibility to make the younger generation of gay men and women aware of the struggles that brought us this far."

The show is in Liverpool until mid-May then tours nationally.

Lori Ostlund Wins Again. This Time, the California Book Award

The remarkable Lori Ostlund continues to win prizes for her lgbt inclusive debut story collection, The Bigness of the World, which by this point feels like it should be mandatory reading. Some of its many honors so far:

• Winner of the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

• Winner of a Rona Jaffe Writers Foundation Award ($25,000)

• Winner of the California Book Award for First Fiction (announced last week)

• Winner of the Lawrence Foundation Award for the year's best story in Prairie Schooner

• Richard Russo selected her story "All Boy" for Best American series 2010

* Longlisted for The Story Prize

• Nominated for the Publishing Triangle Award for Debut Fiction (tba Thursday)

• Nominated for Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Debut Fiction (tba May 27)

• PW starred review, "Each piece is sublime."

Nevertheless, mainstream review attention has been scant. And the book is impossible to find in Manhattan; I've called the chains and the independents. Buy it online and talk it up among your friends.

Ostlund's partner Anne Raeff wrote the novel Clara Mondschein's Melancholia.

Below, Ostlund reads "All Boy" from her book and forthcoming in the next Best American Short Stories.

Lori Ostlund reads All Boy from Tim Kahl on Vimeo.

Due Vincitori Italiani: I Am Love & Loose Cannons

Later this summer you'll have two opportunities to watch three generations of extremely good looking Italian merchant dynasties cope with suppressed desires, unexpected passions, strong mothers, all-seeing servants, and grown children finally coming out to their conservative families. In both movies the gay third generation marks a seismic change in freedom from the stifled affections of their elders, but the films have opposite personalities, immediately evident in their trailers.

The Tilda Swinton starrer I Am Love is richer in every sense. Very likely it's the most sumptuous, most elegant film you'll see this year. Predictably, Swinton is splendid as a Russian wife beautifully trapped in a Milanese clan. The debut director charmed the audience at New Directors New Films apologizing for sounding pretentious as he said this was his Buddenbrooks. Even the gorgeous, confining mansion becomes a character. Over the top but a must see for cineastes, from June 18.

After Steam: The Turkish Bath, His Secret Life, Facing Windows, and Saturn in Opposition, Ferzan Ozpetek has made his funniest and most blatantly enjoyable film yet. Loose Cannons is an ensemble dramedy that sometimes aspires toward Almodovar and sometimes toward Mamma Mia. More than summer fun, if not quite profound, it features six queer characters, including the lead played by Riccardo Scamarcio of Eden Is West. Tonight at the Tribeca Film Festival, Ozpetek and three of his actresses discussed the joys of filming in Lucca. Indiewire offers a brief interview.

Born April 23-25: Wonner, Gaultier, Halston, Jonsi

An abstract expressionist of the Bay Area Figurative Movement, Paul Wonner (1920-2008) maybe wasn't Diebenkorn but his early and middle works endure. Above are his Sarah Vaughn Singing (1963) and Woman with Flowers (1961). For more than fifty years he was partners with Theophilus Brown who, at 91, is said still to paint every day in San Francisco. In the 1960s they lived in Santa Monica and were friends with the locals, William Inge, Andre Previn, Isherwood and Bachardy, Eva Marie Saint and her husband. The Guggenheim, SFMoMA, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum are among the many institutions that collect Wonner's work.

The way things are going, Jean-Paul Gaultier is going to be remembered for creating Madonna’s cone bra corset. But he’s been a force in fashion since the mid-1970s and, who knew, he created the best-selling men’s fragrance in the EU. Never formally trained as a designer, he has long had a visionary sense of style, especially in the theatricality of his fashion shows and the boldness of his advertising. Yet his couture collections are as praised as his ready-to-wear. His boyfriend, Francis Menuge, convinced Gaultier to quit his job at Pierre Cardin and open his own studio in 1976. They lived and worked together, with Menuge as business manager until his death from aids in 1990. Gaultier was single for fifteen years following Menuge’s death then began a new relationship with a man who does not live in France.

Also, John Epperson. And Shakespeare. And Alex Sanchez, whose Bait omission from this year's Lambda's YA finalists still rankles. A great and moving story for young readers.

Born in Des Moines, graduated from a high school in Evansville, Indiana, Roy Halston Frowick had shed the Midwest along with his first and last names by the time he designed Jackie Kennedy’s iconic inauguration pillbox hat when he was twenty-nine. Soon after, he began designing clothes, which were standouts for their elegance and simplicity. As famous for his perpetual partying at Studio 54 as he was for his fashions, Halston was the first designer to understand the power of licensing his brand. His name appeared on everything from scarves to eyeglasses to perfume to the uniforms for airlines and rental car companies, yet because he was a perfectionist unable to delegate any designing to his staff, he cracked under enormous pressure. The firm that bought his company asked him to design a clothing line for J.C. Penney, and when he did so, Bergdorf’s stopped carrying his clothes and many longstanding clients decamped to other designers. Ultimately he was fired from his own company and legally barred from designing under his name. He left New York for San Francisco and died of aids in 1990.

Who’s that star playing his guitar with a bow like a cello? And who sings the end credits song "Sticks and Stones" in How To Train Your Dragon? Why, it’s Jónsi, of course, the lead singer of the other Icelandic musical sensation, Sigur Rós. They followed the worldwide success of their 1999 post-rock album Ágætis byrjun, with 2002’s album called ( ), which was sung entirely in Vonlenska, or Hopelandic, a made-up language of nonsense syllables. Because it sounds similar to Icelandic, it’s an open question whether people in other parts of the world could tell any difference, but those fans would at least have noticed that the accompanying lyrics booklet was left blank for listeners to write their own meaning of the words. Sigur Rós’s songs have been used in movies by Greg Araki, Cameron Crowe, and Wes Anderson, as well as on numerous tv shows, and they’ve sold more than two million albums. Jónsi is 100% supergay and last year released an album called Riceboy Sleeps with his boyfriend under the moniker Jónsi and Alex. This month he releases his first solo album Go.

Oceans

Ravishing. So why is Disney hiding the fact that Oceans is directed by the Winged Migration team? (My guess: They're trying so hard to brand their documentary division Disney Nature, they won't mention any other studio's movie.) Happily, Jacques Peppin's and Jacques Cluzaud's fish extravaganza is just as spectacular as their bird movie. Yet, aside from identifying the species, the voiceover narration is mainly pointless. You might be happier taking an iPod and enjoying the stunning imagery while skipping Pierce Brosnan's announcement that penguins aren't very good figure skaters.

Did you realize the floating trash mass in the Pacific Gyre is now larger than Texas? You won't learn that from this movie, which only glances distantly at the oceans' dire problems. Without pointing fingers at any actual culprits, they merely mention "pollution" and "overfishing," then return to the magnificence. Curiously, the 86-minute U.S. edition is 14 minutes shorter than the European version; maybe they get more facts.

Nevertheless, even in this form, Oceans is essential, incredible viewing. No surprise, the French trailer below chooses better scenes, but the movie at your multiplex is in English.

Mark Doty's Wife and Other Treasures in Granta's Sex Issue

Did you know Mark Doty was married to a woman? Odds are steep that you did not. As he explains, "You will perhaps see why a writer who has had a good deal to say about other periods of his life has considered this material unwriteable: it seems Gothic, ridiculous. To narrate those years seems inevitably to accuse Ruth, and to invite me to offer justifications for my own foolishness in marrying her." His remarkable essay, "The Unwriteable," is the lead and best piece in Granta #110: Sex, which went on sale yesterday. Doty's thirteen-page piece is nonstop revelations, which I won't spoil. His age at the time. Her age. The age of another male in her life. The guy with whom he had an intense sexual affair at the time. Why that ended. On and on. Surely people will pressure Doty to expand this to a book.

The issue's other featured contributors are Jeanette Winterson, Jennifer Egan, Tom McCarthy, Adam Foulds, Carl Phillips, Herta Muller, Philip Boehm, Yann Faucher (photographs), Dave Eggers (four animal drawings), and a one page and a half page excerpt of Roberto Bolano's Antwerp that frankly seems included for bragging rights that Bolano is included. One essay missing from the issue is Michael Cunningham's exploration of vampires. A shame.

The other standout piece is an excerpt from James Lord's memoir My Queer War, which FSG releases next week. This wonderful chapter shows an amenable young Lord being picked up by and having sex with Jerry, a fellow GI, who upon discovering Lord is already 20 says, "Late starter.... Don't get me wrong, but you've got a lot to learn." He takes him in to Boston on a Saturday night where the bar at the Hotel Statler is packed with 150 servicemen, "not one lady or girl among them, only a handful of civilians." Jerry confirms, "Yes, they're all gay." James goes home with a 30 year old (who offers Rachmaninov's second piano concerto as "Rocky Two") and then his adventures really begin.

Last night was New York's launch party for the issue at Soho's Coco de Mer. Above, the incomparable Patrick Ryan [red shirt] excites some of the models. I talked to Joe Cross for fifteen minutes before learning he was the star of Running with Scissors and had been in Milk. When I asked what he liked to read, Joe laughed, "...magazines, labels on expensive soaps, tags on mattresses." I talked to Michael Lucas for ten minutes without touching on his movie career (porn, his own company) but we found common ground in Berlin's Museum of Film and his love of biographies. He told me many funny / scary stories from Marlene Dietrich by her daughter Maria Riva, which he highly recommends.

Munro, Trevor, Proulx, Cameron Among O. Henry Prize Stories 2010

Junot Diaz, Paula Fox, and Yiyun Li have chosen an excellent crop of stories for this year's PEN/O. Henry Prize collection, just on sale, including Peter Cameron's desperately wrenching yet funny, "The End of My Life in New York." I loved it, which in this case is saying something because it begins with one of my least favorite subjects, a longterm crumbling couple discussing their current lovers. With his signature empathy Cameron makes the reader ache for his sad, hurt, unemployed protagonist while also showing his many faults. He has a run in with his partner's much younger boyfriend at a chiropractor's office, a stranger outside the former CBGB, and spends much of the story wanting to tell someone a horrible New York anecdote he recently heard. In her introducton, editor Laura Furman notes a similarity with the driver in Chekhov's "Misery" who needs someone to listen to his story. A lofty and earned comparison. I'm sure I'm not the only one to point out the story could truly be called Someday. Cameron writes that the story languished unfinished on his hard drive for many years, "like adult children living in their parents' basement."

Special congratulations also to Subtropics magazine, where "The End of My Life in New York" first appeared. David Leavitt launched the literary journal in 2006 and this marks the sixth time a Subtropics story has been selected for the O. Henry or Best American series.

Thrilling also to find Preeta Samarasan's story honored. Her amazing novel of a family in decline, Evening Is the Whole Day, has the vexing distinction of being the book I most frequently recommend with the fewest readers taking my advice. Her view is like Tolstoy's, but it's only 352 pages.

Though they've been a little uneven of late, the stories here by Alice Munro, William Trevor, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Annie Proulx are all knockouts. Proulx's is a masterpiece, and yes, it's the one I wrote about two years ago with its riveting gay bunkhouse scene.

Annie Proulx, “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” The New Yorker
Kirstin Allio, “Clothed, Female Figure,” Iowa Review
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “The Headstrong Historian,” The New Yorker
Wendell Berry, “Stand By Me,” Atlantic Monthly
Jess Row, “Sheep May Safely Graze,” Threepenny Review
Preeta Samarasan, “Birch Memorial,” A Public Space
Brad Watson, “Visitation,” The New Yorker
William Trevor, “The Woman of the House,” The New Yorker
Daniel Alarcón, “The Bridge,” Granta
Daniyal Mueenuddin, “A Spoiled Man," The New Yorker
James Lasdun, “Oh, Death,” Paris Review
Natalie Bakopoulos, “Fresco, Byzantine,” Tin House
Peter Cameron, “The End of My Life in New York,” Subtropics
Ted Sanders, “Obit,” Indiana Review
Damon Galgut, “The Lover,” Paris Review
George Bradley, “An East Egg Update,” Yale Review
Ron Rash, “Into the Gorge,” Southern Review
John Edgar Wideman, “Microstories,” Harper’s Magazine
Alice Munro, “Some Women,” The New Yorker
Lore Segal, “Making Good," The American Scholar

Buy PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2010.

Sarah & Gordon Brown Honor David Mixner via Video

Prime Minister & Mrs. Brown taped a brief message saluting David Mixner for the Point Foundation dinner in his honor and, surprisingly, it's not a boilerplate tribute. They pack a lot into forty-five seconds. Contrast the blandest, pollyanna "I am with you" that we hear, to the Prime Minister's stark honesty in saying, "Progress on gay rights is neither permanent nor inevitable. The lessons from California and Uganda and elsewhere is that things can go backwards."

On a lighter note, imagine the video Carla Bruni would make to honor a queer leader.

The City of Your Final Destination

Having been alarmed by critics ("stultifying torpor") and warned by the novelist ("You'll probably hate it"), I went to The City of Your Final Destination expecting to have to make allowances for the filmed version of a greatly admired book. Instead, I really liked it. All of the actresses are exceptionally good and even Anthony Hopkins as an aging gay man rises far above his recent phoned-in petulant performances. In adapting the story of an Iranian grad student who travels from Boulder to Uruguay to convince the expat widow, mistress, and brother of a one-book novelist to allow him to write his (and by extension their) biography, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala retains the heart of Peter Cameron's more elegant themes of dispossession and what art can and cannot capture. So yes, there's more talk than action but each scene moves the story apace. Shot in Colorado and Argentina by Javier "Talk to Her" Aguirresarobe, the film always looks great: open landscapes, cloistered hacienda, handsome extras. Jorge Drexler's music and Carol Ramsey's costumes deserve special note for further conveying character. Not to sound shallow, but it's also a pleasure to see a movie that so naturally unites a principal cast from (left to right) England, Egypt, the U.S., France, Japan, Argentina, and Romania.

The film has two awful, clunky scenes toward the end but they're not nearly as bad as this trailer. Consider it an homage to Cubism and A.D.D., stringing together random shots overlaid with unconnected dialog, all wildly out of sequence.

Born April 20-22: Waters, Mitchell, Takei, Forrest, Tobias, Vandross

He's a visionary, he's unique, and his bizarro, vulgar yet sweet movies are part of the permanent collection at MoMA, so of course you think of John Waters as a filmmaker. But he's more: He has written three books, published three volumes of photographs, and his artwork has been shown in many museums and galleries internationally. As for the movies, he has made sixteen, with his best work clustered from 1972 to 1988: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, Polyester and Hairspray starring the incomparable Divine [also pictured] who was his special ally since childhood. Johnny Depp fans might insist on including 1990's Cry Baby, but the four movies since then seem like lesser efforts, or at least they are more mainstream. His children's Christmas movie starring Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey, endearingly titled Fruitcake, has been canceled. Owing to the success of the movie version of the Broadway adaptation of his original film Hairspray, New Line convinced Waters to write Hairspray 2: White Lipstick which focuses on Tracy in the late 60s during the British Invasion and Vietnam. Having been scheduled as a summer 2010 release, it is now slated for 2012. (Travolta said he's not returning; Michelle Pfeiffer's character has been deleted.) His fourth book Role Models pubs next month. FSG calls it "a self-portrait told through intimate profiles of favorite personalities" and one of them is Denton Welch.

At eleven John Cameron Mitchell made his stage debut as the Virgin Mary and later played Huck Finn (Big River), Dickon (The Secret Garden), and The Young Thing (Hello Again). Then came Hedwig. Born of childhood memories and the queer rock energy of Squeezebox, Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered on February 14, 1998 with music and lyrics by Stephen Trask and directed by Peter Askin. It won multiple awards, running for two years before the original team took it to Boston, Los Angeles, and London. Since then Hedwig has been mounted hundreds of times throughout the world, spawning eight different recordings (including those by the Peruvian, Korean, and Australian casts) and two tribute albums. Mitchell directed the film version himself, then made Shortbus, which is constantly referred to as his authentic sex movie but is just as much his valentine to alt New York. It premiered at Cannes in 2006, was released in twenty-five countries, winning several festival awards, and grossed just under two million dollars in the U.S. Currently he's in production to direct the movie of David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize winning play, Rabbit Hole, starring Nicole Kidman, Sandra Oh, and Diane Wiest, and Aaron Eckhart.

When he was five in 1942, Los Angeles-born George Takei (pronounced tah-KAY) and his family were sent to an Arkansas internment camp for Japanese Americans. Relocated to a camp in Tule Lake, California, they were not allowed to return to Los Angeles until after the war. Takei attended Berkeley and graduated from UCLA, where he stayed on to get his masters in theater. He speaks English, Japanese, and Spanish fluently. In addition to his career-defining role as Sulu on Star Trek, he ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 1973. Of seventeen candidates, he came in second, behind Tom Bradley. Since 2006 he has been the official announcer on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show and he plays Hiro’s father on Heroes. Takei’s dignified and sharp opening ceremony speech was a highlight of Chicago’s Gay Games. He met Brad Altman, his partner of twenty years, at Frontrunners. They were married in California last September at the Japanese American National Museum, which Takei co-founded.

Novelist Katherine V. Forrest writes the Kate Delafield detective books, often cited as the first lesbian mystery series. Her debut novel, Curious Wine, has become an lgbt classic, selling more than 300,000 copies. She has won three Lambda literary awards, including their Pioneer Award. Forrest also writes science fiction novels, most notably the Daughters of a Coral Dawn trilogy. She lives in San Francisco with her partner Jo Hercus.

Money guru Andrew Tobias managed the Let's Go empire as an undergraduate at Harvard and has written many bestselling financial books such as The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need as well as the classic growing-up-gay memoir The Best Little Boy in the World, originally under the pen name John Reid. He has been treasurer of the Democratic National Party since 1999, a job for which he is paid $1 a year, and has been a long time board member on HRC. His partner since 1994, Charles Nolan, left his fashion job to volunteer fulltime for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.

Preeminent among R&B and soul singers, Luther Vandross won eight Grammys and sold more than 25 million albums worldwide. Initially Vandross preferred to stay in the background, writing songs, producing, and singing backing vocals for Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Carly Simon, Chaka Khan, Chic, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, and for Roberta Flack, who finally insisted he sing for himself. After two unsuccessful albums with his group Luther, he released his first solo album, Never Too Much, which went double platinum. From then on he has been a major presence on R&B charts and radio. Among his greatest hits are “The Glow of Love,” which spent sixteen weeks at number one, “Power of Love/Love Power,” “Here and Now,” “Best Things in Life Are Free,” with Janet Jackson, and “Dance with My Father” which won four Grammys including Song of the Year. A diabetic suffering from hypertension, Vandross struggled with his weight which sometimes exceeded 300 pounds. In April 2003 he had a stroke and never regained his health, dying in July 2005. Although he avoided questions about his personal life, his homosexuality was an open secret.

At eleven John Cameron Mitchell made his stage debut as the Virgin Mary and later played Huck Finn (Big River), Dickon (The Secret Garden), and The Young Thing (Hello Again). Then came Hedwig. Born of childhood memories and the queer rock energy of Squeezebox, Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered on February 14, 1998 with music and lyrics by Stephen Trask and directed by Peter Askin. It won multiple awards, running for two years before the original team took it to Boston, Los Angeles, and London. Since then Hedwig has been mounted hundreds of times throughout the world, spawning eight different recordings (including those by the Peruvian, Korean, and Australian casts) and two tribute albums. Mitchell directed the film version himself, then made Shortbus, which is constantly referred to as his authentic sex movie but is just as much his valentine to alt New York. It premiered at Cannes in 2006, was released in twenty-five countries, winning several festival awards, and grossed just under two million dollars in the U.S. Currently he's in production to direct the movie of David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize winning play, Rabbit Hole, starring Nicole Kidman, Sandra Oh, and Diane Wiest, and Aaron Eckhart.

At eleven John Cameron Mitchell made his stage debut as the Virgin Mary and later played Huck Finn (Big River), Dickon (The Secret Garden), and The Young Thing (Hello Again). Then came Hedwig. Born of childhood memories and the queer rock energy of Squeezebox, Hedwig and the Angry Inch premiered on February 14, 1998 with music and lyrics by Stephen Trask and directed by Peter Askin. It won multiple awards, running for two years before the original team took it to Boston, Los Angeles, and London. Since then Hedwig has been mounted hundreds of times throughout the world, spawning eight different recordings (including those by the Peruvian, Korean, and Australian casts) and two tribute albums. Mitchell directed the film version himself, then made Shortbus, which is constantly referred to as his authentic sex movie but is just as much his valentine to alt New York. It premiered at Cannes in 2006, was released in twenty-five countries, winning several festival awards, and grossed just under two million dollars in the U.S. Currently he's in production to direct the movie of David Lindsay-Abaire's Pulitzer Prize winning play, Rabbit Hole, starring Nicole Kidman, Sandra Oh, and Diane Wiest, and Aaron Eckhart.

When he was five in 1942, Los Angeles-born George Takei (pronounced tah-KAY) and his family were sent to an Arkansas internment camp for Japanese Americans. Relocated to a camp in Tule Lake, California, they were not allowed to return to Los Angeles until after the war. Takei attended Berkeley and graduated from UCLA, where he stayed on to get his masters in theater. He speaks English, Japanese, and Spanish fluently. In addition to his career-defining role as Sulu on Star Trek, he ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 1973. Of seventeen candidates, he came in second, behind Tom Bradley. Since 2006 he has been the official announcer on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show and he plays Hiro’s father on Heroes. Takei’s dignified and sharp opening ceremony speech was a highlight of Chicago’s Gay Games. He met Brad Altman, his partner of twenty years, at Frontrunners. They were married in California last September at the Japanese American National Museum, which Takei co-founded.

Novelist Katherine V. Forrest writes the Kate Delafield detective books, often cited as the first lesbian mystery series. Her debut novel, Curious Wine, has become an lgbt classic, selling more than 300,000 copies. She has won three Lambda literary awards, including their Pioneer Award. Forrest also writes science fiction novels, most notably the Daughters of a Coral Dawn trilogy. She lives in San Francisco with her partner Jo Hercus.

Money guru Andrew Tobias managed the Let's Go empire as an undergraduate at Harvard and has written many bestselling financial books such as The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need as well as the classic growing-up-gay memoir The Best Little Boy in the World, originally under the pen name John Reid. He has been treasurer of the Democratic National Party since 1999, a job for which he is paid $1 a year, and has been a long time board member on HRC. His partner since 1994, Charles Nolan, left his fashion job to volunteer fulltime for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign.

Preeminent among R&B and soul singers, Luther Vandross won eight Grammys and sold more than 25 million albums worldwide. Initially Vandross preferred to stay in the background, writing songs, producing, and singing backing vocals for Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Carly Simon, Chaka Khan, Chic, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, and for Roberta Flack, who finally insisted he sing for himself. After two unsuccessful albums with his group Luther, he released his first solo album, Never Too Much, which went double platinum. From then on he has been a major presence on R&B charts and radio. Among his greatest hits are “The Glow of Love,” which spent sixteen weeks at number one, “Power of Love/Love Power,” “Here and Now,” “Best Things in Life Are Free,” with Janet Jackson, and “Dance with My Father” which won four Grammys including Song of the Year. A diabetic suffering from hypertension, Vandross struggled with his weight which sometimes exceeded 300 pounds. In April 2003 he had a stroke and never regained his health, dying in July 2005. Although he avoided questions about his personal life, his homosexuality was an open secret.

GetEQUAL's Three Public Actions in Three Days

Young activists shake things up. Gay Inc. frowns.

Monday night during a Barbara Boxer fundraiser in Los Angeles, five members of GetEQUAL interrupted Obama's speech about economic recovery to demand action on repealing Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Obama didn't think heckling him made sense. Kip Williams praised the upstarts for drawing attention to the administration's continued delaying tactics on this campaign promise. Last week both AmericaBlog and SLDN's Aubrey Sarvis reported that multiple Hill staffers said the White House has asked them to postpone a vote on DADT to next year.

Yesterday six veterans who are GetEQUAL members handcuffed themselves to the White House fence, again protesting DADT. In an "extremely unusual" move at a public space known for frequent demonstrations, White House security / park police banned all media from access to the protestors and shut down half of Lafayette Park. Now they say it was a "rookie mistake" and Aravosis says they're lying.

Today five or six members of GetEQUAL disrupted a House committee hearing to demand action on ENDA. The Dallas Voice reports on the GetEQUAL co-founder Robin McGehee's effort to give the Chairman a magic marker:

Activists from GetEQUAL interrupted a House committee hearing this morning to demand a markup of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The activists approached Chairman George Miller, D-California, and attempted to hand him a magic marker.

“I don’t know if it’s because of the recession that you guys you can’t afford markers, or whatever the issue is, but in our community there are people being fired because they are lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender.”

Mitchell refused to take the marker but told the activists that the committee plans to consider ENDA soon.

“We’re working on it as expeditiously as we can,” Miller said.

Another unidentified committee member could be heard voicing opposition to ENDA.

“This is the problem with this. There’s no end to it. You’re never going to satisfy them all,” the unidentified lawmaker said.

Contact! A Book of Encounters by Jan Morris

Great to see a new book on sale this week from 83 year-old travel legend Jan Morris, Contact!: A Book of Encounters, that shifts its focus from her famous evocations of place to revealing vignettes about people. Culled from her fifty years of writing, the pieces here are said to be very short -- as brief as a few sentences to several paragraphs -- each describing a person she met while traveling. The Booklist reviewer said, "The emphasis on individuals rather than destinations results in a delightfully idiosyncratic kaleidoscope: small portraits rendered in colorful and not always adulatory prose. Visiting the current occupant of Longwood, a distinctive octagon-shaped mansion in Natchez, Louisiana, she is treated to a feast of southern fried chicken. Attending a Paris fashion show, however, was not so positive. She sat 'among the condescending New York buyers and unbelievably ugly princesses of American fashion journalism.' Ouch!"

In 2008, Morris entered into a civil partnership with the woman she had married decades ago when she was James Morris.

Coming Out in Anicent Greece: 18 Year-Olds Run Nude Torchlit Race

 

Next time the conversation rolls around to bemoaning the world we've lost and your friends are stuck on the old oxymorons -- Manhattan apartment, living wage, political civility -- try quoting James Davidson in his breathtaking book The Greeks and Greek Love. Discussing how society announced the transition from off-limits boyhood to expected dating at age eighteen, he writes:

"In fact they seem to have 'come out' in a rather spectacular fashion in Athens, running a nude torch race during the night before the great summer festival of Athena's birthday, the Panathenaea, from the altar of Love in the gymnasium of the Academy outside the city walls to an altar in the city. Of course the spectacle attracted an audience. Comic authors describe people waiting at the city gate in Ceramic parish to welcome these new graduates with "slaps of Ceramicus" ... and for those men who didn't yet have boyfriends it must have been like a bit like an express cattle market."

That's not such a surprise when you remember athletes in the original Olympics competed naked. But dry your tears because it turns out nude races are thriving throughout the US, Canada, England, and Spain (home of the legendary Patxi Ros nudist run each September, far below). Last weekend was the Running Bare 5K in Pelion, South Carolina and the Bare Buns Run in McDade, Texas AND the Bare Burro 5K in Colton, California. This coming weekend is the Fig Leaf 5K in Dawsonville, Georgia and the Skinnydipper Sun Run in Decatur, Texas. The following weekend is the Hidden River Trail Streak in St. George, Georgia and the Dare To Go Bare 5K in Lutz, Florida. The list goes on and on. If you're going to suggest that Depew, Oklahoma is a long way from Athens, wait till May 16, when a sizable contingent of Bay to Breakers run naked as Bare to Breakers, covering 12K of San Francisco and nothing else. They encourage "the enjoyment of photographing bare runners."

The Panathenaea it is not, but each Halloween season at least five American cities host Naked Pumpkin Runs. Thank you, Boulder, Seattle [below], Portland, Arcata, and Sebastopol. This will allow certain types many centuries hence to say, Oh, look what we missed! Why couldn't we live in 2010? They used to put carved pumpkins over their heads and run naked through the streets.

New Gay Magazine Launches: Out There

If you were launching a new glossy magazine for the discerning international gay man, would your four areas of content be: Features, Spotlight, Travel, and Style? That's how they roll at the just released Out There, with their cover story on Alan Cumming, interviews with Peter Tatchell and (straight?) actor Michael Fassbender, as well as quickies with photographers Markus Bollingmo and Eiki Mori, singer Ezra Axelrod, and novelist Paul Burston. It costs £10 an issue (twice yearly, for now) and competes with Attitude, Britain's bestselling gay mag, which costs £3.50.

Until proven otherwise, the world's best lifestyle magazine for les gays is the French Têtu, which manages to be smart without stridency and sexy without pandering. The magazine began after Gai Pied failed and is "directed" by Pierre Bergé, YSL's longtime partner. They are generous with their free online content, far beyond the culturally significant slideshows of their cover models. Recently they ran a short piece and fifteen photos of Australian rugby players' campaign for diversity acceptance, memorably translated as «footy contre l'homophobie.»

Film Adaptation of Peter Cameron's The City of Your Final Destination Scores Weekend's Highest Per Screen Average

The long delayed movie version of Peter Cameron's novel The City of Your Final Destination finally debuted in the U.S. on Friday, and it earned the highest per screen average of any film in release. Its $22,000 beat Banksy's $20,750, possibly because TCOYFD was on only one screen, New York's elegant Paris, while the Banksy documentary premiered on eight. This coming weekend it expands to more NY area theaters and to Los Angeles.

The movie about a grad student's quest to write a biography of an author and his impulsive trip to Uruguay to get permission from the deceased's brittle family of expats is the first Ivory-Jhabvala collaboration without Merchant. Critics have been unanimous is praising Laura Linney and the gorgeous cinematography (thanks to Talk to Her's Javier Aguirresarobe, also responsible for shooting Taylor Lautner in New Moon) but they can't agree on the overall result. Anthony Hopkins and Charlotte Gainsbourg also star. Rex Reed calls it "a triumph;" others have suggested it's too talky. I loved the book's observations, its tranquility, its gay couple, and its prickly women, so I can't wait to see how it has been adapted.

Typically, publishing has fumbled its end of things. Although the film was originally scheduled for a March release, which was pushed back to April, the movie tie-in paperback will go on sale May 11.

Spring Comes To Rural Virginia

Favorite oak tree near my partner's 1790 farmhouse in Virginia. Others after the jump.