Band of Thebes

Born September 27, 29: Sebastian Stuart, Douglas A. Martin

Long after his own fractured senior year at a "ragtag" prep school in Connecticut, Sebastian Stuart wrote about a gay boy completing his wayward education alongside his glamorous, tragic, female new bff in The Hour Between, winner of this year's Ferro-Grumley Award. No one else could capture Stuart's rollicking career with half his panache, so you must his read his bio in his own words. Like Jane Smiley, he is at ease in many genres, but he has more fun. He ghostwrote Charm! as the fictional soap opera character Kendall Hart and co-wrote 24-Karat Kids with the very real Dr. Judy Goldstein who wears Chanel suits every day to examine the over-praised, over-pressured children of Upper East Side narcissists. That book was #2 on the Boston Globe bestseller list and sold in seven foreign countries. This Friday marks the debut of his Janet's Planet mystery series, the first of which is To the Manor Dead. Janet Petrocelli is a "recovering therapist" and "junque junkie" who moves from a bad marriage in Manhattan to an antique shop and amateur sleuthing in the Hudson Valley. The second book in the series, Dead By Any Other Name, is coming in September 2011. He and Stephen McCauley are celebrating twenty years together.

Douglas A. Martin is 37. Born in Virginia, raised in Georgia, he moved to New York at 25 to be a performing poet and playwright. He's published three volumes of poetry, including In the Time of Assignments from Soft Skull; a collection of short fiction, They Change the Subject; a triptych of novellas (about Balthus, Hart Crane, and Francis Bacon) Your Body Figured; and three impressive novels: Outline of My Lover (chosen by Colm Tóibín in the TLS as an International Book of the Year); a gift of gay and literary history rescue, Branwell: A Novel of the Bronte Brother; and last year's Once You Go Back (named by uber-reader Richard Labonte as one of his favorites of 2009). Widely praised by Dennis Cooper, Dale Peck, Wayne Koestenbaum, and many others, his books are must reading. Admirers of his inventive and moving work will not be surprised to learn that in leading creative writing classes he cross-pollinates disciplines, telling his students, "...that I am going to teach in metaphors, that I am going to be elliptical, that I am going to talk about film technique and contemporary art as much as I talk about sentences."

David Sedaris's New Bestiary: Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk

Cute? Cloying? Comic brilliance? David Sedaris aims to update Jean de La Fontaine with a little book of animal stories, Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk, that went on sale two days ago: A male squirrel and female chipmunk date, maybe fall in love, are separated by their families' prejudice, and wonder what if for the rest of their lives, mostly through ignorance of the word "jazz" (performed below); a healthy lab rat blames her neighboring lab rat's illness on his "hatefulness and negative energy;" a cynical cat is forced to attend slow AA meetings in prison; a duck, turtle, and frog meet in a complaint line and trade stories of bureaucracy; a hen sees every barnyard death as proof of the fallen being judged by God. The Onion's AV Club was disappointed: "...the collection largely lacks Sedaris’ usual gentle wit and sophistication. Here, he goes for easy targets, clumsy bluntness, and graphic details, like the cat lecturing her baboon hairdresser on the importance of a well-licked anus, or a hippo musing over her rectal colony of singing leeches. The simplicity curdles much of the humor, leaving behind something slight and one-note..." Sedaris told NPR, "Sometimes in these stories, you'd kind of be hard-pressed to try to sort of figure out who's the worst." One of his tales is about a crow who lures a pregnant lamb to give birth out in the open so it can eat the eyeballs of her newborn lamb. A mezzanine seat at his Atlanta reading a week from tonight costs $57.50. A mezzanine seat at his Apollo shows November 1 and 2 is $70.70, or you can see him give a free reading at the Union Square B&N November 8. Full tour here.

Emma Donoghue Reads from Room, Says Next Book Will Be Lesbian

Which other Man Booker Prize finalist could so effortlessly tweak America's nipple fixation and the Janet Jackson hysteria while discussing her nominated novel? Ah, Irish Canadian lesbians can do it all. Congratulations to delightful, spellbinding Emma Donoghue, whose Room roared onto the NYT bestseller list last week at #10 amid intense competition. Evident from her reading last night at the Irish Arts Center in Manhattan, the story of a kidnapped young woman and her five year-old son kept hostage in a soundproofed backyard shed is an amazing balancing act. Donoghue said she worked hard to equalize the horror and uplift, and she succeeded. The audience frequently tensed or laughed at the perfectly placed, unobtrusive details, quietly devilish or slyly humorous. The even greater feat is giving readers all the insights they need about the adults and their predicament through the realistic narration of five year-old Jack who doesn't understand the larger implications of what he conveys. Donoghue modestly said this burdens readers more, making them do the work of figuring out Ma's real responses; but of course that's only possible through the author's precision. She said the story, characters, outline, and final scene came to her during a long highway drive and she wrote the book quickly, in six months of four-day work weeks. She approached the novel more like her historical fiction because this too was taking the reader to a place they couldn't have been, unlike her looser, contemporary stories. Saying as a writer she enjoyed the confining aspects of the plot, she compared it to her Slammerkin. After the Q&A she told me there's no lesbian content in Room but there will be in her next novel. Do whatever you can to see her on tour, which continues through late October, with a break for the Booker ceremony on October 12. (If you must know, the nipple discussion sprang from a question about whether Ma continued to breastfeed Jack as a way to avoid getting pregnant again; Donoghue said no, that was an ineffective method of birth control, and it probably had more to do with supplementing their tinned food diet.)

Four Recent Gay Teen Suicides

Two points: If 13 year-olds are killing themselves after "years of torment" from classmates, you might need to rethink your belief that 5th and 6th grade is too young to discuss gay issues with. Also, are early teen lesbians more resilient, less self-destructive, or not picked on as much?

Two weeks ago last Thursday, Billy Lucas, 15, endured another day of antigay bullying at Greensburg High School, southwest of Indianapolis, including being told that he should kill himself, and after school hanged himself in his grandmother's barn. The school principal says he was unaware of any problem. After Lucas's death, the Facebook page set up to memorialize Billy featured comments from classmates making fun of the way he died, mocking his cowardice, and calling him antigay slurs.

 

A week ago Sunday, Seth Walsh, 13, hanged himself from a tree in his backyard in Tehachapi, California. He had been bullied by antigay classmates for years, and had finally switched out of a traditional classroom to independent study to avoid them. According to CBS News, "Police investigators interviewed some of the young people who taunted Seth the day he hanged himself, and determined despite the tragic outcome of their ridicule, their actions do not constitute a crime, reported KGET. "Several of the kids that we talked to broke down into tears," Jeff Kermode, Tehachapi Police Chief, said. "They had never expected an outcome such as this." After lingering on life support for nine days, Seth died yesterday. He is an organ donor. Friends made the video below during that time.

Last Wednesday Asher Brown, 13, came out to his supportive stepfather in the morning, went to school where he had long been relentlessly bullied for his small size, poverty, and being gay, returned home, and shot himself with his stepfather's 9 mm Beretta in his stepfather's closet. His parents say they had complained to the Houston-area school officials for 18 months about their son's mistreatment, to no effect. School officials now maintain the parents never contacted them. A local tv station interviewed many students and parents who say they knew Asher was harassed and that bullying in the school goes unchecked because officials do not want to cross the popular kids and their parents. Asher Brown got straight A's. You can sign a petition to the Houston school system.

 

Last Wednesday Tyler Clementi, 18, jumped off the GW Bridge. The Rutgers gay freshman committed suicide after he was caught on hidden webcams in a dorm room having sex with another male student on September 19 and again on September 21. The boy who set up the webcams, Dharun Ravi, posted to Twitter on September 19: "I went into Molly's room and turned on my webcam. I saw him making out with a dude. Yay." Dharun and Molly, both 18, have been arrested on multiple counts of invasion of privacy, carrying a maximum penalty of five years in jail.

 

Also check out Dan Savage's new viral video project It Gets Better, urging lgbt teens not to give up.

Michael Cunningham's By Nightfall

Those of us waiting for Michael Cunningham to return to the united power and originality and queer triumph in each of his second, third, and fourth novels, A Home at the End of the World, Flesh and Blood, and The Hours, were enraptured by his 2009 contribution to a fledgling journal Electric Literature said to be from his forthcoming novel Olympia. That high title has been lowered to By Nightfall (said to be from Rilke's Duino Elegies) and the verve and dash of that gay story have been swamped, all but erased, by a straight SoHo gallery owner's existential crisis and a soft examination of the role of beauty in living. Midforties husband and wife Peter and Rebecca offer their extra loft bedroom to her cute, ever-indulged, drug addicted 23 year-old brother Ethan, known in the family as Mizzy for The Mistake. And, too obviously, during his visit he lives up to his nickname; everyone is mistaken about his motives as he promises/ lies to Rebecca and cockteases/ blackmails Peter. The other plot line involves a rising art star who makes beautiful gold urns on a heroic scale but etched with very vulgar words, and the Meryl Streep-ready role of a rich yet soulful Connecticut woman who wants replacement art in her gorgeous garden before her famous Chinese guests arrive. Echoes of Olympus linger -- there's a nice moment of Mercury gliding by on an FTD van, Manet's painting earns a hat tip -- but Peter and Rebecca are plainly mortal and mortality is everywhere, from current cancer and a quick aids flashback to Damien Hirst's dead shark floating in formaldehyde. The perpetual Hirst question, possibly irrelevant, But is it art?, here might be, But is this how a shallow gallery owner thinks?

"He can feel something, roiling at the edges of the world. Some skittery attentiveness, a dark gold nimbus studded with living lights like a fish in the deep black ocean; a hybrid of galaxy and sultan's treasure and chaotic, inscrutable deity."

PW says, "Cunningham's sentences are, individually, something to behold, but they're unfortunately pressed into the service of a dud story." The Wall Street Journal counters, "You'll find plenty that's sterile and pompous, but it's ultimately redeemed by startling moments of beauty and clairvoyance."

In the eye of the beholder: FSG begs you to see similarities.

2010 MacArthur Grants: David Cromer, Annette Gordon-Reed, Yiyun Li

The MacArthur Foundation announced their 2010 Fellows, among them openly gay theater director David Cromer, fiction writer Yiyun Li, Hemings historian Annette Gordon-Reed, the co-writer of The Wire and Treme, a 72 year-old type designer, the hot French Berkeley economist surfer Emmanuel Saez, and a third generation stone carver specializing in lettering. You may remember Cromer, a high school dropout, from a long profile by Alex Witchel in the NYT mag last February:

He left in November of his junior year. “My mother’s been saying it to me since I was a child, and it remains true to this day: if I do not want to do something, I will not do it. There is no force on earth that can make me. I never did my homework, ever. I would say I was a very unpopular kid. I didn’t have a lot of friends. In high school somehow I found like-minded people, sort of interested in the arts, sort of enlightened nerds, and I found living in that community to be the most interesting thing.”

Cromer fell in with a group obsessed with “The Rocky Horror Picture Show,” regularly attending midnight screenings at the Biograph Theater in Chicago. He took a lot of drugs and had a lot of sex, he said. After two years, he decided to get his G.E.D....

His mother is alive and happy, Cromer said. “The great thing is, she’s been supportive of this risky thing I did with my life — going into the arts instead of getting a decent job.” His parents were also supportive, or at least neutral, about his being gay. “I think the fact that I was gay was visible from space, so I think nobody was surprised,” he said. “I seem sort of butcher now — when I was in ‘Angels in America’ in Chicago, they said I didn’t play gay enough. But I was a particularly flamey little kid.” Cromer told me he was dating someone he would identify only as the Gentleman Caller. “I’m not going to mention him, because if we break up, it will depress me when I read it,” he said.

The group's only fiction writer, Yiyun Li, 38, is the author of two hugely praised collections of stories winning many prizes and earning comparisons to Alice Munro and Chekhov, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers and Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, as well as a much lauded "magnificent" "grim" novel, The Vagrants, about the ravages of the Cultural Revolution.

Reading the West

Two nice hikes up the empty south fork of the Shoshone River. (Not fancy like Jackson Hole, nevertheless ranch owners here include oldtimer Herbert Allen and newcomer Bill Gates who last year bought the Irma Lake place.) 

For those of you who like to inhabit the West vicariously, through reading, keep in mind the annual awards below, listed with their most recent winners in fiction and nonfiction. Perhaps these juries skew better in nonfiction than fiction, most of which somehow have neglected Wallace Stegner, Annie Proulx, Jim Harrison, Thomas McGuane, James Galvin, Kent Haruf, Louise Erdrich, Rick Bass, Mark Spragg, Barbara Kingsolver, Ivan Doig, Gretel Ehrlich, and several other literary favorites. For books embodying the spirit of the West with lesbian or gay main characters, you can't beat Tom Spanbauer's The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain, Willa Cather's My Antonia, David Ebershoff's The 19th Wife, Tom Robbins' Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. Of the many novels of the West with a supporting character who's gay, the best, period, is Louise Erdrich's wonderful The Master Butchers Singing Club. 

 

The Mountains and Plains Independent Booksellers' Book Awards.

Below Zero by C.J. Box

The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America by Timothy Egan

 

The Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America.

Far Bright Star by Robert Olmstead 

The Secret War in El Paso: Mexican Revolutionary Intrigue, 1906-1920 by Charles Harris III and Louis Sadler

 

The Western Heritage Awards presented at the National Cowboy Museum.

The Sundown Chaser by Dusty Richards

The Last Indian War: The Nez Perce Story (Oxford) by Elliot West

 

The Willa Awards from Women Writing the West.

The Last Cowgirl by Jana Richman 

Full Court Quest: The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School Basketball Champions of the World by Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith

 

For nonfiction only, check the Western History Awards, the Westerners International book prizes, and the Southwest Book Awards.

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

Fifteen years after Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us, Kate Bornstein updates a classic. With a new co-editor, S. Bear Bergman, Bornstein collects 47 essays by transpeople, genderqueers, and other sex/gender radicals. Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation features five sections:

1. Do I look like an outlaw to you?

2. Being reconfigured is not the same as being reimagined

3. ...which is why I'm as cute as I happen to be.

4. It might not be a picnic, but there's a great buffet.

5. And still we rise.

Reviewing the collection for AfterEllen, Alley Hector particularly admired contributions by Telyn Kusalik (Identity, Schmidentity), Kyle Lukoff (Taking Up Space), and E.S. Weisbrot (Seaworthy).  

I haven't seen the book but you can study the entire table of contents via Amazon's "Look Inside" feature, which also makes available the editors' introduction. That piece, their "intermission," and their epilogue are not straight text; they're transcripts of an instant message conversation between Bornstein and Bergman.

Details on the Wachowskis' Marine - Iraqi Gay Romance

New York magazine's Vulture spies have read the Matrix makers' script of their much-rumored, ultra-secret next project, Cobalt Neural 9, a gay romance between a hot U.S. marine and a militant Iraqi soldier. Hollywood insiders/naysayers agree the movie will "never, ever" be made by a studio and the rich, rich pair will need to self-finance the picture. Unfortunately it sounds like what starts as a Brokeback-like character-driven story morphs into another cheap assassination pic. But won't that turn guarantee tragedy for the star-crossed lovers who ought to be enemies, re-emphasizing similarities with Romeo & Juliet? Vulture says:

"...the film takes place in the future all right — nearly a hundred from now. But its main story is told in Cloverfield-esque flashbacks by digital archeologists sorting through “found footage” from CNN and chips from old digital cameras from the U.S. occupation of Iraq. The heroes are indeed a gay American soldier named (with little irony) "Butch" and an Iraqi soldier turned militant. Butch is endearing, young, and a ravishingly handsome Marine. Our spies tell us that he "just wants to fuck and kill everything" in Iraq — until, that is, he falls in love with the Iraqi.

"The two meet while Butch is on a combat patrol in Iraq during the second Gulf War, and soon enough, the two are engaged in graphically described sex (actual line from the script: "They rut like animals behind this fence") albeit while disguised in burqas. The two soldiers’ relationship blossoms, and Butch begins to get to know his lover's family. But after he inadvertently draws attention to their ancestral home, disaster strikes. This tragedy radicalizes the pair and they become convinced that the only way to rid the world of evil is to kill the architect of the invasion, the then-president of the United States, George W. Bush. And so, during one of the president’s secret sorties to Iraq, they attempt to assassinate him."

As film geeks know but oddly missing from all these reports, the Wachowskis have already made a great same-sex thriller, Bound, starring Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly. Literary types will be glad to know the Wachowskis other current project is an adaptation of David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas penned by Tom Tykwer, whose bi romance Three just played at Venice.

(No, no, just a random photo.)

Gay Man, Bi Woman Win PEN USA Literary Awards in Fiction, Nonfiction

PEN USA has announced the winners of its annual Literary Awards. In the category "research nonfiction," Minal Hajratwala won for Leaving India: My Family's Journey from Five Villages to Five Continents, also a winner of this year's bisexual Lambda Literary Award and a silver medalist in nonfiction at the California Book Awards. A writer at the San Jose Mercury News from 1992 to 2000, Hajratwala was on the board of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association.

Gay, multi-talented Victor Lodato won the PEN USA fiction award for his first novel, Mathilda Savitch, and was a finalist in the drama category for Dear Sara Jane. The novel is narrated by a girl whose older sister has died and whose parents are the opposite of helpful in the aftermath. Just so you know you're not in for piles of sun dappled, Hallmarky grief, the first sentence is: "I want to be awful." Reviews are spectacular.

Although the fiction jury was two women and one man, all five finalists are male. Not wild about that, but happy to see three smaller presses in the mix. With Lodato (fsg): 

Scott Blackwood, We Agreed to Meet Just Here (New Issues)

Robert Boswell, The Heyday of the Insensitive Bastards: Stories (Graywolf)

Ryan Boudinot, Misconception (Grove)

Laird Hunt, Ray of the Star (Coffee House)

Jill Johnston, author of Lesbian Nation, Dies at 81

Watch the video. Author of ten books, including the 1973 classic Lesbian Nation calling for a female separatist society, Jill Johnston died in Connecticut on Saturday at 81. Johnston later considered the book, now out of print, a "period piece" and collected her favorite work from that era in 1998's Admission Accomplished: The Lesbian Nation Years, 1970-75. Other of her books were two volumes of memoir and a biography of her father whom she never knew and whom, she discovered with a shock, had never married her mother. A longtime art critic, Johnston also wrote Jasper Johns: Privileged Information, "which explored the artist’s works as a series of evasions and subterfuges rooted in conflict about his homosexuality," according to the NYT. In 2005, she wrote a book blasting national policies since 9/11. Johnston is survived by two children and her spouse Ingrid Nyboe whom she married in Denmark in 1993 and again in Connecticut in 2009. 

Here's a perfect example of the pitfalls of reporting. Read this passage from her obituary then watch the events described, in the first 90 seconds of the clip. They don't match. Beyond that, the video is fascinating as a time capsule from 1971, not least for its passionate audience engagement and its frequent, casual vulgarity. (The entire event is on YouTube. The beginning of Jill's speech "New Approach" is at 2:50 in this clip which begins with sensational Germaine Greer, also seen below next to Norman Mailer.) The NYT:

"After reciting a feminist-lesbian poetic manifesto and announcing that “all women are lesbians except those that don’t know it yet,” Ms. Johnston was joined onstage by two women. The three, all friends, began kissing and hugging ardently, upright at first but soon rolling on the floor.

"Mailer, appalled, begged the women to stop. “Come on, Jill, be a lady,” he sputtered.

"The filmmakers Chris Hegedus and D. A. Pennebaker captured the event in the documentary “Town Bloody Hall,” released in 1979. Mary V. Dearborn, in her biography of Mailer, called the evening “surely one of the most singular intellectual events of the time, and a landmark in the emergence of feminism as a major force.”

Autumn in Wyoming

Flew from New York to Salt Lake to Cody yesterday. This was my reward. (Click to enlarge.)

David Rakoff's Half Empty

Five long years after Don't Get Too Comfortable (nine years since Fraud!), David Rakoff is releasing his new book today. According to the bestselling gay Canadian Jewish New Yorker, Half Empty promises to be "a defense of melancholy, pessimism, anxiety and all of the emotions that have been tarred with the brush of negativity and therefore stricken from the larger cultural conversation. I hope to argue...that, while these emotions may well be hedonically less pleasant, they remain necessary and even beautiful at times." It's a tribute to his sense of humor that he's continued to write about the comedy of pessimism while undergoing chemo for cancer. The cancer is a result of earlier radiation treatments when he had lymphoma in his 20s. Now he may lose his arm. As he says, " There's a lot of stuff you can do with one arm — like continue living." And continue writing for GQ and continue broadcasting on PRI's This American Life.

And continue touring. Rakoff appears tonight at B&N Union Square, tomorrow night in Baltimore, and the following night in DC. After that, he reads in Columbus, Chicago, St. Paul, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, New York, Brooklyn, Boston, and New York. Details here.

Larry Kramer Reads from his 4,000-page Manuscript The American People

Last night at one of the Writers with HIV/aids events curated by Sarah Schulman at White Columns' ACT UP exhibit, Larry Kramer read from three sections of his decades-in-the-making, rumored to be 4,000 page manuscript of The American People. In addition to highlighting the presence of gay people at every moment in our nation's past, Kramer has long contended that aids has been around almost forever, and he took pride in pointing out that this week scientists caught up with him, discovering a strain of hiv in monkeys 32,000 years ago. In the novel aids is U.C. for underlying condition and hiv is "nectar."

The first section, "The Great Awakening," emphasized the religious roots of Americans' capacity for hate and self-hate. A minister's calling people pieces of shit and people berating themselves as a piece of shit may seem jarring in the 1740s but the phrase unifies all three sections' preoccupation with blood and feces. Kramer unearthed remarkable facts of New England churches "naming names" of its sinning congregants, including one sermon individually denouncing 100 men lusting for other males (compared with 200 men lusting for females) and 45 women lusting for other women. He says one such Easter sermon in Connecticut lasted 9 hours and resulted in over 40 deaths, some from heart attacks, some the result of parents stabbing their sinning children as sacrifice to Jesus. Kramer's Civil War section discussed the horrors of a war ravaged Washington DC and the PTSD of men who loved other men during battle and did not want to return home after Lee's surrender. The third section, in the 80s or 90s, was narrated in first person by Dr. Daniel Jerusalem, 55, reflecting on the demise of a beautiful young patient, his 2,200+ death. The overflow, sitting in the aisles crowd gave Kramer a standing ovation.

The book promises to be important for Kramer's exhaustive research. As a novel, it may daunt. The length per se is not impossible. If Vikram Seth needs 1,500 pages for the story of one extended family in India in the 1950s, Kramer can take 2,000 pages for three centuries of American life. But 2,000 pages without specific, engaging characters -- sometimes without any characters at all, just facts or generalizations about what churches did, what men after the Civil War didn't do -- could be rough rowing for some readers. Kramer previously has said he began writing it as a history book but FSG insisted he call it a novel. Either way, the crowd loved it.

The second half of the night's program was Dudley Saunders singing nine songs, six old, three new, and again much loved by the audience. Great, strong voice. One song consisted of lyrics taken from the Book of Isaiah, but my favorites were the two songs loosely inspired by novels: Mary Gaitskill's Veronica and Sarah Schulman's Rat Bohemia. Catch Saunders at the Out Music Awards on December 1 and at the Stonewall Inn on December 2.

Next Monday Schulman curates an evening of Emanuel Xavier, Edmund White, Dale Peck, 
Lynne Tillman, and Alexis Pauline Gumb reading work by writers lost to aids. On October 4, her series continues with readings by David Halperin, Jaime Manrique, Jim Eigo, John Weir, Marie Howe, Terry Rowden, and Penny Arcade. Go early, and thank Sarah for all she's done.

At UN, ACT UP Demands Access to Medicine, Freedom for Tian Xi

On Saturday, London activists held a massive demonstration to protest the pope's visit on three counts: 1) that the UK government helped fund the pontiff's publicity tour as if he were a head of state, 2) denouncing the church's views on a variety of issues, especially those affecting women and gay people, and 3) refusing to be silenced against church officials' appalling conduct during and after the abuse scandals. The seasoned organizers -- including gay hero Peter Tatchell -- expected 2,000 people to march with them. Instead, they had 20,000. The God Delusion author Richard Dawkins gave a "stinging" nine-minute speech.

In that spirit, I attended this morning's ACT UP rally at the United Nations to demand greater access to aids medicines around the world and to call on China to release two jailed aids activists. I particularly enjoyed talking to a woman from Beijing who concisely explained the plights of Tian Xi and Hu Jia. Theirs was not the only bravery I admired.

Queer Inclusive Native Alaskan Artifacts from Smithsonian on Display

Long before John Waters and Johnny Depp, the Athabascans along the lower Yukon River had their own queer Cry Baby. That's the name of the artifact above left, described as "a male Giyema spirit who wore earrings and female chin tattoos." Read more about it or browse the 600+ objects the Smithsonian's Arctic Studies department has lent to the Anchorage Museum. The magnificent show features many computers screens on which you can zoom in on any item, read its history, see archival photos of the object in use, and listen to commentary by contemporary elders discussing its creation and function.

College of NJ Gay Duo Achieve World's Longest Kiss: 33 Hours

Matty Daley and Bobby Canciello succeeded tonight in their attempt to achieve the world's longest kiss, unbroken for 33 hours. They're just friends. Bobby had to get permission from his boyfriend. They did it -- as required, standing and in public (at the College of New Jersey) -- to promote gay awareness and to "queer the Guinness World Records." The previous record was 32 hours 7 minutes held by a German man-woman couple. The longest kiss record has never been held by a same-sex couple until now.

Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work

Having never, ever seen Project Runway, I'm perhaps not the best to comment on co-host Tim Gunn's newly published second book, Gunn's Golden Rules: Life's Little Lessons for Making It Work. But I'm happy for any openly gay silver fox style guru tearing up the bestseller lists. (He's been in or near the Top 50 on Amazon since its release two weeks ago.) Fashion readers can sample his chatty introduction here.

I am, at least, qualified to comment on his reading etiquette and the report from Minneapolis is impressive. For a tv star to hug every fan who wanted a hug, pose with anyone who wanted a picture, shake every hand, and personalize every book, is fairly amazing. As is signing until 10:16 at an event scheduled from 7:00 to 9:00 midway through a grueling publicity haul.

Reviews indicate he doesn't avoid gay anecdotes but one thing you won't get is sex scenes. In 2006, Gunn said he was still hung up on his boyfriend from 1980s, present whereabouts unknown. Maybe he still is. His new book says he hasn't had sex "in decades." He stresses, "I wanted to say that, whether you're gay or straight, you can live a celibate life and be perfectly satisfied and happy."

Oxford American Dictionary Adds Lipstick Lesbian, Bromance, LMAO

 

Lipstick lesbians, twenty years overdue you're finally official. Updated for the first time since 2005, the New Oxford American Dictionary has added 2,000 words, phrases, or new meanings in its just-released third edition, including:

BFF,  be all that,  bromance,  carbon credit,  eggcorn,  hater,  hockey mom,  LBD,  lipstick lesbian,  LMAO,  megachurch,  my bad,  the new black,  social networking,  staycation,  steampunk,  tag cloud,  tramp stamp,  truthiness,  TTYL,  turducken,  tweet,  unfriend,  wardrobe malfunction,  waterboarding,  what's not to like?,  zombie bank

Stephen Colbert gets credit for truthiness but Janet Jackson is denied wardrobe malfunction? Among your other questions: Why did they wait until 2010 to add gal pal? Or nimrod! Or riff? Or: arc, a bridge too far, channel, cop to, flyover, frighten the horses, glow sticks, like herding cats, share a moment, and talk the talk.

Sacha Baron Cohen's Freddie Mercury Biopic To Avoid AIDS

The world's first major rock star to die of aids won't have aids in his first major biopic. Deadline Hollywood is reporting that Sacha Baron Cohen has signed a deal to play Freddie Mercury in a film written by Golden Globe winner and two-time Oscar nominee Peter Morgan who penned The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Last King of Scotland, and Eastwood's forthcoming Hereafter.

Producers already have said the movie will not deal with Mercury having aids. Opting for a simpler, happier ending, they are stopping their story at Live Aid, in 1985, where Queen's performance rocked the world and continues to be voted the best rock gig of all time. Mercury tested positive for HIV in 1987 yet despite frequent speculation in the British press, he did not acknowledge having aids until one day before he died in November 1991.

Screenwriter Morgan could again mine the complexities and tensions between public/private persona, this time through a man who was less than forthcoming about the extent of his gay sex life and perhaps less than eager to discuss his 100% Parsi background. (Born Farrokh Bulsara in Zanzibar, he did not change his surname until he was 24 in England. How, for example, did being born and raised in Africa affect Mercury's much-condemned decision in 1984, to break the cultural boycott of apartheid South Africa and play Sun City?) Then again, the script may go soft, yielding another give-the-masses-what-they-want movie. In that case, expect a lot of Mercury's early 1970s relationship with Mary Austin, who remained his best friend for life. Mercury left Mary his mansion, most of his estate, and all his royalties; while giving Jim Hutton, whom he'd been with six or seven years at the time of his death, a mere half million pounds.

Sacha Baron Cohen played gay, awesomely, in Talladega Nights and flamboyantly in Bruno. His one song was a good reason to wake up from the otherwise sleepy Sweeney Todd.

This marks the first time the remaining members of Queen have licensed their songs for a movie about the band. Production on the film starts next year.