Band of Thebes

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: Sledge, Hammer

 

Lifetime achievement honoree Alan Hollinghurst, both poetry winners, and both fiction winners did not attend the 23rd Publishing Triangle Awards, but luckily all three nonfiction winners (above l to r: Spring, Hammer, Bornstein) made excellent and important remarks when collecting their prizes.

Justin Spring said he and fellow nominees Wendy Moffat and Tripp Evans were motivated by a shared feeling that the "accepted histories of our subjects needed to reviewed or adjusted" and particularly praised the behind-the-scenes work of librarians, archivists, and document dealers. An elated Barbara Hammer gave a joyful tribute to her longtime partner Florrie Burke and read the book's dedication to her and to women artists everywhere. Kate Bornstein, who said "I haven't called herself a woman since 1989," chided Publishing Triangle for the binary of gay and lesbian, excluding trans and more than 50 other kinds of otherness celebrated in an impromptu recital of an alternative alphabet, "S for S&M, F for Feminist..." Leadership Award winner Richard Schneider said the Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide has, since 1994, published more than 982 writers, nearly 25% of whom are from New York. After particularly praising Andrew Holleran and the review's literary editor Martha Stone, he said readers would soon be able to enjoy a digital edition but that the print version would endure for a long time.

In an emailed statement, Hollinghurst said what he finds "most sustaining" in writing is "the depiction of gay life. As a gay man I've been given a huge and fascinating subject." When beginning his own career Hollinghurst said Edmund White's work "gave courage and huge possibility." Of his own work, he said, "The task keeps redefining itself."

The Ferro-Grumley Awards for LGBT Fiction: Michael Sledge, The More I Owe You

    Finalists:

    * Daniel Black, Perfect Peace
    * Lucy Jane Bledsoe, The Big Bang Symphony
    * Daniel Allen Cox, Krakow Melt
    * David McConnell, The Silver Hearted: A Novel
    * Eileen Myles, Inferno

The Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction: Katharine Beutner, Alcestis

    Finalists:

    * Michael Alenyikov, Ivan and Misha: Stories
    * Catherine Kirkwood, Cut Away

The Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction: Barbara Hammer, HAMMER!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life

     Finalists:

    * Terry Castle, The Professor
    * Emma Donoghue, Inseparable: Desire Between Women in Literature

The Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction: Justin Spring, Secret Historian

    Finalists:

    * R. Tripp Evans, Grant Wood
    * Wendy Moffat, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster

Special Nonfiction Award to: Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman, eds., Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation

The Audre Lorde Award for Lesbian Poetry: Jen Currin, The Inquisition Yours   

    * Elizabeth J. Colen, Money for Sunsets
    * Eleanor Lerman, The Sensual World Re-emerges

The Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry: Michael Walsh, The Dirt Riddles

    * Paul Legault, The Madeleine Poems
    * Eric Leigh, Harm’s Way

Leadership Award: The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide

Lifetime Achievement Award: Alan Hollinghurst

John Waters on Tennessee Williams and Staying Bohemian

Isn't this the perfect John Waters anecdote: He likes the annual Tennessee Williams festival for its Stella yelling contest, which last year was won by a mime. At a massive reading in Chelsea Wednesday night presented by 192 Books, he often mentioned Williams, as a favorite writer who "saved his life" as did Genet, and as a role model because despite his success he "stayed Bohemian" unlike the social climbing Truman Capote. Waters said he liked Williams' "bad" work as much as good work and was glad to see it getting more attention now. He also said we should be fighting for the right of lesbians to be bad mothers, complaining, "Gay people have to be good now. I hate that!" He thinks angry is cute at 20 but "if you're angry at 65 you're just an asshole. After 30 you can't complain about your parents anymore. We're all dealt a hand. Move on!" Asked what his favorite NYC bar is, he said nothing since Squeezebox (to loud applause) because he likes it "mixed up where you can't tell who's what" and he's "against separatism." Asked about his early films he said, "People look at those movies and say, 'You mut have done a lot of drugs.' Well, we did." Asked who should play him in a movie he said he is a realist, unlike Aretha Franklin who got mad when skinny Halle Berry wouldn't play her and then rejected the suggestion of Queen Latifah. So he said Steve Buscemi, adding that flight attendants frequently lean down and tell Waters, "I loved you in Fargo!" Buscemi told Waters he gets mistaken for Don Knotts.

In their styles of dress, hair, hats, and tats the overflow, SRO crowd represented each point on the spectrum of awesome, from Hairspray girls to guys wearing Civil War caps. Street theater would be far more interesting if everyone followed suit. 

Waters' Role Models in newly out in paperback.

Tonight, Tonight: Hollinghurst at Publishing Triangle Awards in New York

Next month when you're staring at the $100 ticket cost for the Lammys you'll wonder why you didn't attend the wonderful Publishing Triangle awards on April 28 -- free ceremony, fewer prizes, and free after-party from an all-volunteer army of queer book lovers. Tonight's lineup of nominees is particularly appealing and the keynote will be given by lifetime achievement winner Alan Hollinghurst. You've waited seven years since The Line of Beauty and early buzz on The Stranger's Child says it's even better. The story traverses the entire 20th century, beginning with a Rupert Brooke-ish lad who is loved by his Cambridge classmate and the classmate's sister before dying young in WWI. See Hollinghurst now because the novel doesn't pub until October, which gives Knopf plenty of time to change that typeface.

For the full list of nominees, click here.

Finalists for The Ferro-Grumley Awards for LGBT Fiction

    * Daniel Black, Perfect Peace
    * Lucy Jane Bledsoe, The Big Bang Symphony
    * Daniel Allen Cox, Krakow Melt
    * David McConnell, The Silver Hearted: A Novel
    * Eileen Myles, Inferno
    * Michael Sledge, The More I Owe You

Tonight at 7:00pm at the New School, 66 W 12th Street.

The Jack Bank by Glen Retief

Like male aggression itself, young schoolboy bullying is everywhere this season, playing a central part in the indie documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, the Oscar winning foreign film In a Better World, those ubitiquous YouTube videos for the It Gets Better campaign which is now a book [[Kindle]], and bullying is the troubled heart of Glen Retief's new autobiography The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood [[Kindle]]. Toward the end of aparthied, white Glen lives in bliss at Kruger National Park, until at 12 he is sent to a hellish boarding school where older boys make younger boys strip nude, jump up and down and receive swattings with cricket bats or electrical shocks to their genitals. Trouble is, when Glen is older he derives "enormous, surprising pleasure" from administering the beatings to younger boys. He connects the Boer system of abuse and torture to South Africa's greater ills, and he struggles to reconcile the shameful experiences that he considers "life's defining moment" with his homosexuality.

Not my kind of book but those who've read it are impressed:

“A remarkable memoir with the deeply resonant literary power of the finest fiction. The Jack Bank  is an important book by a supremely gifted writer.”—Robert Olen Butler

“One of those books that you never forget and never stop talking about.  Retief belongs in the pantheon of white African writers Alexandra Fuller, Peter Godwin, Coetzee, and Gordimer.”—Bob Shacochis

“Glen Retief’s Jack Bank is a transgressive, harrowing and illuminating work of literary art.  In a language marked by a brutal childhood in the last years of the apartheid regime, and with uncommon wisdom, Retief’s epiphanic narrative draws us into regions of  cultural importance beyond the scope of traditional memoir.  Thus, he changes what we imagine this genre to be, allowing it to become something truer.”—Carolyn Forché

"Eloquent...readers everywhere will be caught by the searing detail about family, friendship, sex and love."—Booklist

"Visceral and emotionally complex--an impressive first book."—Kirkus Reviews

Gay 27 Year-Old Salon Editor Doesn't Get Why Larry Kramer Isn't Chill

 

As eternal as spring blossoms and Cher farewell tours is the pas de deux of youth's self-absorbed apathy and age's righteous anger. This version is called "The Problem With Gay Men Today," performed across the pages of Salon by Deputy Arts Editor Thomas Rogers, a 27 year-old gay Brooklynite who has a way lot of straight friends, and the indomitable, soon to be 76 years old Larry Kramer who is first, last, and always gay. Larry says:

"I am a gay person before I’m anything else. I’m a gay person before I’m a white person, before I’m a Jew, before I’m a writer, before I’m American, anything. That is my most identifying characteristic and I don’t find many people who would say that. The polls say the same thing: People do not identify themselves as gay. And that’s too bad. In fact, it’s tragic. It will prevent us from ever having what we deserve, I believe."

They talk about how gay ghettos are emptying out and gay people are less visible to each other now and whether the internet is to blame. Rogers and a gay bud saw a preview of the revival of Kramer's The Normal Heart opening on Broadway tomorrow and found himself feeling a "perverse nostalgia" for AIDS because there's "something appealing about having this galvanizing issue to unite gay men. We don't have that as much now." Larry, discussing his partner, 64, points out

"I'll obviously die before he does, and the way the laws are written it's very hard to leave him anything of substance compared to what I have to leave. It all goes to taxes because we're not legally federally married and that's not fair, that's just not fair. You don't care about it at your age, but I care about it at mine, and there are a lot of older gays who should care about it as well. That should be a galvanizing issue. Anything that keeps us from being unequal should be galvanizing. I want what they have. I do. And everybody should. But again, people don't think that way."

Rogers does not refute the statement that he doesn't care. Earlier, he said he thought the battles over AIDS "seem very alien to a lot of young people's experiences" and that "many of the ideas in the play will seem exotic and a little dated to a lot of young gay men." He becomes more animated when discussing "the interesting thing about Grindr," which Kramer has never heard of.

Study Documents NY Museums' Wide Suppression of LGBT Themes

Last week, Out History released a previously unpublished study by curator Jonathan David Katz and Weena Perry documenting the suppression of LGBT themes in exhibits, online education, and printed catalogs at New York's leading museums. Of the seven institutions, the Guggenheim ranked the highest with a nonetheless low score of 12% inclusiveness and the worst, with a total of 0%, was the New York Historical Society. The Met earned an abysmal 1.8%. Such willful exclusion of queer scholarship and information is deeply damaging; the report argues  

"The failure of museums to engage in a wide swathe of art historical scholarship is of grave concern because it raises the question of historical accuracy. Failing to educate the public about the LGBT subject matter or significance of the work, or of the work’s producer, does a profound disservice to the work as a cultural document, to the LGBT community which has produced a number of greatly respected and admired artists, and to the society as a whole."

Beyond the macro view, the details of the museums' pettiness are painful to read: "As recently as 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was asked if they would simply list a symposium on Rauschenberg and sexuality among their publicity materials for their Rauschenberg Combines exhibit. They refused, as they refused to include sexuality in any way in the exhibition itself."

The full report covers the years from 1995 to its completion in August 2007 but was never been published.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Smithsonian is hosting a two-day free public forum called Flashpoints and Fault Lines:  Museum Curation and Controversy, which will be broadcast live on the web starting at 6:00pm. Katz and Charles Francis are two of the speakers on the panel Representing Sensitive Topics: Gender and Sexuality, scheduled to begin at 7:15pm. They will dazzle, of course, but otherwise the majority of participants are so uniformly establishment -- handpicked by the Smithsonian -- the event might be renamed Curation and Conformity. Notice on Wednesday's panel titled Curation, the questions include "To what extent do public figures have a say in how they are presented? How do we listen to cultural communities and account for their sensibilities and sensitivities?" When the "cultural community" complaining was the Catholic League, the museum immediately removed the Wojnarowicz piece from Hide/Seek. When it's criticism from the LGBT community, the results are documented in the report above.

Born April 22: John Waters

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 four 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 their shared childhood in Maryland. 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, as has the sequel New Line convinced Waters to write, Hairspray 2: White Lipstick, imagining Tracy in the late 60s during the British Invasion and Vietnam. The paperback of his wonderful Role Models -- the best LGBT book of 2010 according to Bill Clegg and Sebastian Stuart -- goes on sale on Tuesday, April 26. (At odd times my partner still quotes Waters' fashion advice from that book, such as wear Scotch Tape on your face.) If you're near New York, join me on Wednesday, April 27 to hear him read from Role Models at the Paula Cooper Gallery in Chelsea. The event is free but reservations are mandatory from 192 Books.

Beyond Censorship: Art Destroyers

On April 1, her 53rd birthday, Susan Burns of Arlington, Virginia physically attacked Gauguin's painting Two Tahitian Women in the National Gallery because, she said, “I feel that Gauguin is evil. He has nudity and is bad for the children. He has two women in the painting and it’s very homosex­ual. I was trying to remove it. I think it should be burned.” Burns has a history of mental illness, has been convicted of throwing shoes in stores and hurling a full cup of coffee at a bartender, for which she served 2.5 years in prison, the longest of her three lock-ups. Though the frame sustained minor damage, the painting was unhurt.

On Palm Sunday, after escalating protests by conservative Catholics and the National Front in Avignon, four vandals age 18 to 25 swung hammers and pickaxes to slashing two photographs by the New York-based Honduran-Afro-Cuban artist Andres Serrano: The Church, which depicts a nun's hands in prayer, and Immersion (Piss Christ), which shows a crucifix submerged in a jar of his urine.

The Guardian reports:

Civitas, a lobby group that says it aims to re-Christianize France, launched an online petition and mobilised other fundamentalist groups. The staunchly conservative archbishop of Vaucluse, Jean-Pierre Cattenoz, called Piss Christ "odious" and said he wanted this "trash" taken off the gallery walls. Last week the gallery complained of "extremist harassment" by fundamentalist Christian groups who wanted the work banned in France.

Lambert, one of France's best known art dealers.. likened the atmosphere to "a return to the middle ages."

On Saturday, around 1,000 Christian protesters marched through Avignon to the gallery. The protest group included a regional councillor for the extreme-right Front National, which recently scored well in the Vaucluse area in local elections. The gallery immediately stepped up security, putting plexiglass in front of the photograph and assigning two gallery guards to stand in front of it.

But on Palm Sunday morning, four people in sunglasses aged between 18 and 25 entered the exhibition just after it opened at 11am. One took a hammer out of his sock and threatened the guards with it. A guard grabbed another man around the waist but within seconds the group managed to take a hammer to the plexiglass screen and slash the photograph with another sharp object.

The gallery director, Eric Mézil, said it would reopen with the destroyed works on show "so people can see what barbarians can do".

The paper says the incident "has plunged secular France into soul-searching about Christian fundamentalism and Sarkozy's use of religious populism in his bid for re-election next year."

Elsewhere in the French government, openly gay Minister of Culture Frederic Mitterrand condemned the attack saying, “I’m shocked that someone can go into a museum, assault the guards and destroy an art work. This is unacceptable. If one is offended by a piece of art one should make a formal complaint at law: this is a fundamental principle of the French Republic. Any act of violence, destruction, and intolerance is unacceptable.”

World's Fastest Solo Eiger Summit + Queer Climbing Clubs

Not off topic if it inspires you to get The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic by Lucy Jane Bledsoe. Or join one of these fourteen queer climbing clubs:

Georgia Dyno 'Mos -- Atlanta (100+ members since April 2010)

Glam Climb of Texas -- Austin

Lez Climb -- Bay Area lesbians

Flame and Flash -- Bay Area queers

Queerabiners -- Boston

Not So Trad -- London 

Heel Hookers -- Los Angeles

Crux -- New York

R.O.C. -- Orlando

Rock Out -- Richmond

St. Louis 'Mo Climbers -- St. Louis

Crag Crux Climbers -- Toronto

T.O. 'Mo Climbers -- Toronto

LGBT Rock Climbing Group -- Vancouver

Homo Climbtastic hosts the world's largest queer climbing gatherings, which gives it bragging rights to claim "HC is the goddamn center of the queer climbing universe." Last weekend they wrangled more than 70 lgbt folk from all over out to California to climb in Bishop.

Queer Eye for Your Federal Tax Receipt

Did you tear up when you submitted your taxes this year? With the government's intention to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the percentage of your money funding agencies that discriminate against you got smaller. Or were you crying? The percentage of your tax money funding agencies that support heterosexuals while denying you and your partner the exact same rights is still huge, including the biggest slices of the federal spending pie chart: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

(For the hot LGB masochists who miss funding organizations working against them, consider a gift to GOProud. Republican candidates Huckabee, Romney, Pawlenty, Barbour, and Santorum have said they will re-instate Don't Ask, Don't Tell if elected.)

For the first time ever, you can go to this White House website, enter your tax payment amounts, and see a breakdown of where your money goes... which would be great if the percentages weren't completely bogus. In a typically slick political move, the administration has kept separate Social Security and the Medicare hospital tax, as they appear on your W-2. No surprise then, by removing a big chunk of the money, the remaining dollars look more important. Specifically, this way they can lead with the "largest" percentage of your money going to "national defense" at 26.3%. Nice for red state military hawks -- and oh yes they did color it red on the WH pie chart -- but it isn't true. It's 26.3% of your "income tax" which technically is only a part of your federal taxes. Cheap tactic. If they're going to create something called "Your Federal Taxpayer Receipt" the percentages should be based on your federal tax payment, period. For example, this one from Third Way.

(If you're confused because you're used to seeing military spending at around half the budget, you're right: That's the annual fight over discretionary spending, not the total federal budget.)

Born April 20: Takei, Forrest, Tobias, Vandross

When he was five in 1942, Los Angeles-born George Takei 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. He met Brad Altman, his partner of twenty-two years, at Frontrunners. They were married in California in September 2008 at the Japanese American National Museum, which Takei co-founded. He is 74 today and his name is pronounced tah-KAY.

Novelist Katherine V. Forrest, 72, 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 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, 64, 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. Nolan died in January.

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 a wide open secret.

On Sale Today: PEN/ O. Henry Prize Stories 2011

A.M. Homes, Christine Schutt, and the must-read Manuel Muñoz edited this year's PEN/O. Henry Prize stories, selecting work from Chris Adrian, Kenneth Calhoun, Adam Foulds, Susan Minot, Lori Ostlund, Jim Shepard, Elizabeth Tallent, Lily Tuck, and Brad Watson, along with other emerging or underexposed authors. Either by design or happenstance, the collection omits all of the contemporary giants in short fiction, so this is your chance to become more familiar with some newer voices. Ostlund's story of an ex-pat lesbian couple's dissolving union while teaching English in Malaysia is smart and sad and funny, and it's not even the very best piece in her award-winning collection The Bigness of the World [[Kindle]].

Anyone interested in the next generation of short story giants should by now already own Colm Tóibín's amazing The Empty Family [[Kindle]] and Yiyun Li's terrific Gold Boy, Emerald Girl [[Kindle]]. I'm also an ardent fan Manuel Muñoz's stories in The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, almost all of which are gay, whereas his elegant new novel, What You See in the Dark, ripples outward from a tangle of straight relationships and a murder, and has earned stellar reviews.

Complete list of PEN/Prize stories after the jump.

Born April 19: Dick Sargent

Although Dick Sargent is forever known as the second Darrin on Bewitched, he actually was cast in that role first but could not get out of his contract with Universal. When he finally joined the show after Dick York dropped out, it became one of the gayest casts in prime time, with lesbian Agnes Moorehead, ubergay Paul Lynde, and the actress who played Tabitha also grew up to be a lesbian. Sargent was in a twenty year relationship with a man he identifies only as Frank, and they frequently socialized as a couple with Elizabeth Montgomery and her husband. For the last several years of his life he lived with his partner Albert Williams. He came out on National Coming Out Day, October 11, 1991, in part as a reaction to Gov. Pete Wilson’s veto of a bill protecting gay people from job discrimination and because of concerns about high suicide rates among gay teenagers. He had tried to kill himself twice at Stanford when he realized he was gay. Devoting his final years to LGBT rights activism, he died of prostate cancer in 1994.

Pulitzer Prizes: Ryan, Egan, Chernow, Foner, Mukherjee

Jennifer Egan has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her novel A Visit from the Goon Squad [[Kindle]] and former Poet Laureate Kay Ryan has won the award in poetry for her greatest hits collection spanning 45 years inclusive of her lesbian relationships, The Best of It: New and Selected Poems.

The general nonfiction award was given to Siddhartha Mukherjee for The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, and Ron Chernow won the award in biography for Washington: A Life. Eric Foner won the award in history for The Fiery Trial: Abraham Lincoln and American Slavery.

Bruce Norris won the drama prize for Clybourne Park.

Many years the most interesting aspect of the Pulitzers announcement is the runners-up. Not this time. The other fiction finalists are Jonathan Dee's The Privileges and Chang-rae Lee's The Surrendered. The fiction jury was critic Elizabeth Taylor, Alan Cheuse, and Nicholas Delbanco.

Born April 17: Chavela Vargas

photo ©valentina siniego benenati  vsiniego.blogspot.com

A late bloomer, perhaps, but what an extraordinary flower -- Mexican singer Chevela Vargas, 92 today, did not release her first album until she was 42, didn't come out as a lesbian until she was 81, and didn't debut at Carnegie Hall until she was 83. What was she doing all those years before recording Noche de Bohemia in 1961? Well, she dressed as a man, often in her signature red jorongo, smoked cigars, drank heavily, and packed a pistol, so obviously she was busy with more than singing rancheras in the streets. And maybe she had an affair Frida Kahlo (as Josephine Baker had). Since that first record, she has released more than eighty albums. Her great fame of the 1960s and 70s subsided when she retired to battle her alcoholism. She returned to performing at 72 in 1991 in Mexico City. Since then her music has been widely used in films and she has appeared singing in several movies including Almodovar's Flower of My Secret, Taymor's Frida [below], and Innartu's Babel. All I can say is buy her, beware: The first time you hear Chavela unleash her power midway through the quiet Paloma Negra you might drop whatever you're holding.

Adult Hardcover, Paperback Book Sales Fell 34% in February

Fewer people are reading physical books.

According to new stats from the Association of American Publishers, February 2011 sales of adult books fell 34.4% compared to February 2010. The figure combines hardcovers, paperbacks, and mass markets. Sales of children's books fell 16%.

Sales of digital books rose 202% in February, boosted by the many people who received Kindles, Nooks, Sony Readers and iPads for the holidays. 

Related: When a A Different Light folded in New York in March 2001, the company said the closure would allow them to concentrate on their two remaining stores in California. When the West Hollywood branch shut down in 2009, they said they had no intention of closing the San Francisco store. Now, inevitably, the Castro is losing its flagship LGBT bookstore.

Five New Nonfiction LGBT Books

     

Editors Noreen Giffney, Michelle Sauer, and Diane Watt have collected fifteen essays in The Lesbian Premodern, including Lillian Faderman's "A Usable Past?" and Anna Klosowska's "Medieval Barbie Dolls." Karma Lochrie writes the foreword and Robyn Wiegman contributes the afterword, "The Lesbian Premodern Meets the Lesbian Postmodern."

Pulitzer-finalist and recent Publishing Triangle lifetime achievement honoree Martin Duberman examines two early queer activists in this dual biography beginning in the 1960s, in A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds [[Kindle]]. The NYT Book Review critic called it "refreshing and inspiring."

Felice Picano's True Stories: Portraits from My Past [[Kindle]] mixes memories of his childhood and adult encounters with Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Charles Henri Ford, Bette Midler, and Diana Vreeland.

To the long list of closeted celebrities who wait to come out until after their careers are over and they have a book to sell, add 80s sitcom star from Family Ties Meredith Baxter Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame, and Floundering [[Kindle]].

Humorist Wade Rouse's fourth memoir in six years pulls together memories of family get-togethers, It's All Relative: Two Families, Three Dogs, 34 Holidays, and 50 Boxes of Wine [[Kindle]].

Born April 13-14: Deboarh Batts, John Gielgud, Angela

Angela, my sister, is as awesome and amazing as she is publicity shy. Nevertheless, she deserves excellent best wishes from the entire blogosphere, particularly from this corner that owes her so much.

Deborah A. Batts grew up in Philadelphia then attended Radcliffe College and Harvard Law School. In 1994 Bill Clinton appointed her to the federal bench, making her the first openly gay federal judge in U.S. history. Sixty-two today, she is shown above with her portrait, which is the first portrait of a black woman and first of an out person on the walls of Harvard Law School.

Tony winner, Grammy winner, BAFTA winner, John Gielgud is often considered one of the world's finest actors. A consummate performer of Shakespeare on stage and screen, Gielgud was equally at home in historical dramas such as Brideshead Revisited (and Caligula), experimental works such as Beckett's Catastrophe, and contemporary comedies such as Arthur. For nearly forty years he lived with his partner Martin Hensler. In 1953, he was arrested and convicted of cottaging in Chelsea Mews. Afterward the public did not scorn him; rather, at his next appearance on stage he was given a standing ovation. That same year he was knighted. Although he was out and discussed his homosexuality in his autobiography, when he died at ninety-six in 2000, many newspaper articles degayed his life and omitted his partner of almost four decades. When criticized for this, the Washington Post defended their decision saying he was known for being an actor, not for being gay. Their long obituary included the details that he loved to garden and enjoyed trashy commercial paperback novels but not a word about his relationship.

A Visit to Ground Zero

After a day touring the Delta (including the B.B. King Museum in Indianola) we ended up at the world famous Ground Zero Blues Club in Clarksdale, Mississippi. The first people we met were a couple from Paris; inside, visitors from Venezuela, Austria, and Germany mixed with a Southerners of every stripe. The club is co-owned by Morgan Freeman and Bill Luckett, the must-win gubernatorial candidate, and it has revitalized the town and region. Every inch of the club's interior is inked with graffiti, at least one of which celebrates a gay couple.