Band of Thebes

Private Moments by Howard Roffman

Oh, why not? It's New Year's Eve. One of the best gay Eastern European works of total fiction in the last couple years is Howard Roffman's Private Moments. He's created strong characters and memorable images in a jumbo tome that packs 260 pages. Back when we had gay bookstores, they were full of excellent, hard-to-find novels and drippy photo books that weren't good enough to be art and weren't exciting enough to be porn. Clearly, Roffman is no Herbert List or George Platt Lynes (whose recent collection The Male Nudes should ennoble every gay man's library), but his color photographs are great. [Please forgive the poor selection and weak quality available online.] You're a sophisticated viewer; you can see when a fashion photo is about the dress and when it's about the celebrity wearing it; in the same manner, here you'll realize that even though Roffman's handsome models do everything (yep), his subject is actually camaraderie rather than carnality. But, as they say at circuit parties, the sex is fun, too.

Originally published in a whopping 8-1/4" x 12" format, the book has been re-released in a handier and less expensive edition at 7" x 10."

Colm Tóibín Digitally: Irish Memoir, 200 Novels, McCabe Story

This month Colm Tóibín publishes a brief memoir of growing up in Enniscorthy and his early adulthood in Dublin called A Guest at the Feast. Americans can read the first two pages but you can't buy it and you can't import it. The work is available only as an e-book and exclusively in the UK. The Penguin Shorts series also features brand new, low-priced short fiction by Anita Brookner and Helen Dunmore.

American readers can buy Tóibín's e-book The Modern Library in which he and Carmen Callil select the best 200 novels written since 1950. At first glance, I love their list.

For 99 cents Ann Patchett will tell you the secrets of The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir About Writing and Life.

Readers angry about these works not being printed on paper can relax by listening to the soothing sounds of Tóibín's voice for 32 minutes reading and discussing Eugene McCabe's short story "Music at Annahullian."

Antigay Humor Calendar Removed from B&N, Amazon

 

God knows I'm always happy to see The Gays flex their muscles. Nevertheless, I have mixed feelings about this week's uproar causing B&N.com to remove cartoonist Joe King's tacky humor calendar I'm Not Gay, I'm Just a Sissy. (UPDATE: Amazon continues to sell it. also has removed it.) The product is ignorant, unfunny, in bad taste, and steeped in tired stereotypes about effeminate men. It does not libel, defame, spew false facts, or incite violence. At heart, the problem appears to be the silly and mean-spirited attempts at humor are offensive to some people. We are in for a world of trouble if the criteria for removing a product is that some people say it fails their personal taste test. As with the Hide/Seek debacle, I think the best response against offensive work is to make one's case articulately, and shun it, but not censor it.

Born December 30: Douglas Coupland

When he was thirty, Douglas Coupland published his first novel which permanently named the post-Boomers Generation X. In the twenty years since, he's written thirteen more novels, nine works of nonfiction (most recently a biography of Marshall McLuhan and the official guide to the Vancouver Olympics), and plays, screenplays, and tv scripts (a miniseries called Extinction Event). In 2010 he delivered the Massey Lectures in Canada, following in the footsteps of Noam Chomsky, Jane Jacobs, Carlos Fuentes, Margaret Atwood, and Martin Luther King Jr. Ever the intellectual renegade, Coupland's "lecture" is a five-hour real-time novel called Player One: What Is To Become of Us that takes place in an airport cocktail lounge amid a global catastrophe.

Beyond the 22 books and many scripts, Coupland is a visual artist. Recently he designed the Monument to the War of 1812 in Toronto, the iconic sculptures in Canoe Landing Park, and Canada's national monument to fallen firefighters to open in Ottawa in March 2012. He lives with David Weir in Vancouver, where they bought the midcentury house behind theirs for a high style project loved by the NYT. He says he works seven days a week and has never taken a vacation.

NPR Rediscovers Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You

   

On Boxing Day, NPR's series You Must Read This featured YA novelist Jennifer Hubbard raving about Peter Cameron's wonderful, wonderful novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You[Kindle]. (Inexpicably, the brand new paperback is only $5.20 online. Get it.) Peter has created one of the best teenagers and one of the best grandmothers in recent fiction, period. Hubbard says:

In the first two pages, in which the narrator refers to his sister as "a bit of a linguistic zealot" and worries about his mother's announcing "in a disturbing brainwashy way" that she plans to spend her third honeymoon in a city she hates, I was hooked.

In October, You Must Read This covered Gerbrand Bakker's IMPAC Dublin-winning, marvelous gay/bi Dutch novel The Twin [Kindle], a favorite of several smart readers in Thebes' 2010 queer lit poll.

A movie adaptation of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You premiered at the Rome Film Festival last month and is scheduled to open in Italy in February. It stars Toby Regbo, Ellen Burstyn, Marcia Gay Harden, Peter Gallagher, Lucy Liu, and Stephen Lang. Elisa sings "Love Is Requited" from the soundtrack.

Salon Series of Minority Youth Coming Out Stories: Pariah Personals

Cross-promoting the movie, this week Salon is running a series called Pariah Personals in which minority and immigrant teens write about coming out to their families. Some critics say the movie suffers from an over-familiar story, but all of these blessedly brief first-person essays have fresh, unexpected details:

Monday, Jamilah King's mother offered to attend a pride parade with her at a time when neither was comfortable with it.

Tuesday, Jean Melesaine [below], a Samoan Mormon lesbian, learned at five years old that she would go to hell and started jacking cars when she was seven and robbing apartments at ten.

Wednesday, Andres Garcia, 17, [above] avoided telling his family because he "just figured they'd be close-minded," and his coming out did spark a fight -- because his brother was hurt to be the last to know and his father felt awful for all the suffering Andres would face in a prejudiced world.

Pariah Opens Today, Expands Next Week

For whatever reason, the debut Brooklyn black teen lesbian coming out movie Pariah doesn't have quite as strong buzz as the white lesbian family film The Kids Are All Right (big stars, known director) or the Harlem black teen film Precious (Sundance winner, backed by Oprah and Tyler Perry). Pariah opens today in New York, Hollywood, and San Francisco to solid reviews. On January 6 it expands to Cambridge, Chicago, Dallas, DC, San Diego, and Seattle. This is your triple chance to support women directors, black film, and queer movies, all wildly underrepresented at the box office.

CNN on Gay Couples Paying Higher Federal Taxes Due to DOMA

In January 2009 when we had a democrat president and majority in the house and senate, the top gay priority ought to have been undoing DOMA, not slow-walking DADT or ENDA. Instead, we had HRC telling us 2015 2017 really wasn't that long to wait. Bad strategy. Yesterday CNN ran this familiar story that because the nefarious Defense of Marriage Act prohibits the government from recognizing gay marriage, queer couples "can't combine their income and deductions to take advantage of lower tax rates." The article runs a scenario showing the imbalance to be as high as $6,043. That's a lot extra to pay to a government that rejects you. Yet it's peanuts compared to far more costly travesties of DOMA that CNN ignores: a surviving queer spouse can't get her/his partner's Social Security. In July, USA Today reported that same-sex couples are blocked from "1,049 federal rights that heterosexual couples receive."

[Yes, in 1996 Clinton could have vetoed DOMA for symbolic purposes. The bill passed 85–14 in the Senate and 342–67 in the House, certain of an override.]

Born December 28: F.W. Murnau, Manuel Puig, Socalled

After studying art history at the University of Heidelberg and flying as a combat pilot in WWI, F.W. Murnau directed his first film The Boy in Blue in 1919 when he was thirty-one. Before his death in a car crash at forty-two, he became one of cinema's early giants -- (said to be 6'9" tall) -- with a prodigious output in Germany, most famous of which is Nosferatu from 1922. After four years and many more successes (The Last Laugh, Faust) Murnau moved to Hollywood and made what many critics consider one of the greatest films ever, Sunrise, which shared the top prize at the first Oscar ceremony. Sunrise is #82 on the AFI 100 Greatest Films list but in 2002 the British Film Institute ranked it #7 of all time. He made two more movies -- Four Devils (lost) and Our Daily Bread (released as City Girl) -- before his final picture, Tabu, a loincloth romance shot in Tahiti that won a cinematography Oscar for Floyd Crosby (father of David Crosby who is biologically the father of Melissa Etheridge's children). He died a week before Tabu's premiere. Because humans are easily titillated, and because some are snickering homophobes, the baseless rumor persists that Murnau's fatal car crash was the result of his performing oral sex on his chauffeur.

Born in central Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig first wanted to be an architect then became a film archivist with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. His love of movies infuses his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, published when he was thirty-six. Praised in Latin America as that work was, his international reputation rests on his fourth novel, published in 1976, about a gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell: Kiss of the Spider Woman [[Kindle]] also became an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 1993. The buoyancy of his early books, mixing high literary art with the low-brow style of telenovas, gave way to a bitterness in later books that reduced their popularity. A leftist exile in Mexico City for decades, he died there at fifty-seven suffering a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

 

Who brings the funk, da noise, and the klezmer? That's right, the super original Jewish Canadian rapper Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. If you think Ukrainian music from the 1930s won't mesh with drum n bass, you haven't heard his Ghettoblaster. His trippy "You Are Never Alone" video became a YouTube sensation with 2.5 million views, and last year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel. In a world of timid, homogenized, market-driven art, Socalled is a standout. Which doesn't mean everything he tries works, but when he hits, he's genius. I met him and loved him after the NYC screening of the documentary. Not to brag, but after talking a while I did the very best thing one man can do for another... insisted he read Tatyana Tolstaya. Check his upcoming tour in February and March.

Five Finalists for the Great Gay Play & Musical Contest

Broadway World reports Pride Films and Plays has announced the five finalists in the 2012 Great Gay Play and Musical Contest:

At The Flash by Sean Chandler and David Leeper, Woodland Hills, CA
    At The Flash is a multi-character history of a fictitious gay bar called The Flash as seen through the eyes of five specific, yet universal characters whose stories are told through a series of inter-woven scenes representing LGBT history from the 1960s to today. One actor plays all the roles in this theatrical tour-de-force.

Hello Norma Jeane by Dylan Costello, London, UK
    Joe has his life turned upside-down when his grandmother admits her deepest secret - that she is in fact Marilyn Monroe, coming out of hiding 50 years after faking her death in 1962. Can Joe really be the gay grandson of Marilyn Monroe? Joe's search for the truth, his self-worth, and his love for his grandmother are tested to the limit in this funny drama that is full of surprises.

Lost in History by Adam Siegel, Maplewood, NJ
    In Lost in History, we meet Ben Goldfarb, a man who is caring for his demanding father while trying to have a baby through a surrogate. When his father gets a new roommate at the nursing home where he is living, Ben learns it is Isaac Strauss - the famous psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor. What will Ben learn about his father, about Isaac, and about himself in this new powerful new drama of family and history?

Mr. Teddy by George Smart, Quincy, MA
    Mr. Teddy explores the sexy and complex dynamics of a long-term relationship between three men who are a part of the gay subculture where role playing is the norm and a way of life. 'Daddies' Alex and Marc have enjoyed 10 years together with their 'son' Teddy, until their friend Joan instigates a confrontation that tests the very definition of family.

Under A Rainbow Flag by Leo Schwartz, Chicago, IL
    Navy Medical Corpsman Jon Philips finds himself in the company of other gay men, both stateside and on the battle field in World War II. As we follow Jon and his friends from 1943 to 1951, we learn of love, joy, and loss in this brand-new musical. Under A Rainbow Flag is based on actual events in the life of Navy corpsman, Jon Philips, resident of Evanston, Illinois, and is the first musical to be named a finalist in this competition.

Born December 27: Wilson Cruz

In 1992 when he was 19, Wilson Cruz told his Afro-Puerto Rican parents he was gay, shocking and "hurting" his mother, and enraging his father, who banished him from their Brooklyn home. For two months, Wilson stayed with friends or lived in his car. He moved to Hollywood, determined to be an out actor of color, and within two years he was cast as Ricky, the gay teen on the critically acclaimed series My So-Called Life starring Claire Danes. Oliver Stone cast him as Hoover's servant Joaquin in Nixon, and he appeared in 11 episodes on the sixth and final season of Party of Five. In the decade since then, he has guested on many series and had small roles in big films (He's Just Not That Into You) and larger roles in smaller films, like The Ode, co-directed, co-produced, and adapted by Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla from his debut novel Ode to Lata [Kindle]. Wilson Cruz reconciled with his parents long ago and is a tireless advocate for LGBTQ youth. He is also, apparently, always on Twitter, where he asked ppl to support The Trevor Project for Christmas and donate to GLSEN for his birthday. Today he's 38 and celebrating in Puerto Vallarta.

Interracial Gay Wedding, Corporate Drama at Archie Comics

Comic book character Kevin Keller followed in his father's footsteps, joined the army, was injured in Iraq, came home to a rehab center, and fell in love with his physical therapist, Dr. Clay Walker. Now, they're getting married. The gay wedding issue (#16) goes on sale in bookstores January 4 and at newsstands January 10.

Jonathan Goldwater followed in his father's footsteps as CEO of Archie Comics and said if the wholesome, all-American series hadn't embraced LGBT characters it would risk becoming irrelevant. He said Kevin's initial coming out resulted in a mere seven canceled subscriptions but added "hundreds and hundreds" of new subscribers.

Goldwater's bigger problem is his co-CEO Nancy Silberkleit, 57, who assumed the job after her husband's death in 2009. The two families have run the Archies empire since its creation by Goldwater's father in 1941. Now, the company is suing Silberkleit for harassment. The New York Post cites a few allegations:

* Barging into a meeting, pointing at four men in the room, and screeching, “Penis, penis, penis, penis!”

* Complaining her “balls hurt” and she needed to “adjust my balls because they are irritating me.”

* Shouting, “All you penises think you can run me out,” and telling a new employee to “stand up and pull down your pants.”

* told a female worker that the only reason anyone in the company liked her was because she had “big boobies.”

Of the gay issue, CNN casually mentions the most appalling fact: "The Comics Code Authority, an industry body, explicitly banned any mention of homosexuality in comics until 1989."

Sandy Leonard Finds the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul

Photo: Sandy Leonard Snaps

If today is the day for miraculous stories from the Mediterranean region, none beats this one from photoblogger Sandy Leonard. Even if you somehow have never read Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's knockout novel The Museum of Innocence [Kindle], you can appreciate the true story of a very literary traveler in Istanbul searching out a fictitious institution from a favorite book and discovering it to be real. That came entirely from Sandy's meticulous research, wanting to walk the exact neighborhood where the made-up museum would have been. But once he found the actual Museum of Innocence, created by Pamuk to recreate the one in his novel, he learned it will not open to the public until May 2012. Then serendipity stepped in, taking the form of a group of German officials including a leading Green lady much beloved by The Gays. Read Sandy's post. And make his blog part of your daily itinerary.

Wilde's Tomb Cleaned of Kisses and Behind Barrier

Quick, is there a glass wall in Oscar Wilde's fairy tales? Because now there is one around his grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery. The Irish government and the Irish Fund for France paid roughly 50,000 euros to clean the tomb with its Jacob Epstein's Assyrian nude figures, which by tradition have been covered in kisses from devoted queers and outcasts. Authorities also erected a 7-foot plate glass barrier to keep pilgrims from puckering up. Anyone could have predicted this: Now people kiss the glass.

Rupert Everett attended the unveiling with Wilde's grandson, Merlin Holland, 66. Next fall, Rupert plans to star in and direct a film he's written about Wilde's final three years, costarring Colin Firth, Emily Watson and Tom Wilkinson. The Guardian reports:

"Singling out earlier films about Wilde – by Robert Morley, Peter Finch and Stephen Fry – he said: 'All other films stop when [Wilde] goes to prison. I think that's partly because the heterosexual world … still can't face what they did to him … after [Wilde] came out of prison, if an Englishman saw him in the street he was absolutely entitled to go up and slap him or spit at him ... everybody abandoned him.

"'It's the most extraordinary story – and a very short time ago … I think people can't really face that side of him. It's too cruel."

Richard Labonté's Ten Best Fiction, Nonfiction of 2011

The best-read gay man in North America announced his favorite books of the year: Leading Richard Labonté's fiction list, alphabetically by title, is Colm Tóibín’s The Empty Family [Kindle]. The other nine books are six titles by men, including novels by Matthew Gallway The Metropolis Case [Kindle] and Dennis Cooper The Marbled Swarm, and story collections from T. Leland Love/Imperfect [Kindle] and Lonely Christopher The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse [Kindle]. The three standouts by women are Nina Revoyr's Wingshooters [Kindle], Sally Bellerose's The Girls Club [Kindle], and Laurie Weeks' East Village extravaganza Zipper Mouth [Kindle]. 

Notably absent is a novel that argues gay literature is the heart of English culture, Alan Hollinghurst’s The Stranger's Child [Kindle].

The nonfiction list is marvelously eclectic from porn (Halsted Plays Himself) to poets (Nocturnal Omissions) to memoirs by Jane Lynch and Justin Bond (Tango: My Childhood, Backwards and in High Heels).

Lesbians Share Navy's Official First Kiss Returning to Home Port

Photo by Brian Clark | The Virginian-Pilot

As widely reported, yesterday morning two lesbians became the first same-sex couple to get the traditional dockside first kiss when an officer returns home from sea. After 80 days away, Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta embraced her waiting girlfriend Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell, 22. Gaeta got the honor by winning the on-board lottery, having bought fifty tickets at a dollar each. (Other sailors purchased more than one hundred tickets each.) The couple has been dating for a little more than two years, since they were roommates at their first training school after boot camp. Of their official kiss Gaeta said, “It's a big deal. It’s nice to be able to be myself. It’s been a long time coming.” Snell said, "This is the first time we can actually show who we are."

By coincidence, it's the one year anniversary of Obama signing the DADT repeal. NBC News reports that the haters were wrong: "But the chaos they predicted if openly gay and lesbian soldiers served in close quarters during combat never happened." Watch the segment featuring out gay soldiers in Afghanistan.

To see how far we've come, revisit Christopher Bram's gay sailor / gay brothel / WWII spy novel Hold Tight.

TIME on Tintin: "Basically Everbody's Probably Gay."

Hey, Sailor: Tintin cruises for a friend on the Unicorn

True fans of film have their moment when they once and for all gave up on Steven Spielberg, certainly by the time of his shatteringly awful idea to Americanize Harry Potter and make it a cartoon -- if Harry Potter is American he's not Harry Potter anymore. So devotees of Tintin have had good reason to worry about today's release of Spielberg's first ever animated film -- namely, if Tintin is straight, he's not Tintin anymore. Depending on your view for the past eighty-two years, the beloved Belgian manboy is either wonderfully gay or sweetly asexual. The original stories unfold in an all-male world devoid of girls and women (except the opera diva Bianca Castafiore, which really only proves...). Stretching the point, the Herge cartoons are like an innocent version of Tom of Finland -- the naive but curious young hero wanders into adventures with bigger, brawny strangers, they tussle and struggle to a climax, and everybody goes home a little happier, wiser, and with new friends in the brotherhood of man.

In any case, I was prepared for Hollywood to crush one more tiny altar in my little gay soul, only to discover that, no! Miraculously, they resisted the urge to force a female love interest on Tintin! The cast is absent of women except Bianca and the grownup Billy Elliot is surrounded only by men: Daniel Craig, Simon Pegg, Andy Serkis, Cary Elwes, Nick Frost, Toby Jones, on and on.

TIME magazine's book man Lev Grossman innumerates 11 points for the uniniated:

6. Does Tintin — how can I put this — love the ladies? That is not known. He does not appear to be a sexual being at all. (This question is explored in Frederic Tuten’s excellent novel Tintin in the New World [[Kindle]] as well as Charles Burns’ hallucinatory graphic novel X'ed Out which stars a feckless manchild named Nitnit.)

7. Does he even know any ladies? Not really. There are hardly any female characters at all in Tintin. I don’t know why this is, but it’s a major weakness of the series. The only recurring female character is Bianca Castafiore, this awful opera-singer who’s weirdly obsessed with Captain Haddock. She makes a cameo in the movie. But all of Tintin’s other friends are guys, all of whom seem to be unmarried. Basically everybody’s probably gay.

The movie has earned generally strong reviews for being just what you need right now: a lot of fun.

Get the original stories in handsome volumes, each combining three complete tales for less than the price a movie ticket: 

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 1: Tintin in America / Cigars of the Pharaoh / The Blue Lotus

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 2: The Broken Ear / The Black Island / King Ottokar's Sceptre

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 3: The Crab with the Golden Claws / The Shooting Star / The Secret of the Unicorn

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 4: Red Rackham's Treasure / The Seven Crystal Balls / Prisoners of the Sun

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 5: Land of Black Gold / Destination Moon / Explorers on the Moon

The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 6: The Calculus Affair / The Red Sea Sharks / Tintin in Tibet

**yes, I came back to Spielberg for Catch Me If You Can.

Danish MP Wants Hans Christian Andersen Gay Festival

Once upon a time there was a thirty year-old MP named Trine Bramsen who wanted her government to sponsor a week-long gay festival celebrating Hans Christian Andersen. She said it would lure queer couples to Andersen's birthplace, Funen, which she represents as a Social Democrat. Her evil opponents laughed wickedly and called her idea "silly." Denmark was the first nation in the universe to legalize same-sex unions, in 1989, the same year Disney bastardized The Little Mermaid with a singing, dancing happy ending. (Andersen's original, dark tale is said to represent his views of relationships, most or all of which were unrequited in his case.) Denmark will extend full marriage equality to gay couples in February, and Trine envisions a tourist bonanza. Topping the list of questions about the festival, who will play the lead in The Emperor's New Clothes?

Serious readers of fairy tales really ought to own these gorgeous editions from Norton: The Annotated Brothers Grimm, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, and The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales for starters. Later, you should add The Annotated Peter Pan, The Annotated Alice, The Annotated Hunting of the Snark, and The Annotated Wind in the Willows, among many others in the stellar series.

Contemporary followers of fairy tales should consider the career-spanning new Collected Folk Tales by Alan Garner, whom Neil Gaiman called a "national treasure" in his rave review. Readers looking for more blood and vinegar in their tales might try There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.

Born December 20: Elsie de Wolfe

Baby boomers who think they invented being young at sixty are forgetting about Elsie de Wolfe who at sixty-one in 1926 attended a costume ball in Paris dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer and made her entrance doing handsprings. When she turned seventy, the world's most famous interior designer wrote her autobiography and noted that her daily exercise regimen still included yoga, headstands, and walking on her hands. Her design style was nearly as dramatic, banishing the dark, heavy Victorian look for new openness, airiness, and light. Starting at forty, she received her first major commission for Stanford White's Colony Club, after which she designed the interiors for the premiere families of her day, the Fricks, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Windsors. Ten years into her success, in her early fifties, she stopped to become a nurse in World War I in France and earned the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. From her late twenties onward she lived with Elisabeth Marbury, one of the first women to work as a theatrical agent, representing among others Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. They spent thirty-three years together as a classic butch-femme couple, mentoring a whole generation of younger lesbians including Mercedes de Acosta who would become Greta Garbo's lover. Then de Wolfe up and married Sir Charles Mendl because she wanted a title. Now Lady Mendl, she expected nothing to change with Marbury, given that her marriage was completely platonic, and the women remained lovers for seven more years, until 1933, when Marbury died.

The next time you discuss outing and public figures and privacy, you might bear in mind that in 1926, the New York Times ran a front page story calling de Wolfe's wedding "a great surprise"  because "she makes her home with Elisabeth Marbury at 13 Sutton Place." Not that everything can be explained by early experiences, but the woman who spent her life making things beautiful grew up listening to her mother tell her she was ugly. When she was seventy, Parisian fashionistas named her the best dressed woman in the world. She is immortalized in song lyrics by Irving Berlin and by Cole Porter:

When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up,

Now turns a handspring, landing up-on her toes

Anything Goes!

Read her landmark book The House in Good Taste or either of two biographies, the 366 page Elsie De Wolfe: A Life in the High Style or the 143 page Elsie De Wolfe: A Decorative Life from Clarkson Potter.

Born December 19: Cyril Collard, Jean Genet

Cyril Collard [above, right] adapted, directed, and starred in the vividly bisexual film Les Nuits Fauve [Savage Nights], based on his second novel. The autobiographical story examines the life of a thirtyish aspiring director, Jean, engaged in simultaneous affairs with an 18-year-old French girl and a young, "straight" Spanish rugby player, Samy, who develops a taste for S&M and moves in with him, while Jean still (compulsively?) enjoys frequent, rough anonymous hookups, all of which is further complicated by his being HIV+. Heralding the start of a dazzling career, the movie won four Cesar Awards in 1993, including Best Film, but Collard did not attend. Three days earlier he died of aids at 35.

Flashback to 1949: South Pacific opened on Broadway, James Gould Cozzens won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, All the King's Men won the Oscar for Best Picture, and in France, Jean Genet received his tenth criminal conviction, which meant he would be sent to prison for life. In the preceding five years he had published his five groundbreaking novels, as well as three plays and dozens of poems, all of which were greatly esteemed by his European contemporaries despite his focus on petty thieves and his inclusion of gay sex. As news of his dire situation spread, rather than ostracizing Genet, the leading intellectuals rallied to his defense, and with a public push from Cocteau, Sartre, and Picasso, among others, Genet was pardoned by the French president. It is safe to say Harry Truman would not have done the same because at that point Genet's fiction was still banned in the United States. Genet never returned to prison after that, nor did he ever publish another novel, although he continued to write plays, poems, and a memoir, Un Captif Amoureux, published in 1986, the year after he died of throat cancer. For the full story, read Edmund White's definitive Genet: A Biography.