Band of Thebes

SNL To Add First Lesbian Cast Member Kate McKinnon

What's your hurry? Twenty-seven years after Saturday Night Live hired its first openly gay cast member, the show is ready to hire lesbian comedian Kate McKinnon. Reports say she'll appear, in a try-out of sorts, on next week's show hosted by Sofia Vergara from Modern Family. For three seasons Kate appeared on Logo's The Big Gay Sketch Show. Rumors abound that Kristen Wiig may be ditching SNL for Hollywood, and that Abby Elliott "also expressed interest in leaving at season's end."

So, who was that out gay performer hired in 1985? Terry Sweeney. FYI, Kate wasn't watching. She was born in 1984.

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

 

Celebrate with biographies of cultural impressario Sergei Diaghilev [Kindle] who turns 140 today, and Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 72, or a memoir by mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 78, or a cd from comic Suzanne Westenhoefer, 51.

Younger Every Day

Last month, Amelia, a mom blogger on HuffPost wrote about her son happily announcing he's gay. He's seven. Predictably, a lot of naysayers claim children can't know their orientation so young, but legions of lgbt people can refute that personally. Now the boy's father, Dave, has written a post declaring his full support for his son's coming out and, he says, laughing at the ignorant comments inspired by his wife's article, like, "Isn't your son's father going to miss teaching him sports?" "Isn't not having your child get married going to just break your heart?" As it turns out, the little dude is a football jock.

On Sunday, the NYT magazine is running Elizabeth Weil's major article about the "new normal" of girls going through puberty before age ten. The story begins with the shocking detail of Ainsley growing pubic hair when she was six. Growth spurts, armpit hair, pimples, developing breasts, PMS cycling with her mother, somehow these are now issues some girls must cope with in third grade. Whatever the cause, that shift is robbing kids of childhood, not their own honesty in coming out.

Terence Rattigan's The Deep Blue Sea

In a rare show of unity, critics from the NYT, LAT, Time, New York, The Onion, and Entertainment Weekly each gave The Deep Blue Sea a perfect 100 rating via Metacritics. David Edelstein said Rachel Weisz in this movie is as beautiful as any actress who has ever appeared on film. More grounded, David Denby pointed out that being gay and closeted when homosexuality was illegal, playwright Terence Rattigan couldn't say what he wanted to say. The limited story begins with the attempted suicide of a judge's wife who has left everything in 1950 London to live in poverty in a drab rooming house and be ignored by her lover, a younger, selfish, scared, cold, alcoholic former RAF pilot. Alas, even willing to settle for subtext, I found the film stilted and stagy. But director Terence Davies has captured a fine look, and the smaller parts are wonderful: the wronged husband, his bitter mother, the landlady, the bewildered buddy and his girlfriend who delivers by far the best line: "If you get cold you can rub two Boy Scouts together."

The postwar, depressed love story shares so many similarities with Coral Glynn, all of which Peter Cameron handles better, FSG should find a way to pair them for critics and readers as the film expands to more markets in coming weeks.

Born March 29: Bruce Weber

 
Such is the world that photographer Bruce Weber, 66, made "news" yesterday for releasing a series of Abercrombie videos featuring this man to man kiss. Weber is married to a woman but for four decades years his primary subject has been the eroticizing of men's bodies and male camaraderie. (One of his many books is a collaboration with Reynolds Price, Bear Pond, capturing naked young men at play in the Adirondacks.) Weber's ubiquitous softcore campaigns for Abercrombie and Calvin Klein underwear have, for better or worse, reshaped gay culture, then youth culture, then American culture. This has been true at least since 1982 when he got Brazilian pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus to wear only white briefs and recline against a white rock. That iconic ad and billboard was named one of "ten photos that changed America," by the industry bible American Photographer.

The internet wants you to watch Weber's videos here: shower kiss, wrestling duo, wrestling team, shirtless film shoot, Melville, and matador.

Rachel Maddow's Drift

In her first book Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power [Kindle], Rachel Maddow "traces how U.S. national intelligence agencies have taken over duties that were once assigned to the military, and how this shift has increased the public disconnect from the consequences of war." 

Rachel says she grew up in a household that respected military service -- her father fought in Vietnam -- and she might have joined up herself, were it not for that LGBT ban.

The NPR site:

"Politically, secrecy is a great excuse," Maddow tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "If something is being done on a secret basis in national security, that's a great reason for elected officials to not talk about it. And that's a great way to shirk accountability for it with the public."

That lack of accountability, says Maddow, lets America's national defense operate without public oversight or knowledge.

"When things are done in secret in our name, we can be held accountable for them, even if we can't hold accountable our government for directing it," she says. "And that feels very un-American to me."

Using intelligence agencies and private contractors has also increasingly disconnected the American public from the consequences of war, says Maddow.

"I don't think anybody set out to make us so divorced from the wars that we wage," she says. "But all of these little tweaks — all of these little changes that we made — had the effect of letting a president wage war without political restraint and letting us wage war in a way where we didn't necessarily notice or know the names of all of those who were deployed in our name. Because a lot of them were working for companies that didn't have any obligation to report to us when their people were killed. We ended up doing stuff in a way that insulated the American public from what our military was doing to the point where we don't feel much friction when Americans go downrange."

Guess who had an easy time getting blurbs? Everyone from Naomi Klein and Matt Taibbi to Roger Ailes and Tom Brokaw lavishly praise the book. I don't care what Tom or Roger think but Naomi Klein promises the work isn't an overly academic trudge, "With her savage wit, dazzling command of facts, and eye for the absurd, Maddow tells the epic story of how American warfare came to be both never-ending and practically invisible..."

What a great spring for lesbian authors: Ellis Avery, Carol Anshaw, Jeanette WInterson, Sarah Schulman, Rachel Maddow, Lucy Jane Bledsoe, and soon Alison Bechdel.

Stephen McCauley Comes Out

      

Yes, Rain Mitchell is female. Stephen McCauley unmasks an alter ego in this charming interview with Anita Diamant. Read the series she finds "funny and wise," saying the books "find the balance between the lunacy and the wisdom of yoga in America today, cleverly exposing both sides through the lives of the main characters."

AD:  It’s a different voice, but I hear little echoes of you throughout. What was it like working this way?

RM:  Liberating! I tend to second-guess everything I scribble onto the page. Rain is more secure than I am.  Rain has a better work ethic. I'm easily distracted, but Rain has laser focus.  Rain loves big plot twists, while I'm hesitant about them. Believe me, I learned a lot from Rain... I’m proud of Rain.

            +  +  +

AD:  The books are very funny and upbeat, but there are some pretty dark corners as well—a miscarriage, a bad marriage, an abusive relationship.  

RM:  I like these women so much, I hate when bad things happen to them.  I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I shed a few tears while writing.  But if you’re going to have subplots and suspense, you have to have trouble.

AD: Do you have a favorite among the characters?

RM:  The character I have the most fun with is Alan, Lee’s narcissistic ex-husband. He’s just so appallingly and consistently selfish, I can always count on him to do something outrageous.  I keep hoping he’ll reform, but it hasn’t happened yet.  I’m afraid bad characters are sometimes more fun to write about.  

Let yourself go. For now, the paperback of Tales from the Yoga Studio [Kindle] is only $6 at a major online retailer. Get it before the second book, Head Over Heels [Kindle], is released on April 24 and takes off worldwide. The series has sold foreign rights in fourteen countries.

Born March 28: Dirk Bogarde

After distinguished service as an intelligence officer in the Queen's Royal Regiment during WWII, Dirk Bogarde tried acting and became Britain's top box office draw of the 1950s. So it was big news in 1961 when he chose to play a closeted, married gay barrister in Victim, especially considering he was closeted himself. (He and his manager Anthony Forwood lived together for decades.) In 1963, Bogarde played the creepy, closety valet in The Servant, and later played the tragic gay lead of Death in Venice. Today, the courage of these choices can hardly be imagined. Even in 1971, two years after Midnight Cowboy, Warner Brothers was so terrified of Death in Venice being charged with obscenity in the U.S. they wanted to drop the movie altogether. They relented after Queen Elizabeth and Princess Anne attended the London premiere; it won an Oscar. Yet offscreen in his own life, Bogarde lacked the same bravery. After the anguish of watching his partner suffer a prolonged battle with Parkinson's and liver cancer, he became a vocal proponent of euthanasia. That was 1988, coincidentally the same year that John Gielgud came out quietly and Ian McKellan came out blazingly. Bogarde never did. He retired in 1990 and lived till 1999, by which time he had written something like eight volumes of autobiography, none of which tells the full truth of his life. In fact, he destroyed much of his personal archives.

Wachowskis Lose Their Hard 'R' Gay Soldier Love Story

Deadline Hollywood reports the Wachowski duo who directed The Matrix, Speed Racer, and the lesbian heist flick Bound aren't going to make their movie about a gay relationship between a male U.S. soldier and an Iraqi man after all. In something of an understatement:

"The Wachowskis just finished [David Mitchell's] Cloud Atlas. They had circulated to financiers a script last spring for a hard-R drama they wanted to direct about a gay relationship between a U.S. soldier and an Iraqi, but had trouble setting it up."

Instead, Lana and Andy return to sci-fi with Jupiter Ascending, maybe starring Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum [right]. He may suggest a classic hot dunce but, like Brad Pitt, he can be funny. Yes, I saw the okay 21 Jump Street, and yes he's enjoyable. 

Celebrating Peter Cameron & Anticipating Mario Vargas Llosa

     

The literary gods confused their players at last’s Tribeca dinner night honoring Coral Glynn [Kindle] and I was permitted a place at the head table with Peter Cameron and his FSG editor/publisher Jonathan Galassi. Praise for Peter poured in from every inch of the elegant, candlelit room while I besieged Jonathan asking about his own new book of poems charting his love for a younger man, Left-handed [Kindle], and about Mario Vargas Llosa’s forthcoming The Dream of the Celt. Jonathan confirmed that in the novel Irish nationalist Roger Casement is actively gay though, like others, Vargas Llosa thinks some of his lustier diary entries were fantasies. Preorder now or mark June 5 on your calendar because this promises to be the true queer novel of the summer (while John Irving will inevitably grab more attention for his bi book In One Person [Kindle] out May 8). Also with us were, among others, cover artist Duncan Hannah, performing artist John Kelly who is enthralled with Sarah Schulman’s new The Gentrification of the Mind [Kindle], and Peter’s (very beautiful) Italian translator Giuseppina Oneto who also translated Wolf Hall, Andrew Sean Greer, Kiran Desai, and Gore Vidal, and announced that Peter’s previous novel is again riding high on the Italian bestseller lists thanks to a movie tie-in. Have you done your part so the same can be said of Coral Glynn in America?

Born March 27: Denton Welch

Even if you weren't part of the Shanghai scene in the 1920s, you'll feel like you're remembering and reliving it as you sink into the splendor of Denton Welch's autobiographical novel / fictionalized memoir Maiden Voyage. Born in China to English parents, the young aesthete Welch collected art objects as a child and intended to be a painter before, at twenty, a car struck him while he was cycling in Surrey and rendered him unfit for anything but the writing life. His spine and the complications left him in pain until his death at thirty-three. (He did paint this self-portrait, which hangs in the National Gallery London.) His short novel In Youth Is Pleasure is essential reading, as is his vaguely unfinished A Voice Through a Cloud. Spoiler alert: Nothing happens. Artistic, sensitive Orvil Pym with athletic, bullying older brothers spends his fifteenth summer, um, having feelings? Noticing things? Against all logic he makes it absolutely compelling. As proof of Welch's alchemist talents to transform empty days into gold, here's William S Burroughs, who often cited Welch as his "greatest literary influence," explaining, "Whenever a student tells me he has nothing to write about I refer him to Denton Welch. He makes the reader aware of the magic that is right under his eyes..." That magic is evident everywhere in Welch's collected stories; Bob Smith said "At Thirteen" was his all-time favorite short fiction by a gay author. Long ago when Peter Cameron inscribed my copy of Andorra he wrote, "Read Denton Welch." One of the ten thousand enduring charms of Peter's marvelous novel Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You [Kindle] is his teen protagonist's love of Welch's work.

Julie Otsuka Wins PEN/Faulkner Award

A National Book Award finalist, Julie Otsuka's second novel The Buddha in the Attic [Kindle] has won this year's PEN/Faulkner Award. The brief, poetic novel about Japanese war brides is told in the first person plural. The finalists were:

Russell Banks, Lost Memory of Skin [Kindle]

Don DeLillo, The Angel Esmeralda: Stories [Kindle]

Anita Desai, The Artist of Disappearance [Kindle]

Steven Millhauser, We Others: New and Selected Stories [Kindle]

Julie Otsuka, The Buddha in the Attic [Kindle]

 

In other PEN news, the lineup for this year's World Voices festival features more gay writers than in previous years. At minimum: Nikki Finney, Tony Kushner, Michael Cunningham, Edmund White, Justin Torres, and David Levithan. The non-gay participants are pretty impressive, too: Laurie Anderson, Atwood, Auster, Amis, Eisenberg, Egan, Danielle Evans whom you really need to read and not only because her collection is called Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, Hemon, Herta Muller, Claire Messud, Katha Pollitt, Francine Prose, George Packer, Victoria Redel, Rushdie, Sante, Marjane Satrapi, Shteyngart, Simic, and Anne Waldman, among dozens of other authors. Considerately, this fest runs April 30 - May 6, which means the day after the Tribeca Film Festival ends (April 18 - 29) you can turn your full attention to what really matters.

New York Magazine's ACT-UP Portfolio

To mark the 25th anniversary of ACT UP's founding, this week's New York magazine showcases a few of the 225 black and white portraits photographer Bill Bytsura shot of members over a six year period, and Christopher Anderson captures some of the same sitters today.

This image shows Luis Lopez-Detres and Eric Sawyer, who now reminds readers, “This treatment is not a cure. And for 97 percent of people living with AIDS in the world, they have no access to the drugs at all. For them nothing has changed.”

Bruno Wollheim's Documentary "David Hockney: A Bigger Picture"

Driving around Los Angeles, David Hockney tells documentary filmmaker Bruno Wollheim that all gay men like California because people there are generally fit and wear fewer or tighter clothes. (And you, innocent lamb, thought he moved there for the light.) The director adds that those famous nude pool pictures gave the false impression that David lived some brilliantly debauched bacchanal, but in fact it was only the boys who partied all night; David missed out and was up early painting, while they napped in the early sun. Either way, you won't see any poolside performances because Hockney relocates back to his birthplace. There, he begins painting en plein air landscapes, giving the director a three-year shoot in shifty Yorkshire weather and a very different film than he envisioned. The canvases grow monumental but the movie stays a crisp 60 minutes. It makes clear that Hockney's handsome French assistant is also his boyfriend of more than fifteen years, but Jean-Pierre isn't interviewed. Of course the great joy is Hockney himself, who manages to be just as watchable when he's working silently as when he's holding forth about photography being dead and, later, back again. Caught in contradicting himself he simply tells the camera, "Never believe what an artist says." As he's made evident for fifty years, the truth is in seeing.

Friday night's one-time screening at Columbia's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America was hosted by Rick Whitaker, author of The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara: Reading Gay American Writers and Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling.

Hockney fans unable to get to London before April 9 for the Royal Academy's retrospective can console themselves with the book David Hockney: A Bigger Picture. Three weeks from now is the American release of Christopher Simon Sykes' David Hockney: The Biography, one of my most anticipated books of the year.

Weekend in Virginia

Lots of gorgeous rain showers, perfect for reading recent Nobel winner J-M.G. Le Clezio's adventure novel The Prospector and Nancy Clark's family comedy The Hills at Home [Kindle]. 

Has any literary outpost noted that two weeks running the NYT Book Review cover has been a gay nonfiction book with another major queer novel reviewed inside? Last week: Flagrant Conduct and Coral Glynn. This week, Jeanette Winterson's memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and Carol Anshaw's novel Carry the One. 

The Hunger Games

The first fifteen minutes of the new record-breaking smash The Hunger Games set in an Appalachian coal mining district are terrific, like stepping into one of Dorothea Lange’s Depression photos, where people in poverty are seen with dignity and integrity, yet the futuristic movie also mixes in overtones of Blade Runner and 1984, and Shirley Jackson’s classic story "The Lottery." When our heroine Katniss (the excellent Jennifer Lawrence from Winter’s Bone) volunteers to replace her younger sister in the nation’s annual televised teen survivalist deathmatch, the action moves to the city, and it leaves behind two of its greatest assets, the more important of which is nuance.

Suddenly hamfisted, the movie pounds home the point that the capital and the media are run by wicked queens wearing outrageous colors and braying like buffoons; in short, fabulous is evil. The audience knows it’s wrong because the good, drab people back home are starving and here the gluttons wear glitter. These scenes mock the shallowness of “style,” the ridiculousness of “design,” the stupidity of “sophistication.”

One exception to this is, of all people, the stylist, Cinna. I’m told in the books he is clearly gay. In the movie he is clearly Lenny Kravitz. His natural warmth is a very welcome respite from the shrill immortality of the aging glamour guys Stanley Tucci and Toby Jones. Happily, the bulk of the movie is spent efficiently if predictably in the woods watching the countdown to the inevitable winner. Not to flaunt my own butch Alaskan backcountry cred, but clearly the Hollywood suits didn’t bother to hire a naturalist. We’re warned that as many teens die of “exposure” as from being killed by their competitors. Given the movie’s ideal conditions in a temperate climate, this threat is about as realistic as opera singers shattering glasses with high notes or loud noises triggering avalanches.

If you like escapist entertainment, go see The Hunger Games. It’s important to upend the lie that boys won’t go see movies about girls. And it’s nice that out lesbian producer Nina Jacobson, fired by Disney, is enjoying a gigantic hit. It would be even nicer if she and Suzanne Collins (credited as one of three screenwriters) kept/ included some overtly queer-positive content. But lesbians have kickass Katniss, and gay men have the other great asset left behind in her hometown, Liam Hemsworth, Thor’s hotter brother, as well as a buff blond named Cato.

For readers who somehow missed the massive popularity of the trilogy: Last week Suzanne Collins became Kindle’s all-time best-selling author.

Gay Lives by Robert Aldrich

Robert Aldrich, a professor of European history at the University of Sydney, has compiled eighty biographical sketches of LGBT people from ancient to modern times in his new book, Gay Lives, released stateside this week by Thames & Hudson. He told a local paper:

“It’s hard to talk about gay and lesbian history without covering the Christopher Isherwoods and the Harvey Milks and all of that, but once you move past that, it’s interesting to learn how there were people involved in same-sex activities in all walks of life – the book has a lesbian nun, a criminal, painters, explorers… I wanted to take a lot of less well-known figures from across continents and around the world to show diversity, because in many ways diversity is the theme of the book.”

The handsome, heavy book includes 56 color illustrations and 72 in black and white. 

Aldrich's previous book is Gay Life & Culture: A World History.

Born March 23: J.C. Leyendecker

In the early 20th century when Arrow had 94% of market share, much of the shirtmaker's success could be laid with illustrator J.C. Leyendecker -- he used his chiseled boyfriend as the model for the archetypal Arrow Collar Man. Born in Germany in 1874, Leyendecker moved with his family to Chicago when he was eight. He and his brother enrolled at the city's Art Institute before studying art nouveau at the Académie Julian in Paris. They returned to Chicago early in 1899 and by May Leyendecker received his first commission for a cover of the era's most famous magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Throughout his career he would draw 321 more covers for them, creating the genre of "adorable" domestic chaos, stirring patriotism, family holidays, lovers' foibles, and youthful high spirits (with scrawny nudity) that today we associate with his Eve Harrington protege and successor Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker was slight and disliked confrontation; when his friends warned him Rockwell was stealing his style, he didn't protest. (Being a gay man and an immigrant in the early 20th century may also have amplified his instincts to avoid trouble.) One area in which he maintained preeminence was the blatant homoerotic. Leyendecker's men eternally give one another penetrating looks inside, outdoors, and on deck, and they're always thrusting elongated objects at happy angles from their bodies. He never met a muscle that didn't need to beef up, ripple, or glisten under his expert touch. As his biographers   explain, “Neighboring artists shared models with the brothers, which meant a seemingly endless train of attractive Greenwich Village lads parading through their chilly studio in the buff.” One was named Charles Beach. He was 17 and Leyendecker was 28. By all accounts Beach was both hot and not, given to self aggrandizing claims that he did Leyendecker's work (despite not being able to draw), along with the more typical fits of jealousy, insecurity, and tyranny. Margo Channing Norman Rockwell complained he never heard Beach say anything intelligent and called him "stupid." Nevertheless, Leyendecker and Beach moved into a New Rochelle mansion together and threw luxe parties attended by the jazz age set including Scott and Zelda. Inevitably, times changed, the commissions dwindled, and the money ran out. They had to dismiss their staff yet they stayed together a total of 49 years, until Leyendecker's death in 1951 when he instructed his private papers be destroyed. For more, read J.C. Leyendecker.

Leyendecker's artist brother F.X. Leyendecker also had an eye for masculine muscle, as with this barechested blacksmith, and for strategically placed missiles between shirtless swabbies (compare below). He became addicted to drugs and killed himself at 47.

    

    

Queer Spoiler: Jeff, Who Lives at Home

Spoiler alert. The exceptionally (excessively?) modest movie about a day in the life of a stoner slacker, Jeff, Who Lives at Home follows one of its story strands to an interracial, senior citizen, same-sex kiss. Coworkers in a drab office, Susan Sarandon, 65, and Rae Dawn Chong, 51, culminate an anonymous online flirtation by kissing as the fire alarm sprinklers soak them, because SS's character has always dreamed of making out under a waterfall. Both ladies say they're "not gay," yet after wet kissing they agree to run off to New Orleans together. Like the rest of the movie, their story arc is a little undercooked, a little overplayed, and a little full of holes, but also like the whole endeavor, it's well-intentioned and fairly sweet.

Volver

I'm back in my beloved Cambridge for twenty-four hours. Last night my partner and I got to dine with internationalist extraordinaire Sandy Leonard, just back from Cuba.