Band of Thebes

Bettye LaVette Discusses 30 Years of Sex with Women

If only all R&B singers / celebrities / married people / senior citizens were as open and offhand about their same-sex relationships as Bettye LaVette is. The Grammy nominee is marking 50 years in the music business with the release this week of her new album Thankful N' Thoughtful and her first book, A Woman Like Me [Kindle], in which she discusses her lesbian affairs. Typical of her breezy, brassy style is the chapter, "Groupies Who Sang." On its first page she writes, "I was in my dressing room, angry that James Brown didn't want me to close my set with Let Me Down Easy because I was getting too much applause." On the second page Tammi [Terrell] confronts her with a handgun. On the third page, Bettye's "producer-pimp" suggests she have sex with Cindy Wharton, "a stunning woman." On the fourth page, fueled by the twin encouragements of money and cocaine, they do it while he watches:

"...But I did it, and I liked it. I liked it well enough that Cindy was in my life for the next thirty years. We'd have our boyfriends and husbands. We'd live our separate lives, but if we were in the same city on the same night, we'd get together.

     "My dalliances with women just sort of happened. I've never had hangups about sex, an area where I've felt fortunately free. In the case of women, once the sex was over, it was over. It never turned to romance. The friendship with Cindy, though, remained strong. She and I had some wild adventures."

She was equally forthcoming last night when I saw her at Union Square and took this picture. 

People have been continually re/discovering LaVette since at least 2003. Another breakthrough was her 2008 performance of Love Reign O'er Me at the Kennedy Center Honors, where Barbra Streisand and Pete Townsend nodded along oh so whitely. That appearance led to A Change Is Gonna Come, her duet with Jon Bon Jovi at Obama's inauguration. The NYT says, "Ms. LaVette now rivals Aretha Franklin as her generation’s most vital soul singer. She uses every scrape, shout and break in her raspy voice, with a predator’s sense of timing, to seize the drama of a song."

Mate Mag Names the 500 Most Powerful Gay Men of All Time

1. Leonardo

2. Socrates

3. Alexander

4. Stephen

5. Oscar

Congratulations to Mr. Fry, the only living member of this 1%, the top five of Mate Magazine's ranking of the five hundred most influential gay men throughout history. According to GSN, "The list compiled by Mate Magazine was chosen by six qualified opinion leaders from around the globe including Eric Butter, president of the Mr Gay World Organization, Marc Puttman, CEO of Out TV – the leading gay TV station in the Netherlands and Sweden, and Tris Reid-Smith, co-founder and editor of Gay Star News."

Gay Men Having Babies in Fiction, Memoir, Movies, and TV

Today is the official pub date of Michael Lowenthal's fourth novel The Paternity Test about the tangled loyalties between a gay couple of ten years, Pat and Stu, who move from New York to Cape Cod, and their Brazillian surrogate mother, Debora, and her carpenter husband, Danny. Given Lowenthal's grace and insight in Charity Girl [Kindle], Avoidance, and The Same Embrace, the new book has to be deeper and more nuanced than the current wave of movies and tv about gay surrogacy.

Four months ago Touchstone published Hollywood fixture and Don Roos' partner Dan Bucatinsky's memoir Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad [Kindle]. Along with NPH, Gwyneth, Lisa, Jane, Rosie, Dan, Ayelet, and Shonda, someone named Terrence McNally also loved it, saying, “Few people make me laugh as much as Dan Bucatinsky, but I was not prepared this time to be crying between the guffaws. This is a book I will return to again and again for its humor, that's a no-brainer, but for its sly wisdom as well.” 

October 12 is the NYC release of Jonathan Lisecki's low budget comedy about a gay man and straight woman having a child together, Gayby. It's based on his 2010 short shown at more than 100 film festivals. This year the feature has screened at fests in LA, SF, Seattle, Tokyo, Athens, Nova Scotia, Kansas City, Memphis, Louisiana, North Carolina, Boston, and Houston, among others. Last week it won the audience award in Oslo.

Meanwhile, Ryan Murphy's surrogacy sitcom The New Normal has been steadily losing viewers week by week. Click now to watch the complete episodes, which will only be free until mid to late October. Facing the erosion of his series, Ryan yesterday announced that episode 10 will guest star Marlo Thomas and the Halloween episode will reference Honey Boo Boo. 

9/10  Pilot  (2.5/6)

9/11 "Sofa's Choice"  (2.5/7)

9/18 "Baby Clothes"   (2.2/6)

9/25 "Obama Mama"  (2.0/5)

Telegraph Avenue Continues Chabon's Gay Streak

Isn't Michael Chabon a writer perpetually teetering between impressive bright kid and intolerable showoff for the grownups? His spiraling, tender, funny, overlong new novel Telegraph Avenue [Kindle] admirably tackles race relations in Oakland in 2004 as friends Nat Jaffe (Jewish) and Archy Stallings (black) run indie Brokeland Records threatened by the invasion of a superstore. But then -- Mom! Dad! Look! -- he goes and writes a sentence that stretches twelve pages. Stunts like this, and an unnecessary appearance by Senator Obama, take you out of the characters' lives and remind you you're being entertained by A Very Talented Author Who Can Do Anything He Tries! As Andrew O'Hehir says,"Chabon is not a writer to let one metaphor suffice when two (or five) will do the job, but his style is so joyful and his dialogue so contagious that once I got in the swing of Telegraph Avenue I never minded the florid effusion of verbiage." F.E. of V., indeed. There's also an effusion of cray cray plot and coincidence. Their wives, Aviva and Gwen, run a midwife service called Berkeley Birth Partners, and the men's adorable film geek sons, gay Julius and "not gay" Titus have sex together. (Gwen is unaware of Titus' existence; for a while Archy doesn't know Titus is back in the Bay Area.) If you include the victim in The Yiddish Policemen's Union, this marks the fifth of Chabon's five major novels to feature a prominent gay male character, after: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Wonder Boys, and The Mysteries of Pittsburgh.

Four Decades Later, Merle Miller's "On Being Different"

  

Compare the type size and readability of the word homosexual on the 1971 book jacket and today's re-release from Penguin Classics.

Five days after America met rascally bigot Archie Bunker in the debut of All in the Family, the NYT magazine ran Merle Miller's groundbreaking coming out essay, "What It Means To Be a Homosexual," a response to Joseph Epstein's homophobic screed in Harper's. Miller's piece generated a record-setting 2,000 letters and later was described as "the most widely read and discussed essay of the decade." He expanded his work into a short book, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual [Kindle] republished today with a self-absorbed foreword by Dan Savage about his Hawaiian vacation -- three gay couples, three straight 13 year-old boys, zero seductions, total trust; look how far I've come since 1971 when Miller's friends wouldn't bring their teen children to his house anymore -- and a far, far better afterword by Charles Kaiser. Brave and important as it was, the book is not a cheerleading celebration. One writer now says On Being Different "is a searing indictment of social hypocrisy, written with a quiet but burning passion… it is an American classic because of the beauty it achieves through its unflinchingly honest portrayal of the raw pain of rejection." Historian Jonathan Ned Katz notes Miller's "eloquent voice is still poignant, still relevant to the ongoing struggle, our struggle for dignity and equal rights."

Miller published several novels and bestselling biographies until his death at 67 in 1986. On October 10, Kaiser, Savage, and Victor Navasky discuss On Being Different at the 82nd & Broadway B&N.

Howdy, Cowboy #1

Does America's least populous state, Wyoming, have the highest number of good writers per capita? Annie Proulx, Gretel Ehrlich, Alexandra Fuller, Alison Hagy, C.J. Box, William Haywood Henderson (and his gay novel Native), and Craig Johnson. Last night we went to the library expecting Johnson to read; instead, he screened the pilot of the record-breaking new A&E series based on his novels about Absaroka County sheriff Walt Longmire. 

Johnson's first novel The Cold Dish [Kindle] won France's Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur, and his fourth, Another Man's Moccasins [Kindle] won the Spur Award and was named the Mountains & Plains Book of the Year. He recently published the series' ninth volume, As the Crow Flies, which USA Today called, “a top-notch tale of complex emotions and misguided treachery… a superb novel steeped in the culture of the American West.” The Houston Chronicle said, “The pleasure of the series rests in Walt’s narration, with its laid-back, observant, bemused recounting of events…  Solid landscapes, a mélange of fully fleshed characters (familiar and new), drily laconic dialogue, and assorted power struggles keep the latest in this rich and satisfying series on engaging course.”

Howdy, Cowboy #2

Before Stonewall, some of the staunchest gay advocates were purveyors of softcore porn whose homoerotic photos fell asunder of the postal service's rigid moral codes. Read about those early trials and the ultimate happy trails in this massive new coffee table book from the COLT Studios pioneer, Jim French Diaries. The surprising history is further enlivened by French's candor discussing everything from issues of race in adult entertainment to how he judged a potential COLT man. Readers may also enjoy 352 pages of nudity. French pushed butch to such extremes and staged his uber built musclemen in such cliched roles -- cowboy, cop, fireman, leatherman -- some wondered if his true subject wasn't artifice. Either way, you'll have no trouble finding the just the right colt for your lasso or holster.

Howdy, Cowboy #3

See 15 photos from my 18th trip to Cody: mountains, rivers, fire signs, smoke, autumn leaves, antelope, pack mules, and my pard.

Grumpy Old Gays Trash Talk Current Queer Culture in Lovetown

Michal Witkowski rams the gates of nostalgia in his debut novel Lovetown, whose aging gay characters in Poland have the cheek to hanker for the bad old days behind the Iron Curtain. Oh, they were so much younger then, and had no trouble scoring with the inexhaustible supply of Russian soldiers. These gents go by the names "Patricia" and "Lucretia" and they scandalize the gay journalist interviewing them, a newbie who is at once more free and more uptight than they ever were. They complain, "No one has any sense of filth or wrongdoing; it's all about having fun." 

Historical gay novelist Neil Bartlett reviewed it in the Guardian:

"The dark, postmodernist wit of this transformation places the reader in a quandary. Is she or he to join the party, or to watch it from a safe distance?...

"In one cruel and deliciously unreasonable passage a buffed-up muscle-boy (hobbies: monogamy and civil rights) corners the journalist and demands to know why he isn't writing the kind of novel that young gay men such as himself enjoy these days – socially responsible ones about monogamy and civil rights. Turning on this hapless representative of bourgeois "liberation" the full linguistic force of his anti-heroines' scorn, Witkowski makes it clear that contemporary culture abandons at its peril the heritage of survival tactics which his queens cultivated through the dark years. Faced with exclusion and brutality, they kept themselves alive through an unholy marriage of desperation and imagination, constructing an alternative reality that could teach the younger generation a thing or two about empowerment. Or, as a queen called Paula puts it more succinctly in the novel's closing pages: "So take that darling, and put that in one pan of the scales, and in the other put all those gay bars of yours."

Surprisingly for a rad queer novel, Lovetown was longlisted last year with work from Orhan Pamuk, David Grossman, and Per Petterson for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize. So far it's been published in 12 languages. 

Perks & Plague: Support Queer Film This Weekend

After We Were Here and United in Anger, today's aids doc How To Survive a Plague has an average rating of 90 on Metacritic, meaning "universal acclaim." The San Francisco Chronicle says it "lingers as a testament to extraordinary human bravery. It stands as one of the most heartbreaking and suspenseful sagas of the year." It opens in NYC, LA, SF, and Chicago; next week: DC, Atlanta, and Cambridge.

Stephen Chbosky's million-copy-selling first novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower is now a movie that he adapted and directed. Most critics have singled out its gay character, Patrick, played by Ezra Miller. EW gave the movie an A, citing Patrick as "a kind of teenage Oscar Wilde played by the mesmerizing Ezra Miller... The movie is tough-minded: It zeroes in on Patrick's anger at dating a closeted football star." (The quarterback is played by Johnny Simmons, right in OUT's moody photo.) Salon's Andrew O'Hehir writes:

"Here he takes one of the most hackneyed central-casting roles in the lexicon – the wisecracking gay sidekick, who covers his pain with laughter – and fills every moment with awkward significance... Patrick is trying on semi-adult masks to see if they fit. He’s doing so in that confusing post-Harvey Milk, pre-gay marriage era when LGBT rights was emerging as a national issue but options for real-life gay kids in suburbia were pretty limited."

On the lasting importance of pop entertainment, Daniel Mendelsohn's new essay revisits landmark gay TV moments, from Paul Lynde to Dynasty to Brideshead to Will & Grace to the Glee kiss that made him cry.

Wyoming Smog

The blue sky ought to extend down to the horizon. That's smoke from the forest fires.

Halberstam on Creative Mayhem and the Collapse of Heterosexuality

A year after The Queer Art of Failure, theorist Judith/Jack Halberstam is back with Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal [Kindle] again shredding the heteronormative straight-jacket. Halberstam argues the increasing number of women living alone, men avoiding marriage, pop culture bromances, pregnant men, gay marriage, and queers raising kids all signal the flaming end of heterosexuality. And from those tired ashes will rise freer sexualities and more fluid genders. It's a Gaga world.

Says Halberstam, "In this book I am building on the potentiality of failure to say that if marriage, long-term relationships, the couple form and family itself are all failing as social forms, then instead of grieving their collapse, we should revel in the new opportunities for relationality, connection and kinship that are suddenly and startlingly available to us in the world today."

USC News reports "In large part, the book examines how mass media is struggling to keep up, broadcasting conflicting messages about how men and women are supposed to act, love, marry and raise children. It’s all becoming more liquid "because the social forms that held all those categories in place are dissolving." Halberstam added, "We’re basically going to have an opposition in this country not between gay and straight but between traditional, monogamous households and alternative ones. And, frankly, the alternative ones will probably eventually outnumber the traditional ones."

Out lesbian, author, and New Yorker staffer Ariel Levy says the book is a "provocative and pleasurable romp through contemporary gender politics... as fun as it is illuminating."

This Saturday at 4:30pm, Halberstam reads at Bluestockings, 172 Allen St., NYC.

Born September 20: J.M.K.

Yay. Scel amrae forever.

Marco Roth's Memoir of Closeted Dad Dying of Aids and Its Aftermath

The only child of Central Park West intellectuals, Marco Roth grew up with La Fontaine's fables and Norse myths and a family lie. The story went that his scientist father didn't wear latex gloves in the lab and from a stray needle prick he contracted aids. Not so. Typical for such a literary family, Marco found the truth, that his father dated men, by reading a galley of his paternal aunt Anne Roiphe's memoir 1185 Park Avenue. Thirteen years later, Marco says he started his book The Scientists: A Family Romance [Kindle], out this week from FSG, as an act of revenge against her but it grew into something far more complicated. One review explains, "As part of his puzzling-out project, or as a literary conceit, Roth starts reading and rereading the books his father gave him, including Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Goncharov's Oblomov, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Revisiting the classics and a father's secret gay life ought to call to mind Alison Bechdel's brilliant Fun Home. If he's lucky.

Born September 19: Brian Epstein

After the Beatles were honored with an MBE in 1965, George Harrison said the initials stood for Mister Brian Epstein. Later Paul McCartney said, "If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian." The gay, Jewish Liverpudlian had been an acting student at RADA with Peter O"Toole and Albert Finney but quit soon after his arrest for "persistent importuning" at a well-known cottaging site. He was 27 in January 1962 when the unknown John, Paul, George, and Ringo signed a contract for Brian to manage them. With zero previous management experience, he developed their onstage look and demeanor, including their collarless German suits and their signature synchronized bow. More importantly, after every major label in London turned them down, he got them a contract with George Martin at EMI's Parlophone. Epstein also managed several other acts, including Cilla Black ("Anyone Who Had a Heart") and Gerry & the Pacemakers. Fans are divided over whether or not his intense relationship with John was sexual; their famous trip to Barcelona was potrayed in the movie The Hours and Times. In August 1967, while the Beatles were in Wales with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Brian took his usual six Carbitral pills to help him sleep but, mixed with alcohol, the dose killed him. His death, at 32, was ruled accidental. That same summer homosexuality was finally decriminalized in England and Wales. Needless to say, Brian did not discuss his gay affairs in his 1965 autobiography A Cellarful of Noise [Kindle $5.99], which clever John said should be called A Cellarful of Boys. For a more revealing look, try In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story [IKindle].

Met Museum's "Regarding Warhol" Includes Queer Section

  

No major artist has worked a gayer persona than Andy Warhol, but of course the Metropolitan Museum can't bring itself to say so outright in the opening text of their fun, lumpy, ultimately unconvincing new show Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years. Instead, the curators cough out some bland morsel about "human sexuality in all its forms." 

After that introductory choking, more silence, as room after room of commentary on sixty artists' work fails to acknowledge what alert viewers will see on their own: Following Andy's ascent, gay art -- not just gay artists, many of whom are included here -- reached a tipping point after which even straight artists began to reflect a gay sensibility. The curators can't even find the courage to say gay while discussing the aids art of Silence = Death Project and Gran Fury.

Because an (unspoken) arc of the whole show has been about the gay effect, it comes as a surprise to enter a late gallery titled “Queer Studies: Camouflage and Shifting Identities.” Although bland and boilerplate, the text is wonderful to see, but it's also confusing. This is where the queer begins? With Avedon? But not, in earlier galleries, Mapplethorpe? And not Jeff Koons' ceramic Michael Jackson and Bubbles? 

Nevertheless art critic Blake Gopnik says the queer section is the best room in the show: 

"Looking at a Warhol painting, you feel a mix of someone just being himself—the star-struck Warhol; Warhol rubbernecking at tabloid death—and someone wrapping that “natural” persona in complex artifice. The best room in Regarding Warhol gives a hint at the origins of his art’s double state. It sets Warhol in the context of art by and about gays and lets us see that the doubleness that’s in almost any Warhol may be there already in the simple fact of being gay in a homophobic world—where you’re seen as not just being gay but as playing gay too. Warhol couldn’t simply act however he wanted, be as limp-wristed as he chose; he was always also viewed as acting the “swish,” as being that character known as the Limp-Wristed Man. In his paintings, he doesn’t simply express a stargazer’s love of Marilyn, the way an outsider fan artist might. He also expresses an arch awareness of his own fandom, a remove from it, an awareness of the social performance it counts as. And he uses the artifacts of painting—the crudeness of silk screen, the harshness of unblended color, the vacancy of blank fields of paint, the endless repetition of subjects—to evoke the “unnatural” state of his tastes. He doesn’t merely depict Marilyn. Like a drag queen, he makes sure that we notice the way that he’s capturing her."

New York magazine's Jerry Saltz calls Regarding Warhol "a shallow, pandering fecklessness to the pseudo-extravaganza" with "the unusual distinction of being a very bad show with very good work." He's right insofar as the show is filled with masterpieces well worth your visit, and that the curators fail to make much of a point beyond Andy was influential.

The show opens to the public today and runs through December 31. Click here for a list of the sixty artists and a few highlights. Or get the catalog.

Born September 18: Greta Garbo

When Greta Lovisa Gustafsson was fourteen, her beloved father, a janitor, died and she had to quit school to work fulltime in a barbershop. She became a salesclerk in a department store in Stockholm, also modeled for them, made a promotional short film, a feature, and was discovered by a gay director, Mauritz Stiller, who gave her the name Greta Garbo. Louis B. Mayer saw their Gosta Berlings Saga in Berlin and brought them both to Hollywood. By the next year, 1926, she was a major star and when her only sister died of cancer at twenty-three, MGM wouldn't let Garbo go back to Sweden for the funeral.
    She had an affair with her co-star John Gilbert; they moved in together; and he proposed to her three times. In a reverse of the cliched ultimatums, Garbo wanted to quit working if they got married, he wanted her to continue making movies. She finally agreed to a wedding; the day came; and she left him at the altar.
    Delaying the inevitable, knowing it had ruined many careers, she finally made the transition from silents to talkies with Anna Christie in 1930 and again she was a towering success, earning her first Academy Award nomination. Her second Oscar nod came with her second movie, Romance. In 1931 she had four starring roles, including the lead in Mata Hari, and she began her relationship with Mercedes de Acosta. (She also had affairs with Louise Brooks and Marlene Dietrich.) The following year she made Grand Hotel. In 1933 Garbo used her clout to get Laurence Olivier removed from Queen Christina and replaced by her ex-fiancee John Gilbert, now fading. Her stardom skyrocketed throughout the 1930s with Anna Karenina, Camille, and Ninotchka. In 1941 she made Two-Faced Woman, her second movie with Cukor, then took a break from acting. In 1949 Garbo did test shoots for a comeback in Walter Wanger's La Duchesse de Langeais, which couldn't get financed and was never made. She turned down every other role she was offered. She left Hollywood for New York (450 East 52nd St.) but was awarded an honorary Oscar in 1955. She furiously shunned Mercedes de Acosta when she published her 1960 memoir including her lesbian affairs; she survived breast cancer; she survived People magazine publishing photos of her swimming nude in 1976; and she died at eighty-four in 1990. Famously frugal, she left $20 million to her niece.
    Garbo avoided interviews, never attended premieres, did not reply to fan mail, never signed autographs, and elaborately eluded paparazzi. Obviously, the mystery increased people's fascination. The Guinness Book of World Records named her the Most Beautiful Woman Who Ever Lived.

In the Making by G.F. Green

The gay novel of the summer is sixty years old. First published in Britain in the early 50s, it surprised some readers with its frank and beautifully captured relationship between two boys at boarding school. Sensitive Randall Thane worships an older lad named Felton. Built on interior concerns and deeply felt descriptions, In the Making [Kindle] reminded me of Denton Welch's work, which is an enormous compliment but perhaps not much of a leap because 1.) Green dedicated his first book of stories to Welch, and because 2.) the novel came recommended to me by Welch champion Peter Cameron (as well as from another excellent reader, A.C.). The Guardian places Green's style "between Proustian reverie and Jamesian analysis," while the TLS says "The tone is Forsterian, with occasional nods in the direction of Forrest Reid." Note: Welch, Proust, James, Foster, Reid -- four giants, and all five are gay. Get In the Making now. Autumn is the perfect time for this back to school marvel.

And for god's sake if you haven't yet, read Welch. Only yesterday in the NYTBR, Nicholson Baker, answering the question Which writers are egregiously overlooked or underrated? said, "Denton Welch deserves more of a fuss."

"Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You" Opens October 5

Notice how those unwatchable trailers have propelled Cloud Atlas back onto the bestseller list? Let the same thing happen to a more deserving novel, Peter Cameron's awesomatomic joy Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You whose film has a more watchable (but not perfect) trailer above and a more limited release beginning October 5. Unfortunately, this pits it directly against a triple threat of other literary adaptations that day: The Paperboy, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenweenie. 

I saw the trailer on screen last night before The Queen of Versailles and the audience liked it.

Bel Ami Rebels

In the spirit of Von Gloeden, get the brand new book Bel Ami Rebels by Spanish celebrity photographer Joan Crisol. This time those Bel Ami pups play ruff.