Band of Thebes

Born February 28: Stephen Spender

Even though Stephen Spender delayed publication of his fine first novel, The Temple, for fifty-nine years (until 1988, when he was seventy-nine), you shouldn't expect its gay content to be as important as in E.M. Forster's Maurice (delayed fifty-eight years, until his death). The protagonist doesn't like his same-sex encounters in pre-War Germany, and much of the book's focus is political. In real life, after a series of affairs with men, Spender married twice and began to renounce his gay past, although the photo above, in which he is flanked by Auden and Isherwood on Fire Island, was taken six years into his second marriage. Later, he began to rework the past by rewriting selected lines from his eighteen books of poetry. He changed

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution.

to

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution.

In a similar vein, he became increasingly sensitive to how other people portrayed him, even when it might not have been him. In 1994, he sued David Leavitt and Viking for the novel While England Sleeps, which he claimed was based on his life and charged that the gay scenes were "pornographic." They settled out of court, and Leavitt altered certain passages for subsequent editions. Spender died the next year. Among his other legacies were twenty books of nonfiction (biography, criticism, travel, memoir), two plays, and two children. His daughter Lizzie married Dame Edna.

The Missing Myth

I promised to do a release announcement for Gilles Herrada's book The Missing Myth: A New Vision of Same-Sex Love [Kindle] which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls "extraordinary." (More praise here.) The jacket copy says:

"If homosexual behavior is an aberration from the standpoint of reproduction, why is it widespread among humans, primates, and a myriad of other animal species, and why has it been favored by evolution? And if homosexuality is considered a moral problem based on religious beliefs, why were more homosexuals exterminated under the brief reigns of such secular regimes as the Communists and the Nazis than during the entire Christian Inquisition. Why is everything about homosexuality always a paradox?

"In The Missing Myth Gilles Herrada tackles the many questions about the role and meaning of homosexuality in the evolution of our species and the development of civilization: what evolutionary edge same-sex relationships have provided to the human species; what biological mechanisms generate the sexual diversity that we observe; why homosexual behavior ended up being prohibited worldwide; why homophobia has persisted throughout history; why the homosexual community resurfaced after World War II; and others.

"In this heartfelt, beautifully written, and painstakingly researched text, the author sculpts a vision of homosexuality that integrates its biological, sociological, cultural, ethical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions. Stressing the connection between the social status of homosexuality and how same-sex love is depicted in the myths of a particular culture, The Missing Myth advocates the creation of a new mythosnot only informed by all the fields of knowledge, but also inclusive of the beauty, truth, and goodness of same-sex love."

Born February 27: Derren Brown

Derren Brown has made a career of doing tricks on stage for money. Since 2000, he has been on British television annually blowing viewers' minds and effing with their senses through his signature mix of "magic, suggestion, psychology, misdirection, and showmanship." The forty-one year-old professional illusionist, mentalist, and skeptic makes no claims of psychic or paranormal ability; indeed, he scoffs at those who do so. Beyond his seven tv series and eight specials, he has created five stage shows including the last year's Svengali, which the Daily Mail critic called "the eeriest, most captivating, brain-baffling show I’ve ever seen." He has published four books, the best-reviewed of which is Tricks of the Mind. In his spare time, Brown paints oversized, exaggerated portraits of famous people and has gathered more than one hundred of them in this book. Let's leave to romance writers the humid analogy that the most mysterious magic of all is love, but after coming out in 2007, Brown has finally found it for himself. He says, “I spent a lot of time thinking about me and working on what I wanted to be before I came into a relationship. In some ways, it’s bad because you come into relationship quite late without a lot of experience and you have a lot to learn. But that can also be exciting. Certainly, it’s lovely to have somebody love you and it’s lovely to love someone else.”

Gerbrand Bakker's Ten White Geese

A year after its English translation went on sale in the UK, Gerbrand Bakker's second novel Ten White Geese [Kindle] finally was published yesterday in the U.S. Although the new book isn't nearly as gay as his IMPAC Dublin winner The Twin, it does share the intelligence, subtlety, and beauty of that debut. Any summary of the plot is a disservice but: A married Dutch woman abandons her husband and her Emily Dickinson dissertation to disappear at a remote farmhouse in Wales, and a handsome 18 or 19 year-old local boy shows up with his dog. After I got over my disappointment about the novel's lack of homoeroticism, I adored it. Peter Cameron likes it even more:

“I loved Gerbrand Bakker’s beautiful novel The Twin, but nothing could have prepared me for the singular experience of reading Ten White Geese. Mr. Bakker illuminates the beautiful, tragic darkness at the core of every life with a meticulously honest compassion that is both heartbreaking and revivifying. This book stopped me in my tracks, and moved me beyond words.”

Two extras for Bakker fans: his NPR interview and the late revelation that The Twin has been filmed as It's All So Quiet [below], which just screened at the Berlinale. Indiewire gave it an A-.

 

Born February 26: Robert Byron

Upon his debut in 2006, critics rightly hailed Rory Stewart’s book about his walk across Afghanistan, The Places In Between [Kindle], a “flat out masterpiece” but too few explored the full extent of his debt to gay travel writer Robert Byron. The book’s tone, observations, humor, and history lessons follow the template established by Byron’s classic The Road to Oxiana (reissued with a preface by Stewart). Bruce Chatwin considered Byron's book "a sacred text," and Patrick Leigh Fermor's writing also reflects Byron's tremendous influence. At Eton and Oxford he nurtured the love of architecture so evident in his work, but at university he was perhaps more known for his impersonation of Queen Victoria. His “hedonistic” life ultimately got him expelled. Undaunted, he traveled. His first great trip was to Mount Athos in Greece, scene of the pig tickling above. Five years after his Greek book,Byron wrote First Russia, Then Tibet: Travels through a Changing World. In Peking, he lived with Desmond Parsons and developed a terrific crush on him before Desmond was stricken with Hodgkin’s Disease and left for a Swiss clinic where he died at twenty-six in July 1937. Devastated, Byron published his magnum opus that year and never wrote another major work. In 1941 he set sail for Egypt, where he was to work for the Times, and his ship sank in a torpedo attack by a German U-Boat. His body was never found. He was thirty-five.

An excerpt after the jump.

 

Peter Cameron's Coral Glynn Now in Paperback

Praised universally by critics of discernment, like Mark Doty in More: "With its echoes of Iris Murdoch’s moral fables and Daphne du Maurier’s lush romances, Coral Glynn [Kindle] is like an engrossing black-and-white movie for a rainy afternoon—a tale of clouded hearts, hidden motives and dangerous affections," Peter Cameron's marvelous sixth novel is today available in paperback. As ever, reviewers ignored the book's significant gay subplots in an effort to appeal to mainstream readers. The novel was a favorite on last year's Band of Thebes queer lit poll.

For more stellar reviews, click here.

Peter's unmissable fifth novel was Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, preceded by The City of Your Final Destination, Andorra,The Weekend, and Leap Year. 

Born February 25: Severo Sarduy

Why Reinaldo Arenas and not Severo Sarduy? Born six years apart, the gay Cuban exile novelists died of aids in within three years of each other. In death, Arenas became a star, then, with Julian Schnabel's film , a superstar, whereas the twenty years since Sarduy's passing in 1993 have largely erased the memory of his accomplishments. His novel Cobra won France's Prix Médicis étranger in 1972, immediately followed by four literary heavyweights, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortazar, Steven Millhauser, and Doris Lessing, but for some reason his win did not propel him to their level of international acclaim, possibly because his novel is about a kitschy trans cabaret performer at the Lyrical Theater of Dolls.

Born in 1937 in Cuba's third largest city Camagüey, he left at 23 to study in Madrid but within a month diplomatic ties frayed between Spain and Cuba, and Sarduy had to move to Paris. Ultimately, he stayed there for the rest of his life, though he traveled throughout Europe and met his longtime companion François Wahl on vacation in Italy. His two volumes of essays are Written on a Body and Christ on the Rue Jacob, which Booklist called, "a special book of thrilling ideas excitingly expressed."

Next week, wonderful Archipelago (forever blessed for bringing Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin to American readers) is publishing Sarduy's novel Firefly [Kindle]: "For the first time in English, Severo Sarduy's most autobiographical work, centered on two transvestites who undergo oppositional sexual surgeries (one is castrated, the other is given a new member). This convention-defying, scatological, and very funny novel is a paradise of words, 'paradisic by plenitude' (Roland Barthes)."

Sunday Times Short Story Prize Shortlist

Lesbian writer Ali Smith is a finalist for the £30,000 Sunday Times short story prize, the world's richest award for a single work of short fiction. Judge Joanna Trollope called Smith's tale "The Beholder," about a depressed woman who develops inexplicable symptoms, "a very moving one. And it is really, really beautifully written."

• Junot Diaz, "Miss Lora"

• Mark Haddon, "The Gun"

• Sarah Hall, "Evie"

• Cynan Jones, "The Dig"

• Toby Litt, "Call It 'The Bug' Because I Have No Time to Think of a Better Title" 

• Ali Smith, "The Beholder" 

The winner will be announced at the Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival next month.

Born February 24: Winslow Homer, Judith Butler

Born in Boston in 1836, Winslow Homer moved to Paris in 1867 where he lived with his close friend and fellow painter, Albert Kelsey. The depth of their connection is unknown because the intensely private Homer kept no diary, journal, saved no letters, and, unusual for an artist of his time, never completed a self portrait. He did, however, keep a photo of them on the back of which he wrote "Damon and Pythias." According to Richard Mann, the lifelong bachelor artist used a boy as his model for several of his famous paintings of women, as in Reading, above. For the final fifteen years of his life, until 1910, his closest companion at his estate in Prouts Neck, Maine, was Lewis Wright. Whatever their precise relationship, it disturbed some of Homer's friends and neighbors, apparently beyond Wright's being black. Homer painted 700 watercolors, the finest of which are reproduced in this book from Yale and that book from Norton. Or stick with the classic oils in Winslow Homer: An American Vision.

Already an academic to watch out for, Judith Butler became a star at thirty-four with the release of Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity in 1990. The queer studies/ feminist pioneer/ icon has published new books every few years since, still sparking waves of devotion, debate, and derision. In 2008, she received a Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award with prize money of $1.5 million going to her Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley. Two years ago, Utne Reader named her one of 25 Visionaries Changing Your World. Today, she's 57.

Two Gay Views of Swann's Way Centenary

Writing on the NYRB site, Colm Tóibín unpacks the Morgan Library's new exhibit celebrating the 100th anniversary of Swann's Way:

"Proust’s handwriting is bad; it is the handwriting of a novelist rather than a dandy... In a letter to a publisher, as Proust seeks to explain what his novel is about, one word, however, stands alone and is written with a rare exactitude. In a letter to Alfred Vallette, editor of Le Mecure de France, in 1909 Proust described his work-in-progress: it “is a genuine novel and an indecent one in places. One of the principal characters is a homosexual.” The handwriting is that of a man in a hurry. Most of the words can be made out because of the context. But the word “homosexual,” as it is written in his hand here, stands alone; it is very clearly written, each letter perfectly made and totally legible. There is a feeling as you look at it that it was a word Proust did not often write, or that perhaps he enjoyed writing, or that it was a term he now wanted to take his time over, and he needed Vallette to be able to see it clearly.

"Or perhaps it was written to be the most easily deciphered word in the entire exhibition so that maman, watching from the sky, could make it out and rest in peace, worrying her way happily into eternity, with plenty to feast on, as indeed visitors to the Morgan will have as they ponder the makings of Proust’s great work."

Earlier this week, the Guardian ran a headline: How LGBT Is Proust? Newbie Sam Jordison cherry-picks his way through generations of smart critics confronting the gay question -- Andre Gide, Germaine Greer, Edmund White, Rick Whitaker -- before he gradually winds down to a limp finish:

"Perhaps, finally, we might say it doesn't matter. The book is what it is and we should accept it as such. If any novel can speak for itself, it's this one."

The Morgan Library exhibit is up through April 28.

Los Angeles Times Book Award Finalists

     

The only fiction finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk [Kindle] is now a finalist for the Los Angeles Times' Book Prize. The dazzling anti-war story spans one day, Thanksgiving, when Billy and his fellow Army heroes are made to parttake in a Dallas Cowboys halftime show with Beyonce. They must also navigate the treachery of a Hollywood film deal, and survive the bloviating gratitude of the rich people they meet in VIP suites, before being shipped back to continue fighting in Iraq. There's plenty of humor, scorching satire, and a minor but significant homo-subtext with Billy still rattled by a mid-battle deep kiss from his hot Sargeant and drunk, over-privileged young married football fans teasing them about Don't Ask, Don't Tell.

FICTION

• Jami Attenberg, The Middlesteins
• Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue
• Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk [Kindle]
• Lauren Groff, Arcadia
• Lydia Millet, Magnificence

FIRST FICTION

• David Abrams, Fobbit
• Kevin P. Keating, The Natural Order of Things
• Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine
• Maggie Shipstead, Seating Arrangements
• Robin Sloan, Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore

GRAPHIC WORK

• Alison Bechdel, Are You My Mother?
• Leela Corman, Unterzakhn
• Sammy Harkham, Everything Together: Collected Stories
• Spain Rodriguez, Cruisin' With the Hound: The Life and Times of Fred Toote
• Chris Ware, Building Stories

CURRENT INTEREST

• Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity
• Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
• Karen Elliott House, On Saudi Arabia: Its People, Past, Religion, Fault Lines – and Future
• Jim Sterba, Nature Wars: The Incredible Story of How Wildlife Comebacks Turned Backyards into Battlegrounds
• Jake Tapper, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

BIOGRAPHY

• H.W. Brands, The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace
• Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson
• Alice Kessler-Harris, A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman
• David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy
• R.J. Smith, The One: The Life and Music of James Brown

HISTORY

• John Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul
• George Black, Empire of Shadows: The Epic Story of Yellowstone
• Fergus M. Bordewich, America's Great Debate: Henry Clay, Stephen A. Douglas, and the Compromise That Preserved the Union
• Amy S. Greenberg, A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and the 1846 U.S. Invasion of Mexico
• Geoffrey Kabaservice, Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party

SCIENCE

• Susan Cain, Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking
• George Dyson, Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
• Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human
• Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't
• Florence Williams, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History

After the jump, finalists for Mystery, YA, and Poetry

Winterson on Woolf's Queerest, Most Joyful Work

Writing this week in the New Statesman, Jeanette Winterson explores Virginia Woolf's gayest novel:

Orlando written as a romp, a love letter, a gay book in every sense of the word, turned out to be the engine of an exploding freedom in her style. Writing Orlando did Woolf good. Begun as a gift to Sackville-West it became a gift to herself. It is the most joyful of her books. Woolf’s mind was always first-rate, but when she came to write her next book, A Room of One's Own(1929), she carried across the full-heartedness of Orlando. A Room of One's Own is a masterpiece because it is more than a polemic; when she writes about women, about men, about the interplay of the mind, about creativity – above all, about writing – all her thoughts are steeped in feeling. The tract is much more than an argument; it is a passion for life as it could be lived.

"Sackville-West, who was not a great writer or a deep thinker, and certainly not a faithful lover, released something in Woolf – something that had been pressing at the bars since Mrs Dalloway (1925). The quality of mind that Woolf (following Coleridge) called “androgyny” is really an adventure of the spirit (think Emily Dickinson). Sackville-West, for all her evening suits and ancestors, did not possess that quality of mind or that adventure of spirit, but she did have a full sexuality and a body to match. It is as though Sackville- West became Woolf’s blood supply for a while. Woolf was never a physical person; with Vita she found herself to be a woman – rather in the way that Orlando does. Sackville- West, all body, allowed Woolf to live in her own body.

"It is an entertaining thought to remember that Orlando, all sex-change, cross-dressing and transgressive desire, appeared in the same year as Radclyffe Hall’s sapphic romance The Well of Loneliness. The two novels are different solar systems. The Well is gloomy, beaten, defensive, where women who love women have only suffering and misunderstanding in their lonely lives. The theme is as depressing as the writing, which is terrible. Orlando is a joyful and passionate declaration of love as life, regardless of gender. The Well was banned and declared obscene. Orlando became a bestseller."

Read the full essay here. For more, get The Letters of Vita Sackville-West and Virginia Woolf or Desiring Women: The Partnership of Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

Clive Davis' Memoir: Boyfriends, Bisexuality, Big Stars

In an announcement even longer delayed and less surprising than Jodie Foster's, hitmaker Clive Davis has finally, officially come out in his new memoir The Soundtrack of My Life [Kindle], six weeks shy of his 81st birthday. The producing powerhouse who founded Arista Records and J Records, Davis signed or managed superstars Janis Joplin, Laura Nyro, Santana, Bruce Springsteen, Chicago, Billy Joel, Pink Floyd, Earth Wind & Fire, Aerosmith, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Patti Smith, Air Supply, Barry Manilow, Alicia Keys, TLC, Usher, Pink, Outkast, Eurythmics, Annie Lennox, Alan Jackson, and of course Whitney Houston, among dozens of others. He is currently Chief Creative Officer of Sony Music Group, with flagship labels Columbia, RCA, and Epic. Online databases peg his net worth at $800 million. 

The twice-married father of four says he's been dating men for decades. He's been with his current partner for eight years and before that had a fourteen-year relationship with a (male) doctor.

One of several upcoming projects is relaunching My Fair Lady on Broadway. He wants Anne Hathaway and Colin Firth.

The LA Times' critic says the book is "filled with fantastic scenes and revelations" but short on the business of the music industry.

Gretel Ehrlich on Facing the Wave

If you were a novelist you could retire after creating a character like Gretel Ehrlich. She has twice been struck by lightning (see A Match to the Heart). She has spent months dogsleding across Greenland (see This Cold Heaven). Born in Montecito, growing up staring at the Channel Islands from her bed, she transplanted herself forty years ago to an isolated stretch of the country's least populous state, Wyoming, where, between bouts of award-winning writing and freelance sheepherding, she deepened her love of all things Japanese. The themes of her brave and beautiful new book, Facing the Wave [Kindle], about the resilience of the coastal people in the aftermath of the tsunami, amplify ideas dating back at least to her 1989 essay "The Bridge to Heaven" (in Islands, the Universe, Home) recounting her December pilgrimage to the sacred mountain Osorezan. After an arduous, many-day journey, the truck's final passage was blocked by a locked gate and she decided to walk the rest of way in a blizzard -- twenty-six miles roundtrip. 

Okay, you say, so she's a brilliant writer, and a hearty traveler, but what makes her worthy of a great character in literature? Her original vision. Sunday night at Washington's Politics & Prose, during her first reading from the new book, she discussed witnessing, at a tiny inland river temple, survivors bringing bodies of the dead in wheelbarrows, and her reaction was, This is so cool. Not for her any wallowing in sorrow or sticky pieties of optimism. She writes, "neurotic suffering is only the flapping of ego." She believes in action, in "movement: life’s extraordinary experiences entwined with the ordinary, and from that littered ground, the courage to leap."

Her own action is to start a partnership between American architects and Japanese builders to get some fast, responsible housing for the more than 300,000 people still displaced. So far, no website where you can donate but as soon as it's up, you'll find a link on this site.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune says, "In sum, Facing the Wave is a masterpiece of narrative reportage that balances Ehrlich’s own reaction with the voices of the victims."

If somehow you are unfamiliar with her previous fourteen books of essays, travel, poetry, fiction, and biography, start with the new book or her powerful collection The Solace of Open Spaces or This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland.

She's on tour this week: Aspen, Santa Barbara, SF, Corte Madera, Santa Cruz, Seattle, and Portland. On March 11 she will appear on the PBS NewsHour, followed by readings the next two nights in Albany and Manchester, VT. 

Edmund White x 2

Today is the paperback release of Edmund White's gay-straight novel Jack Holmes and His Friend [Kindle]. Last year The New Yorker said, "In tender prose, White does justice to the erotic potential of the story, with abundant and charged descriptions of sex. Switching between Jack’s point of view and Will’s, White shows each man as he perceives himself and as he is perceived by his friend. The result is not just ironic, it is an elegant study of the paradoxes and half-truths that emerge in long-standing friendships."

You can also order Nicholas Radel's Understanding Edmund White, which the University of South Carolina Press claims is "the first book-length critical study of White's work."

They go on to say Nadel

"...examines America's best-known gay novelist within the changing social contexts of the past half-century, when gay and lesbian people moved from being seen as psychologically deviant to being increasingly accepted as productive members of society. Radel explores the ways White documents this cultural transition, in both his fiction and his nonfiction, and contributes to it by making gay writing a source for new knowledge of sexuality.

"Taking into account recent scholarship on White, Radel provides insightful analysis of the author's autobiographical novels and short stories, from A Boy's Own Story through The Married Man and Chaos. Understanding Edmund White makes White's early experimental novels, Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes for the King of Naples, and Caracole, as well as his later historical fiction, Fanny and Hotel de Dream, accessible by showing how their emphasis on sexuality and social change connects them to the autobiographical fictions. Radel also shows how White's most recent novel, Jack Holmes and His Friend, deftly combines historical and autobiographical narratives to

North Sea Texas

After winning festival prizes in Canada and Europe, North Sea Texas finally is available on DVD today in the US. Pim, a sensitive blond 14 year-old, has the good taste to fall in love with Gino, his dark haired 17 year-old motorcycle-riding neighbor. And, yes, they have sex. But when Gino falls for a girl, he follows her to another town. And sad Pim starts dreaming about Zoltan, the carnival worker. Then Gino comes back...  

Born February 19: Pim Fortuyn

The conservative-populist Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was openly gay to a degree that's unimaginable here: On national television he explained that he enjoyed the taste of semen, comparing it to a strong liqueur, and he used his North African and Arab tricks as "proof" he wasn't racist. Dutch voters, for and against him, were more interested in his ideas. He wanted to slash health services and education, was drastically anti-immigration, spoke against the "Islamisation of our culture," and worried about shari'a law superseding the Dutch legal code. Yet he was also for euthanasia, for legalized soft drugs, for same-sex marriage, and for reducing the military by combining the army and air force. Although Fortuyn was riding a crest of widespread popularity in 2002 with fully fifty percent of voters aged 18-30 supporting him (huge in a multi-party system), the Netherlands did not get to have their first ever openly gay Prime Minister, because they had their first assassination in 330 years, since 1672. A white Dutch man shot Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting "the weaker parts of society to gain political power." The motive was unrelated to Fortuyn's being gay. The killer, thirty-two, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Fortuyn was fifty-four. Contrarian even in death, Fortuyn was buried twice, first in the Netherlands, then dug up and re-interred in Pordenone, Italy, where he owned a second home.

Lesbian "Ladder" in Smithsonian's American Stories

In 1956, thirteen years before Stonewall, the lesbian group Daughters of Bilitis began publishing a monthly journal called The Ladder and one issue from 1968 now appears in the Smithsonian's new exhibit American Stories. Over 100 artifacts on display cover just shy of 400 years of history, from the Pilgrims to Obama, so the queer presence is significant. Seeing the inclusion this weekend made me doubly proud because it might never have happened without my partner's spearheading the effort to get Frank Kameny's papers in the Smithsonian's collection in 2006 and his subsequent public criticism in 2010 when they were far too slow in putting any of the artifacts on view. 

Unfortunately, in conveying four centuries of American history too much of the exhibit is entertainment: Kermit the Frog, a witch cloak from Wicked, Archie Bunker's chair, Dorothy's ruby slippers, which are the welcoming object in the display area and the only artifact on the webpage.

Happily, another exhibit celebrating the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation and the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington features a big wall of Bayard Rustin which does mention his homosexuality and later has LGBT rights marches as part of the legacy of the 1963 march. The exhibit is created by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History, still on schedule to open near the Washington Monument in 2015.

Born February 18: Duane Michals, Audre Lorde

Born to Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, Audrey Lorde recognized the power of names and naming early in life, changing hers as a child to Audre to highlight the symmetry of both names ending in e. At 49 her landmark Zami: A New Spelling of My Name confirmed her stature as a great and essential writer and the nation's foremost "black lesbian feminist poet warrior." Still in her twenties, through a year at the National University of Mexico, graduating from Hunter, and getting her advanced degree from Columbia, she began publishing her poems and seeing them anthologized abroad as well as in Langston Hughes' New Negro Poets USA. (In 1997 Norton published her definitive Collected Poems at 512 pages.) A mother of two children from an eight year marriage to attorney Edwin Rollins, she was already enjoying her lesbianism at twenty, during a year at the National University of Mexico, and later had a seventeen year relationship with psychology professor Frances Clayton, as well as shorter relationships with the artist Mildred Thomson and finally with Gloria Joseph. That Clayton is white might be noteworthy because it was during those years, co-mothering the two children, that Lorde attacked the underlying racism of the feminist movement, linking the experience to slavery in essays like "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." Lorde had equally strong insights into the lgbt movement. From a 1980 interview reprinted in the book I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde:

"...most gay white men are marginal only in one respect. Much of the gay white movement seeks to be included in the american dream and is angered when they do not receive the standard white male privileges, misnamed as 'american democracy.'

    "Often, white gay men are working not to change the system. This is one of the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is. Black gay men recognize, again by the facts of survival, that being Black, they are not going to be included in the same way...

    "I see no essential battle between many gay men and the white male establishment. To be sure, there are gay men who do not view their oppression as isolated, and who work for a future. But it is a matter of majority politics: many gay white males are being pulled by the same strings as other white men in this society. You do not get people to work against what they have identified as their basic self-interest."

After fighting cancer for fourteen years, Lorde died in 1992 in St. Croix at 58. Jackie Kay is one of many who call Lorde "my hero."

Even if you've somehow missed everything else, you know the self-taught photographer Duane Michals, who turns 81 today, for his cover art on the Police's album Synchronicity. Hallmarks of his black and white work are his use of handwritten text, nude men, dramatic juxtapositions, artificial stagings, and nods to gay history -- the horse image is from his 1970 Salute to Walt Whitman and was sold five years ago at a Christie's auction of Elton John's art. Among his more recent books is The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy. Awesomely, Michals and his partner, an architect he met at the gym in 1960, this year will celebrate 53 years together. Old school to the core, Michals is dismayed by "all these kids spewing out of art school photographing their dinner and then making it a 20-foot photograph," and he is not a supporter of gay marriage. From a 2008 interview:

So, you're politically against gay marriage, or just spiritually against it?

"I'm politically against it. I want civil unions. I want all the political advantages, but marriage is a tired vestige of the heterosexual world. I don't know why gay people would want to get married. Of all things! It's a failed institution. It just doesn't make sense. Wedding cake? Oh please!"

Thirty years of his portraits appear in Album.

Born February 17: Robert Dessaix, Fritz Krupp

Which book finally dislodged The Horse Whisperer from the #1 spot on Australia's bestseller lists? Basically its opposite: Robert Dessaix's Night Letters was a surprise sensation, an intellectual novel compromised of twenty letters written in a hotel in Venice in the mid-1990s by an Australian man newly diagnosed with HIV. Echoing literary travelers from Marco Polo and Dante to Casanova and Sterne, contemplating life, death, love, and the passage of time, the narrator R. discourses on cathedrals and museums, seduction and sex, hell and heaven, Venice and Venetians. Despite the character's dire future, critics hailed his "wry, chatty, surprisingly cheerful voice" (NYTBR) finding him "seductive, charming, and always thought-provoking" (Kirkus). The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "luminous gem" and the Cleveland Plain Dealer "a story exquisitely told." Dessaix's second novel, Corfu, also describes gay ex-pats in Europe and again rings with literary echoes: Homer, Sappho, Chekhov, Cavafy. His nonfiction includes a memoir called A Mother's Disgrace about his own adoption and subsequent wanderlust; Twilight of Love, a book about retracing Turgenev's steps as he followed a married opera star and her husband for years; and an anthology, Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing. In April 2011 he published On Humbug. Last August he published As I Was Saying: A Collection of Musings [Kindle]. After a failed marriage to a woman, Dessaix wrote a personal ad in 1982 and met Peter Timms, who is still his partner.As for longevity and dedication, Dessaix created a complex language when he was eleven and continues to speak it to himself even now, as he turns 69 today.

Heir to a 300 year-old dynasty and a newer steel, ammunitions, and weapons empire, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, known as Fritz, preferred marine biology but took over the family firm in 1887 when he was thirty-three. Also against his inclination, he married a woman. He spent as much time as he could in Capri, pursuing his first loves of oceanography and men. For the times when he had to be in Germany, he arranged for his favorite Italian youths to work at a luxury hotel in Berlin, where he often stayed for their service and where other guests complained about the noises coming from his inner sanctum. Accustomed to enormous power -- by the turn of the century he had built Krupp into the largest company in Europe -- he ignored others' objections. This may be why his wife was institutionalized. The media, however, could not be quelled forever. An Italian newspaper was preparing to print accounts of his famous island orgies, with photos. Vorwärts, the Social Democrats' magazine, beat them to it, outing the forty-eight year-old Fritz on November 15, 1902. Seven days later he killed himself. Emperor Wilhelm II blasted his political opponents and defended Fritz against the "slander," and his wife immediately "recovered" to continue raising their two daughters. The eldest inherited the firm which became a Nazi juggernaut. The dynasty endures as does fascination with them; someone filmed their story, including dandified Fritz flaunting his rough trade. Photos after the jump.