Band of Thebes

Underdogs Dominate Warwick Prize Shortlist

    

Literary heavyweights Franzen, Keneally, Barnes, and Ghosh are among the authors cut in the leap from longlist to shortlist for the biennial Warwick Prize for Writing. The award is rare for combining nonfiction, poetry, and fiction, and for its £25,000 ($38,746) jackpot. Wonderful nature writer Robert Macfarlane is my favorite among the six shortlisted:

Jim Al-Khalili, Pathfinders: The Golden Age of Arabic Science [Kindle], nonfiction.

Amy Espeseth, Sufficient Grace, novel.

Cordelia Fine, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference [Kindle], nonfiction.

Etgar Keret, Suddenly, a Knock on the Door [Kindle], stories.

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot [Kindle], nonfiction.

Alice Oswald, Memorial: A Version of Homer's Iliad, poem.

The winner will be announced September 24.

Born August 31: David McConnell

One of my favorite gay novels of recent years is also one of the most mysterious: In David McConnell's The Silver Hearted, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed port town in an unnamed country teams up with a young local sailor to transport chests of treasure as a frenzied mob sparks a revolution. Told in high literary style, a pulpy story becomes mesmerizing, erotic, and haunting. Edmund White said it better than I can: "The Silver Hearted is our Heart of Darkness. It is just as ominous, as violent, as exotic, as darkly colonial. But it is a lot better written than Conrad’s book. Whereas Conrad is always resorting to ‘the unspeakable,’ McConnell tells us everything in glowing detail and in fresh, eloquent language. Sexy, demonic, elusive, The Silver Hearted is a perfect work of art." Patrick McGrath said he can't recommend the novel too highly and "David McConnell is the most intriguing, original and exotic writer I've come across in years. The atmosphere he creates in The Silver Hearted is imbued with dread, mystery, lust, sleaze, greed and beauty. A constant potent undertow of violence is at work in the sustained suspense of his narrative." 

David's first book was the introspective novel The Firebrat, about which Matthew Statdler said, "I love this book. Abjection has never been so gorgeous."

His third book [Kindle], out this year, is a significant departure, nonfiction reportage on the murders of gay men. PW said it is a "journalistic tour de force," Library Journal said it's "a masterpiece of reportage," and Sebastian Junger said it's "a stunning exploration of Manhood in America." David reads from the book and discusses homophobia at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Decatur Book Festival tomorrow afternoon.

Colm Tóibín on Wilde's Dualities in New Edition of De Profundis

According to his sons, Oscar Wilde especially liked Robert Louis Stevenson's work and Colm Tóibín discusses the Jekyll and Hyde dualities in so much of Wilde's life: gay and married, an Irishman in London, rich and chased by creditors, an aristocrat and Irish patriot, "a wit who was also serious, but a limp and timid lyricist who wrote brave and modern plays." In the spring of 1895, he was also the accuser and accused in two infamous trials that took him from the most celebrated man in London to a jailed, unspeakable scoundrel. For the first and most horrible part of his sentence he was prohibited from having pen and paper. Toward the end of his two year confinement, he wrote his famous long, long love letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, now collected in De Profundis and Other Prison Writings [Kindle], introduced by Tóibín in a new edition from Penguin.

If you've made it to adulthood without revisiting Stevenson, stop everything and read Kidnapped [Kindle]. Rupert Smith says, "First and foremost, it’s one of the most exciting adventure novels I can think of, a model of brilliant plotting, compelling narrative and sharp, magnetic characterisation. The story of David Balfour, the young ingenu sold into slavery and cheated of his inheritance by wicked Uncle Ebenezer, is probably the best coming-of-age narrative I can think of – it never labours its points, but it shows David learning from each experience and acquaintance until he’s man enough to claim what’s rightfully his. But there’s another level to Kidnapped, one which only struck me when I re-read it in my 40s – it’s a profoundly homosexual novel. I can see readers rolling their eyes at this point, but bear with me. Whether Stevenson realised it or not, the kidnapping of the young man and his experiences at the hands of older, more powerful men is fraught with erotic energy, and his friendship with the charismatic Alan Breck is highly romantic. Some critics point to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as ‘proof’ of Stevenson’s homosexual leanings, and I can see their point – but for me, Kidnapped is the dead giveaway (and the better novel). In fact, this was the book that inspired me to write the first of my James Lear novels, The Low Road [Kindle], which is a sexed-up version of the same basic story."

Two Boys Kissing

Two weeks from now will mark the tenth anniversary of David Levithan's semi-classic debut, the "dippy, happy" teen novel Boy Meets Boy, and this week he releases his eighteenth book, Two Boys Kissing [Kindle]. Based on a real event, the novel follows two seventeen year-olds, Craig and Harry, as they attempt to break the record for world's longest kiss. If you're not a teen and guess the book has nothing for you, think again: It's narrated by a Greek chorus of "gay uncles" from the generation lost to aids. A starred PW review called it "a landmark achievement," and Entertainment Weekly gave it an A-. 

Some of David's best works are collaborations, most notably with John Green for Will Grayson, Will Grayson about two boys one gay, one straight, who have the same name; and with Rachel Cohn for Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist, which became an okayish Michael Cera movie that was not entirely degayed.

Ever inventive, his most recent novel was Every Day, a NYT bestseller about a boy who each morning wakes up as a different person but always in love with the same girl. So far his only adult book is the gay novella The Lover's Dictionarythat both charmed and suffered from being written as dictionary entries.

Born August 29: Edward Carpenter

Ardent socialist (author of the anthem England Arise, founding member of the Independent Labour Party), feminist (saying, “there is no solution except the freedom of woman,” he considered traditional marriage to be a form of prostitution), gay activist (his ground-breaking books like My Days and Dreams and The Intermediate Sex go far beyond earlier essays by his friend John Addington Symonds), pacifist, nudist, mystic, poet, and the first person to introduce sandals to modern Britain, Edward Carpenter’s greatest legacy may be how he lived his life. Utterly changed after reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1863, he began to dream of a brotherhood of manly love that would erase class lines and give rise to a true democracy. After graduating from Cambridge and leaving a position vacated by Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, Carpenter gave public lectures in Leeds intended for the working class (but attended only by the middle class, who didn’t warm to his ideas) and sought to befriend laborers, unsuccessfully. Finally in 1891, after meeting by chance on a train, he and uneducated George Merrill became lovers. In 1898, when Carpenter was fifty-four and Merrill was thirty-two, they established a house together, absolutely unheard of in an England still widely antigay in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trials. They lived together openly as a couple for thirty years until Merrill’s death, and their cross-class love was the direct inspiration for their friend E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, as well as D.H. Lawrence’s heterosexualized version, Lady Chatterley's Lover. Not all authors were so enamored. In the decade after Carpenter’s death, George Orwell ridiculed “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac” among the Socialists. Yet an American Communist, Harry Hay, credited Carpenter’s writings for galvanizing him to start the first gay rights group, The Mattachine Society, in Los Angeles in 1950. The must-read, Lammy-winning biography Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love by Sheila Rowbotham was Peter Tatchell's and Jeanette Winterson's favorite book of 2008 and Sarah Schulman's favorite lgbt book of 2009.

Born August 28: Nancy Kulp, Karl Ulrichs

Which gay genius saw the potential in a short-haired young lesbian, a former Florida newspaper reporter who had interviewed Clark Gable and the Duke & Duchess of Windsor but now was stuck working a desk job in the studio's publicity department, and asked her to be in his new picture? George Cukor cast skinny Nancy Kulp as, what else, the comic spinster -- at 30! -- and variations on that theme were the mainstay of her career for the next thirty-eight years. Although she wrung every drop of humor from the wet cliche of the sexless, manless old maid, midcentury critics could be cruel in their critiques of Kulp, describing her as TV's most homely girl with the "face of a shriveled balloon, the figure of a string of spaghetti, and the voice of a bullfrog in mating season." Undaunted, she played her thin parts with brio, building from bit roles in Shane, Sabrina, and A Star Is Born, to her biggest success on television. After three seasons on his Bob Cummings Show, writer-producer Paul Henning cast Kulp in his next project, The Beverly Hillbillies. Surely her Miss Jane Hathaway is one of the immortal early queer characters, and while audiences were invited to laugh at her highly unlikely pining for hot Jethro (when he wasn't in drag as his sister Jethrine), Kulp gave her character all the dignity befitting the scholarly, single secretary who was happiest with her women-only birdwatching society. Finally, critics appreciated her and she was rewarded with an Emmy nomination in 1967 and, following the series' end in 1971, roles on The Brian Keith Show, Sanford & Son, and The Love Boat. In her early sixties, she returned to her native Pennsylvania and ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1984. Her former Hillbillies costar Buddy Ebsen did ads attacking her as "too liberal" and her Republican opponent won in the Reagan re-election landslide. Closeted her whole career, Kulp finally came out in a carefully controlled way to interviewer in 1989, reprinted in Boze Hadleigh's book Hollywood Lesbians. She died of cancer in February 1991 at sixty-nine. YouTube's Mister Esoteric has compiled these clips honoring her as a forerunner to Lily Tomlin, Sandra Bernhard, and Ellen.

 

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had an affair with his riding instructor when he was fourteen, was forced to quit his civil servant job for being gay when he was thirty-four, and began publishing pamphlets explaining and defending same-sex love when he was thirty-seven. Five years later, the day after his forty-second birthday, he addressed the German congress, coming out publicly and demanding they repeal their anti-gay laws. It was 1867, one hundred two years before Stonewall, and he was shouted down before he could finish his speech. Though his books were banned in Saxony and Berlin he continued writing on the subject for the rest of his life. In 1870, he published Araxes, which lays out all of the modern arguments for the rights of gay citizens. In 1879, he published the twelfth volume of his ongoing project, The Riddle of "Man-Manly" Love, and moved to Italy, which was more hospitable. Indeed, Ulrichs was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Naples shortly before he died, one month prior to his seventieth birthday. Today, streets are named for him in Bremen, Hanover, and Munich, where this afternoon they will celebrate with their annual street party and poetry reading in Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Platz. In his final years, he wrote 

“Until my dying day I will look back with pride that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the spectre which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt.”

Dallas Buyers Club and Mud

Focus has moved the release date of the true-story, straight-gay, uplifting aids movie Dallas Buyers Club five weeks earlier, from December 6 to November 1. Yesterday they unveiled the trailer.

In twenty years of acting since Dazed & Confused, guess which nude bongo banger has never been nominated for an Oscar or even a lousy Golden Globe? Last year ought to have been Matthew McConaughey's moment for a supporting nod, but I suspect he fell asunder of dreaded vote splitting -- the gay independent Bernie was his better performance while the homoerotic but degayed studio stripper flick Magic Mike grabbed all the attention (and earned him four big wins from the Spirit Awards, National Society of Film Critics, NY Film Critics, and the Village Voice film poll). Will it happen again in 2013? Because he's very good in Mud but all the hype will be for Dallas Buyers Club. [You know how Hollywood equates physical transformations with Real Acting. In Mud, he bravely went with scraggly hair, but for Dallas Buyers he lost all that weight! My god, not since Charlize played ugly (Best Actress), or Nicole wore that fake nose (Best Actress), or Jamie wore sunglasses (Best Actor), or Daniel got a wart (Best Actor)...]

Anyway, although it's not as powerful as the foreign Oscar winner In A Better World, Mud springs from the same roots of nice young teens making a series of increasingly bad decisions. Also, there's the friction of a classic, innocent boy crush on a charismatic, shirtless criminal. Anyone seeking a flicker of subtext might notice that this story arc climaxes late at night when McConaughy crawls through the boy's window and climbs into bed with him. Reese Witherspoon detractors / fans should note she is barely in the movie. It is the third impressive feature from 34 year-old director Jeff Nichols who wrote each of his films. Mud was released on dvd earlier this month or watch it right now.

Terry Castle on Being Gay Married

Here's what you're going to do. You are going to read Terry Castle's LRB essay on the real joy and underlying ambivalance about marriage equality, which is really an examination of how comfortably or uncomfortably the new acceptance rests on all the rejection that came before. With sentences like, "In those days (and yes, even now) one’s mother could always be counted on, likewise, to underscore one’s alienation from the rest of humankind," it's mandatory reading:

"Some of the diffidence I felt no doubt had to do with the fact that Blakey and I had already been living together – delightfully, with nary a closet in sight – for six years. Apart from the political statement – rah, rah, cheers, queers – the ritual, I grumbled, was beside the point. Yet troubling too were a host of larger metaphysical questions. Marriage had always been defined (and naturalised) as a relationship between a man and a woman; could it now, merely by way of a few wishful speech acts and contrived theatrical gestures, be completely reconceived? Was it possible – just like that – to revamp one of the key kinship structures around which human society had been organised for millennia? What would Wittgenstein have said? Was ‘gay marriage’ part of ‘everything that is the case’? Would he have got married? To himself or another person? One could noodle away the hours pondering such things.

"My own seemingly innate, sometimes Arctic, aloofness had to be part of the equation too. Anyone who knows me knows it: my perverse tendency to stand sadly apart from sociability and look rejected, even when surrounded by affable people doing everything possible to show their affection for me. In some skittish, not so deeply buried part of me, it’s always San Diego in 1967 and the treacherous lunch court at Marston Junior High School. I’m 13 again; shy, pudgy and unpopular, eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich in miserable, Cain-like isolation, while the more confident girls – those who shriek and rat their hair and travel in ardent, gossipy packs – point at me and guffaw. What a weirdo. Shall we just say that my childish heart turned then to adamant? That self-protection meant fixing one’s eyes on blankness and acting dead? When I began thinking of myself as a lesbian – not so long afterwards, really – the age-old stereotype of the female homosexual as doomed misfit, lost in a dark and sterile world of shadows, seemed purpose built for me."

If you somehow still don't know Castle -- whom Sontag named "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today" and James Wolcott calls "a Jedi knight of literary exploration" -- for goodness' sake, get the essay collection The Professor: A Sentimental Education [Kindle only $3.79].

Born August 27: Jeanette Winterson

Given that in 2011 she wrote one of the finest queer books of this decade, her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? [Kindle], winner of a Stonewall UK award and a Lambda Literary Award, is it unkind and unfair to ask where is Jeanette Winterson's next great novel? Her best-known fiction is still her first, her landmark debut from 1985 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which covers many of the events revisited in the memoir. She wrote it in two months because she needed money; it won the Whitbread and became a modern classic. Five years later the television version, adapted by Winterson, won the BAFTA for best drama. To my mind, her finest is The Passion [Kindle], which takes place in France and Venice during the Napoleonic Wars, and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1987. Two years later she released her most ambitious novel, Sexing the Cherry, which touches down in several centuries but is most firmly rooted in the Restoration. And in 1992 she published a novel about an affair, Written on the Body, which virtually everyone took to be inspired by her romantic liaison with her literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, married to Julian Barnes until her death in 2008. At that point Winerson was four years into her twelve-year partnership with Peggy Reynolds, to whom she dedicated "with love" her novel about her affair.

But aren't the six adult novels in the twenty-one years since then -- Art & Lies, Gut Symmetries, The PowerBook, Lighthousekeeping, Weight, The Stone Gods -- more about the author's idea than the characters? In the past ten years she has also written two children's picture books (The King of Capri, The Lion, The Unicorn and Me), a middle-grade chapter book (Tanglewreck), two YA historical novels (The Battle of the Sun, The Daylight Gate), and an original hour-long special for CBBC on Christmas 2009 called Ingenious. She's creative, she won't be pinned down, she's prolific, she's a workaholic -- in her spare time she runs the organic cornershop Verde's in the ground floor of her Georgian house in Spitalfields -- but for all her admirable busyness is she somehow wasting her time? Earlier this summer she announced she's reworking A Winter's Tale for the upcoming series The Hogarth Shakespeare.

James Tait Black Memorial Prize Winners

Dating from 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize has honored everyone from Lawrence, Forster, Waugh, Greene, and Compton-Burnett to Spark, Chatwin, Coetzee, Rushdie, Banville, Bainbridge, Byatt, Hollinghurst, Tremain, Franzen, McEwan, and Zadie Smith, so attention must be paid to this year's two winners, in fiction and biography. Say the judges:

"Alan Warner's The Deadman's Pedal is an exceptionally fine novel, richly evocative in detail, beautifully poised in execution, which in the story of one young man's journey to adulthood through the mysteries of childhood, sexuality, work, the realities of class society and the experience of divided family loyalties, offers a compelling poetic vision of a changing Scotland."

"Tanya Harrod's The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew: Modern Pots, Colonialism, and the Counterculture offers an exceptional portrait of a remarkable craftsman and his world. Harrod constructs this biography with the same eye for form and purpose that marked the work of her subject."

The three other fiction finalists were The Panopticon [Kindle] by Jenni Fagan, The Big Music [Kindle] by Kirsty Gunn, and Leaving the Atocha Station [Kindle] by Ben Lerner.

Among the biography finalists was Michael Gorra's Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece [Kindle].

FYI, the first woman to win this award was Radclyffe Hall, for Adam's Breed in 1926.

Alan Warner photo by Jayne Wright in The Scotsman.

Born August 26: Christopher Isherwood

Vastly underappreciated, and remembered largely for the wrong reasons, Christopher Isherwood changed the way fiction is written with his "I am a camera" style of narration. Read his interview in the Paris Review's series The Art of Fiction and make time for one of the best gay books ever, Christopher and His Kind*, which is equally enthralling about literary revelations and sexual mores: Rejecting his uptight, upperclass England, Isherwood spent much of his twenties in Berlin where he dated working class teens. Falling in love with young Heinz at a time when living quarters were especially scarce, he moved into Heinz's family's one bedroom apartment; the parents moved out of their bedroom and slept in the living room so the twenty-five year-old Brit could enjoy a double bed in privacy with their fifteen year-old son. Another person he met was Jean Ross, on whom he based Sally Bowles in his The Berlin Storieswhich of course became Cabaret. After moving to England and on to New York with Auden, and further literary successes, Isherwood settled permanently in Los Angeles, where when he was forty-eight he met teenager Don Bachardy. Immediately, Isherwood wrote The World in the Evening , followed by Down There On A Visit and what many consider his best novel, A Single Man. They remained partners for over thirty years until Isherwood's death in 1986. Their relationship is the subject of the documentary,  Chris & Don. A Love Story. After more than 1,100 pages of Diaries: 1939-1960 and another 800 pages of The Sixties, last November saw 928 pages of Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983.

*And here's the sex-filled BBC2 film

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis Win VMA for Pro-Marriage Equality Song

Accepting MTV's Video Music Award for Best Song with a Social Message for their pro-gay, pro-marriage equality jam Same Love [below], Macklemore said, "I've been writing songs since I was 15 and out of every single song I have every written to me this is the most important record out of all of them. And to watch this song in the last year spread across the world is a testament to what is happening right here now America on the forefront of equality. Gay rights are human rights there is no separation."

Earlier in the evening, he and Ryan Lewis performed the song with lesbian Mary Lambert and Dreamgirl Jennifer Hudson. The twenty-four year-old Lambert has been out since she was seventeen and published her first book of poetry earlier this year, 500 Tips for Fat Girls.

Full list of VMA winners here.

Albanian Virgins: Women Who Spend Their Lives as Men

If you're literate, you've probably read and re-read to the point of memorization, Alice Munro's knock-out tale "The Albanian Virgin," so you'll be interested in photographer Jill Peters' recent project to document these mountain women who live as men. The tradition dates back at least to the 1400s, though with modernization encroaching, today far fewer women live this way. See nine in her portfolio. 

Munro's story is available in her three-decades-spanning Selected Stories, which, so rare in these endeavors, actually does collect her best work, including the first of her two gay stories, The Turkey Season. That piece appeared in The New Yorker in 1980, one year after Ann Beattie's half-gay story The Burning House and seventeen years before Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain.

Also if you're literate, you really should read Albania's greatest writer, Ismail Kadare, who won the first International Booker in 2005. Beware, even with his straightforward prose, he will bewitch you like Orhan Pamuk. Realists should start with his short, riveting Broken April [Kindle] which follows two strands: Gjor, a young man reluctantly caught in an ancient blood feud, and an intellectual couple honeymooning in the Accursed Mountains. More fanciful readers should try Chronicle in Stone [Kindle] or The General of the Dead Army or The Fall of the Stone City or The Palace of Dreams.

Born August 25: Rob Halford

Hiding in plain sight for more than twenty years, the closeted lead singer of Judas Priest modeled his look on the gay leather scene which became a heavy metal mainstay. From 1974 to 1992, Rob Halford fronted the band, wowing fans with his pseudo-operatic style of singing and impressing critics with his four octave vocal range. Offstage, he struggled with alcohol dependency and violent relationships, the worst moment coming after a bad fight: When Halford got a taxi, his boyfriend shot himself and died. After that, Halford improved his life. In 1997, he played gigs with Pansy Division at gay pride parties and the next year he came out on MTV. In 2003, he reunited with Judas Priest. In 2008 the band released their second post-reunion album, Nostradamus, which was their sixteenth studio album, and they played on the Masters of Metal Tour. Since then they've released two live albums.

Halford lives in Phoenix, San Diego, Amsterdam, and his native Walsall, England, hometown also to Boy George. Since coming out, Halford says the support of the metal community has been "tremendous."

Rural Gay America 1900-1960

New this summer is Colin Johnson's Just Queer Folks: Gender and Sexuality in Rural America [Kindle] which, the publisher says, "explores the seldom-discussed history of same-sex intimacy and gender nonconformity in rural America during a period when the now familiar concepts of heterosexuality and homosexuality were only just beginning to take shape... Johnson argues instead for a queer historicist approach. In so doing, he uncovers a startlingly unruly rural past in which small-town eccentrics, "mannish" farm women, and cross-dressing Civilian Conservation Corps enrolees were often just queer folks so far as their neighbours were concerned. Written with wit and verve, Just Queer Folks upsets a whole host of contemporary commonplaces."

PW says he "doggedly decodes" passages of Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men and Stegner's The Big Rock Candy Mountain "that hint at gay sex."

For a contemporary take, get Mary L. Gray's excellent, triple-award-winning Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America [Kindle]. 

Born August 24: M

One of my very favorite people dislikes publicity to the exact degree that I admire her: immensely. A careful, thoughtful editor by temperament and trade, she taught me how to eat, speak, read, write, garden, museum-go, and travel internationally... seven of my all-time greatest pastimes. Though I couldn't hope to match her knowledge, natural skill, and intuitive elegance in those activities, it has been an abiding pleasure to fall short in her shadow. Especially now she deserves your respect and gratitude for years of bravery and persistence in the slow task of helping to educate a straight community on lgbt equality, the best kind of local change that ripples nationally. 

A voracious, versatile, and adventurous reader, she recommends Hilary Spurling's two-volume biography The Unknown Matisse and Matisse the Master and Andrea Barrett's National Book Award-winning collection, Ship Fever [Kindle], especially the story "Rare Birds."

Born August 23: Neil Bartlett, Conner Habib

Neil Bartlett received an OBE at forty-two for his special services to the arts. The author, translator, or director of dozens of plays for television, radio, and most especially theater, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National, the ART, and the Lyric Hammersmith where he was Artistic Director for eleven seasons, he has also published a handful of gay books: The literary novel Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall plumbs the erotic relationship between an older man and his younger boyfriend in an unnamed town. In The House on Brooke Street he contrasts a London department store clerk and an aristocrat's obsession with the latter's 19 year-old blond servant Gabriel in a story that flips between the 1920s and 50s. His most recent novel, Skin Lane, about a 46 year-old furrier and his boss's teen nephew, was a finalist for a Costa award after winning wide acclaim from critics and A-list authors Armistead Maupin, Patrick McGrath, and Will Self who said, it's "a fiendishly taut little psycho-shocker that recalls Simenon at his most hardboiled and Highsmith at her creepiest." Six months ago, the British Library announced the acquisition of Bartlett's personal papers and video archives.

Yesterday, Conner Habib taught a seminar called "Anthroposophy 101: Rudolf Steiner, Freedom, and the Western Esoteric Tradition" in San Francisco. It was probably pretty good because Conner previously earned the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor at UMASS, during his three years lecturing on literature, composition, and creative writing. He also loves to talk and write about organismic and evolutionary biology which he studied with many of the greats in the field like Lynn Margulis and Fritjof Capra. All of this is important to remember because Conner is a porn star. For his efforts in more than 100 sex films and scenes, he has been named Best Newcomer by the GayVN in 2010 and he won Best Supporting Actor at the Grabbys in 2012 for his work with Allen Silver in Dad Goes To College directed by Joe Gage. He often writes about sex, what it's like on set or describing why he likes rest stops or creating an identity in porn or why Americans fear gay sex. His birth name is Andre Khalil and he chose Conner Habib to reflect his Irish and Syrian ancestry. Today he's 36. Read his blog or join his 25,079 followers on twitter.

Flavorwire Lists "50 Essential Works of LGBT Fiction"

Yesterday's list of fifty books Flavorwire considers essential queer fiction is sort of good, sort of awful. Yes, absolutely: Hollinghurst, Baldwin, Winterson, Forster, Mann, Sarah Waters, Isherwood, Renault, Proust. But the list includes far too many recent, first-time authors who are friends of the compiler? talented but have not yet reached the mastery of those omitted: Wilde, Waugh, Cheever, Cather, Capote, Colette, Gide, Firbank, William S Burroughs, Marguerite Yourcenar, Denton Welch, Colm Toibin, Michael Cunningham, Stephen McCauley, Alan Bennett, Philip Hensher, Peter Cameron, J.R. Ackerly, David Leavitt, Dale Peck, Dorothy Allison, Reinaldo Arenas, Paul Russell, Alison Bechdel, Jaime Manrique, E. Lynn Harris, Alan Gurganus, Katherine Forrest, Glenway Westcott, Jonathan Strong, Tove Jansson, and Tennessee Williams, to name a few. In the face of so many omissions, it's impossible to justify giving Larry Kramer two entries, for Faggots and The Normal Heart.

How do you feel about straight authors on a list of gay books? Intellectually, the work speaks for itself, period. Emotionally, it's tough to see so many dedicated writers above pushed aside for at least four non-gay authors who made it onto the list: Andre Aciman, Jeffrey Eugenides, Michael Chabon, and Stephen Chbosky. What do they offer that can't be found in a comparable book from a queer writer? By any yardstick, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You is ten times better than The Perks of Being a Wallflower.

Despite its shortcomings, the list also surprises, happily, with three lesser-known gems: At Swim, Two Boys [Kindle] by Jamie O’Neill, Funny Boy by Shyam Selvadurai, and Narrow Rooms by James Purdy.

I never see Flavorwire and would have missed this were it not for the intrepid Logan Ragsdale, a New York City area librarian.

Born August 22: László Almásy

To the long line of queer lives stolen, degayed, and straightened by writers and filmmakers craving a broader audience, add László Almásy [seated], the Hungarian aristocrat, desert explorer and Nazi smuggler who may have spied for both sides in WWII, and is the protagonist of The English Patient. Almásy was gay and certainly didn't have a soaring romance with anyone's wife; he and a young German soldier named Hans Entholt were lovers and letters unavailable to the public offer proof that he also had sex with Egyptian princes. Born in what is now Austria, educated in England, he joined the Hussars in WWI, was shot down over Italy, continued as a flight instructor, and after the war was a winning speed racer. Earlier, in 1926, after driving along the Nile from Egypt to the Sudan, Almásy became interested in the area and led expeditions in search of the mythic Zerzura. His sponsor died and that man's wife perished in a mysterious plane crash the following year. In 1934 or 35, Almásy and another adventurer became the first whites to establish contact with the Magyarab tribe and earned the title Abu Ramla [Father of the Sand] from his Bedouin friends, developing desert skills that would come in handy during WWII as part of Operation Salaam when he smuggled Nazi spies across enemy lines and drove 4,200 km across the Sahara. Yet when he returned to Budapest, he helped hide and save several Jewish families from being deported to death camps. After the war, he was arrested in Hungary, sent to a Soviet prison, was acquitted thanks to a bribe allegedly paid by MI6, was smuggled to Austria by British officials on a fake passport, and sent to Egypt where King Farouk got him named the technical director at the new Desert Research Institute. Visiting Austria in 1951, he contracted dysentery and died at 55.

The English Patient won the Booker Prize and the movie version won nine Oscars, including best picture. A more accurate portrayal is John Bierman's The Secret Life of Laszlo Almasy: The Real English Patient.

GLAAD: Only 6 of 101 Studio Movies in 2012 Passed Vito Russo Test

Industry lapdog/watchdog GLAAD today released its Studio Responsibility Index reporting that of 101 Hollywood feature films, fourteen included l,g, or b characters (zero trans), but even that is a stretch. Eleven of the fourteen are comedies, some of which play the gay reveal for laughs. The remaining three are a drama in which the gay love interest dies; an actioner with a bi villain; and a concert film with a queer stylist backstage. Only six films passed the Vito Russo Test, described here by the LA Times:

To pass the "Russo Test," a film must contain an identifiably LGBT character, who must not be solely identified by their sexual orientation or gender identity, and who must be tied to the film's plot so that his or her removal from the story would have a major effect on it.

Can you name all six? Pitch Perfect, Fun Size, Rock of Ages, The Five-Year Engagement, Skyfall, and the drama Cloud Atlas [above], which had the year's only prominent gay storyline and was among 2012's biggest flops.

Several of the remaining eight are very weak inclusions: Adam Sandler's That's My Boy, Eddie Murphy's A Thousand Words, Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator, 21 Jump Street, American Reunion, Think Like a Man, Ted, and Katy Perry the Movie: Part of Me. The GLAAD report mentions but wisely doesn't count The Avengers simply for its quick cameo by newsman Thomas Roberts, because he is out in real life.

Because the report is aimed at major studios, it doesn't list widely-distributed gay-inclusive films like the sly, animated feature ParaNorman, the really overrated teen drama The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or the nonstop parade of gray-haired cliches in The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which once again kills off its wistful, lonely old homo.