Band of Thebes

Born April 29: C.P. Cavafy

Indisputably the greatest Greek poet since antiquity, C.P. Cavafy achieved his genius because of, not in spite of, his homosexuality. Dan Chiasson argued as much in his spectacular five-page appreciation in The New Yorker, excerpted below, on the occasion of Daniel Mendelsohn's "extraordinary," must-own translations, Complete Poems and The Unfinished Poems. For a first-hand account of the man, read E.M. Forster's touching biography in his Alexandria: A History and Guide, published in 1922, eleven years before Cavafy died of larynx cancer on his 70th birthday. Four decades later, David Hockney created a dozen etchings inspired by his poems, including this one, In the dull village. The director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, chose this print as #97 in his A History of the World in 100 Objects. Covering more than a million years of human experience, MacGregor can give the era from 1914 onward only five items: a Russian Revolution plate, a Mozambique throne constructed of rifles, a Sharia-compliant Visa credit card, a solar lamp, and this ode to gay sex.

Chiasson wrote:

"By day, he performed his ordinary Alexandrian act: leaving the office, hitting the stock exchange, where he was licensed to trade; visiting a billiards club. At night he paid beautiful young men -- dishwashers and tailors' assistants and grocery boys -- for sex. Cavafy's work draws from two intensely private sources: the old histories of the Hellenic world which he read in the evenings, and the nights of sex, rigged for retrospective poignancy, that ensued. 

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"Because everybody dwells in history together, all at once, Cavafy refused to divvy up the available moods into one pile appropriate for obscure Byzantines and another for his Alexandrian rent boys. This makes him a master of mismatched affect...

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"These were the years when Cavafy maintained a double life, letting his mother wear herself out over dinner, then sneaking off, aided by her servant, into the seedy districts of Alexandria to cruise for young men. In short, if a great poet hadn't been sneaking around on his mother, an entire world of cabarets and coffee shops, as vivid in its way as Dickens's London, might have passed without notice.

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"Cavafy would write a number of erotic poems in historical dress -- "Caesarion" is one -- but until 1910 he hadn't attempted what Pound called "direct treatment of the thing." "The thing," in Cavafy's case, was homosexual desire, a difficult subject to treat directly at the time. Oscar Wilde had, within memory, spent two years in prison for "gross indecency." Cavafy had a model for sexual frankness in the Greek Anthology, that remarkable compilation of ancient insults, boasts, epigrams, and erotica, much of it recovered from mummy wrappings and pottery shards. But many of those writers were anonymous and all of them had the advantage over Cavafy -- a towering advantage if one wants to talk openly about gay sex -- of having been dead several thousand years."

Additional kudos to Chiasson for including James Merrill's comment, "The difficulty of being Cavafy's kind of homosexual in Alexandria in those years must have been staggering. How to choose among a thousand daily opportunities."

Last month, Everyman released a pocket Cavafy edited by Mendelsohn.

After 37 Years, Giovanni's Room Closing

Currently the oldest lgbt bookstore in the US, Giovanni's Room was unable to find a buyer and will close forever on May 17.

The Philadelphia institution will sell remaining stock at 25% off. 

Lambda Announces Mid-Career, Emerging Winners

   

Lambda this morning announced the winners of their annual prizes for Mid-Career Novelists Who Have Used 'Tides' in Romance Titles, Radclyffe and Michael Thomas Ford, known for his many humor collections and many novels like Suicide Notes, What We Remember, and The Road Home.

Lambda's two Emerging Writers are familiar to readers of Thebes queer lit poll: Charles Rice-Gonzalez, author of Chulito [Kindle], and Imogen Binnie, whose Nevada [Kindle] inspired Michelle Tea to say, "This book blew my mind. It’s everything – personal, political, funny, raw, hyper-brainy and down to earth. I want to stay in Maria’s brain forever as she rides her bike through the streets of Brooklyn, doggedly hashing out her existence with humor and befuddled honesty. A really powerful new literary voice."

Born April 29: Leslie Jordan

Twenty years after his first television appearance (on The Fall Guy), Southern sparkplug Leslie Jordan won an Emmy for his recurring guest role on Will & Grace as Karen's classically queeny rival, Beverly Leslie. Two years later he unleashed his book and solo show, My Trip Down the Pink Carpet [DVD], a high-spirited romp about his "Marilyn Monroe Syndrome," charting his course from smalltown Tennessee prejudices, self-hatred, Hollywood, alcoholism, more Hollywood, self-acceptance, still more Hollywood, sobriety, drama, and fame. This year he hosted the Hookie Awards for outstanding achievement in gay escort work. 

See his schedule of upcoming events in Houston, Baltimore, Provincetown, Ogunquit, and New Hope here.

Colm Tóibín and Christopher Castellani

Sandy Leonard tipped fb readers to this literary chat between Colm Tóibín and Christopher Castellani, recently a Ferro Grumley finalist for his gay novel All This Talk of Love [Kindle].

Donatello Loves His David in The Medici Boy

After seventeen books of poems and fiction, John L'Heureux got a Guggenheim to write this, his eleventh novel, The Medici Boy [Kindle], about Donatello's crush on the model he used to sculpt David. The artist's sexual infatuation with, then love for, the young urchin / hustler Agnolo Mattei leads him to create the first freestanding bronze nude in more than a thousand years... and worse. Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee says it's a "gripping story of love, genius, and betrayal."

Born April 26: Henry de Montherlant

Hardcore old school aristocratic masculinist, misogynist, and fascist, Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant decried the wimpy, feminized 20th-century male and is said to have celebrated strong Germany's triumph over his weakened native France in 1940. By then, at 45, he had enjoyed widespread literary success, especially with his shockingly prejudiced series The Girls, which sold millions of copies, was translated into more than a dozen other languages, and caused Simone de Beauvoir to attack it for an entire chapter of The Second Sex. Early in his career Montherlant published the gayish novel The Bachelors, his essays on vigorous sport and the pleasures of youth Les Olympiques, and, in 1929, wrote the far more explicit all-male school romance The Boys which he did not release it until 1969. His play on a similar love triangle between an older male student, a younger male student, and their jealous male teacher, La Ville Dont Le Prince Est Un Enfant, was produced in 1952 and in 1997 finally became a movie known in English as The Fire That Burns. Expect the classic doomed, sadder but wiser ending: It is Montherlant, after all, who said, "Happiness writes in white ink on a white page." At 77, almost blind, he swallowed cyanide then fired a gun at his head.

After the jump, samples from Montherlant's Paysages des Olympiques with 87 homoerotic art snaps by Czech photographer Karel Egermeier.

Publishing Triangle Winners: Sara Farizan and Sara Farizan

             and   

Sara Farizan made history last night when, for the first time in the 26-year history of the Publishing Triangle Awards, she won both the Ferro-Grumley and the Debut Fiction prize for her novel If You Could Be Mine. Also, she arrived from the airport as her marketing director was accepting the debut award on her behalf.

The Ferro-Grumley Award: If You Could Be Mine [Kindle], Sara Farizan  

Debut Fiction: If You Could Be Mine [Kindle], Sara Farizan

Gay Nonfiction: White Girls, Hilton Als 

Lesbian Nonfiction: Passionate Commitments: The Lives of Anna Rochester and Grace Hutchins, Julia M. Allen

Gay Poetry: All the Heat We Could Carry, Charlie Bondhus

Lesbian Poetry: Enchantée, Angie Estes

Lifetime Achievement: María Irene Fornés

Caleb Crain on "the Crash of the Gay Novel"

In a new essay on the New Yorker blog, cheekily titled "How Much Gay Sex Should a Novel Have?" Caleb Crain samples a century of gay fiction, from Henry James to his own Necessary Errors, and tries to dissect the widespread publishing myth that gay novels don't sell. Yet for some reason he does not mention E. Lynn Harris's many, many gay novels that charted high on the NYT bestseller list and Justin Torres's gay literary novel on the NYT list and Colm Toibin's gay literary novel on the NYT list and David Ebershoff's gay literary novel on the NYT list and Armistead Maupin's gay literary novel -- last month! -- on the NYT fiction list. Nor does he mention any lesbian literary bestsellers, like Sarah Waters, or new-form hybrid stars like Alison Bechdel. Although Crain's topic is novels, any discussion of publishing's claim that gay literary content cannot sell needs to confront the super-phenom called David Sedaris, whose very gay essay collections have given Little, Brown eight consecutive NYT bestsellers, most at #1.

Another aspect worth exploring is the raft of gay bestsellers by non-gay authors, like John Irving's In One Person and Michael Chabon's several books that feature gay characters in major, co-starring roles.

There's a gap between Crain's observation about popular entertainment:

"After all, homosexuals went on to flourish on television, to become ubiquitous on the Internet, and to prosper in the courts." 

and this minority mindset when it comes to books:

"...But capitalism is a numbers game. Self-identifying homosexuals are not an enormous population, and, in general, they don’t buy literary fiction about themselves at a rate that would compensate for their small numbers. It can’t have helped that AIDS decimated the generation of gay men who, in the nineties, would have been in their forties, fifties, and sixties—prime ages for reading and buying books. It might also be the case that AIDSbrought the attention of straights to gay voices in the eighties and early nineties...and that interest in the gay novel faded in tandem with journalistic coverage of the AIDS crisis. Whatever the cause or perceived cause, I suspect that, nowadays, a mainstream publishing house rarely takes on a gay novel unless an editor believes that the book will find straight readers, too. Because some straights still find homosexuality disgusting (cf. comment trolls across the Internet) and a larger number fail to find gay characters 'relatable,' a gay novel faces steeper odds from the start."

 Some cultural thinker needs to get at the heart of why gay characters on tv are relatable and gay characters in novels 'aren't.' 

Ludmila Ulitskaya Wins Austrian State Prize for European Literature

Das macht mich sehr glücklich! I could sing Pharrell.

With past winners Auden, Pinter, Calvino, Beauvoir, Lessing, Kundera, Duras, Rushdie, Eco, Barnes, and, last year, John Banville, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature is always worth following, never more so than today's award to Ludmila Ulitskaya. The best book to begin with is the pure-Greek and mixed-Russian family tale Medea and Her Children [Kindle], which also provides a much-needed window into the Crimea. Follow that with the novel of exiles in New York, The Funeral Party, and then her ambitious Daniel Stein, Interpreter, bringing together Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Read Ulitskaya now -- as you know the Nobel committee is -- before all the December hoopla when FSG releases a major new work, The Big Green Tent spanning decades in the lives of three Soviet dissidents caught in the country's fall and rise and fall.

 

Gender Failure

After six story collections including Missed Her, the novel Bow Grip, and the nonfiction Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme, Ivan Coyote now collaborates with Rae Spoon for their new book Gender Failure. Inspired by their joint live show that toured the U.S. and Europe, the book gathers Coyote's and Spoon's struggles against a binary-ordered world, with multiple blurbers calling the result both heartbreaking and hilarious. Michelle Tea says it's "a dynamic, beautiful and important piece of literature."

Lidia Yuknavitch, author of The Chronology of Water, says "This book profoundly changed my life; I will step into the word and lexicon of 'gender' differently, I will never be in my body in the same way, I am a different reader forever, and I am grateful. Gender Failure will take you apart and put you back together—I laughed my ass off, I cried my heart out, I yelled my head off, and I ended up in the only place that matters: love, compassion, with our whole bodies."

Out Today: Queer Paris, Marriage Miscarriage, Roberts Memoir

  

For her 17th novel and 28th book overall, Francine Prose reclaims forgotten historical queer lives in Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 [Kindle]. In an approving review for the NYTBR, Edmund White called it "a novel of great reach and power." 

NYT reporter Jo Becker's story of how we got marriage equality -- because of Chad Griffin?? -- has at last united the entire gay community... against it. The gay left consideres the book "bullshit," the gay middle says it's "truly horrendous," and the gay right memorably calls it "a fellatial account" by "an ignorant reporter" "who knows nothing of the movement's history." Confirming just how backward and out of touch the straights are when it comes to representing queer lives, Penguin has bizarrely given this high-profile gay success story a jacket fit for a funereal. Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality [Kindle].

Good Morning America star, cancer survivor, and recently out lesbian Robin Roberts releases her inspirational memoir Everybody's Got Something [Kindle].

Born April 22: John Waters

Your wait is almost over. Four years after his oddball memoir Role Models and two years after his goofball journey, six weeks from today FSG will release Carsick: John Waters Hitchhikes Across America [Kindle]. Yes, at 66 he really thumbed alone from Baltimore to San Francisco. Fifteen rides with total strangers took him eight days, and he says of his drivers, “Pot smokers, cops, I got everybody. And everybody was lovely.” Last year he explained the new book saying, "The first half is a little novella. I imagine the 15 best rides that could ever happen, and I did the 15 worst rides that could ever happen."

His trashy yet sweet movies are part of the permanent collection at MoMA, but beyond the films John Waters has written four books, published three volumes of photographs, and his artwork has been shown in many museums and galleries internationally. As for the movies, he's made sixteen, with his best work clustered from 1972 to 1988: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, Polyester and Hairspray starring the incomparable Divine [also pictured] who was his special ally since their shared childhood in Maryland. Johnny Depp fans might insist on including 1990's Cry Baby, but the four movies since then seem like lesser efforts, and, horribly, it's been a full ten years since he's directed anything. His children's Christmas movie starring Johnny Knoxville and Parker Posey, endearingly titled Fruitcake, has been canceled, as has the sequel New Line convinced Waters to write, Hairspray 2: White Lipstick, imagining Tracy in the late 60s during the British Invasion and Vietnam.  Today, he's 68.

Stamps of Approval: Harvey Milk, Tom of Finland, Tove Jansson

 

The Harvey Milk stamp is now available for preorder online here. The statement says, "The U.S. Postal Service® is proud to honor the life of Harvey Milk, a visionary leader who became an iconic figure in the struggle for gay civil rights. In 1977, Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, making him one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States." The stamp will be released on May 22, his 84th birthday.

Finland announced three stamps depicting the art of Touko Laaksonen, Tom of Finland, come September or October. Their statement reads, "His emphatically masculine homoerotic drawings have attained iconic status in their genre and had an influence on, for instance, pop culture and fashion. The drawings on the stamp sheet represent strong and confident male figures typical of their designer." Anyone who just can't wait to lick and stick those should get Tom of Finland XXL or The Complete Kake Comics.

Finland's first new commerative of 2014 showed two photos of favorite novelist Tove Jansson. Read The Summer Book [Kindle] or The True Deceiver [Kindle]. Earlier, her Moomins got a stamp of their own.

Cannes 2014

Gay wunderkind Xavier Dolan, still only 25, returns to Cannes for the fourth time with his fifth film, Mommy. This is his first to be in the official competition, against new movies by the Dardennes, Cronenberg, Assayas, Egoyan, Loach, Leigh, and Godard. Capote director Bennett Miller returns with Foxcatcher, the creepy gayish true story of John du Pont and his relationship with the Olympic wrestling brothers, one of whom he murdered, played by Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo. Last year Cannes screened HBO's Behind the Candelabra, but they skipped this year's HBO tale of tragic gays, The Normal Heart.

Opening Film: Grace Of Monaco, dir: Olivier Dahan
Closing Film: To be announced

COMPETITION
Winter Sleep, dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Clouds Of Sils Maria, dir: Olivier Assayas
Saint Laurent, dir: Bertrand Bonello
Maps To The Stars, dir: David Cronenberg
Two Days, One Night, dirs: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Born April 17: Chavela Vargas

A late bloomer, perhaps, but what a flower -- Mexican singer Chavela Vargas did not release her first album until she was 42, didn't come out as a lesbian until she was 81, and didn't debut at Carnegie Hall until she was 83. What was she doing all those years before recording Noche de Bohemia in 1961? Well, she dressed as a man, often in her signature red jorongo, smoked cigars, drank heavily, and packed a pistol, so obviously she was busy with more than singing rancheras in the streets. And maybe she had an affair Frida Kahlo (as Josephine Baker had). Since that first record, she has released more than eighty albums. Her great fame of the 1960s and 70s subsided when she retired to battle her alcoholism. She returned to performing at 72 in 1991 in Mexico City. Since then her music has been widely used in films and she has appeared singing in several movies including Almodovar's Flower of My Secret, Taymor's Frida, and Innartu's Babel. All I can say is buy her, beware: The first time you hear Chavela unleash her power midway through the quiet Paloma Negra you might drop whatever you're holding. She died in 2012 at 93.

Growing Up Gay in 80s Scotland

"This amazing book... grips from beginning to end and leaves the reader elated," says Diana Athill of the gay work I've most looked forward to this spring, Damian Barr's memoir Maggie & Me: Coming Out and Coming of Age in 1980s Scotland [Kindle]. Winner of Stonewall's Writer of the Year Award and the humor prize at the Political Book Awards, Barr's book appeared on best of the year lists in the Times, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the Evening Standard, the Mail on Sunday, the New Statesman, the Independent, and multiple times on Band of Thebes queer lit poll, where one of the best-read men in Britain, Gay's the Word manager Jim McSweeney, said it's "engaging... beautifully written... wise, funny and deeply moving." 

Maggie O'Farrell: "Out of poverty, brutality and prejudice, Damian Barr builds something riveting, touching and painfully funny. His account of growing up under Thatcher's regime defines the experience of a generation. At once personal and universal, Maggie & Me is a work of stealthy genius."

S.J. Watson: "As gripping as a thriller, laugh-out-loud funny and deeply touching... A triumph."

Louisa Young: "Maggie & Me is a perfect chip supper of a memoir: nostalgic, tart, crisp and seductive. It’s also sad, kind, witty and sexy."

Growing Up White, Gay, and Jewish in South Africa

Out today from FSG is Lost and Found in Johannesburg [Kindle] (published internationally as Dispatcher) by Mark Gevisser, the award-winning biographer and Teddy-winning filmmaker who is an Open Society Fellow working on The Global Sexuality Frontier. Growing up gay, white, and Jewish during apartheid, Mark kept to himself and was keen on maps, fixated by the mysterious blank areas that separated his family's neighborhood from where their black servants lived. As a double outsider he developed an eye for boundaries, and transgression. His father married the daughter of an anti-Semite, Mark eventually marries his partner, a man of color, and they move to Paris. On a visit back to work on this memoir, he is the victim of a violent home invasion, bound, gagged, and held hostage at gunpoint. Throughout the book, he poignantly confronts the gap between assumptions and reality. Teju Cole: "Outstanding. A genuinely strange, marvelous, and complex account of a self and a city. Does for Johannesburg what Pamuk did for Istanbul." Claire Messud: "Mark Gevisser’s extraordinary memoir asks profound questions – about race, sexuality, faith and politics -- while examining both his own history and that of his beloved Johannesburg. The result is unlike any other book I know. It is illuminating, unsettling, engrossing, often funny, and, in a word, brilliant." Dinaw Mengestu: "A story as complex and beautiful as any memoir I've ever read."

Mark Gevisser will speak in New York on May 1 at Columbia and May 6 at CLAGS.

 

For gay novels from South Africa try:

Michael Power, Shadow Game (banned for its interracial gay love in 1972, reissued)

Damon Galgut, A Sinless Season (1982)

Stephen Gray’s Time of Our Darkness (1988)

Mark Behr’s Embrace (2000)

K Sello Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001)

Michiel Heyns, The Children's Day (2002)

Guy Willoughby, Archangels (2002)

Michiel Heyns, The Reluctant Passenger (2003)

Barry Levy, Burning Bright (2004)

Craig Higginson, The Hill (2005)

Fred Khumalo, Seven Steps to Heaven (2007)

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room (2010)

Born April 15: Leonardo, Henry James, Lynes, Gadol, Whitaker

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, writer... the world's greatest genius did it all without a university education, denied to him as a lowerclass bastard. At twenty-four he was twice arrested for sodomy, in April and June, after which he became increasingly secretive about his affairs with men, including a young falconer named Bernardo di Simone, according to Michael White. His notebooks cover 5,000 pages and foretell inventions or discoveries to come centuries later: bicycles, calculators, military tanks, helicopters, hang gliders, the double hull, solar power, and plate tectonics. Other drawings are erotica, including an erect angel (qui) based on his tempestuous boyfriend, a hellcat named Salai, to whom he bequeathed the Mona Lisa. 

Henry James, four centuries later and 400 times more repressed, wrote some of the world's finest fiction. His gayest works are the novel The Bostonians (excluded from his collected works due to its queerness) and the long short story The Pupil. Undiminished even in the age of txtng, he is the subject of Colm Toibin's IMPAC Dublin winner The Master and the reigning spirit of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker winner The Line of Beauty. Exactly one year ago, the Pulitzer judges named as a finalist Michael Gorra's superb Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece [Kindle], which was also a NBCC nominee and a best book of the year at The New Yorker, WSJ, the Guardian, and The Millions.

You deserve it. Get George Platt Lynes: The Male Nudes (my favorite, after the jump) or see him in front of the camera in When We Were Three: Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescot 1925-1935. He is the basis for the photographer in Donald Windham's novel Tanaquil.

Always a favorite recommender on Thebes queer lit poll, Peter Gadol studied with Seamus Heaney and Helen Vendler at Harvard from which he graduated magna cum laude. Four years later Crown published his first novel, Coyote (1990), followed by The Mystery Roast (1993), Closer to the Sun (1996), a PEN West prize nominee The Long Rain [Kindle] (1997), Light at Dusk (2000), and the Lammy-nominated Silver Lake [Kindle] about two gay architects and their dangerous overnight guest. Fifty today, Peter is working on American Modern, a novel about 20th century design.

Rick Whitaker's audacious new fiction An Honest Ghost [Kindle] is a Publishing Triangle nominee, a Lammy finalist, an ALA Over the Rainbow book, and a TLS book of the year. Previously he wrote a memoir about his experiences as a hustler, Assuming the Position, and a book about reading gay American writing, The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara. I wish he would write about his experiences as an adoptive single dad -- not easy, given his published history as a sex worker -- though of course I respect any privacy decisions in not writing about family.

Pulitzer Winners 2014: Tartt, Fagin, Taylor, Marshall, Seshadri

 

Drat! FUN HOME was a finalist for the 2014 Pulitzer in Drama but lost to The Flick. The winners are

Fiction: The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt

Nonfiction:Toms River: A Story of Science and Salvation, Dan Fagin

History: The Internal Enemy: Slavery and War in Virginia, 1772-1832, Alan Taylor

Biography: Margaret Fuller: A New American Life, Megan Marshall

Poetry:3 Sections, Vijay Seshadri

Drama: The Flick, Annie Baker

Music: Become Ocean, John Luther Adams 

Bizarrely, the fiction finalists were not Lahiri, McDermott, Kushner, Ozeki, or any of the other nominees for the National Book Award or the NBCC... they were The Son by Philipp Meyer and The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis. The Reporting prizes and full citations here.

photos 1,3 via everybody reading books, photo 2 from just a jeep guy