Band of Thebes

Recapturing Radical Queer: Mausoleum of Lovers

Triple threat Stephen Motika, author of Western Practice, program director of Poets House, and publisher of Nightboat Books, invited me to Thursday's exhilarating, overflow double launch (above) at Callicoon Fine Arts of dead novelist Hervé Guibert's photo exhibition (below) and reading from his just published, really amazing, arty and sexy Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991. Douglas Martin was there! Wayne Koestenbaum gives the book a super rave review -- "magnitude itself" -- in the upcoming Bookforum. I pecked through the episodic passages here and there and was transported. Guibert died of aids at 36, leaving behind, among other work, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and Ghost Image.

Born May 31: Walt Whitman

You could make a case that the Big Bang moment of the modern lgbt universe was Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he self-published in 1855 when he was 36. His open celebration of love between men was a major inspiration to Oscar Wilde and to Edward Carpenter and to scores of other towering queer leaders who have turned the tide of human history. Born in Long Island the second of nine children, he moved frequently with his poor and unlucky family and dropped out of school at 11. He jumped from job to job, teaching, journalism, government clerk. He was fired from his post at the Bureau of Indian Affairs after the new Secretary of the Interior read his book. Whitman became a nurse during the Civil War and in 1866 met his beloved Peter Doyle, a streetcar conductor. He lived until 1892. For the full story, read Gary Schmidgall's MLA Prize winning biography, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. Ignore the generations of scholars who have tried to degay him, the contemporary critics who claim his homosexuality is "irrelevant," and his own late life prevarications about his having had a wife and children. Also, read the poems.

 

Reading the West Awards & Irish Novel of the Year

 

Earlier today the Mountains & Plains Booksellers announced their annual awards for the best writing of the West.

Fiction: The Son by Philipp Meyer (also a Pulitzer finalist)

Nonfiction: The Emerald Mile: The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko

Children's: The Last Ride of Caleb O'Toole by Eric Pierpoint

Earlier this week came the announcement of the Irish Novel of the Year, which turned out to be yet another honor for Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, the unstoppable debut that was written in six months then languished unpublished for nine years. Previously, it won the Goldsmiths Prize, was shortlisted for the Folio Prize, and is currently a finalist for the Orange Baileys Women's Prize.

Born May 30: Colm Tóibín

This is his year: last month Colm Tóibín was named chairman of the PEN World Voices festival (replacing Salman Rushdie) and on October 7 comes his new novel Nora Webster, about an Irish woman widowed at 40 with four children, a certain contender for major awards. Twenty-four years ago, after being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros. His Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and a Booker finalist. His story collection, The Empty Family, is flat-out magnificent and won the Lammy for gay fiction. His earlier story collection was Mothers and Sons and his newer essay collection is New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families.

Three books Tóibín considers major influences on his work are The Sun Also Rises, Giovanni’s Room, and Go Tell It On the Mountain, and he told B&N his ten favorite novels, not in order, are: Company, Beckett; A Book of Common Prayer, Didion; Doctor Faustus, Mann; Daniel Deronda, Eliot; Age of Iron, Coetzee; Amongst Women, McGahern; The Portrait of a Lady, James; The Trial, Kafka; Things Fall Apart, Achebe; Island, McLeod; and The Enigma of Arrival, Naipaul.

Out in the Army: My Life as Gay Soldier

"A wonderful, stirring and thrilling read. I laughed, wept and winced… " said Stephen Fry of James Wharton's memoir Out in the Army: My Life as a Gay Soldier [and Kindle]. Released in the UK last summer, nominated for a Stonewall Award last fall, the book was published here two weeks ago. 

Biteback books says,

"Seeking escape from the quiet Welsh countryside, James Wharton joined the British Army. Along the way, he faced a battle of his own: finding the courage to tell his fellow soldiers he is gay.

"Written with searing honesty, James charts his incredible journey from punch bag to poster boy, along the way describing the tribulations of coming to terms with his sexuality. Late nights in the clubs of Soho to early mornings guarding the Queen; rocket attacks in Iraq to tank rides with Prince Harry on the plains of Canada—this is James's life out in the army."

Born May 29: Rupert Everett

Bitter about his stalled film career (thirty years since Another Country opposite a baby Colin Firth), sourly against gay marriage ("beyond tragic"), Rupert Everett at 55 has finally settled into the dual careers he was always meant to have, stage actor and author. Last year he was nominated for an Olivier Award for playing Oscar Wilde in a West End revival of The Judas Kiss, and he is writing a biopic covering Wilde's final years. Also last year he co-starred with Benedict Cumberbatch, Janet McTeer, and Rebecca Hall in a five-part minseries of Parade's End. He has published two novels, which I expected to be charming and frivilous and found to be charming and affecting: Hello Darling, Are You Working? and The Hairdressers of St.Tropez. His two memoirs, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and Vanished Years, are spiced with sharper flavors. He shifts between politely savaging the egomania of his more famous co-stars and dutifully recording the wisdom of his family: 'You were such a solitary child,' Granny says dreamily. 'Very quiet. You always played alone. You hated birthday parties. Now I read in Hello! that you're the life and soul of every party. What happened?'

Fleet Week Image of the Day #9

 

The sailors pulled out yesterday. David LaChapelle above. Bruce Weber below.

Lost Early LGBT Photos Seen Anew in The Invisibles

After winning the Cesar for best documentary, Sebastien Lifshitz finally gets a US release this week for the companion volume The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century. Lifshitz collected the snapshots over twenty years of trawling flea markets, junk shops, and ebay in France, Germany, Portugal, and the United States. He says, "With each discovery I was stunned, for these images didn’t match the official history of homosexuality as it has been conveyed to us. As a teenager, when I dreamed of my adult life, if I stuck to the literature or the few films that existed on the subject, the future promised to be dark. To be gay or lesbian meant belonging to a genealogy of suffering, to have a dramatic, if not a tragic, destiny. Despite the many battles and certain victories that ensued, the homosexual remained a victim in the collective consciousness; a hidden man. Yet, these images, which I've found through the years, were telling another story -- one about a homosexuality without inhibitions, gentle and playful." 

Born May 28: Patrick White

When you count gay Nobel Prize winning novelists, do you get beyond André Gide and Thomas Mann? The Australian writer Patrick White, born in 1912, won the award in 1973. Although White never forgave his parents for shipping him off to a detestable boarding school in England, he inherited their conservatism and did not discuss his sexuality nor did he include openly gay characters in his work until 1979's The Twyborn Affair, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. After winning the inaugural Miles Franklin Award for his enduring Voss, White declined that award a second time for Riders in the Chariot and refused all other prizes, asking the Booker judges to remove his name from their shortlist to give younger writers a chance. Obviously, he made an exception for the Nobel, but he sent his friend the painter Stanley Nolan to Stockholm to accept the prize on his behalf. He lived with a former Greek soldier his same age, Manoly Lascaris, who was his ballast and partner for forty-eight years. White finally came out when he was sixty-nine with the publication of his memoir, Flaws in the Glass. He died at seventy-eight in 1990, Lascaris survived him thirteen years. 

Fleet Week Image of the Day #8

   

Two favorite captains from New Bedford's Whaling Museum. Though none can touch Captain Wentworth from Persuasion.

Stephen Greco's Now and Yesterday

You know Stephen Greco as a journalist and an administrator of the Ferro-Grumley, and today he releases his sweeping literary novel about longtime gay friends in Brooklyn, Now and Yesterday [and Kindle]. Ed White says it's "an often poignant, and sometimes chilling, romance of the creative class," and Kirkus writes

"Greco slides a slice of American gay culture under the literary microscope. Peter and Harold settled in Brooklyn in the 1970s, committed lovers, one with journalism ambitions, the other a poet. Then Harold died during the early days of the AIDS crisis. Peter forgot poetry and built a boutique ad agency, now gobbled up by a conglomerate, where he peddled "goods and services for a brave new world in which more people needed more things." With but one serious relationship post-Harold, Peter lives at the edge of loneliness. Greco believably sketches New York's gay culture—the right parties, the right place for clothing, and who's shtupping whom—while watching Peter redefine himself. Peter laments and dithers and becomes almost a less-interesting character than his friend Jonathan, a celebrated documentary filmmaker dying of prostate cancer. Greco delves artfully into Peter's stumbling friendship-turned-romance with Will, a young California writer seeking prestige bylines, and lays it against his refusal to take up with rent boys. A second narrative thread places Peter at a moral crossroads when his corporate bosses demand he cook up a campaign for a Glenn Beck-like demagogue. With his gift for observation and turns of phrase—"the remains of an intellectual enshrined in the urn of a glamorous career"—Greco offers a book about big ideas rather than action: ideas about gay life; about the depths and importance of friendship; about money and power; about the need for love and sex; and about a man's moral relationship to who he is and what he does. Greco has written a life-affirming yet melancholy, John O'Hara-like analysis of post-baby-boom-meets-millennial-queer Big Apple society."

Greco's previous books include The Sperm Engine and Dreadnought.

Born May 27: John Cheever

Closeted, self-hating, alcoholic, miserably married, and a frequent liar, John Cheever escaped by creating a more bucolic WASP suburbia in his beautiful fiction. Not coincidentally his most accomplished novel, Falconer [and Kindle], is the one that deals openly with love between men, (also not coincidentally) imprisoned. His masterpieces are his stories. He slept with everyone from Walker Evans when he was young to Allan Gurganus when he was old. (Read Cheever's memory of the Evans hookup here.) Blake Bailey was awarded a Guggenheim to write his biography, which went on to be a Pulitzer finalist and won the NBCC and the Francis Parkman Prize.

Fleet Week Image of the Day #7

Vintage scrub day. The ad on the left promises, "our men are battle-hot and swamp-dirty."

 

St. Aubyn and Hollinghurst

Today's much-too-long New Yorker profile of Edward St. Aubyn has at least two noteworthy details: 1) he named his daughter Eleanor, the same as the atrocious mother in the Melrose novels and 2) contrary to those novels' plot, his own mother, Lorna, merely threatened to leave Le Plan, their fabled 80-acre estate in Provence, to a New Age group but in fact she sold it to him. Ian Parker writes: 

"The year that he lost the Booker [2006], St. Aubyn sold Le Plan to a “very nice and massively rich” French family that reminded him of characters in the Babar books. His mother had died, after a series of stokes, the previous year, between the delivery and the publication of a novel that described her physical and cognitive decline. She had no more money. St. Aubyn had by then given himself a few years to experience Le Plan through the eyes of his son. For Lucian, “it wasn’t filled with these dark and complex meanings,” he said. “He just thought it was completely fabulous, as indeed it was. You know, there were cherry trees and apricot trees with ladders leaning against them—you could climb up and have an apricot. And frogs, and a series of ponds, and goldfish, and water lilies: this little fiefdom, this hamlet, which took quite a long time for a small boy to walk around.”

"Alan Hollinghurst had visited Le Plan several times in previous years, and had written parts of The Line of Beauty there. Just before the property changed hands, he came to stay with St. Aubyn, and they went from building to building, deciding what should be added to a bonfire that burned for three weeks. As St. Aubyn recalled, “I’d be saying, ‘Oh my God, I remember getting this suit!’ There would be, of course, a story attached to everything. And I’d look at Alan, who’d say”—firm, low voice—“ ‘Burn it.’ ” After a while, St. Aubyn skipped the anecdotes; Hollinghurst continued to say, “Burn it.”

Read the entire profile here. Get St. Aubyn's new novel Lost for Words [and Kindle].

Born May 26: Alan Hollinghurst

Here are the five essential things to know about Alan Hollinghurst, 60 today and still the only openly gay man to win the Booker Prize: 1. his first novel The Swimming-Pool Library (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), 2. his second novel The Folding Star (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), 3. his third novel The Spell, 4. his fourth novel The Line of Beauty (winner of the Man Booker Prize), and 5) his fifth novel The Stranger's Child (finalist for the Walter Scott Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker). Read them all. When he made his debut with The Swimming-Pool Library, Edmund White called it, "the best book on gay life yet written by an English author." Hollinghurst has only gotten better with time, though you should put The Spell last on your list. As one of the ten queer curators of London's Gay Icons show, his six selections included Ronald Firbank, Joe Dallesandro, Thom Gunn, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Fleet Week Image of the Day #6

 

In honor of tonight's The Normal Heart, a re-purposed Leyendecker poster amid some original recruitment techniques. More shirtless thrusting after the jump.

Cannes Winners

 Last night at Cannes, the twisted, gayish, Olympic wrestling, Channing Tatum, Mark Ruffalo, Steve Carell movie Foxcatcher won best director for Bennett Miller, whose previous credits include Capote.

Gay director Xavier Dolan, 25, shared the Jury Prize for his fifth feature, Mommy. The other jury winner was Jean-Luc Godard, 83, for Goodbye to Language. 

Other awards:

• Palme d'Or: Winter Sleep (Turkey)
• Grand Prize: Le Meraviglie (The Wonders). (Italy)
• Best Actor: Timothy Spall in Mr. Turner directed by Mike Leigh (about JMW Turner)
• Best Actress: Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars directed by David Cronenberg
• Best Screenplay: Leviathan (Russia)

Born May 25: Ian McKellen

For anyone who still thinks being an out actor is a career-ender, study the numbers: Ian McKellen ranks #16 or #17 in all-time box office grosses, at $2.7 billion, far ahead of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler, and homophobe Mel Gibson (#48), to name a few. Please note his two cash cows -- five X-Men movies so far, the sixth Tolkien movie this December -- came after he "shocked" viewers by purring down the red carpet, flaunting his four-decades-younger boyfriend Nick Cuthell, at the Oscars when he was nominated for the adaptation of Chris Bram's Gods and Monsters. Out since 1988, he co-founded Stonewall UK, the lgbt rights powerhouse, in response to the deplorable Section 28, and he's been an unabashed activist on queer issues ever since. He has won a Golden Globe, a Tony, a SAG award, two Critics' Choice awards, four Drama Desk awards, and six Olivier awards, and been nominated for two Oscars, four BAFTAs, and five Emmys. He was knighted in 1991. Playing off Sir Ian, Stephen Fry calls him Serena. He is also best chums with co-star Patrick Stewart. Their two-man show charmed everyone, which cannot be said of his BBC comedy with Derek Jacobi, Vicious. An avowed atheist, Ian got ordained online as a Unification Church minister and officiated Patrick's third wedding. Watch them together on Late Night. Or watch them fail at The Newlywed Game. Today he's 75.

Fleet Week Image of the Day #5

 

Because it's Saturday night.

Tom of Finland and Jean Cocteau. More in common than you might think. Hand placement.

Taschen's XXX The Complete Kake Comics includes episodes The Naval Visit and Pants down, Sailor.

  

The Best Gay Books of Spring

     

Before you get deliriously swamped by the wave of great gay books coming this summer -- starting next week with two hotly anticipated titles, Stephen Greco's novel Now and Yesterday and James Magruder's story collection Let Me See It -- take another look at this pretty amazing spring harvest. 

 

Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer. A novel about EM Forster from 1912-1924, his gayest years, including his first trip to India.

Tatamkhulu Afrika, Bitter Eden [and Kindle]. Three gay men and their shifting loyalties in WWII POW camps.

John L'Heureux, The Medici Boy [and Kindle]. Donatello and his love of the scamp who posed for his bronze David.

Joseph Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism. Nonfiction, with 250+ pictures.

Mark Gevisser, Lost and Found in Johannesburg. Memoir of growing up white, gay, and Jewish in South Africa from the 70s to today.

Damian Barr, Maggie & Me. Award-winning, angry, funny memoir of growing up gay in Scotland in the 80s.

Ivan Coyote, Gender Failure. Nonfiction.

Edward White, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America [and Kindle]. Brilliant biography of the famed queer photographer and his era, 1880-1964.

Tom Spanbauer, I Loved You More [and Kindle]. Novel spanning 25 years in Idaho, New York, and Portland.

Peter Hujar: Love & Lust. Photos.

Mark Wunderlich, The Earth Avails. Poems. 

Emma Donoghue, Frog Music [and Kindle]. Queers, frogs, and murder in 1876 San Francisco.