Band of Thebes

When Gay Characters Happen to Straight Authors...

Know how when you read old-timey novels from the 1960s and 70s in which white authors suddenly tried to do black characters? And the results were jive? We've entered a similar period now, when straight authors are going gay for straight editors and straight readers, none of whom knows our actual history (as with Jo Becker) or the emotional layers of their queer characters. The current disappointing example is last week's fiction in The New Yorker, Madame Lazarus, narrated by an elderly gay man in Paris whose much younger boyfriend gets him a dog to compensate for his many absences during distant business trips. Here are his thoughts on their relationship:

"James is young, far younger than I. When you are the older man, you can be equal, for a time. He has youth and beauty, but you have money and experience. You know many people, and you can take him to Portofino, to Biarritz, to Capri. It is an old story."

Here, as in the entire story, there's nothing unique to the experience of being gay. It might all have been written about an older man and his trophy wife then switched to a gay couple in the final draft. Unfortunately, the flat, trite statements extend everywhere. He says, "I am older now than I thought possible. I did not believe I would ever be this ancient person." And the story evinces zero sense of Paris or the French. The piece's one shocker is that it's written by the reliable Maile Meloy, whose Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It really is worth reading.

A more promising gay male character from a straight author can be found in The Signature of All Things [and Kindle], out today in paperback. One crucial man is a 19th-century globetrotting gentle white Bostonian who discovers sex with a young South Pacific warrior, but back in the states his gay ways bring a world of hurt. Like many readers, I could overlook the book's baggy style and constant repetitions in order to spend several decades with an appealing lady botanist who travels from her native Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam. With echoes of Andrea Barrett and A.S. Byatt, Elizabeth Gilbert fashions her own enjoyable trip.

Born June 3: Wilfred Thesiger

A leading figure of the golden age of exploration, it's appropriate that Sir Wilfred Thesiger was awarded the Lawrence Medal and the Burton Medal, not least because they were all gay. Born in 1910 to a British diplomat in Abssynia, Thesiger was educated at Eton and Oxford where his only happy times were vacations (and beating Cambridge as captain of the boxing team). On his first college break he worked for his passage on a steamer to Constantinople. Returning, he found a personal invitation from Haile Selassie to attend his coronation as Emperor. On his second summer break, he worked a fishing trawler off Iceland. At 23 he went back to Africa, became assistant district commissioner in the Sudan, and learned to fast ride camels with the local men, adopting their clothes and diet. Said to call any invention more modern than the steam engine "an abomination," he hated the first world's intrusion on remote wilderness and peoples. In WWII, he fought with the Sudan defense force against Mussolini's Italians and with the Syrians against the Vichy French. A job with what became the United Nation's anti-locust program took him to the Arabia's famed Empty Quarter prompting his best work, Arabian Sands (now with an introduction by Rory Stewart), which the Guardian recently called "probably the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever." Thesiger's other masterpiece, The Marsh Arabs [and Kindle] (introduced by Jon Lee Anderson), covers the seven years he lived off and on with the people of southern Iraq. His travels in Asia with the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and the Pamirs, are recounted in Among the Mountains. Chances are his autobiography Life Of My Choice avoids his homosexuality, but his gay side is somewhat integrated in Alexander Maitland's Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Thesiger died at 93 in 2003, leaving 23,000 negatives of his photographs to the Pitt Rivers Museum at Oxford. See fifty-nine of his images here and one below.

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, sketches, 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.

 

Rupert & Istvan's Story Continues in The Mercury Waltz

          

After six works of adult fiction, Kathe Koja turned her talents to YA and published seven novels for young readers, then in 2010 fused the best of both worlds, dazzling grown-ups with a daring literary adventure, Under the Poppy [Kindle], a gay love story set in a brothel in Brussels in the 1870s. Exploring the lives of prostitutes and puppeteers she earned comparisons with Angela Carter and praise like this:

Library Journal: "Despite all the trappings of puppets, sex shows, stabbings, and drawing-room treachery, this is a love story about how, sometimes despite themselves, Rupert, Istvan, and their friends have created a family. . . . she creates an atmospheric tale for those who like their historical fiction on the dark and lurid side. Those readers who enjoyed Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin or Sarah Water’s Fingersmith will find similar themes."

Publishers Weekly: "A page turner with riveting language and close attention to sensory detail. Set in late 19th-century Brussels, the story follows the adventures of puppeteer Istvan and brothel owner Rupert who bond as friends and lovers."

Cleveland Plain Dealer: "Koja can pack a lot Dickensian humor into a sentence . . . [she] takes a page from Victorian lit in her writerliness, and she reveals human nature like someone slipped her the manual."

Cory Doctorow, BoingBoing: "This book made me drunk. Koja’s language is at its poetic best, and the epic drama had me digging my nails into my palms. It’s like a Tom Waits hurdy-gurdy loser’s lament come to life, as sinister as a dark circus."

Last week, to too little fanfare, she published the sequel The Mercury Waltz. Having chosen the earlier book for Thebes' queer lit poll, Tom Cardamone says of Istvan & Rupert's continuing story, "If Dickens had a penchant for opium and sodomy he might have given us a world as rich as The Mercury Waltz, but only Kathe Koja could wholly deliver these goods. This beguiling, complex, urban tale of rueful economies, of how the puppet strings of love and lust are forever entangled, is simply inimitable."

Born January 9: Richard Halliburton

In the 1920s and 30s, three names conjured the glories of adventure travel: Lindbergh, Halliburton, and Earhart. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Halliburton was a small-framed, sickly child and compensated with a life of pushing himself to extremes. He climbed the Matterhorn, made the first recorded winter summit of Mount Fuji, and took the first aerial photo of Everest. In 1931, with a hired pilot, he circled the globe in an open cockpit biplane, the Flying Carpet, (though they put the plane on ships to cross the Atlantic and Pacific), giving first flights to royalty in Iran and Iraq, the White Rajah's wife in India, and the chief of the Nyak, who paid him in shrunken heads.

Always thirsting for adventure, Halliburton bent local laws well past custom and legality: He tried to enter Mecca, was jailed for photographing the guns at Gibraltar, hid within the Taj Mahal to spend an evening alone, savoring the solitude at sunset and swimming in the pool by moonlight. He registered his body as a ship, the S.S. Halliburton, in order to enter the Panama Canal and remains the only person to have swum its length, 48 miles. Thoroughly original, he twice retraced other travelers' trips in tribute, swimming the Hellespont like his hero Byron and crossing the Alps by elephant as Hannibal had in 218 BC.

As for pushing boundaries at home, Halliburton was likely lovers with the gay movie star Ramón Novarro, and, even more openly, he commissioned an architect to build his cantilevered home, nicknamed Hangover House, in Laguna Beach with three bedrooms: one each for himself, his boyfriend Paul Mooney, and Mooney's boyfriend, the architect. It is the basis for Heller House in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead [Kindle].

In March 1939, now enormously famous, Halliburton, Mooney, and an experienced crew left Hong Kong in their custom Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, to make landfall at the San Francisco World's Fair. Exactly three weeks out, they hit a typhoon and perished. Much earlier, he had written to his father:

And when my time comes to die, I’ll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain and thrills—any emotion that any human ever had—and I’ll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed...

Ever mindful of his public persona, Halliburton occasionally peppered his narratives with nameless, entirely made-up female love interests, yet he lingers over male beauty, and his private letters are explicitly gay. His many travel books include The Royal Road to Romance and Seven League Boots. He dedicated his first adventure book to his roommates at Princeton, whose “sanity, consistency, and respectability” inspired him to flee.

Gay Pirates in Love: Black Wade

If one of your new year's resolutions is "More pirates," grab the hot and charming adult comic Black Wade: The Wild Side of Love. After the heavy ink brutality of The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame, the gorgeous colors and airbrushed characters here provide a welcome release. Which is not to say the swashbuckle is pure sweetness: Black Wade initially has to take English naval officer Jack Wilkins by force, but true love triumphs, even underwater (NSFW). For anyone who's dreamed of explicit gay Disney adventures, your triple wooden-masted ship awaits.

Hild, One of the Best Novels Dorothy Allison Has Read, Period

What two-time Booker-winner Hilary Mantel has done for the Tudors with Thomas Cromwell, six-time Lammy-winner Nicola Griffith does for seventh-century England through the young life of the future St. Hilda of Whitby, in her majestic novel Hild [Kindle], out today from Farrar, Straus. 

Dorothy Allison: "Nicola Griffith is an awe-inspiring visionary. Hild is not just one of the best historical novels I have ever read—I think it’s one of the best novels, period. It sings with pitch-perfect emotional resonance, and I damn well believe in this woman and everyone she engages." 

Starred Booklist: "In short, Griffith triumphs with this intelligent, beautifully written, and meticulously researched novel."

Neal Stephenson: "You will never think of them as the Dark Ages again. Nicola Griffith’s command of the era is worn lightly and delivered as a deeply engaging plot. Her insight into human nature and eye for telling detail is as keen as that of the extraordinary Hild herself. The novel resonates to many of the same chords as Beowulf, the legends of King Arthur, The Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones—to the extent that Hild begins to feel like the classic on which those books are based."

Karen Jay Fowler: "What a fabulous book! Hild has all the joys of historical fiction—transportation into a strange, finely detailed world—along with complex characters and a beautiful evocation of the natural world. But the tensions of the gathering plot make Hild feel like a quick read—too quick! Truly, truly remarkable."

Ariel Levy's "Thanksgiving in Mongolia"

The most devastating queer essay you'll read today: Intrepid lesbian New Yorker reporter Ariel Levy at 38 went alone to Ulaanbaatar when she was five months pregnant and five years married, and suddenly she was neither. She writes, "People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself. I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself. And I liked the idea of telling my kid, “When you were inside me, we went to see the edge of the earth.”

Mixed with the inescapable foreboding are lighter details like a twelve-year expat consultant from Tennessee telling her, "You’re talking about an economy based on yak meat and goat hair." She goes to "an underground gay bar called 100 Per Cent—which could have been in Brooklyn, except that everyone in Mongolia still smoked indoors. I liked sitting in a booth in a dark room full of smoking, gay Mongolians, but my body was feeling strange." 

Two pages later her happiness is shattered and she thinks, "this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me." Read it.

So far, her only book is Female Chauvinist Pigs [Kindle].

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.

Born June 3: Wilfred Thesiger

A leading figure of the golden age of exploration, it's appropriate that Sir Wilfred Thesiger was awarded the Lawrence Medal and the Burton Medal, not least because they were all gay. Born in 1910 to a British diplomat in Abssynia, Thesiger was educated at Eton and Oxford where his only happy times were vacations (and beating Cambridge as captain of the boxing team). On his first college break he worked for his passage on a steamer to Constantinople. Returning, he found a personal invitation from Haile Selassie to attend his coronation as Emperor. On his second summer break, he worked a fishing trawler off Iceland. At 23 he went back to Africa, became assistant district commissioner in the Sudan, and learned to fast ride camels with the local men, adopting their clothes and diet. Said to call any invention more modern than the steam engine "an abomination," he hated the first world's intrusion on remote wilderness and peoples. In WWII, he fought with the Sudan defense force against Mussolini's Italians and with the Syrians against the Vichy French. A job with what became the United Nation's anti-locust program took him to the Arabia's famed Empty Quarter prompting his best work, Arabian Sands (now with an introduction by Rory Stewart), which the Guardian recently called "probably the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever." Thesiger's other masterpiece, The Marsh Arabs [Kindle] (introduced by Jon Lee Anderson), covers the seven years he lived off and on with the people of southern Iraq. His travels in Asia with the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and the Pamirs, are recounted in Among the Mountains. Chances are his autobiography Life Of My Choice avoids his homosexuality, but his gay side is somewhat integrated in Alexander Maitland's Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Thesiger died at 93 in 2003, leaving 23,000 negatives of his photographs to Oxford. See 59 of his images here and one below.

20 Year Old Gay Climber Tops Everest, His Sixth of Seven Summits

Way back in 2008, when he was 15, Cason Crane summited Kilimanjaro with his mother, Isabella (above). After graduating cum laude from Choate, he took a year off to create Rainbow Summits, an initiative to raise money and awareness for the Trevor Project by climbing the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent.

Last week on May 21 he conquered Everest (right). Cason, the sole Yank, summited with dudes from Austria, Sweden, Iceland, and Australia, on a team led by New Zealanders Dean Staples, making his ninth summit, and three-timer Lydia Bradey who in 1988 became the first woman to ascend without an oxygen tank.

Everest was to be Cason's crowning seventh summit, but last August his team got to 17,200' on Denali and weather shut them down. A 27-day excursion for naught. (Day 19: "Another weather day…in protest of the bad weather, I am not going to write a blog post. Take that, weather gods.") 

Cason will attempt Denali again this summer, between June 15 - July 15, and if he makes it to the top, he will become the first openly gay climber and the fifth youngest climber to do all Seven Summits. About 350 people have accomplished this, but only 120 have done the eight peaks that Cason will do, summiting twice in Australasia, to cover both Carstensz and Kosciusko.

He starts Princeton in the fall. Follow him on twitter or fb.

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.

 

Born February 1: Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Langston Hughes

In a fair literary universe, adventure lesbian author Lucy Jane Bledsoe's books would outsell Pam Houston and Cheryl Strayed. Instead, Lucy's vivid exploration of three women's relationships and the meaning of home, set in an Antarctic research station conjured so astutely you'll think you've lived there yourself, The Big Bang Symphony, was released in May 2010, became a finalist for four book prizes, but still is not available in paperback or as an eBook. Lucy's first novel, Working Parts, about adult literacy, won the Stonewall Book Award in 1998. She is a five-time Lammy finalist, for those two books, her two other novels, This Wild Silence and Biting the Apple, and her anthology Lesbian Travels. Her own trips are collected in a wonderful book called The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic, and she's also written half a dozen titles for kids. Maybe 2013 is her year. Last month she won the top prize in the Saturday Evening Post's Great American Fiction Contest for her story "Wolf," about a couple in Yellowstone. Editorial Director Steven Slon says, "This terrific story is a tribute to human passion and to the American adventurer spirit. It's also a powerful evocation of the call of the wild." 

 

Celebrating "Langston Hughes, poet," as we must, neglects the bulk of his creative work: eleven plays, the screenplay of Way Down South (released the same year as Gone with the Wind), novels (starting with Not Without Laughter), forty-seven short stories (which often paid his rent), a series of books showcasing famous black Americans' accomplishments, six children's books, bold political writings, and two volumes of autobiography that as much as anything focus on Langston Hughes, traveler. His first memoir covers Harlem and Paris (after his scattered Midwestern childhood with visits to his father, an attorney who left the family to live in Mexico); and his second, I Wonder as I Wander, recounts his journeys in Russia, Turkmenistan, China, Japan, Cuba, Haiti, and Spain during their civil war. Of course his genius most often reveals itself in his poetry, which emphasizes a purity and simplicity like Whitman's, but unlike Whitman his directness of language does not extend to openness about his sexuality. Hughes's most cited homoerotic poems such as "Young Sailor" and "Joy", safeguarded with women or "she," are more cautious than the Calamus cycle. Below, listen to him read his response to Whitman's "I Hear America Singing." He died at 65 in 1967 and his ashes are interred beneath the lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th St. Long degayed, Hughes' homosexuality is the centerpiece of Isaac Julien's film on historical black gay experience amid entrenched homophobia, Looking for Langston.

Born January 9: Richard Halliburton

In the 1920s and 30s, three names conjured the glories of adventure travel: Lindbergh, Halliburton, and Earhart. Like Theodore Roosevelt, Richard Halliburton was a small-framed, sickly child and compensated with a life of pushing himself to extremes. He climbed the Matterhorn, made the first recorded winter summit of Mount Fuji, and took the first aerial photo of Everest. In 1931, with a hired pilot, he circled the globe in an open cockpit biplane, the Flying Carpet, (though they put the plane on ships to cross the Atlantic and Pacific), giving first flights to royalty in Iran and Iraq, the White Rajah's wife in India, and the chief of the Nyak, who paid him in shrunken heads.

Always thirsting for adventure, Halliburton bent local laws well past custom and legality: He tried to enter Mecca, was jailed for photographing the guns at Gibraltar, hid within the Taj Mahal to spend an evening alone, savoring the solitude at sunset and swimming in the pool by moonlight. He registered his body as a ship, the S.S. Halliburton, in order to enter the Panama Canal and remains the only person to have swum its length, 48 miles. Thoroughly original, he twice retraced other travelers' trips in tribute, swimming the Hellespont like his hero Byron and crossing the Alps by elephant as Hannibal had in 218 BC.

As for pushing boundaries at home, Halliburton was likely lovers with the gay movie star Ramón Novarro, and, even more openly, he commissioned an architect to build his cantilevered home, nicknamed Hangover House, in Laguna Beach with three bedrooms: one each for himself, his boyfriend Paul Mooney, and Mooney's boyfriend, the architect. It is the basis for Heller House in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead [Kindle].

In March 1939, now enormously famous, Halliburton, Mooney, and an experienced crew left Hong Kong in their custom Chinese junk, the Sea Dragon, to make landfall at the San Francisco World's Fair. Exactly three weeks out, they hit a typhoon and perished. Much earlier, he had written to his father:

And when my time comes to die, I’ll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain and thrills—any emotion that any human ever had—and I’ll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed...

Ever mindful of his public persona, Halliburton occasionally peppered his narratives with nameless, entirely made-up female love interests, yet he lingers over male beauty, and his private letters are explicitly gay. His many travel books include The Royal Road to Romance and Seven League Boots. He dedicated his first adventure book to his roommates at Princeton, whose “sanity, consistency, and respectability” inspired him to flee.

Blond Ambition

  

One of my all-time favorite books, ever, is Kon-Tiki, Thor Heyerdahl's account of his 1947 attempt to float five thousand miles across the Pacific from Peru to Polynesia. Bucking universal scorn and probable doom, he and five friends built their raft by hand using only materials available to early South Americans. A documentary of their magnificent adventures already won an Oscar in 1951 [clip after the jump]. This week Toronto screens a new feature begging the timeless question, What would you do stuck on a raft for four months with six blond lean-muscled Norwegian men?