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.

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 March 21: Zackie Achmat

Born of Indian parents in South Africa in 1962, Zackie Achmat grew up in the "coloured" community and was always a rebel for equality. By the time he was ten he was a total bookworm and gained special permission to use the whites-only library for reading, but he was still prohibited from using its restrooms. When he was fourteen, during the Sowetto Uprisings, he set his school on fire to convince his classmates to join the boycott. As an active member of the illegal ANC for years, he was jailed many times before apartheid ended and the ANC's Nelson Mandela was elected president in 1994. That same year Achmat co-founded the National Coalition for Gay and Lesbian Equality, and in 1996 South Africa had become the first nation whose Bill of Rights bans discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Building on lessons from the gay rights and anti-apartheid movements, in 1998 Achmat created the Treatment Action Campaign [TAC] to fight aids through prevention, to increase awareness, and to get medicines to the poor. Immediately he gained worldwide attention by announcing he was HIV+ and would refuse to take his drugs until they were available to all South Africans. Among the many ways TAC has changed lives is by helping to erode the shame and stigma of HIV, proclaiming one's positive status with bold t-shirts rather than hiding or lying. Winning numerous legal and public relations victories against the government and international pharmaceutical corporations, Achmat finally resumed his meds when he was very ill in August 2004, anticipating correctly that in November the Ministry of Health would announce its plan to distribute ARVs widely. In 2003 The New Yorker ran an excellent profile of him written by Samantha Power and the following year the American Friends Service Committee nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize (which went to Kenya's Wangari Maathai). In 2008, he married Dalli Weyers, 25, in a wedding where the traditional caketop figures of a bride and groom were replaced by a king and a cowboy. They divorced in 2011. Zackie appeared in Dylan Mohan Gray's 2013 aids pharma documentary Fire in the Blood which has since become the longest running documentary feature in India.

Salvation Army at New Directors, New Films

Yesterday was the public onsale for Abdellah Taïa's movie of his Moroccan gay novel Salvation Army, selected for New Directors, New Films on March 27 (Walter Reade) and March 28 (MoMA). Taïa will speak at both screenings. NDNF writes,

"Like the book it’s based on—Abdellah Taïa’s own 2006 landmark novel—the Moroccan author’s directorial debut is a bracing, deeply personal account of a young gay man’s awakening that avoids both cliché and the trappings of autobiography. First seen as a 15-year-old, Abdellah (Saïd Mrini) habitually sneaks away from his family’s crowded Casablanca home to engage in sexual trysts with random men in abandoned buildings. A decade later, we find Abdellah (now played by Karim Ait M’hand) on scholarship in Geneva, involved with an older Swiss professor (Frédéric Landenberg). With a clear-eyed approach, devoid of sentimentality, this wholly surprising bildungsfilm explores what it means to be an outsider, and with the help of renowned cinematographer Agnès Godard, Taïa finds a film language all his own: at once rigorous and poetic, worthy of Bresson in its concreteness and lucidity."

You should also read his autobiographical gay novel An Arab Melancholia which spans twenty years in Rabat, Paris, and Cairo.

Bitter Eden

The same week I learned the devoted publisher has wanted to secure the rights to this somewhat autobiographical queer novel for more than ten years, one of my very favorite writers emailed me praising the book and suggesting it for Thebes: Three soldiers (two British, one South African) are POWs during WWII, first in Italy then in Germany.

Finally out yesterday in the US, Bitter Eden [Kindle] arrives with a starred Kirkus review: "The taboo of homosexuality—the accusations, the denials, the flaunting and acquiescing—is a primary concern of the novel, as gay and straight and all that lies in between struggle in close quarters and constant deprivation... What begins as an unforgettable account of prisoners of war ends as something surprising: a love story." Christos Tsiolkas says, "Bitter Eden is one of those rare books that is both tender and tough, that is a punch to the stomach and a caress to the face. This is an exploration of men in war, and though it rings absolutely true to the experiences of Allied prisoners in the World War II, it also transcends the specific and the historic to be a moving and unsettling chronicle of the ferocious bonds and dangerous conflicts that emerge when any group of men are pushed to extremes. Bitter Eden is earthy and lyrical, caustic and moving. It is a thrilling read."

The author published his first novel at 17 and this, his fourth novel, at 82. Born in 1920 to an Egyptian father and Turkish mother, he was orphaned at two and raised by a Methodist couple who renamed him John Carlton and forgot to mention he wasn't white. He changed his name first to Jouza Joubert, then to Ismail Joubert. He was a POW during WWII and much later served time in the same prison where and while Nelson Mandela was held. Banned for five years and forbidden to write, he used the name Tatamkhulu Afrika under which he won many prizes for his poetry and essays. Two weeks after publishing Bitter Eden he died of injuries from being struck by a car.

Failing at Home, American Antigay Zealots Win Overseas

Losing so many recent battles in the US, American antigay Evangelicals are taking their hate to countries with more receptive audiences, especially in Africa, South America, and the former Soviet Union. You know about the meddling in Uganda and Nigeria but did you realize Scott Lively toured fifty cities throughout Russia denouncing gaydom and urging them to criminalize LGBT advocacy. Last week Alex Seitz-Wald (left) reported on the growing export of Evangelical homophobia and today he talked to NPR's the Takeaway. Listen here. 

US Premiere of Abdellah Taïa's Debut Film, Salvation Army

Even in France, financiers wouldn't back producer Claude Kunetz's plan to let Abdellah Taïa adapt and direct his novel Salvation Army, possibly out of anti-Arab, anti-North African prejudice or possibly because the first 40 minutes are about a fifteen-year-old boy who has sex with older men. Finally they received modest funding, and got Claire Denis's star cinematographer Agnes Godard, and finished the 80-minute movie in time to screen at Venice and Toronto. Thursday night it had its US premiere at the Palm Springs Film Festival (with one more screening tomorrow at the Regal 9 at 12:30pm.) The Hollywood Reporter liked the "authentic" first half and disliked the confusing second half in Geneva. Variety complained of the entire movie's "airlessness," saying, Taïa "botches his adaptation of his own excellent novel, translated here with a distancing coldness not helped by emotionless perfs." But the critic does steer viewers seeking gay Arab films to Maher Sabry’s All My Life and Samer Daboul’s Out Loud.

Salvation Army will be released in France later this year and will screen at festivals in Reykjavik, Namur, Sao Paulo, Geneva, and beyond. The novelist says his "dream was always to become one day a filmmaker" and he will continue to make movies.

Awards Season Begins with One Win for Dallas Buyers Club

The New York Film Critics Circle named David O Russell's American Hustle the year's best movie and one of its stars, Jennifer Lawrence, best supporting actress. Best supporting actor is Jared Leto, who plays the gay drag queen Rayon in Dallas Buyers Club. Best actor is Robert Redford for All Is Lost and best actress is Cate Blanchett for Blue Jasmine. Best director is Steve McQueen for 12 Years a Slave and best foreign film Blue Is the Warmest Color. Full list here.

The National Board of Review announced their very different winners, with best movie and director wins for Her by Spike Jonze, and the top acting awards to Bruce Dern for Nebraska and Emma Thompson for Saving Mr Banks, and supporting wins for Will Forte (Nebraska) and Octavia Spencer (Fruitvale Station). The NBR names its Top 10 films and Top 10 independents, which includes Dallas Buyers Club, Mud, and The Place Beyond the Pines. Full list.

The Oscars have narrowed the documentary category to these fifteen films. Still in the running: God Loves Uganda about Evangelicals' antigay crusade there, as well as The Armstrong Lie, Blackfish, Dirty Wars, Pussy Riot, The Square, Stories We Tell, Tim's Vermeer, and 20 Feet from Stardom, among others.

Born November 22: André Gide

Alice Munro, 82, isn't going to Stockholm to collect her Nobel Prize next month, and in December 1947 neither did "the venerable master of French literature whose genius has so profoundly influenced our time," André Gide, 78, who was too ill to travel. (Read his full citation here.) The award capped a rollercoaster career that began with the publication of a novella when Gide was twenty-two in 1891, reached successive peaks with The Immoralist(1902), Strait Is the Gate (1909), and Lafcadio's Adventures (1914); plummeted with the publication of Corydon (1920), his nonfiction book in praise of homosexuality'; soared again with his best novel, The Counterfeiters [Kindle] (1925); and immediately shocked certain segments of the public again with his autobiography, If It Die (1926) with his joyful memories of teenage masturbating with the concierge's son under the dining room table or his adult lovemaking with an Arab youth on a sand dune in Algeria. While in North Africa, Gide also befriended Oscar Wilde. The following year he published Travels in the Congo, his greatly influential attack on French colonialism. That trip marked the end of his eleven year relationship with Marc Allégret, who had eloped with him when he was fifteen or sixteen and Gide was forty-seven. (Allégret's father had been the best man at Gide's never-consummated wedding and wasn't bothered at all by their affair; Gide's wife, however, didn't like being left behind and she burned all of his letters in retaliation. Marc Allégret went on to direct more than fifty films.) After spending the war and post-war years in Tunis, Gide returned to Paris where he died in 1951. In 1952, the Catholic church put all of his works on their Index of Forbidden Books.

August 1920: William Butler Yeats, Marc Allégret, and Gide photographed by Lady Ottoline Morrell

Born November 12: Damon Galgut

Damon Galgut had major life experiences earlier than you: Cancer at age six, with prolonged hospital stays in intense pain; his first published novel written at seventeen; and South Africa's premiere literary award, previously won by Brink, Coetzee, and Gordimier, before he was thirty. It was not until he was forty, in 2003, that he broke out internationally, with his fifth novel The Good Doctor, shortlisted for the Booker and the IMPAC Dublin. He followed that with The Impostor, and in 2010 published a lovely "novel" recounting three of his long solo walking trips, with gay undercurrents, In a Strange Room [Kindle], again shortlisted for the Booker. The typical Galgut protagonist is an intelligent, isolated man struggling to connect and so is this one, named Damon Galgut. In 2011's Band of Thebes poll, Sarah Waters wrote, "One of the most impressive and affecting books I've read in the past couple of years is Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room. Three linked short narratives follow a restless protagonist across a series of African and Asian landscapes as he continually searches for and fails to find an attachment to people and to places. A beautiful, powerful novel about longing and loss, of opportunities missed and desire endlessly thwarted."

Mia Couto Wins $50,000 Neustadt Literature Prize

That itchy feeling you should be reading more widely? Scratch it with Mia Couto, the Portuguese writer from Mozambique, who has just won the Neustadt Prize worth $50,000. His gods are the magic realists of Brazil and Colombia, so do not be surprised that his brief novels are narrated by a dead man (Under the Frangipani) or an eleven-year-old boy who believes his father's lie that they are the last five people on Earth (The Tuner of Silences). Two of his books have been made into movies, Sleepwalking Land and A River Called Time.

The Neustadt is a pretty big deal, awarded only every other year, and its Susan Lucci is Haruki Murakami. Although he has lost three times, some recent winners remain far more obscure to American readers: Assia Djebar, Nuruddin Farah, Alvaro Mutis, Patricia Grace, and the poet Duo Duo.

Born October 8: James Magruder, Urvashi Vaid

After earning his Ph.D. at the Yale School of Drama, translating the finest French plays, and writing the book for Broadway's misnamed musical The Triumph of Love, James Magruder jumped to fiction. His great debut novel about a horny gay teen growing up with religious parents in Florida in the 1970s, Sugarless [Kindle], was a finalist for a Lammy and for the Saroyan International Prize for Writing, and it earned him strings of adjectives from famous writers: "important, funny, heartbreaking, and beautiful" (Tony Kushner) and "compassionate, funny, wrenching, and real" (Amy Bloom). After several publishing delays, his story collection Let Me See It will come out next May. Follow him on Facebook for glimpses of the extraordinary year he and his longtime partner Steve Bolton are spending in East Africa.

 

Born in New Delhi, Urvashi Vaid moved with her family to Potsdam, New York in 1966 when she was eight; attended her first anti-war rally when she was eleven; and gave her first political speech, supporting McGovern, when she was twelve. Basically, she's never stopped working for broad issues of peace and social justice, especially for LGBT rights within a larger vision of fairness and equality. After receiving her law degree, she joined the ACLU's prisons project, then began her long association with the NGLTF, whose Policy Institute she headed for many years, both before and after a break to write her book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. For five years she was deputy director of a unit of the Ford Foundation's peace and social justice program, and from 2005 to 2010 she was Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, whose dual missions are, srsly, rights and protections for Great Apes and LGBT humans. Last year she released a collection of essays, Irresistible Revolution: Confronting Race, Class and the Assumptions of LGBT Politics, which ubiquitous blurbist Tony Kushner called," evivifying, incisive, provocative, scrupulously argued, and beautifully articulated." For a long, funny time she's been partners with Kate Clinton, dividing their time between Manhattan and Provincetown. (Photo by Jurek Wajdowicz.)

Born September 4: Mary Renault, George Hoyningen-Huene

After receiving her degree from Oxford in 1928, Mary Renault became a nurse in Bristol, aiding soldiers injured at Dunkirk and later assisting in the brain surgery ward, leading to her first novel, Purposes of Love (1939), set in a contemporary hospital. She knew the subject well, having fallen in love with another nurse, Julie Mullard, who would be her life partner for fifty years. Renault’s first five novels each had contemporary settings and vaguely or overtly lesbian themes, the strongest in her third novel, The Friendly Young Ladies (1943). Her fourth book earned her $150,000 from MGM, which Renault and Mullard used to leave the repressive, post-war, antigay atmosphere of England for the relative freedom of South Africa. (They participated in many Black Sash events, for white women against apartheid, begun in 1955.) Established there, Renault wrote The Charioteer (1953), her first novel with a male protagonist, a gay WWII soldier who discovers that his hidden love for an older former schoolmate is returned. Her artistic breakthrough came with her next novel, again with a gay male protagonist, but set in the more open world of Ancient Greece,
which would be her hallmark for the rest of her writing career, in seven additional novels, a biography, and a study of the Persian Wars. Two of those novels tell the life story of Theseus, who in Greek mythology killed the Minotaur thanks to Ariadne’s help, and three other novels cover the life of Alexander the Great, including one narrated by his lover Bagoas, The Persian Boy [Kindle] (1972), her most praised work. It ranks 32nd on Publishing Triangle's list of the 100 best lgbt novels. In 2010, Renault was shortlisted for the Lost Booker prize for her 1970 novel about bisexual Alexander the Great, Fire from Heaven [Kindle]. (The award was given to another historical novel, J.G. Farrell's Troubles, about Ireland after WWI.)

In January, Daniel Mendelsohn published an essay in The New Yorker about how reading Renault's novels led him to realize he's gay. He wrote her a letter and their correspondence lasted eight years.

 

The only son born to a Baltic nobleman and the daughter of an American diplomat, Baron George Hoyningen-Huene was a teen when his family fled the Russian Revolution, leaving St. Petersburg first for London then for Paris. By twenty-five he was the top photographer at French Vogue, creating iconic images like this one of Josephine Baker. At thirty he met his younger boyfriend, the photographer and eager nude model below, Horst P. Horst. Four years later he moved to New York, where Hoyningen-Huene shot for Harpers Bazaar and published two books on Greece and Egypt, and Horst moved in with Valentine Lawford (with whom he stayed fifty-three years and raised an adopted son, Richard Horst). Hoyningen-Huene headed for Hollywood and his stunning star portraits -- of Dietrich, Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Garbo at 46 -- went deeper than surface glamor. Beyond studio stills, he also worked on films, most notably several collaborations with Cukor, choosing lighting, colors, and designing the title sequence. He died in Los Angeles at sixty-eight. Get William Ewing's book The Photographic Art of Hoyningen-Huene.

Born August 1: Yves Saint Laurent

Are any three letters as elegant as YSL? When he was seventeen, Yves Saint Laurent began working for Christian Dior, who referred to him as his dauphin. When Dior died suddenly four years later, Saint Laurent was made head of the fashion house, but soon he was conscripted to serve in the Algerian war. Hazed by his rougher fellow soldiers, the fragile couture artiste lasted twenty days before he had a nervous breakdown. The army tried to cure him with electroshock therapy. When he returned to Dior, he found he had been replaced. He started his own house, giving rise to some of the most famous clothes in history: the Mondrian dress, "le Smoking," the tuxedo for women, the designer leather jacket, the sheath dress, the gold cape. For nearly twenty years he and his business manager Pierre Bergé were lovers, and, after they broke up they continued living together for another ten years. In 1983, Saint Laurent became the first living designer to be honored by the Metropolitan Museum of Art with a retrospective. In 1993, he and Bergé sold the company for $600 million. After his retirement in 2002, Saint Laurent spent much of his time in Marrakech, where he restored and opened to the public the vivid gardens originally designed by French expat Jacques Majorelle. He died in June 2008 (most newspapers degayed his obituary, calling Bergé, who announced his death, "a friend" or omitting him) and his ashes are interred in the garden. At his funeral in Paris, Catherine Deneuve read a poem by Walt Whitman. The Pierre Berge-Yves Saint Laurent Foundation, a powerhouse in aids research and funding, also operates his haute couture studio as a gallery showcasing fashion. Two great photo books are Yves Saint Laurent and Yves Saint Laurent: Style.

Why Is Obama Praising Bush on His Global HIV/AIDS Program?

Pathetic. Of all the half-straws to grasp at in his remarks at yesterday's dedication of the Bush Library in Dallas, why did Obama highlight Bush's global hiv/aids initiative? And why did NPR use this as their soundbyte? Bush's PEPFAR program took money away from NGOs and threw billions to antigay evangelical groups whose solution to the crisis is to promote "abstinence until marriage." Deaths from the disease are said to have decreased under the program but infection rates remain the same. Or new infections are rising. Some close observers have felt the faith-based approach was more about promoting religion and recruiting non-Christians than about teaching prevention to those most at risk. Cary Alan Johnson cites officials' "stunning disregard for the needs of men who have sex with men and other hiv-vulnerable groups." Read his 2007 report "Off the Map: How HIV Programs Are Failing Same-Sex Practicing People in Africa" or Scott Everertz' 2010 paper, "How Ideologogy Trumped Science: Why PEPFAR Has Failed To Meet Its Potential." 

Other point: It's time to end the nonsense of individual presidential libraries. A president's papers belong to nation and ought to be housed in the Library of Congress or the National Archives, not these expensive shrines to vanity.

Born January 6: Juan Goytisolo

Praised by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Edmund White, and according to the Guardian, "widely acknowledged as Spain's greatest living writer," Juan Goytisolo has lived in self-imposed exile in Marrakech since the 1960s. (He is 82 today and now spends part of each year in Paris.) His more than 30 books make clear why he left his native land: Franco, the post-Franco government, the Catholic church, middle class bourgeois attitudes, and homophobia. Also, he loves Arabs, particularly illiterate or uneducated men whose gayness is not marked by effeminate behavior but a hyper virility. Depending on which critics you ask, his masterpiece is either his two-volume memoir, groundbreaking for among other things its frankness about gay sex, or his trilogy Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. Goytisolo's 2005 novel, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, recounts in his typically subversive style the ribald sexual antics of a gay priest. His most recent book is Exiled from Almost Everywhere [Kindle]. Last year he was awarded the $65,000 Prix Formentor.

Gale and Van Der Merwe Tie for Green Carnation Prize

Ultimately, even with their delay, the Green Carnation Prize judges couldn't agree on a single winner, so the 2012 award is a tie between veteran Patrick Gale's A Perfectly Good Man and newcomer Andre Carl van der Merwe's Moffie [Kindle].

Gale's sixteenth novel looks at the life of an Anglican priest in Cornwall who apparently assists in the suicide of a paralysed former rugby player.

Van der Merwe's debut novel is about a sensitive, gay nineteen year-old conscripted into the Angola Bush War.

 The shortlist was:

• Carol Anshaw, Carry the One [Kindle]
• Patrick Gale, A Perfectly Good Man
• Philip Hensher, Scenes from Early Life
• Kerry Hudson, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma 
• Andre Carl Van Der Merwe, Moffie [Kindle]
• Edmund White, Jack Holmes and His Friend [Kindle]

Previous winners are Catherine Hall's The Proof of Love last year and Christopher Fowler's Paperboy in 2010.

The New Yorker Profiles Frank Mugisha

Finally getting the international recognition he deserves after winning an RFK Human Rights award last fall, Ugandan gay activist Frank Mugisha is profiled in the current double issue of The New Yorker. It's another chapter in staff writer Alexis Okeowo's forthcoming book about LGBT Africa. Two weeks ago she compiled a brief list of the 8 Most Fascinating Africans of 2012, mandatory reading for anyone stuck in an all-US/Europe news cycle. Meet Malawi's lady president, Nigerian pop star twin brothers, Cameroon's gay rights lawyer Alice Nkom, and a 19 year-old college girl who, between classes, is a member of Parliament. 

Abstract says: "LETTER FROM UGANDA about activist Frank Mugisha. On a breezy October night two years ago, Frank Mugisha was having a beer with friends in Kampala when he was shown a local tabloid called Rolling Stone, which had outed him and ninety-nine other gay Ugandans. The next morning, Mugisha—who leads Sexual Minorities Uganda, orSMUG, the country’s largest gay-rights organization—scanned the article and e-mailed it to other gay-rights activists and lawyers. The fallout had been immediate. David Kato, at that time Uganda’s best-known gay activist, began receiving threats, and was murdered three months later. In 2009, a year before the article was published, David Bahati, a Ugandan politician, had introduced an anti-homosexuality bill to parliament. When the Rolling Stone article came out, LGBT activists, feeling under attack from the bill, which had not yet been put to a vote, decided to sue the paper for defamation and inciting violence. SMUG led the initiative. In the past two years, SMUG has documented more than fifty cases of discrimination, harassment, and violence against LGBTs in Uganda. In May, gay-activist groups, under SMUG’s leadership, opened the country’s first LGBT health clinic. Ugandans have traditionally been indifferent to homosexuality, as long as it stays in the closet. International disapproval of the Bahati bill has allowed Mugisha and his fellow-activists to strengthen the Ugandan gay-rights movement. The efforts of anti-gay advocates like Bahati are partly informed by outside forces—in particular, by American evangelical missionaries."

Born November 12: Damon Galgut

Damon Galgut had major life experiences earlier than you: Cancer at age six, with prolonged hospital stays in intense pain; his first published novel written at seventeen; and South Africa's premiere literary award, previously won by Brink, Coetzee, and Gordimier, before he was thirty. It was not until he was forty, in 2003, that he broke out internationally, with his fifth novel The Good Doctor, shortlisted for the Booker and the IMPAC Dublin. He followed that with The Impostor, and in 2010 published a lovely "novel" recounting three of his long solo walking trips, In a Strange Room, again shortlisted for the Booker. The typical Galgut protagonist is an intelligent, isolated man struggling to connect and so is this one, named Damon Galgut. In last year's Band of Thebes poll, Sarah Waters wrote, "One of the most impressive and affecting books I've read in the past couple of years is Damon Galgut's In a Strange Room. Three linked short narratives follow a restless protagonist across a series of African and Asian landscapes as he continually searches for and fails to find an attachment to people and to places. A beautiful, powerful novel about longing and loss, of opportunities missed and desire endlessly thwarted." 

Green Carnation Prize Shortlist: Anshaw, Gale, Hensher, Hudson, White

The Green Carnation Prize for LGBT fiction has announced the 2012 shortlist spanning three continents:

• Carry the One, Carol Anshaw (American, 4^th novel)
• A Perfectly Good Man, Patrick Gale (British, 16^th novel)
• Scenes from Early Life, Philip Hensher (British, 8^th novel)
• Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma, Kerry Hudson (debut)
• Moffie, Andre Carl Van Der Merwe (South African, debut)
• Jack Holmes and His Friend, Edmund White (American, 10^th novel)

Cut from last month's longlist of thirteen are Alison Bechdel, Bill Clegg, Stella Duffy, Patrick Flannery, Jess Richards, Keith Ridgway, and Sandi Toksvig.

The winner will be announced in London on December 12.