Band of Thebes

Born July 11: Tab Hunter, Vito Russo

Rock Hudson, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Farley Granger, Tab Hunter: Was any heartthrob movie star straight in the straitlaced 1950s? Hunter and Perkins dated each other for several years while the press reported phony stories that Hunter was involved with Debbie Reynolds or Natalie Wood. Born Arthur Kelm, he eventually made more than 50 movies after being rechristened "Tab Hunter" by his agent Henry Willson, a gay man who also handled Rock Hudson, Troy Donahue, Robert Wagner, and loads of others; read Willson's disturbing biography. Hunter's triumphs were Damn Yankees, Lafayette Escadrille, and That Kind of Woman. He recorded a pop song, Young Love, which was the #1 hit in the U.S. for a month in 1957, and made many subsequent albums. He had a short-lived television show and a famous flop on Broadway, co-starring with Tallulah Bankhead in Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, which closed after five performances. Smaller movies followed. In the 1980s he had a comeback, starring twice with Divine, first in Polyester, then in Lust in the Dust, which he co-produced with Allan Glaser. Hunter did not come out until September 2003, when at 72, he sold a book proposal for a memoir that would discuss his life candidly. Tab Hunter Confidential [Kindle] appeared in 2005 and revealed he and his producer Allan Glaser have been romantic partners for twenty-nine years. They live in Montecito. Here's a recent photo of Hunter, Glaser, and John Waters.

Russo For ten years, from 1972 to 1982, Vito Russo toured the country giving what would later be a PowerPoint presentation about the portrayal of lesbians and gay men in the media. His devastating book on the subject, The Celluloid Closet, published in 1981 and revised in 1987, was years ahead of its time and remains essential reading today. The book was made into a documentary in 1996, six years after his death from aids. Russo’s sharp critique of the industry led him to co-found the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). It is hard to imagine the principled visionary connected to today’s GLAAD, which endorsed such overblown caricature-fests as Boat Trip and praised I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry despite
the movie’s parade of stereotypes. Finally, Russo has been given the biography he deserves in Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo [Kindle] and in the documentary Vito. 

White Crane released two new volumes of Vito's uncollected writings Out Spoken: A Vito Russo Reader - Reel One [Kindle], which covers his film essays, including reams of reviews and great, early interviews with Almodovar, Almendros, Anger, Bette, Debbie, Lily, Rhoda, Gandalf, and Tennessee among others, while Out Spoken: Reel Two [Kindle] covers politics and aids.

The Normal Heart Earns 16 Emmy Nominations

Nice day for Ryan Murphy (hatted) whose programs earned at least 34 Primetime Emmy nominations this morning. American Horror Story: Coven scored 17, Glee got 1, and his adaptation of The Normal Heart for HBO earned 16 noms for best tv movie, directing, writing, editing, casting, cinematography, costumes, hair, makeup, prosthetic makeup, lead actor, supporting actress, and a fourway among supporting actors (openly gay Matt Bomer, openly gay Jim Parsons, openly gay Joe Mantello, and Alfred Molina).

For its fifth season, Modern Family earned another 10 Emmy nominations. It won best comedy series in 2010, 2011, 2012, and 2013.

Last year's big gay HBO movie Behind the Candelabra attracted a lot more viewers and one fewer Emmy nominations at 15.

Born June 11: Allan Gurganus

Blessed with a runaway blockbuster selling two million copies, cursed with his biggest success coming with his debut, Allan Gurganus has seen his 1989 first novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All adapted in 1994 into a hit television miniseries nominated for nine Emmys, winning four, and in 2003 become a Broadway flop, closing after one official performance. Fifteen years before that book, at twenty-six in 1974, with the encouragement of John Cheever, he published a story called Minor Heroism in The New Yorker, which was the first time the magazine ran fiction with an openly gay protagonist. Thankfully, the gay characters have continued, though slowly. Recipient of a Guggenheim, a Lammy, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and an Ingram Merrill award, Gurganus is not a prolific writer. It had been twelve years since his last book, the really wonderful The Practical Heart: Four Novellas from 2001, when last year he published a new collection of three novellas once again set in his Falls, North Carolina: earning strong reviews, Local Souls [and Kindle] was chosen twice on Thebes' best books survey. Before these collections, in 1997 he published his second novel, the rollicking, sad, all-gay New York saga Plays Well with Others [and Kindle], and in 1990 the story collection White People. Gurganus long ago moved back to his native North Carolina where his activism included co-founding Writers Against Jesse Helms. Today is 67 and continues to work on his still-gestating third novel, The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church.

Choreographing Gay Sex for Hollywood

You know how it is: Your phone rings and there's a producer begging you to arrange a gay orgy for Scorsese because, uh, quote, that's "not really in Marty’s wheelhouse." So you do The Wolf of Wall Street. Then Ryan Murphy asks you to get Matt Bomer and Mark Ruffalo to hook-up more naturally. One of your guides for those Normal Heart romps is Tom Bianchi's book Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975-1983. So it goes if you're Michael Arnold, the choreographer whose niche is sex scenes. Deadline interviews him about his "trust exercises" with the stars, and more. (photos: movie above, book below)

Julia Glass Brings Back Gay Protagonist from Three Junes, Sequel

Fenno McLeod, the bookstore-owning gay man who was the soul of Julia Glass's National Book Award winning debut Three Junes and returned in her second novel The Whole World Over, emerges again in her new, fifth novel, And the Dark Sacred Night [and Kindle]. Once more exploring the many forms of family, Glass tells this story in close third-person from five points of view, from nearly as many locations: New Jersey to Vermont to Cape Cod. At forty, inert Kit Noonan seeks out the father he's never known, against his mother Daphne's wishes. She was eighteen when she gave birth to him and had once been the lover of Malachy Burns, Fenno's musical friend who died of aids in Three Junes. On his quest Kit meets, among others, Malachy's mother and Fenno and his partner Walter Kinderman. The Dallas Morning News critic says, "Glass’s prose is so lovely and filled with felicitous phrases and insights that when she orchestrates a family reunion, the reader is apt to just follow along like Kit, knowing the music is bound to enthrall."

Gay Numbers, Or, Why The Normal Heart Was Not a Theatrical Release

Sure, it's pianos to t-cells, but this year's HBO Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend gay movie failed to match last year's HBO Sunday night of Memorial Day weekend gay movie. In 2013, Behind the Candelabra attracted 3.5 million viewers. Last week, The Normal Heart drew 1.4 million. After a much lamented, much hyped thirty year journey to the screen, this so-so showing will further convince studio execs and multiplex managers that the place for gay drama is television.

FWIW, even with all its awards, and its feel-good trailer, the final US gross for Dallas Buyers Club

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 23: Allen Barnett

The absolutely terrific writer Allen Barnett -- born in Joliet in 1955, studied at Loyola, moved to New York to act, died of aids at thirty-six in 1991 -- is in danger of being lost. His only book is out of print. His New York Times obituary said:

Mr. Barnett was the author of The Body and Its Dangers (1990), a collection of stories in which many of the characters are afflicted with aids. The book was a winner of a PEN/ Ernest Hemingway Citation. Mr. Barnett worked for the Gay Men's Health Crisis, helped to establish the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and taught aids education to students of English as a second language at the 23d Street Y.M.C.A.

He is survived by his mother, Margaret Barnett of Joliet, Ill.; four sisters, Debby, Cindy, Donna and Rhonda, and two brothers, Dale and Ricky.

In addition to the PEN citation (a sort of runner-up to the actual award), The Body and Its Dangers won a Ferro-Grumley and a Lammy. Publishers Weekly said,

Barnett's willingness to venture into explosively emotional terrain with empathy, candor and balance is perhaps best revealed in his stunning "The Times As It Knows Us," where men sharing a summerhouse appear to have created family within the gay community--yet even this proves illusory.

Reviewing it for the Times Meg Wolitzer wrote,

The urgency of Mr. Barnett's characters, and their simple good will toward all that is human, carry considerable weight. He portrays their awareness of fragility with such candor and melancholy that they almost seem to be holding their own hearts in their hands.

Four years ago Christopher Bram wrote about Allen in the excellent queer lit rescue project The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered [and Kindle] conceived and edited by Tom Cardamone. For serious readers, this book is a must for its 28 essays and its bibliography citing further works by more than 80 gay authors.

Born May 1: Trebor Healey

   

Last year Lambda announced Trebor Healey as an outstanding mid-career novelist and the next day he won his second Ferro-Grumley Award for his moving, road trip novel A Horse Named Sorrow [and Kindle], also a Lammy finalist and still not released in paperback. It was published in October 2012 simultaneously with his speculative YA novel Faun [and Kindle], about a boy whose changes at puberty are hairier and more pointed than yours were. Trebor won his first Ferro-Grumley, and a Violet Quill award, for Through It Came Bright Colors about 21-year-old suburban good boy Neill who breaks the stress of his family's struggles with his brother's cancer by sneaking into San Francisco for sex with men. Trebor's other books are Sweet Son of Pan, A Perfect Scar, and Queer and Catholic. His work is anthologized in many collections including Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism and multiple volumes of Best Gay Erotica: 2006, 2007, 2003, and 2004. Fifteen years before he was a PEN Emerging Voices mentor, he wrote a song for Pansy Division called Denny that foreshadows his fiction: smart, dark, quirky, angry, and funny. A West Coast child, he was born in San Francisco, grew up in Seattle, attended Berkeley, stayed in SF, spent a year in Buenos Aires, and now lives in Los Angeles.

Born April 6: Rob Epstein, Joseph Olshan

A trailblazer way ahead of the zeitgeist, Rob Epstein alone or with Jeffrey Friedman, won two Academy Awards, three Peabodys, four Emmys, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honors, for his/their gay documentaries The Times of Harvey Milk, Common Threads - Stories from the Quilt, The Celluloid Closet, and Paragraph 175. Then they decided to try narrative features, making the Allen Ginsberg obscenity trial movie Howl, starring James Franco, Jon Hamm, Jeff Daniels, and Mary-Louise Parker, which grossed $617,334. Last year saw their first non-gay feature, the biopic Lovelace starring Amanda Seyfried as the porn starlet, Sharon Stone as her monstrous mother, and again James Franco as Hugh Hefner. It grossed $356,582. (To compare, The Celluloid Closet grossed $1.4 million in 1996.) More than a year ago they announced a movie about Anita Bryant, starring Uma Thurman, which does not appear to have begun production. In December, for World Aids Day, HBO aired their new short The Battle of amfAR. In February, TCM screened their 90-minute special offering an inside look at the Oscars. Masters of the documentary, Epstein and Friedman have written a how-to book called The Art of Nonfiction Movie Making.

Auspicious from the start, in 1985, Joseph Olshan saw his first novel Clara's Heart win the London Times/Jonathan Cape Young Writers Competition, get great reviews, and three years later become a movie starring Whoopi Goldberg as a Jamaican housekeeper in Rye, New York who transforms a boy's life. In 1994, he published his best-known gay novel Nightswimmer, the story of Will Kaplan's struggles to reconnect with life, and a new boyfriend, a decade after his partner Chad either drowned or intentionally disappeared. In 2008 he released his eighth novel, The Conversion, again about a gay man untangling memory and doubt in the aftermath of his lover's death (this time in Paris and Tuscany, an American translator mourning a famous older poet). Yet again Olshan earned impressive reviews comparing his work to that of Graham Greene and Andre Aciman. His most recent book Cloudland is a mystery inspired by the real, unsolved serial murders of six women in the Connecticut River valley of New Hampshire and Vermont, where he lives. His work has been translated into sixteen languages.

Tom Spanbauer's In the City of Shy Hunters

Peter Kurth in Salon: "A master narrator and stylist… In the City of Shy Hunters is so finely crafted, Spanbauer’s characters so true to life, the New York City he remembers from the early days of the plague so exactly captured in its ‘unrelenting’ mess and glory, you’ll think you’ve been reading a modernist classic."

The Baltimore Sun: "In the City of Shy Hunters has the earmarks of a literary landmark… Its importance and originality are unmistakable."

Dennis Cooper in The Village Voice: "A big ambitious stylefest of a novel, in the mode of… Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony, Allan Gurganus’s Plays Well with Others, and Dale Peak’s Now It's Time to Say Goodbye… What distinguishes Spanbauer’s novel from the rest of the pack is his hellish, distinctive voice. Longtime fans will recognize its unusual sentences, at once choppy and strangely elegant, overtly informative but weirdly surreal, tender of phrase yet cleansed of overt emotion."

The Seattle Times: "Ambitious and compelling…a mixture of the ghastly, the hilarious and the curiously touching."

Library Journal: "Unlike other 'early aids' novels, this one acknowledges that aids touches all classes, races, religions, and sexual orientations. Excellent characters (real New Yorkers), great writing, and a new twist on an over-used plot recommend this book..."

Hold Tight Gently

Don't give in to aids history fatigue yet: This week comes Martin Duberman's highly praised Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of Aids [Kindle]. In addition to stellar blurbs from D'Emilio, Schulman, Bronski, Fullwood, Bunch, Blanche Wiesen Cook, and two-time Pulitzer winner David Levering Lewis, PW gave it a starred review:

"In this insightful history, gay rights activist and distinguished historian Duberman attempts to revive aids awareness by detailing the early years of the epidemic, particularly the period of 1981–1995. He sets the details within a framework constructed around the experiences of two men: white singer/activist Michael Callen and black poet/cultural worker Essex Hemphill, both of whom lived with AIDS for years and died at age 38. Duberman pulls no punches in capturing the chaos, uncertainty, and ignorance of the era, looking at the sexual culture that allowed the disease to thrive; he also examines the fear and contradictions of the political environment. Through interviews, writings, personal experience, and Hemphill's poetry, Duberman creates a vivid, complex snapshot of the fractured, conflicted gay community as it responded to the growing problem. It’s a sobering narrative, replete with the sexism, racism, homophobia, and false leads that marked the onset of the aids epidemic. Most importantly, it addresses the role of aids as a 'gay disease' and exposes the differences between the white and black gay communities in their responses. Duberman’s accessible, open, and honest prose reminds us that aids is not over; only the sense of urgency has waned."

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.

Born March 20: John Boswell

When Publishing Triangle ranked the 100 Best LGBT Nonfiction Books of all time, they included works by Plato, Freud, Foucault, Faderman, Duberman, et al., and their undisputed choice at #1 was Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality by John Boswell, a history professor at Yale. He was 33 when it was published in 1980. Newsweek said it was, "an astonishing work of scholarship that ranges with ease over fourteen centuries...What makes the work so exciting is not simply its content -- fascinating though that is -- but its revolutionary challenge to some of Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." Specifically, he proved that the Roman Catholic Church hadn't always been antigay, had either been indifferent to or had actually celebrated male - male love until the twelfth century. No surprise, Boswell was attacked by some conservative academics who thought he was promoting a gay agenda and by some gay people who said he was a Church apologist. Ultimately the complaints only added to the book's popularity because it was impeccably researched; it won the 1981 American Book Award for history.

After writing the first book about the widespread practice of child abandonment in medieval times, Boswell returned to gay topics and the early Church in another groundbreaking work, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. This time he argued the Church actually condoned certain male - male relationships with ceremonies that could be seen as precursors to gay marriage. Again, the book was brilliantly researched; again, the uproar; but the public debate was cut short: Boswell died of aids in December 1994 when he was 47. At Yale, he helped start the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center, and his pre-modern history courses were immensely popular, among the top ten in enrollments.

Adam Mars-Jones Essay on Coming Out in the 70s

Not breaking news from 37 years ago but a good reminder of bad times. After Adam Mars-Jones came out on New Year's Eve in the final hours of 1977, his father, a homophobic lawyer turned judge, spent days calmly cross-examining him, trying to prove his son at twenty-three was wrong about his orientation: You got a boner watching a Jacqueline Bisset movie! and Prince Charles used to be confused too until an older woman straightened him out. Later, dad changed tactics and sent Adam research about 'successful' hormone therapies: worse, the information was in his law clerk's handwriting.

In this new essay at LRB, M-J also recounts his own mistakes as when he morosely, lugubriously told his mum:

"...if I’m convinced that I played my coming-out scene to my mother in a key of sickly self-pity, then the reality was surely worse. Did I compare my sexual orientation with her own road accident a few years earlier, as something that had to be dealt with in all its damage rather than wished away? I’m afraid I did. As the years went by she must have been surprised to realise that my life contained both fun and meaning, intimacy and mild self-respect, but then so was I. Finally Mum had asked the question mothers nerve themselves to ask: would this life make me happy? I said that it would, but I couldn’t avoid a vocal wobble and an implication of martyrdom."

Mars-Jones, now 59, is the author of the gay novels The Waters of Thirst, Pilcrow, and Cedilla, as well as the story collection Monopolies of Loss and the aids anthology The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis.

Born February 25: Severo Sarduy

Why Reinaldo Arenas and not Severo Sarduy? Born six years apart, the gay Cuban exile novelists died of aids in within three years of each other. In death, Arenas became a star, then, with Julian Schnabel's film , a superstar, whereas the twenty years since Sarduy's passing in 1993 have largely erased the memory of his accomplishments. His novel Cobra won France's Prix Médicis étranger in 1972, immediately followed by four literary heavyweights, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortazar, Steven Millhauser, and Doris Lessing, but for some reason his win did not propel him to their level of international acclaim, possibly because his novel is about a kitschy trans cabaret performer at the Lyrical Theater of Dolls.

Born in 1937 in Cuba's third largest city Camagüey, he left at 23 to study in Madrid but within a month diplomatic ties frayed between Spain and Cuba, and Sarduy had to move to Paris. He stayed there for the rest of his life, though he traveled throughout Europe and met his longtime companion François Wahl on vacation in Italy. His two volumes of essays are Written on a Body and Christ on the Rue Jacob, which Booklist called, "a special book of thrilling ideas excitingly expressed."

Last year wonderful Archipelago (forever blessed for bringing Gerbrand Bakker's gay novel The Twin to American readers) published Sarduy's novel Firefly [Kindle]: "For the first time in English, Severo Sarduy's most autobiographical work, centered on two transvestites who undergo oppositional sexual surgeries (one is castrated, the other is given a new member). This convention-defying, scatological, and very funny novel is a paradise of words, 'paradisic by plenitude' (Roland Barthes)."

Three Gay Essays

In a think piece called A Plague on All These Aids Films and Stuff former editor of POZ Walter Armstrong takes a critical look at two "feel-good" documentaries How to Survive a Plague and United in Anger, the "feel real" doc We Were Here, and two dramas Dallas Buyers Club and Ryan Murphy's forthcoming The Normal Heart, among other titles. Armstrong critiques the book The AIDS Generation: Stories of Survival and Resilience but not Sean Strub's Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival.

Michelangelo Signorile writes Why Gay Rights and Trans Rights Should Be Separated.

The Guardian reports on a three-person panel discussing gay vs post-gay television, from reality shows to sitcoms to Looking. Whether or not you agree, it's interesting to consider Andrew Haigh's HBO series on a continuum with Baldwin and Isherwood. Nick Mattos said, 

"In the 50s and 60s, gay men were often depicted as these thoughtful, sad, somewhat tragic characters, with lives full of longing and struggle; Christopher Isherwood and James Baldwin come to mind as great authors of this trope. When I saw the first episode of Looking, I was struck by the degree to which longing had finally re-entered the queer narrative. Looking tackles the romantic lives of a certain subset of gay men with stunning lucidity, and particularly captures the frustrating nonsense and painful longing that often come into play in modern queer life.

Peter Hujar: Love & Lust

If, like us, you can't get to San Francisco, you can get the Fraenkel Gallery's monograph from their new show Peter Hujar: Love & Lust. Hujar was lover, friend, and mentor to David Wojnarowicz, twenty years younger, who appears here multiple times. They both died of aids, five years apart, at 53 and 37.

Annie Leibovitz says Susan Sontag's favorite photo of herself was this one Hujar took in 1975.

The gallery: "Celebrated and revered by artists, the work of Peter Hujar remains something of a public secret, but his photographs dealing with sex and eroticism, made between the years 1969 and 1986, have come to define a certain era in New York. Today they are widely considered to be his finest and most radical work. Hujar's view of the human body is uninhibited and uncompromising, but his poignant explorations of sexuality and desire also project a universal humanity; as Nan Goldin said of Hujar's nudes, "Looking at his photographs of nude men, even of a naked baby boy, is the closest I ever came to experience what it is to inhabit male flesh." This monograph, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, is the first to deal specifically with Hujar's photographs of love and lust. Captured in deeply textured black and white, these photographs present a view of human relationships that encompasses both the tender and taboo. This volume also contains an interview with author Fran Lebowitz from 1989, and newly commissioned essays by Vince Aletti and Stephen Koch."

Edmund White Returns to Paris with Inside a Pearl

After Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1995), The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2000), and the "My Europe" section of My Lives: A Memoir (2005), Edmund White today releases his new memoir Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris [Kindle]. Yes, that's a woman seated with him, and, yes, Bloomsbury has degayed the flap copy. Bookforum says, "His portrait of Marie-Claude de Brunhoff…is one of the most affecting depictions of the contours of friendship between a gay man and a straight woman in recent literarature." Don't worry, he hasn't gone soft. As sexually frank as ever, his "grand banquet comes with a delicious roster of cameos—Michel Foucault, Ned Rorem, Milan Kundera, Mary McCarthy, Lauren Bacall, Julian Barnes, Nigella Lawson, Dominique Nabokov, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Azzedine Alaia, Paloma Piccaso…But Inside a Pearl is also a dedication to the lovers and companions and night-time cruisers who get equal footing in the sweeping, Bank-to-Bank narrative…Early along the way, White tests positive for aids, and a trace of flinching mortality underlies the extravagance and dizzying spree that makes Inside the Pearl such an exhilarating ride," according to Interview. Jay Parini in the NYTBR writes, "White is wonderfully tender about his lovers, whom he treats with uniform respect, even melancholy. Indeed a sadness infuses his story . . .This narrative unfolds, for all its frenetic pleasure-seeking, in the shadow of aids . . . [A] beautifully written memoir. . . 'Inside a Pearl' refers not only to Paris, with its mists and mysteries." Library Journal: "A gossipy and enlightening account of living as a gay man among the French intelligentsia . . .White's skillful writing rescues the book from being just another account of an American in Paris." 

Always entertaining in person, he reads tonight at Three Lives in NYC.

Born February 3: Gengoroh Tagame, Gertrude Stein, Marlon Riggs

Descended from samurai, Gengoroh Tagame -- 50 today -- is the world's leading artist of gay bdsm manga. Buy his big book, The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame edited by Chip Kidd and introduced by Ed White, which Garth Greenwell reviewed for Towleroad saying, "Even in depicting violence, his drawings have an extraordinary delicacy, conveying extremes of emotion—humiliation, pain, despair, but also arousal, relief and, in one story, heartbreaking devotion—with incredible economy. The essays offered here discuss Tagame’s debt to Japanese woodblock prints, and I found myself marveling at the fine textures of his work, the gorgeous patterning of clothing, floor tiles, landscapes, the hairs on a man’s legs or the sweat on his face." Or get his new book Endless Game. His website is impressively, obviously nsfw. But in person? So sweet. Shown here last year he accepted a handshake then hug from Youth in Decline.

By the time she was four, Gertrude Stein had lived in Pennsylvania, Vienna, Paris, and Oakland. By the time she was seventeen, both her parents were dead and her eldest brother took over the successful family business. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1897 and spent the summer studying embryology at Woods Hole, then attended Johns Hopkins Medical School, which she left after two years. In 1903 she moved to Paris where she would stay until she died forty-three years later. Unlike writers who withdraw to contemplate, Stein engaged with the world head-on across the arts. She wrote novels, plays, essays, autobiography, and libretti, sometimes in collaboration with close friends. Mocked for her modernist use of repetition ("A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"), Stein could be perfectly succinct, as when naming the Lost Generation, or saying, "Hemingway, remarks are not literature." A bold collector of new art, she and Alice Toklas, partners for almost forty years, hosted legendary weekly salons in which the best of Paris came to see the paintings and stayed for the conversation. Among their regular attendees were Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Derain, Rousseau, Hemingway, Wilder, Anderson, Appolinaire, Thomson, Bowles, Pound, and Bernard Fay, the gay Nazi informer who protected Toklas and Stein, a Jewish lesbian after all, throughout WWII. Although they were great travelers (it was they who tipped Bowles to Tangier), Stein and Toklas perversely stayed in France through the war. Although she wrote her coming out memoir, Q.E.D. before she was thirty, it was not published until 1950, four years after her death at 72. Despite thirty-nine years together, Stein left Toklas very little. Nieces and nephews grabbed the fortune in art. Stein and Toklas are buried side by side in Père Lachaise. Get the essential Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories by Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer. 

Marlon Riggs graduated with honors from Harvard in 1978, earned his MA in journalism from Berkeley, and before long got an NEA grant to make the landmark documentary of black gay culture, Tongues Untied, which caused all kinds of sensations at Berlin, at Cannes, on PBS, and on the Senate floor. A prime target for right-wing attacks, it also won prizes at San Francisco's Frameline, Atlanta's film fest, and New York's documentary festival. Riggs' next work, Color Adjustment, examined television's "unflattering" portrayal of black characters from 1948 to 1988. After that he made Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, interviewing HIV+ black men. Working on Black Is...Black Ain't (viewable in parts starting here), he died of aids. He was 37.