Band of Thebes

Born August 13: Jonathan Strong, Herb Ritts

By the time he was twenty-five, Illinois native Jonathan Strong had graduated from Harvard, won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, had twice won O. Henry awards for his short fiction (including 3rd prize), and published his first book, Tike and Five Stories, winner of the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. (Rosenthal recipients just prior to his win were Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates; soon after him came Thomas McGuane, Alice Walker, and Richard Yates.) In the intervening forty-three years, Strong has published eleven more books. Two recent novels are the just terrific Drawn From Life (2008) and the Lammy finalist Consolation (2010). Both books' protagonists are out gay men, which may or may not contribute to why Strong is not as widely read as he ought to be; or it may simply be the unfair wheel of literary fate. Either way, he is overdue for his Barbara Pym moment of rediscovery. James Morrison offered an excellent survey of Strong's work, "Happiness in a Corner," upon publication of his opera novel More Light in 2011. Strong's Hawkweed and Indian Paintbrush was to be out this spring from a very small press. A longtime lecturer at Tufts, he is happily partnered and lives without the internet or email in Rockport, Massachusetts.

 

A classicist in the tradition of George Platt Lynes or Irving Penn, Herb Ritts' elegance was always overshadowed by his popularity. His friendships with superstars were somehow more newsworthy than his ability to capture the iconic instant and transform mortals into myth. Those friendships began early; he grew up in Brentwood, next door to Steve McQueen who on Sundays would take Herb riding on his motorcycle in the desert, and his first break came from shooting his buddy Richard Gere. As much as any other photographer, Ritts defined style for the ten years from 1982 to 1992 on the covers of Vanity Fair, Vogue, Rolling Stone, GQ, as well as in countless ad campaigns, the apex of which was the Marky Mark underwear shoot for Calvin Klein (not nearly as ripped as you remember). Ritts also directed commercials and more than a dozen music videos for Janet, Michael, Mariah, Tina, Toni, Britney, Bon Jovi, Chris Isaak, Tracy Chapman, N Sync, Shakira, JLo, and Madonna, winning two VMAs from MTV. Yet because his subjects were celebrities and supermodels, he was often deemed shallow and superficial. Perhaps in those early years straight critics found it easier to dismiss him rather than confront their discomfort with his work's homoeroticism. Openly gay throughout his career, he was a major force in fundraising for aids groups like Amfar long before it was fashionable. Forthright about his own hiv-positive status, he died of pneumonia at fifty in 2002 and is survived by his partner, Erik Hyman. The subject of a massive solo show last year at LACMA, his work is in the permanent collections of many of the world's best museums including the MFA Boston, the Getty, the Guggenheim, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. For more, read Charles Churchward's Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour: A Photographer's Life and His World.

   

Gay Man's "Return to Oakpine"

In 1969, high schoolers Jimmy, Frank, Craig, and Mason formed a garage band in Oakpine, Wyoming. In 1999, Jimmy, now a writer in New York, unable to afford the cost of his aids care, comes back to die. His dad won't let him in the house and his mom calls Craig to refit the garage into a spare room. At the same time, newly-divorced multimillionaire Mason comes back from his life as a good-guy lawyer in Denver, and, now pushing fifty, they reform the band. Jimmy is too sick to play but Craig's son takes his place. Old secrets, hurts, and girlfriends are revisited, and new relationships formed. The characters' core decency and quiet humor make Return to Oakpine [Kindle] ideal comfort food -- perfect for an easy read, say, if you are doped up on cold medicine or simply want to spend a couple hours with nice people. Longtime fans of Ron Carlson, and you should be one, will be disappointed that this book lacks the originality and verve that made Five Skies such a stunner or The Signal so compulsive.

Queer readers new to Carlson's work will also be disappointed. His saintly Jimmy is yet another example of a well-meaning straight writer who has zero feeling for the interior lives of gay men. Missing entirely are any sort of fear of being found out, any form of coming out to himself or friends or family, and any hint of a sexual impulsive at any point in his life. A gay New Yorker coming home to die in Wyoming in 1999 might dwell on Matthew Shepard who was murdered in Laramie in October 1998. Better drawn are the earnest, super-clumsy questions of his straight friends: "When two gay guys go out to dinner, who pays?"

Also a little earnest and clumsy is Salon's recent essay about the lack of high profile gay novels and the pitfalls of straight authors' attempts at queer lives, citing The Interestings, The Art of Fielding, and The Emperor's Children. 

If you're keeping score, Viking degayed and de-aidsed the Oakpine flap copy.

Born August 8: Randy Shilts

In 1981, Randy Shilts became the first journalist at a major newspaper to cover the gay community full-time. In 1999, five years after Shilts died from aids, the NYU Department of Journalism ranked his reporting on the pandemic for the San Francisco Chronicle 44th of the top hundred works of journalism in the twentieth century. His exhaustive, meticulous book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is regarded as a modern classic. Gary Wills said Shilts’ book “will be to gay liberation what Betty Friedan was to early feminism and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to environmentalism." It covers what were then believed to be the origins of the disease in Africa in the 1970s to 1985, when Rock Hudson’s announcement that he had aids finally captured mass culture’s attention. Shilts examines the years between, detailing the ignorance, denial, hostility, and indifference of medical, health, and government officials as the unknown “gay cancer” ravaged America, as well as profiling the pioneering doctors and gay activists who fought for funding, research, and public awareness as tens of thousands died around them. HBO’s 1993 adaptation And the Band Played On was nominated for twenty awards and won nine, including the Emmy for best made-for-tv movie. Conduct Unbecoming, his next book, again as monumental, examined through thousands of interviews the U.S. military’s treatment of its lesbian and gay servicemembers. At the time of his death in 1994 he was planning a book on homosexuality in the Catholic Church. Shilts's first book, a biography of Harvey Milk called The Mayor of Castro Street was to become a film by Bryan Singer but was beaten out by Gus van Sant's Milk.

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.

Born July 28: Colin Higgins

So your Australian-American pool boy/chauffeur wants to show you his screenplay. His first screenplay. But these are groovy times -- the tail end of the 60s -- and the kid is a Stanford dropout who hitchhiked to NYC, failed to become an actor, joined the army like his dad, wrote for Stars & Stripes in Germany, hung out in Paris for six months, went back to Stanford to finish his B.A., then got his M.F.A. in screenwriting from UCLA, so you say, Sure, okay, I'll read the damn script, how bad could it be? Well, it's crazy brilliant. You think. Maybe just crazy. So you show it to Robert Evans at Paramount and he agrees. Of course -- who couldn't see this coming -- the kid is dying to direct it himself. Give him seven grand for test shoot but... no chance. Forget it. Give the picture to Hal Ashby, get Ruth Gordon, and release it when? What's the right time of year for an old lady/suicidal nerd movie? Christmas! And... Total flop. Nonetheless, his debut Harold and Maude, allowed Colin Higgins to write the Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Jill Clayburgh 1976 smash hit Silver Streak, which enabled him to direct his next screenplay, the Goldie Hawn, Chevy Chase 1978 success Foul Play, which he followed with the Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton 1980 megahit 9 to 5. Colin followed that with the Burt Reynolds, Dolly Parton 1982 spectacle The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas. Gay, childless, and drowning in money, in 1986 he established the Colin Higgins Foundation for humanitarian concerns. He directed the tv miniseries based on Shirley MacLaine's Out on a Limb, and in 1988 he died of aids. This year's recipients of Colin Higgins Foundation Youth Courage Awards are Isaias, Alan, and Katherine. Harold and Maude and 9 to 5 are ranked #45 and #74 on AFI's list of the 100 funniest films of all time.

David's Death-Defying Doggerel

At last, today is the bittersweet release of beloved David Rakoff's posthumous first novel, 128 pages of rhyming anapestic tetrameter telling the story of eleven characters through the 20th century, Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish [Kindle]. In the recent NYT story about David's efforts to write it between final bouts of chemotherapy, his editor said the novel is "the purest distillation of David’s belief that we live in a world that is essentially cruel and indifferent, but there are remedies for that. And the remedies are kindness and beauty. It’s very clever and erudite, and it’s very, very funny, as David was, but fundamentally it is a brief for kindness."

Critic Craig Seligman praised the book, especially the gay artist Cliff who is dazzled by San Francisco and its easy sex:

"And crowning it all was the chief among joys:

"The liquid, ubiquitous river of boys.

"[Expletive], kissable, dateable, rentable,

"Faeries and rough trade, or highly presentable.

"Stupid as livestock or literate in Firbank,

"All of it galaxies distant from Burbank."

David was too sick to draw the illustrations throughout the book (done instead by Chip Kidd / Seth, who designed / drew the cover) but, two weeks before he died, he did find the strength to read the unabridged audio version over four days of two-hour sessions.

After the jump, another passage in which the aids-stricken Cliff laments leaving life too soon.

Get David's previous bestselling books of humor: Fraud [Kindle], Don't Get Too Comfortable, and Half Empty [Kindle].

Born July 16: Reinaldo Arenas

In his searing memoir Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas recalled his impoverished childhood in Cuba and his early memories of being so hungry he ate dirt. He also described his vivid and prolific sexual adventures beginning at a very young age with a male cousin, and later with his uncle, a domesticated animal, and countless men, all told with an unvarnished honesty that shocked some readers. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of the 1993, but Arenas could not enjoy its success. His hard luck was a constant. In his teens he became besotted with and then disillusioned by the Castro regime, which eventually imprisoned him, prohibited him from publishing, and threatened him with death. He attempted to escape from Cuba on an inner tube, was caught, and was sent to a far worse prison. Even when he was officially forbidden from having paper, he managed to write and  got his work smuggled out of the country and published abroad. Released from prison in 1976 after renouncing his fiction and essays, Arenas was, by a fluke, part of the Mariel boatlift to Florida in 1980. Exploding with the boundless freedoms of writing and gay sex in New York, he entered his most fertile phase: Farewell to the Sea, The Color of Summer, The Palace of the White Skunks, and The Doorman. Within seven years he got aids. Ravaged by the unstoppable disease and depressed by the lack of attention paid to his work, he intentionally overdosed on his medicine on December 7, 1990. His memoir was published in Spanish in 1992 and in English the following year. In 2000, Julian Schnabel adapted Before Night Falls into a gorgeous, gay, award winning film starring Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp, Olivier Martinez, Diego Luna, and Sean Penn. Earlier this year, Duke released Jorge Olivares' Becoming Reinaldo Arenas: Family, Sexuality, and The Cuban Revolution [Kindle]. Jaime Manrique said it "reads like an engrossing novel whose main character—the phenomenally talented Reinaldo Arenas—has a vitality and genius that haunt our imagination. This very personal, and relevant, work of literary criticism is a fitting tribute to a brave and great writer."

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. 

Last summer, White Crane awesomely 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.

32 People on Aids at 32

Among the 32 people Kergan Edwards-Stout asked to reflect on aids 32 years later are several authors: Frank Bruni, Trebor Healey, Patricia Nell Warren, Greg Louganis, Michael Musto, Richard Kramer, and MIchael Nava, whose memory from 1984 features a woman baffled by the idea of an angry protest against the diet candy Ayds. 

"Frank Bruni: I'm 48, have been "out" since the age of 18 and had many acquaintances and friends who, in the mid 1980s and late 1980s and even early 1990s, got sick and died. Only a few were close friends, and it saddens and horrifies me that they're no longer here. But what really saddens and horrifies me isn't personal loss; it's our country's loss, our world's loss. So much talent, so much verve, so much humor, so much mischief, so much generosity, all gone. For me the legacy of AIDS -- which, I hasten to point out, is still with us, not to be overlooked or belittled -- is an awareness of how unpredictably and mercilessly the future can disappear, how randomly disease can strike and also how dangerous and shortsighted it is for people themselves, and for society in general, not to confront public health threats immediately, vigorously, honestly and without denial or prejudice. The sadness that sticks with me is less about the friends gone than about the revelation of human and societal shortcomings."

Read all 32 in a Huffington Post slideshow.

Fairyland: Growing Up with a Gay Dad in 70s San Francisco

Alysia Abbott's mother liked it that her husband was bi and sometimes picked out guys for him. She also had extra flings, but she died when Alysia was two; suddenly Steve, enjoying the golden age of gay sex in San Francisco, had to raise a daughter on his own. He got aids and died before she turned 22 in 1992. Their twenty years together are the subject of her brand new memoir Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father [Kindle].

Earlier this week Alysia got the whole hour on Fresh Air. 

Edmund White: “A vivid, sensitively written account of a complex but always loving relationship. This is not only a painfully honest autobiography but also a tribute to old-fashioned bohemian values in a world that is increasingly conformist and materialistic. I couldn't put it down!” 

Alison Bechdel: “Generous, precise, and deeply moving, Fairyland is a love story that not only brings a new generational perspective to a history we’re in danger of forgetting, but irrevocably shifts the way we think about family itself.”

Dani Shapiro: “At once a father-daughter love story, a testament to survival, a meditation on profound loss, and a searing chronicle of a complex coming of age, Fairyland is a beautiful, haunting book that instructs, even as it breaks our hearts.” 

Honor Moore: “In Alysia Abbott’s gorgeous account of her 1980s San Francisco childhood, a whimsical gay poet becomes an intelligent father, his motherless daughter a forceful and articulate young woman, and a rich, dizzy fairyland is shuttered by a plague. As a chronicle of the moment when the San Francisco of Armistad Maupin became the city of Harvey Milk, when gay and experimental poetry flourished in California, Fairyland is vivid and indelible. As the portrait of a conspiracy of love between a father and a daughter, it is heartrending, a brilliant addition to the literature of American memoir.”

Two Fire Island Books: Modernist Architecture, 70s Polaroids

 

For readers who won't be celebrating Memorial Day weekend in the Pines, there are two new books 1) about the gay architect who gave the island its look with houses like the one above, Fire Island Modernist: Horace Gifford and the Architecture of Seduction by Christopher Rawlins and 2) Tom Bianchi's snaps of the men who loved them.

New York magazine writes:

Gifford’s was a gay architectural vernacular that eschewed camp—“butch,” Rawlins calls it. “But in its muscular austerity,” he writes, “a hypermasculine form of drag could also be discerned.” As time went on, the houses became more elaborate, with conversation pits and make-out lofts—a form of sexed-up cocaine modernism. Gifford, a fixture in the community, embodied this pre-AIDS boundarylessness.

The NYT also covered the book with this doozy from the Department of Oh, Please:

“My line to people is that the Pines is to gay people what Israel is to Jews,” Andrew Kirtzman, a longtime Pines resident and real estate developer, said recently. “It’s the spiritual homeland. There’s just a sense of history in the air, almost tangible but not quite. You just feel like you’re part of some kind of grand creation meant solely for gays.” 

It's unfair of the NYT to saddle a good book with that quote, yet its ridiculousness is outdone by the article's 60+ author Guy Trebay who offers: "And what once looked like licentiousness, flamboyance and bacchanalian behavior seems tame in an era of adolescent sexting and phones with downloadable hookup apps." An orgy at the meatrack was "tame" compared to a downloadable app?  bro srs gafc

Please focus instead on Paul Goldberger saying Fire Island Modernist is an "important book, at once a work of architectural and social history." And Charles Kaiser: "Rawlins deftly melds biography, architectural criticism and social history to provide a rich portrait of Horace Gifford, and a vivid explanation of how the architect’s design aesthetic contributed to the formation of modern gay culture." 

Next week also sees the release of Tom Bianchi's collection Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975-1983. He said the island seemed like "a gay Brigadoon" at the time:

“I was the young, lonely gay boy in the Midwest who had no idea paradise existed,” Mr. Bianchi said. “Everything about the Pines was new, the very idea of a place where you could play on the beach and hold hands with a guy and be with like-minded people and dance all night with a man.”

Difficult to remember in an era of marriage equality and widespread social acceptance of gay people, Mr. Bianchi added, is the social and political tenor of those decades when in many places it remained illegal for two men to dance together in public, when stereotypes of gay men as “sick deviants, weak and ineffectual and involved in sterile, unimportant relationships” still held sway.

...

In the Pines, Mr. Bianchi said, “We as gay men were finally able to let go of the judgments we’d internalized, to take each other’s hands and help each other explore.”

Sexual desire, like gravity, he added, is an irresistible “force holding us to the planet.” The period his book documents, in the last moments before a random virus laid waste to a generation of gay men, “was a very sexy and a very sexual time.”

“But it wasn’t a shallow experience whatsoever,” he said. “I met some pretty incredible people. We certainly loved.”

Born May 23: Allen Barnett

The absolutely terrific writer Allen Barnett, who died of aids at thirty-six in 1991, is in danger of being lost. His only book is out of print and he still has no entry on Wikipedia. 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 the 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.

This obit is woefully inadequate for someone so talented. (As is this post, but I'm away from my copy of his book.) In addition to the PEN award, The Body and Its Dangers also won the Lambda for fiction. 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.

Three years ago Christopher Bram wrote about Allen in the excellent queer lit rescue project The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered [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.

"Aids Caused Gay Marriage": Positive Pictures, A History

Fran Lebowitz's remark, "Nobody ever says it, but AIDS caused gay marriage," got Paul Schulz wondering about the relationship between those two topics and he discovered he agreed with her. The result is his photography book about the fight against aids co-authored with Christians Lütjens, Positive Pictures - A Gay History. In their essay they endorse another famous quote, Larry Kramer's insistence that it is "the greatest sociocultural achievement of a minority in human history that gay men saved themselves -- that we did not all die."

Between the striking photos, the book also features essays by queer art curator Jonathan D. Katz, cultural critic Jan Kunemund, porn director Jorg Andreas, Deutsche Aids-Hilfe's Tino Henn and Carsten Schatz, as well as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence's Katharina Laetitiam Donans, among others.

The publisher says, "Aids changed everything about the way gay men live: how we love, how we make love, how we see ourselves and others. Schulz and Lütjens collect images from three decades of fighting, fucking and winning. Heartbreaking, moving, inspiring."

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.

How To Survive a Plague DVD, Miniseries

After losing the Spirit Award to Kirby Dick's important doc The Invisible War and losing the Oscar to feelgood fare Searching for Sugar Man, David France's really excellent film about aids and ACT UP, How to Survive a Plague, is now available on DVD or can be seen online instantly.

Last week, ABC optioned a scripted miniseries that will be more or less based on people in the documentary, covering the core years 1987 to 1996. David France is writing it and he said the cast "will be a tight ensemble. A handful of people with almost nothing in common but their shared battle against the epidemic."

EW had more:

"France, and his producing partner Howard Gertler will both serve as Executive Producers on the project, alongside former Focus Features president of production John Lyons (Boogie Nights, Pieces of April). "ABC is really the perfect match for this. ABC is the network that brought us Roots and so many other enormous and seminal miniseries. But Roots is such an important touchstone for me because it was really about the arrival of the African American people to full citizenship, and how that happened," France said. "That’s the same kind of trajectory that we see with the arrival of the gay and lesbian community to full involvement in public life. That happened in a much quicker timeline, but in a way I think that How To Survive A Plague the miniseries will tell that parallel story. And ABC knows how to do that. I was thrilled that they wanted to do this, and that they saw that it was part of their cultural tradition to tell these enormous stories that really changed the way generations of people think about a certain part of our history."

Born February 15: Bill T. Jones

The cruel vagaries of aids: In 1984, both Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, professional partners running their jointly named dance troupe and boyfriends for thirteen years, since college at SUNY Binghamton, were diagnosed with HIV. Zane died in 1988; last June, after twenty-six years of being HIV+, Jones added another Tony Award (for the smash hit Fela!, which he co-created, directed, and choreographed) to his many, many honors including a MacArthur 'genius' award in 1994 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2010. His more than one hundred maverick dance pieces, which frequently incorporate same-sex attraction, eroticism, anger, and nudity, have been seen worldwide and he often collaborates with the era's leading artists, from Toni Morrison and Max Roach on Degga to Jessye Norman for How! Do! We! Do! Confronting the perceived death sentence of aids, he traveled the country interviewing many kinds of terminally ill patients before creating his celebration of living, Still/Here, which many have loved and some have hated, like the New Yorker's former dance critic Arlene Croce, who refused to see "victim art." In 1995, Jones published his autobiography Last Night on Earth, happily misnamed. In 2010 he was a Kennedy Center Honors recipient alongside Paul McCartney and Oprah Winfrey. (photo: Lois Greenfield)

Born January 29: Greg Louganis

In 1988 when he was twenty-eight, at the Seoul Olympics, attempting to repeat his unprecedented double golds from 1984 (springboard and tower), Greg Louganis hit his head on the board during his second to last dive. Freshly stitched up, on his final dive he earned a perfect score. Again, he won both gold medals. Widely hailed as one of the great sports comebacks of all time, it earned him ABC Sports' Athlete of the Year. Three years earlier he had won the Sullivan Award as the nation's most outstanding amateur athlete, and he had been an American favorite ever since winning a silver medal at the Montreal Olympics when he was sixteen.

But what a difference one detail makes. Seven years later he published his autobiography, Breaking the Surface [Kindle], cowritten with Eric Marcus, in which he revealed he is HIV+. Suddenly he was no longer the hero of the comeback but the infected sneak whose bleeding might have put other divers at risk (not true, according to Anthony Fauci). The doctor who gave him stitches had not worn gloves. His book was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks, and all of his corporate sponsors except Speedo dropped him. (He had come out eight months earlier, at Gay Games in New York.) Remarkable for its candor, his book showed readers that performing after hitting his head was nothing compared to the stress of being closeted, HIV+, and in an abusive relationship. Even his website said, "the highs that came with winning never compensated for the lows."

Officially, he was a mentor to the US diving team at the London Olympics but these days his heart is really with his dogs. He has six canines, three of whom are named after characters in Harry Potter. Greg's most recent book is For the Life of Your Dog: A Complete Guide to Having a Dog From Adoption and Birth Through Sickness and Health.

Man Booker International Shortlist

    

Judges of the Man Booker International Prize have broken through from a parallel universe where these ten writers are their finalists for a newish lifetime achievement award given only every other year. You'll note the complete absence of authors who are Spanish, Latino, African, or Arab:

U R Ananthamurthy (India)

Aharon Appelfeld (Israel)

Lydia Davis (USA)

Intizar Husain (Pakistan)

Yan Lianke (China)

Marie NDiaye (France)

Josip Novakovich (Canada)

Marilynne Robinson (USA)

Vladimir Sorokin (Russia) 

Peter Stamm (Switzerland)

Unedited, expat judge Tim Parks said to the press, "Ten wonderful authors, nine of whom I didn't know before I started reading for this prize." Yikes, dude.

If you don't know Yan Lianke, his Dream of Ding Village [Kindle] is an aids novel that was shortlisted for the Asia Booker and his most recent Lenin's Kisses [Kindle] was named a best book of 2012 by The New Yorker, MacLeans, and Kirkus. I was as happy as you when a black woman won the Prix Goncourt in 2009, and last summer Knopf finally brought out the English translation of Marie NDiaye's Three Strong Women [Kindle]. Readers of a certain bent may be able to queer their experience of Lydia Davis's novel The End of the Story about an unnamed narrator's obsession with a much younger male ex-lover. And fans of northern wonders Tove Jansson, Gerbrand Bakker, and Per Petterson should certainly seek Peter Stamm's short novel Unformed Landscapes about Kathrine, a woman who has never been below the Arctic Circle until she abandons her husband and son.

The winner of the Man Booker International will be announced May 22.

Two Too Gay: Liberace, Larry Kramer Movies Won't Get Theatrical Release

Despite top stars (Michael Douglas, Matt Damon above / Julia Roberts, Mark Ruffalo) and big directors (Steven Soderbergh / Ryan Murphy), two long-gestating queer films, Behind the Candelabra and Larry Kramer's aids drama The Normal Heart, have failed to find studio backing and won't be released as features. The reason is they're "too gay."

Kramer's play debuted in 1985 and for years Barbra Streisand was going to make the movie version. In 2011 The Normal Heart was announced as a feature directed by out wiz Ryan Murphy, costarring Alec Baldwin and Jim Parsons, and co-produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B, but the funding fizzled.

Soderbergh, who is straight and retiring this year so less shy about burning his bridges, unloaded on Hollywood's homophobia in his efforts to finance the Liberace biopic: "Nobody would make it. We went to everybody in town. They all said it was too gay. And this is after ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ by the way, which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned. It made no sense to any of us." He added, "Studios were going, 'We don't know how to sell it.' They were scared."

For some thoughts on Soderbergh's indignation, see the following post.

Both movies have been picked up by HBO, where they will get a lot of attention, a lot of award nominations, and limited viewership. Behind the Candelabra airs this spring, The Normal Heart in 2014.

Born January 5: Alvin Ailey

Growing up in Texas, Alvin Ailey hid his dancing from his disapproving mother for two years and when she first saw him backstage in make-up, she slapped his face. His terror of her homophobia lasted decades, to his final days, so much so that when he was dying of aids at fifty-eight in 1989 he asked his doctor to lie about the cause on his death certificate. That fear outlives him. A CBS profile from August 2008 celebrates the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater's 50th anniversary with great dancing and an American success story of a black troupe thriving in a typically white corner of the arts. It omits any mention that he was gay, or gay people's contribution to dance, that he died of aids, or aids' toll on the arts. It also erases the more complicated aspects of Ailey's life, like his devastating arthritis, his addiction to cocaine, or his dependence on lithium. His private demons never obscured his public genius. One of the seventy-nine dances he choreographed, Revelations, set to spirituals and gospel music, is among the most popular and most seen ballets of the twentieth-century.