Band of Thebes

Born December 14: Hervé Guibert

In his teens Hervé Guibert lied about his age to work on the magazine 20 ans and in his very early 20s he got a job at France's most prestigious newspaper, Le Monde. He published several books and, at 28, won a César Award for his gay screenplay L'Homme blessé, co-written with its director Patrice Chéreau. The dark film tells a Genet-like tale of young man's doomed first love for a manipulative thief/hustler/pimp whom he eventually kills. Open about his same-sex affairs since high school, Guibert avoided mainstream gay culture and had significant affairs with Michel Foucault, 29 years his senior, and Thierry Jouno, who was living with a woman, Christine, and their two children. In 1988, four years after Foucault's death, Guibert was diagnosed with aids and began to document his decline, giving rise to his most famous books, including the barely veiled novel To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life which describes/betrays secrets about Foucault's S&M and attacks former friend Isabelle Adjani for backing out of a purported promise to film one of his screenplays. Guibert married Christine, who was also HIV+, so that she and Thierry's children would inherit his royalties. Blind and ravaged by the disease, Guibert tried to kill himself the day before he turned 36. He died two weeks later. Thierry [below, in a photo by Guibert] followed within six months.

Born November 23: Bruce Vilanch

Listen to Bette Midler: "Bruce was the first man to put something in my mouth that made us both money." She and Vilanch began working together in 1970 after she read his Chicago Tribune review of her show saying she needed more jokes. She called him and said, So write me some. Thirty-eight years later, in 2008, he co-wrote her Caesars Palace gig The Showgirl Must Go On. The Oscars' head writer and New Hollywood Squares star has also created comic material for Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Diana Ross, David Letterman, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Florence Henderson, and this year Tab Hunter. Vilanch has punched up many, many Hollywood scripts, including films that don't immediately seem to bear his razor humor, like Die Hard 2 and Raiders of the Lost Ark, and he has acted in Mahogany, Ice Pirates, and The Morning After. He's also starred on Broadway as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, for which he shaved off his signature thirty-year shaggy blond beard, and off Broadway in his own show Almost Famous. He is the subject of the a-list love explosion Get Bruce! and appears in Laughing Matters. Beyond being funny, Vilanch has been a tireless supporter of many aids and gay rights causes.

Born November 17: Rock Hudson, RuPaul

Winnetka's Roy Scherer Jr was renamed and remade by a Hollywood gay impresario and total mess whom you can read about in dastardly detail in The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson. Although in his first movie, Fighter Squadron, the 6'5" hunk needed 38 takes to nail his only spoken line, with coaching he became an affable, natural superstar. He reached a new high with Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession in 1954 and the next year barely dodged certain doom: The tabloid Confidential threatened to report his secret gay affairs. Instead, Willson gave them dirt on two of his other, less lucrative clients, Rory Calhoun (prison stint) and Tab Hunter (arrested at a gay party five years earlier), and shoehorned Hudson into a sham marriage with his secretary. In 1956, Hudson and fellow closet case James Dean both earned Oscar nominations for Giant opposite Elizabeth Taylor, who would 29 years later be galvanized by Hudson's death to force an unwilling nation to confront AIDS. As much as his public acknowledgement finally "gave a face" to the disease that had already killed thousands, it also fueled a panicked distrust of all gay men because he had hidden his status from his sex partners like Marc Christian and his kissing co-stars like Linda Evans. Succumbing just before he turned 60, he would have been 86 today. He lives on in celluloid glory and in the pages of his friend Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City as the virile icon Blank Blank.

Like any other future drag star born in 1960, RuPaul Andre Charles spent his childhood in San Diego lipsynching Supremes songs, being called names, avoiding sports, and winning the two most important prizes in junior high: Best Dancer and Best Afro. High school didn't go as well (he was expelled for not attending), until he moved to Atlanta with his brother and sister-in-law at sixteen. He began to blossom, thanks largely to drama class, though his attendance in every other subject was still a problem. Eventually he dropped out, got his GED, started community college, and quit. When he was twenty-two he appeared on the American Music Show with two girls as RuPaul and the U-Hauls. When he was thirty-two, the nation was coming down from twelve years of Reagan-Bush, grunge was peaking, and RuPaul put on her best blond wig, her brightest jewels, her fiercest heels, and taught the whole world to sing, "Sashay, chante!" "Work it, girl!" and "You better work!"

Oddly, that hit, Supermodel, only reached #45 on the pop charts, but it remained in heavy rotation on MTV forever and became a cultural moment. Whereas most drag representations before her were catty and bitchy, RuPaul's message was love everybody; everybody, love! Subsequent singles milked the same bouncy vibe but failed to catch on with the masses, though Back to my Roots is an essential history of black hairstyles in three danceable minutes. Adding to her list of drag queen firsts, RuPaul became the face of MAC cosmetics and sang a duet with Elton John. She co-hosted KTU's popular morning show for two years and hosted her own tv show on VH1. Season four of her popular RuPaul's Drag Race begins on Logo in January 2012 with 13 contestants and more episodes (18) than ever before.

Born November 15-16: Francois Ozon, Glenn Burke

From 1998 to 2003 Francois Ozon made the frothy Sitcom; the suburban noir-cum-folktale closet allegory Criminal Lovers; Fassbinder's Water Drops on Burning Rocks; followed by his three greatest films: the extraordinary Under the Sand, with Charlotte Rampling as a woman whose husband vanishes; 8 Women, a mystery-musical with France's all-star all-female cast of all-time (Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, Fanny Ardant, Virginie Ledoyen, Danielle Darrieux, Ludivine Sagnier); and Swimming Pool, again with Sagnier and Rampling as an uptight thriller writer whose life changes while hosting her publisher's seductive, freewheeling teenage daughter. From 2004 to 2009 Ozon made five other films: 5 x 2, Time To Leave, the costume drama Angel, the flying baby fable Ricky, and Le Refuge. Last year he returned to form with a semisweet 70s sexism comedy Potiche in which Catherine Deneuve played an ignored, huge haired matron who triumphs when she must take over her husband's umbrella factory but ends up alone. Next year comes Dans la Maison, with Kristen Scott Thomas, Emmanuelle Seigner, and Denis Menochet.

In the 1970s, most interracial gay couples could expect tension with their partner's parents, but in Glenn Burke's case, his boyfriend's father was his own baseball team's manager, homophobe Tommy Lasorda. Glenn played for the Dodgers for three seasons, including the '77 World Series, before they dealt him to his native Oakland. His relationship with A's manager Billy Martin wasn't complicated by family ties but was no less welcoming: in front of the team, Martin called Glenn a faggot. He lasted one season. A knee injury either ended his career with the majors or was a good enough excuse to send him to the minors in Utah. He quit baseball in 1979, when he was 27. Although he had been out to his team, he came out publicly in 1982, the same year he medaled as a sprinter at Gay Games. Four years later he competed in basketball at Gay Games 1986, by which time he was addicted to cocaine. He became homeless in San Francisco and in 1994 he revealed he was fighting aids. In the months before his death at 42 in 1995, he published his autobiography Out at Home and told People magazine, "My mission as a gay ballplayer was to break a stereotype . . . I think it worked." Last year SportsNet profiled him in a documentary "Out: The Glenn Burke Story."

Double Gay Triple Canopy: Wojnarowicz Journals, McCourt Story

Was the internet made so marketers could haunt you in your home and you could shop anywhere at any time via a handheld hoohickey, or was it created for Triple Canopy? This month, Issue 14 of the online arts journal features Lucy Ives' selections of David Wojnarowicz's 30+ journals being digitised by NYU's Fales Library. She writes:

"Of his diary accounts of sex at the West Side piers and elsewhere, Wojnarowicz told Sylvère Lotringer:

"When I wrote them I was so excited to write them, to document them. I thought they were the most amazing things that I had ever seen. They were like films or they reminded me of Burroughs’s Wild Boys. I loved it. I loved the fact that it was outdoors, that it was by the river and in the wind. They were moments of incredible beauty to me.

"I remember when I first started becoming more and more aware of AIDS. And here I am sitting with all these journals, looking at them in total disgust. … And now, years later, I realize I shifted again and want these things.

"It is with this in mind that one reads Wojnarowicz’s accounts of anonymous sex, his cinematic reflection of the encounter. Many of the selections I have made here, then, are graphic—perhaps more so than other previously published excerpts from the journals. There are also mundane episodes. We see a Manhattan that barely resembles our own. And we see Wojnarowicz at work, taking photos of hell in an alley (homelessness, refuse) or visiting an editor at the Soho Weekly News, the paper that would first publish his “Rimbaud in New York” series. I have wanted to show both the explicitness and the everydayness of Wojnarowicz’s writing practice, as it is in this meeting of the extraordinary and the routine that one finds the crucible of the artist’s personal myth."

Issue 14 also has a gay short story by James McCourt called "The Canticle of Skoozle." Mirroring the marriage of high (canticle) and low (skoozle) in its title, the tale of heroworship of a high school's doomed star athlete is told in a regal voice conveyed in the all-cap symbols and abbreviations of a txt msg. Similarly, the accompanying collage mixes Nijinsky with Abercrombie. A sample:

"...O SKOOZLE! SKOOZLE! U HAD SUCH A BEAUTIFUL, FABULOUS, FINE HEAD ON YR SHOULDERS & ANOTHER CROWNING YR MAJESTIC MEMBER (THE WORD GLANS NEVER ENTERED YR VOCABULARY). GLORIOUS IT WAS 2 B ALIVE IN THOSE DAYS W U & 2 WATCH U B/ING YOUNG, THE VERY HEAVEN. WHEN WE SED U WR LIKE A BREATH OF SPRING WE DID NT COMMENT IDLY OR IN THE INANE MANNER OF REMARKING ON THE REFRESHING EFFECT OF AN AEROSOL AIR FRESHENER ON THE ROOM, 4 THERE WAS TH@ IN YR PERSONAL SCENT (ON ITS ACCOUNT THE PRINCIPAL, A LEARNED MAN VERSED IN M@TERS GREEK (HA-HA), DUBBED U HYAKINTHOS)..."

Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo

Two trusted critics, Dean Van de Motter and Doug Ireland, both knew Vito Russo, so heed their high praise of the brand new biography Celluloid Activist by Michael Schiavi. Ireland writes a comprehensive tribute to his friend while also critiquing the book:

"It is the great merit of Schiavi’s meticulously researched book that he restores to us Vito’s exuberant incandescence, his extraordinary charisma, his evergreen sense of indignation, and his unquenchable militancy, as well as his vulnerability and never-ending search for love on his terms (“the only terms any of us ever knows,” as Orson Welles said in “Citizen Kane” — for one cannot write about Vito without dropping in one of those cinematic references that ceaselessly and obsessively peppered his conversation). Vito was a friend of mine, and I do so miss him. Now, thanks to Schiavi’s book, he lives again."

Van de Motter knew Vito from ACT UP. He says,

"Before AIDS defined both his body and his activism, before his participation in the Gay Activist’s Alliance re-defined Queer Identity, Vito Russo was a passionate lover of film. He owned a movie projector as a child and spent most of the rest of his life accumulating films. But more than anything else, he loved screening them.  Perhaps nothing gave him more satisfaction than showing movies to other people. It was of course a natural for him to screen the movies for the GAA’s post-Stonewall Firehouse Flicks series. After the success of the first screening: Roman Polanski’s The Fearless Vampire Killers, Vito Russo became convinced that there was value to gays watching movies together. Years before these films–and more–would be re-defined and deconstructed in his classic book The Celluloid Closet, Vito was doing what he was always doing: showing movies to his friends and laughing along with them.

And yet it is impossible to think of him as a film historian who was way ahead of his time without thinking of him as an activist...."

Born May 17: Howard Ashman

Perfectly plotted, gorgeously rendered, Beauty and the Beast is smart, funny, scary, and romantic. Best of all, its protagonist is a sensible, solitary reader who prefers books to almost everything else, and, during the possibly too-sweet happy ending, there’s a beautiful instant when she’s clearly disappointed to see the craggy Beast restored to his blandly handsome visage. Lyricist Howard Ashman was the excutive producer and, working with composer Alan Menken, created the witty, sweeping songs. Also collaborating on The Little Shop of Horrors, The Little Mermaid, and Aladdin, they won two Oscars, two Golden Globes, two Grammys, and were nominated for two Tonys. Ashman died of aids when he was forty, months before the unprecedented triumph of Beauty and the Beast, which was the first animated movie ever to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. His partner Bill Lauch accepted his second Oscar on his behalf.

Born May 4: Keith Haring, Lance Bass

Keith Haring’s graffiti-style art became iconic when he was in his mid-twenties. Instantly recognizable and associated with the 80s New York street scene, his work often featured short lines radiating out from exuberant figures rendered in black and white or bright, flat colors. A great believer in public art, particularly inspired by Christo’s Running Fence, Haring was invited to create murals in Japan, Australia, South America, and throughout Europe, notably on a western section of the Berlin Wall. In 1986, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, he painted a mural working with 900 children. Haring created art for many public health campaigns, including anti-drug posters and most famously a series of ads promoting safe sex that, like much of his work, was explicitly homoerotic. Yet his art was also playful and humorous, as when he painted Grace Jones' enormous skirt in Grace Jones' video I'm Not Perfect. See it all in the documentary, The Universe of Keith Haring or read his journals, reissued this year with previously unpublished drawings. He died of aids in 1990 at age thirty-one.

Born and raised in Mississippi, Lance Bass, 32, attended space camp when he was twelve and has wanted to be an astronaut ever since. Instead, he had to settle for joining Justin Timberlake and three other singers when he was sixteen to form one of the most successful boy bands of all time, 'N SYNC. After the band split up, he came out in a People magazine cover story in July 2006, when he was twenty-seven. His memoir, Out of Sync, says after the breakup he spent four months in Star City, Russia training to be a cosmonaut. He is certified by NASA and the Russian Space Program but because his funding fell through, his only celestial experience was season seven of Dancing with the Stars. He will appear along with Wanda Sykes and Clay Aiken in an upcoming episode of Drop Dead Diva about a lesbian whose high school won't let her attend prom.

Gay 27 Year-Old Salon Editor Doesn't Get Why Larry Kramer Isn't Chill

 

As eternal as spring blossoms and Cher farewell tours is the pas de deux of youth's self-absorbed apathy and age's righteous anger. This version is called "The Problem With Gay Men Today," performed across the pages of Salon by Deputy Arts Editor Thomas Rogers, a 27 year-old gay Brooklynite who has a way lot of straight friends, and the indomitable, soon to be 76 years old Larry Kramer who is first, last, and always gay. Larry says:

"I am a gay person before I’m anything else. I’m a gay person before I’m a white person, before I’m a Jew, before I’m a writer, before I’m American, anything. That is my most identifying characteristic and I don’t find many people who would say that. The polls say the same thing: People do not identify themselves as gay. And that’s too bad. In fact, it’s tragic. It will prevent us from ever having what we deserve, I believe."

They talk about how gay ghettos are emptying out and gay people are less visible to each other now and whether the internet is to blame. Rogers and a gay bud saw a preview of the revival of Kramer's The Normal Heart opening on Broadway tomorrow and found himself feeling a "perverse nostalgia" for AIDS because there's "something appealing about having this galvanizing issue to unite gay men. We don't have that as much now." Larry, discussing his partner, 64, points out

"I'll obviously die before he does, and the way the laws are written it's very hard to leave him anything of substance compared to what I have to leave. It all goes to taxes because we're not legally federally married and that's not fair, that's just not fair. You don't care about it at your age, but I care about it at mine, and there are a lot of older gays who should care about it as well. That should be a galvanizing issue. Anything that keeps us from being unequal should be galvanizing. I want what they have. I do. And everybody should. But again, people don't think that way."

Rogers does not refute the statement that he doesn't care. Earlier, he said he thought the battles over AIDS "seem very alien to a lot of young people's experiences" and that "many of the ideas in the play will seem exotic and a little dated to a lot of young gay men." He becomes more animated when discussing "the interesting thing about Grindr," which Kramer has never heard of.

Paglia on Elizabeth Taylor's Sex Appeal and Rapport with Gay Men

Salon telephoned femme provocateur Camille Paglia for thoughts on Elizabeth Taylor, her ideal "Babylonian pagan woman -- the goddess Ishtar, the anti-Mary," with whom she has been obsessed since she was 11 or 12. From her many books of essays, you've already heard Paglia praise Taylor's "volcanic," "animalistic," "maternal" sexuality and complain about Hollywood's, and feminism's, efforts to "destroy" it in women ever since. Here, she also notes Taylor as gay buddy:

"It's interesting what a profound rapport she always had with gay men, beginning with Montgomery Clift. She was a great friend and counselor to him early on, when he was struggling with his homosexuality. Then when he had that terrible car crash that deformed his face, I've read that she ran down the road to his aid and saved his life by pulling his tongue out of his throat. It was a bloody scene -- he was choking to death. She always had a gift for intimate communication with both gay and straight men."

I suspect the Salon editor, mindful of the site's demographics, wanted to keep the topic on today's women -- particularly Meryl Streep ("she's always doing drag") and Gwyneth Paltrow's android skinniness -- rather than digging deeper into Taylor's queer connections. Unfortunately, they never discuss James Dean or Rock Hudson or George Cukor or Tennessee Williams or Michael Jackson, or Taylor's historic, heroic, hellfire determination to do something about aids when Hollywood and Washington desperately, despicably ignored the pandemic. Nor does Paglia mention lesbians' relationship to Taylor but she does comment on The Kids Are All Right:

"Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right is a truly wonderful film, but Julianne Moore and Annette Bening -- who is fabulous in it and should have won the Oscar for her portrayal of a prototypical contemporary American career woman -- were painfully scrawny to look at on the screen. This is the standard starvation look that is now projected by Hollywood women stars -- a skeletal, Pilates-honed, anorexic silhouette, which has nothing to do with females as most of the world understands them."

A "luscious, opulent, ripe" thank you to Sandy Leonard for sending the article.

Born March 20-22: John Boswell, Zackie Achmat, Stephen Sondheim

Native New Yorker Stephen Sondheim, the winningest composer in Broadway history, has earned eight Tonys, eight Grammys, seven Drama Desk awards, an Obie, an Oscar, and a Pulitzer Prize. Last year he turned 80 and was feted with major special concerts by the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, the New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall, and assorted stage and screen legends at benefits by the Roundabout Theatre Company and the New York City Center. Also, they renamed the former Henry Miller Theatre on 43rd Street in his honor. Arlington Virginia's acclaimed Signature Theatre created the Sondheim Award, of which Sondheim was the premiere recipient, Angela Lansbury the second, and next will be Bernadette Peters. Last October, Knopf published Sondheim's Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes, this coming October they'll release Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2011) with Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Wafflings, Diversions and Anecdotes. A great lover of puzzles and games, he contemplated giving up theater to write mysteries, and did co-author two whodunnit screenplays; The Last of Sheila, co-written with Anthony Perkins, won them an Edgar. Sondheim did not have a live-in boyfriend until 1992, when he was 61; he and dramatist Peter Jones lasted seven years.

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. The New Yorker ran an excellent profile of him written by Samantha Power in 2003, 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 his partner Dalli Weyers, 25, in a terrific wedding where the traditional caketop figures of a bride and groom were replaced by a king and a cowboy.

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. He is said to have written his comments on student papers in perfect medieval calligraphy.

Two Gay Histories: Queer America and The Other Eighties

Bradford Martin may not classify his new book The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan [[Kindle]] as gay history but any nonfiction that looks seriously at both the LGBT rights movement and ACT UP's achievements should be on your radar. PW said, "Martin writes with a welcome evenhandedness and a knack for choosing small events that speak for the larger context, annotating each political battle with insights into the movement's legacy. His descriptions of the success of Act Up in bringing attention to the AIDS epidemic, college students' building of shantytowns to focus attention on South African apartheid, and the women's movement's efforts to protect abortion rights are all excellent, as is his description of the arts as a counterweight to the Reagan cultural agenda. This is a valuable picture of the complex political cross-currents that swirled in a decade too often seen simplistically as Morning in America."

The New Press has just released the first trade edition of Vicki Eaklor's Queer America: A People's GLBT History of the United States, which apparently appeared as a $65 textbook in 2008. ARBA reviewed the book saying, "A great deal has been written about twentieth-century U.S. history as well as about the history of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (GLBT) people, but this excellent volume is unique in combining the two as a survery of GLBT twentieth-century American history. An outstanding reference that belongs in every academic and public collection, Queer America is written for the general reader with a view to documenting how fully in the last century GLBT history is U.S. history….Queer America is eminently successful in accomplishing its goal of being a one-stop handbook to U.S. GLBT history of the twentieth century."

Under the Sun: The Letters of Bruce Chatwin

Why in 554 pages of gay travel writer Bruce Chatwin's correspondence Under the Sun are there no letters to his two "most significant male lovers" Donald Richards and designer Jasper Conran? Did he never write to them, were the letters lost, or did the collection's editor omit them? Can't answer because Viking turned down my request for the book and Key West's one remaining independent bookshop had never heard of this collection. I doubt the omission is from homophobia; Chatwin's wife (and co-editor here) seems to have been far more comfortable with his homosexuality than he was. Reviewers say his letters to her were brief and brusque. Elsewhere, his goregous writing shines through.

(Photo from 1984, when he was 44, by Getty Images via The Australian. He died at 48.)

Born March 3: James Merrill

One of the greater gifts banking has given the world is James Merrill. Second son of a founder of Merrill Lynch, James was brought up in rarefied luxury and intellect: His governess taught him German and French, his father published a book of his early literary efforts when he was sixteen, his Amherst professor (and lover) published a book of his poems at twenty. Over his long career, Merrill won every major American prize for his formal, slightly old-fashioned, rhyming poetry: two National Book Awards, the NBCC, the Library of Congress's Bobbitt National Prize, Yale's Bollingen Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Although his two early novels are more muted on the subject, his poetry and his 1993 memoir A Different Person openly celebrate gay life.

Merrill and his partner David Jackson were together forty years, dividing their time annually between Stonington, Connecticut and Athens. Later they traded Greece for Key West where their long relationship frayed. Merrill started the Ingram Merrill Foundation in honor of his divorced parents and gave generous, often anonymous grants to struggling writers, including his friend Elizabeth Bishop. A later friend, Pulitzer winning novelist and Key West resident Alison Lurie, wrote a memoir of Merrill and Jackson called Familiar Spirits, alluding to their love of ouija board seances memorialized in his postmodern, free verse 560-page epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. He died in 1995 of an aids-related heart attack while visiting Arizona one month shy of his sixty-ninth birthday. His New York Times obit omits Jackson.

Born February 15-17: Bill T. Jones, Robert Dessaix

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. (photo: Lois Greenfield)

 

Which book finally dislodged The Horse Whisperer from the #1 spot on Australia's bestseller lists? Basically its opposite: Robert Dessaix's Night Letters was a surprise sensation, an intellectual novel compromised of twenty letters written in a hotel in Venice in the mid-1990s by an Australian man newly diagnosed with HIV. Echoing literary travelers from Marco Polo and Dante to Casanova and Sterne, contemplating life, death, love, and the passage of time, the narrator R. discourses on cathedrals and museums, seduction and sex, hell and heaven, Venice and Venetians. Despite the character's dire future, critics hailed his "wry, chatty, surprisingly cheerful voice" (NYTBR) finding him "seductive, charming, and always thought-provoking" (Kirkus). The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "luminous gem" and the Cleveland Plain Dealer "a story exquisitely told." Dessaix's second novel, Corfu, also describes gay ex-pats in Europe and again rings with literary echoes: Homer, Sappho, Chekhov, Cavafy. His nonfiction includes a memoir called A Mother's Disgrace about his own adoption and subsequent wanderlust; Twilight of Love, a book about retracing Turgenev's steps as he followed a married opera star and her husband for years; and an anthology, Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing. Last April he published On Humbug. After a failed marriage to a woman, Dessaix wrote a personal ad in 1982 and met Peter Timms, who is still his partner. As for longevity and dedication, Dessaix created a complex language when he was eleven and continues to speak it to himself even now, as he turns 67 today.

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, cowritten with Eric Marcus, in which he revealed he is HIV positive. 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 last year said, "the highs that came with winning never compensated for the lows."

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.

Richard Labonté Names Top 10 LGBT Fiction, Nonfiction of 2010

North America's preeminent guru of LGBT books, Richard Labonté has named his top 10 fiction and nonfiction titles of 2010. Naturally, many of the works will be familiar to you, but click through to discover the lesser-known gems that somehow didn't make the Thebes queer lit list. Anyone who pigeonholes gay fiction as all the same should study the breadth of Richard's list, which encompasses Lucy Jane Bledsoe's Antarctica, Michael Sledge's South America, as well as

Elaine Beale, Another Life Altogether, Yorkshire in the 70s

Daniel Allen Cox, Krakow Melt, Poland in 2005

Tristan Garcia, Hate: A Romance, Paris in the 80s and 90s

Lisa Gitlin, I Came Out for This? Cleveland and DC

Marshall Moore, An Ideal for Living, San Francisco

Sorry to admit I'd never heard of Lisa Gitlin's debut novel I Came Out for This? about a 47 year-old Jewish woman who comes out in Cleveland and moves to DC, but I'm going to order it after finding this bit:

"I hate Terri Rubin, the woman I’m in love with. She called and told me she’s dating a woman named Sonya. I hate this Sonya and I hate Terri and I hate myself because I was never like this in my life. Do you know what it’s like to come out when you’re in your forties, having menopausal symptoms, for God’s sake, and then fall madly in love with someone? All of a sudden you’re in adolescence for the first time. You don’t even recognize yourself. My whole adult life I was this cool, collected writer, strutting around in jeans and leather jacket, advising friends and siblings about their relationships, being a devoted daughter and a responsible professional person and a good citizen, and then one day I woke up and realized I was gay, and then this sassy woman walked into my life and I fell in love at first sight, after spending my life thinking that never really happened and only watching West Side Story because of the gangs. And now I’ve become the kind of person I used to make fun of, who becomes hysterical because her beloved tells her she’s dating some woman named Sonya who has an apothecary store in Bethesda, Maryland.

"I’m sick of being in this endless rut, I’m sick of Cleveland, and I’m thinking of moving to Washington, DC to be with Terri Rubin who I hate."

Gitlin will read in Toledo on Wednesday, December 29, at the bookstore People Called Women. Buy her book.

Born December 8: Dan Hartman

Dan Hartman started at 13 with his older brother. They wrote and recorded music together in their band The Legends but it wasn't until Hartman was 27, in 1978, that his song "Instant Replay" broke out and became a #1 disco hit. Two years later he topped again, with Relight My Fire. His biggest hit came in 1984, when I Can Dream About You was a Top 10 smash on the Hot 100 chart, followed by We Are the Young, which became his third #1 dance track. Fate being so fickle, he never had another hit himself but enjoyed enormous success writing or producing tracks for Tina Turner, James Brown, Dusty Springfield, Joe Cocker, Bonnie Tyler, Steve Winwood Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Nona Hendryx. According to Wikipedia, all the music Hartman worked on has sold a total of more than 50 million copies. He died of aids at 43 in 1994, yet his music endures. Often covered by bouncy pop acts like Lulu and Take That, his "Relight My Fire" appeared in last year's award-winning video game Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony.

Born November 17: Rock and Ru

Winnetka's Roy Scherer Jr was renamed and remade by a Hollywood gay impresario and total mess whom you can read about in dastardly detail in The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson. Although in his first movie, Fighter Squadron, the 6'5" hunk needed 38 takes to nail his only spoken line, with coaching he became an affable, natural superstar. He reached a new high with Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession in 1954 and the next year barely dodged certain doom: The tabloid Confidential threatened to report his secret gay affairs. Instead, Willson gave them dirt on two of his other, less lucrative clients, Rory Calhoun (prison stint) and Tab Hunter (arrested at a gay party five years earlier), and shoehorned Hudson into a sham marriage with his secretary. In 1956, Hudson and fellow closet case James Dean both earned Oscar nominations for Giant opposite Elizabeth Taylor, who would 29 years later be galvanized by Hudson's death to force an unwilling nation confront AIDS. As much as his public acknowledgement finally "gave a face" to the disease that had already killed thousands, it also fueled a panicked distrust of all gay men because he had hidden his status from his sex partners like Marc Christian and his kissing co-stars like Linda Evans. Succumbing just before he turned 60, he would have been 85 today. He lives on in celluloid glory and in the pages of his friend Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City as the virile icon Blank Blank.

She's 50 today, mmkay? Like any other future drag star born in 1960, RuPaul Andre Charles spent his childhood in San Diego lipsynching Supremes songs, being called names, avoiding sports, and winning the two most important prizes in junior high: Best Dancer and Best Afro. High school didn't go as well (he was expelled for not attending), until he moved to Atlanta with his brother and sister-in-law at sixteen. He began to blossom, thanks largely to drama class, though his attendance in every other subject was still a problem. Eventually he dropped out, got his GED, started community college, and quit. When he was twenty-two he appeared on the American Music Show with two girls as RuPaul and the U-Hauls. When he was thirty-two, the nation was coming down from twelve years of Reagan-Bush, grunge was peaking, and RuPaul put on her best blond wig, her brightest jewels, her fiercest heels, and taught the whole world to sing, "Sashay, chante!" "Work it, girl!" and "You better work!"

Oddly, that hit, Supermodel, only reached #45 on the pop charts, but it remained in heavy rotation on MTV forever and became a cultural moment. Whereas most drag representations before her were catty and bitchy, RuPaul's message was love everybody; everybody, love! Subsequent singles milked the same bouncy vibe but failed to catch on with the masses, though Back to my Roots is an essential history of black hairstyles in three danceable minutes. Adding to her list of drag queen firsts, RuPaul became the face of MAC cosmetics and sang a duet with Elton John. She co-hosted KTU's popular morning show for two years and hosted her own tv show on VH1. Season three of her popular RuPaul's Drag Race begins on Logo in January 2011 with more contestants (13) and more episodes (16) than ever before.