With the thirty-year assimilation frenzy is this concept of gay artists being preferred as double outsiders still true? Or was it always only the victim fantasy of a deluded straight artist?
"In art politics, to be homosexual is, a priori, more correct than to be heterosexual. Because to be an artist is to be an outsider, and to be a gay artist is to be a double outsider. That's the correct condition. If you're a straight artist, it's not clear that your outsiderness is legitimate. I know this is totally absurd. But the fact is that in our culture it does fall primarily to gays and blacks to make something interesting. Almost everything from straight white culture is less interesting, and has been for a long time."
--painter David Salle from 1992 in Janet Malcolm's new collection Forty-one False Starts: Essays on Artists and Writers
from Yale and 
from Norton. Or stick with the classic oils in 
.
, twenty years younger, who appears here multiple times. They both died of aids, five years apart, at 53 and 37.
published under the name James Barr in 1950 when he was twenty-eight. Set in Seattle, San Francisco, and Oklahoma, it's a love story between two cultured young manly men, self-accepting Tim and still-struggling twenty-three year-old Phillip, both of whom abhor "the average homosexual's" degeneracy and all effeminate men. The book was a best-seller but caused two problems: When Fugaté rejoined the Navy and needed Top Secret clearance he was discovered to be Barr, prompting an eight-month investigation that ended with a general discharge under honorable conditions. The other problem, cited in Drewey Gunn's brand new book 
was a five-year obscenity case against his publisher who ultimately settled for a fine and a promise to keep Quatrefoil and the two other offending titles out of print. Fugaté's discharge politicized him and he began writing articles for ONE and The Mattachine Review, including a landmark essay about his Navy case penned under his real name. Sixteen years after his debut, he finally published his second novel 
in 1966. Suddenly single after a fifteen-year relationship, the protagonist meets a wide swath of NYC queer characters, from a humpy young drifter to a wise black bar-owner to a rich European count with potent sexual powers. After returning to Kansas to be with his mother in her final years, Fugaté went back to New York, then moved to Claremont, Oklahoma for more than a decade. He died there at seventy-three.
played by five-foot-five, 68 year-old Bob Balaban who in 
which was made into 
.
or Hartley's own autobiography 
.
or go for Taschen's big boy 
[
and James Saslow's exceptional 
.
.
.
