Band of Thebes

Brunei Adopts Sharia Law To Kill Gay Men by Stoning, Hotel Boycotts Ensue

Last Wednesday, the penalty for gay sex in Brunei was ten years in prison. On Thursday, Brunei became the eighth current nation to maintain the death penalty for homosexuality, adopting the Sharia Law method of death by stoning. Brunei owns a group of ten luxury hotels, including the Hotel Bel-Air and the Beverly Hills Hotel, which is seeing a growing list of cancellations. For the first time since its debut eleven years ago, the Night Before Oscar event will not take place at the BHH next March. More immediately, Wednesday's banquet honoring Amy Pascal, eight months in planning, has been yanked from the BHH and will now take place on the Sony lot. 

Over the weekend, Richard Branson announced Virgin's more than 50,000 employees will boycott all ten Dorchester group hotels in response to the antigay law. Ellen, Stephen Fry, Sharon Osborne, and several other celebrities declared personal boycotts and urged their fans to follow. In addition to the two Los Angeles landmarks, the eight other hotels to avoid are: the Dorchester and 45 Park Lane in London; Coworth Park in Ascot; the Plaza Athénée and Hotel Meurice in Paris; the Hotel Eden in Rome; the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan; and Le Richemond in Geneva.

The seven other nations with the death penalty for homosexuality are Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Click here for the full list of all 83 countries where homosexuality is illegal.

Born April 7: Harry Hay, Zamora Linmark

He was born in England, came to America at seven, and, in his twenties, had an affair with Grandpa Walton when that actor was in his thirties: Even now there's so much we don't recall about Harry Hay who started The Mattachine Society in 1950 in Los Angeles. To grasp the bravery of founding a gay rights group at that time, remember it was illegal for homosexuals to gather in public. A woman accompanied them for cover, or they met in private. Depending on your view, Hay is the most interesting or the most difficult of the movement's founders because he was permanently opposed to gay assimilation. He was also a longtime member of the Communist Party, a founding member of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, and a cofounder of Radical Faeries. (Happy, carefree NSFW fairy photo after the jump.) He met his life partner at fifty-one and died at ninety in 2002. Read a collection of his own writings, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder or his biography, The Trouble With Harry Hay [Kindle] by Stuart Timmons.

Today he would be 102. For his centenary, Los Angeles dedicated a Silver Lake staircase in his honor, The Mattachine Steps. We visited them in January and were very grateful to the person who added the much-needed homemade sign beneath the staid, gray official marker that says Mattachine but doesn't say gay.

A favorite on Thebes' queer lit survey, R Zamora Linmark's Leche [Kindle] is about a young gay Filipano-American returning to the country where he was born and coping with his dual identities. Or, as Kevin Killian says, the novel "takes that old exile-returns cliché and fucks with it till it cries out in ecstasy." Critic Nicholas Boggs said, the book "is a riotous ride through modern-day Manila featuring encounters with a larger-than-life cast of characters including a (perhaps) bisexual cabbie, an activist nun, an acclaimed movie director, and President Corazon Aquino’s actress daughter, also known as the Massacre Queen of the Philippine Cinema.” A two-time Fulbright recipient, Linmark has also written poetry and plays and has taught at the University of Miami and the University of Hawaii. 

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.

 

The Homoerotics of Orientalism: Brown Boys & Rice Queens

Who can resist a book about "Asian performance shaped by the homoerotics of orientalism [that] focuses on the relationship between the white man and the native boy"? Released last week, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias [Kindle] promises "Eng-Beng Lim unpacks this as the central trope for understanding colonial and cultural encounters in 20th and 21st century Asia and its diaspora. Using the native boy as a critical guide, Lim formulates alternative readings of a traditional Balinese ritual, postcolonial Anglophone theatre in Singapore, and performance art in Asian America. Tracing the transnational formation of the native boy as racial fetish object across the last century, Lim follows this figure as he is passed from the hands of the colonial empire to the postcolonial nation-state to neoliberal globalization. Read through such figurations, the traffic in native boys among white men serves as an allegory of an infantilized and emasculated Asia, subordinate before colonial whiteness and modernity. Pushing further, Lim addresses the critical paradox of this entrenched relationship that resides even within queer theory itself by formulating critical interventions around "Asian performance."

Lisa Duggan says, "Through fresh and compelling analyses, Eng-Beng Lim repeatedly shifts the lens through which we view our queerly postcolonial journey. Lim’s writing is always witty, sometimes hilarious, making this provocative new work of scholarship a pleasure and a revelation."

The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame: Master of Gay Erotic Manga

Yesterday in Les Mots a la Bouche I stumbled on this first-ever Genogoroh Tagame opus in English, a greatest hits by the genius of gay manga, edited by Chip Kidd and introduced by Edmund White. The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame: Master of Gay Erotic Manga pubbed in the US too quietly in May and critics predictably called him "Japan's Tom of Finland." Fair in that they both portray hyper macho characters but unfair to them as artists. Just look.

UPDATE: Garth Mitko Greenwell sent me this wonderful short by Max Freeman and a link to Freeman's interview with Tagame. I love this: "I started drawing comics in middle school, and it was mostly comical comics, funny comics, for classmates and teachers and that kind of thing. And they all liked it a lot. And there was a main character that developed, and he was the captain of the soccer team, who is kind of my first love. I have no idea why, but I suddenly started drawing him getting captured by the rival team and being stripped and humiliated, and this was in middle school, before I came out, or before I was thinking about myself as a gay person, so I was like, "Why am I drawing this?" But I also gave that comic to my friends. They said they liked it, but I don't know what they really thought."

At Least Two Gay Authors Longlisted for DSC Prize for South Asian Lit

Philip Hensher's award-winning fictional memoir of his husband's childhood in Bangladesh Scenes from Early Life [Kindle] and Shyam Selvadurai's novel The Hungry Ghosts about a gay man shuttling between Toronto and visits to his dying grandmother in Sri Lanka are two of the longlisted titles for th $50,000 DSC Prize for South Asian Literature. 

Anand: Book of Destruction 

Benyamin: Goat Days

Cyrus Mistry: Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer 

Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya: The Watch 

Manu Joseph: The Illicit Happiness of Other People

Mohsin Hamid: How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia

Nadeem Aslam: The Blind Man's Garden

Nayomi Munaweera: Island of a Thousand Mirrors

Nilanjana Roy: The Wildings 

Philip Hensher: Scenes from Early Life [Kindle] 

Ru Freeman: On Sal Mal Lane

Sachin Kundalkar: Cobalt Blue

Shyam Selvadurai: The Hungry Ghosts

Sonora Jha: Foreign

Uzma Aslam Khan: Thinner Than Skin

The shortlist will be announced November 20.

Highlights from the New York Film Festival

Notes from this year's NYFF. Links are to trailers.

Stranger by the Lake (French). I took two of my favorite filmgoers to the festival's one gay movie and it divided us: Was the movie bad because it was "tedious and hollow" or was it bad because it was a "psychotic, self-hating gay slasher pic"? The film does have two great scenes: 1) a man drowns someone and 2) the handsome killer asks the sole witness -- who has a huge crush on him -- to go swimming with him. Young dude says no way. But desire makes one ignore common sense and, well, he takes the plunge and swims after the murderer. Tense! Alas, it should have been a short.

Touch of Sin (Chinese). Four barely linked stories about contemporary China. Despite depressing conditions and bursts of violence, a brilliant work of art from Jia Zhangke. In theaters now. Go.

Like Father, Like Son (Japanese). Another winner from Koreeda. Two very different families discover their sons were switched at birth. The hippie couple have raised a bohemian free spirit while the workaholic has raised a serious little boy. The wives differ from the husbands about what should be done. No easy answers. You ought to go see it just because I said so, but you may need this extra incentive to see the original: Spielberg has optioned it for an American remake. 

Le Weekend (British). Jim Broadbent, Lindsay Duncan, and a surprisingly marvelous Jeff Goldblum in a comedy about an unhappy English couple who attempt to rekindle their 30-year marriage on a 3-day trip to Paris. I like the actors so much I was willing to overlook the movie's insistence on celebrating as madcap anarchy what is just plain irresponsible behavior. Sure, splurge, but don't run out on a steep restaurant tab.

All Is Lost (American). One actor and no words. Great moviemaking, but I could watch storms at sea for 100 hours and be enthralled. Also, problem-solving. Even though I fall on the Paul Newman side of the divide, Robert Redford gives a great performance at 77. 

My Name Is Hmmm (French). A good premise (abused girl runs away, Scottish trucker befriends her) ruined by amateur filmmaking. Characters announce their feelings to the mirror, every moody shadow must be zeroed in on and stared at.

Captain Phillips (American). What happened to Paul Greengrass? The anti-establishment insight of Bloody Sunday and the complexity of United 93 have vanished in this lovesong to the US Navy Seals. The thrills are there, yes, but nothing else. To recap: White Americans = good, black Somalis = evil. And Tom Hanks' yankee accent comes and goes with the tides, though he is less annoying than usual. The one to see instead is the Dutch film, A Hijacking.

BONUS ROUND:

Haute Cuisine (French). Now in limited release, wrongly marketed as feelgood fluff. A frankly bittersweet look at the country woman summoned to Paris to cook for the president, only to be thwarted at every turn by the snobbery and sexism of the established male chefs as well as the soulless, budget-slashing bureaucrats.

Enough Said (American). A little flawed but it's always worthwhile to support an artist like Nicole Holofcener in a Nancy Meyers world.

Gravity (Outer Space). People! The corny script and flawed science are beside the point. It would be a better film if it had the guts to go silent like the first half of WALL-E or All Is Lost, but it's easy enough to overlook the cliches as you're immersed in the stunning visuals. Must be seen on IMAX. 

Born September 12: Leslie Cheung, Chip Kidd

Leslie Cheung was a pop superstar, a movie idol, and he had a loving boyfriend named Hok-Tak Tong, so his millions of fans were stunned on April 1, 2003 to learn he had jumped off a twenty-fourth floor balcony of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong. His suicide dominated the headlines of Asian tabloids for more than a month, searching every aspect of his life for clues. The youngest of ten children of a Kowloon tailor, he was educated in England and returned to Hong Kong to sing. He released more than twenty-five very successful albums and his hit “Monica” was named Song of the Century. Two years after his death, China Central Television named him The Most Favorite Actor In 100 Years of Chinese Cinema for his work with directors John Woo, Kaige Chen, and Wong Kar-Wai, among others. Unlike many closeted actors in America, Cheung enthusiastically played gay characters, notably in two of his most famous films, Farewell, My Concubine and Happy Together. He came out in 1997 and his career thrived. His albums from that year on were extremely popular, as were his concerts, and many of his movies. He tried to kill himself in 2002 and succeeded the next year, when he was forty-six. His suicide note read,

"Depression! Many thanks to all my friends. Many thanks to Professor Felice Lieh-Mak [his psychiatrist]. This year has been so tough. I can't stand it anymore. Many thanks to Mr. Tong. Many thanks to my family. Many thanks to Fei-Fei. In my life I did nothing bad. Why does it have to be like this?"

This marks graphic designer Chip Kidd's 27th year working at Knopf, notable because today he turns 49. In addition to creating many of the era's most iconic book jackets (Jurassic Park, American Psycho, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), he is also an editor-at-large for Pantheon. A lifelong Batman fanatic, he has written many books about cartooning, including Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross, Shazam!: The Golden Age of the World's Mightiest Mortal, Jack Cole and Plastic Man, Batman Animated, Batman Collected, and Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan. He has also written two novels about a gay graphic designer, The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners. But he deserves to be punished for co-authoring with Lisa Birnbach the sequel to the Preppy Handbook, True Prep: It's a Whole New Old World. In his spare time, he blogs a lot and fronted the band Artbreak, whose song "Asymmetrical Girl" plays after the jump. His 2012 TED talk about book design garnered more than 780,000 views and last year he published his first graphic novel, Batman: Death by Design. Next month, Workman releases his Go: A Kidd's Guide to Graphic Design . Unless they've split, he and super poet J.D. "Sandy" McClatchy, 68, are longtime partners, living in Manhattan, Stonington, CT, and Palm Beach.

Gay-Inclusive Garden of Evening Mists Wins Walter Scott Prize

Having lost the Man Booker to Hilary Mantel last year, Tan Twan Eng has now triumphed over her, as well as former Booker winners Pat Barker and Thomas Keneally, to take the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction his gay-inclusive second novel, The Garden of Evening Mists [Kindle]. In March it won the Man Booker Asia Prize, beating Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk.

Elliott Mackle chose it as one of his favorites for Thebes queer lit poll saying, "The male/male elements in Tan Twan Eng’s lyrical The Garden of Evening Mists, set during and after World War II in Malaya, are comparatively minor but crucial and heart-breaking."

The complete shortlist for the £25,000 Walter Scott Prize:

• Toby's Room by Pat Barker
• The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally
• Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel
• The Streets by Anthony Quinn
• The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
• Merivel: A Man of His Time by Rose Tremain

 

 

Does Jesus Really Love Him?

It sounds like a book from the 70s, or the 90s, but Princeton grad, TIME reporter-at-large, and lifelong Christian, Jeff Chu recently toured the country asking every kind of religious leader Does Jesus Really Love Me?: A Gay Christian's Pilgrimage in Search of God in America [Kindle]. Chu's blend of memoir and reporting has earned great reviews almost everywhere, including Dan Savage on the cover of the NYTBR a week ago: "a fascinating, thoughtful, and important book." Library Journal calls it "poignant, at times painful, and spiced with wry humor," and Frank Bruni writes, "Jeff’s own story makes me hopeful. It’s one of grace."

Again sounding outdated at a time when marriage equality now enjoys majority support nationwide, not as a sudden turnaround but as the result of gradual, steady gains of about two percenage points a year since 2004 (read Nate Silver), Harper scarily describes it thus:

"From Brooklyn to Nashville to California, from Westboro Baptist Church and their 'God Hates Fags' protest signs, to the pioneering Episcopalian bishop Mary Glasspool—who proclaims a message of liberation and divine love, Chu captures spiritual snapshots of Christian America at a remarkable moment, when tensions between both sides in the culture wars have rarely been higher. Funny and heartbreaking, perplexing and wise, Does Jesus Really Love Me? is an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual pilgrimage that reveals a nation in crisis."

This is not Chu's fault. But it's worth noting that publishers are still harping on gay culture wars when even Rush Limbaugh has conceded defeat, saying, "The issue is lost. I don’t care what the Supreme Court does. [Gay marriage] is inevitable."

Gay-Inclusive Garden of Evening Mists Wins Man Asia Prize

Congratulations to Tan Twan Eng who, moments ago, beat Orhan Pamuk, Jeet Thayil, and two other finalists to win the Man Asia Literary Prize for his second novel The Garden of Evening Mists [Kindle]. A critical favorite, it was also shortlisted for the Man Booker, losing to Hilary Mantel.

Elliott Mackle chose it as one of his favorites for Thebes queer lit poll saying, "The male/male elements in Tan Twan Eng’s lyrical The Garden of Evening Mists, set during and after World War II in Malaya, are comparatively minor but crucial and heart-breaking."

The four other novels shortlisted for the $30,000 award were:

• Between Clay And Dust - Musharraf Ali Farooqi (Pakistan)
• The Briefcase – Hiromi Kawakami (Japan)
• Silent House - Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)
• Narcopolis - Jeet Thayil (India)

Last year's winner, Please Look After Mom, by Kyung-sook Shin of South Korea, may be unknown to you but since its win it has sold more than two million copies worldwide.

Born January 14: Yukio Mishima, Cecil Beaton

Brilliant writer and fascist militant nut, Yukio Mishima published forty novels, many collections of stories and essays, and was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize before, at 45, launching a deranged coup attempt against the Japanese government with four other men immediately after which he and another committed ritual suicide. Mishima wrote his first book in his early twenties and became a celebrity at 24 with his bestselling second novel, the autobiographical gay conformity story Confessions of a Mask. While that book chronicled a solitary experience, bigger shocks awaited in his novel Forbidden Colors exploring Tokyo's vast gay subculture. In dreaming of an all male world it also gave voice to Mishima's misogyny and gave rise to his dedication to a hyper-masculine ideal of beauty, starting with himself. He detested intellectuals' emphasis on the mind, instead espousing a life of physicality, muscle, and action, which led to increased scenes of sadomasochism and gay rape in his fiction and greater vanity in his life. On a hardcore workout regimen, he began posing nude for gay photographers and acting in movies. Highlights of his prolific output are The Sound of Waves, a hetero love story so popular it's been filmed five times; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; and his Sea of Fertility tetralogy beginning with Spring Snow. In 1998 Jiro Fukushima published a book about his affair with Mishima and Mishima's son and daughter successfully sued him for invasion of privacy and copyright violation for quoting their father's letters to him.

Avoiding sports as a child, Cecil Beaton learned photography from his nanny on her Kodak 3A, and avoiding academics at Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1925, he took his first published photo, printed in Vogue, of one of England's leading Shakespearean scholars in drag: To be exact, George "Dadie" Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as the Duchess of Malfi. From there Beaton had to go work for his father's timber company, which he suffered for eight miserable days. After that he returned to his rightful place in the world of design, creating book jackets and studying photography until Vogue hired him fulltime in 1927. Although his style is flowery and theatrical, many of his most enduring images are serious people captured at critical times: a tense Churchill in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation portrait, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding portrait. During the war, he volunteered and was posted to the Ministry of Information, capturing images of the Blitz, its young injured on the cover of Life, and RAF pilots in their cockpit.

Versatile in his talents, Beaton also designed the lighting, sets, and costumes for many Broadway musicals, winning four Tony Awards, and for several Hollywood extravaganzas, winning the Oscar for best costumes twice, for Gigi and most famously for his high camp creations in My Fair Lady. Although he never consummated his long unrequited love for Peter Watson, a gay art collector whose interests lay elsewhere, Beaton did enjoy possibly the greatest consolation prize of the twentieth century, an affair with Gary Cooper. For his entire life, he kept his childhood diary in which he first realized he was a "terrible, terrible homosexualist" and that shame never fully disappeared, driving him to a few misguided affairs with women later in his life, including one with Greta Garbo, who dumped him and went back to women. When he was seventy he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and though he adapted to drawing and photographing with his left hand, he never recovered his earlier ease. He died six years later, in 1980.

Click here, to re-read Sandy Leonard's immortal Beaton/Coral Browne memory.

Philip Hensher's Scenes from Early Life

In 2008, the editors at Amazon named their #1 overall best book of the year Philip Hensher's great big brilliant gay-inclusive sixth novel The Northern Clemency [Kindle], which was also shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Since then he's published another large novel King of the Badgers [Kindle] (memorable for its respectable gay bear couple hosting their monthly, drug-dabbling orgy the same night the village newcomers have a cocktail party, with some impromptu cross-pollination) and a nonfiction book about the lost art of handwriting.

Pubbed in England last April, yesterday saw the US release of Hensher's shorter new book, Scenes from Early Life [Kindle], a hybrid memoir/novel closely based on his husband's childhood in Dhaka, where he and his cousins play games based on Kojak, Dallas, and Roots while their parents struggle under the terrible civil war that will separate Bangladesh from Pakistan. Favorably compared to work by Rushdie and Vikram Seth, the book is "one of the most delightful and engaging descriptions of family life to have been published for many years," "suffused with tenderness, yet altogether free from sentimentality," and, "a richly depicted saga of childhood joys and sorrows...his most purely pleasurable novel to date," according to three UK critics. It was shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize.

Portraits of LGBT Couples in Vietnam

 

Despite a history of homophobia, Vietnam celebrated its first pride parade in August and it may become the first nation in Asia to legalize same-sex marriage. Photographer Maika Elan, 26, has been documenting queer couples in her native country for two years. The NYT reports:

"Most took some time to warm up to her. But after being around her subjects for a few days, she got a sense of their routines at home. In fact, the idea of home became integral to the work. When she followed one couple outside, she watched how their posture changed in public. They weren’t comfortable. At a flower market, where she was photographing the two men together, onlookers stopped to ask why two men would hug. She sought private moments instead — where her subjects would be free from stares and criticism, and less inclined to dramatize their relationship. Moments when they forgot she was there."

You can see a portfolio of her images on her website. 

Born December 16: Noël Coward, Kanako Otsuji

At fourteen in 1913 Noël Coward began an affair with Philip Streatfeild, a thirty-four year old society painter whom he met only because his mother was Streatfeild's charwoman. Two years later, Streatfeild was dying of tuberculosis and urged Mrs. Astley Cooper to nurture the "delicate" Coward, which she did. He began appearing in plays, was discharged from WWI service for ill health, and had his first writing success at twenty-five with The Vortex, scandalously popular in London and New York for its wit and veiled hints of drugs and gay life. While the times changed, Coward did not; he kept that veil cemented in place for the next five decades.

Although many of his sophisticated, camp comedies play peekaboo with the closet, especially the threesome in Design for Living (1932) and less popular later works like Song at Twilight (1966), the urbane Coward never actually came out. A friend of King George, Coward traveled widely to perform for WWII troops and secretly worked as a spy, hiding behind his high life persona. The press attacked him for his excesses during wartime. The king suggested a knighthood, but Churchill disliked his "flamboyance" and blocked it. After the war, Coward fell in love with the actor Graham Payn and they stayed together nearly thirty years. In 1956 they became tax exiles, landing first in Bermuda then in Jamaica where they were neighbors to the constantly bickering Mr. & Mrs. Ian Fleming. Coward enjoyed a revival in the 1960s and finally was knighted in 1970. He died in Jamaica in 1973, still with Payn. You can read his biography or go right to his diaries, letters, plays, or the The Noël Coward Reader.

Born in Kobe in 1974, Kanako Otsuji was a junior karate champion in Asia, opting to attend university in Korea to study tae kwon do. Although she failed to make the Japanese olympic team in 2000, three years later she became one of only seven women -- and the youngest person ever -- elected to the 110-member Osaka Assembly. She came out the day before Tokyo Pride in 2005 by publishing her memoir. That same year she succeeded in changing the law that previously allowed only married couples to rent public housing in Osaka; now lgbt couples can too. In April 2007 she did not stand for re-election and two months later she married her partner Maki Kamura in an outdoor, public ceremony, although Japan does not recognize same-sex marriage. (Adorable wedding photos here and here.) In 2009, filmmaker Naomi Hiltz premiered her documentary about Otsuji at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival.

Asian Booker Longlist Has Gay-Inclusive Garden of Evening Mists

    

Two titles shortlisted for the Man Booker and a 30 year-old novel by Orhan Pamuk are among this year's longlisted books for the Man Asian Literary Prize. The two Booker titles are the Indian romp Narcopolis and Tan Twan Eng's The Garden of Evening Mists, which is also the sole overlap with Thebes' queer lit poll: Elliott Mackle said, "The male/male elements in Tan Twan Eng’s lyrical The Garden of Evening Mists, set during and after World War II in Malaya, are comparatively minor but crucial and heart-breaking."

The fifteen longlisted books are:

Goat Days – Benyamin (India)

Between Clay and Dust - Musharraf Ali Farooqi (Pakistan)

Another Country - Anjali Joseph (India)

The Briefcase – Hiromi Kawakami (Japan)

Thinner Than Skin - Uzma Aslam Khan (Pakistan)

Ru - Kim Thúy (Vietnam / Canada*)

Black Flower - Young-Ha Kim (South Korea)

Island of a Thousand Mirrors - Nayomi Munaweera (Sri Lanka)

Silent House - Orhan Pamuk (Turkey)

Honor - Elif Shafak (Turkey)

Northern Girls - Sheng Keyi (China)

The Garden of Evening Mists [Kindle] - Tan Twan Eng (Malaysia)

The Road to Urbino – Roma Tearne (Sri Lanka / U.K.*)

Narcopolis [Kindle] - Jeet Thayil (India)

The Bathing Women – Tie Ning (China)

The shortlist will be announced on January 9 and the winner on March 14 at a black tie dinner in Hong Kong.

Julie Otsuka Wins Prix Femina Étranger

A National Book Award finalist last year, Julie Otsuka's second novel The Buddha in the Attic [Kindle] won the PEN/Faulkner in March, and earlier tonight in Paris she was awarded the Prix Femina Étranger. The brief, poetic novel about Japanese war brides is told in the first person plural. Some previous winners of the prize are Edward St. Aubyn, Nuala O'Faolain, Rose Tremain, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, David Malouf, Amos Oz, and J.M. Coetzee.

The winner of the Prix Femina itself was Patrick Deville for his novel Peste et Choléra, yes, plague and cholera, about the bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin (1863-1943). The prize has been given annually since 1904, except during WWI and WWII.

Authors Excluded from List of 54 Influential Asian LGBT People

Remember what journalism was? It's been replaced by slideshows. They keep you on the site longer and increase page views. HuffPost's JR Tungol has compiled the "54 Most Influential LGBT Asian Icons" and he writes, "Each icon I've discovered has instilled in me a sense of pride and even greater hope in the upswing of our civil rights movement." He found "familiar faces such as Margaret Cho and BD Wong to perhaps lesser-known individuals such as Urvashi Vaid." Wut! Who are these 53 icons better known than Urv? Well... A woman who self-pubbed a zine in 1995 and quit to focus on her acupuncture business. A man who started a gay group at Michigan. The diversity director at HRC. A diversity director at NYU. The mayor of West Sacramento. Somebody running for Congress in California. Tungol overdoses on fashion people and includes FIVE different contestants from RuPaul's Drag Race... which is five times as many novelists as he names, only Ghalib Dhalla. The list ignores three-time Nobel nominee Yukio Mishima! Vikram Seth! Also missing are wonderful writers like Han Ong, Alexander Chee, Shyam Selvadurai, Malinda Lo, Rahul Mehta, Noel Alumit, Zamora Linmark, Rakesh Satyal, Justin Chin, et al. 

Nevertheless, queer Asian visibility needs every link it can get, and the slideshow may introduce you to a few worthy people like lesbian Pamela Ki Mai Chen, newly nominated to the federal bench.

Born October 24: Emma Donoghue, B.D. Wong

Who works harder than Emma Donoghue? This month she's debuted a new play about New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan and a new collection of short stories called Astray [Kindle]. Two years ago she wrote the blockbuster Room [Kindle] -- shortlisted for the Booker, the Orange Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Galaxy International prize; winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust prize -- and last week she revealed her remarkably sane reaction to all the fuss. Four months before Room, Knopf published her essential and immensely entertaining, decade-in-the-making exploration of lesbians in literature, Inseparable [Kindle]. In six previous novels she proved herself equally at home in the present (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing) and the past (Slammerkin, Life Mask, The Sealed Letter). She has also written four collections of stories, five plays, and five radio plays. She lives with her partner Chris and their children, Una and Finn, in Ontario. (Photo by Sarah Lee for the Guardian.)

A fourth generation Chinese-American, B.D. Wong made his Broadway debut in 1988 in M. Butterfly, for which he became and remains the only actor to win the five major theater prizes for the same role. But it was not enough to convince David Cronenberg to cast him in the movie version five years later, when he chose John Lone instead. Wong starred with Margaret Cho in her much praised, quickly canceled series All American Girl, then played a priest on Oz, and for ten years running Dr George Huang on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He and his ex-partner Richie Jackson, an agent, are parents of a son named Foo, the surviving child of twins born extremely prematurely. Wong wrote a book about the experience called Following Foo.

Born September 12: Leslie Cheung, Chip Kidd

Leslie Cheung was a pop superstar, a movie idol, and he had a loving boyfriend named Hok-Tak Tong, so his millions of fans were stunned on April 1, 2003 to learn he had jumped off a twenty-fourth floor balcony of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong. His suicide dominated the headlines of Asian tabloids for more than a month, searching every aspect of his life for clues. The youngest of ten children of a Kowloon tailor, he was educated in England and returned to Hong Kong to sing. He released more than twenty-five very successful albums and his hit “Monica” was named Song of the Century. Two years after his death, China Central Television named him The Most Favorite Actor In 100 Years of Chinese Cinema for his work with directors John Woo, Kaige Chen, and Wong Kar-Wai, among others. Unlike many closeted actors in America, Cheung enthusiastically played gay characters, notably in two of his most famous films, Farewell, My Concubine and Happy Together. He came out in 1997 and his career thrived. His albums from that year on were extremely popular, as were his concerts, and many of his movies. He tried to kill himself in 2002 and succeeded the next year, when he was forty-six. His suicide note read,

"Depression! Many thanks to all my friends. Many thanks to Professor Felice Lieh-Mak [his psychiatrist]. This year has been so tough. I can't stand it anymore. Many thanks to Mr. Tong. Many thanks to my family. Many thanks to Fei-Fei. In my life I did nothing bad. Why does it have to be like this?"

Last year graphic designer Chip Kidd celebrated 25 years working at Knopf, notable because today he turns 48. In addition to creating many of the era's most iconic book jackets (Jurassic Park, American Psycho, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), he is also an editor-at-large for Pantheon. A lifelong Batman fanatic, he has written many books about cartooning, including Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross, Shazam!: The Golden Age of the World's Mightiest Mortal, Jack Cole and Plastic Man, Batman Animated, Batman Collected, and Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan. He has also written two novels about a gay graphic designer, The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners. But he deserves to be punished for co-authoring with Lisa Birnbach last year's sequel to the Preppy Handbook, True Prep: It's a Whole New Old World. In his spare time, he blogs a lot and fronted the band Artbreak, whose song "Asymmetrical Girl" plays after the jump. So far this year Kidd's given a TED talk about book design garnering half a million views and he's published his first graphic novel, Batman: Death by Design. Unless they've split, he and super poet J.D. "Sandy" McClatchy, 67, are longtime partners, living in Manhattan, Stonington, CT, and Palm Beach.