Band of Thebes

Evie Wyld's All the Birds, Singing

Sensing a winner, last year I imported Evie Wyld's second novel All the Birds, Singing [and Kindle] from England. I was hoping for an Australian Miriam Toews and I did love same quality of careful attention to isolated places and remote people: a young woman named Jake tends sheep on a bleak island off the British coast and earlier was a very unlucky teen prostitute in the Outback. Yesterday it won Australia's top literary award, the $60,000 Miles Franklin, and last week it won two awards in the UK: The £10,000 Encore (beating Eleanor Catton's Booker winner The Luminaries) and a £5,000 Jerwood Fiction Uncovered prize. Among her seven fellow winners of that award is Bernardine Evaristo for her atypical gay novel Mr. Loverman.

Evie Wyld runs an independent bookshop in South London. Her debut, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, earned her a spot on Granta's once-a-decade list of the Best Young British Novelists.

Born May 28: Patrick White

When you count gay Nobel Prize winning novelists, do you get beyond André Gide and Thomas Mann? The Australian writer Patrick White, born in 1912, won the award in 1973. Although White never forgave his parents for shipping him off to a detestable boarding school in England, he inherited their conservatism and did not discuss his sexuality nor did he include openly gay characters in his work until 1979's The Twyborn Affair, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize. After winning the inaugural Miles Franklin Award for his enduring Voss, White declined that award a second time for Riders in the Chariot and refused all other prizes, asking the Booker judges to remove his name from their shortlist to give younger writers a chance. Obviously, he made an exception for the Nobel, but he sent his friend the painter Stanley Nolan to Stockholm to accept the prize on his behalf. He lived with a former Greek soldier his same age, Manoly Lascaris, who was his ballast and partner for forty-eight years. White finally came out when he was sixty-nine with the publication of his memoir, Flaws in the Glass. He died at seventy-eight in 1990, Lascaris survived him thirteen years. 

Born February 17: Robert Dessaix, Fritz Krupp

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 queer 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. Invited to the Shanghai International Literary Festival in March 2010, he was denied a visa, probably because of his HIV+ status. In April 2011 he published On Humbug. More recently came As I Was Saying: A Collection of Musings [Kindle]. 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 70 today. 

Born 160 years ago today, heir to a 300-year-old dynasty and a newer steel, weapons, and ammunitions empire, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, known as Fritz, preferred marine biology but took over the family firm in 1887 when he was thirty-three. Also against his inclination, he married a woman. He spent as much time as he could in Capri, pursuing his first loves of oceanography and men. For the times when he had to be in Germany, he arranged for his favorite Italian youths to work at a luxury hotel in Berlin, where he often stayed for their service and where other guests complained about the noises coming from his inner sanctum. Accustomed to enormous power -- by the turn of the century he had built Krupp into the largest company in Europe -- he ignored others' objections. This may be why his wife was institutionalized. The media, however, could not be quelled forever. An Italian newspaper was preparing to print accounts of his famous island orgies, with photos. Vorwärts, the Social Democrats' magazine, beat them to it, outing the forty-eight year-old Fritz on November 15, 1902. Seven days later he killed himself. Emperor Wilhelm II blasted his political opponents and defended Fritz against the "slander," and his wife immediately "recovered" to continue raising their two daughters. The eldest inherited the firm which became a Nazi juggernaut. The dynasty endures as does fascination with them: In 2009 a four-and-a-half-hour tv miniseries Krupp - Eine deutsche Familie showed a dandified Fritz flaunting his rough trade. Photos after the jump.

Radical Faeries Photo Essay in TIME

  

Claire Martin captures Radical Faeries in 20 photos published by Time magazine. Happily, the images are celebatory rather than mocking or exploitive. The couple at right are Spiral and Flame Tree.

Martin said, "What excited me most about discovering Faerieland was the possibility to photograph a story where the crux for change lies in the culture of the wider society, not within the fringe community itself. It was a joy to photograph a story about love, acceptance and creativity that also carries a strong message about the problems and prejudices in society and culture today."

Australia High Court Rejects Gay Marriage Law, Invalidates Unions

The several dozen same-sex couples who have wed in the Australian Capital Territory since Saturday, today saw their unions dissolved by a unanimous high court ruling that rejects marriage equality. The silver lining comes via George Williams, a constitutional law expert who:

"said it was significant that the high court made clear the federal parliament had the power to legislation for same-sex marriage nationally. He had not expected this to be spelled out in the ruling.

"That’s a very significant finding and it’s significant because when the federal bills have come into the parliament the ‘no’ people have argued strongly it would be unconstitutional … This clears the way for a federal law."

Australian Gorilla Wins Iris Prize, Etyan Fox Wins Feature Award

Tim Marshall's Gorilla [above] has won the Iris Prize for best lgbt short film and £25,000. His twelve-minute story is summarized, "On a weekend away, a newly formed couple are forced to face the unknown in their lives when a mysterious woman arrives at their secluded campsite." 

The Iris Prize Best Feature Award honored versatile Etyan Fox for Cupcakes [below], a light-hearted turn about a EuroSong-like competition, after his acclaimed Yossi & Jagger and Yossi. He wins £1,000.

Jay Bedwani won Best UK Short for his ten-minute film, My Mother. "Gustavo reminisces about his childhood and his relationship with his mother, the inspiration behind his weekend trips to San Francisco, where he lives as his alter ego, Donna."

The Youth Jury selected as their winner Straight with You, a nineteen-minute documentary about a gay eleven year-old boy who is out to his family but not his school.

Acting awards went to Sabine Wolf in Two Mothers and Ryan Steele in Five Dances. 

Paul Freeman's Heroics

Fed up with shaved, steroided gym bunnies, gay Tasmanian/Australian photographer Paul Freeman published seven books of "real" men in two series, Bondi or bush. Never mind that for about half the images, he took Sydney models to the Outback to manufacture the verisimilitude he sought. In 2011, with his eighth book Heroics he broadened his scope and began to time travel, often giving his nude subjects props from another era. He returns to that conceit in his just-out tenth book Heroics 2, which celebrates male archetypes from the original Band of Thebes to contemporary firefighters and lifeguards. Freeman, a bit of a talker, told The Lush Life the series was inspired by ancient statuary:

"Heroics was not meant to be a 'serious' homage. It was meant to be a bit ironic, with elements of costume drama and theatre. It’s a tongue in cheek reflection of how heterosexual men have always highly rated their own heroism and bravery and glamorized their greatness with these over the top erotic monuments. It was meant to reference a time (back in ancient Rome and Greece) when the beautiful naked male was publicly celebrated in art. When I traveled through Europe some years back, I took hundreds of photos of some of the very erotic male statues that exist as a consequence of this Renaissance in art, and which occupy very public places in most of the major cities. It always amused and perplexed me that the  masses of humanity who rush hurriedly by these works of art in their daily commute, would still baulk at the idea of the naked male as a thing of art in their ‘real lives.’ ‘Heroics’ is just another mild middle finger held up at all those absurd notions, even though it’s a pretty polite finger.  I thought by spelling out some of the themes of statuary found in Rome and London, by using real men, I could highlight the absurdity of disgust at the nude male by heterosexual men when they gloried in it in their own shrines."

Freeman is also the author of the 1997 biography Ian Roberts: Finding Out, about Australia's first openly gay sports star and the world's first out professional rugby player.

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.

What the Family Needed by Steven Amsterdam

Today is the US release of gay expat Steven Amsterdam's first novel What the Family Needed [Kindle], which has already been longlisted for the IMPAC Dublin Prieze and has earned an A from Entertainment Weekly, whose reviewer said, ""Remarkable ... at once magical and very normal, a wishful fantasy about the strength it can take to love one's family members well."

"What the Family Needed is a wonderful novel: imaginative, intelligent, empathetic. It's like a cross between The Corrections and The Slap, except without any of the gloom or rage and with the addition of something that may or may not be either a form of magic realism or simply that old staple of the literary art, metaphor."  -Sydney Morning Herald

"Every now and then, a novel arrives that conveys not only wisdom and understanding but also offers a dose of magic. Part fable, part dreamscape, part family drama, What the Family Needed can be read in several ways. Some of the delight is that nothing is lost in choosing one way over another; in fact, each reading contains all other possible readings." -Brisbane Courier Mail

"Amsterdam has a gift for switching reality about: in his sharp and engaging fiction, life seems ordinary but radically unsettling. It's not even clear what species of fiction we are dealing with... Exhilarating." -The Australian

In last year's Thebes' queer lit poll, Neel Mukherjee called it "a smart, magical (literally), wry mosaic of a novel about the bonds that constitute a family. His angle of vision is new and the resulting work witty, fresh and original."

Steven Amsterdam's book of linked stories, Things We Didn't See Coming [Kindle], was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and won The Age's Book of the Year award.

A native New Yorker, Amsterdam has lived in Melbourne for 10 years. Tonight he reads at Three Lives.

Born February 17: Robert Dessaix, Fritz Krupp

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. In April 2011 he published On Humbug. Last August he published As I Was Saying: A Collection of Musings [Kindle]. 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 69 today.

Heir to a 300 year-old dynasty and a newer steel, ammunitions, and weapons empire, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, known as Fritz, preferred marine biology but took over the family firm in 1887 when he was thirty-three. Also against his inclination, he married a woman. He spent as much time as he could in Capri, pursuing his first loves of oceanography and men. For the times when he had to be in Germany, he arranged for his favorite Italian youths to work at a luxury hotel in Berlin, where he often stayed for their service and where other guests complained about the noises coming from his inner sanctum. Accustomed to enormous power -- by the turn of the century he had built Krupp into the largest company in Europe -- he ignored others' objections. This may be why his wife was institutionalized. The media, however, could not be quelled forever. An Italian newspaper was preparing to print accounts of his famous island orgies, with photos. Vorwärts, the Social Democrats' magazine, beat them to it, outing the forty-eight year-old Fritz on November 15, 1902. Seven days later he killed himself. Emperor Wilhelm II blasted his political opponents and defended Fritz against the "slander," and his wife immediately "recovered" to continue raising their two daughters. The eldest inherited the firm which became a Nazi juggernaut. The dynasty endures as does fascination with them; someone filmed their story, including dandified Fritz flaunting his rough trade. Photos after the jump.

Naomi Watts in The Impossible 2

 

Of all Nobel Laureate Doris Lessing's stories, director Anne Fontaine chose to film The Grandmothers,about two sexy moms who each start sleeping with the other's hot son. In the story, the affairs last from the time the lads are in their late teens to their 30s, when the moms finally break it off and the hurt young men never forgive them. Looks like the movie collapses time to a shorter span. For fun, imagine how the gay dad version of this "daring," "brave," "surprising love story" would be greeted by studios, stars, and critics.

The Australian movie starring Naomi Watts and Robin Wright Penn opens in France on April 3 under the title Perfect Mothers. It releases in the US with the title Two Mothers. In any language, the music is so awful you'll think it's a parody, a la the Samberg - Timberlake Mother Lover.

Born August 16: Dennis Altman, Wolfgang Tillmans

Forty-one years ago, way back in 1971, Australian gay rights pioneer Dennis Altman published his groundbreaking book Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. While teaching at the University of Sydney, La Trobe, and Harvard, he has continued to publish "savvy, energetic" work, including Gore Vidal's America, AIDS in the Mind of America, and Global Sex, about which PW said: "Altman is best when he... compares Bangkok's current reputation with Vienna's as "the global brothel" circa 1900; when he traces the dissemination of U.S. gay culture around the world; or when he discusses how Reagan and Thatcher used traditional "moral panics" to promote their agendas. Drawing upon a wide range of sources and cultural artifacts including Playboy, U.N. Development Programme reports, Sharon Stone's famous leg crossing in Basic Instinct, and La Cage aux Folles, as well as the theories of Freud, Herbert Marcuse, William Reich and Franz Fanon Altman ranges outside the usual boundaries of academic research."

Born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968, photog phenom Wolfgang Tillmans made it to England as an exchange student when he was fifteen in 1983, just in time for the queerish alt rock explosion led by Depeche Mode, the Smiths, the Cure. After stints in Hamburg, and a year in New York where he met his German partner Jochen Klein, they settled in London in 1995. Two years later Klein died of aids. Three years after that, in 2000, Tillmans became the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win the UK's prestigious Turner Prize. Two years later he filmed the video for Pet Shop Boys' "Home and Dry." In 2006, he opened Between Bridges gallery space in London to promote overlooked political art. But what's his own style? All over the map. New York mag tried to nail it last year: "A Tillmans has slackerlike beauty and nonchalance; a color sense that is more like that of a monochrome painter who works in large or otherwise unbroken fields; an accidental and uncontrived appearance; an attraction to the abstract and fragmented; and a sense of the photograph as an object that (usually unframed) occupies wall space more like a sheet than like a piece of art." Taschen has a three-volume, 556-page retrospective of his work.

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 smash Gene Wilder, Richard Pryor, Jill Clayburgh 1976 superhit 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 include 17 year-old Oklahoma queer activist Tempest Cartwright, and 11 year-old Jazz, born a boy, insisting since age 2 she is a girl, who is credited with starting the Transkids Movement. Harold and Maude and 9 to 5 are ranked #45 and #74 on AFI's list of the 100 funniest films of all time.

Born July 2: Daniel Kowalski

Australian Daniel Kowalski won his first three Olympic medals in swimming (two bronze for 200m, 400m and a silver for 1500m) at the '96 Atlanta games two weeks after he turned 21. He won his first and only Olympic gold at the Sydney 2000 games for a relay event in which he did not swim in the finals (but medaled nonetheless because he swam in the qualifying rounds) when he was 25. Two years later chronic shoulder problems and a series of unsuccessful surgeries forced him to retire. What followed were "literally years of torment, denial and very, very dark times," not because he had failed to achieve his goal of solo golds but because he was suffocating in the closet. Eight years after retiring, Kowalski finally came out in this April 2010 essay in The Age. He is 37 today. Fellow Aussie Matthew Mitcham was already out at 20 when he won the gold for 10m platform diving with the highest single-dive score in Olympic history at the Beijing games in 2008. Many athletes say the stress of the closet keeps them from performing at their peak. Kowalski, now a coach, was inspired by Welsh rugby superstar Gareth Thomas who came out in December 2009.

Rory Stewart on Bruce Chatwin

Rory Stewart, who turned his solo walk across Afghanistan into the recent travel masterpiece The Places In Between [Kindle], has written the introduction to complicated closet case Bruce Chatwin's classic book blending fiction and nonfiction covering his (few) treks in the Outback and his (many) thoughts on Aboriginal culture, The Songlines. Much of the essay can be found at the NYRB blog:

"Today, however, Chatwin’s fictions seem more transparent. We may not be too surprised to discover the journeys with nomads for which he “quit his job,” and which John Lanchester admired, were brief interludes in a period more accurately described as Chatwin getting married and becoming an undergraduate at Edinburgh University. And the passages, suffused with symbolic and literary resonances, that once seemed most impressive, no longer seem the most satisfying. His personality, his learning, his myths, and even his prose, are less hypnotizing. And yet he remains a great writer, of deep and enduring importance.

"The magic of The Songlines lies for me today in the central section, which records what Chatwin observed on February 8, 9, and 10 in 1982 with Toly Sawenko in Ti-Tree, Stirling, and Osborne Bore. The account is precise, understated, beautifully written, and, in an important sense, truthful. Someone as mythically inclined as Chatwin must have been tempted to portray Aborigines either as tragic victims or noble savages. But in his first glimpse of an Aboriginal settlement, he immediately shows us that he is better than that—much better than that. This is not an idyllic grove..."

Both Stewart and Chatwin are champions of another gay, pioneering travel memoirist Robert Byron, whose marvelous The Road to Oxiana greatly influenced their own work.

At a formative age I loved Chatwin's novel On the Black Hill. Some literary types may be inclined to read the story of two Welsh brothers who share a bed for forty-two years as a more acceptable stand-in for the kind of domestic male-male relationship Chatwin could not bring himself to create.

Gay Lives by Robert Aldrich

Robert Aldrich, a professor of European history at the University of Sydney, has compiled eighty biographical sketches of LGBT people from ancient to modern times in his new book, Gay Lives, released stateside this week by Thames & Hudson. He told a local paper:

“It’s hard to talk about gay and lesbian history without covering the Christopher Isherwoods and the Harvey Milks and all of that, but once you move past that, it’s interesting to learn how there were people involved in same-sex activities in all walks of life – the book has a lesbian nun, a criminal, painters, explorers… I wanted to take a lot of less well-known figures from across continents and around the world to show diversity, because in many ways diversity is the theme of the book.”

The handsome, heavy book includes 56 color illustrations and 72 in black and white. 

Aldrich's previous book is Gay Life & Culture: A World History.

Born February 17: Friedrich Alfred Krupp, Robert Dessaix

Heir to a 300 year-old dynasty and a newer steel, ammunitions, and weapons empire, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, known as Fritz, preferred marine biology but took over the family firm in 1887 when he was thirty-three. Also against his inclination, he married a woman. He spent as much time as he could in Capri, pursuing his first loves of oceanography and men. For the times when he had to be in Germany, he arranged for his favorite Italian youths to work at a luxury hotel in Berlin, where he often stayed for their service and where other guests complained about the noises coming from his inner sanctum. Accustomed to enormous power -- by the turn of the century he had built Krupp into the largest company in Europe -- he ignored others' objections. This may be why his wife was institutionalized. The media, however, could not be quelled forever. An Italian newspaper was preparing to print accounts of his famous island orgies, with photos. Vorwärts, the Social Democrats' magazine, beat them to it, outing the forty-eight year-old Fritz on November 15, 1902. Seven days later he killed himself. Emperor Wilhelm II blasted his political opponents and defended Fritz against the "slander," and his wife immediately "recovered" to continue raising their two daughters. The eldest inherited the firm which became a Nazi juggernaut. The dynasty endures as does fascination with them; someone filmed their story, including dandified Fritz flaunting his rough trade. Photos after the jump.

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 68 today.

That Awesome Aussie Ad for Gay Marriage

Warning: You might cry. He writes in pen in a hardcover book.

After 33 Years, Sydney Degays Mardi Gras

Two facts: The Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras is among the most-watched televised events in Australia each year and as a condition of sponsorship all corporations had to give an explicit statement of support for the LGBT community. Last week, the mardi gras board removed Gay and Lesbian from the event's name. A furious former SG&LMG president Richard Cobden told Same Same:

“This morning’s Sydney Morning Herald front page sums it up: Mardi Gras goes straight.

“Neither the organisation, and especially not this Board or staff, had any permission or mandate to make Mardi Gras straight. Peter Urmson says ‘this is our gift to the city’. It was not his to give.”

“For 20-plus years we have been able to force the mainstream media to call it the GAY AND LESBIAN MARDI GRAS. They had to say the words. For a long time they did not want to but we made them. That has been thrown away.”

“Even major sponsors had to do that [give a message of queer support]. How can the organisation possibly ask for that now when they themselves have dropped an explicit gay and lesbian message?

“Finally, sponsors had to use the words ‘gay and lesbian’ when associating themselves with Mardi Gras. Making them do so was a powerful force for liberation. Now they don’t have to use those words. Easier for marketing people to get sponsorship dollars and keep their jobs; a big step backwards for gay and lesbian rights.”

The men responsible for putting the name back in the closet use inclusivity as their excuse, saying they want to emphasize that Mardi Gras is for everyone.

Born August 16: Dennis Altman, Wolfgang Tillmans

Forty years ago, way back in 1971, Australian gay rights pioneer Dennis Altman published his groundbreaking book Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation. While teaching at the University of Sydney, La Trobe, and Harvard, he has continued to publish "savvy, energetic" work, including Gore Vidal's America, AIDS in the Mind of America, and Global Sex, about which PW said: "Altman is best when he... compares Bangkok's current reputation with Vienna's as "the global brothel" circa 1900; when he traces the dissemination of U.S. gay culture around the world; or when he discusses how Reagan and Thatcher used traditional "moral panics" to promote their agendas. Drawing upon a wide range of sources and cultural artifacts including Playboy, U.N. Development Programme reports, Sharon Stone's famous leg crossing in Basic Instinct, and La Cage aux Folles, as well as the theories of Freud, Herbert Marcuse, William Reich and Franz Fanon Altman ranges outside the usual boundaries of academic research."

Born in Remscheid, Germany in 1968, photog phenom Wolfgang Tillmans made it to England as an exchange student when he was fifteen in 1983, just in time for the queerish alt rock explosion led by Depeche Mode, the Smiths, the Cure. After stints in Hamburg, and a year in New York where he met his German partner Jochen Klein, they settled in London in 1995. Two years later Klein died of aids. Three years after that, in 2000, Tillmans became the first photographer and the first non-British artist to win the UK's prestigious Turner Prize. Two years later he filmed the video for Pet Shop Boys' "Home and Dry." In 2006, he opened Between Bridges gallery space in London to promote overlooked political art. But what's his own style? All over the map. New York mag tried to nail it last year: "A Tillmans has slackerlike beauty and nonchalance; a color sense that is more like that of a monochrome painter who works in large or otherwise unbroken fields; an accidental and uncontrived appearance; an attraction to the abstract and fragmented; and a sense of the photograph as an object that (usually unframed) occupies wall space more like a sheet than like a piece of art." Hang on till next March, when Taschen will release a three-volume, 556-page retrospective of his work.