Band of Thebes

Born October 14: Katherine Mansfield

Cousin to Australian author Elizabeth von Arnim (The Enchanted April), friend of D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, spiritual heir to Chekhov's humanism, New Zealander Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp became a peerless master of the short story and died at thirty-two. She burned through sexual passion with women and men but not really with either of her husbands. Blatantly exploiting the affection of a singing teacher eleven years her senior, she agreed to marry George Bowden only because she was already pregnant by another man, refused to sleep with him on their wedding night and left him for good within hours. Her starchy mother arrived in England from New Zealand, blamed the breakup on her longtime lesbian lover Ida Baker, dispatched her daughter to a spa in Bavaria, and cut her out of her will. Mansfield miscarried. But it was there she discovered Chekhov. Upon her return to London in 1910 she started writing more seriously. In 1911 she began a relationship with editor John Murry, left him, got back together, left him again in 1913, got back together again, left him again in 1917, and in 1918 married him. Within two weeks she departed to travel for her health. First Paris, then she and Ida Baker lived in San Remo, Italy. As her tuberculosis worsened, she weakened, and yet this final period gave rise to her greatest works. Thirty-five of her best, including "The Garden-Party," "The Doll's House," and "At the Bay," are found in her Selected Stories from Norton. To understand her life, get her notebooks or brilliant biographer Claire Tomalin's Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life or Jeffrey Meyers' Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View. In a wise appreciation for the Telegraph, lesbian author Ali Smith mentions Mansfield's immediate impact on her contemporaries thus:

"She dunted Virginia Woolf, with a good sharp elbow, into the kind of experimental writing for which Woolf is revered. She unknowingly presented her friend DH Lawrence with one of the more sapphic narrative episodes of The Rainbow by telling him stories of her youth, and was later, again inadvertently, his model for the character of Gudrun in Women in Love."

Smith also cites Mansfield's influence on T.S. Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Scott Fitzgerland, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, Brigid Brophy, Christopher Isherwood, Carson McCullers, Philip Larkin, and Angela Carter.

Winners of the First Ever Bisexual Book Awards

    

Monday afternoon and the Bi Writers still have not posted the winners online. Piecing together victories by searching each author's fb page. For now, study the finalists:

Bisexual Fiction

• Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, edited by Brit Mandelo
• History of a Pleasure Seeker, Richard Mason
• In One Person, John Irving
• The Last Nude, Ellis Avery
• Mount Royal: There's nothing harder than love, Basil Papademos
• Silver Moon, Catherine Lundoff
• Whitetail Shooting Gallery, Annette Lapointe

Bisexual Nonfiction 

• WINNER: My Awesome Place: The Autobiography of Cheryl B [Kindle], Cheryl Burke
• Girlfag: A Life Told in Sex and Musicals, Janet W. Hardy

Bisexual Poetry

• WINNER: Fireflies at Absolute Zero, Erynn Rowan Laurie
• Love Without Limits: The Bi-Laws of Love, Yazmin Monet Watkins
• Shine, Donnelle McGee

Bisexual Erotica

• WINNER: Mount Royal: There's nothing harder than love, Basil Papademos
• Magic University: The Poet and the Prophecy, Cecilia Tan
• Times Square Queer: Tales of Bad Boys in the Big Apple, Mykola Dementiuk

Bisexual Speculative Fiction

• Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, edited by Brit Mandelo
• Gleams of a Remoter World, Fiona Glass
• Magic University: The Poet and the Prophecy, Cecilia Tan
• Silver Moon, Catherine Lundoff

Bi Writer Award

• WINNER: My Awesome Place: The Autobiography of Cheryl B [Kindle], Cheryl Burke
• Beyond Binary: Genderqueer and Sexually Fluid Speculative Fiction, edited by Brit Mandelo
• Fireflies at Absolute Zero, Erynn Rowan Laurie
• Girlfag: A Life Told in Sex and Musicals, Janet W. Hardy
• Mount Royal: There's nothing harder than love, Basil Papademos
• Magic University: The Poet and the Prophecy, Cecilia Tan
• Silver Moon, Catherine Lundoff
• Times Square Queer: Tales of Bad Boys in the Big Apple, Mykola Dementiuk
• Whitetail Shooting Gallery, Annette Lapointe

Bi Book Publisher of the Year:

Clive Davis' Memoir: Boyfriends, Bisexuality, Big Stars

In an announcement even longer delayed and less surprising than Jodie Foster's, hitmaker Clive Davis has finally, officially come out in his new memoir The Soundtrack of My Life [Kindle], six weeks shy of his 81st birthday. The producing powerhouse who founded Arista Records and J Records, Davis signed or managed superstars Janis Joplin, Laura Nyro, Santana, Bruce Springsteen, Chicago, Billy Joel, Pink Floyd, Earth Wind & Fire, Aerosmith, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Patti Smith, Air Supply, Barry Manilow, Alicia Keys, TLC, Usher, Pink, Outkast, Eurythmics, Annie Lennox, Alan Jackson, and of course Whitney Houston, among dozens of others. He is currently Chief Creative Officer of Sony Music Group, with flagship labels Columbia, RCA, and Epic. Online databases peg his net worth at $800 million. 

The twice-married father of four says he's been dating men for decades. He's been with his current partner for eight years and before that had a fourteen-year relationship with a (male) doctor.

One of several upcoming projects is relaunching My Fair Lady on Broadway. He wants Anne Hathaway and Colin Firth.

The LA Times' critic says the book is "filled with fantastic scenes and revelations" but short on the business of the music industry.

Born January 22: George Gordon Byron

Happy 225th birthday to that pansexual romeo George Gordon. Adultery, incest, sodomy were mere half-loves next to his great love, self-love. His Byronic passions were in full flame by 13 when he entered the all-male world of Harrow in 1801 and forged his first sexual liaisons, particularly with John FitzGibbon, subject of some later poems collected in Hours of Idleness. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he fell in love with John Edleston, commemorated in his famous series of elegies, Thyrza, which necessarily disguises his beloved as a woman because gay men were still being arrested, tried, and hanged. His poems lament "kindred hearts must roam/ And seek abroad, the love denied at home." Accordingly, immediately after college Byron went to Greece. There he had sex with many young men, going so far as to include one of them, Nicolo Giraud, in his will with a gift of 7,000 pounds. While away Byron received letters from Charles Matthews and John Hobhouse detailing the latest gay gossip and criminal trials in a Latin code that was not broken until 1957. Back in England in 1812 he published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and became a sensation. Byronmania swept the country and his exploits were criticized and celebrated. He had affairs with notably married women like Lady Caroline Lamb and later his half-sister Augusta. Ever mindful of the importance of an author's looks, when he wasn't sleeping with them he slept with curlers in his hair.

On January 2, 1815 he married Lady Caroline's cousin, the heiress Annabella Milbanke, a disastrous union that lasted exactly a year. In January 1816 she fled with their new daughter amid widespread rumors of his multiple evils. He signed the document of separation in April and soon after left England forever. In 1819 he began publishing his opus Don Juan, still unfinished at his death in Greece at 36 in 1824. In Byron: Life and Legend, biographer Fiona MacCarthy argues Byron's true sexual attraction was for young men. For another view, there's Edna O'Brien's brief life, Byron in Love.

My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey

Classics scholar Charles Beye was openly gay in his teens in the 1940s, twice married to women, fathered four children, has been partnered with a man for the past 20 years, and waited until he was 82 to release this memoir My Husband and My Wives: A Gay Man's Odyssey [Kindle]. Published today by FSG, it earned a boffo review from NPR's Maureen Corrigan:

“It’s Beye’s charming raconteur voice, however, and his refusal to bend anecdotes into the expected ‘lessons’ that really make this memoir such a knockout. Beye won me over in his introduction when he admitted that, looking back at the long span of his life—he’s now over 80—the big question he still asks himself is, ‘What was that all about?’ . . . Beye’s story is a complex, poignant addition to the sexual canon. While he seems to have been blessedly free of the standard sexual guilt growing up, he was also acutely aware of the cost of being different . . . Beye’s memoir ends on a joyous note. He and his husband of the title have been married for some four years; together for 20. Bowing to his background in ancient Greek, Beye subtitled his memoir ‘A Gay Man’s Odyssey,’ but he might just as well have availed himself of the affirmative LGBTQ slogan It Gets Better.” 

Bettye LaVette Discusses 30 Years of Sex with Women

If only all R&B singers / celebrities / married people / senior citizens were as open and offhand about their same-sex relationships as Bettye LaVette is. The Grammy nominee is marking 50 years in the music business with the release this week of her new album Thankful N' Thoughtful and her first book, A Woman Like Me [Kindle], in which she discusses her lesbian affairs. Typical of her breezy, brassy style is the chapter, "Groupies Who Sang." On its first page she writes, "I was in my dressing room, angry that James Brown didn't want me to close my set with Let Me Down Easy because I was getting too much applause." On the second page Tammi [Terrell] confronts her with a handgun. On the third page, Bettye's "producer-pimp" suggests she have sex with Cindy Wharton, "a stunning woman." On the fourth page, fueled by the twin encouragements of money and cocaine, they do it while he watches:

"...But I did it, and I liked it. I liked it well enough that Cindy was in my life for the next thirty years. We'd have our boyfriends and husbands. We'd live our separate lives, but if we were in the same city on the same night, we'd get together.

     "My dalliances with women just sort of happened. I've never had hangups about sex, an area where I've felt fortunately free. In the case of women, once the sex was over, it was over. It never turned to romance. The friendship with Cindy, though, remained strong. She and I had some wild adventures."

She was equally forthcoming last night when I saw her at Union Square and took this picture. 

People have been continually re/discovering LaVette since at least 2003. Another breakthrough was her 2008 performance of Love Reign O'er Me at the Kennedy Center Honors, where Barbra Streisand and Pete Townsend nodded along oh so whitely. That appearance led to A Change Is Gonna Come, her duet with Jon Bon Jovi at Obama's inauguration. The NYT says, "Ms. LaVette now rivals Aretha Franklin as her generation’s most vital soul singer. She uses every scrape, shout and break in her raspy voice, with a predator’s sense of timing, to seize the drama of a song."

Back to School: Banned Books, Naked Golfers, Bi Dudes

Bethany College in Lindsborg, Kansas has suspended the entire men's golf team for three tournaments because of this photo. Team captain Jack Hiscock is appealing. The native Brit says his bit of fun with the lads has got blown out of proportion.

In Monroe Township, New Jersey, angry parents at Williamstown High School have succeeded in removing two books from reading lists because the works depict lgbt sex and drug use. The tenth grade list had Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood which includes a lesbian sex scene between a 31 year-old woman and 13 year-old student. The honors English senior list had Nic Sheff's Tweak: Growing Up on Methamphetamines which obviously includes drug use and, just slightly less obviously, a gay orgy.

Six years after researchers at Northwestern University said bisexual males do not exist, now other Northwestern scientists have discovered that yes, they do. Boston's Bisexual Resource Center president Ellyn Ruthstrom told the NYT:

“This unfortunately reduces sexuality and relationships to just sexual stimulation. Researchers want to fit bi attraction into a little box — you have to be exactly the same, attracted to men and women, and you’re bisexual. That’s nonsense. What I love is that people express their bisexuality in so many different ways.”

CBS News reports that bisexuals responded to the findings with, "Duh."

Bruce Duffy's Novel about Rimbaud, Disaster Was My God

Twenty-four years ago Bruce Duffy published his first novel, The World as I Found It, about Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, and Ludwig Wittgenstein to great reviews and a subsequent NYRB re-release with an introduction by David Leavitt. Ten years later an autobiographical second novel fizzled. Now comes his third, Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud, and much like his mercurial subject, the reviews are either a day in heaven or a season in hell. 

Writing for the Boston Globe, Richard Eder finds the book "astonishing" and says "the feverish atmosphere Duffy uses to create the high-charged intensity of his characters. The trek and the desert passages are breathlessly absorbing; the adorned texture of Duffy’s writing becomes addictive. Among other things, Disaster is the rare example of a page-turner whose pages are richly weighted."

In this week's New Yorker, Daniel Mendelsohn admires Duffy's portrayal of the poet's mother but says, "More problematic, inevitably, is the representation of Rimbaud himself. The interior of an artist’s mind is notoriously difficult to represent on the page. Although Duffy has some nice evocations of the boy-poet’s “cycloning brain,” they feel as if they come from outside the organ in question, rather than from within; too often, the author has to fall back on the ungainly device of interjecting reminders of Rimbaud’s greatness. (“What other nineteenth-century writer managed to break through to the twentieth?”) This cheerleading gets wearisome—as do some misfired attempts at freshening the period drama with contemporary locutions: “Two-seat fat,” “cooties of feeling.”

Mendelsohn's essay is a larger think piece on Rimbaud and why he stopped writing at twenty, incorporating John Ashbery's poems and Graham Robb's biography and this take on the tiger-sex tumult with Verlaine:

"Many readers and biographers see the couple as what one critic calls 'the Adam and Eve of modern homosexuality,' but the evidence suggests that, as far as Rimbaud was interested in anyone other than himself, he was interested primarily in women. (Later, in Abyssinia, he lived with a strikingly good-looking local woman; she wore Western clothes and smoked cigarettes, while he wore native costume.) It is hard to escape the feeling that Verlaine, an ugly man whose appearance Rimbaud made cruel jokes about, was a kind of science experiment for the poet..."

Duffy recently penned a piece for The Daily Beast about the novelist's problems with an unsympathetic protagonist, "When Your Hero's an SOB."

The World According to Karp: Irving Exits RH with Bi Novel for S&S

Perennial bestseller John Irving, 69, wants to turn things around: He is leaving longtime publisher Random House because of his declining US book sales while his foreign sales increase. According to Simon & Schuster publisher Jonathan Karp, In One Person, Irving's new novel about a bisexual man, will come out during gay pride month 2012. PW notes it is "the author's first work done in first person since 1989's A Prayer for Owen Meany. S&S said the book marks a return to the sexual themes Irving famously explored in The World According to Garp and that the work is also the author's 'most political' since his 1985 novel, which dealt with abortion,The Cider House Rules. Karp added that In One Person is 'both timeless and deeply relevant to our times.'"