Band of Thebes

Born July 11: Tab Hunter, Vito Russo

Rock Hudson, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Farley Granger, Tab Hunter: Was any heartthrob movie star straight in the straitlaced 1950s? Hunter and Perkins dated each other for several years while the press reported phony stories that Hunter was involved with Debbie Reynolds or Natalie Wood. Born Arthur Kelm, he eventually made more than 50 movies after being rechristened "Tab Hunter" by his agent Henry Willson, a gay man who also handled Rock Hudson, Troy Donahue, Robert Wagner, and loads of others; read Willson's disturbing biography. Hunter's triumphs were Damn Yankees, Lafayette Escadrille, and That Kind of Woman. He recorded a pop song, Young Love, which was the #1 hit in the U.S. for a month in 1957, and made many subsequent albums. He had a short-lived television show and a famous flop on Broadway, co-starring with Tallulah Bankhead in Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, which closed after five performances. Smaller movies followed. In the 1980s he had a comeback, starring twice with Divine, first in Polyester, then in Lust in the Dust, which he co-produced with Allan Glaser. Hunter did not come out until September 2003, when at 72, he sold a book proposal for a memoir that would discuss his life candidly. Tab Hunter Confidential [Kindle] appeared in 2005 and revealed he and his producer Allan Glaser have been romantic partners for twenty-nine years. They live in Montecito. Here's a recent photo of Hunter, Glaser, and John Waters.

Russo For ten years, from 1972 to 1982, Vito Russo toured the country giving what would later be a PowerPoint presentation about the portrayal of lesbians and gay men in the media. His devastating book on the subject, The Celluloid Closet, published in 1981 and revised in 1987, was years ahead of its time and remains essential reading today. The book was made into a documentary in 1996, six years after his death from aids. Russo’s sharp critique of the industry led him to co-found the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). It is hard to imagine the principled visionary connected to today’s GLAAD, which endorsed such overblown caricature-fests as Boat Trip and praised I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry despite
the movie’s parade of stereotypes. Finally, Russo has been given the biography he deserves in Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo [Kindle] and in the documentary Vito. 

White Crane released two new volumes of Vito's uncollected writings Out Spoken: A Vito Russo Reader - Reel One [Kindle], which covers his film essays, including reams of reviews and great, early interviews with Almodovar, Almendros, Anger, Bette, Debbie, Lily, Rhoda, Gandalf, and Tennessee among others, while Out Spoken: Reel Two [Kindle] covers politics and aids.

Born July 10: Marcel Proust, Neil Tennant

Years before Joyce's, Woolf's, and Faulkner’s novels, contemporary with Braque, Gris, and Picasso’s cubist paintings, and with Einstein’s shattering theories of physics, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust created a work of art whose central concern is time. Published over fourteen years, the seven volumes of his epic A la recherche du temps perdu radically reshape conventional narrative to recreate the sensation of memory, the past co-existing in thought simultaneous with the present, as each moment of the present becomes the past. Many, many critics, including Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, consider the work as a whole to be the greatest novel of the century or of all-time. It is also a landmark in gay literature. Volume Four is titled Sodom and Gomorrah and contains lengthy essays on homosexuality (often seen as a rebuttal to Andre Gide's recent Corydon), but every volume encompasses gay characters, observations, and experiences. One rationale for his somewhat dark view is that Proust had co-opted his own happy memories of gay love in trying to imagine heterosexual love for his characters, leaving him only bitter reminiscences when he wrote about aspects of gay life. Another theory is that he was uncomfortable with his sexuality, which manifested itself always with the lower classes and especially with his own servants. His deepest relationship was with his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, who lived with his wife in Proust’s townhouse. Proust also had an affair with his secretary, Albert Nahmias, the namesake for the novel’s love interest, Albertine. When he went to sex clubs, Proust liked to be whipped and humiliated. Very, very rich from an inheritance, he typically slept during the day and wrote at night, both while lying in his blue bed, in his bedroom cork-lined for silence, now in the Musée Carnavalet.

Neil Tennant is 60. Tonight PSB play Serbia.

Born July 9: David Hockney

Don’t let his placid English face fool you: David Hockney's art has been one revolution after another. However beautiful, most of what he’s done upends convention or expectation. As early as 1959-60 and 1961, with Erection and the Whitman-titled We Two Boys Together Clinging, he was boldly painting gay love. Once he saw southern California, he began to use color in more startling ways. He painted gay couples, such as Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, exactly as he depicted straight couples, in 1968, when the rest of the world certainly didn't see them that way. His photomontages, or “joiners” primarily from 1970-1986, virtually reinvented how one could use a polaroid. He created wild stage sets for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala, and the Met. And, in 2001, he proposed a shattering theory that the Old Masters did not paint freehand so much as follow images projected onto their canvas via camera obscura techniques. (This might solve the mystery of why details at the edges of their paintings are inexplicably blurry or out of focus.) Thirty years after his iconic A Bigger Splash, Hockney created A Bigger Grand Canyon, a series of 60 rectangular paintings fitted together to form one giant picture. Even more recent work has included painted installations illuminated with black light, as at the Smithsonian American Art  Museum. Jack Hazan’s documentary captures every angle of Hockney's intense romance with Peter Schlesinger, who appears nude in his most famous pool pictures. To celebrate his 70th birthday in 2007, Hockney showed his recent paintings of his native Yorskhire, like the one above, at the Tate Britain in London. A newer passion is the Brushes app on iPad, with which he has drawn three covers for The New Yorker. Now we have Christopher Simon Sykes' David Hockney: The Biography [Kindle] to complement Lawrence Weschler's True to Life: Twenty-Five Years of Conversations with David Hockney [Kindle].

Born July 8: F. Holland Day, Arthur Evans

Although F. Holland Day is remembered (some say imitated after this) as an early pioneer of art photography, he was also an influential book publisher whose 100+ titles included works by Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. The sole inheritor of a fortune from his father, a Boston merchant, Day was able to indulge his artistic pursuits with abandon. He amassed a large collection of ephemera connected to John Keats and he built a summer camp in Little Good Harbor, Five Islands, Maine where he hosted other artists and youths who modeled for him. The lads were usually from Boston’s immigrant slums where Day often tutored poor children in reading. One of his young models was Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant, whom Day encouraged in his literary ambitions and achieved fame with his book of poetic essays, The Prophet, published in more than twenty languages. (Gibran is the source, often paraphrased, for everything from Beatles’ lyrics to Kennedy’s “Ask not...”) Day also photographed adults, notably himself as Christ, as well as prominent artists and gay leaders such as Edward Carpenter. A fire in 1904 destroyed Day’s studio and most of his negatives. He later lost interest in photography and died in 1933 at sixty-nine. Read Patricia Fanning's Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day for many revelations about turn of the century Boston.

British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (far left) did not begin his famous excavations at Knossos until 1900 when he was forty-nine. In 1878 someone had discovered a small portion of the ruins but it was only after Crete became an independent state free of Turkey that Evans was able to purchase the site and organize a dig on a necessarily massive scale. The "palace" is a series of 1,000 interlocking rooms. Luckily, Evans lived another forty-one years, plenty of time to unveil the structures he decided were source of the mythic King Minos and his fabled Minotaur; hence Evans' coining the term Minoan civilization from the 27th to 15th centuries BC. One aspect of real life there was bull dancing, a tradition in which youths cavorted with angry steers to great honor and, usually within three months, certain death. Mary Renault brings the practice alive in her novel The King Must Die about Theseus's Cretan adventures. (Below, my picture of bull dancing from Knossos and Henry Cavill as Theseus in Tarsem Singh's ancient Greek hotfest The Immortals.) Evans was Keeper of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum from 1894-1908 and many, many of the treasures he found at Knossos ended up in its collection. He is degayed in most accounts of his life but not in Cathy Gere's intriguing Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.

   

Born July 5: Richard Labonté, Amélie Mauresmo, Jean Cocteau

If you like to read, you owe the magnificent Richard Labonté a big thank you. A co-founder and eventual manager of the A Different Light bookstores, he for many years wrote the essential column Books To Watch Out For. A brilliant, nonstop reader with exquisite taste, his annual best of the year choices are mandatory for the rest of us. For several years he outperformed Hercules coordinating the judging of the Lambda Literary Awards -- three or four judges in each of 24 categories. He is himself a multiple Lammy winner for some of the thirty anthologies he has edited or co-edited, most recently Studs: Gay Erotic Fiction, out next month from Cleis;. Read this interview with him conducted by mystery writer John Morgan Wilson.

In 1999 unseeded 19 year old Amélie Mauresmo beat the world's #1 female tennis player and became only the third Frenchwoman to make it to the finals of a Grand Slam event. That's also when Amélie came out, and within five years she was herself ranked #1 in the world, yet she still hadn't won a Grand Slam. No one questioned her talent but they noticed her nerves; often she would lead in a championship match only to sputter and lose. At the Athens Olympics in 2004, she fell in the finals to Justine Henin and settled for a silver medal. In January 2006, at 26, she finally won the Australian Open. Six months later, she won Wimbledon, the first Frenchwoman to do so since Suzanne Lenglen in 1925 and the first out lesbian since Martina's ninth win in 1990. Here's how tennis has changed in the past two decades: Martina had 158 career titles (including 18 Grand Slam singles titles) and earned $21 million in prize money (not endorsements); Amélie had 25 career titles (2 Grand Slams) and earned $15 million in prize purses. Amélie retired at 30 in December 2009.

He published his first volume of poetry at nineteen, with thirty more volumes throughout his life. He published seven novels (the best of which is his fifth, Les Enfants Terribles. He wrote twenty-four plays (his twentieth, Le bel indifférent, was created for Edith Piaf and became a towering success). He wrote eleven ballets (his second, Parade, was produced by Diaghilev and designed by Picasso). He wrote six operas. He was a graphic designer, a clothes designer, and an interior designer. He painted. He drew. He photographed. He managed a professional boxer, who became the sport's first Hispanic world champion. He was an actor. And he made six feature films, two of which happen to be among the most lauded in the history of cinema, La belle et la bête and Orphée, both of which star his boyfriend, superstar idol Jean Marais. God only knows where Jean Cocteau found the inspiration, or the time. He also dated Edouard Dermit, whom he adopted, the boxer “Panama” Al Brown, whom he managed, a few women including Natalie Paley, whom he impregnated, and the fifteen-year-old writing prodigy Raymond Radiguet, who may or may not have been something of an opportunist when it came to dating. Cocteau died in 1963 from complications of a heart attack, at seventy-four, an hour after learning of Edith Piaf’s death. The Cocteau Museum finally opened in 2011 in the south of France.

Born July 2: Donald Windham

Donald Windham's many books include the lovely short novel Two People about a middle-aged American man's romance with a moody 17 year-old Italian lad; a too-brief fiction called Tanaquil about a tomboy girl and an artistic boy modeled on George Platt Lynes; his impressive debut The Dog Star [and Kindle] praised by Mann and Gide alike; his great Lost Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote Tennessee Williams and Others, as well as the collection Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham.

Born in Atlanta in 1920, he moved to New York City when he was 19, with his artist boyfriend Fred Melton. Within four years, Windham, who never went to college, was dating a Princeton undergrad named Sandy Campbell. Through the ups and downs of friendships with a large gay circle including Truman Capote, Lincoln Kirstein, Pavel Tchelitchew, Paul Cadmus, and Tennesse Williams, they stayed together 45 years until Campbell's death in 1988. Windham lived on until 2010, leaving the bulk of their estate to fund writing awards of $1 million annually administered by Yale and named for the gay couple. The second Windham-Campbell Awards were announced this year.

Karl Bissinger's photo from 1949 shows Windham, second from left, with the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, the artist Buffie Johnson, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal.

Born July 1: Fortune Feimster, Paul Russell, Farley Granger

Any girl named Fortune is going to be a bit funny. The 34 year-old Groundlings comedian and Chelsea Lately regular couldn't even realize she's a lesbian in a normal way. She swears her big revelation came when she was 25, watching an old Stockard Channing movie called The Truth About Jane. Her stand-up act relies on similar personal mishaps, like her first girl date, and on other people's mistakes, like folks thinking she is Jonah Hill. As with most improv players, she's best at high-energy, situational humor rather than polished cleverness. She's been invited to audition for SNL at least twice and the second time she imitated Richard Simmons. Fortune hasn't yet had her lucky breakout to comic stardom but she does have 136,000 followers on twitter and a full calendar of events. Kergan recommends her Hooters character Darlene Witherspoon.

Often told from multiple viewpoints, Paul Russell's books thrive on the friction of opposites. Class, cultural, and economic differences complicate his characters' desires, and in many of his six novels the core relationship is an intergenerational gay romance. (He wanted to title one work The Pederast; his agent and editor didn't.) If only Russell's complex and nuanced achievements could be summarized as neatly as the numbers: In order his novels, are The Salt Point, hairdresser Anatole falls for 18 year-old hustler Leigh who then gets with Anatole's friend Lydia; Boys of Life, ten years later Tony looks back at being plucked from rural obscurity at 16 by gay art filmmaker Carlos Reichart; Sea of Tranquillity, two decades in an astronaut's family moving from Houston to Tennessee to Turkey whose very frisky son Jonathan loves the shy Stayton, son of a tv preacher; The Coming Storm [Kindle] married headmaster's crush on new 25 year-old teacher Tracy who in turn is having an affair with his 15 year-old student Noah; and the War Against the Animals [Kindle] 19 year-old (or early 20s?) upstate "redneck" Jesse who comes to love the ailing 49 year-old Manhattan escapee Cameron whom his homophobic brother Kyle is plotting to exploit. Russell's dazzling sixth novel The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov [Kindle] won the Ferro-Grumley and an IPPY, took silver at the ForeWord awards, and was a finalist for the Lammy. Read him.

According to his autobiography, Include Me Out, midcentury movie star Farley Granger joined the Navy at 19 and on his first voyage, from San Francisco to Honolulu, was seasick the whole way losing 23 pounds and needing to be hospitalized when they reached land. Thus it was that the almost too pretty Granger spent the war onshore in Hawaii, working the enlisted men's club on Waikiki Beach or helping entertain the troops under the command of the never-married Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans best known as Samantha's campy warlock father on Bewitched. Granger claims that while in Honolulu, in one memorable night, he had his first sexual experiences with a woman (a "hostess" a private club) then with a man (an enlisted officer who picked him up at that club). Obviously a star, within four years he had a lead role in Alfred Hitchcock's gay film Rope, based on the Leopold - Loeb murder and written by awesome Arthur Laurents, whom he dated for the year during filming and after. Later Granger had affairs with Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein, and filmed his biggest hit, again with Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train, from the novel by Patricia Highsmith, the lesbian author of the Mr. Ripley novels.

Granger's career faltered through the 50s, including a disastrous Broadway musical version of Pride & Prejudice in which he played Mr. Darcy. Early in the 60s he joined the National Repertory Theatre

According to his autobiography, Include Me Out, midcentury movie star Farley Granger joined the Navy at 19 and on his first voyage, from San Francisco to Honolulu, was seasick the whole way losing 23 pounds and needing to be hospitalized when they reached land. Thus it was that the almost too pretty Granger spent the war onshore in Hawaii, working the enlisted men's club on Waikiki Beach or helping entertain the troops under the command of the never-married Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans best known as Samantha's campy warlock father on Bewitched. Granger claims that while in Honolulu, in one memorable night, he had his first sexual experiences with a woman (a "hostess" a private club) then with a man (an enlisted officer who picked him up at that club). Obviously a star, within four years he had a lead role in Alfred Hitchcock's gay film Rope, based on the Leopold - Loeb murder and written by awesome Arthur Laurents, whom he dated for the year during filming and after. Later Granger had affairs with Jerome Robbins and Leonard Bernstein, and filmed his biggest hit, again with Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train, from the novel by Patricia Highsmith, the lesbian author of the Mr. Ripley novels.

Born June 27: Cazwell

We'll always have Ice Cream Truck. Cazwell's biggest hit is an all-male, sweet and sweaty ode to everything oral. Alas, the low-tech charm of that suckadelic jingle was lightning that has yet to strike twice. Raised in Worcester, Luke Caswell started singing with the Boston hip hop band Moreplay, but moved on from the city and the genre. He says, "I know a lot of gay rappers that really consider themselves hip hop and want to be accepted by hip hop producers, and my point of view is, 'Why bother? Why spend all my time and energy trying to make a culture who hasn’t acknowledged my existence for the past twenty years accept me?'" Now a New Yorker, he djs and hosts weekly club nights downtown. He was an opening act on the Cyndi Lauper/ Debbie Harry/ Erasure/ everybody True Colors tour in 2007, played Dior Hommes after party in 2008, judged RuPaul's Drag Race, and has had his songs played on LoGo and True Blood. Most recent singles include the hyper track "Guess What? (I'm Hot!)" and "No Selfie Control." Like him on fb.

Born June 26: Stephen McCauley

Stephen McCauley is one of America's great novelists, period. While other authors get lost chasing attention and acceptance or writing precious books no one wants to read, he consistently delivers the very best of what fiction can be: original, funny, wise, and true. On tour for his sixth wonder, Insignificant Others [and Kindle], he said he felt he may have taken the comedy of manners as far as it could go. His successes range from his superb True Enough to his effervescent debut, The Object of My Affection, and three other gems: The Easy Way Out, The Man of the House, and Alternatives to Sex. Like John Banville's Benjamin Black or Joyce Carol Oates' Rosamond Smith, McCauley explored a different genre with the freedom of a new name. If his own books are fine feature films -- and they are! Have you seen the French adaptation of True Enough, called La vérité ou presque, starring Karin Viard and François Cluzet? -- his Rain Mitchell novels are glorious television on the page: big, bright, walloping delights. Start with Tales from the Yoga Studio then shift positions to Head Over Heels. 

You must also read his knockout piece, "Let's Say," about his uneasy truce with his difficult, antigay father in Patrick Merla's collection Boys Like Us. A couple as handsome as they are talented, McCauley and longtime partner Sebastian Stuart (a Ferro-Grumley winner for The Hour Between) live in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Born June 23: Alan Turing, David Leavitt

Anyone tallying the cost of Britain's homophobia must include all the things Alan Turing didn't solve or invent because he killed himself at 41. The brilliant mathematician had already broken the Germans' Enigma code during WWII, become an OBE, laid the groundwork for the modern computer by designing the Automatic Computing Engine, and devoted himself to the mathematical biology field called morphogenesis (specifically, discerning the Fibonacci numbers in plant structures). In 1952 his home was burgled by two men, one of whom was a 19 year-old Turning had slept with, and as a result of their break-in he was charged with gross indecency under the same 1885 law that felled Oscar Wilde. To avoid prison, he was forced to undergo painful injections of estrogen as a form of chemical castration. He died by eating a poisoned apple. His mother strongly believed the cyanide in the fruit was accidental, owing to her son's legendary carelessness, but his death was ruled a suicide. Timothy Ferris points out that Turing's favorite fairy tale was Snow White. The best short biography of him is The Man Who Knew Too Much by David Leavitt...

 

Raised in Palo Alto, David Leavitt graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Yale at 21, by which time he had already published a gay themed short story in The New Yorker. His first collection, Family Dancing, appeared the following year and was nominated for an NBCC (losing to Louise Erdrich) and the PEN/Faulkner Award (won by Tobias Wolff). Since then he's published eight novels, among them another PEN/Faulkner finalist, The Indian Clerk; three other collections of stories or novellas; his collected stories; a brief book on Florence; and, a short biography of gay birthday-mate Alan Turing. He is a professor at the University of Florida, where he and his partner Mark Mitchell co-edit the excellent literary journal Subtropics whose fiction is regularly gay and often selected among the year's best. Leavitt and Mitchell also co-edited an anthology of gay fiction from 1748 to 1914, Pages Passed From Hand to Hand. They divide their time between Florida and Tuscany and in their spare time have co-written two other books about Italy. He was named a NYPL Literary Lion. Earlier this month Bloomsbury released the paperback of his much-praised gay/bi novel of Lisbon during the war, The Two Hotel Francforts, which was a finalist for both the Ferro-Grumley and a Lammy.

Born June 20: E. Lynn Harris

In 1990, no publisher would take a chance on a first novel about a man torn between his girlfriend and his secret boyfriend, all of them black. Undaunted, the author, a successful IBM salesman who was used to breaking barriers, having been the first black editor of the yearbook at the University of Arkansas and the first black male Razorbacks cheerleader, decided to publish it himself. At black bookstores, book clubs, and beauty salons around Atlanta, he sold thousands of copies to gay men and straight women. A local sales rep mentioned the book’s popularity to the publisher of Anchor/ Doubleday, which quickly republished that novel, Invisible Life, and ten subsequent books by the phenomenal E. Lynn Harris. Nearly all of his books have been NYT bestsellers. His sixth and seventh novels, Not a Day Goes By and Any Way the Wind Blows both debuted at #2 on the NYT list. His author events regularly attracted 900 people or more. Upbeat, optimistic, and romantic, his stories never gloss over life’s struggles and pain. His memoir, What Becomes of the Brokenhearted [Kindle], includes his own coming out story as well as bouts with depression, drinking, low self-esteem, and a suicide attempt just before he decided to start writing. His novel Basketball Jones confronted homophobia and double lives in the NBA. His final novel is In My Father's House was about Bentley Dean III, who ran a modeling agency in Miami:

"Strapped for cash, Bentley reluctantly agrees to supply gay, bi or very open-minded eye candy for a VIP party hosted by Prosperity Gentleman's Club, which is run by Emperor Seth Sinclair, a closeted gay celebrity. When Jah, an 18-year-old student Bentley's been mentoring, covers for a no-show model and begins an affair with Seth, big trouble looms. Harris's wry tale about second chances highlights what readers have long loved about his work: his ability to depict the pursuit of love and self-respect, regardless of societal and family pressures."

While on a business trip in Los Angeles in July 2009, Harris died of heart disease at age 54. To date his books have sold more than four million copies.

Born June 17: Carl Van Vechten

Decades ahead of his time, "Harlem's most famous 'Honorary Negro'" was also, despite two wives, fairly open about his many gay relationships -- big leaps for a white Iowan born in 1880. Now, Carl Van Vechten is celebrated primarily as a photographer, but he also was a famously controversial novelist, Gertrude Stein's literary executor, and one of the early 20th century's greatest cultural kingmakers. Yet he has been without a full-scale biography since before Stonewall. This year FSG published London critic Edward White's debut, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America [Kindle] which covers his queer life in detail, thanks to troves of private papers that have been unsealed since the last biography. White's book arrives with starred reviews from three pre-pub journals including Booklist which calls it "a marvelously written, masterful portrait of an exceptionally complex person." In the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh praised the book's "startling breadth" and agreed with White's assessment of Van Vechten as a "prophet of a new cultural sensibility that promoted the primacy of the individual, sexual freedom, and racial tolerance and dared put the blues on a par with Beethoven." Library Journal selected it as one of their Four Essential Nonfiction Picks for February.

Author of Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, David Margolick blurbs, "Journalist, novelist, critic, photographer, iconoclast, visionary. Dandy and groupie, hedonist and dissembler, provocateur and self-promoter. Champion of Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, drinking buddy of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, "honorary Negro" to some, racist exploiter to others. Denizen of the black and gay demimondes, flouter of racial and sexual divides and taboos. Carl Van Vechten was all of these things, and much more besides, in his brilliant and gaudy life. It would burst an ordinary biography at the seams, but Edward White manages to do to Van Vechten in death what no one ever accomplished in life: tame him. With wit, style, and skepticism, The Tastemaker both cuts Van Vechten down to size and restores to him the lofty stature he deserves."

Two years ago, Yale published Emily Bernard's much-praised Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White [Kindle] which does incorporate Van Vechten's gay affairs, including his interracial, intergenerational relationship with the closeted young novelist Wallace Thurman, author of The Blacker the Berry, but Bernard's book is not a full biography.

The thorny issue of white patronage of black artists is the heart of one of Kevin Killian's favorite books last year, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance [Kindle only $2.99].

Van Vechten's photo work can be seen The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts, as well as in Portraits and Passionate Observer and Extravagant Crowd.

Born June 16: Jaime Manrique

Born illegitimately in Colombia of an adulterous union, Jaime Manrique was not publicly acknowledged by his rich, prominent father who soon moved on to another mistress. His childhood struggles are just one facet of Manrique's landmark queer Latino Lit book Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. Some of the same early memories also surface in his book of poems, My Night with Federico García Lorca. His mother moved the family to Florida, where she became a domestic servant and Jaime excelled at school, earning his BA in English from the University of South Florida. After two more or less bisexual novels that got a lot of attention in Colombia, Manrique's first openly gay novel Latin Moon in Manhattan made a splash here in 1992. Five years later he edited Besame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction, which features seventeen short stories. He's won a Guggenheim for his nonfiction, and four years ago he made a foray into Isabel Allende and Tomas Eloy Martinez territory with Our Lives Are the Rivers, his long-promised novel about Manuela Saenz, Simón Bolívar's mistress. It won the International Latino Book Award for best historical novel. His newest book is Cervantes Street, which earned rave blurbs from Junot Diaz, Esmeralda Santiago, and Edith Grossman. Read him.

Born June 13: Siegfried Fischbacher

A classic meet cute: Two German teens escape postwar strife by working on a cruise ship. One is a waiter who, when his bosses aren’t looking, performs magic tricks for the passengers, which proves so popular he’s given his own show. The other is an enraptured bellboy who becomes his onstage assistant and, to spice up the disappearing animal act, smuggles a cheetah on board. So began the legendary team, Siegfried & Roy. They fell in love, toured Europe, played Princess Grace’s Red Cross benefit in Monaco, then the Lido in Paris, and by 1970 it was Vegas, baby. They began to use more exotic animals in their illusionist show and, in 1989, when Steve Wynn opened the Mirage, they were so popular he guaranteed them a minimum of $57.5 million for the next five years. In 2000, they were the ninth highest-paid celebrities in the United States, just behind Steven Spielberg. Audiences adored their exotic white tigers and their camp theatrics, which featured hooded musclemen, capes, ultra tight leggings, and Roy's ludicrously oversized codpieces described as “certainly more frightening” than the tigers. Their last performance was October 3, 2003, when it was widely reported that a tiger “bit” Roy. Siegfried disputes this, saying if the tiger intended to harm Roy he would have snapped his neck and vigorously shaken him. Instead, Montecore, a seven year-old tiger who had been in the show for six years, wanted to help. Roy fell, possibly attempting to intercept a woman in the front row who may have been reaching out to touch Montecore, and the tiger was trying to rescue him, carrying him in his mouth as a mother tiger would her cubs. Roy suffered severe blood loss and critical injuries that kept him in rehabilitation for years. In April 2010, they gave a final benefit performance, with Montecore, lasting ten minutes. Siegfried and Roy continue to share a west Las Vegas eight-acre estate called the Jungle Palace, though they maintain separate living quarters.

Siegfried is 75 today. It is the younger Roy, 69 until October, who was hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit from three male caretakers who have videotape of the incidents.

Born June 12: Henry Scott Tuke

Born in York in 1858, Henry Scott Tuke grew up in Falmouth where he discovered the pleasures of nude swimming that become the core subject of his en plein air paintings until his death at 70 in 1929. Moving to London when he was sixteen to attend art school, he graduated six years later, then toured Italy and Paris. His friends and acquaintances of the time included Symonds, Wilde, and Sargent (whose many, secret paintings of male nudes were numerous enough to fill this book). But by 1886 Tuke was back near Falmouth, spending £40 to buy a two-masted sailboat which he converted to a floating studio and living quarters. Initially the only models he could get to pose were from London but before long he and the local youth had become friends for life, though many of them died in WWI. An avid traveler, in the 1890s Tuke returned to Italy, adding Corfu and Albania to his list and a new, vibrant light to his palette. Later he ventured to the Caribbean and Central America, further brightening his colors. Nervous critics over-emphasize the innocence of his art, stressing that if anything the depictions are sensual not sexual, and making obvious comparisons to Eakins. Among Tuke's big collectors is Elton John. His work fills many books like Catching the Light. Five more images after the jump

Born June 11: Allan Gurganus

Blessed with a runaway blockbuster selling two million copies, cursed with his biggest success coming with his debut, Allan Gurganus has seen his 1989 first novel Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All adapted in 1994 into a hit television miniseries nominated for nine Emmys, winning four, and in 2003 become a Broadway flop, closing after one official performance. Fifteen years before that book, at twenty-six in 1974, with the encouragement of John Cheever, he published a story called Minor Heroism in The New Yorker, which was the first time the magazine ran fiction with an openly gay protagonist. Thankfully, the gay characters have continued, though slowly. Recipient of a Guggenheim, a Lammy, the Sue Kaufman Prize, and an Ingram Merrill award, Gurganus is not a prolific writer. It had been twelve years since his last book, the really wonderful The Practical Heart: Four Novellas from 2001, when last year he published a new collection of three novellas once again set in his Falls, North Carolina: earning strong reviews, Local Souls [and Kindle] was chosen twice on Thebes' best books survey. Before these collections, in 1997 he published his second novel, the rollicking, sad, all-gay New York saga Plays Well with Others [and Kindle], and in 1990 the story collection White People. Gurganus long ago moved back to his native North Carolina where his activism included co-founding Writers Against Jesse Helms. Today is 67 and continues to work on his still-gestating third novel, The Erotic History of a Southern Baptist Church.

Born June 9: Bruce Duffy, Cole Porter

Bruce Duffy has written three novels, two of which reclaim difficult gay giants. His fictionalized life of Wittgenstein, The World as I Found It [and Kindle], has been a queer favorite for 25 years and now is released as a NYRB classic introduced by David Leavitt. After its critical success, Duffy won a Whiting and a Guggenheim. Three years ago he returned to historical fiction with Disaster Was My God: A Novel of the Outlaw Life of Arthur Rimbaud [and Kindle]. That book, he says, finally came together for him when he realized it was the story of "a monster raised by a witch."

The zenith of sophistication, Cole Porter wrote the wittiest, worldliest love songs ever recorded and a good part of his genius emanated from his experience as a gay man. Born to a rich family in Indiana, a graduate of an East Coast prep school and Yale, married to a famed, older socialite for thirty-four years, Porter was utterly at ease in the highest society, yet his constant sexual relationships with men allowed him permanent outsider status. His art depended on his double life. Unable to express gay love openly, his lyrics are far more original and memorable for their necessary codes and double entendres. If you still don't understand You're the Top with its refrain "But if, Baby, I'm the bottom, you're the top," please see me after class. Porter is peerless at hiding in plain sight, subverting the scandalous into showstopping "innocent" fun, as in Let's Do It (1928), You Do Something To Me (1929), Love for Sale (1930), All Through the Night (1934), Anything Goes (1934), I've Got You Under My Skin (1936), Let's Misbehave (1937), My Heart Belongs to Daddy (1938), I've Got My Eyes on You (1939) Well Did You Evah! (1939) Let's Be Buddies (1940) You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To (1942), Something for the Boys (1943), He's a Right Guy (1943), I'm In Love With a Solider Boy (1943), Too Darn Hot (1948), All of You (1954) Mind If I Make Love To You? (1955) and You're Just Too, Too (1956), among countless others.

Openly closeted, Porter enjoyed affairs with Ballets Russes librettist Boris Kochno, Boston hotshot

Born June 8: Marguerite Yourcenar

By the time she was eight, Brussels-born Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour was reading Aristophanes. By ten she was learning Latin, and at twelve, Greek. In 1929, when she published her first novel, Alexis, about a closeted gay man leaving his family, she chose to write under an anagram of her surname, Yourcenar. In 1937, she and her American translator, Grace Frick, fell in love and remained together forty-two years until Frick’s death in 1979. The following year, Yourcenar became the first woman ever elected to the French Academy, established in 1635, suppressed in 1793, and restored in 1803. To date, 726 people have been elected “immortals,” eight of them women. Among the many renowned French writers who were never elected to the Academy are Moliere, Balzac, Zola, and Proust. Yourcenar wrote novels, stories, poems, essays, a book-length study of Mishima, and three volumes of her autobiography, yet her exalted reputation is based mainly on her masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian. Like Mary Renault, Yourcenar chose to address homosexuality in her work through male characters, especially those in antiquity, and her novel fully describes Hadrian’s great love for Antinous, a youth of astonishing beauty and athletic grace. She and Frick first vacationed on Mount Desert Island, Maine, in 1942, and moved there full-time in 1950, in a house they called Petite Plaisance, which today survives as a museum.

Born June 6: Thomas Mann

In 1975, twenty years after his death, Nobel laureate Thomas Mann’s newly unsealed diaries showed the full extent of his homosexual desires. Although he married when he was thirty and fathered six children, Mann considered his love for Paul Ehrenberg, a painter and violinist twenty-one years his junior, to be the “central experience of my heart.” Similarly, a real-life infatuation with a Polish boy inspired him to write the classic novel of gay yearning, Death in Venice. To varying degrees gay themes are also evident in The Magic Mountain, Tonio Kroger, Mario and the Magician, Doctor Faustus, The Deceived, and The Confessions of Felix Krull. In nearly all cases, the gay character dies, because Mann believed open homosexuality would kill society and destroy the individual, even though he felt homoeroticism was artistically necessary and inspired much of his own work. For the full convoluted rationale, see his 1925 essay “About Marriage.” No surprise, then, that Mann's relationship with his three queer children,  Klaus, Golo, and Erika, was complicated. Colm Toibin writes about it in an LRB essay called I Could Sleep with All of Them reviewing Andrea Weiss's enthralling bio, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story. Among my all-time top ten favorite books of any kind is his novel Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family [and Kindle].

Born June 5: Compton-Burnett, Orman, Keynes

Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of seven children. Her beloved father died suddenly in 1901 when she was sixteen; three years later a favorite brother Guy died of pneumonia; twelve years later her other favorite brother Noel was killed in the battle of the Somme; and the following year, 1917, her two youngest sisters, aged eighteen and twenty-two, locked the door of their bedroom on Christmas Day and killed themselves by swallowing veronal. The year after that Compton-Burnett caught the Spanish Influenza and nearly died herself; and the year after that she and her partner Margaret Jourdain began living together, a happy relationship that lasted thirty-two years, until Jourdain’s death in 1951. Compton-Burnett was knighted in 1967, by which time she had published nineteen of her twenty novels. From the start, her oblique style rendered almost exclusively in dialog had divided critics. Leonard Woolf rejected her manuscript for the Hogarth Press saying “She can’t even write!” while the critic for the New Statesman said, “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." She thought her two best novels were A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant. Her two novels that include homosexuality are both set in single-sex schools: lesbians have More Women Than Men (1933) and gay men  get Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949).

As she approached her thirtieth birthday, Suze Orman, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s south side, was a waitress in a bakery in Berkeley, California. Then she trained as an Account Executive at Merrill Lynch, became a Vice President at Prudential Bache, and in 1987 founded her own business, The Suze Orman Financial Group. Now she hosts The Suze Orman Show on CNBC and Suze Orman’s Financial Freedom on QVC and has won two daytime Emmy awards. She writes a monthly money column in O, Oprah’s magazine, and has written ten books including The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying, The Road to Wealth Revised, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny, and The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream, a NYT #1 bestseller. She does not invest in