Band of Thebes

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 May 22: Paul Winfield

After three consecutive years of winning best actor at Speech and Drama Teachers Association Drama Festival during high school in Los Angeles, Paul Winfield received an offer of a scholarship to Yale. It was 1959 and he turned it down. Nine years later he played Diahann Carroll's boyfriend on the groundbreaking tv series Julia. In 1972, he earned a best actor Oscar nomination for his starring role in Sounder, and lived with his co-star Cicely Tyson for a year and a half. After that, he split for San Francisco where he met Charles Gillan Jr., an architect and set designer on "Married … With Children," "Who's the Boss?" "Mad About You" and "The Nanny." They stayed together for 30 years. Returning to LA, he again played opposite Cicely Tyson in A Hero Ain't Nothin But A Sandwich and yet again when he starred as Martin Luther King Jr. in the miniseries King, for which he and she were both nominated for Emmys. In the 80s and 90s he appeared in twenty-five films including Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, The Terminator, Presumed Innocent, Dennis the Menace, and Mars Attacks! Although open in his social life, he was closeted in public, yet played gay characters in Mike's Murder and Relax... It's Just Sex. Winfield appeared in recurring story arcs on L.A. Law, Touched by an Angel, and Picket Fences, for which he won an Emmy in 1995. Suffering from diabetes, he died of a heart attack at 64 in 2004, two years after his partner. (AP photo via)

Lambda Announces Mid-Career, Emerging Winners

   

Lambda this morning announced the winners of their annual prizes for Mid-Career Novelists Who Have Used 'Tides' in Romance Titles, Radclyffe and Michael Thomas Ford, known for his many humor collections and many novels like Suicide Notes, What We Remember, and The Road Home.

Lambda's two Emerging Writers are familiar to readers of Thebes queer lit poll: Charles Rice-Gonzalez, author of Chulito [Kindle], and Imogen Binnie, whose Nevada [Kindle] inspired Michelle Tea to say, "This book blew my mind. It’s everything – personal, political, funny, raw, hyper-brainy and down to earth. I want to stay in Maria’s brain forever as she rides her bike through the streets of Brooklyn, doggedly hashing out her existence with humor and befuddled honesty. A really powerful new literary voice."

Out Today: Queer Paris, Marriage Miscarriage, Roberts Memoir

  

For her 17th novel and 28th book overall, Francine Prose reclaims forgotten historical queer lives in Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 [Kindle]. In an approving review for the NYTBR, Edmund White called it "a novel of great reach and power." 

NYT reporter Jo Becker's story of how we got marriage equality -- because of Chad Griffin?? -- has at last united the entire gay community... against it. The gay left consideres the book "bullshit," the gay middle says it's "truly horrendous," and the gay right memorably calls it "a fellatial account" by "an ignorant reporter" "who knows nothing of the movement's history." Confirming just how backward and out of touch the straights are when it comes to representing queer lives, Penguin has bizarrely given this high-profile gay success story a jacket fit for a funereal. Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality [Kindle].

Good Morning America star, cancer survivor, and recently out lesbian Robin Roberts releases her inspirational memoir Everybody's Got Something [Kindle].

Growing Up White, Gay, and Jewish in South Africa

Out today from FSG is Lost and Found in Johannesburg [Kindle] (published internationally as Dispatcher) by Mark Gevisser, the award-winning biographer and Teddy-winning filmmaker who is an Open Society Fellow working on The Global Sexuality Frontier. Growing up gay, white, and Jewish during apartheid, Mark kept to himself and was keen on maps, fixated by the mysterious blank areas that separated his family's neighborhood from where their black servants lived. As a double outsider he developed an eye for boundaries, and transgression. His father married the daughter of an anti-Semite, Mark eventually marries his partner, a man of color, and they move to Paris. On a visit back to work on this memoir, he is the victim of a violent home invasion, bound, gagged, and held hostage at gunpoint. Throughout the book, he poignantly confronts the gap between assumptions and reality. Teju Cole: "Outstanding. A genuinely strange, marvelous, and complex account of a self and a city. Does for Johannesburg what Pamuk did for Istanbul." Claire Messud: "Mark Gevisser’s extraordinary memoir asks profound questions – about race, sexuality, faith and politics -- while examining both his own history and that of his beloved Johannesburg. The result is unlike any other book I know. It is illuminating, unsettling, engrossing, often funny, and, in a word, brilliant." Dinaw Mengestu: "A story as complex and beautiful as any memoir I've ever read."

Mark Gevisser will speak in New York on May 1 at Columbia and May 6 at CLAGS.

 

For gay novels from South Africa try:

Michael Power, Shadow Game (banned for its interracial gay love in 1972, reissued)

Damon Galgut, A Sinless Season (1982)

Stephen Gray’s Time of Our Darkness (1988)

Mark Behr’s Embrace (2000)

K Sello Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001)

Michiel Heyns, The Children's Day (2002)

Guy Willoughby, Archangels (2002)

Michiel Heyns, The Reluctant Passenger (2003)

Barry Levy, Burning Bright (2004)

Craig Higginson, The Hill (2005)

Fred Khumalo, Seven Steps to Heaven (2007)

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room (2010)

Born April 13: Frank Murphy, Lanford Wilson, Deborah Batts

 

Frank Murphy was mayor of Detroit (1930-33), governor of Michigan (1937-39), U.S. Attorney General (1939-40), the final Governor-General of the Philippines (1933-35), and a Justice of the Supreme Court (1940-49) appointed by Franklin Roosevelt. Never married, he was romantically involved with Edward G. Kemp, his housemate for most of his adult life. Read more about him in Deb Price and Joyce Murdoch’s excellent book Courting Justice.

Born and raised in Missouri, playwright Lanford Wilson was a founding member of New York's Circle Rep, which first presented many of his dramas. His best-known works include Balm in Gilead, Hot L Baltimore, Fifth of July, Talley’s Folly, and Burn This. Among his many honors are the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award, the Outer Critics Circle Award, the Obie Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. In 2004 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He died of pneumonia at 73 in 2011.

Deborah A. Batts grew up in Philadelphia then attended Radcliffe College and Harvard Law School. In 1994 Bill Clinton appointed her to the federal bench, making her the first openly gay federal judge in U.S. history. She is shown above with her portrait, which is the first portrait of a black woman and first of an out person on the walls of Harvard Law School. Now 67, she took senior status two years ago.

And When the Groove Is Dead and Gone

Waiting for Hilton to nail what Frankie really meant. Until then, Rolling Stone says:

"Nobody can agree on who invented the blues or birthed rock & roll, but there is no question that house music came from Frankie Knuckles, who died Monday afternoon of as-yet-undisclosed causes at age 59. One of the Eighties and Nineties' most prolific house music producers and remixers, Knuckles is, hands down, one of the dozen most important DJs of all time. At his Chicago clubs the Warehouse (1977-82) and Power Plant (1983-85), Knuckles’ marathon sets, typically featuring his own extended edits of a wide selection of tracks from disco to post-punk, R&B to synth-heavy Eurodisco, laid the groundwork for electronic dance music culture—all of it."

Revisit his own The Whistle Song, Tears, and Baby Wants To Ride or any of his legendary remixes: Michael's You Are Not Alone, Chaka's Ain't Nobody, Sounds of Blackness's The Pressure, Diana's Love Hangover, PSB's Left to My Own Devices, Lisa Stansfield's Never Never Gonna to Give You Up, Hercules & Love Affair's Blind, Whitney's Million Dollar Bill, or Toni's Unbreak My Heart.

Born April 1: Samuel R. Delany

The Samuel R. Delany resurgence has been in full swing for seven years now -- in 2007 the documentary about him premiered at Tribeca, in 2008 his Dark Reflectionswas a Stonewall Honors book, in 2009 a university press published Conversations with Samuel R. Delany, in 2010 he was selected as a judge for the National Book Awards, in 2012 he released his twenty-fourth novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders [Kindle] whose praise from Michael Cunningham, Andrew Holleran, Edmund White paled next to Lonely Christopher's emphatic declaration that it is the best novel of the 21st century, and in 2013 Delany released a popular new fully-illustrated edition of his Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York. (For more on his beloved NYC, read his unmissable Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.) An overachiever in other fields, too, he is a patron of XXX theaters and video booths and estimates his total number of male sexual partners to be 50,000. Or, three a day for fifty years, roughly.

If all this seems a little unusual for a writer at seventy-two, well, Delany defied expectation from the beginning. The tenth child born to a Harlem couple in the 1940s, he was not the likeliest boy to prep at Dalton with Wallace Shawn. When he took up writing, some were surprised he chose to work in science fiction. Once he'd made a name for himself in that genre -- his Dhalgren sold a million copies -- some were further surprised by his inclusions of significant sexual content. His has also written erotica that he is happy to call pornography, like Phallos which takes place during Hadrian's reign. Norman Mailer said of his most transgressive work of brutal sexual violence, narrated by an 11 year-old, "There is no question that Hoggby Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit."

Delany has won the Nebula four times, the Hugo twice, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. A professor at U Mass Amherst for eleven years, Delany has taught at Temple University since 2000. His own work is required reading in many college courses, across multiple departments: literature, black studies, and queer studies. Try his autobiography The Motion Of Light In Water, "with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin."

(photo via)

Hold Tight Gently

Don't give in to aids history fatigue yet: This week comes Martin Duberman's highly praised Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of Aids [Kindle]. In addition to stellar blurbs from D'Emilio, Schulman, Bronski, Fullwood, Bunch, Blanche Wiesen Cook, and two-time Pulitzer winner David Levering Lewis, PW gave it a starred review:

"In this insightful history, gay rights activist and distinguished historian Duberman attempts to revive aids awareness by detailing the early years of the epidemic, particularly the period of 1981–1995. He sets the details within a framework constructed around the experiences of two men: white singer/activist Michael Callen and black poet/cultural worker Essex Hemphill, both of whom lived with AIDS for years and died at age 38. Duberman pulls no punches in capturing the chaos, uncertainty, and ignorance of the era, looking at the sexual culture that allowed the disease to thrive; he also examines the fear and contradictions of the political environment. Through interviews, writings, personal experience, and Hemphill's poetry, Duberman creates a vivid, complex snapshot of the fractured, conflicted gay community as it responded to the growing problem. It’s a sobering narrative, replete with the sexism, racism, homophobia, and false leads that marked the onset of the aids epidemic. Most importantly, it addresses the role of aids as a 'gay disease' and exposes the differences between the white and black gay communities in their responses. Duberman’s accessible, open, and honest prose reminds us that aids is not over; only the sense of urgency has waned."

Jacqueline Woodson Selected for Hans Christian Andersen Shortlist

Yesterday, out lesbian Jacqueline Woodson, who lives with her partner and kids in Brooklyn, added to her huge list of prizes -- among them, two National Book Awards, three Newbery Awards, three Coretta Scott King Honors, and two major lifetime achievement awards -- a finalist of the Hans Christian Andersen Awards. Chosen from a longlist of fifty-eight writers from thirty-three countries, the six on the shortlist are:

·       Ted van Lieshout from the Netherlands. Lieshout uses a dialogue of words and images. With his original and visual writing style he observes the world with a different perspective every time. He is always looking for new styles and techniques to shape both words and pictures.

·      Houshang Moradi Kermani from Iran. Kermani has been writing creative humanistic works for children and adults for over four decades. Nature, village, family, and poverty together with self-respect, peace and mutual understanding are the most frequent subjects of his work.

·      Mirjam Pressler from Germany. “Without books the world remains a confining place and limits what we can imagine and consider doing,” says Pressler. “We need many different books. Books provide us with perspectives. A certain book can acquire an important, world-changing meaning.”

·       Nahoko Uehashi from Japan. Uehashi tells stories that are replete with imagination, culture and the beauty of a sophisticated process and form. Her literary subjects are based on ancient Japanese mythology and science-fiction fantasy that are deeply rooted in human reality. 

·       Renate Welsh from Austria. Welsh focuses on children’s social reality therefore enabling them to cope with their own lives. Family crisis and social injustice, illnesses, social exclusion, violence at home and at school, isolation and identity conflicts are depicted with remarkable honesty.

·       Jacqueline Woodson from the USA. Woodson often features African-American characters in her books because she feels strongly that children need to see themselves reflected in books. Each book she writes is a new experience, a way to learn something new or engage with a different subject that matters to her.

Born March 12: Randall Kenan, Sergey Nabokov

Randall Kenan dazzled the literary world with his 1989 debut novel, A Visitation of Spirits, about the inhabitants of a Southern rural black community, including a gay man whose internalized homophobia leads him to tragedy. Three years later his first collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, earned even greater acclaim for another empathetic look at the townsfolk of his imagined Tims Creek, North Carolina. Kenan has won a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Writers award, a John Dos Passos award, a Sherwood Anderson award, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but he hasn't published any other books of fiction in 18 years. Instead, he wrote a short YA biography of his idol James Baldwin, collected 200 interviews for his 688-page oral history Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, riffed on Baldwin in a 149-page essay called The Fire This Time, and edited Baldwin's uncollected writings in The Cross of Redemption. He teaches at his alma matter, UNC Chapel Hill.

Especially for the Nabokov family, fiction is truer than bare fact. Read Paul Russell's award-winning novel about Vladimir's gay brother, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov [Kindle] and his conversation about him with Christopher Bram over at The Millions.

Disney Cuts Boy Scouts, NBA Funds Gay Groups, Mayors Won't March

Since he signed with the Nets, Jason Collins' jersey has been the top seller at NBA.com. He chose number 98 to honor Matthew Shepard who was killed in 1998. Last week in Denver to play the Nuggets, he finally met Judy, Dennis, and Logan Shepard. The NBA announced they are donating the profits from sales of Collins' jersey to GLSEN and the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

Time: "The Walt Disney Company announced Saturday it would withdraw funding from the Boy Scouts of America beginning in 2015 unless the scouting organization overturns a policy banning gay leaders."

New York and Boston mayors refuse to march in St. Patrick's Day parades that exclude lgbt people. Bill de Blasio did appear in yesterday's Queens inclusive parade. No word yet if the first compromise in twenty years from the Boston bigots -- who now say they will allow gay vets to march in the military section -- is enough to get Martin Walsh in step.

George Will appeared on Fox to discuss Arizona SB1062 and offer his view that the victims are the bullies: "...This too must be said: It's a funny kind of sore winner in the gay rights movement that would say, 'A photographer doesn't want to photograph my wedding -- I've got lots of other photographers I could go to, but I'm going to use the hammer of government to force them to do this.'... It's not neighborly and it's not nice. The gay rights movement is winning. They should be, as I say, not sore winners."

The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America

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. Today FSG publishes 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.

I already admire the book for being a rigorous 300-odd pages, unlike so many lazy biographies of mammoth bloat.

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 February 18: Duane Michals, Audre Lorde

Even if you've somehow missed everything else, you know the self-taught photographer Duane Michals, 82 today, for his cover art on the Police's Synchronicity. Hallmarks of his black and white work are his use of handwritten text, nude men, dramatic juxtapositions, artificial stagings, and nods to gay history -- the horse image is from his 1970 Salute, Walt Whitman and was sold six years ago at a Christie's auction of Elton John's art. Among his more recent books is The Adventures of Constantine Cavafy. Awesomely, Michals and the architect he met at the gym in 1960 will this year celebrate their 54th anniversary. Old school to the core, Michals is dismayed by "all these kids spewing out of art school photographing their dinner and then making it a 20-foot photograph," and he had this to say about gay marriage in a 2008 interview:

So, you're politically against gay marriage, or just spiritually against it?

"I'm politically against it. I want civil unions. I want all the political advantages, but marriage is a tired vestige of the heterosexual world. I don't know why gay people would want to get married. Of all things! It's a failed institution. It just doesn't make sense. Wedding cake? Oh please!"

Thirty years of his portraits appear in Album. Earlier books are A Visit With Magritte, The House I Once Called Home, and Foto Follies: How Photography Lost Its Virginity on the Way to the Bank.

Born to Caribbean immigrants in Harlem, Audrey Lorde recognized the power of names and naming early in life, changing hers as a child to Audre to highlight the symmetry of both names ending in e. At 49 her landmark Zami: A New Spelling of My Name confirmed her stature as a great and essential writer and the nation's foremost "black lesbian feminist poet warrior." Still in her twenties, through a year at the National University of Mexico, graduating from Hunter, and getting her advanced degree from Columbia, she began publishing her poems and seeing them anthologized abroad as well as in Langston Hughes' New Negro Poets USA. (In 1997 Norton published her definitive Collected Poems at 512 pages.) A mother of two children from an eight year marriage to attorney Edwin Rollins, she was already enjoying her lesbianism at twenty, during a year at the National University of Mexico, and later had a seventeen year relationship with psychology professor Frances Clayton, as well as shorter relationships with the artist Mildred Thomson and finally with Gloria Joseph. That Clayton is white might be noteworthy because it was during those years, co-mothering the two children, that Lorde attacked the underlying racism of the feminist movement, linking the experience to slavery in essays like "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." Lorde had equally strong insights into the lgbt movement. From a 1980 interview reprinted in the book I Am Your Sister: Collected and Unpublished Writings of Audre Lorde:

"...most gay white men are marginal only in one respect. Much of the gay white movement seeks to be included in the american dream and is angered when they do not receive the standard white male privileges, misnamed as 'american democracy.'

    "Often, white gay men are working not to change the system. This is one of the reasons why the gay male movement is as white as it is. Black gay men recognize, again by the facts of survival, that being Black, they are not going to be included in the same way...

    "I see no essential battle between many gay men and the white male establishment. To be sure, there are gay men who do not view their oppression as isolated, and who work for a future. But it is a matter of majority politics: many gay white males are being pulled by the same strings as other white men in this society. You do not get people to work against what they have identified as their basic self-interest."

After fighting cancer for fourteen years, Lorde died in 1992 in St. Croix at 58. Jackie Kay is one of many who call Lorde "my hero."

Born February 12: Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson is the US nominee for the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award to be announced in March. In her nearly two dozen books for young readers she has given voice to characters usually ignored or silenced in mainstream stories, and in doing so she's been a finalist for or won the National Book Award, the Newbery Honor Medal, the Caldecott Medal, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the ALA Notable Book Award, the Parents' Choice Award, the Booklist Editors' Choice Award, and many, many regional prizes. She most often writes about friendship, especially across racial and class lines, and family or first love. Her girls are strong and her boys are caring, and she has included lgbtqi characters as adults and children, sometimes as the primary storyline. She's created a complete bibliography of her novels, with plot summaries and where and why she wrote each book. She lives in Brooklyn with her longtime partner and their two children, loves pizza, hates artichokes, and wisely doesn't believe in writer's block. The ALA's 2009 list of great lgbt reads for young readers included her novel After Tupac and D Foster about a trio of 11 to 13 year-olds coping with a tough neighborhood and the homophobia aimed at one of their brothers. Her most recent books are the story of brave girl coping, badly, with serious loss after Hurricane Katrina, Beneath a Meth Moon, and This Is the Rope: A Story From the Great Migration.

Born February 3: Gengoroh Tagame, Gertrude Stein, Marlon Riggs

Descended from samurai, Gengoroh Tagame -- 50 today -- is the world's leading artist of gay bdsm manga. Buy his big book, The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame edited by Chip Kidd and introduced by Ed White, which Garth Greenwell reviewed for Towleroad saying, "Even in depicting violence, his drawings have an extraordinary delicacy, conveying extremes of emotion—humiliation, pain, despair, but also arousal, relief and, in one story, heartbreaking devotion—with incredible economy. The essays offered here discuss Tagame’s debt to Japanese woodblock prints, and I found myself marveling at the fine textures of his work, the gorgeous patterning of clothing, floor tiles, landscapes, the hairs on a man’s legs or the sweat on his face." Or get his new book Endless Game. His website is impressively, obviously nsfw. But in person? So sweet. Shown here last year he accepted a handshake then hug from Youth in Decline.

By the time she was four, Gertrude Stein had lived in Pennsylvania, Vienna, Paris, and Oakland. By the time she was seventeen, both her parents were dead and her eldest brother took over the successful family business. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1897 and spent the summer studying embryology at Woods Hole, then attended Johns Hopkins Medical School, which she left after two years. In 1903 she moved to Paris where she would stay until she died forty-three years later. Unlike writers who withdraw to contemplate, Stein engaged with the world head-on across the arts. She wrote novels, plays, essays, autobiography, and libretti, sometimes in collaboration with close friends. Mocked for her modernist use of repetition ("A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"), Stein could be perfectly succinct, as when naming the Lost Generation, or saying, "Hemingway, remarks are not literature." A bold collector of new art, she and Alice Toklas, partners for almost forty years, hosted legendary weekly salons in which the best of Paris came to see the paintings and stayed for the conversation. Among their regular attendees were Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Derain, Rousseau, Hemingway, Wilder, Anderson, Appolinaire, Thomson, Bowles, Pound, and Bernard Fay, the gay Nazi informer who protected Toklas and Stein, a Jewish lesbian after all, throughout WWII. Although they were great travelers (it was they who tipped Bowles to Tangier), Stein and Toklas perversely stayed in France through the war. Although she wrote her coming out memoir, Q.E.D. before she was thirty, it was not published until 1950, four years after her death at 72. Despite thirty-nine years together, Stein left Toklas very little. Nieces and nephews grabbed the fortune in art. Stein and Toklas are buried side by side in Père Lachaise. Get the essential Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories by Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer. 

Marlon Riggs graduated with honors from Harvard in 1978, earned his MA in journalism from Berkeley, and before long got an NEA grant to make the landmark documentary of black gay culture, Tongues Untied, which caused all kinds of sensations at Berlin, at Cannes, on PBS, and on the Senate floor. A prime target for right-wing attacks, it also won prizes at San Francisco's Frameline, Atlanta's film fest, and New York's documentary festival. Riggs' next work, Color Adjustment, examined television's "unflattering" portrayal of black characters from 1948 to 1988. After that he made Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, interviewing HIV+ black men. Working on Black Is...Black Ain't (viewable in parts starting here), he died of aids. He was 37.

 

Born February 1: Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Langston Hughes

More publishing troubles: Lucy Jane Bledsoe's vivid exploration of three women's relationships and the meaning of home, set in an Antarctic research station conjured so astutely you'll think you've lived there yourself, The Big Bang Symphony, was released in May 2010, became a finalist for four book prizes, yet is still not available in paperback or as an eBook. Lucy's first novel, Working Parts, about adult literacy, won the Stonewall Book Award in 1998. She is a five-time Lammy nominee, for those two books, her two other novels, This Wild Silence and Biting the Apple, and her anthology Lesbian Travels. Her own trips are collected in a wonderful book called The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic [Kindle], and she's also written half a dozen titles for kids. She won the top prize in the Saturday Evening Post's Great American Fiction Contest for her "Wolf," about a couple in Yellowstone. Editorial Director Steven Slon says, "This terrific story is a tribute to human passion and to the American adventurer spirit. It's also a powerful evocation of the call of the wild." 

 

Celebrating "Langston Hughes, poet," as we must, neglects the bulk of his creative work: eleven plays, the screenplay of Way Down South (released the same year as Gone with the Wind), novels (starting with Not Without Laughter), forty-seven short stories (which often paid his rent), a series of books showcasing famous black Americans' accomplishments, six children's books, bold political writings, and two volumes of autobiography that as much as anything focus on Langston Hughes, traveler. His first memoir covers Harlem and Paris (after his scattered Midwestern childhood with visits to his father, an attorney who left the family to live in Mexico); and his second, I Wonder as I Wander, recounts his journeys in Russia, Turkmenistan, China, Japan, Cuba, Haiti, and Spain during their civil war. Of course his genius most often reveals itself in his poetry, which emphasizes a purity and simplicity like Whitman's, but unlike Whitman his directness of language does not extend to openness about his sexuality. Hughes's most cited homoerotic poems such as "Young Sailor" and "Joy", safeguarded with women or "she," are more cautious than the Calamus cycle. Below, listen to him read his response to Whitman's "I Hear America Singing." He died at 65 in 1967 and his ashes are interred beneath the lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th St. Long degayed, Hughes' homosexuality is the centerpiece of Isaac Julien's film on historical black gay experience amid entrenched homophobia, Looking for Langston.

Samuel Delany's Graphic Memoir Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of NYC

Seven years before Fun Home, the great polymath Samuel Delany published a graphic memoir Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York about his longterm partnership with tall, white, Irish-American Dennis Ricketts who, when they met, was thirty-six, homeless, and selling old books from a shopping cart on Broadway. They've been together twenty-two years and last summer Delany rereleased the book with new commentary and an introduction by Alan Moore. No idea how everyone missed this treasure. The Strand did a talk with Delany and illustrator Mia Wolff in August, which you can watch here.

For more about the erotics of the city and the importance of a vibrant street life, get Delany's anti-gentrification book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue [Kindle].

Born January 5: Alvin Ailey

Growing up in Texas, Alvin Ailey hid his dancing from his disapproving mother for two years and when she first saw him backstage in make-up, she slapped his face. His terror of her homophobia lasted decades, to his final days, so much so that when he was dying of aids at fifty-eight in 1989 he asked his doctor to lie about the cause on his death certificate. That fear outlives him. A CBS profile from August 2008 celebrates the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater's 50th anniversary with great dancing and an American success story of a black troupe thriving in a typically white corner of the arts. It omits any mention that he was gay, or gay people's contribution to dance, that he died of aids, or aids' toll on the arts. It also erases the more complicated aspects of Ailey's life, like his devastating arthritis, his addiction to cocaine, or his dependence on lithium. His private demons never obscured his public genius. One of the seventy-nine dances he choreographed, Revelations, set to spirituals and gospel music, is among the most popular and most seen ballets of the twentieth-century.