Band of Thebes

Born May 27: John Cheever

Closeted, self-hating, alcoholic, miserably married, and a frequent liar, John Cheever escaped by creating a more bucolic WASP suburbia in his beautiful fiction. Not coincidentally his most accomplished novel, Falconer [and Kindle], is the one that deals openly with love between men, (also not coincidentally) imprisoned. His masterpieces are his stories. He slept with everyone from Walker Evans when he was young to Allan Gurganus when he was old. (Read Cheever's memory of the Evans hookup here.) Blake Bailey was awarded a Guggenheim to write his biography, which went on to be a Pulitzer finalist and won the NBCC and the Francis Parkman Prize.

St. Aubyn and Hollinghurst

Today's much-too-long New Yorker profile of Edward St. Aubyn has at least two noteworthy details: 1) he named his daughter Eleanor, the same as the atrocious mother in the Melrose novels and 2) contrary to those novels' plot, his own mother, Lorna, merely threatened to leave Le Plan, their fabled 80-acre estate in Provence, to a New Age group but in fact she sold it to him. Ian Parker writes: 

"The year that he lost the Booker [2006], St. Aubyn sold Le Plan to a “very nice and massively rich” French family that reminded him of characters in the Babar books. His mother had died, after a series of stokes, the previous year, between the delivery and the publication of a novel that described her physical and cognitive decline. She had no more money. St. Aubyn had by then given himself a few years to experience Le Plan through the eyes of his son. For Lucian, “it wasn’t filled with these dark and complex meanings,” he said. “He just thought it was completely fabulous, as indeed it was. You know, there were cherry trees and apricot trees with ladders leaning against them—you could climb up and have an apricot. And frogs, and a series of ponds, and goldfish, and water lilies: this little fiefdom, this hamlet, which took quite a long time for a small boy to walk around.”

"Alan Hollinghurst had visited Le Plan several times in previous years, and had written parts of The Line of Beauty there. Just before the property changed hands, he came to stay with St. Aubyn, and they went from building to building, deciding what should be added to a bonfire that burned for three weeks. As St. Aubyn recalled, “I’d be saying, ‘Oh my God, I remember getting this suit!’ There would be, of course, a story attached to everything. And I’d look at Alan, who’d say”—firm, low voice—“ ‘Burn it.’ ” After a while, St. Aubyn skipped the anecdotes; Hollinghurst continued to say, “Burn it.”

Read the entire profile here. Get St. Aubyn's new novel Lost for Words [and Kindle].

Born May 26: Alan Hollinghurst

Here are the five essential things to know about Alan Hollinghurst, 60 today and still the only openly gay man to win the Booker Prize: 1. his first novel The Swimming-Pool Library (winner of the Somerset Maugham Award), 2. his second novel The Folding Star (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize), 3. his third novel The Spell, 4. his fourth novel The Line of Beauty (winner of the Man Booker Prize), and 5) his fifth novel The Stranger's Child (finalist for the Walter Scott Prize, longlisted for the Man Booker). Read them all. When he made his debut with The Swimming-Pool Library, Edmund White called it, "the best book on gay life yet written by an English author." Hollinghurst has only gotten better with time, though you should put The Spell last on your list. As one of the ten queer curators of London's Gay Icons show, his six selections included Ronald Firbank, Joe Dallesandro, Thom Gunn, and Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The Best Gay Books of Spring

     

Before you get deliriously swamped by the wave of great gay books coming this summer -- starting next week with two hotly anticipated titles, Stephen Greco's novel Now and Yesterday and James Magruder's story collection Let Me See It -- take another look at this pretty amazing spring harvest. 

 

Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer. A novel about EM Forster from 1912-1924, his gayest years, including his first trip to India.

Tatamkhulu Afrika, Bitter Eden [and Kindle]. Three gay men and their shifting loyalties in WWII POW camps.

John L'Heureux, The Medici Boy [and Kindle]. Donatello and his love of the scamp who posed for his bronze David.

Joseph Boone, The Homoerotics of Orientalism. Nonfiction, with 250+ pictures.

Mark Gevisser, Lost and Found in Johannesburg. Memoir of growing up white, gay, and Jewish in South Africa from the 70s to today.

Damian Barr, Maggie & Me. Award-winning, angry, funny memoir of growing up gay in Scotland in the 80s.

Ivan Coyote, Gender Failure. Nonfiction.

Edward White, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America [and Kindle]. Brilliant biography of the famed queer photographer and his era, 1880-1964.

Tom Spanbauer, I Loved You More [and Kindle]. Novel spanning 25 years in Idaho, New York, and Portland.

Peter Hujar: Love & Lust. Photos.

Mark Wunderlich, The Earth Avails. Poems. 

Emma Donoghue, Frog Music [and Kindle]. Queers, frogs, and murder in 1876 San Francisco.

Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia

 With a lofty Metacritic score of 74, twelve months after its premiere at Tribeca, Nicholas Wrathall's documentary Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia storms into theaters this weekend. Stephen Holden says, "Heavily seasoned with epigrams worthy of Oscar Wilde, this entertaining documentary portrays Vidal as a pessimistic political prophet with streaks of paranoia and misanthropy, but a truth teller nonetheless." Dates are:

5/23 IFC Center + Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, New York
6/6 Nuart, Los Angeles
6/6 Ritz At The Bourse, Philadelphia
6/6 Varsity, Seattle
6/6 E Street, Washington D.C.
6/13 Opera Plaza, San Francisco
6/13 Shattuck, Berkeley
6/13 Mayan, Denver
6/13 Midtown Art, Atlanta
6/13 Lagoon, Minneapolis
6/20 Ken, San Diego
6/20 Nickelodeon, Santa Cruz
6/27 Kendall Square, Cambridge
6/27 Palm, San Luis Obispo
6/27 Fleur, Des Moines

Get Gore's book Imperial America: Reflections on the United States of Amnesia or his opus United States: Essays 1952-1992, which won a National Book Award.

Young Gay Actors Go Camp in The Home for Wayward Ladies

The new, start-up publisher lost me at "bitchy brunches" but I do like blurber Marc Acito. Some readers might be in the mood for this first novel, The Home For Wayward Ladies [and Kindle], from Broadway producer Jeremy Blaustein.

"When used correctly, friendship is the most powerful weapon known to man. Fresh out of Mackinaw Conservatory's School of Theater, Eli, Hunter, and Nick have relocated to Manhattan's Upper-Upper West Side bound by an oath that friendship shall conquer all. Amid bitchy brunches and failed one-night stands, these friends - as promising as they are promiscuous - are on a quest to have their voices heard over the roar of city. When they get a chance to work in summer stock, this "family" is forced to find out the hard way what it takes to become the ultimate anything: a somebody. Day jobs pay bills and hand jobs stroke the ego, but handling betrayal with grace is the best way to prove who is a true Lady."

Acito said, "The Home For Wayward Ladies isn't just funny. It's laugh-out-loud, read-out-loud-to-your-friends, snort-a-cocktail-out-your-nose, lose-bladder-control kind of funny. A gem of a debut in the effervescent tradition of Patrick Dennis and Armistead Maupin."

"This Boy" Wins Orwell and Ondaatje Prizes

Forget Dave Eggers and his lil bro with their money in cushy California. Alan Johnson was orphaned at twelve in 1962 in London and raised by his sister Linda who was sixteen. They were given a council flat in a condemned building with no electricity and one shared outdoor toilet for all inhabitants. Alan left school at fifteen to stack shelves at a supermarket and became a postman at eighteen. Since then, the one-time Marxist has been Home Secretary, Health Secretary, Education Secretary, Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, and a Labour MP for seventeen years. On Monday, his memoir of childhood This Boy won the Ondaatje Prize from the Royal Society of Literature, which last year honored Philip Hensher's fictionalized account of his husband's childhood, Scenes from Early Life. Now Johnson's memoir has also won Britain's top award for political writing, the Orwell Prize, beating yet another biography of Margaret Thatcher.

Born May 23: Allen Barnett

The absolutely terrific writer Allen Barnett -- born in Joliet in 1955, studied at Loyola, moved to New York to act, died of aids at thirty-six in 1991 -- is in danger of being lost. His only book is out of print. His New York Times obituary said:

Mr. Barnett was the author of The Body and Its Dangers (1990), a collection of stories in which many of the characters are afflicted with aids. The book was a winner of a PEN/ Ernest Hemingway Citation. Mr. Barnett worked for the Gay Men's Health Crisis, helped to establish the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and taught aids education to students of English as a second language at the 23d Street Y.M.C.A.

He is survived by his mother, Margaret Barnett of Joliet, Ill.; four sisters, Debby, Cindy, Donna and Rhonda, and two brothers, Dale and Ricky.

In addition to the PEN citation (a sort of runner-up to the actual award), The Body and Its Dangers won a Ferro-Grumley and a Lammy. Publishers Weekly said,

Barnett's willingness to venture into explosively emotional terrain with empathy, candor and balance is perhaps best revealed in his stunning "The Times As It Knows Us," where men sharing a summerhouse appear to have created family within the gay community--yet even this proves illusory.

Reviewing it for the Times Meg Wolitzer wrote,

The urgency of Mr. Barnett's characters, and their simple good will toward all that is human, carry considerable weight. He portrays their awareness of fragility with such candor and melancholy that they almost seem to be holding their own hearts in their hands.

Four years ago Christopher Bram wrote about Allen in the excellent queer lit rescue project The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered [and Kindle] conceived and edited by Tom Cardamone. For serious readers, this book is a must for its 28 essays and its bibliography citing further works by more than 80 gay authors.

Maurice Vellekoop

Citing inspiration from early gay giants like Drummer and Stroke's Harry Bush (Hard Boys), midcentury artist George Quaintance, and of course Tom of Finland, illustrator Maurice Vellekoop carries on their tradition of depicting handsome, self-assured, masculine men in lust and, crucially, with a sense of humor. Vellekoop uses a brighter, more cheerful palette to draw his joyful frolics and the results may give rise to, among other things, confusing questions. Can such flat, simple pictures be hot? Yes. Is it wrong? No. Frankly, some viewers can't / won't / don't want to be turned on without a frisson of guilt or shame. There's not a shadow of those in Vellekoop's magazine work -- which you've seen in The New Yorker, the NYT, Wallpaper, Vogue, Rolling Stone, Out, EW, et al -- nor in his gay books like his solo manly Pin-ups or his alpha-male (!) ABC Book: A Homoerotic Primer with XXX sex scenes for each letter.

 

Lost for Words, Winner of the Wodehouse Prize

From any other writer, a satire about literary awards would be something to flee, but I'd follow Edward St Aubyn anywhere. His eighth novel, and his first non-Patrick Melrose book in fourteen years, Lost for Words [and Kindle] arrives in the US today after sharply dividing critics in Britain. Yesterday it was the surprise winner of the Wodehouse prize for literature that has a sense of humor. His fellow finalists were 

• Sebastian Faulks, Jeeves and the Wedding Bells
• Helen Fielding, Mad about the Boy
• Hanif Kureishi, The Last Word
• John Niven, Straight White Male
• Joseph O'Connor, The Thrill of it All

David Levithan, Darren Stein Discuss Changes in Gay Books, Movies

After so many Debbie Downer dispatches about the demise of the gay novel, successful editor-author David Levithan and director Darren Stein are super psyched about the state of queer storytelling. In a short conversation for the Guardian, David says,

"The exciting thing is how many of them there are, and how many different stories they have to tell. (For great examples of this, check out Nina LaCour's new novel Everything Leads to You or Alex London's Proxy.) I don't think there's the pressure anymore to tell "the" lgbtq story, and instead the focus is on telling "a" lgbtq story. There's not the assumption that there's a single story to tell; instead it's about finding all of the interesting facets, and illuminating them. As in life, being lgbtq is a part of the character and part of the story, but it doesn't have to determine the entire plot."

They also list their favorite queer characters in movies and books, which introduced me to James Howe's novel Totally Joe [and Kindle].

"There are many gay characters I love, but I probably love Joe the most. He's only twelve, but he is out to his family and friends, has his first crush, loves his pop divas, and is telling his life in alphabetical order. He has his blue moods, but mostly he lives in Technicolor, unrepentantly. I love that when James Howe created him, he seemed like a radical invention for children's literature. Now he's a kid you see every time you visit a school."

David's most recent book is Every Day. Darren's movie is the gay high school comedy GBF [stream now]. I watched it. Even though it boasts the new, new acceptance, the movie feels really dated? And that thing where you know what's going to happen before it happens? And what the characters are going to say before you check online to see if it's really ten years since Mean Girls? And nineteen years since Clueless? Which makes you sad? Inside? Sort of? But then omg that blond girl wasted in like the minorest role is the incredible Evanna Lynch. Luna Lovegood! More sad.

Say what you will, but despite its tired overall story arc, Superbad is full of surprises. To a lesser extent, so is last summer's fake family comedy We're the Millers. One surprise there is when Ron Swanson wet-fingers Jason Sudeikis' earhole. Another surprise is the terrific young actor Will Poulter, who won a Bafta for this funny, heartfelt performance.

Born May 18: Don Bachardy

Eighty today, Don Bachardy has one more thing to celebrate: He helped bring out last week's collection of love letters The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy [and Kindle]. Overshadowed and overlooked, he is a lovely artist of these nuanced, revealing sketches of their famous friends, and a daring painter, whose official gubernatorial portrait of Jerry Brown hangs in the California State Capitol. In the documentary Chris & Don. A Love Story he thoughtfully discusses his life in art and the complex power imbalances of a 30+ year relationship that began when he was southern California teenager and his new English bf in his late forties was already an international literary star.

Armed Forces Day

Soldier or sailor? Take your pick—or do both—with Evan Bachner's kind of amazing troves of archival army and navy photos from 1939-45. He has plucked the finest of the fittest for At Ease: Navy Men of World War II and Men of World War II: Fighting Men at Ease. (He also published Making WAVES: Navy Women of World War II.) More after the jump.

   

The Sixth Extinction and a Central Problem of Gay History

Although it covers many die-offs old and new (especially the current demise of frogs and bats -- perversely, I wanted more catastrophe), Elizabeth Kolbert's ripping good read The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History [and Kindle] really is more interested in trickier questions like how people notice mass events that might be very quick in geologic time -- a couple hundred years -- given that each generation accepts its circumstances as baseline normal. Perception is crucial. She opens chapter five recounting a 1949 Harvard experiment that flashed regular playing cards with two alterations in the deck: a red spade and a black diamond. Students could not figure out what they were seeing. They couldn't determine the color ("purple," "brown," "rusty") or the suit of the changed cards. Inspired by that work, Thomas Kuhn studied how people deal with disruptive information. "Their first impulse is to force it into a familiar framework... Signs of mismatch are disregarded..."

"The pattern was, Kuhn argued, so basic that it shaped not only individual perceptions but entire fields of inquiry. Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible. The more contradictions accumulated, the more convoluted the rationalizations became. 'In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty,' Kuhn wrote."

To my mind nowhere is this syndrome more obvious or more prevalent than when historians or scientists are confronted with gay material. Scholars read Shakespeare's love sonnets to a young man and, exactly as Kuhn notes, they force it into a familiar framework ("friendship") and the more contradictions that accumulate (126 loving sonnets to him and the book dedicated to him vs. only 26 angry and unhappy sonnets to the dark lady), the more convoluted their rationalizations become. Historians find Lincoln in bed with a handsome young soldier while his wife is away or they read one of Eleanor Roosevelt's few surviving love letters to lesbian journalist Lorena Hickok, and suddenly they can't see what they're seeing. Even worse is scientists' global disregard of the 1,500 species of animals that engage in foreplay, mounting, penetration, pair-bonding, or co-parenting in same-sex couples. Rather than create outlandish excuses why some animals primarily have sex and pair with their own gender when the opposite gender is available, heteroists simply erase it. A profound and entertaining rescue is Bruce Bagemihl's phenomenal book, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity.

British Library Posts 1200 Treasures: Wilde, Byron, Hardy, Austen, Eliot

Ex your ennui -- it's always a thrill to see a favorite author's handwritten manuscripts and letters. The British Library has posted 1,204 newly digitized items plus two dozen videos like the Brontes at Haworth or Jane's tight pages or the origins of A Christmas Carol or Blake's radicalism. Among others, you can explore:

Oscar Wilde (a first edition of Dorian Gray, Roger Luckhurst on perversion and degeneracy)

Jane Austen 

William Blake

Lord Byron

Lewis Carroll

George Eliot

Charles Dickens

Thomas Hardy

Robert Louis Stevenson 

Smithsonian's US History in 101 Objects: LGBT Protest Signs, Aids Quilt

For once, we're part of the mainstream historical narrative. The Smithsonian's History of America in 101 Objects features Pocahontas' portrait, slave shackles, the Declaration of Inpendence, John Deere's plow, Lewis & Clark's compass, Bell's telephone, Edison's lightbulb, a suffragist's banner, a klansman's hood, Louis Armstrong's trumpet, Babe Ruth's baseball, Dorothy Gale's ruby slippers, Muhammad Ali's boxing gloves, Neil Armstrong's space suit, Julia Child's kitchen, Apple's Mac, panels from the aids quilt, and picket signs from the Mattachine's lesbian and gay rights picket at the White House in 1965. Each entry has photos and a related essay.

Essential as it is to be acknowledged on equal footing in the story of America, it must be said most selections are thuddingly unoriginal. Unlike every page of Neil MacGregor's A History of the World in 100 Objects, nothing here is a surprise or even a stretch. Redundantly, the curators include separately the Wright Brothers' plane and Lindbergh's plane but completely omit newspapers & magazines; oil and energy; any form of theater; any religion after 1846; the Homestead Act; the 19th century labor movement; the Dust Bowl; environmentalism; on and on.

For a dose of the American wonder, richness, and intrigue missing above, here is Slate's brand new map of each state's most common language after English and Spanish:

We, the Animals: Isherwood - Bachardy Love Letters

Naturally when you see that title, The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy [and Kindle], out this week from FSG, you want to know which animals. Chris was an old workhorse/stallion named Dobbin and Don was kitten named Kitty.

You'll be forgiven for thinking those names dim compared to the ark of human names that vivify these charming, sometimes smart, sometimes gossipy pages: Ackerley, Albee, Julie Andrews, Antonioni, Peggy Ashcroft, Astaire, Astor, Auden, Bacall, Bacon, Balanchine, James Baldwin, JM Barrie, Alan Bates, Beaton, Beckett, Sybille Bedford, Betjeman, Bogarde, Bouvier, Bowles, Brando, James Bridges, Britten, Bunuel, Richard Burton...all the way to Vidal, Visconti, Warhol, Weisman, Welles, Wells, Wescott, Williams, Wood, Woodcock, Woolf, Wyatt, Yeats, York, and Zeffirelli.

Born May 14: William Percy, Magnus Hirschfeld

One of the best, most jolting, and cruelly overlooked gay books from 2012 was Benjamin Wise's William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker [and Kindle]. Born in 1885, Percy was, "a queer plantation owner, poet, and memoirist. Though he is best known as a conservative apologist of the southern racial order, in this telling Wise creates a complex and surprising portrait of a cultural relativist, sexual liberationist, and white supremacist. We follow Percy as he travels from Mississippi around the globe and, always, back again to the Delta. Wise's exploration brings depth and new meaning to Percy's already compelling life story--his prominent family's troubled history, his elite education and subsequent soldiering in World War I, his civic leadership during the Mississippi River flood of 1927, his mentoring of writers Walker Percy and Shelby Foote, and the writing and publication of his classic autobiography, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son. This biography sets Percy's life and search for meaning in the context of his history in the Deep South and his experiences in the gay male world of the early twentieth century. In Wise's hands, these seemingly disparate worlds become one."

The next time people claim the gay rights movement is a recent invention or that you’re anachronistically imposing a modern concept on a pre-Stonewall era that could not possibly have supported the idea, remind them of Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1896, he wrote and published a pamphlet on homosexual love called Sappho and Socrates. In 1897 with the leaders of the gay journal Der Eigene, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose motto was “Justice through science.” Their first goal was to overturn the notorious 1871 German law Paragraph 175, criminalizing male homosexuality. Not only did they campaign openly and publicly, they urged prominent people to sign their petition to repeal the law. Among the 5,000 signatories were Einstein, Tolstoy, Mann, Hesse, and Rilke. When the bill to repeal came before the Reichstag in 1898, it failed, and, infuriated by their hypocrisy, Hirschfeld contemplated outing various members of parliament who had voted against it. Undaunted by the defeat, the committee continued to get the bill reintroduced repeatedly over the next decades. 
        Thirty-four years before Kinsey, Hirschfeld collected detailed information about sexual behavior in surveys from 10,000 people

Hugh Thomson Wins Wainwright Prize

Of the six finalists for a new prize honoring the year's best nature and travel books, three titles are about walking, including the winner, Hugh Thomson's The Green Road Into the Trees: An Exploration of England.

The shortlist:

Simon Armitage, Walking Home: A Poet's Journey. "In summer 2010 Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards the Yorkshire village where he was born. 

Patrick Barkham, Badgerlands: The Twilight World of Britain's Most Enigmatic Animal. "The author of The Butterfly Isles turns his wry, affectionate attention to an even more beloved (and controversial) British animal – the badger."

Charlotte Higgins, Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain. "This book is about the encounter with Roman Britain. What does Roman Britain mean to us now? How were its physical remains rediscovered and made sense of? How has it been reimagined, in story and song and verse?"

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. "Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes criss-crossing the British landscape and its waters, and connecting them to the continents beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, of pilgrimage and ritual, and of songlines and their singers. "

Hugh Thomson, The Green Road Into the Trees: An Exploration of England. "From the very centre of England – literally, as his village is furthest from the sea – he travels to its outermost edges. By taking a 400 mile journey from coast to coast, through both the sacred and profane landscapes of ancient England, Hugh casts unexpected light – and humour – on the way we live now."

Esther Woolfson, Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary. "A beautifully written and thought-provoking record of a year spent observing the natural world in a city, which looks afresh at our relationship to the animals and plants that live in close proximity to us." 

Glenn Greenwald on Growing Up Gay

After several delays, out today is gay journalist Glenn Greenwald's shattering new book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State [and Kindle]. He gave an impressively frank interview to GQ's Michael Paterniti which is mainly about Snowden, the NSA, the likelihood of his own arrest, and how drastically the US has regressed since Daniel Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, but it also includes this exchange on growing up gay in the 1970s and 80s.

GQ: Was there a formative moment in your childhood that might've cast you in the adversarial role?

GG: Being gay was a big part of that process. I grew up gay in the '70s and '80s, when things were obviously much different than they are now. There was no gay culture for a gay teen in an American suburb, at all. The overriding message was there's something wrong with you, there's something inside of you that's just wrong. It's broken. It's bad. It's diseased. And so it's a pretty harsh message to internalize when you're, like, 11. It leaves you with three different options.

       One is you just keep internalizing it and keep internalizing it and tell yourself that you're this horrible, diseased, broken person. And that's why gay teens kill themselves. Another strategy is to say I'm going to try and convince you that you're wrong, right? I'm going to show you that I'm actually really normal in every other way. That's the gay lobby in D.C., who are just, like, so intent on proving that they're exactly like straight people in every single other way, so please accept us. And then, I think, a third strategy is just to say, You know what? Go fuck yourself. I'm going to be the one to impose judgments on you, and let's examine the propriety of your behavior instead.

 

GQ: How did that play out?

GG:I was always identified as the smart kid or whatever. But I had disciplinary problems starting in seventh, eighth grade. I would just start arguing with teachers. I realized that my ability to reason