Band of Thebes

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 May 29: Rupert Everett

Bitter about his stalled film career (thirty years since Another Country opposite a baby Colin Firth), sourly against gay marriage ("beyond tragic"), Rupert Everett at 55 has finally settled into the dual careers he was always meant to have, stage actor and author. Last year he was nominated for an Olivier Award for playing Oscar Wilde in a West End revival of The Judas Kiss, and he is writing a biopic covering Wilde's final years. Also last year he co-starred with Benedict Cumberbatch, Janet McTeer, and Rebecca Hall in a five-part minseries of Parade's End. He has published two novels, which I expected to be charming and frivilous and found to be charming and affecting: Hello Darling, Are You Working? and The Hairdressers of St.Tropez. His two memoirs, Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins and Vanished Years, are spiced with sharper flavors. He shifts between politely savaging the egomania of his more famous co-stars and dutifully recording the wisdom of his family: 'You were such a solitary child,' Granny says dreamily. 'Very quiet. You always played alone. You hated birthday parties. Now I read in Hello! that you're the life and soul of every party. What happened?'

Born May 25: Ian McKellen

For anyone who still thinks being an out actor is a career-ender, study the numbers: Ian McKellen ranks #16 or #17 in all-time box office grosses, at $2.7 billion, far ahead of Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, Adam Sandler, and homophobe Mel Gibson (#48), to name a few. Please note his two cash cows -- five X-Men movies so far, the sixth Tolkien movie this December -- came after he "shocked" viewers by purring down the red carpet, flaunting his four-decades-younger boyfriend Nick Cuthell, at the Oscars when he was nominated for the adaptation of Chris Bram's Gods and Monsters. Out since 1988, he co-founded Stonewall UK, the lgbt rights powerhouse, in response to the deplorable Section 28, and he's been an unabashed activist on queer issues ever since. He has won a Golden Globe, a Tony, a SAG award, two Critics' Choice awards, four Drama Desk awards, and six Olivier awards, and been nominated for two Oscars, four BAFTAs, and five Emmys. He was knighted in 1991. Playing off Sir Ian, Stephen Fry calls him Serena. He is also best chums with co-star Patrick Stewart. Their two-man show charmed everyone, which cannot be said of his BBC comedy with Derek Jacobi, Vicious. An avowed atheist, Ian got ordained online as a Unification Church minister and officiated Patrick's third wedding. Watch them together on Late Night. Or watch them fail at The Newlywed Game. Today he's 75.

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."

Born May 9: Alan Bennett

Britain has been celebrating Alan Bennett's 80th birthday all week, and one notable interview came Tuesday on BBC Four when he explained his choice to stay closeted so long: "My objection about people knowing more about one's private life was that I didn't want to be put in a pigeonhole. I didn't want to be labelled as gay and that was it. I just wanted to be my own man, as it were." Read other interviews, praise, and commentary at the Guardian, the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, and the Independent.

 Much of his career as a playwright, screenwriter, author and actor been devoted to wry or gently comic emotional cripples, inhabiting worlds where happiness is as suspect (very) as it is unlikely (highly) and where unrequited love is a redundancy. His best known works are the adaptation of Prick Up Your Ears (gay playwright Joe Orton murdered by his lover), An Englishman Abroad (gay traitor Guy Burgess), The Madness of George III (crazy king), A Question of Attribution (another gay traitor, Anthony Blunt), and of course The History Boys. In 2011 reader Gary reminded me about Bennett's highly successful series of humorous and touching monologues, Talking Heads, which can be seen online. (Lovingly spoofed by Stephen Fry in drag.) The son of a Northern butcher, Bennett was accepted at Cambridge but, following a boy who didn’t like him, switched to Oxford where he took a first in history and, in 1960, joined Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, and Jonathan Miller to appear in the instantly famous comedy revue Beyond the Fringe. He also performed in The Secret Policeman’s Ball and The Secret Policeman’s Other Ball. Although he has been with his current partner, Rupert Thomas, for nearly 20 years, only recently has he felt comfortable discussing his gay life. And he's begun to create unqualified delights, such as the one even Michiko called “a completely charming entertainment: a small gem,” his novella The Clothes They Stood Up In, about a middle-aged married couple who return from the theatre to discover their flat has been robbed of absolutely everything, down to their last thumbtack and thimble. His hugely praised novella The Uncommon Reader, about the Queen's newfound love of literature thanks to a gay teenager, is a slender perfection. Since then he's published a memoir about his parents, A Life Like Other People's, and a pair of gay-inclusive tales in a short book wittily titled Smut [Kindle]. The same week that the British Library paid half a million pounds for Ted Hughes' papers, Bennett announced he is donating all his papers -- including decades of diaries and unpublished manuscripts -- to Oxford's Bodleian Library, in gratitude for his state scholarship.

Born May 4: Lincoln Kirstein

Lincoln Kirstein is most remembered for getting Balanchine to America in 1933 and later co-founding and running the New York City Ballet with him, but his influence extended throughout all the arts: literature, painting, sculpture, photography, theater, and film. Claudia Roth Pierpont’s said, "The sheer breadth of Kirstein's endeavor -- so unthinkable in the present age of specialization -- has made him appear to some people to be the last historical example of the Renaissance man." Often considered to have known everyone who mattered, Kirstein was a particularly powerful force in the thriving culture of gay artists, befriending among many others George Platt Lynes (who took this photo), Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Cecil Beaton, W.H. Auden, Glenway Wescott, Virgil Thomson, Philip Johnson, Pavel Tchelitchev, and Paul Cadmus, whose sister he married without pausing in his endless succession of affairs with young male dancers. He came out publicly in 1982; he died in 1996. Read his own Mosaic: Memoirs or Martin Duberman's The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein.

Kirstein also played a significant role in the actual events that inspired The Monuments Men. At the time he was a tall, strapping 38 year-old, yet his character is played by a five-foot-five, 68 year-old weakling, lest any attention be diverted from the film's 52 year-old writer, director, producer, and star.

Born May 2: Howard Cruse, Lorenz Hart

In 2011 Rizzoli published Howard Cruse's 80's comic strip The Complete Wendel with an introduction by Alison Bechdel who said, "It's a little shocking to me as I re-read Wendel from this vantage point to see the extent to which my own cartoon characters took their cues from Howard's." Bechdel also praises Cruse's professional coming out in a hostile time with the path-breaking annual anthology Gay Comix and his Wendel strip, "a radical act that both paved the way and set the bar for successive generations of queer cartoonists." Born and raised in Springville, Alabama in 1944, Cruse didn't get to New York until 1977, where two years later he met his husband Eddie Sedarbaum. In 2003 they said goodbye to all that and moved to North Adams, Massachusetts. In 1995, a few years after Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer for Maus, Cruse published Stuck Rubber Baby a graphic novel about his growing up and coming out in the South of the 1960s. The book has won the top graphics prizes in the US (the Eisner and Harvey awards), as well as similar honors in the UK (Comics Creators award), Germany (Luchs award), Spain, and France. When The Comics Journal compiled their list of the 100 Best Comics of the Century, they included Stuck Rubber Baby, ranking it five spots above Alan Moore's Watchmen. He released uncollected work in The Other Sides of Howard Cruse. Today, he's 70.

Super songwriter and private wreck Lorenz Hart partnered with Richard Rodgers to create dozens of classic showtunes from the late 1920s to early 1940s: Isn't It Romantic?, Blue Moon, Falling in Love with Love, The Lady Is a Tramp, and Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered are among their biggest. Gay audiences didn't have to dig deep to find double meaning in Hart's contrarian, gender-free lyrics to songs like My Funny Valentine. His severe alcoholism and weeks-long binges are part of the reason Rodgers dumped him and moved on to collaborating with Oscar Hammerstein II. Even more of a mess after his mother's death, Hart increased his drinking and died of exposure and pneumonia at 48. Read Gary Marmorstein's A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart.

Born April 29: Leslie Jordan

Twenty years after his first television appearance (on The Fall Guy), Southern sparkplug Leslie Jordan won an Emmy for his recurring guest role on Will & Grace as Karen's classically queeny rival, Beverly Leslie. Two years later he unleashed his book and solo show, My Trip Down the Pink Carpet [DVD], a high-spirited romp about his "Marilyn Monroe Syndrome," charting his course from smalltown Tennessee prejudices, self-hatred, Hollywood, alcoholism, more Hollywood, self-acceptance, still more Hollywood, sobriety, drama, and fame. This year he hosted the Hookie Awards for outstanding achievement in gay escort work. 

See his schedule of upcoming events in Houston, Baltimore, Provincetown, Ogunquit, and New Hope here.

Born April 14: John Gielgud, Angela

In 1991 John Gielgud became the fourth person in the universe to EGOT, having won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. Also the winner of multiple BAFTAs and Golden Globes and a special Olivier Award, Gielgud was and is still considered one of the world's finest actors. A consummate performer of Shakespeare on stage and screen, he was equally at home in historical dramas such as Brideshead Revisited (and Caligula), experimental works such as Beckett's Catastrophe, and contemporary comedies like Arthur. In 1953, he was arrested and convicted of cottaging in Chelsea Mews. Unlike today's finger-wagging moralists (see George Michael's career after his entrapment for cruising, thanks largely to homophobic record execs and radio programmers), the post-War public did not scorn him; rather, at his next appearance on stage he was given a standing ovation. Indeed, that same year he was knighted. Although Gielgud was out and discussed his homosexuality in his autobiography, when he died at ninety-six in 2000, many obituaries degayed his life and omitted his partner of almost four decades, Martin Hensler. When criticized, the Washington Post defended their decision saying he was known for being an actor, not for being gay. Their long tribute included the details that he loved to garden and enjoyed trashy commercial paperback novels. Read his books An Actor and His Time and Backward Glances.

My sister Angela is every kind of awesome, and more. At three, upon hearing she was going to get a baby brother, she urged our parents to name me Julia Child. From that summit of prescience, her insights have grown wiser every day. She and her partner of 22 years met by sitting next to each other at the SF lgbt film fest, Frameline. (See what happens when you support queer film!) They live in Berkeley.

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.

Richard Kramer's These Things Happen Now in Paperback

A favorite on Thebes' poll in 2012 and again in 2013, and a local bestseller in Los Angeles, Richard Kramer's smart, funny, affecting gay novel These Things Happen [Kindle] gives voice to multiple narrators as fifteen year-old Wesley navigates first love and four parents -- mom, stepdad, dad, and dad's partner George, who to my mind is the book's winningest character. The story's heart and snap is no surprise to followers of Kramer's impressive career in television, writing / directing / producing many series including My So-called Life, Thirtysomething, and Tales of the City. Indeed, this story is ready to become a series for HBO produced by Oprah. Read it now before the show kicks Modern Family asunder.

Someone had an inspired idea to illustrate this New York novel with art by James McMullan (get his brand new Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood) but it's wrong to denude the cover of its many marquee blurbs and reviews. NYT: "Funny and captivating." PW: "Kramer's triumph." Lambda: "Compulsively readable." Julia Glass: "A fresh, brave love story." Michael Cunningham: "Incisive, wise, funny, moving." Cathleen Schine: "Artful, thoughtful, and extremely funny... wonderful." Daniel Mendelsohn: "wise and wide-eyed, sage and sensitive, extremely funny and, in the end, disarmingly touching."

Born April 11: Glenway Wescott, Arthur Wooten

Expat American literary young men colliding in Gertrude Stein's orbit in Paris, Hemingway took an immediate dislike to gay novelist Glenway Wescott for his artificial affectations [from Wisconsin, he acquired an English accent] and his "fake" fiction. In The Sun Also Rises he lampooned Wescott as Robert Prescott until Max Perkins made him change the overly obvious last name to Prentiss. Wescott's major novels, before he ceased writing them at 44, are The Grandmothers, based on his own family, Apartment in Athens [Kindle], about a Greek family forced to host a German officer, of which Susan Sontag said in The New Yorker it is “among the treasures of 20th-century American literature,” and The Pilgrim Hawk [Kindle], which David Leavitt chose as a favorite of 2011. Late last year came his gay-inclusive stories, A Visit to Priapus. One area in which Wescott trumped Hemingway: His relationship with MoMA curator Monroe Wheeler lasted 68 years, from 1919 to his death at 85 in 1987. After you read the novels, try Jerry Rosco's Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography or get Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott, 1937-1955 and A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956-1984.

Reader Daniel recommends the really wonderful When We Were Three: Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott 1925-1935.

Camp out with some old-school gay humor. Arthur Wooten's novel of misadventures in middle-aged gay dating, On Picking Fruit [Kindle], inspired Edmund White to say, "If gallantry in our day is defined as facing adversity with screams of laughter, then this is the most gallant book I know of." Its sequel is Fruit Cocktail [Kindle]. Three generations of Southern zany types converge in Birthday Pie [Kindle], and Leftovers examines a 1950s divorced woman's zeal for Tupperware. Dizzy: A Fictional Memoir goes backstage with Broadway royalty. Wooten's site says, "All of his books have been adapted to film, television and/or stage."

Born April 5: Nigel Hawthorne

Nigel Hawthorne had already won a Tony, an Olivier, and five BAFTAs (four for his famous role on Yes Minister) by the time American audiences discovered him starring in The Madness of King George when he was 65. The heavily gay production -- director (Nicholas Hytner), writer (Alan Bennett), co-star (Rupert Everett) -- was nominated for fourteen BAFTAs and several Oscars, including one for Nigel as Best Actor (losing to Forrest Gump). Closeted, he gave an interview to The Advocate, which outed him over his long relationship with Trevor Bentham, the former stage manager turned screenwriter of A Month By The Lake and Nigel's final film The Clandestine Marriage. Traumatic though the outing was, the Oscar exposure upped Nigel on Hollywood's radar: Spielberg cast him in Amistad, Mamet cast him in The Winslow Boy, and Disney used him in Tarzan. Nicholas Hytner again chose Nigel for my favorite of his roles, in Stephen McCauley's The Object Of My Affection in 1998. The following year he was knighted. Because Britain still didn't have civil unions in 2001 when Nigel died at 72, Trevor was burdened with a massive 40% tax bill -- rather than 0% -- on the inheritance, as if they were mere flatmates, and feared losing their home. They had been together 22 years. Published posthumously, Nigel's memoir is Straight Face.

Sheridan Morley Prize Shortlist

Down from five finalists each of the past three years (including last year's gayfest starring Arthur Laurents' The Rest of the Story, Simon Callow's Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World, and winner Rupert Everett's Vanished Years [Kindle]), the new shortlist for the Sheridan Morley Prize for the best theater book is only three titles:

• Michael Blakemore, Stage Blood
• Michael Simkins, The Rules of Acting
• Philip Zeigler, Olivier

Stage Blood recounts Blakemore's five tempestuous years as Associate Director at the National Theatre under Olivier and Peter Hall. Three reviews call it "wise," "masterly," and "tremendous fun."

The winner will be announced next month in London.

Tennessee! Truman! Gore! Famous! Members! and Entourages!

After oodles of splashy, breathless bios Darwin Porter uncaps his purple pen for Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages [Kindle]. Some smouldering tidbit maybe about the Kennedys -- oh this, Jackie + Nureyev! and Nureyev + Bobby! -- has already been picked up by the Globe. No, not the Boston Globe. The trashy tabloid.

Earlier titles from the well-oiled Porter machine include:

• Brando Unzipped: Marlon Brando: Bad Boy, Megastar, Sexual Outlaw
• Merv Griffin: A Life in the Closet
• Hollywood's Silent Closet: The Lusty Saga of America's First Star F*#%er
• Frank Sinatra, The Boudoir Singer: All the Gossip Unfit to Print from the Glory Days of Ol' Blue Eyes
• Paul Newman, The Man Behind the Baby Blues: His Secret Life Exposed
• J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson: Investigating the Sexual Secrets of America's Most Famous Men and Women
• Steve McQueen, King of Cool: Tales of a Lurid Life
• Elizabeth Taylor: There is Nothing Like a Dame
• Marilyn At Rainbow's End: Sex, Lies, Murder, and the Great Cover-up 
• Damn You, Scarlett O'Hara: The Private Lives of Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier
• Inside Linda Lovelace's Deep Throat: Degradation, Porno Chic, and the Rise of Feminism
• Those Glamorous Gabors: Bombshells from Budapest

Born January 27: Ethan Mordden

Best known for writing on opera, his six-volume study of Broadway musicals, and his five-book Buddies cycle following a group of gay characters -- I've a Feeling We're Not In Kansas Anymore, Buddies, Everbody Loves You, Some Men Are Lookers, and How's Your Romance? --  the unstoppable Ethan Mordden also offers all-in-one versions covering much the same ground: last year's Anything Goes: A History of American Musical Theatre [Kindle] and his earlier sweeping novel of the emergence of gay America over four decades, How Long Has This Been Going On? PW raved about his

"...masterfully crafted pages. Beginning in L.A. in 1949 and concluding at New York City's 1991 Gay Pride Parade (with interim stops in San Francisco, rural New Hampshire and small-town Minnesota), this singular work chronicles gay consciousness with trenchant humor, editorial observations tinged with a soupcon of cynicism and scenes of often devastating emotional impact. Mordden pulls no punches as he presents a compelling assortment of quirky characters who connect, disconnect and reconnect in a constantly affecting game of musical lives. Bitter and sweet, it's all here: the barely opened closets of the 1950s, the 1969 Stonewall riots, the growing prominence of San Francisco as a gay capital and, of course, the coming of AIDS. Evocative descriptions make appropriate, occasionally campy, references to pop culture , while comic and poignant passages commingle throughout the detail-packed narrative... an astonishing scope... achingly real... stunning work."

A former regular contributor to The New Yorker, he says his favorite of his novels is The Venice Adriana, whose heroine is an opera diva much like Callas. His most recent gay fiction is The Passionate Attention of an Interesting Man [Kindle]. Among his many, many other books are A Guide to Orchestral Music: The Handbook for Non-Musicians, The Hollywood Studios, Ziegfeld: The Man Who Invented Show Business and Love Song: The Lives of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya.

Born January 11: Eva La Gallienne, Marc Acito

In 1960, when Mercedes de Acosta published her tell-all memoir Here Lies the Heart revealing her affairs with Marlene Dietrich, Great Garbo, Ona Munson, and Isadora Duncan, none was an angrier, exposed ex than the English/French/Danish actress Eva Le Gallienne. They had a five-year affair, beginning in 1920 when Eva was 21 and making a splash on Broadway, and Mercedes was 27. Four years after being outed by that book, Eva was given a special Tony Award, celebrating her 50th year of acting and her extensive theater work, founding and sustaining several rep companies. In 1977 she won an Emmy for playing Fanny Cavendish in George Kaufman's comedy The Royal Family, and in 1980, she became the world's oldest Oscar nominee in acting for her role in Resurrection starring the also- nominated Ellen Burstyn. She died of natural causes at 92. Six years later her record was broken when 87 year-old Gloria Stuart was nominated for Titanic.

Author of the cult favorite comedic novel How I Paid for College [Kindle] and its sequel Attack of the Theater People [Kindle], Marc Acito hasn't published a new book since 2008, so what did he do all of 2012? In March, the Old Globe in San Diego premiered his and Jeffrey Stock's musical adaptation of A Room with a View. In April, he won a Helen Hayes Award in Washington DC for his play about gay penguins, Birds of a Feather. In September, the premiere of his musical Allegiance, starring George Takei and Lea Salonga as Japanese-Americans held in US internment camps during WWII, broke the all-time box office record at the Old Globe. And in December, he saw the premiere run of his one-man-monologue-with-songs adaptation of How I Paid for College. A former opera singer, Marc sometimes performs singing commentaries on NPR. He is married to Floyd Sklaver and lives in New York City, of course.

Alan Bennett's 2013 Diary

Birds, books, theater, politics, and funerals: Alan Bennett shares his diary with the LRB.

17 April. Shots of the cabinet and the ex-cabinet at Lady Thatcher’s funeral in St Paul’s just emphasise how consistently cowardly most of them were, the only time they dared to stand up to her when eventually they kicked her out. What also galls is the notion that Tory MPs throw in almost as an afterthought, namely that her lack of a sense of humour was just a minor failing, of no more significance than being colourblind, say, or mildly short-sighted. In fact to have no sense of humour is to be a seriously flawed human being. It’s not a minor shortcoming; it shuts you off from humanity. Mrs Thatcher was a mirthless bully and should have been buried, as once upon a time monarchs used to be, in the depths of the night.

3 May. I am reading Neil MacGregor’s Shakespeare's Restless World. It’s very good, even overcoming my (A.L. Rowse generated) prejudice against reading about Shakespeare. I hadn’t realised at Richard Griffiths’s funeral in Stratford that Shakespeare’s father had been buried in the churchyard, the whereabouts of the grave now unknown. So when, waiting for the service to start, I went out for a pee under one of the yews in a sheltered corner of the cemetery I may well have been pissing on Shakespeare’s dad’s grave. More decorously, Richard’s massive coffin was resting where presumably Shakespeare’s coffin rested, a notion that would have pleased him though at the service it goes unremarked.

Two weeks ago Bennett's The History Boys (starring Richard Griffiths) was voted the UK's favourite play, ahead of 2 Noises Off, 3 Hamlet, 4 Arcadia, and 5 The Importance of Being Earnest.

Born December 16: Noël Coward, Farzana Doctor

Just in time for his 114th birthday, read Janette Jenkins' short new book Firefly [Kindle] looking back at Coward's life from his final days in Jamaica. The Independent called it a "beautiful novel... an elegiac portrait...This moving novel pays tribute to a great talent as the curtain comes down..." The Washington Post said it's "quietly witty and remarkable." 

At fourteen in 1913 Noël Coward began an affair with Philip Streatfeild, a thirty-four year old society painter whom he met only because his mother was Streatfeild's charwoman. Two years later, Streatfeild was dying of tuberculosis and urged Mrs. Astley Cooper to nurture the "delicate" Coward, which she did. He began appearing in plays, was discharged from WWI service for ill health, and had his first writing success at twenty-five with The Vortex, scandalously popular in London and New York for its wit and veiled hints of drugs and gay life. While the times changed, Coward did not; he kept that veil cemented in place for the next five decades.

Although many of his sophisticated, camp comedies play peekaboo with the closet, especially the threesome in Design for Living (1932) and less popular later works like Song at Twilight (1966), the urbane Coward never actually came out. A friend of King George, Coward traveled widely to perform for WWII troops and secretly worked as a spy, hiding behind his high life persona. The press attacked him for his excesses during wartime. The king suggested a knighthood, but Churchill disliked his "flamboyance" and blocked it. After the war, Coward fell in love with the actor Graham Payn and they stayed together nearly thirty years. In 1956 they became tax exiles, landing first in Bermuda then in Jamaica where they were neighbors to the constantly bickering Mr. & Mrs. Ian Fleming. Coward enjoyed a revival in the 1960s and finally was knighted in 1970. He died in Jamaica in 1973, still with Payn. You can read his biography or go right to his diaries, letters, plays, or the The Noël Coward Reader.

Born in Zambia, raised in Whitby, Ontario, Farzana Doctor has written two novels exploring queer and straight Indian-Canadians living in Toronto. Her debut, Stealing Nasreen, about a married couple both of whom become secretly interested in a lesbian psychologist, was nominated for a Masala! Mehndi! Masti! People's Choice Award. Her second novel, Six Metres of Pavement [Kindle], won a Lammy, a Rainbow Award, was named by Now magazine a top ten book of 2011, was short-listed for the Toronto Book Award, and recently was longlisted in the top forty of Canada Reads 2014. (At least two of the remaining five Canada Reads contenders have queer content: Kathleen Winter's wonderful Annabel and Esi Edugyan's Giller winner, Booker finalist Half-Blood Blues [Kindle] spanning fifty years, beginning with a young black German jazz musician in Berlin in 1939.) Farzana has also won a Dayne Ogilvie Prize from the Writers Trust of Canada, an award exclusively for lgbt authors. The manuscript of her as-yet-untitled third novel was one of Sarah Schulman's favorite books in this year's Band of Thebes poll.