Band of Thebes

Firefly: Novel of Noël Coward's Final Days in Jamaica

In 156 pages Janette Jenkins imagines Noel Coward's last weeks at his Jamaican retreat, blending his final decline with memories of his entire life, including his many gay affairs and his decades-long relationship with actor Graham Payn. Appearing in the UK last summer to strong reviews, Firefly [Kindle] has yet to take off in the US after October's soft release. In a group review, the NYT called it "beautifully observed... moving drama." Writing for The Telegraph Mark Sanderson said,

"As he floats in his turquoise pool, dreams and memories waft him into the past, where he rubs shoulders with Dietrich, Garland and Olivier. From the window of his London flat he is transported back by the sight of a passer-by blowing suggestively on a hot chip. Thus two worlds collide: glamorous Hollywood and the amorous homosexual underground. There are many brief encounters.

"Nevertheless, Coward tries, as always, to maintain appearances and to put on a good performance. Lord Mountbatten described Coward as fourteen men in one, and Jenkins shows all the facets of this supremely multitalented man. 'The Master' – 'Jack of all trades; master of none' – is by turns witty, charming, kind, querulous, proud, dithering and distressed. This portrait reveals him to be delightful to know and frightful to live with – which is probably why no one does. Loneliness is the price he pays for splendid isolation.

"The result is not depressing, though Scenes of camp comedy relieve the encroaching darkness. One in which Coward mercilessly teases a Daily Express reporter... is hilarious.

"Jenkins evokes the early Seventies with aplomb. She also proves a virtuoso ventriloquist. To cover so much ground in so few words, to bring back such a big personality with such brevity, is no mean feat. Fireflyshimmers with the all the passion and transience of life."

After reading the novel, go back to Cowards' diaries or his letters or Payn's memoir My Life with Noel Coward [Kindle].

Born November 25: Virgil Thomson

Prodigy Virgil Thomson sprung from a junior college in Kansas City, Missouri to Harvard thanks entirely to a Mormon scholarship, awarded because he was friends with one of Joseph Smith's many grand-daughters. In Cambridge, he thrived. With the glee club he bopped to Paris, at the invitation of Bernard Fay, an influential gay man who would later become a Nazi collaborator, sending many to their deaths while saving Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; for that story, see Janet Malcolm's Two Lives.

In fact, it was the musical Toklas who, from the shadows, guided the partnership of Stein and Thomson when he returned to live in Paris in the 20s. Together they created the landmark opera Four Saints in Three Acts, revolutionary for its all black cast, which finally premiered in 1934 in Hartford. [Read Steven Watson's Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism].Thirteen years later, just before Stein's death, they created an opera about lesbian icon Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All. By that time, Thomson had already composed music for three films, most memorably Pare Lorentz's The River, and was midway through his fourteen years as music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune. (He hated the work of Britten, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Sibelius, among others.) In 1948, he scored a b&w film about a Cajun boy, his pet raccoon, a hungry alligator, and the threat of an oil rig on the bayou, Louisiana Story, winning 1949's Pulitzer Prize for music.

Thomson lived for another forty years, at the Chelsea hotel with his partner Maurice Grosser, in diminishing circumstances. Of course, times changed, and his compositions were not played by American orchestras as often as he had counted on when he quit his job as a critic. He became something of a father figure to the next generation of gay composers and artists, most prominently Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Frank O'Hara, and Ned Rorem. In 1966 Thomson penned his autobiography, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982 for his reader, and was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 1983. He died in 1989, a year after Grosser. Anthony Tommasini has written the definitive biography, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle.

Fun Home: The Musical

My ideal musical wouldn't have any songs and would allow me to watch it from my house while reading a book, so just possibly my thoughts on Fun Home: The Musical are irrelevant. I liked it. I loved seeing an honest portrayal of dyke life from childhood to adulthood, adapted by former Five Lesbian Brother Lisa Kron. And one song, "Changing My Major," is perfection: tuneful, witty, necessary, and it actually furthers the story. Its first two lines, sung by a college girl who has just had her first, long-delayed lesbian experience, are, "I'm changing my major to Joan. I'm changing my major to Sex with Joan." Two other songs are also great, one from a child's perspective of really seeing a butch for the first time and the other culminating with the suicide. The tricky, near impossible, task of translating Alison Bechdel's brilliant, genre-busting memoir Fun Home to stage is admirably handled, though I would have liked much more of the adult Alison and fewer pointless, "adorable" kid songs (an unending fake commercial for the Bechdel funeral home and an imitation Partridge Family jam) designed purely to halt the action and delight the easily fooled audience, which they did. I was shocked that Proust, who is so central to the book, has vanished from the musical (despite the sublime potential of these rhymes: boost, roost, goosed...) The self-confessed theatergoer who went with me liked the show very much, though he thought some of the music was "derivative of Sondheim" and he wanted to see lots of Bechdel drawings all night instead of just one, at the close.

In one regard, the show suffers from same cautious syndrome that afflicted Behind the Candelabra: in both, the middle-aged man's teen male lover is played by someone way too old. Here, seventeen-year old Roy is played by hot, muscular Joel (jo-EL) Perez who looks thirty and is actually twenty-seven. This dishonest change flattens a story that is already about the blurred lines between youth and adulthood and diminishes its complexity.

Much more useful to you: The NYT superloved it. Now through November 17 at the Public. See it.

(photo by Joan Marcus via)

Born October 16: Jameson Currier, Oscar Wilde

A one-man force in gay books, Jameson Currier published his first collection of stories with Viking in 1993, and, in the twenty years since, he's released half a dozen new books and a greatest hits, started a successful gay small press, and launched a thriving gay literary journal. His own books are, in reverse order, What Comes Around, The Third Buddha, The Wolf at the Door, The Haunted Heart and Other Tales, Still Dancing: New and Selected Stories, Desire Lust Passion Sex, Where the Rainbow Ends, and Dancing on the Moon. From 2005 to 2012 he wrote the indispensable blog Queer Type. Since 2010, his Chelsea Station Editions has released at least eighteen titles including Michael Graves' Dirty One and David Pratt's Lammy winner Bob the Book. In 2011, Jim debuted Chelsea Station journal, soon to see its fifth issue. That same year he was inducted into the Saints & Sinners Hall of Fame in New Orleans.

At this point, what's left? You've done the essentials -- studied his great works, read Richard Ellmann's biography, and watched the Stephen Fry - Jude Law movie. Well, you could fly to see the statue erected to him in Dublin or Maggi Hambling's strange bust in London (which creates the effect of everyone looking down on him) or pop over to Paris to put more flowers on his grave in Pere Lachaise. Or reread his letters, like this one, asking to see Walt Whitman a second time during his U.S. visit in 1882: "Before I leave America I must see you again -- there is no one in this wide great world of America whom I love and honour so much. With warm affection, and honourable admiration, Oscar Wilde." See the original here.

Robert Schanke on Queer Theatre + Cal Yeomans

Finally out paperback, Robert Schanke's Queer Theatre and the Legacy of Cal Yeomans [Kindle] earned this praise from the Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide:

"An absorbing gay history - psychological, social, sexual, and cultural - expertly informed by Schanke's knowledge of the theatre ... [He] has used Cal's plays, journals, and letters, plus the interviews he conducted with Cal's friends, and put them together in unobtrusive, readable prose - and got it right. This book is not just about gay theatre and gay liberation, but also about gay childhood in the small-town South and gay adulthood in cities at a time when liberation turned to horror. It's an amazing story." 

Born September 1: Lily Tomlin, Roger Casement, Emma Stebbins, Dave King

Detroit's funniest daughter, Mary Jean Tomlin was featured on Merv Griffin when she was twenty-six and landed a spot on Laugh-In when she was thirty, creating the telephone operator Ernestine. Wanting to expand another character, Edith Ann, the bratty child in the big chair, Tomlin found the Peabody-winning after school special writer Jane Wagner. They clicked. They've been life partners and collaborators for forty-two years and now they're getting married. Wagner wrote and directed Tomlin projects ranging from Grammy-winning comedy albums and Emmy-winning tv specials to hit movies (The Incredible Shrinking Woman) to super flops (Moment by Moment, co-starring John Travolta) to Tony-winning Broadway megahits (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe). Beyond her endeavors with Wagner, Tomlin most frequently worked with Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts, A Prairie Home Companion), and gave star performances in 9 to 5, All of Me, Big Business, and Flirting with Disaster. She's had recurring roles on many top tv shows Murphy Brown, The West Wing, Will & Grace, Desperate Housewives, and Damages. Most recently, she was Tina Fey's mom in the skippable Admission. In March 1977, when Time was still a news magazine, Tomlin was its cover story; Wagner is identified first as "a friend" but later the article says the ladies share a house off Sunset. Eighteen years ago, Tomlin co-produced and narrated the gay Hollywood documentary The Celluloid Closet, an act some took as her coming out. She's a hysterical actress, obvs, but is she also a little hysterical? Her meltdowns on the set of I Heart Huckabees are more than a little salty, yet minor compared to the tantrum thrown by the director. Remember, nothing is harder than comedy. Today she's 74.

Also born today: Roger Casement, the gay Irish rebel hanged by the Brits in 1916 and subject of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Dream of the Celt [Kindle]; Emma Stebbins, sculptor of the Central Park landmark Angel of the Waters, which you know as Bethesda Fountain, and girlfriend of actress Charlotte Cushman; and Dave King, author of the 2005 indie hit novel The Ha-Ha [Kindle] and husband of Franklin Tartaglione.

Born August 23: Neil Bartlett, Conner Habib

Neil Bartlett received an OBE at forty-two for his special services to the arts. The author, translator, or director of dozens of plays for television, radio, and most especially theater, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National, the ART, and the Lyric Hammersmith where he was Artistic Director for eleven seasons, he has also published a handful of gay books: The literary novel Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall plumbs the erotic relationship between an older man and his younger boyfriend in an unnamed town. In The House on Brooke Street he contrasts a London department store clerk and an aristocrat's obsession with the latter's 19 year-old blond servant Gabriel in a story that flips between the 1920s and 50s. His most recent novel, Skin Lane, about a 46 year-old furrier and his boss's teen nephew, was a finalist for a Costa award after winning wide acclaim from critics and A-list authors Armistead Maupin, Patrick McGrath, and Will Self who said, it's "a fiendishly taut little psycho-shocker that recalls Simenon at his most hardboiled and Highsmith at her creepiest." Six months ago, the British Library announced the acquisition of Bartlett's personal papers and video archives.

Yesterday, Conner Habib taught a seminar called "Anthroposophy 101: Rudolf Steiner, Freedom, and the Western Esoteric Tradition" in San Francisco. It was probably pretty good because Conner previously earned the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor at UMASS, during his three years lecturing on literature, composition, and creative writing. He also loves to talk and write about organismic and evolutionary biology which he studied with many of the greats in the field like Lynn Margulis and Fritjof Capra. All of this is important to remember because Conner is a porn star. For his efforts in more than 100 sex films and scenes, he has been named Best Newcomer by the GayVN in 2010 and he won Best Supporting Actor at the Grabbys in 2012 for his work with Allen Silver in Dad Goes To College directed by Joe Gage. He often writes about sex, what it's like on set or describing why he likes rest stops or creating an identity in porn or why Americans fear gay sex. His birth name is Andre Khalil and he chose Conner Habib to reflect his Irish and Syrian ancestry. Today he's 36. Read his blog or join his 25,079 followers on twitter.

Born August 6: Martin Duberman, Andy Warhol

Defiantly out and proudly Leftist in his life and in his writing well before Stonewall, Martin Duberman has always been attracted to the rebels and troublemakers of their times. His first biography in 1961, Charles Francis Adams, won the Bancroft Prize, and his second biography in 1966 of Fireside poet James Russell Lowell was a finalist for the National Book Award. Later subjects include Paul Robeson, Black Mountain, Lincoln Kirstein (a Pulitzer finalist), his dual look at Barbara Deming and David McReynolds, and, just last year when he was 82, Howard Zinn. Surpassing his several volumes of plays and political essays, Duberman's most important legacy is his pioneering work reclaiming gay history: About Time: Exploring the Gay Past, the Lammy winner Hidden from History, and Stonewall. Just as illuminating are his three memoirs, Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey, Midlife Queer and Waiting To Land. Duberman carried his vision beyond books and in 1991 he founded the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies [CLAGS] at CUNY and became its first director. He has been honored with lifetime achievement awards, honorary degrees, and special recognitions from many institutions including the American Historical Association, Publishing Triangle, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his "contributions to literature."

For an artist so often dismissed as shallow, Andy Warhol’s work remains a permanent feature of the contemporary life. The way Andy saw the world shaped what the world has become. You can’t say that about Pollock or Motherwell or Rothko or Rauschenberg or Johns (the last two of which—gay, closeted, dating each other—didn’t want to be seen with Andy because he wasn’t butch enough). You might say it about Picasso, but Picasso didn’t make movies (sixty-six shorts and features, many with Paul Morrissey) or start magazines (Interview, still being published today) or produce bands (The Velvet Underground) or have his own show on MTV or coin a phrase as widely-used and enduring as fifteen minutes of fame. Born Andrew Warhola in Pittsburgh in 1928, he was an illustrator for Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and The New Yorker before he could support himself by his art. His first submissions to galleries were drawings of male nudes that were deemed too gay; his first solo show, in 1952, was called Fifteen Drawings Based on the Writings of Truman Capote. Within four years his work was shown in a group exhibition at MoMA. In the Sixties he made his silk screens of soup cans, Marilyns, Elvises, and Jackies, and in 1968 he was shot, almost fatally. His death, in 1987, followed routine gall bladder surgery and several hospital missteps such as overloading him with fluids and failing to monitor his condition. He had avoided and postponed the operation because he did not trust doctors and hospitals. For more, read Wayne Koestenbaum's heady appreciation or plunge into Andy's Diaries.

Gay Lorenz Hart Bio Now in Paperback

Earlier this week Simon & Schuster released the paperback of Gary Marmorstein's A Ship Without A Sail: The Life of Lorenz Hart [Kindle], for once not degayed:

“Blue Moon,” “Where or When,” “The Lady Is a Tramp,” “My Funny Valentine,” “Isn’t It Romantic?,” “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered”—these are just some of the unforgettable songs that lyricist Lorenz “Larry” Hart wrote together with composer Richard Rodgers. A Ship Without a Sail is the story of the exuberant yet troubled Hart, who wrote so knowingly about the love that eluded him in his own short life. Despite their highly successful collaborations for Broadway and Hollywood, Rodgers and Hart were an odd couple. Rodgers was precise, handsome, heterosexual, and eager to be accepted by Society. Hart was barely five feet tall, alcoholic, homosexual, most at home in a bar or restaurant, and prone to unexplained disappearances. His lyrics spin with wit, brilliance, and sophistication, yet at their core is an unmistakable wistfulness and yearning; they are all the more remarkable considering that he never sustained a romantic relationship, living virtually his entire life with his mother until his death at age forty-eight. Gary Marmorstein’s revelatory biography brings Hart and his colorful world vividly to life, and includes many of the lyrics that define Hart’s indelible legacy."

Reviewing it for the WSJ, J.D. McClatchy liked the author's "panache, sympathy and smarts." His praise was echoed by David Hadju in The New Republic and by the novelist-poet Brad Leithauser in the NYTBR.

Born July 14: Arthur Laurents

Two-time Tony winner Arthur Laurents died in 2011 at ninety-two. Born in the Jewish section of Flatbush, he wrote the book for the musicals West Side Story, Gypsy, Anyone Can Whistle, and Hallelujah, Baby!; the novels and the screenplays for The Way We Were and The Turning Point, the screenplay for Rope (starring his then-lover Farley Granger); the play that became the movie Summertime; and he directed I Can Get It for You Wholesale, La Cage Aux Folles, Anyone Can Whistle, and the Broadway versions of Gypsy in 1974 and the later triple Tony winning revival starring the Patti Lupone. Laurents was openly gay even during the McCarthy era, when he received less work but avoided being blacklisted. Smart people can discuss the obvious and subtle gay substitutes and outsider figures who run through all of Laurents' work. His two memoirs are Original Story By and Mainly on Directing. He and his partner Tom Hatcher lived together fifty-one years, mainly in Quogue, Long Island, until Hatcher's death in 2006. It was Hatcher's idea as he was dying to re-invent West Side Story as a bilingual musical to give Laurents something to do as a new widower. The revival earned four Tony nominations, winning one.

Kay Ryan, Tony Kushner Among Today's National Medal Recipients

Today the president will award national medals in the arts and humanities to 24 recipients including the lesbian former US poet laureate Kay Ryan and the gay sell-out Tony Kushner. Also, Anna Deavere Smith, who at 62 still says, "Well, I don't talk about my personal life... Look, there's a lot of identity on parade. I don't think we need any more of it from me." In 1997 lesbian trailblazer Adrienne Rich refused her medal, citing "the cynical politics" of the Clinton administration.

National Medal of Arts

• Herb Alpert, Malibu, CA
• Lin Arison, Bal Harbour, FL
• Joan Myers Brown, Philadelphia, PA
• Renée Fleming, New York, NY
• Ernest Gaines, Oscar, LA
• Ellsworth Kelly, Spencertown, NY
• Tony Kushner, New York, NY
• George Lucas, San Anslemo, CA
• Elaine May, New York, NY
• Laurie Olin, Philadelphia, PA
• Allen Toussaint, New Orleans, LA
• Washington Performing Arts Society, Washington, DC

National Humanities Medal

• Edward L. Ayers, Henrico, VA
• William G. Bowen, Princeton, NJ
• Jill Ker Conway, Boston, MA
• Natalie Zemon Davis, Toronto, CANADA
• Frank Deford, New York, NY
• Joan Didion, New York, NY
• Robert Putnam¸ Cambridge, MA
• Marilynne Robinson¸ Iowa City, IA
• Kay Ryan , Fairfax, CA
• Robert B. Silvers, New York, NY
• Anna Deavere Smith¸ New York, NY
• Camilo José Vergara, New York, NY  

Born July 10: Fiona Shaw, Marcel Proust

How nimble is that Fiona Shaw, most recently in Terrence Malik's The Tree of Life, twelve episodes of True Blood, and the Virgin Mary on Broadway. Born in County Cork in 1958, she earned her degree from University College there, then trained at London's Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. Long a star of the West End, she broke out to select American audiences in a small role in the very best of all Jane Austen adaptations, Persuasion, in 1995 and the following year wowed New York with her one-person performance of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land for which she won a Drama Desk Award. The year prior she had amazed and angered London audiences when she played Richard II, directed by Deborah Warner, also a lesbian. Collaborating frequently with Warner, notably in the National Theatre adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook, Shaw co-starred with former model Saffron Burrows as lesbian lovers, just as they were in real life. And Warner was partners with Winterson. Both couples have since separated. Shaw still lives in Primrose Hill.

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

Born June 15: Neil Patrick Harris

NPH is forty! The rare child tv actor (Doogie Howser, M.D.) to transition successfully to adult roles (How I Met Your Mother), Neil also handled his coming out better than most, after Perez Hilton planned to reveal his relationship with David Burtka in 2006. Still together, Neil and David welcomed boy-girl twins (Gideon and Harper) in 2010. In his spare time, he hangs out with Harold & Kumar, sings in Joss Whedon's musical web series Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog, and hosts the Tonys. He's done that four times and is certain to beat Angela Lansbury's record five-time hosting. He has two sequels out this summer, Smurfs 2 and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 2. 

Degayed Kinky Boots Wins 6 Tonys, Best Musical

A gay co-producer, a gay director/choreographer, a gay writer, a bi composer, and a gay leading actor transform a sweet little film into a big Broadway musical about drag queens and make every character straight. They win six Tonys and declare their product's message is it's okay to be who you are.

CBS didn't show Larry Kramer's full acceptance speech for his Stevenson humanitarian award. They did flash a split-screen snipet in which he said the words "gay activist."

Obvs, the big winner was NPH.

Born June 10: Terrence Rattigan

After the full-blown success at twenty-five of his first solo play, the light-hearted French Without Tears (1936), Terrence Rattigan wanted to write a more serious work. He created the satirical drama After the Dance (1939), attacking the apolitical generation of Bright Young Things for their failure to stop another war. For the prolific Rattigan, success followed success, among them: The Winslow Boy, The Browning Version, The Deep Blue Sea, and Separate Tables, all of which became popular movies. He was twice nominated for both a BAFTA and an Oscar. Yet just as he had earlier attacked the older generation, now in 1956 John Osborne's Look Back in Anger exploded all the hallmarks of the Rattigan generation: the staid, repressed, older and old-fashioned characters who never paraded their emotions. Overnight, Rattigan was deeply out of favor with the critics who had adored him, and the timing could not have been worse. In 1957 he wrote his first play that directly addressed his homosexuality, Variation on a Theme, and it was panned. Rattigan's father had been a career diplomat whose habitual dalliances eventually got him fired by the Home Office. Not surprisingly, Rattigan learned to keep his own relationships well hidden, perhaps to the point of being emotionally cut off even from his partners. Completely out of step with London's mod, Swinging Sixties, he decamped for Bermuda. There, he wrote for Hollywood and for a time was the world's highest paid screenwriter. His first bout of leukemia in 1962 went into remission two years later, only to recur in 1968. He died of cancer in 1977 still in Bermuda.

Born June 9: Cole Porter

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 Howard Sturges, architect Ed Tauch, actor Robert Bray, choreographer Nelson Barclift, and director John Wilson, as well as innumerable shorter interludes with servicemen and chorus boys at weekend all-male parties. Remarkably, he kept his spirits up (ditto his libido) despite a crippling leg injury from a 1937 riding fall which necessitated thirty-four operations over the rest of his life and ended in amputation. When he died in 1964, Porter left half his royalties to the children of his longtime friend and ex-lover Ray Kelly. He was decidedly de-gayed in the Kevin Kline movie De-Lovely, but not in William McBrien's "complex and groundbreaking" biography, whose "most startling scholarship is on the subject of Porter's homosexuality."

Sandy Leonard offered this illuminating comment: "I wonder if 'Love for Sale' informed in any way his later masochistic attraction and ongoing (if not "constant") sexual relationship with actor, husband (Shirley Jones) and father (David, Shaun, et al.), Jack Cassidy. Capote's got a story about this in his Gerald Clarke biography."

Born May 30: Colm Tóibín

All this, and now he's a Tony nominee, too, for his debut, a one-woman show adapted into the novella, The Testament of Mary. Despite favorable reviews and several nominations, the Broadway show closed prematurely. If ticket sales were sluggish it may be because ticket prices were ridiculous. Early in its run, when I tried to order online two normal, non-premium orchestra seats on a week night, the total was $418. For a monologue. I didn't go. Anyway, here's hoping he wins on June 9 and that NPH kisses him.

Predicting future Nobel Prize honorees is a thankless, pointless pastime, yet everything the Nobel winners in literature have, Colm Tóibín has too: an impressive body of novels illuminating an overlooked group of people, many books of nonfiction, journalism, history, and travel (try Bad Blood: A Walk along the Irish Border or Homage to Barcelona), a staggering and seemingly effortless range of important critical essays, vision, verve, and gravitas (some of which are collected in All a Novelist Needs: Colm Tóibín on Henry James, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families [Kindle], and Love in a Dark Time: And Other Explorations of Gay Lives and Literature).

After being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros.

His sixth novel Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and won a Costa award. (No update on the film, adapted by Nick Hornby, which was to have begun shooting this spring with Rooney Mara, and didn't.) Tóibín's Lammy winner The Empty Family is flat-out magnificent, and some readers insist his previous story collection Mothers and Sons is even better. Amazon and Amazon UK list his Untitled Novel on Ireland as releasing in February or March 2014.

(photo by Joshua Bright via)

Fierstein on His Drag Queen Musical: "No One's Gay in This"

Interesting artistic decision or blatant sell-out? Broadway is not my thing so you be the judge of Harvey Fierstein's comments on Michelangelo Signorile's radio show confirming that "no one's gay" in the new musical version of the movie Kinky Boots about big men who do drag. Sure, it's based on a true story but a gay character could be there somewhere. Perhaps the more compelling dynamic would have been to depict a mix of sexualities on stage, to highlight their differences and surprising similarities, etc etc. I'm skeptical that the choice to exclude and erase is really all that brave and progressive. But the establishment loves it -- Kinky Boots is the most-nominated show (13!) at the Tonys three weeks from tonight.

Signorile recaps on HuffPost:

"Fierstein says he wrote and clearly portrays Lola as heterosexual, yet not one critic or reviewer has picked up on it, assuming that the character must be gay because he’s doing drag.

 “I mean, he’s not gay,” Fierstein said in an interview on my SiriusXM radio program about the character based on a true story which was made into a 2005 British film of the same name. “I wrote this character as a heterosexual transvestite. He’s very clear that that is what he is. I thought this was a really interesting character to put up on the stage...rather than arguing the same arguments I’ve argued in 'La Cage,' to do something different. The really interesting thing to me is that not one critic -- not the gay critics, not the straight critics, -- not one critic picked up on him being straight. Not one. They all talked about, ‘Harvey’s gay liberation message or whatever.’ There’s no gay liberation message in this! No one’s gay in this! It’s so interesting to me that our prejudices are so strong that we hear what we think we hear.”

Born May 9: Alan Bennett

Much of Alan Bennett’s 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. 

After Chauncey's Pansies, Meet The Nance's Chauncey

By coincidence, Douglas Carter Beane's new play The Nance, which brings to life the era of pansy acts and burgeoning antigay blacklash described in Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940 by George Chauncey, is about a nelly performer named Chauncey Miles (Nathan Lane). Chauncey, a middle-aged Republican actor, plays a superswish character in a fading New York burlesque lifted by the sudden popularity of his pansy act beloved by both gay and straight audiences. It is 1937 and in advance of the coming World's Fair and a tight mayoral race, officials want to clean up the city: Police raids on gay bars expand to theaters, with fines, raids, and ultimately a ban on degenerate performers. In typically twisted tradition, the city official leading the ban on pansy performances is himself a closet case, and the law he's pushing to ban gay performers will still allow cross-dressing. I don't think The Nance mentions it, but of course the spreading antigay sentiment was also enshrined in Hollywood's infamous Hays Code of 1934 banning, among other things, "sex perversion."

Offstage, either from this growing repression, his long self-hatred, or simple preference, Chauncey prefers one night stands, yet he agrees to a relationship with Ned, a much younger naive newcomer he picks up in a lavender automat. The untenable imbalances of their situation (Chauncey wants an open relationship; Ned needs monogamy) combined with the stress of neverending fear of police raids and the probability of Chauncey losing his career are juggled with other plot strands emphasizing hopes raised and dashed -- notably unions, strikes, and Communism. Already groaning with too much material, the play is constantly interrupted by burlesque performances that overstay their welcome. Corny routines compete with unsexy strip numbers. Even without the edits it craves, The Nance has some powerful moments and makes important points about a forgotten era in our history.