Band of Thebes

Born November 2: Luchino Visconti, k.d. lang

Born a count in one of northern Italy's six richest families, Luchino Visconti was adrift until he was thirty, when Coco Chanel decided he should work in movies and got him a job as third assistant director on a film by Jean Renoir. His own debut as a director came after seven years, during which time he learned the trade and dated the photographer Horst. Of his twenty films, most praised are The Leopard, The Damned, The Stranger, Rocco and his Brothers, with its open subplot of the boxing coach who pays young fighters for sex, and Death in Venice, from Thomas Mann's #1 of the all-time 100 best lgbt books. At sixty-nine, Visconti died of a heart attack in Rome, survived by his partner of more than ten years German actor Helmet Berger, who appeared in four of Visconti's films, most notably The Damned and Ludwig. (And here bare.) Sandy Leonard, who knows about such things, says Visconti worked through his opening-night jitters at Covent Garden by making out in an elevator with Alain Delon. 

 

Before Melissa, before Ellen, before George Michael, before Adam, before Ricky, k.d. lang came out way back in 1992. Although that was fairly groundbreaking at the time, her coming out did nothing to hinder the sales of her multi-platinum album Ingenue, nor did it prevent her from winning another Grammy, being made an officer of the Order of Canada, or getting named to VH1's 100 Greatest Women in Rock n Roll and CMT's 40 Greatest Women in Country Music. In fact, she sparked a much angrier backlash in rural areas by supporting a vegetarian campaign called Meat Stinks. From 1997 to 2000 she took a break, fell in love with The Murmurs singer Leisha Hailey, moved to Los Angeles, and came back with her happiest album, Invincible Summer. Three years later she won her fourth Grammy for her collaboration with Tony Bennett and also released an album of covers by Canadian composers. Last year she released Sing It Loud, a cd with her Siss Boom Band, and appeared on Tony Bennett's Duets II, doing "Blue Velvet."

Born October 24: Emma Donoghue, B.D. Wong

Who works harder than Emma Donoghue? This month she's debuted a new play about New Yorker writer Maeve Brennan and a new collection of short stories called Astray [Kindle]. Two years ago she wrote the blockbuster Room [Kindle] -- shortlisted for the Booker, the Orange Prize, the Governor General's Award, the Galaxy International prize; winner of the Rogers Writers' Trust prize -- and last week she revealed her remarkably sane reaction to all the fuss. Four months before Room, Knopf published her essential and immensely entertaining, decade-in-the-making exploration of lesbians in literature, Inseparable [Kindle]. In six previous novels she proved herself equally at home in the present (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing) and the past (Slammerkin, Life Mask, The Sealed Letter). She has also written four collections of stories, five plays, and five radio plays. She lives with her partner Chris and their children, Una and Finn, in Ontario. (Photo by Sarah Lee for the Guardian.)

A fourth generation Chinese-American, B.D. Wong made his Broadway debut in 1988 in M. Butterfly, for which he became and remains the only actor to win the five major theater prizes for the same role. But it was not enough to convince David Cronenberg to cast him in the movie version five years later, when he chose John Lone instead. Wong starred with Margaret Cho in her much praised, quickly canceled series All American Girl, then played a priest on Oz, and for ten years running Dr George Huang on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He and his ex-partner Richie Jackson, an agent, are parents of a son named Foo, the surviving child of twins born extremely prematurely. Wong wrote a book about the experience called Following Foo.

Basement of Wolves by Daniel Allen Cox

        

One of our most original and most interesting writers Daniel Allen Cox last week published his third novel, Basement of Wolves. Daniel's first novel Shuck [Kindle], which drew loosely on his experiences posing nude for photographers such as Richard Kern, Stanley Stellar, and Reed Massengill, and his few appearances in adult film, was nominated for a Lammy. His second novel, Krakow Melt [Kindle], which drew loosely on his year living in Poland, was nominated for a Lammy and the Ferro-Grumley. Daniel describes his new novel, about an actor spending a week in a hotel with a younger hustler, as his "most mainstream book, whatever that means." Arsenal Pulp Press says:

"Michael-David is a paranoid actor who feels that fame has ruined him. When a film shoot with wolves for co-stars takes a troubling turn, he disappears shortly before the premiere and barricades himself in an L.A. hotel, convinced that he’s cursed and must ride it out in hiding. He begins to explore the hotel’s secret passageways with the help of a young skateboarder he befriends, away from the glare of the spotlight. Meanwhile, the film’s director, suspicious that Michael-David is having an affair with his ex, is trying to find him in time for the premiere. A long-dormant nicotine addiction leads him closer to the target and into the path of danger, while the wolves also sniff out Michael-David for one final scene. A work of dream logic, Basement of Wolves is a haunting and cinematic romp through the minefields of identity crisis."

 Daniel reads in NYC on April 25 at B&N 82 + Bway, in Montreal on April 21, and at the Ottawa Writers Festival on April 29. His next project is a screenplay with Bruce La Bruce about a romance between a teenager and an 80 year-old.

Born March 4-5: Matt Lucas, David Plante, Pier Paolo Pasolini

The only gay in the village turns thirty-eight today. Five years after the end of Little Britain, Matt Lucas has done everything from play Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Benny in Gnomeo and Juliet, and Kristen Wiig's roommate in Bridesmaids. Last year he and longtime collaborator David Walliams reteamed for a BBC mocumentary called Come Fly with Me, scheduled for a second season this fall. In December 2006 Lucas and Kevin McGee, his partner of four years, celebrated their civil partnership with an over-the-top ceremony at which the elaborately costumed guests included Elton and David, Neil Tennant, Courtney Love, Graham Norton, Stephen Gately, Will Young, and novelist Ben Elton. Within two years they divorced and ten months later Kevin killed himself.

Since his fiction debut forty-two years ago, The Ghost of Henry James, David Plante has written a new book every couple years. His best known works form the gay-vague Francoeur trilogy -- The Family, The Country, The Woods -- about a French-Canadian American family with Native American ancestry and seven sons, just like his own. In 2009 Plante published his 19th book, The Pure Lover [Kindle], a remarkably concise memoir of his nearly forty years with his Greek partner Nikos Stangos, four years his senior. Richard Labonté chose it as a favorite of 2009 and Pulitzer-winning critic Michael Dirda said, "out of the fragments, Proustian moments and sharply felt memories of a happy and painful past, David Plante has made a lovely book, joyful, plangent and true."

 

Poet, philosopher, novelist, newspaper columnist, playwright, painter, actor, and atheist, Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a communist until he was kicked out of the party in 1949 for being gay, which they discovered when he was charged with corrupting minors and obscene acts in public. He was twenty-seven and he was not convicted, but he had to leave their small town northwest of Trieste and, with his mother, moved to Rome. Enduring difficult years being unemployed or underemployed, he published his first important collection of poems in 1954, followed the next year by his first novel, Ragazzi di vita [Boys of Life], which caused a sensation for its raw look at the aimless lives of petty criminals and sometimes hustlers in Rome's roughest neighborhoods.

In 1957 he helped write Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, and three years after that he landed his debut acting role. The following year, 1961, he directed Accattone, the first of his twenty films. In Teorema, Terrence Stamp plays a stranger who moves in with family in Milan and one by one has sex with everyone: the religious maid, the artistic son, the frigid mother, the wallflower daughter, and lastly the father, then leaves and they all fall apart. That was an original screenplay, but many of his later and most celebrated films were adaptations of classics, often infused with nudity and sex: Oedipus Rex, Medea (starring Maria Callas, not singing), The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, and 120 Days of Sodom. Several of his movies featured Ninetto Davoli, his boyfriend since 1963 when he was fifteen.

Throughout the summer of 1975, as he was trying to complete his version of de Sade, Pasolini warned friends he would be killed by the mafia. In November, he picked up a seventeen year-old hustler and was murdered by being run over by his own car. In 2005, the hustler recanted his confession and said three men with Southern Italian accents killed Pasolini. Key details of the crime make it seem impossible to have been perpetrated by a lone person. A longtime friend, the artist Giuseppe Zigaina, is just one of many who believes the always theatrical, always contrarian Pasolini organized his own death. He was fifty-three. Forty-one years after its release, 120 Days of Sodom was named by Time Out's Film Guide as cinema's all-time most controversial film.

Steve N. says the Anna Magnani starrer Mamma Roma is essential fabulosity. Dolce & Gabanna agreed with him and cast Madonna in their homage ads shot by Steven Klein.

Daniel Allen Cox for Freedom To Read

Fans of Daniel Allen Cox's daring, original work, Shuck [Kindle] and Krakow Melt [Kindle], knew he'd make a beautifully inventive choice in creating an anti-censorship video for Canada's Freedom To Read week. It's about the words. The two minutes you spend here will bring you that much closer to the April release of his new novel, an atypical Hollywood noir called Basement of Wolves.

Born December 30: Douglas Coupland

When he was thirty, Douglas Coupland published his first novel which permanently named the post-Boomers Generation X. In the twenty years since, he's written thirteen more novels, nine works of nonfiction (most recently a biography of Marshall McLuhan and the official guide to the Vancouver Olympics), and plays, screenplays, and tv scripts (a miniseries called Extinction Event). In 2010 he delivered the Massey Lectures in Canada, following in the footsteps of Noam Chomsky, Jane Jacobs, Carlos Fuentes, Margaret Atwood, and Martin Luther King Jr. Ever the intellectual renegade, Coupland's "lecture" is a five-hour real-time novel called Player One: What Is To Become of Us that takes place in an airport cocktail lounge amid a global catastrophe.

Beyond the 22 books and many scripts, Coupland is a visual artist. Recently he designed the Monument to the War of 1812 in Toronto, the iconic sculptures in Canoe Landing Park, and Canada's national monument to fallen firefighters to open in Ottawa in March 2012. He lives with David Weir in Vancouver, where they bought the midcentury house behind theirs for a high style project loved by the NYT. He says he works seven days a week and has never taken a vacation.

Born December 28: F.W. Murnau, Manuel Puig, Socalled

After studying art history at the University of Heidelberg and flying as a combat pilot in WWI, F.W. Murnau directed his first film The Boy in Blue in 1919 when he was thirty-one. Before his death in a car crash at forty-two, he became one of cinema's early giants -- (said to be 6'9" tall) -- with a prodigious output in Germany, most famous of which is Nosferatu from 1922. After four years and many more successes (The Last Laugh, Faust) Murnau moved to Hollywood and made what many critics consider one of the greatest films ever, Sunrise, which shared the top prize at the first Oscar ceremony. Sunrise is #82 on the AFI 100 Greatest Films list but in 2002 the British Film Institute ranked it #7 of all time. He made two more movies -- Four Devils (lost) and Our Daily Bread (released as City Girl) -- before his final picture, Tabu, a loincloth romance shot in Tahiti that won a cinematography Oscar for Floyd Crosby (father of David Crosby who is biologically the father of Melissa Etheridge's children). He died a week before Tabu's premiere. Because humans are easily titillated, and because some are snickering homophobes, the baseless rumor persists that Murnau's fatal car crash was the result of his performing oral sex on his chauffeur.

Born in central Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig first wanted to be an architect then became a film archivist with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. His love of movies infuses his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, published when he was thirty-six. Praised in Latin America as that work was, his international reputation rests on his fourth novel, published in 1976, about a gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell: Kiss of the Spider Woman [[Kindle]] also became an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 1993. The buoyancy of his early books, mixing high literary art with the low-brow style of telenovas, gave way to a bitterness in later books that reduced their popularity. A leftist exile in Mexico City for decades, he died there at fifty-seven suffering a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

 

Who brings the funk, da noise, and the klezmer? That's right, the super original Jewish Canadian rapper Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. If you think Ukrainian music from the 1930s won't mesh with drum n bass, you haven't heard his Ghettoblaster. His trippy "You Are Never Alone" video became a YouTube sensation with 2.5 million views, and last year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel. In a world of timid, homogenized, market-driven art, Socalled is a standout. Which doesn't mean everything he tries works, but when he hits, he's genius. I met him and loved him after the NYC screening of the documentary. Not to brag, but after talking a while I did the very best thing one man can do for another... insisted he read Tatyana Tolstaya. Check his upcoming tour in February and March.

Born November 18: Klaus Mann, Emanuel Sandhu

Novelist (Mephisto), memoirist (Turning Point), and playwright (Anja and Esther), Klaus Mann could never outrun his father's preeminence as a writer, but could he also never get over his father's love? Colm Tóibín notes the many times in Thomas Mann's diaries when he expresses sexual interest in Klaus, nicknamed Eissi, here at fourteen:

"‘terribly handsome in his swimming trunks. Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son . . . It seems I am once and for all done with women? . . . Eissi was lying tanned and shirtless on his bed, reading; I was disconcerted.’ Later that year he ‘came upon Eissi totally nude and up to some nonsense by Golo’s bed’ and was ‘deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming’"

Far quicker than his father to grasp the evil of the Nazi ascent, Klaus left Germany for Paris in 1933 when he was 26. He was granted Czech citizenship and came to America in 1936, the year of Mephisto, dividing his time between Princeton and New York. The following year he met his partner, Thomas Quinn Curtiss, who would become a critic for the IHT and Variety and wrote the screenplay for The Iceman Cometh. Klaus wrote one more novel, Der Vulken, about German exiles during WWII, published in 1939; his autobiography; and one nonfiction work Andre Gide and the Crisis of Modern Thought. As Tóibín says, Klaus "was fluid and generous and flighty. He kept nothing in reserve, and this, despite his obvious literary talent, or maybe because of it, made him melancholy...instead of writing about death as his father did obsessively, he allowed the aura of death to enter his own spirit." He was also addicted to heroin. He killed himself with an overdose of pills, in Cannes, in 1949. Curtiss lived until 2000. Andrea Weiss illuminates it all in her fascinating dual biography, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, including their mainly queer circle of friends: Gide, Isherwood, Cocteau, Brecht, McCullers, and Auden, whom Erika married for citizenship.

 
Half Italian and half East Indian, Toronto native Emanuel Sandhu enrolled in dance school when he was three and won a spot in Canada's National Ballet School when he was eight. He stayed for ten years before devoting himself full-time to ice skating, winning his first Canadian Men's Skating Championship three years later with a perfect score. He has won it twice more, placing first or second each of the nine years between 1998 and 2006. In 2007 he was third. The clip from his audition for So You Think You Can Dance Canada shows his coach saying, "The ego! Sometimes too big!" followed by Sandhu announcing, "Dancing is my favorite language. It's body language. And I love it." Sandhu un-retired and tried for a skating comeback earlier this year but was sidelined by an injury. Today, he's 31.

Born November 2: Luchino Visconti, k.d. lang

Born a count in one of northern Italy's six richest families, Luchino Visconti was adrift until he was thirty, when Coco Chanel decided he should work in movies and got him a job as third assistant director on a film by Jean Renoir. His own debut as a director came after seven years, during which time he learned the trade and dated the photographer Horst. Of his twenty films, most praised are The Leopard, The Damned, The Stranger, Rocco and his Brothers, with its open subplot of the boxing coach who pays young fighters for sex, and Death in Venice, from Thomas Mann's #1 novel of the all-time 100 best lgbt books. At sixty-nine, Visconti died of a heart attack in Rome, survived by his partner of more than ten years German actor Helmet Berger, who appeared in four of Visconti's films, most notably The Damned and Ludwig. (And here bare.) Sandy Leonard, an expert on such matters, says Visconti worked through his opening-night jitters at Covent Garden by making out in an elevator with Alain Delon. 

Before Melissa, before Ellen, before George Michael, before Adam Lambert, k.d. lang came out way back in 1992. Although that was fairly groundbreaking at the time, her coming out did nothing to hinder the sales of her multi-platinum album Ingenue, nor did it prevent her from winning another Grammy, being made an officer of the Order of Canada, or getting named to VH1's 100 Greatest Women in Rock n Roll and CMT's 40 Greatest Women in Country Music. In fact, she sparked a much angrier backlash in rural areas by supporting a vegetarian campaign called Meat Stinks. From 1997 to 2000 she took a break, fell in love with The Murmurs singer Leisha Hailey, moved to Los Angeles, and came back with her happiest album, Invincible Summer, quoting Camus: In the depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. Three years later she won her fourth Grammy for her collaboration with Tony Bennett and also released an album of covers by Canadian composers. In April she released Sing It Loud, a cd with her Siss Boom Band. In September, Tony Bennett released Duets II, featuring another cover with k.d., this time "Blue Velvet."

Giller Prize Shortlist

What must Esi Edugyan do to get a US publisher to release her Half-Blood Blues? The novel is a Booker finalist and now appears on the Giller Prize short list. The only other title honored on both lists is also a second novel, Patrick deWitt's darkly rollicking The Sisters Brothers about a pair of professional killers in California in 1851.

David Bezmozgis,The Free World
Lynn Coady, The Antagonist
Patrick deWitt, The Sisters Brothers
Esi Edugyan, Half-Blood Blues
Zsuzsi Gartner, Better Living Through Plastic Explosives
Michael Ondaatje, The Cat's Table

Alice Munro Is 80, Publishes First Lesbian Story

On Sunday, Alice Munro turned eighty. On a civilized planet the day would have been celebrated with bouquets of wildflowers, very expensive champagne, and a quiet half-hour to re-read your favorite story of hers. Probably something from Friend of My Youth or Open Secrets but it might date back from The Moons of Jupiter or The Progress of Love. (For once, novices really can get many of the author's very best works in the Selected Stories.) Proving that she still has new things to say in her eighth decade, Munro last month published Gravel in The New Yorker, marking what may be the first time she has written about a lesbian. I can't think of another; please correct me gently in the comments. Although she almost always uses a female protagonist, she has twice written about gay men, memorably in 1980's Turkey Season (from The Moons of Jupiter) and 1993's The Jack Randa Hotel (in Open Secrets). Her thirteenth collection of stories is coming in October 2012.

Born March 4: David Plante

Since his fiction debut 41 years ago, The Ghost of Henry James, David Plante has written a new book every couple years. His best known works form the gay-vague Francoeur trilogy -- The Family, The Country, The Woods -- about a French-Canadian American family with Native American ancestry and seven sons, just like his own. In 2009 Plante published his 19th book, The Pure Lover [[Kindle]], a remarkably concise memoir of his nearly forty years with his Greek partner Nikos Stangos, four years his senior. Richard Labonté chose it as a favorite of 2009 and Pulitzer- winning critic Michael Dirda said, "out of the fragments, Proustian moments and sharply felt memories of a happy and painful past, David Plante has made a lovely book, joyful, plangent and true."

Two Vancouver Schools Flashmob Against Bullying

In Vancouver, the kids at an elementary school and a secondary school pulled on the pink and pulled off a giant flashmob to dance their way to acceptance... acceptance of you, gay viewers!

Born December 30: Douglas Coupland

When he was thirty, Douglas Coupland published his first novel which permanently named the post-Boomers Generation X. In the eighteen years since, he's written thirteen more novels, nine works of nonfiction (most recently a biography of Marshall McLuhan and the official guide to the Vancouver Olympics), and plays, screenplays, and tv scripts (next, a miniseries called Extinction Event). This fall, he delivered the Massey Lectures in Canada, following in the footsteps of Noam Chomsky, Jane Jacobs, Carlos Fuentes, Margaret Atwood, and Martin Luther King Jr. Ever the intellectual renegade, Coupland's "lecture" is a five-hour real-time novel called Player One: What Is To Become of Us [no Kindle] that takes place in an airport cocktail lounge amid a global catastrophe. His publisher writes:

"Five disparate people are trapped inside: Karen, a single mother waiting for her online date; Rick, the down-on-his-luck airport lounge bartender; Luke, a pastor on the run; Rachel, a cool Hitchcock blonde incapable of true human contact; and finally a mysterious voice known as Player One. Slowly, each reveals the truth about themselves while the world as they know it comes to an end. In the tradition of Kurt Vonnegut and J. G. Ballard, Coupland explores the modern crises of time, human identity, society, religion, and the afterlife. The book asks as many questions as it answers, and readers will leave the story with no doubt that we are in a new phase of existence as a species -- and that there is no turning back."

Coupland lives with David Weir in Vancouver, where they bought the midcentury house behind theirs for a high style project loved by the NYT. If you're wondering how the past 19 years has produced 14 novels, 8 nonfiction books, and numerous scripts, Coupland says he works seven days a week and has never taken a vacation.

Born December 28: F.W. Murnau, Manuel Puig, Socalled

After studying art history at the University of Heidelberg and flying as a combat pilot in WWI, F.W. Murnau directed his first film The Boy in Blue in 1919 when he was thirty-one. Before his death in a car crash at forty-two, he became one of cinema's early giants -- (said to be 6'9" tall) -- with a prodigious output in Germany, most famous of which is Nosferatu from 1922. After four years and many more successes (The Last Laugh, Faust) Murnau moved to Hollywood and made what many critics consider one of the greatest films ever, Sunrise, which shared the top prize at the first Oscar ceremony. Sunrise sinks to a lowly #82 on the AFI 100 Greatest Films list but in 2002 the British Film Institute ranked it #7 of all time. He made two more movies -- Four Devils (lost) and Our Daily Bread (released as City Girl) -- before his final picture, Tabu, a loincloth romance shot in Tahiti that won a cinematography Oscar for Floyd Crosby (father of David Crosby who is biologically the father of Melissa Etheridge's children). He died a week before Tabu's premiere. Because humans are easily titillated, and because some are snickering homophobes, the baseless rumor persists that Murnau's fatal car crash was the result of his performing oral sex on his chauffeur.

Born in central Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig first wanted to be an architect then became a film archivist with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. His love of movies infuses his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, published when he was thirty-six. Praised in Latin America as that work was, his international reputation rests on his fourth novel, published in 1976, about a gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell: Kiss of the Spider Woman [[Kindle]] also became an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 1993. The buoyancy of his early books, mixing high literary art with the low-brow style of telenovas, gave way to a bitterness in later books that reduced their popularity. A leftist exile in Mexico City for decades, he died there at fifty-seven suffering a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

 

Who brings the funk, da noise, and the klezmer? That's right, the super original Jewish Canadian rapper Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. If you think Ukrainian music from the 1930s won't mesh with drum n bass, you haven't heard his Ghettoblaster. His trippy "You Are Never Alone" video became a YouTube sensation with 2.5 million views, and earlier this year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel [below]. In a world of timid, homogenized, market-driven art, Socalled is a standout. Which doesn't mean everything he tries works, but when he hits, he's genius. I met him and loved him after the NYC screening of the documentary. Not to brag, but after talking a while I did the very best thing one man can do for another... insisted he read Tatyana Tolstaya. If you're near New York on January 20, see him at Joe's Pub.

Debut Novelist Johanna Skibsrud Wins Giller Prize

Before she hit the Giller Prize longlist, Johanna Skibsrud had only sold a couple hundred copies of her debut novel, The Sentimentalists, published by a very small press. Now, after winning the $50,000 award last night, she has the #3 spot on Amazon.ca, behind Keith Richards and a former US president.

Emma Donoghue's Room [Kindle] somehow was not nominated for the Giller, but it is a finalist for the Governor's General Award next Tuesday. In fact the Giller and Governor's General lists are completely different except for one title they share: Kathleen Winter's novel Annabel [no Kindle yet]. In 1968 in a tiny village on the Labrador coast, the new parents of a hermaphrodite decide to sew shut the infant's female genitalia and raise their baby as a boy. Wayne "struggles to live up to the manly standards imposed by his well-meaning if curmudgeonly father, but when adolescence rolls around, Wayne's body reveals a number of surprises and becomes a battleground of physiology, identity, and sexual discovery." The book pubs here January 4.

Born October 24-27: B.D. Wong, Emma Donoghue, Dan Mathews

A fourth generation Chinese-American, B.D. Wong made his Broadway debut in 1988 in M. Butterfly, for which he became and remains the only actor to win the five major theater prizes for the same role. But it was not enough to convince David Cronenberg to cast him in the movie version five years later, when he chose John Lone instead. Wong starred with Margaret Cho in her much praised, quickly canceled series All American Girl, then played a priest on Oz, and for ten years running Dr George Huang on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. He and his ex-partner Richie Jackson, an agent, are parents of a son named Foo, the surviving one of two twins born extremely prematurely. Wong wrote a book about the experience called Following Foo.

Emma Donoghue is 41 and this is her year. In May, Knopf published her immensely entertaining, decade-in-the-making exploration of lesbians in literature, Inseparable [Kindle], and last month Little, Brown published her defining book, Room [Kindle]. So far, that novel has been shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the Writers Trust Fiction award, and the Governor's General Award. Room has become an instant bestseller in Canada and the UK, and here in the US, even as the NYT list becomes more crowded with Follett, Franzen, Connelly, and le Carre, Donoghue moved up three spots last week, her fifth week on the list. Best of all -- because what's better than knowledge -- she learned the word autoantonym from the website you are reading now. The youngest of eight children of literary critic Denis Donoghue, Dublin-born Emma is also the youngest of “the four,” contemporary U.K. lesbian novelists, along with Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson, and Ali Smith. In her novels she is equally at home in the present day (Stir-Fry, Hood, Landing) and the past (Slammerkin, Life Mask, The Sealed Letter). She lives in Ontario with her partner Chris, their young daughter Una, and their six-year son Finn, on whom last year she test-ran questions for Room's five-year-old narrator, Jack. At a recent New York reading where she was kind about Band of Thebes, she admitted she even coaxed him into a "game" of rolling him up in a rug to see how he would fit and how difficult it would be for her character to wriggle out. In fact, very difficult. She told me her next novel will return to lesbian life.

A towering outsider with impressive insider pull, 6'5" Dan Mathews led the "I'd Rather Go Naked" anti-fur campaign and convinced Morrissey, Pink, Pam, and Paul McCartney to do spots for the love-them-or-hate-them animal rights group PETA. He started poor, was bullied in high school, worked at McDonalds and as a model to put himself through American University, and after graduating started at PETA as a receptionist. His 2007 memoir Committed: A Rabble-Rouser's Memoir [Kindle] finally pubbed in the UK last year, when gay rights living legend Peter Tatchell chose it on Band of Thebes best lgbt book poll saying, "It’s a story full of ideas, action and loads of gossip about the many celebrities who support PETA’s work. Off-beat, hilarious, irreverent, and highly ethical, Committed is a damn good read. It shows how direct action can raise consciousness and secure social change – and be lots of fun." 

David Rakoff's Half Empty

Five long years after Don't Get Too Comfortable (nine years since Fraud!), David Rakoff is releasing his new book today. According to the bestselling gay Canadian Jewish New Yorker, Half Empty promises to be "a defense of melancholy, pessimism, anxiety and all of the emotions that have been tarred with the brush of negativity and therefore stricken from the larger cultural conversation. I hope to argue...that, while these emotions may well be hedonically less pleasant, they remain necessary and even beautiful at times." It's a tribute to his sense of humor that he's continued to write about the comedy of pessimism while undergoing chemo for cancer. The cancer is a result of earlier radiation treatments when he had lymphoma in his 20s. Now he may lose his arm. As he says, " There's a lot of stuff you can do with one arm — like continue living." And continue writing for GQ and continue broadcasting on PRI's This American Life.

And continue touring. Rakoff appears tonight at B&N Union Square, tomorrow night in Baltimore, and the following night in DC. After that, he reads in Columbus, Chicago, St. Paul, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, New York, Brooklyn, Boston, and New York. Details here.

Born July 8: Spaulding, Fitzgerald, Evans, Johnson

Online journalist Pam Spaulding of the essential, influential lgbt political blog Pam's House Blend today turns forty-seven (click for a photo tour of four decades of happy smiles and evolving hairstyles). A Fordham alum who lives in Durham, with family backgrounds in both New York City and North Carolina, Pam considers herself to have "dual citizenship" as a Southerner and a Yankee. She started the Blend in 2004 "as a personal response to the anti-gay state of the political landscape." It won Best LGBT Blog at the 2005 and 2006 Weblog Awards and made Pam one of OUT's 100 last year. Make sure she's part of your daily reading.

Filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald worried his debut feature The Hanging Garden would be too arty and too gay for anyone to pay attention to: Sweet William, now slim and confident at twenty-five, returns home for the first time in a decade to attend a wedding, where he talks to the hanging corpse of his fat fifteen year-old self who was caught having sex with the bi guy his sister is now marrying. The universally lauded movie was nominated for eleven Genie Awards and won three, among many other Canadian and international prizes. His second movie was Beefcake, the popular docu-drama homage to Bob Mizer of the early gay muscle mags from the Athletic Model Guild. Fitzgerald's fourth and fifth features, The Event and 3 Needles, cover different aspects of aids and hiv. 3 Needles stars Olympia Dukakis, Chloe Sevigny, Lucy Liu, Sandra Oh, Stockard Channing, and Shawn Ashmore, and earned its director a DGA nom. Earlier this year, Fitzgerald debuted his first play, Cloudburst, to rousing acclaim. Raised in New Jersey, Fitzgerald attended Cooper Union and spent a semester in Halifax, Nova Scotia where he has lived ever since.

British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (far left) did not begin his famous excavations at Knossos until 1900 when he was forty-nine. In 1878 someone had discovered a small portion of the ruins but it was only after Crete became an independent state free of Turkey that Evans was able to purchase the site and organize a dig on a necessarily massive scale. The "palace" is a series of 1,000 interlocking rooms. Luckily, Evans lived another forty-one years, plenty of time to unveil the structures he decided were source of the mythic King Minos and his fabled Minotaur; hence Evans' coining the term Minoan civilization from the 27th to 15th centuries BC. One aspect of real life there was bull dancing, a tradition in which youths cavorted with angry steers to great honor and, usually within three months, certain death. Mary Renault brings the practice alive in her novel The King Must Die about Theseus's Cretan adventures. (Below, my picture of bull dancing from Knossos this May and actor Henry Cavill as Theseus in Tarsem Singh's ancient Greek hotfest The Immortals coming November 2011.) Evans was Keeper of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum from 1894-1908 and many, many of the treasures he found at Knossos ended up in its collection. He is degayed in most accounts of his life but not in Cathy Gere's intriguing Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.

   

Soon after graduating from Harvard in 1930, Philip Johnson became the first director of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design though he himself was not yet an architect. In the ensuing years he was a committed fascist, an ardent admirer of Hitler, and he even toured conquered Poland at the Nazis' invitation. How he as a gay man reconciled the Reich's murder of gay men probably shouldn't be any more pressing than how he as a human reconciled the Reich's slaughter of humans, but somehow it sharpens the point. In 1948, when Johnson built his master degree thesis, Glass House, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and remains one of the most important designs of the century. His two best known other works are the Seagrams Building (with Mies van der Rohe) and the AT&T Building with its controversial Chippendale top, completed when he was seventy-eight. His many other projects include the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, the Amon Carter Museum,

Soon after graduating from Harvard in 1930, Philip Johnson became the first director of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design though he himself was not yet an architect. In the ensuing years he was a committed fascist, an ardent admirer of Hitler, and he even toured conquered Poland at the Nazis' invitation. How he as a gay man reconciled the Reich's murder of gay men probably shouldn't be any more pressing than how he as a human reconciled the Reich's slaughter of humans, but somehow it sharpens the point. In 1948, when Johnson built his master degree thesis, Glass House, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and remains one of the most important designs of the century. His two best known other works are the Seagrams Building (with Mies van der Rohe) and the AT&T Building with its controversial Chippendale top, completed when he was seventy-eight. His many other projects include the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, the Amon Carter Museum,

Josh Dolgin in The Socalled Movie

So many people complain about the death of gay culture, the dearth of new queer genius, the sameness and staleness of what we might broadly term Abercrombie arts, yet when a true original like Socalled comes to town, the midsize auditorium is two-thirds empty. Tuesday night after three flights getting to JFK, after Josh Kilmer-Purcell's reading, I saw The Socalled Movie and was blown away. Whatever the documentary lacks in structure and flow is irrelevant compared to the excitement of spending 86 minutes with a visionary talent. Canadian musician John Dolgin mixes Klezmer with hip hop, r&b, and drum & bass to amazing effect. In the opening seconds of the trailer below he overlays a 30s sample with a 70s groove, saying, "...and they go together! It's absurd!"  His video for You Are Never Alone has been watched 2.4 million times on YouTube. His other songs have garnered a few thousand views. Go figure.

Initially Dolgin resisted the idea of doing a documentary but relented after a couple weeks when he realized it would be an ideal vehicle to drive people to the artists who inspire him: Katie Moore, James Brown trombonist Fred Wesley, Lounge legend Irving Fields, clarinetist David Krakauer, and cellist Matt Haimovitz, all of whom make music with him. Another inspiration to him is adult filmmaker Toby Ross, whose old porn Dolgin loves so much he started making his own documentary about Ross. Dolgin screened Ross's gay porn Cruisin 57 with live band accompaniment in Montreal. He says he intentionally showed it downtown (in an old porn palace that was originally a Yiddish theater), not in the gay neighborhood, because he wanted to share queer culture with a nongay audience.

As for his own sexual awakening, Dolgin said it was two gay skin magazines that he shoplifted while on a class trip to NYC when he was 14 that got him through his adolescence. He also said it was Ryan McGinley -- with whom he went to the Montreal gay strip club Taboo -- who told him about Toby Ross. McGinley was invited to last night's screening but was too busy to attend.

You'll hear him in the trailer below sounding exactly like another master, John McPhee, saying he has no confidence in his work, yet he's compelled to create. 

The JCC (along with the New Festival) held a rooftop reception for Dolgin after the screening Q&A. When an older guy described his taste in men, Dolgin asked, "What's a Wonder Bread Queen?" I told him that was my favorite thing he said all night; he told me he had been reading a lot Somerset Maugham (so I mentioned the new biography) and a lot of Stephen King. I took this second comment for what it was -- an obvious cry for help -- and insisted that since he loved the Russians he needed to know Tatyana Tolstaya and her magnificent stories newly collected as White Walls.

When you're ordering that book, also get Socalled's album Ghettoblaster with tracks like "(These Are) The Good Old Days," "You Are Never Alone," and "(Rock the) Belz."

You can watch the whole movie now, as the documentary is one of the four debut films in YouTube's new pay per view program. It's 99 cents.