Band of Thebes

Growing Up Gay in 80s Scotland

"This amazing book... grips from beginning to end and leaves the reader elated," says Diana Athill of the gay work I've most looked forward to this spring, Damian Barr's memoir Maggie & Me: Coming Out and Coming of Age in 1980s Scotland [Kindle]. Winner of Stonewall's Writer of the Year Award and the humor prize at the Political Book Awards, Barr's book appeared on best of the year lists in the Times, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the Evening Standard, the Mail on Sunday, the New Statesman, the Independent, and multiple times on Band of Thebes queer lit poll, where one of the best-read men in Britain, Gay's the Word manager Jim McSweeney, said it's "engaging... beautifully written... wise, funny and deeply moving." 

Maggie O'Farrell: "Out of poverty, brutality and prejudice, Damian Barr builds something riveting, touching and painfully funny. His account of growing up under Thatcher's regime defines the experience of a generation. At once personal and universal, Maggie & Me is a work of stealthy genius."

S.J. Watson: "As gripping as a thriller, laugh-out-loud funny and deeply touching... A triumph."

Louisa Young: "Maggie & Me is a perfect chip supper of a memoir: nostalgic, tart, crisp and seductive. It’s also sad, kind, witty and sexy."

Adam Mars-Jones Essay on Coming Out in the 70s

Not breaking news from 37 years ago but a good reminder of bad times. After Adam Mars-Jones came out on New Year's Eve in the final hours of 1977, his father, a homophobic lawyer turned judge, spent days calmly cross-examining him, trying to prove his son at twenty-three was wrong about his orientation: You got a boner watching a Jacqueline Bisset movie! and Prince Charles used to be confused too until an older woman straightened him out. Later, dad changed tactics and sent Adam research about 'successful' hormone therapies: worse, the information was in his law clerk's handwriting.

In this new essay at LRB, M-J also recounts his own mistakes as when he morosely, lugubriously told his mum:

"...if I’m convinced that I played my coming-out scene to my mother in a key of sickly self-pity, then the reality was surely worse. Did I compare my sexual orientation with her own road accident a few years earlier, as something that had to be dealt with in all its damage rather than wished away? I’m afraid I did. As the years went by she must have been surprised to realise that my life contained both fun and meaning, intimacy and mild self-respect, but then so was I. Finally Mum had asked the question mothers nerve themselves to ask: would this life make me happy? I said that it would, but I couldn’t avoid a vocal wobble and an implication of martyrdom."

Mars-Jones, now 59, is the author of the gay novels The Waters of Thirst, Pilcrow, and Cedilla, as well as the story collection Monopolies of Loss and the aids anthology The Darker Proof: Stories from a Crisis.

Why Is No One Discussing the Cost of the Closet at Sochi?

All Olympians are expected to smile through inhuman amounts of pressure, fear, and doubt, yet certain athletes shoulder another terrible burden. Widely seen as closeted, 28-year-old skater Jeremy Abbott fell hard during his routine Thursday. Again. Asked about his pattern of choking on big nights, he lashed out in a way that may bring back memories of titanic, welling emotions before you were out: 

"I would just hold my middle finger in the air and say a big 'F you' to everyone who has ever said that to me because they have never stood in my shoes.

"They've never had to do what I had to do. Nobody has to stand center ice before a million people and put an entire career on the line for eight minutes of their life when they've been doing it for 20-some years. And if you don't think that that's not hard, you're a damn idiot.

"I'm proud to be standing here. I'm a four-time national champion and a two-time Olympian, and no one can take that away from me. So whatever people have to say about me, that's their own problem because I'm freaking proud of what I've done and I'm not going to apologize for any of it."

Maybe the media has more to cover in gay sports than the self-congratulating stories that they are "ready" for Michael Sam.

Frank Ocean: Man of the Year, Album of the Year & Six Grammy Noms

Remember last July 4 when 25 year-old New Orleans R&B hip-hop singer Frank Ocean came out -- via tumblr, of course -- and you said, Who? Understandable, because his debut album Channel Orange didn't come out until a week later. Last month it was voted Album of the Year at the Soul Train Awards, and by the music critics at USA Today, and now the album has topped the UK's 12th annual Poll of Polls (Jack White was second, Tame Impala third). Earlier this month Ocean was named MTV's Man of the Year. Channel Orange is nominated for six Grammys, including Album of the Year, Best New Artist, Best Urban Contemporary, and Record of the Year for this gay song, "Thinking About You."

First Ever Openly Gay Professional Boxer, Orlando Cruz

Yesterday Orlando Cruz became professional boxing's first openly gay fighter. (A very few others have come out in retirement.) The 31 year-old featherweight said, "I want to try to be the best role model I can be for kids who might look into boxing as a sport and a professional career. I have and will always be a proud Puerto Rican. I have always been and always will be a proud gay man." If Cruz wins his next fight on October 19 in Kissimee he may be in line for a shot at a major title.

Also yesterday, a new poll by three news outlets showed that 60% of Latino Americans believe same-sex couples should have the right to marry. Only 38% disagreed. The same poll asked Latino adults what is the one thing your child could do that would cause you the greatest disappointment, and only 10% said being gay. The top responses were drug addiction (43%) and going to prison (33%).

Four Decades Later, Merle Miller's "On Being Different"

  

Compare the type size and readability of the word homosexual on the 1971 book jacket and today's re-release from Penguin Classics.

Five days after America met rascally bigot Archie Bunker in the debut of All in the Family, the NYT magazine ran Merle Miller's groundbreaking coming out essay, "What It Means To Be a Homosexual," a response to Joseph Epstein's homophobic screed in Harper's. Miller's piece generated a record-setting 2,000 letters and later was described as "the most widely read and discussed essay of the decade." He expanded his work into a short book, On Being Different: What It Means to Be a Homosexual [Kindle] republished today with a self-absorbed foreword by Dan Savage about his Hawaiian vacation -- three gay couples, three straight 13 year-old boys, zero seductions, total trust; look how far I've come since 1971 when Miller's friends wouldn't bring their teen children to his house anymore -- and a far, far better afterword by Charles Kaiser. Brave and important as it was, the book is not a cheerleading celebration. One writer now says On Being Different "is a searing indictment of social hypocrisy, written with a quiet but burning passion… it is an American classic because of the beauty it achieves through its unflinchingly honest portrayal of the raw pain of rejection." Historian Jonathan Ned Katz notes Miller's "eloquent voice is still poignant, still relevant to the ongoing struggle, our struggle for dignity and equal rights."

Miller published several novels and bestselling biographies until his death at 67 in 1986. On October 10, Kaiser, Savage, and Victor Navasky discuss On Being Different at the 82nd & Broadway B&N.

"Good Friend"

Many of you greatly respect privacy in the lives of famous people, like Sally Ride, but this is a blog that loiters at the corner of literature and queer, and it needs to report what's being said there. 

A well-known lesbian / novelist re-posted this photo on Facebook with its original caption, Fran Lebowitz and good friend Toni Morrison out on the town. Her only commentary was to repeat the words "good friend" in quotes. Most readers interpreted this to imply the two writers share more than wild hair and nighttime sunglasses. Others say they're not convinced, asking why the two pictured authors can't both be lesbians but not dating each other. The best comment explores this question about legitmate scholarship: 

"How am I supposed to write about sexual politics in the work of someone who insists this is her 'good friend'? This is similar to the problem of not being able to quote Willa Cather's letters. 'I can't tell you what's really up with TM, but, trust me, something's up with TM.' It's childish."

[Savvy readers, please let me know if FB posts are generally considered public speech and may be quoted in the same way as an author's website.]

Sally Ride, First Lesbian in Space, Dies at 61

Pioneering astronaut Sally Ride has died of pancreatic cancer at 61. Did I miss her coming out or did it happen today in her obituary? Her partner of 27 years, Dr. Tam O'Shaughnessy, does not mention their personal relationship in her long bio on Sally Ride Science. Sally's obit posted today to the site does include their partnership; her official NASA bio doesn't. Before this afternoon, her wikipedia page had no LGBT tags.

Our community has faced many challenges in the 29 years since her first space shuttle mission. The visible support and leading example of a national hero could only have helped. She chose to stay closeted and silent.

Even more stressful than being lovers, Sally and Tam were co-authors; their books include Voyager: An Adventure to the Edge of the Solar System and the award-winning The Third Planet: Exploring the Earth from Space. 

UPDATE: Brian points to this article in which the astronaut's sister Bear Ride, also gay, says Sally "never hid her relationship with Tam," and "Sally didn't use labels." Bear adds, "I hope it makes it easier for kids growing up gay that they know that another one of their heroes was like them." Maybe yes, and that's great. Or maybe queer kids today want their heroes to be out.

Younger Every Day

Last month, Amelia, a mom blogger on HuffPost wrote about her son happily announcing he's gay. He's seven. Predictably, a lot of naysayers claim children can't know their orientation so young, but legions of lgbt people can refute that personally. Now the boy's father, Dave, has written a post declaring his full support for his son's coming out and, he says, laughing at the ignorant comments inspired by his wife's article, like, "Isn't your son's father going to miss teaching him sports?" "Isn't not having your child get married going to just break your heart?" As it turns out, the little dude is a football jock.

On Sunday, the NYT magazine is running Elizabeth Weil's major article about the "new normal" of girls going through puberty before age ten. The story begins with the shocking detail of Ainsley growing pubic hair when she was six. Growth spurts, armpit hair, pimples, developing breasts, PMS cycling with her mother, somehow these are now issues some girls must cope with in third grade. Whatever the cause, that shift is robbing kids of childhood, not their own honesty in coming out.

Salon Series of Minority Youth Coming Out Stories: Pariah Personals

Cross-promoting the movie, this week Salon is running a series called Pariah Personals in which minority and immigrant teens write about coming out to their families. Some critics say the movie suffers from an over-familiar story, but all of these blessedly brief first-person essays have fresh, unexpected details:

Monday, Jamilah King's mother offered to attend a pride parade with her at a time when neither was comfortable with it.

Tuesday, Jean Melesaine [below], a Samoan Mormon lesbian, learned at five years old that she would go to hell and started jacking cars when she was seven and robbing apartments at ten.

Wednesday, Andres Garcia, 17, [above] avoided telling his family because he "just figured they'd be close-minded," and his coming out did spark a fight -- because his brother was hurt to be the last to know and his father felt awful for all the suffering Andres would face in a prejudiced world.

Pariah Opens Today, Expands Next Week

For whatever reason, the debut Brooklyn black teen lesbian coming out movie Pariah doesn't have quite as strong buzz as the white lesbian family film The Kids Are All Right (big stars, known director) or the Harlem black teen film Precious (Sundance winner, backed by Oprah and Tyler Perry). Pariah opens today in New York, Hollywood, and San Francisco to solid reviews. On January 6 it expands to Cambridge, Chicago, Dallas, DC, San Diego, and Seattle. This is your triple chance to support women directors, black film, and queer movies, all wildly underrepresented at the box office.

Gay Indian-Americans in Rahul Mehta's Quarantine

Two years ago, Madison Smartt Bell edited New Stories from the South 2009, selecting, alongside work from Wendell Berry and Jill McCorkle, "Quarantine," a piece by Rahul Mehta about a young Indian-American bringing home his boyfriend to meet his parents in West Virginia. (Mehta was born and raised there.) Last year, his collection of stories, Quarantine [[Kindle]], all of them about gay Indian-Americans, was published in hardcover in India to much acclaim, some fuss, and surprisingly strong sales. Now, at last, Harper has released Mehta's book here as a paperback original. Praising the richness and depth of his characters and observations, Madison Smartt Bell calls it "the best first collection I have read in twenty years." Pankaj Mishra considers Mehta's voice "gentle, even tender, but powerful." Manil Suri says the stories are "insightful and compellingly readable." I haven't seen the collection and am greatly anticipating reading the stories.

Mehta gave a long interview to The Hindu Literary Review in which he discussed how long the collection took to write (nine years), the amount of sex included (readers: not enough, his mother: too much), and writers he admires (Lydia Davis, Amy Hempel, Arundhati Roy, Vikram Seth, and Mohsin Hamid, among others).

Coming Out at 75: Christopher Plummer in 'Beginners'

Rave reviews all around for Mike Mills' autobiographical second feature Beginners, based on his father's coming out very late in life, six month before he died. The movie, finally opening today in limited release, has a Metacritic average of 85. It's the Pick of the Week on Salon, where Andrew O'Hehir calls it "one of the best films about homosexuality ever made by a straight person." Mills is married to Miranda July. David Edelstein super-loved the "marvelously inventive romantic comedy pickled in sadness," praising its "nuttiness" and comparing it to Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life.

Four clips from the film are available here.

The Jack Bank by Glen Retief

Like male aggression itself, young schoolboy bullying is everywhere this season, playing a central part in the indie documentary The Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, the Oscar winning foreign film In a Better World, those ubitiquous YouTube videos for the It Gets Better campaign which is now a book [[Kindle]], and bullying is the troubled heart of Glen Retief's new autobiography The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood [[Kindle]]. Toward the end of aparthied, white Glen lives in bliss at Kruger National Park, until at 12 he is sent to a hellish boarding school where older boys make younger boys strip nude, jump up and down and receive swattings with cricket bats or electrical shocks to their genitals. Trouble is, when Glen is older he derives "enormous, surprising pleasure" from administering the beatings to younger boys. He connects the Boer system of abuse and torture to South Africa's greater ills, and he struggles to reconcile the shameful experiences that he considers "life's defining moment" with his homosexuality.

Not my kind of book but those who've read it are impressed:

“A remarkable memoir with the deeply resonant literary power of the finest fiction. The Jack Bank  is an important book by a supremely gifted writer.”—Robert Olen Butler

“One of those books that you never forget and never stop talking about.  Retief belongs in the pantheon of white African writers Alexandra Fuller, Peter Godwin, Coetzee, and Gordimer.”—Bob Shacochis

“Glen Retief’s Jack Bank is a transgressive, harrowing and illuminating work of literary art.  In a language marked by a brutal childhood in the last years of the apartheid regime, and with uncommon wisdom, Retief’s epiphanic narrative draws us into regions of  cultural importance beyond the scope of traditional memoir.  Thus, he changes what we imagine this genre to be, allowing it to become something truer.”—Carolyn Forché

"Eloquent...readers everywhere will be caught by the searing detail about family, friendship, sex and love."—Booklist

"Visceral and emotionally complex--an impressive first book."—Kirkus Reviews

Four Australian Writers Debate Queer Literature

Sophie Cunningham moderates a panel of Benjamin Law, Fiona McGregor, and William Yang discussing the usual issues -- labels, semantics, ghettoization, gender issues, generation gaps, and the "death knell" of queer books -- all done with charming Aussie accents. Fiona says, "Sex is at the heart of any decent writer, going back to Sappho and Homer."

It's part of the Big Gay Week at Melbourne's leading literary spot, the Wheeler Centre. Other videos feature coming out stories and a lecture by Helen Razer arguing against funding gay art which she says is “as desperately needed as promoting white men in politics.”

Gay Celebrity Update: Entertainers & Complainers

Like Tab Hunter who came out to promote his memoir, gay former mini-series star Richard Chamberlain came out at 69 to promote his memoir. Now 76, Chamberlain recently said he "wouldn't advise a gay leading man-type actor to come out" because "there’s still a tremendous amount of homophobia in our culture. For an actor to be working is a kind of miracle… so it’s just silly for a working actor to say, ‘Oh, I don’t care if anybody knows I’m gay’ — especially if you’re a leading man… Look at what happened in California with Proposition 8. Please, don’t pretend that we’re suddenly all wonderfully, blissfully accepted.”

This week, figure skater Johnny Weir finally came out at 26 to promote his new memoir, Welcome to My World. On the Today Show he said, "I'm a person -- I've never lived in a closet. I've never claimed to be anything -- I've never claimed to be straight or gay. I claim to be Johnny Weir. And I think that's something that's very important for anybody in this world, is to own who you are, regardless of what you're born into. I was born a white male. A white gay male, and I don't celebrate being white or male. So, why should I celebrate being gay. That's my opinion on the whole thing."

Last year, country singer Chely Wright came out to promote her memoir Like Me. In a very thoughtful new interview with Autostraddle, she says, "It didn’t help my career. My record sales went directly in half. If it appears from the outside in that it’s helped my career, it could be because I haven’t talked about the negative. You won’t hear me bitching and moaning on my Facebook about the hate mail I’ve gotten. My life has been threatened. I get nasty letters every day, “I’m through with you Chely Wright, you’re going to hell.” There’s a big difference between press and advocacy and…. sometimes people forget that people who sing or make movies, this isn’t just a hobby for us. This is how I pay my bills. In coming out I had a feeling that it would diminish my wage earning, and that feeling was correct. And, I am fine with that." Chely also says when she came out last May, a lot of celebrity friends supported her privately but when the media asked about her coming out they said, "No comment." Only Mary Chapin Carpenter supported her in public.

Promoting his new awards bait movie Rabbit Hole which has zero queer content, John Cameron Mitchell chatted with the Advocate. New York mag summarizes:

"Gay film' means 'stupid kind of lamebrained date film with pecs,'" complains the Hedwig and the Angry Inch director, who also finds fault with modern gay men's single-minded devotion to pop icons like Lady Gaga: "I get a little homophobic lately when I meet young people who just assume that this is what you're supposed to be because you're gay. It makes me feel like I'm in some sort of frat society where you've got to do this, you've got to listen to that, you've got to wear these clothes."

Utah Schools' Gay-Straight Alliances Increase 255% in Past Year

In January 2010 the total number of Gay-Straight Alliances in Utah public high schools was nine; today it's thirty-two. Whether or not the sharp rise is a reaction against the increasingly visible anti-gay role of the Mormon church -- the LDS president's remarks against homosexuality prompted a demonstration in Salt Lake by 4,000 protesters -- the NYT identifies a "new activism by gay and lesbian students, an organizing drive by a gay rights group and the intervention of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has threatened to sue districts that put up arbitrary hurdles." The paper points out that "the alliances must still work around a 2007 state law that was expressly intended to stifle them by requiring parental permission to join and barring any discussions of sexuality or contraception, even to prevent diseases." Typically, the anti-gay conservatives portray the clubs as "recruiting." Pictured is the Utah Pride Center's Eric Hamren who trains student organizers.

In a separate article, the NYT's Erik Eckholm profiles Jason Osmanski, now 17 and the leader of the new GSA at Snow Canyon High School, who realized he was gay when he was 7. After enduring years of trauma and depression, he came out to his mother in Wal-Mart when he was 14 and 11 months. She said, "If you are joking, you are grounded for life." He wasn't.

Anyone interested in the plight of gay teens struggling with the entrenched anti-gay policies of the LDS should get to know Jordan Scott at the heart of David Ebershoff's excellent novel The 19th Wife [[Kindle]].

Catching Up on Coming Out: Kele Okereke

Huge year for Bloc Party frontman Kele Okereke, and impossibly I missed every milestone. October 2009, Bloc Party officially on hiatus. January 2010, Kele launches his photo blog, which he updates all the time. March 2010, after all those Bowie and Morrissey hints, Kele finally comes out, quite awesomely choosing to do so with BUTT Magazine. (Kele describes his Nigerian parents as "super Catholic" and troubled by his news.) June 2010, Kele appears on the cover of Attitude, is voted #1 sexiest out gay male musician by LP33, and releases his first solo album, The Boxer. October 2010, Kele earns a Stonewall nomination for entertainer of the year and begins a massive European tour. By end of 2010, Kele claims he will move to Manhattan. (!!)

My Queer War by James Lord, Out Now

Cannot wait to read the memoir on sale this week by art historian James Lord about his WWII service. I loved the chapter excerpt in Granta's new issue, for the vicarious time travel to the 1940s, the excitement of Lord's romantic adventures, and the sheer pleasure of his speedy prose. He gets right to it. An engaging and positive review by Christopher Benfey appears in the current New Republic. 

Benfey quotes Lord:

"I suddenly saw like an appalling sunburst, fatal and final, that what I really wanted to do with the good-looking boys whose best pal I longed to be was not just horsing around in the locker room but doing freely with them in bed after lights out everything I had always till then been compelled to do in solitude with myself. In short, the creature I’d suddenly seen was that abnormal, that abominable thing called a homosexual, a loathsome mistake of nature, a cultural criminal whom any feeling person would naturally put in prison."

Then Benfey writes:

"It is to avoid this fate, both inner and outer, that Lord flees to the Army. Later, he contrasts his own cowardly flight from reality with his younger brother’s motivations for joining up. “Teddy had heroically sought out danger and achieved the merit of dying,” shot by a Japanese sniper on Luzon, “whereas I had miserably run away from the inconvenience of being queer.” Lord’s ambivalence, one foot in the closet, leads to predictable misunderstandings during his early posting in a chemical warfare unit near Reno. He tells one of his superiors that he’s in love with him. “Don’t tell me,” the officer replies. “Don’t even think about telling me.”

"Lord gets a more encouraging, if lingeringly ambiguous, response from a mysterious young soldier named Johannes Friedrich Kessler, who goes by the name of Hanno, just like “the last of the Buddenbrooks in Thomas Mann’s novel.” Lord and Hanno embark on romantic excursions to ghost towns and silver mines in the Nevada outback, all the while discussing Tonio Kröger and young Werther. (“Guy in a story by Goethe,” Hanno explains. “Hopelessly in love. He kills himself.”) They reveal everything to one another except the one big secret, the “lurid, shaming, guilty secret,” that might seal their Burschenherrlichkeit, rendered by the well-hung and camera-shy Hanno as “glorious fellowship,” forever.

"Hanno emerges as the great might-have-been in Lord’s story, an embodiment of ideal masculinity, “the superior shiver of high culture,” and “another Germany.”

Buy My Queer War now.

NYT Magazine on Coming Out in Junior High School

Must reading in today's NYT Magazine.

“When I first realized I was gay,” Austin [left] interjected, “I just assumed I would hide it and be miserable for the rest of my life. But then I said, ‘O.K., wait, I don’t want to hide this and be miserable my whole life.’ ”

I asked him how old he was when he made that decision.

“Eleven,” he said.

Benoit Denizet-Lewis examines the ups and downs of coming out in junior high. Happily, some of the article is centered around young people in conservative Tulsa, which proves to be more accepting than you thought.

Despite a frequent kneejerk reaction against children declaring their orientation so young, the adults in the article acknowledge their responsibility to helping and protecting these kids.

"A middle-school counselor in Maine ... conceded that her school was 'totally unprepared' for openly gay students. 'We always knew middle school was a time when kids struggle with their identity,' she told me, 'but it was easy to let anti-gay language slide because it’s so imbedded in middle-school culture and because we didn’t have students who were out to us or their classmates. Now we do, so we’re playing catch up to try to keep them safe.'"

Even the executive director of the Christian Educators Association International says, “I certainly don’t believe school districts should force a sexual agenda on the community, but we can’t just put our heads in the sand and ignore the kind of harassment that’s going on.”

Denizet-Lewis writes, "When a 12-year-old boy matter-of-factly tells his parents — or a school counselor — that he likes girls, their reaction tends not to be one of disbelief, dismissal or rejection. “No one says to them: ‘Are you sure? You’re too young to know if you like girls. It’s probably just a phase,’ ” says Eileen Ross, the director of the Outlet Program, a support service for gay youth in Mountain View, Calif. “But that’s what we say too often to gay youth. We deny them their feelings and truth in a way we would never do with a heterosexual young person.”

Last year, Denizet-Lewis memorably wrote about gay marriage while excluding lesbians and unable to find couples of color. This article is better, with lesbians Lala and Tina and bi Kera, though still lopsided toward white males.

Read it.