Band of Thebes

Edgar Winners 2014

Announced last night, the winners of the Edgars, celebrating the best mystery and crime books, are:

Best Novel: Ordinary Grace, William Kent Krueger

Best First Novel: Red Sparrow, Jason Matthews

Best Paperback Original: The Wicked Girls, Alex Marwood

Best Fact Crime: The Hour of Peril: The Secret Plot to Murder Lincoln Before the Civil War, Daniel Stashower

Best Biography: America Is Elsewhere: The Noir Tradition in the Age of Consumer Culture, Erik Dussere

Best Juvie: One Came Home, Amy Timberlake

Best YA: Ketchup Clouds, Annabel Pitcher

Born April 6: Rob Epstein, Joseph Olshan

A trailblazer way ahead of the zeitgeist, Rob Epstein alone or with Jeffrey Friedman, won two Academy Awards, three Peabodys, four Emmys, and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among many other honors, for his/their gay documentaries The Times of Harvey Milk, Common Threads - Stories from the Quilt, The Celluloid Closet, and Paragraph 175. Then they decided to try narrative features, making the Allen Ginsberg obscenity trial movie Howl, starring James Franco, Jon Hamm, Jeff Daniels, and Mary-Louise Parker, which grossed $617,334. Last year saw their first non-gay feature, the biopic Lovelace starring Amanda Seyfried as the porn starlet, Sharon Stone as her monstrous mother, and again James Franco as Hugh Hefner. It grossed $356,582. (To compare, The Celluloid Closet grossed $1.4 million in 1996.) More than a year ago they announced a movie about Anita Bryant, starring Uma Thurman, which does not appear to have begun production. In December, for World Aids Day, HBO aired their new short The Battle of amfAR. In February, TCM screened their 90-minute special offering an inside look at the Oscars. Masters of the documentary, Epstein and Friedman have written a how-to book called The Art of Nonfiction Movie Making.

Auspicious from the start, in 1985, Joseph Olshan saw his first novel Clara's Heart win the London Times/Jonathan Cape Young Writers Competition, get great reviews, and three years later become a movie starring Whoopi Goldberg as a Jamaican housekeeper in Rye, New York who transforms a boy's life. In 1994, he published his best-known gay novel Nightswimmer, the story of Will Kaplan's struggles to reconnect with life, and a new boyfriend, a decade after his partner Chad either drowned or intentionally disappeared. In 2008 he released his eighth novel, The Conversion, again about a gay man untangling memory and doubt in the aftermath of his lover's death (this time in Paris and Tuscany, an American translator mourning a famous older poet). Yet again Olshan earned impressive reviews comparing his work to that of Graham Greene and Andre Aciman. His most recent book Cloudland is a mystery inspired by the real, unsolved serial murders of six women in the Connecticut River valley of New Hampshire and Vermont, where he lives. His work has been translated into sixteen languages.

Stranger by the Lake

Out today in limited release, this handsomely composed French film of gay sex and gay murder that unfolds oh-so-slowly over a summer in a lakeside cruising area, divided our group last fall at the New York Film Festival because we each disliked it in different ways. And yet Stranger by the Lake has unanimous very positive reviews, averaging a lofty 83 on Metacritic. Toronto's Adam Nayman says,

"It turns out that still waters run deep – and with a hell of an undertow to boot. The genius of Guiraudie’s precisely measured set-up is how it affords him space to trenchantly explore ideas about fear and desire without overstepping generic boundaries; whatever its submerged themes, the film is first and foremost a thriller, with its share of superbly meted-out shocks. Spare, steely, sexually explicit in a way that transcends mere provocation, Stranger by the Lake is vital cinema."

Watch the trailer here. It's the sixth feature from writer-director Alain Guiraudie, who turns fifty in July.

Revisiting 1950s Homophobia and Sen. Lester Hunt's Suicide

Placeholder. Read Roger McDaniel's Dying for Joe McCarthy's Sins: The Suicide of Wyoming Senator Lester Hunt [Kindle only $3.99] which inspired last night's amazing mock trial in DC of Joe McCarthy and his two nefarious sidekicks. Sponsored by the newly relaunched Mattachine Society of Washington. More soon. 

Born August 31: David McConnell

One of my favorite gay novels of recent years is also one of the most mysterious: In David McConnell's The Silver Hearted, an unnamed narrator in an unnamed port town in an unnamed country teams up with a young local sailor to transport chests of treasure as a frenzied mob sparks a revolution. Told in high literary style, a pulpy story becomes mesmerizing, erotic, and haunting. Edmund White said it better than I can: "The Silver Hearted is our Heart of Darkness. It is just as ominous, as violent, as exotic, as darkly colonial. But it is a lot better written than Conrad’s book. Whereas Conrad is always resorting to ‘the unspeakable,’ McConnell tells us everything in glowing detail and in fresh, eloquent language. Sexy, demonic, elusive, The Silver Hearted is a perfect work of art." Patrick McGrath said he can't recommend the novel too highly and "David McConnell is the most intriguing, original and exotic writer I've come across in years. The atmosphere he creates in The Silver Hearted is imbued with dread, mystery, lust, sleaze, greed and beauty. A constant potent undertow of violence is at work in the sustained suspense of his narrative." 

David's first book was the introspective novel The Firebrat, about which Matthew Statdler said, "I love this book. Abjection has never been so gorgeous."

His third book [Kindle], out this year, is a significant departure, nonfiction reportage on the murders of gay men. PW said it is a "journalistic tour de force," Library Journal said it's "a masterpiece of reportage," and Sebastian Junger said it's "a stunning exploration of Manhood in America." David reads from the book and discusses homophobia at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution/Decatur Book Festival tomorrow afternoon.

Daddy Love by Joyce Carol Oates

Adding to Joyce Carol Oates' 3 children's books, 6 YA books, 9 books of plays, 10 books of poetry, 11 books under two pseudonyms, 16 books of nonfiction, 27 books of stories, and 41 previous novels, Daddy Love [Kindle] maps new terrain in her signature explorations of race, class, gender, violence, sex, and abuse redeemed by keen psychological insight and deft literary style. Here, in her 124th book, Oates swaps her frequent theme of men violating women for a plot about a man who abducts boys. Her 1995 trip inside the head of a male serial killer who preyed on young men, Zombie [Kindle], won the Bram Stoker Award for Best Novel.

Although his transgressive fiction is very different, and always features fully developed adolescents, most of whom begin their fateful encounters willingly or ambivalently, Dennis Cooper would be the ideal critic to review this extreme character study. Short of that,

Booklist says:

"Oates’ daring journey through the labyrinths of criminal minds takes a fierce turn in this unflinching yet restrained tale of the sick symbiosis between an abducted child and his fiendish captor. Dinah, a white woman living in Michigan, defied her nasty mother to marry Whit, a black radio personality. They love and adore their son, Robbie, who is a smart if high-strung five-year-old when a stranger ambushes Dinah in a mall parking lot, grabs her son, and nearly kills her when she desperately runs after his van. Known as Chester Cash, a secretive itinerant preacher and craftsman, this monster calls himself Daddy Love as he conducts his gruesome regime of torture, rape, and reward, which we witness from both his and Robbie’s perspectives over the course of six grim years. For all the horror and sensationalism of her wrenching subject, Oates judiciously charts Robbie’s brutal metamorphosis and Dinah’s resilience in an urgently compelling and drastically revealing study of evil, habitual terror, and survival."

And PW says:

"At the start of this gripping psychological thriller from Oates, Dinah Whitcomb is playing the 'find our car' game with her five-year-old son, Robbie, in the parking lot of an Ypsilanti, Mich., mall when a stranger seizes the boy and runs over Dinah in his van, maiming her. Robbie is renamed Gideon by Daddy Love, his abductor, who has kidnapped several little boys through the years, killing them when they’re adolescents and 'too old' for him. The outside world knows Daddy Love as Chet Cash, a loving father, a sensitive artist, and itinerant preacher. Spanning six years, the action shifts between Gideon and Daddy Love, who’s quick to mete out cruel punishments, and Dinah and her husband, bonded by guilt in a crumbling marriage. The creep factor ramps up when the intuitive Gideon realizes that he’s not Daddy Love’s only 'son' and the fate that awaits him. This unsettling tale showcases Oates’s masterful storytelling."

JCO's 125th book, her 43rd novel, The Accursed, is coming in March and in August she'll release Evil Eye: Four Novellas of Love Gone Wrong. Alas, she turns 75 this year and will never catch Georges Simenon or Nora Roberts or Isaac Asimov who published 506 books or Barbara Cartland who wrote 722 novels.

Bulls & Chickens: 1960s Ring Extorted $2 Million from Gay Men

Reminiscent of The Boys of Boise and The Scarlet Professor, today's Slate essay by William McGowan examines another antigay scandal of the 1950-60s, an exortion ring preying on rich closeted men who hired young hustlers. Awful as the societal attitudes were -- paving the way for successful threats of exposure -- this story highlights a remarkable turnaround for extortionist Ed Murphy, who "fairy shaking" closeted men for money to lobbying for gay rights and organizing NYC pride's street festival. He died of aids in 1989.

The whole piece is 7,000 words, and worth it:

"Impersonating corrupt vice-squad detectives, members of this ring, known in police parlance as bulls, had used young, often underage men known as chickens to successfully blackmail closeted pillars of the establishment, among them a navy admiral, two generals, a U.S. congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor, a prep school headmaster, and several well-known actors, singers, and television personalities. The ring had operated for almost a decade, had victimized thousands, and had taken in at least $2 million. When he announced in 1966 that the ring had been broken up, Manhattan DA Frank Hogan said the victims had all been shaken down “on the threat that their homosexual proclivities would be exposed unless they paid for silence.”

"Though now almost forgotten, the case of “the Chickens and the Bulls” as the NYPD called it (or “Operation Homex,” to the FBI), still stands as the most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history. And while the Stonewall riot in June 1969 is considered by many to be the pivotal moment in gay civil rights, this case represents an important crux too, marking the first time that the law enforcement establishment actually worked on behalf of victimized gay men, instead of locking them up or shrugging."

Check out the article's several old b&w photos of johns and male prostitutes in NYC, this one from Times Square in August 1965.

Gay Stats

Reporters are revisiting three perennial stories, just in time for Pride Month:

The Atlantic on how wrong, wrong, wrong those poor, clueless straights are. Thirty-five percent of people polled guessed that 25% or more of Americans are gay or lesbian. Another seventeen percent guessed the percentage of gay or lesbian Americans is 20% - 25%. The magazine says the correct answer is "probably less than 2%."

HuffPost reports 2011 saw the highest number of antigay murders ever in one year in the US, since tracking this stat began in 1998: Thirty killings.

The NYT says gaydar is accurate about 64% of the time guessing whether or not women are lesbians and 57% of the time when trying to figure out if a man is a top or bottom, uh, into you gay.

Gay Ugandan Featured in Article Demanding Gay Executions Is Killed

Months after gay rights activist David Kato, 43, appeared on the cover of a Ugandan tabloid article listing the addresses of local LGBT leaders and calling on readers to murder them, he has been killed in his home. Kato had quit his job as a schoolteacher to work fulltime for LGBT rights. Ugandan police say they do not think his murder, from blows to his head with a hammer, was a hate crime. In the past two months, ten other people have been killed in the area during robberies, according to police.

Val Kalende, chairwoman of one of Uganda’s gay rights groups, said, “David’s death is a result of the hatred planted in Uganda by U.S. evangelicals in 2009. The Ugandan government and the so-called U.S. evangelicals must take responsibility for David’s blood.”

The U.S. government has yet to condemn the murder. Instead, Johnnie Carson, America's top diplomat for Africa said via Twitter, "We are horrified and saddened by the murder of prominent human rights activist David Kato in Uganda yesterday afternoon." UPDATE: See comments for links to statements from the State Department ("profoundly saddened") and the White House ("deeply saddened"), thanks to Mel P.

European Parliament President Jerzy Buzek said, "David Kato was a man that fought for the rights of people to live freely regardless of their sexual orientation in Uganda. I call for the perpetrators of this crime to be brought to justice He was a remarkable human rights defender." Buzek called on Uganda to legalize homosexuality, adding, "I underline that sexual orientation is a matter falling within the remit of the individual right to privacy in the framework of universal human rights and fundamental freedoms."