Band of Thebes

Born February 15-17: Bill T. Jones, Robert Dessaix

The cruel vagaries of aids: In 1984, both Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, professional partners running their jointly named dance troupe and boyfriends for thirteen years, since college at SUNY Binghamton, were diagnosed with HIV. Zane died in 1988; last June, after twenty-six years of being HIV+, Jones added another Tony Award (for the smash hit Fela!, which he co-created, directed, and choreographed) to his many, many honors including a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1994 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 2010. His more than one hundred maverick dance pieces, which frequently incorporate same-sex attraction, eroticism, anger, and nudity, have been seen worldwide and he often collaborates with the era's leading artists, from Toni Morrison and Max Roach on Degga to Jessye Norman for How! Do! We! Do! Confronting the perceived death sentence of aids, he traveled the country interviewing many kinds of terminally ill patients before creating his celebration of living, Still/Here, which many have loved and some have hated, like the New Yorker's former dance critic Arlene Croce, who refused to see "victim art." In 1995, Jones published his autobiography Last Night on Earth, happily misnamed. (photo: Lois Greenfield)

 

Which book finally dislodged The Horse Whisperer from the #1 spot on Australia's bestseller lists? Basically its opposite: Robert Dessaix's Night Letters was a surprise sensation, an intellectual novel compromised of twenty letters written in a hotel in Venice in the mid-1990s by an Australian man newly diagnosed with HIV. Echoing literary travelers from Marco Polo and Dante to Casanova and Sterne, contemplating life, death, love, and the passage of time, the narrator R. discourses on cathedrals and museums, seduction and sex, hell and heaven, Venice and Venetians. Despite the character's dire future, critics hailed his "wry, chatty, surprisingly cheerful voice" (NYTBR) finding him "seductive, charming, and always thought-provoking" (Kirkus). The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "luminous gem" and the Cleveland Plain Dealer "a story exquisitely told." Dessaix's second novel, Corfu, also describes gay ex-pats in Europe and again rings with literary echoes: Homer, Sappho, Chekhov, Cavafy. His nonfiction includes a memoir called A Mother's Disgrace about his own adoption and subsequent wanderlust; Twilight of Love, a book about retracing Turgenev's steps as he followed a married opera star and her husband for years; and an anthology, Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing. Last April he published On Humbug. After a failed marriage to a woman, Dessaix wrote a personal ad in 1982 and met Peter Timms, who is still his partner. As for longevity and dedication, Dessaix created a complex language when he was eleven and continues to speak it to himself even now, as he turns 67 today.

Born January 13: Horatio Alger Jr., Edmund White, Matthew Bourne

Although in the 112 years since his death, Horatio Alger's stories have become synonymous with "rags to riches," the hard working boys in his novels don't amass fortunes. A typical plot is that a rich older queen man notices a plucky orphaned lad, witnesses his act of bravery or honor, and sets him up with a decent low-level job in a company, giving him security but not wealth. Often the older man gets the boy to live with him. Alger himself was a bright youth, entering Harvard at 16 and studying with Longfellow. (At left, his graduation photo at 20.) He became a minister but at 34 fled his Unitarian parish in Brewster, Massachusetts after church officials discovered he was having sex with two teenagers. Or, as they said, committing the "most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys." By that time, 1866, Alger had already written nine books for children; he moved to New York City and over the next 33 years wrote 120 more. Despite his prolific production he never became rich. Besotted with bootblacks and street scruffs, he ate often meals and / or slept at the Newsboys Lodging House and gave away his earnings or was conned out of them by the young men he so admired. Except for Ragged Dick, his books did not become bestsellers until years after his death in 1899 at 67 at his sister Augusta's house in Natick. She destroyed all of his personal papers.

If the phrase "man of letters" isn't too fusty, it applies to no American writer more than Edmund White. He's equally accomplished in a variety of locales, languages, time periods, and literary genres: fiction, travel, memoir, biography, criticism, drama, and cultural observation. In 2009 you learned that he is the contemporary writer John Irving re-reads most often and whose new books he most anticipates. Irving called White's recent fiction, Hotel de Dream,"flawless" and said that White's 1982 landmark gay novel A Boy's Own Story far outshines Cather in the Rye. Readers of all stripes owe White thanks for rescuing Jean Genet with his NBCC award-winning biography, and gay readers in particular are indebted to his honesty about sex and his longtime HIV+ status. Generous with his time and influence, he equally promotes gay literature's forgotten gems (Belchamber) and emerging voices (Salvation Army). A professor at Princeton, White has been made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. His popular memoir City Boy was a NYT notable book and a NBCC finalist. He has more or less finished his next novel, about a long friendship between a gay man and a straight man.

In 1995 Matthew Bourne cast male dancers as the swans in Swan Lake and became a sensation throughout the world. Writing in The New Yorker years later, Joan Acocella said, "it made an old love story romantic again, by making it seem dangerous." Other critics called it "a miracle." Contrary to some purist's grumblings, his Swan Lake is not a gimmick. The rigid establishment has embraced it, adding it to the standard A Level syllabus for dance majors in Britain. Extremely in demand to choreograph other people's big West End musicals, Bourne's goal with his own productions is to make dance interesting to people who ordinarily would avoid it. He enlivened the stale favorite The Nutcracker; created a version of Bizet's Carmen called The Car Man with plenty of shirtless greasemonkeys and a homoerotic subplot adapted from The Postman Always Rings Twice; transformed Edward Scissorhands into a full-length dance; and created a piece called Play Without Words, based on the 60s movie The Servant. Acocella's fact piece on Bourne from March 12, 2007 remains the best profile of him, in part because she directly addresses the gay aspect. He says he specifically wants his work to make homosexuality acceptable. He is still planning an all-male version of Romeo & Juliet called Romeo, Romeo and last year unveiled a dance production of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Born January 5: Alvin Ailey

Growing up in Texas, Alvin Ailey hid his dancing from his disapproving mother for two years and when she first saw him backstage in make-up, she slapped his face. His terror of her homophobia lasted decades, to his final days, so much so that when he was dying of aids at fifty-eight in 1989 he asked his doctor to lie about the cause on his death certificate. That fear outlives him. A CBS profile from August 2008 celebrates the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater's 50th anniversary with great dancing and an American success story of a black troupe thriving in a typically white corner of the arts. It omits any mention that he was gay, or gay people's contribution to dance, that he died of aids, or aids' toll on the arts. It also erases the more complicated aspects of Ailey's life, like his devastating arthritis, his addiction to cocaine, or his dependence on lithium. His private demons never obscured his public genius. One of the seventy-nine dances he choreographed, Revelations, set to spirituals and gospel music, is among the most popular and most seen ballets of the twentieth-century.

Glasgay! Festival and "Lip Service," Glascow's Answer to The L Word

 

Every autumn since 1993, the queer culture festival Glasgay! has been rocking the UK's third largest city with LGBT events in literature, film, theater, music, dance, art, comedy, spoken word, and lectures. What had been a mere fortnight with 3,000 people has grown into a month-long extravaganza attracting more than 35,000 fans. Filling twenty venues, this year's many highlights include:

a crossdressing version of Jean Genet's The Maids

movies old and new -- Orlando, Prayers for Bobby, Stonewall Uprising, and City of Borders, a documentary about Jerusalem's only gay bar

the orchestra-infused arty pop group The Irrespressibles (above live, or enjoy the video version with nudity, pearls, and car washing)

the dancetastic Big Loud & Proud Ceilidh

a lecture by the Glasgow Women's Library Archivist Hannah Little on the hidden treasures of the national lesbian archive

a reading by Jackie Kay (left), whose Trumpet deserves a much wider readership here. The novel was inspired by Billy Tipton, a jazz musician and biological woman who lived as a man for 50 years

 

For anyone unable to attend the events now through November 13 but still in need of your queer Glaswegian fix, BBC 3 answers your prayers with a new series called Lip Service, much like The L Word. The Guardian's Claudia Cahalane loves it. Meet two characters below, the sweet mess Cat and sexy trouble Frankie (she cruises a book thief and offers cigarettes to small children in front of their mom!).

 

A New Biography of Diaghilev, The Man Who Made Ballet Gay?

Diaghilev with one of his dancing lovers, Serge Lifar

 Crowding a shelf already heavy with at least eight biographies of the Russian impresario, Oxford last week published Sjeng Scheijen's 552-page Diaghilev: A Life. Happily, Scheijen gives Diaghilev's homosexuality the attention it warrants because as a ballet master sleeping with his principal dancers, art, self, and sex were always entwined. NYT critic Alastair Macaulay argues

"Ballet was not Diaghilev’s first, second or third love. But he found in it the ideal vehicle to bring other arts together. It’s also likely that it stimulated, and sublimated, his sexuality. As he developed a taste for younger men, so ballet brought him the male beauties he desired; and his status gave him maximum casting-couch power.

"In several cases, his lovers — who included, successively, the star dancers Vaslav Nijinsky, Léonide Massine, Anton Dolin and Serge Lifar — needed no seduction from him; they were ambitious. And this gay Pygmalion was most galvanized when he could turn these male Galateas into artists the world would worship. Ballet had hitherto been essentially a heterosexual art glorifying femininity, but now a long series of Diaghilev ballets cast more luster on hero than heroine, while at least two of them (“Jeux,” “Les Biches”) actively encouraged homosexual nuances."

Sjeng Scheijen divides his time between Amsterdam and Moscow where he is cultural attaché at the Netherlands Embassy. Read an excerpt of his first chapter here.

London's Victoria & Albert Museum is hosting a massive exhibit, Diaghilev and the Golden Age of the Ballet Russes, from September 25 - January 9.

Born March 12: Vaslav Nijinsky, Randall Kenan

By the time Vaslav Nijinsky was nineteen the formerly impoverished youth had already enjoyed exquisite teenage affairs with the forty-something Prince Pavel Dimitrievitch Lvov who drenched him in luxury, a rebound fling with Count Tishkievitch, and had begun his great romantic and professional partnership with Sergei Diaghilev, under whose tutelage Nijinsky was early known as the God of Dance. One of the very few male ballet stars to perform en pointe, his reputation in Russia and Paris grew with each successive role in Cleopatra, Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle. At Diaghilev's urging, Nijinsky began to choreograph his own works and the radical results remain the stuff of legend: at twenty-two, Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun which ended with him masturbating, and a year later Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring which ended with the audience rioting.(Possibly at Stravinsky's prompting, for the publicity.)

Later the same year, impulsively, stupidly, tragically, he married Romola Pulsky, a Romanian woman who had been chasing him across continents and oceans, finally landing him in Buenos Aires. Enraged, Diaghilev fired him. Nijinsky tried and failed to start his own dance troupe. Stumbling in a new and ill-fitting role, the star who was used to being petted and lavished with gifts now had to support a wife and child with no money and no employment. When his stress was its highest, World War I broke out, and he, a Russian in Hungary, was considered an enemy and held as a prisoner. In 1916 Diaghilev rescued him and got the family to New York, to join his Ballets Russes. From the instant of their joyous kissing reunion, Romola came between the lovers. Predictably, Nijinsky's mental state declined. Imagine performing on stage with a fear of the other dancers and a uncontrollable terror that the trap doors would open. Diaghilev removed himself back to Europe; Nijinsky was the wrong person to be left in charge of the company. Later Diaghilev again tried to reconcile, and again Romola "protected" her husband from him, thwarting any more reunions. Nijinsky's depression turned to delusions and Romola, with his doctors, had him committed to an asylum in Switzerland. It was 1919 and he was twenty-nine. For the next thirty-one years he was in and out of institutions until his death in London in 1950.

Randall Kenan dazzled the literary world with his 1989 debut novel, A Visitation of Spirits, about the inhabitants of a Southern rural black community, including a gay man whose internalized homophobia leads him to tragedy. Three years later his first collection of stories, Let the Dead Bury Their Dead, earned even greater acclaim for another empathetic look at the townsfolk of his imagined Tims Creek, North Carolina. Kenan has won a Guggenheim fellowship, a Whiting Writers award, a John Dos Passos award, a Sherwood Anderson award, and a Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but he hasn't published any other books of fiction in 18 years. Instead, he wrote a short YA biography of his idol James Baldwin, collected 200 interviews for his 688-page oral history Walking on Water: Black American Lives at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century, and riffed on Baldwin in a 149-page essay called The Fire This Time. Forty-seven today, he teaches at his alma matter, UNC Chapel Hill.

Born January 13: Horatio Alger Jr., Edmund White, Matthew Bourne

Although in the 111 years since his death, Horatio Alger's stories have become synonymous with "rags to riches," the hard working boys in his novels don't amass fortunes. A typical plot is that a rich older queen man notices a plucky orphaned lad, witnesses his act of bravery or honor, and sets him up with a decent low-level job in company, giving him security but not wealth. Often the older man gets the boy to live with him. Alger himself was a bright youth, entering Harvard at 16 and studying with Longfellow. This is his graduation photo at 20. He became a minister but fled his Unitarian parish in Brewster, Massachusetts and quit the cloth forever at 34 after church officials discovered he was having sex with two teenage males. Or, as they said, committing the "most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys." By that time, 1866, he had already written nine books for children; he moved to New York City and over the next 33 years wrote 120 more. Despite his prolific production he never became rich. Besotted with bootblacks and street scruffs, he ate often meals and / or slept at the Newsboys Lodging House and gave away his earnings or was conned out of them by the young men he so admired. Except for Ragged Dick, his books did not become bestsellers until years after his death in 1899 at 67 at his sister Augusta's house in Natick. She destroyed all of his personal papers.

If the phrase "man of letters" isn't too fusty, it applies to no one better than Edmund White, 70 today. He's equally accomplished in a variety of locales, languages, time periods, and literary genres: fiction, travel, memoir, biography, criticism, drama, and cultural observation. Last year you learned that he is the contemporary writer John Irving re-reads most often and whose new books he most anticipates. Irving called White's recent fiction, Hotel de Dream,"flawless" and said that White's 1982 novel A Boy's Own Story far outshines Cather in the Rye. Readers of all stripes owe White thanks for rescuing Jean Genet with his NBCC award-winning biography, and gay readers in particular are indebted to his honesty about sex and his longtime HIV+ status. Generous with his time and influence, he equally promotes gay literature's forgotten gems (Belchamber) and emerging voices (Salvation Army). A professor at Princeton, White has been made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. His memoir City Boy was a NYT notable and by far the most cited nonfiction on the survey of authors' favorite lgbt books of 2009.

In 1995 Matthew Bourne, 50 today, cast male dancers as the swans in Swan Lake and became a sensation throughout the world. Writing in The New Yorker years later, Joan Acocella said, "it made an old love story romantic again, by making it seem dangerous." Other critics called it "a miracle." Contrary to some purist's grumblings, his Swan Lake is not a gimmick. The rigid establishment has embraced it, adding it to the standard A Level syllabus for dance majors in Britain. Extremely in demand to choreograph other people's big West End musicals, Bourne's goal with own productions is to make dance interesting to people who ordinarily would avoid it. He enlivened the stale favorite The Nutcracker; created a version of Bizet's Carmen called The Car Man with plenty of shirtless greasemonkeys and a homoerotic subplot adapted from The Postman Always Rings Twice; transformed Edward Scissorhands into a full-length dance; and created a piece called Play Without Words, based on the 60s movie The Servant. Acocella's fact piece on Bourne from March 12, 2007 remains the best profile of him, in part because she directly addresses the gay aspect. He says he specifically wants his work to make homosexuality acceptable. He is still planning an all-male version of Romeo & Juliet called Romeo, Romeo and earlier this year unveiled a dance production of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Born January 5: Alvin Ailey

 

Growing up in Texas, Alvin Ailey hid his dancing from his disapproving mother for two years and when she first saw him backstage in make up, she slapped his face. His terror of her homophobia lasted decades, to his final days, so much so that when he was dying of aids at fifty-eight in 1989 he asked his doctor to lie about the cause on his death certificate. That fear outlives him. The CBS profile below from August 2008 celebrates the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater's 50th anniversary with great dancing and an American success story of a black troupe thriving in a typically white corner of the arts. It omits any mention that he was gay, or gay people's contribution to dance, that he died of aids, or aids' toll on the world, and it erases the more complicated aspects of Ailey's life, like his devastating arthritis, his addiction to cocaine, or his dependence on lithium. His private demons never obscured his public genius. One of the seventy-nine dances he choreographed, Revelations, set to spirituals and gospel music, is among the most popular and most seen ballets of the twentieth-century.

Born January 1: Forster, Hoover, Haines, Béjart, Hormel, Orton, Vasquez, Stefano, Arquette, Burrows

E.M. Forster (1879-1970) English novelist revered for Howards End, A Room With a View, A Passage to India, and Maurice, but don't forget his excellent, posthumous collection of stories, The Life to Come, filled with gay men less anguished than those in the superb novels.

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) American FBI director and closet case of unsurpassed twistedness.

William Haines (1900-1973) Hollywood hero, one of the top five grossing movie stars annually from 1928 - 32 for charming films like The Smart Set, The Duke Steps Out, and Just a Gigolo. In 1933 he was busted for picking up a sailor and taking him to a YMCA, prompting his studio to demand a sham marriage to a woman. Haines refused to betray his partner of seven years Jimmie Shields that way, and quit films for a very successful career as an interior designer. Read William J. Mann's extraordinary biography, Wisecracker.

Maurice Béjart (1927-2007) French-Swiss choreographer who directed maverick ballets and all-male homoerotic dances long before Matthew Bourne. Watch this at least until 2:20.

James Hormel (1933 -) Grandson of SPAM, American philanthropist, ambassador, and gay rights activist. Hormel turns 77 today. His partner Michael P. Nguyen graduated from Swarthmore in 2008.

Joe Orton (1933-1967) randy British playwright of explicitly gay hits like Entertaining Mr. Sloane and What the Butler Saw, murdered by his unstable lover. Subject of Stephen Frears' fine biopic Prick Up Your Ears starring Gary Oldman and Vanessa Redgrave.

Eloy de la Iglesia (1944-2006) Spanish writer - director of the gay festival favorite Bulgarian Lovers among other movies.

Junior Vasquez (1946 -) Legendary DJ and diva.

Joey Stefano (1968-1994) Porn superstar. After you've satisfied yourself with his film acting, read Wonder Bread & Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano.

Alexis Arquette (1969 -) American actress, musician, singer, and trans, perhaps best known for his roles in Last Exit to Brooklyn and The Wedding Singer.

Saffron Burrows (1972 -) English actress, former model and former girlfriend of director Mike Figgis, Burrows has for many years been romantically linked with splendid Fiona Shaw. The pair played lovers in a stage adaptation of Jeanette Winterson's The PowerBook yet have never confirmed or denied their relationship. Burrows starred in 2008's surprisingly fun The Bank Job and the NBC sitcom My Own Worst Enemy.

Born January 13: Edmund White, Matthew Bourne

If the phrase "man of letters" isn't too fusty, it applies to no one better than Edmund White. He's equally accomplished in a variety of locales, languages, time periods, and literary genres: fiction, travel, memoir, biography, criticism, drama, and cultural observation. Last week you learned that he is the contemporary writer John Irving re-reads most often and whose new books he most anticipates. Irving called White's recent fiction, Hotel de Dream,"flawless" and said that White's 1982 novel A Boy's Own Story far outshines Cather in the Rye. (A Boy's Own Story is absolutely mandatory. If you haven't read it, now you have another resolution for 2009.) Readers of all stripes owe White thanks for rescuing Jean Genet with his NBCC award-winning biography, and gay readers in particular are indebted to his honesty about sex and his longtime hiv-positive status. (That debt may not extend to his rather downbeat, hustler-dwelling My Lives; read his other books first; his Parisian stroll The Flâneur provides a nicer sense of his melancholy.) A professor at Princeton, White has been made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and an Officier de L'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. Today he turns 69.

Should Matthew Bourne be everyone's role model? At 49, he combines such vast expertise and originality that he has permanently altered his profession, and he's done it by being gay. In 1995 he cast male dancers as the swans in Swan Lake and became a sensation throughout the world. Writing in The New Yorker years later, Joan Acocella said, "it made an old love story romantic again, by making it seem dangerous." Other critics called it "a miracle." Contrary to some purist's grumblings, his Swan Lake is not a gimmick. The rigid establishment has embraced it, adding it to the standard A Level syllabus for dance majors in Britain. Nor is it too elitist. Extremely in demand to choreograph other people's big West End musicals, Bourne's goal with own productions is to make dance interesting to people who ordinarily would avoid it. He enlivened the stale favorite The Nutcracker; created a version of Bizet's Carmen called The Car Man with plenty of shirtless greasemonkeys and a homoerotic subplot adapted from The Postman Always Rings Twice; transformed Edward Scissorhands into a full-length dance; and created a piece called Play Without Words, based on the 60s movie The Servant. Acocella's fact piece on Bourne from March 12, 2007 remains the best profile of him, in part because she directly addresses the gay aspect. He says he specifically wants his work to make homosexuality acceptable. He is planning an all-male version of Romeo & Juliet called Romeo, Romeo.

Stay with this clip at least till 2:35, then you'll be hooked. (And bear in mind this was for the Royal Variety Performance, broadcast in the UK. Compare that to the extreme unlikelihood of the Kennedy Center Honors doing a gay romance.)

Born January 5: Juan Goytisolo, Alvin Ailey

Praised by Mario Vargas Llosa, Carlos Fuentes, Guillermo Cabrera Infante, Edmund White, and according to the Guardian, "widely acknowledged as Spain's greatest living writer," Juan Goytisolo has lived in self-imposed exile in Marrakech since the 1960s. (He is 78 today and now spends part of each year in Paris.) His more than thirty books make clear why he left his native land: Franco, the post-Franco government, the Catholic church, middle class bourgeois attitudes, and homophobia. Also, he loves Arabs, particularly illiterate or uneducated men whose gayness is not marked by effeminate behavior but a hyper virility. Depending on which critics you ask, his masterpiece is either his two-volume memoir, groundbreaking for among other things their frankness about gay sex, or his trilogy comprised of Marks of Identity, Count Julian, and Juan the Landless. His most recent novel, A Cock-Eyed Comedy, recounts the ribald sexual antics of a priest in Goytisolo's typically subversive style.

If you watch the CBS profile below from last August celebrating the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater's 50th anniversary, you'll see some great dancing and an American success story of a black troupe thriving in a typically white corner of the arts. What you won't see is any mention that he was gay, or gay people's contribution to dance, that he died of aids, or aids' toll on the world, nor will you see any of the more complicated aspects of his life, like his devastating arthritis, his addiction to cocaine, or his dependence on lithium. To his final days, at fifty-eight, he was so terrified of his mother's homophobia (growing up in Texas, he hid his dancing from her for two years; when she first saw him backstage in make up, she slapped his face), he asked his doctor to lie about the cause on his death certificate. His private demons never obscured his public genius. One of the seventy-nine dances he choreographed, Revelations, set to spirituals and gospel music, is among the most popular and most seen ballets of the twentieth-century.

Born December 24: Robert Joffrey, Bob Smith

Born in Seattle to an Afghan father and Italian mother, Adbullah Jaffa Bey Khan had asthma and wore braces on his feet, and, to strengthen his breathing and his legs, began studying dance at twelve. At sixteen he fell in love with a twenty-two year man in the Coast Guard named Gerald Arpino. A few years later they moved to New York together and Joffrey made his debut at "nineteen" with Ballets de Paris. (Probably he was twenty-one; all evidence suggests he lied about being born in 1930.)  Becoming a soloist in May O'Donnell's troupe from 1950-3, he realized at 5'4" his prospects as a dancer were limited, and concentrating on choreography and teaching, he longed to start his own company. With Arpino, he did. The Robert Joffrey Ballet won great acclaim for their originality (especially emphasizing male virtuosity in what had traditionally been a ballerina's world) and they struggled financially. In 1963 President Kennedy invited them to perform at the White House and they toured Russia, sponsored by the State Department, to thunderous applause; upon returning to America they lost their funding. When he was forty-five and still living with (though no longer in a sexual relationship with) Arpino who was co-director of the company, Joffrey fell in love with a twenty-six year-old art gallery manager named Aladar Marberger. Both men contracted HIV and died of aids within months of each other in 1988. Arpino became artistic director of the Joffrey that year and in 1995 moved the company to Chicago. He died this past October, still connected with the company he and Joffrey created.

God bless Bob Smith, the first openly gay comedian on The Tonight Show and the author of the funniest sign at New York's Prop 8 protests. Oh, yes, he's also the author of Selfish and Perverse the Publishing Triangle Award nominated first novel covering a few months in the life of Nelson Kunker, a handsome, endearingly hapless television writer from Los Angeles who falls in love with Roy, a salmon fisherman, and spends the summer with him in Alaska. Dylan Fabizak, a hot actor / recovering addict / compulsive flirt wheedles his way into their lives; quips, sex, and danger ensue, sometimes simultaneously. Smith said he would cast Seann William Scott as Dylan. He's working on his second novel, which will be mandatory reading when it comes out.

2008 Pulitzer Prizes

The Pulitzer board doesn't publicly reveal the two finalists in each category until they announce the winners, which happened this afternoon. Two openly gay writers whose books were mentioned here multiple times have been selected as finalists. In biography, Martin Duberman's The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein was honored and in the very crowded  general nonfiction category, the debut book from The New Yorker's music critic Alex Ross, The Rest Is Noise, was recognized.

Born March 12: Vaslav Nijinsky

By the time Vaslav Nijinsky was nineteen the formerly impoverished youth had already had exquisite teenage affairs with the forty-something Prince Pavel Dimitrievitch Lvov who drenched him in luxury, a rebound fling with Count Tishkievitch, and had begun his great romantic and professional partnership with Sergei Diaghilev, under whose tutelage Nijinsky was early known as the God of Dance. One of the very few male ballet stars to perform en pointe, his reputation in Russia and Paris grew with each successive role in Cleopatra, Sleeping Beauty, and Giselle. At Diaghilev's urging, Nijinsky began to choreograph his own works and the radical results remain the stuff of legend: at twenty-two, Debussy's Afternoon of a Faun which ended with him masturbating, and a year later Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring which ended with the audience rioting. Later the same year, impulsively, stupidly, tragically, he married Romola Pulsky, a Romanian woman who had been chasing him across continents and oceans, finally landing him in Buenos Aires. Enraged, Diaghilev fired him. Nijinsky tried and failed to start his own dance troupe. Stumbling in a new and ill-fitting role, the star who was used to being petted and lavished with gifts now had to support a wife and child with no money and no employment. When his stress was its highest, World War I broke out, and he, a Russian in Hungary, was considered an enemy and held as a prisoner. In 1916 Diaghilev rescued him and got the family to New York, to join his Ballets Russes. From the instant of their joyous kissing reunion, Romola came between the lovers. Unsurprisingly, Nijinsky's mental state declined. Imagine performing on stage with a fear of the other dancers and a uncontrollable terror that the trap doors would open. Diaghilev removed himself back to Europe; Nijinsky was the wrong person to be left in charge of the company. Later Diaghilev again tried to reconcile, and again Romola "protected" her husband from him, thwarting any more reunions. Nijinsky's depression turned to delusions and Romola, with his doctors, had him committed to an asylum in Switzerland. It was 1919 and he was twenty-nine. For the next thirty-one years he was in and out of institutions until his death in London in 1950.

Born February 15: Bill T. Jones

How's this for the cruel vagaries of aids: In 1984, both Bill T. Jones and Arnie Zane, professional partners running their jointly named dance troupe and boyfriends for thirteen years, since college at SUNY Binghamton, were diagnosed with HIV. Zane died in 1988. Last June, after twenty-three years of being HIV+, Jones added a Tony Award for Spring Awakening's choreography to his many, many honors including a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1994. His more than one hundred maverick dance pieces, which frequently incorporate same-sex attraction, eroticism, anger, and nudity, have been seen worldwide and he often collaborates with the era's leading artists, from Toni Morrison and Max Roach on Degga to Jessye Norman for How! Do! We! Do! Confronting the perceived death sentence of aids, he traveled the country interviewing many kinds of terminally ill patients before creating his celebration of living, Still/Here, which many have loved and some have hated, like the New Yorker's dance critic Arlene Croce, who refused to see such "victim art." In 1995, Jones published his autobiography Last Night on Earth, happily misnamed.

Saturday Morning International Dance Diplomacy

It started seven years ago as a spoof on a Japanese comedy show, mocking the inanity of boy bands and the government's blind optimism in the face of a severe recession (suggesting people stay happy even when they've lost all their clothes but a fig leaf). An instant classic, Yatta! was released as a single by the Leaf Squad in April 2001, reached #6 on the Japanese pop charts and went triple platinum. Because there is no greater universal truth than underwear dancing, Yatta became a global phenomenon. You can compare the contrasting styles of French boys outdoors in Lyon, French boys indoors at CMF, California boys on stage at UC Santa Barbara, Southern boys in a male beauty pageant (with the Japanese version projected behind them), Seattle boys in green shorts rather than the mandatory fig leaves, German boys in a basement in Marburg, a kind of awesome animated version shot in Star Wars Galaxies by SOE, and the original Leaf Squad recreating their sensation live on Jimmy Kimmel. By far the best version comes from eight Swedish boys from the Katedral school in Vaxjo, found by Brian.

The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein

On the off chance you aren’t going to make time for all 736 pages of Martin Duberman’s The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein to be published next week by Knopf, at least read Claudia Roth Pierpont’s trenchant review in this week’s New Yorker. Kirstein is most remembered for getting Balanchine to America in 1933 and later co-founding and running the New York City Ballet with him into the 1980s, but his influence extended throughout all the arts: literature, painting, sculpture, photography, theater, and film. Often considered to have known everyone, Kirstein was a particularly powerful force in the thriving culture of gay artists, befriending among many others George Platt Lynes, Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Cecil Beaton, W.H. Auden, Glenway Wescott, Virgil Thomson, Philip Johnson, Pavel Tchelitchev, and Paul Cadmus, whose sister he married without pausing in his endless succession of affairs with young male dancers. He came out publicly in 1982; he died in 1996. Pierpont notes, "The sheer breadth of Kirstein's endeavor--so unthinkable in the present age of specialization--has made him appear to some people to be the last historical example of the Renaissance man."

Recently, in The New Yorker

"Stay single and stay alive" was a proposed slogan for John Waters' new comedy series 'Til Death Do Us Part about real-life married couples in which one spouse has murdered the other. It might also be John Waters' own motto, as he tells the Talk of the Town reporter in this week's New Yorker [March 26, 2007] that he's never  lived with a boyfriend. He turns 61 next month and still delights in an old-school feyness. "I always thought the privilege of being gay is that we don't have to get married or go in the Army. I personally have no desire to imitate a fairly corny, expensive heterosexual tradition, though I certainly know gay couples who are married who should be. I am all for it. I have always joked that the growth industries are gay divorce and tattoo removal."

Gay presence in the New Yorker has improved recently. Last week’s issue [March 19, 2007] featured a profile of the four finalists for Britain’s 2006 Turner Prize in art, including video artist Phil Collins. “Although he officially lives in Glasgow with his boyfriend, he spends most of his time traveling—to Belfast, Belgrade, Bogota, Baghdad—and making elaborate videos with the locals.” He has upcoming solo shows at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh [March 31 – July 1] and the Dallas Museum of Art.

Also in that issue, Dana Goodyear profiled Cameron Silver, owner of Decades, the influential vintage couture shop on Melrose. He is a former cabaret singer and Peggy Moffitt considers Cameron “the most socially adept person I’ve ever met, and I’ve met loads and loads of people in a very long life.” His bar mitzvah reception, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, was named “The Cameron Awards” where he sang “Easy Street,” “New York, New York,” and “You’re Never Fully Dressed Without a Smile” wearing a tuxedo, top hat, and white gloves, before giving his guests faux Oscars. Unrelated, he’s gay. He and his boyfriend of nine years, “a handsome commercial actor named Jeff Snyder,” won an award from the L.A. Conservancy for their restoration of their 1930 Rudolf Schindler house in Los Feliz. The first paragraph includes Gwen Stefani, Sandy Hill, Julia Roberts, Chloe Sevigny, and Jada Pinkett Smith, and the article continues apace for seven pages. As is always the case with first rate fashion writing, the clothes outshine the stars.

Lastly in that issue, John Colapinto wrote a very long profile of Karl Lagerfeld.

The previous issue of the New Yorker [March 12, 2007] featured Joan Acocella’s essential profile of choreographer Matthew Bourne, which broke the much-repeated story of his plans to stage a gay version of the Romeo & Juliet ballet to be called Romeo, Romeo. “Bourne lives in Church Cottage with his partner, Arthur Pita—formerly a dancer in his company, now an independent choreographer—and their two Chihuahuas, Mr. Eddie and Grace.”

The March 12 issue also gave readers Paul Rudnick’s brief comic essay “Inappropriate,” which imagined unsuitable books for children such as The Big Floppy Penis and Where’s Waldo’s Hand? One imaginary book’s description ended with, “And so before eating his meagre ration of watery gruel, he would masturbate until his palm bled.”