Band of Thebes

Gay History Week: New Mattachine, Normal Heart, Milk Stamp

Two big gay profiles in today's New York Times: 1) Larry Kramer on the decades-long journey to film The Normal Heart, airing on HBO this Sunday, and 2) the successful efforts of the newly revived Mattachine Society of Washington DC, headed by my husband Charles Francis, to find and bring forth hidden legal and political documents of the early and recent gay rights battles. The story, Uncovered Papers Show Past Government Efforts To Drive Gays from Jobs, is currently the third-most-emailed feature on the paper's Nation page. Obviously not every topic could make the article but I was particularly sorry they cut Charles' praise for Allan Berube, the MacArthur genius who wrote Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in World War II, and the invisible gay blogger who turned Charles on to degayed history and introduced him to Berube's work his fellow Mattachine board members Rick Rosendall and Pate Felts, as well as the many pro bono attorneys at MWE including Lisa Linsky.

Tomorrow is Harvey's 84th birthday and the official release of the Milk stamp.

Born April 14: John Gielgud, Angela

In 1991 John Gielgud became the fourth person in the universe to EGOT, having won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. Also the winner of multiple BAFTAs and Golden Globes and a special Olivier Award, Gielgud was and is still considered one of the world's finest actors. A consummate performer of Shakespeare on stage and screen, he was equally at home in historical dramas such as Brideshead Revisited (and Caligula), experimental works such as Beckett's Catastrophe, and contemporary comedies like Arthur. In 1953, he was arrested and convicted of cottaging in Chelsea Mews. Unlike today's finger-wagging moralists (see George Michael's career after his entrapment for cruising, thanks largely to homophobic record execs and radio programmers), the post-War public did not scorn him; rather, at his next appearance on stage he was given a standing ovation. Indeed, that same year he was knighted. Although Gielgud was out and discussed his homosexuality in his autobiography, when he died at ninety-six in 2000, many obituaries degayed his life and omitted his partner of almost four decades, Martin Hensler. When criticized, the Washington Post defended their decision saying he was known for being an actor, not for being gay. Their long tribute included the details that he loved to garden and enjoyed trashy commercial paperback novels. Read his books An Actor and His Time and Backward Glances.

My sister Angela is every kind of awesome, and more. At three, upon hearing she was going to get a baby brother, she urged our parents to name me Julia Child. From that summit of prescience, her insights have grown wiser every day. She and her partner of 22 years met by sitting next to each other at the SF lgbt film fest, Frameline. (See what happens when you support queer film!) They live in Berkeley.

1,000-Page Stanwyck Bio "Does Not Explore Issues of Personal Sexuality"

Why are critics giving Victoria Wilson a pass for degaying A Life of Barbara Stanwyck [Kindle]? Is it because she's an editor at Knopf? Or is it because they know diehard fans don't like their icons outed? At 1,044 pages this volume covers only half of the closeted actress's life and apparently avoids her orientation altogether. The very, very exhaustive index lacks entries for sexuality, homosexuality, lesbian, gay, or rumors, and the NYT critic hurries past the colossal implications in noting, "Ms. Wilson does not explore issues of personal sexuality. What she does tackle is the outrageous ways in which sexual stereotypes were marketed to pitch movies." 

In a long interview, Lara Fowler asked if Stanwyck's second marriage to Robert Taylor was to cover up their mutual homosexualities and Wilson only denies Taylor's queerness... with the "proof" of Harry Hay's word. [As Mattachine founder and fiery Communist, Hay possibly was not welcome in all Hollywood circles. Stanwyck was an ice-cold conservative.] Wilson said, with appalling nerve if the NYT is accurate that her book avoids personal sexuality,:

"I had one ambition for my biography of Barbara Stanwyck, and that was to write a book that reflected the truth about my subject and her world, regardless of what it was. I have written quite detailed portraits of Stanwyck’s two marriages; the first to Frank Fay; the second to Robert Taylor. Each marriage was complex and came about because of complex reasons – and stayed in tact because of equally complicated reasons; neither marriage came about because of homosexuality. I asked many people who would have a somewhat informed inkling about Robert Taylor’s sexuality, people who knew him at the time, or would have heard about the (then, of necessity) underground truth of his sexuality and nowhere did I come across any hint of his being gay, including interviewing Harry Hay, founder in 1950 of the Mattachine Society. If anyone would have known, or heard about the truth of Taylor’s sexuality over the years, it would have been Harry Hay. . ."

For a more honest look, get William Mann's Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 or Boze Hadleigh's Hollywood Lesbians.

Eisenhower Museum, Biographies Ignore His Antigay Executive Order

Sixty years ago this month, Eisenhower signed the risible Executive Order 10450 banning gay people and other 'perverts' from government service. It established the falsehood that lgbt employees were security risks, authorized FBI investigations of suspected deviants, and destroyed thousands of careers and lives. In an essay posted today, Charles Francis explores its inception and its awful legacy. He investigates the demise of the order's patient zero, Arthur Vandenberg Jr., son the of Senate Foreign Relations Chair. The younger Arthur organized Citizens for Eisenhower and the new administration had already announced his appointment as Secretary to the President, until Hoover smeared him with details of Arthur's hidden gay life, forcing him to abandon public service and leave Washington forever. The essay cites David Johnson, author of The Lavender Scare: The Cold War Persecution of Gays and Lesbians in the Federal Government, with the White House's 1953 press release stating that within the first four months of the new Order, 1,456 employees had been 'separated from Federal service' for security reasons. 

Charles' essay also reveals the dismaying extent to which this crucial antigay flash point has been erased from history. He read the three most recent Eisenhower tomes -- by Jean Edward Smith (Random House, 2012), Evan Thomas (Little, Brown, 2012), and Jim Newton (Doubleday, 2011) -- only to discover each author had ignored it. The books never mention Executive Order 10450. Pressing further, Charles traveled to the Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum in Abilene, Kansas. He writes:

"The Eisenhower Museum's version of events appears on a bright-red text board under the heading 'Personal Freedom vs. National Security.' It reads, 'Eisenhower believed that personal initiative and freedom lay at the heart of the American way of life.' Later it continues, 'Eisenhower recognized that internal threats to American national security existed. ... Investigators reviewed thousands of government workers deemed possible security risks, and dismissed around 1,500 between 1953 and 1957. Another 6,000 resigned rather than undergo often far-reaching questioning of their personal lives.'

"I had found my answer. The Eisenhower Museum interprets the executive order by not mentioning the word 'perversion.' The visitor must decode the phrase 'questioning their personal lives.' LGBT Americans remain the invisible human wreckage. Newly declassified documents reveal that the "questioning" was a systematic, sometimes obsessive investigation, managed by Hoover himself, as part of the FBI's 'Sex Deviates in Government Service' program.

In his final paragraph, he calls for the museum to rewrite its official text and include the LGBT citizens excluded by Ike's order.

"There is no remedy for the thousands whose lives were destroyed, the searing and humiliating personal investigations, the untold numbers of men and women driven from public service. But, as in any 'truth and reconciliation' project, let us at least tell the story. The National Archives and Records Administration working with the curators at the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum should take down that text board for review and a rewrite. Add the words 'sexual perversion.' Following the word 'thousands' insert 'homosexuals.' Then add 'LGBT Americans.'"

As far as Band of Thebes knows, the Eisenhower family has never spoken about Executive Order 10450 and the decades of unjustified government animus against gay and lesbian Americans initiated by their ancestor. Of course no one can be asked to answer for their forerunners, yet in the spirit of greater inclusiveness and simple historical accuracy, we welcome the next generation's thoughts on this aspect of his legacy the next time they are called upon to celebrate his heroics.

(photo by Charles Francis)

Tariq Ali On Two Gay Writers Who Made Lincoln Straight

"Not very convincing," says Tariq Ali in his LRB piece taking apart Tony Kushner's attempt to have it both ways regarding his establishment-pandering and, surprise, surprise, much-nominated screenplay Lincoln. Kushner claims while he "personally believes" the 16th president was queer, he can justify degaying him because:

"I wanted to write about a very specific moment and I chose this moment and I don’t feel that there’s any evidence at this particular moment that Lincoln was having sex with anybody… He seems to have not slept and taken no time off and during this period I think he was beginning to feel ground to a pulp by the war and by the pressures of his job. I find it difficult to believe that Lincoln was banging anybody."

So we're only gay during the moments when we're "banging anybody"? And people in stressful, powerful jobs never use sex as a release? As Ali says, "history and present times contradict such a narrow view."

That's the old news. The new aspect is that Ali reveals he confronted Gore Vidal about his degayed Lincoln [Kindle]. From a taperecorded lunch in Los Angeles:

TA: Given the recent book and materials on Lincoln’s homosexuality how do you feel having portrayed him as a raving heterosexual in your novel?

GV: You’re a bastard. What a bastard question. It hurts. It hurts. How could I have missed that?

TA: You didn’t look?

GV: I had no idea, but since Tripp's book I’ve gone back and devoured everything on the subject. There is no doubt in my mind. Once he was in bed with the Captain and the latter’s son walked in. On another occasion they were disturbed and Lincoln opened the door wearing his lover’s nightgown. Oh what a fool I was.

Lincoln was published in 1984. Three decades later, here we are.

Degayed Thornton Wilder Bio Attacked - Belatedly - in NYT Book Review

The hero of the week is Cheever biographer Blake Bailey for his roaring criticism of Penelope Niven's decision to degay her biography of Thornton Wilder. Although Bailey doesn't mention him, the disgraceful omission is also a stain on the distinguished, 50-year career of Niven's editor Hugh Van Dusen (Jacques Barzun, Howard Zinn) who ought to have had the moral strength to insist on an open and accurate portrayal of Wilder's life. To say nothing of Harper's gay publisher Jonathan Burnham. Great as Bailey's critique is, readers will notice the NYT Book Review buried his review two months after the book's release, when it might have had a more significant impact on how the mainstream received this whitewashed work. Bailey writes:

"The gorilla in the room, of course, is Wilder’s sexual orientation, around which Niven does some very fancy dancing. The first explicit mention of homosexuality occurs on Page 99, in reference to a “young ballet dancer” named Hubert whose letters “suggest an overt interest in the Thornton of the vivid blue eyes,” though Wilder “appeared to be innocently unaware.” Fifty-some pages later, an actor named Gareth Hughes piques a dawning awareness in Wilder, who considers Hughes “the divinest thing to look upon that I have ever seen.” Lest we leap to rash conclusions, however, Niven is keen to remind us — over and over, a veritable mantra — that Wilder was a very private man and this is a very private matter. Meanwhile, she concedes, in so many words, that the lives of Wilder’s siblings were also blighted by sexual repression. Charlotte was the most forthcoming on the subject: a promising poet before the onset of mental illness and an eventual lobotomy, she hinted at her predicament in five “Monologues of Repression,” while admitting elsewhere that she’d never managed a “homosexual consummation” because she was “too frigid” even to kiss. The bleakness of such a life — a bleakness her brother doubtless knew only too well — was perhaps “one significant root of her breakdown,” according to Niven.

"So why is Niven reluctant to discuss this root in Thornton’s case? Let her tell it: “Opinions diverge as to whether a writer’s sex life is a legitimate field for public examination unless it serves as subject matter and/or thematic matter for the artistic work, or unless it has, with the writer’s complicity, emerged into public view as a defining force in the life and work. A very private man. . . . ” — and so on. The occasion for this oracular windup is the only piece of real evidence we have that Thornton himself enjoyed a consummation or two (albeit fleeting and skittish) with one Samuel Steward, who wrote of the encounter in a 1981 memoir. Niven goes after Steward like a stern nun wielding a ruler with germproof gloves. First she impugns his credibility, pointing out that he got his facts “slightly askew,” to wit: 43 years after the fact, Steward claimed that he and Wilder had spent “six or seven” days together in Zurich, rather than the two and a half that both men claimed in contemporaneous accounts. Other hard things are said against Steward’s general character until, grimly, Niven allows that “a case can be made” in favor of Wilder’s bisexuality. That said — and never mind Niven’s previous assertion that sexual frustration may well have led to actual schizophrenia for poor Charlotte — Thornton Wilder was (wait for it) “a deeply private man,” and one should protect his privacy in the same spirit that he would have protected the privacy of his partners: “not out of hypocrisy but out of affection, out of courtesy, out of propriety, out of respect for others, and himself.”

"Where to begin? First of all, “a case can be made” that on a certain level Wil­der was not an especially “private” man at all; he was a lonely man, and there’s a difference. To put a finer point on it: Wil­der was a man with hundreds of friends but no real intimates, and to the former he was willing to tell pretty much all there was to tell about his life. What he was “private” about, very specifically, was his all but nonexistent sex life, perhaps because he couldn’t find words to convey the matter even to himself. Whom is Niven appeasing with all her cant about privacy? Wilder? Wilder’s dead, and you relinquish a certain degree of privacy by dying (or so thought Voltaire: “To the dead we owe only the truth”). She reminds me of nothing so much as the would-be biographer in Wilder’s “Bridge of San Luis Rey,” Brother Juniper, who despite an exhaustive investigation misses the “central passion” of his subjects’ lives. “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it? — every, every minute?” the dead Emily wonders, plaintively, at the end of “Our Town.” In that line one hears something of Wilder’s personal tragedy, and (it was his genius to suggest) that of humanity at large."

Thanks to Stephen Motika for sending me this review on vacation. Buy his book Western Practice.

NYT Praises Thornton Wilder Biography for Its "Sexlessness"

Thornton Niven Wilder was gay. He enjoyed an affair with Sam Steward while writing Our Town. He was great friends with Gertrude and Alice in Paris when their salon was dominated by their "seconde famille" of gay men, including Carl Van Vechten, who photographed him at left. One link that gave deeper meaning and context to his numerous other friendships with people like Willa Cather and Montgomery Clift was their unvoiced common queerness. 

So it's a sour surprise to read that Penelope Niven's 832-page biography released this week from Harper apparently erases Wilder's private life just because he was reticent in his own time. The sourness turns rancid upon seeing the NYT praise a biographer for whitewashing an enormous, relevant aspect of her subject's life.

Charles Isherwood writes, "Among the refreshing aspects of Penelope Niven’s new biography, Thornton Wilder: A Life, is its startling sexlessness, the paucity of the kind of dish that sometimes has seemed to drive the market in literary biography in recent decades. Ms. Niven, the author of books about Carl Sandburg and Edward Steichen, has dug deeply into the copiously documented life of her subject, drawing on access to substantial troves of previously undisclosed family papers. And yet, setting aside the dubious testimony of a single man who claims to have gone to bed with Wilder, Thornton Wilder: A Life tells of a life lived without the sexual relationships and romantic attachments that we sometimes falsely assume to be the most momentous passages in an artist’s — or anyone’s — life."

This is a preposterous leap of illogic for a critic to make. Sex need not be the "most momentous passage" to be worthy of inclusion in a lengthy examination of his life.

Possibly Isherwood is misrepresenting the book. Edward Albee calls it "a splendid and long-needed work."

Philip Kennicott Slams the Art World's Homophobia

In the Washington Post, Philip Kennicott blasts a favorite Thebes topic: the entrenched homophobia of museums, galleries, and critics, with much discussion of Christopher Reed's new book, Art and Homosexuality: A History of Ideas. Kennicott's essay is must reading:

"Even the arts world, often seen as a haven for diversity, is being forced to confront a long record of using cultural power to demean, control and hide the contributions of gay artists...

"While both [Hide/Seek] and Reed’s book make a positive case for the often intimately entwined histories of homosexuality and art (especially in the 20th century), they also document a litany of shameful events and grievances, many of them perpetrated by institutions and people who may be forced to confront past bigotry and make amends...

"Even museums that are not actively in the business of anti-gay bigotry are often prone to hiding the rich history of same-sex desire... Rarely, if ever, is any explanation given for the role that figures such as Ganymede (a boy kidnapped by Zeus), Saint Sebastian (depicted as a handsome youth pierced by arrows) and Orpheus (who in some versions of the legend turns away from women and to the love of boys after his ultimate loss of Eurydice) play in the iconography of same-sex eroticism.

"In some cases it is museum policy not to explain anything about the art (another suicidal habit of the modern American museum). But in other cases, the information is simply missing. As cultural change continues... institutional silence on gay themes may no longer be seen as an innocuous, 'family friendly' strategy. 'Family' is now understood to include gay parents, married gay couples and people with gay children, and the absence of basic information about the role of same-sex desire in art history has become an overt sin of omission."

As Kennicott explains, "Whole movements and eras, from the aestheticists of the late 19th century to the abstract expressionists of the mid-20th century, simply don’t have coherence without reference to same-sex desire."

While unmasking the antigay biogtry of straight powerbrokers -- "the downtown Artists’ Club, which served prominent ab-ex painters, also encoded a 'no homosexuals' clause in its constitution" -- Kennicott also points out that gay artists Gilbert & George refused to allow their work to be included in a gay show in 1982 or in Reed's book now.

More to come about Reed's intriguing book, just out from Oxford University Press.

Big thanks to a favorite reader for the tip.

The Met Degays Another Queer Icon, Alexander McQueen

The perfectionist in Alexander McQueen would find much to admire in the stunning show of his work, Savage Beauty, which opened today at the Met, while the rebel in him would detest the way he has been softened, defanged, and degayed for rich, conservative fashion matrons/museum patrons. Andrew Bolton's curatorial notes often mention McQueen's "politics" and his complicated relationship growing up in England with Scottish roots yet the discussion of his work completely erases the outsider queer energy that fueled his visionary genius.

Trained as a tailor in Savile Row, McQueen's craftsmanship and obsession with detail (and his vast stable of couture workers, largely ignored in the exhibit) made his clothes technical masterpieces. His shattering originality, always engaging the past to destroy it and reinvent it, raised his work to art. Aiming higher still, he presented each collection in elaborately staged performances reinforcing the season's theme, with the models moving as pieces on a giant chess board, or robotic nozzles spray-painting colors onto a spinning woman's white dress on the runway, or an enormous two-way mirror-box alternately reflecting the audience and revealing his creations. I saw a private preview earlier and was wowed. Brave the stampedes and see it twice before July 31. The show's catalog from Yale Press is already in Amazon's Top 100 bestsellers. Click to enlarge.

 

Study Documents NY Museums' Wide Suppression of LGBT Themes

Last week, Out History released a previously unpublished study by curator Jonathan David Katz and Weena Perry documenting the suppression of LGBT themes in exhibits, online education, and printed catalogs at New York's leading museums. Of the seven institutions, the Guggenheim ranked the highest with a nonetheless low score of 12% inclusiveness and the worst, with a total of 0%, was the New York Historical Society. The Met earned an abysmal 1.8%. Such willful exclusion of queer scholarship and information is deeply damaging; the report argues  

"The failure of museums to engage in a wide swathe of art historical scholarship is of grave concern because it raises the question of historical accuracy. Failing to educate the public about the LGBT subject matter or significance of the work, or of the work’s producer, does a profound disservice to the work as a cultural document, to the LGBT community which has produced a number of greatly respected and admired artists, and to the society as a whole."

Beyond the macro view, the details of the museums' pettiness are painful to read: "As recently as 2005, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was asked if they would simply list a symposium on Rauschenberg and sexuality among their publicity materials for their Rauschenberg Combines exhibit. They refused, as they refused to include sexuality in any way in the exhibition itself."

The full report covers the years from 1995 to its completion in August 2007 but was never been published.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the Smithsonian is hosting a two-day free public forum called Flashpoints and Fault Lines:  Museum Curation and Controversy, which will be broadcast live on the web starting at 6:00pm. Katz and Charles Francis are two of the speakers on the panel Representing Sensitive Topics: Gender and Sexuality, scheduled to begin at 7:15pm. They will dazzle, of course, but otherwise the majority of participants are so uniformly establishment -- handpicked by the Smithsonian -- the event might be renamed Curation and Conformity. Notice on Wednesday's panel titled Curation, the questions include "To what extent do public figures have a say in how they are presented? How do we listen to cultural communities and account for their sensibilities and sensitivities?" When the "cultural community" complaining was the Catholic League, the museum immediately removed the Wojnarowicz piece from Hide/Seek. When it's criticism from the LGBT community, the results are documented in the report above.

Canonfire: Roland Emmerich's Anonymous Explodes 'Shakespeare'

Rhys Ifans, Vanessa Redgrave, Derek Jacobi, David Thewlis, Rafe Spall, and Mark Rylance star in the master of disaster Roland Emmerich's new movie Anonymous, arguing that Shakespeare's plays were written by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. To allow enough cannonfire and violence to keep today's audiences engaged with a story about writing, the story unfolds during the Essex rebellion. In interviews Emmerich has been saying when the film opens in September he expects protestors outside his London townhouse. Won't it be odd if the openly gay director and the openly gay narrator (Jacobi, a noted Oxfordian) relish angering fans over the contested authorship question yet are too timid to portray the fact that 126 of the sonnets are addressed to the poet's beloved young man? What is a naked woman doing at 1:33? Alack, there lies more peril in thine eye than.. Radiohead soundtrack?

In case you were wondering, twelve years on, I am still enraged that Shakespeare in Love shows the Bard penning Sonnet 18 to Gwyneth Paltrow. To paraphrase Sonnet 420: Dude. Lame.

Eastwood Liked Hoover Script Because It Avoided Homosexuality

Clint Eastwood tells the Wall Street Journal he was attracted to Dustin Lance Black's J. Edgar Hoover script because it "didn't quite go down that road" exploring the FBI chief's sexuality. Although the director says "If you're doing a biography, you try to stay as accurate as possible to reality," he appears ready to ignore a central aspect of Hoover's life -- especially odd given that Hoover himself was obsessed with exploiting people's hidden sex lives. He spent the bulk of his career illegally amassing his infamous "secret files" detailing the private acts of notable people. WSJ interviewer Michael Judge writes:

"The Hoover screenplay was written by Dustin Lance Black, the Oscar-winning writer of the 2008 film "Milk" about the life and 1978 murder of gay-rights activist and San Francisco City Councilman Harvey Milk. When I ask if the screenplay addresses reports by former FBI employees that Hoover was a cross-dresser and perhaps a closeted homosexual, Mr. Eastwood says not really. In fact, what attracted him to the screenplay was the fact that it "didn't quite go down that road."

"As with all his films, Mr. Eastwood didn't rely on others to do his research. "I went back and read probably all the material that [Mr. Black] had read. . . . I went and visited with the FBI in Washington, D.C., and tried to find out as much as I could about people who had worked with Hoover."

"Mr. Eastwood's main interests are the workings of a sprawling, crime-fighting bureaucracy and how a young man—Hoover was 29 when he was made director of the Bureau of Investigation in 1924—survived to serve eight presidents, from Calvin Coolidge to Richard Nixon. Hoover was, in many ways, "the most powerful guy in the country," says Mr. Eastwood, "at a time when America was by far the most powerful country" in the world.

"The film spans Hoover's entire career, from the 1919-20 Palmer Raids, which saw thousands of suspected anarchists, socialists and other radicals detained or deported; to the Gangster Wars of the 1930s that resulted in the shooting deaths of such arch-criminals as John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson; to the wiretaps and secret dossiers of the 1950s and '60s on "subversives" that included leftists and Communist Party members but also political rivals, celebrities and civil-rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr.

Hoover's name is synonymous with abuse of power, yet Eastwood seems to want to flit over that and focus elsewhere, like his "great ideas." He says:

"I'm sure he had his excesses. . . . He was obviously a very detailed guy all his life, starting as a very young man. He had some great ideas—modern-day investigative techniques [like fingerprinting and forensic science]. But he also liked the glory of it all."

Some questions: Could the writer of The Journey of Jared Price, Pedro, Milk, and the narrator of 8: The Mormon Proposition really have wanted to explore Hoover's life and ignore his closeted pathology? Or did Eastwood degay it? Or is he engaging in publicity spin, downplaying that part of the film so it won't be perceived as a gay movie? 

(Image by Terry Shoffner for the WSJ)

Allen Ginsberg's Photos Degayed at National Gallery of Art

 

You don't think of simple, 2-D, single-frame photos as being cubist but Allen Ginsberg's prints capture ordinary moments in the lives of a core group of friends, ex-lovers, and partners, and they simultaneously offer a view back from the future, as Ginsberg wrote descriptions of each sitting when he reprinted the images decades later. On display in three rooms of the west wing of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, until September 6, Beat Memories radiates all kinds of love. I saw it on Friday and loved the portraits and snapped moments of William S Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Peter Orlovsky, Gary Snyder, Neal Cassady, Larry Rivers, Francesco Clemente, and Gregory Corso (above, in Paris). The subjects are almost exclusively male and the vibe is proudly queer. Indeed, Ginsberg says the idea for writing on his images came from wondering what Rimbaud and Verlaine were doing before and after they were photographed.

Senior curator Sarah Greenough and NGA director Rusty Powell repeatedly acknowledge the gay aspect of Ginsberg's life (while perhaps missing the centrality of it in the creation of his work) in their respective smart essay and welcoming letter in the handsome exhibition catalogue, which retails for $50. However in the gallery itself, and online, all the places the text information is public and free, every curatorial mention of homosexuality has been banished. If the image of a young Peter Orlovsky cartwheeling nude in tall grass by a pond speaks for itself, his relationship to Ginsberg remains a mystery to viewers. Typical of the museums cowering in the shadow of the Capitol, with one hand they write on the wall about the Beats' "sexual openness" and with the other hand they erase every trace of it from their visitors' gaze. Greenough unwisely wondered aloud at a recent press preview what Ginsberg would think of her exhibit. She already has the answer, in Ginsberg's own handwriting on the museum's piece 2008.131.14, in which he complains of Heavy Petting, "final movie version cut out Bill's queer loves." If that's not clear enough, then Howl.

The exhibit was co-funded by the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation. View 12 images here.

Man Depicted in The English Patient Was Exclusively Gay, Not Burned

Now that The English Patient has become one of the most beloved and honored romances of the past twenty years -- first as a bestselling novel that won the Booker Prize and the Governor General's Award, then as an award winning movie that took six Baftas and nine Oscars -- can we erase from its millions of fans' memories the falsehood that the Hungarian spy Count Laszlo de Almásy ever would have had an affair with the married British woman Katherine Clifton, and re-tell the story accurately, showing that his great passion was for a young Nazi soldier named Hans Entholt? Moreover, although the core of the story is that he suffered burns over his entire body, became addicted to morphine, and died of an overdose in Italy, in actuality, he was never burned, and lived until 1951 when he was killed by dysentery in Salzburg, Austria.

All these changes beg why novelist Michael Ondaatje used Laszlo de Almásy's name. He made up Katherine Clifton, loosely basing her and her husband on Dorothy and Sir Robert Clayton East-Clayton.

Almásy's love letters to Hans Entholt have just surfaced at the Heinrich Barth Institute for African Studies in Cologne, confirming long widespread rumors that he was gay. Other letters reveal his sexual relations with "Egyptian princes." Born in 1895, Almásy was exclusively homosexual, not bi. (He appears above, in sunglasses.) According to the Daily Mail news story, he died "never having once slept with a woman."

Shakespeare's Sonnets Heterosexualized on Stage in New York

Here's the dedication page of the 1609 first printing of Shakespeare's sonnets, which says the only begetter of the poems is Mr. W.H. Of the 154 sonnets, 1 through 126 are addressed to a young man; call him Mr. W.H. The sonnets 127 through 152 are addressed to a "dark lady," which might seem to contradict that Mr. W.H. is the "only begetter" of the love poems, unless you remember that every female role Shakespeare ever wrote was performed by a young man wearing a dress. Anytime the Bard wrote lines for a "woman" he was writing about a twink in drag. It was beyond comprehension that an actual female would expose and debase herself appearing on stage and it remained so for two generations after Shakespeare's death. As for the unimaginable, England beheaded their King and abolished the monarchy before they allowed a woman on stage.

Last night at the Duke on 42nd Street, eighty-five year old British director Peter Brook presented "Love Is My Sin," his staging of thirty-one sonnets. He says:

"Love Is My Sin allows us to penetrate into Shakespeare's own, most secret life. It is his private diary, in which we find his intimate questions, his jealousy, his passions, his guilt, his despair. Above all, he searches to discover for himself the deep meaning of being attracted by a man, by a woman or even by the act of writing itself. This is neither a play nor a poetry recital. It catches the actors in human relationships. Then, at the very end, they become speakers for Shakespeare himself..."

Although Brook mentions "a man" in his notes, it doesn't appear to be conveyed on stage. The performance stars only "two lovers," sixty-six year old Michael Pennington and Brook's wife Natasha Parry who turns eighty this year. He kisses her hand; they address the audience or each other directly. While the music of Louis Couperin is meant to evoke an authentic 17th century atmosphere, young Mr. W.H. has vanished. The anachronistic casting has gone unmentioned by mainstream critics.

This is tricky because of course great literature transcends its particulars, and a poem is not a biopic. Yet Brook insists this is about "Shakespeare's own, most secret life" while annihilating Mr. W.H. The production erases gay love and replaces it with a hetero version because that's what the straight director and the majority of the audience want to see. ($75 for 50 minutes.) Mr. W.H. was an actual person, not an imagined, generic pop song "you." If his gender is irrelevant in a more universal look at love, then so is the race of civil rights leaders in the more universal quest for freedom. The argument being what really matters is the ultimate truth of the words, the passion, the equality, not whether the person was short or left-handed or queer or of color. Frederick Douglass as played by sixteen year-old snowflake Justin Bieber because it will sell more tickets.

LGBT Americans Whitewashed from "Everyday Life" at the Met

Again the Metropolitan Museum's curators have closed their eyes and turned their heads rather than face the presence of gay people in history. The final room of their lush, sporadic show American Stories: Paintings from Everyday Life 1765-1915 has more naked male muscle than New Moon. Yet the gayest men are a fully clothed couple in John Sloan's 1909 canvas Chinese Restaurant. Anyone who has studied the period or read George Chauncey's masterpiece Gay New York will recognize all the telltale signals gay men of that era used to announce their homosexuality and attract masculine partners: the bleached blond hair, the red tie, the cigarette gesture. The painting's description speculates on the possibility of the woman's "easy virtue" while ignoring the certainty of the men's orientation. Saying they were gay, and by extension that she felt comfortable around gay men, would reveal more about her character and Sloan's scene than to inform us that "two men look on with amusement."

If this is progress, enjoy: The last sentence of the text beside Swimming explains, "It may also encode aspects of Eakins' sexuality." The other two paintings are George de Forest Brush's Picture Writer's Story and Thomas Anshutz's Ironworkers' Noontime.

Born December 4: Samuel Butler, Cornell Woolrich, A. Scott Berg

Born to a family of Anglican clergymen, Samuel Butler attended Cambridge, worked with the poor in London, then cut loose for New Zealand. There, he became a sheep rancher, and in the manner of Jack Twist and Ennis Del Mar, fell into an intense relationship with Charles Paine Pauli. They were so close that when Butler returned to England in 1864, Pauli went with him, and for the next thirty years, as Butler wrote his books, most notably Erehwon and The Way of All Flesh, he supported Pauli financially. Through three decades of playing poor, Pauli was in fact ferreting away a fortune, because he was simultaneously accepting money from several men. His duplicity was revealed only after his death. In 1899, Butler wrote Shakespeare's Sonnets Reconsidered, arguing that the poems are about a sexual relationship between an older writer and the beautiful young man who betrayed him.

Cornell Woolrich's life story offers so many cautionary tales that his biography is called First You Dream, Then You Die. A hard-nosed crime writer ranking with Chandler and Hammett, his prolific stories and novels became the movies Rear Window, Phantom Lady, The Bride Wore Black, and Mississippi Mermaid, as well as more than twenty other films. That and his book sales explain why he had nearly one million dollars in the bank when he died at sixty-four in 1968, but why did he live for thirty-five years, with or near his mother, in a seedy residential hotel in Harlem? Although Woolrich was already in his fifties when she died, rather than exploring his freedom, he moved in with his aunt in a worse hotel. He had torrid gay affairs, which he described in his diary, discovered by his wife of three months. She learned, among other things, that he wore a sailor's uniform to go looking for late night adventures. Their marriage, never consummated, was annulled. In his final years, he moved into a luxury hotel, alone, yet he continued to treat himself badly. After wearing shoes that were too tight and seeing his foot become infected, he ignored it until finally doctors had to amputate his leg. A chronic smoker and alcoholic, he died weighing eighty-nine pounds.

A. Scott Berg grew up in Los Angeles, his brother is uber agent Jeff Berg longtime CEO of ICM, and his partner is Kevin McCormick, executive producer of Saturday Night Fever and Dying Young, so, sure, why wouldn't he be the screenwriter of the groundbreaking 1980s gay drama Making Love? Well, because he's literary nerd A. Scott Berg, named for F. Scott Fitzgerald, who geekily attended Princeton because Fitzgerald had gone there, and wrote his senior thesis about Fitzgerald's editor Maxwell Perkins, which he turned into a full length biography that won a National Book Award. His third book, Lindbergh, won a Pulitzer. His fourth, a memoir of his long friendship with Katharine Hepburn, held until her death and published eleven days later, was more problematic. Called exploitive by everyone from Robert Gottlieb in the New York Times to official Hepburn friend Liz Smith in her gossip column, Kate Remembered is a soft-focus glance that perpetuates the myths Hepburn wanted to endure; he degays her. (For a deeper look, including her relationships with women, read William J. Mann's excellent Kate.) Berg's next biography, which he hopes to complete in 2009, is about Woodrow Wilson.

Hollywood's Long Love of Murdered Gays Continues with Milk

On the review compilation site Metacritic, Milk earned a perfect 100 score from The Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Times, The New York Post, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The San Francisco Chronicle, Rolling Stone, TV Guide, Slate, and Time. It also has the most Oscar buzz. None of this would be happening if Milk had a happy ending.  Hollywood has a long history of making movies and honoring films that can be summarized as gay = dead.

Somehow the few big budget movies that do show lgbt people, and those that are considered important each year, tend to fall in the category of Plea for Sympathy. "Gays shouldn't be killed" is a fairly low hurdle to clear, yet it's about as far as Hollywood is willing to go, and each time they do, they're cheered by robust self congratulations.

In the spirit of Vito Russo, look at which stories get told and rewarded, and which don't:

The Children's Hour (1961) lesbian suicide, five Oscar nominations

Silkwood (1983) (probably) bi woman murdered (for other reasons), five Oscar nominations, incl. bi and lesbian roles

The Times of Harvey Milk (1984) gay man murdered, won Best Documentary Oscar 

Philadelphia (1994) gay man dies of aids, five Oscar nominations, two wins incl. gay role

As Good As It Gets (1997) gay man bashed, seven Oscar nominations, incl. gay role, two wins

Boys Don't Cry (1999) trans FTM murdered, two Oscar nominations, won Best Actress for FTM role

The Hours (2002) lesbian suicide but also open well adjusted lesbians, nine Oscar nominations incl. Best Actress win for suicide role

Monster (2003) killer lesbian executed, Best Actress Oscar 

Brokeback Mountain (2005) gay man murdered, eight Oscar nominations, incl. two gay roles, three wins

Little Miss Sunshine (2006) gay man attempts suicide, four Oscar nominations, two wins

Milk (2008) gay suicide and gay man murdered, Oscar nominations to come

For whatever reason, the rare big studio movies in which the gay characters don't die are ignored by the Oscars, as are the many great indie queer movies that never reach the distribution they deserve. Other than The Hours, the best may be Gods and Monsters from 1998, which was nominated for three Oscars and won best adapted screenplay, and Far From Heaven (2002), which earned four nominations. Maurice, Velvet Goldmine, and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert were each nominated only for costumes; The Birdcage only for art direction; My Best Friend's Wedding only for music.

Transamerica was a great exception in 2005, nominated for two Oscars including the MTF role, but it's an open question whether it would have been so honored if the M had been played by an M rather than an F. That same year, Capote was nominated for five Oscars, but typically it was completely degayed. Truman's lover Jack Dunphy was reduced to something less than a roommate -- a concerned friend -- since they were never shown at home together. 

Where are the major Hollywood movies showing healthy, unharmed contemporary same sex couples, and where are their Oscars? Why has The Front Runner languished in development for decades? Patricia Nell Warren says it's because it's set at the Olympics, but now the crowds can easily be CGI. For that matter, where is the biopic of Walt Whitman including his boyfriend Peter Doyle? Whitman's importance to American literature is approximately one thousand times greater than Harvey Milk's place in American politics.

Is it that filmmakers and screenwriters feel it's more important to show injustice against gay people, or are these the only stories studios will greenlight? Executives are certainly more comfortable with the storyline that goes "come out, die" and so is the religious right. The Family Research Council protested Kinsey but they, and Focus on the Family, and Concerned Women of America, all announced they wouldn't picket Brokeback Mountain.

For any Hollywood defenders who want to suggest that "drama is conflict," save your keystrokes. Conflict does not mean annihilation. In mainstream storytelling, an unhappy ending is considered more sophisticated because it is uncommon. Each year hundreds of very common movies conclude with a male and female couple united happily. Those that don't are exalted for subverting convention and playing against the audience's expectations. Obviously, gay stories do not unfold against a wealth of happy endings and viewers have been trained to expect misery.

As for Milk with a happy ending, that movie would be called Noble. Elaine Noble was elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature against all odds from a conservative Irish Catholic district, basically Dan White's people. And she did it three years before Harvey, though Milk ignores her accomplishment and touts him as the first openly gay man elected rather than first gay person. The plot of a scrappy woman triumphing over entrenched unfairness is a Hollywood favorite (Norma Rae, Erin Brokovich) but you won't see this one get made.

And if you haven't yet seen Milk, please pay attention to the scene when Harvey sees the ad designed to fight Prop 6. Not only could you substitute the ads against Prop 8, it's exactly the same as the print ads for Milk. He's outraged, and with good reason.

Milk Ads Degayed

Focus Features ran their big announcement ad in yesterday's papers, the final Sunday before their best shot at an Oscar opens on Wednesday, and it hides any hint of the movie's gay content. Setting aside the problem of an ad campaign that forces the gay activist who insisted on gay visibility back into the closet after thirty years of progress, is it even good marketing? In all seriousness, if you didn't know Harvey Milk, what would you think this movie was about? Wisconsin dairy farmers? The milk lobby? Really bad haircuts? Compare this to the poster for Rob Espstein's documentary, which clearly shows a politician and the tagline says he's gay.

In a country where some people can't say on what date the events the of 9/11 occurred, let's not pretend "everyone knows" the history of a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978. For that matter, let's also not pretend to be too surprised. As soon as Brokeback Mountain proved its crossover appeal, Focus yanked the iconic Heath-n-Jake white hat-black hat ads and replaced them with photos of the men and their wives. Hollywood always aims for the widest common denominator, erasing any sign of otherness. The one sheet for Dreamgirls showed three women in silhouette, with their backs to the camera and swathed in red stage light, so viewers wouldn't see they were black.

Brokaw's Meagerly Updated BOOM! Still Weak on Gay Rights

Not to equate Election Day with limp deliveries on old promises, but remember last year when Tom Brokaw de-gayed the entire 1960s in his book Boom! and assured everyone he'd fix it in future editions? Howard Kurtz quizzed him about it on CNN, and in Rachel Dowd's blunt interview with the Advocate, Brokaw said:

Obviously I feel bad. It was not that it wasn’t on my mind, but it was not the defining history of the ‘60s. I was trying to do the five big pillars, which in my judgment were race, war, politics, women, and culture... Having said all that, I think it was a mistake not to make reference to Stonewall. And we’re going to do that in subsequent editions.

Now the paperback is on sale. Stonewall still does not appear anywhere in the main text of the book, and it is still omitted from the index; but it has been added to the timeline in the back matter, and Brokaw has written a thin, two-page preface. Two watery paragraphs cover gay rights:

In June 1969, gay men and women living in New York rose up against police in their favorite hangouts in Greenwich Village, including a club called the Stonewall Inn. The Stonewall riots, as the came to be called, are widely credited with launching what we know today as the gay rights movement. It wasn't until the late Seventies, the Eighties, and the Nineties that gay liberation gained real traction nationally, through long-overdue changes in laws, workplace practices, and popular acceptance.

Like civil rights and women's rights, gay rights remain a work in progress, and controversial in some quarters. But indisputedly the movement began that late spring night in 1969.

"Indisputedly?" Was Brokaw always just a news reader? Because a reporter or a journalist, and certainly a historian, would see Stonewall as a culmination, not the beginning, of the growing gay rights movement in that decade. The Mattachine Society was formed in 1950, ONE splintered off and formed a separate group in 1952, The Daughters of Bilitis in 1956, and their reach was vast: Local chapters appeared in more than seven cities and each founding group sent its own magazine nationwide: ONE was published until 1967, The Ladder appeared monthly until 1970. Frank Kameny and Barbara Gittings organized the public, midday protests at the White House in 1965 and at Independence Hall on every Fourth of July from 1966 through the end of the Sixties. It is precisely because so much gay heat had been simmering for so long in so many places that it could boil over at Stonewall.

For comparison, in his new preface Brokaw also writes two, meatier paragraphs about the rise of the religious right. Those are personalized with names (Robertson, Falwell); there's no mention of their being "controversial in some quarters;" and for them he breaks his strict Sixties-only rule. After discussing Liberty University's creation in 1971, Brokaw writes, "By 1979 Falwell... had formed the Moral Majority, which proved to be a powerful ally for the Republican party." Why doesn't he say it was dissolved in 1989? For that matter, why doesn't he call lgbt voters a powerful ally for the Democrats, and why are our leaders left anonymous?

Following up on another aspect of the story, Kameny wrote this letter of complaint to Random House's publisher Gina Centrello and Brokaw's editor Kate Medina last November. He never received a reply.