Band of Thebes

Born June 5: Compton-Burnett, Orman, Keynes

Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of seven children. Her beloved father died suddenly in 1901 when she was sixteen; three years later a favorite brother Guy died of pneumonia; twelve years later her other favorite brother Noel was killed in the battle of the Somme; and the following year, 1917, her two youngest sisters, aged eighteen and twenty-two, locked the door of their bedroom on Christmas Day and killed themselves by swallowing veronal. The year after that Compton-Burnett caught the Spanish Influenza and nearly died herself; and the year after that she and her partner Margaret Jourdain began living together, a happy relationship that lasted thirty-two years, until Jourdain’s death in 1951. Compton-Burnett was knighted in 1967, by which time she had published nineteen of her twenty novels. From the start, her oblique style rendered almost exclusively in dialog had divided critics. Leonard Woolf rejected her manuscript for the Hogarth Press saying “She can’t even write!” while the critic for the New Statesman said, “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." She thought her two best novels were A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant. Her two novels that include homosexuality are both set in single-sex schools: lesbians have More Women Than Men (1933) and gay men  get Two Worlds and Their Ways (1949).

As she approached her thirtieth birthday, Suze Orman, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s south side, was a waitress in a bakery in Berkeley, California. Then she trained as an Account Executive at Merrill Lynch, became a Vice President at Prudential Bache, and in 1987 founded her own business, The Suze Orman Financial Group. Now she hosts The Suze Orman Show on CNBC and Suze Orman’s Financial Freedom on QVC and has won two daytime Emmy awards. She writes a monthly money column in O, Oprah’s magazine, and has written ten books including The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying, The Road to Wealth Revised, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny, and The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream, a NYT #1 bestseller. She does not invest in

Financial Times Business Book of the Year Shortlist

Reading about business may or may not appeal to you but the Financial Times has a great general/ literary books section, and it has a strong track record for this award. The fun part is each finalist below receives approx. $16,000 and the winner gets $48,000 on November 18.

The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a World on Fire by Neil Irwin

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger & Kenneth Cukier

The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise of The Indian-American Elite and The Fall of The Galleon Hedge Fund by Anita Raghavan

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead by Sheryl Sandberg

Making It Happen: Fred Goodwin, RBS, and the Men Who Blew Up the British Economy by Iain Martin

Born June 5: Keynes, Compton-Burnett, Orman

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years. I still don't think Niall Ferguson's statements last month about Keynes' gayness are worth mentioning.

Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of seven children. Her beloved father died suddenly in 1901 when she was sixteen; three years later a favorite brother Guy died of pneumonia; twelve years later her other favorite brother Noel was killed in the battle of the Somme; and the following year, 1917, her two youngest sisters, aged eighteen and twenty-two, locked the door of their bedroom on Christmas Day and killed themselves by swallowing veronal. The year after that Compton-Burnett caught the Spanish Influenza and nearly died herself; and the year after that she and her partner Margaret Jourdain began living together, a happy relationship that lasted thirty-two years, until Jourdain’s death in 1951. Compton-Burnett was knighted in 1967, by which time she had published nineteen of her twenty novels. From the start, her oblique style rendered almost exclusively in dialog had divided critics. Leonard Woolf rejected her manuscript for the Hogarth Press saying “She can’t even write!” while the critic for the New Statesman said, “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." She thought her two best novels were A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant. Her two novels that include homosexuality are both set in single-sex schools staffed by closeted lesbians (More Women Than Men, 1933) or gay men (Two Worlds and Their Ways, 1949). As ever, her method is to inform the reader indirectly, so nothing is any more overt here than in the rest of her work.

As she approached her thirtieth birthday, Suze Orman, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s south side, was a waitress in a bakery in Berkeley, California, making $400 a month. Then she trained as an Account Executive at Merrill Lynch, became a Vice President at Prudential Bache, and in 1987 founded her own business, The Suze Orman Financial Group. Now she hosts The Suze Orman Show on CNBC and Suze Orman’s Financial Freedom on QVC and has won two daytime Emmy awards. She writes a monthly money column in O, Oprah’s magazine, and has written ten books including The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying, The Road to Wealth Revised, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny, and The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream. She does not invest in the stock market. In 2007 she came out in a New York Times interview, noting the unfair tax burdens that same-sex couples shoulder. In 2008 and 2009, she was named one of the Time 100, and earlier this year, Forbes named her one of the world's top 10 most influential celebrities, sandwiched between Bono and Clint Eastwood. She married her longtime partner and co-producer of her show, Kathy Travis, in a ceremony in South Africa. Now, she's 62.

Born January 8: Winnaretta Singer, David Bowie

Isaac Merritt Singer, father of the modern sewing machine, also sired 24 children, the 20th of whom was music patron and lesbian Winnaretta Singer. When Isaac made his first fortune of $200,000 in 1839 with an invention that drilled rock, he retired and returned to acting, touring with his own theater troupe for five years. In 1849 he developed a wood carving machine and in 1851 he obtained a patent for improvements on someone else's unwieldy sewing apparatus. Winnaretta was born in Yonkers, but the family soon moved to Paris, then to London, before settling in Devon where Isaac built a 115-room mansion modeled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles. When she was ten her father died and their mother moved them back to Paris, where, in her late teens, Winnaretta was open about her lesbian relationships. At 22 she married Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard and within hours established a no-sex rule: On their wedding night she is said to have climbed atop an armoire and informed her surprised husband that she would kill him if he came nearer. She continued her affairs with women and within five years their marriage was annulled. Among her many lovers were goddaughter (or daughter) of Edward VII, Olga de Meyer, painter Romaine Brooks, pianist Renata Borgatti, and novelist Violet Trefusis.

When she was 29 Winnaretta agreed to marry happily and platonicly the 59 year-old Prince Edmond de Polignac who shared her deepest love of music and, it seems, her homosexuality. Their famous salon in their mansion on what is today Avenue Georges-Mandel hosted first performances of new work by Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel with frequent guests Proust, Cocteau, Colette, Diaghilev, Monet, and Isadora Duncan, who had a baby by one of Winnaretta's brothers. Eight years into their marriage, the prince died and Winnaretta commissioned more than seven compositions in his honor including works by Stravinsky, Satie, and Weill. Winnaretta played the piano and organ, and she painted, but her greatest contributions to the arts were as patron to individuals, ballets, operas, and symphonies. In 1911 she built a public housing project and during WWI she and Marie Curie transformed private limousines into rolling radiology units to aid the injured at the front. Born in New York during the Civil War she died in London during WWII, in 1943 at 78 living with her lover Alvilde Chaplin, 34. Winnaretta is included in Diana Souhami's Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art and is the subject of Sylvia Kahan's biography Music's Modern Muse.

Light years ahead of the pack in his androgyny, bisexuality, theatricality, and his music, David Bowie today turns 66 and releases his first single in 10 years, Where Are We Now?, a midtempo lament, below. His legendary Carnegie Hall debut in 1972 was only his third show ever in the U.S. The critic Robert Christgau called Bowie "an English fairy" and complained that songs like "Andy Warhol" weren't manly enough for American rockers. Of course, Bowie had sunk to his knees in front of guitarist Mick Ronson and simulated oral sex. Bowie's son Duncan, 42 this year, directed the movies Moon and Source Code. Bowie's daughter Lexi is 12.

CNN on Gay Couples Paying Higher Federal Taxes Due to DOMA

In January 2009 when we had a democrat president and majority in the house and senate, the top gay priority ought to have been undoing DOMA, not slow-walking DADT or ENDA. Instead, we had HRC telling us 2015 2017 really wasn't that long to wait. Bad strategy. Yesterday CNN ran this familiar story that because the nefarious Defense of Marriage Act prohibits the government from recognizing gay marriage, queer couples "can't combine their income and deductions to take advantage of lower tax rates." The article runs a scenario showing the imbalance to be as high as $6,043. That's a lot extra to pay to a government that rejects you. Yet it's peanuts compared to far more costly travesties of DOMA that CNN ignores: a surviving queer spouse can't get her/his partner's Social Security. In July, USA Today reported that same-sex couples are blocked from "1,049 federal rights that heterosexual couples receive."

[Yes, in 1996 Clinton could have vetoed DOMA for symbolic purposes. The bill passed 85–14 in the Senate and 342–67 in the House, certain of an override.]

Born June 5-8: Yourcenar, Keynes, Compton-Burnett, Orman

By the time she was eight, Brussels-born Marguerite Cleenewerck de Crayencour was reading Aristophanes. By ten she was learning Latin, and at twelve, Greek. In 1929, when she published her first novel, Alexis, about a closeted gay man leaving his family, she chose to write under an anagram of her surname, Yourcenar. In 1937, she and her American translator, Grace Frick, fell in love and remained together forty-two years until Frick’s death in 1979. The following year, Yourcenar became the first woman ever elected to the French Academy, established in 1635, suppressed in 1793, and restored in 1803. To date, 710 people have been elected “immortals,” four of them women. Among the many renowned French writers who were never elected to the Academy are Moliere, Balzac, Zola, and Proust. Yourcenar was a consummate woman of letters, writing novels, stories, poems, essays, a book-length study of Mishima, and three volumes of her autobiography, yet her exalted reputation is based mainly on her masterpiece, Memoirs of Hadrian. Like Mary Renault, Yourcenar chose to address homosexuality in her work through male characters, especially those in antiquity, and her novel fully describes Hadrian’s great love for Antinous, a youth of astonishing beauty and athletic grace. Some critics consider it the best historical novel ever written. She and Frick first vacationed on Mount Desert Island, Maine, in 1942, and moved there full-time in 1950, in a house they called Petite Plaisance, which today survives as a museum.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.

Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of seven children. Her beloved father died suddenly in 1901 when she was sixteen; three years later a favorite brother Guy died of pneumonia; twelve years later her other favorite brother Noel was killed in the battle of the Somme; and the following year, 1917, her two youngest sisters, aged eighteen and twenty-two, locked the door of their bedroom on Christmas Day and killed themselves by swallowing veronal. The year after that Compton-Burnett caught the Spanish Influenza and nearly died herself; and the year after that she and her partner Margaret Jourdain began living together, a happy relationship that lasted thirty-two years, until Jourdain’s death in 1951. Compton-Burnett was knighted in 1967, by which time she had published nineteen of her twenty novels. From the start, her oblique style rendered almost exclusively in dialog had divided critics. Leonard Woolf rejected her manuscript for the Hogarth Press saying “She can’t even write!” while the critic for the New Statesman said, “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." She thought her two best novels were A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant. Her two novels that include homosexuality are both set in single-sex schools staffed by closeted lesbians (More Women Than Men, 1933) or gay men (Two Worlds and Their Ways, 1949). As ever, her method is to inform the reader indirectly, so nothing is any more overt here than in the rest of her work.

As she approached her thirtieth birthday, Suze Orman, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s south side, was a waitress in a bakery in Berkeley, California. Then she trained as an Account Executive at Merrill Lynch, became a Vice President at Prudential Bache, and in 1987 founded her own business, The Suze Orman Financial Group. Now she hosts The Suze Orman Show on CNBC and Suze Orman’s Financial Freedom on QVC and has won two daytime Emmy awards. She writes a monthly money column in O, Oprah’s magazine, and has written ten books including The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying, The Road to Wealth Revised, Women & Money: Owning the Power to Control Your Destiny, and The Money Class: Learn to Create Your New American Dream. She does not invest in the stock market. In 2007 she came out in a New York Times interview, noting the unfair tax burdens that same-sex couples shoulder. In 2008 and 2009, she was named one of the Time 100, and in 2010 she was one of Forbes' most powerful women in the world. Last September she married her longtime partner and co-producer of her show, Kathy Travis, in a ceremony in South Africa. Now, she's 60.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.

Queer Eye for Your Federal Tax Receipt

Did you tear up when you submitted your taxes this year? With the government's intention to repeal Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the percentage of your money funding agencies that discriminate against you got smaller. Or were you crying? The percentage of your tax money funding agencies that support heterosexuals while denying you and your partner the exact same rights is still huge, including the biggest slices of the federal spending pie chart: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

(For the hot LGB masochists who miss funding organizations working against them, consider a gift to GOProud. Republican candidates Huckabee, Romney, Pawlenty, Barbour, and Santorum have said they will re-instate Don't Ask, Don't Tell if elected.)

For the first time ever, you can go to this White House website, enter your tax payment amounts, and see a breakdown of where your money goes... which would be great if the percentages weren't completely bogus. In a typically slick political move, the administration has kept separate Social Security and the Medicare hospital tax, as they appear on your W-2. No surprise then, by removing a big chunk of the money, the remaining dollars look more important. Specifically, this way they can lead with the "largest" percentage of your money going to "national defense" at 26.3%. Nice for red state military hawks -- and oh yes they did color it red on the WH pie chart -- but it isn't true. It's 26.3% of your "income tax" which technically is only a part of your federal taxes. Cheap tactic. If they're going to create something called "Your Federal Taxpayer Receipt" the percentages should be based on your federal tax payment, period. For example, this one from Third Way.

(If you're confused because you're used to seeing military spending at around half the budget, you're right: That's the annual fight over discretionary spending, not the total federal budget.)

Born April 20: Takei, Forrest, Tobias, Vandross

When he was five in 1942, Los Angeles-born George Takei and his family were sent to an Arkansas internment camp for Japanese Americans. Relocated to a camp in Tule Lake, California, they were not allowed to return to Los Angeles until after the war. Takei attended Berkeley and graduated from UCLA, where he stayed on to get his masters in theater. He speaks English, Japanese, and Spanish fluently. In addition to his career-defining role as Sulu on Star Trek, he ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 1973. Of seventeen candidates, he came in second, behind Tom Bradley. Since 2006 he has been the official announcer on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show. He met Brad Altman, his partner of twenty-two years, at Frontrunners. They were married in California in September 2008 at the Japanese American National Museum, which Takei co-founded. He is 74 today and his name is pronounced tah-KAY.

Novelist Katherine V. Forrest, 72, writes the Kate Delafield detective books, often cited as the first lesbian mystery series. Her debut novel, Curious Wine, has become an lgbt classic, selling more than 300,000 copies. She has won three Lambda awards, including their Pioneer Award. Forrest also writes science fiction novels, most notably the Daughters of a Coral Dawn trilogy. She lives in San Francisco with her partner Jo Hercus.

Money guru Andrew Tobias, 64, managed the Let's Go empire as an undergraduate at Harvard and has written many bestselling financial books such as The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need as well as the classic growing-up-gay memoir The Best Little Boy in the World, originally under the pen name John Reid. He has been treasurer of the Democratic National Party since 1999, a job for which he is paid $1 a year, and has been a long time board member on HRC. His partner since 1994, Charles Nolan, left his fashion job to volunteer fulltime for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Nolan died in January.

Preeminent among R&B and soul singers, Luther Vandross won eight Grammys and sold more than 25 million albums worldwide. Initially Vandross preferred to stay in the background, writing songs, producing, and singing backing vocals for Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Carly Simon, Chaka Khan, Chic, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, and for Roberta Flack, who finally insisted he sing for himself. After two unsuccessful albums with his group Luther, he released his first solo album, Never Too Much, which went double platinum. From then on he has been a major presence on R&B charts and radio. Among his greatest hits are “The Glow of Love,” which spent sixteen weeks at number one, “Power of Love/Love Power,” “Here and Now,” “Best Things in Life Are Free,” with Janet Jackson, and “Dance with My Father” which won four Grammys including Song of the Year. A diabetic suffering from hypertension, Vandross struggled with his weight which sometimes exceeded 300 pounds. In April 2003 he had a stroke and never regained his health, dying in July 2005. Although he avoided questions about his personal life, his homosexuality was a wide open secret.

Obama's DOMA, DADT, Drilling, Climate, FDA, Spying, Wall Street

Late yesterday the Obama Administration filed a notice of appeal in the case where the Defense of Marriage Act was ruled unconstitutional. Early in 2011 they will defend DOMA, which candidate Obama called "abhorrent" and vowed to repeal. The White House still claims to want to overturn DOMA.

Yesterday the administration also ended its moratorium on offshore drilling. Anyone who felt during the gulf spill crisis that BP was calling the shots, should read the NYT about the president's "haste" when the three studies about the spill are unfinished. The Secretary of Interior(!) said, "We are open for business."

Yesterday Federal Judge Virginia Phillips issued an injunction to halt Don't Ask, Don't Tell. Last month when she declared DADT unconstitutional, the White House said she lacked authority over the military. Now 21 senators have called on Obama not to appeal Judge Phillips' decision.

Speaking of lacking authority over the military: Afghanistan.

Read The New Yorker piece on Obama and the failed climate change bill: "The White House’s “grand bargain” of oil drilling in exchange for a cap on carbon had backfired spectacularly... Obama said that he knew “the votes may not be there right now, but I intend to find them in the coming months.” He never found them, and he didn’t appear to be looking very hard...[a lobbyist:] '...Everybody is going to be thinking about whether Barack Obama was the James Buchanan of climate change.”

Not to mention the loophole-riddled, gift to big pharma, no public option but yes pre-existing conditions health care compromise written by industry lobbyists.

Speaking of industry lobbyists: Genetically modified meat is coming your way and the FDA doesn't want it labeled as such because that would "confuse consumers." The Washington Post reports the FDA may even ban non-modified food from saying its GMO-free.

Obama is calling for drastically expanded powers to spy on citizens who are not suspected of wrongdoing (Salon). Additionally, the administration wants to track every single international money transfer, in any amount, sent to or from the US.

The documentary Inside Job, which my partner and I loved, was made by an early Obama supporter, Charles Ferguson. Asked to assess the Financial Reform Bill, an industry player said he only needs one word, "Ha!" Of the entire $2 trillion catastrophe, not one person has been charged with a crime. Virtually every principal villain has been rehired or brought into the Administration.

Google To Compensate LGBT Employees for Unfair Fed Tax Burden

The Don't Be Evil empire announced today that it would begin to "gross up" the pay of their lesbian and gay employees receiving domestic partner benefits, reimbursing them for the extra money they owe in federal taxes each year that their heterosexual counterparts do not. According to the Mercury News, Google joins companies like Kimpton boutique hotels and Cisco who have already enacted such a policy to compensate for the unfair federal burden. Gayglers, Google's 700 member LGBT employee group, brought the discrepancy to management's attention and the company agreed to right the government's wrong.

A Gay "Bonfire"? Adam Haslett's Union Atlantic

Pulitzer finalist, openly gay Adam Haslett's much anticipated first novel Union Atlantic (on sale yesterday) is propelled not so much by its compulsive banking scandal plot as by its underlying tensions between old and new, peace and war, idealism and greed, security and risk. In 2002 former marine Doug Fanning’s brazen trading schemes bring his venerable Boston bank, Union Atlantic, to peril. His neighbor, Charlotte Graves, a former history teacher forced to retire for her strident views, sues him for building a monstrous mansion on disputed property adjoining hers. A fiery liberal slightly unhinged, Charlotte has sharp insights into the decline of modern life ("What had governments become these days but the poorly advertised fire sale of the public interest?") and hears her dogs talk to her in the language of Cotton Mather and Malcolm X. Charlotte’s brother Henry, whose wife recently died of cancer, is head of the NY Federal Reserve and will help decide Union Atlantic's fate. Charlotte’s sole tutor student, a high school slacker named Nate Fuller whose father recently killed himself, falls into blind worshipful first love with Doug, who exploits the eager boy for his access to his adversary.

Employing a sprawling cast and a nimble understanding of the business of money (easy illegalities, corporate espionage, laughable regulation), Haslett dips into points of view of all the people above as well as the presiding judge, the old guard bank president, his social queen wife, support staff, and the book's most wholly likable person, the chief settlements administrator, a middle aged black woman named Evelyn Jones whose son has just been murdered in a drug deal. In one of the Haslett's many scalpel details, Evelyn recalls that eight years ago, at her welcome minority breakfast, the only other high ranking black woman, a light skinned Princeton alum, asked her whose secretary she was. Another is that as soon as the profit bubble bursts, the straight bank president is ready to sacrifice his star trader, offering authorities news of his liaison with a boy "possibly underage" and equating his secret gay life with his "secret" lawbreaking for the bank.

Penetrating as these glances are, the glimpses into so many lives will either charm readers who relish the cairn-like accumulation of perspectives or frustrate those wanting deeper, sustained looks at fewer people. Perhaps because of Haslett's preference for short fiction, nearly all of the novel's relationships unfold in the backstory, statically, through isolated memories. In the book's present the only personal relationships that develop are Doug and Charlotte against each other, and Doug and Nate with their physical arrangement. The thrill of a big, ambitious novel having a brusque gay romance at its core is barely lessened by the critics' fast gloss over it, and the publisher, Doubleday, and the author's website completely obscuring it.

At a frantic moment in the plot Doug lectures the bank president Holland on the real cost of his luxury lifestyle. It's a feeling the reader knows because the novel's bold ambitions come at the partial expense of character. There's a staginess to some of the high flying speeches, delivered at unlikely points, and even some interior monologues are too intricately rounded to pass for actual thoughts. So the elegant pageant of handpuppets is broken by flashes of the author's naked wrist poking out. This is a seventeen year old monosyllabic mumbler a few seconds into his first intercourse: "... as if, perversely, by enacting the fantasy of self-forgetting the self only grew stronger and more ineluctable than ever." An ex-marine reunited with his housecleaner mother: "Under the blaze of her unvanquished eyes..."

Each one of the passages below feels right in its place, yet coming in a twenty-nine page run they again remind the reader an author put them there:

Charlotte, page 25: "...they never mentioned the eyes of the wealthy young and the violence simmering numbly there. She had seen it at school, the way her students had grown pointed, turned into swords wielded by their masters."

Doug, page 41: "As a teenager he'd begun jacking off naked in front of the mirror on the back of his closet door, goading himself on, his looks beginning to handle like his first real weapon, his first experience of control."

Doug, page 53: "That's what he was like for a man like Holland: an attractive weapon."

Doug, page 54: "Doug was the perfect antidote: a means to direct action. Yet, as with any secret weapon, the pleasure and protection lay in the having it, not in the use."

Several critics have compared Union Atlantic to Bonfire of the Vanities, but I found Haslett's book far more humane than Wolfe's grandstanding satire. (James Wood thinks Union Atlantic, with its front and center House As Symbol, reminiscent of Howards End.) Many literary novels climax emotionally around ninety percent through, then let you cool down a little. For me, Union Atlantic's power was still ascending -- thanks to a beautifully underwritten arm grab -- after the final page. That's just one of many accomplishments in this uneven yet vigorous and necessary novel.

Haslett will appear this month in Paris (Feb 7 - 11), Brooklyn (Feb 12), Manhattan (16), Cambridge (18), Dallas (19), Houston (21), Denver (22), San Francisco (24), Corte Medera (25 noon), Menlo Park (25 night), and Seattle (26). In March he'll visit Abu Dhabi, Philadelphia, Raleigh-Durham, and Iowa City.

Born June 5: Keynes, Compton-Burnett, Garcia Lorca, Orman

Economist John Maynard Keynes, novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett, poet Federico Garcia Lorca, and financial guru Suze Orman, all here.

Born February 21: David Geffen

David Geffen's entertainment career began with a lie, fabricating family connections to famous people and claiming a college degree, in order to get a job in the William Morris Agency mailroom, but his success is indisputable. Having triumphed three times starting record companies from scratch, backing blockbuster musicals on Broadway (Cats, Dreamgirls), financing extremely successful movies (Risky Business), and co-founding DreamWorks, the boy from a humble corner of Brooklyn sold his first company for $7 million, sold his second for $540 million, and now is worth more than $6 billion. According to Forbes' list last September, he's the 52nd richest person in America. How did he do it? With an uncanny sense of what would be popular, he signed The Eagles, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Linda Rondstadt, Jackson Browne, John Lennon's comeback album, Asia, Aerosmith, Guns n Roses, XTC,  Sonic Youth, Blink-182, Peter Gabriel, Neil Young, Nirvana, and Cher. He's been equally prescient about the art market and in the fall of 2006 he sold a de Kooning for $63 million, a Jasper Johns for $80 million, and a Jackson Pollock for $140 million, the most expensive sale of a painting ever. Ditto, his real estate investments. Hit hard by the death of his friend Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell, Geffen began making multi-million dollar donations to aids foundations in the late 80s, yet he was criticized for remaining in the closet. In 1992, he finally came out. In the years since, his philanthropy has kept pace with his wealth. He gave an unrestricted gift of $200 million to the UCLA medical school. Geffen turns 65 today and still suffers from what he told the New York Times fifteen years ago, when he was fifty:

If Geffen has had one conspicuous failure, it is a personal one: his inability to maintain a long-term relationship. Although Geffen is remarkably candid, he winces and struggles when talking about his current personal life. "I aspire to have a relationship with somebody," he says. "I haven't always been successful at it. But being gay is very different from being straight in the area of relationships. Of course, there are gay people who've had a long-term relationship for 50 years, but they're not the rule. And it's difficult to be in a relationship with someone as well known and wealthy as I am. There's a disparity that works in heterosexual relationships that doesn't work in homosexual relationships."

Balderdash.

Born June 5: Keynes, Compton-Burnett, Garcia Lorca, Orman

Ever the economist relying on empirical data, John Maynard Keynes recorded all of his sexual activity— alone, together, asleep—from his Cambridge days onward. There, he had been an Apostle with Lytton Strachey and Leonard Woolf and moved readily into the Bloomsbury circle in London. Two years later he met his great love Duncan Grant with whom he had a long relationship and with whom he remained close friends even after they stopped having sex. Thanks to Keynes’s diligent record keeping, historians know that by the time things ended with Grant, he had slept with twenty-five men and possibly one woman. In 1921 he fell in love with a star of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, Lydia Lopokova, and married her in 1925, by which time both Grant and Strachey maintained households with women while continuing to have sex with men. They never had children. Seven years after his marriage, his mother Florence Ada Keynes, who had been among the first women to graduate from Cambridge, became mayor of that city. Keynes’ father, a noted economist himself and longtime lecturer at Cambridge, outlived his son by three years.

Novelist Ivy Compton-Burnett was one of seven children. Her beloved father died suddenly in 1901 when she was sixteen; three years later a favorite brother Guy died of pneumonia; twelve years later her other favorite brother Noel was killed in the battle of the Somme; and the following year, 1917, her two youngest sisters, aged eighteen and twenty-two, locked the door of their bedroom on Christmas Day and killed themselves by swallowing veronal. The year after that Compton-Burnett caught the Spanish Influenza and nearly died herself; and the year after that she and her partner Margaret Jourdain began living together, a happy relationship that lasted thirty-two years, until Jourdain’s death in 1951. Compton-Burnett was knighted in 1967, by which time she had published nineteen of her twenty novels. From the start, her oblique style rendered almost exclusively in dialog had divided critics. Leonard Woolf rejected her manuscript for the Hogarth Press saying “She can’t even write!” while the critic for the New Statesman said, “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius." She thought her two best novels were A House and Its Head and Manservant and Maidservant. Her two novels that include homosexuality are both set in single-sex schools staffed by closeted lesbians (More Women than Men, 1933) or gay men (Two Worlds and Their Ways, 1949). As ever, her method is to inform the reader indirectly, so nothing is any more overt here than in the rest of her work.

Ah, Spain, the beautiful contradiction. Even after the end of Franco’s fascist, anti-gay rule, the family of Spain’s greatest poet and playwright, Federico Garcia Lorca, suppressed the publication of his sonnets and then successfully fought to have them renamed Sonnets rather than Sonnets of Dark Love as Garcia Lorca called them. The scholar Angel Sahuquillo has pointed out that for over fifty years anyone attempting to study homosexuality in the Garcia Lorca's work was accused of being "irresponsible, ignoble, envious, and vile." Of course, Garcia Lorca himself was conflicted. Passionately in love with Salvador Dali, who rejected him, and a sculptor named Emilio Aladrén Perojo, Lorca wrote “Ode to Walt Whitman” epitomizing "pure" same-sex love while denigrating effeminate gay men with common slurs. Garcia Lorca’s unfinished play The Destruction of Sodom remains lost but his biographer Ian Gibson says the play’s theme was to be "the pleasures of the homosexual confraternity, who have made such a contribution to world culture." A month after Civil War broke out in 1936, Garcia Lorca returned to his birthplace, Granada, despite its being an ultra-conservative stronghold, and was promptly arrested with his brother-in-law, a socialist mayor. Within three days, without formal charges or a trial, the militia executed him and threw his body in an unmarked grave somewhere between Alfacar and Viznar. Unquestionably, people wanted him dead for many reasons, yet the comment that was most widely reported and survives to this day was one of his executioners bragging, “I fired two bullets into his ass for being a queer.”      

   Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint

Don’t let me ever lose the wonder
of your eyes like a statue’s, or the stress
placed on my cheek at night.
by the solitary rose of your breath.

I’m afraid of being on this shore
a branch-less trunk: this deepest feeling
of having no bloom, or pulp, or clay
for the worm of my suffering.

If you’re my hidden treasure,
if you’re my cross, and my moist pain,
if I’m a dog, of yours, my master,

never let me lose what I have gained,
and decorate the branches of your stream
with the leaves of my enraptured autumn.

As she approached her thirtieth birthday, Suze Orman, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants on Chicago’s south side, was a waitress in a bakery in Berkeley, California. Then she trained as an Account Executive at Merrill Lynch, became a Vice President at Prudential Bache, and in 1987 founded her own business, The Suze Orman Financial Group. Now she hosts The Suze Orman Show on CNBC and Suze Orman’s Financial Freedom on QVC and has won two daytime Emmy awards. She writes a monthly money column in O, Oprah’s magazine, and has written seven books including The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom, The Road to Wealth, and Women and Money. She ends her show each week with the catch phrase, “People first, then money, then things.” She came out in a New York Times interview earlier this year, noting the unfair tax burdens that same-sex couples shoulder. She does not invest in the stock market. Her partner of seven years, Kathy Travis, is a co-producer of The Suze Orman Show.