Band of Thebes

Born July 10: Marcel Proust, Neil Tennant

Years before Joyce's, Woolf's, and Faulkner’s novels, contemporary with Braque, Gris, and Picasso’s cubist paintings, and with Einstein’s shattering theories of physics, Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust created a work of art whose central concern is time. Published over fourteen years, the seven volumes of his epic A la recherche du temps perdu radically reshape conventional narrative to recreate the sensation of memory, the past co-existing in thought simultaneous with the present, as each moment of the present becomes the past. Many, many critics, including Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, consider the work as a whole to be the greatest novel of the century or of all-time. It is also a landmark in gay literature. Volume Four is titled Sodom and Gomorrah and contains lengthy essays on homosexuality (often seen as a rebuttal to Andre Gide's recent Corydon), but every volume encompasses gay characters, observations, and experiences. One rationale for his somewhat dark view is that Proust had co-opted his own happy memories of gay love in trying to imagine heterosexual love for his characters, leaving him only bitter reminiscences when he wrote about aspects of gay life. Another theory is that he was uncomfortable with his sexuality, which manifested itself always with the lower classes and especially with his own servants. His deepest relationship was with his chauffeur, Alfred Agostinelli, who lived with his wife in Proust’s townhouse. Proust also had an affair with his secretary, Albert Nahmias, the namesake for the novel’s love interest, Albertine. When he went to sex clubs, Proust liked to be whipped and humiliated. Very, very rich from an inheritance, he typically slept during the day and wrote at night, both while lying in his blue bed, in his bedroom cork-lined for silence, now in the Musée Carnavalet.

Neil Tennant is 60. Tonight PSB play Serbia.

Born July 5: Richard Labonté, Amélie Mauresmo, Jean Cocteau

If you like to read, you owe the magnificent Richard Labonté a big thank you. A co-founder and eventual manager of the A Different Light bookstores, he for many years wrote the essential column Books To Watch Out For. A brilliant, nonstop reader with exquisite taste, his annual best of the year choices are mandatory for the rest of us. For several years he outperformed Hercules coordinating the judging of the Lambda Literary Awards -- three or four judges in each of 24 categories. He is himself a multiple Lammy winner for some of the thirty anthologies he has edited or co-edited, most recently Studs: Gay Erotic Fiction, out next month from Cleis;. Read this interview with him conducted by mystery writer John Morgan Wilson.

In 1999 unseeded 19 year old Amélie Mauresmo beat the world's #1 female tennis player and became only the third Frenchwoman to make it to the finals of a Grand Slam event. That's also when Amélie came out, and within five years she was herself ranked #1 in the world, yet she still hadn't won a Grand Slam. No one questioned her talent but they noticed her nerves; often she would lead in a championship match only to sputter and lose. At the Athens Olympics in 2004, she fell in the finals to Justine Henin and settled for a silver medal. In January 2006, at 26, she finally won the Australian Open. Six months later, she won Wimbledon, the first Frenchwoman to do so since Suzanne Lenglen in 1925 and the first out lesbian since Martina's ninth win in 1990. Here's how tennis has changed in the past two decades: Martina had 158 career titles (including 18 Grand Slam singles titles) and earned $21 million in prize money (not endorsements); Amélie had 25 career titles (2 Grand Slams) and earned $15 million in prize purses. Amélie retired at 30 in December 2009.

He published his first volume of poetry at nineteen, with thirty more volumes throughout his life. He published seven novels (the best of which is his fifth, Les Enfants Terribles. He wrote twenty-four plays (his twentieth, Le bel indifférent, was created for Edith Piaf and became a towering success). He wrote eleven ballets (his second, Parade, was produced by Diaghilev and designed by Picasso). He wrote six operas. He was a graphic designer, a clothes designer, and an interior designer. He painted. He drew. He photographed. He managed a professional boxer, who became the sport's first Hispanic world champion. He was an actor. And he made six feature films, two of which happen to be among the most lauded in the history of cinema, La belle et la bête and Orphée, both of which star his boyfriend, superstar idol Jean Marais. God only knows where Jean Cocteau found the inspiration, or the time. He also dated Edouard Dermit, whom he adopted, the boxer “Panama” Al Brown, whom he managed, a few women including Natalie Paley, whom he impregnated, and the fifteen-year-old writing prodigy Raymond Radiguet, who may or may not have been something of an opportunist when it came to dating. Cocteau died in 1963 from complications of a heart attack, at seventy-four, an hour after learning of Edith Piaf’s death. The Cocteau Museum finally opened in 2011 in the south of France.

Queer in Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo

Still more lgbt reads from nyrb classics:

"When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece,Last Words from Montmartre [and Kindle]. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words from Montmartre tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note.

"The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s Dictée, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation."

PW said, "Qiu’s voice, both colloquial and metaphysical, enchants.... It would be wrong to interpret the book’s—or, for that matter, the author’s—ultimate surrender to death as a rejection of the richness of life; rather, like Goethe’s young Werther, this 'last testament' (an alternative translation of the title) affirms the power of literature."

Born June 8: Marguerite Yourcenar

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, 726 people have been elected “immortals,” eight of them women. Among the many renowned French writers who were never elected to the Academy are Moliere, Balzac, Zola, and Proust. Yourcenar wrote 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. 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.

Recapturing Radical Queer: Mausoleum of Lovers

Triple threat Stephen Motika, author of Western Practice, program director of Poets House, and publisher of Nightboat Books, invited me to Thursday's exhilarating, overflow double launch (above) at Callicoon Fine Arts of dead novelist Hervé Guibert's photo exhibition (below) and reading from his just published, really amazing, arty and sexy Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991. Douglas Martin was there! Wayne Koestenbaum gives the book a super rave review -- "magnitude itself" -- in the upcoming Bookforum. I pecked through the episodic passages here and there and was transported. Guibert died of aids at 36, leaving behind, among other work, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and Ghost Image.

Lost Early LGBT Photos Seen Anew in The Invisibles

After winning the Cesar for best documentary, Sebastien Lifshitz finally gets a US release this week for the companion volume The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century. Lifshitz collected the snapshots over twenty years of trawling flea markets, junk shops, and ebay in France, Germany, Portugal, and the United States. He says, "With each discovery I was stunned, for these images didn’t match the official history of homosexuality as it has been conveyed to us. As a teenager, when I dreamed of my adult life, if I stuck to the literature or the few films that existed on the subject, the future promised to be dark. To be gay or lesbian meant belonging to a genealogy of suffering, to have a dramatic, if not a tragic, destiny. Despite the many battles and certain victories that ensued, the homosexual remained a victim in the collective consciousness; a hidden man. Yet, these images, which I've found through the years, were telling another story -- one about a homosexuality without inhibitions, gentle and playful." 

Born May 5: James Beard, Del Martin

James Beard knew he was gay when he was seven in Portland and, acting on those impulses as soon as he got to college, was expelled from Reed in his freshman year for "homosexual activity."  He traveled with a theater troupe, spent several years in Europe, came home, and moved to New York still hoping to be an actor. He took a temporary job as a caterer and three years later published his first cookbook, Hors d'Oeuvre and Canapés, in 1940. After three more books he got his own cooking show on television and, in 1955, he established The James Beard Cooking School, which lasted 30 years until his death in 1985. His huge appetites extended to money and fame, leading him to many, many endorsement deals that contradicted everything he preached in the kitchen. Despite a famous temper, he could be a nurturing mentor and loyal friend, and with Gael Greene he founded Citymeals-on-Wheels. He is openly gay in his memoir Delights And Prejudices and his collection of letters Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles. Two biographies are Epicurean Delight: The Life and Times of James Beard by longtime friend Evan Jones, husband of legendary editor Judith Jones, and The Solace of Food by Robert Clark.

Del Martin died in August 2008 at 87, widowing a wife with whom she spent 55 years championing the rights of the denigrated and disenfranchised. In 1955, when homosexuality was illegal, she, her life partner Phyllis Lyon, and six other lesbians founded the Daughters of Bilitis in her native San Francisco. By 1960 DOB chapters were active in nine cities nationwide and their magazine, The Ladder, was thriving despite most readers' need for secrecy. Even in friendly waters, they had to fight the tides against lesbians, both among straight women in NOW and gay men in the queer equality movement. Martin addressed the latter situation in her landmark article, "Goodbye, My Alienated Brothers," which appeared in the Advocate in 1970. Two years later, she and Lyon were instrumental in forming the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, and they published their seminal book Lesbian/Woman. In 1979 they were honored by a group of medical professionals who wanted to start a clinic for lesbians who lacked health care, and they chose the name Lyon-Martin Health Services. In 1995 they were named separately as delegates to the White House Conference on Aging. Ever the trailblazers, Martin [above right, left left] and Lyon were the very first gay couple to be married in San Francisco in February 2004. If there is anything good about her death, it's that she did not have to see Prop 8 pass three months later. Click here to watch them describes the early hurdles they faced in forming and growing DOB during a time when they could not advertise their existence.

Today's Dose of Keatsian Porn Is a Joy Forever

It's not every porn movie that pulls its name from a line of Keats, uses classical music in its trailer, and generally looks like a poor man's Miramax doing an all-gay sex romp -- Il Postino with three-ways by the sea. (Watch the sundrenched R rated trailer, nothing X.) Partners of fifteen years, Jake Jaxson and RJ Sebastian, released the movie last year (above) and now have published an explicit photobook (below), also called A Thing of Beauty, which confusingly is not necessarily outtakes from their film of the same name. Dudes just love their Keats.

Four other brand-new gay photobooks scratch your changing moods. Scruffy: Raunch. Pretty: Anticipation by Joe Mozdzen, with a preface by Greg Gorman. Fratty: Fond Memories by Mark Lynch. Brazily: Rio Men by Leo Castro. You won't confuse any of these with the high art of Peter Hujar: Love & Lust.

In another class altogether, finally coming later this month is Sebastien Lifshitz's collection The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century, the companion volume to his Cesar-winning gay documentary.

Born April 26: Henry de Montherlant

Hardcore old school aristocratic masculinist, misogynist, and fascist, Henry Marie Joseph Frédéric Expedite Millon de Montherlant decried the wimpy, feminized 20th-century male and is said to have celebrated strong Germany's triumph over his weakened native France in 1940. By then, at 45, he had enjoyed widespread literary success, especially with his shockingly prejudiced series The Girls, which sold millions of copies, was translated into more than a dozen other languages, and caused Simone de Beauvoir to attack it for an entire chapter of The Second Sex. Early in his career Montherlant published the gayish novel The Bachelors, his essays on vigorous sport and the pleasures of youth Les Olympiques, and, in 1929, wrote the far more explicit all-male school romance The Boys which he did not release it until 1969. His play on a similar love triangle between an older male student, a younger male student, and their jealous male teacher, La Ville Dont Le Prince Est Un Enfant, was produced in 1952 and in 1997 finally became a movie known in English as The Fire That Burns. Expect the classic doomed, sadder but wiser ending: It is Montherlant, after all, who said, "Happiness writes in white ink on a white page." At 77, almost blind, he swallowed cyanide then fired a gun at his head.

After the jump, samples from Montherlant's Paysages des Olympiques with 87 homoerotic art snaps by Czech photographer Karel Egermeier.

Out Today: Queer Paris, Marriage Miscarriage, Roberts Memoir

  

For her 17th novel and 28th book overall, Francine Prose reclaims forgotten historical queer lives in Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 [Kindle]. In an approving review for the NYTBR, Edmund White called it "a novel of great reach and power." 

NYT reporter Jo Becker's story of how we got marriage equality -- because of Chad Griffin?? -- has at last united the entire gay community... against it. The gay left consideres the book "bullshit," the gay middle says it's "truly horrendous," and the gay right memorably calls it "a fellatial account" by "an ignorant reporter" "who knows nothing of the movement's history." Confirming just how backward and out of touch the straights are when it comes to representing queer lives, Penguin has bizarrely given this high-profile gay success story a jacket fit for a funereal. Forcing the Spring: Inside the Fight for Marriage Equality [Kindle].

Good Morning America star, cancer survivor, and recently out lesbian Robin Roberts releases her inspirational memoir Everybody's Got Something [Kindle].

Cannes 2014

Gay wunderkind Xavier Dolan, still only 25, returns to Cannes for the fourth time with his fifth film, Mommy. This is his first to be in the official competition, against new movies by the Dardennes, Cronenberg, Assayas, Egoyan, Loach, Leigh, and Godard. Capote director Bennett Miller returns with Foxcatcher, the creepy gayish true story of John du Pont and his relationship with the Olympic wrestling brothers, one of whom he murdered, played by Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo. Last year Cannes screened HBO's Behind the Candelabra, but they skipped this year's HBO tale of tragic gays, The Normal Heart.

Opening Film: Grace Of Monaco, dir: Olivier Dahan
Closing Film: To be announced

COMPETITION
Winter Sleep, dir: Nuri Bilge Ceylan
Clouds Of Sils Maria, dir: Olivier Assayas
Saint Laurent, dir: Bertrand Bonello
Maps To The Stars, dir: David Cronenberg
Two Days, One Night, dirs: Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne

Growing Up White, Gay, and Jewish in South Africa

Out today from FSG is Lost and Found in Johannesburg [Kindle] (published internationally as Dispatcher) by Mark Gevisser, the award-winning biographer and Teddy-winning filmmaker who is an Open Society Fellow working on The Global Sexuality Frontier. Growing up gay, white, and Jewish during apartheid, Mark kept to himself and was keen on maps, fixated by the mysterious blank areas that separated his family's neighborhood from where their black servants lived. As a double outsider he developed an eye for boundaries, and transgression. His father married the daughter of an anti-Semite, Mark eventually marries his partner, a man of color, and they move to Paris. On a visit back to work on this memoir, he is the victim of a violent home invasion, bound, gagged, and held hostage at gunpoint. Throughout the book, he poignantly confronts the gap between assumptions and reality. Teju Cole: "Outstanding. A genuinely strange, marvelous, and complex account of a self and a city. Does for Johannesburg what Pamuk did for Istanbul." Claire Messud: "Mark Gevisser’s extraordinary memoir asks profound questions – about race, sexuality, faith and politics -- while examining both his own history and that of his beloved Johannesburg. The result is unlike any other book I know. It is illuminating, unsettling, engrossing, often funny, and, in a word, brilliant." Dinaw Mengestu: "A story as complex and beautiful as any memoir I've ever read."

Mark Gevisser will speak in New York on May 1 at Columbia and May 6 at CLAGS.

 

For gay novels from South Africa try:

Michael Power, Shadow Game (banned for its interracial gay love in 1972, reissued)

Damon Galgut, A Sinless Season (1982)

Stephen Gray’s Time of Our Darkness (1988)

Mark Behr’s Embrace (2000)

K Sello Duiker, The Quiet Violence of Dreams (2001)

Michiel Heyns, The Children's Day (2002)

Guy Willoughby, Archangels (2002)

Michiel Heyns, The Reluctant Passenger (2003)

Barry Levy, Burning Bright (2004)

Craig Higginson, The Hill (2005)

Fred Khumalo, Seven Steps to Heaven (2007)

Damon Galgut, In a Strange Room (2010)

Born April 11: Glenway Wescott, Arthur Wooten

Expat American literary young men colliding in Gertrude Stein's orbit in Paris, Hemingway took an immediate dislike to gay novelist Glenway Wescott for his artificial affectations [from Wisconsin, he acquired an English accent] and his "fake" fiction. In The Sun Also Rises he lampooned Wescott as Robert Prescott until Max Perkins made him change the overly obvious last name to Prentiss. Wescott's major novels, before he ceased writing them at 44, are The Grandmothers, based on his own family, Apartment in Athens [Kindle], about a Greek family forced to host a German officer, of which Susan Sontag said in The New Yorker it is “among the treasures of 20th-century American literature,” and The Pilgrim Hawk [Kindle], which David Leavitt chose as a favorite of 2011. Late last year came his gay-inclusive stories, A Visit to Priapus. One area in which Wescott trumped Hemingway: His relationship with MoMA curator Monroe Wheeler lasted 68 years, from 1919 to his death at 85 in 1987. After you read the novels, try Jerry Rosco's Glenway Wescott Personally: A Biography or get Continual Lessons: The Journals of Glenway Wescott, 1937-1955 and A Heaven of Words: Last Journals, 1956-1984.

Reader Daniel recommends the really wonderful When We Were Three: Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescott 1925-1935.

Camp out with some old-school gay humor. Arthur Wooten's novel of misadventures in middle-aged gay dating, On Picking Fruit [Kindle], inspired Edmund White to say, "If gallantry in our day is defined as facing adversity with screams of laughter, then this is the most gallant book I know of." Its sequel is Fruit Cocktail [Kindle]. Three generations of Southern zany types converge in Birthday Pie [Kindle], and Leftovers examines a 1950s divorced woman's zeal for Tupperware. Dizzy: A Fictional Memoir goes backstage with Broadway royalty. Wooten's site says, "All of his books have been adapted to film, television and/or stage."

Folio + Foreign Fiction

So a bunch of literary Brits got fed up with the Booker for pandering to popularity and retaliated by creating what they promised would be a more literary literary award, called The Folio Prize, which announced its first winner, who got $66,612: 

George Saunders, Tenth of December [Kindle]

A.S. Byatt found it "very sad" that of the eight Folio finalists, five were American and only one was British (Jane Gardam). Byatt bemoaned the "dumbing down" of UK fiction which lacks the "energy" of yesteryear, and, although the US books are more "inventive and beautifully written," she noted they were a tad self-centered in their American myopia: "I don’t think there’s one that is the slightest bit interested in Britain or Europe or Africa or Asia." 

We should all be reading more foreign fiction. Now you may have particular interest in the Ukrainian writer Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky whose book of fables, Autobiography of a Corpse, is longlisted for one of the fiction prizes below. The only two authors to appear on both lists are Javier Marías, for The Infatuations, and superstar Karl Ove Knausgaard for My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love.

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist of fifteen titles:

Back to Back by Julia Franck

Brief Loves that Live Forever by Andreï Makine

Butterflies in November by Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir

The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon

The Dark Road by Ma Jian

Exposure by Sayed Kashua

The Infatuations by Javier Marías

The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim

My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard

A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli

The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Ogawa Yoko

The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Kawakami Hiromi

Ten by Andrej Longo

 

The Best Translated Book Award has a longlist of 25 titles including these highlights:

The Story of a New Name by Elena Ferrante (translated by Ann Goldstein)

Her Not All Her by Elfriede Jelinek (trans. Damion Searls)

My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgaard, (trans. Don Bartlett)

Autobiography of a Corpse by Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky (trans. Joanne Turnbull)

The Infatuations by Javier Marías (trans. Margaret Jull Costa)

In the Night of Time by Antonio Muñoz Molina (trans. Edith Grossman)

The Whispering Muse by Sjón (trans. Victoria Cribb)

The Devil's Workshop by Jáchym Topol, (trans. Alex Zucker)

The End of Love by Marcos Giralt Torrente (trans. Katherine Silver)

City of Angels: or, The Overcoat of Dr. Freud by Christa Wolf (trans. Damion Searls)

Sandalwood Death by Mo Yan (trans. Howard Goldblatt)

 

Finally, the French American Translation Prize five finalists are:

• All My Friends by Marie NDiaye (trans. Jordan Stump)
• The Conductor and Other Tales by Jean Ferry (trans. Edward Gauvin)
• Electrico W by Hervé Le Tellier (trans. Adriana Hunter)
• No Fixed Abode by Marc Augé (trans. Chris Turner)
• Where Tigers Are at Home by Jean-Marie Blas de Roblès (trans. Mike Mitchell)

Eastern Boys

You know how it goes: After all that monotonous cruising in a train station you finally talk to the 19 year-old Ukrainian hustler, Marek, who promises to show up at your flat the next afternoon, and when you open the door it's a young kid claiming he's Marek and you shouldn't have invited him over for sex because he's underage, it's illegal, and he'll scream if you don't do what he says. Immediately the entire gang of hustlers arrive, drink your liquor, berate you, dance, smash your table, and remove every item of value from your apartment while you dance a little or stand there in a stupor. The next week, Marek comes back to your now empty flat and doesn't apologize, so of course you start dating / paying him for sex. Deeper feelings arise, and Marek wants an iPhone. A white iPhone. Naturally, you buy it for him. Soon enough you move him out of your bedroom to the study, announce the sex is over, and want to adopt him. But he doesn't have any proper papers to be in France and the gang leader (shirtless above) keeps everyone's passport locked up. 

The director Robin Campillo was very appealing before the screening of Eastern Boys at Lincoln Center's Rendez-vous with French Cinema. He admitted he was the editor and hoped it wasn't too long. It was. Somewhere in the footage there's a good movie about makeshift families (most especially the gang) and immigration and power and helplessness and love. 

For alternative families of restless young men rewatch Beau Travail and for the complexities of dating an eastern hustler reread Mitko.

Born March 12: Randall Kenan, Sergey Nabokov

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, riffed on Baldwin in a 149-page essay called The Fire This Time, and edited Baldwin's uncollected writings in The Cross of Redemption. He teaches at his alma matter, UNC Chapel Hill.

Especially for the Nabokov family, fiction is truer than bare fact. Read Paul Russell's award-winning novel about Vladimir's gay brother, The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov [Kindle] and his conversation about him with Christopher Bram over at The Millions.

Born February 25: Severo Sarduy

Why Reinaldo Arenas and not Severo Sarduy? Born six years apart, the gay Cuban exile novelists died of aids in within three years of each other. In death, Arenas became a star, then, with Julian Schnabel's film , a superstar, whereas the twenty years since Sarduy's passing in 1993 have largely erased the memory of his accomplishments. His novel Cobra won France's Prix Médicis étranger in 1972, immediately followed by four literary heavyweights, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortazar, Steven Millhauser, and Doris Lessing, but for some reason his win did not propel him to their level of international acclaim, possibly because his novel is about a kitschy trans cabaret performer at the Lyrical Theater of Dolls.

Born in 1937 in Cuba's third largest city Camagüey, he left at 23 to study in Madrid but within a month diplomatic ties frayed between Spain and Cuba, and Sarduy had to move to Paris. He stayed there for the rest of his life, though he traveled throughout Europe and met his longtime companion François Wahl on vacation in Italy. His two volumes of essays are Written on a Body and Christ on the Rue Jacob, which Booklist called, "a special book of thrilling ideas excitingly expressed."

Last year wonderful Archipelago (forever blessed for bringing Gerbrand Bakker's gay novel The Twin to American readers) published Sarduy's novel Firefly [Kindle]: "For the first time in English, Severo Sarduy's most autobiographical work, centered on two transvestites who undergo oppositional sexual surgeries (one is castrated, the other is given a new member). This convention-defying, scatological, and very funny novel is a paradise of words, 'paradisic by plenitude' (Roland Barthes)."

Edmund White Returns to Paris with Inside a Pearl

After Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1995), The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2000), and the "My Europe" section of My Lives: A Memoir (2005), Edmund White today releases his new memoir Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris [Kindle]. Yes, that's a woman seated with him, and, yes, Bloomsbury has degayed the flap copy. Bookforum says, "His portrait of Marie-Claude de Brunhoff…is one of the most affecting depictions of the contours of friendship between a gay man and a straight woman in recent literarature." Don't worry, he hasn't gone soft. As sexually frank as ever, his "grand banquet comes with a delicious roster of cameos—Michel Foucault, Ned Rorem, Milan Kundera, Mary McCarthy, Lauren Bacall, Julian Barnes, Nigella Lawson, Dominique Nabokov, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Azzedine Alaia, Paloma Piccaso…But Inside a Pearl is also a dedication to the lovers and companions and night-time cruisers who get equal footing in the sweeping, Bank-to-Bank narrative…Early along the way, White tests positive for aids, and a trace of flinching mortality underlies the extravagance and dizzying spree that makes Inside the Pearl such an exhilarating ride," according to Interview. Jay Parini in the NYTBR writes, "White is wonderfully tender about his lovers, whom he treats with uniform respect, even melancholy. Indeed a sadness infuses his story . . .This narrative unfolds, for all its frenetic pleasure-seeking, in the shadow of aids . . . [A] beautifully written memoir. . . 'Inside a Pearl' refers not only to Paris, with its mists and mysteries." Library Journal: "A gossipy and enlightening account of living as a gay man among the French intelligentsia . . .White's skillful writing rescues the book from being just another account of an American in Paris." 

Always entertaining in person, he reads tonight at Three Lives in NYC.

Queer Bites in Provence, 1970

Despite its flaws -- an author not quite equal to his subjects and not fully convincing in his loose thesis, as well as problems of pacing, padding, and compulsive repetition -- Luke Barr's Provence, 1970: M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, and the Reinvention of American Taste [Kindle] stays readable thanks to its idyllic setting and stellar cast. The majority of those stars were queer: thrice-married bisexual MFK Fisher, old guard gay chef James Beard, upstart gay cook Richard Olney, and lesbian partners Sybille Bedford and Eda Lord. More gay men cruise the background including Beard's longtime partner pastry chef Gino Coffaci, NYT critic Craig Claiborne, and Fisher's high-flying friend David Pleydell-Bouverie. Of this rich, homo banquet Barr can serve forth only two crumbs: one observation that "catty" "snobs" Bedford and Olney hit it off because their orientation made them both outsiders, and one passing mention of Stonewall the previous year. The straight stars are supernovas, Julia & Paul Child and her editor Judith Jones, with glimpses of imperial Simone Beck and sweet Nora Barr, who is Fisher's sister and the author's grandmother. Luke Barr's lasting contribution here is having unearthed his great aunt MF's lost diary of this trip.

Readers may imagine from the book's subtitle a cause and effect -- because these gastro kingpins gathered, they actually discussed and decided something about the future of American food together -- but the reality is trickier. They were all on separate vacations, barely overlapping, and each had already decided to switch directions. In December 1970 Beard was years into his American Cookery, Julia months earlier had resolved to split from Simca Beck and go solo for her future books, and MFK Fisher's food career was largely behind her: Maybe the trip altered her long-held views of France, but after that she published only one new full-length work (a memoir of Marseille) and a few collections gathering older and more recent pieces.

Nevertheless it's a pleasure to see so many fascinating people in a beautiful spot before it was spoiled. If the book's greatest moments of brio and dynamism come from excerpts of its subjects' writing, you can go directly to their memoirs: Julia's My Life in France [Kindle], Beard's Delights And Prejudices, Richard Olney's Reflexions, Sybille Bedford's Quicksands, MFK Fisher's The Art of Eating, and Judith Jones' wonderful The Tenth Muse [Kindle]. Do not underestimate her: Jones (below, center) turns 90 this year and her long publishing career spans rescuing The Diary of Anne Frank from the rejection pile to decades of editing John Updike, Anne Tyler, Peter Taylor, and William Maxwell and scores of classic cookbooks. 

How Degayed Is The Monuments Men?

 

"Based on a True Story:" Clooney transforms a 38 year-old, tall, gay stud into a tiny 68 year-old weakling.

The list of what I'd endure for Thebes does not extend to sitting through writer-director-star George Clooney's "tepid" (USA Today), "lifeless" (Variety), "pandering" (NYT), "self-congratulatory" (AV Club), "failure" (EW, which gave it a C-) of "threadbare formula and sentimental cliches" (Wash Post), The Monuments Men, so I can't report the exact extent to which he's degayed the real men and women who rescued art stolen by the Nazis. One clue can be found here: The character based on the imposing, six-foot, broad-shouldered uber queer Lincoln Kirstein age 38 in May 1945 is played by five-foot-five, 68 year-old Bob Balaban who in these interviews says he didn't study Kirstein for his role as "Preston Savitz" and no Q or A mentions anything gay. Nor do critics. Balaban hints "many of his key characteristics weren’t necessarily written into my part of the movie." But he's small and sensitive and struggles to climb a wall and he's the only one of them who wears spectacles, so audiences will get it, right? Why be honest about actual gay heroics in history when you can rely on stale signifiers and sissy stereotypes?

While still shy of gay contributions, the better telling of these events is in Lynn Nicholas' NBCC winning The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe's Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War which was made into this documentary.