Lost in last fall's book crush was Alvin Orloff's delightful third novel Why Aren't You Smiling? [Kindle] which charmed me even though it's about the 14 year-old emerging gay dweeb Leonard, the good son of atheists, and his wayward relationship with a hot Jesus Freak named "Rick" (formerly Irving Mandelbaum). Except for the Reagan-era coda, the book takes place in California in the 1970s when religion was barefoot and stringy haired and happened in places like "Christ's Crash Pad." Funny novels never get the credit they deserve for being serious, and this one has an especially tender affection for its searching souls and benignly ridiculous era. It's also smart about families, biological or otherwise.
The book is nicely blurbed by Daniel Handler, Karl Soehnlein, and Kevin Killian who says the novel "enacts, in hilariously satiric terms, something of love’s pull on us, a love that surprises and delights even when it’s almost more absurd than we can stand."
Orloff's previous romps explore the NYC 80s club scene in Gutterboys and the fabulous planet Zeeron in a queer sci-fi parody I Married An Earthling.
Not to imply that movie adaptations are the ultimate yardstick of artistic merit but of Peter Cameron's five novels, three have been made into feature films. The stories he tells resonate deeply with other types of storytellers. And with readers. And with critics. The New York Times Book Review said, "The Weekend [[Kindle]] echoes Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose brilliant narrative critiques of material culture open, again and again, to the metaphysical, to that dimension where the known world cedes to mystery." The London Times wrote, "If The City of Your Final Destination were eligible for the Man Booker Prize I would be pressing for it to be on the shortlist. It has all the qualities currently undervalued on the literary scene: understatement, humour, and a dispensing with pedestrian naturalism... it has the dream-like mistiness of somewhere in one of Shakespeare's late plays." The Philadelphia Inquirer hailed Andorra [[Kindle]] as "a nearly perfect book . . . a work of remarkable and sustained invention and imagination." The Toronto Star said Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You [[Kindle]] is "considerably more sophisticated, subtle, and rewarding" than Catcher in the Rye. Peter has also written a play, two marvelous collections of short stories, and in his spare time he publishes extremely elegant handmade books in very limited editions at his Wallflower Press. His disquieting, engrossing, and beautiful sixth novel, Coral Glynn, will be published next March. I read it in October and am still enslaved to its understated power.
Jazz genius Billy Strayhorn spent his life in a jam: professionally, he couldn’t live with or without Duke Ellington. Gay in an intolerant time and homophobic musical subculture, he was lucky to be able to live and work openly behind the protective band leader. Yet Ellington took credit for Strayhorn’s music and made him work without a contract. Duke’s highest earning number, his signature tune, the holy grail of the era, Take the A Train, was, unknown to everyone at the time, written by Strayhorn, who never received any royalties. Ellington got rich. Strayhorn worked mainly to be able to work, without recognition or reward. But what work it is: Lush Life, Day Dream, Rain Check, Satin Doll, Chelsea Bridge, Lotus Blossom, Clementine, Johnny Come Lately, and many songs recorded by his dear friend Lena Horne, including Maybe, Something To Live For, and the double-edged Love Like This Can’t Last. As for his own “love like this,” within his first year in New York he and his boyfriend Aaron Bridgers moved in together and lived openly as a couple in Harlem, brave for 1940, when he was twenty-four. And, after a life of heavy drinking and constant smoking, when he died of cancer of the esophagus at fifty-one, he died not in Lena Horne’s arms as an oft-repeated story has it [she was in Europe], but with his partner Bill Grove. Although that was two years before Stonewall, Strayhorn worked in the early gay rights movement. Proving the depth of the prejudice he struggled against, even now the official Billy Strayhorn website completely de-gays him. We've had the prestigious biography for fifteen years; where is the Hollywood biopic?
Do you think Simon Amstell knew he was gay before or after he knew he was funny? At fourteen he appeared on a British morning chat show impersonating Dame Edna. The sweetness and malice stuck. Now 32, Simon's humor is sometimes branded "mean" or "horrible." (He prefers "cheeky.") True, he teased Amy Winehouse about her drinking, but as the host of Popworld from 2000 to 2006 he was often criticized for asking famous singers exactly what viewers wanted to know. One "notorious" incident was when Britney Spears appeared on the show long after rehab, court hearings to determine her stability, and public displays of erratic behavior, like shaving her head. Simon asked if she thought she'd "gone a bit nuts?" Britney cried, and people attacked Simon. To closeted Savage Garden singer Darren Hayes, Simon asked, "So, when are you going to come out, then?" Hayes said, "Excuse me?" Simon said, "You're obviously gay. Why won't you come out?" This was cut from the aired version. Hayes calls the incident pivotal in his finally coming out two years later and still refers to Simon as a "total prick." From October 2006 to January 2009, he hosted the comedy quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, winning top category prizes from the Royal Television Society, the British Comedy Awards, and the Broadcast Awards. The Times named the show (during Simon's era) one of the best forty programs of the decade. In 2010 he co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in Grandma's House, an award-winning sitcom in which his hapless, neurotic, adorable character, a former quiz show host named Simon, returns to live with his cheerful, middle class family. It's now filming its second season.
Below, John Barrowman challenges him to a gay-off on Buzzcocks and a clip from Grandma's House. Click through for cheekier clips lampooning acting coaches and Ben Whishaw.
Much earlier this month openly gay superstar humorist David Rakoff won the Thurber Prize for his terrific third collection of smart, funny essays, Half Empty [[Kindle]]. Entertainment Weekly wrote, “Combining journalistic tenacity, literary smarts, and a talent for gut-busting one-liners . . . His blend of withering wit and self-effacing humor makes these essays soar.”
The marvelous David Rakoff is one of three finalists for this year's Thurber Humor Prize for his hilarious collection Half Empty [[Kindle]], newly out in paperback this week. The New York Times called it brilliant and The Paris Review said it is “tough, suave, dry, and very funny.”
A funny thing is happening to Andy Samberg's spoof trio The Lonely Island. They earned a Grammy nomination for their highly self-evident single I'm on a Boat, and they really and truly won an Emmy for their seminal work with Justin Timberlake, Dick in a Box. (Their more semenal Jizz in My Pants has shot up to 103 million views on YouTube.) Their brand-new sophomore and sophomoric effort Turtleneck & Chain burst onto the Billboard album chart at #3, the highest debut of the week. Predictably, the border between farce and legitimacy is ever harder to delineate. Their fresh collaborations with Akon, Beck, Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Nicki Minaj, and Michael Bolton are sort of indistinguishable from those artists' real songs. You'll be glad to know John Waters makes an appearance, too. And, if possible, the always phallic-friendly trio has gotten gayer. The final track is No Homo which, of couse, reveals the total gayness of the guy using the phrase in every line. The lyrics:
Hey man. Hey. Dude you're looking pretty swoll, you been working out? Uh yeah, why are you looking? Oh no, not like that man, I mean, no homo. Ohhh no homo. Cool When you want to compliment a friend (no homo) But you don't want that friendship to end (no homo) To tell a dude just how you feel (no homo) Say 'no homo' so he knows the deal (no homo) Hey yo man you got a fresh style (no homo) And you know you got the best smile (no homo) Your girlfriend is a lucky lady (no homo) With your looks you'll make a handsome baby (no homo) I like the way your shoulders fill out that shirt (no homo) It's hard to pull off but you make it work (no homo) Hey yo I kinda like your natural scent (no homo) Hey yo I kinda like the musical RENT (no homo) Man I can't decide who wore it best (no homo) But I'm feeling Diane Keaton's vest (no homo) I admit it I'm a fashionista (no homo) And I know every line of Mystic Pizza (no homo) Damn this rose is something special (no homo) Yeah, we should goof around and wrestle (no homo)
Let's hit the hot tub and take a dunk (no homo) We're all friends ain't no need for trunks (no homo) Man I'm really feeling buzzed right now (no homo) Are you really feeling buzzed right now? (no homo) Yo we should watch this gay porno tape (no homo) But as a joke cause we're all straight (no homo) Man you could wash laundry on those abs (no homo) Yo I think girls look good in drag (no homo) Hey I've been thinking about posing nude (no homo) Yo I've been thinking about fucking a dude (no homo) We could 3-way 69 (no homo) Or human centipede in a line (no homo) Or some docking could be hella fun ( no homo) Oh yeah man or I could do this one (no homo) Hey yo no homo but I wanna dress up like Dorothy and butt fuck a dude while he 69s Morrissey(?) No homo but I wish I lived in Ancient Greece To gave young Socrates the illful release Hey yo no homo but today I'm coming out the closet Wanna scream it from the mountains like a gay prophet These two words have set me free (no homo) Damn it feels good to be (no homo)
Editors Noreen Giffney, Michelle Sauer, and Diane Watt have collected fifteen essays in The Lesbian Premodern, including Lillian Faderman's "A Usable Past?" and Anna Klosowska's "Medieval Barbie Dolls." Karma Lochrie writes the foreword and Robyn Wiegman contributes the afterword, "The Lesbian Premodern Meets the Lesbian Postmodern."
Pulitzer-finalist and recent Publishing Triangle lifetime achievement honoree Martin Duberman examines two early queer activists in this dual biography beginning in the 1960s, in A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds [[Kindle]]. The NYT Book Review critic called it "refreshing and inspiring."
Felice Picano's True Stories: Portraits from My Past [[Kindle]] mixes memories of his childhood and adult encounters with Tennessee Williams, W.H. Auden, Charles Henri Ford, Bette Midler, and Diana Vreeland.
To the long list of closeted celebrities who wait to come out until after their careers are over and they have a book to sell, add 80s sitcom star from Family Ties Meredith Baxter Untied: A Memoir of Family, Fame, and Floundering [[Kindle]].
Tickets are now on sale for Homo Comicus, a whirligig of queer hilarity at the Gotham Comedy Club on April 6. Funny writers Eddie "Mental" Safarty and Bob "Remembrance of Things I Forgot" Smith organized the benefit which features the ever-awesome Kate Clinton, Erin Foley (above), Andre Kelly, Elvira Kurt, and Eddie. The night's emcee is radio personality Frank DeCaro, author of A Boy Named Phyllis: A Suburban Memoir. Homo Comicus tickets are a mere $20, or $30 for VIP. All door proceeds support the Lambda Literary Foundation.
Set your intellectualist angst aside for a night and enjoy the froth of gay writer-director Francois Ozon's Potiche and its all-star cast: Catherine Deneuve, Fabrice Luchini, Karin Viard, and Gerard Depardieu. Yes, it's a meringue but it's a meringue from France, where even the sweets are made with melancholy... meaning, all the couples in the comedy do not end up together. But quel laughs! It's 1977 and neglected wife Suzanne (Deneuve) takes over the management of the family umbrella factory from her sexist, philandering husband (Luchini) who inherited it from her beloved father. When she as the new boss meets with the furious striking workers for the first time, she wears her very best white fur and pearls "for respect," and when she stuns her husband with a bit of news from the past with huge ramifications, she chirps, "See! For such an old couple we still have so much to share!" The romantic hijinx aren't limited to the heteros; the gay son who doesn't quite know he's gay ends up dating a guy he doesn't realize is his half-brother.
I saw the east coast premiere last night at the Paris where, alas, my camera worked worse above water than below. If you squint through the blur you will recognize BFFs Ozon and Deneuve. After the screening I declined a request to be interviewed for French tv (if only I had been wearing a Bande du Thebes t-shirt!) but accepted an invite to the after party at Rouge Tomate. A real throwback: terrible music, great food, and hundreds of attractive people talking to each other rather than checking messages.
Potiche [roughly, trophy wife] opens in select U.S. cities on March 25.
Comedian, college dropout after one semester, #1 NYT bestselling author, sitcom star, chat show mogul, record company wannabe, vegan, animal lover, and lesbian wife, Ellen DeGeneres was named the funniest person in America by Showtime way back in 1982 when she was twenty-four. Johnny Carson, a big fan, considered her a girl Bob Newhart, though she cited Steve Martin and Woody Allen as significant influences. Her sitcom Ellen ran from 1994 to 1998 including her character's history making coming out in The Puppy Episode, seen by a record setting 46 million people. In 2003 she voiced Dory in Finding Nemo, Pixar's most successful movie ever. That September she premiered her talk show, which has become a mega hit, dancing its way to twenty-nine Daytime Emmys. During the height of the Prop 8 campaign to rescind gay marriage in California, she wed her wife, Portia De Rossi, fifteen years her junior, and screened this video on her show. Do we still have to hear the lie that stars can't be out, vocal in their support of gay rights, and popular with middle America? Ellen has won five consecutive People's Choice Awards as Favorite Daytime Talk Show Host. She just won her first Teen Choice Award. In 2007, she hosted the Oscars, earning higher ratings and more viewers than Jon Stewart in 2006 and 2008 and Hugh Jackman in 2009. In 2008, at fifty, she became the face of Maybelline's CoverGirl. Last year she was the new judge on American Idol, this year she amps up her record label eleveneleven whose first artist is (was?) 12 year-old Greyson Chance. A new memoir is coming, too.
You think of Graham Chapman as one of the original members of Monty Python's Flying Circus and the star of Life of Brian, but the 6'2" blond was also a certified medical doctor, a rugby player, a mountaineer, an alcoholic, and a smoker, dying of cancer at 48. Python first aired in 1969, the same year Graham came out to friends and family, and he was one of the first queer celebrities to campaign for gay rights. He met his partner David Sherlock in Ibizia in 1966 and five years later they adopted a teenage runaway who later became Graham's business manager. Because Graham favored the unconventional, his autobiography has five authors, including David and a pre-fame Douglas Adams. His funeral was the scene of some comic one-upmanship in 1989, but David did not scatter his ashes until 2005.
It's inappropriate to talk about George without Gilbert because for decades now they've lived their lives jointly, wearing matching business suits, as an ongoing performance piece, thinking of themselves as "living sculptures." Although Gilbert & George see no distinction between their everyday activities in London's East End and their artwork, the world knows them best by their massive black and white photocollages tinted with primary colors and covered in black tape to suggest stained glass. They frequently feature themselves in their work, as well as the occasional, banally "shocking" nudity, sex, or bodily fluid. More shocking, they are big gay conservatives and still swoon for Margaret Thatcher. Like Warhol, they have achieved a signature style that is instantly recognizable as theirs alone, no small feat in an our era of image overload. Way back in 1985 they won Britain's most prestigious art award, the Turner Prize, and their importance has not faded.(Proof of their cultural significance: they were spoofed by South Park and derided by the Evening Standard as "PERV DUO.") In 2005 they represented Britain at the Venice Biennale. They have been together more than forty years, claiming it was love at first sight when they met while studying sculpture on September 25, 1967, when Gilbert Proesch was twenty-four and George Passmore was twenty-five. Today he's sixty-eight.
Lisa Kudrow's improvised online comedy series Web Therapy gets a big boost from a three-episode visit from Meryl Streep playing a flaky gay conversion therapist named Camilla Bowner who specializes in "restoring men to their natural straight state." According to Deadline Hollywood, Streep's character blames Kudrow's character for "her husband Kip’s resistance to the female form and uses everything from talk therapy, aversion therapy and ultimately her own brand of 'Healing Touch' treatment to get him 'back on track.' " The series is co-created by openly gay writer-director Don Roos who has cast Kudrow in three of his four feature films. Streep's first episode airs Monday, November 8.
Five long years after Don't Get Too Comfortable (nine years since Fraud!), David Rakoff is releasing his new book today. According to the bestselling gay Canadian Jewish New Yorker, Half Empty promises to be "a defense of melancholy, pessimism, anxiety and all of the emotions that have been tarred with the brush of negativity and therefore stricken from the larger cultural conversation. I hope to argue...that, while these emotions may well be hedonically less pleasant, they remain necessary and even beautiful at times." It's a tribute to his sense of humor that he's continued to write about the comedy of pessimism while undergoing chemo for cancer. The cancer is a result of earlier radiation treatments when he had lymphoma in his 20s. Now he may lose his arm. As he says, " There's a lot of stuff you can do with one arm — like continue living." And continue writing for GQ and continue broadcasting on PRI's This American Life.
And continue touring. Rakoff appears tonight at B&N Union Square, tomorrow night in Baltimore, and the following night in DC. After that, he reads in Columbus, Chicago, St. Paul, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland, New York, Brooklyn, Boston, and New York. Details here.
Cultural studies grad students can spend the rest of the day deconstructing 1) an out lesbian actress 2) playing a homophobic coach 3) arguing for greater lgbt visibility 4) so that she can oppress them. In this teaser for Glee's second season starting April 13, Sue Sylvester complains about "sneaky gays" blending in with the rest of society. She demands they "swish it up." In short, more like Stewie.
Piscataway's funniest son tripped through several dead ends -- Yale, copy writing, stage set painting, satiric novels for Knopf -- before hitting his stride as a playwright in his 30s with I Hate Hamlet and Jeffrey. At the same time he was an uncredited contributor to The Addams Family and the sole screenwriter of its sequel, Addams Family Values. He also wrote parts of The First Wives Club and all of Sister Act for Bette Midler, though successfully sued to have his name removed when it was rewritten as a Whoopi Goldberg vehicle. His first and only major studio gay movie was inspired by Tom Hanks' Oscar acceptance speech for Philadelphia. Grossing $63.8 million in 1997 In and Out did half the business of The Birdcage the year before. Rudnick's movies since then have been either disappointing or atrocious (Marci X, Isn't She Great, and The Stepford Wives), but he redeemed himself with his faux movie reviews by Libby Gellman-Waxmner. More recently he's written "Shouts & Murmurs" pieces in The New Yorker imagining the Vatican's homosexual screening quiz, obscene books for children, Christian gym bunnies, or gay sheep. Unlike David Sedaris or David Rakoff, Rudnick never met a gay cliché he didn't want to put on a big pink pedestal festooned with glitter, sparklers, and disco lights. Camp is the one thing he's chest-thumpingly serious about. He complained to the New York Times:
''There's a tradition of gay flamboyance that would be shameful to
lose. My God, if every gay character has to become the
responsible district attorney or the crusading senator, then who will
ultimately benefit? Yes, we will prove that gay people can be every bit
as dull as everyone else. I guess, on a political level, it could be
important to make that point. But certainly not for my entertainment
dollar!''
Earlier this year his trio of monologues, The New Century, was hysterical. Watch him on Charlie Rosehere.
Born in Seattle to an Afghan father and Italian mother, Adbullah Jaffa Bey Khan had asthma and wore braces on his feet, and, to strengthen his breathing and his legs, began studying dance at twelve. At sixteen he fell in love with a twenty-two year man in the Coast Guard named Gerald Arpino. A few years later they moved to New York together and Joffrey made his debut at "nineteen" with Ballets de Paris. (Probably he was twenty-one; all evidence suggests he lied about being born in 1930.) Becoming a soloist in May O'Donnell's troupe from 1950-3, he realized at 5'4" his prospects as a dancer were limited, and concentrating on choreography and teaching, he longed to start his own company. With Arpino, he did. The Robert Joffrey Ballet won great acclaim for their originality (especially emphasizing male virtuosity in what had traditionally been a ballerina's world) and they struggled financially. In 1963 President Kennedy invited them to perform at the White House and they toured Russia, sponsored by the State Department, to thunderous applause; upon returning to America they lost their funding. When he was forty-five and still living with (though no longer in a sexual relationship with) Arpino who was co-director of the company, Joffrey fell in love with a twenty-six year-old art gallery manager named Aladar Marberger. Both men contracted HIV and died of aids within months of each other in 1988. Arpino became artistic director of the Joffrey that year and in 1995 moved the company to Chicago. He died this past October, still connected with the company he and Joffrey created.
God bless Bob Smith, the first openly gay comedian on The Tonight Show and the author of the funniest sign at New York's Prop 8 protests. Oh, yes, he's also the author of Selfish and Perverse the Publishing Triangle Award nominated first novel covering a few months in the life of Nelson Kunker, a handsome,
endearingly hapless television writer from Los Angeles who falls in
love with Roy, a salmon fisherman, and spends the summer with him in
Alaska. Dylan Fabizak, a hot actor / recovering addict / compulsive
flirt wheedles his way into their lives; quips, sex, and danger ensue,
sometimes simultaneously. Smith said he would cast Seann William Scott as Dylan. He's working on his second novel, which will be mandatory reading when it comes out.
Starring Neil Patrick Harris, Alison Janney, Jack Black, Maya Rudolph, Margaret Cho, John C. Reilly, Andy Richter, various people who must be from tv, and creator Marc Shaiman at the piano.
This afternoon The Hollywood Reporter posted an interview with Bill Maher including this exchange:
THR: Will you be watching the Olympics?
Maher: [Laughs.] No. The Olympics are pretty gay. Have you
seen the opening ceremonies? Makes Cirque de Soleil look like a
John Wayne movie. It's become so feminized. We have to find out
that the javelin thrower is fighting diabetes and he was brought up
in an orphanage.
Are you a First Amendment Gay? (No acronyms, please.) If so, enjoy these two really crass, tasteless, totally NSFW clips from the new Onion DVD. Climb aboard the all gay cruise ship the Queen Nathan II, or call the experts when you get stuck.
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