Band of Thebes

Born August 7: Anna Weirauch, William J. Mann

Nine years before London's 1928 deluge of lesbian fiction, including Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Compton MacKenzie's Extraordinary Women, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel, and Djuna Barnes' The Ladies Almanack, Anna Weirauch published The Scorpion in Germany. It was the first of three novels following Mette Rudolph from childhood to adulthood. In the first volume young Mette has an affair with Olga, who eventually breaks up with her and kills herself. When Mette's parents enlist a psychiatrist to "cure" her, she dismisses the idea that lesbians are sick or need treatment. In the next two volumes she encounters most of the social ills of Weimer Berlin, including  drug abuse, alcoholism, and rampant promiscuity but in the end, she finds contentment by leaving the city. Once she's settled in a rural area, restored by nature, she's ready to really love another woman. An abridged single-volume translation of the three novels, unnecessarily titled Of Love Forbidden, was published in America in 1933. That same year, when she was 46, Weirauch and her partner moved from Berlin to Upper Bavaria. After the war they moved to Munich and returned to a very different West Berlin in 1969 when she was 82. She died there the following year.

Dividing his time between Palm Springs and Provincetown, and between fiction and nonfiction, William J. Mann has published ten books since 1997. The first of his five biographies was the terrific joy Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star, which single-handedly lauched a Haines revival. Seek out Haines' movies, from 1922 to 1934, which are witty, effervescent delights. Mann reclaimed more queer movie lore in Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger. Although his landmark biography Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn [Kindle] was a NYT Notable Book in 2006, it didn't quite get the widespread attention it deserved because the mainstream didn't want to hear their icon was primarily a lesbian and her endlessly hyped romance with Spencer Tracy was cover for their separate same-sex adventures. His less overtly gay How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood [Kindle] from 2009 was followed last October by Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand [Kindle].

Mann's five novels are: The Men from the Boys, The Biograph Girl, Where The Boys Are, All American Boy, and Object of Desire [Kindle]

Born June 13: Siegfried Fischbacher

How’s this for meeting cute? Two German teenagers escape postwar strife by working on a cruise ship. One is a waiter who, when his bosses aren’t looking, performs magic tricks for the passengers, which proves so popular he’s given his own show. The other is an enraptured bellboy who becomes his onstage assistant and, to spice up the disappearing animal act, smuggles a cheetah on board. So began Siegfried & Roy. They fell in love, toured Europe, played Princess Grace’s Red Cross benefit in Monaco, then the Lido in Paris, and by 1970 it was Vegas, baby. They began to use more exotic animals in their illusionist show and, in 1989, when Steve Wynn opened the Mirage, they were so popular he guaranteed them a minimum of $57.5 million for the next five years. In 2000, they were the ninth highest-paid celebrities in the United States, just behind Steven Spielberg. Audiences adored their exotic white tigers and their camp theatrics, which featured hooded musclemen, capes, ultra tight leggings, and Roy's ludicrously oversized codpieces described as “certainly more frightening” than the tigers. Their last performance was October 3, 2003, when it was widely reported that a tiger “bit” Roy. Siegfried disputes this, saying if the tiger intended to harm Roy he would have snapped his neck and vigorously shaken him. Instead, Montecore, a seven year-old tiger who had been in the show for six years, wanted to help. Roy fell, possibly attempting to intercept a woman in the front row who may have been reaching out to touch Montecore, and the tiger was trying to rescue him, carrying him in his mouth as a mother tiger would her cubs. Roy suffered severe blood loss and critical injuries that kept him in rehabilitation for years. In April 2010, they gave a final benefit performance, with Montecore, lasting ten minutes. Siegfried and Roy continue to share a west Las Vegas eight-acre estate called the Jungle Palace, though they maintain separate living quarters.

Siegfried is 74 today. It is the younger one, Roy, 68 until October, who last year was hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit from three male caretakers who have videotape of the incidents.

Gay "Dark Arts" in The New Yorker

While I was chasing birds around Alaska, the New Yorker published Ben Marcus's story The Dark Arts, about a 20-something American slacker with an autoimmune disorder who travels to Düsseldorf for experimental treatments he can't afford. Waiting for his (delayed? ex-?) girlfriend to join him, Julian stays in a hostel where the men have sex with one another at night. From the very first paragraph:

"The beds in the old gymnasium were singles, which didn’t keep certain of the guests from coupling when the lights went out. Sometimes Julian could hear them going at it, fornicating as if with silencers on. He studied the sounds when he couldn’t sleep, picturing the worst... In the morning he could never tell just who had been making love. The men dressed and left for the day, avoiding eye contact, mesmerized in the glow of their cell phones."

Inevitably, later in the story one of the frisky men tries Julian. He's asleep, he's aroused, he responds, he freaks. 

"That night at the hostel, a visitor came to Julian’s bed. Some uninvited man crept under his covers while he slept, and Julian woke up—suddenly, rudely, confused. This man was taking liberties. Before much could happen—before disgrace and shame and, who knows, the implication that he was even remotely O.K. with this—he’d fled to the bathroom.

"His heart was blasting, his sleep shirt damp and twisted. From the bathroom, looking back out into the gymnasium, the air thick with sleep, he saw no sign of anything. No man, no sounds, just beds and bodies and darkness. It was as if the stranger had vanished. Hands had been on him while he slept, and when he thought about it he saw himself lying there reciprocating. He couldn’t piece it together. What in the goddam hell had happened? He checked his body everywhere, testing. For evidence? Damage?

"He’d been touched, that he was sure of. He’d been touched, it had happened, and now there was nothing to be done about it. He crouched in a bathroom stall, trying to think. Some scene in whatever he’d been dreaming—he’d been having some kind of intense dream, oh, God—had allowed this to happen, had made him stay longer in his bed than he should have. As if he were enjoying it. He’d been dreaming of cuddling, and not with Hayley, but big deal. That was how it worked. You could date the whole world in your dreams, and it was O.K. You could, actually, date-rape the whole world in a dream, too....and wake up crying. So fucking what. The point is, he was cuddling someone in his dream, and he was doing it in that squirming way, he had to admit, that he hoped might lead to more, and then he woke up beside a body, and what were you supposed to do? There was no way not to respond. Anyone would. It could have been a dog and he would have nuzzled into it, feeling something. He was aroused, technically, but he had been aroused before the man crawled into bed with him, so this was bullshit."

Without spoilers, let's say Julian's awakening isn't over. Finally, his girlfriend does show up, and guess what...

The entire story is available free, without registration. Read an interview about it here. Ben Marcus's most recent novel is The Flame Alphabet [Kindle].

Born May 14: Magnus Hirschfeld

The next time people claim the gay rights movement is a recent invention or that you’re anachronistically imposing a modern concept on a pre-Stonewall era that could not possibly have supported the idea, remind them of Magnus Hirschfeld. In 1896, he wrote and published a pamphlet on homosexual love called Sappho and Socrates. In 1897 with the leaders of the gay journal Der Eigene, Hirschfeld founded the Scientific Humanitarian Committee, whose motto was “Justice through science.” Their first goal was to overturn the notorious 1871 German law Paragraph 175, criminalizing male homosexuality. Not only did they campaign openly and publicly, they urged prominent people to sign their petition to repeal the law. Among the 5,000 signatories were Einstein, Tolstoy, Mann, Hesse, and Rilke. When the bill to repeal came before the Reichstag in 1898, it failed, and, infuriated by their hypocrisy, Hirschfeld contemplated outing various members of parliament who had voted against it. Undaunted by the defeat, the committee continued to get the bill reintroduced repeatedly over the next decades. 
        Thirty-four years before Kinsey, Hirschfeld collected detailed information about sexual behavior in surveys from 10,000 people and published the results in his 1914 book Homosexuality in Men and Women. Extending his push for gay rights into other media, in 1919 Hirschfeld wrote and acted in a movie called Different from the Others starring Conrad Veidt, whose character comes out to thwart his extortionist gay ex-lover but then loses his job and kills himself. That same year, the government gave Hirschfeld a former royal palace in Berlin to house his Institute for Sexual Research, which offered medical and psychological consultations, marriage counseling, contraception, sex education, and promoted women’s emancipation and rights for gay and transgender people. The institute’s ongoing success inevitably drew the attention of the Nazis. One of the Nazis' early actions, on May 6, 1933, was to ransack the archives and confiscate names and addresses. On May 10, the Nazis returned to hold a massive book burning in Opernplatz on Unter den Linden, destroying the invaluable collection of 20,000 volumes and 5,000 images depicting “deviants” and ideas that were “un-German.” Hirschfeld was on a lecture tour of the United States and never returned home. In Nice in 1935, on his sixty-seventh birthday, he had a heart attack and died, survived by his partner, colleague, former student, and heir, Li Shiu Tong, who lived until 1993.

"Aids Caused Gay Marriage": Positive Pictures, A History

Fran Lebowitz's remark, "Nobody ever says it, but AIDS caused gay marriage," got Paul Schulz wondering about the relationship between those two topics and he discovered he agreed with her. The result is his photography book about the fight against aids co-authored with Christians Lütjens, Positive Pictures - A Gay History. In their essay they endorse another famous quote, Larry Kramer's insistence that it is "the greatest sociocultural achievement of a minority in human history that gay men saved themselves -- that we did not all die."

Between the striking photos, the book also features essays by queer art curator Jonathan D. Katz, cultural critic Jan Kunemund, porn director Jorg Andreas, Deutsche Aids-Hilfe's Tino Henn and Carsten Schatz, as well as the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence's Katharina Laetitiam Donans, among others.

The publisher says, "Aids changed everything about the way gay men live: how we love, how we make love, how we see ourselves and others. Schulz and Lütjens collect images from three decades of fighting, fucking and winning. Heartbreaking, moving, inspiring."

Born March 28: Håkan Lindquist, Dirk Bogarde

Is it the mild gay content that prevents the international literary community from adding Håkan Lindquist to the working list of great living Nothernish writers like Gerbrand Bakker, Peter Stamm and Per Petterson (all of them indebted to the magnificent simplicity of lesbian Tove Jansson)? Or is it merely because only two of Håkan's five novels are available in English, and those two were long-distance efforts from a German publisher? Rest assured, his time will come. Until then, you can pride yourself on getting to know this dashing Swede (who splits his time between Stockholm and Berlin) before IMPAC Dublin discovers him. His short, domestic novels tackle eternal themes of family secrets, the nature of love, and the passage of time, with a fresh perspective and a modern, gay naturalism. My Brother and His Brother follows Jonas as he tracks down and uncovers surprising details about Paul, his older brother who died at sixteen the year before Jonas was born. On Collecting Stamps is a beautiful look back, from middle age, as Mattias reconsiders his unconventional friendship, starting at twelve, with a lonely middle-aged stamp collector, Samuel. Notice in both cases the complex double layering of time: At eighteen, Jonas is now older than his "older" brother, and Mattias has reached the same stage of life Samuel was when they met. Brilliant. Read him. (Photo by Yuna Yagi.)

After distinguished service as an intelligence officer in the Queen's Royal Regiment during WWII, Dirk Bogarde tried acting and became Britain's top box office draw of the 1950s. So it was big news in 1961 when he chose to play a closeted, married gay barrister in Victim, especially considering he was closeted himself. (He and his manager Anthony Forwood lived together for decades.) In 1963, Bogarde played the creepy, closety valet in The Servant, and later played the tragic gay lead of Death in Venice. Today, the courage of these choices can hardly be imagined. Even in 1971, two years after Midnight Cowboy, Warner Brothers was so terrified of Death in Venice being charged with obscenity in the U.S. they wanted to drop the movie altogether. They relented after Queen Elizabeth and Princess Anne attended the London premiere; it won an Oscar. Yet offscreen in his own life, Bogarde lacked the same bravery. After the anguish of watching his partner suffer a prolonged battle with Parkinson's and liver cancer, he became a vocal proponent of euthanasia. That was 1988, coincidentally the same year that John Gielgud came out quietly and Ian McKellan came out blazingly. Bogarde never did. He retired in 1990 and lived till 1999, by which time he had written something like eight volumes of autobiography, none of which tells the full truth of his life. In fact, he destroyed much of his personal archives.

Born March 16: Sybille Bedford

How close did the exquisite writer Sybille Bedford come to being killed by the Nazis? Born in 1911 outside Berlin and raised a Roman Catholic, she lived with her aged father, Baron Maximilian Josef von Schoenebeck, when her mother, his second wife, Elizabeth Bernard, Anglo-German Jewish, rich, and beautiful, was off with another man. At 22 Sybille blasted the Nazis in an essay for Klaus Mann's literary journal and they subsequently discovered her heritage and seized her bank accounts. She couldn't renew her German passport and couldn't stay abroad once it had expired, and without an income. That could
have led to the end. Enter Aldous Huxley's wife Maria who knew gay Auden had just gallantly wed Erika Mann to solve her citizenship problems. Said Maria, “We must get one of our bugger friends to marry Sybille.” They didn't need to look far; Auden's butler had been having an affair with an English army officer Terry Bedford, who agreed to be used. Now a British citizen, Sybille spent the war in America with the Huxleys and wrote three unpublishable novels imitating Aldous' style. After the war, she traveled to Mexico, found her exceptional voice, and wrote her legendary A Visit to Don Otavio. An absolute must read. Bruce Chatwin said of another book, “When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Mrs. Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.” Bedford became friends with another wanderlust writer, Martha Gellhorn, and lovers with Eda Lord. She spent the 1950s to 70s loosely based in France, Italy, Britain, and Portugal.

She also wrote four novels, one of which was a Booker nominee. The best is A Legacy, covering two Austrian-German families leading up to WWI. The queerest is A Compass Error, about a teenage girl's affair with a married woman. The most commericial is Jigsaw, again mining her formative years for a story about a girl shuttled between her unconventional mother in Italy and her father's uptight family in England. In her 90s she finally wrote her memoir, Quicksands, which nearly as obliquely covers a lot of the same ground as her autobiographical novels, including her lesbian relationships. V. S. Pritchett praised her mind as “radiant.” The finest essay about her is Joan Acocella's appreciation in the New Yorker. Bedford could be blunt; in that spirit, you're a bloody fool to skip her work.

Lore

By far the best movie so far of 2013 is Lore, based on Rachel Seiffert's debut novel The Dark Room, which was shortlisted for the Booker and won the Los Angeles Times Prize for first fiction. Brilliantly acted, beautifully shot, the film follows the disintegration of a German family in the wake of WWII. After fleeing their home for a rustic farmhouse where they are not wanted, the Nazi father leaves forever and the brittle, devastated mother soon abandons the five children to turn herself in, sparing them/herself the experience of the police dragging her away to a camp. The proud, uncomprehending children still expect to win the war and still expect a train to take them north to grandmother's house. They have a lot of unwanted truths to face, as does the defeated nation at large. Though the movie wisely stays entirely on them during their long walk north, around the edges you get perfect moments of Germans' bitter disillusionment and angry, willful ignorance. (At aid stations, they claim the posted newspaper clippings of death camp victims are fakes, staged by the Americans.) Viewers who complain the children aren't likable enough, or the ending isn't happy enough, must be looking for sheer entertainment rather than art. Lore ranks with The White Ribbon, The Reader, and Downfall.

Released last month, it's down to one screen in Manhattan. Don't miss it.

Born February 17: Robert Dessaix, Fritz Krupp

Which book finally dislodged The Horse Whisperer from the #1 spot on Australia's bestseller lists? Basically its opposite: Robert Dessaix's Night Letters was a surprise sensation, an intellectual novel compromised of twenty letters written in a hotel in Venice in the mid-1990s by an Australian man newly diagnosed with HIV. Echoing literary travelers from Marco Polo and Dante to Casanova and Sterne, contemplating life, death, love, and the passage of time, the narrator R. discourses on cathedrals and museums, seduction and sex, hell and heaven, Venice and Venetians. Despite the character's dire future, critics hailed his "wry, chatty, surprisingly cheerful voice" (NYTBR) finding him "seductive, charming, and always thought-provoking" (Kirkus). The San Francisco Chronicle called it a "luminous gem" and the Cleveland Plain Dealer "a story exquisitely told." Dessaix's second novel, Corfu, also describes gay ex-pats in Europe and again rings with literary echoes: Homer, Sappho, Chekhov, Cavafy. His nonfiction includes a memoir called A Mother's Disgrace about his own adoption and subsequent wanderlust; Twilight of Love, a book about retracing Turgenev's steps as he followed a married opera star and her husband for years; and an anthology, Australian Gay and Lesbian Writing. In April 2011 he published On Humbug. Last August he published As I Was Saying: A Collection of Musings [Kindle]. After a failed marriage to a woman, Dessaix wrote a personal ad in 1982 and met Peter Timms, who is still his partner.As for longevity and dedication, Dessaix created a complex language when he was eleven and continues to speak it to himself even now, as he turns 69 today.

Heir to a 300 year-old dynasty and a newer steel, ammunitions, and weapons empire, Friedrich Alfred Krupp, known as Fritz, preferred marine biology but took over the family firm in 1887 when he was thirty-three. Also against his inclination, he married a woman. He spent as much time as he could in Capri, pursuing his first loves of oceanography and men. For the times when he had to be in Germany, he arranged for his favorite Italian youths to work at a luxury hotel in Berlin, where he often stayed for their service and where other guests complained about the noises coming from his inner sanctum. Accustomed to enormous power -- by the turn of the century he had built Krupp into the largest company in Europe -- he ignored others' objections. This may be why his wife was institutionalized. The media, however, could not be quelled forever. An Italian newspaper was preparing to print accounts of his famous island orgies, with photos. Vorwärts, the Social Democrats' magazine, beat them to it, outing the forty-eight year-old Fritz on November 15, 1902. Seven days later he killed himself. Emperor Wilhelm II blasted his political opponents and defended Fritz against the "slander," and his wife immediately "recovered" to continue raising their two daughters. The eldest inherited the firm which became a Nazi juggernaut. The dynasty endures as does fascination with them; someone filmed their story, including dandified Fritz flaunting his rough trade. Photos after the jump.

Berlinale Teddy Awards: In The Name Of, Bambi, Concussion

Last night the Teddy Awards for the best queer movies at the 63rd Berlin Film Festival, the big winner was the drama In the Name Of about a tempted gay priest working with tough youths in a remote Polish village (above). In addition to winning the Teddy, Malgorzata Szumowska's feature also won the audience award. 

Best documentary was awarded to Bambi, a portrait of a Algerian trans woman who was born in 1935 and began performing cabaret in Paris in the 1950s.

A special jury prize was given to Concussion, the lesbian drama directed by Stacie Passon that recently screened at Sundance.

Click here for a full list of forty queer films at the Berlinale, including Free Fall about a man who unexpectedly falls in love with another fellow in his police training program (below); White Night about a Seoul hookup between two men who never stay still, Won-Gyu, a flight attendant and Tae-Jun, a bike courier; Exposed, Beth B's look at the new burlesque; and a documentary about Paul Bowles called The Cage Door Is Always Open.

Born December 28: F.W. Murnau, Manuel Puig, Socalled

After studying art history at the University of Heidelberg and flying as a combat pilot in WWI, F.W. Murnau directed his first film The Boy in Blue in 1919 when he was thirty-one. Before his death in a car crash at forty-two, he became one of cinema's early giants -- (said to be 6'9" tall) -- with a prodigious output in Germany, most famous of which is Nosferatu from 1922. After four years and many more successes (The Last Laugh, Faust) Murnau moved to Hollywood and made what many critics consider one of the greatest films ever, Sunrise, which shared the top prize at the first Oscar ceremony. Sunrise is #82 on the AFI 100 Greatest Films list but in 2002 the British Film Institute ranked it #7 of all time. He made two more movies -- Four Devils (lost) and Our Daily Bread (released as City Girl) -- before his final picture, Tabu, a loincloth romance shot in Tahiti that won a cinematography Oscar for Floyd Crosby (father of David Crosby who is biologically the father of Melissa Etheridge's children). He died a week before Tabu's premiere. Because humans are easily titillated, and because some are snickering homophobes, the baseless rumor persists that Murnau's fatal car crash was the result of his performing oral sex on his chauffeur.

Born in central Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig first wanted to be an architect then became a film archivist with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. His love of movies infuses his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, published when he was thirty-six. Praised in Latin America as that work was, his international reputation rests on his fourth novel, published in 1976, about a gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell: Kiss of the Spider Woman [Kindle] also became an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 1993. The buoyancy of his early books, mixing high literary art with the low-brow style of telenovas, gave way to a bitterness in later books that reduced their popularity. A leftist exile in Mexico City for decades, he died there at fifty-seven suffering a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

 

 

Who brings the funk, da noise, and the klezmer? That's right, the super original Jewish Canadian rapper Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. If you think Ukrainian music from the 1930s won't mesh with drum n bass, you haven't heard his Ghettoblaster. His trippy "You Are Never Alone" video became a YouTube sensation with 2.5 million views, and last year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel. In a world of timid, homogenized, market-driven art, Socalled is a standout. Which doesn't mean everything he tries works, but when he hits, he's genius. I met him and loved him after the NYC screening of the documentary. Not to brag, but after talking a while I did the very best thing one man can do for another... insisted he read Tatyana Tolstaya. Next month he rocks Banff, Calgary, and Edmonton.

Born November 18: Klaus Mann

Novelist (Mephisto), memoirist (Turning Point), and playwright (Anja and Esther), Klaus Mann could never outrun his father's preeminence as a writer, but could he also never get over his father's love? Colm Tóibín notes the many times in Thomas Mann's diaries when he expresses sexual interest in Klaus, nicknamed Eissi, here at fourteen:

"‘terribly handsome in his swimming trunks. Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son . . . It seems I am once and for all done with women? . . . Eissi was lying tanned and shirtless on his bed, reading; I was disconcerted.’ Later that year he ‘came upon Eissi totally nude and up to some nonsense by Golo’s bed’ and was ‘deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming’"

Far quicker than his father to grasp the evil of the Nazi ascent, Klaus left Germany for Paris in 1933 when he was 26. He was granted Czech citizenship and came to America in 1936, the year of Mephisto, dividing his time between Princeton and New York. The following year he met his partner, Thomas Quinn Curtiss, who would become a critic for the IHT and Variety and wrote the screenplay for The Iceman Cometh. Klaus wrote one more novel, Der Vulken, about German exiles during WWII, published in 1939; his autobiography; and one nonfiction work Andre Gide and the Crisis of Modern Thought. As Tóibín says, Klaus "was fluid and generous and flighty. He kept nothing in reserve, and this, despite his obvious literary talent, or maybe because of it, made him melancholy...instead of writing about death as his father did obsessively, he allowed the aura of death to enter his own spirit." He was also addicted to heroin. He killed himself with an overdose of pills, in Cannes, in 1949. Curtiss lived until 2000. Andrea Weiss illuminates it all in her fascinating dual biography, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, including their mainly queer circle of friends: Gide, Isherwood, Cocteau, Brecht, McCullers, and Auden, whom Erika married for citizenship.

Born November 14: Adolf Brand

When was the world's first gay journal published? Congratulations if you said 116 years ago, in 1896. That's when Adolf Brand, at 22, started Der Eigene in Berlin. Originally cloaked as a journal of "male culture," within two years it went exclusively gay. In 1900, Brand published Elisar von Kupffer's landmark anthology of gay poems, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe In der Weltliteratur, including works from Ancient Greece and Rome, Renaissance Italy, Elizabethan England, 19th century Germany, as well as Arab and Japanese texts. Brand and his colleagues were constantly harassed and frequently prosecuted for their articles and photography, but he never backed down. Indeed, the first of his three prison sentences was for having attacked a member of parliament with a dog whip. His second prison term, eighteen months, was for libel, after reporting the affair between the German chancellor Prince von Bülow and the Privy Councilor Max Scheefer. His third prison term was two months, after he was convicted of violating Paragraph 175 for printing "lewd writings" in Der Eigene. The journal lasted thirty-six years. (Compare that with ONE, nineteen years; The Ladder, sixteen years; or 10 Percent magazine, four years.) His life's work destroyed and left in financial ruin, Brand gave up his activism in the 1930s. He spent two years in the German army and married a nurse, Elise Behrendt, who knew he was gay. He and Elise were killed together on February 2, 1945 when an Allied bomb exploded their home.

   

Born November 10, 12: Roland Emmerich, Roland Barthes

Nothing says "a Roland Emmerich film" like the two words "global smash." The auteur of the apocalypse has been so phenomenally successful worldwide at destroying the Earth in Independence Day, Godzilla, and The Day After Tomorrow, by the time he made 2012, he negotiated for one-fourth of the gross. Twenty-five percent of the total box office is $192 million. Overall, his movies have grossed $3.2 billion. The 57 year-old was born in Stuttgart and, with his sister Ute, runs Centropolis Entertainment, also responsible for Stargate, The Patriot, and 10,000 BC. Emmerich says he has witnessed plenty of racism in Hollywood (the studio did NOT want to cast Will Smith in ID; nor did they want an interracial couple in TDAT) but no homophobia. His historical drama Anonymous, arguing that Edward de Vere wrote Shakespeare's work, was roundly panned yet earned an Oscar nom for best costume design. An early Hillary Clinton supporter, Emmerich is a big donor to LGBT and anti-global warming causes. If you think his movies are an assault on the senses, wait till you see his 1830 townhouse in Knightsbridge. Yes, that's a life-size wax replica of the pope reading his own obituary. And, yup, Princess Di is flipping you her middle finger. Embracing controversy, next year on Pride weekend he'll release an action movie, White House Down, in which Channing Tatum saves a black president (Jamie Foxx) from a white paramilitary coup.

Who, in the mid-1950s, but a closeted, chain-smoking, French homosexual intellectual who lived with his mother could look at the Abbé Pierre’s haircut and spark an essay on how personality-driven charity prevented people from seeing the root causes of poverty? Roland Barthes was among the first to bridge high and low culture, showing that absolutely anything anywhere could become a text for him to parse. In his canonical book Mythologies he closely “read” the nuances of topics as varied as wrestling, Einstein, the new Citroën, photography, toys, movies, wine vs. milk, soap vs. detergent, literature, and Garbo’s face. Because he saw so much in everyday objects, French companies tried to hire him to predict consumers’ reactions, work he flirted with then avoided. Among his eighteen books, the most praised are S/Z, his intricate study of Sarrasine by Balzac; Camera Lucida, a study of photography launched by the significance of a single photo of his beloved mother; and his essay “The Death of the Author,” about the irrelevance of writers to their work. After leaving a luncheon given by François Mitterrand in February 1980, Barthes was struck by a laundry truck and died one month later, age 64. Published posthumously, Incidents ruefully describes his amorous (mis)adventures with men throughout Europe and Morocco. His Mourning Diary was published in 2010.

Whatever Happens, We'll Always Have Art

Don't say Spencer Tunick. The Berlin art duo Diego Agullo, 32, and Dmitry Paranyushkin, 30, who share a background in dance, don't want you to compare their all-male Humping Pact video work with its emphasis on thrusting movement to the American co-ed nude still photographer, 45. Some of their "missions" can seem cold but in later scenes the graphic compositions are startling. Currently on view in Brussels at Beursschouwburg through November 24.

Support them starting at 99 cents or participate in future humps by contributing 200 euros. Upcoming: Vienna, Frankfurt, the Moroccan desert, and Norwegian fjords.

On a Wednesday in September by Stephan Niederwieser

Traversing time from WWII to today, a popular gay novel in Germany On a Wednesday in September is now available in English. Stephan Niederwieser is the author of seven novels and Elle calls this one, "A magical book about the ineluctable power of love." That magic comes from a ring Edvard gives his boyfriend Bernhard, triggering strange visions. The publisher explains: "Nazi Germany, a blond soldier, and trails of blood in the snow. While seeking answers to these haunting images Bernhard crosses paths with many strangers: his close-lipped father, stewardess Kim, grand seignior Raimondo, gigolo Fred, and his own strong-willed mother Lydia. The ring connects the lives of these strangers, and what seems contradictory finally comes together."

The versatile Niederwieser has also written a series of how-to manuals for you to up your game: Blow Me: The Complete Guide to Oral Sex, Bend Over: The Complete Guide to Anal Sex, and Do It Yourself: The Complete Guide to Masturbation.

Born October 7: John Horne Burns, Herbert List

 

Born in 1916 in Andover, the eldest of seven children, John Horne Burns graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, taught at Loomis for five years, and joined the army in 1942. A gay man could do worse than to be stationed in Casablanca, Algiers, and Italy, and a budding novelist could hardly do better than to spend a violent war reading the mail written by enemy prisoners to censor the compromising lines. He used his experiences, including international cross-class pickups in gay bars in Naples, in his first and best known novel The Gallery, a panoramic story-cycle recently reissued by NYROB Classics. As you see from Nina Leen's LIFE magazine photo above, his debut launched him alongside James Michener and Irwin Shaw. Alas, their career trajectories diverged. Two years later, in 1949, Burns suffered a typical second novel comedown in Lucifer with a Book, and retaliated by moving permanently to Italy. He published his third novel, mawkishly titled A Cry of Children, in 1952, again greeted by bad reviews or critical silence. He suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in 1953 and died at 36. According to Gore Vidal, Burns said "To be a good writer, one must be homosexual."

Part Jewish and all gay, Herbert List fled his family's Hamburg coffee brokerage business in 1936 and traveled through free Europe taking many of his best known photographs. He was in Greece shooting pictures like this front and this back when Germany invaded the country in 1941. List was forced to return home and later had to join the German army. He spent 1944-45 in Norway making military maps. After the war he joined Magnum but for whatever reason he didn't take many photos. He published three major books of earlier work and eventually gave up photography altogether to concentrate on his enchanting drawings in bright colors, sometimes of happy nude gay couples. In 1988, Stephen Spender finally published his novel The Temple, a roman a clef of his pre-War years in Germany, which includes a List-inspired character named Joachim. List died in 1975 but his style lived on in the work of Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, among others.

Born September 16: Wilhelm von Gloeden

In 1876, when he was twenty and suffering from what was likely tuberculosis, Wilhelm von Gloeden left Germany for a life in Taormina, Sicily where, depending on your view, he became a great photographer, a pornographer, or a pioneer of sexual tourism. Setting up his young male models, usually nude or half-clothed outdoors, often in pairs or groups, in poses to suggest ancient Greek or Roman scenes, he made over 3,000 glass plate negatives between 1890 and the start of the Great War. In 1936, five years after his death, Mussolini's police destroyed more than 2,500 of the negatives, which he had left to his lover Pancrazio Buciuni, who had been one of his models. The images that survive are startling for their technical accomplishment and their sexual tension. They became popular as postcards in Europe, Britain, and America. Von Gloeden was already rich and shared the profits with his models and he helped fund many small businesses in the region, which critics say may explain why the locals tolerated his homosexuality and the increasing tourist trade. Many of his photographs are posted at this online gallery of his work.

Born August 28: Karl Ulrichs

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had an affair with his riding instructor when he was fourteen, was forced to quit his civil servant job for being gay when he was thirty-four, and began publishing pamphlets explaining and defending same-sex love when he was thirty-seven. Five years later, the day after his forty-second birthday, he addressed the German congress, coming out publicly and demanding they repeal their anti-gay laws. It was 1867, one hundred two years before Stonewall, and he was shouted down before he could finish his speech. Though his books were banned in Saxony and Berlin he continued writing on the subject for the rest of his life. In 1870, he published Araxes, which lays out all of the modern arguments for the rights of gay citizens. In 1879, he published the twelfth volume of his ongoing project, Research on the Riddle of Man-Manly Love, and moved to Italy, which was more hospitable. Indeed, Ulrichs was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Naples shortly before he died, one month prior to his seventieth birthday. Today, streets are named for him in Bremen, Hanover, and Munich, where this afternoon they will celebrate with their annual street party and poetry reading in Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Platz. In his final years, he wrote

 

“Until my dying day I will look back with pride that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the spectre which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt.”

Born August 26: Christopher Isherwood

Vastly underappreciated, and remembered largely for the wrong reasons, Christopher Isherwood changed the way fiction is written with his "I am a camera" style of narration. Read his interview in the Paris Review's series The Art of Fiction and make time for one of the best gay books ever, Christopher and His Kind*, which is equally enthralling about literary revelations and sexual mores: Rejecting his uptight, upperclass England, Isherwood spent much of his twenties in Berlin where he dated working class teens. Falling in love with young Heinz at a time when living quarters were especially scarce, he moved into Heinz's family's one bedroom apartment; the parents moved out of their bedroom and slept in the living room so the twenty-five year-old Brit could enjoy a double bed in privacy with their fifteen year-old son. Another person he met was Jean Ross, on whom he based Sally Bowles in his The Berlin Stories, which of course became Cabaret. After moving to England and on to New York with Auden, and further literary successes, Isherwood settled permanently in Los Angeles, where when he was forty-eight he met teenager Don Bachardy. They remained partners for over thirty years until Isherwood's death in 1986. Their relationship is the subject of the documentary,  Chris & Don. A Love Story. After more than 1,100 pages of Diaries: 1939-1960 and another 800 pages of The Sixties, in November comes 928 pages of Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983.

*not sure about this BBC2 film