Band of Thebes

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.

It is Roy, not Siegfried, who last month was hit with a sexual harassment lawsuit from three male caretakers who have videotape of the incidents.

Support DER SAMURAI by Till Kleinert

When the film gods play fair, all the world's cineastes will celebrate Till Kleinert. His magnificent 2008 medium-length film Cowboy was a tremendous highpoint of 2008. Now he's in pre-production on his first feature, DER SAMURAI, and you can get in on the bragging rights by donating $10, $25, $40, $100, or more to help finance the film. If you care at all about nurturing queer art, please consider supporting this visionary writer/director. Click to indiegogo. 

Born March 23: J.C. Leyendecker

In the early 20th century when Arrow had 94% of market share, much of the shirtmaker's success could be laid with illustrator J.C. Leyendecker -- he used his chiseled boyfriend as the model for the archetypal Arrow Collar Man. Born in Germany in 1874, Leyendecker moved with his family to Chicago when he was eight. He and his brother enrolled at the city's Art Institute before studying art nouveau at the Académie Julian in Paris. They returned to Chicago early in 1899 and by May Leyendecker received his first commission for a cover of the era's most famous magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Throughout his career he would draw 321 more covers for them, creating the genre of "adorable" domestic chaos, stirring patriotism, family holidays, lovers' foibles, and youthful high spirits (with scrawny nudity) that today we associate with his Eve Harrington protege and successor Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker was slight and disliked confrontation; when his friends warned him Rockwell was stealing his style, he didn't protest. (Being a gay man and an immigrant in the early 20th century may also have amplified his instincts to avoid trouble.) One area in which he maintained preeminence was the blatant homoerotic. Leyendecker's men eternally give one another penetrating looks inside, outdoors, and on deck, and they're always thrusting elongated objects at happy angles from their bodies. He never met a muscle that didn't need to beef up, ripple, or glisten under his expert touch. As his biographers   explain, “Neighboring artists shared models with the brothers, which meant a seemingly endless train of attractive Greenwich Village lads parading through their chilly studio in the buff.” One was named Charles Beach. He was 17 and Leyendecker was 28. By all accounts Beach was both hot and not, given to self aggrandizing claims that he did Leyendecker's work (despite not being able to draw), along with the more typical fits of jealousy, insecurity, and tyranny. Margo Channing Norman Rockwell complained he never heard Beach say anything intelligent and called him "stupid." Nevertheless, Leyendecker and Beach moved into a New Rochelle mansion together and threw luxe parties attended by the jazz age set including Scott and Zelda. Inevitably, times changed, the commissions dwindled, and the money ran out. They had to dismiss their staff yet they stayed together a total of 49 years, until Leyendecker's death in 1951 when he instructed his private papers be destroyed. For more, read J.C. Leyendecker.

Leyendecker's artist brother F.X. Leyendecker also had an eye for masculine muscle, as with this barechested blacksmith, and for strategically placed missiles between shirtless swabbies (compare below). He became addicted to drugs and killed himself at 47.

    

    

Born February 28: Stephen Spender

Even though Stephen Spender delayed publication of his fine first novel, The Temple, for fifty-nine years (until 1988, when he was seventy-nine), you shouldn't expect its gay content to be as important as in E.M. Forster's Maurice (delayed fifty-eight years, until his death). The protagonist doesn't like his same-sex encounters in pre-War Germany, and much of the book's focus is political. In real life, after a series of affairs with men, Spender married twice and began to renounce his gay past, although the photo above, in which he is flanked by Auden and Isherwood on Fire Island, was taken six years into his second marriage. Later, he began to rework the past by rewriting selected lines from his eighteen books of poetry. He changed

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have a boy, a railway fare, or a revolution.

to

Whatever happens, I shall never be alone. I shall always have an affair, a railway fare, or a revolution.

In a similar vein, he became increasingly sensitive to how other people portrayed him, even when it might not have been him. In 1994, he sued David Leavitt and Viking for the novel While England Sleeps, which he claimed was based on his life and charged that the gay scenes were "pornographic." They settled out of court, and Leavitt altered certain passages for subsequent editions. Spender died the next year. Among his other legacies were twenty books of nonfiction (biography, criticism, travel, memoir), two plays, and two children. His daughter Lizzie married Dame Edna.

Ira Sachs Wins Teddy Award for Best Queer Film at Berlinale

Congratulations to Ira Sachs whose Keep the Lights On won Best Feature at the 26th Teddy Awards celebrating queer film at the Berlinale. Over ten years, a New York gay couple's relationship is threatened by competing addictions.

Zuschauerpreis der Siegessaeule: The bigger winner might be The Parade [above]. From Serbia, the turbulent farce follows homophobic mafia hitmen forced to defend the flaming queers at a fractious gay pride parade, with additional comedy/conflict among Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, Kosovo-Albanians and Croatian war vets. The cliche-riddled movie equally lampoons nellie fags and moronic machismo in the name of ultimately affirming gay acceptance. Amazingly, it became a monster box office smash success across the Balkans, becoming the #1 movie of 2011 with double the ticket sales of the number two movie, The Smurfs. The optimistic, solipsistic director expects this year's gay pride parade to be the region's first ever without anti-gay violence, thanks to his movie.

Best Documentary: Call Me Kuchu, a film by Katherine Wright and Malika Zouhali-Worral, about Uganda's first openly gay activist, David Kato, who was murdered. More here.

Best Short: Loxoro. A mother in Peru searches for her teenaged daughter and her best friend, both transsexuals.

Special Jury Prize: Jaures

Special Teddy I & II: Ulrike Ottinger, Mario Montez

As for the main jury prizes at the Berlinale, the Golden Bear went to Caesar Must Die by 80 and 82 year-old brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani. (Last year's Golden Bear winner, which also swept the acting awards, was the Iranian drama A Separation. It has an impossible 99% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and truly is as good as everyone says. See it before it wins on Sunday.)

Born February 17: Friedrich Alfred Krupp, Robert Dessaix

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.

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. Last April he published On Humbug. 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 68 today.

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. Check his upcoming tour in February and March.

Born December 9: Johann Joachim Winckelmann

Often called the father of art history, a founding hero of modern archaeology, and one who ushered in the Neoclassical craze of the 18th century, Johann Joachim Winckelmann was also the prototype of the white Northern European who, cursed with being born too late (1717), pining for the lost Hellenistic age, moved to Italy to immerse himself in the beauty of the past and console himself with the youth of the present. Born into poverty in Brandenburg, scraping through university, he was then underpaid throughout his twenties as a teacher. He became a private tutor to a wealthy family and fell in love with his only pupil, Peter Lamprecht, who later lived with him. At thirty Winckelmann was appointed secretary of a library near Dresden with 40,000 volumes and assisted its owner with writing a book about the Holy Roman Empire. His study of local antiquities eventually led to his first book, Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture. That, in turn, led to stipend to visit Italy for two years, which stretched to the rest of his life. A new Catholic convert, he became librarian to two kind, older Cardinals. After their deaths, he was librarian to the rich and influential Cardinal Albani who paved the way for him to become prefect of antiquities at the Vatican when he was 45. The following year, 1764, he published his masterpiece, History of the Art of Antiquity, which begins with the Egyptians and Etruscans and for the first time differentiates among Greek, Greco-Roman, and Roman art. Immediately heralded as a monumental work, it established his reputation throughout Europe. Four years later he was invited to court in Vienna and Berlin but re-entering the north he had a panic attack and returned to Trieste. Waiting for a ship he became acquainted with Francesco Arcangeli who murdered him in his hotel bed. Arcangeli robbed him and later told police he thought Winckelmann was a nobody.

Born November 18: Klaus Mann, Emanuel Sandhu

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.

 
Half Italian and half East Indian, Toronto native Emanuel Sandhu enrolled in dance school when he was three and won a spot in Canada's National Ballet School when he was eight. He stayed for ten years before devoting himself full-time to ice skating, winning his first Canadian Men's Skating Championship three years later with a perfect score. He has won it twice more, placing first or second each of the nine years between 1998 and 2006. In 2007 he was third. The clip from his audition for So You Think You Can Dance Canada shows his coach saying, "The ego! Sometimes too big!" followed by Sandhu announcing, "Dancing is my favorite language. It's body language. And I love it." Sandhu un-retired and tried for a skating comeback earlier this year but was sidelined by an injury. Today, he's 31.

Born November 14: Adolph Brand

When was the world's first gay journal published? Congratulations if you said 115 years ago, in 1896. That's when Adolf Brand, at 22, started Der Eigene in Berlin. Originally cloaked as a journal of "male culture," its content became exclusively gay culture within two years. 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.

Paul Russell Reads from The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

Tonight at the B&N on Broadway at 82nd St., Paul Russell reads from The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov [[Kindle]], his sixth novel and his first to reimagine the life of a gay historical figure. From St. Petersburg to England to Paris to Berlin, Sergey meets Diaghilev, Stravinsky, Magnus Hirschfield, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Cocteau, and Picasso, yet remains eternally overshadowed by his brother Vladimir. PW said, "With compelling characters and steady prose, the reader will breeze through this pleasurable, heart-breaking account of the other Nabokov." Fifteen authors have blurbed the book, including Christopher Bram who knows a thing or two about using fiction to rescue forgotten gay figures of the 1920s-50s: "A miraculous novel, witty, sexy, dramatic, and profound, the deeply involving story of a young man who experiences too much love, beauty and history in the first half of the twentieth century. It is Paul Russell's masterpiece."

 

If you can clone yourself, also see Chic superstar Nile Rodgers tonight at the Union Square B&N reading from his memoir of writing, producing, and performing megamonster hits with Diana Ross ("Upside Down"), David Bowie ("Let's Dance"), Peter Gabriel ("Walk through the Fire"), Duran Duran ("The Reflex"), Sister Sledge ("We Are Family") and Madonna ("Material Girl," "Like a Virgin"). Rodgers says he was in a Manhattan bar's restroom with five Diana Ross impersonators when he realized he should write a song specifically for her gay fans. The result was "I'm Coming Out." His book is called Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny [[Kindle]].

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 drawings, which are currently on view at the gay museum in Berlin. I saw them last year and was charmed by his light touch, bright colors, and 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 lives on in the work of Herb Ritts and Bruce Weber, among others. Check this Slate gallery of sixteen images.

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 28-29: Edward Carpenter, Karl Ulrichs

Ardent socialist (author of the anthem England Arise, founding member of the Independent Labour Party), feminist (saying, “there is no solution except the freedom of woman,” he considered traditional marriage to be a form of prostitution), gay activist (his ground-breaking books like My Days and Dreams and The Intermediate Sex go far beyond earlier essays by his friend John Addington Symonds), pacifist, nudist, mystic, poet, and the first person to introduce sandals to modern Britain, Edward Carpenter’s greatest legacy may be how he lived his life. Utterly changed after reading Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1863, he began to dream of a brotherhood of manly love that would erase class lines and give rise to a true democracy. After graduating from Cambridge and leaving a position vacated by Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf’s father, Carpenter gave public lectures in Leeds intended for the working class (but attended only by the middle class, who didn’t warm to his ideas) and sought to befriend laborers, unsuccessfully. Finally in 1891, after meeting by chance on a train, he and uneducated George Merrill became lovers. In 1898, when Carpenter was fifty-four and Merrill was thirty-two, they established a house together, absolutely unheard of in an England still widely antigay in the aftermath of the Oscar Wilde trials. They lived together openly as a couple for thirty years until Merrill’s death, and their cross-class love was the direct inspiration for their friend E.M. Forster’s novel Maurice, as well as D.H. Lawrence’s heterosexualized version, Lady Chatterley's Lover. Not all authors were so enamored. In the decade after Carpenter’s death, George Orwell ridiculed “every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer [and] sex maniac” among the Socialists. Yet an American Communist, Harry Hay, credited Carpenter’s writings for galvanizing him to start the first gay rights group, The Mattachine Society, in Los Angeles in 1950. The Lammy winning biography of Carpenter by Sheila Rowbotham was Peter Tatchell's and Jeanette Winterson's favorite book of 2008 and Sarah Schulman's favorite lgbt book of 2009.

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 14: Horst P. Horst

Horst patriotically joined the U.S. army as a photographer in July 1943, three months before he became a U.S. citizen. (He was German, born Horst Paul Albert Bohrmann but chose to be Horst P. Horst because he was known by his first name and to distance himself from the Nazi officer Martin Bormann.) By then he had been famous for eleven years, thanks initially to lesbian Janet Flanner's New Yorker review of his Paris show in 1932, and he had already shot Dietrich, Davis, Crawford, Coward, Schiaparelli, Chanel, and Garbo, as well as his most famous photograph, The Mainbocher Corset. He had already had an affair with his mentor George Hoyningen-Huene, who took this photo of Horst age twenty-five in 1931 and had dated future-filmmaker Luchino Visconti; and he was five years into his relationship with former British diplomat Valentine Lawford, with whom he would stay for sixty-one years. Together, they adopted and raised a son, Richard J. Horst. Out of favor and largely ignored in the 70s, Horst made a comeback starting in 1980 when Life hired him to shoot nine photos. In 1990, David Fincher used Horst's signature light and deep shadow style to create Madonna's video Vogue, even reenacting his Mainbocher Corset shot. Horst continued to work until close to his death at ninety-three in 1999.

Born June 12-13: Henry Scott Tuke, Siegfried, Djuna Barnes

Born in York in 1858, Henry Scott Tuke grew up in Falmouth where he discovered the pleasures of nude swimming that become the core subject of his en plein air paintings until his death at 70 in 1929. Moving to London when he was sixteen to attend art school, he graduated six years later, then toured Italy and Paris. His friends and acquaintances of the time included Symonds, Wilde, and Sargent (whose many, secret paintings of male nudes were numerous enough to fill this book). But by 1886 he was back near Falmouth, spending £40 to buy a two-masted sailboat which he converted to a floating studio and living quarters. Initially the only models he could get to pose were from London but before long he and the local youth had become friends for life, though many of them died in WWI. An avid traveler, in the 1890s Tuke returned to Italy, adding Corfu and Albania to his list and a new, vibrant light to his palette. Later he ventured to the Caribbean and Central America, further brightening his colors. Critics emphasize the innocence of his art, stressing that if anything the depictions are sensual not sexual, and making obvious comparisons to Eakins. Among Tuke's big collectors is Elton John. His work fills many books like Catching the Light.

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 a year. 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. They are big boosters of the College of Magic (not Hogwarts) in perfectly named Cape Town, South Africa.

If Djuna Barnes lived in our age of the dysfunctional, harrowing memoir, she could outsell Mary Karr, Augusten Burroughs and James Frey combined. Her father believed in polygamy and moved his mistress into their house in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York when Djuna was five. He had eight children but no interest in supporting them; his mother had to write letters begging money from friends. Djuna was never sent to school and was raped at sixteen by a neighbor, with her father’s consent. For years Djuna shared a bed with her grandmother, whose sexually explicit letters much later suggest they were intimate. When Djuna was seventeen her father and grandmother forced her to marry his mistress’s brother, Percy Faulkner, who was fifty-two. After two months, Djuna fled and later, confronted with financial ruin, the family split up. Djuna, her mother, and three of her brothers moved to Manhattan, wher she was thrilled to study at the Pratt Institute, but within six months she was forced to leave to help support her family. She was a fulltime reporter and freelanced hundreds of articles to bring in more money. When she was twenty-three she moved to her own apartment in Greenwich Village, where she befriended bohemians, joined the Provincetown Players, and had many affairs with men and women. She became engaged to Ernst Hanfstaengl who reacted to the increasingly anti-German sentiment in America by breaking up with Djuna in favor of a German wife. (He later moved to Germany and became a close associate of Hitler.)

Djuna rebounded by falling deeply in love with fellow journalist and Provincetown Player Mary Pyne, who caught tuberculosis and died in 1919. Two years later McCall’s sent her to Paris, where she also interviewed James Joyce for Vanity Fair. By winter of the following year, she was

If Djuna Barnes lived in our age of the dysfunctional, harrowing memoir, she could outsell Mary Karr, Augusten Burroughs and James Frey combined. Her father believed in polygamy and moved his mistress into their house in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York when Djuna was five. He had eight children but no interest in supporting them; his mother had to write letters begging money from friends. Djuna was never sent to school and was raped at sixteen by a neighbor, with her father’s consent. For years Djuna shared a bed with her grandmother, whose sexually explicit letters much later suggest they were intimate. When Djuna was seventeen her father and grandmother forced her to marry his mistress’s brother, Percy Faulkner, who was fifty-two. After two months, Djuna fled and later, confronted with financial ruin, the family split up. Djuna, her mother, and three of her brothers moved to Manhattan, wher she was thrilled to study at the Pratt Institute, but within six months she was forced to leave to help support her family. She was a fulltime reporter and freelanced hundreds of articles to bring in more money. When she was twenty-three she moved to her own apartment in Greenwich Village, where she befriended bohemians, joined the Provincetown Players, and had many affairs with men and women. She became engaged to Ernst Hanfstaengl who reacted to the increasingly anti-German sentiment in America by breaking up with Djuna in favor of a German wife. (He later moved to Germany and became a close associate of Hitler.)

Djuna rebounded by falling deeply in love with fellow journalist and Provincetown Player Mary Pyne, who caught tuberculosis and died in 1919. Two years later McCall’s sent her to Paris, where she also interviewed James Joyce for Vanity Fair. By winter of the following year, she was

When We Danced on Water by Evan Fallenberg

Evan Fallenberg's ambitious second novel When We Danced on Water [[Kindle]] explores two marvelous characters in Tel Aviv who make art from painful pasts. Vivi, a 42 year-old waitress: 

"I paint. I embroider. I makes collages," she says, bending back a finger as she lists each addition. "I whittle, I sculpt. I photograph. I sketch, I bead, I weave. I do video art. And right now I'm learning glassblowing. That's not the whole list, but you get the picture."

Her customer is an 84 year-old man, Teo Levin, who has devoted his life to a single discipline, dance, as a former prodigy and renowned choreographer. You'll notice he is exactly twice her age, and their parallels are many. Both Jewish, single, and childless, their most significant romances were with German Christian men under very different circumstances yielding the same result: imprisonment. Teo's famous ballet is Obsession, inspired by the six years he spent in Berlin during the war as a teenage kept-boy of a handsome, married Nazi officer, Freddy. Teodor wasn't gay; he had previously been in budding love with a girl in Copenhagen but over time he became more ambiguous about Freddy's nightly sexual advances. Freddy renames him Teo and, tellingly, he remains Teo for life. The themes of imprisonment, renaming, and the war making people lose their identity are reinforced by a subplot in which Teo's sister Margot is hidden in a convent and elects to stay there forever as Sister Katharina.

The novel's very best sections are the oddball friendship between Vivi, who lives with a hot gay DJ, and Teo, who lives with a devoted housekeeper from his native Warsaw, Nelly. Skillful flashbacks are gripping in the first two-thirds of the book. The final third is an extended, heartfelt 75-page memory of Teo's time with Freddy, which some readers may find long, already knowing the ultimate outcome, but the scenes give greater depth to Teo's psyche and to understanding his Obsession. In the closing pages, after Vivi has heard Teo's story in full, she thinks:

"The themes are the same as the old stories -- cruelty, lust, power, disenfranchisement, dignity, love and hate, obsession -- but without the concentration camps, the dogs, the rampaging, murderous mobs."

As a summary of Fallenberg's book, it comes close, but overlooks his humor which can be wry and touching. Here's Teodor leaving for Denmark at 14, reading a letter from his father:

" 'Be flexible where you can, but do nothing contrary to the principles upon which you have been raised.' There was no listings of those principles and Teodor wondered what they were."

Read When We Danced on Water, and if you missed it earlier, get his award-winning debut Light Fell [[Kindle]]).

Born May 14: Magnus Hirschfeld

I too often run afoul of intelligent LGBT people who claim I'm anachronistically imposing a modern concept of queerness on a pre-Stonewall era and tell me I don't understand 19th century "friendships." As politely as I can, I suggest they reread their Whitman, their Symonds, and their Hirschfeld. In 1896, Magnus Hirschfeld wrote and published a pamphlet on homosexual love called Sappho and Socrates. In 1897—or, 114 years ago—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 supporting gay rights 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.

Love of Gandhi's Life Was German-Jewish Bobybuilder; Cue Paul Rudnick

Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph Lelyveld has just published a new biography of Gandhi Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India [[Kindle]] making the case that the love of his life was Hermann Kallenbach (seated, right), a German-Jewish bodybuilder and architect. From the Wall Street Journal's review:

"Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some ­reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might ­relate to the enemas Gandhi gave ­himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.

"Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about "how completely you have taken ­possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."

"They were parted when Gandhi ­returned to India in 1914, since the German national could not get permission to travel to India during ­wartime—though Gandhi never gave up the dream of having him back, writing him in 1933 that "you are always ­before my mind's eye." Later, on his ashram, where even married "inmates" had to swear celibacy, Gandhi said: "I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of men and women."

The Indian state Gujarat, birthplace of Gandhi, has already made sale of the biography illegal. Several Indian newspapers have condemned the "predictable," "kneejerk" ban.

You know Paul Rudnick squealed when he heard the news. Today the New Yorker runs his humor piece, "I Was Gandhi's Boyfriend," narrated by a hot dumb blond ice dancer named Kelly:

I first met him when he came to see my ice show in Nepal, which was called “Holiday on Dirt.” Gandhi came backstage and he told me, “I very much enjoyed watching you pretend to ice-skate, in your tight pants.” I asked him, “Um, so why are you wearing a diaper?” And he explained that his outfit was a traditional Indian dhoti, and I said, “Well, you look like the New Year’s baby.” And he said, “You are so handsome when you are not speaking.”

My Brother and His Brother by Håkan Lindquist

In clear, unadorned prose Håkan Lindquist's prize-winning short novel My Brother and His Brother [[no Kindle]] tells the story of Jonas Lundberg who, from 13 to 18, tries to understand the life, love, and death of his unknown older brother Paul who was struck by a train at 15, two years before Jonas was born. Adult readers will see some but not all of the answers before the young teenager forms the questions; this only adds to its realism and in no way loosens the story's grip. Foremost among these: Was Paul gay? Is their parents' friend Daniel also gay? Did Paul kill himself? With the discovery of a hidden diary, Jonas can reconstruct Paul's affair and sexual initiation with Petr, a Czech 16 year-old. Typical of Linquist's simplicity in storytelling and beautiful restraint are these few lines that end chapter fourteen:

    Petr handed Paul the camera.
    "It has to be a profile," Paul said. "I have to get your nose."
    Petr laughed. "My nose? What do you mean? Is it that special?"
    "It is."
    "In what way?"
    "It's the only nose I've ever seen halfway into my navel."
    Peter laughed so hard he almost fell off the rock. "Well, in that case you must see that my lips are in the picture too."
    "Don't worry, your lips will be there."

With the same control and understatement, Lindquist describes a tragedy four pages later. It isn't what you, or Jonas, were expecting. Even as it's unfolding, it isn't what it seems. Such is this novel that makes literature of exploring life's surprises.

Some readers may seek a broader canvas -- throughout his teens Jonas has no friends but his parents (expertly drawn, with their deep love for him and their recurring bouts of grief) and their contemporary Daniel; Jonas barely mentions school or sports or movies or music or books -- while other readers will find the narrow concentration increases the novel's potency and impact.

First published in Sweden in 1993, the book won Le Prix Littéraire Bordelaise de Lunetterie when it appeared in French in 2002. It has been published in seven other countries but has not been released in English until now, by Berlin's Bruno Gmünder. Lindquist has written several more novels and an opera libretto, William, which imagines a love affair between Shakespeare and Marlowe. It has been performed eleven times, always to sold-out audiences.

Thanks to Lawrence Schimel for introducing me to Håkan's work.