Band of Thebes

Born September 4: Mary Renault

After receiving her degree from Oxford in 1928, Mary Renault became a nurse in Bristol, aiding soldiers injured at Dunkirk and later assisting in the brain surgery ward, leading to her first novel, Purposes of Love (1939), set in a contemporary hospital. She knew the subject well, having fallen in love with another nurse, Julie Mullard, who would be her life partner for fifty years. Renault’s first five novels each had contemporary settings and vaguely or overtly lesbian themes, the strongest are in her third novel, The Friendly Young Ladies (1943). Her fourth won her $150,000 from MGM, which Renault and Mullard used to leave the repressive, post-war, antigay atmosphere of England for the relative freedom of South Africa. (They participated in many Black Sash events, for white women against apartheid, begun in 1955.) Established there, Renault wrote The Charioteer (1953), her first novel with a male protagonist, a gay WWII soldier who discovers that his hidden love for an older former schoolmate is returned. Her artistic breakthrough came with her next novel, again with a gay male protagonist, but set in the more open world of Ancient Greece, which would be her hallmark for the rest of her writing career, in seven additional novels, a biography, and a study of the Persian Wars. Two of those novels tell the life story of Theseus, who in Greek mythology killed the Minotaur thanks to Ariadne’s help, and three other novels cover the life of Alexander the Great, including one narrated by his lover Bagoas, The Persian Boy (1972), her most praised work. It ranks 32nd on Publishing Triangle's list of the 100 best lgbt novels. In 2010, Renault was shortlisted for the Lost Booker prize for her 1970 novel about bisexual Alexander the Great, Fire from Heaven. (The award was given to another historical novel, J.G. Farrell's Troubles, about Ireland after WWI.)

Gay Achilles Novel Wins Orange Prize

Tonight in London, American Madeline Miller won the 2012 Orange Prize for her debut novel The Song of Achilles [Kindle], narrated by his lover Patroclus. This ought to be the Band of Thebes-iest book of the decade; alas, I could never get in step with the novel's style. I agreed with gay classicist Dan Mendelsohn who thoughtfully, elegantly, swiftly speared and slaughtered it in the pages of the NYT Book Review:

"The real Achilles’ heel of this book is tone — one made disastrously worse by the author’s decision to metamorphose an ancient story of heroes into a modern tale of hormones....The problem reaches crisis proportions in the handling of the “love affair,” which begins with an embarrassing breathlessness and climaxes — sorry! — in the long-awaited and, it must be said, cringe-inducing consummation...Why is this so awful? Partly it’s the swoony soft-porn prose, but in the end it’s something much more significant, something that gets to the heart of why Miller’s book doesn’t swell or ripen into a meaningful engagement with the ancient literary tradition, as any serious attempt to appropriate the classics must." 

Orange Prize jury chair novelist Joanna Trollope does herself no favors by overstepping to drag in Homer's approval of Miller's efforts: “This is a more than worthy winner — original, passionate, inventive and uplifting. Homer would be proud of her.” (Not to trump a Trollope, but Homer is where I live. He would hate it.) Mendelsohn says Mary Renault "would have found this book distasteful in the extreme."

If you're looking for a once in a lifetime brilliant reimagining of an ancient gay affair, read Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian about the great emperor's love for the teen Antinous.

Born April 11: Glenway Wescott

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

Born March 4-5: Matt Lucas, David Plante, Pier Paolo Pasolini

The only gay in the village turns thirty-eight today. Five years after the end of Little Britain, Matt Lucas has done everything from play Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Benny in Gnomeo and Juliet, and Kristen Wiig's roommate in Bridesmaids. Last year he and longtime collaborator David Walliams reteamed for a BBC mocumentary called Come Fly with Me, scheduled for a second season this fall. In December 2006 Lucas and Kevin McGee, his partner of four years, celebrated their civil partnership with an over-the-top ceremony at which the elaborately costumed guests included Elton and David, Neil Tennant, Courtney Love, Graham Norton, Stephen Gately, Will Young, and novelist Ben Elton. Within two years they divorced and ten months later Kevin killed himself.

Since his fiction debut forty-two years ago, The Ghost of Henry James, David Plante has written a new book every couple years. His best known works form the gay-vague Francoeur trilogy -- The Family, The Country, The Woods -- about a French-Canadian American family with Native American ancestry and seven sons, just like his own. In 2009 Plante published his 19th book, The Pure Lover [Kindle], a remarkably concise memoir of his nearly forty years with his Greek partner Nikos Stangos, four years his senior. Richard Labonté chose it as a favorite of 2009 and Pulitzer-winning critic Michael Dirda said, "out of the fragments, Proustian moments and sharply felt memories of a happy and painful past, David Plante has made a lovely book, joyful, plangent and true."

 

Poet, philosopher, novelist, newspaper columnist, playwright, painter, actor, and atheist, Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a communist until he was kicked out of the party in 1949 for being gay, which they discovered when he was charged with corrupting minors and obscene acts in public. He was twenty-seven and he was not convicted, but he had to leave their small town northwest of Trieste and, with his mother, moved to Rome. Enduring difficult years being unemployed or underemployed, he published his first important collection of poems in 1954, followed the next year by his first novel, Ragazzi di vita [Boys of Life], which caused a sensation for its raw look at the aimless lives of petty criminals and sometimes hustlers in Rome's roughest neighborhoods.

In 1957 he helped write Fellini's Nights of Cabiria, and three years after that he landed his debut acting role. The following year, 1961, he directed Accattone, the first of his twenty films. In Teorema, Terrence Stamp plays a stranger who moves in with family in Milan and one by one has sex with everyone: the religious maid, the artistic son, the frigid mother, the wallflower daughter, and lastly the father, then leaves and they all fall apart. That was an original screenplay, but many of his later and most celebrated films were adaptations of classics, often infused with nudity and sex: Oedipus Rex, Medea (starring Maria Callas, not singing), The Decameron, Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, and 120 Days of Sodom. Several of his movies featured Ninetto Davoli, his boyfriend since 1963 when he was fifteen.

Throughout the summer of 1975, as he was trying to complete his version of de Sade, Pasolini warned friends he would be killed by the mafia. In November, he picked up a seventeen year-old hustler and was murdered by being run over by his own car. In 2005, the hustler recanted his confession and said three men with Southern Italian accents killed Pasolini. Key details of the crime make it seem impossible to have been perpetrated by a lone person. A longtime friend, the artist Giuseppe Zigaina, is just one of many who believes the always theatrical, always contrarian Pasolini organized his own death. He was fifty-three. Forty-one years after its release, 120 Days of Sodom was named by Time Out's Film Guide as cinema's all-time most controversial film.

Steve N. says the Anna Magnani starrer Mamma Roma is essential fabulosity. Dolce & Gabanna agreed with him and cast Madonna in their homage ads shot by Steven Klein.

Born January 24: Hadrian

Born in Italica, Spain 1,935 years ago today, Publius Aelius Hadrianus became, at 41, the third of the Five Good Roman Emperors, following the death of Trajan who was a cousin of Hadrian's father. Overall, his reign was marked by comparable peace, the exception being the second Roman-Jewish War, after which he remained violent in his Anti-Semitism. Without constant military battles he was able to fortify the empire which stretched from north Africa to northern England and from Portugal to Iraq. Along with the wall that bears his name near the Scottish border, Hadrian oversaw several colossal building projects. Most notable are the Pantheon in its current form (entirely rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original) and what is said to have been the largest temple in the ancient capital, The Temple of Venus and Roma. A great traveler, he rarely saw his wife, vastly preferring the culture of Athens to Rome and the company of young men to women. Of course, his greatest love was Antinous, whom he met at thirteen or fourteen in Turkey. After Antinous drowned in the Nile at nineteen, Hadrian's tributes were unparalleled: He had him deified, founded the city of Antinopolis, commissioned dozens of busts and statues of him, built a temple to him at his villa in Tivoli, and put his likeness on money, the only non-Emperor ever honored with a coin. They were not just friends. The Cult of Antinous was extremely popular with a certain kind of man throughout the empire and flourished until later when it was harshly condemned for being based on an 'immoral relationship' and suppressed by the emerging Catholic church. Hadrian died at 62 without any biological children. In his final year, he adopted for the sake of an heir a 51 year-old named Antoninus Pius.

Regardless of whether or not you think you're interested in the ancient world, read lesbian Marguerite Yourcenar's amazing novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, translated into English by Grace Frick, her partner for forty-two years. The book is so good it made Yourcenar the first woman elected to the Académie Française, founded in 1635.

Born January 7: Chester Kallman

In 1939 Chester Kallman was an eighteen year-old blond Jewish kid from Brooklyn when he met W.H. Auden, the thirty-two year-old English, Anglican poet. Auden had thought he would be forever excluded from any semblance of marriage and his joy at finding himself in a romantic, erotic relationship even led him to wear a wedding ring. For a few months. Kallman's inability to stay still, and his infidelities, wounded Auden and his naked grief can be seen in every line of his famous essay on Shakespeare's sonnets to a beautiful lad. As Adam Kirsch writes, "The younger man was considered Auden’s inferior in every way by most of his friends, and [Auden's] biographers continue to be puzzled by the attachment. (Richard Davenport-Hines, whose 1995 biography, Auden, is psychologically very acute, can find nothing nicer to say about Kallman than that “it was impossible to be indifferent about” him.)" Despite public fights, affairs, and separations, they were still together in their way thirty-four years later at Auden's death at 66 in 1973. They collaborated on several opera libretti including The Rake's Progress (1951), Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), and Love's Labor's Lost (1973). Kallman published three volumes of poetry, Storm at Castelfranco (1956), Absent and Present (1963), and The Sense of Occasion (1971). Although he remained a New Yorker, they summered in Ischia, Italy from 1948 to 1957, and began spending winters in Athens circa 1963, by which time they had switched to summering in Kirchstetten, Austria. Kallman died in Greece in 1975, two weeks after turning 54. American Thekla Clark was a friend for twenty-four years and wrote a short, clear-eyed memoir about the couple Wystan and Chester.

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 October 15: Virgil

You'd think you would always side with a poet over an emperor meddling in his work, but thank god Augustus overruled Publius Vergilius Maro’s final wish. For ten years, Virgil had been working on an epic poem, the first half of which would be modeled on the Odyssey and the second half of which would be the Roman answer to the Illiad. Traveling with Augustus from Italy to Greece, Virgil became ill with a fever and died at fifty in the harbor at Brundisi, leaving instructions that his poem be destroyed because it was unfinished. Instead, Augustus had it published and The Aeneid was immediately recognized as the masterpiece it remains today. Although the epic includes a moving episode between the male lovers Nisus and Euryalus, Virgil’s greatest gay works are in his The Eclogues. The second of those poems is Alexis, which begins unabashedly

    The shepherd Corydon with love was fired/ For fair Alexis, his own master's joy

So ardent is the slave’s desire for his owner’s favorite youth, and so fine is the poem, that the name Corydon has endured for 2,000 years as a symbol of same-sex love, from the Elizabethan sonnets of Richard Barnfield to the title of Andre Gide’s defense of homosexuality in 1920. In 2009 reader Ed Oliver reminded everyone about the Georgics, his favorite work by Virgil.

Born July 8: Arthur Evans, Philip Johnson

British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (far left) did not begin his famous excavations at Knossos until 1900 when he was forty-nine. In 1878 someone had discovered a small portion of the ruins but it was only after Crete became an independent state free of Turkey that Evans was able to purchase the site and organize a dig on a necessarily massive scale. The "palace" is a series of 1,000 interlocking rooms. Luckily, Evans lived another forty-one years, plenty of time to unveil the structures he decided were source of the mythic King Minos and his fabled Minotaur; hence Evans' coining the term Minoan civilization from the 27th to 15th centuries BC. One aspect of real life there was bull dancing, a tradition in which youths cavorted with angry steers to great honor and, usually within three months, certain death. Mary Renault brings the practice alive in her novel The King Must Die about Theseus's Cretan adventures. (Below, my picture of bull dancing from Knossos this May and actor Henry Cavill as Theseus in Tarsem Singh's ancient Greek hotfest The Immortals coming November 2011.) Evans was Keeper of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum from 1894-1908 and many, many of the treasures he found at Knossos ended up in its collection. He is degayed in most accounts of his life but not in Cathy Gere's intriguing Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.

   

Soon after graduating from Harvard in 1930, Philip Johnson became the first director of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design though he himself was not yet an architect. In the ensuing years he was a committed fascist, an ardent admirer of Hitler, and he even toured conquered Poland at the Nazis' invitation. How he as a gay man reconciled the Reich's murder of gay men probably shouldn't be any more pressing than how he as a human reconciled the Reich's slaughter of humans, but somehow it sharpens the point. In 1948, when Johnson built his master degree thesis, Glass House, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and remains one of the most important designs of the century. His two best known other works are the Seagrams Building (with Mies van der Rohe) and the AT&T Building with its controversial Chippendale top, completed when he was seventy-eight. His many other projects include the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, the Amon Carter Museum,

Soon after graduating from Harvard in 1930, Philip Johnson became the first director of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design though he himself was not yet an architect. In the ensuing years he was a committed fascist, an ardent admirer of Hitler, and he even toured conquered Poland at the Nazis' invitation. How he as a gay man reconciled the Reich's murder of gay men probably shouldn't be any more pressing than how he as a human reconciled the Reich's slaughter of humans, but somehow it sharpens the point. In 1948, when Johnson built his master degree thesis, Glass House, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and remains one of the most important designs of the century. His two best known other works are the Seagrams Building (with Mies van der Rohe) and the AT&T Building with its controversial Chippendale top, completed when he was seventy-eight. His many other projects include the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, the Amon Carter Museum,

Patrick Leigh Fermor Dies at 96

The Guardian has never published a truer sentence than this, from polymath Patrick Leigh Fermor's obituary today: "A Time of Gifts is not only a great travel book (a term he disliked), but one of the wonders of modern literature."

The magic of the memoir began decades earlier, in 1933 when the 18-year-old Paddy decided not to attend college but instead to walk from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul. He waited 44 years to write about the first section of the journey, and the second section needed nearly another decade. He is said to have held onto the proofs to that follow-up book Between the Woods and the Water for "several years." Needless to say, he could never relinquish his manuscript covering the final third of his epic journey, but he was seen earlier this year "working on corrections to a finished text" and his biographer Artemis Cooper says, a "draft of the third volume has existed for some time, and will be published in due course." Even if he had never embarked on his long trek, his stellar reputation would rest on his two books about Greece, Mani: Travels in the Southern Peloponnese and Roumeli: Travels in Northern Greece. He and his wife Joan lived in Greece for half a century. Before that he fought with the Crete resistance in the war, spending two years disguised as a shepherd and living in high caves. His valor earned him medals and a dull, flattened-out movie in which he is played by Dirk Bogarde. He was an inspiration to generations of writers, travel writers, and LGBT travel writers, most especially Jan Morris and Bruce Chatwin.

UPDATE: A tribute from Jan Morris.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Born March 3: James Merrill

One of the greater gifts banking has given the world is James Merrill. Second son of a founder of Merrill Lynch, James was brought up in rarefied luxury and intellect: His governess taught him German and French, his father published a book of his early literary efforts when he was sixteen, his Amherst professor (and lover) published a book of his poems at twenty. Over his long career, Merrill won every major American prize for his formal, slightly old-fashioned, rhyming poetry: two National Book Awards, the NBCC, the Library of Congress's Bobbitt National Prize, Yale's Bollingen Prize, and the Pulitzer Prize. Although his two early novels are more muted on the subject, his poetry and his 1993 memoir A Different Person openly celebrate gay life.

Merrill and his partner David Jackson were together forty years, dividing their time annually between Stonington, Connecticut and Athens. Later they traded Greece for Key West where their long relationship frayed. Merrill started the Ingram Merrill Foundation in honor of his divorced parents and gave generous, often anonymous grants to struggling writers, including his friend Elizabeth Bishop. A later friend, Pulitzer winning novelist and Key West resident Alison Lurie, wrote a memoir of Merrill and Jackson called Familiar Spirits, alluding to their love of ouija board seances memorialized in his postmodern, free verse 560-page epic poem The Changing Light at Sandover. He died in 1995 of an aids-related heart attack while visiting Arizona one month shy of his sixty-ninth birthday. His New York Times obit omits Jackson.

Born January 24: Hadrian

Born in Italica, Spain 1,935 years ago today, Publius Aelius Hadrianus became, at 41, the third of the Five Good Roman Emperors, following the death of Trajan who was a cousin of Hadrian's father. Overall, his reign was marked by comparable peace, the exception being the second Roman-Jewish War, after which he remained violent in his Anti-Semitism. Without constant military battles he was able to fortify the empire which stretched from north Africa to northern England and from Portugal to Iraq. Along with the wall that bears his name near the Scottish border, Hadrian oversaw several colossal building projects. Most notable are the Pantheon in its current form (entirely rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original) and what is said to have been the largest temple in the ancient capital, The Temple of Venus and Roma. A great traveler, he rarely saw his wife, vastly preferring the culture of Athens to Rome and the company of young men to women. Of course, his greatest love was Antinous, whom he met at thirteen or fourteen in Turkey. After Antinous drowned in the Nile at nineteen, Hadrian's tributes were unparalleled: He had him deified, founded the city of Antinopolis, commissioned dozens of busts and statues of him, built a temple to him at his villa in Tivoli, and put his likeness on money, the only non-Emperor ever honored with a coin. They were not just friends. The Cult of Antinous was extremely popular with a certain kind of man throughout the empire and flourished until later when it was harshly condemned for being based on an 'immoral relationship' and suppressed by the emerging Catholic church. Hadrian died at 62 without any biological children. In his final year, he adopted for the sake of an heir a 51 year-old named Antoninus Pius.

Regardless of whether or not you think you're interested in the ancient world, read lesbian Marguerite Yourcenar's amazing novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, translated into English by Grace Frick, her partner for forty-two years. The book is so good it made Yourcenar the first woman elected to the Académie française, founded in 1635.

Visitors to the British Museum's massive show on Hadrian in 2008 were greeted with a marble statue of Antinuous as Osiris. The opening sentence read, "Antinous was the lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian." No degaying for them. We went to Hadrian's Villa an hour outside Rome in May 2009. It's impressive with the ruins of 30 buildings over 250 acres. But there's no sign at the Antinoeion.

close-up after the jump

In Tearing Haste: Letters of Deborah Mitford and Patrick Leigh Fermor

You could have no nobler new year's resolution than to be more like Patrick Leigh Fermor. If you're in school, drop out immediately and walk from the English Channel to Istanbul, as he did from December 1933 to January 1935, starting when he was 18. (After that he spent more than two years in Crete, as a UK special ops officer, disguised as a shepherd, living in caves, leading the Greek resistance. In the badly titled and inaccurate movie of those events, Ill Met By Moonlight, he's played by Dirk Bogarde.) If you're going to be 96 next month, continue work on volume three of your memoir of that first, fabled walk. (The two extent volumes, from 1977 and 1986, are the immortal classics A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Water.)

Now with In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor readers can see behind the many travel books to more than fifty years of personal life, from 1954 to 2007. His long volleys and her short returns are crowded with half a century of famous figures from Asquith, Diana Cooper, the Kennedys, Betjemen, Evelyn Waugh and Truman Capote to Lucian Freud, Bruce Chatwin, the Queen and the Prince and Princess of Wales. Everywhere, their correspondence is enlivened by her quotations of the vast Derbyshire staff at her 126-room country house Chatsworth and his interactions with his beloved local Greeks. Chatwin's visit to PLF in Greece inspires only "v nice, tremendous know-all, reminds me of a couplet by O Goldsmith .... He's a great pal of Jackie Onassis." In letters festooned with marvellous, glorious, genius, and frequent comparisons to Heaven, Paradise, and Mecca, you see where "v nice" falls. And don't ever doubt Debo, who is after all the last Mitford sister, or her ability to rise to the level of his letters. Her reply:

"Bruce Chatwin. OH how unfair you knowing him. He wrote a book which I so adored I've never really felt like another. You know what I mean, like my Dad & White Fang.

"How ghoul if he's a know-all, but I wd like just to see & smell him to see for myself. Or is it like meeting royal people & actors, better not?"

Admirers of PLF's rough and tumble travels may need a moment to adjust to the extremely high altitude of his letters, all of which begin, "Darling Debo," and at times threaten to float higher still, into a stratosphere reserved for Wodehouse characters. Things are "frightfully good" or "jolly" and rather than be as common as to say "unfortunately..." PLF announces "the pestilential thing is..." If it ever feels twee, it's balanced by his many truly charming quick line drawings throughout and two 8-page photo inserts.

The crowning highlight is a twenty-page account of his 1972 trek in the Pindus Mountains with three other men and a married couple, a totally improvised trip after being refused permission to climb the Hakkiari in Turkish Kurdistan. Rock slides, snow fields, local guides, 4:00am wakings, the cold, the wet, a steady wonder of flora, fauna, vistas -- all the joys of an ascent conveyed in clear, grounded prose. As with the entire collection, you'll feel privileged for the first-hand look at a fading world of intelligent dash.

Readers who have devoured all the other PLF titles will be gratified to discover NYRB Classics is next week re-issuing his first book, The Traveller's Tree, describing his solo tour through Guadeloupe, Martinique, Dominica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Haiti in the pre-tourist days of the late 1940s.

Cavalcade of Genius: Patrick Leigh Fermor, Colm Tóibín, Annie Proulx

You can have your blizzard nights stranded with a college swim team; there can be no greater thrill than this storm of literary brilliance. Just as I finished In Tearing Haste, the letters of travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor and Debo Mitford, yesterday was the on-sale of Colm Tóibín's new collection of (gay-inclusive) stories The Empty Family [[Kindle]] and Annie Proulx's first nonfiction, Bird Cloud [[Kindle]], a memoir of her buying 640 acres in Wyoming and trying to build the perfect house. I'll review each separately.

Chain of Classicists: Mendelsohn on Wilde on Symonds on Homer

In 1873 John Addington Symonds (left) published his Studies of the Greek Poets, emboldened by recognizing a kindred gay love in the ancients. From the current New York Review of Books:

"Like certain others of the “Oxford Hellenists” of the mid-nineteenth century—including Walter Pater, another figure whose work Wilde would admire extravagantly—Symonds was a secret homosexual who sought, through readings of the Greek classics, to find both expression for and justification of his own sexual nature. Indeed, Symonds later wrote in his memoirs that he had virtually discovered his sexuality through a reading of Plato’s Phaedrus and Symposium: the night he read their “panegyric of paiderastic love” was “one of the most important of my life.” In time, he would go on to write explicitly about Greek homosexuality in A Problem in Greek Ethics, a text that was circulated privately for ten years before its eventual publication, in 1883, and is now seen as a foundational document of modern homosexual studies.

"However flowery his style and whatever lip service he paid to conventional condemnation of “paiderastia,” there were those who were able to read between the lines of Symonds’s work—especially the lines of the final chapter of the second volume of Studies of the Greek Poets, with its controversial defense of Greek rather than Judeo-Christian morals, which he dismissed as “theistic fancies liable to change.” (Phyllis Grosskurth’s 1964 biography of Symonds retells an amusing anecdote about a “shocked compositor” who, after setting the type of Symonds’s book, wrote an outraged letter to the author.) The critic and sometime watercolorist Richard St John Tyrwhitt fulminated against Symonds’s book in a lengthy article that appeared in The Contemporary Review, warning that Studies of the Greek Poets advocated “the total denial of any moral restraint on any human impulses.” As a result of the controversy surrounding the second volume of his study, Symonds reluctantly withdrew his candidacy for the Poetry Chair at Oxford."

In 1876, student Oscar Wilde (right) spent his summer vacation writing a critique of Symonds' views of Homer, now published as a 103-page book called The Women of Homer. The young Wilde doesn't hesitate to school Symonds and "all other writers I have read" on what they've misunderstood about Penelope's private emotions. Now, writing in NYROB classics scholar Daniel Mendelsohn critiques Wilde's essay, continuing his paragraphs above with:

"The breathtaking self-assurance of this pronouncement suggests why Wilde’s long-forgotten text is intriguing, for reasons other than the glimpse it gives us of the road not taken by a significant cultural figure. The confrontation between Wilde and Symonds is, in the end, a confrontation between two eras. In Wilde’s dismissal of Symonds and the rest, you can already hear not only the voice of the mature writer, blithely dismissing the intellectual and social conventions of his age, but the voice of an as yet unborn criticism, one particularly willing to question prevailing assumptions about style, canons, and gender. Like the best of his mature work, this juvenile piece seems to leapfrog forward from the late-nineteenth to the late-twentieth century."

Amping the gay icon quotient higher still, Mendelsohn brings in Walt Whitman at the end of his essay, quoting Wilde: "Whitman is a great writer…. There is more of the Greek residing in him than in any modern poet. His poetry is Homeric in its large pure delight of men and woman, and in the joy the writer has and shows through it all in the sunshine and breeze of outdoor life."

Much as I admire all five of the gay authors here, this essay feels less than urgent, and more suited to an academic journal, especially because it's a review of a rare book not available in the U.S. and not for sale on Amazon.co.uk. You can order it through the Oscar Wilde Society of London. However, Mendelsohn does include, without discussion, another title by one of the new book's co-editors, Thomas Wright: Last year's unusual and intriguing biography, Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.

Born July 8: Spaulding, Fitzgerald, Evans, Johnson

Online journalist Pam Spaulding of the essential, influential lgbt political blog Pam's House Blend today turns forty-seven (click for a photo tour of four decades of happy smiles and evolving hairstyles). A Fordham alum who lives in Durham, with family backgrounds in both New York City and North Carolina, Pam considers herself to have "dual citizenship" as a Southerner and a Yankee. She started the Blend in 2004 "as a personal response to the anti-gay state of the political landscape." It won Best LGBT Blog at the 2005 and 2006 Weblog Awards and made Pam one of OUT's 100 last year. Make sure she's part of your daily reading.

Filmmaker Thom Fitzgerald worried his debut feature The Hanging Garden would be too arty and too gay for anyone to pay attention to: Sweet William, now slim and confident at twenty-five, returns home for the first time in a decade to attend a wedding, where he talks to the hanging corpse of his fat fifteen year-old self who was caught having sex with the bi guy his sister is now marrying. The universally lauded movie was nominated for eleven Genie Awards and won three, among many other Canadian and international prizes. His second movie was Beefcake, the popular docu-drama homage to Bob Mizer of the early gay muscle mags from the Athletic Model Guild. Fitzgerald's fourth and fifth features, The Event and 3 Needles, cover different aspects of aids and hiv. 3 Needles stars Olympia Dukakis, Chloe Sevigny, Lucy Liu, Sandra Oh, Stockard Channing, and Shawn Ashmore, and earned its director a DGA nom. Earlier this year, Fitzgerald debuted his first play, Cloudburst, to rousing acclaim. Raised in New Jersey, Fitzgerald attended Cooper Union and spent a semester in Halifax, Nova Scotia where he has lived ever since.

British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (far left) did not begin his famous excavations at Knossos until 1900 when he was forty-nine. In 1878 someone had discovered a small portion of the ruins but it was only after Crete became an independent state free of Turkey that Evans was able to purchase the site and organize a dig on a necessarily massive scale. The "palace" is a series of 1,000 interlocking rooms. Luckily, Evans lived another forty-one years, plenty of time to unveil the structures he decided were source of the mythic King Minos and his fabled Minotaur; hence Evans' coining the term Minoan civilization from the 27th to 15th centuries BC. One aspect of real life there was bull dancing, a tradition in which youths cavorted with angry steers to great honor and, usually within three months, certain death. Mary Renault brings the practice alive in her novel The King Must Die about Theseus's Cretan adventures. (Below, my picture of bull dancing from Knossos this May and actor Henry Cavill as Theseus in Tarsem Singh's ancient Greek hotfest The Immortals coming November 2011.) Evans was Keeper of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum from 1894-1908 and many, many of the treasures he found at Knossos ended up in its collection. He is degayed in most accounts of his life but not in Cathy Gere's intriguing Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.

   

Soon after graduating from Harvard in 1930, Philip Johnson became the first director of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design though he himself was not yet an architect. In the ensuing years he was a committed fascist, an ardent admirer of Hitler, and he even toured conquered Poland at the Nazis' invitation. How he as a gay man reconciled the Reich's murder of gay men probably shouldn't be any more pressing than how he as a human reconciled the Reich's slaughter of humans, but somehow it sharpens the point. In 1948, when Johnson built his master degree thesis, Glass House, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and remains one of the most important designs of the century. His two best known other works are the Seagrams Building (with Mies van der Rohe) and the AT&T Building with its controversial Chippendale top, completed when he was seventy-eight. His many other projects include the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, the Amon Carter Museum,

Soon after graduating from Harvard in 1930, Philip Johnson became the first director of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design though he himself was not yet an architect. In the ensuing years he was a committed fascist, an ardent admirer of Hitler, and he even toured conquered Poland at the Nazis' invitation. How he as a gay man reconciled the Reich's murder of gay men probably shouldn't be any more pressing than how he as a human reconciled the Reich's slaughter of humans, but somehow it sharpens the point. In 1948, when Johnson built his master degree thesis, Glass House, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and remains one of the most important designs of the century. His two best known other works are the Seagrams Building (with Mies van der Rohe) and the AT&T Building with its controversial Chippendale top, completed when he was seventy-eight. His many other projects include the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, the Amon Carter Museum,

The Kri-Kri of Crete's Samaria Gorge

 

Even the pummeling Mediterranean sun couldn't make me confuse my Capra aegagrus creticus with my Antilope cervicapra, but an overheard comment about the Kri-kri did bring to mind the Blackbuck. In all the world, the Kri-kri exist only in Crete's high White Mountains above and down in the Samaria Gorge, so I felt lucky to spot and photograph this mother and kid. Miles later I heard a Homo sapien explain that the Kri-kri adult males live in "bachelor" herds, which is often how people discuss the homosexual flock of male Blackbucks. According to research published in the peer journal Behavior, scientists know that all Blackbuck males over three years leave the male group only "once or twice in each male's lifetime" to attempt mating with females. In other words, they try it, hate it, and say in their traumatized gazelle voices, 'Hell if I'm ever doing THAT again.' Instead, "adult males often perform courtship displays toward adolescent males prior to mounting them." The researchers conclude: "Because of the organization of Blackbuck society into sex-segregated herds and the small number of active breeding males, only a fraction of the male population is ever involved in heterosexual activity.... life in the bachelor herd is preferable for many males." You owe it to yourself to buy Bruce Bagemihl's mindblowing book, Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity. 

Samaria gorge offers eleven miles of hiking wonders, not least of which is the remarkable signage. Whereas our national park posters advise, "Watch for falling rock" theirs warn, "GREAT DANGER!! WALK QUICKLY" We ended the day taking a water taxi with a woman from Colorado in a little boat piloted by Captain George, who explained to me he was in a new movie called The Kings of Mykonos. Also, he has a pet Kri-kri named Romeo whom he bottle-fed for six months and now follows him everywhere, even in the boat, even in the helicopter to Mykonos to make the movie. And you need a scientist to tell you that animal is gay?

   

(Note the two hikers for scale. And, yes, the water is that turquoise.)

Ancient Crete's Ritualized Male Abductions

Naturally native Zeus (born in a cave in the eastern half) brought Europa to Crete and snatched Ganymede away from here: The island has a long tradition of abduction as a prelude to romance. Thanks to the dazzling, meticulous research by James Davidson, we now know that in ancient Crete, slightly older males showed their interest in younger men by abducting them. The abductor would check with the younger man's friends first and they would have a minimum of three days to decide whether or not it was a good match. If they approved, they would steer their bud to the agreed meeting point without telling him. The abductor would take him to a communal man house and kiss him in public -- but probably not do anything more -- then woo the abducted with three months of hunting and carousing with the abducted's friends, who had to help pay for the lavish presents he received. At the end of the three months, the abducted slaughtered a bull in honor of Zeus for a great banquet during which he announced his acceptance. It was a great honor to have been chosen, and for the rest of his life, the abducted got to wear special clothes announcing his higher status, and got exulted positioning at the start of games and battle. This is just one of the many stories that will hold you captive in Davidson's indispensable The Greeks and Greek Love.

My partner and I have been hiking bits of the E4, which as you know runs from Spain to Crete. I took the shot above near Sougia and below near Zaros.

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Greece's Ancient Life at Home Exhibit Includes Gay Erotic Play

Jetlagged though I was, this suggestive illustration in the Greek National Museum of Archeology's new exhibit on Eretria caught my attention this afternoon. Happily, the text is gay inclusive when discussing aspects of the symposium, which were attended only by males. "The discussion between men flourished in parallel, along with songs, dexterity games and erotic play, in which occasionally prostitutes took part." Two of the show's several ancient images supporting that view appear after the jump.

In another gallery hall the headbanded lad called to mind Darren Ryleston, of Jonathan's Strong's wise and compassionate new novel Consolation discussed below.