Band of Thebes

Brunei Adopts Sharia Law To Kill Gay Men by Stoning, Hotel Boycotts Ensue

Last Wednesday, the penalty for gay sex in Brunei was ten years in prison. On Thursday, Brunei became the eighth current nation to maintain the death penalty for homosexuality, adopting the Sharia Law method of death by stoning. Brunei owns a group of ten luxury hotels, including the Hotel Bel-Air and the Beverly Hills Hotel, which is seeing a growing list of cancellations. For the first time since its debut eleven years ago, the Night Before Oscar event will not take place at the BHH next March. More immediately, Wednesday's banquet honoring Amy Pascal, eight months in planning, has been yanked from the BHH and will now take place on the Sony lot. 

Over the weekend, Richard Branson announced Virgin's more than 50,000 employees will boycott all ten Dorchester group hotels in response to the antigay law. Ellen, Stephen Fry, Sharon Osborne, and several other celebrities declared personal boycotts and urged their fans to follow. In addition to the two Los Angeles landmarks, the eight other hotels to avoid are: the Dorchester and 45 Park Lane in London; Coworth Park in Ascot; the Plaza Athénée and Hotel Meurice in Paris; the Hotel Eden in Rome; the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan; and Le Richemond in Geneva.

The seven other nations with the death penalty for homosexuality are Iran, Mauritania, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Click here for the full list of all 83 countries where homosexuality is illegal.

Stamps of Approval: Harvey Milk, Tom of Finland, Tove Jansson

 

The Harvey Milk stamp is now available for preorder online here. The statement says, "The U.S. Postal Service® is proud to honor the life of Harvey Milk, a visionary leader who became an iconic figure in the struggle for gay civil rights. In 1977, Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, making him one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States." The stamp will be released on May 22, his 84th birthday.

Finland announced three stamps depicting the art of Touko Laaksonen, Tom of Finland, come September or October. Their statement reads, "His emphatically masculine homoerotic drawings have attained iconic status in their genre and had an influence on, for instance, pop culture and fashion. The drawings on the stamp sheet represent strong and confident male figures typical of their designer." Anyone who just can't wait to lick and stick those should get Tom of Finland XXL or The Complete Kake Comics.

Finland's first new commerative of 2014 showed two photos of favorite novelist Tove Jansson. Read The Summer Book [Kindle] or The True Deceiver [Kindle]. Earlier, her Moomins got a stamp of their own.

Ten IMPAC Dublin Finalists: Bakker, Eng, Knausgaard, Flanery, NDiaye

At least two gay/inclusive novels (Eng, Flanery) and two hetero books that made Thebes' annual list (Knausgaard, Bakker -- impressively back here for his second novel after winning this prize for his first) are among the ten finalists on today's shortlist for the $138,000 IMPAC Dublin Award. 

Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker, (Dutch)

Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser (Sri Lankan/Australian)

Absolution by Patrick Flanery (American)

My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgaard (Norwegian)

Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye (French)

Traveler of the Century by Andrés Neuman (Argentinian)

The Light of Amsterdam by David Park (Northern Irish)

The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan (Irish) 

The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng (Malaysian)

The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombian) 

The winner will be announced June 12. The IMPAC Dublin is among my very favorite prizes, with previous winners Tóibín, Pamuk, Petterson, Bakker, and Edward P. Jones. But they need more women. For the past thirteen years a male writer has won and this year eight of the ten finalists are men.

Independent Foreign Fiction Prize Shortlist

Announced today, the six titles on the shortlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize are:

The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami

My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love;[Kindle] by Karl Ove Knausgaard

A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales [Kindle] by Yoko Ogawa

The Mussel Feast [Kindle] by Birgit Vanderbeke

This is a vital award, worth your attention. Previously honored are Pamuk, Kundera, Sebald, and Petterson. Last year's winner was Ten White Geese [Kindle] by Gerbrand Bakker whose terrific gay novel The Twin [Kindle] won the IMPAC Dublin.

Born March 20: John Boswell

When Publishing Triangle ranked the 100 Best LGBT Nonfiction Books of all time, they included works by Plato, Freud, Foucault, Faderman, Duberman, et al., and their undisputed choice at #1 was Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality by John Boswell, a history professor at Yale. He was 33 when it was published in 1980. Newsweek said it was, "an astonishing work of scholarship that ranges with ease over fourteen centuries...What makes the work so exciting is not simply its content -- fascinating though that is -- but its revolutionary challenge to some of Western culture's most familiar moral assumptions." Specifically, he proved that the Roman Catholic Church hadn't always been antigay, had either been indifferent to or had actually celebrated male - male love until the twelfth century. No surprise, Boswell was attacked by some conservative academics who thought he was promoting a gay agenda and by some gay people who said he was a Church apologist. Ultimately the complaints only added to the book's popularity because it was impeccably researched; it won the 1981 American Book Award for history.

After writing the first book about the widespread practice of child abandonment in medieval times, Boswell returned to gay topics and the early Church in another groundbreaking work, Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe. This time he argued the Church actually condoned certain male - male relationships with ceremonies that could be seen as precursors to gay marriage. Again, the book was brilliantly researched; again, the uproar; but the public debate was cut short: Boswell died of aids in December 1994 when he was 47. At Yale, he helped start the Lesbian and Gay Studies Center, and his pre-modern history courses were immensely popular, among the top ten in enrollments.

Jacqueline Woodson Selected for Hans Christian Andersen Shortlist

Yesterday, out lesbian Jacqueline Woodson, who lives with her partner and kids in Brooklyn, added to her huge list of prizes -- among them, two National Book Awards, three Newbery Awards, three Coretta Scott King Honors, and two major lifetime achievement awards -- a finalist of the Hans Christian Andersen Awards. Chosen from a longlist of fifty-eight writers from thirty-three countries, the six on the shortlist are:

·       Ted van Lieshout from the Netherlands. Lieshout uses a dialogue of words and images. With his original and visual writing style he observes the world with a different perspective every time. He is always looking for new styles and techniques to shape both words and pictures.

·      Houshang Moradi Kermani from Iran. Kermani has been writing creative humanistic works for children and adults for over four decades. Nature, village, family, and poverty together with self-respect, peace and mutual understanding are the most frequent subjects of his work.

·      Mirjam Pressler from Germany. “Without books the world remains a confining place and limits what we can imagine and consider doing,” says Pressler. “We need many different books. Books provide us with perspectives. A certain book can acquire an important, world-changing meaning.”

·       Nahoko Uehashi from Japan. Uehashi tells stories that are replete with imagination, culture and the beauty of a sophisticated process and form. Her literary subjects are based on ancient Japanese mythology and science-fiction fantasy that are deeply rooted in human reality. 

·       Renate Welsh from Austria. Welsh focuses on children’s social reality therefore enabling them to cope with their own lives. Family crisis and social injustice, illnesses, social exclusion, violence at home and at school, isolation and identity conflicts are depicted with remarkable honesty.

·       Jacqueline Woodson from the USA. Woodson often features African-American characters in her books because she feels strongly that children need to see themselves reflected in books. Each book she writes is a new experience, a way to learn something new or engage with a different subject that matters to her.

Folio + Foreign Fiction

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

George Saunders, Tenth of December [Kindle]

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

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

The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize longlist of fifteen titles:

Back to Back by Julia Franck

Brief Loves that Live Forever by Andreï Makine

Butterflies in November by Audur Ava Ólafsdóttir

The Corpse Washer by Sinan Antoon

The Dark Road by Ma Jian

Exposure by Sayed Kashua

The Infatuations by Javier Marías

The Iraqi Christ by Hassan Blasim

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

A Meal in Winter by Hubert Mingarelli

The Mussel Feast by Birgit Vanderbeke

Revenge: Eleven Dark Tales by Ogawa Yoko

The Sorrow of Angels by Jón Kalman Stefánsson

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Kawakami Hiromi

Ten by Andrej Longo

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Whispering Muse by Sjón (trans. Victoria Cribb)

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

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

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

Sandalwood Death by Mo Yan (trans. Howard Goldblatt)

 

Finally, the French American Translation Prize five finalists are:

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

Born February 19: Pim Fortuyn, Beth Ditto

The conservative Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn was openly gay to a degree that's unimaginable here: On national television he explained that he enjoyed the taste of semen, comparing it to a strong liqueur, and he cited his hook-ups with North African and Arab men as "proof" that he wasn't racist. Dutch voters, for and against him, were more interested in his ideas. He wanted to cut government's role in health services and education, he spoke against the "Islamisation of our culture," sounded a warning cry about the dangers of shari'a law superseding the Dutch legal code, and pledged to cut immigration drastically. Yet he was also for euthanasia, for legalized soft drugs, for same-sex marriage, and for reducing the military by combining the army and air force to save money. Although Fortuyn was riding a crest of widespread popularity with fully fifty percent of voters aged 18-30 supporting him (huge in a multi-party system), the Netherlands did not get to have their first ever openly gay Prime Minister, because they had their first assassination in 330 years, since 1672. A white Dutch man shot Fortuyn to stop him from exploiting "the weaker parts of society to gain political power." The motive was unrelated to Fortuyn's being gay. The killer, thirty-two, was sentenced to eighteen years in prison. Fortuyn was fifty-four. Contrarian even in death, Fortuyn was buried twice, first in the Netherlands, then dug up and re-interred in Pordenone, Italy, where he owned a second home.

Grace Kelly, Marilyn, Marlene, and Charlize rock to Beth Ditto in this famous Dior tv spot shot at Versailles [after the jump]. That song, Heavy Cross, from her post-punk band Gossip (formerly The Gossip, formed fifteen years ago in Olympia), was an international smash: With 97 weeks on the singles charts it was the second longest-staying song ever on the German charts (now it ranks sixth). If it somehow makes sense that the Arkansas native who claimed to have eaten squirrel meat growing up would become the indie darling of the alt music world -- playing every festival from Coachella to Glastonbury to SxSW, with NME naming Gossip "the greatest punk rock’n’roll disco soul band on the planet" -- it is perhaps still a surprise, given the extreme body fascism of the billion-dollar beauty industry, that Beth could become a face of fashion. Yet she was Glamour's International Artist of the Year in 2008, appeared nude on the debut issue of London's LOVE magazine in 2009, and in 2010 walked the catwalk herself, opening Jean Paul Gaultier's spring collection during Paris fashion week. In 2012 the band released their fifth studio album and Beth published her memoir Coal to Diamonds [Kindle] co-written with Michelle Tea. Last summer, barefoot in Maui, in a gown Gaultier designed for her, she married her girlfriend Kritsin Ogata, who wore tailored shorts and sneakers. Today she's 33.

377 Day of Global Rage in 95 Photos

Buzzfeed collects nearly one hundred pictures from Sunday's worldwide protests against India's supreme court ruling on 377 making homosexuality illegal. Photos posted by Oninthough Kar (Kolkata, left) and Vivek Shraya (Toronto, right).

Tomorrow: Protest India's Antigay Law

Get off the sidelines and take an hour on Sunday to protest India's reinstatement of 377, making homosexuality illegal. You are not unconnected to this: Americans, the justices referenced Scalia and Thomas in their decision. Brits, your people introduced the law. Everyone, community.

Protests will happen in Ann Arbor, Boston/Cambridge (noon, Harvard Sq.), Berlin, Cambridge UK, London, New York (3:00pm Union Sq.), Philadelphia (3:00pm, Love Statue Penn Campus), Richmond VA, Sydney, Toronto, Vancouver, and Washington DC (tba). There must be something on the US west coast? Get updates here.

Already, last night SF protested at the Indian Consulate [right] and DC at the Indian Embassy [left]. 

  

The Homoerotics of Orientalism: Brown Boys & Rice Queens

Who can resist a book about "Asian performance shaped by the homoerotics of orientalism [that] focuses on the relationship between the white man and the native boy"? Released last week, Brown Boys and Rice Queens: Spellbinding Performance in the Asias [Kindle] promises "Eng-Beng Lim unpacks this as the central trope for understanding colonial and cultural encounters in 20th and 21st century Asia and its diaspora. Using the native boy as a critical guide, Lim formulates alternative readings of a traditional Balinese ritual, postcolonial Anglophone theatre in Singapore, and performance art in Asian America. Tracing the transnational formation of the native boy as racial fetish object across the last century, Lim follows this figure as he is passed from the hands of the colonial empire to the postcolonial nation-state to neoliberal globalization. Read through such figurations, the traffic in native boys among white men serves as an allegory of an infantilized and emasculated Asia, subordinate before colonial whiteness and modernity. Pushing further, Lim addresses the critical paradox of this entrenched relationship that resides even within queer theory itself by formulating critical interventions around "Asian performance."

Lisa Duggan says, "Through fresh and compelling analyses, Eng-Beng Lim repeatedly shifts the lens through which we view our queerly postcolonial journey. Lim’s writing is always witty, sometimes hilarious, making this provocative new work of scholarship a pleasure and a revelation."

IMPAC Dublin Longlist

    

The IMPAC Dublin award unveiled its longlist of 152 books nominated by libraries from 110 cities in 39 nations. The most cited works are Hilary Mantel's Bring Up the Bodies and Richard Ford's overrated Canada, each with nine recommendations. Sixteen titles of queer interest:

Gerbrand Bakker, The Detour/aka Ten White Geese [Kindle], five nominations

Carol Brunt, Tell the Wolves I'm Home, five nominations

Michael Chabon, Telegraph Avenue, two nominations

Patrick Flanery, Absolution, one nomination

A.M. Homes, May We Be Forgiven, one nomination 

John Iriving, In One Person, three nominations 

Karl Ove Knausgaard, My Struggle: Book One [Kindle], two nominations

Ayana Mathis, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie, one nomination 

Toni Morrison, Home, one nomination 

Herta Müller, The Hunger Angel, one nomination

Zadie Smith, NW, three nominations  

Twan Eng Tan, The Garden of Evening Mists, one nomination

Jeet Thayil, Narcopolis, one nomination

Colm Tóibín, The Testament of Mary, two nominations

Mario Vargas Llosa, The Dream of the Celt, one nomination

Edmund White, Jack Holmes and His Friend, one nomination

The shortlist of six will be announced April 9, 2014. The winner gets €100,000 on June 12.

Swedish Theaters, TV Adopt Alison Bechdel's Test To Rate Films for Sexism

An idea from Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip in 1985 has now become the basis for a new system in Sweden for grading films' sexism or lack thereof. The Guardian reports:

To get an "A'' rating, a movie must pass the so-called Bechdel test, which means it must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.

"The entire 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, all 'Star Wars' movies, 'The Social Network,' 'Pulp Fiction' and all but one of the 'Harry Potter' movies fail this test," said Ellen Tejle, the director of Bio Rio, an art-house movie theater in Stockholm's trendy Sodermalm district.

 Although only a handful of movie theaters are launching the program, AP notes "the state-funded Swedish Film Institute supports the initiative, which is starting to catch on. Scandinavian cable TV channel Viasat Film says it will start using the ratings in its film reviews and has scheduled an "A'' rated "Super Sunday" on Nov. 17, when it will show only films that pass the test, such as The Hunger Games, 'The Iron Lady and Savages."

Mia Couto Wins $50,000 Neustadt Literature Prize

That itchy feeling you should be reading more widely? Scratch it with Mia Couto, the Portuguese writer from Mozambique, who has just won the Neustadt Prize worth $50,000. His gods are the magic realists of Brazil and Colombia, so do not be surprised that his brief novels are narrated by a dead man (Under the Frangipani) or an eleven-year-old boy who believes his father's lie that they are the last five people on Earth (The Tuner of Silences). Two of his books have been made into movies, Sleepwalking Land and A River Called Time.

The Neustadt is a pretty big deal, awarded only every other year, and its Susan Lucci is Haruki Murakami. Although he has lost three times, some recent winners remain far more obscure to American readers: Assia Djebar, Nuruddin Farah, Alvaro Mutis, Patricia Grace, and the poet Duo Duo.

The Two Hotel Francforts by David Leavitt

Two-time PEN Faulkner finalist David Leavitt's eighth novel The Two Hotel Francforts [Kindle], out yesterday, yet again maps new territory, after his IMPAC Dublin-shortlisted The Indian Clerk [Kindle](Cambridge, Madras from 1913 to 1936), The Body of Jonah Boyd (California, 1969 and later), Martin Bauman [Kindle](literary Manhattan in the 80s), The Page Turner [Kindle](Rome, NYC), While England Sleeps (London during WWI), Equal Affections(New Jersey), and The Lost Language of Cranes (New York). Here, he follows two married American couples stuck in Lisbon for a momentous fortnight in 1940 waiting for a ship to take them safely back to the States: Longtime working expats in Paris, Pete and Julia Williams, and permanent idle wanderers, Iris and Edward Freleng, who together write a series of mystery novels. Soon, the two husbands embark on a rocky affair. The nude romps on the beach at night, the burning sex on a car hood during the day, the wanting and worry, the strange behavior and unexplained absences, all these are brand new to one of them and old hat to the other. Deepening the plot, one wife knows, colluding and controlling, while the other wife harbors a huge hidden life of her own, beyond her Jewish identity, which she is also masking.

Because Leavitt establishes so many strong dualities -- two couples, two hotels, occupied / free zones, secrets and exposure, and the constant suspicion of spies -- readers might anticipate the story to toggle between two points of view. Instead, he has plain Pete Williams recount all the events from many years later, somewhat in the manner of Henry James' careful, befuddled innocents who get far more education than they expect in Europe. With its semi-rich Americans abroad, troubled family ties, and beauty struggling to suppress a kind of a madness, the mood may also call to mind Tender Is the Night. As Leavitt moves his layered story along, ably conjuring the war's hard energy and the nervous plenty of a neutral Portugal, his real subject is narration. Believe it. This book's big reveal and ultimate action come not through Pete but in excerpts from the Frelengs' subsequent mystery novel and a fluttery memoir by another character. Pete opens the next chapter with, "I am not, I gather, a very good storyteller," and proceeds to list all ten "Rules the Novice Writer Should Follow," saying it was only the discovery that he had broken every dictum that compelled him to finish his manuscript. The result further expands Leavitt's already impressive body of work.

Intimate Activism

Stretch yourself. Move beyond reading about gay New Yorkers and queer Californians, and get Cymene Howe's new book just out from Duke, Intimate Activism: The Struggle for Sexual Rights in Postrevolutionary Nicaragua. It's "the story of ... the most repressive antisodomy law in the Americas... passed shortly after the Sandinistas lost power in 1990 and, to the surprise of many, was repealed in 2007. In this vivid ethnography, Cymene Howe analyzes how local activists balanced global discourses regarding human rights and identity politics with the contingencies of daily life in Nicaragua. Though they were initially spurred by the antisodomy measure, activists sought to change not only the law but also culture. Howe emphasizes the different levels of intervention where activism occurs, from mass-media outlets and public protests to meetings of clandestine consciousness-raising groups. She follows the travails of queer characters in a hugely successful telenovela, traces the ideological tensions within the struggle for sexual rights, and conveys the voices of those engaged in "becoming" lesbianas and homosexuales in contemporary Nicaragua."

This release comes eleven months after Duke published Queer Activism in India [Kindle].

Born September 6: Jane Addams

Failing in her longheld goal to become a doctor, dropping out of a med school after a spinal injury and a nervous breakdown, Jane Addams did the next best thing: She spent two years traveling in Europe, which laid the foundation for her second foreign tour, when she secretly studied the world's first settlement house in London's East End with dreams of starting one in America with her girlfriend Ellen Gates Starr. They did it, opening Chicago's renowned Hull House in 1889, built on the three R's: residence, research, and reform. Their primary social causes were healthcare, education, immigration, child labor, and women's suffrage. At its peak Hull House accommodated two thousand visitors a week in its free lectures, concerts, library, book bindery, gym, bathhouse, coffeehouse, clubs, drama group, music school, art gallery, nursery, kindergarten, and adult classes, ultimately inspiring widespread continuing education programs throughout the nation and nearly 500 copycat settlement houses by 1920. A charter member of the American Sociological Society in 1905, a cofounder of Teddy Roosevelt's Progressive Party in 1912, Addams was elected president of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in 1915. Sixteen years later she became the first American woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, in 1931. She died in 1935, still running Hull House which had expanded to a compound of thirteen buildings. For a private escape in every sense, she shared a summer house in Bar Harbor, Maine with her longtime partner Mary Rozet Smith. They are shown together above circa 1896 and at left thirty years on. 

Read Louise Knight's biography Jane Addams: Spirit in Action [Kindle]. Or go right to the source with The Jane Addams Reader.

After 122 years, Hull House Association abruptly ceased operations last year due to bankruptcy, denying some 300 employees severance pay, earned vacation, and continued health coverage. They provided services to 60,000 people annually. The mansion remains open as a museum.

Albanian Virgins: Women Who Spend Their Lives as Men

If you're literate, you've probably read and re-read to the point of memorization, Alice Munro's knock-out tale "The Albanian Virgin," so you'll be interested in photographer Jill Peters' recent project to document these mountain women who live as men. The tradition dates back at least to the 1400s, though with modernization encroaching, today far fewer women live this way. See nine in her portfolio. 

Munro's story is available in her three-decades-spanning Selected Stories, which, so rare in these endeavors, actually does collect her best work, including the first of her two gay stories, The Turkey Season. That piece appeared in The New Yorker in 1980, one year after Ann Beattie's half-gay story The Burning House and seventeen years before Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain.

Also if you're literate, you really should read Albania's greatest writer, Ismail Kadare, who won the first International Booker in 2005. Beware, even with his straightforward prose, he will bewitch you like Orhan Pamuk. Realists should start with his short, riveting Broken April [Kindle] which follows two strands: Gjor, a young man reluctantly caught in an ancient blood feud, and an intellectual couple honeymooning in the Accursed Mountains. More fanciful readers should try Chronicle in Stone [Kindle] or The General of the Dead Army or The Fall of the Stone City or The Palace of Dreams.

International Gay Intimidation: Greyson, Greenwald, Alekseev

On Friday, Egyptian officials arrested Canadian physician Tarek Loubani and queer filmmaker John Greyson who made the aids musical Zero Patience and the lyrical, semi-magical Lilies, which was nominated for thirteen Genie awards and won four including best picture -- imagine if Todd Haynes' Poison won the top Oscar. The two were trying to get to Gaza to train doctors / make a documentary about a hospital. Police are still detaining them in Torah prison, where Mubarak has been held.

Joe Jervis worries about "famed Russian gay activist Nikolai Alekseev. Some people think he may have been kidnapped, others are worried he's had a mental breakdown." Queerty has more.

Glenn Greenwald, the gay journalist who broke the Snowden story, reports his Brazilian boyfriend David Miranda was detained by British officials for nine hours under the UK terrorism law when he tried to change planes at Heathrow coming home from Berlin. Documents show fewer than .06% of detainees are kept more than six hours. Please read his blistering essay, which says in part:

"They obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

"This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism. It's bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It's worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic. Even the Mafia had ethical rules against targeting the family members of people they felt threatened by. But the UK puppets and their owners in the US national security state obviously are unconstrained by even those minimal scruples."

Amnesty condemned the "unwarranted revenge tactics" and Keith Vaz, the chairman of the home affairs select committee, has formally requested an explanation.

UPDATE: The Times of London reports that in advance of the detention, UK officials shared their plan to hold David Miranda with the White House. No one objected.

20 Year Old Gay Climber Tops Everest, His Sixth of Seven Summits

Way back in 2008, when he was 15, Cason Crane summited Kilimanjaro with his mother, Isabella (above). After graduating cum laude from Choate, he took a year off to create Rainbow Summits, an initiative to raise money and awareness for the Trevor Project by climbing the Seven Summits, the highest peaks on each continent.

Last week on May 21 he conquered Everest (right). Cason, the sole Yank, summited with dudes from Austria, Sweden, Iceland, and Australia, on a team led by New Zealanders Dean Staples, making his ninth summit, and three-timer Lydia Bradey who in 1988 became the first woman to ascend without an oxygen tank.

Everest was to be Cason's crowning seventh summit, but last August his team got to 17,200' on Denali and weather shut them down. A 27-day excursion for naught. (Day 19: "Another weather day…in protest of the bad weather, I am not going to write a blog post. Take that, weather gods.") 

Cason will attempt Denali again this summer, between June 15 - July 15, and if he makes it to the top, he will become the first openly gay climber and the fifth youngest climber to do all Seven Summits. About 350 people have accomplished this, but only 120 have done the eight peaks that Cason will do, summiting twice in Australasia, to cover both Carstensz and Kosciusko.

He starts Princeton in the fall. Follow him on twitter or fb.