Band of Thebes

Born July 8: F. Holland Day, Arthur Evans

Although F. Holland Day is remembered (some say imitated after this) as an early pioneer of art photography, he was also an influential book publisher whose 100+ titles included works by Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. The sole inheritor of a fortune from his father, a Boston merchant, Day was able to indulge his artistic pursuits with abandon. He amassed a large collection of ephemera connected to John Keats and he built a summer camp in Little Good Harbor, Five Islands, Maine where he hosted other artists and youths who modeled for him. The lads were usually from Boston’s immigrant slums where Day often tutored poor children in reading. One of his young models was Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant, whom Day encouraged in his literary ambitions and achieved fame with his book of poetic essays, The Prophet, published in more than twenty languages. (Gibran is the source, often paraphrased, for everything from Beatles’ lyrics to Kennedy’s “Ask not...”) Day also photographed adults, notably himself as Christ, as well as prominent artists and gay leaders such as Edward Carpenter. A fire in 1904 destroyed Day’s studio and most of his negatives. He later lost interest in photography and died in 1933 at sixty-nine. Read Patricia Fanning's Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day for many revelations about turn of the century Boston.

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 and Henry Cavill as Theseus in Tarsem Singh's ancient Greek hotfest The Immortals.) 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.

   

Born July 2: Donald Windham

Donald Windham's many books include the lovely short novel Two People about a middle-aged American man's romance with a moody 17 year-old Italian lad; a too-brief fiction called Tanaquil about a tomboy girl and an artistic boy modeled on George Platt Lynes; his impressive debut The Dog Star [and Kindle] praised by Mann and Gide alike; his great Lost Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote Tennessee Williams and Others, as well as the collection Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham.

Born in Atlanta in 1920, he moved to New York City when he was 19, with his artist boyfriend Fred Melton. Within four years, Windham, who never went to college, was dating a Princeton undergrad named Sandy Campbell. Through the ups and downs of friendships with a large gay circle including Truman Capote, Lincoln Kirstein, Pavel Tchelitchew, Paul Cadmus, and Tennesse Williams, they stayed together 45 years until Campbell's death in 1988. Windham lived on until 2010, leaving the bulk of their estate to fund writing awards of $1 million annually administered by Yale and named for the gay couple. The second Windham-Campbell Awards were announced this year.

Karl Bissinger's photo from 1949 shows Windham, second from left, with the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, the artist Buffie Johnson, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal.

Gay American Authors Compete for Italy's Premio Bottari Lattes Grinzane

The only American finalists for the 2014 Premio Bottari Lattes Grinzane, honoring the year's best fiction published in Italy, are two gay men: Peter Cameron, for a belated translation of his early, deeply moving gay novel The Weekend [and Kindle], and Andrew Sean Greer, who won, for The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells [and Kindle], a book that suffered here for pubbing against Kate Atkinson's multiple lives novel Life After Life. The other finalists were Kim Leine (winner of last year's Nordic Council Literature Prize), Stefania Bertola, and Alessandro Mari.

Photos of the celebrations here and here.

 

Died May 17: Sandro Botticelli

With an unknown birthdate circa 1445 Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi was appreprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi in the early 1460s and within several years had his own workshop, from which he launched a stellar career that made him the quintessential Quattrocento artist of Florence -- very much including the charge of sodomy. Called Il Botticello (little barrel) he had a horror of marriage, never wed, dated young men, and -- with his priorities perfectly clear in his painting, as above -- was a favorite of Popes. Even more importantly, he was a favorite of Medicis, who commissioned many pieces including two of the most iconic works in Western art, The Birth of Venus and Primavera. After his death on May 17, 1510, he was forgotten and his work was ignored for 350 years. Of course, it took a gay man to rescue him from oblivion, Walter Pater in the 1870s. Get the oversized monograph with 200 color plates Botticelli: Likeness, Myth, Devotion or Ronald Lightbown's biography Botticelli: Life and Work. At left, a probable self-portrait and after the jump, more images.

Donatello Loves His David in The Medici Boy

After seventeen books of poems and fiction, John L'Heureux got a Guggenheim to write this, his eleventh novel, The Medici Boy [Kindle], about Donatello's crush on the model he used to sculpt David. The artist's sexual infatuation with, then love for, the young urchin / hustler Agnolo Mattei leads him to create the first freestanding bronze nude in more than a thousand years... and worse. Nobel laureate J.M. Coetzee says it's a "gripping story of love, genius, and betrayal."

Born April 15: Leonardo, Henry James, Lynes, Gadol, Whitaker

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, writer... the world's greatest genius did it all without a university education, denied to him as a lowerclass bastard. At twenty-four he was twice arrested for sodomy, in April and June, after which he became increasingly secretive about his affairs with men, including a young falconer named Bernardo di Simone, according to Michael White. His notebooks cover 5,000 pages and foretell inventions or discoveries to come centuries later: bicycles, calculators, military tanks, helicopters, hang gliders, the double hull, solar power, and plate tectonics. Other drawings are erotica, including an erect angel (qui) based on his tempestuous boyfriend, a hellcat named Salai, to whom he bequeathed the Mona Lisa. 

Henry James, four centuries later and 400 times more repressed, wrote some of the world's finest fiction. His gayest works are the novel The Bostonians (excluded from his collected works due to its queerness) and the long short story The Pupil. Undiminished even in the age of txtng, he is the subject of Colm Toibin's IMPAC Dublin winner The Master and the reigning spirit of Alan Hollinghurst's Booker winner The Line of Beauty. Exactly one year ago, the Pulitzer judges named as a finalist Michael Gorra's superb Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece [Kindle], which was also a NBCC nominee and a best book of the year at The New Yorker, WSJ, the Guardian, and The Millions.

You deserve it. Get George Platt Lynes: The Male Nudes (my favorite, after the jump) or see him in front of the camera in When We Were Three: Travel Albums of George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Wescot 1925-1935. He is the basis for the photographer in Donald Windham's novel Tanaquil.

Always a favorite recommender on Thebes queer lit poll, Peter Gadol studied with Seamus Heaney and Helen Vendler at Harvard from which he graduated magna cum laude. Four years later Crown published his first novel, Coyote (1990), followed by The Mystery Roast (1993), Closer to the Sun (1996), a PEN West prize nominee The Long Rain [Kindle] (1997), Light at Dusk (2000), and the Lammy-nominated Silver Lake [Kindle] about two gay architects and their dangerous overnight guest. Fifty today, Peter is working on American Modern, a novel about 20th century design.

Rick Whitaker's audacious new fiction An Honest Ghost [Kindle] is a Publishing Triangle nominee, a Lammy finalist, an ALA Over the Rainbow book, and a TLS book of the year. Previously he wrote a memoir about his experiences as a hustler, Assuming the Position, and a book about reading gay American writing, The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara. I wish he would write about his experiences as an adoptive single dad -- not easy, given his published history as a sex worker -- though of course I respect any privacy decisions in not writing about family.

Born March 23: Steven Saylor/Aaron Travis, J.C. Leyendecker

London's Sunday Times says Steven Saylor "evokes the ancient world more convincingly than any other writer of his generation," evident across the twelve novels and two story collections of his Roma Sub Rosa series about Gordianus the Finder, including two CWA Historical Dagger Award finalists, Last Seen in Massilia and The Judgment of Caesar, the Lammy nominee The Venus Throw, and the Lammy winner Catilina's Riddle. Saylor may be best known for his 1,200-year epics Roma and Empire, international bestsellers published in twenty-two languages. He has also written two novels of his native Texas, most notably A Twist at the End about O. Henry and a series of murders in Austin in the 1880s. Last month came his sixteenth novel, Raiders of the Nile, which USA Today calls "exuberantly entertaining." He and Rick Solomon, partners since 1976, divide their time between Austin and Berkeley. An essay about their long relationship appears in My Mother's Ghost.

Earlier, Saylor was the bestselling gay erotica writer Aaron Travis. Maybe you don't want academic approval of your taboo-busting porn, but you do want results: Michael Bronski says Slaves of the Empire [Kindle] is "a high point of gay male writing in the second half of the twentieth century" that has achieved "near-mythological status," and he calls Blue Light [Kindle only 99 cents] "a contemporary supernatural masterpiece as frightening as anything H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King ever wrote." Susie Bright agrees, saying it's "perhaps the most fantastic supernatural erotic thriller ever written." She selected his stories for at least two volumes of her mainly straight Best American Erotica series and to celebrate its tenth anniversary she asked readers to name their favorite piece from all ten volumes: The winner was The Hit [Kindle], which Saylor notes was inspired by the movies Carnival Story and Murder by Contract. William Burroughs' and John le Carré's work partially prompted Crown of Thorns about an American spy in Istanbul who submits to "a brutal Turkish stevedore." Other titles in the newly digitized Aaron Travis Erotic Library are Short, Brainy & Hot, Wild West, Wrestling Tales, Military Discipline, Eden and the horrifying Kudzu.

 

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 or, yes, 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.

    

    

All This Talk of Love

Christopher Castellani's third novel in his Maddalena trilogy, All This Talk of Love [Kindle], is a Ferro-Grumley finalist.

According to the Friends of South End Library, the book describes "the aging patriarch of an Italian-American immigrant family thinking about the haunting circumstances of his gay son’s death by suicide, decades before. The fourteen-year-old, Tony, had fallen in love with a waiter, Dante, at the family’s restaurant. The father found, and read, the teenager’s love poems, written on the back of the guest checks used for customers’ orders when working there after school. This was the 1960s. The waiter was fired. The son didn’t come home from school one day. His body was found in the river shortly after. The patriarch’s musings go from despair over prevailing social taboos at the time (..“common sense tells me this can’t be”..) to the horror of the AIDS epidemic since (..“when he feels–can he even admit it?–relieved, almost grateful, that Tony died when he did.”..) to the guilt he now can express (..“it was his own hand on his son’s back that night, pushing him off the bridge”..). Like the bridge itself, Antonio’s feelings span the time from those unforgiving days of the 1950s and 60s to this Christmas Eve almost 30 years later, when he is seventy-two. He believes his poem to Tony, if he could have written it, would have read “. .I want you back. Give me another chance..” Antonio even dares to think he “would have made peace with the truth about his son, as his own flesh and blood, the way other fathers have done.”

Born March 5: Matt Lucas, Pier Paolo Pasolini

In fact, the only gay in the village lives in West Hollywood with Rebel Wilson and plays Derrick on her show Super Fun Night. Eight years after Little Britain, Matt Lucas has been Tweedledee and Tweedledum in Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, Benny in Gnomeo and Juliet, and Kristen Wiig's roommate in Bridesmaids. He and longtime collaborator David Walliams reteamed for a BBC mocumentary called Come Fly with Me and more recently he guested on Community and Portlandia. 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. Today, Matt is forty.

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. With his mother he 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 you must experience Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma.

Bitter Eden

The same week I learned the devoted publisher has wanted to secure the rights to this somewhat autobiographical queer novel for more than ten years, one of my very favorite writers emailed me praising the book and suggesting it for Thebes: Three soldiers (two British, one South African) are POWs during WWII, first in Italy then in Germany.

Finally out yesterday in the US, Bitter Eden [Kindle] arrives with a starred Kirkus review: "The taboo of homosexuality—the accusations, the denials, the flaunting and acquiescing—is a primary concern of the novel, as gay and straight and all that lies in between struggle in close quarters and constant deprivation... What begins as an unforgettable account of prisoners of war ends as something surprising: a love story." Christos Tsiolkas says, "Bitter Eden is one of those rare books that is both tender and tough, that is a punch to the stomach and a caress to the face. This is an exploration of men in war, and though it rings absolutely true to the experiences of Allied prisoners in the World War II, it also transcends the specific and the historic to be a moving and unsettling chronicle of the ferocious bonds and dangerous conflicts that emerge when any group of men are pushed to extremes. Bitter Eden is earthy and lyrical, caustic and moving. It is a thrilling read."

The author published his first novel at 17 and this, his fourth novel, at 82. Born in 1920 to an Egyptian father and Turkish mother, he was orphaned at two and raised by a Methodist couple who renamed him John Carlton and forgot to mention he wasn't white. He changed his name first to Jouza Joubert, then to Ismail Joubert. He was a POW during WWII and much later served time in the same prison where and while Nelson Mandela was held. Banned for five years and forbidden to write, he used the name Tatamkhulu Afrika under which he won many prizes for his poetry and essays. Two weeks after publishing Bitter Eden he died of injuries from being struck by a car.

Born February 17: Robert Dessaix, Fritz Krupp

Which book finally dislodged The Horse Whisperer from the #1 spot on Australia's bestseller lists? Basically its opposite: Robert Dessaix's Night Letters was a surprise sensation, an intellectual queer 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. Invited to the Shanghai International Literary Festival in March 2010, he was denied a visa, probably because of his HIV+ status. In April 2011 he published On Humbug. More recently came As I Was Saying: A Collection of Musings [Kindle]. After a failed marriage to a woman, Dessaix wrote a personal ad in 1982 and met Peter Timms, who is still his partner. As for longevity and dedication, Dessaix created a complex language when he was eleven and continues to speak it to himself even now, as he turns 70 today. 

Born 160 years ago today, heir to a 300-year-old dynasty and a newer steel, weapons, and ammunitions 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: In 2009 a four-and-a-half-hour tv miniseries Krupp - Eine deutsche Familie showed a dandified Fritz flaunting his rough trade. Photos after the jump.

Born January 24: Hadrian

Born in Italica, Spain 1,937 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 December 8: Norman Douglas

Roughly every twenty years, in 1896, 1916, and 1937, novelist Norman Douglas had to flee another nation in the wake of another gay scandal. At 27, after two years in the British foreign service, he was forced to leave St. Petersburg in 1896. The next year, to cheer himself up he bought a villa outside of Naples. Still bored the year after that, he married his first cousin, had two sons, and divorced his wife within five years on the basis of her infidelity. Working at Ford Maddox Ford's literary journal The English Review he met, befriended, and feuded with D.H. Lawrence whose revenge was to render him a character, James Argyle, in Aaron's Rod. Amid the frenzy of the Great War in 1916, Douglas at 45 was charged with "indecent assault" on a 16 year-old lad. Douglas later explained it was "for kissing a boy and giving him some cakes and a shilling," but the youth was angry enough to press charges and Douglas was anxious enough to skip bail and live in exile in Capri. It's the setting of his best known novel, published the next year, a hedonistic farce called South Wind whose purported lightness I found a touch heavy. David Higdon says, 'The novel stands in a tradition of such works as Samuel Johnson's Rasselas, the Marquis de Sade's Justine, Thomas Love Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, and W. H. Mallock's The New Republic." His travel books include Siren Land: A Celebration of Life in Southern Italy and Old Calabria. Unreformed in his late sixties, Douglas faced another sex scandal and left Italy for France in 1937. He died in 1952 with the last words, "Get these f---ing nuns away from me." His language was even saltier in his book of limericks, for years said to be among the most pirated writings in English.

Photo by Carl van Vechten, Florence, 1935

Vanity Fair on the Vatican's Secret Gay Lives

Maybe the only thing less interesting than the Cheney sisters' stragetic, headline-grabbing "feud" -- what next, the Quayle sons bicker? -- is the sex lives of priests. But if you care, Michael Joseph Gross reports in the December issue of Vanity Fair on the secret gay clergy at the Vatican. The story begins with a cliche: a priest in a gay sauna in Rome. Gross writes:

"At the Vatican, a significant number of gay prelates and other gay clerics are in positions of great authority. They may not act as a collective but are aware of one another’s existence. And they inhabit a secretive netherworld, because homosexuality is officially condemned. Though the number of gay priests in general, and specifically among the Curia in Rome, is unknown, the proportion is much higher than in the general population. Between 20 and 60 percent of all Catholic priests are gay, according to one estimate cited by Donald B. Cozzens in his well-regarded The Changing Face of the Priesthood. For gay clerics at the Vatican, one fundamental condition of their power, and of their priesthood, is silence, at least in public, about who they really are.

"Clerics inhabit this silence in a variety of ways. A few keep their sexuality entirely private and adhere to the vow of celibacy. Many others quietly let themselves be known as gay to a limited degree, to some colleagues, or to some laypeople, or both; sometimes they remain celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way, perhaps the least common but certainly the most visible, involves living a double life..."

Read it all.

Born October 21: Robert Ferro

When editors of the New York Review of Books Classics finally seek me out to ask which forgotten titles must be brought back into print, one of my top five recommendations will be Robert Ferro's novel The Family of Max Desir published thirty years ago, in 1983. Amazingly, it spans three generations and seventy years in the Desiderio family, from Sicily to Brooklyn to New Jersey, in a mere 215 pages. It works because the writing is so swift and right and alive. Reunited with distant relatives after decades apart: "Then he recognized certain faces, older and changed, like music played slower." Pushing forty, the gay character Max worries when he cruises the Village: "People will no longer turn to look at him, will see nothing but themselves being seen." Everything rings true about this family, including their complicated, shifting degrees of acceptance of Max's actor boyfriend of fifteen years, Nick Flynn. Ferro's other novels are his debut The Others from 1977, his final book Second Son when he was dying of aids in 1988, and his third novel, The Blue Star, which Stephen Greco selected for Tom Cardamone's The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered [Kindle].

You already know Robert Ferro as the patron of the Ferro-Grumley Award. He and Michael Grumley met as graduate students and stayed together wo decades, until their deaths from aids a few months apart in 1988. Both men were forty-six. They co-authored Atlantis: The Autobiography of a Search. 

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 images are collected in various books such as Wilhelm von Gloeden: Photography (192 pages), Wilhelm Von Gloeden (63 pages with a double nude cover), Wilhelm Von Gloeden: Taormina (83 pages), and Wilhelm von Gloeden by Roger Peyrefitte.

Born July 8: F. Holland Day, Arthur Evans, Philip Johnson

Although F. Holland Day is remembered (some say imitated after this) as an early pioneer of art photography, he was also an influential book publisher whose 100+ titles included works by Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. The sole inheritor of a fortune from his father, a Boston merchant, Day was able to indulge his artistic pursuits with abandon. He amassed a large collection of ephemera connected to John Keats and he built a summer camp in Little Good Harbor, Five Islands, Maine where he hosted other artists and youths who modeled for him. The lads were usually from Boston’s immigrant slums where Day often tutored poor children in reading. One of his young models was Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant, whom Day encouraged in his literary ambitions and achieved fame with his book of poetic essays, The Prophet, published in more than twenty languages. (Gibran is the source, often paraphrased, for everything from Beatles’ lyrics to Kennedy’s “Ask not...”) Day also photographed adults, notably himself as Christ, as well as prominent artists and gay leaders such as Edward Carpenter. A fire in 1904 destroyed Day’s studio and most of his negatives. He later lost interest in photography and died in 1933 at sixty-nine. Read Patricia Fanning's Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day for many revelations about turn of the century Boston.

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 Superman Henry Cavill as Theseus in Tarsem Singh's ancient Greek hotfest The Immortals.) 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, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, PPG Place in Pittsburgh, the IDS Tower in Minneapolis, the Boston Public Library's 1972 addition, 101 California in San Francisco, 190 South LaSalle in Chicago, 191 Peachtree Tower in Atlanta, Das Amerikan Business Center in Berlin, Puerta de Europe in Madrid, and the Tata Theater in Mumbai. Considered by many to be among his greatest designs is the LGBT Cathedral of Hope-United Church of Christ in Dallas, a soaring structure "without right angles or parallel lines." Although the ambitious cathedral remains a dream, the church finally broke ground on the Interfaith Chapel in 2007. You can learn more about it and take a virtual tour here. Johnson lived with his partner, curator David Whitney, from 1960 to his death in 2005.

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 New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, PPG Place in Pittsburgh, the IDS Tower in Minneapolis, the Boston Public Library's 1972 addition, 101 California in San Francisco, 190 South LaSalle in Chicago, 191 Peachtree Tower in Atlanta, Das Amerikan Business Center in Berlin, Puerta de Europe in Madrid, and the Tata Theater in Mumbai. Considered by many to be among his greatest designs is the LGBT Cathedral of Hope-United Church of Christ in Dallas, a soaring structure "without right angles or parallel lines." Although the ambitious cathedral remains a dream, the church finally broke ground on the Interfaith Chapel in 2007. You can learn more about it and take a virtual tour here. Johnson lived with his partner, curator David Whitney, from 1960 to his death in 2005.

Born June 24: Forrest Reid, Vladimir Luxuria

Only a few years after the Oscar Wilde trials, Forrest Reid published his second novel The Garden God: A Tale of Two Boys [Kindle] while still a student at Christ's College, Cambridge, and with all the ignorant optimism of youth, he dedicated the book to his 62 year-old friend Henry James. The Master was shocked at the gay love story and outraged to be named in it; he never again spoke to Reid. A happier Cambridge connection came with E.M. Forster who continued to write and visit his former pupil until Reid's death in 1947. When a blue plaque was ready for Reid's house in 1952, Forster traveled to Belfast to unveil it. His 1912 novel Following Darkness [Kindle] is said to be an inspiration for Joyce's 1924 A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In 1944 he won the James Tait prize for his sixteenth book of fiction and the climax of his Tom Barber trilogy, Young Tom. Praised in his lifetime for his explorations of boyhood a la Barrie and Walpole, Reid's work is forgotten today. Is it the gay factor or his flowery, sentimental style?

Wladimiro Guadagno moved from Foggia to Rome in 1985 when he was twenty, and twenty years later she ran for a seat in the Italian Parliament. Now Vladimir Luxuria, she won, becoming the world's second trans MP, after New Zealand's Georgina Beyer. Prior to her victory she had been an actress, cabaret entertainer, and party promoter, organizing Rome's first gay pride in June 1994. A member of the Communist Refoundation Party, she lost her re-election bid in 2008 and bounced back from defeat by appearing on "the Italian answer to Survivor," a celebrity reality tv contest show called L'Isola dei Famosi which took place in Honduras. Faced with fierce competition from this supermodel dating this soccer star, Luxuria triumphed, winning the hearts of Italy in the decisive public poll. Required to make a charitable contribution of fifty-percent of her 200,000 euro winnings, she did not choose a T, B, G, or L nonprofit but instead selected UNICEF because she won't have children herself. Although she exclusively uses the feminine pronoun, has had rhinoplasty and partial breast construction, and "lives as a female," she has chosen not to have sex reassignment surgery and "remains physically and legally male."

Essays by Gay Italian-American Men: Our Naked Lives

Big month in the Michael Carosone - Joseph LoGiudice household: They've adopted a two-year old Shih Tzu and co-edited a new essay collection called Our Naked Lives: Essays From Gay Italian American Men.Blurbed by Michael Musto, David Bergman, and Michelangelo Signorile, the book features these authors and possibly more:

Michael Carosone, John D'Emilio, Charles Derry, George Di Stefano, Joseph A. Federico, Joseph A. LoGiudice, Michael Luongo,David Masello, Tommi Avicolli Mecca, Joe Oppedisano, Frank Anthony Polito, Felice Picano, Michael Schiavi, Frank Spinelli, and Tony Tripoli.

Many of the writers recount struggles to balance their homosexuality with their complicated, tradition-bound Italian-American heritage. Happily, in most cases the rejecting families eventually come round to acceptance and affirmation.

Joseph says, "The book centers broadly on the intersection of sexuality and ethnicity and how they clash with one another. Specific themes surround familial issues, conflicts with Roman Catholicism, father-son disputes, gender stereotypes, and the separation of gay and Italian American identities."

Their first book event is at the B&N at Broadway & 82nd St on Tuesday, June 25 at 7:00.

Born March 5: Pier Paolo Pasolini

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 you must experience Anna Magnani in Mamma Roma.