Band of Thebes

Queer in Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo

Still more lgbt reads from nyrb classics:

"When the pioneering Taiwanese novelist Qiu Miaojin committed suicide in 1995 at age twenty-six, she left behind her unpublished masterpiece,Last Words from Montmartre [and Kindle]. Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words from Montmartre tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note.

"The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s Dictée, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation."

PW said, "Qiu’s voice, both colloquial and metaphysical, enchants.... It would be wrong to interpret the book’s—or, for that matter, the author’s—ultimate surrender to death as a rejection of the richness of life; rather, like Goethe’s young Werther, this 'last testament' (an alternative translation of the title) affirms the power of literature."

Born February 3: Gengoroh Tagame, Gertrude Stein, Marlon Riggs

Descended from samurai, Gengoroh Tagame -- 50 today -- is the world's leading artist of gay bdsm manga. Buy his big book, The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame edited by Chip Kidd and introduced by Ed White, which Garth Greenwell reviewed for Towleroad saying, "Even in depicting violence, his drawings have an extraordinary delicacy, conveying extremes of emotion—humiliation, pain, despair, but also arousal, relief and, in one story, heartbreaking devotion—with incredible economy. The essays offered here discuss Tagame’s debt to Japanese woodblock prints, and I found myself marveling at the fine textures of his work, the gorgeous patterning of clothing, floor tiles, landscapes, the hairs on a man’s legs or the sweat on his face." Or get his new book Endless Game. His website is impressively, obviously nsfw. But in person? So sweet. Shown here last year he accepted a handshake then hug from Youth in Decline.

By the time she was four, Gertrude Stein had lived in Pennsylvania, Vienna, Paris, and Oakland. By the time she was seventeen, both her parents were dead and her eldest brother took over the successful family business. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1897 and spent the summer studying embryology at Woods Hole, then attended Johns Hopkins Medical School, which she left after two years. In 1903 she moved to Paris where she would stay until she died forty-three years later. Unlike writers who withdraw to contemplate, Stein engaged with the world head-on across the arts. She wrote novels, plays, essays, autobiography, and libretti, sometimes in collaboration with close friends. Mocked for her modernist use of repetition ("A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"), Stein could be perfectly succinct, as when naming the Lost Generation, or saying, "Hemingway, remarks are not literature." A bold collector of new art, she and Alice Toklas, partners for almost forty years, hosted legendary weekly salons in which the best of Paris came to see the paintings and stayed for the conversation. Among their regular attendees were Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Derain, Rousseau, Hemingway, Wilder, Anderson, Appolinaire, Thomson, Bowles, Pound, and Bernard Fay, the gay Nazi informer who protected Toklas and Stein, a Jewish lesbian after all, throughout WWII. Although they were great travelers (it was they who tipped Bowles to Tangier), Stein and Toklas perversely stayed in France through the war. Although she wrote her coming out memoir, Q.E.D. before she was thirty, it was not published until 1950, four years after her death at 72. Despite thirty-nine years together, Stein left Toklas very little. Nieces and nephews grabbed the fortune in art. Stein and Toklas are buried side by side in Père Lachaise. Get the essential Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories by Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer. 

Marlon Riggs graduated with honors from Harvard in 1978, earned his MA in journalism from Berkeley, and before long got an NEA grant to make the landmark documentary of black gay culture, Tongues Untied, which caused all kinds of sensations at Berlin, at Cannes, on PBS, and on the Senate floor. A prime target for right-wing attacks, it also won prizes at San Francisco's Frameline, Atlanta's film fest, and New York's documentary festival. Riggs' next work, Color Adjustment, examined television's "unflattering" portrayal of black characters from 1948 to 1988. After that he made Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, interviewing HIV+ black men. Working on Black Is...Black Ain't (viewable in parts starting here), he died of aids. He was 37.

 

Born January 14: Yukio Mishima, Cecil Beaton

Brilliant writer and fascist militant nut, Yukio Mishima published forty novels, many collections of stories and essays, and was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize before, at 45, launching a deranged coup attempt against the Japanese government with four other men immediately after which he and another committed ritual suicide. Mishima wrote his first book in his early twenties and became a celebrity at 24 with his bestselling second novel, the autobiographical gay conformity story Confessions of a Mask. While that book chronicled a solitary experience, bigger shocks awaited in his novel Forbidden Colors exploring Tokyo's vast gay subculture. In dreaming of an all male world it also gave voice to Mishima's misogyny and gave rise to his dedication to a hyper-masculine ideal of beauty, starting with himself. He detested intellectuals' emphasis on the mind, instead espousing a life of physicality, muscle, and action, which led to increased scenes of sadomasochism and gay rape in his fiction and greater vanity in his life. On a hardcore workout regimen, he began posing nude for gay photographers and acting in movies. Highlights of his prolific output are The Sound of Waves, a hetero love story so popular it's been filmed five times; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; and his Sea of Fertility tetralogy beginning with Spring Snow. In 1998 Jiro Fukushima published a book about his affair with Mishima and Mishima's son and daughter successfully sued him for invasion of privacy and copyright violation for quoting their father's letters to him.

Avoiding sports as a child, Cecil Beaton learned photography from his nanny on her Kodak 3A, and avoiding academics at Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1925, he took his first published photo, printed in Vogue, of one of England's leading Shakespearean scholars in drag: To be exact, George "Dadie" Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as the Duchess of Malfi. From there Beaton had to go work for his father's timber company, which he suffered for eight miserable days. After that he returned to his rightful place in the world of design, creating book jackets and studying photography until Vogue hired him fulltime in 1927. Although his style is flowery and theatrical, many of his most enduring images are serious people captured at critical times: a tense Churchill in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation portrait, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding portrait. During the war, he volunteered and was posted to the Ministry of Information, capturing images of the Blitz, its young injured on the cover of Life, and RAF pilots in their cockpit.

Versatile in his talents, Beaton also designed the lighting, sets, and costumes for many Broadway musicals, winning four Tony Awards, and for several Hollywood extravaganzas, winning the Oscar for best costumes twice, for Gigi and most famously for his high camp creations in My Fair Lady. Although he never consummated his long unrequited love for Peter Watson, a gay art collector whose interests lay elsewhere, Beaton did enjoy possibly the greatest consolation prize of the twentieth century, an affair with Gary Cooper. For his entire life, he kept his childhood diary in which he first realized he was a "terrible, terrible homosexualist" and that shame never fully disappeared. He had a few misguided affairs with women later in his life, including one with Greta Garbo, who dumped him and went back to women. When he was seventy he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and though he adapted to drawing and photographing with his left hand, he never recovered his earlier ease. He died six years later, in 1980.

Click here, to re-read Sandy Leonard's immortal Beaton/Coral Browne memory.

Gretel Ehrlich on Facing the Wave

If you were a novelist you could retire after creating a character like Gretel Ehrlich. She has twice been struck by lightning (see A Match to the Heart). She has spent months dogsleding across Greenland (see This Cold Heaven). Born in Montecito, growing up staring at the Channel Islands from her bed, she transplanted herself forty years ago to an isolated stretch of the country's least populous state, Wyoming, where, between bouts of award-winning writing and freelance sheepherding, she deepened her love of all things Japanese. The themes of her brave and beautiful new book, Facing the Wave [Kindle], about the resilience of the coastal people in the aftermath of the tsunami, amplify ideas dating back at least to her 1989 essay "The Bridge to Heaven" (in Islands, the Universe, Home) recounting her December pilgrimage to the sacred mountain Osorezan. After an arduous, many-day journey, the truck's final passage was blocked by a locked gate and she decided to walk the rest of way in a blizzard -- twenty-six miles roundtrip. 

Okay, you say, so she's a brilliant writer, and a hearty traveler, but what makes her worthy of a great character in literature? Her original vision. Sunday night at Washington's Politics & Prose, during her first reading from the new book, she discussed witnessing, at a tiny inland river temple, survivors bringing bodies of the dead in wheelbarrows, and her reaction was, This is so cool. Not for her any wallowing in sorrow or sticky pieties of optimism. She writes, "neurotic suffering is only the flapping of ego." She believes in action, in "movement: life’s extraordinary experiences entwined with the ordinary, and from that littered ground, the courage to leap."

Her own action is to start a partnership between American architects and Japanese builders to get some fast, responsible housing for the more than 300,000 people still displaced. So far, no website where you can donate but as soon as it's up, you'll find a link on this site.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune says, "In sum, Facing the Wave is a masterpiece of narrative reportage that balances Ehrlich’s own reaction with the voices of the victims."

If somehow you are unfamiliar with her previous fourteen books of essays, travel, poetry, fiction, and biography, start with the new book or her powerful collection The Solace of Open Spaces or This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland.

She's on tour this week: Aspen, Santa Barbara, SF, Corte Madera, Santa Cruz, Seattle, and Portland. On March 11 she will appear on the PBS NewsHour, followed by readings the next two nights in Albany and Manchester, VT. 

Born January 14: Yukio Mishima, Cecil Beaton

Brilliant writer and fascist militant nut, Yukio Mishima published forty novels, many collections of stories and essays, and was thrice nominated for the Nobel Prize before, at 45, launching a deranged coup attempt against the Japanese government with four other men immediately after which he and another committed ritual suicide. Mishima wrote his first book in his early twenties and became a celebrity at 24 with his bestselling second novel, the autobiographical gay conformity story Confessions of a Mask. While that book chronicled a solitary experience, bigger shocks awaited in his novel Forbidden Colors exploring Tokyo's vast gay subculture. In dreaming of an all male world it also gave voice to Mishima's misogyny and gave rise to his dedication to a hyper-masculine ideal of beauty, starting with himself. He detested intellectuals' emphasis on the mind, instead espousing a life of physicality, muscle, and action, which led to increased scenes of sadomasochism and gay rape in his fiction and greater vanity in his life. On a hardcore workout regimen, he began posing nude for gay photographers and acting in movies. Highlights of his prolific output are The Sound of Waves, a hetero love story so popular it's been filmed five times; The Temple of the Golden Pavilion; The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea; and his Sea of Fertility tetralogy beginning with Spring Snow. In 1998 Jiro Fukushima published a book about his affair with Mishima and Mishima's son and daughter successfully sued him for invasion of privacy and copyright violation for quoting their father's letters to him.

Avoiding sports as a child, Cecil Beaton learned photography from his nanny on her Kodak 3A, and avoiding academics at Cambridge, which he left without a degree in 1925, he took his first published photo, printed in Vogue, of one of England's leading Shakespearean scholars in drag: To be exact, George "Dadie" Rylands, a Cambridge Fellow for 72 years, was costumed as the Duchess of Malfi. From there Beaton had to go work for his father's timber company, which he suffered for eight miserable days. After that he returned to his rightful place in the world of design, creating book jackets and studying photography until Vogue hired him fulltime in 1927. Although his style is flowery and theatrical, many of his most enduring images are serious people captured at critical times: a tense Churchill in 1940, Queen Elizabeth II's coronation portrait, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor's wedding portrait. During the war, he volunteered and was posted to the Ministry of Information, capturing images of the Blitz, its young injured on the cover of Life, and RAF pilots in their cockpit.

Versatile in his talents, Beaton also designed the lighting, sets, and costumes for many Broadway musicals, winning four Tony Awards, and for several Hollywood extravaganzas, winning the Oscar for best costumes twice, for Gigi and most famously for his high camp creations in My Fair Lady. Although he never consummated his long unrequited love for Peter Watson, a gay art collector whose interests lay elsewhere, Beaton did enjoy possibly the greatest consolation prize of the twentieth century, an affair with Gary Cooper. For his entire life, he kept his childhood diary in which he first realized he was a "terrible, terrible homosexualist" and that shame never fully disappeared, driving him to a few misguided affairs with women later in his life, including one with Greta Garbo, who dumped him and went back to women. When he was seventy he suffered a major stroke that left him partially paralyzed, and though he adapted to drawing and photographing with his left hand, he never recovered his earlier ease. He died six years later, in 1980.

Click here, to re-read Sandy Leonard's immortal Beaton/Coral Browne memory.

Gideon and Tom Walk with Irony

Gideon Lewis-Kraus has Daddy issues because his father, a rabbi, ditched his family to go live with his gym bunny boyfriend Brett. Gideon was nineteen, which is a little old to be an abandoned child but a good age to worry that his very existence stems from a miserable lie. At twenty-seven, he's still drifting and invites a Big Bro figure, the writer Tom Bissell, to walk the 420-mile circuit of the Camino de Santiago in northern Spain. They use irony the way lame pilgrims used crutches -- constantly. And in place of Patrick Leigh Fermor's encyclopedic memory, they carry laptops. Endless emails ensue. Sometimes their new friendship falters. Critics say it's the best third of A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful [Kindle].

Later, Gideon makes a longer hike, alone, to the eighty-eight temples around the Japanese island Shikoku. The circuit is over 700 miles long and, apparently, this second section feels like it.

For the third part, Gideon invites his dad and his brother with him to make a Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to the grave of Rebbe Nachman in the Ukraine. The WSJ claims "Gideon's father understands the symbolism but is ever on the lookout" for a gay hookup. 

Two years ago, Gideon sent one hundred pages about that trip to Choire Sicha for the gay seal of approval and now Choire weighs the whole endeavor for Slate. I don't see how the book could be as trenchant and entertaining as his review, one paragraph of which is:

"There is something quite disturbing in the way in which Gideon writes about his father, who is a bundle of secrets and half-muttered truths and glancing drive-bys of information. This is Gideon's chief complaint about his father's behavior — but also the way that he chooses to inform us about the man. Because of this delivery method, the picture of his father is looming and monstrous but vague. He sketches a menacing Big Dad figure: He threw things, was capricious and prone to rage, was eccentric and frightening, was charming and hilarious but moreover unknowable in the way of fathers. What's striking is that Gideon was unable to lay this out more directly: He cannot bring himself to sit down and write direct pages to relay what kind of menace his father was, and how that changed over time. In part this was likely to protect his father and/but also this is a 6-year-old's depiction of a parent. (Five cents please!)"

A Sense of Direction rides the current vogue for walking books, with Damon Galgut's Booker finalist In a Strange Room and Cheryl Strayed's NYT bestseller Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail.

The Radiation Network

Information junkies can now monitor radiation levels throughout the U.S., updated every minute at the Radiation Network. The fine print says the Alaska monitor, in Anchorage, is located indoors.

Your interest may be amped by conflicting reports today about Japan's nuclear woes. The Vancouver Sun begins "One of the reactors at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi power plant did sustain a nuclear meltdown, Japanese officials admitted for the first time on Thursday, describing finding a pool of molten fuel at the bottom of the reactor's containment vessel." The NYT puts these facts midway through their brief article -- "That indicated that the exposed fuel has probably melted and slumped to the bottom of the vessel in little pellets" -- and avoids using the term meltdown other than to report the plant did not sustain a "full meltdown." The reporter emphasizes the upbeat, quoting a scientist David Lochbaum from "a nonprofit group usually critical of the nuclear industry," saying, "As bad as things are, they’re getting better." Tepco had earlier said it would take six to nine months to bring the plant under control; now, it will be longer.

Yesterday Greenpeace released a study finding 10 of the 22 seaweed samples they collected 40 miles from the stricken plant contain up to five times the legal limits of Iodine-131 and Caesium-137. Seaweed is a staple of the Japanese diet and the annual harvest begins next Friday.

Born December 16: Kanako Otsuji, Noël Coward

Born in Kobe in 1974, Kanako Otsuji was a junior karate champion in Asia, opting to attend university in Korea to study tae kwon do. Although she failed to make the Japanese olympic team in 2000, three years later she became one of only seven women -- and the youngest person ever -- elected to the 110-member Osaka Assembly. She came out the day before Tokyo Pride in 2005 by publishing her memoir. That same year she succeeded in changing the law that previously allowed only married couples to rent public housing in Osaka; now lgbt couples can too. In April 2007 she did not stand for re-election and two months later she married her partner Maki Kamura in an outdoor, public ceremony, although Japan does not recognize same-sex marriage. (Adorable wedding photos here and here.) In 2009, filmmaker Naomi Hiltz premiered her documentary about Otsuji at the Vancouver Queer Film Festival. Today she's thirty-six.

At fourteen in 1913 Noël Coward began an affair with Philip Streatfeild, a thirty-four year old society painter whom he met only because his mother was Streatfeild's charwoman. Two years later, Streatfeild was dying of tuberculosis and urged Mrs. Astley Cooper to nurture the "delicate" Coward, which she did. He began appearing in plays, was discharged from WWI service for ill health, and had his first writing success at twenty-five with The Vortex, scandalously popular in London and New York for its wit and veiled hints of drugs and gay life. While the times changed, Coward did not; he kept that veil cemented in place for the next five decades.

Although many of his sophisticated camp comedies play peekaboo with the closet, especially the bi threesome in Design for Living (1932) and less popular later works like Song at Twilight (1966), the urbanely glamorous Coward never actually came out. A friend of King George, Coward traveled widely to perform for WWII troops and secretly worked as a spy, hiding behind his high life persona. The press attacked him for his excesses during wartime. The king suggested a knighthood, but Churchill disliked his "flamboyance" and blocked it. After the war, Coward fell in love with the actor Graham Payn and they stayed together nearly thirty years. In the 1956 they became tax exiles, landing first in Bermuda then in Jamaica where they were neighbors to the constantly bickering Mr. & Mrs. Ian Fleming. Coward enjoyed a revival in the 1960s and finally was knighted in 1970. He died in Jamaica in 1973, still with Payn. You can read his biography or go right to his diaries, letters, plays, or the brand-new The Noël Coward Reader.

Haruki Murakami Is Charmed By Your Loud, American Gayness

Answers to your two questions.

Q. What would happen if the chatty man behind me in the very, very long book signing line at The New Yorker Festival told Haruki Murakami to his face, "Hey, If you ever decide you're gay, call me!"
A. Murakami would light up, elated, grinning, and say no, no. It looked like it might have been his happiest moment of the interminable session.

Q. Was the woman his translator?
A. No, she stamped the title page next to his signature. See below, in blue.

Free Answer: The two essential novels are Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.