Band of Thebes

Born June 16: Jaime Manrique

Born illegitimately in Colombia of an adulterous union, Jaime Manrique was not publicly acknowledged by his rich, prominent father who soon moved on to another mistress. His childhood struggles are just one facet of Manrique's landmark queer Latino Lit book Eminent Maricones: Arenas, Lorca, Puig, and Me. Some of the same early memories also surface in his book of poems, My Night with Federico García Lorca. His mother moved the family to Florida, where she became a domestic servant and Jaime excelled at school, earning his BA in English from the University of South Florida. After two more or less bisexual novels that got a lot of attention in Colombia, Manrique's first openly gay novel Latin Moon in Manhattan made a splash here in 1992. Five years later he edited Besame Mucho: New Gay Latino Fiction, which features seventeen short stories. He's won a Guggenheim for his nonfiction, and four years ago he made a foray into Isabel Allende and Tomas Eloy Martinez territory with Our Lives Are the Rivers, his long-promised novel about Manuela Saenz, Simón Bolívar's mistress. It won the International Latino Book Award for best historical novel. His newest book is Cervantes Street, which earned rave blurbs from Junot Diaz, Esmeralda Santiago, and Edith Grossman. Read him.

The Sound of Things Falling Wins €100,000 IMPAC Dublin Award

Juan Gabriel Vásquez has won the €100,000 IMPAC Dublin Award for his third novel, inspiring the jury to say, "The Sound of Things Falling [and Kindle] is a consummate literary thriller that resonates long after the final page. Through a masterly command of layered time periods, spiralling mysteries and a noir palette, it reveals how intimate lives are overshadowed by history; how the past preys on the present; and how the fate of individuals as well as countries is moulded by distant, or covert, events."

Among the ten finalists from 152 nominees were two gay-inclusive books -- The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng and Absolution by Patrick Flanery -- as well as Ten White Geese by Gerbrand Bakker, Questions of Travel by Michelle de Kretser, My Struggle: Book One by Karl Ove Knausgaard, Three Strong Women by Marie NDiaye, Traveler of the Century by Andrés Neuman, The Light of Amsterdam by David Park, and The Spinning Heart by Donal Ryan.

The IMPAC Dublin is my very favorite literary award, previously honoring Gerbrand Bakker, Colm Toibin, Orhan Pamuk, Edward P. Jones, and Per Petterson... each before they broke out in America.

Born April 17: Chavela Vargas

A late bloomer, perhaps, but what a flower -- Mexican singer Chavela Vargas did not release her first album until she was 42, didn't come out as a lesbian until she was 81, and didn't debut at Carnegie Hall until she was 83. What was she doing all those years before recording Noche de Bohemia in 1961? Well, she dressed as a man, often in her signature red jorongo, smoked cigars, drank heavily, and packed a pistol, so obviously she was busy with more than singing rancheras in the streets. And maybe she had an affair Frida Kahlo (as Josephine Baker had). Since that first record, she has released more than eighty albums. Her great fame of the 1960s and 70s subsided when she retired to battle her alcoholism. She returned to performing at 72 in 1991 in Mexico City. Since then her music has been widely used in films and she has appeared singing in several movies including Almodovar's Flower of My Secret, Taymor's Frida, and Innartu's Babel. All I can say is buy her, beware: The first time you hear Chavela unleash her power midway through the quiet Paloma Negra you might drop whatever you're holding. She died in 2012 at 93.

Born March 10: John Rechy

Although Scottish-Mexican-American John Rechy doesn't want to be ghettoized as a gay writer, his most important work pioneered a new type of literature honestly depicting men who have sex with men. In 1963 his first novel, City of Night [Kindle], followed the aimless encounters of a nameless hustler turning tricks in New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, crosscut with memories of his childhood in El Paso. By making his protagonist anonymous and introducing a succession of minor characters seen only briefly, Rechy re-emphasized the sensation of hustling for the reader. (He knew his trade: He continued to work as a prostitute on Santa Monica Blvd even after the book became a surprise hit, even after he became a professor at UCLA, even after he turned forty.) Decades later in 2003, a NYT critic called City of Night a "bona fide cult classic," "deservedly considered a milestone of transgressive fiction." That was not the consensus when it first appeared. And after thirteen books, his literary awards are limited to an NEA grant and lifetime achievement recognitions from PEN West, Publishing Triangle, and the ONE Foundation.

Rechy's second novel, Numbers [Kindle], trod the same path as City of Night but from another direction: a slightly older Johnny Rio returns to L.A. for a ten day binge not as an escape but to recapture his previous glory; some readers see Johnny Rio as using sex not merely to confirm his desirability but also as a means to find a greater connection and begin to forge a gay identity. For 1967, that was a big step. Among Rechy's ten other novels are Rushes, Bodies and Souls, The Coming of Night, Marilyn's Daughter (about a girl who believes herself to the love child of Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy), and his much-praised The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. His three works of nonfcition are The Sexual Outlaw [Kindle], Beneath the Skin: Collected Essays, and from 2009 his memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman [Kindle]. Eighty today, Rechy lives in West Hollywood with Michael, his partner of more than thirty years.

Born February 25: Severo Sarduy

Why Reinaldo Arenas and not Severo Sarduy? Born six years apart, the gay Cuban exile novelists died of aids in within three years of each other. In death, Arenas became a star, then, with Julian Schnabel's film , a superstar, whereas the twenty years since Sarduy's passing in 1993 have largely erased the memory of his accomplishments. His novel Cobra won France's Prix Médicis étranger in 1972, immediately followed by four literary heavyweights, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortazar, Steven Millhauser, and Doris Lessing, but for some reason his win did not propel him to their level of international acclaim, possibly because his novel is about a kitschy trans cabaret performer at the Lyrical Theater of Dolls.

Born in 1937 in Cuba's third largest city Camagüey, he left at 23 to study in Madrid but within a month diplomatic ties frayed between Spain and Cuba, and Sarduy had to move to Paris. He stayed there for the rest of his life, though he traveled throughout Europe and met his longtime companion François Wahl on vacation in Italy. His two volumes of essays are Written on a Body and Christ on the Rue Jacob, which Booklist called, "a special book of thrilling ideas excitingly expressed."

Last year wonderful Archipelago (forever blessed for bringing Gerbrand Bakker's gay novel The Twin to American readers) published Sarduy's novel Firefly [Kindle]: "For the first time in English, Severo Sarduy's most autobiographical work, centered on two transvestites who undergo oppositional sexual surgeries (one is castrated, the other is given a new member). This convention-defying, scatological, and very funny novel is a paradise of words, 'paradisic by plenitude' (Roland Barthes)."

Born January 13: Horatio Alger, Justin Torres

Although in the 115 years since his death, Horatio Alger's stories have become synonymous with "rags to riches," the hard working boys in his novels don't amass fortunes. A typical plot is that a rich older man notices a plucky orphaned lad, witnesses his act of bravery or honor, and sets him up with a decent low-level job in a company, giving him security but not wealth. Often the older man gets the boy to live with him. Alger himself was a bright youth, entering Harvard at 16 and studying with Longfellow. (At left, his graduation photo at 20.) He became a minister but at 34 fled his Unitarian parish in Brewster, Massachusetts after church officials discovered he was having sex with two teenagers. Or, as they said, committing the "most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys." By that time, 1866, Alger had already written nine books for children; he moved to New York City and over the next 33 years wrote 120 more. Despite his prolific production he never became rich. Besotted with bootblacks and street scruffs, he ate often meals and / or slept at the Newsboys Lodging House and gave away his earnings or was conned out of them by the young men he so admired. Except for Ragged Dick, his books did not become bestsellers until years after his death in 1899 at 67 at his sister Augusta's house in Natick. She destroyed all his papers.

Years before he unleashed his novella We the Animals [Kindle] in 2011, Justin Torres was already collecting literary honors like a Truman Capote Fellowship at Iowa, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and a United States Artists Rolón Fellowship in 2009. His instant classic is now published in twelve languages and was a finalist or winner of many prizes including those from the NAACP, Publishing Triangle, VCU Cabell, Pitt's Fred Brown Award, and the Indies Choice Book Award, as well as being named Salon's fourth sexiest man of 2011, sandwiched between Aloe Blacc and Thom Yorke. In 2012 he was selected as one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35, chosen to speak at the National Book Festival, and he currently holds a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard where he is working on his second novel, about a gay Puerto Rican hustler in New York City. Two chapters of that book have appeared in Harpers and The New Yorker. He's 34.

Born December 28: F.W. Murnau, Manuel Puig, Socalled

After studying art history at the University of Heidelberg and flying as a combat pilot in WWI, F.W. Murnau directed his first film The Boy in Blue in 1919 when he was thirty-one. Before his death in a car crash at forty-two, he became one of cinema's early giants -- (said to be 6'9" tall) -- with a prodigious output in Germany, most famous of which is Nosferatu from 1922. After four years and many more successes (The Last Laugh, Faust) Murnau moved to Hollywood and made what many critics consider one of the greatest films ever, Sunrise, which shared the top prize at the first Oscar ceremony. Sunrise is #82 on the AFI 100 Greatest Films list but in 2002 the British Film Institute ranked it #7 of all time. He made two more movies -- Four Devils (lost) and Our Daily Bread (released as City Girl) -- before his final picture, Tabu, a loincloth romance shot in Tahiti that won a cinematography Oscar for Floyd Crosby (father of David Crosby who is biologically the father of Melissa Etheridge's children). He died a week before Tabu's premiere. Because humans are easily titillated, and because some are snickering homophobes, the baseless rumor persists that Murnau's fatal car crash was the result of his performing oral sex on his chauffeur.

Born in central Argentina in 1932, Manuel Puig first wanted to be an architect then became a film archivist with hopes of becoming a screenwriter. His love of movies infuses his first novel, Betrayed by Rita Hayworth, published when he was thirty-six. Praised in Latin America as that work was, his international reputation rests on his fourth novel, published in 1976, about a gay man and a political prisoner sharing a cell: Kiss of the Spider Woman [Kindle] also became an Oscar-winning film in 1985 and a Tony-winning Broadway musical in 1993. The buoyancy of his early books, mixing high literary art with the low-brow style of telenovas, gave way to a bitterness in later books that reduced their popularity. A leftist exile in Mexico City for decades, he died there at fifty-seven suffering a heart attack after gall bladder surgery.

 

 

Who brings the funk, noise, and klezmer? That's right, the super original Jewish Canadian rapper Josh Dolgin aka Socalled. If you think Ukrainian music from the 1930s won't mesh with drum n bass, you haven't heard his Ghettoblaster. His trippy "You Are Never Alone" video became a YouTube sensation with 2.5 million views, and last year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel. In a world of timid, homogenized, market-driven art, Socalled is a standout. Which doesn't mean everything he tries works, but when he hits, he's genius. I met him and loved him after the NYC screening of the documentary. Not to brag, but after talking a while I did the very best thing one man can do for another... insisted he read Tatyana Tolstaya. 

José Esteban Muñoz Has Died at 46

 NYU confirmed the death of queer studies star José Esteban Muñoz, 46. Like the far-reaching work of his advisor Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick, his first book Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics mixed discussions of Basquiat, Warhol, Mapplethorpe, Issac Julian, Magic Johnson, Pedro Zamora, and Too Wong Foo... with appreciations of Carmelita Tropicana and Vaginal Creme Davis. His follow-up Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity [Kindle] again constrasts established lgbt artists such as Frank O'Hara, Samuel Delany, and Elizabeth Bishop with a new generation of avant garde asskickers like Dynasty Handbag, who, as it happens, performed nude at Yale's Whitney Humanities Center on Monday night. No cause of death has been released.

Born July 16: Reinaldo Arenas

In his searing memoir Before Night Falls, Reinaldo Arenas recalled his impoverished childhood in Cuba and his early memories of being so hungry he ate dirt. He also described his vivid and prolific sexual adventures beginning at a very young age with a male cousin, and later with his uncle, a domesticated animal, and countless men, all told with an unvarnished honesty that shocked some readers. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of the 1993, but Arenas could not enjoy its success. His hard luck was a constant. In his teens he became besotted with and then disillusioned by the Castro regime, which eventually imprisoned him, prohibited him from publishing, and threatened him with death. He attempted to escape from Cuba on an inner tube, was caught, and was sent to a far worse prison. Even when he was officially forbidden from having paper, he managed to write and  got his work smuggled out of the country and published abroad. Released from prison in 1976 after renouncing his fiction and essays, Arenas was, by a fluke, part of the Mariel boatlift to Florida in 1980. Exploding with the boundless freedoms of writing and gay sex in New York, he entered his most fertile phase: Farewell to the Sea, The Color of Summer, The Palace of the White Skunks, and The Doorman. Within seven years he got aids. Ravaged by the unstoppable disease and depressed by the lack of attention paid to his work, he intentionally overdosed on his medicine on December 7, 1990. His memoir was published in Spanish in 1992 and in English the following year. In 2000, Julian Schnabel adapted Before Night Falls into a gorgeous, gay, award winning film starring Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp, Olivier Martinez, Diego Luna, and Sean Penn. Earlier this year, Duke released Jorge Olivares' Becoming Reinaldo Arenas: Family, Sexuality, and The Cuban Revolution [Kindle]. Jaime Manrique said it "reads like an engrossing novel whose main character—the phenomenally talented Reinaldo Arenas—has a vitality and genius that haunt our imagination. This very personal, and relevant, work of literary criticism is a fitting tribute to a brave and great writer."

Born July 12: Michelle Rodriguez

Butch beauty. From the boxer in Girlfight to the pilot in Avatar, Michelle Rodriguez on screen is adrenaline personified. She's perfected that role in the Fast & Furious flicks, S.W.A.T., Resident Evil, the tv show Lost, and her best movie, the surfer grrrl gem Blue Crush. Rodriguez has also cemented that persona off-screen with an arrest for assault, numerous speeding violations, DUI, her decision to go to jail rather than do community service, violation of her probation, lying "clerical errors" about when she did/didn't do her forced community service, and a second stint in the slammer (18 days of a 180 day sentence, released because of overcrowding). Her lawyers blame her erratic behavior on the price of fame compounded by pressure to hide her sexuality a reaction to allergy medicine.

Half Mexican, half Puerto Rican, and happy to play with her bad girl image in a Hollywood still obsessed with blond, squeaky clean facades, Rodriguez is not quite so rad as to actually come out. While she frequently says, "I am not a lesbian," she also tells the media she has been with both sexes. Her partners and film colleagues have been even more helpful, and more specific, as when Kristanna Loken went public about their relationship and out lesbian Guinevere Turner confirmed it. Rodriguez again played a marine in Battle: Los Angeles. She will be in the second Machete movie in October and the seventh(!) Fast & Furious next summer. Today she's 35.

NYT Op-Ed: "How Latin Culture Got More Gay"

Radcliffe Institute fellow and author of The Night Is Young: Sexuality in Mexico in the Time of Aids, Hector Carrillo penned this opinion piece for the NYT asking how the recent great strides for lgbt rights in Central and South America -- including Tuesday's judicial ruling that may lead to marriage equality throughout Brazil -- can be reconciled with "the stereotype of Latin culture as a bastion of religiosity and machismo?"

He writes:

"Since the 1970s, protest movements helped end military dictatorships or long periods of one-party rule; this democratic opening empowered left or center-left governments that have strongly emphasized human rights and individual freedom... gay and lesbian activists piggybacked on this wave of democratization.

"The recent expansion of same-sex marriage rights has come about in part through alliances of left-of-center legislative majorities with progressive executives... judges have played an important role in advancing the cause of gay equality, as evidenced this week in Brazil, where the National Council of Justice, which oversees the judiciary, ruled that notary publics may not refuse to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies. (Judicial appeals, or legislative action, could reverse the decision.)

"These achievements were not inevitable; for decades the left, with ideological roots in class struggle, could be as patriarchal and homophobic as the capitalists and soldiers it condemned. So to understand why the politics changed, we must also look to society.

"In the 1990s, I interviewed dozens of Mexicans, straight and gay, in Guadalajara, the country’s second largest city. They spoke about how they wanted their lives to differ from their parents’. Women wanted to be recognized as sexual beings, with legitimate desires and the ability to pursue them. Men felt the old models of machismo were constraining, not empowering. As the anthropologist Matthew Gutmann found in Mexico City around the same time, this was the first generation of Mexicans for whom machismo was a dirty word.

"This desire for individual autonomy — which in some ways lagged behind the sexual revolution in the United States — extended to gay and lesbian people. The emergence of aids as a global epidemic coincided with a period of energetic democratization. Of course, increased visibility generated homophobic reactions, but it also motivated gays to declare their identities and organize politically."

Here's the essay in full.

For more, read these:

Queering the Public Sphere in Mexico and Brazil: Sexual Rights Movements in Emerging Democracies, Rafeal de la Dehesa

Changing Men and Masculinities in Latin America, Matthew Guttmann

Chicana Lesbians: The Girls Our Mothers Warned Us About, Carla Trujillo

Gay Latino Studies: A Critical Reader

From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction

With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading Chicana Lesbians

Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing

Compañeras: Latina Lesbians: an Anthology

Virgins, Guerrillas, and Locas: Gay Latinos Writing about Love

Besame Mucho: An Anthology of Gay Latino Fiction

Tortilleras: Hispanic and U.S. Latina Lesbian Expression

Latina Lesbian Writers and Artists

The Faith Healer of Olive Avenue, Manuel Munoz 

And get the current PEN Faulkner winner Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Sáenz. Only yesterday on FB, Garth "Mitko" Greenwell and Bob "Selfish and Perverse" Smith were raving about the seven wonders in Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club. 

Born April 17: Chavela Vargas

A late bloomer, perhaps, but what an extraordinary flower -- Mexican singer Chevela Vargas did not release her first album until she was 42, didn't come out as a lesbian until she was 81, and didn't debut at Carnegie Hall until she was 83. What was she doing all those years before recording Noche de Bohemia in 1961? Well, she dressed as a man, often in her signature red jorongo, smoked cigars, drank heavily, and packed a pistol, so obviously she was busy with more than singing rancheras in the streets. And maybe she had an affair Frida Kahlo (as Josephine Baker had). Since that first record, she has released more than eighty albums. Her great fame of the 1960s and 70s subsided when she retired to battle her alcoholism. She returned to performing at 72 in 1991 in Mexico City. Since then her music has been widely used in films and she has appeared singing in several movies including Almodovar's Flower of My Secret, Taymor's Frida, and Innartu's Babel. All I can say is buy her, beware: The first time you hear Chavela unleash her power midway through the quiet Paloma Negra you might drop whatever you're holding. She died last year at 93.

Junot Díaz Wins World's Richest Story Prize for Tale of Underage Sex

Pulitzer winner, NBCC winner, MacArthur genius, MIT professor Junot Díaz has won the Sunday Times Short Story Prize -- at £30,000 the world's richest award for a single story -- for "Miss Lora," included in his National Book Award finalist This Is How You Lose Her [Kindle]. He makes an interesting point about the double standard on underage sex. Readers here can probably think of another younger - older dynamic that people "aren't celebrating."

Díaz told the Guardian:

"We tend, as a culture, to think of boys having underage sex quite differently to how we think of girls. I find that quite disturbing, and wanted to question the logic of that," he said. "If a boy has sex with his teacher, people under their breath are kind of high-fiving the kid. If a 16- or 15-year-old girl has sex with an older teacher – forget about it. No one's celebrating. That seemed really strange." 

Díaz said he grew up "with so many young men who had experiences when they were teenagers with older women", and was interested in writing about the issue. "The silence around it is pretty enormous," he said. "I think it is a conversation we need to continue to have."

One of the judges called the story an "instant classic." It appeared in The New Yorker last April.

The other finalists were: Mark Haddon's The Gun; Sarah Hall's Evie; Cynan Jones' The Dig; Toby Litt's Call It 'The Bug' Because I Have No Time to Think of a Better Title; and Ali Smith's The Beholder.

Gay Latino Writer Who Came Out at 54 Wins PEN Faulkner Award

Benjamin Alire Sáenz, 58, has won the prestigious PEN/Faulkner Award for his gay story collection Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club [Kindle]. Ignored by mainstream publishers and media, the book is a paperback original from Cinco Puntos Press.

The four other finalists were:

• Amelia Gray, Threats 
• Laird Hunt, Kind One 
• T. Geronimo Johnson, Hold It 'Til It Hurts [Kindle] 
• Thomas Mallon, Watergate [Kindle]

Previous PEN Faulkner winners include Deborah Eisenberg, Ha Jin, Michael Cunningham, Kate Christensen, Ann Patchett, John Updike, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Peter Taylor, Annie Proulx, and Philip Roth three times.

This is a huge year for Benjamin Alire Sáenz who won two big awards at ALA two months ago for his gay YA novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe [Kindle].

Born March 10: John Rechy

Although Scottish-Mexican-American John Rechy doesn't want to be ghettoized as a gay writer, his most important work pioneered a new type of literature honestly depicting men who have sex with men. In 1963 his first novel, City of Night [Kindle], followed the aimless encounters of a nameless hustler turning tricks in New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, crosscut with memories of his childhood in El Paso. By making his protagonist anonymous and introducing a succession of minor characters seen only briefly, Rechy re-emphasized the sensation of hustling for the reader. (He knew his trade: He continued to work as a prostitute on Santa Monica Blvd even after the book became a surprise hit, even after he became a professor at UCLA, even after he turned forty.) Decades later in 2003, a NYT critic called City of Night a "bona fide cult classic," "deservedly considered a milestone of transgressive fiction." That was not the consensus when it first appeared. And after thirteen books, his literary awards are limited to an NEA grant and lifetime achievement recognitions from PEN West, Publishing Triangle, and the ONE Foundation.

Rechy's second novel, Numbers [Kindle], trod the same path as City of Night but from another direction: a slightly older Johnny Rio returns to L.A. for a ten day binge not as an escape but to recapture his previous glory; some readers see Johnny Rio as using sex not merely to confirm his desirability but also as a means to find a greater connection and begin to forge a gay identity. For 1967, that was a big step. Among Rechy's ten other novels are Rushes, Bodies and Souls, The Coming of Night, Marilyn's Daughter (about a girl who believes herself to the love child of Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy), and his much-praised The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. His three works of nonfcition are The Sexual Outlaw [Kindle], Beneath the Skin: Collected Essays, and from 2009 his memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman [Kindle]. Seventy-nine today, Rechy lives in West Hollywood with Michael, his partner of thirty years.

Two or Three Gay Authors Among Five PEN/Faulkner Finalists

Congratulations to Benjamin Alire Sáenz, who came out at 54 in 2009 and is having a spectacular year now, honored with three awards at ALA for his gay novel Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, and yesterday earned double Lammy nominations and became a PEN/Faulkner finalist. 

Thomas Mallon, 61, told an interviewer after the publication of his first mainly gay novel Fellow Travelers in 2007, "I have always been openly gay, but to put homosexuality front and center in the book was different..." 

The five PEN/Faulkner finalists are:

• Amelia Gray, Threats (FSG)
• Laird Hunt, Kind One (Coffee House Press)
• T. Geronimo Johnson, Hold It 'Til It Hurts [Kindle] (Coffee House Press)
• Thomas Mallon, Watergate [Kindle] (Pantheon)
• Benjamin Alire Sáenz, Everything Begins and Ends at the Kentucky Club (Cinco Puntos Press)

The winner will be announced March 19.

Born February 25: Severo Sarduy

Why Reinaldo Arenas and not Severo Sarduy? Born six years apart, the gay Cuban exile novelists died of aids in within three years of each other. In death, Arenas became a star, then, with Julian Schnabel's film , a superstar, whereas the twenty years since Sarduy's passing in 1993 have largely erased the memory of his accomplishments. His novel Cobra won France's Prix Médicis étranger in 1972, immediately followed by four literary heavyweights, Milan Kundera, Julio Cortazar, Steven Millhauser, and Doris Lessing, but for some reason his win did not propel him to their level of international acclaim, possibly because his novel is about a kitschy trans cabaret performer at the Lyrical Theater of Dolls.

Born in 1937 in Cuba's third largest city Camagüey, he left at 23 to study in Madrid but within a month diplomatic ties frayed between Spain and Cuba, and Sarduy had to move to Paris. Ultimately, he stayed there for the rest of his life, though he traveled throughout Europe and met his longtime companion François Wahl on vacation in Italy. His two volumes of essays are Written on a Body and Christ on the Rue Jacob, which Booklist called, "a special book of thrilling ideas excitingly expressed."

Next week, wonderful Archipelago (forever blessed for bringing Gerbrand Bakker's The Twin to American readers) is publishing Sarduy's novel Firefly [Kindle]: "For the first time in English, Severo Sarduy's most autobiographical work, centered on two transvestites who undergo oppositional sexual surgeries (one is castrated, the other is given a new member). This convention-defying, scatological, and very funny novel is a paradise of words, 'paradisic by plenitude' (Roland Barthes)."

Born February 6: Ramón Novarro

When rival movie studios wanted their own Valentino, their solution was to promote Ramón Novarro, Hollywood's first Mexican star, as the original "Latin Lover." Born José Ramón Gil Samaniego in Durango, Mexico in 1899 his family fled the Mexican Revolution and settled in Los Angeles, where by the time Ramón was eighteen he was appearing in silent films. In 1923 he became a leading actor in Scaramouche, and when he was twenty-six he played the title role in Ben Hur, which created a sensation with its very short tunics. (Watch this clip to see him like a geek at a Roman circuit party, suddenly reunited with a friend who has become buff: He can't keep his hands off the guy's arms.) Novarro went on to star opposite Joan Crawford (Across to Singapore), Norma Shearer, Myrna Loy (The Barbarian), and Greta Garbo (Mata Hari), but he only dated men and he refused to enter a sham marriage just for publicity's sake. One of his dashing boyfriends was the adventurer Richard Haliburton , who built his famous house in Laurel Canyon to be near Novarro. At his peak in the 1920s and 30s, Novarro earned $100,000 per movie. When he was no longer young enough to play the boyish lover, MGM opted not to renew his contract, and he lived comfortably off his savvy real estate investments. In 1968, when he was sixty-nine, he hired two brothers, Tom and Paul Ferguson, to have sex with him but they only went to his house in hopes of robbing him of a giant stash of cash. Upon realizing there was no hidden fortune, they killed him and left with twenty dollars.

Stonewall Book Awards: YA Winner, Honor Titles

The Stonewall Book Award YA winner is Benjamin Alire Saenz's Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe [Kindle] about the unlikely friendship between two 15 year-old boys. Dante is confident and openly gay; Ari is always angry and unsure of who he is.

Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe is also this year's winner of the ALA's Pura Belpré Award for the best book that affirms Latino culture. Not sure if a gay book has ever won the Belpré before.

The committee chose four lgbt YA books as Honor Titles:

Raina Telgemeier, Drama

Hannah Moskowitz, Gone, Gone, Gone

Lesléa Newman, October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard

S. J. Adams, Sparks: The Epic, Completely True Blue, (Almost) Holy Quest of Debbie

Richard Blanco's Making a Man of Me

A reminder that Richard Blanco's much-buzzed essay about growing up with a homophobic grandmother is a reprint from David Groff and Jim Elledge's new anthology Who's Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners [Kindle].

From his earliest childhood, Blanco's grandmother blasts him with antigay slaps teaching him everything about him is wrong:

"Better to having a granddaughter who's a whore than a grandson who is un pato faggot like you. Understand?"

"I told your mother not to get you those crayons for Christmas. You should be playing outside like un hombre, not coloring in your girly books like dat maricón Juan Alberto."

"Hay Santo, you sound like una niña on the phone. When is your voice going to change?"

"Stop clacking your sandals and jiggling like a sissy. Straighten up por Dios--we're in public."

"I no taking you to dat Enrique's house neber again. He's a Mamacita's boy. I don't want you playing with him. I don't care what you say, those GI Joes he has are dolls. Do you want to play with dolls; is dat what you want señorita?"

Beyond learning that all his natural instincts are incorrect, the young Blanco took this as a lesson from her constant attacks

"I came to believe that all love was conditional like my grandmother's. Consequently, I shut down my emotional communication with others, because in my mind no one could be trusted. I became afraid to love, because no one could truly love a faggot like me: not my father or mother, not my brother--or my lovers."

The other consequence is that it shaped him as a writer:

"...I tell him about my grandmother and the coping mechanisms I developed; how they naturally led me to writing; mechanisms that became part of my very creative process. Becoming withdrawn and introverted, I grew to become an observer of the world, instead of a participant. In order to survive emotionally I learned to read my environment very carefully and then craft appropriate responses that would (hopefully) prevent abuse and ridicule from my grandmother. I explain to my husband-to-be that I am still that quiet, repressed boy whenever I am in a room full of people, trying to be as invisible as possible, but taking in every detail, sensory as well as emotional, that will eventually surface in a poem."

Blanco says

"Through the years and to this day I continue unraveling how that abuse affected my personality, my relationships, and my writing. I write, not in the light of Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, or Elizabeth Bishop, but in the shadow of my grandmother--a homophobic woman with only a sixth-grade education--who has exerted (and still exerts) the most influence on my development as a writer."

With Blancomania rampant, you can bet New York publishers won't rest until he writes a memoir. For now, there's the full essay and the anthology. Other writers celebrate more positive mentors like Whitman, Wilde, Gide, Baldwin, O’Hara, Rechy, Forster, Gunn, Ginsberg, Botticelli, Janet Frame, Shirley Jackson, Bette Midler and Captain Kirk. Contributors include Mark Doty, Dale Peck, Paul Monette, Kenny Fries, Tim Miller, Rigoberto Gonzalez, Aaron Hamburger, Justin Chin, and Michael Klein.