Band of Thebes

ONE Archivist Glimpses Some 1950s Pride

                  

Kyle Morgan, an archivist at the must-visit ONE Archives in Los Angeles, posts photos from 1953 on TIME's Lightbox page. He writes:

"The image is part of the ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives at the University of Southern California Libraries – the largest repository of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer materials in the world. The picture was once owned by the young man on the right-hand side of the image above, Joseph John Bertrund Belanger. Belanger, for most of his life, was a devoted collector of LGBT history. Born in Edmonton, Canada, in 1925, he served in the Royal Canadian Air Force and was a member of the Mattachine Society – an early instance of what today would be called an LGBT organization — in the early 1950s. It is thanks to his passion and foresight that the image survives today."

The ever-growing bibliography of books of archival gay photos includes, most recently, The Invisibles: Vintage Portraits of Love and Pride. Gay Couples in the Early Twentieth Century, as well as James Gardiner's Who's a Pretty Boy, Then?: 150 Years of Gay Life in Pictures, Russell Bush's Affectionate Men: A Photographic History of a Century of Male Couples, 1850-1950, John Ibson's Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography, David Deitcher's Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918, Montague Glover's private photos of gay Brits 1914-1950 in A Class Apart, and Jonathan Ned Katz's Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality. 

Born May 18: Don Bachardy

Eighty today, Don Bachardy has one more thing to celebrate: He helped bring out last week's collection of love letters The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy [and Kindle]. Overshadowed and overlooked, he is a lovely artist of these nuanced, revealing sketches of their famous friends, and a daring painter, whose official gubernatorial portrait of Jerry Brown hangs in the California State Capitol. In the documentary Chris & Don. A Love Story he thoughtfully discusses his life in art and the complex power imbalances of a 30+ year relationship that began when he was southern California teenager and his new English bf in his late forties was already an international literary star.

We, the Animals: Isherwood - Bachardy Love Letters

Naturally when you see that title, The Animals: Love Letters Between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy [and Kindle], out this week from FSG, you want to know which animals. Chris was an old workhorse/stallion named Dobbin and Don was kitten named Kitty.

You'll be forgiven for thinking those names dim compared to the ark of human names that vivify these charming, sometimes smart, sometimes gossipy pages: Ackerley, Albee, Julie Andrews, Antonioni, Peggy Ashcroft, Astaire, Astor, Auden, Bacall, Bacon, Balanchine, James Baldwin, JM Barrie, Alan Bates, Beaton, Beckett, Sybille Bedford, Betjeman, Bogarde, Bouvier, Bowles, Brando, James Bridges, Britten, Bunuel, Richard Burton...all the way to Vidal, Visconti, Warhol, Weisman, Welles, Wells, Wescott, Williams, Wood, Woodcock, Woolf, Wyatt, Yeats, York, and Zeffirelli.

Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winners: Ozeki, Fink, Rowling, Lust

     

Shortlisted for both the Booker and the NBCC, Ruth Ozeki wins the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.

Fiction

• Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being

First Fiction

• NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names

Current Interest

• Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital

Biography

• Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator

Mystery / Thriller

• JK Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling

After the jump, winners in HIstory, Science, Poetry, Graphic Novels, and YA

Born April 7: Harry Hay, Zamora Linmark

He was born in England, came to America at seven, and, in his twenties, had an affair with Grandpa Walton when that actor was in his thirties: Even now there's so much we don't recall about Harry Hay who started The Mattachine Society in 1950 in Los Angeles. To grasp the bravery of founding a gay rights group at that time, remember it was illegal for homosexuals to gather in public. A woman accompanied them for cover, or they met in private. Depending on your view, Hay is the most interesting or the most difficult of the movement's founders because he was permanently opposed to gay assimilation. He was also a longtime member of the Communist Party, a founding member of Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition, and a cofounder of Radical Faeries. (Happy, carefree NSFW fairy photo after the jump.) He met his life partner at fifty-one and died at ninety in 2002. Read a collection of his own writings, Radically Gay: Gay Liberation in the Words of Its Founder or his biography, The Trouble With Harry Hay [Kindle] by Stuart Timmons.

Today he would be 102. For his centenary, Los Angeles dedicated a Silver Lake staircase in his honor, The Mattachine Steps. We visited them in January and were very grateful to the person who added the much-needed homemade sign beneath the staid, gray official marker that says Mattachine but doesn't say gay.

A favorite on Thebes' queer lit survey, R Zamora Linmark's Leche [Kindle] is about a young gay Filipano-American returning to the country where he was born and coping with his dual identities. Or, as Kevin Killian says, the novel "takes that old exile-returns cliché and fucks with it till it cries out in ecstasy." Critic Nicholas Boggs said, the book "is a riotous ride through modern-day Manila featuring encounters with a larger-than-life cast of characters including a (perhaps) bisexual cabbie, an activist nun, an acclaimed movie director, and President Corazon Aquino’s actress daughter, also known as the Massacre Queen of the Philippine Cinema.” A two-time Fulbright recipient, Linmark has also written poetry and plays and has taught at the University of Miami and the University of Hawaii. 

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.

Los Angeles Times Book Award Nominees

    

Fiction

• Percival Everett, Percival Everett by Virgil Russell
• Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs
• Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being
• Susan Steinberg, Spectacle: Stories
• Daniel Woodrell, The Maid's Version

 

The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction

• NoViolet Bulawayo, We Need New Names
• Jeff Jackson, Mira Corpora
• Fiona McFarlane, The Night Guest
• Jamie Quatro, I Want to Show You More
• Ethan Rutherford, The Peripatetic Coffin and Other Stories

 

Current Interest

• Sheri Fink, Five Days at Memorial: Life and Death in a Storm-Ravaged Hospital
• David Finkel, Thank You for Your Service
• Charlie LeDuff, Detroit: An American Autopsy
• Barry Siegel, Manifest Injustice: The True Story of a Convicted Murderer and the Lawyers Who Fought for His Freedom
• Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief

 

    

Biography

• Marie Arana, Bolivar: American Liberator
• A. Scott Berg, Wilson
• Benita Eisler, The Red Man's Bones: George Catlin, Artist and Showman
• Edna O’Brien, Country Girl: A Memoir
• Deborah Solomon, American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell

 

Mystery / Thriller

• Richard Crompton, Hour of the Red God
• Robert Galbraith, The Cuckoo's Calling
• John Grisham, Sycamore Row
• Gene Kerrigan, The Rage
• Ferdinand von Schirach, The Collini Case

 

After the jump, nominees in HIstory, Science, Poetry, Graphic Novels, and YA

Born January 20: Julia Morgan

After earning her engineering degree from Berkeley in 1894, Julia Morgan moved to Paris and, refusing to accept the initial rejections from the École des Beaux-arts, finally gained admittance and became the first woman to receive the school's degree in architecture. In 1904 she became the first female architect licensed by California and designed El Campanil for Mills College, the first freestanding bell tower on a US campus and the first reinforced concrete structure on the west coast. After the 1906 earthquake all architects were in demand, none more so than Morgan because her tower survived unscathed. Within a decade she accepted her first commission in southern California, the Spanish revival Herald-Examiner building in Los Angeles, after which the paper's owner approached her about designing a little something at the top of 250,000 acres he owned near San Simeon. Hearst was tired of camping up there. He thought he wanted a bungalow. Quickly, it became his castle. And a 25 year project, in part because of its scale (58 bedrooms, 60 bathrooms, 41 fireplaces, virtual tour here) and in part because he constantly "tinkered," e.g., demolished and rebuilt the epic outdoor Neptune pool three times before he was satisfied. The indoor Roman pool is more lavish.

Defiant about not being a debutante, never married, and widely believed to be a lesbian, Morgan retired in 1951 and died six years later at 85. She left behind 700 completed buildings, including 11 at Asilomar. Perennially rediscovered, she's the subject of many books like Mark Wilson's Julia Morgan: Architect of Beauty and Sara Boutelle's Julia Morgan, Architect.

Born January 10: Sal Mineo, Dennis Cooper

Although later he was twice nominated for an Oscar, Sal Mineo's career peaked when he was sixteen, playing Rebel Without a Cause's geeky Plato, a universal touchstone for anyone who's ever harbored a crush on James Dean. As if it wouldn't be exhilarating and nerve-wracking enough in 1955 to be a gay Sicilian sixteen year-old acting opposite the blond, bi twenty-four year-old superstar and Natalie Wood, Mineo was also having an affair with the director, Nicholas Ray, who was forty-four. Well, it was all downhill from there. Mineo was praised for his stage roles and for his work in Exodus and Who Killed Teddy Bear? and he recorded a couple albums with two Top 40 hits, but he had been typecast and his moment had passed. Unfortunately, the movies' sensitive, gay teen devolved into television's deranged psycho killer, with guest starring roles on Hawaii Five-O, Columbo, S.W.A.T., Police Story, and Ellery Queen. When he was thirty-seven, walking at night through an alley near his home in West Hollywood, he was stabbed once in a botched mugging, and died. John Lennon offered a cash reward to find his killer. Many people, including Mineo's family, believe the courts convicted the wrong man, who had confessed and recanted, was released in 1990, and was reincarcerated for parole violations. A few books have been written about Mineo's life and death; Kevin Killian recommends Michael Michaud's' biography. In 2013 James Franco released a movie about Mineo's murder, Sal.

In 1968, when he was fifteen, Dennis Cooper read 120 Days of Sodom and wrote his own de Sade-like 1,000 page novel set in high school. Thirty-nine years later, Cooper was award the Prix Sade in France for his tenth novel, The Sluts. We'll never know how that first fiction compares to his mature work with his signal interest in transgressive behavior and exploited boundaries (alienated youth, predatory gay men, child abuse, sexual torture, eroticized murder, mutilation, satanic sacrifice, snuff porn, and drugs) because he was so afraid his mother would find his manuscript he burnt it. His George Miles cycle of novels -- Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide,Period -- has been translated into seventeen languages. A child of Pasadena, Cooper divides his time between the US and Paris. His most recent novel The Marbled Swarm [Kindle], which many readers feel is among his very best, is his first to be set in France. The New Yorker said, "Provocative...Cooper’s interest in the darkest corners of the human experience...has not dimmed with age. The novel’s contradictory narratives intentionally echo the secret passageways in which the narrator’s predatory activities take place, creating a baroque, voyeuristic effect." His eclectic blog is essential daily reading. Any minute now will be the release of his expanded The Weaklings (XL).

Joshua Tree National Park

For a few days after Palm Springs and L.A., where we finally saw Saving Mr. Banks, because movies about aging Engish women writers must be supported, and American Hustle, which is as brilliant as critics say (17 gave it a perfect 100 on Metacritic), though the Studio 54-ish scene is strangely degayed. Among the huge afros and open polyester shirts, it needed a some fabulous gays to cinch its 1978 groove.

MOCA's Bob Mizer & Tom of Finland

Hell yes to anyone credited with "robbing straight culture of its most virile and masculine archetypes... and recasting them as unapologetic, self-aware, and boastfully proud enthusiasts of gay sex." In this case, that's Tom of Finland, who 20 years after his death gets his first mainstream museum exhibit, with Bob Mizer, at MOCA through January 26. It's a smart show. I think Tom's careful drawings are more enduring than Mizer's breakneck output of 60 photos a day, 7 days a week, for 50 years. Inevitably, some people will complain Tom of Finland is a mere illustrator, and then we can debate his universal moments in the way boosters discuss Norman Rockwell's work. (The men may have even more in common: Deborah Solomon's new American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell [Kindle] wonders about the impulse behind his homoerotic scenes, greatly irking his descendants.)

Along with the expected magnets and pins, the gift shop sells pristine vintage copies of Mizer's magazine Physique Pictorial. For the closest thing to a retrospective catalog, get Bob's World: The Life and Boys of A.M.G.'s Bob Mizer or go for Taschen's big boy Tom of Finland XXL.

This is a street banner in WeHo advertising the show. See the uncovered image to appreciate the boldness of the choice for a public poster.

By luck, we are making a habit of celebrating the internationalist Sandy Leonard's birthday by viewing appropriate art exhibits in Los Angeles. Last year it was Kubrick and Caravaggio. Read his blog.

Born December 15: J. Jack Halberstam

USC professor and trenchant pop culture queer critic, J. Jack Halberstam's four most important books are:

Female Masculinity (1998). Library Journal says it "makes a compelling argument for a more flexible taxonomy of masculinity, including not only men, who have historically held the power in society, but also women who embody qualities that are usually associated with maleness, such as strength, authority, and independence. Fleshing out her argument by drawing on a variety of sources -- fiction, films, court documents, and diaries -- Halberstam calls for society to acknowledge masculine lesbian women and value them."

In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives [Kindle] (2005) examines trans representations and influences in fiction, art, music, and movies ranging from Boys Don't Cry to The Full Monty and Austin Powers.

The Queer Art of Failure [Kindle] (2011). PW calls it, "A lively and thought-provoking examination of how the homogenizing tendencies of modern society might be resisted through the creative application of failure, forgetting, and passivity, actions generally deemed of little value within today's capitalist models of success. . . . [A]s a close reader of popular culture, she is exemplary, and as a valiant attempt to find value in positions and attitudes such as negativity that our modern success-oriented society disdains, this study is never less than thrilling.”

Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal [Kindle] (2012). Ariel Levy says, "Jack Halberstam—the king of feminism—has managed to make sense of pregnant men, Lady Gaga, gay marriage, and the advent of the bromance in this provocative and pleasurable romp through contemporary gender politics. Gaga Feminism is as fun as it is illuminating."

Halberstam is 52 today and lives in Los Angeles with Marcarena Gomez-Barris.

Born November 19: Morris Kight, Calvin Klein

In 1958, when native Texan Morris Kight arrived in Los Angeles, he was almost forty and ready to fight for gay rights, but he considered the Mattachine Society elitist. In reaction, he co-founded the third outpost of the Gay Liberation Front, after New York and Berkeley. One of their earliest battles was against a West Hollywood diner called Barney's Beanery which had a painted sign and printed matchbooks with the misspelled warning Fagots Stay Out. After three months of protests, sit-ins, and media glare, the owner removed the original sign, but as soon as the attention subsided, he remounted an identical sign and kept it on display until 1984. In June 1970 to celebrate the first anniversary of Stonewall, Kight helped organize Christopher Street West, which was only permitted after he, Troy Perry, and the ACLU sued reluctant city officials and the hostile police department for the right to have a parade.

Kight's proudest moment came in October 1971, when he and two other activists opened the nation's first gay and lesbian community center. With his sometimes abrasive strategies and leftist politics, Kight had many detractors within the movement. One of those was David Goodstein who transformed the Advocate from a newspaper to a magazine and prohibited his reporters from writing about Kight and other people he thought hurt the image of gay rights. Kight's protest of anti-gay Coors created a public disaster for Outfest, which had finally convinced the brewery to sponsor their film festival. He was also a vocal critic of 1978's proposed amendment to ban gay teachers from public schools. In January 2003, Kight donated his 3,000-item collection of art, papers, and memorabilia to the ONE Institute. Three days later he died, at eighty-three, survived by his partner of twenty-five years, Roy Zucheran.

I was his official escort (ha!) at the Stonewall 25 rally in New York. He was awesome and very, very cranky when the announcer called him Morris Knight.

Poor Calvin, 71 today and alone. As a young man he was protégé of the ne plus ultra of Old World sophistication -- the elegant, Paris-born, never-married, gay Baron Nicolas de Gunzburg, banker, fashion editor of of Town & Country and Vogue, and Best Dressed Hall of Famer who favored the subtle, grayed palette and understated cut on which Calvin has built his empire  -- and after two tasteful lavender marriages Calvin finally comes out with a protégé of his own of sorts, a boyfriend 49 years his junior, named Nick, who's just trash. Baron Nikky would not approve. Now split for good, Nick Gruber, washed up at 23, in and out of rehab, frequently arrested for fights, last summer was thrown out of the A-list Fire Island fundraiser Ascension for a hissyfit in which he threw punches and told the VIP homos to quit touching him because's he's NOT GAY, which he still claims. He later apologized but quote hates labels and is "STRAIGHT." As for other statements of non-reality, Nick also claims he 'never said' anything about book writing, even though the media has copies of the tell-all proposal Obsession: My Life with Calvin Klein co-written by Lisa Arcella that they shopped to every publisher in New York. Are you ready for the sad part? Like Liberace with Scott Thorson, Calvin wanted Nick to look like him and "the proposal speaks of the new clothes, haircut and teeth Klein fitted Gruber with, turning him into a younger version of the designer. Klein also supposedly booked, 'a steroid doctor to help [Nick] keep his lean and pumped look,' gave Nick skin resurfacing and set him up with 'speech therapy to upgrade his speaking style.'" Happily, Calvin's real child, his daughter Marci, turned out better. At 46, she's won four Emmys for producing Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock. 

Also, Poor male models! So you can say you learned something today: According to Forbes, 2013's highest paid male model in the world, Sean O'Pry, earned only $1.5 million (compare, please, to the highest paid girl model's $42 million). The #9 male model made a measly $290,000. See all ten and be shocked.

Born November 16: Glenn Burke

In the 1970s, most interracial gay couples could expect tension with their partner's parents, but in Glenn Burke's case, his boyfriend's father was his own baseball team's manager, homophobe Tommy Lasorda. Glenn played for the Dodgers for three seasons, including the '77 World Series, before they dealt him to his native Oakland. His relationship with A's manager Billy Martin wasn't complicated by family ties but was no less welcoming: in front of the team, Martin called Glenn a faggot. He lasted one season. A knee injury either ended his career with the majors or was a good enough excuse to send him to the minors in Utah. He quit baseball in 1979, when he was 27. Although he had been out to his team, he came out publicly in 1982, the same year he medaled as a sprinter at Gay Games. Four years later he competed in basketball at Gay Games 1986, by which time he was addicted to cocaine. He became homeless in San Francisco and in 1994 he revealed he was fighting aids. In the months before his death at 42 in 1995, he published his autobiography Out at Home and told People magazine, "My mission as a gay ballplayer was to break a stereotype . . . I think it worked." Look for the 2010 documentary "Out: The Glenn Burke Story."

Tom of Finland, Bob Mizer at MOCA Los Angeles

      

In one of the first major exhibits of gay erotica at a mainstream museum, a show of drawings by Tom of Finland and photos by Bob Mizer opens at MOCA Los Angeles on Saturday. It also includes

"...examples of Mizer's groundbreaking magazine Physique Pictorial—where drawings by "Tom of Finland" were first published in the United States in 1957. Spanning work of five decades, the exhibition seeks a wider appreciation for Mizer and Laaksonen's art, considering their aesthetic influence on generations of artists, both gay and straight, while also acknowledging its profound cultural and social impact, most importantly in providing open, powerful imagery of queer sexuality in an era of rapidly shifting attitudes towards homosexuality."

Kudos to curator Bennett Simpson. If you can't go to L.A. before January 26, get Bob's World: The Life and Boys of A.M.G.'s Bob Mizer or spring for Tom of Finland XXL.

Born October 18: James Robert Baker

Like John Kennedy Toole, gay novelist James Robert Baker became despondent over his stalled career, went off his meds, and killed himself in 1997, sixteen years ago next month. In 1992, Simon & Schuster released his angry, funny, unapologetic fourth novel, Tim and Pete, which, like all his work, takes place around Los Angeles, begins as a love story, and ends with a violent response to indifference about aids. It was exactly what some readers needed, yet every publisher rejected all his subsequent manuscripts, possibly because they took his violent fiction as a call to arms. Two books appeared posthumously: Anarchy and Testosterone, which became a movie directed by David Moreton (Edge of 17), written by Dennis Hensley (Misadventures in the 213), starring Antonio Sabato Jr., Sonia Braga, and Jennifer Coolidge, all to no avail. It was a critical and commercial disaster. James Robert Baker's partner Ron Robertson became his literary executor. His earlier novels were Adrenaline (1985), Fuel-Injected Dreams (1986), and Boy Wonder (1988). Three later works remain unpublished, as do his four screenplays. (He graduated from UCLA film school.) The total number of his novels available as ebooks is one or zero. The UK's Gay Times wrote, "Baker's suicide is particularly tragic because it robs American gay writing of a refreshingly distinctive voice quite unlike the po-faced prose of so many of his contemporaries." Today he would have been 67.

Born October 3: Bernard Cooper

A lot of authors queer the line between real life and art, but Bernard Cooper wins fiction prizes for his nonfiction: Twenty-two years ago he won the 1991 PEN Hemingway -- an award for first novel or debut story collection -- for his memoir/autobiographical essays Maps to Anywhere. And his 1994 Harpers piece "Truth Serum" won an O Henry story award a year before his second memoir appeared, Truth Serum, which became a Lammy finalist for autobiography. He has published one novel, A Year of Rhymes (1993), about Burt Zerkin, a suburban L.A. boy dealing with his dawning homosexuality and his adored big brother dying of leukemia, and one collection of short fiction, Guess Again (2000), which is almost entirely gay; it earned an A from Entertainment Weekly, was a Lammy fiction finalist and an ALA Stonewall/Gittings honor book. In 2006, he released a third memoir, The Bill from My Father [Kindle], detailing his pretty horrible dad, a lawyer who once presented him an itemized bill for his upbringing totaling $2 million. The recipient of an NEA grant and a Guggenheim, Bernard Cooper is the very rare nonfiction author who writes gay and has been selected for the Best American Essays series five times: 1988, 1995, 1997, 2002, and 2008. Today he's 62 and next year Norton will publish a collection of recent work on his love of the avant-garde.

Jeremy Lucido's Starrf***er

  

If the oversized twinks of Bel Ami's Big Pleasure Collection and the airbrushed men of Fred Goudon's Summer Souvenirs left you wanting more edge, thank Bruno Gmunder for gathering the best of the first seven issues of photographer Jeremy Lucido's notorious fanzine in one big book: Starrfucker. The 35 year-old native of Florrisant, Missouri has lived in Hollywood since 1999. He launched his very nsfw blog in 2005 and printed his first zine in 2010.

Somehow, he got fellow photographer Venfield 8 to write the book's intro.

Born September 28: Casper Andreas

After acting in several films beginning in 1996, the 6'2" Swedish transplant Casper Andreas wrote, directed, and starred in the first of his signature all-gay, upbeat, micro-budgeted, low-grossing, sex-positive, lightweight romps, Slutty Summer in 2004. Next came A Four Letter Word in 2007, Between Love & Goodbye in 2008, The Big Gay Musical in 2009, Violet Tendencies starring Mindy Cohn in 2010, and Going Down In LA-LA Land in 2011. Although he's acted in a couple shorts by other people, he hasn't directed a feature since then. Maybe he's honing his craft or maybe market pressures are exerting themselves on his art: His highest grossing theatrical release earned $24,140 at the box office, but those figures don't reflect his popularity or his many awards -- or his earnings -- at dozens and dozens of lgbt film festivals and in dvd rentals and vod viewings. This year he shot a short in Sweden, in Swedish, that debuted at a festival of shorts in Drama, Greece. Twenty years a New Yorker, he runs the production and distribution company Embrem Entertainment.

Born August 26: Christopher Isherwood

Vastly underappreciated, and remembered largely for the wrong reasons, Christopher Isherwood changed the way fiction is written with his "I am a camera" style of narration. Read his interview in the Paris Review's series The Art of Fiction and make time for one of the best gay books ever, Christopher and His Kind*, which is equally enthralling about literary revelations and sexual mores: Rejecting his uptight, upperclass England, Isherwood spent much of his twenties in Berlin where he dated working class teens. Falling in love with young Heinz at a time when living quarters were especially scarce, he moved into Heinz's family's one bedroom apartment; the parents moved out of their bedroom and slept in the living room so the twenty-five year-old Brit could enjoy a double bed in privacy with their fifteen year-old son. Another person he met was Jean Ross, on whom he based Sally Bowles in his The Berlin Storieswhich of course became Cabaret. After moving to England and on to New York with Auden, and further literary successes, Isherwood settled permanently in Los Angeles, where when he was forty-eight he met teenager Don Bachardy. Immediately, Isherwood wrote The World in the Evening , followed by Down There On A Visit and what many consider his best novel, A Single Man. They remained partners for over thirty years until Isherwood's death in 1986. Their relationship is the subject of the documentary,  Chris & Don. A Love Story. After more than 1,100 pages of Diaries: 1939-1960 and another 800 pages of The Sixties, last November saw 928 pages of Liberation: Diaries:1970-1983.

*And here's the sex-filled BBC2 film