Band of Thebes

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 16: Sybille Bedford

One of my all-time favorites. After a lavender marriage to escape the Nazis and gain British citizenship, and after three unpublished novels imitating Aldous Huxley's style, Sybille Bedford traveled to Mexico, found her exceptional voice, and wrote her legendary A Visit to Don Otavio [Kindle]. Bruce Chatwin said of another book, “When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Mrs. Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.” Bedford became friends with another wanderlust writer, Martha Gellhorn, and lovers with Eda Lord. She spent the 1950s to 70s loosely based in France, Italy, Britain, and Portugal.

She also wrote four novels, one of which was a Booker nominee. The best is A Legacy, covering two Austrian-German families leading up to WWI. The queerest is A Compass Error, about a teenage girl's affair with a married woman. The most commericial is Jigsaw, again mining her formative years for a story about a girl shuttled between her unconventional mother in Italy and her father's uptight family in England. In her 90s she finally wrote her memoir, Quicksands, which nearly as obliquely covers a lot of the same ground as her autobiographical novels, including her lesbian relationships. The finest essay about her is Joan Acocella's appreciation in the New Yorker.

Born January 19: Patricia Highsmith, Matthew Stadler

European critics consider Patricia Highsmith's twenty-two novels and eight story collections literary descendants of Dostoevsky and Kafka, but American readers know her work mainly as fodder for films: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Ripley's Game. She was most at home in the darker corners of her characters' twisted psyches and as often as not her protagonists expressed themselves through murder. Even in her first full-time job she excelled at creating dual lives, scripting comic book heroes Captain Midnight, Spy Smasher, and the Golden Arrow. Her childhood was divided between Fort Worth and New York and her emotions were split between similar extremes: loving and loathing her stepfather and her mother who claimed to have tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith said her unhappiest year was when her parents abandoned her with her grandmother at 12, yet throughout her life she seemed to seek the intensity of crisis and discord, pushing her friends to fight and her lovers to leave. One former girlfriend, the portraitist Allela Cornell, killed herself by swallowing nitric acid. Another girlfriend was Marijane Meaker, whose work you may know under her pen names Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich, or M. E. Kerr. A woman who didn't become a girlfriend was the frosty, smoldering blond young married mother in Bloomingdales who sent Highsmith into a fever of longing and productivity, resulting in her second novel, The Price of Salt [Kindle]. If you still think queer visibility began with Stonewall, this lesbian book sold nearly a million copies in 1952. And unlike Gore Vidal's 1948 gay novel The City and the Pillar, hers has a happy ending. (Though, unlike Gore, she used a pseudonym, Claire Morgan.) Sarah Waters thinks so highly of The Price of Salt she said it alone warranted Highsmith's inclusion in the National Gallery show Gay Icons. Alcoholic, anti-American, anti-Semitic, stingy, and racist, Highsmith lived in Switzerland for more than thirty years and died, intentionally alone, at 74. She left her estate of several million dollars to Yaddo, where she had rewritten her first novel, Strangers on a Train, at Truman Capote's urging.

Joan Schenkar's illuminating and entertaining biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith [Kindle] again proves difficult characters often make the most riveting reading. Schenkar also edited Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories. Reader Lori Hahn recommends M.E. Kerr/Marijane Meaker's Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's [Kindle].

 

The first book editor for Seattle's The Stranger, the first literary editor for nest, Matthew Stadler wrote four gay novels in the 90s. After Landscape: Memory (a high school student's jottings from WWI era San Francisco), The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee (an art historian's surreal jaunt through the Netherlands, with dwarfs and orphans), and The Sex Offender (the Orwellian, unsuccessful "rehabilitation of a male teacher who had an affair with a 12 year-old boy), his fiction culminated with Allan Stein, a funny, beautiful, and disturbing novel again mixing art criticism, historical settings, foreign travel, and sex with students in this tale about a tutor hired to teach Gertrude Stein's 15 year-old nephew in Paris in the early 1900s. Despite his transgressive preoccupations, Stadler's work was embraced by the mainstream enough to win him a Guggenheim, a Merrill, and a Whiting, but no sales, and at 40 in 1999 he turned away from fiction to focus on urban planning, the positive aspects of sprawl, and publishing. He's edited four anthologies including the urban theory reader Where We Live Now and has a forthcoming book next month about two projects in the Dutch city Deventer. He founded Clear Cut Press in Portland in 2001, and in 2009 he cofounded Publication Studio, a successful print on demand model for books that has spread to seven other cities and earlier this week brought out Stephen Boyer's novel Parasite. Even his ardent fans may be unaware that after a dozen-year break, Stadler self-published his fifth novel in 2011. He compares Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha set in Guanajuato, Mexico to an international mystery a la John Le Carré that explores "the mongrel dynamism, the deluded optimism of 21st century neo-liberal politics."

More Gay Deaths: Vargas, O'Donnell, Hemsley

 

Butch lesbian ranchera singer Chavela Vargas has died at 93. Although she dropped hints all along and refused to change the female pronouns in love songs traditionally sung by men, she did not officially come out until she was 81. Responding to news of her death, Almodóvar, who used her music in his movies, wrote a long post called Adiós volcán: “Chavela Vargas made of abandonment and desolation a cathedral in which we all found a place.”

Tony winner for Hairspray, playwright, and infrequent New Yorker contributor, Mark O'Donnell collapsed in the lobby of his Upper West Side apartment building and died today at 58. I knew him briefly and very much admired his two sweet, quirky, gay novels Getting Over Homer and Let Nothing You Dismay. His two collections of comic pieces are Elementary Education: An Easy Alternative to Actual Learning and Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales.

Ten days ago the actor who played George Jefferson died at 74 and he definitely didn't leave behind a Weezy of his own. Nor did he come out in his obituary, which called him a lifelong bachelor. Michael Musto writes a piece called "Sherman Hemsley Was A Gay! Deal With It!"

Born July 21: Hart Crane

Son of a successful candyman, child of divorce, Hart Crane dropped out of his Ohio high school in 1917 and escaped to New York. For seven years he moved back and forth between the city and Cleveland, writing poems published in literary journals and working in his father's factory. Tortured by his love of men far more than was Whitman decades before him, Crane did have one joyous affair with a Danish merchant mariner named Emil Opffer who inspired his epic, erotically charged verse, Voyages. That poem was one of the highlights of his first book, White Buildings (1926), celebrated for the zest and fire of his lyrics and criticized, as was all his poetry, for its impenetrable confusion. Quoted in this New Yorker essay about Crane, he said he was “more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness . . . than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations.”

While Crane struggled to write his monumental work, The Bridge (1930), he suffered miserable affairs and worsening alcoholism. Although initial critical reception was weak, he won a Guggenheim fellowship to Mexico the following year. Returning from that sojourn aboard the SS Orizaba in April 1932, he hit on a working shipmate and was beaten up. Crane said, "Goodbye, everybody!" and jumped overboard to his death. One of many later writers who revered his work, Tennessee Williams left instructions that his body be buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico where Crane drowned. (Instead, Williams' family buried him in Missouri.) Crane's legacy influenced gay painters as well, inspiring art by Marsden Hartley, Eight Bells Folly, and by Jasper Johns twice: Diver and Periscope. Get his Complete Poems or the Library of America edition with selected letters.

Born April 17: Chavela Vargas

photo ©valentina siniego benenati  vsiniego.blogspot.com

A late bloomer, perhaps, but what an extraordinary flower -- Mexican singer Chevela Vargas, 92 today, 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 [below], 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.

Born February 5: William S. Burroughs

Around 1930, when he was sixteen, William S. Burroughs was expelled from the New Mexico high school where he was keeping a journal of his make out sessions with another boy and taking chloral hydrate, thereby cementing the major themes of his life: writing, drugs, gay sex, travel, and trouble with authorities. Twenty years later, fleeing a drug arrest in Louisiana, Burroughs established himself in Mexico with his common law wife Joan. Drunk, he and Joan thought it would be a good idea to re-enact the William Tell escapade, but rather than shooting the apple he killed his wife. The tragedy seemed to jolt Burroughs into action, and in 1953 with the help of Allen Ginsberg he published his first novel, Junky. He wandered in South America, then Palm Beach, then New York City, then Rome, then Tangier, where he lived in a gay brothel and experimented with new drugs and new styles of writing. One result was that in 1958 the Chicago Review published sections of Naked Lunch, immediately called obscene. The U.S. Postal Service ruled copies could not be sent through the mail. The controversy got the full novel published in 1959, and in 1960 Massachusetts was the first state to prosecute on grounds of obscenity. Six years later, in the nation's last case obscenity case involving only words, not images, the Massachusetts Supreme Court ruled the novel was not obscene. Although Burroughs had been the cover story of Life magazine, and championed by critics like Mary McCarthy, he continued to struggle for another twenty years. Finally in 1983 Ginsberg succeeded in nominating Burroughs to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 literary agent Andrew Wylie began to represent Burroughs, procuring a deal for Queer, Burroughs' unpublished novel from 1953 and a contract for six additional books. Burroughs appeared in Gus van Sant's 1989 movie Drugstore Cowboy, and in 1991 David Croenenberg filmed a much praised adaptation of Naked Lunch starring Peter Weller and Judy Davis. He died in 1997.

Among the many artists who consider Burroughs to be an important influence on their work are: Peter Ackroyd, Laurie Anderson, J.G. Ballard, Charles Bukowski, Angela Carter, Kurt Cobain, Dennis Cooper, Ian Curtis, Jean Genet, William Gibson, Ken Kesey, John Rechy, and Patti Smith. As for Burroughs, he said the greatest influence on his own writing was the shy and delicate Englishman Denton Welch.

Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein

It figures that the Russian supergenius whose innovations in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Oktober (1927) still dictate how movies are shot and edited today would have no trouble creating private visual diversions for himself in an age before internet porn: He drew sketches of gay sex. Re-entering the U.S. from Mexico in 1932, his drawings were discovered by American customs officials who were not "artistic" and not amused. Eisenstein was a Bolshevik after all, and had been run out of Hollywood on his first visit after a campaign against him by fascist Major Pease (and because Paramount hated his treatment of Dreiser's An American Tragedy). The customs debacle capped off a fifteen-month fiasco that was supposed to have been a four-month shoot to restore his reputation. Post-Paramount, Charlie Chaplin had introduced him to Upton Sinclair whose wife Mary Kimbrough financed the Mexican picture, which Eisenstein began filming without a script or even a concept. Complicating matters further, Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the USSR and therefore claimed rights to the film as it was being made, including the right to censor. Ordered home by Soviet authorities angry that he had overstayed his visa, Eisenstein realized that thus removed and having hugely antagonized the Sinclairs, he would never be allowed to edit his Mexican footage. He suffered a nervous breakdown. Worse was on its way. His next film, Bezhin Meadow, was plagued again by his ill-conceived grandiose schemes (this time to shoot simultaneously adult and children's versions) and by his dictatorial style. Soviet officials hated his movie. Eisenstein endured the horror of having his film destroyed, which was mild compared to the fate of the government's executive producer for film, Boris Shumyatsky, who should have been supervising more closely and was executed by firing squad. Eisenstein did triumph again with a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, famous for its beautiful, majestic build up to battle. He followed it with another success, Ivan the Terrible Part I, only to see his Ivan the Terrible Part II confiscated and Part III destroyed. Although he had two wives, historians say neither marriage was consummated. He wrote in his diaries about his endless infatuations with men. He died of a brain hemorrhage at fifty.

Born March 16: Sybille Bedford

How close did the exquisite travel writer and novelist Sybille Bedford come to being killed by the Nazis? Born in 1911 outside Berlin and raised a Roman Catholic, she lived with her aged father, Baron Maximilian Josef von Schoenebeck, when her mother, his second wife, Elizabeth Bernard, Anglo-German Jewish, rich, and beautiful, was off with another man. At 22 Sybille blasted the Nazis in an essay for Klaus Mann's literary journal and they subsequently discovered her heritage and seized her bank accounts. She couldn't renew her German passport and couldn't stay abroad once it had expired, and without an income. That could have led to the end. Enter Aldous Huxley's wife Maria who knew gay Auden had just gallantly wed Erika Mann to solve her citizenship problems. Said Maria, “We must get one of our bugger friends to marry Sybille.” They didn't need to look far; Auden's butler had been having an affair with an English army officer Terry Bedford, who agreed to be used. Now a British citizen, Sybille spent the war in America with the Huxleys and wrote three unpublishable novels imitating Aldous' style. After the war, she traveled to Mexico, found her exceptional voice, and wrote her legendary A Visit to Don Otavio. An absolute must read. Bruce Chatwin said of another book, “When the history of modern prose in English comes to be written, Mrs. Bedford will have to appear in any list of its most dazzling practitioners.” Bedford became friends with another wanderlust writer, Martha Gellhorn, and lovers with Eda Lord. She spent the 1950s to 70s loosely based in France, Italy, Britain, and Portugal. She also wrote four novels, one of which was a Booker nominee and the best of which is A Legacy. In her 90s she finally wrote her memoir, Quicksands, which nearly as obliquely covers a lot of the same ground as her autobiographical novels, including her lesbian relationships. V. S. Pritchett praised her mind as “radiant.” The finest essay about her is Joan Acocella's appreciation in the New Yorker but don't stop there. Read the books.

Latin America's First Legal Same Sex Weddings

Yesterday in Mexico City, via LA Times. One of the lesbian brides said, "I am overjoyed to finally be making this real. A different world is possible." Another bride's brother, 61, said, "I never in my life thought I'd see this. There is very strong change coming to my country. Very slowly, like everything here, but change is coming."

Not if the Catholic Church has its way. A local Cardinal called the new law, which also permits gay couples to adopt children, "perverse and immoral." He claimed the Mexican family was "under attack."

Mexico City's mayor attended the ceremony. Outside the Municipal Palace, demonstrators protested the happy couples' historic day. The antigay gathering was organized by a 29 year old actor(!) who said, "Mexican society is not capable of accepting this."

Visibility Matters: DC, Mexico City Gay Marriage Applicants

Ellen & Portia, Elton & David, Melissa & Julie, Will & Grace, the Modern Family couple, Kurt & his mirror on Glee**... the happy faces of same sex couples in the media are a parade of whiteness. Not to oversimplify but it does seem marginally easier for antigay ministers to stir up black congregations against equality if they consider gay marriage a white phenom. That makes one more reason to celebrate Angelisa Young and Sinjoyla Townsend for being first in line Wednesday morning for an application for a marriage license in DC.

As you know, Wednesday also marked the first day same sex couples in Mexico City could legally apply for marriage licenses. Judith Vazquez and Lol-kin Castaneda discussed their plans in an audio interview with the BBC.

(**Kurt's boyfriend in season two will be "a male Mercedes." Just another singing dancing interracial twink couple in western Ohio.)

Angelisa Young and Sinjoyla Townsend

Darlene Garner and Candy Holmes

 

Rocky Galloway and Reggie Stanley

Cuc Vu and Gwen Migita

 

Jonathan Howard and Gregory Jones escaped the HRC sticker madness

Judith Vazquez and Lol-kin Castaneda in Mexico City

Carlos Alberto Ramos and Javier Gutierrez in Mexico's capital

Mexican accessorizers wait for their marriage application

The Sky Below: Stacey D'Erasmo's Breakout Book

Please, literary gods, let the Stacey D'Erasmo momentum continue. Her first novel Tea was a NYT notable book of 2000. Her second novel, A Seahorse Year, was named a best book of 2004 by Newsday and the San Francisco Chronicle and it won a Lambda award and a Ferro-Grumley award. Now, her third novel, The Sky Below, was published yesterday, and tomorrow it will appear on the cover of the NYTBR with a glowing if roundabout review. (Too much about boxes.) This follows a starred PW review, which was more succinct and more straightforward about the protagonist's being gay:

A luminous novel crafted in meticulous detail with shimmering language, D'Erasmo's third book tells the story of Gabriel Collins... An obituary writer for a half-assed tourist newspaper in post-9/11 Manhattan, Gabriel is also an artist, creating still lifes from found and stolen objects. Gabriel's lover, Janos, a wealthy financier, hopes that Gabriel will abandon his marginal life and move in with him, but Gabriel steadfastly refuses, even when a health crisis threatens to undo him. An impulsive trip to Mexico leads him to a hardscrabble commune where he finds a belated clarity. The descriptions of Gabriel's artwork and his daily struggles comprise a dizzying trip through metaphor and expression, the undisputed centerpiece of which is the dazzling, complicated narration in vivid prose. This is a demanding and immensely satisfying novel, and certainly one of the better New York artist novels in recent memory.

I can't wait to read it, especially because it plays off Ovid, according to her interview with Time Out New York:

... a book about money and Manhattan, The Sky Below is hugely fanciful, frequently riffing on Ovid’s visions of human transformation. Mythos suffuses D’Erasmo’s language: Bob Dylan sounds “like a sarcastic tree stump,” drafts “skitter” around a chilly Greenpoint apartment “like ice fairies.” In some of the story’s more surreal moments, Gabriel himself seems to be turning into a bird.

Then again, maybe those are cancer symptoms. The novel consistently fudges the line between the fantastical and the quotidian: A literalist could read Gabriel as a victim of illness-induced hallucinations, whereas to a fan of Greek myths or Marvel Comics, he could literally be a bird-man. D’Erasmo followed Ovid’s lead there. “In The Metamorphoses,” she says, “these things happen—someone turns into a tree, or someone turns into a bird—but it happens in this world, with these bodies, and you feel the flesh of it, and you feel the bark of it, and you feel the mortality of it. I wanted everything in the book that was slightly magical or transformative to have that feeling.”

You can read an excerpt from the first chapter, or check out D'Erasmo talking with Sam Tanenhaus on this week's NYT's podcast, which you can listen to online or download to you iPod.

D'Erasmo will read January 14 at City Lights in San Francisco and give at least three readings in New York: January 21 at McNally Jackson, February 19 at Housing Works, and April 19 at KGB. Support her.

Born January 1: Forster, Hoover, Hormel, Orton, Vasquez, Stefano, & More

E.M. Forster (1879-1970) English novelist. Of course Howard's End is one of your favorites, but don't forget his excellent collection of stories, The Life to Come, filled with gay men less anguished than his Maurice characters.

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) American FBI director and closet case of unsurpassed twistedness.

Maurice Béjart (1927-2007) French-Swiss choreographer who directed maverick ballets and all-male romantic dances long before the likes of Matthew Bourne.

James Hormel (1933) American philanthropist and gay rights activist.

Joe Orton (1933-1967) randy British playwright and subject of the excellent movie Prick Up Your Ears.

Eloy de la Iglesia (1944-2006) Spanish film director.

Junior Vasquez (1946) American DJ.

Nahum Bernabe Zenil (1947) Mexican painter.

Joey Stefano (1968-1994) Porn superstar.

Clandestinos

Sorry, can't talk, in a hurry as I am moving to Madrid right now.
    Suddenly needing to emigrate is the only danger of the really satisfying Spanish movie Clandestinos, about three lads who escape from a juvenile detention center. The love triangle that develops is not among the teens (a Basque, a Mexican, and a Moroccan), but features Xabi caught between his unreachable lover, a Basque rebel in his 50s, and Germán, an undercover cop, also in his 50s. Touchingly, when Germán takes Xabi home after picking him up from a row of (unrealistically?) stunning hustlers at the mall, what he really wants to do is cook for him, though of course they do that other thing, too: sleep. Xabi's fellow escapees are straight and their girlfriends are awesome in the way that the smaller roles in Almodóvar are such standouts. (Think Lola Dueñas or Rossy de Palma.) Warning: the trailer below is a little lame and its ratio aspect is distorted. Also, there's frontal nudity, in case you're at work. Look for Clandestinos at your upcoming film festival.

John Rechy's About My Life and the Kept Woman

    
How could the pioneering writer of such direct, memorable, and gay titles as City of Night, Numbers, Rushes, and The Sexual Outlaw call his memoir About my Life and the Kept Woman? Banal, disjointed, and  straight-sounding. Worse still, for the autobiography of a Mexican-American gay man who early on embraced his sexuality for fun and profit, Grove inexplicably put a photo of a 1940s escandalosa alone on the cover. (The photo above is Rechy at 40; picture a cover photo of him in his 20s.) Not to worry, the best read man on DList says it's good. And finally the media is beginning to give it some attention. Rechy, 74 next month, granted interviews to the Los Angeles Times and Bay Windows, and reviews appeared this week in the Daily News and the Chronicle. He says the theme of the book is "accepting your identity," and he also says he made details up, inventing what wasn't there in order to clarify what was. For the record, the woman of the title was a notorious local mistress, and a beacon of glamor and independence (or, sex and freedom) to an extremely poor kid coming up in El Paso.

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 small roles 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 circuit party, suddenly reunited with a friend who has become buff: He can't keep his hands off the guy's huge 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. Novarro's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame is located at 6350 Hollywood Blvd.