Band of Thebes

Morrissey. Autobiography.

Is your experience while reading Morrissey's description of an elderly schoolteacher who "favours the girls" -- "Miss Redmond is aging, and will never marry, and will die smelling of attics." -- overlayed with your memories of his lush Will Never Marry from Bona Drag?

The levels of pentimenti across time are a constant in his Autobiography [Kindle], which spans his life from childhood to now and often shifts past action to the present tense. Do you understand writing at all? Study this early, gay paragraph to see how the switch in tenses 1) mimics the other boy's jump to manhood, 2) reinforces the break between the straight Anthony and our crying Steven, and 3) perpetuates that loss:

"It was with Anthony Morris that a torrent of nervous energy unleashed itself in the ripped-out houses in the dangers of faltering light. It was he who told me why girls fluttered around me at St Wilfrids, and what it was they wanted. He told me this because I didn't know, and even when I knew, I was less interested than when I didn't know. I had no idea it was anything other than a mere spout. Many years later, by 1974, Anthony has jumped to stern custodian manliness , and for once his vicious stare is aimed at me: 'You like all those queers, don't you?' he bites. By this he means my merging musical obsessions, and my heart sinks down into a new darkness. There is nothing I can salvage from this accusation, and the eyes pool, as I lose." 

Also, "custodian." 

Like his music, Autobiography has been slammed by haters and exulted by critics: NME ("nigh-on perfect"), The Independent ("a rococo triumph"), The Telegraph ("beautifully measured prose style that combines a lilting, poetic turn of phrase and acute quality of observation"), The New Yorker ("As I floated, unmoored, Morrissey would drop in a single masterfully executed sentence"), and Rolling Stone, which said, "Practically every paragraph has a line or two that demands to be read aloud to the mirror, tattooed on foreheads, carved on tombstones."  

Somebody, hug him.

UPDATE: Stop me if you think you've heard this one before: Spin and Towleroad report disturbing news that certain gay aspects of the UK book have been removed for the American edition. Now, the only cuts cited concern his relationship with photographer Jake Walters -- (he took that terrific shot of Moz holding a baby) -- including the removal of a photograph of Jake as a boy, so it's conceivable this is about Walters' lawyers rather than Putnam's homophobia.

Born December 5: Little Richard

He's 81 today. The white kings of rock were all copying the same gay, black pioneer, Little Richard.

Elvis: "Your music has inspired me - you are the greatest." 

The Beatles: "He was my idol at school. The first song I ever sang in public was Long Tall Sally, at a Butlins holiday camp talent competition! I love his voice and I always wanted to sing like him." "It was all his fault really."

The Rolling Stones: "Little Richard is the originator and my first idol."  "Little Richard is King."

Bob Dylan: in his high school yearbook says his goal is "to join Little Richard."

David Bowie (not so straight): "After hearing Little Richard on record, I bought a saxophone and came into the music business. Little Richard was my inspiration."

Paul Simon: "When I was in high school I wanted to be like Little Richard."

Bob Seeger: "Little Richard - he was the first one that really got to me... I always preferred a high energy vocal, a hard full-force vocal. I liked Little Richard better than Elvis."

Pat Boone: "No one person has been imitated more than Little Richard."

Black superstars too are quick to credit Little Richard, although in following him they never reaped the same rewards as their white counterparts.

James Brown (who claimed that Little Richard was the first to put the funk in the rock beat): "Little Richard is my idol."

Otis Redding: "If it hadn't been for Little Richard, I would not be here. I entered the music business because of Richard - he is my inspiration. I used to sing like Little Richard, his Rock 'n' Roll stuff, you know. Richard has soul, too. My present music has a lot of him in it."

Sam Cooke: "I love Little Richard.  He is a great entertainer and he has done so much for our music."

Smokey Robinson: "Little Richard was the beginning of that drivin', never-let-up, funky Rock 'n' Roll."

Ray Charles: Little Richard "started a kind of music that set the pace for a lot of what's happening today."

Rev. Al Green: "I was a little kid when I heard Little Richard. He was playing piano and singing that song [Jenny, Jenny]. Even then, I knew he was a classic, one-of-a-kind. I never heard (a performer) with that kind of enthusiasm."

Jimi Hendrix: "I want to do with my guitar what Little Richard does with his voice."

What makes his lasting importance astounding is that it's all based on two years' work. He released Tutti Frutti in November 1955, and, in 1957, while touring Australia, he became born again and quit the music business. His success and influence are even more surprising when you consider how, in the middle of the Eisenhower administration (the summer of '56 when Ike added "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and authorized the national motto of "In God We Trust"), Little Richard made the world fall for a high camp, effeminate black man in flashy clothes, crazy hair, wearing heavy pancake makeup and heavier eyeliner. (He based much of his style on another Southern gay black man, Esquerita.) Given the times, none of this should have happened for Richard Penniman. Given his own background, with his parents disowning him at thirteen for being gay, it should have been impossible.

Starting in the 1960s, he staged many comebacks, easily slipping into caricature and never equaling his early highs: After Tutti Frutti came Long Tall Sally, Slipin and Slidin, Rip It Up, Lucille, Jenny, Jenny, Keep a Knockin, and Good Golly, Miss Molly. Beyond the music, he has kept the persona relevant for fifty years. Witness his turn with King Ralph and his ads for Geico. For more, jump into David Kirby's Little Richard: The Birth of Rock 'n' Roll [Kindle].

Born November 25: Virgil Thomson

Prodigy Virgil Thomson sprung from a junior college in Kansas City, Missouri to Harvard thanks entirely to a Mormon scholarship, awarded because he was friends with one of Joseph Smith's many grand-daughters. In Cambridge, he thrived. With the glee club he bopped to Paris, at the invitation of Bernard Fay, an influential gay man who would later become a Nazi collaborator, sending many to their deaths while saving Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas; for that story, see Janet Malcolm's Two Lives.

In fact, it was the musical Toklas who, from the shadows, guided the partnership of Stein and Thomson when he returned to live in Paris in the 20s. Together they created the landmark opera Four Saints in Three Acts, revolutionary for its all black cast, which finally premiered in 1934 in Hartford. [Read Steven Watson's Prepare for Saints: Gertrude Stein, Virgil Thomson, and the Mainstreaming of American Modernism].Thirteen years later, just before Stein's death, they created an opera about lesbian icon Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All. By that time, Thomson had already composed music for three films, most memorably Pare Lorentz's The River, and was midway through his fourteen years as music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune. (He hated the work of Britten, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich, and Sibelius, among others.) In 1948, he scored a b&w film about a Cajun boy, his pet raccoon, a hungry alligator, and the threat of an oil rig on the bayou, Louisiana Story, winning 1949's Pulitzer Prize for music.

Thomson lived for another forty years, at the Chelsea hotel with his partner Maurice Grosser, in diminishing circumstances. Of course, times changed, and his compositions were not played by American orchestras as often as he had counted on when he quit his job as a critic. He became something of a father figure to the next generation of gay composers and artists, most prominently Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Frank O'Hara, and Ned Rorem. In 1966 Thomson penned his autobiography, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 1982 for his reader, and was awarded a Kennedy Center Honor in 1983. He died in 1989, a year after Grosser. Anthony Tommasini has written the definitive biography, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle.

Benjamin Britten Centenary

Yesterday while Boomers wallowed in their death memories of fifty years ago, the English led global celebrations of gay genius Benjamin Britten's 100th birthday, with the BBC reporting more than 100,000 children worldwide sang from the composer's work on Friday afternoon. See more at Britten 100 or hop over to The Red House, the Aldeburgh place he shared with Peter Pears for twenty years which is now home to the Britten Pears Foundation. Read appreciations at The Telegraph ("how he proved the sneerers wrong") or The Guardian (from Marion Thorpe, a friend for forty years) and get Neil Powell's gay-inclusive biography published three months ago, Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music [Kindle]. For more personal memories, try Ronald Blythe's really lovely new book, The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh, 1955-1958 [Kindle].

Born October 13: Kele Okereke

Liverpool born, London raised Kele Okereke was twenty-three in 2005 when Bloc Party released their million-selling debut Silent Alarm which peaked at #3 on the UK charts. Although by that point Kele had been in bands for five or six years, he kept his musical exploits secret from his "super Catholic" Nigerian parents until the album's release. Despite his newfound fame, he continued to study at university, specializing in English literature. Through two more successful albums and subsequent touring, Kele kept his gay life largely hidden, though he did compare himself to Bowie, Molko, and Morrissey. Bloc Party went on hiatus on Halloween 2009 and Kele came out in a March 2010 interview with Butt. Three months later he released his solo album The Boxer, followed by The Hunter in 2011. Last summer he sang on Sub Focus's single "Turn It Around." Said to be shy, it hasn't stopped Kele from publicly feuding with Oasis, "the most pernicious band of all time." Today, he's thirty-two. Follow his visual blog.

 

Macklemore & Ryan Lewis Win VMA for Pro-Marriage Equality Song

Accepting MTV's Video Music Award for Best Song with a Social Message for their pro-gay, pro-marriage equality jam Same Love [below], Macklemore said, "I've been writing songs since I was 15 and out of every single song I have every written to me this is the most important record out of all of them. And to watch this song in the last year spread across the world is a testament to what is happening right here now America on the forefront of equality. Gay rights are human rights there is no separation."

Earlier in the evening, he and Ryan Lewis performed the song with lesbian Mary Lambert and Dreamgirl Jennifer Hudson. The twenty-four year-old Lambert has been out since she was seventeen and published her first book of poetry earlier this year, 500 Tips for Fat Girls.

Full list of VMA winners here.

Born August 25: Rob Halford

Hiding in plain sight for more than twenty years, the closeted lead singer of Judas Priest modeled his look on the gay leather scene which became a heavy metal mainstay. From 1974 to 1992, Rob Halford fronted the band, wowing fans with his pseudo-operatic style of singing and impressing critics with his four octave vocal range. Offstage, he struggled with alcohol dependency and violent relationships, the worst moment coming after a bad fight: When Halford got a taxi, his boyfriend shot himself and died. After that, Halford improved his life. In 1997, he played gigs with Pansy Division at gay pride parties and the next year he came out on MTV. In 2003, he reunited with Judas Priest. In 2008 the band released their second post-reunion album, Nostradamus, which was their sixteenth studio album, and they played on the Masters of Metal Tour. Since then they've released two live albums.

Halford lives in Phoenix, San Diego, Amsterdam, and his native Walsall, England, hometown also to Boy George. Since coming out, Halford says the support of the metal community has been "tremendous."

Born August 13: Jonathan Strong, Herb Ritts

By the time he was twenty-five, Illinois native Jonathan Strong had graduated from Harvard, won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, had twice won O. Henry awards for his short fiction (including 3rd prize), and published his first book, Tike and Five Stories, winner of the Rosenthal Award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. (Rosenthal recipients just prior to his win were Thomas Pynchon and Joyce Carol Oates; soon after him came Thomas McGuane, Alice Walker, and Richard Yates.) In the intervening forty-three years, Strong has published eleven more books. Two recent novels are the just terrific Drawn From Life (2008) and the Lammy finalist Consolation (2010). Both books' protagonists are out gay men, which may or may not contribute to why Strong is not as widely read as he ought to be; or it may simply be the unfair wheel of literary fate. Either way, he is overdue for his Barbara Pym moment of rediscovery. James Morrison offered an excellent survey of Strong's work, "Happiness in a Corner," upon publication of his opera novel More Light in 2011. Strong's Hawkweed and Indian Paintbrush was to be out this spring from a very small press. A longtime lecturer at Tufts, he is happily partnered and lives without the internet or email in Rockport, Massachusetts.

 

A classicist in the tradition of George Platt Lynes or Irving Penn, Herb Ritts' elegance was always overshadowed by his popularity. His friendships with superstars were somehow more newsworthy than his ability to capture the iconic instant and transform mortals into myth. Those friendships began early; he grew up in Brentwood, next door to Steve McQueen who on Sundays would take Herb riding on his motorcycle in the desert, and his first break came from shooting his buddy Richard Gere. As much as any other photographer, Ritts defined style for the ten years from 1982 to 1992 on the covers of Vanity Fair, Vogue, Rolling Stone, GQ, as well as in countless ad campaigns, the apex of which was the Marky Mark underwear shoot for Calvin Klein (not nearly as ripped as you remember). Ritts also directed commercials and more than a dozen music videos for Janet, Michael, Mariah, Tina, Toni, Britney, Bon Jovi, Chris Isaak, Tracy Chapman, N Sync, Shakira, JLo, and Madonna, winning two VMAs from MTV. Yet because his subjects were celebrities and supermodels, he was often deemed shallow and superficial. Perhaps in those early years straight critics found it easier to dismiss him rather than confront their discomfort with his work's homoeroticism. Openly gay throughout his career, he was a major force in fundraising for aids groups like Amfar long before it was fashionable. Forthright about his own hiv-positive status, he died of pneumonia at fifty in 2002 and is survived by his partner, Erik Hyman. The subject of a massive solo show last year at LACMA, his work is in the permanent collections of many of the world's best museums including the MFA Boston, the Getty, the Guggenheim, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. For more, read Charles Churchward's Herb Ritts: The Golden Hour: A Photographer's Life and His World.

   

Born August 7: Anna Weirauch, William J. Mann

Nine years before London's 1928 deluge of lesbian fiction, including Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Compton MacKenzie's Extraordinary Women, Virginia Woolf's Orlando, Elizabeth Bowen's The Hotel, and Djuna Barnes' The Ladies Almanack, Anna Weirauch published The Scorpion in Germany. It was the first of three novels following Mette Rudolph from childhood to adulthood. In the first volume young Mette has an affair with Olga, who eventually breaks up with her and kills herself. When Mette's parents enlist a psychiatrist to "cure" her, she dismisses the idea that lesbians are sick or need treatment. In the next two volumes she encounters most of the social ills of Weimer Berlin, including  drug abuse, alcoholism, and rampant promiscuity but in the end, she finds contentment by leaving the city. Once she's settled in a rural area, restored by nature, she's ready to really love another woman. An abridged single-volume translation of the three novels, unnecessarily titled Of Love Forbidden, was published in America in 1933. That same year, when she was 46, Weirauch and her partner moved from Berlin to Upper Bavaria. After the war they moved to Munich and returned to a very different West Berlin in 1969 when she was 82. She died there the following year.

Dividing his time between Palm Springs and Provincetown, and between fiction and nonfiction, William J. Mann has published ten books since 1997. The first of his five biographies was the terrific joy Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines, Hollywood's First Openly Gay Star, which single-handedly lauched a Haines revival. Seek out Haines' movies, from 1922 to 1934, which are witty, effervescent delights. Mann reclaimed more queer movie lore in Behind the Screen: How Gays and Lesbians Shaped Hollywood, 1910-1969 and Edge of Midnight: The Life of John Schlesinger. Although his landmark biography Kate: The Woman Who Was Hepburn [Kindle] was a NYT Notable Book in 2006, it didn't quite get the widespread attention it deserved because the mainstream didn't want to hear their icon was primarily a lesbian and her endlessly hyped romance with Spencer Tracy was cover for their separate same-sex adventures. His less overtly gay How to Be a Movie Star: Elizabeth Taylor in Hollywood [Kindle] from 2009 was followed last October by Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand [Kindle].

Mann's five novels are: The Men from the Boys, The Biograph Girl, Where The Boys Are, All American Boy, and Object of Desire [Kindle]

Neil Powell's Benjamin Britten Biography Out Today

NPG photo by Fayer

Bellow bravo from the balcony -- Benjamin Britten: A Life for Music [Kindle] by Neil Powell has not been degayed, and neither has Holt's jacket copy, which praises partner Peter Pears: 

"Displaying a passion and proficiency for music at an early age, to the delight of his mother, Edith, a talented amateur musician herself, he began composing music when he was only five years old. After studying at the Royal College of Music, Britten went on to write documentary scores for the General Post Office Film Unit, where he met and collaborated with the poet W. H. Auden.

"Of more lasting importance was Britten’s introduction in 1937 to the tenor Peter Pears, who was to become the inspirational center of his emotional and musical life. Their partnership lasted nearly four decades, during a dangerous time when homosexuality was illegal in England. Conscientious objectors, Britten and Pears followed Auden to America before the war began in 1939. While there, they joined the extraordinary Brooklyn ménage of George Davis, Louis MacNeice, and Paul Bowles.

"Eventually intense homesickness, provoked in part by George Crabbe’s poem “Peter Grimes,” drove the pair home to East Anglia in 1942 and gave Britten the inspiration for his finest opera. Throughout his career, Britten did not want modern music to be just for “the cultured few” and instead always composed his music to be “listenable-to.” The shared quotidian lives of Britten and Pears unfold in this intimate biography and the story of two men who created a truly remarkable legacy.

FWIW, Powell now lives in Aldeburgh, where Britten and Pears spent three decades, three years of which are covered in Ronald Blythe's new book.

Also released today is the gay novelish nonfiction Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual Account of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City [Kindle] by The Awl's Choire Sicha, whose copy Harper has degayed. I have a galley and will post a review later this month.

Members of Queen Demand Family-Friendly, PG Biopic Without AIDS

You can't do a Freddie Mercury biopic without securing the rights to Queen's music, and the band's three remaining members, all comfortably in their 60s -- Brian May, John Deacon, Roger Taylor -- have strict approval over the movie's screenwriter and director. So far they've rejected Tom Hooper (The King's Speech, Les Miserables), David Fincher (Benjamin Button, The Social Network), Peter Morgan (writer of Frost/Nixon, The Queen), and as of today Sacha Baron Cohen has dropped the project over a creative impasse on just how squeaky clean and family-friendly the film has to be. According to Deadline Hollywood, the band wants "a PG movie about Queen while Cohen was counting on a gritty R-rated tell-all centered around the gifted gay singer." Three years ago I posted the movie would end prior to Mercury's getting aids. With all this whitewashing, I'm guessing Farrokh Bulsara "Freddie" won't be Indian, either.

In other gay music movie news, last month Film District paid $10 million to acquire rights to Rocketman, the musical biopic of Elton John. Visual effects veteran Michael Gracey will direct, and said to be starring is Tom Hardy, a casting choice Elton enthusiastically embraces.

Born June 27: Cazwell

Raised in Worcester, Luke Caswell started singing with the Boston hip hop band Moreplay, but moved on from the city and the genre. He says, "I know a lot of gay rappers that really consider themselves hip hop and want to be accepted by hip hop producers, and my point of view is, 'Why bother? Why spend all my time and energy trying to make a culture who hasn’t acknowledged my existence for the past twenty years accept me?'" Now a New Yorker, he djs and hosts weekly club nights downtown. He was an opening act on the Cyndi Lauper/ Debbie Harry/ Erasure/ everybody True Colors tour in 2007, played Dior Hommes after party in 2008, judged RuPaul's Drag Race, and has had his songs played on LoGo and True Blood. To date his biggest hit is the all-male sweet and sweaty ode everything oral, Ice Cream Truck. The DIY charm of that suckadelic jingle is missing from the hyper track he released last week, "Guess What? (I'm Hot!)" Like him on fb.

Ronald Blythe on 50s Gay Circle: Britten, Pears, Forster

The wonderful chronicler of country life Roland Blythe has released a new book The Time by the Sea: Aldeburgh, 1955-1958 to coincide with Benjamin Britten's centenary. A fresh, struggling writer then in his early 30s, Blythe was surprised to be invited over for a drink with E.M. Forster in his 70s. He met Britten and his partner Peter Pears and began working at their new Aldeburgh Festival. His list of artistic "Selected Personalia" included in the book extends four pages: J.R. Ackerley, Elizabeth Bowen, Peter Hall, John Nash, Mervyn Peake, and Sylvia Townsend Warner, among many others. The Times says his "delightful memoir" is "a small masterpiece about an extraordinary place."

Recipient of the RSL's Benson Medal, Blythe is best known for his Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village, which became a super hit movie on British television, seen by more than 14 million viewers when the UK population was 55 million. Fifty years of his best work is collected in Aftermath: Selected Writings.

He is of the old world in not discussing or writing about private life, though he is not a prude about others' pleasures, praising the "explicit" stories of Colm Tóibín, his favorite contemporary novelist. He does tell interviewers he has never lived with anyone and has never been in love. Does his saying he slept with Patricia Highsmith make him more, or less, queer?

The Guardian has a halfhour podcast of Blythe reading and sharing memories. It's gently amusing to see Blythe and podcast in the same sentence: At 90, he has never bothered to learn to drive a car or use a computer.

For pure Britten, go right to the source with his early diaries compiled in Journeying Boy. Neil Bartlett chose it for Thebes' queer lit poll, saying the book "...gives us the unedited raw material out of which this extraordinary young queer man struggled to compose himself in 1930's England. Confused, enthusiastic, despairing, giddy, sure, horny, guilty, overwhelmed, overworked... but with a steely thread of talent drawing him towards his own future. Terrific."

(photo via)

Behind the Camera on 'Behind the Candelabra'

HBO has released an eleven-minute featurette about the making of Steven Soderbergh's swan song, his Liberace biopic that he says is too gay for Hollywood. HBO airs it on Sunday, May 26.

Born May 7: Tchaikovsky

Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades, the love theme from Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture, Symphonies 4, 5, and 6 — what would the world listen to without Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky? Unfortunately, his private life was less sublime than his music. At 37, although he knew he loved men, he agreed to marry a female fan, Antonina Miliukova. Within two weeks of their wedding he tried to kill himself, hoping to catch pneumonia by soaking himself in the Moscow River. At the urging of his doctor, he fled to St. Petersburg and never saw his wife again, although he continued to support her. (The cost of the closet can be seen all around him: Miliukova had several children by other men, gave each infant to an orphanage and spent her final twenty-one years in a home for the certifiably insane. Tchaikovsky's brother Modest was also gay, and he too made an unhappy marriage.) Tchaikovsky enjoyed great renown during his lifetime and among his countless honors two days before he turned 51, he was the conductor at the opening night of Carnegie Hall. When he died at 53, sixty thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral, which for only the third time in Russian history was paid for by the Tsar.

Bruce LaBruce's Essay on the Decline, Cooptation of Camp

With the rush to convince straight politicians and judges we're the same as them and worthy of the same institutions and rights, anyone might believe gay people had stopped thinking about the value of difference. Queercore filmmaker Bruce LaBruce adapts his lecture from last year's Camp/Anti-Camp conference in Berlin for an essay in the new issue of Nat. Brut journal. Rictor Norton says it's "the best analysis of camp since Sontag."

LaBruce begins with fifteen lists of subcategories such as bad gay camp (Will & Grace, Adam Lambert), good straight camp (September, 3 Women), bad straight camp (Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, Stanley Tucci in Prada, Hunger Games), ultra camp (Wilde), bad ultra camp (Liza in Sex & the City 2), reactionary camp (Tyler Perry, Eddie Murphy), subversive camp (Pee Wee Herman), quasi-camp (Midnight Cowboy, Cruising), intentional camp (The Shining, Casino Royale), and unintentional camp (J. Edgar, The Iron Lady), among others.

Realizing, "sadly, most of it falls under the category of 'bad straight camp,'" he traces how we got here and blames the new irony:

"...The net result was that much of the general populous (now roughly equivalent to 'pop culture') had adopted the posture as a given to the extent that people generally lost track of its meaning or purpose: there was a kind of ironic detachment from everything. People started routinely to say the opposite of what they meant, and meant it, failing to understand that their new 'sensibility' had become a betrayal of their actual former set of beliefs or tastes, which they even perhaps once held sacred. So in a sense, irony became a malaise, a kind of generalized disaffection that infected the dominant culture. I surmise that this is what opened up the floodgates for the rise of camp culture, or rather the corruption and misinterpretation of camp culture – a certain detached artificiality and forced excess..."

After a stinging critique of Britney, Gaga, Rihanna, Beyonce, and Nikki ("...hyper-referentiality, extreme hyperbole, a crudely obvious, unnuanced female sexuality, and even a vaguely pornographic sensibility which, unhappily, is post-feminist to the point of misogyny...") he laments:

"This new annexation and corruption of the camp sensibility now exists largely without the qualities of sophistication and secret signification that were developed out of necessity by the underground or outsider gay world, which originally created camp as a kind of gay signifying practice... It was developed as a secret language in order to identify oneself to like-minded or similarly closeted homosexuals, a shorthand of arcane and coded, almost kabbalistic references and practices developed in order to operate safely apart and without fear of detection from a conservative and conventional world that could be aggressively hostile towards homosexuals, particularly effeminate males and masculine females. In the contemporary world, in which gays have largely assimilated into the dominant order, such signifying practices have become somewhat obsolete, and the previous forms of camping and camp identification have long since been emptied of camp or gay significance, rendering them easily co-opted, commercialized, and trivialized."

Beyond the arts, his takedown of political camp is fierce:

"...For what are Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, Bill O’Reilly, Donald Trump, and Herman Cain other than conservative camp icons enacting a kind of reactionary burlesque on the American political stage? Wholly without substance, their views exaggerated and extremely stylized, and evincing a carefully contrived posture of 'compassionate conservatism,' they function merely as a crude spectacle that mocks the unwashed masses by pretending to be one of them while simultaneously offering them policies that are directly antithetical to their authentic needs."

Building to a high point he concludes, 

"The new tendency of conservative camp runs in diametrical opposition to the impulses of classic gay camp, which sought to celebrate, elevate, and even worship the qualities of deviance, difference, and eccentricity that characterized the highly aestheticized homosexual experience of past eras."

Read the full essay and support online journals like Nat. Brut.

Born April 25: Andy Bell

After co-founding and leaving Depeche Mode, after co-founding Yaz and leaving Alison Moyet, Vince Clarke advertised in Melody Maker for a singer for his new duo and plucked a gay meatpacker (literally) born in Dogsthorpe. With his high voice, high energy, and high style, Andy Bell put the disco in Erasure's discography: Who Needs Love Like That, Oh, L'amour, Sometimes, It Doesn't Have To Be, Victim of Love, Chains of Love, and A Little Respect, among many other singles that have, since 1985, propelled them to record sales of 25 million worldwide. Openly out while others cowered, Andy appeared on many gay charity albums like Red Hot + Blue, events like Red Hot + Dance, the True Colors Tour, the No H8 photo campaign, and he's headlining St Louis Pride in June. Though the Brit lives in Spain, the day of the US Supreme Court's DOMA hearing, he tweeted the video of A Little Respect. Middling interest in Erasure's recent albums of 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2011, have led to... a Christmas album coming in November. Andy is 49 today. His partner of 25+ years, Paul Hickey, died at 62 last April.

Born April 24: Patty Schemel

You think Courtney was the only complicated chick in Hole? Drummer Patty Schemel refused to take part in the March 1994 intervention to get Kurt off drugs because she was addicted to heroin and didn't want to be hypocrite. (Patty had been Kurt's first choice to replace Nirvana's original drummer Chad Channing, until Kurt heard Dave Grohl's audition, when she was bumped to second choice.) Famously, she split from Hole before their recording of Celebrity Skin -- maybe because of the drugs, maybe because the producer wanted her gone -- but she still appears on the album cover because she co-wrote many of the songs, even though she doesn't perform them. She was supposed to be in the video for the first single, but didn't show up. That break didn't end her relationship with Courtney. Later they formed the short-lived band Bastard, and she co-wrote and performed song's on Courtney's solo album America's Sweetheart. Patty lives with her wife Christina Soletti and their daughter in Los Angeles.

Patty is the subject of the documentary Hit So Hard, which features interviews with all four Hole members. Its premiere at New Directors New Films got them all in same room together for the first time in thirteen years. Director David Ebersole's next doc is about Cher's mom, Georgia Holt, which premieres on Lifetime next week, May 6.

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.

Behind the Candelabra

Finally, the full trailer. It airs on HBO on May 26.