Band of Thebes

Tracey Thorn's Bedsit Disco Queen

Everything But the Girl, the gay man's motto. And, for a while, every queer's favorite British duo. Lead singer Tracey Thorn's memoir Bedsit Disco Queen: How I Grew Up and Tried to Be a Pop Star is out today from Virago:

"A frank and funny pop culture memoir in the vein of Caitlin Moran's How to be a Woman, this is "how to be a woman artist"

Tracey Thorn, one half of the internationally successful group Everything But the Girl, collaborator with such artists as Paul Weller, Massive Attack, and dance legend Todd Terry, was only 16 when she bought an electric guitar and joined a band. A year later, she formed an all-girl band called the Marine Girls, played gigs, signed to an indie label, and started releasing records. Then, for 18 years, between 1982 and 2000, she was one half of Everything But the Girl. They released nine albums and sold nine million records, went on countless tours, had hits and flops, and were reviewed and interviewed to within an inch of their lives. Tracey has been in the charts, out of them, back in. She's seen herself described as an indie darling, a middle-of-the-road nobody, and a disco diva. As she explains here, she hasn't always fit in, a fact that's helped her to face up to the realities of a pop career. She discusses her realizations—that there are thrills and wonders to be experienced, but also moments of doubt, mistakes, and violent lifestyle changes from luxury to squalor and back again, sometimes within minutes. This is the funny, perceptive, and candid story of her 30-year pop career."

Clive Davis' Memoir: Boyfriends, Bisexuality, Big Stars

In an announcement even longer delayed and less surprising than Jodie Foster's, hitmaker Clive Davis has finally, officially come out in his new memoir The Soundtrack of My Life [Kindle], six weeks shy of his 81st birthday. The producing powerhouse who founded Arista Records and J Records, Davis signed or managed superstars Janis Joplin, Laura Nyro, Santana, Bruce Springsteen, Chicago, Billy Joel, Pink Floyd, Earth Wind & Fire, Aerosmith, Aretha Franklin, Dionne Warwick, Patti Smith, Air Supply, Barry Manilow, Alicia Keys, TLC, Usher, Pink, Outkast, Eurythmics, Annie Lennox, Alan Jackson, and of course Whitney Houston, among dozens of others. He is currently Chief Creative Officer of Sony Music Group, with flagship labels Columbia, RCA, and Epic. Online databases peg his net worth at $800 million. 

The twice-married father of four says he's been dating men for decades. He's been with his current partner for eight years and before that had a fourteen-year relationship with a (male) doctor.

One of several upcoming projects is relaunching My Fair Lady on Broadway. He wants Anne Hathaway and Colin Firth.

The LA Times' critic says the book is "filled with fantastic scenes and revelations" but short on the business of the music industry.

Lesbian Autobiography Beats Clinton, Obama for Spoken Word Grammy

In a surprise vote, Bill Clinton (Back to Work), Michelle Obama (American Grown), Rachel Maddow (Drift), and Ellen DeGeneres (Seriously...I'm Kidding) lost last night's Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album to by far the least-known of the five nominees, lesbian folkie Janis Ian for her new reading of her 2008 memoir Society's Child: My Autobiography [Kindle]. The story covers her music and early fame, of course, as well as her bad marriage to a brilliant but abusive man, her coming out in 1993, and her happy marriage to a woman, Patricia Snyder, celebrating their tenth anniversary this year.

Out gay Frank Ocean's much-nominated channel ORANGE won only Best Urban Contemporary Album. He lost Best New Artist to FUN. Jay-Z and Kanye won Best Rap Collaboration for "No Church in the Wild" which also features Frank Ocean.

John Gordon's Colour Scheme

Not getting enough "gay urban Afro-boho interracial romance" in your literary diet? John Gordon's new novel Colour Scheme [Kindle] will do the trick. According to his publisher, the story unfolds "over one sweaty summer following a night of shocking violence in a post-9/11 London of vinyl records, video-cassettes and mix-tapes, seething with passion and oil-paint, music and dance. Meet bebop-cool Malcolm, wigger rudeboy Luke, Jamaican choreographer George and schizophrenic African artist Ziggy, seekers for love, on the run from buried truths that by the summer's end they all must face. Murder, bereavement, Vodou, twins and madness: new love on the rack. Will it survive?"

You probably know John Gordon best for his work on the tv show Noah's Arc and the feature Noah's Arc: Jumping the Broom, but this is his fifth novel. Exactly a year ago he published his high-octane story of a Jamaican raggae producer chased by gangstas in London, Faggamuffin [Kindle]. His 1993 debut, Black Butterflies, is a healing romance between Wesley and Paul in south London. His second novel Skin Deep, follows best friends Ray (into white guys) and Chris (into leather). His third novel Warriors and Outlaws explores a broader canvas of London life as the young leader of the Panther Posse with political aspirations, Jazz, shoots a policeman and hides out with a drag queen he has previously ignored named Carly.

Is it interesting or irrelevant to know John Gordon is white and lives in Shepherd's Bush? He has been nominated for an NAACP Image Award and won a New London Writers' Award. National Book Award finalist Susan Straight is another white author who in eight novels has written exclusively about protagonists who are black (seven books) or Latino (one).

   

Two Too Gay: Liberace, Larry Kramer Movies Won't Get Theatrical Release

Despite top stars (Michael Douglas, Matt Damon above / Julia Roberts, Mark Ruffalo) and big directors (Steven Soderbergh / Ryan Murphy), two long-gestating queer films, Behind the Candelabra and Larry Kramer's aids drama The Normal Heart, have failed to find studio backing and won't be released as features. The reason is they're "too gay."

Kramer's play debuted in 1985 and for years Barbra Streisand was going to make the movie version. In 2011 The Normal Heart was announced as a feature directed by out wiz Ryan Murphy, costarring Alec Baldwin and Jim Parsons, and co-produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B, but the funding fizzled.

Soderbergh, who is straight and retiring this year so less shy about burning his bridges, unloaded on Hollywood's homophobia in his efforts to finance the Liberace biopic: "Nobody would make it. We went to everybody in town. They all said it was too gay. And this is after ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ by the way, which is not as funny as this movie. I was stunned. It made no sense to any of us." He added, "Studios were going, 'We don't know how to sell it.' They were scared."

For some thoughts on Soderbergh's indignation, see the following post.

Both movies have been picked up by HBO, where they will get a lot of attention, a lot of award nominations, and limited viewership. Behind the Candelabra airs this spring, The Normal Heart in 2014.

Born January 8: Winnaretta Singer, David Bowie

Isaac Merritt Singer, father of the modern sewing machine, also sired 24 children, the 20th of whom was music patron and lesbian Winnaretta Singer. When Isaac made his first fortune of $200,000 in 1839 with an invention that drilled rock, he retired and returned to acting, touring with his own theater troupe for five years. In 1849 he developed a wood carving machine and in 1851 he obtained a patent for improvements on someone else's unwieldy sewing apparatus. Winnaretta was born in Yonkers, but the family soon moved to Paris, then to London, before settling in Devon where Isaac built a 115-room mansion modeled on the Petit Trianon at Versailles. When she was ten her father died and their mother moved them back to Paris, where, in her late teens, Winnaretta was open about her lesbian relationships. At 22 she married Prince Louis de Scey-Montbéliard and within hours established a no-sex rule: On their wedding night she is said to have climbed atop an armoire and informed her surprised husband that she would kill him if he came nearer. She continued her affairs with women and within five years their marriage was annulled. Among her many lovers were goddaughter (or daughter) of Edward VII, Olga de Meyer, painter Romaine Brooks, pianist Renata Borgatti, and novelist Violet Trefusis.

When she was 29 Winnaretta agreed to marry happily and platonicly the 59 year-old Prince Edmond de Polignac who shared her deepest love of music and, it seems, her homosexuality. Their famous salon in their mansion on what is today Avenue Georges-Mandel hosted first performances of new work by Debussy, Fauré, and Ravel with frequent guests Proust, Cocteau, Colette, Diaghilev, Monet, and Isadora Duncan, who had a baby by one of Winnaretta's brothers. Eight years into their marriage, the prince died and Winnaretta commissioned more than seven compositions in his honor including works by Stravinsky, Satie, and Weill. Winnaretta played the piano and organ, and she painted, but her greatest contributions to the arts were as patron to individuals, ballets, operas, and symphonies. In 1911 she built a public housing project and during WWI she and Marie Curie transformed private limousines into rolling radiology units to aid the injured at the front. Born in New York during the Civil War she died in London during WWII, in 1943 at 78 living with her lover Alvilde Chaplin, 34. Winnaretta is included in Diana Souhami's Wild Girls: Paris, Sappho, and Art and is the subject of Sylvia Kahan's biography Music's Modern Muse.

Light years ahead of the pack in his androgyny, bisexuality, theatricality, and his music, David Bowie today turns 66 and releases his first single in 10 years, Where Are We Now?, a midtempo lament, below. His legendary Carnegie Hall debut in 1972 was only his third show ever in the U.S. The critic Robert Christgau called Bowie "an English fairy" and complained that songs like "Andy Warhol" weren't manly enough for American rockers. Of course, Bowie had sunk to his knees in front of guitarist Mick Ronson and simulated oral sex. Bowie's son Duncan, 42 this year, directed the movies Moon and Source Code. Bowie's daughter Lexi is 12.

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

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

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

 

 

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

Frank Ocean: Man of the Year, Album of the Year & Six Grammy Noms

Remember last July 4 when 25 year-old New Orleans R&B hip-hop singer Frank Ocean came out -- via tumblr, of course -- and you said, Who? Understandable, because his debut album Channel Orange didn't come out until a week later. Last month it was voted Album of the Year at the Soul Train Awards, and by the music critics at USA Today, and now the album has topped the UK's 12th annual Poll of Polls (Jack White was second, Tame Impala third). Earlier this month Ocean was named MTV's Man of the Year. Channel Orange is nominated for six Grammys, including Album of the Year, Best New Artist, Best Urban Contemporary, and Record of the Year for this gay song, "Thinking About You."

Born December 5: Little Richard

He's 80 today. The straight, white gods 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.

Born November 29: Peter Cameron, Billy Strayhorn, Simon Amstell

Not to imply that movie adaptations are the ultimate yardstick of artistic merit but of Peter Cameron's six novels, three have been made into feature films. The stories he tells resonate deeply with other types of storytellers. And with readers. And with critics. The New York Times Book Review said, "The Weekend [Kindle] echoes Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose brilliant narrative critiques of material culture open, again and again, to the metaphysical, to that dimension where the known world cedes to mystery." The London Times wrote, "If The City of Your Final Destination were eligible for the Man Booker Prize I would be pressing for it to be on the shortlist. It has all the qualities currently undervalued on the literary scene: understatement, humour, and a dispensing with pedestrian naturalism... it has the dream-like mistiness of somewhere in one of Shakespeare's late plays." The Philadelphia Inquirer hailed Andorra [Kindle] as "a nearly perfect book . . . a work of remarkable and sustained invention and imagination." The Toronto Star said Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You [Kindle] is "considerably more sophisticated, subtle, and rewarding" than Catcher in the Rye. Peter has also written a play, two marvelous collections of short stories, and in his spare time he publishes extremely elegant handmade books in very limited editions at his Wallflower Press. His ravishing sixth novel, Coral Glynn [Kindle], is a top favorite on this year's queer lit poll. Tuesday night he stabbed my heart with an icicle, announcing two years after finishing Coral he still has no ideas for his next novel.

Jazz genius Billy Strayhorn spent his life in a jam: professionally, he couldn’t live with or without Duke Ellington. Gay in an intolerant time and homophobic musical subculture, he was lucky to be able to live and work openly behind the protective band leader. Yet Ellington took credit for Strayhorn’s music and made him work without a contract. Duke’s highest earning number, his signature tune, the holy grail of the era, Take the A Train, was, unknown to everyone at the time, written by Strayhorn, who never received any royalties. Ellington got rich. Strayhorn worked mainly to be able to work, without recognition or reward. But what work it is: Lush Life, Day Dream, Rain Check, Satin Doll, Chelsea Bridge, Lotus Blossom, Clementine, Johnny Come Lately, and many songs recorded by his dear friend Lena Horne, including Maybe, Something To Live For, and the double-edged Love Like This Can’t Last. As for his own “love like this,” within his first year in New York he and his boyfriend Aaron Bridgers moved in together and lived openly as a couple in Harlem, brave for 1940, when he was twenty-four. And, after a life of heavy drinking and constant smoking, when he died of cancer of the esophagus at fifty-one, he died not in Lena Horne’s arms as an oft-repeated story has it [she was in Europe], but with his partner Bill Grove. Although that was two years before Stonewall, Strayhorn worked in the early gay rights movement. Proving the depth of the prejudice he struggled against, even now the official Billy Strayhorn website completely de-gays him. We've had the prestigious biography for fifteen years; where is the Hollywood biopic?

Do you think Simon Amstell knew he was gay before or after he knew he was funny? At fourteen he appeared on a British morning chat show impersonating Dame Edna. The sweetness and malice stuck. Now 32, Simon's humor is sometimes branded "mean" or "horrible." (He prefers "cheeky.") True, he teased Amy Winehouse about her drinking, but as the host of Popworld from 2000 to 2006 he was often criticized for asking famous singers exactly what viewers wanted to know. One "notorious" incident was when Britney Spears appeared on the show long after rehab, court hearings to determine her stability, and public displays of erratic behavior, like shaving her head. Simon asked if she thought she'd "gone a bit nuts?" Britney cried, and people attacked Simon. To closeted Savage Garden singer Darren Hayes, Simon asked, "So, when are you going to come out, then?" Hayes said, "Excuse me?" Simon said, "You're obviously gay. Why won't you come out?" This was cut from the aired version. Hayes calls the incident pivotal in his finally coming out two years later and still refers to Simon as a "total prick." From October 2006 to January 2009, he hosted the comedy quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, winning top category prizes from the Royal Television Society, the British Comedy Awards, and the Broadcast Awards. The Times named the show (during Simon's era) one of the best forty programs of the decade. In 2010 he co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in Grandma's House, an award-winning sitcom in which his hapless, neurotic, adorable character, a former quiz show host named Simon, returns to live with his cheerful, middle class family. It's now filming its second season.

Below, John Barrowman challenges him to a gay-off on Buzzcocks and a clip from Grandma's House. Click through for cheekier clips lampooning acting coaches and Ben Whishaw.

 

Born November 2: Luchino Visconti, k.d. lang

Born a count in one of northern Italy's six richest families, Luchino Visconti was adrift until he was thirty, when Coco Chanel decided he should work in movies and got him a job as third assistant director on a film by Jean Renoir. His own debut as a director came after seven years, during which time he learned the trade and dated the photographer Horst. Of his twenty films, most praised are The Leopard, The Damned, The Stranger, Rocco and his Brothers, with its open subplot of the boxing coach who pays young fighters for sex, and Death in Venice, from Thomas Mann's #1 of the all-time 100 best lgbt books. At sixty-nine, Visconti died of a heart attack in Rome, survived by his partner of more than ten years German actor Helmet Berger, who appeared in four of Visconti's films, most notably The Damned and Ludwig. (And here bare.) Sandy Leonard, who knows about such things, says Visconti worked through his opening-night jitters at Covent Garden by making out in an elevator with Alain Delon. 

 

Before Melissa, before Ellen, before George Michael, before Adam, before Ricky, k.d. lang came out way back in 1992. Although that was fairly groundbreaking at the time, her coming out did nothing to hinder the sales of her multi-platinum album Ingenue, nor did it prevent her from winning another Grammy, being made an officer of the Order of Canada, or getting named to VH1's 100 Greatest Women in Rock n Roll and CMT's 40 Greatest Women in Country Music. In fact, she sparked a much angrier backlash in rural areas by supporting a vegetarian campaign called Meat Stinks. From 1997 to 2000 she took a break, fell in love with The Murmurs singer Leisha Hailey, moved to Los Angeles, and came back with her happiest album, Invincible Summer. Three years later she won her fourth Grammy for her collaboration with Tony Bennett and also released an album of covers by Canadian composers. Last year she released Sing It Loud, a cd with her Siss Boom Band, and appeared on Tony Bennett's Duets II, doing "Blue Velvet."

Cyndi Lauper on Abuse, Suicide, Queer Support, Madonna, More

It's been 29 years this week since She's So Unusual, and she still is. In her new book Cyndi Lauper: A Memoir [Kindle] she reveals she was assaulted by a bandmember, his girlfriend, and the girlfriend's sister, and she stayed in the band. After her huge success, and her failure to sustain it, she considered killing herself. She has rainbow hair, she sang about Blueboy magazine, of course she loves The Gays! She started her True Colors Tour and True Colors Fund to get you some rights, dammit. Oh, and she says Madonna sped up the vocals on "Like a Virgin" to sound like her. Next June during Pride, she'll be 60.

Asked about her fierce queer advocacy she said,"Because I'm a friend and family member, okay? Because I'm not gonna stand by one of my best friends and watch them be discriminated against and have all their civil liberties stripped down -- or my sister or my cousin or whoever -- and just stand there and shut up. Up to 40% of the kids on the street are gay or transgender and they're only on the street because they're gay or transgender. We figured that is fixable. We could fix that. We could get that better."

One thing she's not, is Patti Smith. Cyndi's publisher Atria has done her no favors by aping the jacket of the National Book Award winner Just Kids. Don't they know she's an original?

Feinstein's Memoir Addresses George Gershwin's Gay Life

For six years in his twenties Michael Feinstein was personal assistant / cataloger / surrogate son to Ira Gershwin and his wife, and now, at 56, he's written The Gershwins and Me: A Personal History in Twelve Songs [Kindle]. Feinstein is a noted archivist and surely the highlight of the new book must be the trove of Ira's memories from the heydey of The Great American Songbook, some of which are captured here for the first time. On yesterday's Fresh Air, Feinstein discussed another aspect of his memoir:

"There have always been rumors circulating about George's sexuality, and I addressed it because so many people have asked me about it, and it's important to the gay community to identify famous personalities as being gay. In the case of George, it's all rather mysterious because I never encountered any man who claimed to have a relationship with George, but a lot of innuendo.

"Yet Simone Simon said that she thought that Gershwin must be gay because when they were on a trip together, he never laid a hand on her, she said. Cecelia Ager, who was a very close friend of George's and whose husband Milton Ager was George's roommate, once at the dinner said, well, of course, you know, George was gay.

"And Milton said: Cecilia, how can you say that, how can you say that? And she just looked at him and said: Milton, you don't know anything."

Feinstein also says that although Ira was perfectly accepting of his friends, including Michael, being gay, the first recording he heard of the SF Gay Men's Chorus performing "The Man I Love" made him "very uncomfortable" and he asked for it to be turned off. 

The hardcover of Michael's book comes with a CD of him singing the twelve songs of the subtitle, which include "Strike Up the Band," "'S Wonderful," "I've Got a Crush on You," "They All Laughed," "Someone to Watch Over Me," "Embraceable You," "Who Cares?," "I Got Plenty of Nuthin'," "They Can't Take Than Away from Me," "I Got Rhythm," and "Love Is Here to Stay."

His book is currently outselling Tuesday's other big gay releases, Camille Paglia's Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars [Kindle] and Daniel Mendelsohnn's Waiting for the Barbarians [Kindle].

Bettye LaVette Discusses 30 Years of Sex with Women

If only all R&B singers / celebrities / married people / senior citizens were as open and offhand about their same-sex relationships as Bettye LaVette is. The Grammy nominee is marking 50 years in the music business with the release this week of her new album Thankful N' Thoughtful and her first book, A Woman Like Me [Kindle], in which she discusses her lesbian affairs. Typical of her breezy, brassy style is the chapter, "Groupies Who Sang." On its first page she writes, "I was in my dressing room, angry that James Brown didn't want me to close my set with Let Me Down Easy because I was getting too much applause." On the second page Tammi [Terrell] confronts her with a handgun. On the third page, Bettye's "producer-pimp" suggests she have sex with Cindy Wharton, "a stunning woman." On the fourth page, fueled by the twin encouragements of money and cocaine, they do it while he watches:

"...But I did it, and I liked it. I liked it well enough that Cindy was in my life for the next thirty years. We'd have our boyfriends and husbands. We'd live our separate lives, but if we were in the same city on the same night, we'd get together.

     "My dalliances with women just sort of happened. I've never had hangups about sex, an area where I've felt fortunately free. In the case of women, once the sex was over, it was over. It never turned to romance. The friendship with Cindy, though, remained strong. She and I had some wild adventures."

She was equally forthcoming last night when I saw her at Union Square and took this picture. 

People have been continually re/discovering LaVette since at least 2003. Another breakthrough was her 2008 performance of Love Reign O'er Me at the Kennedy Center Honors, where Barbra Streisand and Pete Townsend nodded along oh so whitely. That appearance led to A Change Is Gonna Come, her duet with Jon Bon Jovi at Obama's inauguration. The NYT says, "Ms. LaVette now rivals Aretha Franklin as her generation’s most vital soul singer. She uses every scrape, shout and break in her raspy voice, with a predator’s sense of timing, to seize the drama of a song."

Halberstam on Creative Mayhem and the Collapse of Heterosexuality

A year after The Queer Art of Failure, theorist Judith/Jack Halberstam is back with Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal [Kindle] again shredding the heteronormative straight-jacket. Halberstam argues the increasing number of women living alone, men avoiding marriage, pop culture bromances, pregnant men, gay marriage, and queers raising kids all signal the flaming end of heterosexuality. And from those tired ashes will rise freer sexualities and more fluid genders. It's a Gaga world.

Says Halberstam, "In this book I am building on the potentiality of failure to say that if marriage, long-term relationships, the couple form and family itself are all failing as social forms, then instead of grieving their collapse, we should revel in the new opportunities for relationality, connection and kinship that are suddenly and startlingly available to us in the world today."

USC News reports "In large part, the book examines how mass media is struggling to keep up, broadcasting conflicting messages about how men and women are supposed to act, love, marry and raise children. It’s all becoming more liquid "because the social forms that held all those categories in place are dissolving." Halberstam added, "We’re basically going to have an opposition in this country not between gay and straight but between traditional, monogamous households and alternative ones. And, frankly, the alternative ones will probably eventually outnumber the traditional ones."

Out lesbian, author, and New Yorker staffer Ariel Levy says the book is a "provocative and pleasurable romp through contemporary gender politics... as fun as it is illuminating."

This Saturday at 4:30pm, Halberstam reads at Bluestockings, 172 Allen St., NYC.

Born September 19: Brian Epstein

After the Beatles were honored with an MBE in 1965, George Harrison said the initials stood for Mister Brian Epstein. Later Paul McCartney said, "If anyone was the Fifth Beatle, it was Brian." The gay, Jewish Liverpudlian had been an acting student at RADA with Peter O"Toole and Albert Finney but quit soon after his arrest for "persistent importuning" at a well-known cottaging site. He was 27 in January 1962 when the unknown John, Paul, George, and Ringo signed a contract for Brian to manage them. With zero previous management experience, he developed their onstage look and demeanor, including their collarless German suits and their signature synchronized bow. More importantly, after every major label in London turned them down, he got them a contract with George Martin at EMI's Parlophone. Epstein also managed several other acts, including Cilla Black ("Anyone Who Had a Heart") and Gerry & the Pacemakers. Fans are divided over whether or not his intense relationship with John was sexual; their famous trip to Barcelona was potrayed in the movie The Hours and Times. In August 1967, while the Beatles were in Wales with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Brian took his usual six Carbitral pills to help him sleep but, mixed with alcohol, the dose killed him. His death, at 32, was ruled accidental. That same summer homosexuality was finally decriminalized in England and Wales. Needless to say, Brian did not discuss his gay affairs in his 1965 autobiography A Cellarful of Noise [Kindle $5.99], which clever John said should be called A Cellarful of Boys. For a more revealing look, try In My Life: The Brian Epstein Story [IKindle].

Born September 12: Leslie Cheung, Chip Kidd

Leslie Cheung was a pop superstar, a movie idol, and he had a loving boyfriend named Hok-Tak Tong, so his millions of fans were stunned on April 1, 2003 to learn he had jumped off a twenty-fourth floor balcony of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in Hong Kong. His suicide dominated the headlines of Asian tabloids for more than a month, searching every aspect of his life for clues. The youngest of ten children of a Kowloon tailor, he was educated in England and returned to Hong Kong to sing. He released more than twenty-five very successful albums and his hit “Monica” was named Song of the Century. Two years after his death, China Central Television named him The Most Favorite Actor In 100 Years of Chinese Cinema for his work with directors John Woo, Kaige Chen, and Wong Kar-Wai, among others. Unlike many closeted actors in America, Cheung enthusiastically played gay characters, notably in two of his most famous films, Farewell, My Concubine and Happy Together. He came out in 1997 and his career thrived. His albums from that year on were extremely popular, as were his concerts, and many of his movies. He tried to kill himself in 2002 and succeeded the next year, when he was forty-six. His suicide note read,

"Depression! Many thanks to all my friends. Many thanks to Professor Felice Lieh-Mak [his psychiatrist]. This year has been so tough. I can't stand it anymore. Many thanks to Mr. Tong. Many thanks to my family. Many thanks to Fei-Fei. In my life I did nothing bad. Why does it have to be like this?"

Last year graphic designer Chip Kidd celebrated 25 years working at Knopf, notable because today he turns 48. In addition to creating many of the era's most iconic book jackets (Jurassic Park, American Psycho, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle), he is also an editor-at-large for Pantheon. A lifelong Batman fanatic, he has written many books about cartooning, including Peanuts: The Art of Charles M. Schulz, Mythology: The DC Comics Art of Alex Ross, Shazam!: The Golden Age of the World's Mightiest Mortal, Jack Cole and Plastic Man, Batman Animated, Batman Collected, and Bat-Manga!: The Secret History of Batman in Japan. He has also written two novels about a gay graphic designer, The Cheese Monkeys and The Learners. But he deserves to be punished for co-authoring with Lisa Birnbach last year's sequel to the Preppy Handbook, True Prep: It's a Whole New Old World. In his spare time, he blogs a lot and fronted the band Artbreak, whose song "Asymmetrical Girl" plays after the jump. So far this year Kidd's given a TED talk about book design garnering half a million views and he's published his first graphic novel, Batman: Death by Design. Unless they've split, he and super poet J.D. "Sandy" McClatchy, 67, are longtime partners, living in Manhattan, Stonington, CT, and Palm Beach.

Born September 5: Freddie Mercury

Whose band has spent more weeks on the UK album charts than any other musical act, meaning more than the Beatles, Pink Floyd, or the Rolling Stones? Who wrote the song chosen by the Guinness Book of Records poll as the greatest song of all time? Who wrote a different song chosen as the best ever by another major poll conducted by Sony? That’s right, Farrokh Bulsara, born in Zanzibar. As founder and frontman of Queen he wrote most of their hits including those two greatest, Bohemian Rhapsody and We Are the Champions. The band is said to have sold more than 300 million albums worldwide. Never a darling of the critical press, Queen was universally considered to be electrifying in concert, in part because of their high camp and theatrics, but also because of Mercury’s mighty four-octave range and mesmerizing flair. They were the first band ever to play South American stadiums and the first to play behind the Iron Curtain (in Budapest), yet they also played Sun City, which put them on the United Nations’ blacklist. Their gig at Live Aid 1985 was later voted by music industry honchos to be the greatest live performance in the history of rock. Below, watch one gay man —in complete clone gear, ultra tight jeans, tank top, and studded armband proudly signaling that the pop charts are the only thing he’ll top—transfix 72,000 people and get all of them waving and singing in unison.
       Exuberantly gay in everything his band did from its name onward, Mercury was not out offstage. He also tried to hide his one-hundred-percent Indian ethnicity—both his parents were Parsis from India—even from his bandmates, and he denied having HIV, for which he tested positive in 1987—until the day before his death on November 24, 1991, when he was 45.

Stephen Frears, who has worked complex gay themes in My Beautiful Laundrette and Prick Up Your Ears, as well as regal Brits in The Queen, is set to direct the biopic starring Sacha Baron Cohen slated to start filming next year. In June NME reported that Katy Perry wants to play Mercury's longtime beard Mary Austin, to whom he left his mansion, noticeably not his partner Jim Hutton who died in 2010. Brace yourself for a globally mainstream story that will likely portray the girlfriend as his one good stable relationship, and his stray gay wanderings as what killed him.  

How To Be Gay by David Halperin

David Halperin says he wrote his new book How To Be Gay, out this week from Harvard, to "make clear the genuineness of the intellectual stakes in [his] inquiry into gay male culture." 

PW: Halperin argues "there’s far more to gay male American identity than a same-sex preference. Halperin interprets gayness through traditional pop culture preoccupations like golden age Hollywood, opera, and Broadway musicals, focusing on Joan Crawford (in particular her role in Mildred Pierce) and Faye Dunaway’s notoriously over-the-top portrayal of the star in Mommie Dearest. Identifying the source of the camp appeal exerted by these ostensibly serious films, Halperin asks why gay men continue to be drawn to coded representations of their experience. He arrives at an apologia for such clichéd signposts of gayness in an era of domestic partnerships and Born This Way. Halperin persuasively defuses charges of misogyny lobbed against gay male culture, but may alienate some by too narrowly defining his vision of what that culture should be. Nonetheless, this book should appeal to specialists and general readers alike with its academically rigorous but accessible argument."

Sarah Schulman says: "Distinguished scholar David Halperin's long-awaited manifesto delivers on its promise. Macho, faggy, queeny, butch diva, opera-swilling, Broadway-loving, gourmet, sex-fascinated, beauty-appreciating, love-desiring, rough trade, high art, race- and class-inflected but not exclusive, generationally situated but not entirely, intellectual, open-hearted, politically minded, leather chaps! Mary!"

Mark Simpson writes: "I've always been a big fan of Joan Crawford, Judy Garland, and Doris Day. Though it was a secret, shameful love. David Halperin's wonderful, wildly ambitious masterpiece has given me the courage to come out about it. And even tell the golden daffodils. As Halperin eloquently explains, desire into identity will not go, even with plenty of poppers and lube. What's more, the dignified, proper, and very particular gay identity really doesn't deserve the giddy, gushing, world-grabbing gay sensibility. And vice versa."

Rockumentary of Openly Gay "American Bowie" Jobriath

Although selling Jobriath as an "American Bowie" was wishful thinking, the story of openly "fairy" glam rocker Jobraith in 1973 and 1974 should make a fascinating documentary. Jim Farber, a talking head in the film, which screens Saturday night at Walter Reade, writes in today's Daily News:

"Jobriath (ne Bruce Wayne Campbell) recorded two albums in 1973 and ’74 that both benefited, and suffered, from historic hype. As you might expect from an aspiring rocker of the day, his albums sounded like David Bowie aping Mick Jagger, but with enough classical and theatrical flourishes to give it an original twist. Many New Yorkers of the era will remember the garish advertizing for Jobriath’s self-titled debut. Gigantic posters of the man not only adorned city buses, they occupied a looming billboard in Times Square, depicting him as an ancient Roman statue, dyed blue, and in the nude, no less.

"Suffice it to say, they were as discussed, and giggled over, as the muscled Marky Mark posters that appeared in that same space, courtesy of Calvin Klein, more than two decades later.

"Music fans may also remember the star’s famous self-description - “I’m rock’s truest fairy,” a banner meant to distinguish him from the rush of pseudo-gay, and faux-bisexual, stars who ruled the glam-rock trend of the early to mid-’70s.

"The original idea was to provide a more outrageous, U.S. answer to the sexually equivocating David Bowie, a notion advanced by Jobriath’s scheming manager, Jerry Brandt.

"The P.R. backfired spectacularly, not only because America wasn’t quite ready for such a creature, but also because of the hard sell behind it. Though Jobriath crafted his inventive music with esteemed classic rock producer Eddie Kramer, and while he got good reviews from Rolling Stone, Esquire spoke for many when it dubbed him “the hype of the year.”

(Hat tip and thanks to J "Ziggy" K.)