Band of Thebes

Bob Mould's Memoir "See a Little Light"

Is the world still full of Hüsker Dü [or Sugar?] fans, or is the mainstream media just hungry for a memoir by an 80s [90s] indie star who knew he was gay at age five but hid his sexuality from most people until his 30s? On sale today, Bob Mould's See a Little Light: The Trail of Rage and Melody [[Kindle]] is getting widespread, favorable coverage for his backstage stories and tales of sleeping with men from every branch of the military. After two longterm relationships he gives in to his more promiscuous side and describes himself as a "thoughtful whore" ready with an eternal family pack of Costco toothbrushes. Also, he gets high and throws knives with William S Burroughs in Kansas.

NYT: "an audacious and moving account of Mr. Mould’s coming of age as a (mostly closeted) gay man in the macho alternative rock scene of the 1980s and 1990s. The book is impressive, too, for its author’s radical unwillingness to ingratiate himself. He was famously severe onstage; mostly, that’s what he is here."

LAT: "Thorny, earnest and intense, he nonetheless elicits sympathy as he figures out how to deal with people and with his own nature."

Washington Post: "captures Husker Du’s sonic gravity and its notorious infighting in fine detail. But it also recounts the traumatic childhood that came before and the fascinating career that came after — one in which Mould would leap from project to project with a fearlessness that belies the anxi­eties that mutated out of his struggles with his family, his addictions and his sexuality."

Minneapolis Star-Tribune: "He had a steady live-in boyfriend in Minneapolis through much of the 1980s, when his band Husker Du was making a name for itself, but Mould said his gayness was “an open secret” at that time, something that he neither hid nor advertised. Mould’s reluctance to be openly gay in his twenties and early thirties stemmed less from being in a hardcore rock world that he claimed was macho but not homophobic, and more from “my own ignorance,” skewed portrayals of gays in the media that made him feel he didn't belong, and a Catholic small-town upbringing in upstate New York. Those factors, along with the AIDS crisis, led Mould to “hate the fact that I was gay.”"

Happily into his third longterm relationship, Mould lives in San Francisco and djs around the country.

The Lonely Island Gets Gayer

A funny thing is happening to Andy Samberg's spoof trio The Lonely Island. They earned a Grammy nomination for their highly self-evident single I'm on a Boat, and they really and truly won an Emmy for their seminal work with Justin Timberlake, Dick in a Box. (Their more semenal Jizz in My Pants has shot up to 103 million views on YouTube.) Their brand-new sophomore and sophomoric effort Turtleneck & Chain burst onto the Billboard album chart at #3, the highest debut of the week. Predictably, the border between farce and legitimacy is ever harder to delineate. Their fresh collaborations with Akon, Beck, Rihanna, Snoop Dogg, Justin Timberlake, Nicki Minaj, and Michael Bolton are sort of indistinguishable from those artists' real songs. You'll be glad to know John Waters makes an appearance, too. And, if possible, the always phallic-friendly trio has gotten gayer. The final track is No Homo which, of couse, reveals the total gayness of the guy using the phrase in every line. The lyrics:

Hey man.
Hey.
Dude you're looking pretty swoll, you been working out?
Uh yeah, why are you looking?
Oh no, not like that man, I mean, no homo.
Ohhh no homo.
Cool
When you want to compliment a friend (no homo)
But you don't want that friendship to end (no homo)
To tell a dude just how you feel (no homo)
Say 'no homo' so he knows the deal (no homo)
Hey yo man you got a fresh style (no homo)
And you know you got the best smile (no homo)
Your girlfriend is a lucky lady (no homo)
With your looks you'll make a handsome baby (no homo)
I like the way your shoulders fill out that shirt (no homo)
It's hard to pull off but you make it work (no homo)
Hey yo I kinda like your natural scent (no homo)
Hey yo I kinda like the musical RENT (no homo)
Man I can't decide who wore it best (no homo)
But I'm feeling Diane Keaton's vest (no homo)
I admit it I'm a fashionista (no homo)
And I know every line of Mystic Pizza (no homo)
Damn this rose is something special (no homo)
Yeah, we should goof around and wrestle (no homo)

Let's hit the hot tub and take a dunk (no homo)
We're all friends ain't no need for trunks (no homo)
Man I'm really feeling buzzed right now (no homo)
Are you really feeling buzzed right now? (no homo)
Yo we should watch this gay porno tape (no homo)
But as a joke cause we're all straight (no homo)
Man you could wash laundry on those abs (no homo)
Yo I think girls look good in drag (no homo)
Hey I've been thinking about posing nude (no homo)
Yo I've been thinking about fucking a dude (no homo)
We could 3-way 69 (no homo)
Or human centipede in a line (no homo)
Or some docking could be hella fun ( no homo)
Oh yeah man or I could do this one (no homo)
Hey yo no homo but I wanna dress up like Dorothy
and butt fuck a dude while he 69s Morrissey(?)
No homo but I wish I lived in Ancient Greece
To gave young Socrates the illful release
Hey yo no homo but today I'm coming out the closet
Wanna scream it from the mountains like a gay prophet
These two words have set me free (no homo)
Damn it feels good to be (no homo)

EuroWinners: Terrence Malick, Kirsten Dunst, and Azerbaijan

Catching up on two European prizes at opposite ends of the arts spectrum: the Cannes jury awarded its Palme d'Or to the Brad Pitt-Sean Penn family epic The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick and best actress award once again to a suffering woman in a Lars von Trier film, this time Kirsten Dunst in Melancholia. Full Cannes winners here. Best actor was France's Jean Dujardin, 38, and best director Denmark's Nicolas Winding Refn for "Drive" set in Los Angeles and starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan. Meanwhile, Azerbaijan won the all-important Eurovision Song contest thanks to Ell & Nikki's duet "Running Scared." Second place was Italy's Raphael Gualazzi, 29, with "Follia D'Amore" and third place Sweden's Eric Saade, 20, with "Popular" below. Another of Eric's songs is "Manboy."

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 thirty-seven, 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 fifty-one, he was the conductor at the opening night of Carnegie Hall. When he died, at fifty-three, sixty thousand people applied for tickets to his funeral, which for only the third time in Russian history was paid for by the Tsar.

Born May 4: Keith Haring, Lance Bass

Keith Haring’s graffiti-style art became iconic when he was in his mid-twenties. Instantly recognizable and associated with the 80s New York street scene, his work often featured short lines radiating out from exuberant figures rendered in black and white or bright, flat colors. A great believer in public art, particularly inspired by Christo’s Running Fence, Haring was invited to create murals in Japan, Australia, South America, and throughout Europe, notably on a western section of the Berlin Wall. In 1986, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Statue of Liberty, he painted a mural working with 900 children. Haring created art for many public health campaigns, including anti-drug posters and most famously a series of ads promoting safe sex that, like much of his work, was explicitly homoerotic. Yet his art was also playful and humorous, as when he painted Grace Jones' enormous skirt in Grace Jones' video I'm Not Perfect. See it all in the documentary, The Universe of Keith Haring or read his journals, reissued this year with previously unpublished drawings. He died of aids in 1990 at age thirty-one.

Born and raised in Mississippi, Lance Bass, 32, attended space camp when he was twelve and has wanted to be an astronaut ever since. Instead, he had to settle for joining Justin Timberlake and three other singers when he was sixteen to form one of the most successful boy bands of all time, 'N SYNC. After the band split up, he came out in a People magazine cover story in July 2006, when he was twenty-seven. His memoir, Out of Sync, says after the breakup he spent four months in Star City, Russia training to be a cosmonaut. He is certified by NASA and the Russian Space Program but because his funding fell through, his only celestial experience was season seven of Dancing with the Stars. He will appear along with Wanda Sykes and Clay Aiken in an upcoming episode of Drop Dead Diva about a lesbian whose high school won't let her attend prom.

Born April 20: Takei, Forrest, Tobias, Vandross

When he was five in 1942, Los Angeles-born George Takei and his family were sent to an Arkansas internment camp for Japanese Americans. Relocated to a camp in Tule Lake, California, they were not allowed to return to Los Angeles until after the war. Takei attended Berkeley and graduated from UCLA, where he stayed on to get his masters in theater. He speaks English, Japanese, and Spanish fluently. In addition to his career-defining role as Sulu on Star Trek, he ran for mayor of Los Angeles in 1973. Of seventeen candidates, he came in second, behind Tom Bradley. Since 2006 he has been the official announcer on Howard Stern’s satellite radio show. He met Brad Altman, his partner of twenty-two years, at Frontrunners. They were married in California in September 2008 at the Japanese American National Museum, which Takei co-founded. He is 74 today and his name is pronounced tah-KAY.

Novelist Katherine V. Forrest, 72, writes the Kate Delafield detective books, often cited as the first lesbian mystery series. Her debut novel, Curious Wine, has become an lgbt classic, selling more than 300,000 copies. She has won three Lambda awards, including their Pioneer Award. Forrest also writes science fiction novels, most notably the Daughters of a Coral Dawn trilogy. She lives in San Francisco with her partner Jo Hercus.

Money guru Andrew Tobias, 64, managed the Let's Go empire as an undergraduate at Harvard and has written many bestselling financial books such as The Only Investment Guide You'll Ever Need as well as the classic growing-up-gay memoir The Best Little Boy in the World, originally under the pen name John Reid. He has been treasurer of the Democratic National Party since 1999, a job for which he is paid $1 a year, and has been a long time board member on HRC. His partner since 1994, Charles Nolan, left his fashion job to volunteer fulltime for Howard Dean’s presidential campaign. Nolan died in January.

Preeminent among R&B and soul singers, Luther Vandross won eight Grammys and sold more than 25 million albums worldwide. Initially Vandross preferred to stay in the background, writing songs, producing, and singing backing vocals for Barbra Streisand, Bette Midler, Carly Simon, Chaka Khan, Chic, Diana Ross, Donna Summer, and for Roberta Flack, who finally insisted he sing for himself. After two unsuccessful albums with his group Luther, he released his first solo album, Never Too Much, which went double platinum. From then on he has been a major presence on R&B charts and radio. Among his greatest hits are “The Glow of Love,” which spent sixteen weeks at number one, “Power of Love/Love Power,” “Here and Now,” “Best Things in Life Are Free,” with Janet Jackson, and “Dance with My Father” which won four Grammys including Song of the Year. A diabetic suffering from hypertension, Vandross struggled with his weight which sometimes exceeded 300 pounds. In April 2003 he had a stroke and never regained his health, dying in July 2005. Although he avoided questions about his personal life, his homosexuality was a wide open secret.

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 April 11-12: Allison, Ludlam, Ray, Mogutin

Born to an unwed fifteen-year-old waitress in South Carolina, Dorothy Allison was the first member of her family to graduate from high school. Against those odds, she has become an international literary sensation for her novels Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) and Cavedweller (1998). Published in more than twelve languages, her work has been awarded  the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction, three the American Library Association Prizes for Lesbian and Gay Writing, several Lambda Literary Awards including the Ferro Grumley Prize, been named a New York Times Notable book of the year, and she has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Lillian Smith prize. Her short fiction, collected in Trash has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories and Best New Stories from the South. Both of her novels have been made into movies. Bastard Out of Carolina was directed by Anjelica Houston, and Cavedweller was directed by Lisa Cholodenko. Allison lives with her partner Alix Layman and teenage son Michael Wolf in Northern California. Riverhead will eventually publish her next novel, She Who.

Playwright and director Charles Ludlam founded the Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1967, when he was twenty-four. His plays are a kaleidoscope of high and low art in which the actors each play multiple parts; Ludlam himself usually took the female roles. The Mystery of Irma Vep is his most popular work, featuring two actors (originally Ludlum and his boyfriend Everett Quinton) playing eight characters. It was the most produced play in the United States in 1991 and in 2003 became the longest-running play ever produced in Brazil. A recipient of four Obie Awards, Ludlum was also honored with fellowships from the NEA and the Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundations. He died of aids in 1987.

Amy Ray, 47, is one half of the folk rock duo Indigo Girls, who in twenty years have sold more than twelve million albums and been nominated for seven Grammys, winning Best Contemporary Folk Recording in 1990. The first out lesbian duo on the pop charts, they have never been a couple. Ray is in a relationship with Carrie Schrader, a documentary filmmaker. Indigo Girls most recent album, Despite Our Differences, was released last fall and debuted in the top 50 of the Billboard chart. Amy's solo project has a new concert cd MVP Live.

Former enfant terrible Slava Mogutin, 37, still lives to provoke. Born in Siberia (and, according to Wikipedia, “the first openly gay personality in the Russian media”) now a New Yorker (after Amnesty International and American PEN helped get him political asylum), the writer and photographer is permanently at war with the establishment. A constant and often vulgar critic of Moscow’s leaders, Mogutin has written seven books in Russian, winning the prestigious Andrei Bely Prize in 2000. He aims for a similar shock value in his hatred of establishment gays and loves to antagonize his audience, describing himself as a "cave-based, homo terrorist, pinko commie fag, and propagandist of brutal violence, psychic pathology and sexual perversions." He brings all that angry energy to his photography, which appears regularly in art, fashion, alt, and porn magazines. His best photo book is Lost Boys followed by NYC Go-Go.

Born March 29, 30: Bruce Weber, Tracy Chapman

If you will, in the past two decades the music business has seen changes soaring several previously unimaginable octaves -- vinyl and cassette to cd to digital downloads; the death of the record store -- while the industry's attitude about stars' private lives has remained the steady, eternal drumbeat of closet, closet, closet. It was April 1988 when Cleveland native, Tufts graduate, Tracy Chapman released Tracy Chapman, the surprise #1 album that would revitalize the folk rock genre and sweep three Grammy awards. She wasn't out then and after seven additional studio albums and one more Grammy in 1997, she is just marginally out now; she has mentioned her past relationship with Alice Walker but I don't think she has called herself a lesbian. In 2002 she told an interviewer, "I have a public life that’s my work life and I have my personal life. In some ways, the decision to keep the two things separate relates to the work I do." On the other hand, when it most mattered in 2008, Chapman did come around from her policy of not giving money to political causes and for the first time she wrote three checks to defeat Prop 8 and discussed her decision with the media. Her eighth album was released a week after Obama was elected and the anti-gay measure passed by a wide margin. It's called Our Bright Future.

Photographer Bruce Weber, 65, is married to a woman but for forty years his primary subject has been the eroticizing of men's bodies and male camaraderie. (One of his many books is a collaboration with Reynolds Price, Bear Pond, capturing naked young men at play in the Adirondacks.) Weber's ubiquitous softcore campaigns for Abercrombie and Calvin Klein underwear have, for better or worse, reshaped gay culture, then youth culture, then American culture. This has been true at least since 1982 when he got Brazilian pole vaulter Tom Hintnaus to wear only white briefs and recline against a white rock. That iconic ad and billboard was named one of "ten photos that changed America," by the industry bible American Photographer.

Grammy Madness 2011

Sheer Grammy insanity: All of the nominees for best spoken word album were comedians and the winner was The Daily Show, even though there's a separate category for best comedy album, in which Lewis Black beat Margaret Cho and Kathy Griffin.

In music, Esperanza Spalding's third album beat Florence + The Machine's splendiferous debut for best new artist. Arcade Fire won album of the year, not Lady Gaga who won best female pop vocal and best pop vocal album. Appropriately, Gaga also won the Grammy for video of the year for Bad Romance, which has been watched on YouTube 344.8 million times. See it again to remember what she's capable of, after Friday's release of her gay anthem Born This Way, so bland and predictable it might actually turn gay teens straight. Nonetheless, since Friday it has become iTunes' fastest selling song ever.

Nursing homes retirement communities across the country are swabbing the froth of aging gay men whose tin hearing aids make them think Born This Way rips off Express Yourself twenty-two years ago. (Little David Fincher, who directed the $2 million Express Yourself video, earlier tonight won the BAFTA for directing The Social Network, an upset over The King's Speech which swept seven awards including best picture and actor.)  Meanwhile, David Guetta won the best remix Grammy for his attempt to enliven Madonna's 'Revolver,' apparently released last year. I'm still jet-lagged but I literally fell asleep at my computer when I tried to listen to this dreck.

The inanity doesn't end there. Album package of the year was awarded to Michael Carney for this Black Keys cover. Srsly.

Hear Matthew Gallaway with Sasha Frere-Jones Tonight in NYC

Tonight at 7:00, debut novelist Matthew Gallaway will give a very brief reading then captivate you in a longer talk with New Yorker music critic Sasha Frere-Jones at McNally Jackson bookstore in SoHo. It's an inspired pairing because Matthew's gay-inclusive book The Metropolis Case [[Kindle]] is steeped in music, particularly opera, and both men are such polymaths they'll be able to discuss anything intelligently and deeply. Before he was a novelist, Matthew wrote the smart and delightfully long-winded blog The Gay Recluse. Before that, he graduated NYU Law, passed the bar, and joined the band Saturnine. His book was greeted on its pub date with a tremendous review in the NYT by a guest critic, Scott Timberg. A week later, the Onion critic differed sharply. See him, read him, and decide for yourself.

Born January 15: Ivor Novello

Why, for the past fifty-four years, have the British Academy of Composers and Songwriters' annual awards been named the Ivors? To honor the Welsh star Ivor Novello, a hugely popular composer, singer, playwright, and actor who published his first song at fifteen and, at twenty-one, had his first smash hit, Keep the Home Fires Burning. Among his twenty-three films were starring roles in early Hitchcock movies The Lodger and Downhill. A presence on the London stage for decades, he wrote more than a dozen plays, many of which he performed with Robert Andrews, his partner for thirty-five years until his death at fifty-eight. Charged with misusing gasoline during World War II, Novello was convicted and imprisoned for a month, an experience which permanently tarnished his self-image, even if his fans forgave him. Some believe the judge's homophobia led to the relatively harsh penalty. Played by Jeremy Northam, Novello appears in Robert Altman's sublime Gosford Park, debonair and largely degayed.

Born January 8: Winnaretta Singer

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 she 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.

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 sinks to a lowly #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 earlier this year he was the subject of a feature documentary by Garry Beitel [below]. 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. If you're near New York on January 20, see him at Joe's Pub.

Born December 8: Dan Hartman

Dan Hartman started at 13 with his older brother. They wrote and recorded music together in their band The Legends but it wasn't until Hartman was 27, in 1978, that his song "Instant Replay" broke out and became a #1 disco hit. Two years later he topped again, with Relight My Fire. His biggest hit came in 1984, when I Can Dream About You was a Top 10 smash on the Hot 100 chart, followed by We Are the Young, which became his third #1 dance track. Fate being so fickle, he never had another hit himself but enjoyed enormous success writing or producing tracks for Tina Turner, James Brown, Dusty Springfield, Joe Cocker, Bonnie Tyler, Steve Winwood Holly Johnson of Frankie Goes to Hollywood, and Nona Hendryx. According to Wikipedia, all the music Hartman worked on has sold a total of more than 50 million copies. He died of aids at 43 in 1994, yet his music endures. Often covered by bouncy pop acts like Lulu and Take That, his "Relight My Fire" appeared in last year's award-winning video game Grand Theft Auto: The Ballad of Gay Tony.

Born December 5: Little Richard

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 recent ads for Geico. Today he is 78, lives in Lynchburg, TN, and is one of GQ's "Men of the Year."

Born November 29: Billy Strayhorn, Peter Cameron

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 fourteen years; where is the Hollywood biopic?

If you think Peter Cameron's contribution to literature is mere brilliance, in two story collections and five novels, you're don't know half of it. Re-read his splendid fifth novel, Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You, about which The Toronto Star said it is "considerably more sophisticated, subtle, and rewarding" than Catcher in the Rye. And go back to his fourth novel, The City of Your Final Destination, before you watch the DVD [out now] of the very enjoyable movie version starring Laura Linney, Charlotte Gainsbourg, and Anthony Hopkins (as the gay brother). Peter's second literary career is rescuing books like Millen Brand's The Outward Room, just re-released by NYRoB Classics, and publishing his extremely elegant handmade books from Wallflower Press.

Born November 25: Virgil Thomson

This would be impossible to imagine if he were an out teenager today, but the musical prodigy Virgil Thomson was stuck at a Kansas City, Missouri local junior college and was only able to attend Harvard thanks to a Mormon scholarship, awarded because he was friends with one of Joseph Smith's granddaughters. In Cambridge, he thrived. With the glee club he bopped to Paris, at the invitation of Bernard Fay, a well connected 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.

It was the musical Toklas who, from the background, 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. 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 shambling 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.

He 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. Thomson penned his autobiography in 1966, 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.

By the Numbers: America Loves Its Lesbian and Gay Entertainment

A lesbian actress and a gay pop star are both in the top five NYT nonfiction bestsellers on the list that will be printed on Sunday. Only Keith Richards and Glenn Beck are more popular than Portia de Rossi's anorexic memoir Unbearable Lightness: A Story of Loss and Gain. And only Jon Stewart separates that book from Ricky Martin's Me at #5.

On the heavily commercial fiction list, Armistead Maupin's eighth Tales of the City novel, Mary Ann in Autumn is #33. David Sedaris is #10 and Emma Donoghue is #18.

Far bigger than books: The all-male, gay rendition of Teenage Dream that Blaine used to serenade Kurt is a record-breaker for Glee. It's the first time a song from the show debuted at #1 on Billboard's digital downloads chart. Even more important, because it's more public and inescapable, the gay version of Teenage Dream is already in the top 10 in radio airplay, the Hot 100, and Pop Songs.

Radio airplay! Americans nationwide are humming along with a cute boy singing to another boy: "Let's go all the way tonight, No regrets, Just love." And, "Let you put your hands on me in my skin-tight jeans, be your teenage dream tonight!" Thank you, Fox Network.

For comparison, Katy Perry's original version is below. To anticpate your question: Josh Kloss.

Speaking of singalongs, and how the world has changed, straight writer Dan Chiasson has an appreciation of The Magnetic Fields' gay braintrust Stephin Merritt on the New York Review of Books blog. He writes: "My children, ages 4 and 6, often ask to hear these songs in the car. (Until you have heard a four-year old boy sing the lines, “Should pretty boys in discos / Distract you from your novel / Remember I’m awful in love with you,” you haven’t approached the full depths of this band’s appeal.)"

Born November 17: Rock and Ru

Winnetka's Roy Scherer Jr was renamed and remade by a Hollywood gay impresario and total mess whom you can read about in dastardly detail in The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson. Although in his first movie, Fighter Squadron, the 6'5" hunk needed 38 takes to nail his only spoken line, with coaching he became an affable, natural superstar. He reached a new high with Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession in 1954 and the next year barely dodged certain doom: The tabloid Confidential threatened to report his secret gay affairs. Instead, Willson gave them dirt on two of his other, less lucrative clients, Rory Calhoun (prison stint) and Tab Hunter (arrested at a gay party five years earlier), and shoehorned Hudson into a sham marriage with his secretary. In 1956, Hudson and fellow closet case James Dean both earned Oscar nominations for Giant opposite Elizabeth Taylor, who would 29 years later be galvanized by Hudson's death to force an unwilling nation confront AIDS. As much as his public acknowledgement finally "gave a face" to the disease that had already killed thousands, it also fueled a panicked distrust of all gay men because he had hidden his status from his sex partners like Marc Christian and his kissing co-stars like Linda Evans. Succumbing just before he turned 60, he would have been 85 today. He lives on in celluloid glory and in the pages of his friend Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City as the virile icon Blank Blank.

She's 50 today, mmkay? Like any other future drag star born in 1960, RuPaul Andre Charles spent his childhood in San Diego lipsynching Supremes songs, being called names, avoiding sports, and winning the two most important prizes in junior high: Best Dancer and Best Afro. High school didn't go as well (he was expelled for not attending), until he moved to Atlanta with his brother and sister-in-law at sixteen. He began to blossom, thanks largely to drama class, though his attendance in every other subject was still a problem. Eventually he dropped out, got his GED, started community college, and quit. When he was twenty-two he appeared on the American Music Show with two girls as RuPaul and the U-Hauls. When he was thirty-two, the nation was coming down from twelve years of Reagan-Bush, grunge was peaking, and RuPaul put on her best blond wig, her brightest jewels, her fiercest heels, and taught the whole world to sing, "Sashay, chante!" "Work it, girl!" and "You better work!"

Oddly, that hit, Supermodel, only reached #45 on the pop charts, but it remained in heavy rotation on MTV forever and became a cultural moment. Whereas most drag representations before her were catty and bitchy, RuPaul's message was love everybody; everybody, love! Subsequent singles milked the same bouncy vibe but failed to catch on with the masses, though Back to my Roots is an essential history of black hairstyles in three danceable minutes. Adding to her list of drag queen firsts, RuPaul became the face of MAC cosmetics and sang a duet with Elton John. She co-hosted KTU's popular morning show for two years and hosted her own tv show on VH1. Season three of her popular RuPaul's Drag Race begins on Logo in January 2011 with more contestants (13) and more episodes (16) than ever before.