Band of Thebes

Born May 10: Blyth Tait

Born in Whangarei, son of a horse breeder, Blyth Tait won his first two of four world equestrian games gold medals at twenty-nine and his first two of four Olympic medals two years later at Barcelona in 1992. That year he topped the world standings at #1, a position he held for almost all of the 90s. At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, Tait won a gold in individual eventing and a bronze with his team. Returning to the Olympics in Sydney in 2000, he was given the honor of bearing New Zealand's flag in the opening ceremony's parade of global athletic hotness, which for the first time included his partner Paul O'Brien, also on the equestrian team. Horribly, days before his competition Tait's horse died suddenly in quarantine, his back-up horse was rendered lame, and he failed to medal. At the Athens Olympics in 2004, he ranked fifth. After several years in retirement, he tried to win a spot on the New Zealand for the 2012 London Olympics. At least as of 2011, he and O'Brien were still a couple. In the history of New Zealand Olympians, he ranks fourth in total medals earned. Today he's 53.

Born October 14: Katherine Mansfield

Cousin to Australian author Elizabeth von Arnim (The Enchanted April), friend of D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, spiritual heir to Chekhov's humanism, New Zealander Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp became a peerless master of the short story and died at thirty-two. She burned through sexual passion with women and men but not really with either of her husbands. Blatantly exploiting the affection of a singing teacher eleven years her senior, she agreed to marry George Bowden only because she was already pregnant by another man, refused to sleep with him on their wedding night and left him for good within hours. Her starchy mother arrived in England from New Zealand, blamed the breakup on her longtime lesbian lover Ida Baker, dispatched her daughter to a spa in Bavaria, and cut her out of her will. Mansfield miscarried. But it was there she discovered Chekhov. Upon her return to London in 1910 she started writing more seriously. In 1911 she began a relationship with editor John Murry, left him, got back together, left him again in 1913, got back together again, left him again in 1917, and in 1918 married him. Within two weeks she departed to travel for her health. First Paris, then she and Ida Baker lived in San Remo, Italy. As her tuberculosis worsened, she weakened, and yet this final period gave rise to her greatest works. Thirty-five of her best, including "The Garden-Party," "The Doll's House," and "At the Bay," are found in her Selected Stories from Norton. To understand her life, get her notebooks or brilliant biographer Claire Tomalin's Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life or Jeffrey Meyers' Katherine Mansfield: A Darker View. In a wise appreciation for the Telegraph, lesbian author Ali Smith mentions Mansfield's immediate impact on her contemporaries thus:

"She dunted Virginia Woolf, with a good sharp elbow, into the kind of experimental writing for which Woolf is revered. She unknowingly presented her friend DH Lawrence with one of the more sapphic narrative episodes of The Rainbow by telling him stories of her youth, and was later, again inadvertently, his model for the character of Gudrun in Women in Love."

Smith also cites Mansfield's influence on T.S. Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Scott Fitzgerland, Willa Cather, Eudora Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Elizabeth Bowen, Brigid Brophy, Christopher Isherwood, Carson McCullers, Philip Larkin, and Angela Carter.

Aaron Hamburger Goes Searching for Janet Frame

Who are the best people on earth? Readers. And none more so than the semi-obsessive literary sort who make religions of their beloved favorite writers. Aaron Hamburger (whom you know for his fine gay stories and novel Faith for Beginners) traveled halfway around the world for A Literary Pilgrimmage: In Search of Janet Frame's New Zealand. Inevitably, he discovers many locals who have never read her, or even heard of her, but he also finds the godson of a gay writer, Frank Sargeson, who despite his own impoverished circumstances, gave shelter to Frame for sixteen months. Aaron writes:

"Cole told us that his godfather had been a solicitor until his arrest for indecency (i.e., gay sex) in a public toilet. After the arrest, Sargeson gave up his career, lifestyle, and even his old name and moved to his family’s “bach” — New Zealand slang for a summer home — to write fiction full-time. Here, in this tiny spartan house, he lived until his death in 1982, surviving on his meager writing income as well as his vegetable garden, where he grew such exotic European plants as tomatoes and zucchini.

"Cole went on to explain that before the opening of the Harbour Bridge in 1959, the North Shore had been a sleepy farming area mostly cut off from the main city of Auckland, and Esmonde Road a quiet cul-de-sac terminating in a mangrove swamp. This cheap, isolated area attracted a community of writers eager to live the bohemian life free from the constraints of New Zealand’s strict middle-class conventions.

"Also, as an openly gay man in a country where homosexuality was criminalized until 1986, Sargeson carried an additional burden. “I remember once there was a heavy knock at the door and his face went all white,” said Cole. “He was afraid it was the police.”

"In Janet Frame, Frank Sargeson saw a fellow misfit, an artist who could thrive only by surviving on society’s margins. He invited her to live in a shack (now demolished) in his garden to work on her writing undisturbed."

Read Aaron's full essay.

Thanks to the Jane Campion film from 1990, Frame's best known work is the second volume of her autobiography, An Angel at My Table. Among many honors late in life, she was awarded an OBE. She died in 2004, having written 12 novels, 3 volumes of stories, and a storm of poems. In 2010, The New Yorker ran an unpublished bit of fiction, Gavin Highly. If you want more about her life from another perspective, try Michael King's biography Wrestling with the Angel.

Assume Nothing: Gender Identity Photography Book and Movie

This week Soft Skull Press is finally publishing Rebecca Swan's cross-cultural look at twenty-five "transsexuals, gender queers, eunuchs, sister girls, drag kings and queens," through interviews and her photography in Assume Nothing. Released in 2004 in her native New Zealand, the book earned acclaim there and in Australia where the Sydney Star Observer said it "captures beauty beyond the binary of male and female . . . inspiring . . . an intelligent blend of content and form, as Swan is not content with capturing biological evidence of difference with a cool anthropological edge . . . The photography also brings into beautiful sharp relief genders that may, paradoxically remain sublimely ‘out of focus.'" Since then the book has appeared in Germany, Scandinavia, and the UK.

Bringing these stories to an even wider audience, New Zealand filmmaker Kirsty MacDonald adapted Assume Nothing as a documentary released last year. The movie is now making the rounds of US festivals, with its next screening at The Tank on West 45th St. on October 29.

On October 28, Brooklyn bookshop Bluestockings will host a panel discussion on "Art, Activism and Gender Identity" with author Swan, her trans man activist partner Jack Byrne, and GATE co-director Justus Eisfield.