Band of Thebes

Born July 11: Tab Hunter, Vito Russo

Rock Hudson, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, Farley Granger, Tab Hunter: Was any heartthrob movie star straight in the straitlaced 1950s? Hunter and Perkins dated each other for several years while the press reported phony stories that Hunter was involved with Debbie Reynolds or Natalie Wood. Born Arthur Kelm, he eventually made more than 50 movies after being rechristened "Tab Hunter" by his agent Henry Willson, a gay man who also handled Rock Hudson, Troy Donahue, Robert Wagner, and loads of others; read Willson's disturbing biography. Hunter's triumphs were Damn Yankees, Lafayette Escadrille, and That Kind of Woman. He recorded a pop song, Young Love, which was the #1 hit in the U.S. for a month in 1957, and made many subsequent albums. He had a short-lived television show and a famous flop on Broadway, co-starring with Tallulah Bankhead in Tennessee Williams’ The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore, which closed after five performances. Smaller movies followed. In the 1980s he had a comeback, starring twice with Divine, first in Polyester, then in Lust in the Dust, which he co-produced with Allan Glaser. Hunter did not come out until September 2003, when at 72, he sold a book proposal for a memoir that would discuss his life candidly. Tab Hunter Confidential [Kindle] appeared in 2005 and revealed he and his producer Allan Glaser have been romantic partners for twenty-nine years. They live in Montecito. Here's a recent photo of Hunter, Glaser, and John Waters.

Russo For ten years, from 1972 to 1982, Vito Russo toured the country giving what would later be a PowerPoint presentation about the portrayal of lesbians and gay men in the media. His devastating book on the subject, The Celluloid Closet, published in 1981 and revised in 1987, was years ahead of its time and remains essential reading today. The book was made into a documentary in 1996, six years after his death from aids. Russo’s sharp critique of the industry led him to co-found the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD). It is hard to imagine the principled visionary connected to today’s GLAAD, which endorsed such overblown caricature-fests as Boat Trip and praised I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry despite
the movie’s parade of stereotypes. Finally, Russo has been given the biography he deserves in Celluloid Activist: The Life and Times of Vito Russo [Kindle] and in the documentary Vito. 

White Crane released two new volumes of Vito's uncollected writings Out Spoken: A Vito Russo Reader - Reel One [Kindle], which covers his film essays, including reams of reviews and great, early interviews with Almodovar, Almendros, Anger, Bette, Debbie, Lily, Rhoda, Gandalf, and Tennessee among others, while Out Spoken: Reel Two [Kindle] covers politics and aids.

Born July 2: Donald Windham

Donald Windham's many books include the lovely short novel Two People about a middle-aged American man's romance with a moody 17 year-old Italian lad; a too-brief fiction called Tanaquil about a tomboy girl and an artistic boy modeled on George Platt Lynes; his impressive debut The Dog Star [and Kindle] praised by Mann and Gide alike; his great Lost Friendships: A Memoir of Truman Capote Tennessee Williams and Others, as well as the collection Tennessee Williams' Letters to Donald Windham.

Born in Atlanta in 1920, he moved to New York City when he was 19, with his artist boyfriend Fred Melton. Within four years, Windham, who never went to college, was dating a Princeton undergrad named Sandy Campbell. Through the ups and downs of friendships with a large gay circle including Truman Capote, Lincoln Kirstein, Pavel Tchelitchew, Paul Cadmus, and Tennesse Williams, they stayed together 45 years until Campbell's death in 1988. Windham lived on until 2010, leaving the bulk of their estate to fund writing awards of $1 million annually administered by Yale and named for the gay couple. The second Windham-Campbell Awards were announced this year.

Karl Bissinger's photo from 1949 shows Windham, second from left, with the ballerina Tanaquil Le Clercq, the artist Buffie Johnson, Tennessee Williams, and Gore Vidal.

Born June 27: Cazwell

We'll always have Ice Cream Truck. Cazwell's biggest hit is an all-male, sweet and sweaty ode to everything oral. Alas, the low-tech charm of that suckadelic jingle was lightning that has yet to strike twice. Raised in Worcester, Luke Caswell started singing with the Boston hip hop band Moreplay, but moved on from the city and the genre. He says, "I know a lot of gay rappers that really consider themselves hip hop and want to be accepted by hip hop producers, and my point of view is, 'Why bother? Why spend all my time and energy trying to make a culture who hasn’t acknowledged my existence for the past twenty years accept me?'" Now a New Yorker, he djs and hosts weekly club nights downtown. He was an opening act on the Cyndi Lauper/ Debbie Harry/ Erasure/ everybody True Colors tour in 2007, played Dior Hommes after party in 2008, judged RuPaul's Drag Race, and has had his songs played on LoGo and True Blood. Most recent singles include the hyper track "Guess What? (I'm Hot!)" and "No Selfie Control." Like him on fb.

Born June 17: Carl Van Vechten

Decades ahead of his time, "Harlem's most famous 'Honorary Negro'" was also, despite two wives, fairly open about his many gay relationships -- big leaps for a white Iowan born in 1880. Now, Carl Van Vechten is celebrated primarily as a photographer, but he also was a famously controversial novelist, Gertrude Stein's literary executor, and one of the early 20th century's greatest cultural kingmakers. Yet he has been without a full-scale biography since before Stonewall. This year FSG published London critic Edward White's debut, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America [Kindle] which covers his queer life in detail, thanks to troves of private papers that have been unsealed since the last biography. White's book arrives with starred reviews from three pre-pub journals including Booklist which calls it "a marvelously written, masterful portrait of an exceptionally complex person." In the New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh praised the book's "startling breadth" and agreed with White's assessment of Van Vechten as a "prophet of a new cultural sensibility that promoted the primacy of the individual, sexual freedom, and racial tolerance and dared put the blues on a par with Beethoven." Library Journal selected it as one of their Four Essential Nonfiction Picks for February.

Author of Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, David Margolick blurbs, "Journalist, novelist, critic, photographer, iconoclast, visionary. Dandy and groupie, hedonist and dissembler, provocateur and self-promoter. Champion of Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, drinking buddy of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, "honorary Negro" to some, racist exploiter to others. Denizen of the black and gay demimondes, flouter of racial and sexual divides and taboos. Carl Van Vechten was all of these things, and much more besides, in his brilliant and gaudy life. It would burst an ordinary biography at the seams, but Edward White manages to do to Van Vechten in death what no one ever accomplished in life: tame him. With wit, style, and skepticism, The Tastemaker both cuts Van Vechten down to size and restores to him the lofty stature he deserves."

Two years ago, Yale published Emily Bernard's much-praised Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance: A Portrait in Black and White [Kindle] which does incorporate Van Vechten's gay affairs, including his interracial, intergenerational relationship with the closeted young novelist Wallace Thurman, author of The Blacker the Berry, but Bernard's book is not a full biography.

The thorny issue of white patronage of black artists is the heart of one of Kevin Killian's favorite books last year, Miss Anne in Harlem: The White Women of the Black Renaissance [Kindle only $2.99].

Van Vechten's photo work can be seen The Homoerotic Photography of Carl Van Vechten: Public Face, Private Thoughts, as well as in Portraits and Passionate Observer and Extravagant Crowd.

Recapturing Radical Queer: Mausoleum of Lovers

Triple threat Stephen Motika, author of Western Practice, program director of Poets House, and publisher of Nightboat Books, invited me to Thursday's exhilarating, overflow double launch (above) at Callicoon Fine Arts of dead novelist Hervé Guibert's photo exhibition (below) and reading from his just published, really amazing, arty and sexy Mausoleum of Lovers: Journals 1976-1991. Douglas Martin was there! Wayne Koestenbaum gives the book a super rave review -- "magnitude itself" -- in the upcoming Bookforum. I pecked through the episodic passages here and there and was transported. Guibert died of aids at 36, leaving behind, among other work, To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and Ghost Image.

Born May 31: Walt Whitman

You could make a case that the Big Bang moment of the modern lgbt universe was Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, which he self-published in 1855 when he was 36. His open celebration of love between men was a major inspiration to Oscar Wilde and to Edward Carpenter and to scores of other towering queer leaders who have turned the tide of human history. Born in Long Island the second of nine children, he moved frequently with his poor and unlucky family and dropped out of school at 11. He jumped from job to job, teaching, journalism, government clerk. He was fired from his post at the Bureau of Indian Affairs after the new Secretary of the Interior read his book. Whitman became a nurse during the Civil War and in 1866 met his beloved Peter Doyle, a streetcar conductor. He lived until 1892. For the full story, read Gary Schmidgall's MLA Prize winning biography, Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. Ignore the generations of scholars who have tried to degay him, the contemporary critics who claim his homosexuality is "irrelevant," and his own late life prevarications about his having had a wife and children. Also, read the poems.

 

Stephen Greco's Now and Yesterday

You know Stephen Greco as a journalist and an administrator of the Ferro-Grumley, and today he releases his sweeping literary novel about longtime gay friends in Brooklyn, Now and Yesterday [and Kindle]. Ed White says it's "an often poignant, and sometimes chilling, romance of the creative class," and Kirkus writes

"Greco slides a slice of American gay culture under the literary microscope. Peter and Harold settled in Brooklyn in the 1970s, committed lovers, one with journalism ambitions, the other a poet. Then Harold died during the early days of the AIDS crisis. Peter forgot poetry and built a boutique ad agency, now gobbled up by a conglomerate, where he peddled "goods and services for a brave new world in which more people needed more things." With but one serious relationship post-Harold, Peter lives at the edge of loneliness. Greco believably sketches New York's gay culture—the right parties, the right place for clothing, and who's shtupping whom—while watching Peter redefine himself. Peter laments and dithers and becomes almost a less-interesting character than his friend Jonathan, a celebrated documentary filmmaker dying of prostate cancer. Greco delves artfully into Peter's stumbling friendship-turned-romance with Will, a young California writer seeking prestige bylines, and lays it against his refusal to take up with rent boys. A second narrative thread places Peter at a moral crossroads when his corporate bosses demand he cook up a campaign for a Glenn Beck-like demagogue. With his gift for observation and turns of phrase—"the remains of an intellectual enshrined in the urn of a glamorous career"—Greco offers a book about big ideas rather than action: ideas about gay life; about the depths and importance of friendship; about money and power; about the need for love and sex; and about a man's moral relationship to who he is and what he does. Greco has written a life-affirming yet melancholy, John O'Hara-like analysis of post-baby-boom-meets-millennial-queer Big Apple society."

Greco's previous books include The Sperm Engine and Dreadnought.

Born May 23: Allen Barnett

The absolutely terrific writer Allen Barnett -- born in Joliet in 1955, studied at Loyola, moved to New York to act, died of aids at thirty-six in 1991 -- is in danger of being lost. His only book is out of print. His New York Times obituary said:

Mr. Barnett was the author of The Body and Its Dangers (1990), a collection of stories in which many of the characters are afflicted with aids. The book was a winner of a PEN/ Ernest Hemingway Citation. Mr. Barnett worked for the Gay Men's Health Crisis, helped to establish the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, and taught aids education to students of English as a second language at the 23d Street Y.M.C.A.

He is survived by his mother, Margaret Barnett of Joliet, Ill.; four sisters, Debby, Cindy, Donna and Rhonda, and two brothers, Dale and Ricky.

In addition to the PEN citation (a sort of runner-up to the actual award), The Body and Its Dangers won a Ferro-Grumley and a Lammy. Publishers Weekly said,

Barnett's willingness to venture into explosively emotional terrain with empathy, candor and balance is perhaps best revealed in his stunning "The Times As It Knows Us," where men sharing a summerhouse appear to have created family within the gay community--yet even this proves illusory.

Reviewing it for the Times Meg Wolitzer wrote,

The urgency of Mr. Barnett's characters, and their simple good will toward all that is human, carry considerable weight. He portrays their awareness of fragility with such candor and melancholy that they almost seem to be holding their own hearts in their hands.

Four years ago Christopher Bram wrote about Allen in the excellent queer lit rescue project The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered [and Kindle] conceived and edited by Tom Cardamone. For serious readers, this book is a must for its 28 essays and its bibliography citing further works by more than 80 gay authors.

Fleet Week Image of the Day #2

Henry Scott Tuke's perfectly positioned 'Sleeping Sailor' shows Harry Cleave posing on the mizzen boom of a derelict French barque the Mazatlan, moored in Falmouth harbor, in the summer of 1905. The painting sold for £15. 

Tuke used the old ship as a floating studio and did several paintings on board including 'The Mid-Day Rest (Sailors Yarning)' seen after the jump. 

For more images get Catching the Light: The Art and Life of Henry Scott Tuke.

Fleet Week Image of the Day #1

1,500 active servicemembers of the Marines, Coast Guard, and Navy arrive in NYC tomorrow for double duty during Fleet Week 2014, straining to make up for last year's sequester tease and ultimate no-show. Beyond these official events, Thebes will honor the seamen with a salty image a day. Starting with the best, none can surpass these watercolors, Farewell Voyage and Amor y Olas, from the amazing French-Mexican California-raised artist Felix D'Eon. See his gorgeous website, which could transfix you for hours with its gay mythological, historical, sporty, outdoorsy, and erotic drawings. Please support him by ordering a print from $12.50 to $60, an original for $850, or individual or boxed greeting cards.

Born May 7: Tchaikovsky

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

Born May 5: James Beard, Del Martin

James Beard knew he was gay when he was seven in Portland and, acting on those impulses as soon as he got to college, was expelled from Reed in his freshman year for "homosexual activity."  He traveled with a theater troupe, spent several years in Europe, came home, and moved to New York still hoping to be an actor. He took a temporary job as a caterer and three years later published his first cookbook, Hors d'Oeuvre and Canapés, in 1940. After three more books he got his own cooking show on television and, in 1955, he established The James Beard Cooking School, which lasted 30 years until his death in 1985. His huge appetites extended to money and fame, leading him to many, many endorsement deals that contradicted everything he preached in the kitchen. Despite a famous temper, he could be a nurturing mentor and loyal friend, and with Gael Greene he founded Citymeals-on-Wheels. He is openly gay in his memoir Delights And Prejudices and his collection of letters Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles. Two biographies are Epicurean Delight: The Life and Times of James Beard by longtime friend Evan Jones, husband of legendary editor Judith Jones, and The Solace of Food by Robert Clark.

Del Martin died in August 2008 at 87, widowing a wife with whom she spent 55 years championing the rights of the denigrated and disenfranchised. In 1955, when homosexuality was illegal, she, her life partner Phyllis Lyon, and six other lesbians founded the Daughters of Bilitis in her native San Francisco. By 1960 DOB chapters were active in nine cities nationwide and their magazine, The Ladder, was thriving despite most readers' need for secrecy. Even in friendly waters, they had to fight the tides against lesbians, both among straight women in NOW and gay men in the queer equality movement. Martin addressed the latter situation in her landmark article, "Goodbye, My Alienated Brothers," which appeared in the Advocate in 1970. Two years later, she and Lyon were instrumental in forming the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, and they published their seminal book Lesbian/Woman. In 1979 they were honored by a group of medical professionals who wanted to start a clinic for lesbians who lacked health care, and they chose the name Lyon-Martin Health Services. In 1995 they were named separately as delegates to the White House Conference on Aging. Ever the trailblazers, Martin [above right, left left] and Lyon were the very first gay couple to be married in San Francisco in February 2004. If there is anything good about her death, it's that she did not have to see Prop 8 pass three months later. Click here to watch them describes the early hurdles they faced in forming and growing DOB during a time when they could not advertise their existence.

Born May 4: Lincoln Kirstein

Lincoln Kirstein is most remembered for getting Balanchine to America in 1933 and later co-founding and running the New York City Ballet with him, but his influence extended throughout all the arts: literature, painting, sculpture, photography, theater, and film. Claudia Roth Pierpont’s said, "The sheer breadth of Kirstein's endeavor -- so unthinkable in the present age of specialization -- has made him appear to some people to be the last historical example of the Renaissance man." Often considered to have known everyone who mattered, Kirstein was a particularly powerful force in the thriving culture of gay artists, befriending among many others George Platt Lynes (who took this photo), Jean Cocteau, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Cecil Beaton, W.H. Auden, Glenway Wescott, Virgil Thomson, Philip Johnson, Pavel Tchelitchev, and Paul Cadmus, whose sister he married without pausing in his endless succession of affairs with young male dancers. He came out publicly in 1982; he died in 1996. Read his own Mosaic: Memoirs or Martin Duberman's The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein.

Kirstein also played a significant role in the actual events that inspired The Monuments Men. At the time he was a tall, strapping 38 year-old, yet his character is played by a five-foot-five, 68 year-old weakling, lest any attention be diverted from the film's 52 year-old writer, director, producer, and star.

Ludmila Ulitskaya Wins Austrian State Prize for European Literature

Das macht mich sehr glücklich! I could sing Pharrell.

With past winners Auden, Pinter, Calvino, Beauvoir, Lessing, Kundera, Duras, Rushdie, Eco, Barnes, and, last year, John Banville, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature is always worth following, never more so than today's award to Ludmila Ulitskaya. The best book to begin with is the pure-Greek and mixed-Russian family tale Medea and Her Children [Kindle], which also provides a much-needed window into the Crimea. Follow that with the novel of exiles in New York, The Funeral Party, and then her ambitious Daniel Stein, Interpreter, bringing together Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.

Read Ulitskaya now -- as you know the Nobel committee is -- before all the December hoopla when FSG releases a major new work, The Big Green Tent spanning decades in the lives of three Soviet dissidents caught in the country's fall and rise and fall.

 

Richard Kramer's These Things Happen Now in Paperback

A favorite on Thebes' poll in 2012 and again in 2013, and a local bestseller in Los Angeles, Richard Kramer's smart, funny, affecting gay novel These Things Happen [Kindle] gives voice to multiple narrators as fifteen year-old Wesley navigates first love and four parents -- mom, stepdad, dad, and dad's partner George, who to my mind is the book's winningest character. The story's heart and snap is no surprise to followers of Kramer's impressive career in television, writing / directing / producing many series including My So-called Life, Thirtysomething, and Tales of the City. Indeed, this story is ready to become a series for HBO produced by Oprah. Read it now before the show kicks Modern Family asunder.

Someone had an inspired idea to illustrate this New York novel with art by James McMullan (get his brand new Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood) but it's wrong to denude the cover of its many marquee blurbs and reviews. NYT: "Funny and captivating." PW: "Kramer's triumph." Lambda: "Compulsively readable." Julia Glass: "A fresh, brave love story." Michael Cunningham: "Incisive, wise, funny, moving." Cathleen Schine: "Artful, thoughtful, and extremely funny... wonderful." Daniel Mendelsohn: "wise and wide-eyed, sage and sensitive, extremely funny and, in the end, disarmingly touching."

Born April 12: Slava Mogutin

Former enfant terrible Slava Mogutin, 40, 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 critic of Moscow’s leaders, Mogutin has written seven books in Russian, winning the Andrei Bely Prize in 2000. He aims for a similar shock value in his hatred of establishment gays, and he loves to antagonize his audience, once describing himself as a "cave-based, homo terrorist, pinko commie fag, and propagandist of brutal violence, psychic pathology and sexual perversions." Happily, he brings all that angry energy to his photography, which appears regularly in art, fashion, alt, and porn magazines. His best photo books are Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go. Last month he released his first book in English, Food Chain.

Born April 10: Frances Perkins, Michael Alenyikov

Next time we're listing lesbian accomplishments let's remember Social Security, unemployment benefits, minimum wage, the 40-hour work week, overtime pay, and anti-child labor laws -- all of which came into being under the leadership of Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins. The first woman ever to hold a US Cabinet position, only she and Harold L. Ickes lasted in their posts for FDR's entire presidency. Born in Boston in 1880, Perkins double majored in physics and chemistry at Mount Holyoke and got her Masters in political science from Columbia in 1910. As Governor, FDR made her New York's first State Commissioner of Labor. She married Paul Wilson, a manic depressive who was frequently institutionalized, and she lived with her lover, heiress Mary Harriman Rumsey, in Georgetown. A power couple par excellence, they hosted dinner parties said to gather at one table Eleanor Roosevelt, Will Rogers, Margaret Bourke-White, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, and unknown Appalachian folk singers. Rumsey died from a riding accident the week before Christmas 1934. Hiding the true nature of her grief, Perkins carried on with the congressional fight for Social Security, which was enacted in August 1935. Perkins lived to 85 in 1965. Her memoir The Roosevelt I Knew is degayed but biographer Kirstin Downey includes her lesbian relationships in The Woman Behind the New Deal: The Life and Legacy of Frances Perkins [Kindle]. Lucy Jane Bledsoe chose it as one of her top reads of 2011.

 

Michael Alenyikov's gay novel-in-stories about brother love and jealousy, Ivan and Misha [Kindle], won the Northern California Book Award, the Gina Berriault Award, and was a finalist for Publishing Triangle's debut fiction award. Born in Kiev, the fraternal twins are raised in New York, where their father who was a doctor is now a doorman, and a gambler, and bipolar. Their mother is dead. When Misha gets a boyfriend, Smith, Ivan feels betrayed. Then things get worse.

Alenyikov was raised in Brooklyn, graduated from Abraham Lincoln High School, attended Queens College, and moved to San Francisco more than twenty years ago. 

Tom Spanbauer's I Loved You More

Not a contest but however you're celebrating today's release of Tom Spanbauer's I Loved You More [Kindle], his former writing student, the super-successful, long-closeted, now openly queer Chuck Palahniuk has outmanned you: He sent gift baskets to 50 indie bookstores to promote the novel.

Huffington Post named it one of eight small press books to watch in 2014.

Wild author Cheryl Strayed calls it "a wrenching and beautiful masterpiece," saying, "intelligence, wit, generosity, love, wisdom, insight, humility, guts, heart-crushing truth and spirit-lifting grace—it’s all there in I Loved You More."

Having successfully mapped the historical western (The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon), the aids novel (In the City of Shy Hunters), and the 60's rural gay bildungsroman (Now Is the Hour), Spanbauer again charts fresh territory in his fifth book. Hawthorne calls it "a love story triangle akin to  The Marriage Plot and Freedom only with a gay main character who charms gays and straights alike. I Loved You More is a rich, expansive tale of love, sex, and heartbreak, covering twenty-five years in the life of a striving, emotionally wounded writer. In New York, Ben forms a bond of love with his macho friend and foil, Hank. Years later in Portland, a now ill Ben falls for Ruth, who provides the care and devotion he needs, though they cannot find true happiness together. Then Hank reappears and meets Ruth, and real trouble starts. Set against a world of struggling artists, the underground sex scene of New York in the 1980s, the drab, confining Idaho of Ben’s youth, and many places in between, I Loved You More is the author’s most complex and wise novel to date."

Bluntly, Spanbauer is yet another big gay talent who used to be published in hardcover by eminent New York houses and now is published as a paperback original by a fine small press. Your support is doubly needed.

Starting tonight in Portland, Tom tours eight dates in Oregon or Seattle and New York City on May 13 at the LGBT Center.

Born April 1: Samuel R. Delany

The Samuel R. Delany resurgence has been in full swing for seven years now -- in 2007 the documentary about him premiered at Tribeca, in 2008 his Dark Reflectionswas a Stonewall Honors book, in 2009 a university press published Conversations with Samuel R. Delany, in 2010 he was selected as a judge for the National Book Awards, in 2012 he released his twenty-fourth novel Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders [Kindle] whose praise from Michael Cunningham, Andrew Holleran, Edmund White paled next to Lonely Christopher's emphatic declaration that it is the best novel of the 21st century, and in 2013 Delany released a popular new fully-illustrated edition of his Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York. (For more on his beloved NYC, read his unmissable Times Square Red, Times Square Blue.) An overachiever in other fields, too, he is a patron of XXX theaters and video booths and estimates his total number of male sexual partners to be 50,000. Or, three a day for fifty years, roughly.

If all this seems a little unusual for a writer at seventy-two, well, Delany defied expectation from the beginning. The tenth child born to a Harlem couple in the 1940s, he was not the likeliest boy to prep at Dalton with Wallace Shawn. When he took up writing, some were surprised he chose to work in science fiction. Once he'd made a name for himself in that genre -- his Dhalgren sold a million copies -- some were further surprised by his inclusions of significant sexual content. His has also written erotica that he is happy to call pornography, like Phallos which takes place during Hadrian's reign. Norman Mailer said of his most transgressive work of brutal sexual violence, narrated by an 11 year-old, "There is no question that Hoggby Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit."

Delany has won the Nebula four times, the Hugo twice, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. A professor at U Mass Amherst for eleven years, Delany has taught at Temple University since 2000. His own work is required reading in many college courses, across multiple departments: literature, black studies, and queer studies. Try his autobiography The Motion Of Light In Water, "with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin."

(photo via)

Tom Spanbauer's In the City of Shy Hunters

Peter Kurth in Salon: "A master narrator and stylist… In the City of Shy Hunters is so finely crafted, Spanbauer’s characters so true to life, the New York City he remembers from the early days of the plague so exactly captured in its ‘unrelenting’ mess and glory, you’ll think you’ve been reading a modernist classic."

The Baltimore Sun: "In the City of Shy Hunters has the earmarks of a literary landmark… Its importance and originality are unmistakable."

Dennis Cooper in The Village Voice: "A big ambitious stylefest of a novel, in the mode of… Edmund White’s The Farewell Symphony, Allan Gurganus’s Plays Well with Others, and Dale Peak’s Now It's Time to Say Goodbye… What distinguishes Spanbauer’s novel from the rest of the pack is his hellish, distinctive voice. Longtime fans will recognize its unusual sentences, at once choppy and strangely elegant, overtly informative but weirdly surreal, tender of phrase yet cleansed of overt emotion."

The Seattle Times: "Ambitious and compelling…a mixture of the ghastly, the hilarious and the curiously touching."

Library Journal: "Unlike other 'early aids' novels, this one acknowledges that aids touches all classes, races, religions, and sexual orientations. Excellent characters (real New Yorkers), great writing, and a new twist on an over-used plot recommend this book..."