Band of Thebes

Born March 30: Vestal McIntyre

Born and raised with six older siblings twenty miles west of Boise, Idaho, Vestal McIntyre attended Tufts, moved to New York, worked as a waiter, and published two books, both of which won Lammys and were named as Editors' Choice selections by the NYT Book Review. Of 2005's eight-story collection You Are Not the One, Booklist said, "Filled with witty dialogue, strong and varied characters, and the power to move and disturb, this is a brilliant debut." The following year the NEA awarded him a grant to work on his first novel, Lake Overturn [Kindle], an ambitious, gay-inclusive work that appeared in 2009 to strong praise -- NYTBR "striking," Philadelphia Gay News "astonishing," Out "richly imagined and fully realized...the next Great Idahoan Novel." The Washington Post named it a Best Book of the Year. Six months ago he published a Kindle Single called Almost Tall about Dinah, a fourteen year-old Midwestern ballet student spending the summer in Manhattan with her uncle Rick and his partner Eddie. Now Vestal lives in London, where he is working on a collection of stories about New York and his second novel.

Born March 28: James Bidgood, Håkan Lindquist, Dirk Bogarde

Like so many true originals who create art ahead of their time, James Bidgood was in danger of being forgotten by a canon that favors the next generation he inspired, great artists very much of their time, in this case the dazzling gay duo Pierre et Gilles and the immensely successful commercial gay photog David LaChapelle. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, Bidgood escaped to New York, attended Parsons, and worked as a window dresser where he would borrow fabric and props to use for his own photo shoots in his tiny Hell's Kitchen apartment. Like Georges Méliès he made enchantments from next to nothing: crinkled wax paper becomes a cave wall. In the over-the-top spirit of the Ziegfeld Follies, he celebrated lavish, luxurious eroticism -- without any money and without any girls. In the early and mid-1960s his homespun gay art was destined for the fringe. In that same cramped apartment, for seven years Bidgood filmed his wordless gay fantasy of a kept hustler's daydreams, Pink Narcissus, which was taken from him by investors, edited, and released without his consent in 1971. He removed his name. Bruce Benderson unraveled the story in the 90s, sparking a Bidgood revival, and the movie was finally re-released with his director credit in 2003. He's enjoyed solo or group shows nationwide and in Spain and Italy. Last year his work was the final image in Musée d'Orsay's Masculin / Masculin. You can still buy his vintage prints for $5000 or glorious big new C-prints for $1750. (To compare, a 1976 Pierre et Gilles print recently sold at Christie's for $215,888.) Eighty-one today, Bidgood is as sharp as ever: read his interview with Michael Kowalinski for Butt in which he says, "because of all that sissy scenery in that ‘Narcissus’ thing, I guess people expect me to be lounging around in a silk caftan, face powdered and rouged with twenty yards of orchid chiffon draped around my neck with my bong and a few boys by my pool! Very often guests like yourself think I only work in this slum dwelling, but I live here!." Get Taschen's big book James Bidgood.

Is it the mild gay content that prevents the international literary community from adding Håkan Lindquist to the working list of great living Nothernish writers like Gerbrand Bakker, Peter Stamm and Per Petterson (all of them indebted to the magnificent simplicity of lesbian Tove Jansson)? Or is it merely because only two of Håkan's six novels are available in English, and those two were long-distance efforts from a German publisher? His time will come. Until then, you can pride yourself on getting to know the dashing Swede (who splits his time between Stockholm and Berlin) before IMPAC Dublin discovers him. His short, domestic novels tackle eternal themes of family secrets, the nature of love, and the passage of time, with a fresh perspective and a modern, gay naturalism. My Brother and His Brother follows Jonas as he tracks down and uncovers surprising details about Paul, his older brother who died at sixteen the year before Jonas was born. On Collecting Stamps is a beautiful look back, from middle age, as Mattias reconsiders his unconventional friendship, starting at twelve, with a lonely

Slava Mogutin's New Food Chain, Old Photo Diary of Crimea

Who else would combine a lace doily with a half-stripped, bound and gagged tough - the obviousness being another slap to the viewer? Favorite anti-bougie angry gay artist Slava Mogutin is known here for his arresting photography but in Russia, prior to exile, he published seven books of fiction, poetry, and essays, winning the Andrei Bely Prize. Culled from his whole writing life, from teenhood to now, his English debut is a "part memoir, part political satire, part magic realism" mashup called Food Chain, out yesterday from novelist Christopher Stoddard's brand new ITNA Press. 

(ITNA is dedicated to releasing "literature deemed too provocative for the mainstream." Its other two titles are La JohnJoseph's farcical orgy/apocalypse fantasy Everything Must Go and Stoddard's own second novel Limiters [Kindle], about Kyle Mason, seen first as a lost 16 year-old raver then as a 26 year-old "sexually compulsive copywriter living in New York City, hyperactively riding the crests of a narcissistic and self-destructive personality.")

Slava has posted a brief text with his photos of Crimea from 2004, when he returned to find a more rundown resort that had, in his youth on visits from Siberia, seemed a Soviet Paradise. His strongest work is Lost Boys and NYC Go-Go.

Hold Tight Gently

Don't give in to aids history fatigue yet: This week comes Martin Duberman's highly praised Hold Tight Gently: Michael Callen, Essex Hemphill, and the Battlefield of Aids [Kindle]. In addition to stellar blurbs from D'Emilio, Schulman, Bronski, Fullwood, Bunch, Blanche Wiesen Cook, and two-time Pulitzer winner David Levering Lewis, PW gave it a starred review:

"In this insightful history, gay rights activist and distinguished historian Duberman attempts to revive aids awareness by detailing the early years of the epidemic, particularly the period of 1981–1995. He sets the details within a framework constructed around the experiences of two men: white singer/activist Michael Callen and black poet/cultural worker Essex Hemphill, both of whom lived with AIDS for years and died at age 38. Duberman pulls no punches in capturing the chaos, uncertainty, and ignorance of the era, looking at the sexual culture that allowed the disease to thrive; he also examines the fear and contradictions of the political environment. Through interviews, writings, personal experience, and Hemphill's poetry, Duberman creates a vivid, complex snapshot of the fractured, conflicted gay community as it responded to the growing problem. It’s a sobering narrative, replete with the sexism, racism, homophobia, and false leads that marked the onset of the aids epidemic. Most importantly, it addresses the role of aids as a 'gay disease' and exposes the differences between the white and black gay communities in their responses. Duberman’s accessible, open, and honest prose reminds us that aids is not over; only the sense of urgency has waned."

Guinness, Heineken, Sam Adams Withdraw from Antigay St Pat's Parades

Arizona redux: Businesses flex pro-gay muscle. Yesterday afternoon Guinness, the last remaining brewer sponsor, joined Heineken and Sam Adams in withdrawing sponsorship of the New York / Boston St. Patrick's Day parades over the organizers' homophobia. Guinness faced pressure from lgbt groups and gay bars that threatened to boycott the Irish brand. Mayors of both cities also refused to march.

On Facebook, Colm Toibin wrote, "As a gay Irish man, and an Irish writer, living in New York, I believe the Parade as it is now constituted is a way of excluding me from celebrating my Irish heritage, and is a way of undermining the progress made both in Ireland and in the United States towards treating all people with dignity." 

Guinness parent company Diageo released a statement saying, "Guinness has a strong history of supporting diversity and being an advocate for equality for all. We were hopeful that the policy of exclusion would be reversed for this year's parade. We will continue to work with community leaders to ensure that future parades have an inclusionary policy."

Salvation Army at New Directors, New Films

Yesterday was the public onsale for Abdellah Taïa's movie of his Moroccan gay novel Salvation Army, selected for New Directors, New Films on March 27 (Walter Reade) and March 28 (MoMA). Taïa will speak at both screenings. NDNF writes,

"Like the book it’s based on—Abdellah Taïa’s own 2006 landmark novel—the Moroccan author’s directorial debut is a bracing, deeply personal account of a young gay man’s awakening that avoids both cliché and the trappings of autobiography. First seen as a 15-year-old, Abdellah (Saïd Mrini) habitually sneaks away from his family’s crowded Casablanca home to engage in sexual trysts with random men in abandoned buildings. A decade later, we find Abdellah (now played by Karim Ait M’hand) on scholarship in Geneva, involved with an older Swiss professor (Frédéric Landenberg). With a clear-eyed approach, devoid of sentimentality, this wholly surprising bildungsfilm explores what it means to be an outsider, and with the help of renowned cinematographer Agnès Godard, Taïa finds a film language all his own: at once rigorous and poetic, worthy of Bresson in its concreteness and lucidity."

You should also read his autobiographical gay novel An Arab Melancholia which spans twenty years in Rabat, Paris, and Cairo.

Disney Cuts Boy Scouts, NBA Funds Gay Groups, Mayors Won't March

Since he signed with the Nets, Jason Collins' jersey has been the top seller at NBA.com. He chose number 98 to honor Matthew Shepard who was killed in 1998. Last week in Denver to play the Nuggets, he finally met Judy, Dennis, and Logan Shepard. The NBA announced they are donating the profits from sales of Collins' jersey to GLSEN and the Matthew Shepard Foundation.

Time: "The Walt Disney Company announced Saturday it would withdraw funding from the Boy Scouts of America beginning in 2015 unless the scouting organization overturns a policy banning gay leaders."

New York and Boston mayors refuse to march in St. Patrick's Day parades that exclude lgbt people. Bill de Blasio did appear in yesterday's Queens inclusive parade. No word yet if the first compromise in twenty years from the Boston bigots -- who now say they will allow gay vets to march in the military section -- is enough to get Martin Walsh in step.

George Will appeared on Fox to discuss Arizona SB1062 and offer his view that the victims are the bullies: "...This too must be said: It's a funny kind of sore winner in the gay rights movement that would say, 'A photographer doesn't want to photograph my wedding -- I've got lots of other photographers I could go to, but I'm going to use the hammer of government to force them to do this.'... It's not neighborly and it's not nice. The gay rights movement is winning. They should be, as I say, not sore winners."

Born February 12: Jacqueline Woodson

Jacqueline Woodson is the US nominee for the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Award to be announced in March. In her nearly two dozen books for young readers she has given voice to characters usually ignored or silenced in mainstream stories, and in doing so she's been a finalist for or won the National Book Award, the Newbery Honor Medal, the Caldecott Medal, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Margaret A. Edwards Award, the ALA Notable Book Award, the Parents' Choice Award, the Booklist Editors' Choice Award, and many, many regional prizes. She most often writes about friendship, especially across racial and class lines, and family or first love. Her girls are strong and her boys are caring, and she has included lgbtqi characters as adults and children, sometimes as the primary storyline. She's created a complete bibliography of her novels, with plot summaries and where and why she wrote each book. She lives in Brooklyn with her longtime partner and their two children, loves pizza, hates artichokes, and wisely doesn't believe in writer's block. The ALA's 2009 list of great lgbt reads for young readers included her novel After Tupac and D Foster about a trio of 11 to 13 year-olds coping with a tough neighborhood and the homophobia aimed at one of their brothers. Her most recent books are the story of brave girl coping, badly, with serious loss after Hurricane Katrina, Beneath a Meth Moon, and This Is the Rope: A Story From the Great Migration.

Born February 1: Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Langston Hughes

More publishing troubles: Lucy Jane Bledsoe's vivid exploration of three women's relationships and the meaning of home, set in an Antarctic research station conjured so astutely you'll think you've lived there yourself, The Big Bang Symphony, was released in May 2010, became a finalist for four book prizes, yet is still not available in paperback or as an eBook. Lucy's first novel, Working Parts, about adult literacy, won the Stonewall Book Award in 1998. She is a five-time Lammy nominee, for those two books, her two other novels, This Wild Silence and Biting the Apple, and her anthology Lesbian Travels. Her own trips are collected in a wonderful book called The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic [Kindle], and she's also written half a dozen titles for kids. She won the top prize in the Saturday Evening Post's Great American Fiction Contest for her "Wolf," about a couple in Yellowstone. Editorial Director Steven Slon says, "This terrific story is a tribute to human passion and to the American adventurer spirit. It's also a powerful evocation of the call of the wild." 

 

Celebrating "Langston Hughes, poet," as we must, neglects the bulk of his creative work: eleven plays, the screenplay of Way Down South (released the same year as Gone with the Wind), novels (starting with Not Without Laughter), forty-seven short stories (which often paid his rent), a series of books showcasing famous black Americans' accomplishments, six children's books, bold political writings, and two volumes of autobiography that as much as anything focus on Langston Hughes, traveler. His first memoir covers Harlem and Paris (after his scattered Midwestern childhood with visits to his father, an attorney who left the family to live in Mexico); and his second, I Wonder as I Wander, recounts his journeys in Russia, Turkmenistan, China, Japan, Cuba, Haiti, and Spain during their civil war. Of course his genius most often reveals itself in his poetry, which emphasizes a purity and simplicity like Whitman's, but unlike Whitman his directness of language does not extend to openness about his sexuality. Hughes's most cited homoerotic poems such as "Young Sailor" and "Joy", safeguarded with women or "she," are more cautious than the Calamus cycle. Below, listen to him read his response to Whitman's "I Hear America Singing." He died at 65 in 1967 and his ashes are interred beneath the lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th St. Long degayed, Hughes' homosexuality is the centerpiece of Isaac Julien's film on historical black gay experience amid entrenched homophobia, Looking for Langston.

Born January 31: Patrick Gale, Brad Gooch

An excellent novelist with wide crossover appeal, whose books have twice been selected for Richard and Judy's reading club, Patrick Gale explores gay and straight characters' fraught ties with their biological relations and more hopeful futures with their makeshift, chosen families. The comic brio of his early work -- in June 1986 when he was 24 his debut The Aerodynamics of Pork was published simultaneously with his second novel -- gradually gave way to a more contemplative, poignant tone in later work. A major turning point was Rough Music [Kindle] in 2000, the first time he used the autobiographical detail of a father who is a prison governor and was rewarded with his widest readership and best reviews: "a masterstoke" (New Statesman); "a triumph" (The Times); and this from Richard Canning in the Independent:

"Patrick Gale is among the great, unsung English novelists. He has written a dozen books, each confirming a remarkable insight into his chosen subject, the vagaries of the human heart. His works attract large readerships – mostly women or gay men – drawn by the witty, pathos-filled analyses of how we conduct relationships, both within the family and outside. His novels form a quiet gathering, not a series of brash entrances. They impress confidently but gently, like those of the closest of his peers, Barbara Trapido, Helen Dunmore and Colm Tóibin…. If Rough Music sounds dark, it is rather – but marvellously so. Gripping, elegant and wise, it is Gale’s best book to date, and should not be missed."  

Another breakthorough came three books later, in 2007, with his tv book club bestseller Notes from an Exhibition about the family of a brilliant bipolar artist mother. Again, high praise: "unutterably moving" (Daily Express), "quietly radiant intelligence, craft and integrity...powerful and surprising" (Sunday Times), "uplifting, immensely empathetic" (Guardian), "dense, thought-provoking, sensitive, satisfying, humorous, humane - a real treat" (Telegraph). A troubled character from that book reappears, happier, in his most recent novel A Perfectly Good Man, about the extended family of a priest who assists a young suicide. It was another R&J pick, a finalist for the Stonewall UK book award (losing to Winterson), and co-winner of the Green Carnation Prize (with Moffie). In 2000 he published a short biography of his friend Armistead Maupin, and last summer in a Guardian piece, Gale said Maupin "taught me that fiction need not thump tubs to change opinions and that a gently comic tone can work wonders."

A graduate of New College, Oxford, an avid gardener, chef, cellist, and whippet walker, he has lived in his beloved Cornwall for many years on a farm near Land's End with his husband Aidan Hicks. He is on a twitter sabbatical until he finishes his new novel.

In addition to several gay novels including Scary Kisses, The Golden Age of Promiscuity and the story collection Jailbait, Brad Gooch has written self-help (Finding the Boyfriend Within), spirituality (Godtalk), and a hybrid (Dating the Greek Gods: Empowering Spiritual Messages on Sex and Love, Creativity and Wisdom). However, his greatest strength is as a biographer, first with City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara [Kindle], a Lammy finalist, and more recently Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor [Kindle], which was an NYT notable book and an NBCC finalist. A recipient of a Guggenheim, an NEA, and other grants, he is currently at work on a life of Rumi. Somehow he is 62.

Ira Sachs' Gay Drama 'Love Is Strange' Premieres at Sundance

Two years after his highly praised autobiographical Keep the Lights On, Ira Sachs is back at Sundance for the fifth time, last night premiering Love Is Strange about the forty-year union between characters played by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina. Also starring Marisa Tomei and Cheyenne Jackson, the movie got a rave from Variety:

"Truth springs from the title and trickles down into every pore of Love Is Strange, an uncompromising yet accessible slice-of-life expression from Ira Sachs, one of the most perceptive and personal directors working in American cinema. Here, the helmer branches out beyond his own lived experience to imagine a same-sex relationship 39 years strong as it is tested immediately following the couple’s long-overdue marriage. This beautifully observed ensembler shines on the strength of its two leads, John Lithgow and Alfred Molina, who conjure four decades together as they enter the 'for better, for worse' phase of their union."

The Hollywood Reporter says, "A beautifully portrayed, loving relationship can overcome even an artificial-feeling physical separation."

Nine years ago Ira won Sundance's Grand Prize for Forty Shades of Blue.

Filmmaker Jenni Olson compiled this roundup of the "hefty slate" of queer movies chosen for the festival, including the lesbian prostitute buddy comedy The Foxy Merkins, the Brooklyn bi Persian drama Appropriate Behavior, features with gay turns from Bill Hader (as Kristen Wiig's brother in The Skeleton Twins), Ben Whishaw (Lilting) and Noah Silver (Jamie Marks Is Dead), as well as documentaries about George Takei, singer Rae Spoon, bisexual internet crusader/suicide Aaron Swartz, the duo Lambert & Stamp, and Olson & Boies fighting Prop 8.

(uncredited photo via)

Body Counts Out Today

Already named on Thebes' recent queer lit poll, Sean Strub's much-anticipated Body Counts: A Memoir of Politics, Sex, AIDS, and Survival [Kindle] arrives today preceded by two admiring mainstream reviews (in the SF Chronicle, Michael Bronski called it "a moving, multi-decade memoir of one gay man's life... forcefully reminds us of the impact an individual can make in changing the world") and a deluge of sixteen blurbs. Among the more useful:

John D'Emilio: "Searingly honest about himself and others, Strub shows how the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and 1990s brought out the best and the worst in people. His heroes are the ordinary men and women who fought to save lives. His villains – and deservedly so – are the cowardly public officials, from Reagan through Clinton, whose opportunism proved deadly to others. This take-no-prisoners memoir has the quality of a suspenseful page-turner, and will keep you reading until the final sentence."

Gloria Steinhem: "Read Body Counts and share one American's story of growing up with an instinct for justice, then finding oneself in an epidemic whose tragedy is multiplied by bias. As a man who survived sexual abuse, rape and an HIV diagnosis, Strub embodies the shared interest of women and men who fight for human rights, and against any government or person intruding on our bodies. By taking us with him on his journey from a conservative family in Iowa to the heart of a global movement for human rights, Sean Strub gives us ideas, strength and heart in our own journey."

For anyone who worried a political aids memoir might be 400 pages of unrelenting heaviness, Jonathan Ned Katz calls it "gossipy," Andrew Tobias compares him to Forest Gump, and Ari Shapiro cites Sean's "interactions with a parade of American icons."

Sean reads from his memoir at BGSQD on January 24.

Born January 13: Horatio Alger, Justin Torres

Although in the 115 years since his death, Horatio Alger's stories have become synonymous with "rags to riches," the hard working boys in his novels don't amass fortunes. A typical plot is that a rich older man notices a plucky orphaned lad, witnesses his act of bravery or honor, and sets him up with a decent low-level job in a company, giving him security but not wealth. Often the older man gets the boy to live with him. Alger himself was a bright youth, entering Harvard at 16 and studying with Longfellow. (At left, his graduation photo at 20.) He became a minister but at 34 fled his Unitarian parish in Brewster, Massachusetts after church officials discovered he was having sex with two teenagers. Or, as they said, committing the "most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys." By that time, 1866, Alger had already written nine books for children; he moved to New York City and over the next 33 years wrote 120 more. Despite his prolific production he never became rich. Besotted with bootblacks and street scruffs, he ate often meals and / or slept at the Newsboys Lodging House and gave away his earnings or was conned out of them by the young men he so admired. Except for Ragged Dick, his books did not become bestsellers until years after his death in 1899 at 67 at his sister Augusta's house in Natick. She destroyed all his papers.

Years before he unleashed his novella We the Animals [Kindle] in 2011, Justin Torres was already collecting literary honors like a Truman Capote Fellowship at Iowa, a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and a United States Artists Rolón Fellowship in 2009. His instant classic is now published in twelve languages and was a finalist or winner of many prizes including those from the NAACP, Publishing Triangle, VCU Cabell, Pitt's Fred Brown Award, and the Indies Choice Book Award, as well as being named Salon's fourth sexiest man of 2011, sandwiched between Aloe Blacc and Thom Yorke. In 2012 he was selected as one of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35, chosen to speak at the National Book Festival, and he currently holds a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard where he is working on his second novel, about a gay Puerto Rican hustler in New York City. Two chapters of that book have appeared in Harpers and The New Yorker. He's 34.

Samuel Delany's Graphic Memoir Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of NYC

Seven years before Fun Home, the great polymath Samuel Delany published a graphic memoir Bread & Wine: An Erotic Tale of New York about his longterm partnership with tall, white, Irish-American Dennis Ricketts who, when they met, was thirty-six, homeless, and selling old books from a shopping cart on Broadway. They've been together twenty-two years and last summer Delany rereleased the book with new commentary and an introduction by Alan Moore. No idea how everyone missed this treasure. The Strand did a talk with Delany and illustrator Mia Wolff in August, which you can watch here.

For more about the erotics of the city and the importance of a vibrant street life, get Delany's anti-gentrification book Times Square Red, Times Square Blue [Kindle].

Gessen's Pussy Riot Book Out Early & Gay Propaganda Event in NYC

Riverhead has rushed an early release of Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot [Kindle] by Masha Gessen, the lesbian journalist who fled Russia with her children last summer. If you missed her tv takedown of the ever-worsening situation there, watch it now. Her critical biography The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin is considered to be among the best. 

Next weekend, Cooper Union is hosting Propaganda: A Celebration of Russian Voices, which will feature Masha Gessen's first public appearance since expatriating from Russia. Her panel is the capstone session of the two-day event, on January 19th at 6:30pm in Cooper Union’s Great Hall. See the full lineup here.

Hip readers will already know Masha's brother Keith Gessen, cofounder of the journal n+1 and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men.

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 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.

The Wolf of Wall St.

Dear Martin Scorsese,

If your three-hour movie has to rely on two hours fifty-nine minutes of voiceovers to explain characters' every feeling and motivation -- even switching back and forth between both players in a scene -- then your screenplay and actors really aren't doing their jobs. 

Also, your three-hour movie about excess is nine hours too long. 

But it was fun to see (finally! your first?) a gay major character who is no more cliched or flawed than anyone else in the film. Jonah Hill finds some fresh life in his role of the closeted, pastel-draped second-in-command, unlike your star Leonardo DiCaprio who relies on his usual tics amped up to frantic 1990s mania. Also, despite Salon's complaint, I had no problem with your openly gay butler who hosts an all-male orgy in the penthouse which the owners interrupt. And I loved the gay broker who offered a workplace bet ha! ha! of performing a sexual favor on Leo and then said, not laughing anymore, "I hope that happens."

As ever, your minor characters triumph. Joanna Lumley as the English auntie! Fran Lebowitz as a New York judge! 

Still looking forward to your next, adapting Shûsaku Endô's novel Silence with Andrew Garfield and Ken Watanabe.

Born January 7: Chester Kallman

In 1939 Chester Kallman was an eighteen year-old blond Jewish kid from Brooklyn when he met W.H. Auden, the thirty-two year-old English, Anglican poet. Auden had thought he would be forever excluded from any semblance of marriage and his joy at finding himself in a romantic, erotic relationship even led him to wear a wedding ring. For a few months. Kallman's inability to stay still and his infidelities wounded Auden, and his naked grief can be seen in every line of his famous essay on Shakespeare's sonnets to a beautiful lad. As Adam Kirsch writes, "The younger man was considered Auden’s inferior in every way by most of his friends, and [Auden's] biographers continue to be puzzled by the attachment. (Richard Davenport-Hines, whose 1995 biography, Auden, is psychologically acute, can find nothing nicer to say about Kallman than 'it was impossible to be indifferent about' him.)" Despite public fights, affairs, and separations, they were still together in their way thirty-four years later at Auden's death at 66 in 1973. They collaborated on several opera libretti including The Rake's Progress (1951), Elegy for Young Lovers (1961), and Love's Labor's Lost (1973). Kallman published three volumes of poetry, Storm at Castelfranco (1956), Absent and Present (1963), and The Sense of Occasion (1971). Although he remained a New Yorker, they summered in Ischia, Italy from 1948 to 1957, and began spending winters in Athens circa 1963, by which time they switched to summering in Kirchstetten, Austria. Kallman died in Greece in 1975 at 54. American Thekla Clark was a friend for twenty-four years and wrote a short, clear-eyed memoir about the couple, Wystan and Chester.

Born January 5: Alvin Ailey

Growing up in Texas, Alvin Ailey hid his dancing from his disapproving mother for two years and when she first saw him backstage in make-up, she slapped his face. His terror of her homophobia lasted decades, to his final days, so much so that when he was dying of aids at fifty-eight in 1989 he asked his doctor to lie about the cause on his death certificate. That fear outlives him. A CBS profile from August 2008 celebrates the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater's 50th anniversary with great dancing and an American success story of a black troupe thriving in a typically white corner of the arts. It omits any mention that he was gay, or gay people's contribution to dance, that he died of aids, or aids' toll on the arts. It also erases the more complicated aspects of Ailey's life, like his devastating arthritis, his addiction to cocaine, or his dependence on lithium. His private demons never obscured his public genius. One of the seventy-nine dances he choreographed, Revelations, set to spirituals and gospel music, is among the most popular and most seen ballets of the twentieth-century.

Born December 20: Sky Gilbert, Elsie de Wolfe

Author of more than thirty plays, Sky Gilbert is also a poet, novelist, drag queen named Jane, and a longtime Toronto provocateur who called his memoir Ejaculations from the Charm Factory [Kindle]. His fiction includes Guilty, St. Stephen's, I Am Kasper Klotz, and Come Back about Judy Garland/Frances Gumm alive at 138 in the year 2050 pursuing her doctorate in feminist studies obsessed with the work of a dead queer playwright, Dash King.

Baby boomers who think they invented being young at sixty are forgetting about Elsie de Wolfe who at sixty-one in 1926 attended a costume ball in Paris dressed as a Moulin Rouge dancer and made her entrance doing handsprings. When she turned seventy, the world's most famous interior designer wrote her autobiography and noted that her daily exercise regimen still included yoga, headstands, and walking on her hands. Her design style was nearly as dramatic, banishing the dark, heavy Victorian look for new openness, airiness, and light. Starting at forty, she received her first major commission for Stanford White's Colony Club, after which she designed the interiors for the premiere families of her day, the Fricks, Morgans, Vanderbilts, and Windsors. Ten years into her success, in her early fifties, she stopped to become a nurse in World War I in France and earned the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. From her late twenties onward she lived with Elisabeth Marbury, one of the first women to work as a theatrical agent, representing among others Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw. They spent thirty-three years together as a classic butch-femme couple, mentoring a whole generation of younger lesbians including Mercedes de Acosta who would become Greta Garbo's lover. Then de Wolfe up and married Sir Charles Mendl because she wanted a title. Now Lady Mendl, she expected nothing to change with Marbury, given that her marriage was completely platonic, and the women remained lovers for seven more years, until 1933, when Marbury died.

The next time you discuss outing and public figures and privacy, you might bear in mind that in 1926, the New York Times ran a front page story calling de Wolfe's wedding "a great surprise"  because "she makes her home with Elisabeth Marbury at 13 Sutton Place." Not that everything can be explained by early experiences, but the woman who spent her life making things beautiful grew up listening to her mother tell her she was ugly. When she was seventy, Parisian fashionistas named her the best dressed woman in the world. She is immortalized in song lyrics by Irving Berlin and by Cole Porter:

When you hear that Lady Mendl, standing up,

Now turns a handspring, landing up-on her toes

Anything Goes!

Read her landmark book The House in Good Taste or either of two biographies, Elsie De Wolfe: A Life in the High Style or Elsie De Wolfe: A Decorative Life.