Before his double play in Masculin / Masculin, Paul Cadmus was part of Hide/Seek with his epic "What I Believe," (above, titled after E.M. Forster's 1938 essay, available in his thumping Two Cheers For Democracy). Cadmus's 1947 heavy-handed painting depicts happy gay life on the left and miserable heteros on the right. (So yet again let's eradicate the falsehood that there was no gay identity before Stonewall.) On the bright gay side, lush fecund green grass supports loving couples and great artists like Forster and Kirstein. On the dark straight side, there is no grass at all, only bleakness, horror, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and, terribly, miscegenation. It's from the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas.
Although the controversy over his 1934 WPA painting The Fleet's In! was sparked by homophobia and led Henry Latrobe Roosevelt to remove it from the Corcoran show, Cadmus was always aware that the outcry helped establish him. For the rest of his life, he said he was grateful for it. By 1937 his paintings at the Midtown Galleries in New York attracted more than 7,000 visitors. He had grown up in Manhattan and was fascinated by sailors, frequently hanging out at the Soldiers' and Sailors' Monument in Riverside Park, where he was often propositioned by navy men on leave but was too shy to go with them, preferring instead to sit on the benches with them and talk. By his twenties, he was over his shyness and traveled through Europe for three years with his lover Jared French, who urged him to quit advertising and paint fulltime. Back in New York, they formed a circle of prominent gay artists including George Platt Lynes, who used Cadmus as a model, and Lincoln Kirstein, who married his sister, Fidelma Cadmus, and fifty years later wrote the catalog as Cadmus was being rediscovered. He enjoyed more than a decade of increasing interest in his work before he died, eleven days after 300 friends had gathered to celebrate his 95th birthday. He was survived by Jon Anderson, his partner of more than thirty-five years.
Prior to his success with Secret Historian
YMCA Locker Room, 1931.
at Barnes & Noble Union Square on Thursday, December 12 from 7:00 to 9:00. No reading, no Q&A, no singing of songs and no signing of stuff. He'll be tired because the night before, December 11,
. A hard-nosed crime writer ranking with Chandler and Hammett, his many stories and novels inspired the more than two dozen movies: 
and James Saslow's exceptional 
.
[
and Cynthia Carr’s 
—each book many years in the making—are equal to the genius of these artists’ lives and creations, and to the task of weighing the often conflicting evidence they left behind."
powerfully rendered by James Romberger and gorgeously colored by Marguerite Van Cook. It hit #5 on the NYT graphic books bestseller list.
memorable for many aspects, including its sexual relationship between teen brothers. He won the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 1981. He released another major work in 1985 and FSG published his Selected Poems in 1988. He died in 1991. Read his 
, 
published thirty years ago, in 1983. Amazingly, it spans three generations and seventy years in the Desiderio family, from Sicily to Brooklyn to New Jersey, in a mere 215 pages. It works because the writing is so swift and right and alive. Reunited with distant relatives after decades apart: "Then he recognized certain faces, older and changed, like music played slower." Pushing forty, the gay character Max worries when he cruises the Village: "People will no longer turn to look at him, will see nothing but themselves being seen." Everything rings true about this family, including their complicated, shifting degrees of acceptance of Max's actor boyfriend of fifteen years, Nick Flynn. Ferro's other novels are his debut 
and his third novel, 
[
, and novelist 
[
]. Three months ago FSG published her ninth novel, 
[
]. She received a Guggenheim to research it and PW gave it a strong, starred review, saying, "Robbins (1918–1998) was the choreographic genius behind the 1957 Broadway hit West Side Story and other musical classics, in addition to such great ballets as Fancy Free and Dances at a Gathering. Vaill was given unprecedented access to Robbins's personal papers after his death, and the result is a critically sophisticated biography that's as compulsively readable as a novel. As she traverses Robbins's growth as an artist, his ambivalence about his Jewish heritage, his bisexuality and his relationships with other artists from Balanchine, to Bernstein to 
.
], a half-hour comedy based on the first novel by TV writer-producer Richard Kramer (Thirtysomething, My So-Called Life). The pay cable network has optioned the book, published last fall, for the comedy project, which will be produced by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Prods. under the company’s deal at HBO. Kramer will write the script and executive produce. 
[
- only $5.99] with typical praise coming from the Los Angeles Times -- "This is the grand accomplishment of Someone, a deceptively simple book that is, in fact, extraordinarily artful, a novel that traces the arc of an unexceptional, almost anonymous life and, seemingly by accident though of course on purpose, turns a run-of-the-mill story into a poem." -- but what most critics aren't saying is that a gay man is very close to the core of the novel. In the same delicate, sly way McDermott presents the heroine's entire life in a handful of minor chords, many of the key notes of a closeted existence in the 40s and 50s and 60s are included at the edge of the story, including being sent to an asylum. If that sounds vague, it's to avoid spoilers. The character whose trans status is not revealed to the shocked spouse until their wedding night, upsetting the entire Irish Brooklyn neighborhood, is seen only briefly but alluded to several times to underscore people's surprises and life's mysteries. 
in 2004. Next came 
in 2007, 
in 2008, 
in 2009, 
starring Mindy Cohn in 2010, and 
in 2011. Although he's acted in a couple shorts by other people, he hasn't directed a feature since then. Maybe he's honing his craft or maybe market pressures are exerting themselves on his art: His highest grossing theatrical release earned $24,140 at the box office, but those figures don't reflect his popularity or his many awards -- or his earnings -- at dozens and dozens of lgbt film festivals and in dvd rentals and vod viewings. This year he shot a short in Sweden, in Swedish, that debuted at a festival of shorts in Drama, Greece. Twenty years a New Yorker, he runs the production and distribution company Embrem Entertainment.
[
, an early gay classic that nearly ruined him in 1967. Or the even earlier 
about a Midwestern spinster who decides to write a memoir of her nephew killed in war only to discover he liked men. More open is the lusty, violent novel of young gay love and hate, 
,
from 1978. Fifteen years on, Purdy unleashed his gayest, funniest, Firbankian romp, 
(1993), in which a Virgil Thomson type decides to write an opera about a Carl van Vechten-ish photographer, revealing on stage in song his bent for his black male subjects. His Russian widow, a former silent-film siren claiming a Romanov connection, tries to shut down the NYC premiere. Supporting characters include a young Kentucky drama queen addicted to unhappy affairs and a has-been movie star who keeps his forty-room mansion crammed with obedient young men.
and 
, Reinaldo Arenas recalled his impoverished childhood in Cuba and his early memories of being so hungry he ate dirt. He also described his vivid and prolific sexual adventures beginning at a very young age with a male cousin, and later with his uncle, a domesticated animal, and countless men, all told with an unvarnished honesty that shocked some readers. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the ten best books of the 1993, but Arenas could not enjoy its success. His hard luck was a constant. In his teens he became besotted with and then disillusioned by the Castro regime, which eventually imprisoned him, prohibited him from publishing, and threatened him with death. He attempted to escape from Cuba on an inner tube, was caught, and was sent to a far worse prison. Even when he was officially forbidden from having paper, he managed to write and got his work smuggled out of the country and published abroad. Released from prison in 1976 after renouncing his fiction and essays, Arenas was, by a fluke, part of the Mariel boatlift to Florida in 1980. Exploding with the boundless freedoms of writing and gay sex in New York, he entered his most fertile phase: 
starring Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp, Olivier Martinez, Diego Luna, and Sean Penn. Earlier this year, Duke released Jorge Olivares' 
[