Band of Thebes

Born July 8: F. Holland Day, Arthur Evans, Philip Johnson

Although F. Holland Day is remembered (some say imitated after this) as an early pioneer of art photography, he was also an influential book publisher whose 100+ titles included works by Aubrey Beardsley and Oscar Wilde. The sole inheritor of a fortune from his father, a Boston merchant, Day was able to indulge his artistic pursuits with abandon. He amassed a large collection of ephemera connected to John Keats and he built a summer camp in Little Good Harbor, Five Islands, Maine where he hosted other artists and youths who modeled for him. The lads were usually from Boston’s immigrant slums where Day often tutored poor children in reading. One of his young models was Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese immigrant, whom Day encouraged in his literary ambitions and achieved fame with his book of poetic essays, The Prophet, published in more than twenty languages. (Gibran is the source, often paraphrased, for everything from Beatles’ lyrics to Kennedy’s “Ask not...”) Day also photographed adults, notably himself as Christ, as well as prominent artists and gay leaders such as Edward Carpenter. A fire in 1904 destroyed Day’s studio and most of his negatives. He later lost interest in photography and died in 1933 at sixty-nine. Read Patricia Fanning's Through an Uncommon Lens: The Life and Photography of F. Holland Day for many revelations about turn of the century Boston.

British archaeologist Sir Arthur Evans (far left) did not begin his famous excavations at Knossos until 1900 when he was forty-nine. In 1878 someone had discovered a small portion of the ruins but it was only after Crete became an independent state free of Turkey that Evans was able to purchase the site and organize a dig on a necessarily massive scale. The "palace" is a series of 1,000 interlocking rooms. Luckily, Evans lived another forty-one years, plenty of time to unveil the structures he decided were source of the mythic King Minos and his fabled Minotaur; hence Evans' coining the term Minoan civilization from the 27th to 15th centuries BC. One aspect of real life there was bull dancing, a tradition in which youths cavorted with angry steers to great honor and, usually within three months, certain death. Mary Renault brings the practice alive in her novel The King Must Die about Theseus's Cretan adventures. (Below, my picture of bull dancing from Knossos this May and Superman Henry Cavill as Theseus in Tarsem Singh's ancient Greek hotfest The Immortals.) Evans was Keeper of Oxford's Ashmolean Museum from 1894-1908 and many, many of the treasures he found at Knossos ended up in its collection. He is degayed in most accounts of his life but not in Cathy Gere's intriguing Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism.

   

Soon after graduating from Harvard in 1930, Philip Johnson became the first director of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design though he himself was not yet an architect. In the ensuing years he was a committed fascist, an ardent admirer of Hitler, and he even toured conquered Poland at the Nazis' invitation. How he as a gay man reconciled the Reich's murder of gay men probably shouldn't be any more pressing than how he as a human reconciled the Reich's slaughter of humans, but somehow it sharpens the point. In 1948, when Johnson built his master degree thesis, Glass House, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and remains one of the most important designs of the century. His two best known other works are the Seagrams Building (with Mies van der Rohe) and the AT&T Building with its controversial Chippendale top, completed when he was seventy-eight. His many other projects include the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, the Amon Carter Museum, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, PPG Place in Pittsburgh, the IDS Tower in Minneapolis, the Boston Public Library's 1972 addition, 101 California in San Francisco, 190 South LaSalle in Chicago, 191 Peachtree Tower in Atlanta, Das Amerikan Business Center in Berlin, Puerta de Europe in Madrid, and the Tata Theater in Mumbai. Considered by many to be among his greatest designs is the LGBT Cathedral of Hope-United Church of Christ in Dallas, a soaring structure "without right angles or parallel lines." Although the ambitious cathedral remains a dream, the church finally broke ground on the Interfaith Chapel in 2007. You can learn more about it and take a virtual tour here. Johnson lived with his partner, curator David Whitney, from 1960 to his death in 2005.

Soon after graduating from Harvard in 1930, Philip Johnson became the first director of MoMA's Department of Architecture and Design though he himself was not yet an architect. In the ensuing years he was a committed fascist, an ardent admirer of Hitler, and he even toured conquered Poland at the Nazis' invitation. How he as a gay man reconciled the Reich's murder of gay men probably shouldn't be any more pressing than how he as a human reconciled the Reich's slaughter of humans, but somehow it sharpens the point. In 1948, when Johnson built his master degree thesis, Glass House, was immediately hailed as a masterpiece and remains one of the most important designs of the century. His two best known other works are the Seagrams Building (with Mies van der Rohe) and the AT&T Building with its controversial Chippendale top, completed when he was seventy-eight. His many other projects include the Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, the Amon Carter Museum, the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, PPG Place in Pittsburgh, the IDS Tower in Minneapolis, the Boston Public Library's 1972 addition, 101 California in San Francisco, 190 South LaSalle in Chicago, 191 Peachtree Tower in Atlanta, Das Amerikan Business Center in Berlin, Puerta de Europe in Madrid, and the Tata Theater in Mumbai. Considered by many to be among his greatest designs is the LGBT Cathedral of Hope-United Church of Christ in Dallas, a soaring structure "without right angles or parallel lines." Although the ambitious cathedral remains a dream, the church finally broke ground on the Interfaith Chapel in 2007. You can learn more about it and take a virtual tour here. Johnson lived with his partner, curator David Whitney, from 1960 to his death in 2005.

Christine Quinn's Superflop

Anyone might think a blog that loiters at the intersection of gay and books would be eager for a memoir by NYC's lesbian mayoral hopeful Christine Quinn, but I avoided it knowing every personal syllable was a political calculation. Witness her overreaching title, With Patience and Fortitude [Kindle]. What queer Irish former Mets fan talks like that? As it turns out, no one is buying it. Literally. The Daily Beast reports her first-week sales were only 100 physical copies.* They've compiled a fun list of other failed memoirs but unfortunately omit Mary Cheney's epic fail, Now It's My Turn: A Daughter's Chronicle of Political Life.

*Like so much in publishing, Nielsen BookScan numbers are a half-assed imitation of how real industries operate. Hollywood can tell you exactly how many tickets were sold, television can tell you exactly how many millions of viewers watched a show, Billboard can tell you exact music sales, but books? The sales are so pitiful they are generally kept secret. BookScan typically captures about 75% of physical book sales but does not include giants (Wal-Mart) or dwarfs (indies). Or ebooks.

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 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.

 

Born May 15: Barbara Hammer

Just since 2009 when she turned 70, pioneering queer filmmaker Barbara Hammer has had a retrospective of her work at MoMA in New York, the Tate in London, and the Jeu de Paume in Paris; her short called "A Horse Is Not a Metaphor" won a Teddy at the Berlinale; her brilliant and inspiring book Hammer!: Making Movies Out of Sex and Life [Kindle] won a Publishing Triangle Award, won a Lammy, and was a favorite on Thebes' queer lit poll; and this year she won a Guggenheim. All deserved, and all infinitely more gratifying when you remember she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer in 2006. Her decades of creating dozens of experimental work to record queer lives (Dyketactics, A Gay Day, Superdyke Meets Madam X, etc.) reached a new high in 1992 with her first feature documentary Nitrate Kisses, acclaimed at Sundance, festivals worldwide, and at the Whitney Biennial. She says, “I choose film and video to make the invisible visible. I am compelled to reveal and celebrate queer and other people whose stories have not been told. I make a multi-level cinema that engages audiences viscerally and emboldens them intellectually. My current work has turned towards recovering missing histories of lesbian artists and is inspired by the words of Gayatri Spivak who cautions against an uncritical archivism leading to nostalgia.” The MoMA curator wrote:

... she came out as a lesbian, an act that helped radicalize her approach to directing. Galvanized by the second wave of feminism in the 1970s, she soon became a pioneer of queer cinema. Hammer has since directed more than eighty films, using avant-garde strategies to explore lesbian and gay sexuality, identity, and history, along with other heretofore unrepresented voices. In the 1970s her films dealt with the representation of taboo subjects through performance, and in the 1980s she began using an optical printer to make films that explore perception. In the 1990s she began making documentaries about hidden aspects of queer history.

Barbara was born in Hollywood, graduated from UCLA, and earned two masters degrees at SFSU. She has lived in New York City for many years and still teaches each summer at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland.

Husbands, The Outs, Hunting Season & Where the Bears Are

Last Wednesday an online poll to rank viewers' favorite web series of all orientations put the gay L.A. series Husbands (The New Normal minus the baby) at #3 with 2,249 votes and the gay Brooklyn series The Outs (Girls minus the females) around #40 with 52 votes. Back when it started, NPR's Ira Glass called Husbands "the future -- of tv, of America." It has the better pedigree, particularly in the form of co-created Jane Epenson, a veteran writer of Buffy, Firefly, Gilmore Girls, the O.C., Game of Thrones, and Warehouse 13, which she created. Also, that funny cameo from Joss Whedon. And a visit from Jon Cryer. It was not so far-fetched for Husbands to boast it was "the most critically successful show ever to emerge in new media," with strong reviews from mainstream critics like Time ("more complex and interesting...than The New Normal") and The New Yorker ("totes adorbs").

This Wednesday, the Atlantic profiled The Outs, citing cooler mags like Interview calling it "the most accurate and essentially human portrayal of young gay men today" and Paper insisting it's "the best web series ever." The article has gotten some attention for quotes from the show's creator and star, Adam Goldman:

"I'm not necessarily knocking what's on television," Goldman says. "I just think there is always room for more well-rounded stories."

"The democratization of media is really exciting," Goldman says. "Particularly for minorities or underrepresented people. You don't have to wait for a studio to say now we are going to make your show. You can look to everyone and say, don't we need this? And if they say yes we do, then you get to make it."

"...But Goldman bristles at being lumped in with a wave of 'gay shows.'

"What's a gay show?" he says, seeming annoyed. "It just doesn't mean anything. There aren't definitions of these things. I don't think of every other show as a straight show. Is it gay because I suck dick? Or is it gay because it's about two gay men? It just doesn't mean anything.

"As soon as people give the label that you are speaking for a whole group, there's just too much pressure. There are black gay people, Asian gay people, trans people...There's no such thing as the voice of a generation for the gay community."

What's a gay show? If you really don't know, try Hunting Season, based on the unshy blog-to-novel, The Great Cock Hunt. The series is co-written by the excellent Adam Baran who curates Queer/ Art/ Film with Ira Sachs.

Or find Where the Bears Are, an amusing romp as familiar types juggle jokes, tricks, and a mystery. They describe the show as The Golden Girls meets Murder, She Wrote. Season two starts next month.

Watch Husbands here. Get into The Outs here.

Born April 12: Slava Mogutin

Former enfant terrible Slava Mogutin, 39, 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.

Now on View: The Best of 10,000 Old Gay Photos, Ephemera

 

This week with its epic though mixed Supreme Court cases, with Time magazine prematurely declaring Gay Marriage Already Won, and with Rush Limbaugh conceding the fight, nothing is more important than remembering the gay past. Get yourself to the sixth floor of 265 Canal St, where for the next two weeks only, you can see highlights from Harry Weintraub's collection of 10,000+ pre-Stonewall gay photographs, scrapbooks, magazines, artifacts, and ephemera. A New York lawyer with an eye for history, Weintraub began collecting the images before aids had a name in the 1980s and his earliest items date from the 1850s. Obviously, assigning sexualities to anonymous subjects in found photos is an inexact art, never free from ambiguity. Indeed, a few well-meaning, over-eager online amateurs go too far, gathering every old image that merely shows men without women and labeling it gay. Though some items remain open to interpretation, much of Weintraub's archive is authentically queer. And invaluable.

Upon receiving the collection in 2011, Cornell's library discussed Weintraub's struggle to find personal gay artifacts:

"Many families were embarrassed by their gay relatives and would throw out their personal effects, Weintraub said, because "they just wanted to get rid of everything. Many times, I was beaten by the dumpster."

"But relatives started finding out about Weintraub’s collection and contacting him, ready to donate garbage bags full of their gay family members’ scrapbooks, pornography, photographs and memorabilia. He also purchased materials through antique dealers, from the basements of Manhattan sex shops and at antique shows all over the country."

That newsletter also asked how can one tell if people in a photograph are gay without context?

"Sometimes it’s obvious, Weintraub said, such as when men are in overtly sexual situations or the photographs were donated directly by the families of known gay men. Other times, particularly with older photographs, it’s more subtle -- conveyed by an open hand instead of a closed fist, the position of the legs, even a facial expression.

"There are clues, tiny details, if you know what to look for," he said, such as the way the men sit or wear matching rings on their right hands."

The show's co-curators Jon Savage and Johan Kugelberg write:

"Many of the artifacts show how the gay underworld intersected with the mainstream of American society – the hostile attention of the police and the gutter press, etc – but many more are intimate documents from within: collaged scrapbooks, candid photographs, porno magazines, home-made erotic artworks that testify to a constantly threatened but nevertheless vivid subculture.

"Many of the men in these photos and collages are trapped in their time: many are so ashamed, guilt-ridden, or burdened by social pressures, that they hide their faces (but not their cocks!) or wear masks. This alludes to the mask that gay men had to wear in straight society during those years, when exposure could mean imprisonment, loss of employment, ostracism.

"It is also evidence of the secret handshakes and systems of signals prevalent in a subculture. When such a subculture is derived from the core human condition of sexuality, the game play of concealment and revelation tell plenty about how all of us, gay and straight, choose to present ourselves and the differences between our public and private life – who we are and who we choose to present to others.

"What’s so great about this extraordinary, unprecedented weight of samizdat imagery is that it shows the inhabitants of this underworld living, working, having sex and having fun in total defiance of everything that they have been told. It is this indomitable spirit – this sheer sense of glee, of saying ‘up yours’ – that Harry Weintraub sought to record, and that we at Boo-Hooray wish to celebrate. 

"Hooray for Gay" is at the Boo-Hooray Gallery, 6th Floor, 265 Canal St., NYC, open daily 11-6.

Readers interested in more should look to James Gardiner's Who's a Pretty Boy, Then?: 150 Years of Gay Life in Pictures, Russell Bush's Affectionate Men: A Photographic History of a Century of Male Couples, 1850-1950, John Ibson's Picturing Men: A Century of Male Relationships in Everyday American Photography, David Deitcher's Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918, Montague Glover's private photos of gay Brits 1914-1950 in A Class Apart, or Jonathan Ned Katz's Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality. 

Big Gay DVD Release Day

Yesterday was the DVD release of: 

Bad Boy Street, Gay director Todd Verow's Parisian film about a middle aged Frenchman, Yann, who finds a younger American passed out on rue des Mauvais-Garçons and takes him home. The next morning, this Brad dude thanks him orally, the start of a beautiful friendship. While Yann wonders if it's love or just sex, Brad harbors a major secret.

Keep the Lights On, Gay director Ira Sachs' drama based on his longterm relationship with literary agent and then-crack-addict Bill Clegg is nominated for four Spirit Awards including Best Feature, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actor.

The Paperboy, Gay director Lee Daniels' violent adaptation of Pete Dexter's novel stars Matthew McConaughey as a gay masochist and Zac Efron as his little bro who learns a lot from hot mess Nicole Kidman. Selected for Cannes, nominated for a Golden Globe, the movie couldn't connect with American critics, who found it lurid.

Pina, The 2011 dance spectacle and Oscar nominated doc finally comes home.

Born January 19: Patricia Highsmith, Matthew Stadler

European critics consider Patricia Highsmith's twenty-two novels and eight story collections literary descendants of Dostoevsky and Kafka, but American readers know her work mainly as fodder for films: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Ripley's Game. She was most at home in the darker corners of her characters' twisted psyches and as often as not her protagonists expressed themselves through murder. Even in her first full-time job she excelled at creating dual lives, scripting comic book heroes Captain Midnight, Spy Smasher, and the Golden Arrow. Her childhood was divided between Fort Worth and New York and her emotions were split between similar extremes: loving and loathing her stepfather and her mother who claimed to have tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith said her unhappiest year was when her parents abandoned her with her grandmother at 12, yet throughout her life she seemed to seek the intensity of crisis and discord, pushing her friends to fight and her lovers to leave. One former girlfriend, the portraitist Allela Cornell, killed herself by swallowing nitric acid. Another girlfriend was Marijane Meaker, whose work you may know under her pen names Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich, or M. E. Kerr. A woman who didn't become a girlfriend was the frosty, smoldering blond young married mother in Bloomingdales who sent Highsmith into a fever of longing and productivity, resulting in her second novel, The Price of Salt [Kindle]. If you still think queer visibility began with Stonewall, this lesbian book sold nearly a million copies in 1952. And unlike Gore Vidal's 1948 gay novel The City and the Pillar, hers has a happy ending. (Though, unlike Gore, she used a pseudonym, Claire Morgan.) Sarah Waters thinks so highly of The Price of Salt she said it alone warranted Highsmith's inclusion in the National Gallery show Gay Icons. Alcoholic, anti-American, anti-Semitic, stingy, and racist, Highsmith lived in Switzerland for more than thirty years and died, intentionally alone, at 74. She left her estate of several million dollars to Yaddo, where she had rewritten her first novel, Strangers on a Train, at Truman Capote's urging.

Joan Schenkar's illuminating and entertaining biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith [Kindle] again proves difficult characters often make the most riveting reading. Schenkar also edited Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories. Reader Lori Hahn recommends M.E. Kerr/Marijane Meaker's Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's [Kindle].

 

The first book editor for Seattle's The Stranger, the first literary editor for nest, Matthew Stadler wrote four gay novels in the 90s. After Landscape: Memory (a high school student's jottings from WWI era San Francisco), The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee (an art historian's surreal jaunt through the Netherlands, with dwarfs and orphans), and The Sex Offender (the Orwellian, unsuccessful "rehabilitation of a male teacher who had an affair with a 12 year-old boy), his fiction culminated with Allan Stein, a funny, beautiful, and disturbing novel again mixing art criticism, historical settings, foreign travel, and sex with students in this tale about a tutor hired to teach Gertrude Stein's 15 year-old nephew in Paris in the early 1900s. Despite his transgressive preoccupations, Stadler's work was embraced by the mainstream enough to win him a Guggenheim, a Merrill, and a Whiting, but no sales, and at 40 in 1999 he turned away from fiction to focus on urban planning, the positive aspects of sprawl, and publishing. He's edited four anthologies including the urban theory reader Where We Live Now and has a forthcoming book next month about two projects in the Dutch city Deventer. He founded Clear Cut Press in Portland in 2001, and in 2009 he cofounded Publication Studio, a successful print on demand model for books that has spread to seven other cities and earlier this week brought out Stephen Boyer's novel Parasite. Even his ardent fans may be unaware that after a dozen-year break, Stadler self-published his fifth novel in 2011. He compares Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha set in Guanajuato, Mexico to an international mystery a la John Le Carré that explores "the mongrel dynamism, the deluded optimism of 21st century neo-liberal politics."

Vive les Livres

The French Embassy is trying to open a French bookstore on the Upper East Side, which would stock imported titles and books in translation. Fear not if you live beyond the 10022 because they will also sell online. Please help by taking this survey [in English or French], which asks how important it is to vous that the new bookshop offer "a quiet room for reading and reflection." You have two blank places in the survey to write in that you want LGBT French books like Hate: A Romance and smart gay magazines like Tetu. I also demanded French editions of translations of American novelists like Stephen McCauley's La vérité ou presque and Peter Cameron's Un jour cette douleur te servira.

Le Figaro has just published its annual list of France's 10 bestselling novelists, based on total sales of each author's books. So it's all the more impressive that young Joël Dicker (above) made #5 based on four months' sales of his prix-winning literary mystery thriller La verite a propos de l'affaire Harry Quebert about a hotshot debut novelist in New York who visits an older, blockbuster novelist in New Hampshire. The top three spots are unchanged from last year's list. The sum of top ten, roughly seven million books, represents 23% of contemporary French fiction sold last year. (Most of the links below are to English translations.)

1. Guillaume Musso: 1.710.500 exemplaires
2. Marc Levy: 1.433.000 exemplaires 
3. Katherine Pancol: 705.000 exemplaires
4. Françoise Bourdin: 512.500 exemplaires  
5. Joël Dicker: 496.000 exemplaires
6. David Foenkinos: 473.000 exemplaires
7. Laurent Gounelle: 471.000 exemplaires
8. Éric-Emmanuel Schmitt: 427.000 exemplaires
9. Grégoire Delacourt: 421.000 exemplaires
10. Amélie Nothomb: 405.000 exemplaires

Born January 16: Francesco Scavullo

Because he made a career of pushing glamor toward tacky, with his models sporting his signature huge windblown hair and Way Bandy's way too much makeup, it's easy to overlook the admirable aspects of Francesco Scavullo's sixty-three years as a fashion photographer. After learning the craft from Horst P. Horst, he published his first cover shot when he was still in his teens and he died of a heart attack when he was eighty-two on his way to photograph Anderson Cooper in 2004. The man was a workhorse. Born on Staten Island, his family moved to Manhattan when he was six, and his father bought him a carriage house when he was nineteen, which he used as his studio for the rest of his life. Some of his most memorable images are Diana Ross's b&w cover and full-color foldout for Diana, the Kristofferson - Streisand poster for A Star Is Born, the Julie Andrews poster for Victor/Victoria, Brooke Shields everywhere, the Bee Gees on the cover of Rolling Stone, Madonna on the cover of Time, and Sting in a loincloth. He shot Beverly Johnson for Vogue's first cover of a black woman, and, garnering far more publicity, he shot Burt Reynolds nude for Cosmopolitan's first centerfold. Hired by Helen Gurley Brown, he defined the Cosmo girl and created her covers for more than thirty years, and while you would never mistake them for art, they reinvented the magazine and made it a low-brow powerhouse. Scavullo lived for thirty-two years with Sean Byrnes, who not only managed and styled his shoots but nursed him through four nervous breakdowns in his ongoing manic depressive cycles. Among his many books are Scavullo: Photographs 1948-1984 and Scavullo on Men.

 

NYC Gay Bookstore Closing

Bent Pages is going out of business. The store announced, "This Saturday and Sunday, we are making all our general literature available for $5.00 a bag. All our LGBT material is available at half price, as is anything else that is not a book or greeting card (posters, photos, record albums, puzzles, bookmarks, artwork). Open this Saturday and Sunday from noon to 5 each day."

Meanwhile, Manhattan's queer pop-up store BGSQD continues its temporary run at the Strange Loop Gallery on Orchard St. Amazingly, they host three or four events a week. Since Friday they've had Laurie Weeks (Zipper Mouth) and Lonely Christopher (The Mechanics of Homosexual Intercourse) and newcomer Stephen Boyer reading from his novel Parasite. BGSQD's recent crowdsourcing fundraising effort fell significantly short of its goal and their gallery stay is said to end February 28, so hurry.

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 very acute, can find nothing nicer to say about Kallman than that '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 had switched to summering in Kirchstetten, Austria. Kallman died in Greece in 1975, two weeks after turning 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: Elsie de Wolfe

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.

National Book Award Winners: Erdrich, Boo, Alexander, Ferry

   

Who's the Nate Silver of literary awards? Announced tonight in New York: 

FICTION

Junot Dí­az, This Is How You Lose Her

Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King

winner - Louise Erdrich, The Round House [Kindle]

Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Kevin Powers, The Yellow Birds

 
 
NONFICTION
 
Anne Applebaum, Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

winner - Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers [Kindle]

Robert A. Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson 

Domingo Martinez, The Boy Kings of Texas: A Memoir

Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East

 

YOUNG PEOPLE'S LITERATURE

winner -- William Alexander, Goblin Secrets [Kindle]

Carrie Arcos, Out of Reach

Patricia McCormick, Never Fall Down

Eliot Schrefer, Endangered

Steve Sheinkin, Bomb: The Race to Build--and Steal--the World's Most Dangerous Weapon

POETRY

winner - David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations [Kindle]

Cynthia Huntington, Heavenly Bodies

Tim Seibles, Fast Animal

Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic

Susan Wheeler, Meme

Richard Kramer's These Things Happen

Thirty-eight years ago, in October 1974, when Richard Kramer was still at Yale, he published a story in The New Yorker. Today is the release of his first novel. Long wait. You might think it prophetic that his story was called "Late Bloomers" -- or self-justifying that his novel is called These Things Happen [Kindle] -- but no, his talent flowered early. As a writer or producer, or both, on thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, Tales of the City, and Queer as Folk, among other projects, he earned five Emmy nominations. Those are some of the more literary tv shows of the past three decades and his novel has already been called "smart, funny, and insightful" by the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Critic Nancy Fontaine explains,

"Wesley and his oldest and closest friend Theo are growing up and attending private school in the city. Their days are filled with college coaches (you need an edge to get into Brown), soccer practice, homework, and hormones. Wesley is currently living with his father, a well-known and respected gay activist, and his father's boyfriend George, a former theater actor and co-owner of the restaurant above which they live. ("I'm not a very queenie queen," declares George.)

"Tenth grade appears to be going swimmingly, and Theo has just won the race for class president. Theo surprises everyone, including himself, when he announces, at the end of his acceptance speech, that he is gay and sets the true motion of the novel rolling. As Wesley tries to deal with this new reality and figure out how to have a relationship with important and unavailable father, everyone else in his life has to evaluate what Theo's revelation means. When an act of violence turns up the emotional volume, the results are often not pretty, even for these educated, well-meaning people.

"Although the first pages might give the impression of a light story and a quick read, These Things Happen is neither. We experience the action from the point of view of each main character in their distinctive and often charming voices as they stumble their way through a difficult situation and find their way back towards each other."

These Things Happen is one of my most anticipated books of the fall. If you enlarge the jacket image you'll see praise from Michael Cunningham and Julia Glass.

Tell the Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt

June Elbus, a 14 year-old in Westchester, grieves for her favorite uncle, Finn, a successful, reclusive artst in Manhattan, who dies of aids at the start of Carol Brunt's debut novel Tell the Wolves I'm Home [Kindle]. It's 1987 and the suburbs' reaction to the pandemic is ignorance, hostility, fear, and indifference. June's family says Finn's longtime partner, a wayward hiv+ Brit named Toby whom they've never met, murdered Finn by infecting him to inherit his apartment and expensive art, and they hound him away from the funeral. Finn has left June and Toby notes begging each to take care of the other and the bulk of the story is their wary then warm secret friendship. June's problem isn't hiding it from her clueless, accountant parents but from her suspicious, jealous sister Greta, who plays Bloody Mary in the school production of South Pacific and is offered a role in Annie on Broadway. Finn's final painting was a double portrait of June and Greta which is featured in the NYT then lands on the cover of Newsweek. Skeptics of these rosy plot points may balk at the novel's lite grasp of aids, whose side effects are mainly thinness and a little shivering before death, but the book is surer of its sense of teen girl confusion and drama.

What I Learned at Comic Con

Jeff Krell has a new book pubbing today, Jayson Gets a Job! Knowing Jayson as I do, I told Jeff this was a frightening prospect. He agreed but said it was his way to explore the current economic situation.

David Reddish wrote a novel, Sex, Drugs & Superheroes: A Savage Journey Into a Wretched Hive of Scum and Supervillainy (The Comic-Con Chronicles). The book is said to follow four characters through San Diego's 2008 con: protagonist Liquin Sonos; first-time attendee Kate; socially inept would-be animator Windsor; and the flamboyant talent agent Brigham.

If you wanted to attend Saturday's panel on gay marriage in comics, you had to get there early. The super crazy crowded session turned away loads of dudes and a few girls. David Stanley got in and filed this report, with photos.

Prism Comics had the best handout. The LGBT nonprofit celebrates their 10th anniversary next April. Support them now. 

Geeks Out had the friendliest table and almost 1,500 likes on Facebook. The gay fanboy group is hosting Skin Tight USA on Saturday in New York and a Wii Olympics in Dallas on Sunday. 

The 68 year-old Scottish actor Ian McDiarmid charges $125 to sign his autograph, and for that price you are not allowed to take his photo. Carrie Fisher does it for $60. Lou Ferrigno, Sean Astin, and Tom Felton each charge $40.

If you wear a Team Kevin t-shirt, hetero geeks will think you like the Archies.

If your partner goes as Daily Planet editor-in-chief Perry White, he will get a lot of play.

Marco Roth's Memoir of Closeted Dad Dying of Aids and Its Aftermath

The only child of Central Park West intellectuals, Marco Roth grew up with La Fontaine's fables and Norse myths and a family lie. The story went that his scientist father didn't wear latex gloves in the lab and from a stray needle prick he contracted aids. Not so. Typical for such a literary family, Marco found the truth, that his father dated men, by reading a galley of his paternal aunt Anne Roiphe's memoir 1185 Park Avenue. Thirteen years later, Marco says he started his book The Scientists: A Family Romance [Kindle], out this week from FSG, as an act of revenge against her but it grew into something far more complicated. One review explains, "As part of his puzzling-out project, or as a literary conceit, Roth starts reading and rereading the books his father gave him, including Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, Goncharov's Oblomov, and Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. Revisiting the classics and a father's secret gay life ought to call to mind Alison Bechdel's brilliant Fun Home. If he's lucky.