Band of Thebes

Met Museum's "Regarding Warhol" Includes Queer Section

  

No major artist has worked a gayer persona than Andy Warhol, but of course the Metropolitan Museum can't bring itself to say so outright in the opening text of their fun, lumpy, ultimately unconvincing new show Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years. Instead, the curators cough out some bland morsel about "human sexuality in all its forms." 

After that introductory choking, more silence, as room after room of commentary on sixty artists' work fails to acknowledge what alert viewers will see on their own: Following Andy's ascent, gay art -- not just gay artists, many of whom are included here -- reached a tipping point after which even straight artists began to reflect a gay sensibility. The curators can't even find the courage to say gay while discussing the aids art of Silence = Death Project and Gran Fury.

Because an (unspoken) arc of the whole show has been about the gay effect, it comes as a surprise to enter a late gallery titled “Queer Studies: Camouflage and Shifting Identities.” Although bland and boilerplate, the text is wonderful to see, but it's also confusing. This is where the queer begins? With Avedon? But not, in earlier galleries, Mapplethorpe? And not Jeff Koons' ceramic Michael Jackson and Bubbles? 

Nevertheless art critic Blake Gopnik says the queer section is the best room in the show: 

"Looking at a Warhol painting, you feel a mix of someone just being himself—the star-struck Warhol; Warhol rubbernecking at tabloid death—and someone wrapping that “natural” persona in complex artifice. The best room in Regarding Warhol gives a hint at the origins of his art’s double state. It sets Warhol in the context of art by and about gays and lets us see that the doubleness that’s in almost any Warhol may be there already in the simple fact of being gay in a homophobic world—where you’re seen as not just being gay but as playing gay too. Warhol couldn’t simply act however he wanted, be as limp-wristed as he chose; he was always also viewed as acting the “swish,” as being that character known as the Limp-Wristed Man. In his paintings, he doesn’t simply express a stargazer’s love of Marilyn, the way an outsider fan artist might. He also expresses an arch awareness of his own fandom, a remove from it, an awareness of the social performance it counts as. And he uses the artifacts of painting—the crudeness of silk screen, the harshness of unblended color, the vacancy of blank fields of paint, the endless repetition of subjects—to evoke the “unnatural” state of his tastes. He doesn’t merely depict Marilyn. Like a drag queen, he makes sure that we notice the way that he’s capturing her."

New York magazine's Jerry Saltz calls Regarding Warhol "a shallow, pandering fecklessness to the pseudo-extravaganza" with "the unusual distinction of being a very bad show with very good work." He's right insofar as the show is filled with masterpieces well worth your visit, and that the curators fail to make much of a point beyond Andy was influential.

The show opens to the public today and runs through December 31. Click here for a list of the sixty artists and a few highlights. Or get the catalog.

"Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You" Opens October 5

Notice how those unwatchable trailers have propelled Cloud Atlas back onto the bestseller list? Let the same thing happen to a more deserving novel, Peter Cameron's awesomatomic joy Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You whose film has a more watchable (but not perfect) trailer above and a more limited release beginning October 5. Unfortunately, this pits it directly against a triple threat of other literary adaptations that day: The Paperboy, Wuthering Heights, and Frankenweenie. 

I saw the trailer on screen last night before The Queen of Versailles and the audience liked it.

Born September 1: Tomlin, Casement, Stebbins, King

Detroit's funniest daughter, Mary Jean Tomlin was featured on Merv Griffin when she was twenty-six and landed a spot on Laugh-In when she was thirty, creating the telephone operator Ernestine. Wanting to expand another character, Edith Ann, the bratty child in the big chair, Tomlin found the Peabody winning after school special writer Jane Wagner. They clicked. They've been life partners and collaborators for forty-one years. Compared to other longterm couples, say, Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, their output has been phenomenal. Wagner wrote and directed Tomlin projects ranging from Grammy winning comedy albums and Emmy winning tv specials to hit movies (The Incredible Shrinking Woman) to super flops (Moment by Moment, co-starring John Travolta) to Tony-winning Broadway megahits (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe). Beyond her endeavors with Wagner, Tomlin most frequently worked with Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts, A Prairie Home Companion), and gave star performances in 9 to 5, All of Me, Big Business, and Flirting with Disaster. She's had recurring roles on many top television shows Murphy Brown, The West Wing, Will & Grace, Desperate Housewives, and Damages. In March 1977, when Time was still a news magazine, Tomlin was its cover story; Wagner is identified first as "a friend" but later the article says they share a house off the Sunset Strip. Tomlin co-produced and narrated The Celluloid Closet, an act many took as her coming out. She's a hysterical actress, of course, but is she also a little hysterical? Her meltdowns on the set of I Heart Huckabees are more than a little salty, yet minor compared to the tantrum thrown by the director. Remember, nothing is harder than comedy.

Also born today: Roger Casement, the gay Irish rebel hanged by the Brits in 1916 and subject of Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa's fine new novel The Dream of the Celt [Kindle]; Emma Stebbins, sculptor of the Central Park landmark Angel of the Waters, which you know as Bethesda Fountain, and girlfriend of actress Charlotte Cushman; and Dave King, author of the 2005 indie hit novel The Ha-Ha [Kindle] and husband of Franklin Tartaglione.

Born August 10: Mark Doty

Mark Doty. There should be a temple, a cathedral, an extra moon. Large enough to honor the three great memoirs -- Firebird, Heaven's Coast, Dog Years -- and the genius poems, the best of which are collected in Fire to Fire, winner of the National Book Award in 2008. A born writer and a natural teacher, his twin talents come together in The Art of Description: World into Word. Follow his blog.

Today he's 59. His husband since 1995 Jen in comments says Doty and the terrific novelist Paul Lisicky parted ways last year.

Rockumentary of Openly Gay "American Bowie" Jobriath

Although selling Jobriath as an "American Bowie" was wishful thinking, the story of openly "fairy" glam rocker Jobraith in 1973 and 1974 should make a fascinating documentary. Jim Farber, a talking head in the film, which screens Saturday night at Walter Reade, writes in today's Daily News:

"Jobriath (ne Bruce Wayne Campbell) recorded two albums in 1973 and ’74 that both benefited, and suffered, from historic hype. As you might expect from an aspiring rocker of the day, his albums sounded like David Bowie aping Mick Jagger, but with enough classical and theatrical flourishes to give it an original twist. Many New Yorkers of the era will remember the garish advertizing for Jobriath’s self-titled debut. Gigantic posters of the man not only adorned city buses, they occupied a looming billboard in Times Square, depicting him as an ancient Roman statue, dyed blue, and in the nude, no less.

"Suffice it to say, they were as discussed, and giggled over, as the muscled Marky Mark posters that appeared in that same space, courtesy of Calvin Klein, more than two decades later.

"Music fans may also remember the star’s famous self-description - “I’m rock’s truest fairy,” a banner meant to distinguish him from the rush of pseudo-gay, and faux-bisexual, stars who ruled the glam-rock trend of the early to mid-’70s.

"The original idea was to provide a more outrageous, U.S. answer to the sexually equivocating David Bowie, a notion advanced by Jobriath’s scheming manager, Jerry Brandt.

"The P.R. backfired spectacularly, not only because America wasn’t quite ready for such a creature, but also because of the hard sell behind it. Though Jobriath crafted his inventive music with esteemed classic rock producer Eddie Kramer, and while he got good reviews from Rolling Stone, Esquire spoke for many when it dubbed him “the hype of the year.”

(Hat tip and thanks to J "Ziggy" K.)

Born July 21: Hart Crane

Son of a successful candyman, child of divorce, Hart Crane dropped out of his Ohio high school in 1917 and escaped to New York. For seven years he moved back and forth between the city and Cleveland, writing poems published in literary journals and working in his father's factory. Tortured by his love of men far more than was Whitman decades before him, Crane did have one joyous affair with a Danish merchant mariner named Emil Opffer who inspired his epic, erotically charged verse, Voyages. That poem was one of the highlights of his first book, White Buildings (1926), celebrated for the zest and fire of his lyrics and criticized, as was all his poetry, for its impenetrable confusion. Quoted in this New Yorker essay about Crane, he said he was “more interested in the so-called illogical impingements of the connotations of words on the consciousness . . . than I am interested in the preservation of their logically rigid significations.”

While Crane struggled to write his monumental work, The Bridge (1930), he suffered miserable affairs and worsening alcoholism. Although initial critical reception was weak, he won a Guggenheim fellowship to Mexico the following year. Returning from that sojourn aboard the SS Orizaba in April 1932, he hit on a working shipmate and was beaten up. Crane said, "Goodbye, everybody!" and jumped overboard to his death. One of many later writers who revered his work, Tennessee Williams left instructions that his body be buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico where Crane drowned. (Instead, Williams' family buried him in Missouri.) Crane's legacy influenced gay painters as well, inspiring art by Marsden Hartley, Eight Bells Folly, and by Jasper Johns twice: Diver and Periscope. Get his Complete Poems or the Library of America edition with selected letters.

David Wojnarowicz Biography: Fire in the Belly

Just out from Bloomsbury, Cynthia Carr's bio of essential artist / writer David Wojnarowicz takes its name from his work censored at the Hide/Seek exhibit, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz [Kindle]. PW chose it as a Pick of the Week, writing "In this lucidly composed, skillfully contextualized first complete biography of David Wojnarowicz, former Village Voice reporter Carr reveals how the controversial artist’s life experience shaped his art and politics. Tracing his early life as a withdrawn, unstable student, sometime hustler, and store clerk in the troubled New York of the late 1960s and early ’70s, Carr reveals the artist’s struggle to express his emerging gay identity and the violent intensity of his family life."

The NYT says, "Ms. Carr’s biography is both sympathetic and compendious; it’s also a many-angled account of the downtown art world of the 1980s... The author braids small, unlikely narratives among the large ones. There’s an account of the art store clerk who gave away free supplies to poor artists he admired, and one of Redden’s, the sole funeral home in Manhattan that would accept AIDS patients in the early days of the crisis, winning the loyalty of many gay men. Ms. Carr, by lining Wojnarowicz in her sights, has seized upon a vivid and peculiarly American story."

The knowing cover photo is by friend and mentor Peter Hujar, whom David called "the parent I never had," except they did sleep together. See Peter's nsfw portrait of David's nude handwork.

If you haven't already, read David's journals and diaries.

Bulls & Chickens: 1960s Ring Extorted $2 Million from Gay Men

Reminiscent of The Boys of Boise and The Scarlet Professor, today's Slate essay by William McGowan examines another antigay scandal of the 1950-60s, an exortion ring preying on rich closeted men who hired young hustlers. Awful as the societal attitudes were -- paving the way for successful threats of exposure -- this story highlights a remarkable turnaround for extortionist Ed Murphy, who "fairy shaking" closeted men for money to lobbying for gay rights and organizing NYC pride's street festival. He died of aids in 1989.

The whole piece is 7,000 words, and worth it:

"Impersonating corrupt vice-squad detectives, members of this ring, known in police parlance as bulls, had used young, often underage men known as chickens to successfully blackmail closeted pillars of the establishment, among them a navy admiral, two generals, a U.S. congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor, a prep school headmaster, and several well-known actors, singers, and television personalities. The ring had operated for almost a decade, had victimized thousands, and had taken in at least $2 million. When he announced in 1966 that the ring had been broken up, Manhattan DA Frank Hogan said the victims had all been shaken down “on the threat that their homosexual proclivities would be exposed unless they paid for silence.”

"Though now almost forgotten, the case of “the Chickens and the Bulls” as the NYPD called it (or “Operation Homex,” to the FBI), still stands as the most far-flung, most organized, and most brazen example of homosexual extortion in the nation’s history. And while the Stonewall riot in June 1969 is considered by many to be the pivotal moment in gay civil rights, this case represents an important crux too, marking the first time that the law enforcement establishment actually worked on behalf of victimized gay men, instead of locking them up or shrugging."

Check out the article's several old b&w photos of johns and male prostitutes in NYC, this one from Times Square in August 1965.

Dirty Looks Every Day

New York's monthly platform for queer experimental film + video, Dirty Looks goes daily in July. Screenings are splattered across Manhattan and Brooklyn in gay bars, real theaters, hotels, parks, and the artist bookstore Printed Matter. The subjects range from a 1967 drag ball to goofball sci-fi to hustlers and celebrities to the current Brooklyn delight Gag! to actual police surveillance video shot during a crackdown on public gay sex in Mansfield, Ohio in 1962. Who knew. Filmmakers include Charles Atlas, Cheryl Dunne, Jim Hubbard, Derek Jarman, Marlon Riggs, Ben Walters, and Fred Halsted (whose gay porn films are the only hardcore in MoMA's permanent collection -- definitely read Halsted Plays Himself by William E. Jones, a filmmaker in the lineup). Organized by Bradford Nordeen, Karl McCool, and David Howe, the arty trippy horny flicks aim to keep the summer "hot, sticky, and social." 

Most of the events are free, but due to limited space in special venues, some require reservations. Tonight's Grace Jones concert One Man Show still has availability. Study the full schedule.

Obviously, Dirty Looks can be found on FB and Twitter.

BGSQD Queer Bookstore Coming to NYC Needs Your Answers

At last! Some literary folk are scouting locations likely in the East Village or the Lower East Side for a new queer bookstore and café opening in late 2012. It's a mouthful: The Bureau of General Services - Queer Division. To get the store right, they need you to fill out this survey, and to make it useful, you must "please be brutally honest." 

Take the survey now. They want your thoughts even if you live outside the NYC area.

Your high enthusiasm for the store will not blind you to the survey's low points. Question #7 is a little simplistic, missing trends in rent increases, queers reading more non-queer books, the long tail, and OWMB being badly stocked:

"7. Why do you think there are no longer any LGBTQ-specific bookstores in NYC? Please check all answers that reflect your opinion. 

"Note: A Different Light closed in 2001. Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop closed in 2009. Bluestockings is an excellent resource for queers, but its mission is broader than the mission of a bookstore that specifically seeks to serve LGBTQ communities.

Amazon.com and other online booksellers drove independent bookstores out of business.

Barnes & Noble and other large chains drove independent bookstores out of business.

The demand for e-books has lessened the demand for print books.

The current economic crisis forced LGBTQ bookstores (and many other small businesses) to close.

LGBTQ people no longer need our/their own bookstores. Most booksellers sell LGBTQ titles.

People read fewer books than they used to.

I don't know.

Other.

Typically, they want to know your race, gender, zip code, and income. Yet in more than twenty questions on your preferences in book buying and café snacking, they never ask about price. Real people make decisions, in part, based on cost. Anyone opening a bookstore in today's market ought to wonder if their customers demand discounting. Or are you willing to overpay in order to support a physical, browsable queer space? Are you cool with crazy expensive cookies? Do they need to be organic, gluten-free, fair trade, and versatile? Not asked. Instead, the survey wonders, basically, should the store be a Bloomsbury sitting room or a Berlin sex club? Speaking of, they also want to know how important it is to you that the staff and customers look hot. Ruh roh. 

Find BGSQD online or on FB. Their ambitious statement after the jump.

26 Writers on LGBTQI NYC

Thomas Keith assembles twenty-six original essays on queer New York in Love, Christopher Street:

"Silence = Death: The Education of a Comedian" by Bob Smith

"An Old Queen's Tale" by Penny Arcade

"The Isle Of Staten" by Michele Karlsberg

"Finding Jesús on Christopher Street" by Brendan Fay

"Dis-membering Stonewall" by Rev. Irene Monroe

"Before I Begin" by David McConnell

"A Bite of the Big Apple" by Val McDermid

"Irrespective of the Storm" by Mark Ameen

"My Last Big Addiction" by Martin Hyatt

"My Family Tree" by Amos Mac

"The Opera Singer's Pants, and How I Got In Them" by Justine Saracen

"The Sum of Our Parts" by Jewelle Gomez

Longer Than Yours

Seven months late, but still happy news: New Yorkers Lou Halsey, 88, and John Spofford Morgan, 94, met in 1947 in a gay bar called The New Verdi on West 72nd, and after 64 years together they married in November. John was an economist. Lou was a barber. Both men are Navy vets. New York mag has more.

Born May 30: Colm Tóibín

How has Nick Hornby become the go-to literary screenwriter, now adapting Tóibín's Brooklyn for a film starring Rooney Mara? Either people really liked An Education or it's because Hornby's wife is again producing.

Predicting future Nobel Prize honorees is a thankless, largely pointless pastime, yet it's true that everything the Nobel winners in literature have, Colm Tóibín has too: an impressive body of novels illuminating an overlooked group of people, many books of nonfiction, journalism, history, and travel, a staggering and seemingly effortless range of important critical essays, vision, verve, and gravitas.

After being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros.

His Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and won a Costa award. Tóibín's current Lammy finalist, The Empty Family, is flat-out magnificent. Only two weeks until the publication of his essay collection, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families [Kindle]. 

Keep the Lights On

Yes, Ira Sachs's Teddy winner Keep the Lights On is mandatory viewing and it's better than last year's gay darling, Weekend. No, it's not as sublime as you want it to be, though even your highest hopes are surpassed by its incandescent title sequence. The first half is wonderful, so honest about relationships in general and gay sex in particular circa 1998-2003. The whole film looks terrific, makes perfect use of Arthur Russell's rediscovered music, and even slips in an interview with the rascally James Bidgood. In the third act the screenplay drifts, possibly because Sachs was too close to his autobiographical material to get the perspective needed to push the material to the level it's aiming for. He had big, big themes in mind, evident in the movie's original title, Shame, and second try, The Closet, two factors driving both characters' addictions. Keep the Lights On is far superior, and a sobering reminder that even our smartest, most gifted directors can benefit from one more rewrite.

Mainstream critics may end up reviewing the characters' behavior rather than Sachs' work but not the Village Voice, which loved it, saying, "Sachs's stunner is a front-runner for best American film of the year." Also: "...this beautifully aching love story gets the hometown spotlight it deserves. Ira Sachs's semiautobiographical, Chelsea-set tale spans a decade in the on-and-off romance between a Danish documentary filmmaker (a revelatory Thure Lindhardt) and his Yankee lit-agent lover (Zachary Booth), cutting to the bone with the gentlest of knives in its dissection of commitment, addiction, and gay sex, withholding judgment even at its grimmest displays of human frailty."

[Cast and crew surround Sachs at Wednesday's NYC premiere.]

ACT UP Marches on Wall Street To Mark 25th Anniversary

Of the hundreds of people marching on Wall Street yesterday to mark the 25th anniversary of ACT UP, nine were arrested. Among the many artists, filmmakers, and writers in attendance, I saw Ira Sachs wearing a baby, Tom Kalin talking truth about My Week with Marilyn, John Weir, and Daniel Allen Cox. The demonstration was a joint action with Occupy, and groups came from at least as far as Boston and Philadelphia to demand more aids funding and to honor the New Yorkers who started it all in 1987. The Nation offers some background.

Remember, in a pinch, duct tape is your friend.

Celebrating Peter Cameron & Anticipating Mario Vargas Llosa

     

The literary gods confused their players at last’s Tribeca dinner night honoring Coral Glynn [Kindle] and I was permitted a place at the head table with Peter Cameron and his FSG editor/publisher Jonathan Galassi. Praise for Peter poured in from every inch of the elegant, candlelit room while I besieged Jonathan asking about his own new book of poems charting his love for a younger man, Left-handed [Kindle], and about Mario Vargas Llosa’s forthcoming The Dream of the Celt. Jonathan confirmed that in the novel Irish nationalist Roger Casement is actively gay though, like others, Vargas Llosa thinks some of his lustier diary entries were fantasies. Preorder now or mark June 5 on your calendar because this promises to be the true queer novel of the summer (while John Irving will inevitably grab more attention for his bi book In One Person [Kindle] out May 8). Also with us were, among others, cover artist Duncan Hannah, performing artist John Kelly who is enthralled with Sarah Schulman’s new The Gentrification of the Mind [Kindle], and Peter’s (very beautiful) Italian translator Giuseppina Oneto who also translated Wolf Hall, Andrew Sean Greer, Kiran Desai, and Gore Vidal, and announced that Peter’s previous novel is again riding high on the Italian bestseller lists thanks to a movie tie-in. Have you done your part so the same can be said of Coral Glynn in America?

Bruno Wollheim's Documentary "David Hockney: A Bigger Picture"

Driving around Los Angeles, David Hockney tells documentary filmmaker Bruno Wollheim that all gay men like California because people there are generally fit and wear fewer or tighter clothes. (And you, innocent lamb, thought he moved there for the light.) The director adds that those famous nude pool pictures gave the false impression that David lived some brilliantly debauched bacchanal, but in fact it was only the boys who partied all night; David missed out and was up early painting, while they napped in the early sun. Either way, you won't see any poolside performances because Hockney relocates back to his birthplace. There, he begins painting en plein air landscapes, giving the director a three-year shoot in shifty Yorkshire weather and a very different film than he envisioned. The canvases grow monumental but the movie stays a crisp 60 minutes. It makes clear that Hockney's handsome French assistant is also his boyfriend of more than fifteen years, but Jean-Pierre isn't interviewed. Of course the great joy is Hockney himself, who manages to be just as watchable when he's working silently as when he's holding forth about photography being dead and, later, back again. Caught in contradicting himself he simply tells the camera, "Never believe what an artist says." As he's made evident for fifty years, the truth is in seeing.

Friday night's one-time screening at Columbia's Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America was hosted by Rick Whitaker, author of The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara: Reading Gay American Writers and Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling.

Hockney fans unable to get to London before April 9 for the Royal Academy's retrospective can console themselves with the book David Hockney: A Bigger Picture. Three weeks from now is the American release of Christopher Simon Sykes' David Hockney: The Biography, one of my most anticipated books of the year.

Three Years On, the NYT Discovers "Queer/ Art/ Film"

Adam Baran and Ira Sachs started Queer/Art/Film in June 2009 with an eclectic mix of video and film clips shown at the 92nd St Y's Tribeca space on the night Michael Jackson died. Eight or nine people attended, and I wrote about it the next day. The New York Times has needed nearly three years to catch up with Ira and Adam's great idea, profiling the series (now at IFC, with an L.A. outpost) in a loose article about gay cinephiles and "keepers of the culture." As ever, one message is that the young don't care about their history:

"Through series like Queer/Art/Film as well as several new movies and books, they are serving as cinematic caregivers at a time when young gay audiences and mainstream Hollywood alike don’t seem interested in film’s gay past."

and

“The irony is that a lot of gay culture of the past is available on YouTube, but young people don’t tap into it,” Mr. Hays said. “They are steeped in ‘Glee,’ but if you talk to them about ‘Death in Venice,’ and that wasn’t that long ago, they don’t know anything about it.”

Adam explains one impetus for the program,

“You can sit at home and watch a movie and then go online and read film journals or blogs or get onto imdb.com and post what you thought of the movie and have online discussions, and that’s great,” said Mr. Baran, who is the programming coordinator for this year’s Outfest, the Los Angeles gay and lesbian film festival. “What you lack is the chance to talk about what the film meant. This series gives everybody a shared experience.”

In a related piece, the paper polls sixteen people to name "the gay film that changed my life." Read replies from Richard Socarides, Andrew Holleran, Wayne Koestenbaum, Dale Carpenter, John Bartlett, Isaac Mizrahi, Paula Vogel, Dustin Lance Black, Justin Bond, John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Musto, Jeff Whitty, Lea DeLaria, and Cheyenne Jackson who chose Beautiful Thing [top].

27 Rue du Fleurus at the Metropolitan Museum

The first thing I did upon my return to New York this weekend was to travel back to Paris in 1903. The Met's amazing exhibit The Steins Collect showcases room after room of early works by Matisse, Picasso, and their contemporaries gathered by the Stein family. Although the museum continually hypes Michael's wife Sarah's contributions, it dismisses Alice Toklas in a single sentence that refers to her only as Gertrude's "companion." However, the lesbian couple's famous salon at 27 Rue du Fleurus is brought wonderfully to life in a large "room" created by three enormous screens on which are projected photos creating a time-lapse effect of how the art was displayed during the decades they lived there. 

(For another view of life at 27 Rue du Fleurus, read Monique Truong's novel narrated by Gertrude and Alice's gay Vietnamese cook, The Book of Salt [Kindle].)

Predictably, the Met erases all the gay influences in the show, but thankfully you still have Wanda Corn and Tirza Latimer's book from their groundbreaking exhibit Seeing Gertrude Stein which specificly emphasized the queer content of Gertrude and Alice's collections. Some of their gay friends -  Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth, Carl Van Vechten, Virgil Thomson, Pavel Tchelitchew, George Platt Lynes, Francis Rose, Frederick Ashton, Kristians Tonny - are in the Met show, including film clips from the black opera Four Saints in Three Acts. Unlike the Corn-Latimer show, the Met's description doesn't mention that choreographer Ashton had sex with at least two of the company's male principals. Degaying aside, you'll still love the art, particularly the works from private collections that you've never seen in person.

If you make it to the Met by Sunday, you'll also see Renaissance Portraits. Or, through the glory of the web, you can look at all 147 works online.

MoMA Hosts World Premiere of ACT UP Doc "United in Anger"

Someday, someone will write a definitive history of 20th century activism and protest, and ACT UP will get credit for changing the world. Until then, there's Jim Hubbard's awesome, imperfect documentary United in Anger, which MoMA screened as opening night of its Documentary Fortnight on Thursday. From 1987 to roughly 1992, with a coda bringing it up to today, the film shows one inspired, phenomenal, queer zap after another: the FDA, the New York Stock Exchange, Grand Central, CBS News, and St. Patrick's where up to 8,000 people rallied against the church's policies. Brazen successes that upended the power dynamic, sped drug approvals, lowered prices, and saved lives. The movie is excellent on women's essential part in the coalition and gives much, deserved time to the always-quotable media godsend Ann Northrop. She points out their goal was visibility and effecting change, not to be liked. A distinction lost on the cozy assimilationists of the past twenty years, I'd say. Among the writers on screen are Sarah Schulman (who co-produced), John Weir, K.M. Soehnlein, Larry Kramer, Urvashi Vaid, and an angry, early '90s Michael Cunningham speaking out against the government more forcefully than he has lately. Of course people might mellow with age and success, and, obviously, the pandemic while still deadly has become more manageable. My point is the movie captures a moment that is gone and you should see it. 

If you can help, please give via Kickstarter.

United in Anger has the sweep I wanted from the widely-praised, more intimate aids doc We Were Here. I'm still looking forward to Sundance's How To Survive a Plague, which has just been picked up for theatrical distribution.