Band of Thebes

Julia Glass Brings Back Gay Protagonist from Three Junes, Sequel

Fenno McLeod, the bookstore-owning gay man who was the soul of Julia Glass's National Book Award winning debut Three Junes and returned in her second novel The Whole World Over, emerges again in her new, fifth novel, And the Dark Sacred Night [and Kindle]. Once more exploring the many forms of family, Glass tells this story in close third-person from five points of view, from nearly as many locations: New Jersey to Vermont to Cape Cod. At forty, inert Kit Noonan seeks out the father he's never known, against his mother Daphne's wishes. She was eighteen when she gave birth to him and had once been the lover of Malachy Burns, Fenno's musical friend who died of aids in Three Junes. On his quest Kit meets, among others, Malachy's mother and Fenno and his partner Walter Kinderman. The Dallas Morning News critic says, "Glass’s prose is so lovely and filled with felicitous phrases and insights that when she orchestrates a family reunion, the reader is apt to just follow along like Kit, knowing the music is bound to enthrall."

Born December 11: John Preston, Jean Marais

On Thursday, April 15, 1993, longtime activist John Preston delivered the Jon Pearson Perry Lecture at Harvard, which he titled My Life As a Pornographer. He was 47 and it had been ten years since the release of his classic gay SM novel Mr. Benson [Kindle], which he published under his real name. (In a great reversal, he used a pseudonym for his straight adventure books.) Preston said, "Pornography has made me be honest, about myself and some of the most intimate details of my life and my fantasies. ... Once I had exposed my own sexual fantasies, my most intimate desires, I feared little else about self-exposure as a writer." Among his other popular one-handers were In Search Of A Master, Entertainment for a Master, The Love of a Master, and I Once Had a Master. He edited many important anthologies including Flesh and the Word, Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront Aids and Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong. His most famous non-erotica novel is Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, which has been adapted for the stage. He died of aids at 48. Dozens of authors pay tribute to him in Looking for Mr. Preston.

Smitten in his teens, Jean Alfred Villain-Marais tried to enroll in the Paris Conservatory and was rejected, but he did get to do a little acting in high school: One day he dressed as a girl and flirted with his male teacher, a performance that riotously delighted his classmates and got him expelled. Cast out, he became a newspaper boy and held several odd jobs until he turned twenty, when Marcel D'Herbier gave him bit parts in several of his films. At twenty-four he auditioned for Jean Cocteau and they fell in love, becoming romantic partners for the next twelve years and friends for life. Internationally, Marais is best known for his seven collaborations with Cocteau, especially Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus, whereas in his native France he is remembered as an Errol Flynn-style idol who did his own stunts in epics du swashbucke epics like the Fantomas trilogy. He adopted a son, Serge, and after his film career slowed, continued acting on stage into his eighties. Marais wrote several volumes of his memoirs, which are still in print in France. His legendary good looks have never been forgotten: see The Smiths' cover art for This Charming Man.

Born September 10: Mary Oliver, Alison Bechdel, Paul Burston

Mary Oliver published her first book of poems at 28, exactly fifty years ago, and of the cascade of awards she's won since then, two major prizes were the Pulitzer at 48 for American Primitive and the National Book Award at 57 for New and Selected Poems. Not slowing down at 78, last year she published A Thousand Mornings and next month she offers the crowd-pleasing collection Dog Songs. She is also a splendid essayist and after several appearances in the Best American series, she edited the annual collection in 2009choosing Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, David Duncan, Brian Doyle, Cynthia Ozick, and John Updike, among others. In 2005, her partner of more than forty years together in Provincetown, Molly Malone Cook, died of cancer, yet after her initial grief, Mary Oliver says she's now the happiest she's ever been. Part of this, she says, is because she hasn't locked the doors of their house for five years. In 2007, the NYT described her as "far and away America's best-selling poet," which needs to be remembered the next time you hear it's impossible for a writer to be out and create queer work and achieve mainstream success.

Photo: Nicole Bengiveno/NYT

After twenty-six years of her sweet, funny, angry, groundbreaking comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, alas to ever dwindling readership and income as more and more queer newspapers went out of business, Alison Bechdel became a surprise critical darling with her tragicomic memoir Fun Home [Kindle], which explores her coming of age and coming out, her father's closeted life, his early, probably intentional death, and their shared love of literature, particularly Proust, whose work this memoir intentionally mirrors. Written in cartoon panels like a graphic novel, Fun Home was a New York Times bestseller, a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, and a best book of the year on at least seven major lists including Time's top ten. Suddenly embraced by the mainstream she did not sell out with a newfound urge to tell a "more accessible," "universal" [straight] story. Her Fun Home follow-up Are You My Mother? [Kindle] published last year again celebrates lesbian life almost exclusively (though the subject is her hetero mother). The NYTBR raved, "The tragedy and comedy are so entwined, so gloriously balanced, the reader can't help being fascinated. The book delivers lightening bolts of revelation...I haven't encountered a book about being an artist, or about the punishing entanglements of mothers and daughters, as engaging, profound or original as this one in a long time." It may be dated or naive in 2013 to praise someone for her integrity, but I greatly admire Bechdel's work ethic and her commitment to living simply in a rather modest home outside Burlington, Vermont with her partner Holly Rae Taylor, who tweets under the name Compost Maven.

Is Paul Burston the biggest gay booster in Britain? Of his four spheres of influence, the most intriguing may be his monthly gay literary showcase Polari (returning tomorrow) and his subsequent creation of the Polari First Book Prize. He also co-edits the new journal Gaze and edits the still-influential lgbt listings section of Time Out London, for which he won a Stonewall Award. Then of course there are his books, which have earned him comparisons to everyone from Jane Austen (by the Independent) to Armistead Maupin (by Jonathan Harvey, who said, "They share a warmth for their characters, have that same page turning quality, a nice, light comic touch and deft plotting.") His debut Shameless appeared in 2001, followed by Star People in 2005, Lovers and Losers in 2007, and Gay Divorcee in 2009. Before that, he co-edited A Queer Romance: Lesbians, Gay Men and Popular Culture [Kindle], and he often writes for the Guardian and the Times and many others, for which he has been shortlisted for Journalist of the Year by the EDAs and the Stonewall Awards. You wouldn't know it but today he's 48. Get him on twitter.

Provincetown Carnival 2012

They're NASA and they know it. The theme was Space Odyssey, so way too many floats played Nicki Minaj's Starships, but the Star Wars stormtroopers sang Hello, Dolly. The lads in camo invited those toddlers posing with them to the tea dance after. And, yes, the Hat Sisters shine on.

 

   

Born January 4: Marsden Hartley

The painter Marsden Hartley never saw success, never had a family or longterm partner, and was basically a drifter for life. Did his failures keep him moving or did his poverty dictate each leap from cheap housing to free board; or was he not fleeing but actively searching, hoping for the appreciation he knew he was due or seeking the love of comrades from his beloved Whitman? The pattern was established in 1885, when he was eight, after his mother died and the family was dispersed to various relatives. He moved incessantly throughout North America and Europe, then lived a series of towns in Maine as he was losing his hearing, his eyesight, and his health, until he died in 1943, at sixty-six. Tragedy chased him. The young German officer he loved was killed early in World War I; the strong, handsome sons of the fishing family he stayed with two summers in Nova Scotia were drowned. The recognition he craved and steadfastly believed in finally came decades after his death. In 1969, writing in the New York Times, Hilton Kramer praised Hartley's portraits as "the boldest paintings of male figures in the history of American art." Click to see the fishing family, a wrestler, another wrestler, or a Finnish sauna, or here to see his landscapes of Maine or New Mexico.

Mark Doty Wins National Book Award

Twenty-one years after his first book was published, Mark Doty has won the National Book Award for his seventh volume of poetry, Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems. Like his four books of nonfiction, Doty's poems are explicit about gay life, love, and sex. One of his early poems collected here is about Hadrian's lover Antinous and another, titled Adonis, is about an old movie theater that now shows gay porn. His long poem The Vault, ostensibly about the gay sex club, is loaded with allusions to classical, Middle English, and 20th century literature.

His finalist award citation reads:

Elegant, plain-spoken, and unflinching, Mark Doty's poems in Fire to Fire gently invite us to share their ferocious compassion. With their praise for the world and their fierce accusation, their defiance and applause, they combine grief and glory in a music of crazy excelsis. In this generous retrospective volume a gifted young poet has become a master.

Doty teaches at the University of Houston and divides his time between New York and Provincetown. Special congratulations also to Sandy Leonard, who recognized Doty's genius before almost everyone else, in the very early 90s.

The nonfiction prize was awarded to Annette Gordon-Reed for The Hemingses of Monticello, which my bf loved. (He speculates that Sally Hemings' brother James was probably gay. James, a slave, became a master chef in Paris while Jefferson was ambassador to France, never married, demanded his freedom back in the U.S., got it, and later killed himself.) Gordon-Reed is the first black woman to win the National Book Award for nonfiction. And it's her birthday.

Born November 6: Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham was brilliant long before The Hours. As an unknown writer, he submitted an early chapter of his wonderful second novel, A Home at the End of the World, to The New Yorker and they published it, then it was selected in the Best American Short Stories anthology. His third novel, Flesh and Blood, was an even more ambitious examination of family life, including gay life, covering three generations in the family of a striving, sometimes brutal Greek immigrant, Constantine Stassos, and his wife, Mary. Three years later he published The Hours and won the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Stonewall Book Award. His success is very richly deserved, but is it ruining him? Specimen Days?  The screenplays? Nevertheless, we'll always have the highpoints, and one of mine, thanks to my favorite ex-bf, was hanging out with him at The Black Party the year it snowed, opening a window upstairs, marveling at the unexpected white world outside and watching steam rise directly from our sweaty skin.

Photo by Heather Conley.

Born October 8: Urvashi Vaid

Born in New Delhi, Urvashi Vaid moved with her family to Potsdam, New York when she was eight, in 1966, attended her first anti-war rally when she was eleven, and gave her first political speech, supporting McGovern, when she was twelve. Basically, she's never stopped working for broad issues of peace and social justice, especially for LGBT rights within a larger vision of fairness and equality. After receiving her law degree, she joined the ACLU's prisons project, then began her long association with the NGLTF, whose Policy Institute she headed for many years, both before and after a break to write her essential book Virtual Equality: The Mainstreaming of Gay and Lesbian Liberation. For five years earlier this decade, she was deputy director of a unit of the Ford Foundation's peace and social justice program. For the past three years she has been Executive Director of the Arcus Foundation, whose dual missions are, I kid you not, rights and protections for Great Apes and LGBT humans. She also is a board member of the Gill Foundation and has been partners for a long, funny time with Kate Clinton.

Varla Jean Merman Explains Stonewall

Born April 22: John Waters

He's a visionary, he's unique, and his bizarro, vulgar yet sweet movies are part of the permanent collection at MoMA, so of course you think of John Waters as a filmmaker. But he's more: He has written three books, published three volumes of photographs, and his artwork has been shown in many museums and galleries internationally. As for the movies, he has made sixteen, with his best work clustered from 1972 to 1988: Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Desperate Living, Polyester, and Hairspray, starring the incomparable Divine who was his special ally since childhood. Johnny Depp fans might insist on including 1990's Cry Baby, but the four movies since then seem like lesser efforts, or at least they are more mainstream. Hope rebounds with next feature, which, I swear, is a children's movie called Fruitcake.

Born November 6: Michael Cunningham

Michael Cunningham was brilliant even before he wrote The Hours. As an unknown writer, he submitted an early chapter of his second novel, A Home at the End of the World, to The New Yorker and they published it, then it was included in the Best American Short Stories anthology. His third novel, Flesh and Blood, was an even more ambitious examination of family life, including gay life, covering three generations in the family of a striving, sometimes brutal Greek immigrant, Constantine Stassos, and his wife, Mary. Three years later he published The Hours and won the Pulitzer Prize, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Stonewall Book Award. His success is very richly deserved, but is it ruining him? In the nine years since then, he has written only an extended travel essay and one novel, Specimen Days, which frankly was a mess and coincidentally has the least gay content of any of his work. (The final section is a love story between a robot and a lizard from outer space.) And he appears to have gone Hollywood. It's understandable that he was tempted to write the screenplay for A Home at the End of the World, but there was no reason for him to adapt Susan Minot's novel Evening into this summer's all-star flop. The New York Times critic said the movie "fails badly," "burdened with false, labored dialogue," "dialogue laden with forced allusions," and that it proved how "some words that pass muster on the page can sound terribly precious coming out of a real person’s mouth." If you're lucky enough to see Michael Cunningham around New York or Provincetown, with his partner of nineteen years, use your telepathy to get him back to what he does best, writing novels about people.