Band of Thebes

Hugh Thomson Wins Wainwright Prize

Of the six finalists for a new prize honoring the year's best nature and travel books, three titles are about walking, including the winner, Hugh Thomson's The Green Road Into the Trees: An Exploration of England.

The shortlist:

Simon Armitage, Walking Home: A Poet's Journey. "In summer 2010 Armitage decided to walk the Pennine Way. The challenging 256-mile route is usually approached from south to north. He resolved to tackle it the other way round: through beautiful and bleak terrain, across lonely fells and into the howling wind, he would be walking home, towards the Yorkshire village where he was born. 

Patrick Barkham, Badgerlands: The Twilight World of Britain's Most Enigmatic Animal. "The author of The Butterfly Isles turns his wry, affectionate attention to an even more beloved (and controversial) British animal – the badger."

Charlotte Higgins, Under Another Sky: Journeys in Roman Britain. "This book is about the encounter with Roman Britain. What does Roman Britain mean to us now? How were its physical remains rediscovered and made sense of? How has it been reimagined, in story and song and verse?"

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot. "Robert Macfarlane sets off from his Cambridge home to follow the ancient tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a vast network of routes criss-crossing the British landscape and its waters, and connecting them to the continents beyond. The result is an immersive, enthralling exploration of the ghosts and voices that haunt old paths, of the stories our tracks keep and tell, of pilgrimage and ritual, and of songlines and their singers. "

Hugh Thomson, The Green Road Into the Trees: An Exploration of England. "From the very centre of England – literally, as his village is furthest from the sea – he travels to its outermost edges. By taking a 400 mile journey from coast to coast, through both the sacred and profane landscapes of ancient England, Hugh casts unexpected light – and humour – on the way we live now."

Esther Woolfson, Field Notes from a Hidden City: An Urban Nature Diary. "A beautifully written and thought-provoking record of a year spent observing the natural world in a city, which looks afresh at our relationship to the animals and plants that live in close proximity to us." 

Growing Up Gay in 80s Scotland

"This amazing book... grips from beginning to end and leaves the reader elated," says Diana Athill of the gay work I've most looked forward to this spring, Damian Barr's memoir Maggie & Me: Coming Out and Coming of Age in 1980s Scotland [Kindle]. Winner of Stonewall's Writer of the Year Award and the humor prize at the Political Book Awards, Barr's book appeared on best of the year lists in the Times, the Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Observer, the Evening Standard, the Mail on Sunday, the New Statesman, the Independent, and multiple times on Band of Thebes queer lit poll, where one of the best-read men in Britain, Gay's the Word manager Jim McSweeney, said it's "engaging... beautifully written... wise, funny and deeply moving." 

Maggie O'Farrell: "Out of poverty, brutality and prejudice, Damian Barr builds something riveting, touching and painfully funny. His account of growing up under Thatcher's regime defines the experience of a generation. At once personal and universal, Maggie & Me is a work of stealthy genius."

S.J. Watson: "As gripping as a thriller, laugh-out-loud funny and deeply touching... A triumph."

Louisa Young: "Maggie & Me is a perfect chip supper of a memoir: nostalgic, tart, crisp and seductive. It’s also sad, kind, witty and sexy."

50 Best Scottish Books Since '63: Kay, McDermid, Smith, Spark, Welsh

The Scottish Book Trust's new list, the "50 Best Scottish Books of the Last 50 Years," features at least five lesbian authors. The books are presented alphabetically, not ranked:

• Jackie Kay, Trumpet [Kindle]
• Val McDermid, A Place of Execution [Kindle]
• Ali Smith, Hotel World [Kindle]
• Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent
• Louise Welsh, The Cutting Room whose protagonist is a gay man

Email me if you find other lgbt writers on the full list.

Colm Tóibín on Wilde's Dualities in New Edition of De Profundis

According to his sons, Oscar Wilde especially liked Robert Louis Stevenson's work and Colm Tóibín discusses the Jekyll and Hyde dualities in so much of Wilde's life: gay and married, an Irishman in London, rich and chased by creditors, an aristocrat and Irish patriot, "a wit who was also serious, but a limp and timid lyricist who wrote brave and modern plays." In the spring of 1895, he was also the accuser and accused in two infamous trials that took him from the most celebrated man in London to a jailed, unspeakable scoundrel. For the first and most horrible part of his sentence he was prohibited from having pen and paper. Toward the end of his two year confinement, he wrote his famous long, long love letter to Lord Alfred Douglas, now collected in De Profundis and Other Prison Writings [Kindle], introduced by Tóibín in a new edition from Penguin.

If you've made it to adulthood without revisiting Stevenson, stop everything and read Kidnapped [Kindle]. Rupert Smith says, "First and foremost, it’s one of the most exciting adventure novels I can think of, a model of brilliant plotting, compelling narrative and sharp, magnetic characterisation. The story of David Balfour, the young ingenu sold into slavery and cheated of his inheritance by wicked Uncle Ebenezer, is probably the best coming-of-age narrative I can think of – it never labours its points, but it shows David learning from each experience and acquaintance until he’s man enough to claim what’s rightfully his. But there’s another level to Kidnapped, one which only struck me when I re-read it in my 40s – it’s a profoundly homosexual novel. I can see readers rolling their eyes at this point, but bear with me. Whether Stevenson realised it or not, the kidnapping of the young man and his experiences at the hands of older, more powerful men is fraught with erotic energy, and his friendship with the charismatic Alan Breck is highly romantic. Some critics point to The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as ‘proof’ of Stevenson’s homosexual leanings, and I can see their point – but for me, Kidnapped is the dead giveaway (and the better novel). In fact, this was the book that inspired me to write the first of my James Lear novels, The Low Road [Kindle], which is a sexed-up version of the same basic story."

James Tait Black Memorial Prize Winners

Dating from 1919, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize has honored everyone from Lawrence, Forster, Waugh, Greene, and Compton-Burnett to Spark, Chatwin, Coetzee, Rushdie, Banville, Bainbridge, Byatt, Hollinghurst, Tremain, Franzen, McEwan, and Zadie Smith, so attention must be paid to this year's two winners, in fiction and biography. Say the judges:

"Alan Warner's The Deadman's Pedal is an exceptionally fine novel, richly evocative in detail, beautifully poised in execution, which in the story of one young man's journey to adulthood through the mysteries of childhood, sexuality, work, the realities of class society and the experience of divided family loyalties, offers a compelling poetic vision of a changing Scotland."

"Tanya Harrod's The Last Sane Man: Michael Cardew: Modern Pots, Colonialism, and the Counterculture offers an exceptional portrait of a remarkable craftsman and his world. Harrod constructs this biography with the same eye for form and purpose that marked the work of her subject."

The three other fiction finalists were The Panopticon [Kindle] by Jenni Fagan, The Big Music [Kindle] by Kirsty Gunn, and Leaving the Atocha Station [Kindle] by Ben Lerner.

Among the biography finalists was Michael Gorra's Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece [Kindle].

FYI, the first woman to win this award was Radclyffe Hall, for Adam's Breed in 1926.

Alan Warner photo by Jayne Wright in The Scotsman.

Born June 4: Val McDermid

Fifty-eight today, Val McDermid has been a trailblazer for at least forty-one years: At 17 she was the first student from a Scottish state school accepted to read English at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, although she really wanted to be Joni Mitchell. Twelve years after graduating, in 1987 she again broke barriers with her debut novel, Report for Murder, starring journalist Lindsay Gordon, said to be the UK's first openly lesbian detective. Eight years later Val released her tenth book, The Mermaids Singing, which won her first major prize and introduced her most famous team, Dr. Tony Hill and Carol Jordan, later subjects of the award-winning tv series Wire in the Blood. In 1999 she published her sixteenth book, A Place of Execution, which launched another tv series (starring Juliet Stevenson, watch it here) and became a NYT Notable Book, extending her winning streak with the LA Times Book Prize, the Barry Award for Best British Mystery, the Anthony Award for Best Novel, the Dilys Prize, and the Mystery Readers of America Macavity Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Edgar, the CWA Gold Dagger, and Sweden's Deckarakademin Prize. The honors continued to flood in nearly as quickly as Val got the books out: the Sherlock Award for Best Crime Novel and another Barry for The Distant Echo; Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year for The Torment of Others; the Portico Prize for Fiction for The Grave Tattoo; Stonewall UK Writer of the Year for Beneath the Bleeding; Romantic Times' Best Procedural Novel for A Darker Domain; numerous shortlistings; and a host of lifetime achievement awards including Scotland magazine's Icons of Scotland, Saints & Sinners Hall of Fame, an Alice B Award, a Lammy Pioneer Award, and the coveted CWA Cartier Diamond Dagger in 2010. Last year she published her 30th book, The Vanishing Point, and her work has been translated into more than 30 languages. She and her wife have separated but continue to share custody of their son, Cameron. With three cats and a border terrier, she divides her time between South Manchester and the coast of Northumberland, when she's not traveling to her many events. She remains undaunted and enthusiastic about readings and signings after December's attack in which a 64 year-old woman poured ink over her. 

Frontier Fur: Gay, Footloose, and Free in the 1830-40s

If you've been pining for an elaborate gay Circuit Party for outdoorsy dudes in an idyllic setting like the Platte River, you're exactly 170 years too late. Restless and oppressed in his native Perthshire, Scotland in the early 1830s, William Drummond Stewart set off for manly adventures in the Rocky Mountains and found plenty of men who were just his type. He liked it so much he extended his brief excursion more than a decade. Before the frontier was settled, men could live together freely in a world without women and with no questions asked. There was no need to hide because there was no one to hide from. Stewart took many lovers and enjoyed a long relationship with a French Canadian - Cree Indian trapper named Antoine Clement. And, yes, they really did party. In 1843, Stewart "organized, fully outfitted and recruited dozens of willing participants to engage in a spectacular and bedazzling Renaissance-themed costume party," says the Billings Gazette. Stewart's biographer William Benemann calls it "one last all-male hurrah before the wagon trains and the families and the plows changed everything forever."

Benemann is a Berkeley Law School Library archivist by day and spends his weekends and vacations in other libraries to track down source material for his gay history books. His newest is Men in Eden: William Drummond Stewart and Same-Sex Desire in the Rocky Mountain Fur Trade [Kindle].

Previously he won a Stonewall award for Male-Male Intimacy in Early America: Beyond Romantic Friendships covering roughly one hundred years from the 1770s to the 1870s. Benemann's debut was A Year of Mud and Gold: San Francisco in Letters and Diaries, 1849-1850.

Decades before Stewart, there was Lewis & Clark. Brian Hall's novel I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company recreates Merriweather Lewis's struggle as a gay man exploring.

Stonewall Awards: Best Writer Winterson, Worst Bigot Cardinal O'Brien

Photo of Jeanette Winterson by Jon at Delores Delargo

Bit of a ruckus today after last night's Stonewall Awards in London. Not for Jeanette Winterson winning with Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? [Kindle] but because the UK lgbt rights powerhouse named Cardinal Keith O'Brien the Bigot of the Year. Barclays and Coutts have warned they will stop underwriting the event if the bigot award is continued next year. The night's winning politician, Ruth Davidson, the lesbian Scottish Tory leader, also criticized the bigot award and was booed for it. Stonewall is standing firm:

"Stonewall insisted the award was entirely justified since O'Brien had been consistently abusive and intolerant about gay marriage. The cardinal had likened it to relegalising slavery, said it was an "aberration", and claimed it might clear the way for polygamous marriages and would cause "further degeneration of society into immorality".

"Colin Macfarlane, the director of Stonewall Scotland, said: "We've never called anyone a bigot just because they don't agree with us. But in just the past 12 months, the cardinal has gone well beyond what any normal person would call a decent level of public discourse."

Speaking on BBC Radio Scotland, Macfarlane added: "The people that were nominated for bigot of the year have this year called gay people Nazis, they have compared them to bestialists and to paedophiles, and one of the nominees suggested that gay people should be put in front of a firing squad and shot dead.

"So I think what we are doing is highlighting the very cruel, very nasty, very pernicious language that is being used by some people – and in particular by the cardinal, who won.

"I think we are right to highlight that and to shine a light on that kind of discrimination, and hence why bigot of the year was one of our award categories."

The Pat-on-the-Head gay rights groups in the US lack the guts to call our bigots what they are, and I hope Stonewall continues the award with two fewer sponsors.

Full list of eleven winners:

Hero of the Year
• Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield
• Jackie Crozier
• Tim Franks
• **Rev Giles Fraser
• Jessie J

Writer of the Year 
• Jackie Kay, Reality, Reality
• **Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
• Madeline Miller, The Song of Achilles
• Patrick Gale, A Perfectly Good Man
• V G Lee, Always You, Edina

Sports Award of the Year 
• Claire Harvey
• Carl Hester
• Lee Pearson CBE
• Outdoor Lads
• Rugby Football League [right]

Entertainer of the Year
• Evan Rachel Wood
• Frank Ocean
• Marcus Collins 
• **Sue Perkins
• Tom Wilkinson 

Born November 10: Ruth Davidson

Yesterday, Ruth Davidson turned 33. Six days earlier, the Glaswegian lesbian was elected leader of the Scottish Conservative Party. That's right, a tartan Tory dyke. If you're wondering where she falls on the oldfashioned, outdated butch-femme spectrum, she served three years in the all-volunteer Territorial Army before being sidelined by an injury during training exercises. She is also an avid kickboxer. Most of her politics may or may not be awful but like fellow conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, she supports same-sex marriage. She and her partner live in Partick.

(Just Another Night at) The Eagle

If you think Hollywood doesn't make big budget gay romances, you didn't subject yourself to the third-rate Gladiator knockoff The Eagle, out this week on DVD. Give or take, it's about two pretty dancers in 140 A.D. (the stars of Step Up and Billy Elliot) both of whom are into leather (thus the title) and fight about who's going to be whose slave. In the first half, the buffer, more built 30 year-old muscle stud Marcus rescues the skinnier, cuter 24 year-old Esca from a brutal top in a helmet mask and makes him his slave. Fine. Lucky them. But -- and this is always a mistake -- they decide to go to Scotland a Burning Man Festival except they don't have a car or a place to stay and it rains a lot and everybody's high and howling and covered with mud or blue paint and mohawks or really dirty long hair and the bonfire isn't that much fun and the food is bloody awful, so nerves are frayed, right? When they could have gone to Rome? Well, Esca's not having it. He totally flips and is all NO, you're MY slave now! So hot, hot Marcus gets tied up and led around on a leash by a twink. Fine. Lucky them again. Then it's sort of confusing, because you don't think of Burning Man as having gift bags or raffle prizes, but suddenly everybody's chasing after some gold accessory in the shape of a bird and instead of just going on eBay and buying one, they call all their old tricks and band together to fight these gnarly dudes and, surprise, the more attractive people win. Triumphant, the happy couple goes back home only to face their biggest challenge of all: prejudice! And even though it violates his traditional values that every couple should be a strict top and bottom, Marcus's commander can see how much the boys love each other and he gives them his blessing to live not as an old school master and slave but as a modern, versatile couple. The boys walk away, down an aisle together, planning their next vacation and grinning into their sunny future. The End. The plot never bothers with the pretense of a girlfriend or wife for either of them. In fact, the entire movie is devoid of women except for a few lady druids left over from a Qkumba Zoo video. [Junior's remix.] Much more startling, The Eagle was somehow scripted and directed by the Oscar-winning team who made The Last King of Scotland. Check the trailer.

The Met Degays Another Queer Icon, Alexander McQueen

The perfectionist in Alexander McQueen would find much to admire in the stunning show of his work, Savage Beauty, which opened today at the Met, while the rebel in him would detest the way he has been softened, defanged, and degayed for rich, conservative fashion matrons/museum patrons. Andrew Bolton's curatorial notes often mention McQueen's "politics" and his complicated relationship growing up in England with Scottish roots yet the discussion of his work completely erases the outsider queer energy that fueled his visionary genius.

Trained as a tailor in Savile Row, McQueen's craftsmanship and obsession with detail (and his vast stable of couture workers, largely ignored in the exhibit) made his clothes technical masterpieces. His shattering originality, always engaging the past to destroy it and reinvent it, raised his work to art. Aiming higher still, he presented each collection in elaborately staged performances reinforcing the season's theme, with the models moving as pieces on a giant chess board, or robotic nozzles spray-painting colors onto a spinning woman's white dress on the runway, or an enormous two-way mirror-box alternately reflecting the audience and revealing his creations. I saw a private preview earlier and was wowed. Brave the stampedes and see it twice before July 31. The show's catalog from Yale Press is already in Amazon's Top 100 bestsellers. Click to enlarge.

 

Glasgay! Festival and "Lip Service," Glascow's Answer to The L Word

 

Every autumn since 1993, the queer culture festival Glasgay! has been rocking the UK's third largest city with LGBT events in literature, film, theater, music, dance, art, comedy, spoken word, and lectures. What had been a mere fortnight with 3,000 people has grown into a month-long extravaganza attracting more than 35,000 fans. Filling twenty venues, this year's many highlights include:

a crossdressing version of Jean Genet's The Maids

movies old and new -- Orlando, Prayers for Bobby, Stonewall Uprising, and City of Borders, a documentary about Jerusalem's only gay bar

the orchestra-infused arty pop group The Irrespressibles (above live, or enjoy the video version with nudity, pearls, and car washing)

the dancetastic Big Loud & Proud Ceilidh

a lecture by the Glasgow Women's Library Archivist Hannah Little on the hidden treasures of the national lesbian archive

a reading by Jackie Kay (left), whose Trumpet deserves a much wider readership here. The novel was inspired by Billy Tipton, a jazz musician and biological woman who lived as a man for 50 years

 

For anyone unable to attend the events now through November 13 but still in need of your queer Glaswegian fix, BBC 3 answers your prayers with a new series called Lip Service, much like The L Word. The Guardian's Claudia Cahalane loves it. Meet two characters below, the sweet mess Cat and sexy trouble Frankie (she cruises a book thief and offers cigarettes to small children in front of their mom!).