Band of Thebes

The War & Peace of Vintage Military Men Cavorting Nude Photobooks

Jump in. Retailers are already selling next month's best gay photobook, My Buddy: World War II Laid Bare, in which still more vintage military meat is seen engaging in "innocent" homoerotic horseplay, often nude. It's from Taschen's Dian Hanson, the free-spirited editrix who brought you the definitive art books on Tom of Finland, big dicks, and Bob Mizer. For size-minded readers: this one is twice as long as Evan Bachner's Men of World War II: Fighting Men at Ease.

Choreographing Gay Sex for Hollywood

You know how it is: Your phone rings and there's a producer begging you to arrange a gay orgy for Scorsese because, uh, quote, that's "not really in Marty’s wheelhouse." So you do The Wolf of Wall Street. Then Ryan Murphy asks you to get Matt Bomer and Mark Ruffalo to hook-up more naturally. One of your guides for those Normal Heart romps is Tom Bianchi's book Fire Island Pines, Polaroids 1975-1983. So it goes if you're Michael Arnold, the choreographer whose niche is sex scenes. Deadline interviews him about his "trust exercises" with the stars, and more. (photos: movie above, book below)

Born May 13: Maupin, Chatwin, Smith

Seventy today, Armistead Maupin's legacy is doubly assured: Begun forty years ago, his important, enduring, and always readable Tales of the City series concluded with its ninth installment, The Days of Anna Madrigal, this January, the same month his Mary Ann, actress Laura Linney, and her husband welcomed their first child, Bennett Armistead Schauer. Those film adaptations in the early 90s were widely praised and greatly loved, and, inevitably, attacked by conservatives, especially because the first film was shown on PBS. Several state legislatures in the South officially condemned the series. No surprise, the frightened suits at PBS ignored the record breaking ratings and awards, and cancelled the sequel. Enter Showtime, which produced the next two adaptations and earned six additional Emmy nominations. Maupin's bravery in print was matched in action, fighting aids and for gay rights. Author of two novels outside the Tales series (Maybe the Moon and The Night Listener), he has written the screenplays for four adaptations of his work and wrote the excellent narration to The Celluloid Closet. After a twelve-year relationship with Terry Anderson, Maupin met and married photographer Christopher Turner. They left their beloved San Francisco and have established themselves in Santa Fe. 

A contemporary heir to Patrick Leigh Fermor's genius in travel writing, Bruce Chatwin's literary talent was matched by his personal panache. So brilliant, so handsome, so acclaimed, so willing to buck British convention, yet so tormented by his own prejudices. Unable to accept that he was gay, he married a woman, Elizabeth Chanler, in 1965, when he was twenty-five, and exclusively pursued men throughout their fifteen years of marriage. (She didn't mind, although she did ask for a separation in 1980.)

Chatwin's reflex for making up cover stories appears to have extended into his nonfiction. The local people of his marvelous travel books like In Patagoniaand The Songlines disputed the accuracy of some of his writing, claiming he embellished or created characters and conversations described as fact. Many episodes in those essays only make sense if you realize he is sleeping with the men he meets. Although there's nothing outright gay in his much loved first novel On the Black Hill, it concerns two long-time bachelor brothers who sleep in the same bed for decades. Even when he was dying at forty-eight in 1989, he remained so closeted he said he had a rare, fatal blood disease contracted in China from a bat bite, rather than say he had aids. One of his lovers was Jasper Conran; Chatwin died in the South of France in a house owned by Jasper's mother, Shirley Conran, and his ashes were scattered near Leigh Fermor's home in the Peleponnese.

Rupert Smith's output is so big and versatile he needs three names to cover it. His own literary fiction includes most recently the award-winning Man's World which follows two storylines of gay Londoners decades apart, both revolving around a trio of similar types made memorable by individual quirks: a quieter man whose best friend is screamingly camp and whose off-again-on-again lover is a hot bloke with serious self-acceptance issues. As in The Swimming-Pool Library, the historical characters (and the old men they become) are more interesting than the funnier but shallower contemporary club denizens. Rupert James is his name for swift, swirly Shirley Conran-ish fiction like Silk and Step Sisters. And James Lear delivers gay erotica in clever settings with actual wit: a country house whodunit (The Back Passage), a murder on a long journey aboard the legendary train The Flying Scotsman (The Secret Tunnel), a Civil War romance between a spoiled white heir and a runaway slave (Hot Valley), a Robert Louis Stevenson-style romp through Scotland in the 1750s (The Low Road), and a new work in the vein of Lee Child (The Hardest Thing). Generously, Rupert has posted on his site a list of his 101 favorite novels with a wonderfully opinionated paragraph about each. Later this year comes his new novel Interlude.

Born May 8: Tom of Finland

In an era when merely entering a gay bar could mean jail time and the instant end of a career, Tom of Finland was boldly visualizing a world of healthy, happy, all-male sexual camaraderie that was hot and had a sense of humor. Then again, his fantasies of hyperidealized, turboerotic, uberbuilt masculinity guaranteed that reality would never measure up. For generations of gay men since the mid-1950s, his art has created an endless coupling of inspiration and insecurity. Born in Kaarina, Finland in 1920, Touko Laaksonen moved to Helsinki when he was nineteen and soon was drafted to fight in World War II. Afterward, he worked in an advertising agency while American physique magazines began to publish his drawings of rugged lumberjacks, cops, jocks, sailors, soldiers, prisoners, lifeguards, musclemen, and his enduring character Kake. In 1973, at the time of his first gallery show, in Hamburg, he was able to quit his job to draw fulltime. His second gallery exhibit, in Los Angeles, was not until 1978, followed by shows in San Franciso and New York, where he became friends with another artist whose work explored gay S&M, Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1981, Veli, his partner of twenty-eight years, died; Laaksonen survived him by ten years. The Finnish Culture Institute hosted an exhibit of his work in Paris in 1999, and in 2004 MoMA added several of his drawings to their permanent collection. Taschen's gigantic, oversized Tom of Finland XXL runs almost 700 pages, contains nearly 1,000 images, and includes essays by John Waters, Camille Paglia, Armistead Maupin, and Todd Oldham. Taschen also offers The Complete Kake. Later this year, Finland issues three stamps of his work.

Stamps of Approval: Harvey Milk, Tom of Finland, Tove Jansson

 

The Harvey Milk stamp is now available for preorder online here. The statement says, "The U.S. Postal Service® is proud to honor the life of Harvey Milk, a visionary leader who became an iconic figure in the struggle for gay civil rights. In 1977, Milk was elected to the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, making him one of the first openly gay elected officials in the United States." The stamp will be released on May 22, his 84th birthday.

Finland announced three stamps depicting the art of Touko Laaksonen, Tom of Finland, come September or October. Their statement reads, "His emphatically masculine homoerotic drawings have attained iconic status in their genre and had an influence on, for instance, pop culture and fashion. The drawings on the stamp sheet represent strong and confident male figures typical of their designer." Anyone who just can't wait to lick and stick those should get Tom of Finland XXL or The Complete Kake Comics.

Finland's first new commerative of 2014 showed two photos of favorite novelist Tove Jansson. Read The Summer Book [Kindle] or The True Deceiver [Kindle]. Earlier, her Moomins got a stamp of their own.

Graphic Gay Erotica of Ancient Greece

Art by Adam Graphite from Greek Love

Dale Lazarov is a writer of vision. For his erotic gay graphic tales he researches and develops the story and creates the scenes that an artist draws without captions or dialogue. The results speak for themselves. Lest Thebes be forced to send a demigod to pound some sense into you: Yes, this is legitimate writing in the same way early silents or any film's extended montages are written -- a storyteller has plotted a narrative, deciding what events and details to slip in and when to pull out.

Samuel Delany is a fan. Of the brand new ancient adventure Greek Love featuring among others, Eros, Ares, and Herakles, Delany says, "Bluntly put, Dale Lazarov and his artists do beautiful books. I've loved them since the first one I saw--and this one is no different. Sensuous, sexy, hot as hell, it's rough and tender by turns, and if erotic art is your thing, you'll love this one too! It's a pleasure and honor for me to tell you just what a treat lies ahead for you. Buy it, read it, and read it again."

Enhancing his muscular action and rich characterizations, Adam Graphite's coloring is gorgeous. Follow Adam and see more of his work here and here.

Dale's earlier books are Sticky with Steve MacIssac, Manly with Amy Colburn, Nightlife with Bastian Jonsson, and Good Sports with Alessio Slonimsky. Digital editions are available via Selz.

See more art after the jump.

The Hookies 2014: Gay Escort Award Winners

Simultaneous multiple congratulations to the Hookies' three double winners: Boomer Banks, voted Best Escort and Best Cock; Duncan Black (pictured), Best Newcomer and Best Ass; and Leo Forte, Best Kink and Best Dressed. The night's greatest hire was getting Leslie Jordan [DVD] to host.

Best Escort: Boomer Banks (ask)

Best Pornstar Escort: Tommy Defendi (ask)

Best Newcomer: Duncan Black ($400)

Best Top: (tie) Angel Rock (ask) and Ty Roderick ($300)

Best Bottom: Killian James ($300. Overnight: $1,000)

Best Cock: Boomer Banks (ask)

Best Ass: Duncan Black ($400)

Best Daddy: Adam Russo (ask)

Best Twink: Blake Stone ("$200 + taxi fare")

Best Body: Austin Wolf ($350-400. Overnight: $1,500)

Best Bear: Tony Orion ($300. Overnight: $1,500)

Best Kink: Leo Forte ($300. Overnight: $1,200)

Best Masseur: Bryan Knight ($120-140)

Best Boyfriend Fantasy: Blue Bailey (ask)

Best Dressed: Leo Forte ($300. Overnight: $1,200)

Best Website: Tyson Tyler (ask)

For the full list of nominees, looky here. For a more sobering view, read Rick Whitaker's Assuming the Position.

Hustlers

Got all your accessories for tonight's last Black Party at Roseland? Boots? Harness? Hustlers? Finally back in stock, Philip-Lorca diCorcia's career-making series -- twenty-five of these images formed his first solo show, at MoMA -- is still a book that keeps on giving. Made possible in part by an NEA grant that became a flashpoint in the war on arts funding, each narrative photo is titled with the hustler's name, age, hometown, and what he charged. It's among Thebes' readers all-time most popular books.

The Desperates

Two years after his story collection Pretty comes humor writer and playwright Greg Kearney's debut novel, The Desperates, now a Lammy nominee for gay general fiction. Any book that uses a epigraph from Christopher Coe's novel Such Times is already on my good side and the opening pages are nicely done, describing college dropout Joel's first day on the job as a phone sex worker:

"...he has never done dirty talk. The few encounters he has had with men since arriving here in the fall have all been mute, glancing, furtive, sad affairs: some mutual masturbation, a bit of frottage -- oh, and that older guy in the porno video booth who knelt to blow him but then made a stink-face and waved him off. Why? Were his balls musty? Was it a foreskin thing? Still, he knows himself to be a passionate person, boundlessly so, so surely a little dirty talk should be easy."

Cormorant Books says, "In telling the intersecting stories of Edmund, Teresa, and Joel — all of whom leave trails of hopeful chaos in their wake — Kearney has painted a blackly comic, yet surprisingly earnest, portrait of modern loneliness. The Desperates is one of the rare novels that leaves you laughing even as it breaks your heart." 

Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us

Gay author Jesse Bering PhD earns a starred PW review for Perv: The Sexual Deviant in All of Us [Kindle]:

"In a book as informative as it is entertaining, Bering argues for the efficacy of science and logic over irrational morals when addressing sexual deviancy. Citing numerous studies and historical sources, Bering makes the claim that, deep down, we are all sexual deviants in one form or another—and that sexual deviancy is, in fact, not deviant at all... Laws and medical diagnoses controlling sexual activity should investigate whether the activities in question cause harm (though harm itself is subjective, and is therefore also a problematic way to assess behavior), rather than whether society is merely grossed out by them. This is clearly a personal topic for Bering, who is gay and, in fact, discusses his experiences of self-loathing and discrimination. . . a delightful, intelligent, and thought-provoking addition to the growing body of our sexual knowledge of self."

The book was a NYT Editors' Choice and highly praised by the Boston Globe, Kirkus, Booklist, Laurie Santos ("fascinating and surprising"), Dan Savage ("peerless"), Paul Bloom ("unusual and wonderful"), and The Scientist which said, "Against a colorful backdrop of science, history, and psychology, Bering calls on human society to stop judging people’s sexual preferences based on a personal belief about what’s normal or natural, instead asking what is harmful. [He] throws a bucket of ice-cold water on topics that often become overheated by the fires of morality, religion, and politics."

Follow him on twitter or friend him on facebook.

Stranger by the Lake

Out today in limited release, this handsomely composed French film of gay sex and gay murder that unfolds oh-so-slowly over a summer in a lakeside cruising area, divided our group last fall at the New York Film Festival because we each disliked it in different ways. And yet Stranger by the Lake has unanimous very positive reviews, averaging a lofty 83 on Metacritic. Toronto's Adam Nayman says,

"It turns out that still waters run deep – and with a hell of an undertow to boot. The genius of Guiraudie’s precisely measured set-up is how it affords him space to trenchantly explore ideas about fear and desire without overstepping generic boundaries; whatever its submerged themes, the film is first and foremost a thriller, with its share of superbly meted-out shocks. Spare, steely, sexually explicit in a way that transcends mere provocation, Stranger by the Lake is vital cinema."

Watch the trailer here. It's the sixth feature from writer-director Alain Guiraudie, who turns fifty in July.

Born January 1: Forster, Hoover, Haines, Béjart, Hormel, Orton, De la Iglesia, Stefano

E.M. Forster (1879-1970) After you've finished the novels (Howards End, A Passage to India, A Room With a View, Maurice), and his openly gay story collection The Life To Come, your mandatory reading is Wendy K. Moffat's NYT notable A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E. M. Forster [Kindle]. Biographer Tripp Evans wrote: "Not only is this a truly groundbreaking study of Forster's life and work -- and an eye-opening read for any student of twentieth-century gay social history -- but it's also beautifully written.  Moffat is one of those rare writers able to combine elegant prose with a style that engages the reader in an intimate conversation (she is, in other words, the very best sort of company).  By illuminating the previously underexamined terrain of Forster's private life, Moffat has restored an important figure, along with his era, to a deeply satisfying wholeness.  It is a remarkable achievement." Get ready for Damon Galgut's new novel, Arctic Summer, which reimagines Forster's first trip to India.

J. Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) American FBI director and closet case of unsurpassed twistedness.

William Haines (1900-1973) Hollywood hero, one of the top five grossing movie stars annually from 1928 - 32 for charming films like The Smart Set, The Duke Steps Out, and Just a Gigolo. In 1933 he was busted for picking up a sailor and taking him to a YMCA, prompting his studio to demand a sham marriage to a woman. Haines refused to betray his partner of seven years Jimmie Shields that way, and quit films for a very successful career as an interior designer. Read William Mann's extraordinary biography, Wisecracker.

Maurice Béjart (1927-2007) French-Swiss choreographer who directed maverick ballets and all-male homoerotic dances long before Matthew Bourne. Watch this at least until 2:20.

James Hormel (1933 -) The grandson of SPAM, American philanthropist, ambassador, gay rights activist, and current political hot potato is 80 today. His partner Michael P. Nguyen graduated from Swarthmore in 2008.

Joe Orton (1933-1967) randy British playwright of explicitly gay hits like Entertaining Mr. Sloane and What the Butler Saw, murdered by his unstable lover. Subject of Stephen Frears' fine biopic Prick Up Your Ears starring Gary Oldman and Vanessa Redgrave.

Eloy de la Iglesia (1944-2006) Spanish writer - director of the gay festival favorites like Bulgarian Lovers [right].

Joey Stefano (1968-1994) Porn superstar. After you've satisfied yourself with his film acting, read Wonder Bread & Ecstasy: The Life and Death of Joey Stefano.

NYT: 5% of US Men Are Predominantly Attracted to Men

The NYT is trying to fill Nate Silver's slot with Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, who today crunches search data to conclude five percent of U.S. men are "predominantly attracted" to men. By coincidence, roughly five percent of porn searches in all states are for m2m, contradicting a notion that gay men flock to blue hubs. There's also this:

"In the United States, of all Google searches that begin “Is my husband…,” the most common word to follow is “gay.” “Gay” is 10 percent more common in such searches than the second-place word, “cheating.” It is 8 times more common than “an alcoholic” and 10 times more common than “depressed.” The states with the highest percentage of women asking this question are South Carolina and Louisiana. In fact, in 21 of the 25 states where this question is most frequently asked, support for gay marriage is lower than the national average."

Queerty summarizes Stephens-Davidowitz's other findings:

* Millions of gay men are still in the closet to some degree; one-tenth of gay men say they haven’t come out to most of the important people in their lives.

* More than one quarter of gay men hide their sexuality from anonymous surveys; about 3.6 percent of American men tell anonymous surveys they are attracted to men.

* While some gays move out of less tolerant states, the openly gay population of those states would only be about 0.1 percent higher if they stayed. 

*  Among the states with the highest percentages of Craigslist ads for males looking for “casual encounters” are Kentucky, Louisiana and Alabama. 

Vanity Fair on the Vatican's Secret Gay Lives

Maybe the only thing less interesting than the Cheney sisters' stragetic, headline-grabbing "feud" -- what next, the Quayle sons bicker? -- is the sex lives of priests. But if you care, Michael Joseph Gross reports in the December issue of Vanity Fair on the secret gay clergy at the Vatican. The story begins with a cliche: a priest in a gay sauna in Rome. Gross writes:

"At the Vatican, a significant number of gay prelates and other gay clerics are in positions of great authority. They may not act as a collective but are aware of one another’s existence. And they inhabit a secretive netherworld, because homosexuality is officially condemned. Though the number of gay priests in general, and specifically among the Curia in Rome, is unknown, the proportion is much higher than in the general population. Between 20 and 60 percent of all Catholic priests are gay, according to one estimate cited by Donald B. Cozzens in his well-regarded The Changing Face of the Priesthood. For gay clerics at the Vatican, one fundamental condition of their power, and of their priesthood, is silence, at least in public, about who they really are.

"Clerics inhabit this silence in a variety of ways. A few keep their sexuality entirely private and adhere to the vow of celibacy. Many others quietly let themselves be known as gay to a limited degree, to some colleagues, or to some laypeople, or both; sometimes they remain celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way, perhaps the least common but certainly the most visible, involves living a double life..."

Read it all.

Anonymous Study Finds More Same-Sex Activity, More Antigay Prejudice

A largely ignored study from the National Bureau of Economic Research in Cambridge polling 2,516 Americans showed that when people are given anonymity they report far greater queer sexual experience (up 59%), increased self-identifying as non-hetero (up 65%), and much higher antigay prejudice, namely:

"Respondents were 67% more likely to express disapproval of an openly gay manager at work and 71% more likely to say it is okay to discriminate against lesbian, gay, or bisexual individuals. The results show non-heterosexuality and anti-gay sentiment are substantially underestimated in existing surveys, and the privacy afforded by current best practices is not always sufficient to eliminate bias." 

Bloomberg News confirms what you always knew:

"The veiled survey had no effect on the answers of young people to questions about their sexual orientation, apparently because social norms don’t much discourage young people from revealing the truth.

"But among Christians and older people, the effect of the veiled approach was especially large, increasing their reports of non-heterosexuality and of same-sex experiences by more than 100 percent.

"In best practices, only a minority of Republicans (35 percent) said they would be unhappy with an LGBT manager. Under the veiled report, most Republicans (67 percent) said they would be unhappy."

Tom of Finland, Bob Mizer at MOCA Los Angeles

      

In one of the first major exhibits of gay erotica at a mainstream museum, a show of drawings by Tom of Finland and photos by Bob Mizer opens at MOCA Los Angeles on Saturday. It also includes

"...examples of Mizer's groundbreaking magazine Physique Pictorial—where drawings by "Tom of Finland" were first published in the United States in 1957. Spanning work of five decades, the exhibition seeks a wider appreciation for Mizer and Laaksonen's art, considering their aesthetic influence on generations of artists, both gay and straight, while also acknowledging its profound cultural and social impact, most importantly in providing open, powerful imagery of queer sexuality in an era of rapidly shifting attitudes towards homosexuality."

Kudos to curator Bennett Simpson. If you can't go to L.A. before January 26, get Bob's World: The Life and Boys of A.M.G.'s Bob Mizer or spring for Tom of Finland XXL.

The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame: Master of Gay Erotic Manga

Yesterday in Les Mots a la Bouche I stumbled on this first-ever Genogoroh Tagame opus in English, a greatest hits by the genius of gay manga, edited by Chip Kidd and introduced by Edmund White. The Passion of Gengoroh Tagame: Master of Gay Erotic Manga pubbed in the US too quietly in May and critics predictably called him "Japan's Tom of Finland." Fair in that they both portray hyper macho characters but unfair to them as artists. Just look.

UPDATE: Garth Mitko Greenwell sent me this wonderful short by Max Freeman and a link to Freeman's interview with Tagame. I love this: "I started drawing comics in middle school, and it was mostly comical comics, funny comics, for classmates and teachers and that kind of thing. And they all liked it a lot. And there was a main character that developed, and he was the captain of the soccer team, who is kind of my first love. I have no idea why, but I suddenly started drawing him getting captured by the rival team and being stripped and humiliated, and this was in middle school, before I came out, or before I was thinking about myself as a gay person, so I was like, "Why am I drawing this?" But I also gave that comic to my friends. They said they liked it, but I don't know what they really thought."

Born October 15: Michel Foucault

Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France, leftist gay activist, and S&M enthusiast, Michel Foucault is a towering figure in queer thought. Years of brilliant, turbulent studies -- he said he only became smart by doing homework for a beautiful, stupid classmate -- culminated with moving from Poitiers to Paris at nineteen and enduring a breakdown at twenty-one and the first of several suicide attempts. Six years later he published his debut book. His doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne became his second, Madness and Civilization in 1961, followed two years later by The Birth of the Clinic. That year, 1963, he met philosophy student Daniel Defert (still living, 76) who was his partner for the rest of his life. While those early works were highly praised, Foucault's breakout success came in 1966 with The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, which "offers a global analysis of what knowledge meant—and how this meaning changed—in Western thought from the Renaissance to the present."  Ever alive to the social constructs demanding "normal" behavior and conformity, he sees queer lessons everywhere, especially in his Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison. His gayest book is the first in his groundbreaking series The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, and The History of Sexuality, Vol. 3: The Care of the Self. While guest lecturing at Berkeley in 1983, he was an avid patron of San Franciso's bathhouses and sex clubs, where he may have contracted the hiv that killed him in June 1984. The official statement on his death at 57 did not mention aids. Defert, who co-founded France's first aids awareness organization AIDES, officially confirmed the cause on the second anniversary of Foucault's death in June 1986. The most gay-inclusive of the major biographies is David Macey's The Lives of Michel Foucault.

The New Press collects Foucault's essential works in Vol. 1 Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, Vol. 2 Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology , Vol. 3 Power.

Jeremy Lucido's Starrf***er

  

If the oversized twinks of Bel Ami's Big Pleasure Collection and the airbrushed men of Fred Goudon's Summer Souvenirs left you wanting more edge, thank Bruno Gmunder for gathering the best of the first seven issues of photographer Jeremy Lucido's notorious fanzine in one big book: Starrfucker. The 35 year-old native of Florrisant, Missouri has lived in Hollywood since 1999. He launched his very nsfw blog in 2005 and printed his first zine in 2010.

Somehow, he got fellow photographer Venfield 8 to write the book's intro.

Born August 23: Neil Bartlett, Conner Habib

Neil Bartlett received an OBE at forty-two for his special services to the arts. The author, translator, or director of dozens of plays for television, radio, and most especially theater, including the Royal Shakespeare Company, the National, the ART, and the Lyric Hammersmith where he was Artistic Director for eleven seasons, he has also published a handful of gay books: The literary novel Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall plumbs the erotic relationship between an older man and his younger boyfriend in an unnamed town. In The House on Brooke Street he contrasts a London department store clerk and an aristocrat's obsession with the latter's 19 year-old blond servant Gabriel in a story that flips between the 1920s and 50s. His most recent novel, Skin Lane, about a 46 year-old furrier and his boss's teen nephew, was a finalist for a Costa award after winning wide acclaim from critics and A-list authors Armistead Maupin, Patrick McGrath, and Will Self who said, it's "a fiendishly taut little psycho-shocker that recalls Simenon at his most hardboiled and Highsmith at her creepiest." Six months ago, the British Library announced the acquisition of Bartlett's personal papers and video archives.

Yesterday, Conner Habib taught a seminar called "Anthroposophy 101: Rudolf Steiner, Freedom, and the Western Esoteric Tradition" in San Francisco. It was probably pretty good because Conner previously earned the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honor at UMASS, during his three years lecturing on literature, composition, and creative writing. He also loves to talk and write about organismic and evolutionary biology which he studied with many of the greats in the field like Lynn Margulis and Fritjof Capra. All of this is important to remember because Conner is a porn star. For his efforts in more than 100 sex films and scenes, he has been named Best Newcomer by the GayVN in 2010 and he won Best Supporting Actor at the Grabbys in 2012 for his work with Allen Silver in Dad Goes To College directed by Joe Gage. He often writes about sex, what it's like on set or describing why he likes rest stops or creating an identity in porn or why Americans fear gay sex. His birth name is Andre Khalil and he chose Conner Habib to reflect his Irish and Syrian ancestry. Today he's 36. Read his blog or join his 25,079 followers on twitter.