Band of Thebes

Born August 21: Aubrey Beardsley

Was it his struggles with tuberculosis, from age nine to his death at twenty-five, that gave Aubrey Beardsley's Nouveau, pre-Raphaelite drawings their stylized touch of the morbid? At twenty he earned his first commission, to create 300 drawings for an edition of Morte d'Arthur. The following year, 1893, Oscar Wilde's publisher hired Beardsley to create the art for the print version of Salome, which very successfully shocked certain segments of society with its sexualized images. If you're picturing a glimpse of stocking, you don't know your Victorian porn: Beardsley's blatant x-rated gay drawings are as whimsical as they are erotic. Yet it was his public association with Wilde that got him fired from the influential arts journal The Yellow Book following the latter's infamous conviction for gross indecency in 1895. After lesser editorial jobs and more enduring book commissions, Beardsley left the increasingly inhospitable England for his health. In 1898 he died in France, as Wilde would two years later. Get his collected work in Aubrey Beardsley or Collected Drawings of Aubrey Beardsley.

The Sexual Politics of Smart Men

How can you resist a book about sex and intelligence studies with chapters like "Queer Individuals: Their Nature and Nurture," "Less Than Ideal Husbands," and "Why the Gifted Boy Didn't Masturbate"? You can't. Out last month from the University of Chicago, Gentlemen's Disagreement: Alfred Kinsey, Lewis Terman, and the Sexual Politics of Smart Men [Kindle] re-examines the debate between sexologist Kinsey and smart-ologist Terman: "Through a fluent discussion of intellectually gifted onanists, unhappily married men, queer geniuses, lonely frontiersmen, religious ascetics, and the two scholars themselves, Peter Hegarty traces the origins of Terman’s complaints about Kinsey’s work to show how the intelligence testing movement was much more concerned with sexuality than we might remember." Hegarty is a former CLAGS board member who works in LGBT and social psychology as head of the School of Psychology at the University of Surrey. Thomas Foster says the book is "a fascinating history of the intersectionality of sexuality and intelligence in the social sciences. Hegarty masterfully weaves together queer theory, history, and psychology to examine how what many in the social science community have defined as normal is constructed and mutually constitutive."

Men Loving Men in Britain 1820-1870: Before Wilde by Charles Upchurch

American scholar Charles Upchurch spent ten years ferreting out accounts of men loving men in Britain from roughly 1820 to 1870, the period when the state first began policing sex between males on a regular basis. He found one thousand mainstream newspaper reports and brilliantly condensed his extraordinary trove into a sharp 206-page narrative. Like George Chauncey's Gay New York, Upchurch's meticulous research reclaims a lost era of gay history and recasts our understanding of an entire era. Jeffrey Weeks praises the book's integrated view, which "refuses to see homosexuality as a thing apart. Its history is firmly located in a dense history of families, communities, rapid change, new forms of policing, and social reform."  Published to great acclaim in a prohibitively expensive hardcover by the University of California in 2009, Before Wilde: Sex Between Men in Britain's Age of Reform [Kindle] finally appears now as a trade paperback. Buy it.

Gay Erotic Awakening at Eton in Alexander's Choice

Oh, England. What won't your schoolboys get up to? Take Alexander Aylmer. The randy Eton student sneaks into his favorite male teacher's sitting room, strips naked, and rolls himself up in a rug, leaving beside it a note saying 'This birthday gift is for you to enjoy in any way you can think of.' He's thirteen.

Nick Richardson has shocked readers of the erudite London Review of Books with his post praising this novel Alexander's Choice [Kindle] by the pseudonymous Edmund Marlowe. Richardson says, "the sex scenes are thrillingly frank." His review:

"Marlowe’s book describes the erotic awakening of a precocious 13-year-old aristocrat called Alexander Aylmer. The year is 1983, and in his second month as a member of (the fictional) Peyntors House – ‘a very old-fashioned house, the most old-fashioned in the school’ – Aylmer has just enjoyed his first orgasm...

"An older boy called Julian, whose father is a removals man who saved for years to send his son to Eton, flirts with Alexander, and Alexander flirts back. There are a couple of agonisingly unconsummated trysts. Alexander goes to Julian’s room brandishing a copy of Cider with Rosie and tells him to read a passage: ‘Quiet incest flourished where the roads were bad; some found their comfort in beasts; and there were the usual friendships between men and boys who walked through the fields like lovers.’ But Julian wimps out of acting on the younger boy’s brazen come-on: ‘He had approached Alexander physically in every way possible short of the overtly romantic and still he had not managed to dare to cross that threshold.’

"Julian’s father receives a letter from the boys’ housemaster informing him of his son’s ‘unhealthy interest in much younger boys’ and the relationship is put on hold. But meanwhile, the tension between Alexander and his English teacher, Damian Cavendish, ‘the nicest beak he had come across’, is mounting. Damian organises some after-hours tutorials, and rereads a book called Greek Love: The Role of Pederasty in the Classical Age to help justify his feelings to himself; Alexander reads The Persian Boy [Kindle] and imagines himself ‘in Damian’s bed, willing slave to his own King, while Damian, wild with lust, kissed him all over’. Finally, on his birthday, Damian comes home to find his sitting-room rug rolled up... which turns out to be – surprise! – Alexander with no clothes on. Damian admires the boy’s ‘smooth twin orbs’ and his ‘delicate bulge’, which, though ‘manifestly smaller than Damian’s own’ is nevertheless ‘evidently virile’. Then they have sex.

"At 416 pages, Alexander’s Choice is perhaps a little long. Marlowe also enjoys using Eton’s esoteric argot, words like ‘div’ (lesson) and ‘beak’ (teacher), each defined on its first appearance in a series of unwieldy passages..." 

The Daily Mail reports another aspect of the novel is the inevitable parsing of characters to determine who might be based on whom, given the many notables at Eton in 1983:

"OE author Guy Walters tells me: ‘The book is set in the Eighties when I was there — David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Earl Spencer, Dominic West, the actor — were all contemporaries. It paints an incredibly racy picture of gay sex at Eton. Put it another way: it’s really dirty.’   Needless to say, Marlowe is a pseudonym, but Walters has no doubt the author is a genuine OE.  ‘It’s quite clear from  descriptions of the school and nicknames for things that whoever wrote it was with us at school,’ he says. ‘And there is a great guessing game going on trying identify who the people in the book might be in real life. 

Bookshelves overflow with novels about student-teacher relationships, but for a factual account of how it really went down with the ancients, get the Lammy winner The Greeks and Greek Love by James Davidson.

Born July 17: Fred Halsted

Born in Long Beach in 1941, Fred Halsted said that although they were working class and he had to help with agricultural jobs to earn money for his mom, he grew up in "paradise. A life of being free. As a kid I was able to run naked through a hundred miles of orange groves in fragrant bloom." He maintained his joy in plants -- majoring in botany at L.A. State, owning a nursery in El Monte, doing gardening work for Joey Heatherton and Vincent Price -- but he couldn't yet regain that youthful sexual freedom. He said he was a petit bourgeois and "the biggest closet queen you can be" and even a raw entrapment by the vice squad in 1967 didn't change him. What finally shattered him was RFK's assassination. After that, he decided he wanted to make the world a better place, and make a lot of money, through porn, including the first ever depictions of certain hardcore S/M acts.

Long before video and digital, Halsted spent three years shooting film for L.A. Plays Itself. It was 1972 and he says his was the first gay porn to be told from a sadist's point of view. It was definitely the first to be screened like an art film for big name New York critics. And surely the first to have a sex scene with no sex -- just shots of WeHo traffic while you hear the voice of an older top and young hayseed negotiating their needs. Halsted also arranged a screening for "all these gay liberationists, writers and other artists." Guess what? Hated it! He said "they expected me to give them a poem to sexual virginity... I thought they’d been around, but they acted like they’d never seen a cock before." Soon enough, financial success and critical acclaim caught up with him; his vision helped define the macho man gay look of the 1970s and still today the only hardcore movies in the Film Collection of MoMA are Halsted's L.A. Plays Itself and Sex Garage. But the 80s were a bad time for him, with more commercialized, video porn, his worsening alcoholism, and the advent of aids, which killed his long-time lover, onscreen co-star, and tormentor, Joey Yale, in 1986. Halsted shot himself in the head in 1989. Read William E. Jones' book Halsted Plays Himself published in 2011 by Semiotext(e).

Born May 13: Armistead Maupin, Bruce Chatwin, Rupert Smith, Alan Ball

Growing up in a prominent conservative Southern family in North Carolina, Armistead Maupin always knew he was gay yet his natural reserve kept him from acting on those feelings until after college, after serving in the Navy, when he was twenty-six. He came out the year he turned thirty. Good thing, because 1974 is also when he began publishing his panoramic observations about San Francisco and its pansexual inhabitants in the Marin paper, The Pacific Sun. In hindsight the next steps look obvious -- move the column to the Chronicle in 1976, morph them into a novel called Tales of the City in 1978, repeat, repeat, and achieve literary renown as the creator of one of the most cherished character driven book series of the century. The film adaptations in the early 90s starring Laura Linney and Olympia Dukakis were widely praised and greatly loved, and, inevitably, vociferously 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, instead opting to cancel the sequel. Enter Showtime, which produced the next two adaptations and earned a total of six additional Emmy nominations. Maupin's bravery in print was matched in action, fighting aids and for gay rights. Author of three other novels (Maybe the Moon, The Night Listener, Michael Tolliver Lives), he has written the screenplays for four adaptations of his work and wrote the excellent narration for The Celluloid Closet. After a twelve-year relationship with Terry Anderson, Maupin met and is now married to Christopher Turner. Last year they left their beloved San Francisco and moved to Santa Fe, where he is working on a new novel. (photo by sfleo67)

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 commercial Jackie Collins-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), and a Robert Louis Stevenson-style romp through Scotland in the 1750s (The Low Road). A brand new James Lear book comes at you next month. Generously, Rupert has posted on his site a list of his 101 favorite novels with a wonderfully opinionated paragraph about each. At #17 is Arnold Bennett's 1908 classic The Old Wives' Tale.

Could a plastic bag caught in the wind on a lower Manhattan street change your life? Alan Ball watched one float for ten minutes and made it a hallmark of his first movie script, American Beauty, which won five Oscars including best picture, best director, best actor, and his own best screenplay. He parlayed that success into writing and directing his gay-positive mortuary series Six Feet Under, for which he earned an Emmy, a DGA, and a PGA. It lasted five seasons and won a total of 46 awards. Ball returned to feature films in 2007 with Towelhead, and continued his partnership with HBO with the supremely sexy, bloody, metaphorical, vampires as minorities ("God Hates Fangs"), Emmy-winning True Blood that launches its sixth season next month. Ball and his partner live next door to another Oscar winning writer-director, Quentin Tarantino, who sued Alan in March 2011 over the "obnoxious pterodactyl-like screams" of their exotic bird aviary. 

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.

London Triptych by Jonathan Kemp

If Band of Thebes had a book club, the next selection would be Jonathan Kemp's novel London Triptych, finally out in North America after its debut wowed British readers way back in 2010. Like Michael Cunningham's triple-threaded riff on Virginia Woolf, London Triptych exists in three eras -- 1890s, 1950s, 1990s -- each echoing the experience of young hustlers and older gay clients, spinning out from the Oscar Wilde rent boy trial. The Hours won a Pulitzer and London Triptych won the Authors Club Prize (established in 1955), besting all its straight competition including the Whitbread/Costa winner for best first novel. Judge Joanne Harris, author of Chocolat, said Kemp's book has “astonishingly textured prose [and] wonderfully defined narrative voices.” The book was also shortlisted for the Green Carnation Prize and the Polari Book Prize. Clayton Littlewood called it "an amazing book. This is the best gay novel to be published in many years... It is literary fiction at its best." And the Times Literary Supplement praised Kemp's evocation of London, saying the city itself is as much a character as his three protagonists. Read it.

You: and Your Sex Schedule

detail from Jacques Réattu, La vision de Jacob, 1792

As we close the first quarter of 2013, you should be having at least your 50th orgasm of the year. Tonight is the 89th night, so climaxing only once every other day is not enough. Step up your game. If somehow the scoreboard shows you need a few more to reach 50, well that's your bar talk / grindr chat for tonight. You're welcome.

Dr. Oz says you need 200 orgasms a year for optimal health. Spread them out. The last thing the world needs is you procrastinating and running around like a crazed teenager trying to have 149 orgasms on December 31. This fact comes from his New Yorker profile, but there's loads more in Dr. Oz's YOU: The Owner's Manual, Updated and Expanded Edition: An Insider's Guide to the Body that Will Make You Healthier and Younger [Kindle].

Publishing can help. They may be killing the literary gay novel but, even in the age of free tumblr porn, picture books are forever: French athletes (Dieux du Stade: Gods of the Stadium), American jocks (Masculinity), Eastern European twinks (Paradise Found: Bel Ami), beautiful men (Luminosity), hung tops (Supersized), power bottoms (Rock Bottom), bears and cubs (Fur: The Love of Hair), rough trade (Brutal Truth), seedy drawings (Just So Horny), kitsch physique paintings of the 40s and 50s (The Art Of George Quaintance), and rediscovered vintage nudes (Uncovered: Rare Vintage Male Nudes).

Junot Díaz Wins World's Richest Story Prize for Tale of Underage Sex

Pulitzer winner, NBCC winner, MacArthur genius, MIT professor Junot Díaz has won the Sunday Times Short Story Prize -- at £30,000 the world's richest award for a single story -- for "Miss Lora," included in his National Book Award finalist This Is How You Lose Her [Kindle]. He makes an interesting point about the double standard on underage sex. Readers here can probably think of another younger - older dynamic that people "aren't celebrating."

Díaz told the Guardian:

"We tend, as a culture, to think of boys having underage sex quite differently to how we think of girls. I find that quite disturbing, and wanted to question the logic of that," he said. "If a boy has sex with his teacher, people under their breath are kind of high-fiving the kid. If a 16- or 15-year-old girl has sex with an older teacher – forget about it. No one's celebrating. That seemed really strange." 

Díaz said he grew up "with so many young men who had experiences when they were teenagers with older women", and was interested in writing about the issue. "The silence around it is pretty enormous," he said. "I think it is a conversation we need to continue to have."

One of the judges called the story an "instant classic." It appeared in The New Yorker last April.

The other finalists were: Mark Haddon's The Gun; Sarah Hall's Evie; Cynan Jones' The Dig; Toby Litt's Call It 'The Bug' Because I Have No Time to Think of a Better Title; and Ali Smith's The Beholder.

Brainy Gay Porn Star on his Cancelled College Sex Talk

If you dream of post-coital pillow talk that's all endosymbiosis and prokaryotes, Conner Habib is your homo erectus. The 35 year-old gay porn star won Best Newcomer at the GayVN awards in 2010, and he studied with Gaia genius Lynn Margulis, whom he considered a "second mom" until her death in 2011.

Despite a signed contract with Corning Community College to speak about sex and culture during the school's week of events on sexuality and sexual health, Conner got axed by the college president who worried about linking lgbt rights with porn. Thursday night, he spoke anyway, at the local library.

Part of his essay on the controversy:

"Where I grew up, just outside of Allentown, PA, I watched, right through my adolescence into adulthood and early college years, while straight people paired off and experienced sex. They were able to engage with a basic aspect of human life that seemed unavailable and distant to me. Unlike today, there was no discussion about gay marriage, nor were there many gay characters on TV. But even if there had been, neither would have rounded out my experience as a man with homosexual feelings because so many of those feelings were — unsurprisingly for a young man — sexual. Gay sex was a lonely venture. It wasn't easy to find, and was only mentioned in slurs and the butt of jokes. "Cocksucker" and "butt fucker" were insults; stand-ins for "faggot."

"Whether I bought it from the adult video store or, later, downloaded it, gay porn helped me encounter positive images of gay men enjoying the act of sex. Gay porn was a window into gay sexuality that was free of shame and guilt, and revealed a different world where sex wasn't a lonely prospect, confined to the shadows or just my imagination.

"This same concern is amplified in places where homosexuality is criminalized or even punishable by death.

"As a porn performer of Arab descent, I've received hundreds of emails from men in Middle Eastern countries expressing gratitude and relief for my having portrayed gay sex in a positive light on camera. When a gay man lives somewhere where his identity is threatened, it's clear how sex - including pornography - and sexuality are intertwined. His sexual imagination, which is criminalized, matches the sexual images of gay pornography (which are also criminalized). Since acting out his imagination through sex would be to risk his life, the access to the images is safer. The images, created by gay men wherever it's legal to create them, provide empowerment and diminish alienation."

Conner speaks this afternoon at the William Way lgbt center in Philadelphia. Catch him every week on his segment "Ask the Expert" at NewNextNow.

International Gay Escort Award Winners: The Hookies

Last night in Manhattan, on the eve of the Black Party XXXIV (with its worst-ever theme and graphics -- clowns), Rentboy.com presented the Hookies, honoring the world's finest male escorts. If any cultural significance can be gleaned from the event, perhaps it's that the finalists and winners are not particularly young -- several claim to be in their 30s -- contradicting shopworn notions about gay desire and priorities. The other point to make is that the victories are meaningless, as they were chosen by a public voting from photos without personal experience of all six nominees for Best Top, etc., in fifteen categories. 

Mr. International Escort 2013 is Mr. San Francisco Christopher Daniels [pic], somehow besting regional hotness from LA, NYC, Chicago, Florida, Toronto, London, and Paris.

Best Newcomer: JD Phoenix

Best Kink: Draven Torres

Best Twink: Sean Caden

Best Daddy: Charlie Harding

Best Body: Trenton Ducati

Best Cock: Rafael Alencar

Best Ass: Tate Ryder

Best Top: Austin Wolf

Best Bear: Heath Jordan

Best Masseur: Andreas NYC

Best Dancer: Erik Rage

Best Blogger: Eli Lewis

Best Dressed: Josh Ryley

Best Boyfriend Fantasy: Samuel Colt

Best Porn Star Escort: Trenton Ducati

The best memoir on hustling is Rick Whitaker's Assuming the Position. But there's also Aiden Shaw's Sordid Truths: Selling My Innocence for a Taste of Stardom and My Undoing: Love in the Thick of Sex, Drugs, Pornography, and Prostitution.

This week Michael Musto posted "So Many Gay Porn Stars Have Died Lately! Why?" and turned to Sean Van Sant for these answers:

"I think all of these deaths are very different," he wrote to me, "so I do not want to generalize. I think sex workers suffer the same problems gay men do in general, with substance abuse and suicide rates high, and those problems can be even worse for sex workers, who lack support systems because of shame and stigma for their profession. But those factors are not new, nor are they suddenly worse than before.

"I think we should be looking closer at

1) Gay men in midlife crisis

2) Use of body-building steroids causing severe health problems and daily pain as men age (this has gone unreported)

3) Over-prescription of pain medications (how and why was it so easy to commit suicide?)

4) A poor economy for transitioning into other forms of work after a career based on physical labor and youth

5) And lastly there is a real possibility of 'copy-cat' syndrome where suicides inspire more suicides. Suicide rates are much, much higher for men than for women; and the U.S. military is experiencing an historical number of suicides among veterans."

(Gay) Sex and the Citadel

 "In the rewriting of Arab sexual history over the past century or so, homosexuality has been buried -- to the point that today's intolerance is now seen as the authentic voice of tradition when it is (as in so many other parts of the Global South) arguably more of an echo of the region's European colonial masters and is certainly less forgiving, in practice, than at other times in its history." p.224

A former Economist reporter and co-vice chair of the UN's Global Commission on HIV and Law, Shereen El Feki devotes a meaty 60-page chapter of her book out this week, Sex and the Citadel: Intimate Life in a Changing Arab World [Kindle], to profiles of gay men in the Middle East, especially Egypt. No surprise, their experiences differ drastically by class. Nasim "an immensely charming and cultured man in his forties" is careful, disapproves of excess camp in his friends, and says "When the police see me, they see my social identity, so they don't arrest me. It's about power." Working class Munir "a small and gentle man, with Nefertiti cheekbones, large, lquid eyes, and the sort of eyelashes mascara marketers dream of" has been jailed for "habitual debauchery." He says "We are not safe. We are afraid to go to this place, or that place. I will never linger in any place where there are many gays. It is very dangerous. Most of the gays, they are young, they are still hyper, they are not very safe."

Other men "felt constrained by the term gay... To [married, father] Hisham, 'gay' implies a full-time occupation, with sex at the center of things, whereas he sees his relations with other men as 'a small corner of our lives, something we can go to or not go to, but it is not obsessing... Look at me--I have a mustasche, I'm masculine.'" The author summarizes, "for him, these are useful compartments, not unwanted closets." 

One quasi surprise in the heavly mustached, masculine culture is that when a guy comes out to his father, the man's response is "Okay, but you must never tell your mother." Another half-surprise is they are aware of the gay love in the 9th century Baghdad poet Abu Nuwas but not of the queer doings in Ahmad ibn Yusuf al-Tifashi's The Delight of Hearts: Or What You Will Not Find in Any Book replete with happy same-sex couplings and the stray bad tricks who beat or rob their pickups.

Depressingly, today's literature is more narrow. Nasim recounts going to see the movie of Alaa al Aswany's The Yacoubian Building with its cliched gay newspaper editor who is murdered by a lover, "much to the delight of audiences." Nasim says at every screening, audiences cheered the murder.

For more, follow Gay Middle East or get Michael Luongo's Gay Travels in the Muslim World.

Born December 24: Kevin Killian, Lee Daniels

Queer national treasure Kevin Killian is 60. A native of New York, a survivor of Catholic schooling, he moved to San Francisco in 1980 and by the end of that decade published two novels Shy (readers of which, said PW, "will be richly compensated by its intellectually stimulating and emotionally gripping prose") and Bedrooms Have Windows. Seven years later he released his debut collection of stories, Little Men, and the following year came his third novel, Arctic Summer. His second collection, I Cry Like a Baby, appeared in 2001. His third collection, the brilliant Impossible Princess, won a Lammy in 2010, the same year he published his fourth novel, Spread Eagle. He shared an American Book Award for co-editing My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. A co-founder of the Poets Theater, he is said to have written more than 30 plays. Queering matrimony, he is married to lesbian Dodie Bellamy.

In 2003, when Halle Berry had her Oscar moment for Monster's Ball, as the first black Best Actress, it was also the first time an Academy Award-winning film was solely produced by a black person: Lee Daniels, 43. He followed it in 2004 with the triple-Independent Spirit Award nominated, Kevin Bacon child molester movie The Woodsman. In 2005 he produced and acted in his directoral debut, Shadowboxer, starring Cuba Gooding Jr., Helen Mirren, Macy Gray, and Joseph Gordon-Leavitt. Then came Precious. Nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director, it won two, supporting actress and adapted screenplay. It was nominated for five major Independent Spirit Awards and won all five. It won awards from the Golden Globes, BAFTA, and the NAACP, among many others. Daniels' followup, this year's pulpy, violent, Zac Efron starrer The Paperboy, was largely panned, though it was selected for Cannes and Nicole Kidman's performance is nominated for SAG and Golden Globe awards. Brace yourself for next year when he releases The Butler, in which Forest Whitaker is a real-life White House servant whose career spanned six First Families: the Eisenhowers (Robin Williams, Melissa Leo), the Kennedys (James Marsden, Minka Kelly), the Johnsons (Liev Schreiber), the Nixons (John Cusack), the Carters, and the Reagans (Alan Rickman, Jane Fonda). Amping the star power, the film also has roles for Vanessa Redgrave, Alex Pettyfer, Terrence Howard, Cuba Gooding Jr., Lenny Kravitz, Mariah Carey, and Oprah.

Daniels was partners with longtime casting director Billy Hopkins and together they adopted and raised Daniels' niece and nephew. Since their breakup Daniels has been with Andy Sforzini (in purple), still raising their children.

Delayed Climaxes

  

A week of postponements:

On Tuesday, Cleis Press was supposed to release Richard Labonte's annual Best Gay Erotica 2013, this time selected and introduced by Paul Russell(!). Didn't happen. I emailed the associate publisher. The upshot: You'll have to keep edging until "later." Or return to Best Gay Erotica 2012, selected by Larry Duplechan, or Best Gay Erotica 2011, chosen by Kevin Killian, with stories by Daniel Allen Cox, James Earl Hardy, and Jeff Mann.

12/12/12 was to see the crowning of the winner of the Green Carnation Prize honoring the year's best lgbt fiction, but the judges just can't agree. So they kicked it to next week. The five judges are Dom Agius, Katie Allen, Catherine Hall, Simon Savidge, and vexed chair Rodney Troubridge. The names of the six finalists are more familiar:

• Carol Anshaw, Carry the One [Kindle]
• Patrick Gale, A Perfectly Good Man
• Philip Hensher, Scenes from Early Life
• Kerry Hudson, Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma 
• Andre Carl Van Der Merwe, Moffie [Kindle]
• Edmund White, Jack Holmes and His Friend [Kindle]

While it's fun to imagine epic battles waged on behalf of queer books -- Kerry's Hudson's novel is bloody brilliant! But it's NOT GAY, darling! BUT SHE IS, you simple-minded rotter! -- the problem may be a judge or two hasn't finished his/her homework. Not to stereotype but one judge is a DJ. Worse, several are writers. You know how they are about "deadlines."

Born December 11: John Preston

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 paid tribute to him in Looking for Mr. Preston.

On a Wednesday in September by Stephan Niederwieser

Traversing time from WWII to today, a popular gay novel in Germany On a Wednesday in September is now available in English. Stephan Niederwieser is the author of seven novels and Elle calls this one, "A magical book about the ineluctable power of love." That magic comes from a ring Edvard gives his boyfriend Bernhard, triggering strange visions. The publisher explains: "Nazi Germany, a blond soldier, and trails of blood in the snow. While seeking answers to these haunting images Bernhard crosses paths with many strangers: his close-lipped father, stewardess Kim, grand seignior Raimondo, gigolo Fred, and his own strong-willed mother Lydia. The ring connects the lives of these strangers, and what seems contradictory finally comes together."

The versatile Niederwieser has also written a series of how-to manuals for you to up your game: Blow Me: The Complete Guide to Oral Sex, Bend Over: The Complete Guide to Anal Sex, and Do It Yourself: The Complete Guide to Masturbation.

Best American Essays: Doty on Dracula = Whitman, Breakup with Paul

  

The Insatiables: Walt, Mark, Bram

Four months after his death at 67 from ALS, openly gay Dudley Clendinen's four-page reverie "The Good Short Life" is a highlight of the The Best American Essays 2012 [Kindle] selected by David Brooks. When it appeared in the NYT magazine, Dudley's essay sparked nearly one thousand letters and a book contract with Algonquin. An even more-discussed essay in the anthology is Jose Anotonio Vargas's "Outlaw" about his exhausting struggles to conceal his illegal status in America, even as he won a shared Pulitzer Prize for the Washington Post. Vargas also is expanding his essay into a memoir.

The essay that makes the collection worth buying is Mark Doty's "Insatiable." In eleven pages it covers Bram Stoker having based Dracula on Walt Whitman (whom he visited three times), Whitman's homosexuality, Doty's sexual compulsion and his breakup with novelist Paul Lisicky after sixteen years together, a list of memorable hookups, the nature of love, and his belief that "deep and attentive touching was a necessary sort of research." After quoting passages from WW and BS, Doty writes:

"Whitman fuses the erotic and the spiritual, as the kiss to the bare chest begins an epiphanic experience, a moment of peace and of understanding, whereas the mouth is brought to Dracula's chest in a kind of rape, a horrible force-feeding which can lead only to repulsion and contagion. And so there it is: the intersection of the chosen and the compulsive, of consuming and being consumed, of the celebratory and of erasure."

Doty is completing What Is the Grass, a "book-length meditation on Walt Whitman, desire, and the ecstatic," of which this essay is part.

Sassafras Lowrey's Roving Pack

For a side of queer Portland ignored by mainstream indie icons like Gus van Sant, read Sassafras Lowrey's debut novel pubbing today Roving Pack. Ze is editor of the award winning anthology Kicked Out and the forthcoming revisionist story collection Leather Ever After. Hir site says "Roving Pack is set in an underground world of homeless queer teens. The stories follow the daily life of Click, a straight-edge transgender kid searching for community, identity, and connection amidst chaos. As the stories unfold, we meet a pack of newly sober gender rebels creating art, families and drama in dilapidated punk houses across Portland, Oregon. Roving Pack offers fast-paced in-your-face accounts of leather, sex, hormones, house parties, and protests. But, when gender fluidity takes an unexpected turn, the pack is sent reeling."

Already the book has been praised by S. Bear Bergman, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, Kate Bornstein, Zoe Whittall, Cristy C. Road, and Kristyn Dunnion who writes, "Fucking A. Sassafras Lowrey takes ‘queer punk’ to a whole new level of insidious drama. Roving Pack cracks out the microscope to examine this Portland-based scene circa 2002 – whether or not the rest of the world can take it. My guess? Hella no!"

Sassafras will read at Bluestockings on October 12.

Howdy, Cowboy #2

Before Stonewall, some of the staunchest gay advocates were purveyors of softcore porn whose homoerotic photos fell asunder of the postal service's rigid moral codes. Read about those early trials and the ultimate happy trails in this massive new coffee table book from the COLT Studios pioneer, Jim French Diaries. The surprising history is further enlivened by French's candor discussing everything from issues of race in adult entertainment to how he judged a potential COLT man. Readers may also enjoy 352 pages of nudity. French pushed butch to such extremes and staged his uber built musclemen in such cliched roles -- cowboy, cop, fireman, leatherman -- some wondered if his true subject wasn't artifice. Either way, you'll have no trouble finding the just the right colt for your lasso or holster.