Band of Thebes

Queering Committed Relationships

Unlikely that those tabloid photos of Anderson Cooper's boyfriend Ben Maisani kissing another man in a NYC park are going to become a cultural moment, but HuffPost's Gay Voices editor Noah Michelson dreams they will launch a national discussion about healthy open relationships. Once again, it's the gay vs. queer divide. Michelson writes:

"One gay friend of mine, who has been with his partner for nearly a decade but is unable to marry him because they reside in a Midwestern state where gay marriage isn't legal, thought the photos of Maisani could make it even harder for him to wed. He questioned how mainstream America would react to Maisani's public display of affection with a man who wasn't his boyfriend and how it would do anything to 'help gay acceptance.' 

"But in my fantasies, we're not gunning for gay acceptance -- especially not if the only way we're granted it is by "behaving ourselves" and struggling to fit into a heteronormative mold (which, as far as I can tell, hasn't really benefited heterosexual people very well, either). Instead, I want us to be pushing for queer liberation, which, to me, has always meant that when it comes to sex and love, we all get to do whatever we want with whomever we want as long as we're not hurting anyone..."

Michelson doesn't mention aids but the pandemic further cemented the dichotomy between the good, monogamous gay and the bad, promiscuous queer. The broader debate has lasted nearly fifty years: Are we going to get equality by saying we're the same as you or by saying it's okay to be different.

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 last year by Semiotext(e).

Why Indeed

Cannibalism + bestiality + gay men -- Is it a diatribe from Rick Santorum or a novel by Dennis Cooper? It's Jesse Bering's collection of science essays, Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That?: And Other Reflections on Being Human [Kindle], which his publisher's marketers harm with pandering jacket copy harping on "the most taboo issues":

"...a bold and captivating journey through some of the most taboo issues related to evolution and human behavior. Exploring the history of cannibalism, the neurology of people who are sexually attracted to animals, the evolution of human body fluids, the science of homosexuality, and serious questions about life and death, Bering astutely covers a generous expanse of our kaleidoscope of quirks and origins."

Otherwise, the book's science is probably sound. The thirty-odd pieces originally ran in Scientific American or on Slate and the title essay appeared in Best Sex Writing 2010. Moreover, the author is going to be great on the gay thingy because he was named Scientist of the Year by the awesome national queer sci - tech nerds association, NOGLSTP. His previous book, The Belief Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny, and the Meaning of Life [Kindle], was an ALA top book of the year. Yale's Paul Bloom says, “Jesse Bering is the Hunter S. Thompson of science writing, and he is a delight to read—funny, smart, and madly provocative.”

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.

 

Born April 2: Camille Paglia

Hallelujah! After her recent headline-grabbing remarks about Elizabeth Taylor (superior to "painfully scrawny" Gwyneth, Annette, & Julianne) and Lady Gaga (inferior to Madonna, Bowie, Cher, & Theda Bara), this fall finally sees a new book from Camille Paglia, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars.

Although it's easy now to suppose a provocateur of such flair and rigor and self-described egomania would always find a platform, Paglia waited nine years to see the publication of her breakthrough book of cultural criticism, Sexual Personae. Five agents and seven publishers rejected it between 1981 and 1985 when Yale finally accepted it. They did not publish until five years later while Paglia taught, tweaked sections, and added new essays. The book sold moderately well before it was named a finalist for a National Book Award. When Vintage released the paperback in 1991, it became a tremendous bestseller and she became a star. Paglia appeared on dozens of talk shows and brought a volcanic pop intellectualism to a nation weaned on the prepackaged chipper inanities of morning television. Read her books Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (1990), Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays (1992), Vamps & Tramps: New Essays (1994), and Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems (2006). Accompanying Todd Oldham's photos, she wrote the text for a short book about the magazine duo Joseph Holtzman and Carl Skoggard's upstate retreat for artists, Camp Nest.

"Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?"

    "As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into 'straight-acting dudes hangin’ out,' what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?" 

Who wouldn't want 232 pages exploring the downside of gay mainstreaming? The subject is so crucial I wish the entire book was written by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, but I'm still intrigued by the anthology she's pulled together. Reviewing Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, PW said, "A distinctive collection of essays by gay and transgender activists, performance artists, and scholars embraces the subversive aspects of queer identity and rails against its “sanitized, straight-friendly version.” Some essays are personal observations of lives on the margins, such as Ezra RedEagle Whitman’s attempts to reconcile his homosexuality with Native American conceptions of manliness, or Booh Edouardo’s experiences as an autistic transgender man interacting with mainstream gay peers. Others focus more on general trends in gay culture, such as Michael J. Faris and ML Sugie’s discussion of racial preferences and prejudices on hookup sites, or George Ayala and Patrick Hebert’s examination of the role of the arts in building community among HIV positive men. Some stories are disheartening, like Matthew Blanchard’s reflections on his hospitalization and disfigurement after many years of drug-fueled indiscriminate, unsafe sex. Others are much more hopeful, like Kristen Stoeckeler’s observations on drag queen and king performers and their playful yet serious blurring of the lines between male and female. Just as the battle for LGBTQ civil rights continues, these essays—alternately moving and sprightly, contemplative and outraged—display the power of presenting an alternative to the mainstream: a world of greater tolerance, acceptance, support, and creativity." 

Samuel Delany blurbed it:"These essays come like a plunge into a forest pool of revitalizing joy, honesty, and common sense. Read them. Now. No—not tomorrow. Now!"

Edmund White wrote,"You may have thought you understood human nature before you read this book; after reading it you will be humbled by all you failed to grasp until now. America invented identity politics but here those identities have been multiplied and articulated as never before."

Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots continues the themes of another anthology Mattilda edited, That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation [Kindle].

The new book comes from AK Press which is literally run by anarchists. In that light, the confusion over its publication is cool. Their site lists the release as Jan 12, 2011 [sic?]; Amazon and B&N have it as Jan 31, 2012 but both retailers are already selling it online; and Mattilda's blog says the book will be released Feb 14, 2012. Worse, none of the sites offers a list of contributors or the table of contents. See Mattilda's massive west coast tour if you can.

Museum of Sex: Sam Steward, Animals, Comics, Movies

As a museum curator, perhaps even more so than in his excellent, National Book Award nominated Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade [[Kindle]], Justin Spring succeeds in bringing to life the vast, loose, and elusive brotherhood of men who had sex with men decades before the modern gay rights movement. In the Museum of Sex's current exhibit, on display until January 2012, Steward is the central lighthouse, at once a beacon and searchlight, his thousands of hookups with 800+ partners illuminating the millions of lives left beyond in the dark. His personal network extended globally. He traveled to France, he corresponded with leading queer intellectuals overseas, and he wrote for emerging gay erotic magazines in Switzerland and Scandinavia, developing a special bond with Tom of Finland. Anyone who thinks Steward was just a sex addict getting off, or doubts that one-time gay hookups can lead to a real feeling of kinship, should study the inscribed book from Alfred Douglas, whom Steward pursued and bedded solely to link himself to Oscar Wilde. Plenty of children have come into the world from briefer couplings of less planning or care.

Overwhelmingly, Steward preferred sex with sailors, toughs, and trade, one of the reasons he became a full-time tattoo artist after academia. (He also tripled his income.) Because in America homosexuality was illegal and exposure was a career ender, today's viewers might lazily think those old encounters were unspoken and anonymous, yet defying it all, here's the white shock of a contract, signed by Professor Steward and one of his college students with no academic gifts but brilliantly endowed, agreeing that he could down on the youth once a month this semester and the first four months of the next year, in exchange for an A. Nearly as detailed are the printed fliers from a San Francisco hustling operation that describe each of the "models" available for private sessions and their rates per hour, with travel surcharges. The exhibit's hundreds of artifacts include photos, Polaroids, slides projected onto a bed's white sheet, tattoo drawings, sketches, journals, diaries, books, newspapers, paddles, whips, and an attempt to recreate the mood of his final cabin. Steward's famous "Stud File" is one degree disappointing, encased in a plastic box and not open to any card, though reproductions of cards cover other walls. The many text explanations throughout are superb.

Even without a contract, the exhibit earns an A. Go see it.

The three other main shows at the Museum of Sex each incorporate LGBT content: exhibits on sex in the animal kingdom, sex in comic books; and sex in movies. Each of these suffers from the immensity of the topic and a brevity of space, yet it's thrilling to see lesbian and gay representations everywhere.

Justin Spring Curates Samuel Steward Show at Museum of Sex

If, unlike Rudolph Valentino and Thornton Wilder and a shipload of sailors, you missed out on making it into Sam Steward's Stud File, rating 746 of his sexual partners and recording "the dates and places of their encounters, a coded key of the various sexual acts that took place as well as partners’ penile dimensions," now you can console yourself with seeing that amorous artifact in person. Expanding from the super success of his Secret Historian [[Kindle]] and its companion An Obscene Diary: The Visual World of Sam Steward, Justin Spring has curated a show opening today at the Museum of Sex in New York, "Obscene Diary: The Secret Archive of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist and Pornographer." According to the MoSex blog, "Over 200 of the best artifacts from the Samuel Steward archive will be on display to the public for the first time." It got off with a bangin party last night and will stay up until January 17.

I hope the Stud File cards are duplicated and posted so people can read them. Visitors to this exhibit want more than a look at a box.

For a different critique of Steward's erotica written as Phil Andros and others from that era, read Michael Bronski's Pulp Friction: Uncovering the Golden Age of Gay Male Pulps.

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.

Born April 1: Samuel R. Delany

Samuel R. Delany has defied expectation from the beginning, sixty-nine years ago. The tenth child born to a Harlem couple in the 1940s, he was not the likeliest boy to prep at Dalton (alongside Wallace Shawn). When he took up writing, some were surprised he chose to work in science fiction. Once he'd made a name for himself in that genre -- his Dhalgren sold a million copies -- some were further surprised by his inclusions of significant sexual content. His has also written erotica that he is happy to call pornography, like Phallos which takes place during Hadrian's reign. Norman Mailer said of his most transgressive work of brutal sexual violence, narrated by an 11 year-old, "There is no question that Hogg by Samuel R. Delany is a serious book with literary merit." Possibly the mainstream literary world is finally catching up with him; last fall he was a National Book Award judge.

Delany's twenty-ninth work of fiction appeared in 2007 and many of his fourteen nonfiction books are still in print. He has won the Nebula four times, the Hugo once, and was inducted into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame in 2002. His novel Dark Reflections won a Stonewall Book Award. A professor at U Mass Amherst for eleven years, Delany has taught at Temple University since 2000. His own work is required reading in many college courses, across multiple departments: literature, black studies, and queer studies. Although he was married to a woman for nineteen years and fathered a daughter, he was openly gay for much of that time and privately identified as gay since his teens. Because he has been an aficionado of XXX theaters and video booths for decades, he estimates his total number of male sexual partners to be 50,000. A documentary covering all aspects of his life, The Polymath, directed by Fred Barney Taylor, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in April 2007 and has screened at many lgbt festivals, winning the jury award at Philadelphia. The movie shows Jonathan Lethem to be a fan; shouldn't he get David Remnick to let him do a major New Yorker profile of the world's leading black, gay, sci-fi intellectual? Until then, try his autobiography The Motion Of Light In Water, "with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin."

Bad Gay News: 18yo Dead; 20, 21yo To Be Executed; Orgasm Illness

Lance Lundsten, an openly gay 18 year-old student at Jefferson High School in Miltona, Minnesota, died over the weekend. Initial reports called it a suicide. Now, according to Lance's father, the coroner says Lance "had an enlarged heart and died of a coronary edema." Friends say Lance was bullied. His funeral is planned for tonight.

Pink News is reporting that two young men in Iran -- Ayub, 20, and Mosleh, 21 -- have been sentenced to death by stoning for having gay sex together. Their execution may be as early as Friday. Advocating on their behalf is complicated by the country's "culture of shame. The families won’t defend their loved ones from this brutal punishment,” according to Soheila Vahdati, an independent human rights defender for Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International and the Iranian Queer Organisation based in San Francisco. The pair filmed themselves having sex, and the footage was found on their cell phones.

The Los Angeles Times posts a brief article about POIS, post-orgasmic illness syndrome. Apparently some men are "allergic to their own semen, developing a mysterious flu-like illness after they have an ejaculation, Dutch researchers reported Monday. The condition has been documented since 2002. Symptoms include feverishness, runny nose, extreme fatigue and burning eyes, which can last for up to a week."

Two Views of London's Sex Life Before the 1960s

 

For everyone already tired of a London dominated by either Kate M., it's time to revisit a darker, randier era. Yale has just published Frank Mort's queer-inclusive Capital Affairs: London and the Making of the Permissive Society, which caused the Herald Scotsman critic to confess, "against all expectations, I adored it." He writes:

"It is sensible to dismiss the excesses of the 1950s – and early 1960s-moralisers, especially when their rhetoric crossed over into bigotry. There were many grotesque homophobic outbursts and, in response to the influx of Indians, Pakistanis and Caribbeans, some truly noxious exercises in racist stereotyping. The trick (one that Mort recognises and ably pulls off) is to look beyond the demagoguery and anatomise the true, muddled, anxious 1950s English attitude towards sex.

"It is a fascinating subject and Mort’s analysis is outstanding. He writes very well, he melds broad analysis with telling tales of individuals and, along the way, he punctures more than his share of myths and lazy orthodoxies."

Seeing the book while visiting a friend at Yale Press last week called to mind Matt Houlbrook's amazing Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918-1957 published by the University of Chicago a few years ago. For many readers, Queer London inspires the same devotion as Gay New York. Houlbrook's consideration of working-class trade, and the upper-class men who loved/feared/used them, is a major strength. Writing in the Times Higher Education Supplement, Matt Cook called it:

“A ground-breaking work. While middle-class lives and writing have tended to compel the attention of most historians of homosexuality, Matt Houlbrook has looked more widely and found a rich seam of new evidence. It has allowed him to construct a complex, compelling account of interwar sexualities and to map a new, intimate geography of London."

Secret Historian's Privates: An Obscene Diary by Sam Steward

Ever been to a party then gone home, only to find out later there was another room there where everyone was having a much, much better time? Sure, you liked listening to nice strangers make interesting points about progressive politics and bands you've never heard of, but after a few beers you would not have minded at all being in the middle of the naked dogpile pitting an Arizona tennis team against nine sailors from fleet week.

So it is with the long, deep, texty 500-page Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade and the big, bold, sexy 8.5" x 11" An Obscene Diary: The Visual World of Sam Steward. In fact, both are written by Justin Spring, but only the former is nominated for a National Book Award. The latter, a splendid companion volume of private sketches, watercolors, tattoo designs, and photos, is not getting nearly the attention it deserves. Many of the bookworm gays who love Secret Historian don't even know the Diary exists.

Talking to George Platt Lynes, Sam Steward dismissed his b&w Polaroids as "a kind of obscene diary... [with] no art." In his perfectly grounding intro essay, which is the only writing in the book, Spring says they're "something much more intimate, questioning, and personal," but admits these sex party souvenirs "were probably much more exciting to the participants than they are to us, today, as viewers." Although they form the massive share of the diary -- with three or four shots per page and more than two-thirds of book's unnumbered pages -- Spring notes:

Among all Steward's works, the Polaroid sex photographs are by far the darkest, most manic, most disturbing works in his collection. Steward himself never pretended that they were art, and he seemed not to find them sexually appealing either, confessing to Lynes, that "they leave me fairly cold." In truth, [they were not intended as pornography], that is, they were not created with the sexual stimulation of the viewer in mind. If anything, they are the by-products of sex play: souvenirs of outrageous, dangerous, and daring sexual exhibitionism."

"Dangerous" is an understatement at a time when mere possession of gay porn could mean jail. The images immortalize average to handsome men engaged in nudity, foreplay, kissing, oral, anal, threeways, bondage, spanking, and whipping, often with telling props or sailor caps and shirts. Some visual "stories" -- The Pick-Up, An Evening of Love, Surrender of Naval Forces,  -- unfold shot by shot over several pages.

I prefer Steward's drawings, reflecting his numerous styles, which Spring variously likens to Thurber, Beardsley, Cocteau, classical Greek painting, Picasso, Felicien Rops, and the gay erotic artist Etienne. Anyone who has looked at Rockwell Kent's woodcuts will see similarities with the bed scene below.

Hooray for being able to use your phone to take pictures of a brand new friend making out with you, and instantly being able to text that photo to your teachers, coaches, and clergy, but as romantic keepsakes go, it's tough to top this: Steward wrote a porn novella called Bell-Bottom Trousers about the erotic adventures of a lusty sailor ashore in Chicago, illustrated key scenes of character development, and self-printed many copies using the hectograph machine at Loyola where he taught. He gave the booklet to the sailors he tricked with. It was the early 1940s. An Obscene Diary reproduces the chaste cover image and the two-page spread of fourteen naked sailors very much enjoying their liberty.

Three more risqué images, including the best watercolor in b&w, after the jump.

An Obscene Diary, out September 3, Antinous Press & Elysium Press. Handsomely slipcased, high production values.

Heterosexism & Black Male Privilege

After weeks of anticipation, I went to 135th Street last night for:

Heterosexism, Sex & Sexuality: A Conversation about Black Male Privilege

How do mainstream ideas about sex and sexuality encourage or stunt black male intellectual, emotional, and social development, and create trauma between black men and black women and other black men? Join us for a conversation with Jewel Woods, author of The Black Male Privileges Checklist and Steven G. Fullwood, project director for the Black Gay & Lesbian Archive.

Brilliant topic. Steven Fullwood [right] is fascinating and his complex insights on heterosexism vis a vis black gay life promised a spirited discussion. Except it didn't happen. Jewel Woods showed up with a PowerPoint presentation. He did talk about black male privilege ("the unique set of social positions and relationships to power that give black men unearned advantages over women") and he did show a slide outlining three ways heterosexism works:

1. By creating boundaries between and within groups

2. By making heterosexuality normative

3. By foreclosing insight and areas into heterosexual men's lives.

Yet the overwhelming majority of his presentation was about straight black men's sex tourism to Brazil,   which happens to be the subject of his 2008 book, Don't Blame It on Rio: The Real Deal Behind Why Men Go to Brazil for Sex. Distilled: They go for access to power, not access to sex per se. His interviewees frequently said, "It allows us to have the experience white men have all the time." "They don't have any limits." "Now I know what it feels like to be white." Woods has never visited Brazil himself. He avoided discussing gay or trans sex workers, and his only comment about the Down Low was to say that straight black men were the one group who didn't have to get into that conversation. He certainly never broached how heterosexism affects lesbians.

During the Q&A, a black man in his 20s told Woods he had "only paid lip service to heterosexism since your talk was actually heterocentric." (Throughout his presentation he said "black men" to mean straight black men, occasionally correcting himself to say "normal black men" or "the average black man.") Woods' circular response didn't travel much beyond, "I appreciate the question."

Justin Spring on Samuel Steward, Secret Historian

Born in Ohio in 1909, Samuel Steward was intimate friends with Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Andre Gide, and George Platt Lynes, lovers with Thornton Wilder, a subject of Kinsey's, a professor at Loyola and DePaul, a failed novelist and mystery writer, a successful porn author as Phil Andros, a legendary tattoo artist as Phil Sparrow, and a sexual epicurean who, from his early teens, documented in detail each of 5,000 releases with roughly 850 different men. (Not least: Rock Hudson, in a department store elevator.) He died in Berkeley in 1993.

Since August, critics nationwide have been trumpeting the multiple triumphs of Justin Spring's nine-years-in-the-making biography, Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade. Not only does Spring expertly weave together the many highly unlikely threads of Steward's life, he rescues an entire lost subculture thereby expanding our view of early and mid-twentieth century American life. The NYT did a review, a feature, and a slideshow.

Interviewed by Mark Harris last night at the 82nd St. B&N, Spring (above, right) called Steward a "one man internet" and said his copious couplings were less important for the sex than for the stories Steward learned. Patchwork though they are, his reports of his tricks' personal histories form a crazy quilt of hidden gay America in the decades prior to Stonewall. Spring spoke eloquently about the double bind facing writers of gay history because "suppression happens at every level," even if "with the best intentions." As soon as a subject dies, a gay buddy may destroy crucial documents or artifacts to protect him from posthumous scorn; or family may degay the papers out of shame or embarrassment; or librarians may hide key papers after they're accepted into the collection. Happily, Steward's archives, including his card catalog The Stud File, have been maintained and will be on display next February at the Museum of Sex.

See the itinerary of Justin Spring's speaking tour. (He says so far on tour gay men have told him, really, 850 partners isn't that many. The new biography of Warren Beatty claims his life list is 12,775 women.) Spring is also the author of biographies on Fairfield Porter and Paul Cadmus: The Male Nude.

U.S. National Sex Survey: 7% of Women, 8% of Men "Other than Hetero"

In the most comprehensive national sex survey conducted since 1994, scientists at Indiana University's Center for Sexual Health Promotion found that seven percent of American women identify as lesbian or bisexual, eight percent of men identify as gay or bi. Naturally, occasional same-sex activity is higher; fifteen percent of American men 50-59 report having ever received oral sex from another male, thirteen percent of men over 40 say they have given oral sex to another male. Fourteen percent of women in their 30s say they have ever given oral sex to another female. Hours of fun to be had from studying their graph below. (Nearly twice as many men in their 50s getting topped than men in their 30s?) According to the data, black and Latino men report significantly higher rates of condom use than do white males. Many more stories and stats from the survey here and here. 

A recent study in the UK by the Office of National Statistics found only 1.5% of the people surveyed identified as L, G, or B, and 95% identified as hetero. 

The US study is based on responses from 5,865 people. The UK study surveyed 450,000 people.

Mark Doty's Wife and Other Treasures in Granta's Sex Issue

Did you know Mark Doty was married to a woman? Odds are steep that you did not. As he explains, "You will perhaps see why a writer who has had a good deal to say about other periods of his life has considered this material unwriteable: it seems Gothic, ridiculous. To narrate those years seems inevitably to accuse Ruth, and to invite me to offer justifications for my own foolishness in marrying her." His remarkable essay, "The Unwriteable," is the lead and best piece in Granta #110: Sex, which went on sale yesterday. Doty's thirteen-page piece is nonstop revelations, which I won't spoil. His age at the time. Her age. The age of another male in her life. The guy with whom he had an intense sexual affair at the time. Why that ended. On and on. Surely people will pressure Doty to expand this to a book.

The issue's other featured contributors are Jeanette Winterson, Jennifer Egan, Tom McCarthy, Adam Foulds, Carl Phillips, Herta Muller, Philip Boehm, Yann Faucher (photographs), Dave Eggers (four animal drawings), and a one page and a half page excerpt of Roberto Bolano's Antwerp that frankly seems included for bragging rights that Bolano is included. One essay missing from the issue is Michael Cunningham's exploration of vampires. A shame.

The other standout piece is an excerpt from James Lord's memoir My Queer War, which FSG releases next week. This wonderful chapter shows an amenable young Lord being picked up by and having sex with Jerry, a fellow GI, who upon discovering Lord is already 20 says, "Late starter.... Don't get me wrong, but you've got a lot to learn." He takes him in to Boston on a Saturday night where the bar at the Hotel Statler is packed with 150 servicemen, "not one lady or girl among them, only a handful of civilians." Jerry confirms, "Yes, they're all gay." James goes home with a 30 year old (who offers Rachmaninov's second piano concerto as "Rocky Two") and then his adventures really begin.

Last night was New York's launch party for the issue at Soho's Coco de Mer. Above, the incomparable Patrick Ryan [red shirt] excites some of the models. I talked to Joe Cross for fifteen minutes before learning he was the star of Running with Scissors and had been in Milk. When I asked what he liked to read, Joe laughed, "...magazines, labels on expensive soaps, tags on mattresses." I talked to Michael Lucas for ten minutes without touching on his movie career (porn, his own company) but we found common ground in Berlin's Museum of Film and his love of biographies. He told me many funny / scary stories from Marlene Dietrich by her daughter Maria Riva, which he highly recommends.

The Saddest Word in Gay Porn: Deflation

 With the Czech economy going down and unemployment shooting up over 10%, more than ever straight young men are willing to have sex with other guys on camera for quick money. Prague has uniquely liberal views; take new model "Justel" who says his girlfriend likes his job and the money but she would hate it if he were filming with a woman. Yet the glut in available models means the pay has shriveled. These days a solo scene earns the performer $168. Sex with a partner means around $300, give or take. The studio owns the scene forever and the model gets zero royalties. Also, because of low HIV rates, most Czech performers are pressured? agree to have sex without condoms, which viewers prefer. American porn actors complain they're getting screwed by outsourcing.

William Higgins, the Oklahoma native who decamped from California during the first wave of aids, pioneered the Prague gay porn industry because the guys were so easy and eager for money. He says he interviews about 120 new applicants a month now, and rejects 80 percent "typically for not having the look — too ugly or misshapen — or, more importantly, not being able to perform under pressure." Higgins turns a profit even off the losers because the auditions stream on his pay per view webcasts: "viewers from all over the world watch the footage live and provide their anonymous, real-time verdicts."

A six-page article in the Global Post reports:

"Higgins also likes to recruit men who have typically never done porn or had sex with men before and market their inexperience as an asset, not a drawback. To this day, he enjoys filming the first-timers, especially if they don’t really like it. He zooms in on their faces clenched in pain. It makes it real, Higgins says.

"He also prefers working with straight guys because they are not as picky about with whom they have sex. “If they are willing to do it with a guy, they’ll do it with any guy. It’s a job,” he says. 'We have one gay guy who always dictates who he’s going to do it with. I’d much rather work with straight guys.'"

If you still aren't uncomfortable, try this: "Many studios prefer to use prostaglandin shots, such as Caverject, injected directly into the erectile tissues of the penis. That causes immediate effect, without having to worry about the unattractive, Viagra-flushed faces on film."

(Pictured is Bel Ami star Kris Evans.)