Band of Thebes

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 5: James Beard, Del Martin

James Beard knew he was gay when he was seven in Portland and, acting on those impulses as soon as he got to college, was expelled from Reed in his freshman year for "homosexual activity."  He traveled with a theater troupe, spent several years in Europe, came home, and moved to New York still hoping to be an actor. He took a temporary job as a caterer and three years later published his first cookbook, Hors d'Oeuvre and Canapés, in 1940. After three more books he got his own cooking show on television and, in 1955, he established The James Beard Cooking School, which lasted 30 years until his death in 1985. His huge appetites extended to money and fame, leading him to many, many endorsement deals that contradicted everything he preached in the kitchen. Despite a famous temper, he could be a nurturing mentor and loyal friend, and with Gael Greene he founded Citymeals-on-Wheels. He is openly gay in his memoir Delights And Prejudices and his collection of letters Love and Kisses and a Halo of Truffles. Two biographies are Epicurean Delight: The Life and Times of James Beard by longtime friend Evan Jones, husband of legendary editor Judith Jones, and The Solace of Food by Robert Clark.

Del Martin died in August 2008 at 87, widowing a wife with whom she spent 55 years championing the rights of the denigrated and disenfranchised. In 1955, when homosexuality was illegal, she, her life partner Phyllis Lyon, and six other lesbians founded the Daughters of Bilitis in her native San Francisco. By 1960 DOB chapters were active in nine cities nationwide and their magazine, The Ladder, was thriving despite most readers' need for secrecy. Even in friendly waters, they had to fight the tides against lesbians, both among straight women in NOW and gay men in the queer equality movement. Martin addressed the latter situation in her landmark article, "Goodbye, My Alienated Brothers," which appeared in the Advocate in 1970. Two years later, she and Lyon were instrumental in forming the Alice B. Toklas Democratic Club, and they published their seminal book Lesbian/Woman. In 1979 they were honored by a group of medical professionals who wanted to start a clinic for lesbians who lacked health care, and they chose the name Lyon-Martin Health Services. In 1995 they were named separately as delegates to the White House Conference on Aging. Ever the trailblazers, Martin [above right, left left] and Lyon were the very first gay couple to be married in San Francisco in February 2004. If there is anything good about her death, it's that she did not have to see Prop 8 pass three months later. Click here to watch them describes the early hurdles they faced in forming and growing DOB during a time when they could not advertise their existence.

Born May 1: Trebor Healey

   

Last year Lambda announced Trebor Healey as an outstanding mid-career novelist and the next day he won his second Ferro-Grumley Award for his moving, road trip novel A Horse Named Sorrow [and Kindle], also a Lammy finalist and still not released in paperback. It was published in October 2012 simultaneously with his speculative YA novel Faun [and Kindle], about a boy whose changes at puberty are hairier and more pointed than yours were. Trebor won his first Ferro-Grumley, and a Violet Quill award, for Through It Came Bright Colors about 21-year-old suburban good boy Neill who breaks the stress of his family's struggles with his brother's cancer by sneaking into San Francisco for sex with men. Trebor's other books are Sweet Son of Pan, A Perfect Scar, and Queer and Catholic. His work is anthologized in many collections including Madder Love: Queer Men and the Precincts of Surrealism and multiple volumes of Best Gay Erotica: 2006, 2007, 2003, and 2004. Fifteen years before he was a PEN Emerging Voices mentor, he wrote a song for Pansy Division called Denny that foreshadows his fiction: smart, dark, quirky, angry, and funny. A West Coast child, he was born in San Francisco, grew up in Seattle, attended Berkeley, stayed in SF, spent a year in Buenos Aires, and now lives in Los Angeles.

Reclaiming the Queer Past with Frog Music

After her hetero, contemporary, Booker-nominated, international smash Room, in her eighth novel Emma Donoghue once again revisits queer historical lives, this time in San Francisco in 1876. Misfits and outsiders of every sexual stripe collide in Chinatown amid a smallpox outbreak and relentless heatwave in Frog Music [Kindle], based on an actual unsolved murder. The sophisticated mystery unwinds forward and backwards around Blanche Beunon, a former circus performer / current stripper / sometime whore, and a trouser-wearing frogcatcher named Jenny Bonnet who is killed on the second page by a bullet intended for Blanche. The rollicking action is peppered throughout with French songs, or, 'frog' music. Donoghue's swift plotting, Dickensian interest in parenthood, and vivid sense of place have been widely praised by critics, a few of whom quibbled with the book's dark tones or rushed lapses in writing.

Chang & Eng author Darin Strauss says, 'Emma Donoghue shows more than range with Frog Music - she shows genius...her greatest achievement yet.'

Peter Hujar: Love & Lust

If, like us, you can't get to San Francisco, you can get the Fraenkel Gallery's monograph from their new show Peter Hujar: Love & Lust. Hujar was lover, friend, and mentor to David Wojnarowicz, twenty years younger, who appears here multiple times. They both died of aids, five years apart, at 53 and 37.

Annie Leibovitz says Susan Sontag's favorite photo of herself was this one Hujar took in 1975.

The gallery: "Celebrated and revered by artists, the work of Peter Hujar remains something of a public secret, but his photographs dealing with sex and eroticism, made between the years 1969 and 1986, have come to define a certain era in New York. Today they are widely considered to be his finest and most radical work. Hujar's view of the human body is uninhibited and uncompromising, but his poignant explorations of sexuality and desire also project a universal humanity; as Nan Goldin said of Hujar's nudes, "Looking at his photographs of nude men, even of a naked baby boy, is the closest I ever came to experience what it is to inhabit male flesh." This monograph, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco, is the first to deal specifically with Hujar's photographs of love and lust. Captured in deeply textured black and white, these photographs present a view of human relationships that encompasses both the tender and taboo. This volume also contains an interview with author Fran Lebowitz from 1989, and newly commissioned essays by Vince Aletti and Stephen Koch."

Born February 1: Lucy Jane Bledsoe, Langston Hughes

More publishing troubles: Lucy Jane Bledsoe's vivid exploration of three women's relationships and the meaning of home, set in an Antarctic research station conjured so astutely you'll think you've lived there yourself, The Big Bang Symphony, was released in May 2010, became a finalist for four book prizes, yet is still not available in paperback or as an eBook. Lucy's first novel, Working Parts, about adult literacy, won the Stonewall Book Award in 1998. She is a five-time Lammy nominee, for those two books, her two other novels, This Wild Silence and Biting the Apple, and her anthology Lesbian Travels. Her own trips are collected in a wonderful book called The Ice Cave: A Woman's Adventures from the Mojave to the Antarctic [Kindle], and she's also written half a dozen titles for kids. She won the top prize in the Saturday Evening Post's Great American Fiction Contest for her "Wolf," about a couple in Yellowstone. Editorial Director Steven Slon says, "This terrific story is a tribute to human passion and to the American adventurer spirit. It's also a powerful evocation of the call of the wild." 

 

Celebrating "Langston Hughes, poet," as we must, neglects the bulk of his creative work: eleven plays, the screenplay of Way Down South (released the same year as Gone with the Wind), novels (starting with Not Without Laughter), forty-seven short stories (which often paid his rent), a series of books showcasing famous black Americans' accomplishments, six children's books, bold political writings, and two volumes of autobiography that as much as anything focus on Langston Hughes, traveler. His first memoir covers Harlem and Paris (after his scattered Midwestern childhood with visits to his father, an attorney who left the family to live in Mexico); and his second, I Wonder as I Wander, recounts his journeys in Russia, Turkmenistan, China, Japan, Cuba, Haiti, and Spain during their civil war. Of course his genius most often reveals itself in his poetry, which emphasizes a purity and simplicity like Whitman's, but unlike Whitman his directness of language does not extend to openness about his sexuality. Hughes's most cited homoerotic poems such as "Young Sailor" and "Joy", safeguarded with women or "she," are more cautious than the Calamus cycle. Below, listen to him read his response to Whitman's "I Hear America Singing." He died at 65 in 1967 and his ashes are interred beneath the lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th St. Long degayed, Hughes' homosexuality is the centerpiece of Isaac Julien's film on historical black gay experience amid entrenched homophobia, Looking for Langston.

Born January 30: Jack Spicer

Dead of alcoholism at 40 four years before Stonewall, Jack Spicer -- with Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser -- schooled young gay Bay Area poets in the 1950s and 60s about their "queer genealogy" and their debt to Rimbauld, Lorca, et al. After 1957 he also lectured on his beliefs of "poetry as dictation" in which the poet is a radio-like receiver of transmissions from the Outside. The best edition of Spicer's collected poems, My Vocabulary Did This to Me [Kindle], edited by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, came out in 2008, ten years after two essentials: his collected lectures, The House That Jack Built [Kindle], and Lewis Ellingham's biography Poet Be Like God: Jack Spicer and the San Francisco Renaissance. For even more, there is Spicer's one and only novel, a mystery called The Tower of Babel that skewers the poetry, art, and gay scene in the immediate aftermath of Ginsberg's first ever public reading of HOWL in October 1955 at San Francisco's 6 Gallery, which Spicer co-founded the year before.

The Days of Anna Madrigal, the Ninth and Final Tales of the City Novel

Cannot wait to read The Days of Anna Madrigal [Kindle], released today, capping Armistead Maupin's groundbreaking, life-changing Tales of the City phenom born forty years ago as a serial in Marin's The Pacific Sun. I missed the first wave of the series but its importance to readers in a time before popular entertainment embraced non-stereotyped, untortured gay characters can hardly be overstated.

Closing on a high note, the final Tale is, according to a starred Booklist review, "Wonderful… Maupin’s last novel in the series is as compulsively readable and endearing as all the previous novels have been."

[Don't sue if, like Cher's many final, last-ever concert tours, this isn't really the end. We've been here before: Armistead retired the series in 1989 and revived it in 2007, at the time denying Michael Tolliver Lives was the series' seventh book, which he later agreed it is. He's no doubt sincere now, and as an artist he deserves to be free of fans' expectations, and yes he and Christopher left the city and moved to New Mexico, yet in a few years he may find he has something more to say about these characters. I hope so.]

After two events today in the Bay Area he reads in Denver, Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Brooklyn and Manhattan. The most magical moment of his tour promises to be January 31 when he will be in conversation with Don Bachardy at the Santa Monica Public Library. On February 10, he launches a victory lap through the British Isles where he is immensely popular: He's already sold out his appearances at the British Library, Homotopia, the Guardian Book Club, and in Edinburgh, while seats are still available in Bath, Manchester, Glasgow, and Dublin. Tour details here.

Wieners for Whiners

Last night's debut episode of Looking is free.

Born January 20: Julia Morgan

After earning her engineering degree from Berkeley in 1894, Julia Morgan moved to Paris and, refusing to accept the initial rejections from the École des Beaux-arts, finally gained admittance and became the first woman to receive the school's degree in architecture. In 1904 she became the first female architect licensed by California and designed El Campanil for Mills College, the first freestanding bell tower on a US campus and the first reinforced concrete structure on the west coast. After the 1906 earthquake all architects were in demand, none more so than Morgan because her tower survived unscathed. Within a decade she accepted her first commission in southern California, the Spanish revival Herald-Examiner building in Los Angeles, after which the paper's owner approached her about designing a little something at the top of 250,000 acres he owned near San Simeon. Hearst was tired of camping up there. He thought he wanted a bungalow. Quickly, it became his castle. And a 25 year project, in part because of its scale (58 bedrooms, 60 bathrooms, 41 fireplaces, virtual tour here) and in part because he constantly "tinkered," e.g., demolished and rebuilt the epic outdoor Neptune pool three times before he was satisfied. The indoor Roman pool is more lavish.

Defiant about not being a debutante, never married, and widely believed to be a lesbian, Morgan retired in 1951 and died six years later at 85. She left behind 700 completed buildings, including 11 at Asilomar. Perennially rediscovered, she's the subject of many books like Mark Wilson's Julia Morgan: Architect of Beauty and Sara Boutelle's Julia Morgan, Architect.

The New Yorker Loves Looking

"This is not your father's homosexuality," says Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker praising Weekend director Andrew Haigh's new gay HBO series Looking, premiering this Sunday, January 19. She says

"Their collaboration is a real beauty, the standout among several smart series launching in January. (Remember when the big TV season started in September? Not anymore.) In contrast to Weekend which was set in a grimy, depressing city in the Midlands, Looking takes place in that Emerald City modern San Francisco, where same-sex marriage is legal and older definitions of gay identity—rebel, outsider, artist—have begun to curl with age. With its unglamorous sex scenes, the show will inevitably be compared to Girls, but Looking has far more in common with Nicole Holofcener’s sweet-and-sour ensembles, or the eighties film Parting Glances —unhurried portraits of sprawling social worlds. Some critics will surely find the show insufficiently transgressive, or “slight,” that code word which is often applied to stories about love and dating. But Looking is a stealth breakthrough, if only because it treats its highly specific circle of gay men with warmth and playfulness, viewing their struggles as ordinary, not outrageous."

After listing the many gay showrunners and their successes of the past 15 years, Nussbaum writes:

"Looking is a whole different ball of wax. Sneaky-funny instead of brassy, it is interested not in extremity but in small-bore observation. In this way, it shares a sensibility with the charming Please Like Me an Australian series, now airing on Pivot, which people also initially called “the gay Girls." Both shows feature diffident heroes, young men who regard retro gay culture with a sense of bemused incredulity, like Christopher Isherwood with a Webcam. Looking establishes this generational theme in its first scene, in which Paddy goes cruising, very briefly. He gets a truncated hand job—“Cold hands!” he complains—but it’s less a sex act than a prank. “The guy who gave it to me was very hairy,” he marvels to his friends. “Not hipster hairy. Like, gym-teacher hairy.” (The scene reminded me of the old Onion headline “Ironic Porn Purchase Leads to Unironic Ejaculation.”)

"That mock-cruising moment feels a bit blunt, like a thesis statement: this is not your father’s homosexuality. A few other early elements are similarly on the nose, like a debate about whether one can separate sex and intimacy. But, as the episodes build, Looking gets subtler, and also more original, sending out tendrils of intrigue. 

If it streams online, I'll watch, though after the trailer below I worry "small-bore" and "diffident" may be code for tedious and self-pitying, plus atrocious lines like "Commitment looks good on you."

Born December 24: Kevin Killian, Lee Daniels

Read Kevin Killian's Spreadeagle, which in this year's Thebes poll, Trebor Healey called "one of the best San Francisco novels I've read." Filmmaker Adam Baran said it's "a blistering, scathing satire of San Francisco’s gay literary and arts culture (and NYC by extension) featuring an unbelievable cast of phonies, fakers, charlatans, criminals, pornographers, art student hustlers, kept boys, meth heads, and deranged psychopaths. Oh, and Armistead Maupin. Laugh out loud funny and totally horrifying at the same time." 

A native of New York, a survivor of Catholic schooling, Kevin 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. 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. The movie was also a winner at the Golden Globes, BAFTA, and the NAACP Imagae Awards, among many others. Daniels' followup, the violent, Zac Efron starrer The Paperboy, was largely panned, though it was selected for Cannes and Nicole Kidman was nominated for SAG and Golden Globe awards. This year his smash, awards-bait The Butler is a surprise total snub at the Golden Globes after nominations from SAG, Critics Choice, People's Choice, Satellite, and two wins at the second-most unnecessary thing on earth, the Hollywood Film Awards. 

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.

Born December 21: Michael Tilson Thomas

Earlier this year Michael Tilson Thomas won his eleventh Grammy for conducting the San Francisco Symphony performing John Adams' Harmonielehre & Short Ride in a Fast Machine. MTT came to SF after a string of successes, beginning with conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra at twenty-four, ten days after being named assistant conductor in 1969, followed by the New York Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, and the London Symphony Orchestra. Twenty-six years ago he founded the New World Symphony, the premier orchestral academy, of which he is still artistic director and was instrumental(!) in getting their New World Center open in 2011 in a Miami Beach complex designed by his former babysitter Frank Gehry. Among his own acclaimed compositions are Poems of Emily Dickinson sung by Renee Fleming, Songs to Poems of Walt Whitman sung by Thomas Hampson, and From the Diary of Anne Frank narrated by Audrey Hepburn. He and Joshua Robison, partners of more than thirty years, share an Edwardian house in San Francisco and a 1925 pink stucco palace in Miami. Today he's 69.

Sofia Coppola To Film Fairyland

Co-writing with Andrew Durham, co-producing with her brother Roman, Sofia Coppola will film Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father [Kindle], Alysia Abbott's book about being raised by her divorced gay dad in San Francisco in the 70s and 80s and his death from aids. It was among the most-cited on Thebes annual poll. Sofia told Deadline, “I love the book Fairyland; it’s a sweet and unique love story of a girl and her dad, both growing up together in 1970′s San Francisco. I think it will make an engaging and touching movie on a subject I’ve never seen before.” 

I like Sofia's work. My compulsive tic demands I point out, again, this will be yet another Hollywood movie in which the gay man dies at the end and the straight characters live on, sadder but noble in their compassion.

Born November 24: K.M. Soehnlein

  

In 2000, Karl Soehnlein's first novel about a gay thirteen year-old in New Jersey in 1978, The World of Normal Boys [Kindle], rocked readers, charmed critics, hit The San Francisco Chronicle's bestseller list, and won a Lammy. The New York Times called it "rich and unflinching," and the Portland paper said it's "very cool and endearing." In 2005, he returned with a son's exploration of his father's past in You Can Say You Knew Me When [Kindle], which nearly every critic agreed was unputdownable, with the Chronicle citing its "remarkably stylish and witty prose" and the LA Times praising it as, "an astute novel of manners." In 2010, Soehnlein revisited Robin MacKenzie from his debut in Robin and Ruby [Kindle], which the Indie Next list called, "honest and searing...an important novel filled with passages to be read aloud, remembered and cherished." His next novel, which might take place in NYC during the very worst of the aids pandemic, is among my most anticipated of 2014/2015. Back in 2009, the NYT covered his and longtime partner Kevin Clarke's commitment ceremony, with some classic gay rom-com on their failed first meeting. This year, they married.

Looking Very Vanilla

Like almost everyone, I admired the authenticity of gay life in Andrew Haigh's indie gem Weekend [watch now] and was anticipating his first tv series "Looking," which debuts Sunday, January 19. Still am, but less so. Even though it's HBO, the trailer has hints of that awful network glibness and the 30-something characters, despite their beards and bathhouse realness, are not fully free of the same funny-mopey vibe of the hipster gay cliche. Moreover, a show that brags so much about being shot in San Francisco should not be 100% white. You're in trouble when when your Bay Area series is less diverse than Modern Family (LA), The New Girl (LA), Happy Endings (Chicago), 2 Broke Girls (Brooklyn), The Mindy Project (Brooklyn), and Parks & Recreation (Pawnee, Indiana).

This led to the Top 100 LEAST Diverse Cities. Guess the producers weren't amped to film in Bismark or Dubuque or Scranton or Plymouth.

Born November 16: Glenn Burke

In the 1970s, most interracial gay couples could expect tension with their partner's parents, but in Glenn Burke's case, his boyfriend's father was his own baseball team's manager, homophobe Tommy Lasorda. Glenn played for the Dodgers for three seasons, including the '77 World Series, before they dealt him to his native Oakland. His relationship with A's manager Billy Martin wasn't complicated by family ties but was no less welcoming: in front of the team, Martin called Glenn a faggot. He lasted one season. A knee injury either ended his career with the majors or was a good enough excuse to send him to the minors in Utah. He quit baseball in 1979, when he was 27. Although he had been out to his team, he came out publicly in 1982, the same year he medaled as a sprinter at Gay Games. Four years later he competed in basketball at Gay Games 1986, by which time he was addicted to cocaine. He became homeless in San Francisco and in 1994 he revealed he was fighting aids. In the months before his death at 42 in 1995, he published his autobiography Out at Home and told People magazine, "My mission as a gay ballplayer was to break a stereotype . . . I think it worked." Look for the 2010 documentary "Out: The Glenn Burke Story."

Terry Castle on Being Gay Married

Here's what you're going to do. You are going to read Terry Castle's LRB essay on the real joy and underlying ambivalance about marriage equality, which is really an examination of how comfortably or uncomfortably the new acceptance rests on all the rejection that came before. With sentences like, "In those days (and yes, even now) one’s mother could always be counted on, likewise, to underscore one’s alienation from the rest of humankind," it's mandatory reading:

"Some of the diffidence I felt no doubt had to do with the fact that Blakey and I had already been living together – delightfully, with nary a closet in sight – for six years. Apart from the political statement – rah, rah, cheers, queers – the ritual, I grumbled, was beside the point. Yet troubling too were a host of larger metaphysical questions. Marriage had always been defined (and naturalised) as a relationship between a man and a woman; could it now, merely by way of a few wishful speech acts and contrived theatrical gestures, be completely reconceived? Was it possible – just like that – to revamp one of the key kinship structures around which human society had been organised for millennia? What would Wittgenstein have said? Was ‘gay marriage’ part of ‘everything that is the case’? Would he have got married? To himself or another person? One could noodle away the hours pondering such things.

"My own seemingly innate, sometimes Arctic, aloofness had to be part of the equation too. Anyone who knows me knows it: my perverse tendency to stand sadly apart from sociability and look rejected, even when surrounded by affable people doing everything possible to show their affection for me. In some skittish, not so deeply buried part of me, it’s always San Diego in 1967 and the treacherous lunch court at Marston Junior High School. I’m 13 again; shy, pudgy and unpopular, eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwich in miserable, Cain-like isolation, while the more confident girls – those who shriek and rat their hair and travel in ardent, gossipy packs – point at me and guffaw. What a weirdo. Shall we just say that my childish heart turned then to adamant? That self-protection meant fixing one’s eyes on blankness and acting dead? When I began thinking of myself as a lesbian – not so long afterwards, really – the age-old stereotype of the female homosexual as doomed misfit, lost in a dark and sterile world of shadows, seemed purpose built for me."

If you somehow still don't know Castle -- whom Sontag named "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today" and James Wolcott calls "a Jedi knight of literary exploration" -- for goodness' sake, get the essay collection The Professor: A Sentimental Education [Kindle only $3.79].

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.

Born August 8: Randy Shilts

In 1981, Randy Shilts became the first journalist at a major newspaper to cover the gay community full-time. In 1999, five years after Shilts died from aids, the NYU Department of Journalism ranked his reporting on the pandemic for the San Francisco Chronicle 44th of the top hundred works of journalism in the twentieth century. His exhaustive, meticulous book And the Band Played On: Politics, People, and the AIDS Epidemic is regarded as a modern classic. Gary Wills said Shilts’ book “will be to gay liberation what Betty Friedan was to early feminism and Rachel Carson's Silent Spring was to environmentalism." It covers what were then believed to be the origins of the disease in Africa in the 1970s to 1985, when Rock Hudson’s announcement that he had aids finally captured mass culture’s attention. Shilts examines the years between, detailing the ignorance, denial, hostility, and indifference of medical, health, and government officials as the unknown “gay cancer” ravaged America, as well as profiling the pioneering doctors and gay activists who fought for funding, research, and public awareness as tens of thousands died around them. HBO’s 1993 adaptation And the Band Played On was nominated for twenty awards and won nine, including the Emmy for best made-for-tv movie. Conduct Unbecoming, his next book, again as monumental, examined through thousands of interviews the U.S. military’s treatment of its lesbian and gay servicemembers. At the time of his death in 1994 he was planning a book on homosexuality in the Catholic Church. Shilts's first book, a biography of Harvey Milk called The Mayor of Castro Street was to become a film by Bryan Singer but was beaten out by Gus van Sant's Milk.