Band of Thebes

Born January 26: Ellen Degeneres

Comedian, college dropout after one semester, #1 NYT bestselling author, sitcom star, chat show mogul, record company wannabe, vegan, animal lover, movie producer, and lesbian wife, Ellen DeGeneres was named the funniest person in America by Showtime way back in 1982 when she was twenty-four. Johnny Carson, a big fan, considered her a girl Bob Newhart, though she also cites Steve Martin and Woody Allen as significant influences. Her sitcom Ellen ran from 1994 to 1998 including her character's history making coming out in The Puppy Episode, seen by a record setting 46 million people. In 2003 she voiced Dory in Finding Nemo, Pixar's most successful movie ever. That September she premiered her talk show, which has become a mega hit, dancing its way to thirty-two Daytime Emmys. During the height of the Prop 8 campaign to rescind gay marriage in California, she wed her wife, Portia De Rossi, fifteen years her junior, and screened this video on her show. Do we still have to hear the lie that stars can't be out, vocal in their support of gay rights, and popular with middle America? Ellen has won six consecutive People's Choice Awards as Favorite Daytime Talk Show Host. In 2007, she hosted the Oscars, earning higher ratings and more viewers than Jon Stewart in 2006 and 2008 and Hugh Jackman in 2009, and she's back hosting again this year. In 2008, at fifty, she became the face of Maybelline's CoverGirl, in 2010 she was a judge on American Idol and appeared as herself on The Simpsons, and in 2011 Hillary Clinton made her a Special Envoy for Global Aids Awareness. Her empire expands significantly with the announcement that hers will be the first-ever US talk show to be broadcast in China. Her most recent book is Seriously...I'm Kidding [Kindle].

Chozen

How is Chozen more important than Looking? Any HBO subscriber watching the Andrew Haigh show has already many, many, many times before seen these nice, polite, middle-class homosexuals. FX viewers have never seen an animated series about a white ex-con gangsta rapper who's gay. Fresh out of prison, living with his sister at college, and still dreaming of hip-hop glory, Chozen brings street swagger including extreme bluntness about what he demands guys do for him. Airing Monday nights after Archer, the half-hour comedy stars Bobby Moynihan, Danny McBride, Method Man, Michael Pena, Nick Swardson, and that perennially brilliant second-banana long overdue for stardom, Kathryn Hahn. 

The pilot creaks along, trying to find its rhythm and lowballing the humor. Watch free here. The second episode was a little better but not readily available online. 

Slate interviews the show's creator, Grant Dekernion:

"Slate: Do you think Chozen’s relationship with Hunter [the hot frat jock lacrosse-player, voiced by Ike Barinholtz the doofus of The Mindy Project] is a healthy one?

"Dekernion: Oh, I don't know if I'd say that. I think his relationship with Hunter begins in the way Chozen begins many relationships, but we tried to build in some subtlety. As we see them throughout the season, Chozen tries to find a way to have a relationship. It may not begin where it's a very loving, equitable situation, but I think Hunter will make it known that he'd like something more real, and Chozen will try to see if he's willing and/or able to do that. And you'll also see changes in Hunter. So, it's not healthy, but I think it's a dynamic that exists."

 

Wieners for Whiners

Last night's debut episode of Looking is free.

Today in Gay Hollywood News

 

Laura Linney, 49, had a surprise baby and named it Bennett Armistead Schauer, just in time for Tuesday's release of the final Tales of the City novel, The Days of Anna Madrigal.

Salon says, No, Hollywood’s not post-queer: The complicated politics of coming out with a discussion about Ian McKellen "outing" Lee Pace (L) and Luke Evans (R). The quotes are needed because in 2002 Luke identified himself as a gay man saying he'd never hidden it, and in 2004 he told the media his career had never suffered for being out and explained to the Advocate what he looks for in porn is "an enormous big fat c--k!" Surprise! Now that he's franchise meat in Fast & Furious 6 and The Crow reboot, Luke is suddenly silent about his sexuality and does not dispute planted stories about his girlfriend Holly Goodchild and their possible wedding. Lee Pace has always been mum about his orientation.

Of Dallas Buyers Club, Slate asks, Was the Real Ron Woodruff Bisexual? 

(Sadly, today Slate also has to ask, Why Do So Many Gay People Smoke?, citing new stats that put the rate of queer smoking 68% higher than the general US population's.)

Critics slammed Jared Leto and Matthew McConaughey for not mentioning aids in their Golden Globes speeches Sunday night. Thursday morning in their statements on their Oscar nominations they did, and Thursday afternoon, a terrified-looking Leto opened his thank yous at the dreary Critics Choice Awards by dedicating his win to people living with hiv. Tonight, they're both up for SAG awards.

Tomorrow night at the Producers Guild Awards, Dallas Buyers Club, Behind the Candelabra, and Modern Family again compete for top honors.

Your daily schadenfreude: After its honking antigay flap, Duck Dynasty's season 5 premiere viewership plummeted DOWN 28% from the season 4 premiere.

Born January 18: Maulik Pancholy, Cary Grant

Having played Jack Donaghy's jealous, lovesick, quasi-closeted assistant Jonathan on 64 of 30 Rock's 138 episodes, Maulik Pancholy came out in November and nine days ago tweeted this photo of his engagement to his longtime boyfriend Ryan Corvaia at the Taj Mahal. Maulik also played Sanjay in 26 of Weeds' 102 episodes, the bisexual Neal on 22 episodes of Whitney, and voices the straight-A neighbor Baljeet Tjinder in nearly all episodes of Phineas and Ferb, the Disney Channel's longest running series. Today he's 40.

 

Cary Grant and Randolph Scott met on the set of Hot Saturday and soon began living together in a house nicknamed Bachelor Hall, which they would share for twelve years, 1932-1944. Their affair has always been spun, desperately, as two stars who lived together merely because both were "tightwads." During that time, Grant was married to Virginia Cherrill from February 1934 to March 1935 and to Barbara Hutton from 1942 to 1945. Two questions: What sort of man keeps his house with his bud even after he gets married, and what sort of tightwad prefers spending the money to maintain two households rather than one? George Cukor confirmed that Randolph Scott talked about their affair to friends, and a slew of recent biographers have also verified their relationship. Grant himself told an interviewer that his first two wives, overlapping with Scott, "accused him of being homosexual," though, of course, he always denied it and was as quick to sue for libel. (He sued Chevy Chase for saying, "What a gal!") Several other men have said they had affairs with Grant, including his chauffeur in 1957 and fashion arbiter Richard Blackwell, who wrote in his autobiography of having sex with both Grant and Scott. Nevertheless, mainstream media continues to portray Grant as the apex of hetero elegance. His fifth and final wife was 47 years his junior. Born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England he died at 82 in Davenport, Iowa in 1986 rehearsing his one-man show.

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 19: Ronan Farrow, Cyril Collard, Jean Genet

Born to Mia Farrow while she was in a long relationship with Woody Allen but still sleeping with ex-husband Frank Sinatra, Satchel Farrow's anger when his dad started dating his half-sister didn't derail him from his path. Switching first to his middle name Seamus then to Ronan, he graduated from college at fifteen. The next year he entered Yale Law School. He interned at Davis Polk and the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, wrote speeches for Richard Holbrooke, was a UNICEF spokesperson for youth, and in 2009 joined the Obama administration working with NGOs in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In 2011, Hillary Clinton appointed him Director of the State Department's Office of Global Youth Issues. In 2012, he was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2013, his mom told Vanity Fair "possibly" Frank Sinatra, not Woody, fathered Ronan. (He tweeted "Listen, we’re all ‘possibly’ Frank Sinatra’s son.") Next month, Ronan debuts his political show on MSNBC. The NYT puff piece said he is "guarded about his private life" and hinted maybe he was "with" Obama's out former speechwriter Jon Lovett. Vice says he's gay. Repeating: Last year to celebrate his 25th birthday he had an ugly sweater party with Katy Perry and Selena Gomez, right. 

Cyril Collard [above, right] adapted, directed, and starred in the vividly bisexual film Les Nuits Fauve (Savage Nights), based on his second novel. The autobiographical story examines the life of a thirtyish aspiring director, Jean, engaged in simultaneous affairs with an 18-year-old French girl and a young, "straight" Spanish rugby player, Samy, who develops a taste for S&M and moves in with him, while Jean still (compulsively?) enjoys frequent, rough anonymous hookups, all of which is further complicated by his being HIV+. Heralding the start of a dazzling career, the movie won four Cesar Awards in 1993, including Best Film, but Collard did not attend. Three days earlier he died of aids at 35.

Flashback to 1949: South Pacific opened on Broadway, James Gould Cozzens won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, All the King's Men won the Oscar for Best Picture, and in France, Jean Genet received his tenth criminal conviction, which meant he would be sent to prison for life. In the preceding seven years he had published his five groundbreaking novels -- Our Lady of the Flowers [Kindle], Miracle of the Rose [Kindle], Funeral Rites, Querelle, The Thief's Journal [Kindle] -- as well as three plays and dozens of poems, all of which were greatly esteemed by his European contemporaries despite his focus on petty thieves and his inclusion of gay sex. As news of his dire situation spread, rather than ostracizing Genet, the leading intellectuals rallied to his defense, and with a public push from Cocteau, Sartre, and Picasso, among others, Genet was pardoned by the French president. It is safe to say Harry Truman would not have done the same because at that point Genet's fiction was still banned in the United States. Genet never returned to prison after that, nor did he ever publish another novel, although he continued to write plays, poems, and a memoir, Un Captif Amoureux, published in 1986, the year after he died of throat cancer. For the full story, read Edmund White's definitive Genet: A Biography.

Born November 23: Bruce Vilanch

Listen to Bette Midler: "Bruce was the first man to put something in my mouth that made us both money." She and Vilanch began working together in 1970 after she read his Chicago Tribune review of her show saying she needed more jokes. She called him and said, So write me some jokes. Thirty-eight years later, in 2008, he co-wrote her Caesars Palace gig The Showgirl Must Go On. The Oscars' head writer and New Hollywood Squares star has won six Emmys. He's also created comic material for Richard Pryor, Joan Rivers, Lily Tomlin, Diana Ross, David Letterman, Billy Crystal, Whoopi Goldberg, Florence Henderson, and, recently, Tab Hunter. Vilanch has punched up many, many Hollywood scripts, including films that don't immediately seem to bear his razor humor, and he has acted in Mahogany, Ice Pirates, and The Morning After. He's also starred on Broadway as Edna Turnblad in Hairspray, for which he shaved off his signature thirty-year shaggy blond beard, and off Broadway in his own show Almost Famous. He is the subject of the A-list love explosion Get Bruce! and appears in Laughing Matters. Beyond being funny, Vilanch has been a tireless supporter of many aids and gay rights causes and appears in Christopher Hines' documentary about gay body image, The Adonis Factor [watch now]. 

Naming him to this year's Out 100 list, the magazine mentions his "upcoming memoir." Until then, get Bruce!: My Adventures in the Skin Trade and Other Essays.

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 17: Rock Hudson, RuPaul Charles

Winnetka's Roy Scherer Jr was renamed and remade by a Hollywood gay impresario and total mess whom you can read about in dastardly detail in The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson [Kindle]. Although in his first movie, Fighter Squadron, the 6'5" stud needed 38 takes to nail his only spoken line, with coaching he became an affable, natural superstar. He reached a new high with Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession in 1954 and the next year barely dodged certain doom: The tabloid Confidential threatened to report his secret gay affairs. Instead, Willson gave them dirt on two of his other, less lucrative clients, Rory Calhoun (prison stint) and Tab Hunter (arrested at a gay party five years earlier), and shoehorned Hudson into a sham marriage with his secretary. In 1956, Hudson and fellow closet case James Dean both earned Oscar nominations for Giant opposite Elizabeth Taylor, who would 29 years later be galvanized by Hudson's death to force an unwilling nation to confront AIDS. As much as his public acknowledgement finally "gave a face" to the disease that had already killed thousands, it also fueled a panicked distrust of all gay men because he had hidden his status from his sex partners like Marc Christian and his kissing co-stars like Linda Evans. Succumbing just before he turned 60, he lives on in celluloid glory and in the pages of his friend Armistead Maupin's Further Tales of the City as the virile icon Blank Blank.

Like any other future drag star born in 1960, RuPaul Andre Charles spent his childhood in San Diego lipsynching Supremes songs, being called names, avoiding sports, and winning the two most important prizes in junior high: Best Dancer and Best Afro. High school didn't go as well (he was expelled for not attending), until he moved to Atlanta with his brother and sister-in-law at sixteen. He began to blossom, thanks largely to drama class, though his attendance in every other subject was still a problem. Eventually he dropped out, got his GED, started community college, and quit. When he was twenty-two he appeared on the American Music Show with two girls as RuPaul and the U-Hauls. When he was thirty-two, the nation was coming down from twelve years of Reagan-Bush, grunge was peaking, and RuPaul put on her best blond wig, her brightest jewels, her fiercest heels, and taught the whole world to sing, "Sashay, chante!" "Work it, girl!" and "You better work!"

Oddly, that hit, Supermodel, only reached #45 on the pop charts, but it remained in heavy rotation on MTV forever and became a cultural moment. Whereas most drag representations before her were catty and bitchy, RuPaul's message was love everybody; everybody, love! Subsequent singles milked the same bouncy vibe but failed to catch on with the masses, though Back to my Roots is an essential history of black hairstyles in three danceable minutes. Adding to her list of drag queen firsts, RuPaul became the face of MAC cosmetics and sang a duet with Elton John. She co-hosted KTU's popular morning show for two years and hosted her own tv show on VH1. Her super popular RuPaul's Drag Race begins its sixth hit season in early 2014.

Swedish Theaters, TV Adopt Alison Bechdel's Test To Rate Films for Sexism

An idea from Alison Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For comic strip in 1985 has now become the basis for a new system in Sweden for grading films' sexism or lack thereof. The Guardian reports:

To get an "A'' rating, a movie must pass the so-called Bechdel test, which means it must have at least two named female characters who talk to each other about something other than a man.

"The entire 'Lord of the Rings' trilogy, all 'Star Wars' movies, 'The Social Network,' 'Pulp Fiction' and all but one of the 'Harry Potter' movies fail this test," said Ellen Tejle, the director of Bio Rio, an art-house movie theater in Stockholm's trendy Sodermalm district.

 Although only a handful of movie theaters are launching the program, AP notes "the state-funded Swedish Film Institute supports the initiative, which is starting to catch on. Scandinavian cable TV channel Viasat Film says it will start using the ratings in its film reviews and has scheduled an "A'' rated "Super Sunday" on Nov. 17, when it will show only films that pass the test, such as The Hunger Games, 'The Iron Lady and Savages."

Stonewall UK Winners: Alli, Barr, Dent, Quakers, and Lions

Announced at London's V&A museum earlier tonight, the 2013 Stonewall Award winners are

Writer of the Year: Damian Barr, Maggie and Me, growing up gay under Thatcher

Publication of the Year: Metro UK magazine

Hero of the Year (tie) Lord Alli and Russian LGBT Network

Bigot of the Year: Pat Robertson

Broadcast of the Year: Marrying Mum & Dad (CBBC) watch here

Entertainer of the Year: Antony Cotton (Coronation Street)

Community Group of the Year: the Quaker LGBT Fellowship

Journalist of the Year: Grace Dent (The Independent)       

Politician of the Year: Baroness Stowell, for getting those marriage equality votes

Sportspeople Award of the Year: Cardiff Lions rugby club   

Advert of the Year: Mamas & Papas print ads of same-sex parents

Born November 6: Michael Cunningham

It's been fifteen years since The Hours. In 2009, Michael Cunningham told Variety, "While I was writing about Virginia Woolf, my mind was never far removed from the idea of girls in bikinis being hacked up by guys wearing hockey masks, and I vowed that if I ever had a good idea, I would write one of these scary movies." Then he sold a slasher flick called Beautiful Girl to Screen Gems. At the same time, he was finishing a Dusty Springfield biopic for Nicole Kidman but, alas, is not the Dusty Springfield biopic by Ray Connelly that Nick Hurran has just been hired to direct, possibly starring Adele. Michael wrote two screenplays that did get made, his own A Home at the End of the World (2004) and Evening (2007) with Susan Minot, as well as episode eight of Showtime's Masters of Sex to air on November 17. In 2011, he announced he was writing "a movie with Gus Van Sant, a fictionalised documentary set in 1912 Portland, Oregon." In 2012, he said he was adapting Turn of the Screw for a feature film and writing a pilot for HBO about a big queer family with adopted kids. Now, he's adapting Ann Leary's novel The Good House for a film reteaming Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro for the fourth time. Today he's 61.

Following Specimen Days and By Nightfall, next May FSG will release Michael's new novel, The Snow Queen, which is in part about a nonbeliever's unexpected turn to religion. Synopsis -- degayed? not gay? -- after the jump.

HBO & Oprah Developing Richard Kramer's "These Things Happen"

Deadline reports that now you really must read this wonderful gay novel: "HBO has put in development These Things Happen [Kindle], a half-hour comedy based on the first novel by TV writer-producer Richard Kramer (Thirtysomething, My So-Called Life). The pay cable network has optioned the book, published last fall, for the comedy project, which will be produced by Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Prods. under the company’s deal at HBO. Kramer will write the script and executive produce. These Things Happen is set in present day Manhattan and focuses on two couples – one gay, one straight. They share a 15-year-old son, who lives on the upper East Side with his mother and doctor stepfather. Trying to get to know his impressive, distant father better, he moves in for a semester with him and his long-time partner who forms an instant friendship with the boy."

Born September 24: Ross Mathews

Here I was thinking gay comic, former Tonight Show intern, current Chelsea Lately regular, and frequent red carpet fixture, Ross Mathews had sort of flopped with his first book Man Up!: Tales of My Delusional Self-Confidence [Kindle] but it already has 202 reviews, besting Sarah's 168, Jen's 120, Heather's 75, and Loni's 19. Alas, his new talk show airing every Friday night on E!, Hello Ross, which debuted earlier this month, may be a different story. Or maybe it just needs time to find its footing. Born in Washington State, a communications major graduate of the University of La Verne [and Shirley!], he now lives in Los Angeles with his partner of five years, stylist Salvador Camarena, and their two rescue dogs. Today he's 34.

(Photo by Austin Young)

Behind the Candelabra Sweeps Emmys

As promised, the Liberace biopic that Hollywood wouldn't release, Behind the Candelabra [now on dvd], has swept the Emmy awards, winning eleven of its fifteen nominations including best movie, best director, best actor, best art direction, best costumes, best makeup, best hair, and many more. 

I thought it was a surprisingly great movie about gay relationships and the imbalances in an older-younger power couple, but I sympathize with viewers upset that a closeted celebrity who did little to nothing to help gay rights and lied about aids is being lionized. That Elton John number was terrible and seemed like any old tune he had sitting around that he suddenly decided to call a tribute song. A song actually inspired by Liberace ought to have some flash: you should hear the capes and the rings and the poodles... and the lost chances and emptiness.

"Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?" To Be Series on ABC

Dan Bucatinsky is adapting and will co-executive produce his memoir of gay parenting Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight? [Kindle] for an ABC series "described as a fast-paced hour-long dramedy about the lives, loves, and scandalous secrets of a group of parents whose kids attend the same school." Obviously, it will be renamed and for now it's called Show & Tell. It's a production of Shonda Rimes' Shondaland, which also produces Grey's Anatomy, on which Bucatinsky is a writer, and Scandal, on which he plays a beleaguered gay husband. For that role he is nominated for an Emmy at what will be the gayest awards show of the year: NPH is hosting, Behind the Candelabra has fifteen nominations with a guaranteed win for Michael Douglas, and Elton John just announced he will perform a tribute to Liberace. Bucatinsky is married to writer/director Don Roos and they are raising two children.

photo via

Born September 1: Lily Tomlin, Roger Casement, Emma Stebbins, Dave King

Detroit's funniest daughter, Mary Jean Tomlin was featured on Merv Griffin when she was twenty-six and landed a spot on Laugh-In when she was thirty, creating the telephone operator Ernestine. Wanting to expand another character, Edith Ann, the bratty child in the big chair, Tomlin found the Peabody-winning after school special writer Jane Wagner. They clicked. They've been life partners and collaborators for forty-two years and now they're getting married. Wagner wrote and directed Tomlin projects ranging from Grammy-winning comedy albums and Emmy-winning tv specials to hit movies (The Incredible Shrinking Woman) to super flops (Moment by Moment, co-starring John Travolta) to Tony-winning Broadway megahits (The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe). Beyond her endeavors with Wagner, Tomlin most frequently worked with Robert Altman (Nashville, Short Cuts, A Prairie Home Companion), and gave star performances in 9 to 5, All of Me, Big Business, and Flirting with Disaster. She's had recurring roles on many top tv shows Murphy Brown, The West Wing, Will & Grace, Desperate Housewives, and Damages. Most recently, she was Tina Fey's mom in the skippable Admission. In March 1977, when Time was still a news magazine, Tomlin was its cover story; Wagner is identified first as "a friend" but later the article says the ladies share a house off Sunset. Eighteen years ago, Tomlin co-produced and narrated the gay Hollywood documentary The Celluloid Closet, an act some took as her coming out. She's a hysterical actress, obvs, but is she also a little hysterical? Her meltdowns on the set of I Heart Huckabees are more than a little salty, yet minor compared to the tantrum thrown by the director. Remember, nothing is harder than comedy. Today she's 74.

Also born today: Roger Casement, the gay Irish rebel hanged by the Brits in 1916 and subject of Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa's novel The Dream of the Celt [Kindle]; Emma Stebbins, sculptor of the Central Park landmark Angel of the Waters, which you know as Bethesda Fountain, and girlfriend of actress Charlotte Cushman; and Dave King, author of the 2005 indie hit novel The Ha-Ha [Kindle] and husband of Franklin Tartaglione.

Born August 28: Nancy Kulp, Karl Ulrichs

Which gay genius saw the potential in a short-haired young lesbian, a former Florida newspaper reporter who had interviewed Clark Gable and the Duke & Duchess of Windsor but now was stuck working a desk job in the studio's publicity department, and asked her to be in his new picture? George Cukor cast skinny Nancy Kulp as, what else, the comic spinster -- at 30! -- and variations on that theme were the mainstay of her career for the next thirty-eight years. Although she wrung every drop of humor from the wet cliche of the sexless, manless old maid, midcentury critics could be cruel in their critiques of Kulp, describing her as TV's most homely girl with the "face of a shriveled balloon, the figure of a string of spaghetti, and the voice of a bullfrog in mating season." Undaunted, she played her thin parts with brio, building from bit roles in Shane, Sabrina, and A Star Is Born, to her biggest success on television. After three seasons on his Bob Cummings Show, writer-producer Paul Henning cast Kulp in his next project, The Beverly Hillbillies. Surely her Miss Jane Hathaway is one of the immortal early queer characters, and while audiences were invited to laugh at her highly unlikely pining for hot Jethro (when he wasn't in drag as his sister Jethrine), Kulp gave her character all the dignity befitting the scholarly, single secretary who was happiest with her women-only birdwatching society. Finally, critics appreciated her and she was rewarded with an Emmy nomination in 1967 and, following the series' end in 1971, roles on The Brian Keith Show, Sanford & Son, and The Love Boat. In her early sixties, she returned to her native Pennsylvania and ran for Congress as a Democrat in 1984. Her former Hillbillies costar Buddy Ebsen did ads attacking her as "too liberal" and her Republican opponent won in the Reagan re-election landslide. Closeted her whole career, Kulp finally came out in a carefully controlled way to interviewer in 1989, reprinted in Boze Hadleigh's book Hollywood Lesbians. She died of cancer in February 1991 at sixty-nine. YouTube's Mister Esoteric has compiled these clips honoring her as a forerunner to Lily Tomlin, Sandra Bernhard, and Ellen.

 

Karl Heinrich Ulrichs had an affair with his riding instructor when he was fourteen, was forced to quit his civil servant job for being gay when he was thirty-four, and began publishing pamphlets explaining and defending same-sex love when he was thirty-seven. Five years later, the day after his forty-second birthday, he addressed the German congress, coming out publicly and demanding they repeal their anti-gay laws. It was 1867, one hundred two years before Stonewall, and he was shouted down before he could finish his speech. Though his books were banned in Saxony and Berlin he continued writing on the subject for the rest of his life. In 1870, he published Araxes, which lays out all of the modern arguments for the rights of gay citizens. In 1879, he published the twelfth volume of his ongoing project, The Riddle of "Man-Manly" Love, and moved to Italy, which was more hospitable. Indeed, Ulrichs was awarded an honorary degree by the University of Naples shortly before he died, one month prior to his seventieth birthday. Today, streets are named for him in Bremen, Hanover, and Munich, where this afternoon they will celebrate with their annual street party and poetry reading in Karl-Heinrich-Ulrichs-Platz. In his final years, he wrote 

“Until my dying day I will look back with pride that I found the courage to come face to face in battle against the spectre which for time immemorial has been injecting poison into me and into men of my nature. Many have been driven to suicide because all their happiness in life was tainted. Indeed, I am proud that I found the courage to deal the initial blow to the hydra of public contempt.”

Born August 27: Jeanette Winterson

Given that in 2011 she wrote one of the finest queer books of this decade, her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? [Kindle], winner of a Stonewall UK award and a Lambda Literary Award, is it unkind and unfair to ask where is Jeanette Winterson's next great novel? Her best-known fiction is still her first, her landmark debut from 1985 Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which covers many of the events revisited in the memoir. She wrote it in two months because she needed money; it won the Whitbread and became a modern classic. Five years later the television version, adapted by Winterson, won the BAFTA for best drama. To my mind, her finest is The Passion [Kindle], which takes place in France and Venice during the Napoleonic Wars, and won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 1987. Two years later she released her most ambitious novel, Sexing the Cherry, which touches down in several centuries but is most firmly rooted in the Restoration. And in 1992 she published a novel about an affair, Written on the Body, which virtually everyone took to be inspired by her romantic liaison with her literary agent, Pat Kavanagh, married to Julian Barnes until her death in 2008. At that point Winerson was four years into her twelve-year partnership with Peggy Reynolds, to whom she dedicated "with love" her novel about her affair.

But aren't the six adult novels in the twenty-one years since then -- Art & Lies, Gut Symmetries, The PowerBook, Lighthousekeeping, Weight, The Stone Gods -- more about the author's idea than the characters? In the past ten years she has also written two children's picture books (The King of Capri, The Lion, The Unicorn and Me), a middle-grade chapter book (Tanglewreck), two YA historical novels (The Battle of the Sun, The Daylight Gate), and an original hour-long special for CBBC on Christmas 2009 called Ingenious. She's creative, she won't be pinned down, she's prolific, she's a workaholic -- in her spare time she runs the organic cornershop Verde's in the ground floor of her Georgian house in Spitalfields -- but for all her admirable busyness is she somehow wasting her time? Earlier this summer she announced she's reworking A Winter's Tale for the upcoming series The Hogarth Shakespeare.