Band of Thebes

Born April 4: Anthony Perkins, Graham Norton

A troubled teen coming of age in the 40s and 50s, Anthony Perkins escaped into acting. He told an interviewer, "There was nothing about me I wanted to be, but I felt happy being somebody else." Uncomfortably gay all his life, he had affairs with Nureyev, Sondheim, Tab Hunter, Christopher Makos, and a six-year relationship with choreographer Glover Dale. At 21 he got his first film role from George Cukor (The Actress written by Ruth Gordon) and he was 28 when Hitchcock cast him as Norman Bates in Psycho. A superstar terrified of being outed and unhappily typecast as a homicidal maniac, he fled to Europe where he worked with Ingrid Bergman in an adaptation of a Francoise Sagan novel and with Orson Welles in his rehash of Kafka's The Trial. Perkins was 39 before he finally had sex with a woman, his co-star Victoria Principal. When he was 41, he married Marisa Berenson's sister Berry on Cape Cod and they had two sons, named Oz and Elvis, though he continued to have sex with men. Having never been tested, he was horrified in 1990 to learn he was HIV+ from a headline in the National Enquirer, which had obtained a sample of his blood. Still closeted, he worked with aids charities, recorded an epilogue to And the Band Played On, and issued this statement, released upon his death from aids on September 12, 1992: "There are many who believe this disease is God's vengeance. But I believe it was sent to teach people how to love and understand and have compassion for each other. I have learned more about love, selflessness and human understanding from the people I have met in this great adventure in the world of aids than I ever did in the cutthroat, competitive world in which I spent my life." Returning from a vacation on Cape Cod on September 11, 2001, his wife died aboard AA flight 11. Their sons are an actor and a musician. Two biographies are Anthony Perkins: Split Image and Anthony Perkins: A Haunted Life.

Born Graham Walker in Bandon, County Cork, he popped over to London to train as a drama instructor but justly wound up on stage and in front of the camera. His success as an interviewer was instantaneous, like champagne uncorked. Effortlessly fun and engaging, he often outshines his guests. His childish delights ought to be embarrassing -- as he admits, "Now, this isn't big or clever," -- but those antics are often very, very funny, especially when he employs his best telephone manner. He called a sheriff's office in a Midwestern state about their law prohibiting intercourse with live fish, and, with Roseanne as his witness, rang up the Austrian tourist board to ask about visiting the north central village called Fucking. ("Is Fucking nice in winter?") It oughtn't be funny, but just try to remain stone-faced during his interview with speed daters. Frodo laughs so hard he kicks up his feet and rolls off the sofa. Norton's two books are a memoir, So Me, and greatest hits from his advice column, Ask Graham.

Born March 31: Diaghilev, Chamberlain, Frank, Westenhoefer

  

Celebrate with the brilliant biography of cultural impresario, founder of the Ballets Russes, and Nijinsky lover Sergei Diaghilev [Kindle] who turns 141 today, or with Barney Frank: The Story of America's Only Left-Handed, Gay, Jewish Congressman, 73, or a memoir by the Beverly Hills native and long-closeted mini-series sensation Richard Chamberlain, 79, or a cd from a lesbian comic who came out early, Suzanne Westenhoefer, 52.

How To Survive a Plague DVD, Miniseries

After losing the Spirit Award to Kirby Dick's important doc The Invisible War and losing the Oscar to feelgood fare Searching for Sugar Man, David France's really excellent film about aids and ACT UP, How to Survive a Plague, is now available on DVD or can be seen online instantly.

Last week, ABC optioned a scripted miniseries that will be more or less based on people in the documentary, covering the core years 1987 to 1996. David France is writing it and he said the cast "will be a tight ensemble. A handful of people with almost nothing in common but their shared battle against the epidemic."

EW had more:

"France, and his producing partner Howard Gertler will both serve as Executive Producers on the project, alongside former Focus Features president of production John Lyons (Boogie Nights, Pieces of April). "ABC is really the perfect match for this. ABC is the network that brought us Roots and so many other enormous and seminal miniseries. But Roots is such an important touchstone for me because it was really about the arrival of the African American people to full citizenship, and how that happened," France said. "That’s the same kind of trajectory that we see with the arrival of the gay and lesbian community to full involvement in public life. That happened in a much quicker timeline, but in a way I think that How To Survive A Plague the miniseries will tell that parallel story. And ABC knows how to do that. I was thrilled that they wanted to do this, and that they saw that it was part of their cultural tradition to tell these enormous stories that really changed the way generations of people think about a certain part of our history."

Born February 3: Gertrude Stein, James Bridges, Marlon Riggs

By the time she was four, Gertrude Stein had lived in Pennsylvania, Vienna, Paris, and Oakland. By the time she was seventeen, both her parents were dead and her eldest brother took over the successful family business. She graduated from Radcliffe in 1897 and spent the summer studying embryology at Woods Hole, then attended Johns Hopkins Medical School, which she left after two years. In 1903 she moved to Paris where she would stay until she died forty-three years later. Unlike writers who withdraw to contemplate, Stein engaged with the world head-on across the arts. She wrote novels, plays, essays, autobiography, and libretti, sometimes in collaboration with close friends. Mocked for her modernist use of repetition ("A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose"), Stein could be perfectly succinct, as when naming the Lost Generation, or saying, "Hemingway, remarks are not literature." A bold collector of new art, she and Alice Toklas, partners for almost forty years, hosted legendary weekly salons in which the best of Paris came to see the paintings and stayed for the conversation. Among their regular attendees were Matisse, Picasso, Braque, Derain, Rousseau, Hemingway, Wilder, Anderson, Appolinaire, Thomson, Bowles, Pound, and Bernard Fay, the gay Nazi informer who protected Toklas and Stein, a Jewish lesbian after all, throughout WWII. Although they were great travelers (it was they who tipped Bowles to Tangier), Stein and Toklas perversely stayed in France through the war. Although she wrote her coming out memoir, Q.E.D. before she was thirty, it was not published until 1950, four years after her death at 72. Despite thirty-nine years together, Stein left Toklas very little. Nieces and nephews grabbed the fortune in art. Stein and Toklas are buried side by side in Père Lachaise. Get the essential Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories by Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer. 

Two-time Oscar nominee James Bridges wrote and directed The Paper Chase, The China Syndrome, Urban Cowboy, Mike's Murder, and Perfect, among other films. It's not hard to guess a queer subtext in his September 30, 1955 starring Richard Thomas as Jimmy, a college kid who "goes berserk" the day his idol James Dean dies. To say nothing of John Travolta's aerobic thrusts in Perfect. Bridges got his start writing The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. His life partner was television's Jimmy Olsen in the Superman series, Jack Larson. Bridges died at 57 in 1993.

Speaking of Harvard (from which he graduated with honors in 1978, followed by his MA in journalism from Berkeley), and speaking of 80s queer dancing, here's a clip from Marlon Riggs' famous Tongues Untied. The best part is the poem by Essex Hemphill. Riggs' 1989 documentary about black gay culture was funded by an NEA grant and shown on PBS, making it a prime target for right wing attack groups. But its breakthrough honesty (and snap lessons) also made it perfect for Cannes and Berlin, as well as the many American events where it won awards: San Francisco's Frameline, Atlanta's film fest, and New York's documentary festival. His next work, Color Adjustment, examined television's "unflattering" portrayal of black characters from 1948 to 1988. After that he made Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien, interviewing HIV+ black men. When he was doing preproduction on his Black Is...Black Ain't (viewable in three parts starting here), he died of aids. He was 37.

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, 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 five 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. 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 newest book is now in paperback, Seriously...I'm Kidding [Kindle].

Queer Critics' Dorian Winners: Keep, Mike, Survive, Bernie

GALECA, the Gay and Lesbian Entertainment Critics Association, has announced the winners of this year's Dorian Awards:

FILM OF THE YEAR: Argo

FILM PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR – ACTOR: Daniel Day-Lewis in Lincoln

FILM PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR – ACTRESS: Anne Hathaway in Les Miserables

LGBT FILM OF THE YEAR: Keep the Lights On

DOCUMENTARY OF THE YEAR: How To Survive a Plague

VISUALLY STRIKING FILM OF THE YEAR: Life of Pi

CAMPY FLICK OF THE YEAR (TIE): Magic Mike and The Paperboy

UNSUNG FILM OF THE YEAR: Bernie [above]

TV DRAMA OF THE YEAR (TIE): American Horror Story: Asylum and Homeland

TV COMEDY OF THE YEAR: Girls

TV PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR – ACTOR: Damian Lewis in Homeland

TV PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR – ACTRESS: Jessica Lange in American Horror Story: Asylum

TV MUSICAL PERFORMANCE OF THE YEAR: Jennifer Hudson, Tribute to Whitney Houston, The Grammys

LGBT TV SHOW OF THE YEAR (TIE): Modern Family and The New Normal

CAMPY TV SHOW OF THE YEAR: Liz & Dick

UNSUNG TV SHOW OF THE YEAR: Happy Endings

TV OR MOVIE TITLE OF THE YEAR: Don’t Trust the B—- in Apt. 23

WE’RE WILDE ABOUT YOU (NEWCOMER AWARD): Ezra Miller

WILDE WIT OF THE YEAR: Jon Stewart

WILDE ARTIST OF THE YEAR: Ryan Murphy

TIMELESS AWARD: Sir Ian McKellen

GLAAD Media Awards

Typically mixing the meritorious, the mediocre, and the misguided, GLAAD today announced nominations in 33 queer categories of TV, movies, music, theater, journalism, blogs, and comic books (but no real books). Eight awards honor media work in Spanish. For every worthy and important nominee like Rachel Aviv's recent Netherland profile of homeless queer youth for The New Yorker, there is a grandstanding canard like that nonsensical piece calling Obama the first gay president which exists solely to grab attention for its author.

As America grows ever more accepting of gay equality, Hollywood reduces our visibility in mainstream features. Again this year, GLAAD's five nominees for best wide-release film are straight movies with only marginal lgbt characters. Some of these perpetuate the worst tropes, including The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel's sad old bugger who, of course, is the only one of the jaunty elderfolk to die. The lesbian in Your Sister's Sister has sex with her sister's boyfriend. The indies are better, led by Ira Sachs' Spirit Award nominee Keep the Lights On; Sundance's Mosquita y Mari; the Tribeca, Chicago, and Seattle film fests audience award winner Any Day Now starring Alan Cumming; the twink love drama North Sea Texas and the hetero wheelchair ballroom dancing romcom Musical Chairs directed by Susan Seidelman of Desperately Seeking Susan.

The documentaries are Chely Wright: Wish Me Away; Codebreaker about Alan Turing; Hit So Hard about Hole's dyke drummer Patty Schemel; David France's Oscar-bound How To Survive a Plague; and Vito.

Born January 12: Tracy Baim, Kieron Richardson

In 1985, the year after she graduated from Des Moines' Drake University, Tracy Baim and three men co-founded Chicago's lgbt newspaper Windy City Times. Two years later she left to start a new queer paper, Outlines, which she ran for 12 years until she bought WCT and merged the two publications. While so many other gay weeklies folded, WCT is thriving and Baim is still publisher and executive editor. She was also co-vice chair of Chicago's Gay Games VII from 1999 to 2007, and with her new free time in September 2008 she launched the website ChicagoGayHistory.org in tandem with the release of her book Out and Proud in Chicago [Kindle]. Among her many other books are Obama and the Gays: A Political Marriage [Kindle], Mom: A Tribute to Mothers of LGBTs, Leatherman: The Legend of Chuck Renslow, Jim Flint: The Boy From Peoria, and a novel about lesbians in the military The Half Life of Sgt. Jen Hunter [Kindle]. Baim also produced a lesbian movie starring Sharon Gless called Hannah Free, winner of five Best Feature awards from lgbt festivals in Miami, Philadelphia, Austin, St. Louis, and Montreal. Days ago she released her newest book Gay Press, Gay Power: The Growth of LGBT Community Newspapers in America [Kindle], with an introduction by John D'Emilio and contributions from ten writers including Sarah Toce, Yasmin Nair, and Lou Chibbaro.

After two years of plot twists, fans of the British drama series Hollyoaks finally got what they wanted the week before Christmas: Ste Hay left his husband Doug Carter to return to his Irish ex, Brendan Brady. Former bad boy Ste (prison for car theft) is played by Kieron Richardson who came out at 24 in September 2010. He said he was inspired by Joe McElderry, the X-Factor winner who came out at 19 two months before him.

If Kieron's agent or manager told him to tone it down, he didn't listen. He posed for this cover of Gay Times. He had already skated his way to 3rd place finish wearing tight, hot pink spangles on Dancing on Ice.

Last year he began co-hosting a weekly "lifestyle and entertainment gossip programme" on the Gaydio radio network from Manchester, which you can listen to live every Sunday.

You can also follow him on The Twitter.

Born November 29: Peter Cameron, Billy Strayhorn, Simon Amstell

Not to imply that movie adaptations are the ultimate yardstick of artistic merit but of Peter Cameron's six novels, three have been made into feature films. The stories he tells resonate deeply with other types of storytellers. And with readers. And with critics. The New York Times Book Review said, "The Weekend [Kindle] echoes Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose brilliant narrative critiques of material culture open, again and again, to the metaphysical, to that dimension where the known world cedes to mystery." The London Times wrote, "If The City of Your Final Destination were eligible for the Man Booker Prize I would be pressing for it to be on the shortlist. It has all the qualities currently undervalued on the literary scene: understatement, humour, and a dispensing with pedestrian naturalism... it has the dream-like mistiness of somewhere in one of Shakespeare's late plays." The Philadelphia Inquirer hailed Andorra [Kindle] as "a nearly perfect book . . . a work of remarkable and sustained invention and imagination." The Toronto Star said Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You [Kindle] is "considerably more sophisticated, subtle, and rewarding" than Catcher in the Rye. Peter has also written a play, two marvelous collections of short stories, and in his spare time he publishes extremely elegant handmade books in very limited editions at his Wallflower Press. His ravishing sixth novel, Coral Glynn [Kindle], is a top favorite on this year's queer lit poll. Tuesday night he stabbed my heart with an icicle, announcing two years after finishing Coral he still has no ideas for his next novel.

Jazz genius Billy Strayhorn spent his life in a jam: professionally, he couldn’t live with or without Duke Ellington. Gay in an intolerant time and homophobic musical subculture, he was lucky to be able to live and work openly behind the protective band leader. Yet Ellington took credit for Strayhorn’s music and made him work without a contract. Duke’s highest earning number, his signature tune, the holy grail of the era, Take the A Train, was, unknown to everyone at the time, written by Strayhorn, who never received any royalties. Ellington got rich. Strayhorn worked mainly to be able to work, without recognition or reward. But what work it is: Lush Life, Day Dream, Rain Check, Satin Doll, Chelsea Bridge, Lotus Blossom, Clementine, Johnny Come Lately, and many songs recorded by his dear friend Lena Horne, including Maybe, Something To Live For, and the double-edged Love Like This Can’t Last. As for his own “love like this,” within his first year in New York he and his boyfriend Aaron Bridgers moved in together and lived openly as a couple in Harlem, brave for 1940, when he was twenty-four. And, after a life of heavy drinking and constant smoking, when he died of cancer of the esophagus at fifty-one, he died not in Lena Horne’s arms as an oft-repeated story has it [she was in Europe], but with his partner Bill Grove. Although that was two years before Stonewall, Strayhorn worked in the early gay rights movement. Proving the depth of the prejudice he struggled against, even now the official Billy Strayhorn website completely de-gays him. We've had the prestigious biography for fifteen years; where is the Hollywood biopic?

Do you think Simon Amstell knew he was gay before or after he knew he was funny? At fourteen he appeared on a British morning chat show impersonating Dame Edna. The sweetness and malice stuck. Now 32, Simon's humor is sometimes branded "mean" or "horrible." (He prefers "cheeky.") True, he teased Amy Winehouse about her drinking, but as the host of Popworld from 2000 to 2006 he was often criticized for asking famous singers exactly what viewers wanted to know. One "notorious" incident was when Britney Spears appeared on the show long after rehab, court hearings to determine her stability, and public displays of erratic behavior, like shaving her head. Simon asked if she thought she'd "gone a bit nuts?" Britney cried, and people attacked Simon. To closeted Savage Garden singer Darren Hayes, Simon asked, "So, when are you going to come out, then?" Hayes said, "Excuse me?" Simon said, "You're obviously gay. Why won't you come out?" This was cut from the aired version. Hayes calls the incident pivotal in his finally coming out two years later and still refers to Simon as a "total prick." From October 2006 to January 2009, he hosted the comedy quiz show Never Mind the Buzzcocks, winning top category prizes from the Royal Television Society, the British Comedy Awards, and the Broadcast Awards. The Times named the show (during Simon's era) one of the best forty programs of the decade. In 2010 he co-created, co-wrote and co-starred in Grandma's House, an award-winning sitcom in which his hapless, neurotic, adorable character, a former quiz show host named Simon, returns to live with his cheerful, middle class family. It's now filming its second season.

Below, John Barrowman challenges him to a gay-off on Buzzcocks and a clip from Grandma's House. Click through for cheekier clips lampooning acting coaches and Ben Whishaw.

 

The New Yorker on Ryan Murphy's Reign of Camp

The New Yorker now costs seven dollars an issue. Write a funny caption for that.

One of the magazine's problems is generational, frantically pimping their iPad app to readers who at heart live in the 19th century. The new TV critic, Emily Nussbaum, pens a long essay about Ryan Murphy's gay camp ethos but you may sense some editorial creaks as she tries to convey her young, city ideas to an aging Westchester audience. Eighties' drag queen Lady Bunny but no Daniel Halperin? Nussbaum writes:

"In 1964, Susan Sontag, in her essay Notes on Camp described it as “a solvent of morality,” and that phrase hints at what is appealing about Murphy’s shows: his Tourettic impulse to offend, even in the midst of the sweetest love story. Camp originated as a private language, in an era when survival as a gay man meant learning to break codes—of male and female behavior, of normality and status. Murphy has taken this vernacular of the closet, and bent it, hard, toward an era of outness. It’s a mighty queer gambit, and one that aligns Murphy with a subset of gay showrunners whom I’ve rarely seen lumped together in critical conversation, perhaps for fear of risking offense.

"Among these is Alan Ball, who created Six Feet Under (the drama that produced David Fisher, the first truly complex gay male character on TV) and True Blood (with its dicey vampirism-as-gay-rights metaphor). There’s also Kevin Williamson, the creator of Dawson's Creek and the new horror show “The Following,” and the executive producer of “The Vampire Diaries”; Desperate Housewives’s Marc Cherry, who named every episode for a Sondheim reference; and Michael Patrick King, the man behind both the exquisitely campy Sex and the City and the execrably campy “2 Broke Girls.” In addition, there’s Silvio Horta, the creator of ABC’s sweet telenovela adaptation Ugly Betty an underrated comedy-drama that managed to celebrate both Queens and queens.

"Like several of these showrunners, Murphy loves divas and zingers. But he stands out for his aggressive attempts to punch right through TV’s lazier habits, stitching genres together like a mad scientist. Murphy’s finest set pieces evoke Charles Busch and Bertolt Brecht as well as Lady Bunny, theatrical figures willing to risk the ridiculous for a shot at the transcendent. If this approach occasionally results in episodes that resemble the bat-winged pig fetus from American Horror Story’s experimental lab, so what? Shock has value, too: it wakes us up."

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. Although in his first movie, Fighter Squadron, the 6'5" hunk 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 fifth season on January 28, 2013.

Richard Kramer's These Things Happen

Thirty-eight years ago, in October 1974, when Richard Kramer was still at Yale, he published a story in The New Yorker. Today is the release of his first novel. Long wait. You might think it prophetic that his story was called "Late Bloomers" -- or self-justifying that his novel is called These Things Happen [Kindle] -- but no, his talent flowered early. As a writer or producer, or both, on thirtysomething, My So-Called Life, Tales of the City, and Queer as Folk, among other projects, he earned five Emmy nominations. Those are some of the more literary tv shows of the past three decades and his novel has already been called "smart, funny, and insightful" by the Seattle Post Intelligencer. Critic Nancy Fontaine explains,

"Wesley and his oldest and closest friend Theo are growing up and attending private school in the city. Their days are filled with college coaches (you need an edge to get into Brown), soccer practice, homework, and hormones. Wesley is currently living with his father, a well-known and respected gay activist, and his father's boyfriend George, a former theater actor and co-owner of the restaurant above which they live. ("I'm not a very queenie queen," declares George.)

"Tenth grade appears to be going swimmingly, and Theo has just won the race for class president. Theo surprises everyone, including himself, when he announces, at the end of his acceptance speech, that he is gay and sets the true motion of the novel rolling. As Wesley tries to deal with this new reality and figure out how to have a relationship with important and unavailable father, everyone else in his life has to evaluate what Theo's revelation means. When an act of violence turns up the emotional volume, the results are often not pretty, even for these educated, well-meaning people.

"Although the first pages might give the impression of a light story and a quick read, These Things Happen is neither. We experience the action from the point of view of each main character in their distinctive and often charming voices as they stumble their way through a difficult situation and find their way back towards each other."

These Things Happen is one of my most anticipated books of the fall. If you enlarge the jacket image you'll see praise from Michael Cunningham and Julia Glass.

The Golden Gays

Gandalf + Claudius. Next year two gay knights Ian McKellen, 73, and Derek Jacobi, 74, will play a bickering, wisecracking, lovable old couple, Dorothy and Blanche, Freddie and Stuart, who've shared a cramped Covent Garden flat for fifty years in an ITV sitcom formerly announced as Vicious Old Queens, now called Vicious. Frances De La Tour, 68, will play their feisty friend. Obviously, the show needs some eye candy, to be provided by the hot young new neighbor who lives upstairs, Ash. (Expect endless Ass jokes.) The sitcom is created by Will & Grace writer Gary Janetti and playwright Mark Ravenhill. The initial season will be six episodes. 

Oscar Animated Longlist Includes Gay Python "Liar's Autobiography"

Yesterday the Academy announced the longlist of 17 films contending for best animated feature nominations, and among the big predictable fare like Brave, Lorax, ParaNorman, Frankenweenie, Hotel Transylvania, Ice Age, Madagascar, Pirates!, Rise of the Guardians, and Wreck-It Ralph, is the gay oddity, A Liar's Autobiography, based on Graham Chapman's memoir. Although the hard-partying Monty Python star died 23 years ago, the film is narrated with audio clips of his voice spliced with newer recordings from everyone else. The piecemeal ethos extends to the visuals, which were farmed out to 14 different animation houses, each using a different style for their unrelated episodes. Happily, the movie has not been degayed. The Washington Post reports, "a cartoon figure named Graham Chapman works through such issues as his alcoholism, promiscuity and confusion over his sexuality (he eventually decides he’s 70 percent gay, based on a survey he did with himself)." Bloomberg adds, the film "also addresses his homosexuality (if he was going to be a “raging poof,” he said, he would be “a butch one, with a pipe”)." Watch the trailer here.

The film is available now on Epix and is playing in Los Angeles, Seattle, and San Francisco. It opens in New York next Friday, November 9.

       

Read the full longlist of animated films after the jump.

Gay Men Having Babies in Fiction, Memoir, Movies, and TV

Today is the official pub date of Michael Lowenthal's fourth novel The Paternity Test about the tangled loyalties between a gay couple of ten years, Pat and Stu, who move from New York to Cape Cod, and their Brazillian surrogate mother, Debora, and her carpenter husband, Danny. Given Lowenthal's grace and insight in Charity Girl [Kindle], Avoidance, and The Same Embrace, the new book has to be deeper and more nuanced than the current wave of movies and tv about gay surrogacy.

Four months ago Touchstone published Hollywood fixture and Don Roos' partner Dan Bucatinsky's memoir Does This Baby Make Me Look Straight?: Confessions of a Gay Dad [Kindle]. Along with NPH, Gwyneth, Lisa, Jane, Rosie, Dan, Ayelet, and Shonda, someone named Terrence McNally also loved it, saying, “Few people make me laugh as much as Dan Bucatinsky, but I was not prepared this time to be crying between the guffaws. This is a book I will return to again and again for its humor, that's a no-brainer, but for its sly wisdom as well.” 

October 12 is the NYC release of Jonathan Lisecki's low budget comedy about a gay man and straight woman having a child together, Gayby. It's based on his 2010 short shown at more than 100 film festivals. This year the feature has screened at fests in LA, SF, Seattle, Tokyo, Athens, Nova Scotia, Kansas City, Memphis, Louisiana, North Carolina, Boston, and Houston, among others. Last week it won the audience award in Oslo.

Meanwhile, Ryan Murphy's surrogacy sitcom The New Normal has been steadily losing viewers week by week. Click now to watch the complete episodes, which will only be free until mid to late October. Facing the erosion of his series, Ryan yesterday announced that episode 10 will guest star Marlo Thomas and the Halloween episode will reference Honey Boo Boo. 

9/10  Pilot  (2.5/6)

9/11 "Sofa's Choice"  (2.5/7)

9/18 "Baby Clothes"   (2.2/6)

9/25 "Obama Mama"  (2.0/5)

Howdy, Cowboy #1

Does America's least populous state, Wyoming, have the highest number of good writers per capita? Annie Proulx, Gretel Ehrlich, Alexandra Fuller, Alison Hagy, C.J. Box, William Haywood Henderson (and his gay novel Native), and Craig Johnson. Last night we went to the library expecting Johnson to read; instead, he screened the pilot of the record-breaking new A&E series based on his novels about Absaroka County sheriff Walt Longmire. 

Johnson's first novel The Cold Dish [Kindle] won France's Le Prix du Polar Nouvel Observateur, and his fourth, Another Man's Moccasins [Kindle] won the Spur Award and was named the Mountains & Plains Book of the Year. He recently published the series' ninth volume, As the Crow Flies, which USA Today called, “a top-notch tale of complex emotions and misguided treachery… a superb novel steeped in the culture of the American West.” The Houston Chronicle said, “The pleasure of the series rests in Walt’s narration, with its laid-back, observant, bemused recounting of events…  Solid landscapes, a mélange of fully fleshed characters (familiar and new), drily laconic dialogue, and assorted power struggles keep the latest in this rich and satisfying series on engaging course.”

Born September 13: Nell Carter

Black, Jewish, lesbian, Republican Bush supporter...Gimme a Break! star Nell Carter fit a lot into her 4'11" frame. Her NYT obit quotes her wanting to be ''Judy Garland without the tragedy.'' She must have meant on stage, where she exuded a sunny, sassy, saucy persona in musicals like Ain't Misbehavin, for which she won a Tony and later an Emmy. Cast as Effie in the original production of Dreamgirls, she quit in preproduction to take a role on the soap opera Ryan's Hope, leaving all the accolades for Jennifer Holliday. Two months before that musical opened, Gimme a Break! debuted and lasted six seasons of Carter playing housekeeper and de facto mother to the white family of a widower police chief. Stephen Holden wrote it "revived the archetype of the mammy," and Carter had a fractious relationship with the show's producers who were eventually replaced. In the final season, the cast included a young Rosie O'Donnell, who was still closeted, and apparently things were quite frosty on set between the two lesbian comediennes. In the 1990s Carter was cast as Miss Hannigan in the revival of Annie and publicly suggested it was racism that caused the producers to use a television commercial featuring a white actress in her role.

In her private life, her struggles were vast. At sixteen she was raped and became pregnant, giving birth to her daughter Tracy. Later when she wanted to conceive, she had three miscarriages. Trying to adopt, she was twice thwarted at the very end of the process, once by a young woman who changed her mind and wanted to keep the baby, once by amateur extortionists. Finally, she succeeded in adopting two boys. She battled a cocaine addiction. In the early 80s, she attempted suicide. In the late 80s, her brother died of aids. All in 1992, she divorced her husband, had two aneurysms, and married her second husband, whom she divorced in 1993. In 1995 and again in 2002 she declared bankruptcy. She died of heart disease, complicated by diabetes, in 2003, at 54. She is survived by her partner Ann Kaser, who became guardian to Carter's children.

Born September 1: Tomlin, Casement, Stebbins, 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-one years. Compared to other longterm couples, say, Blake Edwards and Julie Andrews, their output has been phenomenal. 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 television shows Murphy Brown, The West Wing, Will & Grace, Desperate Housewives, and Damages. 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 they share a house off the Sunset Strip. Tomlin co-produced and narrated The Celluloid Closet, an act many took as her coming out. She's a hysterical actress, of course, 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.

Also born today: Roger Casement, the gay Irish rebel hanged by the Brits in 1916 and subject of Nobel winner Mario Vargas Llosa's fine new 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.

Watch the Full Pilot Episode of Ryan Murphy's The New Normal

Ryan Murphy joins the gay parenting bonanza with this new comedy about two men and their surrogate. It stars Ellen Barkin as a big big bigot, the cute guy from National Treasure and The Hangover, and one of the dudes from The Book of Mormon which is funny because a Mormon-owned Utah tv station is refusing to air the series. It premieres on NBC on September 11. Plenty of winces between the laughs. "You guys are gross." If you have trouble viewing, watch it here.

The unstoppable gay surrogate boom continues in September with the release of Michael Lowenthal's new novel The Paternity Test, which Stephen McCauley calls, “A good, old-fashioned page-turner and a sophisticated look at the mysteries of long-term love and the convoluted reasons for wanting a child. Lowenthal writes with intelligence and passion and made me care a great deal about the fates of his flawed, fascinating characters.”

More Gay Deaths: Vargas, O'Donnell, Hemsley

 

Butch lesbian ranchera singer Chavela Vargas has died at 93. Although she dropped hints all along and refused to change the female pronouns in love songs traditionally sung by men, she did not officially come out until she was 81. Responding to news of her death, Almodóvar, who used her music in his movies, wrote a long post called Adiós volcán: “Chavela Vargas made of abandonment and desolation a cathedral in which we all found a place.”

Tony winner for Hairspray, playwright, and infrequent New Yorker contributor, Mark O'Donnell collapsed in the lobby of his Upper West Side apartment building and died today at 58. I knew him briefly and very much admired his two sweet, quirky, gay novels Getting Over Homer and Let Nothing You Dismay. His two collections of comic pieces are Elementary Education: An Easy Alternative to Actual Learning and Vertigo Park and Other Tall Tales.

Ten days ago the actor who played George Jefferson died at 74 and he definitely didn't leave behind a Weezy of his own. Nor did he come out in his obituary, which called him a lifelong bachelor. Michael Musto writes a piece called "Sherman Hemsley Was A Gay! Deal With It!"