Band of Thebes

Born March 23: Steven Saylor/Aaron Travis, J.C. Leyendecker

London's Sunday Times says Steven Saylor "evokes the ancient world more convincingly than any other writer of his generation," evident across the twelve novels and two story collections of his Roma Sub Rosa series about Gordianus the Finder, including two CWA Historical Dagger Award finalists, Last Seen in Massilia and The Judgment of Caesar, the Lammy nominee The Venus Throw, and the Lammy winner Catilina's Riddle. Saylor may be best known for his 1,200-year epics Roma and Empire, international bestsellers published in twenty-two languages. He has also written two novels of his native Texas, most notably A Twist at the End about O. Henry and a series of murders in Austin in the 1880s. Last month came his sixteenth novel, Raiders of the Nile, which USA Today calls "exuberantly entertaining." He and Rick Solomon, partners since 1976, divide their time between Austin and Berkeley. An essay about their long relationship appears in My Mother's Ghost.

Earlier, Saylor was the bestselling gay erotica writer Aaron Travis. Maybe you don't want academic approval of your taboo-busting porn, but you do want results: Michael Bronski says Slaves of the Empire [Kindle] is "a high point of gay male writing in the second half of the twentieth century" that has achieved "near-mythological status," and he calls Blue Light [Kindle only 99 cents] "a contemporary supernatural masterpiece as frightening as anything H.P. Lovecraft or Stephen King ever wrote." Susie Bright agrees, saying it's "perhaps the most fantastic supernatural erotic thriller ever written." She selected his stories for at least two volumes of her mainly straight Best American Erotica series and to celebrate its tenth anniversary she asked readers to name their favorite piece from all ten volumes: The winner was The Hit [Kindle], which Saylor notes was inspired by the movies Carnival Story and Murder by Contract. William Burroughs' and John le Carré's work partially prompted Crown of Thorns about an American spy in Istanbul who submits to "a brutal Turkish stevedore." Other titles in the newly digitized Aaron Travis Erotic Library are Short, Brainy & Hot, Wild West, Wrestling Tales, Military Discipline, Eden and the horrifying Kudzu.

 

In the early 20th century when Arrow had 94% of market share, much of the shirtmaker's success could be laid with illustrator J.C. Leyendecker -- he used his chiseled boyfriend as the model for the archetypal Arrow Collar Man. Born in Germany in 1874, Leyendecker moved with his family to Chicago when he was eight. He and his brother enrolled at the city's Art Institute before studying art nouveau at the Académie Julian in Paris. They returned to Chicago early in 1899 and by May Leyendecker received his first commission for a cover of the era's most famous magazine, The Saturday Evening Post. Throughout his career he would draw 321 more covers for them, creating the genre of "adorable" domestic chaos, stirring patriotism, family holidays, lovers' foibles, and youthful high spirits (with scrawny nudity) that today we associate with his Eve Harrington protege and successor Norman Rockwell. Leyendecker was slight and disliked confrontation; when his friends warned him Rockwell was stealing his style, he didn't protest. (Being a gay man and an immigrant in the early 20th century may also have amplified his instincts to avoid trouble.) One area in which he maintained preeminence was the blatant homoerotic. Leyendecker's men eternally give one another penetrating looks inside, outdoors, and on deck, and they're always thrusting elongated objects at happy angles from their bodies. He never met a muscle that didn't need to beef up, ripple, or glisten under his expert touch. As his biographers  explain, “Neighboring artists shared models with the brothers, which meant a seemingly endless train of attractive Greenwich Village lads parading through their chilly studio in the buff.” One was named Charles Beach. He was 17 and Leyendecker was 28. By all accounts Beach was both hot and not, given to self aggrandizing claims that he did Leyendecker's work (despite not being able to draw), along with the more typical fits of jealousy, insecurity, and tyranny. Margo Channing Norman Rockwell complained he never heard Beach say anything intelligent and called him "stupid." Nevertheless, Leyendecker and Beach moved into a New Rochelle mansion together and threw luxe parties attended by the jazz age set including Scott and Zelda. Inevitably, times changed, the commissions dwindled, and the money ran out. They had to dismiss their staff yet they stayed together a total of 49 years, until Leyendecker's death in 1951 when he instructed his private papers be destroyed. For more, read J.C. Leyendecker or, yes, J. C. Leyendecker.

Leyendecker's artist brother F.X. Leyendecker also had an eye for masculine muscle, as with this barechested blacksmith, and for strategically placed missiles between shirtless swabbies (compare below). He became addicted to drugs and killed himself at 47.

    

    

SAG Nominations for Dallas Buyers Club, Behind the Candelabra

The Screen Actors Guild film nominations were more or less as expected, except for snubbing Robert Redford for All Is Lost. 

Dallas Buyers Club: "Gay History for Straight People"?

Opening today in New York and Los Angeles and next Friday in fourteen other markets is the feelgood aids drama Dallas Buyers Club guaranteed to get Matthew McConaughey his first Oscar nomination. With twenty-five reviews posted, Metacritic rates it an 84, meaning "universal acclaim." The trusty Andrew O'Hehir made it Salon's pick of the week, writing, "Despite its clichéd elements, Dallas Buyers Club is a fierce celebration of the unpredictable power that belongs to the outcast, the despised, the pariah. That’s not a story of the ‘80s, it’s a story of always."

Two days ago at Deadspin, Will Leitch posted a worthwhile essay called Dallas Buyers Club Is Gay History for Straight People, which concludes:

"This is all well-intentioned, but it's still obnoxious hokum, an important story so distilled and stripped of its essence that by the end, it's not about AIDS and the fight for new drugs at all. It could be about any disease, and any community: It becomes a story about a sick guy fighting The Man, man, to get well. And one point, McConaughey, while grocery shopping with Leto, runs into one of his old pals who can't believe he's hanging out with one of them crossdressing gays. McConaughey turns on his tough-guy face: "He's a person, just like you and me." This is a movie about the AIDS crisis that feels obliged to remind us that gays are people, "just like you and me." Ron Woodruff learns in the course of Dallas Buyers Club that gays are good people, thanks to the illness he now shares with many of them. You will forgive the audience for finding his conversion small solace and, well, pretty beside the fucking point."

Dallas Buyers Club and Mud

Focus has moved the release date of the true-story, straight-gay, uplifting aids movie Dallas Buyers Club five weeks earlier, from December 6 to November 1. Yesterday they unveiled the trailer.

In twenty years of acting since Dazed & Confused, guess which nude bongo banger has never been nominated for an Oscar or even a lousy Golden Globe? Last year ought to have been Matthew McConaughey's moment for a supporting nod, but I suspect he fell asunder of dreaded vote splitting -- the gay independent Bernie was his better performance while the homoerotic but degayed studio stripper flick Magic Mike grabbed all the attention (and earned him four big wins from the Spirit Awards, National Society of Film Critics, NY Film Critics, and the Village Voice film poll). Will it happen again in 2013? Because he's very good in Mud but all the hype will be for Dallas Buyers Club. [You know how Hollywood equates physical transformations with Real Acting. In Mud, he bravely went with scraggly hair, but for Dallas Buyers he lost all that weight! My god, not since Charlize played ugly (Best Actress), or Nicole wore that fake nose (Best Actress), or Jamie wore sunglasses (Best Actor), or Daniel got a wart (Best Actor)...]

Anyway, although it's not as powerful as the foreign Oscar winner In A Better World, Mud springs from the same roots of nice young teens making a series of increasingly bad decisions. Also, there's the friction of a classic, innocent boy crush on a charismatic, shirtless criminal. Anyone seeking a flicker of subtext might notice that this story arc climaxes late at night when McConaughy crawls through the boy's window and climbs into bed with him. Reese Witherspoon detractors / fans should note she is barely in the movie. It is the third impressive feature from 34 year-old director Jeff Nichols who wrote each of his films. Mud was released on dvd earlier this month or watch it right now.

Born January 19: Patricia Highsmith, Matthew Stadler

European critics consider Patricia Highsmith's twenty-two novels and eight story collections literary descendants of Dostoevsky and Kafka, but American readers know her work mainly as fodder for films: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Ripley's Game. She was most at home in the darker corners of her characters' twisted psyches and as often as not her protagonists expressed themselves through murder. Even in her first full-time job she excelled at creating dual lives, scripting comic book heroes Captain Midnight, Spy Smasher, and the Golden Arrow. Her childhood was divided between Fort Worth and New York and her emotions were split between similar extremes: loving and loathing her stepfather and her mother who claimed to have tried to abort her by drinking turpentine. Highsmith said her unhappiest year was when her parents abandoned her with her grandmother at 12, yet throughout her life she seemed to seek the intensity of crisis and discord, pushing her friends to fight and her lovers to leave. One former girlfriend, the portraitist Allela Cornell, killed herself by swallowing nitric acid. Another girlfriend was Marijane Meaker, whose work you may know under her pen names Vin Packer, Ann Aldrich, or M. E. Kerr. A woman who didn't become a girlfriend was the frosty, smoldering blond young married mother in Bloomingdales who sent Highsmith into a fever of longing and productivity, resulting in her second novel, The Price of Salt [Kindle]. If you still think queer visibility began with Stonewall, this lesbian book sold nearly a million copies in 1952. And unlike Gore Vidal's 1948 gay novel The City and the Pillar, hers has a happy ending. (Though, unlike Gore, she used a pseudonym, Claire Morgan.) Sarah Waters thinks so highly of The Price of Salt she said it alone warranted Highsmith's inclusion in the National Gallery show Gay Icons. Alcoholic, anti-American, anti-Semitic, stingy, and racist, Highsmith lived in Switzerland for more than thirty years and died, intentionally alone, at 74. She left her estate of several million dollars to Yaddo, where she had rewritten her first novel, Strangers on a Train, at Truman Capote's urging.

Joan Schenkar's illuminating and entertaining biography, The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith [Kindle] again proves difficult characters often make the most riveting reading. Schenkar also edited Patricia Highsmith: Selected Novels and Short Stories. Reader Lori Hahn recommends M.E. Kerr/Marijane Meaker's Highsmith: A Romance of the 1950's [Kindle].

 

The first book editor for Seattle's The Stranger, the first literary editor for nest, Matthew Stadler wrote four gay novels in the 90s. After Landscape: Memory (a high school student's jottings from WWI era San Francisco), The Dissolution of Nicholas Dee (an art historian's surreal jaunt through the Netherlands, with dwarfs and orphans), and The Sex Offender (the Orwellian, unsuccessful "rehabilitation of a male teacher who had an affair with a 12 year-old boy), his fiction culminated with Allan Stein, a funny, beautiful, and disturbing novel again mixing art criticism, historical settings, foreign travel, and sex with students in this tale about a tutor hired to teach Gertrude Stein's 15 year-old nephew in Paris in the early 1900s. Despite his transgressive preoccupations, Stadler's work was embraced by the mainstream enough to win him a Guggenheim, a Merrill, and a Whiting, but no sales, and at 40 in 1999 he turned away from fiction to focus on urban planning, the positive aspects of sprawl, and publishing. He's edited four anthologies including the urban theory reader Where We Live Now and has a forthcoming book next month about two projects in the Dutch city Deventer. He founded Clear Cut Press in Portland in 2001, and in 2009 he cofounded Publication Studio, a successful print on demand model for books that has spread to seven other cities and earlier this week brought out Stephen Boyer's novel Parasite. Even his ardent fans may be unaware that after a dozen-year break, Stadler self-published his fifth novel in 2011. He compares Chloe Jarren’s La Cucaracha set in Guanajuato, Mexico to an international mystery a la John Le Carré that explores "the mongrel dynamism, the deluded optimism of 21st century neo-liberal politics."

Flagrant Conduct by Dale Carpenter

Four cops walk into an apartment. Two don't see anything, one sees oral sex, and one sees anal sex that he says continues for two more minutes while he watches. What sounds like the set up to a bad joke was a set up of a very different kind -- a disgruntled neighbor calling the police to claim a black man was "going crazy with a gun" in the next apartment. No gun. But the officers did notice homoerotic drawings and arrested the men for sodomy, even though they weren't having sex. In fact, they were clothed. The arrests on September 17, 1998 also set up one of our greatest legal battles, Lawrence v. Texas, the landmark case that overturned the nation's antigay sodomy laws. The lying -- both by the police and the gay couple -- is just one of many revelations Dale Carpenter has uncovered through remarkable journalistic detective work in his new book Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas [Kindle]. Generations of historians, legal scholars, and gay readers will be indebted to him.

I started the book wary that one court case could hold my attention, yet I was enthralled. The large cast comes vividly to life, from the heroic gay bartender who convinced Lawrence to pursue a case against the state to the helpful closeted gay men at the sheriff's department. Despite knowing the outcome, I found the Supreme Court testimony particularly harrowing for the dawning sense that it might so easily have gone against us if the lawyer arguing to uphold the antigay law wasn't such a dunce. My only quibble comes from the unchallenged quote of a joyful gay man sobbing at the decision, saying finally he is no longer a second-class citizen. Of course we still are. But this groundbreaking book brings us one step closer.

Dahlia Lithwick unravels the case in a terrific 3,500-word essay in The New Yorker.

[Bias alert: My partner and I are hosting Dale's book party in DC next week.]

Born January 5: Alvin Ailey

Growing up in Texas, Alvin Ailey hid his dancing from his disapproving mother for two years and when she first saw him backstage in make-up, she slapped his face. His terror of her homophobia lasted decades, to his final days, so much so that when he was dying of aids at fifty-eight in 1989 he asked his doctor to lie about the cause on his death certificate. That fear outlives him. A CBS profile from August 2008 celebrates the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater's 50th anniversary with great dancing and an American success story of a black troupe thriving in a typically white corner of the arts. It omits any mention that he was gay, or gay people's contribution to dance, that he died of aids, or aids' toll on the arts. It also erases the more complicated aspects of Ailey's life, like his devastating arthritis, his addiction to cocaine, or his dependence on lithium. His private demons never obscured his public genius. One of the seventy-nine dances he choreographed, Revelations, set to spirituals and gospel music, is among the most popular and most seen ballets of the twentieth-century.

"Festa Barocca" photo by Andrea Mohin/NYT

Thank You, Team Köln

Men's Relay. Team Dallas won gold in the 30-34 age group, host city Team Köln won bronze. Click top and below to enlarge.

Texan GOP Platform Full-Scale Attack on Gays: Criminalize Homosexuality, End Partner Benefits, Stop Acceptance

The GOP in nation's second largest state has released its 2010 platform calling to criminalize homosexuality, to jail anyone who issues a same-sex marriage license, to prohibit any form of partner benefits, and to stop acceptance of gay people. Among other fearmongering, the platform states that homosexuality, "leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases."

Read these excerpts from the Texas GOP platform so you know what we're up against. (More at Towleroad.) Don't fool yourself that you live in a world unconnected to Texas. Their governor Rick Perry (pictured) wants to be president; it's happened four times in the past twelve elections. And the audacity of their sweeping antigay position will embolden homophobes everywhere.

"Homosexuality – We believe that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society, contributes to the breakdown of the family unit, and leads to the spread of dangerous, communicable diseases. Homosexual behavior is contrary to the fundamental, unchanging truths that have been ordained by God, recognized by our country’s founders, and shared by the majority of Texans. Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable “alternative” lifestyle in our public education and policy, nor should “family” be redefined to include homosexual “couples.” We are opposed to any granting of special legal entitlements, refuse to recognize, or grant special privileges including, but not limited to: marriage between persons of the same sex (regardless of state of origin), custody of children by homosexuals, homosexual partner insurance or retirement benefits. We oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values.

"Texas Sodomy Statutes – We oppose the legalization of sodomy. We demand that Congress exercise its authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to withhold jurisdiction from the federal courts from cases involving sodomy.

"Marriage Licenses – We support legislation that would make it a felony to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple and for any civil official to perform a marriage ceremony for such.

"Family Values – We affirm that this section is a response to the attacks on traditional family values. These include well- funded, vigorous political and judicial attempts by powerful organizations and branches of the government to force acceptance, affirmation and normalization of homosexual behavior upon school children, parents, educational institutions, businesses, employees, government bodies and religious institutions and charities. These aggressive, intolerant efforts marginalize as bigots anyone who dissents."

Looking forward to the Annise Parker's response as the mayor of Houston, a Democrat, and a lesbian.

Born March 10: John Rechy

Although Scottish-Mexican-American John Rechy doesn't want to be ghettoized as a gay writer, his most important work pioneered a new type of literature honestly depicting men who have sex with men. In 1963 his first novel, City of Night, followed the aimless encounters of a nameless hustler turning tricks in New York, Los Angeles, and New Orleans, crosscut with memories of his childhood in El Paso. By making his protagonist anonymous and introducing a succession of minor characters seen only briefly, Rechy re-emphasized the sensation of hustling for the reader. (He knew his trade: He continued to work as a prostitute on Santa Monica Blvd even after the book became a surprise hit, even after he became a professor at UCLA, even after he turned forty.) Decades later in 2003, a NYT critic called City of Night a "bona fide cult classic," "deservedly considered a milestone of transgressive fiction." That was not the consensus when it first appeared. And after thirteen books, his literary awards are limited to an NEA grant and lifetime achievement recognitions from PEN West, Publishing Triangle, and the ONE Foundation.

Rechy's second novel, Numbers, trod the same path as City of Night but from another direction: a slightly older Johnny Rio returns to L.A. for a ten day binge not as an escape but to recapture his previous glory; some readers see Johnny Rio as using sex not merely to confirm his desirability but also as a means to find a greater connection and begin to forge a gay identity. For 1967, that was a big step. Among Rechy's ten other novels are Rushes, Bodies and Souls, The Coming of Night, Marilyn's Daughter (about a girl who believes herself to the love child of Marilyn Monroe and Bobby Kennedy), and his much-praised The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez. His three works of nonfcition are The Sexual Outlaw, Beneath the Skin: Collected Essays, and last year's memoir, About My Life and the Kept Woman, which the best read man in the East Village says is very good. Seventy-six today, Rechy lives in West Hollywood with Michael, his partner of twenty-nine years.

Outside Austin, Texas

A day driving west of Austin, from Barton Creek (pop. 1,589 and richest town in the state) to Llano (with its disquieting motto, "The Way Texas Used To Be") to Bertram ("Home of the Oatmeal Festival"). The spectacular limestone and pink granite hill country was visible intermittently between lashing storms. 

Robert Leleux's "The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy"

Of all the forms of Mother Love, is any more ardently supersized than a Texan gay boy's? To prove it, here comes Robert Leleux's first book, The Memoirs of a Beautiful Boy, of which Kirkus says,

The author's slightly histrionic recollections contain over-the-top set pieces regarding his evangelical school, Mother's hair treatment (she winds up with a cheap wig glued to her bald head) and her impromptu boob and lip augmentations. The text is lush with simile, verdant with metaphor and generally permeated with writerly flair. Though the author calls it a memoir, it reads more like a comic novel with considerable theatrical panache. Addressing his readers as "mes petites," the beautiful boy frequently seems to speak to a special audience. Extravagantly solipsistic.

The story is: His father walks out on them in 1996 when Robert is sixteen, enabling mother and son to devote 100% of their time on their mutual adoration, but also leaving them broke. From their drab house in Petunia they drive each Saturday to Houston's Neiman Marcus to get their hair and nails done. Despite his love of the salon, Liza, Dina, and Lillian Hellman, Robert somehow doesn't realize until he's seventeen that he's gay. His mother says how could you not be? After the ceremony to legally change his name to his partner's, Michael Leleux who was his boyfriend in their hostile high school, Robert's grandfather says, "Better a man than a Yankee girl."