Band of Thebes

When Gay Characters Happen to Straight Authors...

Know how when you read old-timey novels from the 1960s and 70s in which white authors suddenly tried to do black characters? And the results were jive? We've entered a similar period now, when straight authors are going gay for straight editors and straight readers, none of whom knows our actual history (as with Jo Becker) or the emotional layers of their queer characters. The current disappointing example is last week's fiction in The New Yorker, Madame Lazarus, narrated by an elderly gay man in Paris whose much younger boyfriend gets him a dog to compensate for his many absences during distant business trips. Here are his thoughts on their relationship:

"James is young, far younger than I. When you are the older man, you can be equal, for a time. He has youth and beauty, but you have money and experience. You know many people, and you can take him to Portofino, to Biarritz, to Capri. It is an old story."

Here, as in the entire story, there's nothing unique to the experience of being gay. It might all have been written about an older man and his trophy wife then switched to a gay couple in the final draft. Unfortunately, the flat, trite statements extend everywhere. He says, "I am older now than I thought possible. I did not believe I would ever be this ancient person." And the story evinces zero sense of Paris or the French. The piece's one shocker is that it's written by the reliable Maile Meloy, whose Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It really is worth reading.

A more promising gay male character from a straight author can be found in The Signature of All Things [and Kindle], out today in paperback. One crucial man is a 19th-century globetrotting gentle white Bostonian who discovers sex with a young South Pacific warrior, but back in the states his gay ways bring a world of hurt. Like many readers, I could overlook the book's baggy style and constant repetitions in order to spend several decades with an appealing lady botanist who travels from her native Philadelphia to Tahiti to Amsterdam. With echoes of Andrea Barrett and A.S. Byatt, Elizabeth Gilbert fashions her own enjoyable trip.

St. Aubyn and Hollinghurst

Today's much-too-long New Yorker profile of Edward St. Aubyn has at least two noteworthy details: 1) he named his daughter Eleanor, the same as the atrocious mother in the Melrose novels and 2) contrary to those novels' plot, his own mother, Lorna, merely threatened to leave Le Plan, their fabled 80-acre estate in Provence, to a New Age group but in fact she sold it to him. Ian Parker writes: 

"The year that he lost the Booker [2006], St. Aubyn sold Le Plan to a “very nice and massively rich” French family that reminded him of characters in the Babar books. His mother had died, after a series of stokes, the previous year, between the delivery and the publication of a novel that described her physical and cognitive decline. She had no more money. St. Aubyn had by then given himself a few years to experience Le Plan through the eyes of his son. For Lucian, “it wasn’t filled with these dark and complex meanings,” he said. “He just thought it was completely fabulous, as indeed it was. You know, there were cherry trees and apricot trees with ladders leaning against them—you could climb up and have an apricot. And frogs, and a series of ponds, and goldfish, and water lilies: this little fiefdom, this hamlet, which took quite a long time for a small boy to walk around.”

"Alan Hollinghurst had visited Le Plan several times in previous years, and had written parts of The Line of Beauty there. Just before the property changed hands, he came to stay with St. Aubyn, and they went from building to building, deciding what should be added to a bonfire that burned for three weeks. As St. Aubyn recalled, “I’d be saying, ‘Oh my God, I remember getting this suit!’ There would be, of course, a story attached to everything. And I’d look at Alan, who’d say”—firm, low voice—“ ‘Burn it.’ ” After a while, St. Aubyn skipped the anecdotes; Hollinghurst continued to say, “Burn it.”

Read the entire profile here. Get St. Aubyn's new novel Lost for Words [and Kindle].

National Magazine Awards: Fast Company, New York, The New Yorker

Lesbian Ariel Levy's painful essay about her late miscarriage while traveling in Mongolia was one of four writing awards for The New Yorker this afternoon at the Ellies, but a big winner was New York (for best general interest publication, best design, and best website), while Fast Company was named magazine of the year. Zadie Smith won the fiction prize for her short story The Embassy of Cambodia. Read it free.

Full list of all winners after the jump.

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."

Ariel Levy's "Thanksgiving in Mongolia"

The most devastating queer essay you'll read today: Intrepid lesbian New Yorker reporter Ariel Levy at 38 went alone to Ulaanbaatar when she was five months pregnant and five years married, and suddenly she was neither. She writes, "People were alarmed when I told them where I was going, but I was pleased with myself. I liked the idea of being the kind of woman who’d go to the Gobi Desert pregnant, just as, at twenty-two, I’d liked the idea of being the kind of girl who’d go to India by herself. And I liked the idea of telling my kid, “When you were inside me, we went to see the edge of the earth.”

Mixed with the inescapable foreboding are lighter details like a twelve-year expat consultant from Tennessee telling her, "You’re talking about an economy based on yak meat and goat hair." She goes to "an underground gay bar called 100 Per Cent—which could have been in Brooklyn, except that everyone in Mongolia still smoked indoors. I liked sitting in a booth in a dark room full of smoking, gay Mongolians, but my body was feeling strange." 

Two pages later her happiness is shattered and she thinks, "this change in fortune was my fault. I had boarded a plane out of vanity and selfishness, and the dark Mongolian sky had punished me." Read it.

So far, her only book is Female Chauvinist Pigs [Kindle].

Hilton Als on Gay Troubles in White Girls

Finally out from one of the boldest critics at The New Yorker, Hilton Als' White Girls covers a multitude of outsiderness, especially being gay. Junot Diaz calls the book, "The read of the year." Als gave an interview to Frederick McKindra, with these exchanges:

FMcK: It was really heartening to see your description of a powerful love existing between two black men –- one gay and the other straight [a character only referenced by the initials SL]. I didn’t realize how unique that experience would be until reading the essay “Triste Tropique” in your book.

HA: I think it’s just the feeling of connection. One of the things that’s happened recently with gay rights is that people can get married and all of that, but I don’t know how much that’s really going to solve the sense of being outside of things that gay people feel in general. I just think that gay marriage, outside of the Civil Rights which is a great, great thing, it’s not really a Band-Aid on the profound sense of isolation that gay people, particularly gay people of color, can feel. And how much we have to improvise around the gay status quo. When I met SL (and I also want to stress that half of that stuff is fictionalized), he had this great capacity to love and also to be loved, but it’s not without complications, which I also wanted to show. I also wanted to show how two men of color together can be very upsetting to the status quo in general.

FMcK: White men continue to bedevil a certain type of black gay man, a sentiment that arises here in “Triste Tropique.” Were you aware of that bedevilment when exploring your relationship to K -- a gay white man you seemingly fall for in that piece?

HA: He’s very sexy for all the reasons that I say, and then in general I think people are attracted to what they are not, unless they’re really deep narcissists. But I think the history of this country is so fucked up about that, we’re still thinking about it on some level as the forbidden, or that it’s inappropriate. I never understood that. Something like Another Country, on some deep level doesn’t make sense to me because it’s all about [that].

PW gave it a starred review. In the NYT, Rich Benjamin wrote:

"Hilton Als, in the fierce style of street reading and the formal tradition of critical inquiry, reads culture, race and gender in his new essay collection, White Girls. Here, reading becomes psychoanalytic self-exhibition, complete with insights on identity, sexuality, voice and the attainment of knowledge. He also reads the white girls who love so many queers, but could always love more.

"And what’s not to love? Young and recently dumped, a lovesick Als flees his family’s cramped Brooklyn apartment to visit the fashion-industry icon Diana Vreeland on Martha’s Vineyard during the summer of 1981. Vreeland, in white shift and straw hat, greets the ingénue as he gets off the boat: “Come on, let’s go to the supermarket and get a chicken.”

"A gay black man, Als portrays gay black men’s longing to cherish what they cannot sexually love, the putative opposite of themselves, yet the emblem with which they deeply identify: white girls. Als admires and loathes white girls, mocks and mimics white girls, is ignored by white girls, is depended on by white girls, is perceived to be a white girl. “White girls,” he shows, is not just literal people. It’s a state of mind, an art of being."

Ariel Levy Profiles Edith Windsor in The New Yorker

In a long fact piece for The New Yorker called "The Perfect Wife," lesbian staff writer Ariel Levy profiles lesbian plantiff Edith Windsor and includes her lesbian lawyer Roberta Kaplan. Triple the awesomeness. Read it here.

It begins:

“Fuck the Supreme Court!” Edith Windsor said, one hideously hot morning in June, when she’d had just about enough. Then she sighed and mumbled, “Oh, I don’t mean that.” What she really meant was that she was hot, she was tired of waiting, and, most of all, she was tired of being told what to do. “I’m feeling very manhandled!” she said.

It was Windsor’s eighty-fourth birthday, and she was spending it staring at a laptop screen as information from scotusblog.com flashed by in a typeface too small for her to read comfortably. Four years earlier, Windsor’s partner of more than forty years, Thea Spyer, died, leaving Windsor her sole heir. The two were legally married in Canada, in 2007, but, because of the Defense of Marriage Act, Windsor was not eligible for the exemption on estate tax that applies to husbands and wives. She had to pay $363,053 in taxes to the federal government, and $275,528 to New York State, and she did not think that was fair. So, with the help of her attorney, Roberta Kaplan, Windsor sued the United States. “When I saw it in print on the brief—Edith Windsor v. the United States of America—for a moment I panicked,” she said. “Then I thought, If Robbie’s not terrified, I’m not terrified.” But the waiting was getting to her. Once, when Spyer was alive, Windsor attended a meeting with the head of the Human Rights Coalition, at which someone asked him about gay marriage. He replied that it was something that ought to be dealt with later. Windsor stood up and barked, “I’m seventy-seven years old, and I can’t wait!”

Windsor first sought representation for her suit in 2009; she approached a number of gay-rights organizations. “I was told it was the wrong time for the movement,” she said. So a friend of a friend introduced her to Roberta Kaplan, who had been co-counsel on the (unsuccessful) case for marriage equality in New York State in 2006 but usually works at the furthest extreme from gay-rights non-profits. As a partner at the corporate law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, she has numbered among her clients J. P. Morgan Chase and Fitch Ratings. Kaplan is a vigorous, highly assertive forty-seven-year-old, who wears a Rolex and drives an Audi. (Recently, she took her wife, Rachel Lavine, and their seven-year-old son, Jacob, to Yellowstone, on her way back from a conference in Montana. I asked if they had camped out. “Yes,” Kaplan said. “At the Four Seasons.”) . . .

Read more.

Born September 4: Mary Renault, George Hoyningen-Huene

After receiving her degree from Oxford in 1928, Mary Renault became a nurse in Bristol, aiding soldiers injured at Dunkirk and later assisting in the brain surgery ward, leading to her first novel, Purposes of Love (1939), set in a contemporary hospital. She knew the subject well, having fallen in love with another nurse, Julie Mullard, who would be her life partner for fifty years. Renault’s first five novels each had contemporary settings and vaguely or overtly lesbian themes, the strongest in her third novel, The Friendly Young Ladies (1943). Her fourth book earned her $150,000 from MGM, which Renault and Mullard used to leave the repressive, post-war, antigay atmosphere of England for the relative freedom of South Africa. (They participated in many Black Sash events, for white women against apartheid, begun in 1955.) Established there, Renault wrote The Charioteer (1953), her first novel with a male protagonist, a gay WWII soldier who discovers that his hidden love for an older former schoolmate is returned. Her artistic breakthrough came with her next novel, again with a gay male protagonist, but set in the more open world of Ancient Greece,
which would be her hallmark for the rest of her writing career, in seven additional novels, a biography, and a study of the Persian Wars. Two of those novels tell the life story of Theseus, who in Greek mythology killed the Minotaur thanks to Ariadne’s help, and three other novels cover the life of Alexander the Great, including one narrated by his lover Bagoas, The Persian Boy [Kindle] (1972), her most praised work. It ranks 32nd on Publishing Triangle's list of the 100 best lgbt novels. In 2010, Renault was shortlisted for the Lost Booker prize for her 1970 novel about bisexual Alexander the Great, Fire from Heaven [Kindle]. (The award was given to another historical novel, J.G. Farrell's Troubles, about Ireland after WWI.)

In January, Daniel Mendelsohn published an essay in The New Yorker about how reading Renault's novels led him to realize he's gay. He wrote her a letter and their correspondence lasted eight years.

 

The only son born to a Baltic nobleman and the daughter of an American diplomat, Baron George Hoyningen-Huene was a teen when his family fled the Russian Revolution, leaving St. Petersburg first for London then for Paris. By twenty-five he was the top photographer at French Vogue, creating iconic images like this one of Josephine Baker. At thirty he met his younger boyfriend, the photographer and eager nude model below, Horst P. Horst. Four years later he moved to New York, where Hoyningen-Huene shot for Harpers Bazaar and published two books on Greece and Egypt, and Horst moved in with Valentine Lawford (with whom he stayed fifty-three years and raised an adopted son, Richard Horst). Hoyningen-Huene headed for Hollywood and his stunning star portraits -- of Dietrich, Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Garbo at 46 -- went deeper than surface glamor. Beyond studio stills, he also worked on films, most notably several collaborations with Cukor, choosing lighting, colors, and designing the title sequence. He died in Los Angeles at sixty-eight. Get William Ewing's book The Photographic Art of Hoyningen-Huene.

Gay "Dark Arts" in The New Yorker

While I was chasing birds around Alaska, the New Yorker published Ben Marcus's story The Dark Arts, about a 20-something American slacker with an autoimmune disorder who travels to Düsseldorf for experimental treatments he can't afford. Waiting for his (delayed? ex-?) girlfriend to join him, Julian stays in a hostel where the men have sex with one another at night. From the very first paragraph:

"The beds in the old gymnasium were singles, which didn’t keep certain of the guests from coupling when the lights went out. Sometimes Julian could hear them going at it, fornicating as if with silencers on. He studied the sounds when he couldn’t sleep, picturing the worst... In the morning he could never tell just who had been making love. The men dressed and left for the day, avoiding eye contact, mesmerized in the glow of their cell phones."

Inevitably, later in the story one of the frisky men tries Julian. He's asleep, he's aroused, he responds, he freaks. 

"That night at the hostel, a visitor came to Julian’s bed. Some uninvited man crept under his covers while he slept, and Julian woke up—suddenly, rudely, confused. This man was taking liberties. Before much could happen—before disgrace and shame and, who knows, the implication that he was even remotely O.K. with this—he’d fled to the bathroom.

"His heart was blasting, his sleep shirt damp and twisted. From the bathroom, looking back out into the gymnasium, the air thick with sleep, he saw no sign of anything. No man, no sounds, just beds and bodies and darkness. It was as if the stranger had vanished. Hands had been on him while he slept, and when he thought about it he saw himself lying there reciprocating. He couldn’t piece it together. What in the goddam hell had happened? He checked his body everywhere, testing. For evidence? Damage?

"He’d been touched, that he was sure of. He’d been touched, it had happened, and now there was nothing to be done about it. He crouched in a bathroom stall, trying to think. Some scene in whatever he’d been dreaming—he’d been having some kind of intense dream, oh, God—had allowed this to happen, had made him stay longer in his bed than he should have. As if he were enjoying it. He’d been dreaming of cuddling, and not with Hayley, but big deal. That was how it worked. You could date the whole world in your dreams, and it was O.K. You could, actually, date-rape the whole world in a dream, too....and wake up crying. So fucking what. The point is, he was cuddling someone in his dream, and he was doing it in that squirming way, he had to admit, that he hoped might lead to more, and then he woke up beside a body, and what were you supposed to do? There was no way not to respond. Anyone would. It could have been a dog and he would have nuzzled into it, feeling something. He was aroused, technically, but he had been aroused before the man crawled into bed with him, so this was bullshit."

Without spoilers, let's say Julian's awakening isn't over. Finally, his girlfriend does show up, and guess what...

The entire story is available free, without registration. Read an interview about it here. Ben Marcus's most recent novel is The Flame Alphabet [Kindle].

Lesbians, Lesbians, Lesbians: The New Yorker at It Again

 

2011, 2012, and now 2013 for Mothers' Day. What's a gay man have to do to get some frontage? Well, look to the past. Two years before DOMA, ten years before Massachusetts enacted marriage equality, Tina Brown ran the pink cover below left in 1994. Of course as George Chauncey proved, queer visibility was rampant in the 20s and 30s. Just look at these not-so-ambiguous covers, like the crude number from 1939 showing limp-wristed men leaving Sloppy Dicks.

  

Born March 13: Lori Ostlund, Janet Flanner

Growing up in a Minnesota town of 413 people, Lori Ostlund became a traveler in earnest after grad school in 1991 when she moved to Spain and frequently crossed over to Morocco. She has since lived in Albuquerque, Malaysia, and Chapel Hill where she was the Kenan Visting Writer at UNC, and now she and her partner Anne are back in San Francisco. Her smalltown upbringing and various journeys are all reflected in her outstanding first book, The Bigness of the World [Kindle]. It won a Flannery O'Connor Award, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and a Publishing Triangle Award for debut fiction. Two of its stories appeared in the Best American Stories 2010 and the PEN/O. Henry Stories 2011. In a starred review, PW said, "Each piece is sublime." She says on her site, "I find a lack of curiosity unforgivable." Read her.

How did Janet Flanner get the first installment of her famous "Letter from Paris" published in The New Yorker (which would run her column fortnightly for fifty years) and how did she get her pen name Genêt? Both answers: Harold Ross. A restless Hoosier educated in Chicago, Flanner had left Manhattan and her husband to travel in Europe with her lover Solito Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson) and from Paris she wrote to Jane Grant, Ross's wife. In 1925 Ross was still struggling to find the top notch writing he wanted for his new magazine, less than a year old, and he decided to publish Flanner's letter without asking her permission and therefore needed a nom de plume, choosing what he mistakenly thought was French for Janet.

Flanner knew virtually every important person in Paris for decades but also wrote about Algeria, Hungary invaded by the Russians, the Sinai War, and dozens of other topics in her signature style. She won a National Book Award in 1966. The center of a far reaching circle of lesbian friends, she was a constant presence at Natalie Barney's salons and in Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's living room and with the many other prominent lesbians discussed in Paris Was a Woman and, more obliquely, in her own otherwise outstanding memoir Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939. She was equally at home with Gide and Cocteau as she was with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she never lost her knack for being at the elbow of history: She was on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer when they had their famous fracas and rather than ducking she came between them. Although they occasionally had separate affairs, Flanner and Solano remained committed to each other and lived together for fifty years. Solano died in 1975, when she was eighty-seven; Flanner died in 1978, when she was eighty-six. Last fall she was the cover girl for the Hide/Seek catalog.

Daniel Mendelsohn on Mary Renault

Two weeks ago, you learned Daniel Mendelsohn at twelve began "to understand what I was and what I wanted; and I knew that I wasn't alone" after finding the young gay lovers in Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven and The Persian Boy. Daniel's recollections are very moving at first but the story of his subsequent correspondence with the novelist is so personal, some readers may find the full essay extends beyond their captivation.

As journalism morphs toward tv, even The New Yorker's nonfiction now requires video chats. Luckily, he's a natural, at home in Chelsea. For more, get his NBCC nominated Waiting for the Barbarians [Kindle].

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 March 13: Lori Ostlund, Janet Flanner

Growing up in a Minnesota town of 413 people, Lori Ostlund became a traveler in earnest after grad school in 1991 when she moved to Spain and frequently crossed over to Morocco. She has since lived in Albuquerque, Malaysia, San Francisco, and now Chapel Hill where she is the Kenan Visting Writer at UNC. Her smalltown upbringing and various journeys are all reflected in her outstanding first book, The Bigness of the World [Kindle]. It won a Flannery O'Connor Award, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and a Publishing Triangle Award for debut fiction. Two of its stories appeared in the Best American Stories 2010 and the PEN/O. Henry Stories 2011. In a starred review, PW said, "Each piece is sublime." She says on her site, "I find a lack of curiosity unforgivable." Read her.

How did Janet Flanner get the first installment of her famous "Letter from Paris" published in The New Yorker (which would run her column fortnightly for fifty years) and how did she get her pen name Genêt? Both answers: Harold Ross. A restless Hoosier educated in Chicago, Flanner had left Manhattan and her husband to travel in Europe with her lover Solito Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson) and from Paris she wrote to Jane Grant, Ross's wife. In 1925 Ross was still struggling to find the top notch writing he wanted for his new magazine, less than a year old, and he decided to publish Flanner's letter without asking her permission and therefore needed a nom de plume, choosing what he mistakenly thought was French for Janet.

Flanner knew virtually every important person in Paris for decades but also wrote about Algeria, Hungary invaded by the Russians, the Sinai War, and dozens of other topics in her signature style. She won a National Book Award in 1966. The center of a far reaching circle of lesbian friends, she was a constant presence at Natalie Barney's salons and in Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's living room and with the many other prominent lesbians discussed in Paris Was a Woman and, more obliquely, in her own otherwise outstanding memoir Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939. She was equally at home with Gide and Cocteau as she was with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she never lost her knack for being at the elbow of history: She was on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer when they had their famous fracas and rather than ducking she came between them. Although they occasionally had separate affairs, Flanner and Solano remained committed to each other and lived together for fifty years. Solano died in 1975, when she was eighty-seven; Flanner died in 1978, when she was eighty-six. Last fall she was the cover girl for the Hide/Seek catalog.

The New Yorker Profiles the Tyler Clementi Case

This week, The New Yorker's lead story is a lumbering, 12,800-word rehash of gay Rutgers student Tyler Clementi's suicide and his roommate's upcoming trial for invasion of privacy. The magazine too rarely covers gay topics, and this, their one take on gay teen suicide, doesn't include any of the major issues facing most gay teen suicides. It's like reporting on Africa by touring the Seychelles. People are drawn to this case because it exploits fears of internet exposure and because it's just plain sad. Yet it has nothing to say about actual bullying, unresponsive or complicit school officials, family rejection, extreme isolation, religious bigotry, or antigay politicking, or about unlikely pockets of support. Many people will read the piece and come away thinking it's a heartbreaking tale of a lonely college kid who made a terrible choice on a bad night... but what are angry gays complaining about? (Clementi was not outed by the hidden webcam and a total of maybe seven people saw images for a few seconds of him and another guy with their shirts off and their jeans on. His text messages after discovering the spying are full of lols and hahahaha and that all in all his roomie was "pretty decent," though hours later he did request a roommate change.) If you can get past sentences like "His sexual self—born on the Internet, in the shadow of pornography—seems to have been largely divorced from his social self," read the whole essay here.

Readers who are not sufficiently depressed by the main story can dwell on the scene of closeted Anderson Cooper at Rutgers a year later to host a tv special called "Bullying: It Stops Here," where a CNN manager talked to the student audience prior to taping to "coach them on how to express shock or grief while watching the panel." 

A great writer exploring this subject could produce another In Cold Blood. The place to do it is Tennessee, whose legislature is still deliberating their "Don't Say Gay" bill. The state offers plenty of grotesque hatred like Rep. Floyd of Chattanooga standing by his statements that he would "stomp a mudhole" in any man [trans] who tried to use the women's dressing room while his wife or daughter was there. But, less publicized, even rural Tennesseans have shown a tremendous outpouring of gay support. Two recent suicides there were Phillip Parker, 14, whose parents repeatedly complained to his school, and Jacob Rogers, whose friends say he was abused "every day in every class." As I wrote last week, Rogers asked for an Easy Bake Oven when he was six and shot himself at eighteen. 

Alex Ross on Oscar Wilde's Dorian Gray Rewrites

In this week's New Yorker, music critic, sometime DJ, and married gay Alex Ross looks at Oscar Wilde's full career and zeroes in on the pivotal changes he made prior to submitting The Picture of Dorian Gray: "Even before Wilde sent his manuscript to the typist, then, he was hesitating over its homoerotic content, and especially over the pages devoted to Basil’s desire." He says the downshifting revisions "betray a rising anxiety, an urge to lower the emotional temperature."

Ross finds the two recent biographies to be "almost comically contradictory portraits."

Thomas Wright's Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde presents "Wilde is an intellectual dreamer who rarely steps outside the literary realm" and "even suggests that Wilde discovered his sexuality in the pages of Plato."

Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde presents him as "a largely sexual being who reads in order to find a language for his desire and writes in order to speak that desire aloud...McKenna, by fixating on Wilde’s sexual life, arrives at an oddly unflattering portrait. Preying on young literary fans, paying off rent boys, picking up lads as young as fifteen—Wilde is stripped of his charm."

Later, Ross argues:

"The gay strain in Wilde’s work is part of a larger war on convention. In the 1889 story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” a pseudo-scholarly, metafictional investigation of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a boy, Wilde slyly suggests that the pillar of British literature was something other than an ordinary family man. In the 1891 play “Salomé,” Wilde expands a Biblical anecdote into a sumptuous panorama of decadence. Anarchists of the fin de siècle, especially in Germany, considered Wilde one of their own: Gustav Landauer hailed Wilde as the English Nietzsche. Thomas Mann expanded on the analogy, observing that various lines of Wilde might have come from Nietzsche (“There is no reality in things apart from their experiences”) and that various lines of Nietzsche might have come from Wilde (“We are basically inclined to maintain that the falsest judgments are the most indispensable to us”). Nietzsche and Wilde were, in Mann’s view, “rebels in the name of beauty.”

Readers may find the timing of the piece curious, as if the editors had sidelined it until the slower August stupor. Parsing these Dorian Gray changes was a literary pasttime four months ago, with the April publication from Harvard of the "uncensored" version, which alas only restores 500 words. Music fans may wonder how Ross can work in Neil Patrick Harris and Tony Kushner while excluding The Smith's many references to Wilde and, most important, Pet Shop Boys' quote from his sentencing, And I, my Lord, may I say nothing? in "DJ Culture." Devastating and danceable.

Born July 9: David Hockney

Don’t let his placid English face fool you: David Hockney's art has been one revolution after another. However beautiful, most of what he’s done upends convention or expectation. As early as 1959-60 and 1961, with Erection and the Whitman-titled We Two Boys Together Clinging, he was boldly painting gay love. Once he saw southern California, he began to use color in more startling ways. He painted gay couples, such as Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, exactly as he depicted straight couples, in 1968, when the rest of the world certainly didn't see them that way. His photomontages, or “joiners” primarily from 1970-1986, virtually reinvented how one could use a polaroid. He created wild stage sets for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala, and the Met. And, in 2001, he proposed a shattering theory that the Old Masters did not paint freehand so much as follow images projected onto their canvas via camera obscura techniques. (This might solve the mystery of why details at the edges of their paintings are inexplicably blurry or out of focus.) Thirty years after his iconic A Bigger Splash, Hockney created A Bigger Grand Canyon, a series of 60 rectangular paintings fitted together to form one giant picture. Even more recent work has included painted installations illuminated with black light, as at the Smithsonian American Art  Museum. Jack Hazan’s documentary captures every angle of Hockney's intense romance with Peter Schlesinger, who appears nude in his most famous pool pictures. To celebrate his 70th birthday in 2007, Hockney showed his recent paintings of his native Yorskhire, like the one above, at the Tate Britain in London. A new passion is the Brushes app on iPad, with which he has drawn three covers for The New Yorker. Three hundred of his iPad drawings displayed at the Berge-YSL Foundation in Paris last year made gay Awlist Choire Sicha mad: He "hated" the "mostly crap" "garbage."

Love of Gandhi's Life Was German-Jewish Bobybuilder; Cue Paul Rudnick

Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph Lelyveld has just published a new biography of Gandhi Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India [[Kindle]] making the case that the love of his life was Hermann Kallenbach (seated, right), a German-Jewish bodybuilder and architect. From the Wall Street Journal's review:

"Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some ­reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might ­relate to the enemas Gandhi gave ­himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.

"Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about "how completely you have taken ­possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."

"They were parted when Gandhi ­returned to India in 1914, since the German national could not get permission to travel to India during ­wartime—though Gandhi never gave up the dream of having him back, writing him in 1933 that "you are always ­before my mind's eye." Later, on his ashram, where even married "inmates" had to swear celibacy, Gandhi said: "I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of men and women."

The Indian state Gujarat, birthplace of Gandhi, has already made sale of the biography illegal. Several Indian newspapers have condemned the "predictable," "kneejerk" ban.

You know Paul Rudnick squealed when he heard the news. Today the New Yorker runs his humor piece, "I Was Gandhi's Boyfriend," narrated by a hot dumb blond ice dancer named Kelly:

I first met him when he came to see my ice show in Nepal, which was called “Holiday on Dirt.” Gandhi came backstage and he told me, “I very much enjoyed watching you pretend to ice-skate, in your tight pants.” I asked him, “Um, so why are you wearing a diaper?” And he explained that his outfit was a traditional Indian dhoti, and I said, “Well, you look like the New Year’s baby.” And he said, “You are so handsome when you are not speaking.”

Born March 13: Janet Flanner

How did Janet Flanner get the first installment of her famous "Letter from Paris" published in The New Yorker, which would run her column fortnightly for fifty years, and how did she get her pen name Genêt? Both answers: Harold Ross. A restless Hoosier educated in Chicago, Flanner had left Manhattan and her husband to travel in Europe with her lover Solito Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson) and from Paris she wrote to Jane Grant, Ross's wife. In 1925 Ross was still struggling to find the top notch writing he wanted for his new magazine, less than a year old, and he decided to publish Flanner's letter without asking her permission and therefore needed a nom de plume, choosing what he mistakenly thought was French for Janet.

Flanner knew virtually every important person in Paris for decades but also wrote about Algeria, Hungary invaded by the Russians, the Sinai War, and dozens of other topics in her signature style. She won a National Book Award in 1966. The center of a far reaching circle of lesbian friends, she was a constant presence at Natalie Barney's salons and in Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's living room and with the many other prominent lesbians discussed in Paris Was a Woman and, more obliquely, in her own otherwise outstanding memoir Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939. She was equally at home with Gide and Cocteau as she was with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she never lost her knack for being at the elbow of history: She was on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer when they had their famous fracas and rather than ducking she came between them. Although they occasionally had separate affairs, Flanner and Solano remained committed to each other and lived together for fifty years. Solano died in 1975, when she was eighty-seven; Flanner died in 1978, when she was eighty-six. Last fall she was the cover girl for the Hide/Seek catalog.

Born January 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga

"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"

To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression."

Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.