Band of Thebes

The Museum of Innocence Wins Museum of the Year

Just when you thought Orhan Pamuk had nothing left to win, his Museum of Innocence has been named the European Museum of the Year. If you can't get to Istanbul this year, read his catalog, The Innocence of Objects, and of course his walloping novel. In a thousand years there will never be a better story about this museum than Sandy Leonard's.

The jury said, "The Museum of Innocence can be seen simply as a historical museum of Istanbul life in the second half of 20th century. It is also, however, a museum created by writer Orhan Pamuk as an integral, object-based version of the fictional love story of his novel of the same name. The Museum of Innocence is meant as a small and personal, local and sustainable model for new museum development. The Museum of Innocence inspires and establishes innovative, new paradigms for the museum sector. This museum fulfils to the highest degree the notion of 'public quality,' from the point of view both of heritage and of the public."

The EMYA is 37 years old. Last year's winner was the Riverside Museum in Glasgow. 

Born January 24: Hadrian

Born in Italica, Spain 1,937 years ago today, Publius Aelius Hadrianus became, at 41, the third of the Five Good Roman Emperors, following the death of Trajan who was a cousin of Hadrian's father. Overall, his reign was marked by comparable peace, the exception being the second Roman-Jewish War, after which he remained violent in his Anti-Semitism. Without constant military battles he was able to fortify the empire which stretched from north Africa to northern England and from Portugal to Iraq. Along with the wall that bears his name near the Scottish border, Hadrian oversaw several colossal building projects. Most notable are the Pantheon in its current form (entirely rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original) and what is said to have been the largest temple in the ancient capital, The Temple of Venus and Roma. A great traveler, he rarely saw his wife, vastly preferring the culture of Athens to Rome and the company of young men to women. Of course, his greatest love was Antinous, whom he met at thirteen or fourteen in Turkey. After Antinous drowned in the Nile at nineteen, Hadrian's tributes were unparalleled: He had him deified, founded the city of Antinopolis, commissioned dozens of busts and statues of him, built a temple to him at his villa in Tivoli, and put his likeness on money, the only non-Emperor ever honored with a coin. They were not just friends. The Cult of Antinous was extremely popular with a certain kind of man throughout the empire and flourished until later when it was harshly condemned for being based on an 'immoral relationship' and suppressed by the emerging Catholic church. Hadrian died at 62 without any biological children. In his final year, he adopted for the sake of an heir a 51 year-old named Antoninus Pius.

Regardless of whether or not you think you're interested in the ancient world, read lesbian Marguerite Yourcenar's amazing novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, translated into English by Grace Frick, her partner for forty-two years. The book is so good it made Yourcenar the first woman elected to the Académie Française, founded in 1635.

Born January 22: George Gordon Byron

Happy 225th birthday to that pansexual romeo George Gordon. Adultery, incest, sodomy were mere half-loves next to his great love, self-love. His Byronic passions were in full flame by 13 when he entered the all-male world of Harrow in 1801 and forged his first sexual liaisons, particularly with John FitzGibbon, subject of some later poems collected in Hours of Idleness. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he fell in love with John Edleston, commemorated in his famous series of elegies, Thyrza, which necessarily disguises his beloved as a woman because gay men were still being arrested, tried, and hanged. His poems lament "kindred hearts must roam/ And seek abroad, the love denied at home." Accordingly, immediately after college Byron went to Greece. There he had sex with many young men, going so far as to include one of them, Nicolo Giraud, in his will with a gift of 7,000 pounds. While away Byron received letters from Charles Matthews and John Hobhouse detailing the latest gay gossip and criminal trials in a Latin code that was not broken until 1957. Back in England in 1812 he published Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and became a sensation. Byronmania swept the country and his exploits were criticized and celebrated. He had affairs with notably married women like Lady Caroline Lamb and later his half-sister Augusta. Ever mindful of the importance of an author's looks, when he wasn't sleeping with them he slept with curlers in his hair.

On January 2, 1815 he married Lady Caroline's cousin, the heiress Annabella Milbanke, a disastrous union that lasted exactly a year. In January 1816 she fled with their new daughter amid widespread rumors of his multiple evils. He signed the document of separation in April and soon after left England forever. In 1819 he began publishing his opus Don Juan, still unfinished at his death in Greece at 36 in 1824. In Byron: Life and Legend, biographer Fiona MacCarthy argues Byron's true sexual attraction was for young men. For another view, there's Edna O'Brien's brief life, Byron in Love.

Born December 29: Sandy Leonard

 

In honor of the great internationalist Sandy Leonard, a reminder to get Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's newly translated second novel Silent House and his nonfiction wonder The Innocence of Objects, which Pamuk signed for Sandy in November when I snapped this photo. (By magic, Sandy got a tour of the museum in Istanbul months before it opened.) I highly recommend Sandy's daily travel photo site and Pamuk's lectures on literature collected in The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist.

Born January 24: Hadrian

Born in Italica, Spain 1,935 years ago today, Publius Aelius Hadrianus became, at 41, the third of the Five Good Roman Emperors, following the death of Trajan who was a cousin of Hadrian's father. Overall, his reign was marked by comparable peace, the exception being the second Roman-Jewish War, after which he remained violent in his Anti-Semitism. Without constant military battles he was able to fortify the empire which stretched from north Africa to northern England and from Portugal to Iraq. Along with the wall that bears his name near the Scottish border, Hadrian oversaw several colossal building projects. Most notable are the Pantheon in its current form (entirely rebuilt after a fire destroyed the original) and what is said to have been the largest temple in the ancient capital, The Temple of Venus and Roma. A great traveler, he rarely saw his wife, vastly preferring the culture of Athens to Rome and the company of young men to women. Of course, his greatest love was Antinous, whom he met at thirteen or fourteen in Turkey. After Antinous drowned in the Nile at nineteen, Hadrian's tributes were unparalleled: He had him deified, founded the city of Antinopolis, commissioned dozens of busts and statues of him, built a temple to him at his villa in Tivoli, and put his likeness on money, the only non-Emperor ever honored with a coin. They were not just friends. The Cult of Antinous was extremely popular with a certain kind of man throughout the empire and flourished until later when it was harshly condemned for being based on an 'immoral relationship' and suppressed by the emerging Catholic church. Hadrian died at 62 without any biological children. In his final year, he adopted for the sake of an heir a 51 year-old named Antoninus Pius.

Regardless of whether or not you think you're interested in the ancient world, read lesbian Marguerite Yourcenar's amazing novel, Memoirs of Hadrian, translated into English by Grace Frick, her partner for forty-two years. The book is so good it made Yourcenar the first woman elected to the Académie Française, founded in 1635.

Sandy Leonard Finds the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul

Photo: Sandy Leonard Snaps

If today is the day for miraculous stories from the Mediterranean region, none beats this one from photoblogger Sandy Leonard. Even if you somehow have never read Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk's knockout novel The Museum of Innocence [Kindle], you can appreciate the true story of a very literary traveler in Istanbul searching out a fictitious institution from a favorite book and discovering it to be real. That came entirely from Sandy's meticulous research, wanting to walk the exact neighborhood where the made-up museum would have been. But once he found the actual Museum of Innocence, created by Pamuk to recreate the one in his novel, he learned it will not open to the public until May 2012. Then serendipity stepped in, taking the form of a group of German officials including a leading Green lady much beloved by The Gays. Read Sandy's post. And make his blog part of your daily itinerary.

Every Day Is Lesbian Day

Quick hi from Wyoming, where at the lodge's breakfast this morning a white haired gent wore a t-shirt emblazoned with, "Even duct tape can't fix stupid." Did you realize Wyoming's motto is "Equal Rights" and that it is the least populous of all fifty states?

Which brings us to the epic short story, Tits-up in a Ditch, by Annie Proulx in The New Yorker's fiction double issue (June 9 & 16). It's mandatory reading and not just because it coolly decimates contemporary Wyoming and includes a lesbian soldier and two (off-screen) lesbian goat farmers. A comment by a rancher in Tits-up in a Ditch gives Proulx's third collection of Wyoming stories its title, Fine Just the Way It Is, to be published in September. Her first such collection, Close Range, contains Brokeback Mountain.

As for another PEN/Faulkner Award winner, Kate Christensen's novel The Great Man, recently out in paperback, is about three women connected to a deceased famous portraitist in New York: his mistress, his wife, and his sister, a butch lesbian abstract painter. One of Christensen's earlier novels, Jeremy Thrane, is about a gay man in a longterm relationship with a closeted movie star.

An adaptation of a knockout novel with 100% lesbian themes, which takes place in the world of clairvoyants and gentle ladies who charitably visit women's prisons in Victorian London, Sarah Waters' Affinity, is the opening night film of Frameline tonight in San Francisco.

Another international film, The Edge of Heaven, playing across America this summer, features a lesbian couple at the center of its multiple storylines crisscrossing Germany and Turkey. Made by Fatih Akin, the director of Head-On, it has garnered rave reviews and many awards: best screenplay at Cannes, best screenplay at the European Film Awards, and it won four top prizes at the German Film Awards including Best Picture and Best Director.

Saturn in Opposition

Who wouldn't want to spend 113 minutes eavesdropping on this group of nine Italian friends, especially in a movie directed and co-written by Ferzan Ozpetek? Once again someone dies; but after the stabbing at the end of Steam: The Turkish Bath or being struck by a car at the beginning of His Secret Life, maybe the death from natural causes in the middle of Saturn in Opposition suggests Ozpetek is mellowing. The story revolves around two couples: the gay men in the red and black shirts above, and the man in the blue shirt married to the blond woman on the left and having an affair with the blond woman on the right. The women on either end are a gorgeous single cokehead and a short, angry, big-hearted, heavyset acerbic wit married to a tall cop who is equally in love and afraid of her. Not at the level of Almodovar, or even L'Auberge Espagnole, but as ensemble movies go, this one is worth your while. You might not realize how rare it is for a movie's gay storyline to be about adults comfortably and openly themselves, rather than young people, coming out, aids, or victimization. Go see it later this summer.

"A Jihad for Love"

Tired of your queer movies being about white Pottery Barn gays in Los Angeles? Get into the lives of devout gay Muslims trying to reconcile their faith and their sexuality in Parvez Sharma's documentary A Jihad for Love. Nathan Lee, writing in the New York Times, noted the film "ranges from Johannesburg to Istanbul, from doubt to despair (with a happy detour among the drag queens of India). He does manage to locate a headstrong lesbian in Paris, albeit one whose face, like those of many of the subjects here, has been digitally blurred." Playdates into September are:
New York   IFC Film Center   May 21 - June 4
Salt Lake City   SLC Film Center    June 15
Norfolk   Naro Cinema    June 18 - 22
Houston   Angelika Houston    June 20 - 26
Ft. Lauderdale   Sunrise Gateway    June 27 - July 3
Brookline    Coolidge Corner Theatre   June 27 - July 3
San Francisco   Frameline Film Festival   June 28
Los Angeles   Outfest    July 17
Santa Rosa  Rialto Lakeside July 17
Chicago   Siskel Film Center     July 25 - 31
Columbus   Wexner Center     July 25 & 26
Los Angeles    Laemmle Sunset 5   August 1 - 7
Palm Springs    Camelot Theaters   August 1 - 7
Denver    Starz Denver    August 1 - 7
San Diego  Landmark Ken   August 8 - 14
San Francisco   Landmark Lumiere   August 22 - 28
Philadelphia  Landmark Ritz at Bourse   August 22 - 28
Washington DC   Landmark E Street   September 5 - 11
Seattle  Landmark Varsity     September 5 - 11
Berkeley    JCC of the East Bay     September 18, 2008

Turkey Tries To Shut Down Gay Rights Group

Turkish courts will hear arguments from the governor of Istanbul, attempting to disband one of the country's leading gay rights group, Lambda Istanbul, founded in 1993. The governor's office claims the group's objectives are "against the law and morality." In July, the local Prosecutor's Office denied the governor's complaint but a higher court agreed to schedule a hearing for late October. In 2005, Ankara's deputy governor tried a similar move to shut down the capital city's gay rights group Kaos GL but the complaint was dismissed by the Prosecutor's Office. That same year, Parliament drafted an anti-discrimination bill inclusive of sexual orientation, only to see the category eliminated in a later draft. All of this directly contradicts two treaties which Turkey has signed (the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) both of which prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation. The Human Rights Watch has a full summary here. Above, scenes from last summer's gay pride in Istanbul, attended by more than one thousand people.

UPDATE: Yesterday's hearing was only fifteen minutes. The judge ordered the government to prepare a report. Dutch activists from COC, the world's oldest glbt rights group, called on the Dutch government to not support Turkey's bid for EU membership until basic human rights are respected. A member of the Dutch Royal embassy will attend the trial when it resumes on January 31, 2008.