Benoit Denizet-Lewis: The Best LGBT Books of All Time [The Good Men Project, June 9, 2011]

Of all the gay books on the shelves of A Different Light Bookstore in San Francisco, I'm not sure why I left with Larry Kramer's Faggots.

I certainly didn't see myself as a faggot (I played sports, I was a top), but there was something about that book, with its yellow cover and audacious title, that made it irresistible as my first gay-themed book purchase. Still, I was sure to buy it alongside Dan Woog's Jocks: True Stories of America's Gay Male Athletes. Even in a gay bookstore with a blue-haired lesbian working the cash register, I was self-conscious about what people might think.

The year was 1997, and gay bookstores still existed in most big American cities. I was 21 and back home for the summer in my hometown of San Francisco, where a year before I had come out to my dad. "I guess this is what I get for raising you in San Francisco," he'd said, slumping down in a chair as if he'd been shot.

[Continued here]

Kergan Edwards-Stout: Modern-Day Algonquin: A Round-Table Discussion with 5 Gay Authors
[HuffPo, April 2, 2012]

One of the unexpected pleasures of my new journey as an author has been in meeting other writers, many of whom have formed a virtual Algonquin round table on Twitter. Unlike the stereotype of competitors battling each other for readers, this group has been exceedingly generous, supporting and reading each other's work, and tweeting positive reviews and news to their followers. Recently, a few of us connected following the Rainbow Book Fair in New York to discuss our craft and the state of gay literature today. It was with great pleasure that I joined with Gregory G. Allen, David G. Hallman, Carey Parrish, and Arthur Wooten in our own gay take on the Algonquin round table.

[Continued here]

Christopher Bram: How Books Made Me Gay [Huffington Post, February 6, 2012]

I came of age in the 1960s and 1970s. I was a slow learner as a gay man and I used books to show me the way. You might say that I read my way out of the closet.

Growing up outside Norfolk, Virginia, I was a shy, bookish boy, a good boy, a Boy Scout--literally. I did not learn about gay sex by doing it, heaven forbid, or even from hearing about it. There was no internet back then, no "It Gets Better" campaign. The only gay characters on TV were about mannerisms, not sex or affection, and the rare gay characters in movies were usually evil. I had no choice but to explore my sexuality through books. Luckily there was a lot out there, and I was able to use it in my own private, idiosyncratic way.

This struck home again recently while I wrote my literary history, Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America. Without knowing it, I'd been preparing for much of my life to write such a book, reading many of the same novels and memoirs read by earlier generations of gay men to discover who they were.

[Continued here]

• Writers at the Ramparts in a Gay Revolution [New York Times, February 2, 2012]

It's hard to believe that this story - about the tangled lives of men like Gore Vidal, Tennessee Williams, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Truman Capote, Edward Albee, Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, Tony Kushner and Mr. Kramer - has not been combed and braided into a single narrative before. Lesbian literature is not dealt with here; Mr. Bram is probably correct to suggest that "it needs its own historian."

This country's gay revolution, Mr. Bram notes, "began as a literary revolution," far more so than did the civil rights or women's movements. America's literary past is filled with brilliant, closeted gay and very possibly gay writers: Henry James, Walt Whitman, Willa Cather, Hart Crane. But the story Mr. Bram sets out to tell commences in the late 1940s.

National Coalition Against Censorship's LGBTQ Book Bans and Challenges

The following is a list of some of the many books that have been banned and challenged because of their LGBTQ content and themes.

To read more about book challenges and bans check out the Kids' Right to Read Project Report (a *.pdf file) and the NCAC's Book Challenges Report 2006 — 2008

For tips on how to respond to bans and challenges see NCAC's Book Censorship Toolkit

[Continued here]

• Craig Munro: Contains adult themes [Sydney Morning Herald, March 17, 2012]

So secretive was Australian literary surveillance that a list of banned books was not made public until 1958. Some novels, such as Lady Chatterley's Lover, were banned for decades while others, including Brave New World by D.H. Lawrence's friend Aldous Huxley, were restricted for just a few years.

James Joyce's sexually explicit Ulysses (1922) was not formally banned in Australia until 1929, then released in 1937 only to be restricted again in 1941 after pressure from church groups. Defending this about-turn, the minister for customs declared the novel ''holds up to ridicule the Creator and the Church'' and ''cannot be tolerated any longer''.

By 1970, attitudes had changed once more, with customs minister Don Chipp declaring in Parliament that the concept of censorship was ''abhorrent''. It was also embarrassing and Portnoy's Complaint became the last work of fiction to face court in Australia. With the advent of Whitlam's reformist government two years later, the list of banned literary titles was reduced to zero.

10 Famous Authors' Famous Addictions [The Atlantic, January 2, 2012]

The new year is upon us, and we all know what that means: it's time to renounce our indulgences, thwart our addictions, and give up our hedonistic tendencies-if only for a week or two. But don't feel too bad if you fail-some of the most brilliant figures in literary history have been hopeless addicts, hooked on everything from coffee to sex to opium, exhibiting varying degrees of shame about it. It is the human condition, after all, and we can only hope that more garden-variety addicts turn their habits into great literature.

[Continued here]

John A. Harnick: "Balancing our lives on the head of a pin."



Marc Adelman's "Identity, Politics, Sex" At Jewish Museum
[HuffPo, March 13, 2012]

Oftentimes an artist makes a story unfold, but sometimes an artist captures a story evolving all on its own. For his installation "Stelen (Columns)", Marc Adelman collected 50 profile pictures from an internet dating site catering to gay men in Berlin. The catch: all of the photos were curiously taken in front of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, aka the Holocaust Memorial.

[Continued here]

Henry David Thoreau (1817—1862) [Wikipedia]

Henry David Thoreau... was an American author, poet, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, philosopher, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay, Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.

[Continued here]

• Thoreau Reader: Walden [Throeau Server]
• Thoreau, Henry David (1817-1862) [GLBTQ.com]

In essays, journals, and poems, Henry David Thoreau recorded impassioned expressions of the beauty and the agony of love between men.

• A sage for all seasons [The Guardian, June 26, 2004]
• Henry David Thoreau index [New York Times]

Walt Whitman (1819—1892) [Wikipedia]

Born on Long Island, Whitman worked as a journalist, a teacher, a government clerk, and-in addition to publishing his poetry-was a volunteer nurse during the American Civil War. Early in his career, he also produced a temperance novel, Franklin Evans (1842). Whitman's major work, Leaves of Grass, was first published in 1855 with his own money. The work was an attempt at reaching out to the common person with an American epic. He continued expanding and revising it until his death in 1892. After a stroke towards the end of his life, he moved to Camden, New Jersey, where his health further declined. He died at age 72 and his funeral became a public spectacle.

Whitman's sexuality is often discussed alongside his poetry. Though biographers continue to debate his sexuality, he is usually described as either homosexual or bisexual in his feelings and attractions. However, there is disagreement among biographers as to whether Whitman had actual sexual experiences with men. Whitman was concerned with politics throughout his life. He supported the Wilmot Proviso and opposed the extension of slavery generally. His poetry presented an egalitarian view of the races, and at one point he called for the abolition of slavery, but later he saw the abolitionist movement as a threat to democracy.

[Continued here]

• Walt Whitman [Poets.org]
• Walt Whitman [The Walt Whitman Archive]
• A visit to Walt Whitman, reported by Charles Rowley in the Guardian on June 22, 1887 [The Guardian, March 8, 2003]
• Walt Whitman's working life illuminated [The Guardian, April 14, 2011]
• Walt Whitman index [New York Times]
• Walt Whitman on the Deep Connection Between Democracy and Work [The Atlantic, July 8, 2011]

A few weeks ago, I was reading Walt Whitman, enthralled by the energy and rhythm of his poetry. It's easy to see why he was embroiled in fights with 19th-century censors. "I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked," he wrote, "I am mad for it to be in contact with me." In Song of Myself, he praises "a well-made man," saying, "dress does not hide him;/The strong, sweet, supple quality he has strikes through the cotton and flannel;/To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more;/You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side."

And these are some of the milder passages. These probably aren't the ones that got him fired from his job at the Department of the Interior and charged with "that horrible sin not to be mentioned among Christians."

• Walt Whitman: Poet, Chronicler of War [Bilerico Project, October 9, 2011]

No matter how sad the story, Whitman's passion for these young men surfaces regularly in his stories about them. And he recognized some of them as kindred spirits, including these two Southern escapees who sound like a couple:

        "Two of them, one about 17, and the other perhaps 25 or '6, I talk'd with some time. They were from North Carolina, born and rais'd there, and had folks there. The elder had been in the rebel service four years. He was first conscripted for two years. He was then kept arbitrarily in the ranks ... the younger had been soldiering about a year; ... there were six brothers (all the boys of the family) in the army, part of them as conscripts, part as volunteers; three had been kill'd; one had escaped about four months ago, and now this one had got away; ... He and the elder one were of the same company, and escaped together -- and wish'd to remain together."

"The poet is a madman lost in adventure."



Paul Verlaine (1844—1896) [Wikipedia]

Paul-Marie Verlaine... was a French poet associated with the Symbolist movement. He is considered one of the greatest representatives of the fin de siècle in international and French poetry. ...

Verlaine returned to Paris in August 1871, and, in September, he received the first letter from Arthur Rimbaud. By 1872, he had lost interest in Mathilde, and effectively abandoned her and their son, preferring the company of his new lover. Rimbaud and Verlaine's stormy affair took them to London in 1872. In July 1873 in a drunken, jealous rage, he fired two shots with a pistol at Rimbaud, wounding his left wrist, though not seriously injuring the poet. As an indirect result of this incident, Verlaine was arrested and imprisoned at Mons, where he underwent a conversion to Roman Catholicism, which again influenced his work and provoked Rimbaud's sharp criticism.

The poems collected in Romances sans paroles (1874) were written between 1872 and 1873, inspired by Verlaine's nostalgically colored recollections of his life with Mathilde on the one hand and impressionistic sketches of his on-again off-again year-long escapade with Rimbaud on the other. Romances sans paroles was published while Verlaine was imprisoned. Following his release from prison, Verlaine again traveled to England, where he worked for some years as a teacher, teaching French, Latin and Greek and drawing at a grammar school in Stickney in Lincolnshire. From there he went to teach in Boston, before moving to Bournemouth. While in England he produced another successful collection, Sagesse. He returned to France in 1877 and, while teaching English at a school in Rethel, fell in love with one of his pupils, Lucien Létinois, who inspired Verlaine to write further poems. Verlaine was devastated when Létinois died of typhus in 1883.

[Continued here]

• Paul Verlaine: Seventy-Three Poems [Poetry in Translation]

"How queer," Virginia Woolf once observed, "to have so many selves."



Virginia Woolf (1882—1941) [Wikipedia]

Adeline Virginia Woolf... was an English author, essayist, publisher, and writer of short stories, regarded as one of the foremost modernist literary figures of the twentieth century.

During the interwar period, Woolf was a significant figure in London literary society and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Her most famous works include the novels Mrs Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929), with its famous dictum, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction." ...

Woolf came to know Lytton Strachey, Clive Bell, Rupert Brooke, Saxon Sydney-Turner, Duncan Grant, Leonard Woolf and Roger Fry, who together formed the nucleus of the intellectual circle of writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group. Several members of the group attained notoriety in 1910 with the Dreadnought hoax, which Virginia participated in disguised as a male Abyssinian royal. Her complete 1940 talk on the Hoax was discovered and is published in the memoirs collected in the expanded edition of The Platform of Time (2008). In 1907 Vanessa married Clive Bell, and the couple's interest in avant garde art would have an important influence on Woolf's development as an author. ...

The ethos of the Bloomsbury group encouraged a liberal approach to sexuality, and in 1922 she met the writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West, wife of Harold Nicolson. After a tentative start, they began a sexual relationship, which, according to Sackville- West, was only twice consummated. In 1928, Woolf presented Sackville-West with Orlando, a fantastical biography in which the eponymous hero's life spans three centuries and both genders. Nigel Nicolson, Vita Sackville-West's son, wrote "The effect of Vita on Virginia is all contained in Orlando, the longest and most charming love letter in literature, in which she explores Vita, weaves her in and out of the centuries, tosses her from one sex to the other, plays with her, dresses her in furs, lace and emeralds, teases her, flirts with her, drops a veil of mist around her". After their affair ended, the two women remained friends until Woolf's death in 1941.

[Continued here]

• Virginia Woolf: 'This Loose, Drifting Material of Life' by Hermione Lee [New York Times, June 8, 1997]
• Jessica Rosevear: How to date Virginia Woolf [Christian Science Monitor, January 25, 2012]

The date does not go well. You want to quit after pre-dinner appetizers, but she insists on a five-course dinner. You don't understand how a date that short-one hundred ninety-seven pages, to be exact-could feel so long and tedious. You can't follow her conversation, can't understand what she so desperately wants to tell you.

When your professor asks you how it went, you tell him it was interesting, but you can't see a long-term relationship growing. "Okay," he says. "I mean, I think she's great, but she's not for everyone."

• How Virginia Woolf and her band of 'jolly savages' conned their way aboard the pride of the British navy [Daily Mail, February 5, 2012]

It was the practical joke that left pre-war Britain in stitches.

The day a bearded Virginia Woolf and her band of 'jolly savages' duped an admiral into giving them the full red-carpet treatment on board the pride of the British naval fleet has gone down in maritime history.

Now, almost 102 years later, a previously unknown letter has surfaced detailing the escapades of the six Bloomsbury writers who gained top-level access to battleship HMS Dreadnought on February 7, 1910.

The missive, written by Horace de Vere Cole to a friend a day later, details how four donned beards and costumes pretending to be Abyssinian princes, while the other two claimed to be their Foreign Office guides. ...

The Navy took their revenge on one of the hoaxers, painter Duncan Grant, who was abducted, taken to Hampstead Heath and caned.

"I worshipped dead men for their strength, forgetting I was strong."



Vita Sackville-West (1892—1962) [Wikipedia]

The Hon Victoria Mary Sackville-West, Lady Nicolson, CH..., best known as Vita Sackville-West, was an English author, poet and gardener. She won the Hawthornden Prize in 1927 and 1933. She was famous for her exuberant aristocratic life, her strong marriage (although she and her husband Harold Nicolson were both bisexual), her passionate affair with novelist Virginia Woolf and the garden that she and Nicolson created at Sissinghurst. ...

The rules of male primogeniture prevented Vita from inheriting Knole on the death of her father. The house passed, with the title, to her uncle Charles Sackville-West, 4th Baron Sackville. The loss of Knole would affect her for the rest of her life; of the signing in 1947 of documents relinquishing any claim on the property, part of its transition to the National Trust, she wrote that "the signing... nearly broke my heart, putting my signature to what I regarded as a betrayal of all the tradition of my ancestors and the house I loved."

[Continued here]

• Vita Sackville-West's beloved Knole House could be inherited by a woman [Telegraph, January 4, 2012]

Vita Sackville-West, the author, gardener and lover of Virginia Woolf, was so devastated that the rules of male primogeniture prevented her from inheriting Knole House that it affected her whole life.

The current guardian of the property in Kent, Lord Sackville of Knole, says he may, however, leave the estate to one of his two daughters rather than to his son and heir, Arthur, who turns 12 next month.

"In the longer term, it's not reasonable for it to, inevitably, go to a boy," says. "If any child of mine felt that they were constrained in the way they live their life, that would be quite wrong."

• Letters from Vita Sackville-West To Virginia Woolf... [Isle of Lesbos]

To Virginia Woolf, January 21, 1926

Milan [posted in Trieste]

I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your un-dumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn't even feel it. And yet I believe you'll be sensible of a little gap. But you'd clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it would lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is just really a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan't make you love me any the more by giving myself away like this --But oh my dear, I can't be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don't love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defences. And I don't really resent it.

However I won't bore you with any more.

We have re-started, and the train is shaky again. I shall have to write at the stations - which are fortunately many across the Lombard plain.

Venice. The stations were many, but I didn't bargain for the Orient Express not stopping at them. And here we are at Venice for ten minutes only, -- a wretched time in which to try and write. No time to buy an Italian stamp even, so this will have to go from Trieste.

The waterfalls in Switzerland were frozen into solid iridescent curtains of ice, hanging over the rock; so lovely. And Italy all blanketed in snow.

We're going to start again. I shall have to wait till Trieste tomorrow morning. Please forgive me for writing such a miserable letter.

V.

• Vita Sackville-West index [The Guardian]

"Charm, in most men and nearly all women, is a decoration."



E. M. Forster (1879—1970) [Wikipedia]

Edward Morgan Forster OM, CH..., was an English novelist, short story writer, essayist and librettist. He is known best for his ironic and well-plotted novels examining class difference and hypocrisy in early 20th-century British society. Forster's humanistic impulse toward understanding and sympathy may be aptly summed up in the epigraph to his 1910 novel Howards End: "Only connect". ...

Sexuality is another key theme in Forster's works, and it has been argued that a general shift from heterosexual love to homosexual love can be detected over the course of his writing career. The foreword to Maurice describes his struggle with his own homosexuality, while similar issues are explored in several volumes of homosexually charged short stories. Forster's explicitly homosexual writings, the novel Maurice and the short-story collection The Life to Come, were published shortly after his death.

[Continued here]

• A new Life of EM Forster: Moffat's new biography of a closeted literary life [XTRA, August 22, 2011]

By many accounts, Forster inspired admiration, love and respect from those who knew him. Often aspiring writers discovered his books and sought him out. That he managed a triad with the love of his life, Constable Bob Buckingham, and Buckingham's wife, May, is astounding. For a time, he spent long weekends with Bob, while May had Bob for regular weekends.

Gertrude Stein (1874—1946) [Wikipedia]

Gertrude Stein... was an American-Jewish writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France. ...

Stein met her long-time romantic partner, Alice B. Toklas[66] on September 8, 1907, on Toklas' first day in Paris, at Sarah and Michael Stein's apartment. ...

Stein is the author of one of the earliest coming out stories, Q.E.D. (published in 1950 as Things as They Are), written in 1903 and suppressed by the author.

[Continued here]

• The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas from Gertrude Stein Writings 1903-1932 [New York Times]
• Marlena Doktorczyk-Donohue: SFMOMA's The Steins Collect Documents a Life of Art Collecting [Huffington Post, July 7, 2011]

Two photos in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's The Steins Collect (May 21 to Sept. 16, 2011) won't let go of me.

One is a teeny, easy to-miss shot of Gertrude and Alice in their Ford van painted with a red cross and commandeered to minister to the French wounded in 1917. Stein drives... of course.

The other is a bit earlier, from 1911, and shows long-necked Alice Toklas and stalwart, round Gertrude Stein -- both yet young -- rooted and relaxed together in favorite facing chairs of the fabled sitting room/salon at 27 Rue de Fleurus; no hype, just two people who know each other fully.

Any venue featuring the larger-than-life Gertrude tempts us into the default, tired bit about renegade lesbians hooking up (as the kids like to put it) in Paris when this was verboten in the Victorian upper-crust West and East Coast strata the Steins inhabited.

Far more interesting if you want to mention this angle is to note the early, rather exhilarating model the pair provided -- wittingly, unwittingly -- for the possibility of leading a liberated female life -- of any and all romantic/erotic/intellectual persuasions. Here, then, is an early locus of origin for NOW.

• Two New Gertrude Stein Editions Get Yale's Royal Treatment [Publishers Weekly, January 17, 2012]

"Stein's strong influence on generations of poets, especially those interested in literary experimentalism, extended through much of the last century and continues into this one," wrote Hollister and Setina in an e-mail to PW. "But some of her most ground-breaking works--works she considered among her highest achievements--have been not been available in the forms she conceived of for them. The new Stein editions from Yale let readers experience the full extent of Stein's innovations and appreciate their relation to both private and public dimensions of another of her great creative works, her literary career itself."

[DH] Lawrence 'obscenities' finally get a showing [The Guardian, November 22, 2003]

A collection of paintings went on display yesterday - more than 70 years after the images were banned - but there is no sell-by date on obscenity.

In June 1929 a squad of embarrassed policemen raided the Warren gallery in London, and seized 13 paintings by DH Lawrence. They were spared from being burned on condition that they were never exhibited in Britain again.

The paintings were exported - "to corrupt some other poor buggers" as Lawrence remarked - but a set of replicas was on view yesterday at the Pan bookshop in London.

Neither the owner of the replicas, nor the author and publisher of a new book which reproduces dozens of the images seen as even more shocking than Lady Chatterley's Lover, is quite sure what their legal status is.

Two other bookshops turned down the invitation to display the paintings - on space grounds, both insisted. The publishers are hoping to find a space for a longer exhibition.

"I did wonder if the police were going to rush in and seize me, or the pictures," said Christopher Miles, who commissioned the replicas for Priest of Love, the 1982 film which he directed and which starred Ian McKellen as Lawrence. "But I gather there's been somebody big in town, and there isn't a policeman to spare."

[Continued here]

• Barely had Lady Chatterley's Lover been banned than DH Lawrence prompted another scandal with his 'obscene' paintings [Telegraph, November 5, 2003]

On 15 June 1929 about 20 oils and watercolours by a previously unexhibited painter were placed on display at the Warren Gallery in London. It caused a stir among the London art critics, who turned up to this debut one-man exhibition in unusually large numbers. They did so, presumably, because the painter was the well-known émigré and author of notoriously erotic novels, DH Lawrence.

Most of the paintings showed nude men and women embracing or otherwise communing with themselves and one another in Arcadian landscapes of an abstract character. Some were inspired by the Bible, or by ancient mythology. Others were drawn from modern life. Some were comical and burlesque in mood, others melancholic, others ecstatic. The style was energetic, if not terribly assured.

Taken together, the assembled works amounted to a dream of exuberant but also quaintly innocent carnality, set in a naturist idyll where men and women are free to wander naked in groves of shameless bliss. Lawrence had been writing Lady Chatterley's Lover, his last novel, at the same time that he painted many of these vigorously naive paintings, and the paradise which many of them body forth strongly recalls the sexual Eden into which the heroine of that novel yearns - futilely, as it turns out - to escape.

Artist Spotlight: Elisar von Kupffer's Gay Eden (1872—1942)
[The Advocate, May 12, 2012]

Elisar von Kupffer (1872-1942) dedicated his life to a spiritual vision of a perfect world of male love. Most of his writing, art, and painting supported his utopian view of a dreamy youthful bonding between men in an idyllic setting.

To be sure, men of his social standing in life were permitted greater freedom and self-expression. Focusing on the quasi-intellectual side of his philosophy - Klarismus (clarity) - gave his somewhat campy, if not kooky version of a perfect world the safe patina of religion. It was a dreamy world of harmony, eros, and androgynous aesthetics.

He established himself as a muralist in Locarno, Switzerland, with his partner, Eduard von Mayerm and together they created the Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion, a combination museum, temple, and artistic retreat in their villa at the Lake Maggiore.

In the center of the villa is a round room that houses his heroic mural Klarwelt der Seligen. The painting depicts 84 nude, youthful men in various states of ethereal ecstasy and affection. There is a series of poems for each grouping and panel of the mural.

[Continued here]

• Elisar von Kupffer [Wikipedia] Elisar von Kupffer (born in Tallinn, Estonia) was an artist, anthologist, poet, historian, translator, and playwright. He used the pseudonym 'Elisarion' for much of his writing.

He studied at St. Petersburg and then Berlin. After travels in Italy from 1902 to 1915, he established himself as a fine-art painter and muralist in Locarno, Switzerland, with his partner the historian and philosopher Eduard von Mayer (1873-1960). From 1925 to 1929 they transformed their Minusio villa (at the Lake Maggiore) into an opulent collection of art, the 'Sanctuarium Artis Elisarion'. From 1981 this has been a Museum dedicated to von Kupffer's work. The couple were at the heart of a religious movement called the Klarismus (in English: 'Clarity').

In 1899/1900 Adolf Brand published von Kupffer's influential anthology of homoerotic literature, Lieblingminne und Freundesliebe in der Weltliteratur in Berlin. The anthology was reprinted in 1995. The anthology was researched and created, in part, as a protest against the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde in England.

Paul Cadmus (1904—1999) [Wikipedia]

Paul Cadmus... was an American artist. He is best known for his paintings and drawings of nude male figures. His works combined elements of eroticism and social critique to produce a style often called magic realism. He painted with egg tempera.

In 1934 he painted The Fleet's In! while working for the Public Works of Art Project of the WPA. This painting, featuring carousing sailors, women, and a homosexual couple, was the subject of a public outcry and was removed from exhibition at the Corcoran Gallery. The publicity helped to launch his career. He worked in commercial illustration as well, but Jared French, another tempera artist who befriended him and became his lover for a time, convinced him to devote himself completely to fine art.

Jon Andersson, who became Cadmus's longtime companion of 35 years, was a subject of many of his works.

In 1999 he died in his home in Weston, Connecticut due to advanced age, just five days short of his 95th birthday.

[Continued here]

(Click on image to enlarge)

Controversy Erupts Over WeHo Tom of Finland Exhibit [LGBT|POV, February 7, 2011]

This legislative session, Equality California and Sen. Mark Leno will strongly advocate for the FAIR Education Act, a natural extension of last year's historic Harvey Milk Day. The bill requires that LGBT history and contributions be taught in the California education system.

The need for such education became excruciatingly clear recently when a controversy erupted after the city of West Hollywood's Arts & Cultural Affairs Commission unanimously voted not to endorse the Tom of Finland art exhibit in West Hollywood Park, as had been done for at least 10 previous years. The 16th annual Los Angeles Erotic Art Fair Weekend is scheduled for March 25-27 in West Hollywood Park.

The Tom of Finland exhibit itself-which includes drawings and art work from all over the world and requires attendees be 18 and over-was never actually in jeopardy. The West Hollywood Lesbian and Gay Advisory Council had already approved it, which was noted in an agenda item on the consent calendar for the City Council meeting on Feb. 7. No controversy there.

"I am supportive of the Tom of Finland exhibit taking place in West Hollywood, and have been for years," said longtime straight ally, Councilmember Abbe Land. "We look forward to hosting the exhibit in West Hollywood again this year."

[Continued here]

• Tom of Finland [militaryphotos.net]

Tom of Finland was born Touko Laaksonen in 1920 (d. 1991) in the village of Kaarina, Finland. At the age of nineteen, he moved to Helsinki to attend art college and, for his own personal enjoyment, created his first homoerotic drawings.

Following his release from the army after World War II, Touko began to work in advertising. He continued to draw his fantasies and, urged by close friends, submitted them to the American bodybuilding magazine Physique Pictorial. Because of the conservative social climate in 1957, he chose to be published under the pseudonym "Tom of Finland."

• Before the Dawn of Tom [The Advocate, July 9, 2011]

(Click on image to enlarge)

Federico García Lorca (1898—1936) [Wikipedia]

Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca... was a Spanish poet, dramatist and theatre director. García Lorca achieved international recognition as an emblematic member of the Generation of '27. He is believed to be one of thousands who were summarily shot by anti-communist death squads during the Spanish Civil War. In 2008, a Spanish judge opened an investigation into Lorca's death. The Garcia Lorca family eventually dropped objections to the excavation of a potential gravesite near Alfacar. However, no human remains were found.

[Continued here]

• Federico García Lorca [Poets.org]
• Waking Spain's dead [The Guardian, October 31, 2009]
• Spanish archeologists fail to find Federico García Lorca's grave [The Guardian, December 18, 2009]
• 'Extraordinary' Lorca manuscript discovered [The Guardian, January 11, 2011]

Richmond Barthé (1901—1989) [Wikipedia]

James Richmond Barthé... was an African American sculptor known for his many public works, including the Toussaint L'Ouverture Monument in Port-au-Prince, Haiti and a sculpture of Rose McClendon for Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater House.

Barthe once said that "all my life I have be interested in trying to capture the spiritual quality I see and feel in people, and I feel that the human figure as God made it, is the best means of expressing this spirit in man." ...

At fourteen, Barthé left school to take a job as houseboy and handyman, but he still spent his free time drawing. At eighteen, having moved to New Orleans, his parish priest in New Orleans and a writer for the New Orleans Times Picayune recognized his ability. Richmond donated a portrait he made for a church fund raiser. The priest and the writer, along with his employer determined to find an art school where Barthé could study and expand his talent. ...

Following his graduation from The Art Institute of Chicago in 1928, Barthé spent several months in New York, established a studio in Harlem, and eventually moved to NYC permanently in 1930. During the next two decades, he built his reputation as a sculptor. He is associated with the Harlem Renaissance. He won a Guggenheim fellowship twice and other awards. By 1934, his reputation was so well established that he was awarded his first solo show at the Caz Delbo Galleries in New York City. Barthé experienced success after success and was considered by writers and critics as one of the leading "moderns" of his time.

Harlem was one of the three major centers of gay life in New York in 1930, and Barthé soon became integrated into Harlem's gay world. Throughout his career, many of his patrons and subjects were other gay men, and the exploration of both race and eroticism were central to his work.

[Continued here]

William S. Burroughs (1914—1997) [Wikipedia]

William Seward Burroughs II... was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. Burroughs was a primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author who affected popular culture as well as literature. He is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th century." Burroughs wrote 18 novels and novellas, six collections of short stories and four collections of essays. Five books have been published of his interviews and correspondences. Burroughs also collaborated on projects and recordings with numerous performers and musicians, and made many appearances in films.

He was born to a wealthy family in St. Louis, Missouri, grandson of the founder of the Burroughs Corporation, William Seward Burroughs I, and nephew of public relations manager Ivy Lee. Burroughs began writing essays and journals in early adolescence. He left home in 1932 to attend Harvard University, studying English and anthropology, but after being turned down by the Office of Strategic Services and U.S. Navy to serve in World War II, dropped out and spent the next twenty years working a variety of jobs. In 1943 while living in New York City, he befriended Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, the mutually influential foundation of what became the countercultural movement of the Beat Generation, while becoming involved in the drug addiction that affected him for the rest of his life.

Much of Burroughs's work is semi-autobiographical, primarily drawn from his experiences as a heroin addict, as he lived throughout Mexico City, London, Paris, Berlin, the South American Amazon and Tangier in Morocco. Finding success with his confessional first novel, Junkie (1953), Burroughs is perhaps best known for his third novel Naked Lunch (1959), a work fraught with controversy that underwent a court case under the sodomy laws. With Brion Gysin, he also popularized the literary cut-up technique in works such as The Nova Trilogy (1961-64). In 1983, Burroughs was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1984 was awarded the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France. Jack Kerouac called Burroughs the "greatest satirical writer since Jonathan Swift," a reputation he owes to his "lifelong subversion" of the moral, political and economic systems of modern American society, articulated in often darkly humorous sardonicism. J. G. Ballard considered Burroughs to be "the most important writer to emerge since the Second World War," while Norman Mailer declared him "the only American writer who may be conceivably possessed by genius."

[Continued here]

• Capturing a queer icon [Sydney Star Observer, August 30, 2011]

In 1959, influential postmodern author, queer icon and reluctant poster-boy for the Beat generation William S. Burroughs released his seminal novel Naked Lunch.

Half a century later, the book planted the first seeds of inspiration for young US filmmaker Yony Leyser to embark on a five-year labour of love, the exhaustive feature-length documentary William S. Burroughs: A Man Within, screening as part of the Sydney Underground Film Festival.

"I first learned about Burroughs in high school, when I was stuck reading boring puritanical prescribed reading. My friend was reading Naked Lunch, and as soon as I started reading it, I was shocked," the 25-year old told the Star Observer from his new home in Berlin.

"I was just blown away that people could be that open and funny and critical."

Henry Scott Tuke (1858—1929) [The Full Wiki]

Henry Scott Tuke, RA RWS..., was a British visual artist; primarily a painter, but also a photographer. His most notable work was in the Impressionist style, and he is probably best known for his paintings of nude boys and young men.

He was born into a Quaker family in Lawrence Street in York. He was the second son of Daniel Hack Tuke (1827-1895) and Maria Strickney (1826-1917). In 1859 the family moved to Falmouth, where Daniel Tuke, a physician, established a practice. Tuke's sister and biographer, Maria Tuke Sainsbury (1861-1947), was born there. Tuke was encouraged to draw and paint from an early age and some of his earliest drawings-from when he was four or five years old-were published in 1895. In 1870, Tuke joined his brother William at Irwin Sharps's Quaker school in Weston-super-Mare, and remained there until he was sixteen.

[Continued here]

T.E. Lawrence (Click on image to enlarge)

Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden (1856—1931) [Wikipedia]

Baron Wilhelm von Gloeden... was a German photographer who worked mainly in Italy. He is mostly known for his pastoral nude studies of Sicilian boys, which usually featured props such as wreaths or amphoras suggesting a setting in the Greece or Italy of antiquity. From a modern standpoint, his work is commendable due to his controlled use of lighting as well as the often elegant poses of his models. Innovative use of photographic filters and special body makeup (a mixture of milk, olive oil, and glycerin) to disguise skin blemishes contribute to the artistic perfection of his works.

Famous in his own day, his work was subsequently eclipsed for close to a century, only to re-emerge in recent times as "the most important gay visual artist of the pre-World War I era" according to Thomas Waugh.

[Continued here]

(Click on image to enlarge)

Langston Hughes (1902—1967)

Democracy

Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.

I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.


• Langston Hughes [Wikipedia]

Some academics and biographers today believe that Hughes was homosexual and included homosexual codes in many of his poems, similar in manner to Walt Whitman. Hughes has cited him as an influence on his poetry. Hughes's story "Blessed Assurance" deals with a father's anger over his son's effeminacy and "queerness". To retain the respect and support of black churches and organizations and avoid exacerbating his precarious financial situation, Hughes remained closeted.

Arnold Rampersad, the primary biographer of Hughes, determined that Hughes exhibited a preference for other African-American men in his work and life. However, Rampersad denies Hughes's homosexuality in his biography.Rampersad concludes that Hughes was probably asexual and passive in his sexual relationships. He did, however show a respect and love for his fellow black man (and woman). Other scholars argue for Hughes's homosexuality: his love of black men is evidenced in a number of reported unpublished poems to an alleged black male lover.

• Langston Hughes [Poets.org]
• Langston Hughes [Poetry Foundation]
• Langston Hughes index [New York Times]
• Advice With Avocados: A Letter-Writing Friendship [New York Times, March 5, 2001]

Langston Hughes was 22 and Carl Van Vechten 44 when they met at a benefit party in Harlem and their unlikely friendship began. At that time, late in 1924, Hughes, the black poet, had just returned from Europe and was beginning to make a name for himself. Van Vechten, a white critic, novelist and man about town, was far more established and widely known. And he had appropriated black culture as his area of expertise, to the point where one historian anointed him ''the undisputed downtown authority on uptown night life.'' His apartment was nicknamed ''the downtown office of the N.A.A.C.P.'' by Walter White, the secretary of that organization.

My grandmother played the piano, and I used to toddle over there and
pick out little things that sounded good to me.



Billy "Sweet Pea" Strayhorn (1915—1967) [Wikipedia]

William Thomas "Billy" Strayhorn... was an American composer, pianist and arranger, best known for his successful collaboration with bandleader and composer Duke Ellington lasting nearly three decades. His compositions include "Chelsea Bridge", "Take the "A" Train" and "Lush Life". ...

Strayhorn's relationship with Ellington was always difficult to pin down: Strayhorn was a gifted composer and arranger who seemed to flourish in Duke's shadow. Ellington was somewhat of a father figure and the band, by and large, was affectionately protective of the diminutive, mild-mannered, unselfish Strayhorn, nicknamed by the band "Strays", "Weely", and "Swee' Pea". Ellington may have taken advantage of him, but not in the mercenary way that others had taken advantage of Ellington; instead, he used Strayhorn to complete his thoughts, while giving Strayhorn the freedom to write on his own and enjoy at least some of the credit he deserved. Though Duke Ellington took credit for much of Strayhorn's work, he did not maliciously drown out his partner. Ellington would make jokes onstage like, "Strayhorn does a lot of the work but I get to take the bows!" ...

Strayhorn was openly gay. He participated in many civil rights causes. As a committed friend to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., he arranged and conducted "King Fought the Battle of 'Bam'" for the Ellington Orchestra in 1963 for the historical revue My People, dedicated to Dr. King.

[Continued here]

• Billy Strayhorn: Lush Life [PBS]

"When I dare to be powerful, to use my strength in the service of my vision,
then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid."



Audre Lorde (1934—1992) [Wikipedia]

Audre Lorde... was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist.

Lorde set out actively to challenge white women, confronting issues of racism in feminist thought. She maintained that a great deal of the scholarship of white feminists served to augment the oppression of black women, a conviction that led to angry confrontation, most notably in the scathing open letter addressed to radical lesbian feminist Mary Daly, the reply to which she denied having received.

This fervent disagreement with notable white feminists furthered her persona as an "outsider": "in the institutional milieu of black feminist and black lesbian feminist scholars [...] and within the context of conferences sponsored by white feminist academics, Lorde stood out as an angry, accusatory, isolated black feminist lesbian voice".

The criticism did not go only one way: many white feminists were angered by Lorde's brand of feminism. In her essay "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House", Lorde attacked the underlying racism of feminism, describing it as unrecognized dependence on the patriarchy. She argued that, by denying difference in the category of women, feminists merely passed on old systems of oppression and that, in so doing, they were preventing any real, lasting change. Her argument aligned white feminists with white male slave-masters, describing both as "agents of oppression".

In so doing, she enraged a great many white feminists, who saw her essay as an attempt to privilege her identities as black and lesbian, and assume a moral authority based on suffering. Suffering was a condition universal to women, they claimed, and to accuse feminists of racism would cause divisiveness rather than heal it. In response, Lorde wrote "what you hear in my voice is fury, not suffering. Anger, not moral authority."

[Continued here]

• Audre Lorde [Poets.org]

Allen Ginsberg (1926—1997) [Wikipedia]

Irwin Allen Ginsberg... was an American poet who vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression. In the 1950s, Ginsberg was a leading figure of the Beat Generation. Ginsberg's epic poem "Howl", in which he celebrates his fellow "angel-headed hipsters" and excoriates what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States, is one of the classic poems of the Beat Generation.

[Continued here]

• Allen Ginsberg [PBS]
• Allen Ginsberg [Poets.org]
• AllenGinsberg.org [Allen Ginsberg Estate]
• Allen Ginsberg index [New York Times]
• The Lives They Lived: Allen Ginsberg; Birth of a Beatnik [New York Times, January 4, 1998]

He was the modern Walt Whitman -- he heard America singing, swearing, howling, going mad. He sang of himself: gay, spiritual, funny, crude, shocking, wise. He was a popular poet when poetry wasn't popular in America.

When Allen Ginsberg came to Columbia University in the fall of 1943, he was a shy, awkward Jewish kid from New Jersey who wore glasses that magnified his big, dark eyes. He was also a little like the young F. Scott Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald was a poor boy who wanted to know how the very rich behaved. Ginsberg was a mild-mannered hanger-on who wanted to know how the wild ones lived.

Harold Norse (1916—2009) [Wikipedia]

Harold Norse... was an American writer who created a body of work using the American idiom of everyday language and images. One of the expatriate artists of the Beat generation, Norse was widely published and anthologized. ...

Norse met Chester Kallman in 1938, and then became a part of W. H. Auden's "inner circle" when Auden moved to the U.S. in 1939. (Kallman and Auden later became lifelong partners.) However, Norse soon found himself allied with William Carlos Williams, who rated Norse the 'best poet of [his] generation.' Norse broke with traditional verse forms and embraced a more direct, conversational language. Soon Norse was publishing in Poetry, The Saturday Review and The Paris Review. He got his master's degree in literature from New York University in 1951. His first book of poems, The Undersea Mountain, was published in 1953.

From 1954-59 Norse lived and wrote in Italy. He penned the experimental cut-up novel Beat Hotel in 1960 while living in Paris with William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso from 1959 to 1963. He traveled to Tangier, where he stayed with Jane and Paul Bowles. Returning to America in 1968, Norse arrived in Venice, California, near Charles Bukowski. He moved to San Francisco in 1972 and lived in the Mission District of San Francisco for the last 35 years of his life.

Memoirs of a Bastard Angel traces Norse's life and literary career with Auden, Christopher Isherwood, E. E. Cummings, Tennessee Williams, William Carlos Williams, James Baldwin, Dylan Thomas, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Paul Bowles, Charles Bukowski, Robert Graves and Anaïs Nin. With Carnivorous Saint: Gay Poems 1941-1976 Norse became a leading gay liberation poet. His collected poems, In the Hub of the Fiery Force, appeared in 2003.

[Continued here]

• Harold Norse, a Beat Poet, Dies at 92 [New York Times, June 13, 2009]

Harold Norse, a poet who broke new ground beginning in the 1950s by exploring gay identity and sexuality in a distinctly American idiom relying on plain language and direct imagery, died on Monday in San Francisco. He was 92. ...

"Harold was one of the pre-eminent rebel poets of our time," the San Francisco poet Neeli Cherkovski said. "He was someone who smashed conventions, like Ginsberg, and broke through to what he called a new rhythm, writing the way he talked, using the voices of the street. He also gave voice to homosexuality early on."

Christopher Isherwood (1904—1986) [Wikipedia]

Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood... was an English-American novelist. ...

On Valentine's Day 1953, at the age of 48, he met teenaged Don Bachardy among a group of friends on the beach at Santa Monica. Reports of Bachardy's age at the time vary, but Bachardy later said "at the time I was, probably, 16." Despite the age difference, this meeting began a partnership that, though interrupted by affairs and separations, continued until the end of Isherwood's life.

[Continued here]

• Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy: a personal and artistic union [Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2008]

"I can't stand a naked light bulb, any more than I can a
rude remark or a vulgar action."



Tennessee Williams (1911—1983) [Wikipedia]

Thomas Lanier "Tennessee" Williams III... was an American writer who worked principally as a playwright in the American theater. He also wrote short stories, novels, poetry, essays, screenplays and a volume of memoirs. His professional career lasted from the mid 1930s until his death in 1983, and saw the creation of many plays that are regarded as classics of the American stage. Williams adapted much of his best known work for the cinema.

Williams received virtually all of the top theatrical awards for his works of drama, including a Tony Award for best play for The Rose Tattoo (1951) and the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for A Streetcar Named Desire (1948) and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955). In 1980 he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Jimmy Carter and is today acknowledged as one of the most accomplished playwrights in the history of English speaking theater. ...

After some early attempts at heterosexual relationships, by the late 1930s Williams had accepted his homosexuality. In New York he joined a gay social circle which included fellow writer and close friend Donald Windham (1920-2010) and his then partner Fred Melton. In the summer of 1940 Williams initiated an affair with Kip Kiernan (1918-1944), a young Canadian dancer he met in Provincetown, Massachusetts. When Kiernan left him for a woman and marriage he was distraught, and Kiernan's death four years later at 26 delivered another blow.

On a 1945 visit to Taos, New Mexico, Williams met Pancho Rodriguez y Gonzales, a hotel clerk of Mexican heritage. Rodriguez was, by all accounts, loving and loyal but also prone to jealous rages and excessive drink, so the relationship was a tempestuous one. Nevertheless, in February 1946 Rodriguez left New Mexico to join Williams in his New Orleans apartment and they lived and traveled together until late 1947 when Williams ended the affair. Rodriguez and Williams remained friends, however, and were in contact as late as the 1970s.

Williams spent the spring and summer of 1948 in Rome in the company of a teenaged Italian boy to whom he provided financial assistance for several years afterward (a situation which planted the seed of Williams' first novel The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone). When he returned to New York that fall, he met and fell in love with Frank Phillip Merlo (1922-1963), an occasional actor of Sicilian heritage who had served in the U.S. Navy in World War II.

This one enduring romantic relationship of Williams' life lasted 14 years until infidelities and drug abuse on both sides ended it. Merlo, who became Williams' personal secretary taking on most of the details of their domestic life, provided a period of happiness and stability as well as a balance to the playwright's frequent bouts with depression[13] and the fear that, like his sister Rose, he would fall into insanity. Their years together, in an apartment in Manhattan and a modest house in Key West, Florida, were Williams' happiest and most productive. Shortly after their breakup, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer and Williams returned to take care of him until his death on September 21, 1963.

As he had feared, in the years following Merlo's death Williams was plunged into a period of nearly catatonic depression and increasing drug use resulting in several hospitalizations and commitments to mental health facilities. ...

On February 25, 1983, Williams was found dead in his suite at the Elysee Hotel in New York at age 71. The medical examiner's report indicated that he choked to death on the cap from a bottle of eyedrops he frequently used, further indicating that his use of drugs and alcohol may have contributed to his death by suppressing his gag reflex. Prescription drugs, including barbiturates, were found in the room. Williams' body was found by director John Uecker who was identified as his secretary and who travelled with Williams, and was staying in a separate room in Williams' suite.

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• His Greatness: Channelling Tennessee Williams [Globe & Mail, September 23, 2011]

Ultimately, His Greatness is a dark rumination on the burden of fame and the pain of failure. But I don't think Williams, who died in 1983, is rolling in his grave over this unflattering portrait of his twilight years. After all, he set the standard for biographical candour - especially in sexual matters - with his 1975 Memoirs. If anything, his corpse might sit up and applaud this play for its honesty.

• Play finally to be Tennes-seen [New York Post, February 16, 2012]

Director David Schweizer got hold of the play and, using what he calls "sophisticated forensic computer techniques," was able to craft a version that is true, he believes, to Williams' intentions. Schweizer is directing the world premiere, which starts previews April 5 at the Culture Project on Bleecker Street.

"It was written in the vein of a thriller," Schweizer says. "And the female lead is a real corker - one of Tennessee's best creations."

"In Masks Outrageous and Austere" is about the richest woman in the world. Her husband is gay and has a young lover. The three of them are kidnapped by mysterious corporate forces behind the woman's vast wealth.

Michel Tremblay (1942— ) [Wikipedia]

Michel Tremblay, CQ... is a Canadian novelist and playwright. Tremblay grew up in the Plateau Mont-Royal, a French-speaking neighbourhood of Montreal, at the time of his birth a neighbourhood with a working-class character and joual dialect, something that would heavily influence his work. Tremblay's first professionally produced play, Les Belles-Sours, was written in 1965 and premiered at the Théâtre du Rideau Vert on August 28, 1968. Its impact was huge, bringing down the old guard of Canadian theatre and introducing joual to the mainstream. It stirred up controversy by portraying the lives of working class women and attacking the straight-laced, deeply religious society of mid-20th century Quebec. ...

The most profound and lasting effects of Tremblay's early plays, including Hosanna and La Duchesse de Langeais, were the barriers they toppled in Quebec society. Until the Quiet Revolution of the early 1960s, Tremblay saw Quebec as a poor, working-class province dominated by an English-speaking elite and the Roman Catholic Church. Tremblay's work was part of a vanguard of liberal, nationalist thought that helped create an essentially modern society.

His most famous plays are usually centered on homosexual characters. The women are usually strong but possessed with demons they must vanquish. It is said he sees Quebec as a matriarchal society. He is considered one of the best playwrights for women. ...

He has been openly gay throughout his public life, and he has written many novels (The Duchess and the Commoner, La nuit des princes charmants, Le Coeur découvert, Le Coeur éclaté) and plays (Hosanna, La duchesse de Langeais, Fragments de mensonges inutiles) centred on gay characters.

[Continued here]

• Michel Tremblay: L'enfant Terrible of Canadian Theatre [CBC, September 8, 1975]
• Michel Tremblay: writing from inside the womb [CBC, December 15, 1981]
• The enduring appeal of Michel Tremblay [Globe & Mail, February 8, 2011]

Many people fear aging, but Michel Tremblay - once the enfant terrible of Quebec theatre, now its elder statesman - is more worried about his plays getting old.

"Every playwright is afraid that their plays will not age well," says Tremblay, over the phone from his snowbird home in Key West, Fla., where he has done the majority of his writing for the past 20 years.

• A journey toward truth - by train [Globe & Mail, April 24, 2012]

That truth permeates much of Michel Tremblay's oeuvre, and it is particularly evident in the first of a historical trilogy about his beloved characters from Montreal's Plateau, Crossing the Continent. It's about Nana, who appears in The Fat Woman Next Door Is Pregnant. It's 1913, and 10-year-old Nana (Rhéauna) has lived with her grandparents and two younger sisters since she was 5 in idyllic, small-town Saskatchewan. Suddenly, she is summoned to live with her mother in Montreal.

Pakistani American poet [Ifti Nasim] who helped Indian gays migrate dies (1947—2011)
[Times of India, July 26, 2011]

Pakistan-born poet and gay activist Ifti Nasim, who died of a heart attack in a Chicago hospital, once escaped persecution in his native land for his sexual orientation.

Nasim, who died Friday at the age of 64, also helped many Pakistani and Indian gays and lesbians migrate to the US.

He came to the US in 1971 and made a name for himself as a gay activist and Urdu poet. He established Sangat, a gay and lesbian organization, and was inducted into the Chicago Gay and Lesbian Hall of Fame in 1996.

Nasim was a close friend of several lyricists and actors of Hindi cinema.

Nasim's activism transcended religious and political borders.

The BBC made a documentary on Nasim a few years back. "Success makes the world accept you on your own terms," Nasim said, shortly after the documentary was aired.

"But being an openly gay person in the conservative Muslim community has not been easy. They never totally accept you," he said, "they just about tolerate you."

[Continued here]

• South Asian Progressive Action Collective Mourns Passing of Ifti Nasim [SAPAC, July 24, 2011]

Kareem Khubchandani's tribute to Ifti Nasim

"I am privileged to have met, known, and spent time with Ifti Nasim. Ifti was a gifted artist, an inspired activist, a successful businessman, and a truly spectacular being. Ifti was born in Pakistan, and moved to the U.S. to pursue an education in law, but he found that art (specifically poetry) truly moved him. He committed his life to writing, and has performed and published poetry in English, Urdu and Punjabi all over the world. His book Narman has been taken up as a source of inspiration and strength by young people in Pakistan who have had trouble reconciling their sexual orientation and gender identities with what society expects of them. Ifti has been an activist not only through his poetry, but on the ground in Chicago: establishing Sangat for LGBTQ South Asians, rallying South Asians to protest in the wake of post-9/11 hate crimes, and educating South Asians about HIV risk and prevention. Between his art-making and activism, Ifti also worked selling Mercedes cars, and prided himself on his sales skills. Every step of the way, he looked fabulous! Fur, silk, leather, diamonds, gold, sequins, glitter, wigs, makeup, ruffles, and jewelry, he wore it all in style. This is what I will remember most about Ifti, that there was always pleasure to be had; no matter how dire the situation, no matter how painful the issue, there was always pleasure to be found. Ever time I asked Ifti, "How are you?" his answer was, without fail, "Honey, I'm just trying to survive in this big, bad, heterosexual world." But the grace, flair, and humor with which he "survived" assured me that he was doing more than just getting by, he was finding happiness in the crevices of what truly is a difficult world for an outspoken, queer, immigrant, Muslim, South Asian.

"Our community has lost an important figure, but we must continue to be inspired by his activism, his art, and his exuberance. I have lost a special friend, but I will attempt to sustain the difficult work that he has done, and widen the path he has laid for queer desis in Chicago.

"Please keep his family and friends in your thoughts and prayers."

Edmund White (1940— ) [Wikipedia]

Edmund Valentine White III... is an American author and literary critic. He is a member of the faculty of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing. ...

Though he is openly gay himself, not all of his works centre on gay themes. His debut Forgetting Elena (1973) is set on an imaginary island. The novel can be read as commenting on gay culture, but only in a highly coded and indirect manner. Caracole (1985) centers on heterosexual characters, relationships, and desires. Fanny: A Fiction (2003) is a historical novel about Frances Trollope and Frances Wright. White's 2006 play Terre Haute (produced in New York City in 2009) portrays discussions that take place when a prisoner based on Timothy McVeigh is visited by a writer based on Gore Vidal. (In real life McVeigh and Vidal corresponded but did not meet. ...

White's autobiographical works are frank and unapologetic about his promiscuity and his HIV-positive status. In 1982, White helped found the Gay Men's Health Crisis, in New York City. In Paris, in 1984, he was closely involved in the foundation of the French HIV/AIDS NGO AIDES.

[Continued here]

• Edmund White comes out swinging [Salon, October 15, 2009]

Edmund White is one of the few literary giants of the gay world. He is best known for his tetralogy of autobiographical novels -- including "A Boy's Own Story," "The Beautiful Room Is Empty" and "The Farewell Symphony" -- and "States of Desire," a travelogue of pre-AIDS gay America. If his latest memoir, "City Boy," is anything to go by, he's also a very hard person to impress.

• In the '70s, All New York Seemed Young and Gay [New York Times, September 29, 2009]

In all of the gonzo testimony about Stonewall, however, no reaction to the rioting has struck me as being so painfully honest (or so funny) as the novelist Edmund White's. He was there at the Stonewall Inn when it erupted, he writes in his new memoir, "City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s." And when all hell broke loose, his initial response was to sit and stew and cluck.

"I thought we shouldn't create a fuss," he admits. "This was bad for our image. I said out loud, 'Oh, come on, guys.' "

• HIV in the '80s: 'People didn't want to kiss you on the cheek' [CNN, May 25, 2011]

In 1985, Edmund White had five or six published books behind him, a Swiss lover with him and the outcome of an HIV test ahead of him. When the results came in, White told his partner:

"I'm a good enough novelist to know how this is going to work out. I'm going to be positive, you're going to be negative, you're going to be very nice about it, but you're going to break up with me within a year."

By many accounts, White is a good novelist -- a great one, actually, having written numerous acclaimed works of fiction and nonfiction.

Unfortunately, his storytelling sensibility foretold how the HIV tests would turn out and how he would lose his lover because of the dire prognosis: only two or three years left to live.

Like so many gay men in the 1980s, White struggled with an illness that seemed like a death sentence and isolated him from those who feared contagion. But he didn't let himself be defined by his illness, nor did he try to hide it. ...

For many, HIV marked the end of what has been called the "Golden Age of Promiscuity." After the Stonewall riots of 1969, when gays fought back against a police raid at a bar in New York's Greenwich Village, gay activism exploded across the country, and social life became more open. And with birth control pills available, abortion legalized and antibiotics developed for many sexually transmitted diseases, the risks of all forms of sex seemed more minimal than ever before.

• Sacred Monsters: Edmund White's essays should not be measured by ordinary standards [XTRA, January 27, 2012]

Following the recent deaths of Christopher Hitchens in December of 2011, and Susan Sontag in the same month in 2004, and with the possible exception of Gore Vidal, Edmund White is a worthy nomination for the mantle of preeminent essayist in American letters.

The prolific author of fiction, non-fiction and theatre, has recently released a new collection of essays called Sacred Monsters. The title comes from the French term monstre sacré, which, as White explains in the book's introduction, refers to "a venerable or popular celebrity so well known that he or she is above criticism, a legend who despite eccentricities or faults cannot be measured by ordinary standards."

• Edmund White on Gay Fiction [The Browser, February, 2012]

David Mixner: On Becoming A Writer (1946— )
[Hell's Kitchen Journal, January 29, 2012]

My passionate love affair with writing began at a very early age and wasn't fulfilled until the latter part of my life. The years in between were spent overcoming the myths and justifications that danced in my head about why I could never be a writer.

Growing up, books were my great escape. With no television and minimal contact with the outside world, books were a magic carpet that transported me to far away places. My beloved mother, Mary, insisted that all three of her children not only be literate but also love books. We had shelves that dad had made and they were filled with books in the front room. Most of them were very old and out-dated since they had been picked up at penny sales or given to my mother by others.

Amidst those books was a set of encyclopedias that had blue covers with gold printing. They were published sometime in the 1930's and someone had given them to mom. Despite being decades out-of-date, we loved those books filled with knowledge. Often mom, with great pride, would say, "Go look it up in the encyclopedias." Most likely by the time we left home, I had read almost every volume.

[Continued here]

• David Mixner [Wikipedia]
• David Mixner: "When I Am Old and Gay......" [Hell's Kitchen Journal, December 29, 2010]

The LGBT community is about to lose their tribal leaders, elders and generational history without even a peep. In addition, our collective soul might be scarred for ignoring the plight and needs of those whose sacrifice made it possible for today's generation. Most will never even know or enjoy the rights that they fought so hard for you to celebrate today. They couldn't adopt children, run for office or serve in the military. Often they were institutionalized or forced to live lives of lies and fear.

• David Mixner: At Home with Myself: Stories from the Hills of Turkey Hollow [Amazon.ca]
• David Mixner: Sunday's Poetry Corner: David Mixner [Hell's Kitchen Journal, January 29, 2012]

"I didn't want to let women down. One of the stereotypes I see breaking is the
idea of aging and older women not being beautiful."



Annie Leibovitz pawns rights to all future work (1949— )
[The Guardian, February 24, 2009]

She is the world's most famous celebrity photographer, whose portfolio contains some of the most iconic images of the past 30 years, not least the glamorous pictures of Michelle Obama on the latest cover of Vogue. As such Annie Leibovitz is hardly the kind of person you would normally associate with going to a pawn-broker.

But it seems that in these unusual times even the likes of Leibovitz need to find cash in unusual places.

The photographer has turned to a company called Art Capital that specialises in lending money with fine art as the collateral. The New York Times disclosed yesterday that Leibovitz has borrowed about $15m (£10m) from the firm in two tranches.

Records show she secured the loan partly against property, but also by putting up as collateral the copyright, negatives and contract rights to every photograph she has ever taken or will take in future until the loans are paid off.

Such an exceptional step, involving in essence the pawning of her entire life's work, may in Leibovitz's case be explained by the tumultuous few years she has been through. Her long-time friend Susan Sontag died in 2004, and she has been in costly litigation over the renovation of some of her properties.

[Continued here]

• How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz? [New York magazine, August 16, 2009]

Annie Leibovitz clearly hated what a lifetime-achievement award implied about her-that the best days of her 40-year career were behind her. "Photography is not something you retire from," the 59-year-old Leibovitz said from the stage, accepting the honor from the International Center of Photography last May at Pier 60. She was turned out in a simple black dress and glasses, her long straight hair a little unruly, as usual. Photographers, she said, "live to a very old age" and "work until the end." She noted that Lartigue lived to be 92, Steichen 93, and Cartier-Bresson 94. "Irving Penn is going to be 92 next month, and he's still working." Then her tone turned rueful. "Seriously, though, this really is a big deal," she said, hoisting her Infinity Award statuette, her voice quavering to the point where it seemed she might cry. "It means so much to me, you know, especially right now. It's, it's a very sweet award to get right now. I'm having some tough times right now, so ..."

The 700 friends and colleagues who had come to share the evening with her knew about the "tough times." Two vendors had sued her for more than $700,000 in unpaid bills, and in February, the New York Times ran a front-page story reporting that in order to secure a loan, Leibovitz had essentially pawned the copyrights to her entire catalogue of photographs. Even those who had known she was in trouble were shocked by the extent of it. Leibovitz was responsible for some of the world's most iconic magazine covers-a naked John Lennon with Yoko Ono for Rolling Stone, Demi Moore, naked and pregnant, for Vanity Fair. She had moved from celebrity portraiture to fashion photography to edgier, more artistic pictures; some considered her the heir to Richard Avedon or Helmut Newton.

• Annie Leibovitz [Wikipedia]

Leibovitz had a close romantic relationship with noted writer and essayist Susan Sontag. They met in 1989, when both had already established notability in their careers. Leibovitz has suggested that Sontag mentored her and constructively criticized her work.

After Sontag's death in 2004, Newsweek published an article about Leibovitz that made reference to her decade-plus relationship with Sontag, stating that "The two first met in the late '80s, when Leibovitz photographed her for a book jacket. They never lived together, though they each had an apartment within view of the other's."

Neither Leibovitz nor Sontag had ever previously publicly disclosed whether the relationship was familial, a friendship, or sexual in nature. However, when Leibovitz was interviewed for her 2006 book A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005, she said the book told a number of stories, and that "with Susan, it was a love story."

In the preface to the book, she speaks in greater detail about her romantic/intellectual relationship with Sontag, briefly discussing a book they were working on together and describes how assembling A Photographer's Life: 1990-2005 was part of the grieving process after Sontag's death. The book and accompanying show include many photographs of Sontag throughout their life together, including several on her deathbed.

Leibovitz acknowledged that she and Sontag were romantically involved. When asked why she used terms like "companion" to describe Sontag, instead of more specific ones like "partner" or "lover," Leibovitz finally said that "lover" was fine with her. She later repeated the assertion in stating to the San Francisco Chronicle: "Call us 'lovers'. I like 'lovers.' You know, 'lovers' sounds romantic. I mean, I want to be perfectly clear. I love Susan."

Leibovitz is Jewish and nonobservant. Asked if being Jewish is important to her, Leibovitz replied, "I'm not a practicing Jew, but I feel very Jewish." ...

Leibovitz has three children: the eldest, Sarah Cameron Leibovitz (b. October 2001), was born when Leibovitz was 51 years old. Her twins Susan and Samuelle were born to a surrogate mother in May 2005.

• Annie Leibovitz [Vanity Fair]
• Annie Leibovitz: The iPhone Is 'The Snapshot Camera Of Today' [Business Insider, November 17, 2011]
• Annie Leibovitz At Smithsonian Will Feature Images Of Landscapes, People, But No Faces [Huffington Post, January 24, 2012]

Photographer Annie Leibovitz says she has come back from some dark days and revived her creativity with a new photography project now on view at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that marks a departure from her popular celebrity portraits.

"I believe very firmly that gay people of every stripe and age should be role models
for all children, and that means interacting with them."



Armistead Maupin (1944— ) [Wikipedia]

Armistead Jones Maupin, Jr.... is an American writer, best known for his Tales of the City series of novels, based in San Francisco. ...

Maupin's work on a Charleston newspaper was followed with an offer of a post at the San Francisco bureau of the Associated Press in 1971. He says he knew he was gay since childhood, but didn't have sex until he was 26 and only decided to come out in 1974. The same year, he began what would become the Tales of the City series as a serial in a Marin County-based newspaper, the Pacific Sun, moving to the San Francisco Chronicle after the Sun's San Francisco edition folded.

[Continued here]

• Armistead Maupin angered by Alice bathroom slur [ABC, March 17, 2011]

Mr Maupin says he and his partner Christopher have been in Central Australia on holidays, and were going to Bojangles restaurant for lunch.

He said his partner asked one of the bartenders where the bathroom was, but was told there was not one.

"I knew they had one because I'd been there the day before and I said 'what's that over there?', and he gave me a very pointed look and said 'that's reserved for real men'," Mr Maupin said.

"Neither one of us could quite believe he'd said it. And he actually repeated it. He said 'see the sign on the door. It says 'gents'. It's for real men'."

• Armistead Maupin: Tales of the City (TV mini-series) [IMDb]
• Latest Maupin tale tells of 'closet of age' [The Guardian, June 12, 2007]
• Armistead Maupin: Barbary Lane, barbarism and the Vatican [The Guardian, December 19, 2010]
• Armistead Maupin's books index [The Guardian]
• Armistead Maupin, Olympia Dukakis discuss 'Tales of the City' [Los Angeles Times, May 2 2010]
• Armistead Maupin angered by Alice bathroom slur [ABC News, March 17, 2011]
• Tales of the City: The iconic novels finally get their musical due [Out, May 23 2011]

• Armistead Maupin at work on new 'Tales': Author says 'The Days of Anna Madrigal' to be published in 2013 [Gay Star News, January 27, 2012]

Maurice Sendak (1928—2012) [Wikipedia]

Maurice Bernard Sendak... is an American writer and illustrator of children's literature. He is best known for his book Where the Wild Things Are, published in 1963.

Sendak mentioned in a September 2008 article in The New York Times that he is gay, and had lived with his partner, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn for 50 years before Dr. Glynn's death in May 2007. Revealing that he never told his parents, he said, "All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never, never knew."...

[Continued here]

• A Conversation with Maurice Sendak [NPR, June 4, 2005]

His favorite subject? "Scaring children."

His most treasured possessions? Mickey Mouse memorabilia.

His best buddy? A boisterous German Shepherd named for Herman Melville.

This is Maurice Sendak at 76, as Jennifer Ludden found after a trip into the New England woods to interview the famed author and illustrator of books for young readers, best known for 1964's Where the Wild Things Are.

• Maurice Sendak on the First Book He's Written and Illustrated in 30 Years [The Atlantic, September 20, 2011]

Atlantic: I think, for children, there's something both thrilling and terrifying about the idea of life without supervision--life without parents. Was that something you were exploring in Bumble-Ardy?

Sendak: Most children--I know I did when I was a kid--fantasize another set of parents. Or fantasize no parents. They don't tell their real parents about that--you don't want to tell Mom and Dad. Kids lead a very private life. And I was a typical child (I think). I was a liar. I was out to protect my parents from hard truths. Although what I assumed was a hard truth was really--hard to realize what it could be now.

Bumble is a tough little bastard. And he's had a hard time from the word "go." And he knows he's supposed to be good and kind and all of the things that are expected of children. When he tells her that he'll never turn 10, it tells you how much he does not comprehend the business of living and dying. And that's something so much on the minds of children. They may not bring it up, because they don't want to disturb their parents--but children do a lot not to disturb their parents. And they know a lot.

• Maurice Sendak at 83: A portrait of the author as a cranky old man [Globe & Mail, September 24, 2011]

Maurice Sendak, author and illustrator of the classic Where the Wild Things Are, is one of the most important figures in 20th-century children's literature, having helped to liberate the genre from its do-gooding shackles with tales of gleefully misbehaving children who never go punished.

But Bumble-Ardy, Sendak's latest, is the first book the 83-year-old New Yorker has both written and illustrated in 30 years. In this interview, the artist explains how the death of his life partner, psychoanalyst Eugene Glynn, inspired his return to writing.

JB: The publicity says this is your first book in 30 years. How is that?

MS: It sounds good, doesn't it? In one sense, it is. In the minute sense that it's the first picture book in that many years for children. In the interim, I have illustrated a great novel by Herman Melville and a great German drama and I have designed sets for opera here and in Europe. I kind of took time off kiddie bookland.

JB: Why?

MS: I don't know. I know only in the sense that someone called and said, "How would you like to do sets for a Mozart opera?" And I was totally captivated, because I love Mozart with all my heart. And he didn't care that I was inexperienced. I had a wonderful time, and I did another opera and another opera in England and Belgium and Paris and it was great. To hell with kiddie books!

• Maurice Sendak: 'I refuse to lie to children' [The Guardian, October 2, 2011]

Maurice Sendak looks like one of his own creations: beady eyes, pointy eyebrows, the odd monsterish tuft of hair and a reputation for fierceness that makes you tip-toe up the path of his beautiful house in Connecticut like a child in a fairytale. Sendak has lived here for 40 years - until recently with his partner Eugene, who died in 2007; and now alone with his dog, Herman (after Melville), a large alsatian who barges to the door to greet us. "He's German," says Sendak, getting up from the table where he is doing a jigsaw puzzle of a monster from his most famous book, Where the Wild Things Are. Sotto voce, he adds: "He doesn't know I'm Jewish." ...

He is still raging. But since Eugene's death, says Sendak, it is merely an echo of his former anger. He looks around his property, built in 1791 and boasting in its grounds one of the last elms still standing in Connecticut, and approaches something like peace. He knows he is lucky and has been lucky for a long time. His relationship with Eugene, who was a psychoanalyst, lasted almost 50 years. His parents never knew - not officially. "Of course, they knew. Especially my father. My mother was so bewildering and strange and lived in another world, I don't know what she knew. Nothing was said, but if something had been said, I would have been thrown out of the house. And yet they met him and respected him. Strange."

• Maurice Sendak, author of 'Where the Wild Things Are,' dead at 83 [Globe & Mail, May 8, 2012]

During that 2003 interview, Sendak also said he felt as if he were part of a dying breed of illustrators who approached their work as craftsmen. "I feel like a dinosaur. There are a few of us left. (We) worked so hard in the '50s and '60s but some have died and computers pushed others out."

• Sendak's closest friends near at deathbed [Christian Science Monitor, May 8, 2012]

Maurice Sendak's closest friends gathered in his hospital room - playwright Tony Kushner, authors Brian Selznick and Gregory Maguire. Kushner brought jellybeans, while Maguire placed a picture of Lewis Carroll on the table beside Sendak's bed. ...

Sendak, among the most honored and adored children's authors, ranks with Dr. Seuss as a revolutionary force of the past half-century. He told stories about children that were actually about children, and not what adults wished them to be. He inspired every author, from Judy Blume to Daniel Handler, who ever wanted to go a little too far.

"It's almost impossible to overstate his importance," says Handler, known for the Lemony Snicket "Series Of Unfortunate Events" books. "He's a North Star in the firmament of anyone who makes children's books, in particular for his dark and clear-eyed view of the world that was kindred to me when I was in kindergarten and kindred to me now. He gives neither the comfort nor the horror of sentimentality."

"He got right inside what a child was thinking and feeling," said Blume, a close friend of Sendak's who cried as she spoke of him. "I always loved hearing him say that you didn't have to have a child to write children's books. What you have to have is a memory of your own childhood."

Sendak was one of the most important figures in 20th-century children's literature, having helped to liberate the genre from its do-gooding shackles with tales of gleefully misbehaving children who never go punished.

• How Wild Was the Work of Maurice Sendak? [Slate, May 8, 2012]

When Maurice Sendak published Where the Wild Things Are 40 years ago, both fans and detractors called him a Wild Thing. Until then, he'd been best known as the illustrator of Else Holmelund Minarik's Little Bear books, which launched Harper & Row's "I Can Read" line in 1957. But here was Sendak making mischief of one kind and another in a picture book all his own as the 1960s got under way. Gone was the tractable (and adorable) cub who had lured baby boomers like me into reading by themselves. Gone, too, was the attentive mother of those stories, so deft in dealing with her furry 5-year-old's fledgling efforts to define his identity. Instead Sendak had conjured up a hellion in a wolf suit (Max is a classic 4-year-old) whose fed-up mother sends him to bed without dinner. And Sendak had created a centerfold of cavorting monsters-a rumpus he dared to let loose on a younger read-aloud crowd.

Tony Kushner (1956— ) [Wikipedia]

Anthony Robert "Tony" Kushner... is an American playwright and screenwriter. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1993 for his play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, and co-authored with Eric Roth the screenplay for the 2005 film, Munich.

[Continued here]

• How I Made It: Tony Kushner on 'Angels in America' [New York, April 7, 2008]

I had a dream, in 1985, I believe, when a friend I'd gone to school with was sick-one of the first people I knew who'd gotten the AIDS virus. I had a dream of him in his bedroom with an angel crashing through the ceiling. I wrote a poem called "Angels in America." I've never looked at the poem since the day I wrote it.

• Tony Kushner [IMDb]
• Tony Kushner: 'It's a crazy time' [The Guardian, August 31, 2010]
• Tony Kushner's The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide... Opens Off-Broadway [Playbill, May 5, 2011]

Tony Kushner's The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism With a Key to the Scriptures, a dynamic family drama studded with politics and American union fervor, officially opens Off-Broadway May 5 at the Public Theater.

• Tony Kushner: coming out as a socialist [Salon, May, 2011]
• Wrestling with Angels: Playwright Tony Kushner [Tony Kushner The Movie]
• Tony Kushner's Day: The playwright at the heart of America's cultural moment [Newsweek, May 28, 2009]
• Tony Kushner's honour restored by university board's unanimous vote [The Guardian, May 10, 2011]
• Tony Kushner index [New York Times]
• The importance of being Tony Kushner: A vital, moral and empathetic voice in a time when such powers of perception and eloquence are rare [Salon, May 18, 2011]
• After uproar, Kushner to accept N.Y. honorary degree [Salon, June 2, 2011]

David Hockney: Pictures and power (1937— ) [The Guardian, March 27, 2008]

Michael Curtiz, one of the founders of Hollywood and director of Casablanca and many swashbuckling Errol Flynn movies, tells a story about seeing his first bit of cinema in about 1908, in the Cafe New York in Budapest. He recalls what fascinated him: it wasn't the film itself but the fact that everybody watched it. He realised not everyone goes to the theatre, not everyone goes to the opera, but the cinema will attract the masses. By 1920 he was in Hollywood - which was the sticks then, compared with Budapest - but California had the money, the light, and the technology. He was right.

Now let's go back 350 years, to Neopolitan scholar Giambattista Della Porta, who published a book, Natural Magick, about optical projections of nature. He was a renaissance man: scientist, playwright and showman. He put on shows using optical projections (simple to do) and was hauled before the Inquisition by the church.

The church at that time was the sole purveyor of pictures. It knew the power of images, and Della Porta would have noticed, like Michael Curtiz, how people were attracted to that optical projection. They still are.

The church had social control. Whoever controlled the images had power. And they still do. Social control followed the lens and mirror for most of the 20th century. What's now known as the media exert social control, not the church, but we are moving into a new era, because the making and distribution of images is changing. Anyone can make and distribute images on a mobile phone. The equipment is everywhere.

[Continued here]

• Hockney's iPhone drawings come to Canada [CBC, July 29, 2011]
• Modest British artist David Hockney, 74, 'worth a staggering £80 million' [Daily Mail, October 5, 2011]
• Power and glory of Hockney's England: Spectacular works by great artist reveal beauty of the British landscape [Daily Mail, January 19, 2012]

This week, an exhibition opens at the Royal Academy in London, entitled David Hockney: A Bigger Picture. Normally, when an artist is in his 70s, an exhibition on this scale would be a retrospective, looking back over a lifetime's achievement. But most of this show - which contains more than 150 artworks, filling room after vast room - has been done in the past eight years.

As you look around the exhibition, you will notice something apart from the great works of art on the walls. You will see the wonder in the faces of the other people looking at them.

• David Hockney: dark strains beneath the vibrancy [Telegraph, January 21, 2012]
• D- for effort: Hockney's old art teacher says his ex-student's new works are simply 'rubbish' Daily Mail, January 22, 2012]
• Never mind the critics — David Hockney paintings stir the soul [Globe & Mail, January 27, 2012]

Keith Haring, Pop star and lawbreaker, gets a Google Doodle (1958—1990)
[Los Angeles Times, May 4, 2012]

Keith Haring, recipient Friday of a Google Doodle, was among a group of art school students who considered themselves Pop Art heirs to Andy Warhol. But although Haring was dead by age 31, the artist made his own imprint, and it wasn't on a soup can.

Perhaps as remarkable as Haring's art was the man himself -- his energy and personality.

In a 2008 review of a Haring documentary, Los Angeles Times' movie critic Kenneth Turan says Haring's lively pop sensibility, "owlish looks" and exuberant personality combined to make him, as one of his friends said, "a true phenomenon."

Haring grew up in Kutztown, Pa., where he was a diligent paper boy, delivering the Reading Eagle seven days a week. He was interested in art as a boy and would draw comic strips with his father, cartoonist Allen Haring.

But his destiny was bigger and much more offbeat, and by the time he moved to New York in 1978 to attend the School of Visual Arts, he was diving into the street art scene and becoming a fixture at local clubs.

[Continued here]

• Keith Haring Mural Unveiled at the LGBT Community Center in New York City [Passport, March 7, 2012]

The LGBT Community Center in New York City unveiled a partially restord mural by Keith Haring last night in celebration of the artist's life and legacy. The mural reflects Haring's playful, erotic side and highlights the pleasures of gay sex and sexuality before the scourge of AIDS. Titled "Once Upon a Time." the mural is a one-of-a-kind work of art that The Center is proudly restoring and is on public view from March 7 through Saturday, March 31, 2012.

A conversation is a dialogue, not a monologue. That's why there are so few good
conversations: due to scarcity, two intelligent talkers seldom meet.



Truman Capote (1924—1984) [Wikipedia]

Truman Streckfus Persons..., known as Truman Capote... was an American author, many of whose short stories, novels, plays, and nonfiction are recognized literary classics, including the novella Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958) and the true crime novel In Cold Blood (1966), which he labeled a "nonfiction novel." At least 20 films and television dramas have been produced from Capote novels, stories and screenplays. ...

As a lonely child, Capote taught himself to read and write before he entered his first year of schooling. Capote was often seen at age five carrying his dictionary and notepad, and he began writing fiction at the age of 11. He was given the nickname Bulldog around this age, possibly a phonetic reference and pun of "Bulldog Truman" to the fictional detective Bulldog Drummond popular in films of the mid-1930s. ...

Although Capote seemed to never really embrace the Gay Rights Movement, his own openness about homosexuality and his encouragement for openness in others makes him an important player in the realm of Gay Rights none-the-less. In his piece "Capote and the Trillings: Homophobia and Literary Culture at Midcentury," Jeff Solomon details an encounter between Capote and Lionel and Diana Trilling -- two New York intellectuals and literary critics -- in which Capote questioned the motives of Lionel who had recently published a book on E.M. Forster, but had ignored the author's homosexuality. Solomon argues that "when Capote confronts the Trillings on the train, he attacks their identity as literary and social critics committed to literature as a tool for social justice, capable of questioning both their own and their society's preconceptions, and sensitive to prejudice by virtue of their heritage and, in Diana's case, by her gender." By producing works on homosexuality before and after the beginning of the Gay Rights Movement and by living an openly gay lifestyle, Capote became an important representative of the gay community and a leading gay figure throughout the 20th century.

[Continued here]

• Truman Capote index [New York Times]

"I had to be successful, and I had to be successful early,'' Mr. Capote said in 1978. ''The thing about people like me is that we always knew what we were going to do. Many people spend half their lives not knowing. But I was a very special person, and I had to have a very special life. I was not meant to work in an office or something, though I would have been successful at whatever I did. But I always knew that I wanted to be a writer and that I wanted to be rich and famous.'' Success, both as a writer and as a celebrity, came early, when he was 23 years old and published his first novel, ''Other Voices, Other Rooms.'' It was a critical and financial success, and so were most of the volumes of short stories, reportage and novellas that followed, including ''Breakfast at Tiffany's,'' ''The Muses Are Heard,'' ''The Grass Harp,'' ''Local Color,'' ''The Dogs Bark'' and ''Music for Chameleons.''

• Mansion where Truman Capote wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's sells for record $12million [Daily Mail, March 4, 2012]

"I always thought I was good. That's why it was so frustrating when other people didn't agree."



Robert Mapplethorpe (1946—1989) [Wikipedia]

Robert Mapplethorpe... was an American photographer, known for his large-scale, highly stylized black and white portraits, photos of flowers and nude men. The frank, homosexual eroticism of some of the work of his middle period triggered a more general controversy about the public funding of artworks. ...

Mapplethorpe was born and grew up as a Roman Catholic of English and Irish heritage in Our Lady of the Snows Parish in Floral Park, Queens, New York. His parents were Harry and Joan Mapplethorpe and he grew up with five brothers and sisters. He studied for a B.F.A. from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, where he majored in graphic arts,[1] though he dropped out in 1969 before finishing his degree.[2] Mapplethorpe lived with his partner Patti Smith from 1967-1974, and she supported him by working in bookstores. They created art together, and even after he realized he was gay they maintained a close relationship.

Mapplethorpe took his first photographs soon thereafter using a Polaroid camera. In the mid-1970s, he acquired a Hasselblad medium-format camera and began taking photographs of a wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers, and socialites. In the 1980s he refined his aesthetic, photographing statuesque male and female nudes, delicate flower still lifes, and highly formal portraits of artists and celebrities. Mapplethorpe's first studio was at 24 Bond Street in Manhattan. In the 1980s, his mentor and lifetime companion, art curator Sam Wagstaff, gave him $500,000 to buy the top-floor loft at 35 West 23rd Street, where he lived and had his shooting space. He kept the Bond Street loft as his darkroom.

Mapplethorpe died on the morning of March 9, 1989, 42 years old, in a Boston, Massachusetts hospital from complications arising from AIDS. His body was cremated and the ashes buried in Queens, New York, in his mother's grave, marked 'Maxey'.

[Continued here]

• Top 10 Persecuted Artists: 9. Robert Mapplethorpe [Time, April 5, 2011]

American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe ignited a fierce culture war in 1989 when his exhibit "The Perfect Moment" was scheduled to go up at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The exhibit, which featured classic portraits, floral studies and a section of extremely graphic homosexual S&M photos, had already been featured at museums in Philadelphia and Chicago without any protest. (The explicit photos were kept hidden in a separate, age-restricted area during each exhibit.)

But when Republican Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina learned that the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) had given the Philly museum $30,000 for Mapplethorpe's works, he cobbled together a group of 100 Congressmen who wrote an angry letter to the NEA. Not wanting to incite controversy, the Corcoran Gallery backed out of the show. Later, Mapplethorpe's work traveled to Cincinnati's Contemporary Arts Center (CAC), where it caused even more trouble. Mapplethorpe's photographs were used as evidence against CAC director Dennis Barrie, who was charged with obscenity. Luckily, Barrie was acquitted. So while Mapplethorpe wasn't directly persecuted (in fact, he died a few months before the NEA controversy even started), his art received more than its fair share of discrimination.

• Robert Mapplethorpe index [New York Times]
• Understanding Robert Mapplethorpe through Patti Smith [Los Angeles Times, February 9, 2011]

Shooting star: David LaChapelle's search for redemption (1963— )
[The Guardian, February 6, 2009]

"The apocalypse is sold to us on television," photographer David LaChapelle says, sitting in the hall of the Hôtel de la Monnaie, a pre-revolutionary building next to the Seine, and avoiding eye contact with the numerous French journalists who eagerly encircle him. Lachapelle is in Paris to open his long-awaited retrospective in a building normally reserved for housing French coins and medals.

In the main room stands a fantastical pop-up mural showing LaChapelle's own version of apocalypse: consumers laid out nude and clearly in anguish, exotic luxury products and humping golden pigs. Walking us through the exhibition, Lachapelle describes the new work, Decadence: The insufficiency of All Things Attainable (2008), as "anti-commodity art". He nods towards another series, The Crash (2008), four supersized photographs, each printed on mounted cardboard. They display damaged American cars stacked on top of each other, each with a similar title: Enhanced Performance; Intelligent Decadence; Boundless Freedom; Luxurious Power. His latest work, he says, is "inspired by the idea of negative money. I'm taking this as a chance and an opportunity to say something."

This anti-capitalist stance come from a man who has, of course, made millions from fashion shoots, music videos, global-brand marketing and portraits of superstars. His back catalogue is enormous, and the retrospective, which features over 200 works, has definite highlights. Paris Hilton: Hi Bitch, Bye Bitch (2004) and photographs of Jesus Christ surrounded by homeboys (six portraits, 2003) drip with hip irony, while Awakened (eight portraits, 2007) depicts models in oversized clothing artfully submerged in water.

[Continued here]

• David LaChapelle [Wikipedia]

David LaChapelle... is a photographer and director who works in the fields of fashion, advertising, and fine art photography, and is noted for his surreal, unique, sexualized, and often humorous style. ...

In 1995 David LaChapelle shot the famous 'kissing sailors' advertisement for Diesel. It was staged at the peace celebration of World War II and became one of the first public advertisements showing a homosexual couple kissing. Much of its controversy was due it being published at height of the Don't ask, Don't tell debates in USA, which had led to the U.S. Government to bar openly gay, lesbian, or bisexual persons from military service. In a long article published by Frieze in 1996, the advertisement was credited for its "overarching tone of heavy-handed humor and sarcasm". In September 2011 when the Don't ask, Don't tell law was finally removed by President Barack Obama, Renzo Rosso, the founder and president of Diesel who originally had approved and pushed for the advertisement, said "16 years ago people wouldnt stop complaining about this ad. Now it's (open bi- and homosexuality in the U.S. Military) finally accepted legally."

LaChapelle directed singer Elton John's show, The Red Piano at Las Vegas' Caesars Palace, which premiered in 2004. The show features extensive use of video technology on an LED screen backing the show that, when built, was promoted as the largest and brightest of all time. Several of John's songs during the performance are accompanied by short films by LaChapelle. On a CNN interview LaChapelle admitted to gay escorting at the age of 18.

John Rechy (1934— ) [Wikipedia]

John Rechy, (born March 10, 1934 in El Paso, Texas), is an American author, the child of a Scottish father and a Mexican-American mother. In his novels he has written extensively about homosexual culture in Los Angeles and wider America, and is among the pioneers of modern LGBT literature. Drawing on his own background, he has also contributed to Chicano literature, especially with his novel The Miraculous Day of Amalia Gomez, which is taught in several Chicano literature courses in the United States. His work has often faced censorship due to its sexual content, particularly (but not solely) in the 1960s and 1970s, but books such as City of Night have been best sellers, and he has many literary admirers.

[Continued here]

• Midnight cowboy: John Rechy recalls 40 yeas of hustle [The Independent, April 27, 2008]

When John Rechy published his first novel, City of Night, in 1963, he was still earning his living as a prostitute on the streets of Los Angeles. It made sense: he didn't expect a book that dealt with underground gay life in America to make him much money, and it's a foolish writer who gives up the day job (or in Rechy's case, the night job) with the first flush of publication.

Terrence McNally (1939— ) [Wikipedia]

Terrence McNally... is an American playwright who has received four Tony Awards, an Emmy, two Guggenheim Fellowships, a Rockefeller Grant, the Lucille Lortel Award, the Hull-Warriner Award, and a citation from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has been a member of the Council of the Dramatists Guild since 1970 and has served as vice-president since 1981. McNally was partnered to Thomas Kirdahy following a civil union ceremony in Vermont in 2003, and they subsequently married in Washington, D.C. on April 6, 2010. ...

In 1997, McNally stirred up a storm of controversy with Corpus Christi, a modern day retelling of the story of Jesus' birth, ministry, and death in which both he and his disciples are portrayed as homosexual. In fact, the play was initially canceled because of death threats from extremist religious groups against the board members of the Manhattan Theatre Club which was to produce the play. However, several other playwrights such as Tony Kushner threatened to withdraw their plays if Corpus Christi was not produced, and the board finally relented. When the play opened, the theatre was besieged by almost 2,000 protesters, furious at what they considered blasphemy. When Corpus Christi opened in London, a British Muslim group called the Defenders of the Messenger Jesus even went so far as to issue a fatwa sentencing McNally to death. On January 19, 2008, Robert Forsyth, Anglican bishop of South Sydney condemned Corpus Christi (which opened for February's Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras, a play depicting Judas seducing Jesus): "It is deliberately, not innocently, offensive and they're obviously having a laugh about it." The play also showed Jesus administrating a marriage between two male apostles. Director Leigh Rowney accepted that it would offend some Christians and said: "I wanted this play in the hands of a Christian person like myself to give it dignity but still open it up to answering questions about Christianity as a faith system."

[Continued here]

• A Modern, Gay You-Know-Who Superstar [New York Times, October 21, 2008]

Not one angry protester showed up at the first performance of the New York revival of Terrence McNally's notorious "Corpus Christi." There was no talk in the aisles of free speech or the First Amendment. I didn't even walk through a metal detector. Times have certainly changed.

Only a decade ago this fragile, heartfelt play, which portrays Jesus as a young gay man, sparked hysterical protests from religious groups, leading to bomb threats at the Manhattan Theater Club, which canceled the show. Outrage ensued, and before you knew it, a culture war had erupted, before anyone had seen one scene. When the production finally opened, it turned out that it was an earnest and reverent spin on the Jesus story, with some soft-spoken, gay-friendly politics thrown in. Critics were underwhelmed.

• Corpus Christi: Playing with Redemption [corpuschristi-themovie.com]

108 Productions resurrection of Terrence McNally's Corpus Christi is arguably the most successful revival of his play, having garnered national and international acclaim after five years of touring. Now in post production and to be released soon, the documentary feature follows the troupe on their journey with this play and the many faces they meet along the way — a journey they discover would forever change their lives.

Heather Has Two Mommies: 10th Anniversary Edition by Lesléa Newman and Diana Souza
[Amazon.ca, 2000]

This handsome 10-anniversary edition of a minor classic presents the story of Heather, a preschooler with two moms who discovers that some of her friends have very different sorts of families. Juan, for example, has a mommy and a daddy and a big brother named Carlos. Miriam has a mommy and a baby sister. And Joshua has a mommy, a daddy, and a stepdaddy. Their teacher Molly encourages the children to draw pictures of their families, and reassures them that "each family is special" and that "the most important thing about a family is that all the people in it love each other." ...

Originally self-published in 1989, Heather Has Two Mommies became the first title in Alyson's newly formed Alyson Wonderland imprint in 1990. The simple and straightforward story of a little girl named Heather and her two lesbian mothers was created by Newman and illustrator Diana Souza because children's books that reflected a nontraditional family did not exist, but a firestorm of controversy soon ensued. Attacked by the religious right, lambasted by Jesse Helms from the floor of the U.S Senate, and stolen from library shelves, it was an uphill battle for Heather. Thanks to the overwhelming support of booksellers, librarians, parents, and children, however, Heather Has Two Mommies has sold over 35,000 copies, launched a minor industry in providing books for the children of gay and lesbian parents and, as attested to by a recent New Yorker cartoon, become part of the cultural lexicon.

[Continued here]

• Beyond "Heather Has Two Mommies" [Ann Arbor District Library, November 13, 2009]

A few weeks ago, while working in the Youth department downtown, a patron asked me if the library had any books for young children that depicted "alternative families" (by which she meant LGBT picture books). Unsure about how to begin such a search in our catalog, I decided to start with the one book I could think of right away: Heather Has Two Mommies, by Leslea Newman. When I looked up the title, I found that we do indeed have it, but not where I thought it would be; it had been categorized not with the picture books but in the non-fiction section, in the area for "family issues". That's where I also found several other picture books depicting LGBT families. I figured that there must be other people in the community looking for these kinds of books, who like me don't know where to look or even what's out there. So I decided to conduct an assessment of the literature available for young children that portrays non-traditional families, particularly same-gender parents.

• Heather has two mommies and they're both caucasian and moneyed: unsaids in international 'queer' children's literature [Dark Matter, September 28, 2010]

Herb Ritts (1952—2002) [Wikipedia]

Herbert "Herb" Ritts... was an American fashion photographer who concentrated on black-and-white photography and portraits, often in the style of classical Greek sculpture. ...

On December 26, 2002, Ritts died of complications from pneumonia at the age of 50. According to Ritts' publicist, "Herb was HIV-positive, but this particular pneumonia was not PCP (pneumocystis pneumonia), a common opportunistic infection of AIDS. But at the end of the day, his immune system was compromised."

[Continued here]

• Getty Museum acquires set of Herb Ritts photographs [Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2011]

As of last month, the Getty Museum did not have a single image by Herb Ritts in its extensive photography collection. Now it has 69 black-and-white images by the late L.A. fashion photographer valued at close to $1 million, acquired from his foundation in a single transaction that was part gift and part purchase.

Getty associate curator Paul Martineau says the change reflects his own interest in fashion photography as well as a commitment by the department to "strengthen its holdings in the area."

Ritts, who died in 2002, helped to popularize a certain high-drama, high-contrast, starkly beautiful style associated with the 1980s, before fashion photographers began working so hard to make models look realistic, trashy and bedraggled. This acquisition includes some recognizable images, such as an early portrait of his friend Richard Gere smoking at a gas station (done when Ritts was still a Lucite furniture sales rep) and theatrical shots of supermodels like Cindy, Christie and Naomi.

Perhaps in part because of his commercial success in magazines and advertising, Ritts has never been fully embraced by the museum world. Some art critics dismiss him as Robert Mapplethorpe lite.

• Celeb photographer Herb Ritts gets his closeup [CBS News, February 27, 2011]

Whether it was movie stars, musicians or models, Herb Ritts had a way of getting to the ESSENCE of a person.

"I can have a given situation set up, but it's catching that moment - allowing them to be themselves - and capturing something that's special," he said.

And up until his death in 2002 at age 50, Ritts was capturing those special images - photographs that were surprising, amusing, moving, memorable.

Dave Koz (1963— ) [Wikipedia]

Dave Koz... is an American saxophonist. Because they look and sound similar, Koz often draws comparisons to another well-known saxophonist, David Sanborn, and is sometimes billed as "the second coming of Sanborn." ...

In an April 2004 interview with The Advocate, Koz came out publicly as a gay man. Later the same year, he was named by People magazine as one of their "50 Hottest Bachelors" in their June issue.

[Continued here]

• Support Equality: Dave Koz sings This Guys in Love with You (2011) [YouTube]

[Heather] Bambrick takes on weekday morning radio: Toronto singer 'wakes up
in a great mood' [XTRA, September 30, 2011 ]

Toronto jazz singer and award-winning radio personality Heather Bambrick has been named the new host of JAZZFM.91's popular morning-drive slot. It's a big promotion for Bambrick, who previously hosted a weekly show at the popular station.

And there are some pretty big shoes to fill. CBC icon Ralph Benmergui reigned supreme in the morning slot for six years, helping to introduce the station to new local and international listeners. When Benmergui left the station last year, veteran talk-show host John Donabie stepped in but departed after only 10 months. It was while filling in for Donabie that Bambrick decided to throw her hat into the ring for the role of the station's new permanent host.

"My fear was whether or not I could maintain it, and how it would change my life" says Bambrick. "Not to mention waking up at 4:30am. It's way busier than when I would host my Sunday show and be all alone at the station."

She need not have worried. Listeners have responded positively to the station's decision and have embraced Bambrick's warm and witty personality. Cheerful without being chirpy, and funny in that Jann Arden sort of way, Bambrick strikes the perfect balance of music and talk that made Benmergui so popular. She also relishes the interplay with JAZZFM's resident Puck, Jaymz Bee, whose mischievous banter with Benmergui was a program highlight.

[Continued here]

"I wouldn't just call myself a jazz vocalist; I would call myself a vocalist. I write
my own songs, lyrics, and poetry."



Jenni Chang and Lisa Dazols: Singing His Heart Out: Jazz Musician Coco Zhao Talks
Being Openly Gay in China [HuffPo, March 22, 2012]

Nevertheless, we found one jazz musician, Coco Zhao, who has never backed down from an opportunity to be a role model for the Chinese LGBT community. He is a proud Shanghai resident who took to the stage in 2009 to kick off Shanghai's first Pride Festival.

Coco has nothing to hide and makes no apologies. His gay life took a very public form in a documentary by Michelle Chen, called Snake Boy. While the film was not widely distributed in China due to the taboo subject matter of homosexuality, it was featured at the San Francisco Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 2002 and throughout film festivals across the States and Europe. Coco now has a global following, performing in multiple international jazz festivals. ...

Q: As a performer, how have you brought your gay identity into your work?

A: I don't spend a lot of energy thinking about being a gay performer. Most of the time I think of myself as an instrument. I don't think about performing something more masculine or feminine. However, I know my sexuality and personality characters are related to my work. People say my work is very sensitive, detailed, and a little feminine. If that is how my work is, then I wouldn't want it to be another way. That's who I am.

[Continued here]

Windsor Star: "The lines are rich and black, and the images...are like pastoral
poems...Brender à Brandis' ability to capture mood is unparalleled."



Gerard Brender à Brandis (1942— ) [lyghtesome.ns.ca]

"I cannot say exactly when my career as a bookwright and wood engraver began. I had my first lessons in book binding in grade three and "printed" my first book on the family typewriter, adding hand-drawn illustrations. On the very afternoon that I made my first wood engraving in a studio class at University I felt the desire to make this medium my own, supported by an awareness of the traditional connection between wood engraving and the book. Although I have always been more comfortable with tradition than innovation, I do not consider myself to be a mere copy of a nineteenth-century artist.

I did not set out originally to be a "Jack-of-all-trades". I dreamed of founding a community of like-minded souls all involved in the book arts, from writers to bookbinders. I believed that the first printing press I bought would, with its metallic presence, act as a magnet for those who loved both language and craftsmanship. If I failed, however, to draw together those kindred spirits, I have succeeded in achieving the enviable position of being able to conceive a project, give the vision a material form, and market the result all by myself, unlike many authors who must persuade agents, publishers, printers, distributors and retailers in order to reach their audience.

I aim to integrate my work with my life in general as completely as possible, both spatially and temporally, with each enriching the other. My work-room becomes my dining-room when I entertain my friends, and the fruit and vegetables I serve will likely have served as subjects for a sketch before they are served as a meal. Stirring a soup may well provide an interlude between engraving a block and printing it. This weaving together of the strands of my life leaves each vulnerable to disturbance from another, but I would have it no other way. The location of my studio/home on a main street in Stratford allows the interested public to penetrate into my workplace, creating the possiblility of building mutual esteem between the producer of art and its consumer. I believe that I am achieving a relationship that was normal in medieval times but rare in the intervening centuries of specialization and compartmentalization."

— Gerard Brender à Brandis

[Continued here]

• Gerard Brender à Brandis [McMaster University]

Born in the Netherlands in 1942, Gerard Brender à Brandis immigrated to Canada with his family in 1947. After graduating from the Fine Arts programme at McMaster University, he set up his own studio in Carlisle, Ontario. Although he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, he studied wood engraving and the art of making books on his own. In 1969 he established the Brandstead Press, and during the 1970s and 1980s, Brender à Brandis gained both a national and international reputation for his delicate work in wood engraving and linocutting. Best known for his botanicals, interior studies and landscapes, Brender à Brandis is also an accomplished bookwright, producing limited edition books combining the arts of paper-making, wood engraving, typesetting, printing, book binding, and spinning, dyeing and weaving flax into linen covers. He has had solo exhibitions as well as numerous group shows. His work is represented in both public and private collections, and public and university libraries throughout Canada and the United States. Brender à Brandis currently resides in Stratford, Ontario.

Alison Bechdel tightens the family circle (1960— ) [Globe & Mail, May 4, 2012]

Most authors worry about what critics will think, but cartoonist Alison Bechdel has the added burden of being judged by her family, especially her mother. Bechdel's first graphic memoir, Fun Home, published in 2006, laid out some fraught family history for all the world to see.

In 1980, Bechdel came out of the closet, writing a letter to her parents telling them she is a lesbian. Unexpectedly, this led her parents to drop their own personal bombshell. Mother Helen revealed that her husband, Bruce, was a closet homosexual with a history of having affairs with both men and teenage boys. Just as the marriage of the Bechdels was breaking up, Bruce was hit by a truck. The survivors are still not sure if this sudden death was a suicide or an accident.

Fun Home was a widely praised bestseller. Time magazine described it as a "masterpiece" and named it the best book of the year. But Bechdel's brothers disputed what they saw as an excessively harsh portrayal of their father, and her mother was pointedly silent about the contents of the book, although she did praise its artistic form.

[Continued here]

• Drawn Together: 'Are You My Mother?' [New York Times, April 27, 2012]

Bechdel's previous book, "Fun Home," told the story of her father's secret homosexuality, thwarted artistic expression and ultimate suicide, and of her own coming out in college. "Are You My Mother?" delves into her troubled relationship with her distant, unhappy mother, and into her own difficulties connecting with a series of long-term girlfriends. As she confides her tale, she also addresses her mother's bluntly conflicted reaction to her art, and folds their struggle into the writing of the memoir itself. "I would love to see your name on a book," her mother says. "But not on a book of lesbian cartoons."

Bechdel weaves emotional honesty with highbrow deliberation in a way that is never burdensome, and mostly light. "Fun Home" is subtitled "A Family Tragicomic," and in both books the tragedy and the comedy are so consummately entwined, so gloriously balanced, the reader can't help being fascinated. "Are You My Mother?" manages to incorporate complicated and sometimes arcane references - to psychoanalysis and the theories of the pediatrician and psychiatrist Donald Winnicott, to the work of Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich - into a story that is gripping and funny and radiantly clear.

• A Mother Is a Story With Neither Beginning Nor End: Alison Bechdel's follow-up to Fun Home examines her difficult relationship with her difficult mom [Slate, May 4, 2012]

Pedro Almodóvar (1949— ) [Wikipedia]

Pedro Almodóvar Caballero... is a Spanish film director, screenwriter and producer.

Almodóvar is arguably the most successful and internationally known Spanish filmmaker of his generation. His films, marked by complex narratives, employ the codes of melodrama and use elements of pop culture, popular songs, irreverent humor, strong colors, glossy décor and LGBT themes. Desire, passion, family and identity are among Almodóvar's most prevalent themes. His films enjoy a worldwide following and he has become a major figure on the stage of world cinema. ...

Almodóvar is openly gay, and he has incorporated elements of underground and gay culture into mainstream forms with wide crossover appeal, thus redefining perceptions of Spanish cinema and Spain.

[Continued here]

• Pedro Almodóvar [IMDb]
• Pedro Almodóvar index [New York Times]
• Susan Michals: Pedro Almodovar Talks... Pedro Almodovar [Huffington Post, November 17, 2011]

Gay Indian Author [Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla] Examines Sexual Politics (b. ? — )
[The Advocate, September 23, 2011]

Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla discusses his latest novel, The Two Krishnas, which examines the casualities caused by a married Hindu man who risks everything to have an affair with a much younger male lover.

As with Ode to Lata, his autobiographical debut novel about a young Hindu man coming to terms with being gay, out Indian author Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla continues to write about provocative subject matter. With his latest novel, The Two Krishnas (Magnus Books, $14.95), the author chronicles a married man who risks everything to have an affair with a much younger man. Despite its gay theme, the book has crossed over into the mainstream, drawing raves from critics and other writers, both gay and straight. It's even a best seller in India. Dhalla talks to The Advocate about what inspired his novel and why it's resonating with an unexpected audience of readers.

The Advocate: What was your inspiration for the new book?

Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla: I wanted to explore the tragedies we unleash, not just on ourselves, but also upon those we love, when we forgo truth in a futile attempt to fit in and comply with what is expected of us. Men who deny their sexuality either out of shame or social pressures and end up marrying and raising families, only to end up - at best - completely unfulfilled, or worst - devastating their families when they come out is a tale as old as time. I also wanted an opportunity to write a love story that transcended gender and sexual orientation, ironically by exposing those very elements and rendering them irrelevant against a backdrop of human drama.

[Continued here]

• Ghalib Shiraz Dhalla [IMDb]

Gus Van Sant (1952— ) [Wikipedia]

Gus Green Van Sant, Jr.... is an American director, screenwriter, painter, photographer, musician, and author. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Achievement in Directing for his 1997 film Good Will Hunting and his 2008 film Milk, and won the Palme d'Or at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival for his film Elephant. He lives in Portland, Oregon.

His early career was devoted to directing television commercials in the Pacific Northwest. In his films, he has dealt with themes concerning homosexuality and other marginalized subcultures.

His filmography as writer and director includes an adaptation of Tom Robbins' novel Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which features a diverse cast (Keanu Reeves, Roseanne Barr, Uma Thurman, and k.d. lang, with cameos by William S. Burroughs and Heather Graham, among others); and My Own Private Idaho, also starring Reeves as well as River Phoenix.

[Continued here]

• Gus Van Sant [IMDb]
• Gus Van Sant's 'Restless' youth court the old way [San Francisco Chronicle, September 18, 2011]

Gus Van Sant has been thinking a lot about movies from the 1970s. Not because his new romantic drama, "Restless," about the relationship between a death-obsessed teenage boy and a cancer-stricken girl, resembles one of those films, but because he can see the parallels between his movie and those. In particular, he can see how people might think "Restless" would have more than a little bit in common with "Harold and Maude," Hal Ashby's Bay Area-set 1971 black comedy about the relationship between a death-obsessed teenage boy and an elderly woman.

Moroccan writer Taia challenges homosexual taboo [Middle East Online, December 30, 2010]

Novelist Abdellah Taia, who has won acclaim in France and readers abroad, has challenged a taboo in his native Morocco and won't back down: he is the first writer to come out as gay in a country that bans homosexuality.

For 37-year-old Taia, who has lived in Paris for the last decade, being homosexual and Muslim are not mutually exclusive. He "feels Muslim" and is from a country where Islam is the state religion.

"I am the first Moroccan writer who has spoken openly about his homosexuality, to acknowledge it, but without turning my back on the country I'm from," he said.

"My homosexuality, I already felt it from the age of 13, at school.

"But despite this, I feel Muslim. There is no incompatibility between Islam and choices of sexual identity," he said on a recent visit back to Morocco.

[Continued here]

• The gaze of strangers: Morocco, male love and modernity [Open Democracy, January 30, 2008]
• The Moroccan writer Abdellah Taia talks about his book, Salvation Army [al-bab, January, 2009]

Your book, L'Armée du Salut ("Salvation Army"), is shortly going to be published in English in the United States. How did that come about?

I think it started in June 2007. Hédi El-Kholti, from the American publisher Semiotext(e), was in Morocco when Tel Quel (it's like Time or Newsweek) put me on the cover of their magazine with the title: "Homosexuel envers et contre tous". When he went back to America he contacted my French publisher, Le Seuil, and bought the rights to translate the book into English.

• Abdellah Taïa: Openly Gay Moroccan Writer Takes on Homophobia in the Muslim World [Gays Without Borders, May 28, 2009]

A soft-spoken slip of a young man, Abdellah Taia hardly looks the part of an iconoclast. But as Morocco's first high-profile, openly gay man, Taia has made it his mission to win acceptance for homosexuals throughout the Muslim world.

Taia has defied Moroccan society's don't-ask, don't-tell attitude toward homosexuality - and prison sentences that are still on the books in the North African kingdom - to write five autobiographical novels about growing up poor and gay in the northern coastal city of Sale.

The novels, peppered with sexually explicit passages, have catapulted him to fame in his native country and made him the de-facto poster child of its budding gay rights movement.

His work has sparked harsh criticism. Taia said some outraged critics have called on him to renounce Moroccan citizenship so as "not to bring shame" on the country.

• Abdellah Taïa: A Boy to Be Sacrificed [New York Times, March 24, 2012]

In the Morocco of the 1980s, where homosexuality did not, of course, exist, I was an effeminate little boy, a boy to be sacrificed, a humiliated body who bore upon himself every hypocrisy, everything left unsaid. By the time I was 10, though no one spoke of it, I knew what happened to boys like me in our impoverished society; they were designated victims, to be used, with everyone's blessing, as easy sexual objects by frustrated men. And I knew that no one would save me - not even my parents, who surely loved me. For them too, I was shame, filth. A "zamel."

Like everyone else, they urged me into a terrible, definitive silence, there to die a little more each day. ...

Now, over a year after the Arab Spring began, we must again remember homosexuals. Arabs have finally become aware that they have to invent a new, free Arab individual, without the support of their megalomaniacal leaders. Arab homosexuals are also taking part in this revolution, whether they live in Egypt, Iraq or Morocco. They, too, are part of this desperately needed process of political and individual liberation. And the world must support and protect them.

Michael Riordon [MichaelRiordon.net]

A Canadian writer and documentary-maker for almost four decades, Michael generates books and articles, audio, video and film documentaries, and plays for radio and stage.

"My primary goal is to recover voices of people who have been silenced in the mainstream, and to find or create outlets for them to be heard. Each of these voices adds an essential fragment to the evolving human story, our collective work-in-progress."

[Continued here]

Michael V. Smith [MichaelVSmith.com]

Smith is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, performance artist and occasional clown teaching creative writing in the interdisciplinary program of the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies at UBC's Okanagan campus in BC's Interior.

[Continued here]

• Michael V. Smith's Progress: Rich premise undermined by structural flaws [Globe & Mail, April 19, 2011]
• Michael V Smith makes progress [XTRA, May 2, 2011]

Richard Mason (1977— ) [Wikipedia]

Richard Mason (born 1977) is a British novelist. Born in Johannesburg, in South Africa, he was ten years old when he moved to England with his parents. He was educated at Eton and New College Oxford. His first novel, The Drowning People, was published during his first year at Oxford, and has since been translated into 22 languages.

[Continued here]

• The agony and ecstasy of a gay literary wunderkind [London Evening Standard, May 12, 2011]

But as the book, History of a Pleasure Seeker, is a ripping literary romp about the adventures of a dashing, athletic and sexually ambiguous young man, I tell him he looks just right as he is.

Mason, who is 33, dark-haired and rather handsome, has just flown in from New York, where he has recently moved. He's one of those people who never settles anywhere for long. Born in South Africa, educated at Eton and Oxford, and with several homes dotted about the globe, he and his partner Benjamin Morse - an American theologian academic six years his senior - are doing a short stint in New York to produce a deluxe digital iPad edition of the new novel.

• Richard Mason: The author explains why his career took a nose dive after penning a best-selling debut novel [The Independent, May 18, 2008]
• He is waving, not drowning [Telegraph, June 18, 2004]

Lee Hall: 'I will fight this' [The Guardian, July 3, 2011]

For the past year I have been working on the libretto for my next project, a community opera in Bridlington by composer Harvey Brough, commissioned by Opera North. The opera, which was due to premiere on 15 July, takes place over a day on the beach. All human life is there: kids on a school trip, grannies with sandwiches, dog lovers, holiday makers, even a landscape painter. It is Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring meets Death in Venice, drawn by Donald McGill.

The narrative revolves around a single father who, having been made redundant, is forced to take a holiday at home instead of in Ibiza. However, he is completely unable to have a quiet day beside the sea as he is assailed by schoolchildren on a biology field trip, local yobs - and the entire Bridlington Amateur Dramatics Society, who are rehearsing the Bridlington Pageant. There is high drama: at one point, his son is swept out to sea. Essentially, though, it's a comedy about tolerance and inclusiveness.

Rehearsals have been under way for six months. Nearly 400 people of all ages are involved. I am a huge believer in drama's capacity to change lives, and this has been a rich, rewarding and exciting project for all involved.

However, two weeks ago I received the worrying news that the main primary school involved was threatening to pull nearly 300 children from the production. They had problems with the libretto, and requested a list of changes. "Pee-pee" and the use of "stupid" as an insult were objected to. The composer and I worked with the school and Opera North to reach a version that would work for everyone.

[Continued here]

• Lee Hall opera row: celebrities join the fight [The Guardian, July 5, 2011]

Richard Mantle, Opera North's general director, who sent Hall and composer Harvey Brough notice of cancellation from his Blackberry on Friday night after a performance of Das Rheingold, went on Radio 4's Front Row to say that they were "powerless" in the face of trenchant objections from the school to lines in the opera.

It is, without doubt, a mess and because we can't read minds, we will never really know if homophobia has been at play here. Perhaps it's a wake-up call to all of us who are gay and celebrate how things have improved, what great strides have been taken. Are we there yet? Clearly not.

• Opera North's show will go on, but Lee Hall threatens legal action against council [The Guardian, July 7, 2011]

The writer at the centre of a row over a cancelled community opera that sparked accusations of homophobia is considering legal action against the local council, even after Opera North announced in a dramatic U-turn that it would go ahead with the production.

Lee Hall's Beached, an opera that stars 280 children from a local primary school in Bridlington, was cancelled by Opera North after the school and local authority said they were concerned about the content of the production, whose central character is gay.

The decision to stage the production comes after Hall was inundated with messages of support, and after criticism of the school following the show's cancellation.

Hall told the Guardian that although he was relieved and happy that the opera was now going ahead, he wanted a complete retraction from the council regarding "defamatory allegations" he said were made during the dispute.

The local authority has already retracted a statement that claimed the work featured a paedophile. The earlier statement, made by Mike Furbank, head of improvement and learning for East Riding of Yorkshire Council, said that "of particular concern and offence was a character who groomed and abused children in his early days in Ibiza".

• Lee Hall's Beached: what really went on? [The Guardian, July 7, 2011]

Common sense seems to have prevailed: Lee Hall and Harvey Brough's community opera Beached will be staged, after all, next week in Bridlington, with the support of Opera North and the primary school whose seemingly homophobic objections to a single stanza of Hall's libretto have rightfully caused such a ruckus. A victory for online campaigns, the force of the twittersphere, and good old-fashioned celebrity endorsement and indignation? Kind of. Hall has agreed to changing "queer" to "gay" in his text, meaning the lines "Of course I'm queer/ That's why I left here" have now become "Of course I'm gay/That's why I went away". Hall says at his Facebook group that he's happy to make that change in terms of swapping one word for the other, but he's less happy that it gives the school, and by proxy, Opera North, the chance to claim a minor linguistic victory.

Remembering Taylor Siluwé (1966—2011) [Lambda Literary, June 20, 2011]

On Sunday, June 19, 2011, Taylor Siluwé, popular writer, blogger and activist died from lung cancer in his home in New Jersey. He was 43 years old.

Taylor was born January 27, 1966, in Jersey City, where he lived most of his adult life. He studied creative writing at New York University, fulfilling what he considered "a burning passion to write." Known for his darkly erotic and humorous story telling style, Taylor's writing has been featured in numerous publications including Details, Venus, Literary New York, Out IN Jersey, FlavaLIFE, and the E-zine Velvet Mafia. His short stories appeared in the anthologies Law of Desire (Alyson Books) and Best Gay Erotica 2008 (Cleis Press). In addition, Taylor published two sexually charged short story collections, Dancing With the Devil (SGL Café Press) and Cheesy Porn.and other Fairy Tales (SGL Café Press).

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John Seed: Remembering William Theophilus Brown (1919—2012)
[HuffPo, April 19, 2012]

At the age of 11 William "Theophilus" Brown shook the hand of the artist Grant Wood, the creator of "American Gothic," who was awarding him third prize in a juried art competition. "He (Wood) was amazed to see this kid walking up the aisle," Brown later recalled. In the long and richly artistic life that followed Brown racked up interesting life experiences, meeting many more "gods and idols" along the way.

Part of Brown's success in life seems to have stemmed from always know just what to do or say. One day in Europe, for example, he recognized the man knocking at a friend's studio door as Alberto Giacometti, and immediately set up an easel and invited Giacometti to draw the model with them. A few years later Brown challenged a young Richard Diebenkorn one day -- "I'll bet you can't paint a portrait," he noted -- and in short order Diebenkorn painted the first of many portraits.

Brown died on February 8th after an oyster dinner with his friend Matt Gonzalez. Among other things, Bill Brown has remembered as "everyone's favorite dinner companion," but there is much more to be said. I asked his friend and dealer Thomas Reynolds, who has organized a memorial exhibition, to tell me more about him.

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• Figurative painter Theophilus Brown dies [San Francisco Chronicle, February 10, 2012]

William Theophilus Brown, an elegant and irreverent American painter and member of the venerated figurative movement who met and befriended some of history's great artists, from Pablo Picasso to Igor Stravinsky, died Wednesday at his home in San Francisco. He was 92.

Mr. Brown, who lived in the opulent San Francisco Towers, which he christened the "Versailles of retirement communities," was painting until the end, said his friend and gallerist Thomas Reynolds. He had a studio a few blocks from his home and continued to take drawing classes.