Born On This Day- August 21st... Illustrator Aubrey Beardsley

Because of my interest in Oscar Wilde, the man who would become my husband, introduced me to the work of an astonishing late 19th centurt artist. He gave me a book about Aubrey Beardsley, an English artist who was often associated with Oscar Wilde. Wilde's publisher, John Lane, invited Beardsley to illustrate the English edition of the play Salome. When it was published in 1894, both the play & the witty, provocative, & blatantly erotic illustrations created a sensation. That same year Beardsley became famous as the art editor of The Yellow Book, a new arts & letters periodical that Lane inaugurated. Beardsley's stunning black-and-white drawings, title-pages, & covers helped make the new quarterly a great success. The Yellow Book also quickly a target of moralists concerned about the influence of the decadent movement on English society & art. One critic described Beardsley's designs for the periodical as "diseased, weird, macbre, & sinister."

Considering the shortness of his life, he died of TB at age 25, Beardsley's achievements are astonishing. A highly original creator, he transformed the art of illustration & profoundly influenced artists of his own & future generations.

His expert draftsmanship made his drawings particularly suitable to the technical advances in printing at the end of the nineteenth century. He came to maturity at a time peculiarly suited to his genius, when theories of decadence & aestheticism expression to perverse sexuality & fetishism of all kinds. Beardsley's work is sexually frank & sometimes pornographic. He drew erect penises & stylized pubic hair, & he fetishized objects such as shoes & cloths. He also depicted sexual obsession, lesbianism, sadomasochism, & male homosexuality with an honesty & passion intended to shock & provoke.

Beardsley is viewed a satirical artist, with a gift for caricature & the grotesque. He also created revolutionary designs & images & patterns of surpassing beauty. His influence has been immense, & can be discerned in the stylized lines of the new Art Nouveau movement.

Born On This Day- August 15th... Edna Ferber

"A closed mind is a dying mind."
Edna Ferber

I have always been crazy for The Algonquin Round Table, a celebrated group of NYC writers, critics, actors & wits. Members of "The Vicious Circle," as they dubbed themselves, met for lunch each day at the Algonquin Hotel from 1919 through 1929. The group would engage in wisecracks, wordplay & witticisms that, & then in the newspaper columns of Round Table members,they would be celebrated by the public. Later in life some of its members disparaged the group, yet its reputation has endured. I have always been fascinated by them & I have books about the group & many of the individuals including:



Franklin Pierce Adams, columnist
Robert Benchley, humorist & actor
Heywood Broun, columnist & sportswriter
Marc Connelly, playwright
George S. Kaufman, playwright & director
Dorothy Parker, critic, poet, short-story writer, & screenwriter
Harold Ross, The New Yorker editor
Robert E. Sherwood, author & playwright
Alexander Woollcott, critic & journalist
Tallulah Bankhead, actress
Harpo Marx, comedian & actor
Neysa McMein, magazine illustrator
Alice Duer Miller, writer
Donald Ogden Stewart, playwright & screenwriter
Frank Sullivan, journalist & humorist
Deems Taylor, composer
Peggy Wood, actress
& Birthday Girl- author & playwright- Edna Ferber. 

Ferber's novels featured strong female protagonists. She usually highlighted at least one strong secondary character who faced discrimination ethnically or for other reasons. Ferber held a firm belief that all people are equal & possibly that the least attractive may have the best character.


Many theatrical & film productions have been made based on her work: Show Boat, Giant, Ice Palace, Saratoga Trunk, Cimarron (which won an Oscar) . 3 of these works - Show Boat, Saratoga Trunk & Giant - have been made into musicals. When composer Jerome Kern proposed turning the very serious Show Boat into a musical, Ferber was shocked, thinking it would be transformed into a light musical entertainment typical of the 1920s. It was not until Kern explained that he & Oscar Hammerstein II wanted to create a different type of musical that Ferber granted him the rights. In 1925, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her novel- So Big, which by coincidence, is the title of a chapter in my own memoir- Jockstraps & Vicodin (a possible Pulitzer for me?).

There was a silent film made of So Big, & an early talkie movie remake in 1932, starring Barbara Stanwyck, George Brent, & Bette Davis in a supporting role. A 1953 remake of So Big starred Jane Wyman in the Stanwyck role, it is the version most often seen today.

Edna Ferber was a big ol' golf playing, softball team member, dating her former therapist, Indigo Girls loving lesbian. One of her "Old Maid" characters says: "Being an old maid was a great deal like death by drowning ...a really delightful sensation when you ceased struggling." She wrote the gay favorites: Stage Door, Dinner at Eight, & The Royal Family. Ferber was portrayed by the actress Lili Taylor in the 1994 film Mrs. Parker & the Vicious Circle.

Born On This Day- August 14th... Horst P Horst

More photography. Another gay artist. Horst P Horst & Herb Ritts in the same week is an embarrasment of photographic riches.

I have recently come to the realization that although I would give myself a B- as an artist, I can draw & paint with more skill than most civilians. I can place objects in a space with smart aesthetic judgments, & my gardens have been artful enough to published many times, but I am sad to discover that I am a shitty photogrpher. I have come to believe that photography is like singing, dancing or acting, you can hone your skills, but either ya got it, or you ain't. Appearently, I ain't got it. The Husband does most of the shots that are posted of Post Apocalyptic Bohemia. His eye is keen & his design sense trumps my accidental good shots.

In the history of 20th century fashion & portrait photography, Horst P Horst's contribution is among the most artistically significant & long lasting, 1931-1991. He would become so legendary that like other icons, he would be known by just a single word name. Horst’s work is the epitome, elegance, style & rarefied glamour.

In 1930, he met Vogue photographer Baron George Hoyningen-Huene, & the pair became lovers. He traveled to England with the baron. They visited photographer Cecil Beaton, who was working for British Vogue. In 1931, Horst began his association with Vogue, his 1st photograph in French Vogue was published that year.

Horst had his 1st show at La Plume d'Or in Paris in 1932. It was reviewed by Janet Flanner in The New Yorker, & Horst was made instantly famous. Horst shot a portrait of Bette Davis the same year, the 1st in a series of celebrities he would photograph during his life. In 1932 he photographed: Noel Coward, The Lunts, Cole Porter, & Elsa Schiaparelli.

Horst met Coco Chanel in NYC in 1937. Chanel: “Horst was the queen of the whole thing". He would photograph Chanel’s creations for more than 30 years.

He met Valentine Lawford, a British diplomat in 1938 & they lived openly as a couple until Lawford's death in 1991. They adopted & raised a son, Richard J. Horst, together.

In 1941, The German born Horst applied for United States citizenship, & soon joined the US Army. He became an Army photographer, with much of his work printed in the Armed Forces' magazine- Belvoir Castle. In 1945 he photographed United States President Harry S. Truman, with whom he became friends, & he photographed every First Lady in the post-war period at the invitation of the White House.

In 1947, Horst moved into his house in Oyster Bay, New York. He designed the white stucco clad building himself, the design inspired by the houses that he had seen in Tunisia during his relationship with Hoyningen-Huene.

In the 1960s, encouraged by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland, Horst began a series of photos of the high society: Consuelo Vanderbilt, Marella Agnelli, Gloria Guinness, Baroness & Baron Philippe de Rothschild, Helen of Greece & Denmark, Baroness Geoffroy de Waldner, Lee Radziwill, the Duke & Duchess of Windsor, Oscar de la Renta, Andy Warhol, Yves Saint Laurent, Doris Duke, Emilio Pucci, Cy Twombly, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, & Paloma Picasso. The articles were written by his partner Valentine Lawford. Until the time of his death, Horst spent most of his time traveling & photographing. In the1970s, he began working for House & Garden magazine as well as for Vogue.

Horst' career can be said to have reached Old Master status when the world's most famous person- Madonna, created her celebrated hymn to classic fashion photography with her single- Vogue in 1990. In the video directed by David Fincher, she posed as a recreation of Horst's most iconic fashion image, a model seen from behind, wearing a partially tied, back-laced corset made by Detolle.

Horst knew & photographed most of the major figures of the 20th century. He died at his home in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, at 93 years of age. A life lived creating beauty & life lived well.

There Once Was An Old Queer Named Lear

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea

In a beautiful pea green boat,

They took some honey, & plenty of money,

Wrapped up in a five pound note.

The Owl looked up to the stars above,

& sang to a small guitar,

'O lovely Pussy! O Pussy my love,

What a beautiful Pussy you are

You are,

You are!

What a beautiful Pussy you are!'

Pussy said to the Owl, 'You elegant fowl!

How charmingly sweet you sing!

O let us be married! too long we have tarried:

But what shall we do for a ring?'

They sailed away, for a year & a day,

To the land where the Bong-tree grows

& there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood

With a ring at the end of his nose,

His nose,

His nose,

With a ring at the end of his nose.

'Dear pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling

Your ring?' Said the Piggy, 'I will.'

So they took it away, & were married next day

By the Turkey who lives on the hill.

They dined on mince, & slices of quince,

Which they ate with a runcible spoon;

& hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

They danced by the light of the moon,

The moon,

The moon,

They danced by the light of the moon.

It is as simple as ABC to take joy in a gay 19th century writer named as the notable innovator of nonsense.

Today marks the 199th birthday of Edward Lear, an important English illustrator & landscape painter, but more widely known as the writer of an original kind of nonsense verse & for his perfect limericks. His genius is clear in his nonsense poems, with a world of peculiar, phantasmagorical, preposterous creature in nonsense word, with a dash of deep underlying melancholy. Their quality is matched in the limerick & his pen &ink drawings.

Lear was a homosexual who suffered all his life from ill health & depression that he named- “The Morbids”.

He mostly lived abroad. Even though he was naturally timid, he was a constant & courageous traveler who explored: Italy, Greece, Albania, Palestine, Syria, Egypt, India & Ceylon. An indefatigable artist, he produced great number of pen & watercolor sketches of great topographical accuracy. He made his living from these pieces & large oil paintings.

After his nomadic life he lived with his celebrated cat –Foss in San Remo, on the Mediterranean coast, at a house he named "Villa Tennyson." For companions he counted on a circle of friends, correspondents, & his chef- Giorgis. Foss died in 1886 & was buried with some ceremony in a garden at Villa Tennyson. After a long decline in his health, Lear died at his villa in 1888. Lear's funeral was a sad, solitary affair; not one of Lear's many lifelong friends being able to attend.

In his lifetime, Lear published 3 volumes of bird & animal drawings, 7 illustrated travel books, 4 books of nonsense: The Book of Nonsense (1869), Nonsense Songs, Stories, Botany & Alphabets (1871), More Nonsense, Pictures, Rhymes, & Botany (1872), & Laughable Lyrics (1877), plus a posthumous release- Queery Leary Nonsense (1911).

There was an Old Man on a hill,
Who seldom, if ever, stood still;
He ran up & down,
In his Grandmother's gown,
Which adorned that Old Man on a hill.


The Post Apocalyptic Bohemian: Stephen
He liked men for no tangible reason
A frontal lobotomy
Cured him of sodomy
But ruined his plans for the season.

Born On This Day- April 6th... Rob Epstein

He is a Director, Editor, Executive Producer, Cinematographer, Producer, Sound/Sound Designer, & Screenwriter.From the beginning of his career, Oscar winner-Robert Epstein has sought to explore issues of homosexuality onscreen. At 19 years old, he responded to an ad looking for a director to contribute to the nonfiction film Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives (1977). The finished film is a compilation of gay lives that shatter common stereotypes. The film was an impressive debut from such a very young man. Epsteins’ next work was the hugely successful The Times of Harvey Milk (1983), Epstein’s heroic homage to our hero, Harvey Milk, the gay city supervisor & assassination victim. It won an Academy Award for Best Documentary & a host of other honors. The film was screened at festivals & in mainstream theaters.

In 1987, Epstein teamed up with filmmaker Jeffrey Friedman to form Telling Pictures Production in San Francisco, California. Their first film together was Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt, inspired by the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt on the Mall in Washington DC. Narrated by Dustin Hoffman, Common Threads tells the dramatic story of the first decade of HIV/AIDS in America through stories of 5 individuals featured in the Quilt. Epstein won his second Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Common Threads.

Next was The Celluloid Closet (1995), another collaboration by Epstein & Friedman. It took 9 years to finance, produce, & release; started in 1986, it finally had a theatrical release with the help of HBO Films. Narrated by Lily Tomlin, this star-studded film offered one of the first serious, in-depth explorations of Hollywood's onscreen treatment of homosexuality.

In 2000, Epstein & Friedman directed & produced Paragraph 175, a film about the experiences of homosexuals during the Nazi regime in Europe. Narrated by Rupert Everett, & filmed in Germany, France & Spain, Paragraph 175 was awarded the documentary Grand Jury Prize for Directing at Sundance in 2000, with European premiere at the Berlin Film Festival where it was won the International Film Critics Association Award.

Epstein moved to a fiction film scripting & producing 2010's Howl, a dramatization of the 1957 obscenity trial surrounding beat poet Allen Ginsberg, played in the film by my boyfriend- James Franco, & my occasional lover- Jon Hamm.

Rob Epstein lives & works in San Fransisco. He turns 57 years old today.

Born On This Day- April 3rd... David Hyde Pierce

I don’t think I can take more of these mild surprises. First Ricky Martin comes bursting out of the closet door as a “fortunate homosexual man” & wasn’t it just a couple of yeasr ago that I had to lay down from the shock that Sean Hayes was a gay guy? & what is this I hear about Neil Patrick Harris?


Well, imagine the jolt when David Hyde Pierce loaded me with the whammy of coming out in 2007.  Mr. Hyde Pierce, whom I have had a crush on for almost 20 years when I spotted him on a very funny show- The Powers That Be from Norman Lear, had never given me an impression that he might be a homo. The ensemble of theat show included Holland Taylor, John Forsythe (the late & very great), Valerie Mahaffey, Peter MacNicol, & Joseph Gordon-Levitt.


Then came a little TV show – Frasier. As Kelsey Grammer’s title role character's brother- Niles Crane, Pierce was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Emmy for a record 11 consecutive years, winning in 1995, 1998, 1999 & 2004. In 2005, Pierce was nominated for his turn in the stage production Spamalot. In 2007, he starred in Curtains-a new Kander & Ebb musical for which he won the Tony Award for Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Musical. In his acceptance speech for Curtains, he said the first words he spoke on a Broadway stage were 'I'm sorry, I'm going to have to ask you to leave."


Hyde Pierce came out in the softest way possible. An Associate Press notice simply stated: "He worked at Playwrights Horizons, the Public Theater, Shakespeare in the Park & a lot of regional theaters such as the Guthrie in Minneapolis, Chicago's Goodman & Long Wharf in New Haven, Conn. Pierce moved to LA in the early 1990s when his partner, actor-writer-producer Brian Hargrove, wanted to write for television."


The mention warranted little attention until picked up by the Village Voice’s Michael Musto. The reaction was underwhelming, & his relationship with Brian Hargrove was made public in 2007.

When accepting his Tony Award for Curtains, Pierce thanked "my partner, Brian, because it's 24 years of listening to your damn notes… that's why I'm up here tonight." He & Hargrove were married in California on October 24, 2008, just before Proposition 8 was adopted as law.They live in NYC & LA.

Born On This Day- March 21st... James Coco

James Coco was a pudgy & bald character actor whom I admired a great deal, for reasons you can easily grasp. He worked steadily for over 3 decades in commercials, TV, films & on stage.

Coco's career climax came in the role of a struggling gay actor & buddy to a boozy Broadway actress played by Marsha Mason in the film Only When I Laugh (1981). As the supportive friend who wants to be a "big, big star," Coco was winsome, waggish, winning, wise, & over the top gay. He received a well deserved Oscar nomination as Supporting Actor.


Coco was associated with the works of one of my favorite playwrights- Terrence McNally. He played in an off-Broadway double-bill of one-act plays- Sweet Eros/Witness (1968), followed by Here's Where I Belong, a disastrous Broadway musical adaptation of East of Eden that closed on opening night. They had far greater success with Next, which ran for more than 700 performances & won Coco the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Performance.


Coco also achieved success with Neil Simon, who wrote The Last of the Red Hot Lovers (1969) specifically for him & Doris Roberts. It won him a Tony Award nomination as Best Actor in a Play. More work in Simon projects included a Broadway revival of the musical Little Me & films: Murder By Death, The Cheap Detective, & Only When I Laugh.


Coco's other film credits: Ensign Pulver, Tell Me That You Love Me, Junie Moon, Man of La Mancha, Such Good Friends, A New Leaf, The Wild Party, & The Muppets Take Manhattan.


Coco was known for his cooking capabilities, publishing several best-selling cookbooks & making frequent guest appearances on talk shows dressed in his chef's hat & apron. Coco died of a heart attack in NYC, in 1987 at the age of just 56.

Born On This Day- February 5th... Writer William S. Burroughs: “Perhaps All Pleasure Is Only Relief.”

“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what's going on & sometimes paranoia's just having all the facts.”

Drugs, gay sex, foreign lands, trouble with authority & then writing it all down… chapters in my memoir- Jockstraps & Vicodin? No, these are the major themes in the life & works of William S. Burroughs.

In 1988, I had the great pleasure of acting in a film titled- Drugstore Cowboy. Everyone on the set, from director Gus Van Sant to the grips, were in awe of being in the company of William S. Burroughs. He was terrific in the role of a junkie priest & I am a fan of this performance as well known former priest & drug fiend, a frail, unfortunate junkie who turned Matt Dillon's character- Bob on to drugs when the latter was still an altar boy. Oh yeah. Burroughs, with his natty style, gravelly voice ,& sardonic delivery, packs a mighty impression in this small role. I didn’t have a scene with him, & I was too intimidated to chat him up. But, I like the fact that I can drop the phrase-“yeah, I did a little film with William S. Burroughs.”

A still from Drugstore Cowboy

Burroughs, heir to the adding-machine fortune, was Harvard educated & & dressed like a conservative undertaker ,& became famous, before any of his peers, for all the things you were supposed to hide in the 1950s: he was gay, he was a junkie, he shot his wife. Burroughs was indeed a scandalous personality, but his literary works: The Naked Lunch, Queer & Junkie have become important landmarks of American literature. He was a huge influence on everyone from beatniks to punks, from rockers to poets to performance artists, & he added to our lexicon: "Heavy metal," "Blade Runner," "Soft Machine" & "Steely Dan"... all coined by Burroughs. 

He was member of the American drug culture when there really wasn't one, & he really did shoot his wife: Drunk & playing William Tell, he put a bullet through Joan Vollmer's head in Mexico. Burroughs mourned & he admitted that the shooting (for which he never served serious time) made him the writer he was. Burroughs' persona was dry & dour. His public voice was a monotone, & his hat & somber suits were in contradiction to the colorful hippie look of his good friend Allen Ginsberg.

Photo by Avedon

William S. Burroughs was expelled from high school for taking drugs & keeping a diary of his sexploits with the boys. He lived in Mexico, South America, NYC, Rome, & eventually Morocco, where he lived in a gay brothel. While living in Morocco & under the influence of new set of drugs, he started writing in earnest. When The Naked Lunch was published, it was judged as obscene, & U.S. Postal Service would not allow it to be sent in the mail. His works were banned in the USA for years. Finally In 1984, Viking Press published Queer (written in 1953), & subsequently published 6 more of Burroughs’ books. Check out David Croenenberg’s film version of Naked Lunch with Peter Weller & Judy Davis.

There is a funny & ironic anecdote in Patti Smith's memoir- Just Kids. Smith tells of meeting Burroughs for the first time at an automat where he treated her to a meal mistaking her for a pretty boy.

Burroughs died at his home in Lawrence Kansas in 1997, a day after suffering a heart attack.

“In homosexual sex you know exactly what the other person is feeling, so you are identifying with the other person completely. In heterosexual sex you have no idea what the other person is feeling.”

Born On This Day- January 14th... Cecil Beaton

I have been reading 2 volumes of Cecil Beaton’s Diaries over the past year, in small little doses, choosing to read a few entries here & there. He knew & photographed everyone that mattered for most of the 20th century. As a gay man of his time, & a dandy like Quinton Crisp, he had to reinvent himself & discover a way to survive & thrive. I know that I have always been grateful to be a gay man because it meant that I was an outsider & not a straight, white, WASP male, but how much harder that must have been earlier in the century, when homosexuality was illegal & being exposed could mean the end of a career.
 

 
Born in 1904 in London & coming of age at the peak of the 1920s, Cecil Beaton was in love with the worlds of high society, theater, & glamour. Beauty, in his hands, was transformed into elegance, fantasy, romance & charm. His inspired artistic eye led to a following among fashionable society & eventually a full fledged career as the foremost fashion & portrait photographer of his day. He was so attuned to the changes of fashion that his career maintained its momentum for 5 decades; from the Bloomsbury crowd to the Rolling Stones.

Cecil Beaton will always be remembered for his huge influence on the world of photography & fashion. His incredible work the essence of elegance & grace, but his personal behavior was at times, anything but. He was not known to be a loyal friend, a humble talent or a genuine soul of any sort. In fact, his persona & image was fabricated to gain him access to the world that had always just beyond his reach. But everybody loved Cecil, the photographer. He worked for Vogue for more that 30 years. Louise Dahl-Wolfe, who worked for Harper’s Bazaar: "He was such a naughty man. You had to laugh at all the awful things he said about everybody, especially the people at Vogue.”  In fact, Beaton laughed at everybody except himself, for whom he reserved much compassion & self-pity. His friend Truman Capote described Beaton as a “total self-creation”.

Clever, but not intellectual, good looking but not quite handsome, he just failed to make the grade in those things that he thought mattered the most. Beaton was vain, & he had his clothes made one size too small to flatter his already slim figure, but never glamorous, despite an international lifestyle that brought him into contact with everyone who was somebody for more than 50 years.

Garbo, who he almost married.

Shooting Keith Richards in LA.

He had a burning desire to be part of aristocratic privilege, still going strong in the 1920s & 1930s. Beaton was, what was known at the time, a pansy. With his ambition focused on the British upper classes & American celebrities, his gayness could have been a disadvantage, but he capitalised on it by aiming not at the men, but at their wives. He was a first rate photographer but he was always seemed too eager flatter & please .Having flattered his subjects' bodies & faces, he flattered their egos by placing them in settings reflecting the latest artistic movement, making them seem of the moment. He even managed to make Queen Elizabeth 2 & her family look beautiful & stylish!

Mick Jagger circa 1966

For 40 decades he was at the center of the creative world: royal photographer, designer of sets & costumes for stage & screen, from Oscar Wilde’s comedies to My Fair Lady (for which he won an Oscar for the film version), a chronicler of showbiz figures from Audrey Hepburn to Mick Jagger, for whom Beaton had a passion, (Jagger dubbed him “Rip-Van-With-it”). & he kept those diaries that I have been reading, noting everything & revealing the true Cecil Beaton, a mixture of insight, petulance & snobbery, much like the world in which he lived. They reveal the other thing that I suspect in his heart he never forgot: those who are born outsiders must always remain outsiders, after all, outsiders can see things most clearly.

Cecil Beaton died in 1980, after spending a lifetime focusing his lens on the most interesting people of the mid-20th century.

"Be daring, be different, be impractical, be anything that will assert integrity of purpose & imaginative vision against the play-it-safers, the creatures of the commonplace, the slaves of the ordinary."

Born On This Day- January 13th... Writer Edmund White

"As a young teenager I looked desperately for things to read that might excuse me or assure me I wasn't the only one, that might confirm an identity I was unhappily piecing together."

When I was young (I was young once, despite what The Husband may tell you), I would scour the library for books with clues about being gay. The material I found was mostly clinical & the information decidedly depressing. It must be so much easier for baby queers in this era, with a shelves if offerings of gay writings by gay authors of every stripe & disposition.

2 of his newest books are on top of a tall stack of books on my side of the bed. He is one of my favorite authors & one of his books is in my top 10 favorite gay themed books of all time. I am looking forward to his just released new novel- Jack Holmes & His Friend & his book of essays- Sacred Monsters, released in November.

His novel- A Boy’s Own Story (I still have my original copy, purchased in 1982 at The Different Drummer Bookstore on Capital Hill in Seattle) was the first important coming out story that I read, & the first to treat the story of a gay boy where the subject was not portrayed as sick or a "problem". As a young man in my 20s, I thought the novel was brazen & intimate. I was very moved.


White is one of the most prominent & highly acclaimed figures of contemporary gay literature, Edmund White works in many genres of fiction & nonfiction.

A Boy's Story is about the search for identity against the expectations of family & friends, White expertly couples the cosmic & the commonplace. The narrator & his friend Kevin explore the boundaries of their common masculinity: “When he turned his face my way it was dark, indistinguishable; his back & shoulders were carving up strips of light, carving them this way & that as he twisted & bobbed. The water was dark, opaque, but it caught the sun's gold light, the wavy dragon scales writhing under a sainted knight's halo. At last Kevin swam up beside me; his submerged body looked small, boneless. He said we should go down to the store & buy some Vaseline."

I’ve always admired White’s refusal to get all PC, & he takes on gay hypocrisy & prudish gays that condemn promiscuity in the hope that this will make them more normal & palatable for straight people. White is a veteran of the early 1970s: NYC bathhouses, back room bars & along the piers. Edmund White is an old style gay guy, proud to be gay, obsessed with coming out, & attacking those that refuse to do so.


White keeps on putting out fiction, biographies & essays. His States of Desire was written pre-HIV, &contains some of the most graphic & moving depictions of gay male America. White feels that "gay" is a very male concept, having almost nothing to do with lesbians or transsexuals (GLBT !). I have read him, followed him, & I appreciate his place in American gay culture as pioneer & story teller.

White shares a cozy, book-lined Chelsea apartment with his life partner, 46 year old writer Michael Carroll, but White says: "I'm a sex junkie; I believe in promiscuity. Am I a sex addict? I guess. But I'm also a prickly moralist & a weak-willed pleasure lover”. White turns 73 today.


His work so far:


Fiction
• Forgetting Elena (1973)
• Nocturnes for the King of Naples (1978)
• A Boy's Own Story (1982)
• Caracole (1985)
• The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988)
• Skinned Alive: Stories (1995)
• The Farewell Symphony (1997)
• The Married Man (2000)
• Fanny: A Fiction (2003)
• Chaos: A Novella & Stories (2007)
• Hotel de Dream (2007)


Plays
• Terre Haute (2006)


Nonfiction
• The Joy of Gay Sex, with Charles Silverstein (1977)
• States of Desire (1980)
• The Burning Library: Writings on Art, Politics & Sexuality 1969-1993 (1994)
• The Flâneur: A Stroll Through the Paradoxes of Paris (2000)
• Arts & Letters (2004)


Biography
• Genet: A Biography (1993)
• Marcel Proust (1998)
• Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel (2008)


Memoir
• Our Paris: Sketches from Memory (1995)
• My Lives (2005)
• City Boy (2010)

Ragged Dick & Steve; Or, A Consideration Of Horatio Alger, Jr. On His Birthday

He may not exactly be a household name these days, but Horatio Alger was responsible for defining & enshrining one of the great values that Americans hold most strongly.

Alger was the son of a Unitarian minister & a Unitarian minister himself, He was kicked out of his post in the face of allegations of homosexuality & pederasty after it was discovered he was having sex with teenage males. Church officials claimed that he had committed the "most heinous crime, a crime of no less magnitude than the abominable and revolting crime of unnatural familiarity with boys." No, that is not the American virtue that I was thinking about, but because of those circumstances, Alger went on to write what many would call the definitive patriotic literature, rags-to-riches stories that gave the original shape to that goal for which we all strive: the American dream. I still hear the right wingers describe someone as a "real Horatio Alger Story." I wonder if they actually know this story.


Horatio Alger was the master of the dime novel in the mid-19th century. He churned out dozens of almost identical tales: a young, poverty-stricken boy is alone in the big, cold city. He works harder than the other shoe shine boys or newsboys & saves every penny, while the other boys gamble & drink & waste their money on trivial pursuits. The boy meets a wealthy older businessman, who recognizes the lad's ethic & pluck & the beam of intelligence in his sad eyes, & takes him under his wing. Soon the boy has money of his own, responsibility & better status in life.


Alger was pretty plucky himself. He started at Harvard at 16 & studied with Longfellow. By his late teens, he had written a number of books for children. After being dismissed from his church, he moved to NYC & over the next 33 years wrote more that 100 books. His hard work never brought him riches though. He associated himself with the street ruffians of the city. & took his meals &slept at the boys’ boarding houses. He gave his money earned from his stories to the young men that he admired & used as models for his tales.. Except for Ragged Dick, his books were not a success until after his death. His family then destroyed all of his personal papers.


Embedded in Horatio Alger's work is the strong Protestant work ethic, the pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps American creed, & this mythology of upward mobility in America is central to modern conservative thinking, & much of it can be credited to Horatio Alger & his adoring fans. But who was he?


His popularity dwindled in the 1890s & so did his income. In 1896 he had a nervous breakdown that forced him to relocate permanently to his sister's home in Massachusetts. When he died in 1899, his passing was barely noticed by the newspapers. His literary work was bequeathed to his niece, to 2 boys he had casually adopted.


Since 1947, the Horatio Alger Association of Distinguished Americans has bestowed awards & scholarships on the deserving youth. in 1982 Alger's works inspired a musical comedy called Shine!. One modern scholar has described his work as a male Cinderella myth noting similarities with the classic fairy tale. The NY chapter of NAMBLA is named the Horatio Alger club.


Like the Hardy Boys & Nancy Drew series that I read as a boy, his books are all the same, yet all quite readable. Alger had a great gift for narrative. I happened to have bought one at a used book store as an adult because I was amused by the title- Ragged Dick. I suspected that it was a story about my previous weekend, & I was quite surprised at what I was reading.

Among his other colorful titles (which inspire my own):


What Boys Can Do on the Farm for the Camp


Charlie Codman's Cruise: A Story for Boys


Luck And Pluck; or, John Oakley's Inheritance


Rough and Ready; or, Life Among the New York Newsboys


Ben The Luggage Boy; or, Among the Wharves


Do and Dare; or A Brave Boy's Fight for Fortune


Adrift in the City; or, Oliver Conrad's Plucky Fight


Joe the Hotel Boy, or Winning Out by Pluck

Born On This Day- January 12th... Favorite Artist John Singer Sargent

Portrait of Sargent by Boldini

The question remains- was he homosexual? I have always felt that I could tell from his work & sensitivities that he was gay, but we will really never know about one of my favorite American artists- John Singer Sargent.

It seems almost unbelievable now, but I once owned a small pencil sketch of actress Ethel Barrymore by this favorite artist. It was signed- "to Ethel, from JS Sargent 1911”, & it was presented in a small silver art deco frame. It was a gift to me from actress Fay Wray with whom I had an acquaintance in the early 1970s. I eventually gave this piece away to someone that I thought I was in love with. We no longer speak. A lesson learned? No... I continue to give things that I love to people that I love. Do you have your eye on something?

When I lived for a year in Boston (1972-73), I would spend hours wandering the galleries at the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, with it's lovely collection of Sargent's. I would sit & wonder at his paintings & cruise the arty type guys. John Singer Sargent's work seem to attract like minded viewers.

The iconic full-length portrait of New Orleans beauty Virginie Gautreau brought Sargent notoriety. Considered brazen, the portrait of Madame Gautreau in a strapless black gown with a plunging neckline was savaged by the critics as scandalous in 1884. To escape the scandal created by the Portrait of Madame X, in 1886 Sargent moved to London, where his paintings triumphed at the Royal Academy & where he established a brilliant career as a society & celebrity portraitist, doing more than 700 portrait paintings.

He had many friends who were homosexual, including Henry James & Robert Louis Stevenson, & associated with aesthetes & dandies such as Oscar Wilde & Robert de Montesquiou. Sargent was known as distant & reserved. As far as we know, he had no great romantic attachments, only flirtations with women & deep friendships with men.

Portrait of Nicola d'Inverno

Rumors circulated about his relationship with his long time model & assistant Nicola d'Inverno, but no physical relationship has been documented. At his death, his family destroyed all of his personal papers, so the evidence for Sargent's homosexuality is largely in his work, especially his paintings & sketches of male nudes. The Husband I & chanced on an exhibit of pencil sketches by Sargent at a small gallery at NYU in the late 1990s. I turned to the Husband (who knows his art history) & asked- “...was Sargent gay? I mean look at the love that went into these male nudes?” I like to think that he was gay. I am going to claim him as one of our own. His work certainly speaks to me.

Born On This Day- January 10th... Sal Mineo

He was born Salvatore Mineo, Jr. in the Bronx, New York on January 10, 1939.

I have a very odd connection to Sal Mineo. In 1976, I was actually an acquaintance of the man charged with his murder. This was nothing sordid. This man was pursuing one of my best friends. WCK3 & I were concerned for our friend because this mystery man seemed especially troubling. Sal Mineos’s death was major news in LA that February. WCK3 & I really had the chills when this creepy man, who had been aggressively working on our good friend, was charged with the movie star’s demise.

Sal Mineo was nominated for an Academy Award 2 times, & he enjoyed success as a stage director & recording artist, but he is mostly remembered for his performance in Rebel Without A Cause & for the brutal murder that ended his life just as he was on the verge of reinventing himself & his career.



You can feel the sexual heat of the actors in this screen test.


He made his first film appearance in 1955, & appeared in many screen productions, usually playing ethnic& troubled youths. Mineo's career was dominated by that single role that eventually achieved mythic status: Plato in Nicholas Ray's Rebel without a Cause (1955). Mineo's homosexuality was a fairly open secret even at the height of his Hollywood success. He had affairs with Peter Lawford, James Dean, & with Nicholas Ray during the filming of Rebel Without A Cause.

With maturity, he sought to explore his homosexuality in his life & his art. Although he appeared in several television productions & films (his last film was Planet Of The Apes), he found the theater more supportive of his aspirations & sensibilities.



From one of my favorite shows of the era- Shindig! in 1967


In 1969, he directed the Broadway & West Coast productions of Fortune & Men's Eyes, John Herbert's exploration of power roles & homosexuality at a prison. Mineo's production was controversial for its nudity & simulated sex.

In 1976, he was cast as a bisexual burgler in a Los Angeles production of James Kirkwood's P. S. Your Cat Is Dead. As he returned to his West Hollywood apartment from a rehearsal on February 12, 1976, he was stabbed to death. The murder remains cloaked in mystery. A suspect who initially confessed later recanted, but was nevertheless convicted. Over the years, & Mineo's friends & relatives have claimed that the authorities, eager to solve a high profile murder case, charged the wrong man. He was just 37 years old when he was murdered.