Band of Thebes

The Best LGBT Books of 2011: 92 Authors Select Their Favorites

Click through for the year's queer finest...

IPPY Awards: Paul Russell, Larry Closs, Joan Opyr, Sally Bellerose

The Independent Publisher Book Awards announced their top three medalists in a ridiculous, self-defeating total of 94 categories (72 genres plus 22 additional regional honors) yet in the most important race, Literary Fiction, sense and sensibility triumphed: Paul Russell's The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov [Kindle] took the silver right behind the gold for Jaimy Gordon's National Book Award winner, Lord of Misrule. Is Paul's heavy title or the dim, creepily eyeless cover keeping people away from this fine novel? Trust me, you needn't know or care about any of the Nabokovs to relish the feast.

The IPPYs have a separate ghetto for every kind of book, including LGBT, for which the winners are:

Gold: Beatitude by Larry Closs

Silver: Shaken and Stirred by Joan Opyr

Bronze: The Girls Club by Sally Bellerose

Gay Stats

Reporters are revisiting three perennial stories, just in time for Pride Month:

The Atlantic on how wrong, wrong, wrong those poor, clueless straights are. Thirty-five percent of people polled guessed that 25% or more of Americans are gay or lesbian. Another seventeen percent guessed the percentage of gay or lesbian Americans is 20% - 25%. The magazine says the correct answer is "probably less than 2%."

HuffPost reports 2011 saw the highest number of antigay murders ever in one year in the US, since tracking this stat began in 1998: Thirty killings.

The NYT says gaydar is accurate about 64% of the time guessing whether or not women are lesbians and 57% of the time when trying to figure out if a man is a top or bottom, uh, into you gay.

Born June 3: Wilfred Thesiger

A leading figure of the golden age of exploration, it's appropriate that Sir Wilfred Thesiger was awarded the Lawrence Medal and the Burton Medal, not least because they were all gay. Born in 1910 to a British diplomat in Abssynia, Thesiger was educated at Eton and Oxford where his only happy times were vacations (and beating Cambridge as captain of the boxing team). On his first college break he worked for his passage on a steamer to Constantinople. Returning, he found a personal invitation from Haile Selassie to attend his coronation as Emperor. On his second summer break, he worked a fishing trawler off Iceland. At 23 he went back to Africa, became assistant district commissioner in the Sudan, and learned to fast ride camels with the local men, adopting their clothes and diet. Said to call any invention more modern than the steam engine "an abomination," he hated the first world's intrusion on remote wilderness and peoples. In WWII, he fought with the Sudan defense force against Mussolini's Italians and with the Syrians against the Vichy French. A job with what became the United Nation's anti-locust program took him to the Arabia's famed Empty Quarter prompting his best work, Arabian Sands (now with an introduction by Rory Stewart), which the Guardian recently called "probably the finest book ever written about Arabia and a tribute to a world now lost forever." Thesiger's other masterpiece, The Marsh Arabs (introduced by Jon Lee Anderson), covers the seven years he lived off and on with the people of southern Iraq. His travels in Asia with the Hindu Kush, the Karakorams and the Pamirs, are recounted in Among the Mountains. Chances are his autobiography Life Of My Choice avoids his homosexuality, but it is somewhat integrated in Alexander Maitland's Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer. Thesiger died at 93 in 2003, leaving 23,000 negatives of his photographs to Oxford. See 59 of his images here and one below.

Pro-Gay Straight Dems Derail Gay GOP Nominee for Jersey Bench

Curiouser and curiouser. This afternoon in a 7-6 vote, the NJ senate judiciary committee rejected Bruce Harris for the state's highest court, in part because America's first black gay Republican mayor said he would recuse himself from the court's contentious case over gay marriage. His detractors claim he cut this deal with antigay Governor Chris Christie in order to secure the nomination. Democrats are determined to win gay marriage for the garden state and don't want a judge who won't provide a crucial vote for it.

Read more here.

Unanimously Against DOMA

For the first time, a federal appellate court — immediately below the Supreme Court — ruled that the Defense of Marriage Act is unconstitutional for prohibiting federal recognition of same-sex marriages that are valid in the states where they are performed. All three judges (appointed by Reagan, Bush, and Clinton) agreed, writing:

"Many Americans believe that marriage is the union of a man and a woman, and most Americans live in states where that is the law today. One virtue of federalism is that it permits this diversity of governance based on local choice, but this applies as well to the states that have chosen to legalize same-sex marriage. Under current Supreme Court authority, Congress’ denial of federal benefits to same-sex couples lawfully married in Massachusetts has not been adequately supported by any permissible federal interest."

This case will surely go to the Supreme Court and almost certainly get there before Perry, meaning the Court's landmark gay marriage case will not be the one argued by the unbeatable team of Olson and Boies. Writing on the New Yorker's blog, Richard Socarides explains:

"...this is the result favored by the old guard of gay-rights litigators who prefer a more incremental strategy of Supreme Court review. (Although they will not like the language in today’s decision that suggests that states can decide on a case-by-case basis who can get married; but this is the risk of incrementalism.) In this case, a Supreme Court ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would not require any kind of finding that there exists a hitherto-unrecognized constitutional right to same-sex marriage—only that the federal government must recognize marriages validly preformed in states that choose to do so."  

Gay Achilles Novel Wins Orange Prize

Tonight in London, American Madeline Miller won the 2012 Orange Prize for her debut novel The Song of Achilles [Kindle], narrated by his lover Patroclus. This ought to be the Band of Thebes-iest book of the decade; alas, I could never get in step with the novel's style. I agreed with gay classicist Dan Mendelsohn who thoughtfully, elegantly, swiftly speared and slaughtered it in the pages of the NYT Book Review:

"The real Achilles’ heel of this book is tone — one made disastrously worse by the author’s decision to metamorphose an ancient story of heroes into a modern tale of hormones....The problem reaches crisis proportions in the handling of the “love affair,” which begins with an embarrassing breathlessness and climaxes — sorry! — in the long-awaited and, it must be said, cringe-inducing consummation...Why is this so awful? Partly it’s the swoony soft-porn prose, but in the end it’s something much more significant, something that gets to the heart of why Miller’s book doesn’t swell or ripen into a meaningful engagement with the ancient literary tradition, as any serious attempt to appropriate the classics must." 

Orange Prize jury chair novelist Joanna Trollope does herself no favors by overstepping to drag in Homer's approval of Miller's efforts: “This is a more than worthy winner — original, passionate, inventive and uplifting. Homer would be proud of her.” (Not to trump a Trollope, but Homer is where I live. He would hate it.) Mendelsohn says Mary Renault "would have found this book distasteful in the extreme."

If you're looking for a once in a lifetime brilliant reimagining of an ancient gay affair, read Marguerite Yourcenar's Memoirs of Hadrian about the great emperor's love for the teen Antinous.

Born May 30: Colm Tóibín

How has Nick Hornby become the go-to literary screenwriter, now adapting Tóibín's Brooklyn for a film starring Rooney Mara? Either people really liked An Education or it's because Hornby's wife is again producing.

Predicting future Nobel Prize honorees is a thankless, largely pointless pastime, yet it's true that everything the Nobel winners in literature have, Colm Tóibín has too: an impressive body of novels illuminating an overlooked group of people, many books of nonfiction, journalism, history, and travel, a staggering and seemingly effortless range of important critical essays, vision, verve, and gravitas.

After being rejected by twenty publishers over two and half years, Tóibín’s debut novel The South was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and won the Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize for first novel. Two years later his second novel, The Heather Blazing, won the Encore Prize. His third novel, the widely-prized The Story of the Night, set in Argentina, is included on Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian & gay novels. The Blackwater Lightship, his fourth, exploring the fractious family relations as a young man with aids comes back to die in County Wexford, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and was adapted for a tv movie starring Angela Lansbury and Dianne Wiest. The Master, his revelatory novel about Henry James, was an international bestseller. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, named one of the New York Times’ ten best books of the year, won the LA Times Novel of the Year award, and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, worth 100,000 Euros.

His Brooklyn was a highlight of 2009, when it was a bestseller and won a Costa award. Tóibín's current Lammy finalist, The Empty Family, is flat-out magnificent. Only two weeks until the publication of his essay collection, New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and Their Families [Kindle]. 

Gay Bestsellers

At some point, publishers (and lgbt authors) will have to stop saying it's impossible to market (or sell) queer work. Sunday's New York Times bestseller list has four gay books among their various top fives:

Gay gadfly and Bravo network exec vp Andy Cohen glitterbombs his way to #4 on the Nonfiction list with his very endearing memoir Most Talkative: Stories from the Front Lines of Pop Culture [Kindle]. You have Andy to thank/blame for two ubiquitous series, Top Chef and The Real Housewives of... and now he hosts his own talk show.

Perennially popular gay shock memoirist Augusten Burroughs lands on the Advice list at #4 with his guide to facing life problems, This Is How: Proven Aid in Overcoming Shyness, Molestation, Fatness, Spinsterhood, Grief, Disease, Lushery, Decrepitude & More. For Young and Old Alike.[Kindle].

John Irving scores his tenth bestseller on the Fiction list, with In One Person at #5, about a bi stutterer who especially loves gay sex and trans sex. The book debuts four spots higher than Toni Morrison's Home and eleven places above Godfather prequel The Family Corleone.

After two weeks at #1 on the Graphic Books list, Alison Bechdel's wonderful Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama slips to #2, behind Batman: The Court of Owls, which some people would say also has a queer protagonist.

Although the content isn't gay, it's worth mentioning that Rachel Maddow's military book Drift spent four weeks at #1 on the Nonfiction list and now is #7.

To the naysayers who want to discredit each example above as cult of celebrity, I say: E. Lynn Harris.

Cannes Winners: Haneke, Mads, Mungiu

Michael Haneke again won the Palme d'Or tonight for Amour, his first film since taking Cannes' top prize in 2009 for The White Ribbon. Starring 81 year-old Jean-Louis Trintignant, 85 year-old Emmanuelle Riva, and Isabel Huppert, the new movie is the anti-Best Marigold Hotel. 

The jury gave hot Bond villain Mads Mikkelsen the award for best actor for The Hunt. The film is directed by Thomas Vinterberg, best known for his Dogma movie The Celebration, which might be a Danish cousin of the Patrick Melrose Novels by Edward St. Aubyn. This time the story follows a man falsely accused of molesting a girl.

The Romanian director of 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, Cristian Mungiu's new film Beyond the Hills won two prizes, including best actress and best screenplay.

Eurovision 2012

The ugliest act at the 57th Eurovision Song Contest was neighbor Iran teasing host country Azerbaijan that the event would include a gay parade, and their indignant response trying to prove how much they hate homosexuals.

In their fear of flamboyant fanfare they might have been imagining Ireland's Jedward, the twin bros who say they are not gay, rather than Iceland's Jonsi, who has been out for many years. Tough call, but the gayest backup singers either were from Italy, wearing a full rainbow of colored shirts, or from France, going one better by going shirtless.

Sweden's Loreen won in a landslide for an unconvincing club song called Euphoria.

Grating Gatsby

In the novel, the shallowness of the age is balanced by the quality of the writing. Not so the trailer.

Nebula Winners: Walton, Ryman, Johnson, Gaiman

Following in the footsteps of Michael Chabon and Neil Gaiman, Jo Walton has won the 2011 Nebula Award for best novel for Among Others [Kindle], which combines a classic coming of age story at an English boarding school with an epic mother - daughter power struggle fought with magic. It's Walton's ninth novel and the NYT called it "a wonder and a joy." 

Other category winners at the Nebulas, which honor outstanding work in speculative, fantasy, or science fiction, are:

Best novelette: "What We Found," by Geoff Ryman

Best novella: "The Man Who Bridged the Mist," by Kij Johnson

Best short story: "The Paper Menagerie," by Ken Liu

Best drama: Doctor Who, "The Doctor's Wife," by Neil Gaiman

E.O. Wilson on the Sociobiological Advantages of Homosexuality

Two-time Pulitzer winner E.O. Wilson, 82, discusses the intrinsic wrongs of homophobia and the sociobiological benefits of homosexuality in his new book The Social Conquest of Earth [Kindle]: 

"A second example of dogmatic ethics gone wrong for lack of knowledge is homophobia. The basal reasoning is much the same as for opposition to artificial contraception: sex not intended for reproduction must be an aberration and a sin. But an abundance of evidence points to the opposite. Committed homosexuality, with the preference appearing in childhood, is heritable. This means the trait is not always fixed, but part of the greater likelihood of a person's developing into a homosexual is prescribed by genes that differ from those that lead to heterosexuality. It has further turned out that heredity-influenced homosexuality occurs in populations worldwide too frequently to be due to mutations alone. Population geneticists use a rule of thumb to account for abundance at this level: if a trait cannot be due solely to random mutations, and yet it lowers or eliminates reproduction in those who have it, then the trait must be favored by natural selection working on a target of some other kind. For example, a low dose of homosexual-tending genes may give competitive advantages to a practicing heterosexual. Or, homosexuality may give advantages to the group by special talents, unusual qualities of personality, and the specialized roles and professions it generates. There is abundant evidence that such is the case in both preliterate and modern societies. Either way, societies are mistaken to disapprove of homosexuality because gays have different sexual preferences and reproduce less. Their presence should be valued instead for what they contribute constructively to human diversity. A society that condemns homosexuality harms itself."