Band of Thebes

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

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

Six Pairs of Writers Discuss Queer Literature

The Huffington Post's fine series of lgbt writers on gay books climaxed yesterday with a smart, funny discussion between Stephen McCauley and Carol Anshaw. Your initial delight at their effervescent charm --

"Carol: Well, to adhere strictly to the format of a queer chat, I think I need to begin by asking what you're wearing.

"Steve: I'm wearing tight jeans, a flannel shirt, and cowboys boots. Which, I assume, is exactly what you're wearing."

-- will bubble up to intellectual euphoria as they discuss queer lit, greater tolerance in publishing, secondary and "tertiary" homophobia, the randy lesbian at the heart of Carol's pansexual new novel Carry the One [Kindle], and a dozen favorites: Barbara Pym, Trollope, Mavis Gallant, Alice Munro, Rachel Cusk, Alan Hollinghurst, Edmund White, E.M. Forster, Henry James, Emma Donoghue, Colm Toibin, and David Sedaris. 

They go on to say,

"Steve: ...It's always jarring (and boring, no?) to have gay characters presented as the perfect neighbor and friend whose main function is to fix someone's hair or make a fabulous outfit for them. It seems to me that really expresses a great deal of discomfort around the subject. You have to justify their presence in a work of fiction by having them be supernatural in their goodness. You still see that in the way African-American characters are presented as the all-good supporting cast who help the white folks get in touch with their feelings and solve racism.

"Carol: I think of those as "gay" characters. They give absolutely no manifestation of sexuality; they are composed only of their affect. Gayer than springtime hairdressers. Women with tool belts [although, to be honest, I kind of don't mind those]. Probably African-Americans feel the same way about "black" characters.

         I think if you're going to attempt to write narratives with gay characters, you have to let go of worrying about homophobic responses. Queer is the place you start from, not a condition you are going to argue on behalf of."

Huge news for those of us who measure our lives by the roughly five-year intervals at which McCauley releases his treasures: He says, "I've been writing a series of novels about a yoga studio in Los Angeles under a different name. The books have no gay characters. Well, one woman who has a girlfriend but is in the closet. I'm not sure I would have done that if I'd been writing under my own name. The new novel I'm working on is about three siblings, one of whom is gay."

When touring for Insignificant Others, he said his next novel was set in the 1920s or 40s; is this the same book as the three siblings? I have no idea about the yoga series but the pseudonym "Rain Mitchell" is drenched in genius, so, maybe.

Other pairings in the Huffington Post series are Charles Busch and Robert Leleux, Christopher Rice and Eric Shaw Quinn, Val McDermid and Ellen Hart, Joan Larkin and Tony Leuzzi, and Edmund White and Felice Picano.

Born February 1: Langston Hughes

Celebrating "Langston Hughes, poet," as we must, neglects the bulk of his creative work: eleven plays, the screenplay of Way Down South (released the same year as Gone with the Wind), novels (starting with Not Without Laughter), forty-seven short stories (which often paid his rent), a series of books showcasing famous black Americans' accomplishments, six children's books, bold political writings, and two volumes of autobiography that as much as anything focus on Langston Hughes, traveler. His first memoir covers Harlem and Paris (after his scattered Midwestern childhood with visits to his father, an attorney who left the family to live in Mexico); and his second, I Wonder as I Wander, recounts his journeys in Russia, Turkmenistan, China, Japan, Cuba, Haiti, and Spain during their civil war. Of course his genius most often reveals itself in his poetry, which emphasizes a purity and simplicity like Whitman's, but unlike Whitman his directness of language does not extend to openness about his sexuality. Hughes's most cited homoerotic poems such as "Young Sailor" and "Joy", safeguarded with women or "she," are more cautious than the Calamus cycle. Below, listen to him read his response to Whitman's "I Hear America Singing." He died at 65 in 1967 and his ashes are interred beneath the lobby of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th St. Long degayed, Hughes' homosexuality is the centerpiece of Isaac Julien's film on historical black gay experience amid entrenched homophobia, Looking for Langston.

At Last by Edward St. Aubyn

Today is the on-sale for the new book by the man Alan Hollinghurst called “the most brilliant English novelist of his generation,” Edward St. Aubyn. Reviewers assure readers that At Last [Kindle] can be taken as a stand-alone story although it his fifth novel featuring his fictional stand-in, Patrick Melrose. Like his creator, Patrick was born to great privilege and suffered horrible physical abuse from his father over three or four years starting when he was five. His mother's total neglect of him compounded his problems, and from 16 to 28 he was a tireless drug addict. Now he's middle aged with an ex-wife and two teen sons. The new book takes place on the day of his mother's funeral, with flashbacks throughout his life.

Slate's critic Jessica Winter says in At Last, "St. Aubyn also has an astonishing technical virtuosity that animates both his dialogue ... and his descriptions of interior states." All reviewers seem bound to compare St. Aubyn with Evelyn Waugh and Winter says he, "possesses the wit of Waugh and the existential reach of Beckett." 

Another critic cites the father's line, "Even at the bar of the Cavalry and Guards Club one couldn’t boast about homosexual, paedophiliac incest with any confidence of a favorable reception." 

Picador has bundled the four previous books in one "exquisitely harrowing," "intoxicatingly witty," "staggeringly good," and "perversely funny," volume, The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk [Kindle]. The New York Observer's critic says they "are among the smartest and most beautiful fictional achievements of the past 20 years."

Vanishing Gay Culture: Atlanta's Outwrite Books

As late as Tuesday, Outwrite owner Philip Rafshoon was still talking about finding a new location in Atlanta for the lgbt bookstore that has been a queer Southern haven for 19 years. By the end of the week the store had closed forever and filed for bankruptcy. Their landlord raised the rent on the prime Midtown location. (The B&Ns in Chelsea and Lincoln Square were both said to face 400% increases in their rents causing them to close. Say what you will about Amazon, but greedy landlords are not Kindle's fault.) Rafshoon warned customers in May that they had to step up their spending, and they did, but it wasn't enough.

Possibly May was a little late to sound the alarm. The store owed four years of back taxes totaling $184,000. Their other debts, including four months of unpaid rent, put them more than $500,000 in the red. 

Last month Toronto's 31 year-old Glad Day Bookstore announced it is for sale. The local media claims it's the world's oldest surviving lgbt bookshop. Owner John Scythes has been paying the operating shortfall from his own savings. 

Readers will invariably blame the recession and chain superstores and online retailers and ebooks and bloggers who show up uninvited in their homes and force them to click through evil links, but consider also the broader shift in gay culture away from gay-specific businesses. The collapse of gay magazines and newspapers continues with the demise last month of Portland's Just Out after 28 years. All major cities are losing some gay bars and even San Francisco couldn't sustain their Eagle bar, which closed after 30 years because of a 20% rent increase. One interpretation is that with broader mainstream acceptance people have less need for the ghetto. Another is, blame the internet. The web killed print journalism and hook-up sites killed hook-up bars.

Here's Alan Hollinghurst on the shift in literature: "I think that gay writing, gay fiction, had its point, its urgency, through all those years, and then the AIDS crisis added another huge story. But lately, with all the social and legal changes, and the way the perception of gay people has changed, I feel that gay writing is already dissolving into the main body of writing. I sort of feel we’ve moved on.”

Some cities that still have gay bookstores are Philadelphia, Boston, Ann Arbor, Vancouver, London, Paris, Barcelona and San Jose, Costa Rica.

(Photo by Joeff Davis)

The New Yorker Profiles the Tyler Clementi Case

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

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

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

Chilean Lesbian Director Wins Sundance World Screenwriting Award

 

Congratulations to writer-director Marialy Rivas for last night's win at Sundance in World Cinema Screenwriting for her film Young & Wild about a very active bisexual 17 year-old girl. Her cowriter Camila Gutiérrez told the cheering crowd, "I don't speak very well English, but I want to say thanks and have a lot of sex." Read Rivas's essay about growing up lesbian in Chile.

Overlooked by the awards committees were Ira Sachs' feature Keep the Lights On and magazine editor/writer David France's documentary How To Survive a Plague, profiling the peak years of ACT UP and TAG activism.

(Photo: AP/Danny Moloshok)

Bill Clegg Redux II: Jonathan Galassi's Poems, "Left-handed"

After you've read Bill Clegg's memoirs old and new in which he is called Bill, and seen Ira Sachs' movie based on his long relationship with Bill Clegg in which he is called Paul, you can read FSG kingpin Jonathan Galassi's new book of poems Left-handed about his "unrequited" love for Bill Clegg in which he is called Jude. Galassi, 62, was married to a woman for 30 years then fell in love with the much younger man. Three years later Michael Cunningham published his novel about a middle-aged married man falling in love for the first time with a much younger man with a drug habit, and not consummating their relationship. His book is dedicated to Galassi, who edited it. Cunningham tells the NYT: “I knew what he was going through, but I certainly didn’t base my book on him. I had begun it before. If there’s an overlap, it’s what happens when writers are friends and talk to one another.” Literary scholars say time travel may reveal Thomas Mann's inspiration for Tadzio was a young Bill Clegg. Hollywood watchers already know Diane Keaton's new memoir is dedicated to her literary agent, Bill Clegg. 

(Photo: Peterson/FilmMagic via)

Bill Clegg Redux in Ira Sachs' "Keep the Lights On" at Sundance

Mainstream entertainment gatekeepers allow two gay storylines -- coming out or dying (Beginners combined the two plots and the Academy rewarded Christopher Plummer with an Oscar nom) -- so it's rare to see deep and nuanced portrayals of longterm queer relationships. It's infinitely rarer to get the same gay relationship re-examined by both partners, both of whom are wonderful writers in different media. In 2010, literary agent Bill Clegg published his elegant memoir of self-destruction Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man [Kindle]. His true love is the rush he gets from crack, but on every other page is his steadfast, long-suffering boyfriend, filmmaker "Noah," whom he abandons at Sundance. This week at Sundance, Ira Sachs screened his new feature, Keep the Lights On, about a filmmaker's ten-year relationship with a literary lawyer addicted to crack. Their names aren't Ira and Bill but Erik and Paul. As you'd expect from a writer as complex and subtle as Ira, Erik is no simple saint (he's a sexual compulsive) and critics have complained about his "painful, protracted indecision." Some reviewers faulted the lead acting but praised the characters' genuine love and the film's use of music by Arthur Russell who died of aids in 1992. Salon's Andrew O'Hehir flat-out loved it, calling the movie "an instant landmark in gay cinema, and easily the finest dramatic film I saw at Sundance this year." The Hollywood Reporter's David Rooney wrote:

"An additional pleasure of Sachs’ film is its immersive portrait of contemporary New York life, thanks in large part to the gorgeous work of Greek cinematographer Thimios Bakatakis. Without over-aestheticizing the city and turning this into a swoony hipster postcard, the film captures its bars, restaurants, streets, apartment buildings and nightspots with a painterly eye and a seductive tonal range that relies extensively on natural light. And the unfettered ease of the filmmakers in capturing male bodies and physical intimacy shows a freedom that is still rare in American movies." 

Bill Clegg continues his story with a new book due April 12, Ninety Days: A Memoir of Recovery. Keep the Lights On does not yet have distribution. Sundance gives its awards tomorrow night.

Born January 26: Ellen DeGeneres

Comedian, college dropout after one semester, #1 NYT bestselling author, sitcom star, chat show mogul, record company wannabe, vegan, animal lover, and lesbian wife, Ellen DeGeneres was named the funniest person in America by Showtime way back in 1982 when she was twenty-four. Johnny Carson, a big fan, considered her a girl Bob Newhart, though she also cites Steve Martin and Woody Allen as significant influences. Her sitcom Ellen ran from 1994 to 1998 including her character's history making coming out in The Puppy Episode, seen by a record setting 46 million people. In 2003 she voiced Dory in Finding Nemo, Pixar's most successful movie ever. That September she premiered her talk show, which has become a mega hit, dancing its way to thirty-two Daytime Emmys. During the height of the Prop 8 campaign to rescind gay marriage in California, she wed her wife, Portia De Rossi, fifteen years her junior, and screened this video on her show. Do we still have to hear the lie that stars can't be out, vocal in their support of gay rights, and popular with middle America? Ellen has won five consecutive People's Choice Awards as Favorite Daytime Talk Show Host. In 2007, she hosted the Oscars, earning higher ratings and more viewers than Jon Stewart in 2006 and 2008 and Hugh Jackman in 2009. In 2008, at fifty, she became the face of Maybelline's CoverGirl, in 2010 she was a judge on American Idol and appeared as herself on The Simpsons, and in 2011 Hillary Clinton made her a Special Envoy for Global Aids Awareness. Her new book is Seriously...I'm Kidding [Kindle].

ALA's Over the Rainbow Books: Top Ten LGBT Titles of 2011

Separate from the Stonewall Book Awards, the American Library Association's GLBT Round Table annually honors a few dozen queer titles as "Over the Rainbow Books." This year's Top Ten, after the jump, are eight familiar titles and two surprises: Issy Festing's gay Nagpur novel The Bird Keeper [Kindle] and the coffee table book Shades of Love: Photographs Inspired by the Poems of C. P. Cavafy by Edward Albee, with photos by Dimitris Yeros, translations by David Connolly, and an introduction by John Wood. Two of the ten are graphic books, including Howard Cruse's groundbreaking The Complete Wendel.

Their longlist of 74 books includes fiction by Tove Jansson, Colm Tóibín, Matthew Gallaway, Daniel Allen Cox, Bob Smith, Armistead Maupin, Kathleen Winter, Jameson Currier, Tomas Mournian, and Ralph Sassone. An even greater pleasure is finding the unexpected here too, like Rose Tremain's novel of two pairs of adult siblings in southern France, Trespass [Kindle], Heather Newton's gay North Carolina novel Under the Mercy Trees [Kindle], Tony O'Neill's gay Hollywood noir Sick City [Kindle], J.A. Pitts' present-day Pacific Northwest lesbian Norse magic novel Honeyed Words [Kindle], Vicki Weaver's novel about Billie Girl "raised by two women who are brothers," and Andre Carl Van der Merwe's South African novel set during the Angola Bush War, Moffie [Kindle], from the always-reliable Europa Editions.

Among the list's anthologies and short fiction collections is Alex Jeffers' The Abode of Bliss [Kindle], a ten-story cycle told in the sometimes credible, sometimes forced voice of a Turkish student at Harvard. This is a double leap as Jeffers says he's never been to Turkey, but the heartfelt stories are nicely crafted and generous with details. An authentic queer hyphenate experience is found in West Virginia-born Rahul Mehta's fiction of Indian-Americans, Quarantine [Kindle], one of the list's Top Ten. For the other nine...

Born January 25: Virginia Woolf, Somerset Maugham

Here is the only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf. In April 1937 she participated in a BBC lecture series titled Words Fail Me, giving a talk she called "Craftsmanship." She contemplates using new words in an old language, beginning, "Words, English words, are full of echoes, memories, associations. They've been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing today..."

Born in 1882, she published her first novel at 33 and found her real power at 40, with Jacob's Room. Then came a great burst of creativity: Mrs. Dalloway (1925), To the Lighthouse (1927), Orlando (1928), and The Waves (1931). Her collected letters fill six volumes, her diaries five volumes, and half her essays (stopping with 1924) are collected in three books. She wrote a play, two biographies, and she finished two more novels before March 28, 1941. Her London home destroyed in the Blitz, her writing in a lull after finishing her last, believing the Nazis would soon invade the countryside, she felt her mental illness was returning and that this time she would not recover. She drowned herself in the river Ouse at 59. Her body was not found for 21 days.

Where would Hollywood be without perennial favorite Somerset Maugham? Just the list of his work that has been adapted into films three or more times each: The Letter, Rain/Sadie Thompson, The Painted Veil, and Of Human Bondage. Beyond that: Secret Agent, Razor's Egde, The Moon and Sixpence, Up at the Villa, and Being Julia, among dozens of others. Rich and randy, Maugham had an affair with a married woman that led to a baby and, later, at 43 in 1917, a marriage he didn't want and grew to despise. Instead, he loved his secretary Gerald Haxton [right], eighteen years his junior, with whom he traveled the world while his wife Syrie stayed home and decorated Cecil Beaton's flat. After ten years he finally got a very expensive divorce and bought twelve acres in Cap Ferrat, called Villa Mauresque, and created "a kind of discreet sexual nirvana for the literary gay man" and one of the great salons of the 1930s. Haxton died in 1944 and was later replaced by a younger version named Alan Searle, whom Maugham's aging friends disliked and distrusted. In old age, Maugham feuded with his daughter, denied paternity, disowned her, adopted Searle, and changed his will. His daughter sued and won, but Searle got the house and copyrights for 30 years. (One of his daughter's grandchildren is the blind, autistic musical prodigy Derek Paravinci.) The only biography you need is Selina Hastings' fantastic The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham [Kindle], a finalist for the NBCC, LA Times, and Lambda awards. It is gay from page one. Villa Mauresque is now a hotel with rooms from 275 to 1300 euros a night. Tumblr's Matinee Idol offers this pic of the property in happier times:

Stonewall Book Awards: Hoffman, Katz, Bronski

In a surprise choice the American Library Association's Stonewall Book Awards gave its top fiction prize to Sweet Like Sugar [Kindle] by Wayne Hoffman. The novel explores the loving friendship between a 27 year old gay Jewish man and an orthodox rabbi in his 80s.

Nonfiction saw its first tie since 1995, for Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States [Kindle] and Jonathan D. Katz's Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture.

Runners up, called Honor Books, in fiction are: Annabel by Kathleen Winter, Remembrance of Things I Forgot by Bob Smith, and the play The Temperamentals by Jon Marans. The nonfiction Honor Books are Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories by Wanda Corn and Tirza True Latimer, Nina Here Nor There: My Journey Beyond Gender by Nick Krieger, and Persistence: All Ways Butch and Femme by Ivan Coyote and Zena Sharman.

The awards committee gave a special Honor prize to The Picture of Dorian Gray: An Annotated, Uncensored Edition by Mr. Oscar Wilde.

Born January 24: Hadrian

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

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

Hollinghurst, Eugenides Lead NBCC Nominees

The National Book Critics Circle announced their nominees in fiction, nonfiction, biography, autobiography, criticism, and poetry. Winners will be crowned on March 8 in New York at a free, public event.

Teju Cole, Open City

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot

Alan Hollinghurst, The Stranger's Child

Edith Pearlman, Binocular Vision: New & Selected Stories

Dana Spiotta, Stone Arabia

Please note this list has nothing in common with the NYT five best fiction books of the year, and it overlaps with the National Book Award finalists only on Edith Pearlman.

Other categories after the jump.

ALA Announces 18 YA Book Awards, Stonewall to Bil Wright

Carlos Duarte, the fabulously self-assured gay sixteen year-old star of Putting Makeup on the Fat Boy [Kindle] would love to know he's won the Stonewall Book Award for YA fiction. It's the third novel for young people from Bil Wright, whose musical This One Girl's Story was a GLAAD finalist. Wright has also written a novel for adults called One Foot in Love, a la Terry McMillan and Bebe Moore Campbell.

Stonewall YA Award judges also named four honor titles:

Ilike Merey's a + e 4ever [Kindle]. Graphic novel about a gay, high school pretty boy whose life is changed by a tough teen dyke.

Paul Yee's Money Boy [Kindle]. Comfy suburban immigrant teen gets thrown out and must survive on the streets by hustling.

Lili Wilkinson's Pink [Kindle]. Rad lesbian Ava switches to a new high school and toys with going straight to be popular, until musical theater saves her.

Brian Farrey's with or without you [Kindle] Evan and Davis get beaten up for being gay until they're invited to join the Chasers, a solution that might expose Evan's secret boyfriend.

Today's announcement was one of eighteen Children's/YA awards from the American Library Association. The Newbery went to the novel Dead End in Norvelt [Kindle] by nutty Jack Gantos who named his teen protagonist Jack Gantos. The Caldecott Medal for the year's most distinguished picture book was awarded to Chris Raschka's dog drawings in A Ball for Daisy.

The Alex Awards, honoring ten novels for adults that would be of interest to teen readers, this year include David Levithan's The Lover's Dictionary [Kindle].

Read the full list of winners and runners up in all categories.

Gay Teen Suicides Continue

On New Year's Day, Jeffrey Fehr, 18, [left] hanged himself in the front entrance of his family's house in Sacramento. His father said, "For years and years, people knocked him down for being different. It damaged him. It wore on him. He could never fully believe how wonderful he was, and how many people loved him." Nearly 1,000 attended his funeral.

In October, Eric James Borges' "extremist Christian" family disowned him for being gay. Nineteen, he was a volunteer in suicide prevention with the Trevor Project and in December he made this It Gets Better video. He killed himself in Visalia, California on January 13.

Bullying target Phillip Parker, 14, [right] repeatedly told his grandmother he felt like he had a rock on his chest and he just wanted to take the rock off so he could breathe. He was out to his supportive parents who "reported their concerns over their son's bullying to Gordonsville [Tennessee] High School on multiple occasions, but the bullying by a group of students just got worse." Last week he killed himself.

Last month another Tennessean, Jacob Rogers, 18, [left] committed suicide after enduring years of antigay bullying. A friend from school said, "It was like every day, every class." School officials defended their [in]actions, discussed "rumors of previous bullying," and refused to return a reporter's calls. Emotions running high, a school counselor was kicked out of Jacob's funeral. When he was six, Jacob begged for and received an Easy Bake Oven, and the newspaper speculates that no one was surprised when he came out at 14. Obsessed with Gaga, he shared his clothes with girlfriends. His home life was complicated at best. His mother recently moved out of the state and Jacob struggled with an eating disorder, frequent school absences, alcohol, drugs, poor grades, and trouble with health insurance after he turned 18. He shot himself on December 7.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/01/15/4188596/granite-bay-teen-who-committed.html#storylink=cp

Born January 23: Sergei Eisenstein

It figures that the Russian supergenius whose innovations in The Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Oktober (1927) still dictate how movies are shot and edited today would have no trouble creating private visual diversions for himself in an age before internet porn: He drew sketches of gay sex. Re-entering the U.S. from Mexico in 1932, his drawings were discovered by American customs officials who were not "artistic" and not amused. Eisenstein was a Bolshevik after all, and had been run out of Hollywood on his first visit after a campaign against him by fascist Major Pease (and because Paramount hated his treatment of Dreiser's An American Tragedy). The customs debacle capped off a fifteen-month fiasco that was supposed to have been a four-month shoot to restore his reputation. Post-Paramount, Charlie Chaplin had introduced him to Upton Sinclair whose wife Mary Kimbrough financed the Mexican picture, which Eisenstein began filming without a script or even a concept. Complicating matters further, Mexico had no diplomatic relations with the USSR and therefore claimed rights to the film as it was being made, including the right to censor. Ordered home by Soviet authorities angry that he had overstayed his visa, Eisenstein realized that thus removed and having hugely antagonized the Sinclairs, he would never be allowed to edit his Mexican footage. He suffered a nervous breakdown. Worse was on its way. His next film, Bezhin Meadow, was plagued again by his ill-conceived grandiose schemes (this time to shoot simultaneously adult and children's versions) and by his dictatorial style. Soviet officials hated his movie. Eisenstein endured the horror of having his film destroyed, which was mild compared to the fate of the government's executive producer for film, Boris Shumyatsky, who should have been supervising more closely and was executed by firing squad. Eisenstein did triumph again with a biopic of Alexander Nevsky, famous for its beautiful, majestic build up to battle. He followed it with another success, Ivan the Terrible Part I, only to see his Ivan the Terrible Part II confiscated and Part III destroyed. Although he had two wives, historians say neither marriage was consummated. He wrote in his diaries about his endless infatuations with men. He died of a brain hemorrhage at fifty.

Born January 21: Cristóbal Balenciaga

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

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

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