Considering Andrew Sullivan On His 48th Birthday

Andrew Sullivan’s story is undeniably unimaginable. He is an HIV-positive gay Catholic conservative who grew up in a poor, nearly illiterate Irish family in the tiny English village of East Grinstead who went on to become as one of the most powerful writers in America.

Sullivan is really quite dadddylicious... I think I would do him.

I disagree with Sullivan on so very many issues, yet he is one Conservative who not only makes sense a great deal of the time, he also is eloquent, informative, well researched & not locked into any single ideology. He represents so much of the character that the Right Wing Conservatives rail on about: intellectualism, discussion, & truth. Hmmm… maybe he is actually liberal in a bear costume.


Sullivan is the author of 5 books, including The Conservative Soul, which argues that the American right has strayed from "true" conservative thinking. His writing has been published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, Newsweek, The Atlantic, The Economist, & New Republic. Sullivan has appeared on political talk shows: Face the Nation, Nightline, Meet the Press, & he is a regular on my much loved- Real Time with the Bill Maher. I am a daily reader of Sullivan's political blog- Daily Dish, which moved from the Atlantic website to Newsweek this spring. Daily Dish is in the top 10 of the most read blogs on the Internet.


Born in Britain, Sullivan moved to the United States in 1984 after studying at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. After earning masters degree in public administration in 1986, Sullivan went on to write for The New Republic & then became editor in 1990. During his tenure at The New Republic, the magazine won 3 National Magazine Awards for General Excellence, Reporting & Public Interest. After resigning in 1996, Sullivan became a contributing writer & columnist for the New York Times Magazine, a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review & a weekly columnist for the Sunday Times of London. In the summer of 2000, Sullivan became one of the first mainstream journalists to experiment with blogging, & grew a large following with andrewsullivan.com's Daily Dish. He has blogged independently & for Time.com, & in 2007 Sullivan moved his blog to The Atlantic Online, before the switch to Tina Brown’s site for Newsweek, where he now writes several posts every daily.


As a boy, Sullivan slowly realised that he was gay, yet he had no vocabulary to understand it. He says he didn’t hear the word “gay” while at school. Sullivan: “It’s hard for people to understand now, but there was a total silence about homosexuality. It was unmentioned & unmentionable. When I was 8 years old, I asked his mother if it was true that God really knew everything about you. She said yes. Then I answered: ‘ there’s no hope for me, Mum’”


After years of trying to suppress his sexuality that Sullivan claims: “ I had emotional blockage that really warped my personality”, he allowed himself to fall in love & have sex. On a visit home he finally told his parents he was gay. His mother said: “Oh my god. I’d better make a cup of tea.” His father wept. Sullivan had never seen his father cry before. Sullivan said: “What’s wrong? I’m fine.” His father replied: “No, you don’t understand. I’m crying because of everything you must have been through, & I did nothing to support you.” Sullivan: “It was the most honest expression of love I have ever heard.”


Sullivan’s sideswipes with the liberal gay establishment is easy for me to understand. The gay rights debate has been reshaped in the past 2 decades, much because of Sullivan’s writing. He penned the first major article in America calling for gay people to be given the right to marry, & he was brought to task by other gay people for it. He was shunned by gay rights groups & in gay bars he was reviled & dubbed a “collaborator” & physically attacked. The case was made that he was asking gays to assimilate, act less “gay” & model themselves on straight marriage. Sullivan was opting into the very system gay people wanted to destroy.


Sullivan suggested a radical change for the gay rights movement, from an argument that we are different to the insistence that we are the same as straights. Sullivan published Virtually Normal: An Argument about Homosexuality. The book took the homophobic right & the gay left to task & made the case for absorbing gay people into existing social institutions, especially marriage. Sullivan sees this position as fundamentally conservative & I have to agree with him. I never have understood while the Conservative Right Wing rails against gay people as promiscuous & reckless, & stressing that we can not be married & have families. It has occurred to me that by their very own standards, they should be rejoicing that we want to marry.


When it was discovered that Sullivan was advertising for unprotected sex on a bareback website, his detractors went full tilt with the revelation & spotlighted it as a scandal. Sullivan made it absolutely clear he was HIV positive & only sought other positive sex partners. Sullivan: “It was vile. It was published everywhere, & they sent it to my mother & my bosses. They wanted to destroy me.” His critics claimed that this proved Sullivan’s argument for gay monogamy was a fraud. Sullivan: “I was never a hypocrite. Never… No gay man writing at that time was more open about their sex life than I was.”


Sullivan has taken position that is disarmingly honest: “One side has excoriated promiscuity; the other side has glorified it. & both have, in the process, erased the human being in the middle. I felt, & often still feel, unable to live up to the ideals I really hold.” He even admitted to having unprotected sex with another HIV-positive man. When quarries if there is a part of him that subconsciously wanted to get caught? Sullivan: “No. I wanted to get laid!”


Sullivan intends the next battle is to “turn Christianity against the fundamentalists”. For him, “their certainty is the real blasphemy; their desire to control the lives of others the real heresy; their simple depiction of the Godhead proof positive they do not really understand him. In the Gospels, the men who set themselves up as arbiters of moral correctness are often the furthest from God, he says, while Jesus urges people to see beyond fetishising rules & commandments to their own conscience.”

5 years ago Sullivan met Aaron Tone, a younger actor & artist, & fell in love. In 2007 they were married in Provincetown, at a small ceremony for family & friends. It was where, 15 years before, when gay marriage seemed an impossible dream, Sullivan had composed his tome-Virtually Normal. They live together with their 2 beagles in an apartment in Washington DC.

If you follow my little spot on the Internet, you can surmise by my writing & my age, I am daunted by the prospect, that with the inevitability of Marriage Equality for all people in the USA & as the walls come tumbling down around the argument that gays are the product of the devil & that their unions will be the ruin of civilization, gay people will assimilate to the point of loosing their gayness. This concerns me, as I have grabbed hold of being an outsider as my badge of honor. Even though I am married & live in a city without a gay ghetto (gays are everywhere in Portland), in my heart I want us to still be queer. Ours is a rich & rare history. Even when I find Andrew Sullivan to be wrong, the fieriness of his arguments strengthens & stirs me on to be defiant & different.

 

Born On This Day- August 4th... Screenwriter John August

John August has a very sharp website where he offers free advice to fledgling screenwriters. How does he find the time? August is one of Hollywood's most in-demand screenwriters & script doctors polishers. He has won a reputation for versatility with scripts such as Go, a cool & chaotic look at disenfranchised young people directed by Doug Liman, which I really admired, & Big Fish, the fanciful family fable directed by Tim Burton, which I didn’t care for even with the cinematic presence of Ewan McGregor & found to be a bit twee.

When he was 8 years old & had the name John Meise, his teacher had asked everyone in the class to write to someone famous. Most kids sent letters to President Jimmy Carter or an astronaut. August wrote to author, Roald Dahl. The postcard that eventually arrived was a personal note from Dahl. Decades later he would go on to write the screenplay to one of the author’s best known works.

Tim Burton wanted to do a film to follow Dahl's text more faithfully than the 1971 version, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory starring Gene Wilder. The book left no clue to Willy's boyhood. So August playfully made him the son of a renowned, candy-hating dentist.

In one of the script's flashbacks, Willy's father throws his son's Halloween candy into the fireplace: Willy finds a piece spared from the flames & bites in. The opening chords of Jimi Hendrix's version of All Along the Watchtower begin to play, & we begin a spinning perspective shot that would leave Hitchcock jealous. In little Willy's eyes we see a reaction. He's like Isaac Newton getting beaned by the apple.

August said he discovered his vocation when he was just 10 years old, while watching a rented tape of the dark comedy, The War of the Roses. August: "Everything the actors were saying & doing was written someplace. So I tried to write down the dialogue & find out what that was like."

August said his sexual orientation has helped him notice things others miss. August: “For the first 20 years of my life, I was observing the world & trying to model my behavior to look as straight as possible. It's sort of this psychological 'CSI' you're doing on a daily basis. You're always looking for motivation."

His credits include: Go (1999), Blue Streak (1999), Titan A.E. (2000), Charlie's Angels (2000), Jurassic Park III (2001), Minority Report (2002), Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle (2003),The Rundown (2003), Big Fish (2003), Charlie & the Chocolate Factory (2005), Corpse Bride (2005),The Nines, which August also directed (2007), &  a little flick called Iron Man (2008). Up next is Frankenweenie, again with Burton.

August lives in the Hancock Park neighborhood in LA, which he shares with his partner of a decade, Mike Douglass & their daughter.

Born On This Day- August 2nd... Writer James Baldwin

"Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law."

The very first "gay" book I ever read was James Baldwin's GIOVANNI'S ROOM (1956) & at 15 years old, & the tragic story did not lift my spirits. I was reading everything I could that dealt with homosexuality or by a homosexual, & the message I was getting was not positive. I had already decided at 15, that my life was not going to be tragic because I was gay. Still, I found the novel to be erotic & well written. I continued to follow James Baldwin's life & work through his exile in Europe, reading his novels, poems & essays. When he returned to the USA & was active in the civil rights movements of the 60s & 70s, I still admired & had my eyes opened by his words.

Born in 1924, he had a life of extreme hardship, growing up illegitimate & very poor in Harlem, Having his work rejected by publishers (black & Homo!), & harassed by the FBI (he had a 1750 page file on his activities). After the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968 & drawbacks in civil-rights movement, Baldwin started bitterly to acknowledge that violence may be the only route to racial justice. Some optimism about peaceful progress would later return, but in the early 1970s he also suffered from writer's block: "Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent--which attitude certainly has a great deal to support it."

In 1983 Baldwin became a professor in the African-American Studies department of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. He spent his latter years in St. Paul de Vence on the Riviera, France, where he died of stomach cancer on November 30, 1987.

James Campbell said in the NY Times Book Review:
"All the aspects of Baldwin’s character are exposed … He was magnetic, compulsively sociable, elaborately extrovert, darkly introverted, depressive, magnificently generous, self-absorbed, self-dramatizing, funny, furious, bubbling with good intentions, seldom hesitating over a breach of promise – capable of exhibiting all these traits between lunch & dinner, & between dinner & the last whisky at 4 am."

Born On This Day- August 1st... Designer Yves Saint Laurent

Yves Saint Lauren was born in Algeria & raised in France. He was bullied at school, but found solace at home in his drawing & painting & designing of dresses for his mother & sisters.

When he was 17 & studying in Paris, Saint Lauren won 1st prize in a dress design competition sponsored by the International Wool Secretariat.

When Christian Dior saw Saint Laurent's designs, he was so impressed that he offered the young man a job as an assistant & & referred to Saint Laurent as the 'dauphin'. When Dior died in 1957, Saint Laurent took over the house of Dior. His first collection for Dior in 1958 was greeted enthusiastically & his 1960 collection for Dior appropriated the Left Bank style, with black leather jackets, knitted turtlenecks, & crocodile jackets. The fashion world watched with fascination as street fashion was redesigned at the hands of a couturier.

In the same year Saint Laurent was called up to fight in the Algerian war. When he was discharged several months later, he discovered that he had been replaced as head designer at Dior. He then simply created his own company.

Under his own name, Saint Laurent continued to produce elegant wearable clothes that drew on a huge range of influences & he successfully tapped into the vogue for androgynous dressing that spread throughout Europe & the USA in the mid-1960s.

In 1993, Yves Saint Laurent , which was by now also a major perfume house, was sold to a major company & has changed hands a number of times since, becoming part of Gucci in 1999 with Tom Ford as designer & creative director.

In 1958, Saint Laurent met Pierre Bergé, who was at the time the manager & lover of the Parisian painter Bernard Buffet. In a scene out of A Little Night Music, at a weekend party Buffet met his future wife, & Saint Laurent & Bergé roused a romance that lasted until 1976. After their breakup Bergé continued to serve as Saint Laurent's business manager & remained living in their home until 1986.

Although his sexuality was hardly a secret in the fashion world, Saint Laurent did not publicly acknowledge his homosexuality until 1991, in an interview in the French daily newspaper Le Figaro.

As his depression deepened Saint Laurent was joyful only twice a year, on the days a new collection was shown, usually to wild acclaim & within 24 hours that joy would evaporated. Saint Laurent was so attached to his favorite designs, that to part with even one of them would leave a black hole in his life, according to Bergé.

Almost any other leading designer will cite him as their idol. Marc Jacobs refers to him as god. Tom Ford & Jean-Paul Gaultier name him as their mentor.

In 2002, with years of poor health, drug abuse, depression, alcoholism, criticisms of YSL designs, Saint Laurent was forced to face the indignity of having Gucci close the illustrious couture house of YSL.

After his retirement, Saint Laurent became increasingly reclusive & spent the last years of his life at his house in Marrakech, Morocco. He died in June 2008 after a long illness. He was 71 years old.

Born On This Day- July 29th... Ice Capades Superstar Dag Hammarskjöld

Born on this day- July 29th,1905, the considerably closeted Swede- Dag Hammarskjöld was a real Renaissance man: a world class expert of economics, linguistics, literature, & history; an athlete in gymnastics, skiing, & mountaineering; & a bit of a theologian. Hammarskjöld has been credited with having coined the term "planned economy." Receiving 57 votes out of 60, Hammarskjöld was elected Secretary-General of the United Nations in 1953 for a 5 term & was reelected in 1957, greatly extending the influence of the United Nations as well as the prestige of the Secretary-General. He was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1961.

 

Despite holding a position of public prominence as Secretary-General of the United Nations from 1953 until his death in 1961, Hammarskjöld managed to keep secret even the most minor details of his personal life from the world. His published journal- Markings (translated to English by openly gay- W.H. Auden), stays away from any mention of his private life. Hammarskjöld was unable to accept his sexuality & lived an unhappy, frustrated life, suffering slurs from political figures & the international media. But though he couldn’t resolve his own internal conflicts, he was masterful at settling external conflicts as he worked to solve disputes in Palestine, Vietnam, Egypt, & the Congo.

Born On This Day- July 25th... American Artist Thomas Eakins

self portrait by the artist 1902

I am quite enamored of late the 19th & 20th century American painters & Thomas Cowperthwaite Eakins epitomizes everything I love about the American Realist Movement. Eakins was unsuccessful as an artist in his lifetime, but he is thought to be one of the most influential & important figures in American painting. His work is significant for its homoeroticism, & he is noted for his teaching methods, & for his insistence on teaching men & women together, which was ground breaking & controversial at the time.

 Eakins was raised & educated in Philadelphia. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, & he spent several years studying in Paris & Spain. He returned to the Pennsylvania Academy to teach in 1876, & became the director in 1882. His teaching methods were controversial at the time, especially his interest in instructing his students in all aspects of the human figure, including the nude. There were tensions between him & the Academy's board of directors throughout his teaching career, he was ultimately fired in 1886 for removing the loincloth of a male model in a class where female students were present.

Deeply influenced by his dismissal, his later painting concentrated on portraiture, usually of friends & family. This work was realistic but with approach that went beyond just pure representation. He was influenced by early photographers & did many photographs as studies, including many nudes. I find this photographic work to exceptional also.

 

I have a large "coffee table" book of his work that has given me much pleasure. Along with John Singer Sargent & James Whistler his work has been very influential in defining my taste in painting & my passion for art.

photographic study for The Wrestlers

the painting

Born On This Day- July 24th... My Good Close Personal Friend Filmmaker Gus Van Sant

"Fate sucks. I swear. "

Matt Dillon as Bob in Drugstore Cowboy

If I had been somewhat clairvoyant while on the set of Drugstore Cowboy, I would have realized that one day I would someday be living in Portland Oregon, in fact, just 1 mile from where we were filming. I most likely would have dismissed the entire notion as too much candy from crafts service. I loved living in Seattle & I had the best agent in town. I had been fortunate enough to have worked in television (Murder She Wrote, Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, A Day in the Life) & a whole lot of commercials & voice-overs, but the Gus Van Sant project was my first feature film. I was thrilled to be working with the talented director of Mala Noche, a film I was crazy about & that had received an enthusiastic reception at The Seattle Film Festival in 1985.

I was working in a feature! My scenes were with Matt Dillon! I have done 12 films, but this one will always be so special because the very soft spoken Gus Van Sant creates an extremely creative atmosphere for working. Many of the actors that have done films with Van Sant have remarked on how great he is to work with & how wonderful the conditions are on the set of his films. He was not big on rehearsing, but he would ask for something completely different with each take. Matt Dillon (who I have worked with twice) was such a nice gentleman. He would stay & read his lines back to me for our reverse shots & he was such a “regular” guy. He would eat lunch, sitting at a big long table, with the rest of the cast, crew & grips & rarely spent time in his trailer. The rest of the cast were fun & friendly: Kelly Lynch, James LeGross & Heather Graham. I did not get to meet William S Burroughs…my only regret from this experience.

I was invited to the premier of Drugstore Cowboy, but did not attend because I was performing in a play at the time. The film went on to rave reviews & won Independent Spirit Awards for Best Screenplay for Mr. Van Sant & Daniel Yost, Best Cinematography, Best Actor for Matt Dillon, & Best Supporting Actor for Max Perlich. It won Best Screenplay awards from the LA Film Critics Association, the National Society of Film Critics & the NY Film Critics Circle, & Best Film at the Berlin International Film Festival. At the film’s Seattle premier, the Husband turned to me half way through the viewing & stated- “Oh. My. God. You are in a really GOOD movie!”

 Gus Van Zant’s films have ranged from Oscar winning studio fare: Good Will Hunting & Finding Forrester, to very experimental: Gerry & Last Days, Indies: Elephant & Paranoid Park, noble, brave & baffling experiments: the shot by shot re-make of Psycho & Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. He has done 4 films that I love & to which I award 5 Steve Stars: Drugstore Cowboy (of course), My Own Private Idaho, To Die For, & in my top 10 films of all time- Milk.

In 2002, shortly after relocating to Portland after 20 years in Seattle, I was standing with some new Portland friends & some dear former neighbors from Seattle on a street in the Peal District. My friend Susan: “oh my God… look! That is Gus Van Sant!”. The Husband: “Yeah, he lives in this neighborhood & Stephen knows him”. Our little group mumbled some- “yeah, sures & uh-huhs”. When Mr. Van Sant walked past us, he looked up, & said in his usual soft manner- “hello… there… Stephen. I haven’t seen you in a while... strange… your head looks bigger…” & then he went on his way. My friends looked baffled & everyone wanted to know what he meant. I had no idea (what could he have meant?), but I told them that it was an industry term, that good actors had heads that were proportionately too large for their bodies. It was my Gus Van Sant moment.

Born On This Day- July 23rd... Hollywood's Gavin Lambert: Or What as I Smoking?

I met Gavin Lambert at a coke fueled, debauched, all-male party at the home of producer Robert Fryer in the Hollywood Hills. The year was 1973 & it was the only period that I was briefly considered an ingénue. I actually didn’t mind being objectified & passed around. I liked being the object of desire, & being a bit of a slut, I was feeling very democratic & exceptionally open minded. I was hungry for experiences, & was not above putting out for my crack at show biz.

I had smoked a joint that must have been enhanced with something extra, because I don’t remember how I ended up in bed with the handsome older man. In the early morning hours we started in for round 2, & when the little strands of conversation revealed that this man had written the novel & screenplay for one of my favorite childhood movies- Inside Daisy Clover, featuring my favorite star- Ruth Gordon, I went absolutely nutty, screaming- “oh my god, oh my god, that is my favorite movie, I love that movie! Oh yeah, that feels so good. Tell me about working with Ruth Gordon! Do that again, but slower, harder & lower! Oh, I can't believe your created that movie. I love that movie! Will you autograph my ass?” I think I ruined the hot mood with my sudden outburst of fandom.

For 50+ years, the “go to” guy for bitchy, witty & perceptive gossip about Hollywood was screenwriter, novelist & biographer Gavin Lambert, who has died. For much of the 1950s & 1960s, he lived in Hollywood, the inspiration & setting for most of his novels, including The Goodbye People (1971), The Slide Area (1960) & Inside Daisy Clover (1963).

Armistead Maupin: "Decades before it was fashionable, Gavin Lambert expertly wove characters of every sexual stripe into his lustrous tapestries of southern California life. His elegant, stripped down prose caught the last gasp of old Hollywood in a way that has yet to be rivalled."

Lambert wrote the biography- Mainly About Lindsay Anderson (2000), about his friend & roommate at Oxford, director Lindsay Anderson (This Sporting Life, O' Luck Man & If ). He & Anderson founded the short lived but influential film journal- Sequence (1949-51), while still at Oxford. Unlike Anderson, who was tortured throughout his life by guilt about his homosexuality (he fell for happily married, heterosexual young men), Lambert was happily gay. He had a series of fulfilling relationships.

Lambert had an affair with director Nicholas Ray, whose films- Bigger Than Life (1956) & Bitter Victory (1957) Lambert wrote. His longest relationship, however, was with Mart Crowley, who wrote the influential gay play- The Boys In The Band (which I performed in- Boston, autumn 1972). The couple had a home together in L.A.

Lambert wrote & directed Another Sky in 1955, & the film was shot in Morocco. The rather modest film tells the story of a young English woman who discovers her sensuality in North Africa, a reflection Lambert's own sexual liberation in Tangier. He lived in Morocco from 1974 to 1989 on the suggestion of writer Paul Bowles, whom he met in L.A. at the home of Christopher Isherwood & Don Bachardy.

One of my favorite movies from childhood- Inside Daisy Clover (1966) was made into a film from Lambert’s novel with a screenplay by the author. Directed by Robert Mulligan, it tells the tale of how the fame & fortune of a young star, played by Natalie Wood, leads to misery & a nervous breakdown. Lambert first met Wood when he went to Hollywood as an assistant to Ray on Rebel Without A Cause. In 2004, he wrote a revealing biography of the star- Natalie Wood: A Life, admitting they had shared at least one lover. According to Lambert, a 17 year old Natalie Wood lost her virginity to Lambert’s boyfriend Nick Ray. Lambert's biography includes Wood's relationships with Elvis Presley, Robert Wagner, Warren Beatty, Paul Mazursky, & Leslie Caron. In his book, Lambert claimed that Wood frequently dated gay & bisexual men, including Nick Adams, Raymond Burr, James Dean, Tab Hunter, & Scott Marlowe. Lambert also said that Wood helped support his lover- playwright Mart Crowley making it possible for him to write his play, The Boys in the Band (1968).

Lambert's best screenplays were adaptations with gay overtones: Sons & Lovers (1960), based on the novel by D.H. Lawrence, was Oscar nominated, & The Roman Spring Of Mrs Stone (1961), from Tennessee Williams' novel, I Never Promised You A Rose Garden (1977), & Liberace, Behind The Music (1988).

He wrote biographies: On Cukor (1972) , Norma Shearer: A Life (1990), & Nazimova: A Biography (1997) which was the first full scale account of the private life & acting career of lesbian actress Alla Nazimova. He also wrote GWTW: The Making of Gone With the Wind (1973). Lambert was able to interview & gain personal remembrances of those involved with the classic 1939 film, including dismissed director George Cukor & star Vivien Leigh .

I have reason to believe that before his death in 2005, Lambert was working on a book- The Greatest Sex in Hollywood: The 1970s, where I was to be mentioned in the chapter- Live Fast & Die Young, but I was probably there as a footnote. Mr. Lambert was every inch the gentleman. Today is his birthday. He would have been 87 years old.

God & Monsters... Considering James Whale On His 122nd Birthday

I have done several posts about my admiration for one of my all time favorite films, Bill Condon’s film- Gods & Monsters & Sir Ian McKellen’s masterful performance as director James Wale. Thinking of James Wale this morning on his birthday, I landed on the moment when McKellen's James Whale murmurs about the hunky Brendan Frasier’s "architectural skull." Who else could appreciate a skull more than the man who designed the impressive & imposing head of the Frankenstein monster?

"It's the horror movies you'll be remembered for" the geeky fan/ interviewer tells the aging Whale in the film, & despite his gentlemanly manners, you can see irritation in McKellen's eyes. But, the geek is correct of course. Whale's other movies, even his successful version of the musical- Show Boat are mostly forgotten in the 21st century, but people still watch Frankenstein & The Bride of Frankenstein. The look of the monster: square head, seams, scars & neck bolts is a visual icon of the 20th century.

James Whale was a painter before he was a stage & film director, & his eye for design is part of what makes his films so memorable. Besides the look of the monster, played by Boris Karloff, he also created the hairstyle & elegantly stitched scars of the Bride played by Elsa Lanchester. Whale had seen the great German silent horror movies that were never widely released in the USA, & from them he took the starkly dramatic lighting & impressionistic sets, & along with his art director Charles Hall, created the style of Universal Studios Gothic: huge shadowed interiors with enormous doors, imposing staircases & long shadows.

Gods & Monsters asks us to consider that a major influence on Whale's work was his time in the trenches in WW1. The film uses flashbacks of a foxhole lover to provide Whale with awful memories of the young lover’s death. But the war really did the same for the actual Whale. He was in the thick of some intense battles, before ending up in a POW camp, where he began his stage career by producing amateur theatricals.

There is a beauty, perversity, & wit in Whale's Frankenstein films. His dark, horrid, funny work paved the way for directors like Brian De Palma, David Lynch, George A. Romero & Tim Burton.

Whale was an uncloseted gay man in Hollywood during the1930s. While Gods & Monsters is fiction, his real last lover was a gas station operator who for a while had to share Whale with a male nurse. I have read that the Frankenstein films were a way for Whale to give a coded guide to his sexuality & his feelings of being a misunderstood outsider, a lonely monster. Gods & Monsters evokes this with an understanding & even elegance. But, Whale's longtime partner, David Lewis stated: "Jimmy was first & foremost an artist, his films represent the work of an artist, not a gay artist, but an artist." Whale may have identified with the monster not because of his sexuality, but because of his background as a member of a lower class in England.


Whale directed the 1928 play Journey's End on London’s West End & then on Broadway . He moved to Hollywood to direct the film version & lived there for the rest of his life, most of that time with his longtime companion, David Lewis, the prodicer of films such as Dark Victory & Raintree County. They were a couple for 22+ years.

He will always be remembered most for his work in the horror film genre: Frankenstein (1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933) & Bride of Frankenstein (1935), but Whale directed many films in other genres, including what is considered the definitive film version of the musical Show Boat (1936). He became increasingly disenchanted with his association with horror & never returned to the genre.
 

Having experienced WW1 first hand, Whale seemed an inspired choice to direct The Road Back, a sequel to All Quiet on the Western Front in 1937, but the film was a critical & commercial failure. A string of more failures followed & by 1941 his film directing career was over. Whale continued to direct for the stage & also rediscovered his love for painting. He had invested wisely & he lived a comfortable life until suffering several strokes in 1956 left him in pain. Whale committed suicide on 29 May 1957 by drowning himself in his backyard swimming pool. His former partner- David Lewis would later reveal the details of Whale's suicide note.

There is a terrific chapter on Gods & Monsters in Christopher Bram's (the author of the novel) memoir- Mapping The Territory. I recommend this very entertaining & emotional book to anyone that is interested in the process of writing.

Born On This Day- July 21st... American Poet Hart Crane

Hart Crane was born & raised in Ohio. His father was the inventor of Life Savers candy & he had a mother who was an overbearing, flashy hypochondriac. The parents fought bitterly & eventually divorce, providing the young poet a very unhappy childhood.

Crane finally had enough & dropped out of high school to move to NYC in 1916. For 7 years, he split his time between Cleveland & NYC, working at his father's factory, a copy editor, & writing poems that were published in small literary magazines. He often needed to borrow money from his father to survive.

As his work was published, some praised his work, but most critics scoffed at it. Crane has often been criticized as incomprehensible; he was certainly that for me when I attempted to get through his work in a class in American poetry.

Tormented by his attraction to other men, Crane did have a rapturous love affair with a Danish sailor- Emil Opffer who was the inspiration for the epic, erotic poem-Voyages. The poem was the center piece of his first book- White Buildings, in 1926, Crane was indubitably gay, which lead to a lifetime of problems both social & personal. His failed love life was partly due to his obsession with men from the Navy. Ernest Hemingway (they share a birthday) noted: "Poor Hart Crane, always trying to pick up the wrong sailor." Booze contributed to his downfall, under the influence, he would become flirty, frequently in the wrong situations, at the wrong times.

Later in life, Crane made an attempt to play it straight to please the people in his life. Though he tried, he was miserable. Drinking & rough trade bearable, yet made his life worse & worse.

In the early 1930s Hart attempted to marry a girl, Peggy Crowley, the recently divorced wife if his good friend, writer & critic- Malcolm Crowley, but everyone knew it was a sham.

On April 26, 1932, while on board a cruise ship in the Caribbean, Crane was badly beaten after an altercation with a member of the crew that he had made a pass at. The following morning, a female friend found him sitting in his room, remote & ashen. She told him to dress for lunch & left. Shortly before noon on the 27 April, Hart Crane was seen on the deck, looking down at the water. Crane said, "Goodbye, everybody!" & jumped overboard to his death. His body was never recovered.

The most devoted of all the writers & artists who venerated Crane, Tennessee Williams left instructions that his body be buried at sea in the Gulf of Mexico at the spot that Crane drowned. Williams family buried him in St. Louis.

His life is a truly troubled tale of a talented man trying to find where he belongs. His poetry confounds me & his life leaves me circumspect.

We make our meek adjustments,

Contented with such random consolations

As the wind deposits

In slithered & too ample pockets.

For we can still love the world, who find

A famished kitten on the step & know

Recesses for it from the fury of the street,

Or warm torn elbow coverts.

We will sidestep, & to the final smirk

Dally the doom of that inevitable thumb

That slowly chafes its puckered index toward us,

Facing the dull squint with what innocence

& what surprise!

& yet these fine collapses are not lies

More than the pirouettes of any pliant cane;

Our obsequies are, in a way, no enterprise.

We can evade you, & all else but the heart:

What blame to us if the heart live on.

The game enforces smirks; but we have seen

The moon in lonely alleys make

A grail of laughter of an empty ash can,

& through all sound of gaiety & quest

Have heard a kitten in the wilderness

Born On This Day- July 19th... Malcolm Forbes, The Capitalist Tool

The personality trait I most deplore in others? Entitlement. Here is a little tale:

Malcolm Stevenson Forbes probably means nothing to anyone under 40 today. Yet when he died 21 years ago at the age of 70, he was one of the most famous men in America, the result of his shameless, showy smarts at self-promotion.

Forbes inherited Forbes Magazine from his father, its founder, B.C. Forbes, in the late 1950s when he was 38. The magazine had long been a successful business magazine with a strong personality identification with B.C. Forbes. By the early 1970s, Malcolm Forbes, now sole owner, turned it into a hugely successful business monthly magazine. One of his great sensations was the magazine’s annual Forbes 400 Richest.

In the 1970s & 1980s, Forbes lived a luminous, lavish lifestyle, separate from his sedate base on his inherited estate & his large family. In those years he became more prominent & took to the bright lights of NYC.

That was also his public image, although mainly because of his large yachts, his private jets, his residences around the world, & his planeloads of famous, powerful friends.

In late August of 1989, on a weekend, from the 18th to the 20th, Malcolm Forbes gave himself a 70th birthday party in Tangier, Morocco where he owned a palace, the Palais Mendoub. 800 guests were flown in on a chartered Concorde: famous friends, wealthy associates , USA governors, CEOs of multinational corporations, Henry Kissinger, Barbara Walters, Robert Maxwell, & the birthday boy's “date” for the event-Elizabeth Taylor.

It was a party of glitter, glamour & guise, comparable to Truman Capote’s Black & White Ball 23 years earlier. It was well publicized in the fashion & society pages, with a big whack of fairy-dust in the daily papers. It was good for business, mingling advertisers & potential advertisers with the elite of London & Manhattan & his “date” Elizabeth Taylor. It was good for his social reputation, transporting & taking care his very rich friends for free & in style in an exotic country with a Mediterranean climate. The party entertainment was on a grand scale: 600 drummers, acrobats & dancers, a fantasy with a cavalry charge which ended with the firing of muskets into the air by 300 Berber horsemen. The cost of this shindig was more than $3 million.

Forbes died less than 6 months after his party, at home on his estate in Far Hills, NJ. Shortly after he died, he was “outed” as gay by journalist Michelangelo Signorile. Forbes was long known as gay by some & unknown to many. In his later years he became quite the partyer, making up for lost time. The “outing” was a shock, especially to his friends who were not aware, or chose not to believe, that he was gay. Signorile published the story more with intention of showing how acceptable a gay man is without the predictable pale of prejudice. In this case, the band did not play on…

When Forbes died, he was held up by many conservatives as a great American capitalist. Signorile felt that the historical record also needed to show that he was homosexual; he interviewed many people who knew Forbes as gay, some of them men who’d been intimately involved with Forbes.

Highlighting how heated it was at that time to report on the undeclared homosexuality of a public figure who was dead, let alone living, many newspapers viewed Signorile's Forbes story as shocking & scandalous, & it took months for some papers to report on it. The NY Times ran the story 4 months after the fact in a story about outing, & still would not identify Forbes by name, saying that a 'recently deceased businessman' had been 'outed'. Years later, the NY Times would finally report that Forbes was gay, in a story about his son Steve Forbes’ run for the presidency. Steve Forbes has courted the Conservative Christian Right & has come out publicly against gay rights & same sex marriage while campaigning.

Born On This Day- July 17th... Photography Great Berenice Abbott

If you were to click on the label at the bottom of my posts you would discover that I have a very real passion for Photography, whether it is formal portraiture, commercial work, art photography, or found snapshots. I have a sizable & thought provoking collection of vintage photographs of men being affectionate, which I like to share with readers.

Abbott by Man Ray 1925

Abbott by Hank O'Neal 1979

My passion for photography + my keen interest in architecture brings me to today’s birthday- Berenice Abbott. Abbott was a celebrated photographer of NYC architecture. She shot using a Century Universal Camera which produced 8 x 10 inch negatives; this large format camera was the instrument that Abbott used to photographed NYC with diligence & attention to detail. Her work has provided an historical chronicle of many now destroyed buildings & neighborhoods of Manhattan.

During the Great Depression, Abbott was hired by the Federal Art Project (FAP) as a project supervisor for the Changing New York project. She would take the photographs of the city, but had assistants to help her both in the field & in the office. This arrangement allowed Abbott to devote all her time to producing, printing, & exhibiting her photographs. By the time she resigned from the FAP in 1939, she had produced 305 photographs that were added to the collection at the Museum of the City of New York.


When she 1st arrived in NYC, Abbott shared an apartment in Greenwich Village with writer Djuna Barnes, philosopher Kenneth Burke, & literary critic Malcolm Cowley. She pursued journalism, but soon became interested in theater & art, inspired by her friends Eugene O'Neill & Man Ray. Abbott first became involved with photography in 1923, when Man Ray, looking for somebody who knew nothing about photography & would do as he said, hired her as a darkroom assistant at his portrait studio in Montparnasse. Abbott: "I took to photography like a duck to water. I never wanted to do anything else." Ray was impressed by her darkroom work & allowed her to use his studio to take her own photographs.

Self Portrait 1937

In 1935, Abbott fell in love & moved into a Greenwich Village apartment with the art critic- Elizabeth McCausland. They were a couple for 30+ years until McCausland's death in 1965. In the early 1960s Abbott & McCausland traveled US Highway # 1 from Florida to Maine, with Abbott shooting the small town & automobile-related architecture. The project resulted in more than 2,500 photographs. Not only was Abbott a photographer, but also an inventor & innovator. She developed the distortion easel, which created unusual effects on images developed in a darkroom, & the telescopic lighting pole, known today by photographers as an "autopole," to which lights can be attached at any level.

 

Shortly after McCausland’s death, Abbott underwent a lung operation. She was told she should move from NYC because of the air pollution. She bought a rundown house in Maine, remaining there until her death in 1991. Abbott continued to work after her move to Maine. Her last book was A Portrait of Maine in 1968.

Perfection

With Jane Lynch hosting the upcoming Emmys & Neil Patrick Harris just finishing being brilliant & charming hosting the Tonys, I suggest that we only have smart, funny, profoundly gifted, out & proud, legally married to their same sex spoused performers host award shows. It is proven to work, don't mess with the formula.

Do you love Jane Lynch like I do? She Turns 51 today.

Born On This Day- July 10th... Songwriter Jerry Herman

As a little 10 year old musical comedy queen, I would practice kick stepping my way down the staircase at our house as my imaginary chorus sang my character’s name (I think sometimes they were actually singing-Steve). I had just been presented the Original Broadway Cast album Hello, Dolly! & I was having a difficult time recovering from the excitement of such infectious tunes. I had been raised on Lerner & Lowe & Rodgers & Hammerstein, but this new guy was really getting to me. I didn’t know then, but Mr. Jerry Herman would be providing me with a musical number for descending a staircase for the next 4 decades.

Jerry Herman, who writes music & lyrics, produced super successful & contagious tunes for the musicals: Hello, Dolly!, Mame, Dear World, Mack & Mable, & La Cage aux Folles. In these musicals our misunderstood leading lady would introduce a song early in the first act that stated her life philosophy: I Put My Hand In There, It’s Today, Each Tomorrow Morning, Look What Happened To Mabel, & A Little More Mascara. The first act would end in her big soliloquy, where our heroine lifts her own spirits: Before The Parade Passes By, If He Walked Into My Life Today, I Don’t Want To Know, or I Am What I Am. That brings us to the big “staircase” number, when the chorus celebrates how their lives have been changed by the mere presence of this woman with the title songs from Dolly & Mame, When Mabel Comes In The Room, One Person, & The Best Of Times. The song One from A Chorus Line is a parody & an homage to these songs.

Despite the formula, these shows & these wonderful & skillful songs make for superior theatre experiences. Some were super hits & others became cult favorites. He is the only songwriter to have 3 musical on Broadway at the same time. Many of his compositions have become pop standards. Louis Armstrong’s version of Hello, Dolly! outsold The Beatles in 1964. The movie versions of Hello, Dolly! & Mame are considered, by most, to be duds, but as a very young man I was thrilled by the film of Hello, Dolly! & saw it about 20 times. I still love Barbra (decades too young for the role) as Mae West as Dolly Levi. I was very touched that Wall-E discovered emotions from a dilapidated 20th century tape containing a loop of Put on Your Sunday Clothes.

Mr Herman has stated that he will no longer be writing for the theatre:
“I think my style of musical has come and was very, very good to me, but is gone now. I think it's better to know when to leave than to end up with two or three shows that didn't make it. I left at my height."



I was fortunate enough to play Horace Vandergelder in Hello, Dolly! at Seattle Civic Light Opera in the late 1980s & during performances, of course I would close my eyes as the male chorus was singing the title number, & what I was hearing was “Hello, Horace!” or better- “Hello, Stephen!” & I was step kicking down that staircase.

Jerry Herman turns 80 on this day.