Arts & Entertainment
Ahead of their time
New book explores how 20th century writers put gay issues on America’s radar
Gay writer Christopher Bram knew in researching his new book, which involved excavating ancient reviews of the work of prominent queer authors of the mid-20th century and beyond, he’d find ugly instances where homophobia colored the various assessments — he just didn’t realize how unrelenting and vitriolic it would be.
“I just wasn’t prepared for how mean and ugly and vicious the reviews could be of anything gay from the ‘50s well into the ‘80s,” Bram says during a phone chat from San Francisco. “The amount of anti-gay feeling among literary straight people just floored me. Even from people who were more on our side, the amount of condescension and this sneering, snickering tone, it got quite tiring and I only ended up quoting about half of what I found.”
(Image courtesy Twelve Books)
The book, out this month, is “Eminent Outlaws: the Gay Writers Who Changed America” (Twelve Books, $27.99). Bram’s premise is that the work of mid-century gay writers such as Truman Capote, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg, Tennessee Williams and others, on through to later novelists and playwrights such as Christopher Isherwood, Edward Albee, Edmund White, Armistead Maupin, Mart Crowley and Tony Kushner, was a literary revolution that laid the post-World War II groundwork for the modern gay rights movement. Bram, author of “The Father of Frankenstein” (adapted for the screen as the Oscar-winning film “Gods and Monsters”) and eight other novels, says the writers he includes in the book “introduced America to gay experience and sensibility and changed our literary culture.”
It’s a weighty thesis that unleashes an ocean of questions, some covered in the book, others pitched at Bram during this week’s Blade interview. And with Oscar season upon us (they’ll be handed out in Los Angeles Sunday evening), it’s an especially timely moment to consider the seemingly disproportionate contributions of gay writers to the arts. Nearly all the writers he covers have had work adapted to the big screen so their cultural reach is far-ranging and every bit as considerable as their straight counterparts.
Bram was a fan of these writers for decades. About three years ago he was approached by another writer, Sam Wasson, who was researching a book about the film “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (based on a Capote novel), and contacted Bram for literary context. After riffing on the state of gay life and gay writing in the ‘50s and thereafter in the U.S., it occurred to Bram that while nearly all of the writers he focuses on had been written about, there was no single book that explored how their lives and work — many of them knew each other — overlapped and fit into the cultural norms of the day while also influencing those norms often in shocking ways.
While much of the historical material in the book has been presented elsewhere — Bram says only a few points required fresh interviews — the overall story, he says, is not widely known but should be.
“There were all these little bits and pieces like this scattered jigsaw puzzle, but I really wanted to pull them all together to form one big picture,” he says. “What I did was connect the dots. Nobody had ever told this as a single narrative. There were some simple connections I was able to make, even something as simple and obvious as the fact that ‘Other Voices, Other Rooms’ (a gay-themed Capote book), ‘The City and the Pillar’ (from rival Gore Vidal) and the Kinsey Report all came out within a few weeks of each other in 1948, which is surprisingly early and yet it became really this powerhouse year where these gay books were suddenly getting all this attention.”
Bram (Photo courtesy Twelve Books)
Bram says it was a uniquely American phenomenon the catalyst of which was the way World War II had “suddenly brought all these people together in the Army, the Navy — they were exposed to this other type of sexuality, to bad language and profanity they’d never heard before and it didn’t take long for this to be reflected in the publishing industry.”
The book is setting gay tongues wagging and even those who’ve yet to read it, say Bram’s premise is intriguing.
Nicholas Benton, a local gay writer and founder/publisher of the Falls-Church News Press who’s written at length about the unique contributions of gays in culture and society, says that although he takes issue with some of Bram’s contextualization and assessments of some of his subject’s supposed lesser works — Benton’s about halfway through “Outlaws” — he calls it “a very important book with a lot of important information in it.”
So did these writers’ homosexuality and perhaps the outsider status it brought it with it make their work greater than it otherwise might have been?
“One of the features of being a gay person is you can’t help but have an alternate perspective on life,” Benton says. “A straight man walks in the room, sees the hot secretary and that’s all he can think about. A gay man comes in and notices the drapes clash with the rug. I mean obviously that’s an oversimplification, but gay sensibility has something to do with seeing the plight of people who are often invisible to the mind of a straight person … we bring an alternate perspective.”
Bram has a slightly different take. He says, “One would like to think (being gay) would create more empathy but maybe what we can say about homosexuality is much like what we say about religion — it makes the good people better and the bad people worse … for gays, that could mean being overly bitchy, negative or hypercritical of others or full of self pity that doesn’t turn to empathy, it could affect them in many different ways.”
Others say these writers helped America shed some of its Puritanical squeamishness toward sex and “grow up.” Ginsberg’s poem “Howl,” especially, is shockingly bold for its time. It’s amazing it got published in 1955.
“In the case of Williams, he was inestimable in helping to hammer the nails in movie censorship in post-war America,” says Drew Casper, a film expert and professor of critical studies at the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. “Whether his adaptations came through strong or diluted, no mistaking his championing the importance of sex in the lives of his characters, often as a way for them to touch God. Sexuality is an important concern in gay life and relationships, so when gay writers take pen in hand, sexuality is a concern.”
Gay author William J. Mann, who has a bounty of novels and non-fiction Hollywood-themed books to his credit, says he’s “a huge fan” of Bram and “can’t wait” to read “Outlaws.” Mann calls the topic “fascinating” and “great.”
“The role of the arts is always to push what’s expected or what’s understood and certainly when you read the works of James Baldwin for example … you have this real sense of ground being broken and getting people to really understand the wider experience of humanity in a way that the world is much more than just your own little sphere of existence,” Mann says.
Bram says the writers he covers deserve enormous credit — whether it’s Vidal’s cheeky handling of transsexuality in “Myra Breckenridge” or Kushner’s sophisticated handling of the AIDS crisis in “Angels in America” — for getting gay topics on the cultural radar.
“They got the stories out there,” he says. “Homosexuality became a subject that straight and gay people could finally talk about and once people were talking about it, other people started talking about it too. It’s an example of where art did a better job than activism. ‘Boys in the Band’ was made into a movie in 1970 and it played in every major city in the country with prominent actors just a year after the Stonewall riots. In my group of friends at the time, none of us had heard of the Stonewall riots, but we’d all heard of ‘Boys in the Band.’”
Movies
Van Sant returns with gripping ‘Dead Man’s Wire’
Revisiting 63-hour hostage crisis that pits ethics vs. corporate profits
In 1976, a movie called “Network” electrified American moviegoers with a story in which a respected news anchor goes on the air and exhorts his viewers to go to their windows and yell, “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
It’s still an iconic line, and it briefly became a familiar catch phrase in the mid-’70s lexicon of pop culture, the perfect mantra for a country worn out and jaded by a decade of civil unrest, government corruption, and the increasingly powerful corporations that were gradually extending their influence into nearly all aspects of American life. Indeed, the movie itself is an expression of that same frustration, a satire in which a man’s on-the-air mental health crisis is exploited by his corporate employers for the sake of his skyrocketing ratings – and spawns a wave of “reality” programming that sensationalizes outrage, politics, and even violence to turn it into popular entertainment for the masses. Sound familiar?
It felt like an exaggeration at the time, an absurd scenario satirizing the “anything-for-ratings” mentality that had become a talking point in the public conversation. Decades later, it’s recognized as a savvy premonition of things to come.
This, of course, is not a review of “Network.” Rather, it’s a review of the latest movie by “new queer cinema” pioneer Gus Van Sant (his first since 2018), which is a fictionalized account of a real-life on-the-air incident that happened only a few months after “Network” prompted national debate about the media’s responsibility in choosing what it should and should not broadcast – and the fact that it strikes a resonant chord for us in 2026 makes it clear that debate is as relevant as ever.
“Dead Man’s Wire” follows the events of a 63-hour hostage situation in Indianapolis that begins when Tony Kiritsis (Bill Skarsgård) shows up for an early morning appointment at the office of a mortgage company to which he is under crippling debt. Ushered into a private office for a one-on-one meeting with Dick Hall (Dacre Montgomery), son of the brokerage’s wealthy owner, he kidnaps the surprised executive at gunpoint and rigs him with a “dead man’s wire” – a device that secures a shotgun against a captive’s head that is triggered to discharge with any attempt at escape – before calling the police himself to issue demands for the release of his hostage, which include immunity for his actions, forgiveness of his debt, reimbursement for money he claims was swindled from him by the company, and an apology.
The crisis becomes a public spectacle when Kiritsis subjects his prisoner to a harrowing trip through the streets back to his apartment, which he claims is wired with explosives. As the hours tick by, the neighborhood surrounding his building becomes a media circus. Realizing that law enforcement officials are only pretending to negotiate while they make plans to take him down, he enlists the aid of a popular local radio DJ Fred Heckman (Colman Domingo) to turn the situation into a platform for airing his grievances – and for calling out the predatory financial practices that drove him to this desperate situation in the first place.
We won’t tell you how it plays out, for the sake of avoiding spoilers, even though it’s all a matter of public record. Suffice to say that the crisis reaches a volatile climax in a live broadcast that’s literally one wrong move away from putting an explosion of unpredictable real-life violence in front of millions of TV viewers.
In 1977, the Kiritsis incident certainly contributed to ongoing concerns about violence on television, but there was another aspect of the case that grabbed public attention: Kiritsis himself. Described by those who knew him as “helpful,” “kind,” and a “hard worker,” he was hardly the image of a hardened criminal, and many Americans – who shared his anger and desperation over the opportunistic greed of a finance industry they believed was playing them for profit – could sympathize with his motives. Inevitably, he became something of a populist hero – or anti-hero, at least – for standing up to a stacked system, an underdog who spoke things many of them felt and took actions many of them wished they could take, too.
That’s the thing that makes this true-life crime adventure uniquely suited to the talents of Van Sant, a veteran indie auteur whose films have always specialized in humanizing “outsider” characters, usually pushed to the fringes of society by circumstances only partly under their own control, and often driven to desperate acts in pursuit of an unattainable dream. Tony Kiritsis, a not-so-regular “Joe” whose fumbling efforts toward financial security have been turned against him and seeks only recompense for his losses, fits that profile to a tee, and the filmmaker gives us a version of him (aided by Skarsgård’s masterfully modulated performance) that leaves little doubt that he – from a certain point of view, at least – is the story’s unequivocal protagonist, no matter how “lawless” his actions might be.
It helps that the film gives us much more exposure to Kiritsis’ personality than could be seen merely during the historic live broadcast that made him infamous, spending much of the movie focused on his interactions with Hall (performed with equally well-managed nuance by Montgomery) during the two days spent in the apartment, as well as his dealings with DJ Heckman (rendered with savvy and close-to-the-chest cageyness by Domingo); for balance, we also get fly-on-the-wall access to the interplay outside between law enforcement officials (including Cary Elwes’ blue collar neighborhood cop) as they try to navigate a potentially deadly situation, and to the jockeying of an ambitious rookie street reporter (Myha’la) with the rest of the press for “scoops” with each new development.
But perhaps the interaction that finally sways us in Kiritsis’s favor takes place via phone with his captive’s mortgage tycoon father (Al Pacino, evoking every unscrupulous, amoral mob boss he’s ever played), who is willing to sacrifice his own son’s life rather than negotiate a deal. It’s a nugget of revealed avarice that was absent in the “official” coverage of the ordeal, which largely framed Kiritsis as mentally unstable and therefore implied a lack of credibility to his accusations against Meridian Mortgage. It’s also a moment that hits hard in an era when the selfishness of wealthy men feels like a particularly sore spot for so many underdogs.
That’s not to say there’s an overriding political agenda to “Dead Man’s Wire,” though Van Sant’s character-driven emphasis helps make it into something more than just another tension-fueled crime story; it also works to raise the stakes by populating the story with real people instead of predictable tropes, which, coupled with cinematographer Arnaud Potier’s studied emulation of gritty ‘70s cinema and the director’s knack for inventive visual storytelling, results in a solid, intelligent, and darkly humorous thriller – and if it reconnects us to the “mad-as-hell” outrage of the “Network” era, so much the better.
After all, if the last 50 years have taught us anything about the battle between ethics and profit, it’s that profit usually wins.
Books
‘The Director’ highlights film director who collaborated with Hitler
But new book omits gay characters, themes from Weimar era
‘The Director’
By Daniel Kehlmann
Summit Books, 2025
Garbo to Goebbels, Daniel Kehlmann’s historical novel “The Director” is the story of Austrian film director G.W. Pabst (1885-1967) and his descent down a crooked staircase of ambition into collaboration with Adolph Hitler’s film industry and its Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. Kehlmann’s historical fiction is rooted in the world of Weimar German filmmaking and Nazi “Aryan” cinema, but it is a searing story for our challenging time as well.
Pabst was a legendary silent film director from the Weimar Republic’s Golden Era of filmmaking. He “discovered” Greta Garbo; directed silent screen star Louise Brooks; worked with Hitler’s favored director Leni Riefenstahl (“Triumph of the Will”); was a close friend of Fritz Lang (“Metropolis”); and lived in Hollywood among the refugee German film community, poolside with Billy Wilder (“Some Like it Hot”) and Fred Zinnemann (“High Noon”) — both of whose families perished in the Holocaust.
Yet, Pabst left the safety of a life and career in Los Angeles and returned to Nazi Germany in pursuit of his former glory. He felt the studios were giving him terrible scripts and not permitting him to cast his films as he wished. Then he received a signal that he would be welcome in Nazi Germany. He was not Jewish.
Kehlmann, whose father at age 17 was sent to a concentration camp and survived, takes the reader inside each station of Pabst’s passage from Hollywood frustration to moral ruin, making the incremental compromises that collectively land him in the hellish Berlin office of Joseph Goebbels. In an unforgettably phantasmagoric scene, Goebbels triples the stakes with the aging filmmaker, “Consider what I can offer you….a concentration camp. At any time. No problem,” he says. “Or what else…anything you want. Any budget, any actor. Any film you want to make.” Startled, paralyzed and seduced by the horror of such an offer, Pabst accepts not with a signature but a salute: “Heil Hitler,” rises Pabst. He’s in.
The novel develops the disgusting world of compromise and collaboration when Pabst is called in to co-direct a schlock feature with Hitler’s cinematic soulmate Riefenstahl. Riefenstahl, the “Directress” is making a film based on the Fuhrer’s favorite opera. She is beautiful, electric and beyond weird playing a Spanish dancer who mesmerizes the rustic Austrian locals with her exotic moves. The problem is scores of extras will be needed to surround and desire Fraulein Riefenstahl. Mysteriously, the “extras” arrive surprising Pabst who wonders where she had gotten so many young men when almost everyone was on the front fighting the war. The extras were trucked in from Salzburg, he is told, “Maxglan to be precise.” He pretends not to hear. Maxglan was a forced labor camp for “racially inferior” Sinti and Roma gypsies, who will later be deported from Austria and exterminated. Pabst does not ask questions. All he wants is their faces, tight black and white shots of their manly, authentic, and hungry features. “You see everything you don’t have,” he exhorts the doomed prisoners to emote for his camera. Great art, he believes, is worth the temporal compromises and enticements that Kehlmann artfully dangles in the director’s face. And it gets worse.
One collaborates in this world with cynicism born of helpless futility. In Hollywood, Pabst was desperate to develop his own pictures and lure the star who could bless his script, one of the thousands that come their way. Such was Greta Garbo, “the most beautiful woman in the world” she was called after being filmed by Pabst in the 1920s. He shot her close-ups in slow motion to make her look even more gorgeous and ethereal. Garbo loved Pabst and owed him much, but Kehlmann writes, “Excessive beauty was hard to bear, it burned something in the people around it, it was like a curse.”
Garbo imagined what it would be like to be “a God or archangel and constantly feel the prayers rising from the depths. There were so many, there was nothing to do but ignore them all.” Fred Zinnemann, later to direct “High Noon”, explains to his poolside guest, “Life here (in Hollywood) is very good if you learn the game. We escaped hell, we ought to be rejoicing all day long, but instead we feel sorry for ourselves because we have to make westerns even though we are allergic to horses.”
The texture of history in the novel is rich. So, it was disappointing and puzzling there was not an original gay character, a “degenerate” according to Nazi propaganda, portrayed in Pabst’s theater or filmmaking circles. From Hollywood to Berlin to Vienna, it would have been easy to bring a sexual minority to life on the set. Sexual minorities and gender ambiguity were widely presented in Weimar films. Indeed, in one of Pabst’s films “Pandora’s Box” starring Louise Brooks there was a lesbian subplot. In 1933, when thousands of books written by, and about homosexuals, were looted and thrown onto a Berlin bonfire, Goebbels proclaimed, “No to decadence and moral corruption!” The Pabst era has been de-gayed in “The Director.”
“He had to make films,” Kehlmann cuts to the chase with G.W. Pabst. “There was nothing else he wanted, nothing more important.” Pabst’s long road of compromise, collaboration and moral ruin was traveled in small steps. In a recent interview Kehlmann says the lesson is to “not compromise early when you still have the opportunity to say ‘no.’” Pabst, the director, believed his art would save him. This novel does that in a dark way.
(Charles Francis is President of the Mattachine Society of Washington, D.C., and author of “Archive Activism: Memoir of a ‘Uniquely Nasty’ Journey.”)
The Blade may receive commissions from qualifying purchases made via this post.
Theater
Swing actor Thomas Netter covers five principal parts in ‘Clue’
Unique role in National Theatre production requires lots of memorization
‘Clue: On Stage’
Jan. 27-Feb. 1
The National Theatre
1321 Pennsylvania Ave., N.W.
thenationaldc.com
Out actor Thomas Netter has been touring with “Clue” since it opened in Rochester, New York, in late October, and he’s soon settling into a week-long run at D.C.’s National Theatre.
Adapted by Sandy Rustin from the same-titled 1985 campy cult film, which in turn took its inspiration from the popular board game, “Clue” brings all the murder mystery mayhem to stage.
It’s 1954, the height of the Red Scare, and a half dozen shady characters are summoned to an isolated mansion by a blackmailer named Mr. Boddy where things go awry fairly fast. A fast-moving homage to the drawing room whodunit genre with lots of wordplay, slapstick, and farce, “Clue” gives the comedic actors a lot to do and the audience much to laugh at.
When Netter tells friends that he’s touring in “Clue,” they inevitably ask “Who are you playing and when can we see you in it?” His reply isn’t straightforward.
The New York-based actor explains, “In this production, I’m a swing. I never know who’ll I play or when I’ll go on. Almost at any time I can be called on to play a different part. I cover five roles, almost all of the men in the show.”
Unlike an understudy who typically learns one principal or supporting role and performs in the ensemble nightly, a swing learns any number of parts and waits quietly offstage throughout every performance just in case.
With 80 minutes of uninterrupted quick, clipped talk “Clue” can be tough for a swing. Still, Netter, 28, adds, “I’m loving it, and I’m working with a great cast. There’s no sort of “All About Eve” dynamic going on here.”
WASHINGTON BLADE: Learning multiple tracks has got to be terrifying.
THOMAS NETTER: Well, there certainly was a learning curve for me. I’ve understudied roles in musicals but I’ve never covered five principal parts in a play, and the sheer amount of memorization was daunting.
As soon as I got the script, I started learning lines character by character. I transformed my living room into the mansion’s study and hallway, and got on my feet as much as I could and began to get the parts into my body.
BLADE: During the tour, have you been called on to perform much?
NETTER: Luckily, everyone has been healthy. But I was called on in Pittsburgh where I did Wadsworth, the butler, and the following day did the cop speaking to the character that I was playing the day before.
BLADE: Do you dread getting that call?
NETTER: Can’t say I dread it, but there is that little bit of stage fright involved. Coming in, my goal was to know the tracks. After I’d done my homework and released myself from nervous energy, I could go out and perform and have fun. After all, I love to act.
“Clue” is an opportunity for me to live in the heads of five totally different archetype characters. As an actor that part is very exciting. In this comedy, depending on the part, some nights it’s kill and other nights be killed.
BLADE: Aside from the occasional nerves, would you swing again?
NETTER: Oh yeah, I feel I’m living out the dream of the little gay boy I once was. Traveling around getting a beat on different communities. If there’s a gay bar, I’m stopping by and meeting interesting and cool people.
BLADE: Speaking of that little gay boy, what drew him to theater?
NETTER: Grandma and mom were big movie musical fans, show likes “Singing in the Rain,” “Meet Me in St. Louis.” I have memories of my grandma dancing me around the house to “Shall We Dance?” from the “King and I” She put me in tap class at age four.
BLADE: What are your career highlights to date?
NETTER: Studying the Meisner techniqueat New York’sNeighborhood Playhouse for two years was definitely a highlight. Favorite parts would include the D’Ysquith family [all eight murder victims] in “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder,” and the monstrous Miss Trunchbull in “Matilda.”
BLADE: And looking forward?
NETTER: I’d really like the chance to play Finch or Frump in Frank Loesser’s musical comedy “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”
BLADE: In the meantime, you can find Netter backstage at the National waiting to hear those exhilarating words “You’re on!”
Two gay men face deportation to Iran
Van Sant returns with gripping ‘Dead Man’s Wire’
Expanded PrEP access among FreeState Justice’s 2026 legislative priorities
Dignidad para vidas LGBTQ en Centroamérica
Defunding LGBTQ groups is a warning sign for democracy
A ‘Battle’ we can’t avoid
Queer liberation is your liberation
Convert rent check into an automatic investment, Marjorie!
Swing actor Thomas Netter covers five principal parts in ‘Clue’
