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
Intense doc offers transcendent treatment of queer fetish pioneer
‘A Body to Live In’ a fascinating trip into a transgressive culture
Once upon a time in the 1940s, a teenager named Roland Loomis, who lived with his devout Lutheran parents in Aberdeen, S.D., received a hand-me-down camera from his uncle. It was a gift that would change his life.
Small and effeminate, he didn’t exactly fit with the “in” crowd of his small rural town; but he had an inner life more thrilling than anything they had to offer, anyway, and that camera became the key with which it could finally be unlocked. Waiting patiently for those precious hours when he was alone in the house, he used it to capture images of himself that expressed an identity he had only begun to explore, through furtive experiments in body manipulation that incorporated exotic costuming, erotic nudity, gender ambiguity, and what many of us might call (though he would not) self-mutilation, including the piercing of his skin and other extreme forms of physical modification.
Young Roland would go on to become famous (or perhaps, notorious) in the decades to come, but it would be under a different name: Fakir Musafar, the focal figure of filmmaker Angelo Madsen’s documentary “A Body to Live In,” which opened in Los Angeles on Feb. 27 and expands to New York this weekend.
Like Musafar himself, who died of lung cancer at 87 in 2018, it’s a documentary that doesn’t quite follow the expected rules. Eschewing “talking head” commentators and traditional narration, Madsen spins his movie from his subject’s extensive archives and allows the information to come through the voices of those who were close to him: collaborator and life partner Cléo Dubois, performance artists Ron Athey and Annie Sprinkle, and underground publisher V. Vale are among the many who contribute their memories and impressions of him, while evocative photos and film footage create a hazy “slide show” effect to provide a guided tour of his life, his art, and his legacy. Less a biography than a chronicle of profoundly unorthodox self-discovery, it details his development from those early days of clandestine self-photography through a continual evolution that would see him become a performance artist, a central figure in the burgeoning BDSM culture, a seeker who espoused eroticism as a spiritual practice, the founder of a “Radical Faeries” offshoot for the kink/fetish community, and ultimately an elder and mentor for a new generation for whom his once-taboo ideas and explorations had essentially become mainstream – thanks in no small part to his own pioneering efforts.
It’s a fascinating, hypnotic trip into a culture which might feel disturbingly transgressive to those who have never been a part of it – yet will almost certainly feel like being “seen” to those who have. It opens a window into a lifestyle where leather, kink, BDSM, gender play, and non-monogamous “situationships” are not just accepted but viewed as natural variations on the spectrum of human sexuality; and in the middle of it all is Musafar, on a deeply personal quest to connect with the deepest part of his essence through the intense and ritualistic pursuit of an inner drive that keeps pushing him further. As one reminiscing cohort remarks during the film, it’s as if he is “trying to find an answer to a question that” he “cannot form.”
Indeed, it might be said that Madsen’s movie is an exercise in forming that question; bringing his own “transness” into the mix as he examines the various aspects of Musafar’s ever-evolving relationship with self, identity, and presentation, he evokes a timely resonance in which the imperative to make physical form match psychic self-perception becomes an irresistible force, and draws a direct line between his subject’s fluid ambiguity and the plight faced by modern trans people over the bigotry of those who think gender is strictly about genitalia. Perhaps the question has to do with whether we are defined by our identities or by our physical form – or if both are malleable, adaptable, and in a constant state of flux.
In any case, with regard to Musafar, “A Body to Live In” is unquestionably a film about transformation, not just of physical manifestation but of consciousness itself. In his journey from being little Roland, the outcast schoolboy with a secret fetish, to Fakir, the spiritual psychonaut for whom sex and gender are only walls that separate us from a true and eternal essence, he is embodied by Madsen’s reverent documentary as a being in the process of breaking free from the restrictions of physical existence, of transcending all such distinctions by letting go of life itself – something underscored not only by the section of the movie dealing with the impact of the AIDS epidemic on Musafar’s deeply-bonded community, but by his own words, spoken in a deathbed interview that serves as a connecting thread throughout the film. We are kept unavoidably aware of the mortality which – for Musafar at least – seems little more than a prison that keeps us from the unfettered joy of our true nature.
But while Madsen honors his subject as a pillar – and an under-sung hero – of contemporary queer culture, he also addresses the aspects that made him a “problematic” figure; in his life, he drew criticism over perceived cultural appropriation from the indigenous American tribes whose sacred rituals inspired the kink-flavored practices which facilitated his own spiritual odyssey, and which he popularized among his own acolytes to give rise to the still-controversial “Modern Primitive” movement that has been criticized by some for turning meaningful cultural traditions into an excuse for trendy fashion accessories. Even Musafar’s survivors, whose love for him exudes palpably from the stories and memories they share of him throughout the film, make observations that point to his flaws; yet at the same time, Madsen’s documentary makes clear that Musafar himself never saw himself as perfect, either – just as someone willing to endure the kind of suffering that most of us might find unbearable in order to get closer to perfection.
Of course, it probably helped that he enjoyed that so-called “suffering,” but that’s perhaps too glib an observation in the face of a film that so clearly makes a case for the deep and sincere commitment he held for his quest for transcendence; but it’s also a helpful reminder that his practices – which might seem macabre and twisted to the uninitiated – were also an experience of joy, an exercise in rising above pain and making it a vehicle toward enlightenment, and in achieving a deeper understanding of one’s own place in this confusing place we call the universe.
Full disclosure: “A Body to Live In” is an intense experience, replete with candid sexual conversation, frequent nudity, and graphic scenes of extreme fetish practices – like suspension by metal hooks through the skin – which might be hard to handle for those who are unprepared to be confronted by them. Even so, as dark and menacing as it might be for the squeamish outsider, the world revealed in Madsen’s eloquent portrait is full of treasures and steeped in dark beauty, and it’s hard to imagine a more fitting way than that to portray a queer pioneer like the former Roland Loomis.
Nightlife
In D.C. comedy, be sure to shop local
A thriving patchwork of queer-friendly stages in Washington, Baltimore
Most people know stand-up comedy from Netflix specials or late-night sets on Comedy Central. The reality is far different for local working comics like me. A few times a month, I might get paid $50 for a 10-minute set and my photo on a bar flyer to show off to the ladies in my scrapbooking club.
Still, it’s a joy sharing laughs about my well-worn Washington career arc — from conservative reporter to openly trans organic grocery store worker and nightclub comedian. Or, as I like to say onstage, from Fox to foxy.
Stand-up is hard. Offstage, it’s even harder. It took more than a year and nearly 80 open mics to land my first paid set. Since then, I’ve performed in coffee shops, bars, restaurants and even on a city sidewalk. I once performed in the Catskills, which felt like a big deal — even if it was a bigger deal in the 1950s.
As an older trans comic in Washington, I’ve found it nearly impossible to get stage time — or even the courtesy of a returned email — at the big, corporate-owned comedy clubs. Fortunately, there’s a thriving patchwork of queer-friendly producers in Washington and Baltimore creating shows that reflect the diversity of our communities, instead of straight male-dominated lineups that look like the cast of “Ice Road Truckers.”
“There are so many kinds of funny people, but a lot of barriers exist for women and queer people because it’s a very masculine culture,” said Dana Fleitman, who runs the Just Kidding Comedy Collective and is helping produce the Woke Mob Comedy Festival in April, featuring many women and queer comics.
Full disclosure: I’m not performing in the festival. But I am proud to be one of more than 50 women and nonbinary comics Fleitman and her colleagues have helped “train up” through an incubator program she first ran through Grassroots Comedy and now through Just Kidding Comedy Collective.
Another trans comic, Charlie Girard, who splits time between New York and Washington, runs an incubator program called Queers Can’t Take a Joke. He has trained more than 100 comics in Washington.
Girard has one rule: no punching down.
“The best comics speak truth to power,” Girard said. “Making fun of marginalized communities is simple lazy writing based on tired, old stereotypes.”
Ultimately, Girard wants to prepare students not just for queer rooms, but to find their voice and expand into all kinds of spaces.
Comics trained by Girard and Fleitman have gone on to produce or help run shows like Clocked Comedy, Backbone Comedy, the Crackin’ Up open mic and Funny Side Up. Several have found a home on Barracks Row at As You Are — one of my favorite places to perform. In Washington, comic Jenny Cavallero’s show Seltzer is a sober comedy night frequently featuring local queer comics.
In Washington, performer and producer Arzoo Malhotra, who runs Zoo Animal Productions, said it’s a critical moment to support community-based comedy producers, often the first hit by worsening economic conditions.
“We’re losing spaces faster than we’re creating them,” Malhotra said. “We are in the use-it-or-lose-it stage. If there’s a restaurant you like or a performer you want to keep seeing, patronize them now — because they’re going away.”
I’m also grateful for producers in Baltimore, which has a thriving queer comedy scene. Comic Hannah Alden Jeffrey’s monthly “The Really Cool Open Mic,” created for women and trans performers but open to all, regularly draws up to 100 people.
Hannah’s mic and Kenny Rooster’s “Dramedy” open stage have provided safety and opportunity when other stages felt out of reach. Comedians Michael Furr and Jake Leizear also produce shows regularly featuring queer comics.
“We started the REALLY COOL Open Mic because every other mic in town catered toward straight dudes that dominated the Baltimore scene,” Alden Jeffrey said. “Contrary to the lineups of many shows today, people don’t want to see a show of eight guys being bigots. Go figure.”
One of the most important moments for me came when I attended a free showcase at a well-known Adams Morgan club. Like other big venues, it hadn’t responded to emails from a new comic looking for a shot. I sat in the back row thinking maybe these comics were just way funnier than I am.
Then a straight male comedian — with hair even more gorgeous than mine — launched into a long joke comparing eating pizza to performing oral sex on a woman.
At that moment, I walked out feeling better about myself. I remember thinking: nope. I absolutely deserve to be on that stage, too.
Lots of us do.
Jamie Mack is a stand up comedian, speaker and writer. Follow them on Instagram at @jamiemack_blt or email [email protected].
Celebrity News
Liza Minnelli makes surprise appearance at GLAAD Media Awards
Laverne Cox’s fiery speech earned standing ovation
Last night’s GLAAD Media Awards had a few pleasant surprises in store.
Throughout the evening, which was hosted by “Mean Girls” star Jonathan Bennett on Thursday at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles, the audience was clued into the fact that a mystery guest would make an appearance. By the end of the night, it was revealed to be none other than “Cabaret” star and queer icon Liza Minnelli, who was in attendance to accept the newly-created Liza Minnelli Storyteller Award.
An emotional Minnelli told the crowd of queer attendees and creatives, “You make me so proud because you’re so strong, and you stand up for what you believe in. You really do, and it’s so nice to be here. I feel like a five-year-old!” Everyone then joined in a happy birthday celebration for Minnelli’s upcoming birthday on March 12, and the release of her upcoming memoir, “Kids, Wait Till You Hear This!”
Another moment that got the audience standing and cheering was when “Orange Is the New Black” star Laverne Cox took to the stage to call out how “what is going on right now in the United States of America is not right.”
She said, “Identify, I said this earlier, and I’m going to say it again, what dehumanizing language and images are. Call it out and don’t buy into it! So much of my struggle over the past several years [has been] trying to figure out how to combat this assault on my community, rhetorically. I do not want to have the conversation about my life and my humanity on the oppressor’s terms.”
That message was echoed by Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers when accepting the Stephen F. Kolzak Award for their “Las Culturistas” podcast and pledging to donate $10,000 to Equality Kansas after the state revoked transgender people’s driver’s licenses. “We cannot accept this award without condemning the rampant active transphobia from this administration,” Rogers said. “We are also here to let them know in advance that they are fighting a losing battle. When we gather in rooms like this, we are always going to have each other’s backs.”
Among the big winners last night were “Heated Rivalry” for outstanding new TV series, “The Traitors” for outstanding reality competition program, “Stranger Things” for outstanding drama series, “Palm Royale” (which was just cancelled after two seasons) for outstanding comedy series, “Come See Me in the Good Light” for outstanding documentary, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” for outstanding wide theatrical release film and a tie between “A Nice Indian Boy” and “Plainclothes” for outstanding limited theatrical release film.
Quinta Brunson received the Vanguard Award for her hit TV series “Abbott Elementary,” which features Jacob, an openly queer character played by Chris Perfetti. Brunson said, “Queer people have been a part of my life since birth. I have to shout out my uncle … who was the first example of representation in my life of queer people, who allowed me to be free. There are so many people in the room who changed my life.”
On the music side, Young Miko won for outstanding music artist, and KATSEYE won for outstanding breakthrough music artist. Demi Lovato even opened the show with a steamy performance of her single “Kiss.”
The GLAAD Media Awards will officially air Saturday, March 21 on Hulu.
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