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.’”
Music & Concerts
Indigo Girls coming to Capital One Hall
Stars take center stage alongside Fairfax Symphony
Capital One Center will host “The Indigo Girls with the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra” on Thursday, June 19 and Friday, June 20 at 8 p.m. at Capital One Hall.
The Grammy Award-winning folk and pop stars will take center stage alongside the Fairfax Symphony, conducted by Jason Seber. The concerts feature orchestrations of iconic hits such as “Power of Two,” “Get Out The Map,” “Least Complicated,” “Ghost,” “Kid Fears,” “Galileo,” “Closer to Fine,” and many more.
Tickets are available on Ticketmaster or in person at Capital One Hall the nights of the concerts.
Friday, June 13
“Center Aging Friday Tea Time” will be at 2 p.m. in person at the DC Center for the LGBT Community’s new location at 1827 Wiltberger St., N.W. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more details, email [email protected].
Women in Their Twenties and Thirties will be at 8 p.m. at Wundergarten. An update will be posted the night of the event on where to find WiTT’s table. There’ll be a Pride flag to help people find the group. For more details, join WiTT’s closed Facebook group.
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Pride Month Happy Hour” at 7 p.m. at Freddie’s Beach bar and Restaurant. This event is ideal for making new friends, professional networking, idea-sharing, and community building. This event is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Saturday, June 14
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Pride Month Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ+ community, including Allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Rainbow History Project will host “Behind the Scenes With the Senior Curator of ‘Pickets, Protests and Parades’” at 7:30p.m. at Freedom Plaza. This behind-the-scenes experience offers a rare glimpse into the creative process behind this groundbreaking showcase of DC’s LGBTQ+ history. Learn about the bold design decisions that shaped the Quote Wall and Hero Cubes and the powerful stories that almost made the cut. Tickets cost $82 and can be purchased on Eventbrite.
Monday, June 16
“Center Aging Monday Coffee Klatch” will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more details, email [email protected].
Genderqueer DC will be at 7 p.m. in person at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. This is a support group for people who identify outside of the gender binary. Whether you’re bigender, agender, genderfluid, or just know that you’re not 100% cis. For more information, visit their website at www.genderqueerdc.org or check us out on Facebook.
Tuesday, June 17
Bi+ Roundtable and Discussion will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This is an opportunity for people to gather in order to discuss issues related to bisexuality or as Bi individuals in a private setting. Check out Facebook or Meetup for more information.
Wednesday, June 18
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit thedccenter.org/careers.
“Legends Live Loud: A Queer Karaoke Experience” will be at 7 p.m. at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. This will be a dynamic, Center-wide karaoke event celebrating the brilliance and cultural impact of some of our most colorful queer icons. The Center will honor legends through music, pop culture, dance, and inextinguishable liberation. For more details and to sign up, visit the DC Center’s website.
Thursday, June 19
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Book Club” at 7:30 p.m. at Federico Ristorante Italiano. This book club is co-hosted by EQUALITY NoVa and is another opportunity to engage in a fun and rewarding activity. The group doesn’t discriminate when it comes to genres it reads – from classic literature to best selling novels to biographies to histories to gay fiction. For more details, visit Eventbrite.
Cultivating Change Foundation will host “Cultivating Pride Happy Hour” at 5:30 p.m. at Dacha Beer Garden. This Pride month, the organization is inviting LGBTQ+ people and allies in food and agriculture to come together in communities nationwide. These informal gatherings are a chance to connect, celebrate, and build community, whether it’s over coffee, a cocktail, or a conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
There was a time, early in his career, that young filmmaker Wes Anderson’s work was labeled “quirky.”
To describe his blend of dry humor, deadpan whimsy, and unresolved yearning, along with his flights of theatrical fancy and obsessive attention to detail, it seemed apt at the time. His first films were part of a wave when “quirky” was almost a genre unto itself, constituting a handy-but-undefinable marketing label that inevitably became a dismissive synonym for “played out.”
That, of course, is why every new Wes Anderson film can be expected to elicit criticism simply for being a Wes Anderson film, and the latest entry to his cinematic canon is, predictably, no exception.
“The Phoenician Scheme” – released nationwide on June 6 – is perhaps Anderson’s most “Anderson-y” movie yet. Set in the exact middle of the 20th Century, it’s the tall-tale-ish saga of Anatole “Zsa-Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro), a casually amoral arms dealer and business tycoon with a history of surviving assassination attempts. The latest – a bomb-facilitated plane crash – has forced him to recognize that his luck will eventually run out, and he decides to protect his financial empire by turning it over (on a trial basis, at least) to his estranged daughter Liesl (Mia Threapleton), currently a novice nun on the verge of taking her vows. She conditionally agrees, despite the rumors that he murdered her mother, and is drawn into an elaborate geopolitical con game in which he tries to manipulate a loose cadre of “world-building” financiers (Tom Hanks, Bryan Cranston, Riz Ahmed, Mathieu Amalric, and Jeffrey Wright) into funding a massive infrastructure project – already under construction – across the former Phoenician empire.
Joined by his new administrative assistant and tutor, Bjorn (Michael Cera), Korda and Liesl travel the world to meet with his would-be investors, dodging assassination attempts along the way. His plot is disrupted, however, by the clandestine interference of a secret coalition of nations led by an American agent code-named “Excalibur” (Rupert Friend), who seeks to prevent the shift of geopolitical power his project would create. Eventually, he’s forced to target a final “mark” – his ruthless half-brother Nubar (Benedict Cumberbatch), with whom he has played a lifelong game of “who can lick who” – for the money he needs to pull it off, or he’ll lose his fortune, his oligarchic empire, and his slowly improving relationship with his daughter, all at once.
It’s clear from that synopsis that Anderson’s scope has widened far beyond the intimate stories of his earliest works – “Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore,” “The Royal Tenenbaums,” and others, which mostly dealt with relationships and dynamics among family (or chosen family) – to encompass significantly larger themes. So, too, has his own singular flavor of filmmaking become more fully realized; his exploration of theatrical techniques within a cinematic setting has grown from the inclusion of a few comical set-pieces to a full-blown translation of the real world into a kind of living, efficiently-modular Bauhaus diorama, where the artifice is emphasized rather than suggested, and realism can only be found through the director’s unconventionally-adjusted focus.
His work is no longer “quirky” – instead, it has grown with him to become something more pithy, an extension of the surreal and absurdist art movements that exploded in the tense days before World War II (an era which bears a far-too-uncomfortable resemblance to our own) and expresses the kind of politically-aware philosophical ideas that helped to build the world which has come since. It is no longer possible to enjoy a Wes Anderson movie on the basis of its surface value alone; it is necessary to read deeper into his now-well-honed cinematic language, which is informed not just by his signature aesthetic but by intellectual curiosity, and by the art, history, and cultural knowledge with which he saturates his work – like pieces of a scattered puzzle, waiting to be picked up and assembled along the way. Like all auteurs, he makes films that are shaped by a personal vision and follow a personal logic; and while he may strive to make them entertaining, he is perhaps more interested in providing insight into the wildly contradictory, often nonsensical, frequently horrifying, and almost always deplorable behavior of human beings. Indeed, the prologue scene in his latest endeavor illustrates each of those things, shockingly and definitively, before the opening credits even begin.
By typical standards, the performances in “Phoenician Scheme” – like those in most of Anderson’s films – feel stylized, distant, even emotionally cold. But within his meticulously stoic milieu, they are infused with a subtle depth that comes as much from the carefully maintained blankness of their delivery as it does from the lines themselves. Both del Toro and Threapleton manage to forge a deeply affecting bond while maintaining the detachment that is part of the director’s established style, and Cera – whose character reveals himself to be more than he appears as part of the story’s progression – begs the question of why he hasn’t become a “Wes Anderson regular” long before this. As always, part of the fun comes from the appearances of so many familiar faces, actors who have become part of an ever-expanding collection of regular players – including most-frequent collaborator Bill Murray, who joins fellow Anderson troupers Willem Dafoe and F. Murray Abraham as part of the “Biblical Troupe” that enact the frequent “near-death” episodes experienced by del Toro’s Korda throughout, and Scarlett Johansson, who shows up as a second cousin that Korda courts for a marriage of financial convenience – and the obvious commitment they bring to the project beside the rest of the cast.
But no Anderson film is really about the acting, though it’s an integral part of what makes them work – as this one does, magnificently, from the intricately choreographed opening credit sequence to the explosive climax atop an elaborate mechanical model of Korda’s dream project. In the end, it’s Anderson himself who is the star, orchestrating his thoroughly-catalogued vision like a clockwork puzzle until it pays off on a note of surprisingly un-bittersweet hope which reminds us that the importance of family and personal bonds is, in fact, still at the core of his ethos.
That said, and a mostly favorable critical response aside, there are numerous critics and self-identified fans who have been less than charmed by Anderson’s latest opus, finding it a redundant exercise in a style that has grown stale and offers little substance in exchange. Frankly, it’s impossible not to wonder if they have seen the same movie we have.
“The Phoenician Scheme,” like all of its creator’s work, is ultimately an esoteric experience, a film steeped in language and concepts that may only be accessible to those familiar with them – which, far from being a means of shutting out the “unenlightened,” aims instead to entice and encourage them to think, to explore, and, perhaps, to expand their perspective. It might be frustrating, but the payoff is worth it.
In this case, the shrewd political and economical realities he illuminates behind the romanticized “Hollywood” intrigue and his deceptively eccentric presentation speak so profoundly to the current state of world we live in that, despite its lack of directly queer subject matter, we’re giving it our deepest recommendation.
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