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Mark of the ‘Beast’

Novelist Louis Bayard explores Brazil circa 1914 in new adventure

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Louis Bayard, gay news, Washington Blade
Louis Bayard, gay news, Washington Blade

In Louis Bayard’s new novel, Col. Theodore Roosevelt and his son, Kermit, are kidnapped by a mysterious Amazonian tribe in Brazil circa 1914 and must find and kill a ravenous beast to survive. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

‘Roosevelt’s Beast’

By Louis Bayard

Henry Holt and Company

Available March 18

320 pages

Hardcover

$27

henryholt.com

Appearances:

Politics & Prose

5015 Connecticut Ave., N.W.

March 23

5 p.m.

One More Page Books

2200 N. Westmoreland St. No. 101

Arlington, VA

March 27

7 p.m.

Listen for Bayard on the “Diane Rehm Show” (WAMU 88.5)

On March 24 at 11 a.m.

 

Details at louisbayard.com

Washington novelist Louis Bayard, whose new work “Roosevelt’s Beast” will be released Tuesday, spent a whirlwind hour with the Blade two weeks ago touching on everything from how he got started and how his career developed to what he tells young writers in his classes at George Washington University and how he wrestled the “Beast” that is his latest novel.

Bayard, 50, and his partner of 26 years, Don Montuori, are married and have two sons, ages 13 and 11. They live in Capitol Hill. Bayard, born in Albuquerque but raised mostly in Springfield, Va., moved to Washington in 1988, worked on the Hill and later did PR for various environmental groups through the ‘90s. His first novel, the gay-themed “Fool’s Errand,” was published by gay press Alyson Books in 1999. “Roosevelt’s Beast” is his sixth book. He’s not sure how many books he’s sold total, but upon consulting with his publisher, estimates the number to be about 100,000.

His comments have been slightly edited for length.

 

WASHINGTON BLADE: You went to Princeton and Joyce Carol Oates is quoted on the back of your new book. Did you take her creative writing course?

LOUIS BAYARD: Yes. She was also my adviser.

 

BLADE: What did you learn from her?

BAYARD: She was a very exacting reader, so it forced me to think about every word I write and I really do sweat every word. You do sometimes start to think over the course of a book, “Does this really matter,” but I revise and review and I think it’s because I had that kind of very hard eye that sniffs out deceit and flabbiness and all the stuff that can go wrong in prose. I don’t recall any specific lesson. I just recall how nice it was to feel understood by somebody of her caliber.

 

BLADE: Was it a big leap from Alyson to HarperCollins, which published your third book “Mr. Timothy”? How did that play out?

BAYARD: Alyson was one of the few places that would take an un-agented manuscript. The first book was gay-themed and they were a gay publisher so I just thought, “Why not take it straight to them?” It was a good fit for what I was doing. … But then when I had an idea for this book about Tiny Tim (2003’s “Mr. Timothy”), I thought, “I don’t just want this to be plunked on the gay shelf at Borders.” There was that sense of being ghettoized by virtue of being with a gay press. You go on that one shelf in the back of the store. I wanted this out in the front, so I found an agent, finally, after several tries, and he pitched it to the big houses and one of them bit.

 

BLADE: Would you call that your big break?

BAYARD: I guess you’d call it a break. It seemed like a break at the time. It was a break toward the mainstream, I guess, but I never felt like I’ve left the gay sensibility entirely behind.

 

BLADE: Do you enjoy teaching?

BAYARD: I do. I wish it paid a little more honestly. I’m there as an adjunct where you’re paid some ridiculous pittance for a lot of work, but I have other income sources. I just teach one fiction writing class.

 

BLADE: What do you tell your students?

BAYARD: To me, every student is a little different and they all bring something a little different so I just try to create a space where they can experiment and find their own voices. … It’s a workshop, so I’m basically like Socrates there in the midst, throwing out questions and making them think about things.

 

BLADE: About how many would you say have been good enough to get published?

BAYARD: Of the three years I’ve been doing it, I would say, maybe there were about that many who had the potential to do it. It would really be about desire. Actually the best writer I know of, and I can’t even remember her name offhand, but she was exceptional but actually was the least interested in pursuing it. I kept saying, “You really need to try this,” but she kept saying, “Well, I’m going to Europe” and she had all these plans. She just didn’t seem excited about it. That’s where perseverance pays off as much as anything.

 

BLADE: You went from gay contemporary fiction into several novels of historical fiction. How did that creative decision come about?

BAYARD: I thought it was an accident when I had this idea to see what became of Tiny Tim, but it achieved a certain amount of success so they kind of wanted me to keep doing that and I’ve come to believe it was a fortuitous accident because it really is the genre that’s most suited to me. I kind of fought it for a while, but now I’ve accepted that I stumbled into the right place.

 

BLADE: Does writing fiction about people who really lived, like Theodore Roosevelt in your new book, make it seem more real? What is the appeal?

BAYARD: I think there’s both a promise and a challenge that comes with that. People will recognize then name … and perhaps be intrigued as a result, but the challenge is that then you have to make this very well-known character come alive in your own way. It has to be convincing and plausible. You kind of have to work with people’s expectations but also make it a character that lives on the page.

 

BLADE: Do you have history geeks call you out on minutiae?

BAYARD: Oh yes.

 

BLADE: What do you say?

BAYARD: Sorry! Old ladies will e-mail me and say something like, “But there were no poinsettias in English drawing rooms in 1842” or “mockingbirds hadn’t migrated as far north as the Hudson Valley by 1830,” and you just go, “Sorry — that’s why I’m a novelist. I get to make things up or change things around if they don’t work.” I try to be as historically accurate as possible, but I think the story’s more important than the history.

 

BLADE: Is the line between contemporary literature and popular fiction sometimes arbitrary? Where do you feel your books fall on the continuum?

BAYARD: I think of them as sort of a hybrid between literary and genre. I have genre elements, like a mystery or thriller plot, but — what can I say without sounding self regarding? — I do take care with the language and use literary devices. I’m fine with people who just consider them entertainments. I don’t think of them as literature with a capitol L, but I do write to entertain. That’s my first aim. I want it to be a good book, but want you to feel good about yourself the next morning.

 

BLADE: What’s the gulf like between the two worlds? In music, for instance, there seems to be a pretty sizable gulf between classical and pop.

BAYARD: I think the gulf is narrowing because we’re seeing people like Michael Chabon and Colson Whitehead who are literary figures but who are also very deliberately writing in genre and I love the idea of breaking down that wall because I think it’s a silly distinction. I’m thinking of Richard Price who has written these great crime novels set in New York like “Clockers” and “Lush Life.” They’re police procedurals, they’re genre, but they’re such brilliant dissections of our society and they’re so ambitious, so beautifully crafted. The dialogue is extraordinary and I think he should be considered a literary artist.

 

BLADE: You wrote two gay-themed contemporary novels set in Washington. What kind of reactions did you get? Did people assume they were roman a clefs?

BAYARD: I guess there was a little bit of that assumption.

 

BLADE: But you had a sense that people outside of your acquaintance circle were reading and enjoying them?

BAYARD: I think so. Periodically I hear from them. “Fool’s Errand” seems to have a very small but enthusiastic cult. There may only be 12 of them but I hear from them on the order of once a year or so. They were conceived as entertainments so I didn’t expect them to be embraced as the next coming of Edmund White or something. I did worry that when I moved onto other things, that it would be seen as turning my back on gay readers and gay bookstores.

 

BLADE: Did anybody float that theory to you?

BAYARD: No, I probably projected it onto them. I maintain that my books since then still have a gay vibe and I’ve had gay characters in other books. Kermit Roosevelt in this new book isn’t gay, but he’s not really about heteronormative ideals. I don’t write about he-men.

 

BLADE: Was there a sense that you started out writing what you knew, then graduated onto tougher projects?

BAYARD: Oh, that’s interesting. “Fool’s Errand” required zero research. I just drew from my own life and my friends’ lives. “Mr. Timothy” was really the first book where I had to come up with a whole other world, but it was a challenge I wanted to embrace. There’s only so much you can squeeze out of your own life and I’m pretty quiet honestly. Not a lot of drama.

 

BLADE: How do you deem success for these various projects? Is there a sales threshold you like to hit?

BAYARD: To me, success is earning back the advance they give me.

 

BLADE: Now that you have several under your belt, do you feel freer to experiment? The book world seems like a jungle these days. Do you have any sense that if you wrote something that bombed, they would give you another shot?

BAYARD: No, I don’t think they would. This was the second of a two-book deal so after this I’m a free agent.

 

BLADE: So do you feel a lot of pressure?

BAYARD: The pressure is that I want to keep doing this indefinitely so I feel obliged to get a certain number of nice critical reviews and sell a certain amount. But there are plenty of mid-list writers who earn back their advances and are doing everything they need to do but are being dropped from publishing houses. It’s a little scary. The whole business is contracting. They seem to want more high concept stories — you know, werewolves and vampires and what not. Zombies. So you do sort of feel you’re dancing as fast as you can most of the time.

 

BLADE: Sounds nerve wracking.

BAYARD: It is, but it’s the business too, not just authors. Publishers are shit scared and nobody knows anything. Which can be freeing in a way. You think, “Well, I may not know anything, but I know as much as they do.” What’s commercial? Nobody expected “The Da Vinci Code” to become the monster hit that it became, so I don’t know. It’s a weird time.

 

BLADE: Where does the drive come from? Did you always want to do this?

BAYARD: Oh, I’ve known since I was 10 on some level.

 

BLADE: What was the appeal?

BAYARD: Well, every writer starts as a reader. I loved reading from an early age, though my kids don’t. I always have and it’s the thing I love more than anything. So you start as a reader then you realize you want to create the same effect on someone else that these writers did on you. It was really in high school that I first started finding a voice of some kind. … My first credits were in gay magazine called Genre. Are they still around?

 

BLADE: Well, it’s funny you should mention that. (Editor’s note:Genre and Washington Blade previously had the same owners.)

BAYARD: Eventually my first novel came out and kind of went nowhere and there were a couple years where I wasn’t writing much at all, but there was always part of me that kept coming back to this. I think the surest test of a vocation is that you keep going forward even in the face of rejection. Even if it’s not clear that anybody in the world wants to read what you write.

 

BLADE: How tedious is the actual process? Are there points along the way you want to rip your hair out or is there joy in the problem solving?

BAYARD: Both. It’s an unstable compound of all those things. I wish it got easier. I used to think it would, but it really doesn’t.

 

BLADE: What’s the most common mistake you see in your students?

BAYARD? A lot of them are very entranced with words. They’re just discovering word power so they write these amazing, gorgeous, beautiful sentences. … A young writer throws everything at you because they want to impress and stun and overwhelm but. As I get older, I’m realizing you need less and less. Oddly enough, they neglect story. It’s amazing how many of them don’t know what their story is.

 

BLADE: Lots of authors might have one or two good books in them, but to keep doing this over many years is quite a feat. Yet it seems you’re heading down that path. Was there a point you felt you’d turned a corner?

BAYARD: Oh, I never feel I’ve made it. Yes, there are things that might look like success, but for me, it’s a constantly moving goalpost. I used to say all I wanted was to get reviewed in the New York Times. My second book was, but then I ended up in a depressive tailspin the week after. It’s a hard thing to chase because you never feel completely successful.

 

BLADE: What’s next?

BAYARD: Probably a young-adult novel set in the Great Depression. That’s about all I can say. It would be another jump, but it’s the only growth sector in publishing. I’m reading a lot of young-adult stuff and I’ve been very impressed by the quality. Some of it’s really excellent.

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Theater

Celebrate Valentine’s Day with one of these three plays

‘Waitress,’ ‘Love Birds,’ ‘Fuenteovejuna’ offer differing takes on love

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MALINDA plays Jenna in ‘Waitress’ at Olney Theatre Center.

For theatergoers seeking to mark Valentine’s Day with live music, love, and friendship, the DMV offers some new spins on traditional themes. 

Poised to make its regional debut at Olney Theatre Center, Sara Bareilles’s hit musical “Waitress” (Feb.13-March 30) may not seem like a usual love story, but it’s a love story nonetheless. 

“It’s about learning to love and value yourself,” says MALINDA who plays Jenna, the show’s titular server/baker with aspirations to bake prize-winning pies and change her life. “It’s also about sisterhood. From the start, the women involved in the show decided to be there for each other onstage and off, and it shows. For anyone with girl group love in their lives, this is an especially good show to see.

“Jenna doesn’t get a lot of satisfaction out of her primary partnership. Along with self-love she explores the antithesis of that — partner violence. Our director [Marcia Milgrom Dodge] took the lesson of community support and community love to heart.”

Prior to coming out as bisexual in 2022, MALINDA considered herself more of a “quiet queer.” However, the inspiration derived from Irish music (“music of the oppressed”), which she’s famed for singing on TikTok, compelled her to go public. 

She didn’t always believe her queerness to be special: “For me,” MALINDA says, “it was like saying my eyes are hazel. There wasn’t much to celebrate. But then I realized there were missing voices in my community. Felt like the right thing to do, and it’s been one of the great blessings of my life.”

Six years ago, after her Helen Hayes Award-winning turn in “Once,” MALINDA took a break from musical theater. She needed time to age into dream parts, and one of those roles was Jenna. She recalls, “Going back to theater was prominently featured on my vision board, so when Marcia asked me to commit to ‘Waitress,’ I happily agreed.” 

For her, Valentine’s Day is an opportunity to reach out and tell friends, family, and, of course, romantic partners, just how much you love them. 

And she adds “that’s exactly how I plan to celebrate.” 

D.C.’s delightful Holly Twyford is spending Valentine’s Day working at the Folger on Capitol Hill. She’ll be on stage, her wife will be in the audience, and depending on the length of the program, they’ll go out to dinner afterward.

For four performances, the multi-Helen Hayes award-winning actor is serving as narrator for “The Love Birds” (Feb. 14-16), a new Folger Consort work that blends medieval music with a world-premiere composition by acclaimed composer Juri Seo and readings from Geoffrey Chaucer’s “A Parlement of Foules” by Twyford. 

Standing behind a podium, she’ll read Chaucer’s words (translated from Middle English and backed by projected slides in the original language), alternating with music played on old and new instruments.  

“The new music is kind of dissonant with the sounds of birdcalls and nature sounds, painting a picture of what’s going on in Chaucer’s poem that’s beautiful and funny. Chaucer describes the male eagles pleading for the hand of the female eagle. Chaucer seems almost unwittingly feminist when he has the female eagle ask her eagle suitors to give her a year to think about it.”

GALA Hispanic Theatre in Columbia Heights presents “Fuenteovejuna” (through March 2), a timely production staged by out director José Luis Arelleno. Penned in 1613, this work from the Spanish Golden Age ranks among playwright Lope de Vega’s most performed plays.

It’s about tyranny and love, Arellano explains. Within Lope de Vega’s timely tale of brutish power lies an intense love story. In fact, at the top of the show, four characters, two males and two females play a game. What is love? One of the players asserts that love doesn’t exist, while the others disagree. It’s a charming way to kick off the play.

The celebrated director isn’t one to telegraph messages, preferring audiences think for themselves. That said, he does, of course, make strong directorial choices: “If I have to choose between love or war, it’s more important to talk about love. For me, it’s a revolution.” 

And apropos of a Valentine’s Day date, GALA’s production of “Fuenteovejuna” (performed in Spanish with English surtitles) is imbued with live music and verse, an important part of any romantic experience, adds David Peralto, the production’s poetry and verse consultant as well as Arellano’s longtime partner. 

The busy Spain-based couple will celebrate Valentine’s Day in Seville and couldn’t be happier. Arellano describes Seville as the most romantic city in the world.

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Photos

PHOTOS: SMYAL for the New Year

LGBTQ youth services organization holds fundraiser at Shakers

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SMYAL for the New Year was held at Shakers on Jan. 30. (Washington Blade photo by Michael Key)

The LGBTQ youth services organization SMYAL held the “SMYAL for the New Year” fundraiser at Shakers on Thursday, Jan. 30.

(Washington Blade photos by Michael Key)

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a&e features

Valentine’s gifts for the queers you love

Fragrances, X-rated sweet treats, candles, and more

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Put a little love in your heart. That’s what Jackie DeShannon encouraged with her 1969 hit song of the same name, and it’s never been more appropriate than in the context of our current state of affairs. Mute the vitriol this Valentine’s Day and concentrate on what really matters – those you love and who love you back. 

Gucci Guilty Love Edition

Sniffies? You’ll put the site on hold after a whiff of Gucci Guilty Love Edition on the nape of his neck – featuring captivating notes of juniper oil, orange flower absolute and aphrodisiatic Ambrofix – which one review claims to “make your brain sparkle like a fine Champagne.” Cheers to that. $25-$133, FragranceNet.com

Hunky Burning Love Pillow

Sweet dreams are on the docket when you rest your head on the Hunky Burning Love faux-suede square pillow printed with illustrations of shirtless himbos pining for your affection. An exercise in fantasy more than reality, but it beats sitting alone at a bar getting no attention at all. $30, ThePillowTopShop.com

Love Deck

What’s in the cards for your love life in 2025? Fuck around and find out with astrologist Lisa Stardust’s 70-card Love Deck, a tarot set of short spells, meditations and rituals designed to conjure enough love, passion, clarity and confidence to make Potion No. 9 jealous. $13, Amazon.com 

‘Making the Case for Equality’

We’ll continue to fight the good fight over the next four years and beyond – perhaps harder than ever – and Lambda Legal’s “Making the Case for Equality,” a detailed half-century history of our hard-won judicial victories, is a solid reminder of how far we’ve come in the war for LGBTQ+ rights. $45, Amazon.com

Lola Blankets

Schedule an at-home streaming marathon of this year’s Best Picture noms before the big night – there’s a lot to love in 2024’s Oscar picks – and the coziest way to settle in is all snuggled up in the squishiest Lola blankets, reminiscent of the adorable ripples of the cutest Shar Pei. Pick up a couple for the cuddle puddle. $109-$299, LolaBlankets.com

Asa Akira x Cake Life Cookies

Cue the collaboration you didn’t see coming: Adult film star Asa Akira teams up with award-winning trans-owned bakery Cake Life Bake Shop for its sweet-and-spicy Conversation Heart Sugar Cookies, featuring Akira’s XXX-tra special curated box decorated with NFSW phrases like “Cowgirl,” “Cream Pie,” and the ever-subtle “Anal” – that are sure to leave mouths agog at your Gaylentine’s get-together. $19-$21, CakeLifeBakeShop.square.site

Mind Games Candles

Since the late 1990s, the Backstreet Boys have implored us to quit playin’ games with our lovers’ hearts, which is probably why we play mind games instead – and now they come in luxury scents like Jasmine Milk, Tobacco Tonka Bean and Cherry Sandalwood, so you can enjoy mood lighting with your gaslighting. $135, MindGamesFragrance.com

Delysia Chocolates

Inspired by Greek Goddess-of-Love Aphrodite, Delysia Chocolatier’s 16-piece, limited-edition truffle collection includes four each of symbolic Passion (almond-honey-fig), Adoration (raspberry-rose petal-hibiscus), Unity (pomegranate-strawberry), and Love (spiced wine-berry) bite-size chocolates rich enough for savoring and abundant enough for sharing. $60, Delysia.com

DIY Whiskey Hot Sauce

Variety is the spice of life in Thoughtfully Gourmet’s Whiskey-Infused DIY Hot Sauce Kit that combines your favorite cereal spirit with high-quality global ingredients, like Mexican hot peppers, to create sophisticated flavor experiences of varying Scoville heat levels, handsomely housed in fancy decanters. Recipe book, spices and seasonings included; alcohol and antacids are not. $20, Amazon.com

Mikey Rox is an award-winning journalist and LGBTQ lifestyle expert whose work has been published in more than 100 outlets around the world. Connect with Mikey on Instagram @mikeyroxtravels.

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