Arts & Entertainment
‘Hello Gorgeous’
Gay biographer deconstructs Streisand’s ascent to superstardom
Jewish Literary Festival: William Mann
Closing Night
Wednesday, 7:30 p.m.
D.C. Jewish Community Center
1529 16th Street, NW
Tickets: $10
Barbra Streisand in the recording studio for Columbia in New York, mid-1960s. (Photo from the Collection of Stuart Lippner, courtesy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
It’s an interesting time for Barbra Streisand fans.
She’s on tour and played New York last weekend (no D.C. dates scheduled).
A (sort of) new album dropped Oct. 9 called “Release Me” that collects 11 previously unreleased outtakes from various album projects going back to the beginning of her career in the early ‘60s. The faithful legion, of course, are beside themselves finally getting to hear rare cuts like her interpretations of Jimmy Webb’s “Didn’t We” and “Home” from “The Wiz.” Her MusiCares tribute concert, in which she was serenaded last year by Diana Krall, Barry Mainlow, Seal, Stevie Wonder and others, is out on DVD and Blu-ray from Shout! Factory Nov. 13.
But just as interesting is the new book “Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand,” also released this month from gay author William J. Mann, who, in addition to several novels, has penned well-received bios on William Haines, John Schlesinger, Katharine Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor. Mann, an iconoclast who doesn’t smash his subjects but delights in deconstructing widely parsed anecdotes of show biz folklore, zeroes in on Streisand’s early years from early 1960 (when she was 17) to the spring of ’64 by which time she had opened in the long-delayed “Funny Girl” on Broadway and recorded three platinum-selling albums for Columbia.
Mann focuses on her early years because he says “everything we think we know about her can be traced back to this seminal period … She arrived in New York in 1959 as a penniless teenager without any connections or experience. Less than five years later she was the top-selling female recording artist in the country and the star of one of Broadway’s biggest smash hits. Going in as close as I have in this book has allowed me to really shed light on how she accomplished such a feat.”
Mann’s in Washington Wednesday on his book tour at the D.C. Jewish Community Center for a 7 p.m. Streisand presentation after which he’ll sign copies of the book. During two phone chats this week, the 49-year-old author talked about the process of bringing the book — he wasn’t particularly a Streisand fan before — to fruition and how writing it compared to his mammoth Hepburn and Taylor tomes.
Mann says focusing on Streisand’s early years turned out to be an unexpected advantage. Because few of the key players are still in touch with the notoriously private and exacting legend, they felt freer, Mann says, to cooperate. He wasn’t on a mission to bash Streisand, but he did want an honest and fresh take.
“These very, very famous people really live in a bubble,” he says. “It becomes virtually impossible to get an unvarnished opinion because any colleague you talk to is going to have nothing but superlatives and that becomes very difficult. … About 90 percent of the people I spoke to didn’t continue on with her. … so they could be candid. They didn’t have to think, ‘Gee, is Barbra gonna be pissed at me, I have to work with her next month.’”
Gay historian and author William J. Mann (Photo by Michael Childers; courtesy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Despite calling the book “notable for its breadth of detail and fair mindedness,” biographer James Gavin writing for the New York Times said “little” of the book is new, a point Mann counters with his biggest coup — being granted the right to delve into the Jerome Robbins (the Broadway legend who worked on “Funny Girl”) papers at the New York Public Library, which had not previously been plumbed for any Streisand book and are not available to researchers (Mann got an exception through the Robbins’ estate).
And even though Streisand’s first boyfriend, Barry Dennen has written an entire book (1997’s “My Life with Barbra”) on their relationship, Mann says he got fresh material from the gay actor for “Gorgeous.”
One of Mann’s favorite experiences was visiting Phyllis Diller, who became a pal and mentor of the young Streisand during their time performing at seedy New York nightclub the Bon Soir in the early ‘60s. (Diller died in August.)
“She was such a hoot,” Mann says with a laugh. “That interview was probably the most enjoyable of the process. I got to go to her house and she was flirting and laughing. I asked her if she’d give me one of her trademark laughs and she did. I just sat there thinking, ‘I love my job.’”
Other “gets” weren’t so splashy but proved equally invaluable. Though scads of Streisand material has been released and is on YouTube, Mann says the Streisand aficionados — almost all gay — were helpful. He thinks his track record on the Hepburn and Taylor books helped open doors on several fronts.
“There’s one fan, and of course he’s made me promise never to reveal who he is, who had some really amazing stuff. There was a DVD (Streisand) was planning to put out maybe five-six years ago of all her old TV appearances but for whatever reason, it never came out. This guy had a bootleg copy of it, which was extraordinarily helpful. Another fan had some of her original contracts. Which is crazy. Who knows how they get this stuff. You’d think she’d have those herself, but somehow they had them and those were very helpful as well. And of course once you get in those fan circles, one things leads to another and another. I didn’t write it for the fans, because then you’d end up censoring it to please them, but they were a great help.”
Early signs are good.
(Courtesy Houghton Mifflin)
According to Nielsen BookScan, the book has already sold about 2,000 copies. And a glowing USA Today review said Mann’s “meticulous research and insightful analysis go deeper than any previous (Streisand) biography.” Liz Smith called it “excellent.” Amazon reader feedback has been highly positive and perhaps the surest sign that the writer did his homework, there’s been nary a peep, at least so far, from the Streisand camp (she devotes a whole section of her official website to debunking what’s written about her — check out the juicy reads on her tangles with Larry Kramer over a never-made film adaptation of “The Normal Heart” she wanted to do).
At more than 500 pages, “Gorgeous” makes for a lengthy yet brisk read. Mann, who splits his time between New York and Provincetown (where he does most of his writing), is happy to engage a few questions the book inspires, one common enough that he’s written a Huffington Post piece on the topic: that is, surely it’s no coincidence that Streisand, who had several key gay men in her life very early on in her career, ended up one of the biggest gay entertainment icons of all time, right?
“It’s not a coincidence at all,” he says. “She was shaped by so many gay influences … in various ways. The way she dressed, the way she put a song across, the way she styled her songs, they way she interacted with an audience, it’s so obvious all her early mentors were gay and I believe that when those early audiences went to see her, they responded to something familiar. The way she laughed, the way she moved, her campy humor. There was something there gay men recognized and thought, ‘Oh, we can relate to this chick.’ And she was not the first one to have this happen either. It goes all the way back to Mae West and the drag queens she worked with in New York. You see it with Judy (Garland) with Roger Edens, with Joan Crawford and Billy Haines … with Madonna it was the same thing.”
Barbra Streisand with first husband, actor Elliott Gould en route to the Tony Awards on April 29, 1962. (Photo from the collection of Stuart Lippner, courtesy Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
And since Mann, with the Taylor and Streisand books especially, has focused on the nature of fame and how it was achieved — a dissection of the lucky breaks versus the raw material — another question occurs: given Streisand’s undeniable talent and famous drive, was her legend and success inevitable?
Mann says no.
“She would like us to think that, but no, I don’t think it was at all. I think she benefited form some really shrewed salesmanship and a degree of luck. Just the fact that there were some major parts with ‘I Can Get it For You Wholesale’ and “Funny Girl’ for unusual looking Jewish girls, she was lucky that she was there for those parts at the time they came along. Of course she’s brilliantly talented but there are lots of people who were. You hear some of these other singers from the nightclub era like Blossom Dearie or Joanna Beretta and you’re like, ‘Wow, they’re every bit as good as Barbra,’ but they lacked something — either a very shrewd publicity campaign on their behalf or perhaps their own ambition … it took a terrific amount of PR to make it happen.”
Game time: Kate, Liz or Babs?
William J. Mann has written well-received bios of three of the most famous legends the 20th century produced: Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor and now, Barbra Streisand. At the end of an interview, Mann was game for a “lightening round” in which he considers how the three icons stack up. He had to answer each question with one of the three names.
Of the three, which had:
- the most raw talent? “Streisand”
- the most career triumphs? “Taylor”
- Was the most personally content? “Taylor”
- Whose personality evolved the most over the decades? “Hepburn”
- Which was the most fan friendly? “Taylor, by far.”
- The most private? “Streisand. Hepburn was private, but she also put things out there, although not always her true self. So I guess Streisand.”
- Whose work has best stood the test of time? “That’s kind of a draw. They all have. You look at Hepburn in a film like “Alice Adams,” which is this beautiful, brilliant, heartbreaking film that totally stands up. Or Elizabeth in ‘Virginia Woolf’ and you just think, ‘Wow, nobody could have done that better.’ Or one of Barbra’s albums.”
- Which had (or has) the most ardent fans? “Streisand”
- Was the toughest to research? “I suppose Hepburn but she had just passed away so that opened some doors. The other two were alive when I was writing.” (Taylor died shortly after the Mann book came out.)
- Had the most gays in her personal life? “Taylor”
- Had the easiest path to stardom? “Taylor. It was practically handed to her.”
- The toughest? “Streisand, even though it was really fast.”
- And just for fun, any word on how Streisand or Hepburn felt about tying for the Best Actress Oscar in ’68? “They both probably hated to share it,” he says. “Hepburn made a big show of not caring about the Oscars but of course she cared a great deal. … Streisand was very gracious when she accepted (Hepburn did not attend) and said she was ‘in great company.’ It was probably unlike either of them to send the other a congratulatory note, but I don’t fully know the answer to that or whether anybody ever tried to get them together for a photo. I suspect neither of them would have been too wild about that.”
— Joey DiGuglielmo
a&e features
Award-winning D.C. chef reaching new culinary heights
Anthony Jones of Marcus DC competing on ‘Top Chef’
In Anthony Jones’s kitchen, all sorts of flags fly, including his own. Executive chef at award-winning restaurant Marcus DC, Jones has reached culinary heights (James Beard Award semifinalist for Emerging Chef, anyone?), yet he’s just getting started.
Briefly stepping away from his award-winning station, Jones took a moment under a different set of lights. Recently, he temporarily gave up his post at the restaurant for a starring small-screen slot on the latest season of “Top Chef,” which debuted in March. (The show airs weekly on Bravo and Peacock).
Before his strategic slice-and-dice competition, however, Jones, who identifies as gay, draws from his deep DMV roots. In the years before “Top Chef” and the top chef spot at Marcus, he was born and raised in Sunderland, Md., in southern Maryland, near the Chesapeake.
Early memories were steeped in afternoons on boats with his dad bonding over fishing, and wandering the garden of his great-grandparents spread with fresh vegetables and a few hogs. “It was Southern, old-school ethics and upbringing,” he said. “Family and food went hand in hand.” Weekends meant grabbing bushels of crabs, dad and grandma would cook and crack them. Family members would host fish fries for extra cash. In this seafood-heavy youth, Jones managed time to sneak in episodes of the “OG” Japanese “Iron Chef” show, which helped inspire him to pursue a career in the kitchen.
Jones moved to D.C. after graduating from college, ending up at lauded Restaurant Eve, and met famed chef Marcus Samuelson, who brought him to Miami to be part of the opening team for Red Rooster Overtown. After three years, Jones moved back to D.C., where he ran Dirty Habit, reinventing and reimagining the menu, integrating West African flavors and ingredients.
Samuelson, however, wouldn’t let a talent like Jones stay away for too long. Pulling Jones back into his orbit, Samuelson elevated Jones to help him open his namesake restaurant Marcus DC, which has been named a top-five restaurant by the Washington Post. Since then, Jones has been nominated as a semifinalist for the RAMMYs Rising Culinary Star in 2026 and won the Eater DC’s Rising Chef award in 2025.
Samuelson’s Marcus is a tour de force interpreting the Black Diaspora on the plate, from the American South to West Africa, along with his signature “Swedopian” touches. Yet it’s Jones who has deeply informed the plate, elevating his own story to date. Marcus DC is primarily a seafood restaurant, which serves Jones well.
“Where I’m from is seafood heavy, and as I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve moved away from meat.” Veggies and fish are hero dishes. His own dish, Mel’s Crab Rice, was not only lauded by the Washington Post, but is framed by his youth carrying home the crustaceans from Mel’s crab truck. It’s a bowl of Carolina rice, layered with pickled okra, uni béarnaise, and crab. Jones also points to a dish on the opening menu, rockfish and brassica, paying respect to a landmark D.C. institution, Ben’s Chili Bowl. Jones reverse engineered a favorite bowl of chili that’s seafood instead of meat forward, leveraging octopus and rockfish along with different riffs of cauliflower: showing his intellectual, creative, and cultural sides.
While “Top Chef” is showing Jones’s spotlight side, he also lets his identity show at work. “In the kitchen, I make sure we’re inclusive. We don’t tolerate discrimination. Everyone that’s here should feel confident to express themselves. There are so many different flags in the kitchen.”
Jones says that he didn’t fully express his gay identity until fairly recently. He felt reluctant coming out to certain family members, “you’re scared to tell them about being different,” he says, and while that anxiety ate at him, “I’m lucky and fortunate to have unconditional love and that weight off my shoulders.”
Today, “I’m me all the time, Monday to Sunday. I’m honest with people, and my staff is honest with me.”
“Being a chef is hard,” he says, “and being a chef of color is even more difficult.”
Yet his LGBTQ identity is a juggling act, he says. “I need to keep that balance, because once someone finds out something about you, their opinion can change, whether you want it or not.”
Being on a whole season of TV cooking competition, however, might mean millions more might have an opinion of him (Jones has appeared on TV already, on an episode of “Chopped”). To prepare, he says, “I’ve just kept a level head. It’s just an honor to be on top chef with amazing people happy to be there.”
Plus, this season is set in the Carolinas, and Jones attended Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, N.C. “It’s a full story of my life, now a monumental moment for me.”
Jones also recently was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. “JBF has been a north star, a dream for so long. I always had this goal on my wall.”
Being at the top spot at Marcus DC, making waves through his accolades, and cooking on Bravo means that Jones is highly visible. “I think that if someone has a similar background to me, and can see our story, trajectory, and success, they can have more ability to be themselves. This is my goal.”
Back at Marcus, Jones has plenty up his chef’s white’s sleeves. A new spring menu is in the works. He’ll be launching a new tasting menu “dining experience,” he says, and has plans to work on more events and collaborations with chefs and friends to bring in new talent and share the culinary wealth.
Movies
Trans-driven ‘Serpent’s Skin’ delivers campy sapphic horror
Embracing classic tropes with a candid exploration of queer experience
It’s probably no surprise that the last decade or so has seen a “renaissance” in horror cinema. Long underestimated and dismissed by critics and ignored by all the awards bodies as genre films, horror movies were deemed for generations as unworthy of serious consideration; relegated into the realm of “fandom,” where generations of young movie fanatics were left to find deeper significance on their own, they have inspired countless future film artists whose creative vision would be shaped by their influence. Add to that the increasing state of existential anxiety that has us living like frogs in a slow-boiling pot, and it seems as if the evolution of horror into what might be our culture’s most resonant form of pop art expression was more or less inevitable all along.
Queer audiences, of course, have always understood that horror provides an ideal vehicle to express the “coded” themes that spring from existence as a stigmatized outsider, and while the rise of the genre as an art form has been fueled by filmmakers from every community, the transgressive influence of queerness – particularly when armed with “camp,” its most surefire means of subversion – has played an undeniable role in building a world where movies like “Sinners” and “Weapons” can finally be lauded at the Oscars for their artistic qualities as well as celebrated for their success at providing paying audiences with a healthy jolt of adrenaline.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the boldest and most biting entries are coming from trans filmmakers like Jane Schoenbrun (“I Saw the TV Glow”) – and like Australian director Alice Maio Mackay, whose new film “The Serpent’s Skin” opened in New York last weekend and expands to Los Angeles this week.
Described in a review from RogerEbert.com as “a kind of ‘Scanners’ for the dolls,” it’s a movie that embraces classic horror tropes within a sensibility that blends candid exploration of trans experience with an obvious love for camp. It centers on twenty-something trans girl Anna (Alexandra McVicker), who escapes the toxic environment of both her dysfunctional household and her conservative hometown by running away to the “Big City” and moving in with her big sister (Charlotte Chimes). On her first night in town, she connects with Danny (Jordan Dulieu), a neighbor (the only “hottie” in the building, according to her sister) who plays guitar in a band and ticks off all her “edgy” boxes, and has a one-night stand.
The very next day, she starts a new job at a record store, where she connects – through an intense and unexpected incident – with local tattoo artist Gen (Avalon Faust), a young woman she has seen in psychic visions, and who has been likewise drawn to her. The reason? They are both “witches,” born with abilities that give them a potentially deadly power over ordinary humans, and bound together in an ancient supernatural legacy.
It goes without saying that they fall in love; together, they teach and learn from each other as they try to master the mysterious magical gifts they both possess; but when Danny coincidentally books Gen for a tattoo inspired by his earlier “fling” with Anna, an ancient evil is unleashed, leading to a string of horrific incidents and forcing them to confront the dark influences within their own traumatic histories which may have conjured this malevolent spirit in the first place, before it wreaks its soul-stealing havoc upon the entire community.
Confronting the theme of imposed trans “guilt” head on, “Serpent’s Skin” emanates from a softer, gentler place than most horror films, focusing less on scares than on the sense of responsibility which seems naturally to arise just from being “different.”. Both McVicker and Faust bring a palpable feeling of weight to their roles, as if their characters are carrying not only their own fate upon their shoulders, but that of the world at large; blessed (or cursed) with a layer of awareness that both elevates and isolates them, their characters evoke a haunting sense of responsibility, which permeates their relationship and supersedes their personal desires. At the same time, they bring a mix of respect and eroticism to the sapphic romance at the center of the film, evoking a connection to the transgressive and iconic “lesbian noir” genre but replacing its sense of amoral cynicism with an imperative toward empathy and social responsibility.
All of this helps to make the film’s heroines relatable, and raises the stakes by investing us not just in the defeat of supernatural evil, but the triumph of love. Yet we can’t help but feel that there’s something lost – a certain edge, perhaps – that might have turned up the heat and given the horror a more palpable bite. Though there are moments of genuine fright, most of the “scary” stuff is campy enough to keep us from taking things too seriously – despite the best efforts of the charismatic Dulieu, who literally sinks his teeth into his portrayal of the possessed version of Danny.
More genuinely disturbing are the movie’s scenes of self-harm, which both underscore and indict the trope of trans “victimhood” while reminding us of the very real fear at the center of many trans lives, especially when lived under the oppression of a mindset that deplores their very existence.
Still, though Mackay’s film may touch on themes of queer and trans existence and build its premise on a kind of magical bond that makes us all “sisters under the skin,” it is mostly constructed as a stylish tribute to the classic thrillers of an earlier age, evoking the psychological edge of directors like Hitchcock and DePalma while embracing the lurid “shock value” of the B-movie horror that shaped the vision of a modern generation of filmmakers who grew up watching it – and even if it never quite delivers the kind of scares that linger in our minds as we try to go to sleep at night, it makes up for the shortfall with a smart, sensitive, and savvy script and a rare depiction of trans/lesbian love that wins us over with chemistry, emotional intelligence, and enviable solidarity.
What makes “The Serpent’s Skin” feel particularly remarkable is that it comes from a 21-year-old filmmaker. Mackey, who built the foundation of her career behind the camera with a series of low-budget horror shorts in her teens, has already made an impact with movies ranging from the vampire horror comedy “So Vam” (released when she was 16) to the horror musical “Satanic Panic” and the queer holiday shockfest “Carnage for Christmas”. With her latest effort, she deploys a confidence and a style that encompasses both the deep psychological nuance of the horror genre and its guilty-pleasure thrills, rendered in an aesthetic that is grounded in intimate queer and trans authenticity and yet remains daring enough to take detours into the surreal and psychedelic without apology.
It’s the kind of movie that feels like a breakthrough, especially in an era when it feels especially urgent for trans stories to be told.
A “No Kings” demonstration was held in Anacostia on Saturday to protest the Trump administration. Speakers at the rally included LGBTQ activist, Rayceen Pendarvis. Following the rally, demonstrators marched across the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge.
(Washington Blade photos and videos by Michael Key)
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