How to Date a Gay Novelist Who Is Older Than Your Dad

First published on VICE.com, June 21, 2014. Read the original here.

When I was 25, I moved to Berlin with a beat-up copy of Christopher Isherwood’s The Berlin Stories tucked in my bag. Like many hobosexuals and fagabonds before me, I considered the book a lodestone, a guide to transmuting aimless searching and polymorphous desire into meaningful experiences. So when I heard that Farrar, Straus, and Giroux was releasing The Animals, a collection of the letters of Isherwood and his longtime lover, artist Don Bachardy, I knew I had to read it.

Bachardy met Isherwood when he was 18 and Isherwood was 48 (a year older than Bachardy’s own father). Despite the age difference, the couple spent the next 33 years together. Though love affairs and artistic exploits frequently sent them ricocheting around the world, they maintained a deep and unbreakable connection. They expressed this affection (and frustration) through “the Animals,” personae the two adopted in their letters. Bachardy acted as Kitty and Isherwood called himself Dobbin, Kitty's faithful horse.

Bachardy, now 80, still lives in the house the couple shared in Santa Monica. Shaking with faggoty fan boy excitement, I called Bachardy to discuss The Animals and what it's like dating a famous old man who was older than his dad.

VICE: How did your letters become a book?
Don Bachardy: It was my idea. I'd saved all of Chris's letters, and after his death, I found that he’d saved all of mine. Reading through them just made me think the material was too good not to share it with others. There's almost nothing, no letter in the book, that is missing, except one, though I can't remember now where in the sequence it is.

Did you ever discuss publishing something like this with Chris before he died?
No, no, no. And the animals at the time would have been horrified at the suggestion that they would ever be revealed and their letters [would be] published in a book. They would have been quite shocked by such an idea.

What changed your thinking?
I came across both sets of letters and it was very strange reading them again, but interesting too. There were even some laughs in the material, our attempts to entertain each other. There were things I would have liked to have changed—would have changed if I could—but then it's always a mistake to tamper with any mementos of the past.

How did you meet Isherwood? Had you read his books?
I'd seen a production of I Am a Camera [the play adaptation of The Berlin Stories which was later turned into the musicalCabaret]. It was the road company, here in LA, at the Biltmore Theater downtown. I'd actually already met Chris on the beach with my brother on summer weekends—he was one of the many people my brother introduced me to—but it wasn't until February of 1953 that Chris and I started seeing a lot of each other. It hadn't occurred to me that the “Herr Issy-voo” of I Am a Camera was actually the man I was getting to know. He had to tell me himself, and of course, I remembered the play, and eventually I got to meet Julie Harris [who played Sally Bowles in I Am a Camera] because he and Julie had become good friends because of the play.

How did people react to the age difference between the two of you when you started your relationship? 
They freaked out about it at the time, all those years ago, because Chris wasn't in the closet. He couldn't very well pretend to be anything but queer. And everybody knew this very young looking friend he was going around with—they knew he wasn't his son. It was considered quite shocking by people who guessed this relationship with a 30-year age difference. That was not at all usual in those days, and certainly not at all usual that neither party was hiding. No beards required! We just brazened it out. Also, we were both artists, so that made it easier. If we had nine-to-five jobs in a clerk's office, it would have been much tougher because different standards apply.

How was your life as an artist affected by dating Isherwood?
I would never have become an artist except for Isherwood. It was he who constantly urged me to consider being an artist. When we met I showed him drawings that I was doing as an 18-year-old. They were copied from magazine pictures, mostly of movie actors. I did them freehand. Chris saw that I had a real flair for drawing and kept after me: “Why don't you go to art school?”

Well, it took me three years before I dared to make the jump. I was frightened of failing, but his continual support and interest in the work I was doing in art school, once I got started, was invaluable to me. I could never believe in myself as an artist without his support at the time. That was essential to me.

Was it difficult to get people to take you seriously as first?
Yes, because I looked so young and presentable, and most of Chris's friends were around his age or older, so it wasn't so easy for me to be taken seriously by anybody—especially since I hadn't established myself yet as an artist. That's why being an artist was so important! I had to have an identity of my own that was more than just Chris's boyfriend.

Did the age difference concern either of you?
No. I naturally gravitated to people older than I was. It was just instinctive. I knew I could learn so much more from them, and for some reason or another, I had few friends my own age in my school years. So I was ripe to meet an older distinguished man who could give me very, very good advice, which Chris always did.

My favorite paintings you’ve done are the portraits you did of Chris in the last six months of his life. 
I was doing close-ups, these close-ups of what Chris was going through at the time. He was lying in bed, and I was hovering over him, just a few feet away. I don't know of any other artist who has ever done close-up drawings of someone dying day after day, week after week. It seemed so appropriate to me because Chris had urged me to be an artist. And here I was with a model who I knew very well, who I'd drawn and painted through our 33 years together. And here he was dying, and it was a way of being with him intensely for much more of the day because I was drawing him. I was with him and looking at him in a way that I only looked at somebody when [I was] drawing or painting that person, so I could be with him intimately. It felt like dying was something he and I were doing together.

The Fiction Writer Shirley Jackson Stars in Her Own Novel

First published on The Daily Beast, June 18, 2014. Read the original here.

German seems to have a word for every screwed-up specific emotion. If I were to pick one to describe the strangely compelling, deeply unsettling fiction of Shirley Jackson, it would be unheimlich. Freud coined the term to describe the uncomfortable feeling of the familiar suddenly turned foreign. Technically, it means un-home-like, but a better English translation might be uncanny, as in the “uncanny valley,” which refers to the sudden sharp jump in creepiness that occurs when computer animation gets too close to looking human. Jackson, best known today for her short story “The Lottery,” in which a sweet, semi-rural town gathers for a harvest festival / ritual stoning, seems to live in the uncanny valley. All throughout the ’40s, ’50s, and early ’60s, as Americans embraced normal like it was our job, Jackson insisted on showing us the cracks at the margins of our communities, our sanity, and our very reality.

Perhaps this accounts for the ebb and flow of her popularity. While often critically acclaimed and considered a “writer’s writer,” Jackson has faded from the public eye over time. She was too strange for the ’50s, and too apolitical and classically domestic (in her own way) for the radicals of the ’60s and ’70s. In the last few decades, the ho-hum short fiction of small epiphanies—MFA stories about cancer and divorce—have reigned supreme, and Jackson’s folkloric tales of the unexplained and unexplainable have been looked at with a jaundiced eye. If I were to compare her to anyone in contemporary American fiction, it would be Joyce Carol Oates, another prolific virtuoso of the strange.

There are signs, however, that the pendulum of public reception has begun to swing the other way for Jackson. In 2007, the Shirley Jackson Awards “for outstanding achievement in the literature of psychological suspense, horror, and the dark fantastic” was created. In 2010, a musical version of We Have Always Lived in the Castle premiered at Yale Repertory Theatre. In the last year, Penguin Classics has reissued seven of Jackson’s books in beautiful black-spine editions, while this April saw the publication of a previously unknown Jackson story in The New Yorker.

This week, Blue Rider Press releases Shirley, a novel by Susan Scarf Merrell that imagines its protagonist—a 19-year-old newlywed named Rose Nemser—living in Jackson’s chaotic Bennington, Vermont, home in the last year of Jackson’s life. Although it was just published, Shirley has already been optioned by HBO for a two-hour movie.

As the novel opens, Rose and her husband, Frank, are a young, striving couple, moving to Bennington so Frank can begin his teaching career under the tutelage of Stanley Edgar Hyman, Shirley Jackson’s husband. The couple ends up living in the Hyman-Jackson home, where Rose becomes obsessively involved with Jackson, her family, and her stories. For those new to Jackson’s work, Rose’s exploration of her writing provides a great reading list, adding a bit of extra-textual pleasure toShirley.

Apropos to Jackson herself, Merrell’s novel walks a seemingly contradictory line. It is simultaneously a precisely accurate look at the sexual and intellectual failures that real love must allow for and survive, and a darkly fantastical meditation on magic, revenge, love, and reality. It is at turns dreamlike and hyper-realistic.

“I had this particular interest in domestic fiction, but I wasn’t interested in the fiction of domesticity,” Merrell says of the novel, which she began while at graduate school in Bennington (full disclosure: we were in the same year, though in different disciplines). “I am very much interested in this discomfort in the ways that people try to understand their own domestic lives.” This is the central question that Rose finds herself contemplating throughout Shirley: how to live happily in her own life, despite its problems. Or as Rose puts it while explaining what draws readers to Jackson’s work, how to “understand imperfection and know how to live with it and appreciate it.”

Merrell’s first novel, A Member of the Family, explored a foreign adoption gone disturbing and sad, so this fraught family territory isn’t new to her. But originally, she had started doing serious research toward publishing a Jackson biography. “When I actually went to the Library of Congress to look at her papers I wasn’t even exactly sure why,” she says, except that she was drawn to Jackson’s story. There she started reading the love letters between Jackson and Hyman, her brilliant, philandering, infuriating, and yet much-beloved husband.

Soon Merrell knew she wanted to explore the complicated dynamics of their relationship, which was a partnership-of-equals that stretched back to when they were just college kids, utterly infatuated with each other and their own stellar potential. But somewhere along the line, they’d gotten twisted up. They were often cruel and thoughtless to one another, regardless of their complete commitment to their family. Or as Rose puts it: “Despite the terrible things they did, the ways they hurt each other, they needed one another at the core.”

Shirley, at its core, is about exactly that kind of connection: the one that endures despite all else. From the outside, these relationships can look like duty or desperation or simply two people who have given up on finding real happiness in exchange for certitude. The brilliance of Jackson’s life and Merrell’s writing is that they convey the depth and beauty of this kind of connection, showing that it isn’t an endurance exercise, but rather the scarred-but-surviving tree that grows from a root of unrivaled strength: Love. Like Jackson herself, love endures. In the end, Shirley is a love story, albeit an unexpected and uncomfortable one—perhaps the only kind that could ever be told by or about Shirley Jackson.

‘OITNB’ Transgender Star Laverne Cox’s Unbelievable Year

First published on The Daily Beast, June 6, 2014. Read the original here.

It’s been a whirlwind year for Laverne Cox, the unexpected breakout star of the Netflix smash hit Orange Is the New Black. In case you’ve lived under a rock for the last 11 months, the show follows an ensemble of strong female characters living in a fictional prison in Litchfield, Connecticut, and Cox plays Sophia Burset, a transwoman in jail for credit card fraud. In the first season, we watched as Sophia used her people (and hair) skills to find a place for herself among the inmates, while simultaneously trying to save her relationship with her wife and young son on the outside.

With the second season premiering on Netflix Friday, Cox’s career shows no sign of slowing any time soon. In fact, she’s already won too many awards and accolades to list, though when asked to name a favorite, she responds instantly.

“Well, being on the cover of Time is pretty great,” she says, laughing. It’s only been 24 hours since the issue of Time with her face beaming next to the words “The Transgender Tipping Point” hit the newsstands, and in two hours she’s headed to her own birthday/magazine release party. Yet on the phone she is calm and confident, mentioning how she enjoyed our last interview (which was nearly a year ago) and complimenting me on another piece I’d written recently.

The social justice activist in Cox is excited to have Time as a platform from which to talk about the pressing issues facing transgender people, especially transwomen of color. But she’s also an actress who is serious about her craft, so the other award close to her heart, she says, is her recent nomination for a Critic’s Choice Award from the Broadcast Television Journalists Association.

Although she knew right away that Orange Is the New Black would be a fantastic show, Cox says that there was no one moment when she realized the huge success the show—or she herself—would become. “This is something I’ve been hoping for since I was a kid, so I’m not going to lie and say it was entirely unexpected,” she admits. “But you never really think it’ll happen. I’m still not prepared.”

Cox is quick to point out that many other transwomen are helping to break down the doors she’s walking through, and our conversation is peppered with their names: Janet Mock, Isis King, Carmen Carrera. “Transwomen taking care of each other is revolutionary,” she tells me. “We have to support each other.”

Despite her sudden celebrity, Cox is still firmly rooted in her community, and she maintains a sense of humility about her own success. “I know this is not just me,” she says, “it’s something manifesting through me.”

That may be so, and Time may be right that we’re at a tipping point, a moment of inevitable change that will only speed up from here. Indeed, Cox tells me that just in the last week she’s heard from two other trans actors who have landed significant parts playing transgender characters, something that was virtually unheard of when I interviewed her last year. Yet even then, Cox predicted it was coming, telling me “I believe in the creatives. When the creatives begin to do it, the casting directors will come along.”

“This is something I’ve been hoping for since I was a kid, so I’m not going to lie and say it was entirely unexpected,” she admits. “But you never really think it’ll happen. I’m still not prepared.”

But it would be shortsighted to pin Cox’s success solely on societal change. It is her dedication, honesty, and skill that have made her one of the most prominent voices of today’s transgender movement. No matter how successful she becomes, Cox is determined to give back to the community that supports and nurtures her, and especially to help those for whom “the tipping point” still feels a lot like the status quo. She hopes to use her visibility to help young women like Jane Doe, the 16-year-old transgender girl who has been held in an adult prison in Connecticut without charges since April.

When she’s not filming Orange Is the New Black or prepping for one of her many speaking engagements, Cox is working on two exciting upcoming projects. The first, Free CeCe, is a feature-length documentary about CeCe McDonald, a transgender African-American woman from Minnesota who was sent to a men’s prison after suffering a racist, transphobic street attack. McDonald is now free, and the project is working to raise approximately $500,000 to support production. Cox hopes it will be released in early 2016.

Cox is also an executive producer on Trans Teen, a one-hour documentary co-created for Logo and MTV. The doc, which follows the lives of four transgender teenagers, will air simultaneously on both networks in the fall.

As for Orange Is the New Black, Cox promises we’re in for some excitement this season. “Power dynamics really shift and get shook up by Vee,” she says, a new character joining the cast, who has been sent to Litchfield for recruiting children to traffic drugs. But to find out what happens with Sophia, Cox says, we’ll just have to watch.

If you knew you could only read 2,000 more books, where would you begin?

First published in The Guardian, June 1, 2014. Read the original here.

Eight years ago on Christmas morning, my older brother John casually ruined my life.

"Let me ask you something," he said, gesturing with his coffee mug at the piles of books we'd gotten as presents. "How many books would you say you read a week?"

"One?" I shrugged. I was too old, at 28, for original-recipe Facebook. Tweeting was still something I thought only birds did. And iPhones hadn't yet been invented. So, despite having a more-than-full-time job, I had a lot of time to kill.

"Let's be generous and say you have 40 years left at that pace," offered John. "One book a week for 40 years, rounded down a little for weeks where work is crazy or you spontaneously go blind, that equals ... 2000."

My brother leaned back in his chair, savoring the moment.

"That's it," he said. He shook his head, as though contemplating some distant tragedy. "Two thousand books in your lifetime. That's what you get. So every time you pick up a new book, you gotta ask yourself: is this worth it? Is this really one of the 2000 best books ever written?"

He paused for a moment, letting this sink in.

"At the bottom of your list, coming in at number 2000, we have…" He nudged the first book in my pile with his toe: Barbara Kingsolver's Small Wonder. I breathed a sigh of relief. "And at one-thousand-nine-hundred-and-ninety-nine…"

John nudged again, and Kingsolver toppled to the ground, revealing a copy of Jean Craighead George's young-adult classic,My Side of the Mountain.

"I'm re-reading that," I hastened to clarify.

"Re-reading?" John said, eyes-wide like I'd suggested some arcane and dangerous pastime. "Suit yourself…" he added, and left the room.

I just sat there. It's one thing to know theoretically that you can only do so much in your life: see so many places, meet so many people, read so many books. It's another to put an exact number on it. Where once I had been vaguely counting up – every book another brick in the foundation of my… something-or-other – now I was going the other way, and every book was just the physical manifestation of a hundred missed opportunities.

Suddenly the entire pile of books in front of me lost its luster. I eyed them like they were the last guys in a bar at closing time – were any of them worth it, or would I just feel a thick sense of shame in the morning when I rolled over?

What I didn't know then was that 50 books a year would turn out to be a high watermark for me. Aside from a beautifully aberrant period in grad school when I read books like a motherfucker, the graph of my year-to-year reading resembles the path of a boulder flying downhill, gaining speed as it goes.

Despite my best intentions, every year I read fewer and fewer books. More magazines, blogs, podcasts, TV recaps, comics, tumblrs, epic Facebook posts and endless Twitter battles? Yes. Books? No.

For a while, this meant that I was picky about the books I actually did read. They had to be of high quality, possessing some nebulous-but-easily-conveyed cachet. They had to mean something, damn it. Give me Austen, Baldwin, hell even Malcolm Gladwell would do. Only books that you might hear somnambulantly summarized on NPR, that was my rule.

The more I stressed about reading, the harder it became to do. Books went from being an infrequent pleasure to an angst-ridden duty. Somehow, strangely, this didn't make me read more. Compounding the stress, I felt that if I didn't read enough, it meant that civilization was decaying and the internet had won.

(Won what? I wonder now. Fear so often looks irrational in hindsight.)

Worrying all the time was exhausting, and no fun whatsoever. I missed reading – not thinking about reading, or worrying about reading, or planning to read, but just opening a book because I wanted to.

So I decided to embrace my fate. If every book I read from now on would be entered on my Best Books of All Time list, then I would treat them that way. If I was motivated to pick up a book – those solid, stolid objects that never ring or send us push notifications – then something about it was awesome, and I needed to recognize that. I needed to stop caring about what other people thought of my book choices, even if the book in question was intended for 14-year-old girls obsessed with money, fashion and private schools. (That's right, Private, I love you.)

I realized that the "quality" that mattered wasn't that of the book itself so much as the quality of the experience I had reading it. Reading, for me, was primarily an act of love – and love and shame have no place together. (Thank you, 1970's gay liberationists, for that wisdom.)

I no longer try to predict the number of books left in my life. I've lost enough friends unexpectedly to realize that kind of thinking is pointless. (Plus, like everyone else I know, I'm now too busy stressing out about keeping up with my DVR.) My reading or not reading is not a sign of the End of Books, and will not lead directly to some future wherein everyone is illiterate and we only communicate in emoticons. Nor is it an indicator of my worthiness as a person. Reading is simply an intensely pleasurable and very personal thing that I frequently happen to do on the subway – though never frequently enough.

What 'The Normal Heart' Means Today

I was interviewed for a US News & World Report article by Tierney Sneed about the new HBO production of The Normal Heart. Read the entire article here.

Tim Miller lived only a few blocks from the The Public Theater in New York City when it debuted “The Normal Heart,” Larry Kramer’s monumental play about the AIDS crisis, in 1985. He vividly remembers seeing it.

“I don’t think there’s any performance I’ve seen of any play, opera, dance, whatever, as intense as those performances at The Public Theater,” says Miller, a gay performance artist. “People were afraid to go to ‘The Normal Heart’ at the Public because they might get AIDS at the theater.”
The play, set between 1981 and 1984, was nearly contemporaneous to the place the New York gay community found itself in when it premiered: only beginning to understand the AIDS epidemic. It follows a reluctant gay activist named Ned Weeks, who served as a stand-in for the work and proselytizing Kramer was doing, which included founding the Gay Men’s Health Crisis advocacy group. The audience witnesses Weeks confront skeptics, not only in the political and medical communities but in the gay community as well, about what's necessary to curb a disease killing gay men in New York by the hundreds.

“Literally, the feeling of people being fearful of being in the audience and sharing air is testament to why the piece was so important,” Miller says.

His experience likely will be very different from that of a new audience soon to be introduced to “The Normal Heart” – perhaps from their couches during a long weekend – when HBO premieres its adaptation Sunday evening. The film is directed by Ryan Murphy of “Glee” and “American Horror Story” fame, who had Kramer's participation in writing the screenplay. Early reviews have praised the film for emulating the emotional power – much of it brute anger – of the stage original. But that hasn’t stopped some from asking, "Why now?"

It's taken 30 years for “The Normal Heart” to make it to the screen in part due to the legal wrangling over the play’s rights and the funding of the project, which included a notorious falling out between Barbra Streisand and Kramer. Murphy eventually bought the rights which, in his words, cost "a pretty penny."

“There's no part of this film that doesn't feel absolutely relevant to now,” says Plan B Entertainment president Dede Gardner, one of the film's executive producers. “Whether it has to do with the particularities of this disease, which I think remains relevant today as it was then, to discussion of complacency on our watch and what we do about that, to its examination of what protests really look like.”

When it opened onstage in 1985, “The Normal Heart” electrified New York audiences and became The Public Theater's longest-running production.

“It was an opportunity not only to educate the people at risk about what was going on – and we knew very, very little – but also it became an opportunity to educate audiences who were themselves afraid of the people most impacted by this terrible epidemic: gay men,” says Therese Jones, director of the Arts and Humanities in Healthcare Program at the University of Colorado's Center for Bioethics and Humanities. She also teaches a course on AIDS and American culture. “It really in many ways accelerated what we saw was a cultural trend towards humanizing these early individuals and groups most affected by this terrible disease.”

Within 10 years, Tom Hanks had earned an Academy Award for playing a gay lawyer with HIV in the 1993 film “Philadelphia.”

But while “The Normal Heart” and “As Is” – the AIDS play that shortly preceded it – opened the door for a discussion of the epidemic in theater and the arts world at large, that discussion was not without its backlash, much of it coming from places as high as the federal government. For instance, a group of artists known as the NEA Four – of which Miller was a member – saw their National Endowment for the Arts grants pulled because the George H.W. Bush administration and other lawmakers objected to the way it dealt with AIDS and gay themes.  A Supreme Court case eventually sided with the artists.

“Tom Hanks won an Oscar 20 years ago. It didn’t mean we weren’t in the absolute peak of arts censorship in this country coming from the Bush White House,” Miller says. “The culture war is really a war on AIDS culture."

Likewise, the play itself was not always warmly received in other areas of the country. A 1989 production of “The Normal Heart” by Southwest Missouri State University drew the condemnation of state legislators, and the home of the president of the student group advocating for its production was burned down during a candlelight vigil for AIDS victims held on the play’s opening night.

Despite the anti-gay backlash, examinations of the lives of HIV/AIDS sufferers became more prevalent in mainstream pop culture – but even those weren't without their flaws.

“Hollywood did what Hollywood does, and that is overly romanticize [the crisis], or to display people with AIDS as tragic victims in the most insulting way,” says Mark S. King, an activist who blogs about having HIV, which he was diagnosed with in 1985, at My Fabulous Disease. “Why that may have been well-intentioned – I am thinking of ‘Philadelphia’ – it didn’t necessarily reflect the actual lives of those of us living with HIV. It either made us pathetic victims or spiritual martyrs of some sort."

According to Jones, the periods of AIDS art are often divided by the first generation – which was marked by terror, loss and a need to educate (and to which "The Normal Heart" belongs) – and the second generation, which was more political, in your face, and unapologetic about one’s sexuality. After the mid-1990s, treatment for HIV/AIDS improved significantly, and there was a notable decrease in major works produced about the epidemic.

Recent years have seen a resurgence of interest in the darkest days of the early crisis. “Dallas Buyers Club” – about a Texas man’s efforts to bring to fellow HIV sufferers drugs that were illegal in the U.S. – won Oscars this year for its lead and supporting actors, Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto. In 2013, the Academy nominated the film “How to Survive a Plague,” about AIDS advocacy groups in the early years of the crisis, for best documentary feature.

“It’s almost like we’re stripping away the AIDS narrative of its romanticism and replacing it with a more clear-eyed vision of what it was like for us,” King says.

The filmmakers behind HBO’s “The Normal Heart” believe the adaptation will introduce that narrative to a whole new generation unaware of the terror surrounding AIDS at the time. Gardner says she showed a cut of the film to some of her younger friends, who came away "genuinely stunned.”

Likewise, Jones says her young medical students are “flabbergasted” when they study the play and other works from the early years.

“They’re extremely curious about this period," says Miller, who has taken young people to recent stage productions of "The Normal Heart." "It’s mysterious to them.”

One thing about the storyline that's not so mysterious now as it was 30 years ago is Ned’s insistence that members of the gay community embrace monogamous, stable relationships like their heterosexual counterparts.

“The thing that really jumps out to me now is what a marriage play it is,” Miller says. The film version also plays up this aspect of the original work.

Kramer’s views that the gay community should curb its promiscuity drew criticism, even as within the play he included characters that disagreed with Ned's views on the matter. Some chastised "The Normal Heart" for promoting a message they said ran counter to the gay liberation movement.

Nevertheless, much of the activism surrounding AIDS in the 1980s and 1990s has since shifted its heat toward same-sex marriage, and Kramer eventually got to legally marry his partner in 2013. (In a life-imitating-art moment, it was a hospital bedside wedding, just like the one between Ned and his lover, Felix, in the play.) Just this week, Oregon and Pennsylvania became the latest states where gay marriage has been legalized, bringing the current total to 19 in addition to the District of Columbia.

Even outside the context of the gay community’s struggle, supporters of the film believe “The Normal Heart” has relevance, particularly as other recent attempts to study the period have been criticized for whitewashing the hurdles advocates like Kramer faced during those years.

“The great thing about ‘The Normal Heart’ is that it shows that at the time, even the people who cared about these issues were conflicted," says Hugh Ryan, founding director of the New York-based Pop-Up Museum of Queer History and a freelance writer.

While the decision to bring “The Normal Heart” to HBO and how well it was adapted have been widely praised, there is one troubling thing about what it represents in terms of the current interest in that period of the epidemic. Those who are currently most affected by the disease – particularly African-Americans, who per the CDC saw nearly double the AIDS diagnoses of their white counterparts in 2011 – are not having their stories told.

“For those of us most involved in that particular struggle of the time, we were talking white gay men and relatively speaking, yes, we were gay, but we were also relatively privileged,” King says, adding that activists eventually got many of the things they were asking for, like the Ryan White CARE Act and other forms of government response.

But the groups now being hit hardest by HIV have not been so lucky.

“One of my real worries is that by focusing on AIDS of the past versus AIDS of today, you sidestep a lot of issues of race and class,” Ryan says. "We don’t talk enough about AIDS in this country in communities that aren’t white gay men. And we don’t get enough stories from those perspectives. When we do talk about it, it’s statistics about black women. It’s not their lives.”

There are some arts projects – like the web documentary series “Dirty 30,” which focuses on how HIV/AIDS is now affecting black women – that attempt to correct that deficiency.

“As always in our beautiful, screwed up country, it’s these giant steps forward we make at the same time we are being dragged backwards,” Miller says. “And that's the tension that’s there in the play.”

Exploring M. Lamar's 'Negro Gothic Sensibility'

First published on Out.com, May 23, 2014. Read the original with photos and video here.

Before starting a conversation with musician and multimedia artist M. Lamar there are a few things you should read up on: doom metal, Robert Mapplethorpe, Frantz Fanon, Plato, Leontyne Price, bell hooks’ concept of white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy, James Brown, James Baldwin, counter tenors, Cecil Taylor, the early films of Todd Haynes, Carrie Mae Weems, Kara Walker…

This list could go on forever—as could any conversation with Lamar. Thankfully, to enjoy his performances and their freaky bricolage of opera and heavy metal, raw emotion and formal training, flesh and spirit, there’s no reading required. You simply have to be willing to go there. “There,” in this case, being the deep recesses of Lamar’s psyche, where an entire universe of “negro gothic sensibility” is waiting for an audience willing to take the plunge.

"It’s always been a total vision that I have,” Lamar says of his work. He’s an auteur of an artist, determined to write, direct, and star in all of his own endeavors. Perhaps that’s one reason why Hilton Als labeled him a “diva” in the pages of the New Yorker (where he also wrote that Lamar is an “up-and-coming” luminary of NYC’s downtown performance scene).

This totality of vision is what drove Lamar from Alabama (where he was born and raised), to the San Francisco Art Institute(where he studied painting), to Yale’s prestigious studio art MFA program (where he switched over to sculpture), back to San Francisco (this time fronting a series of metal bands), and eventually to the galleries and cabarets of New York City, where his vision is finally blossoming into a series of performances. And a feature-length film. And a gallery show. And a haunting music video wherein naked white boys in a stockade read Hegel while Lamar croons “fuck you” to them in his evocative soprano.

And that’s not to mention the role he’s probably most well known for: Playing the pre-transition scenes of Sophia in the first season of Orange Is the New Black (a part for which he was particularly well suited, given that Laverne Cox—the actress who plays Sophia on OINTB—is Lamar’s twin sister).

For the last two years, Lamar’s been working on a show called Surveillance Punishment and the Black Psyche, which he performed at NYC’s La Mama gallery in January. It explores the story of Willie Francis, a 16-year-old black boy who was executed in Louisiana in 1947. Twice.

How is that possible? “I always say in America we can find a way to kill a black man twice,” Lamar laughs, but he’s only half joking. A drunken prison guard, he explains, installed the electric chair improperly the first time. Francis had been found guilty of killing a white pharmacist named Andrew Thomas, who was either his employer, his lover, or his abuser, depending on how you assemble the facts and rumors swirling around this nearly century-old crime.

The question of interracial consent and desire in a racist world is at the heart of Surveillance, which shuttles back and forth in time between the true story of Willie Francis, a hypothetical consensual slave/overseer relationship on a plantation in 1847, and the modern day. The film’s visuals are as visceral as Lamar’s vocals. When talking about his art, Lamar is an intellectual powerhouse, but his work is informed by that thinking—not constrained by it. It is as emotional as it is thoughtful.

Much of his work focuses on black male sexuality, and white America’s pathological fascination with it. “I’m very interested in white men and their preoccupation with certain kinds of stereotypes about black men and black men’s genitalia,” Lamar tells me. This interest isn’t limited to gay men, Lamar points out—just look at all the white guys directing “big black dick” straight porn. In his music, Lamar turns the lens around, and looks at white people looking at black people. In so doing, he makes obvious the distance between the real lives of black men and the narrow ways in which they are portrayed in the mainstream (white) imagination.

Lamar is currently working on turning Surveillance into a feature-length film, which he hopes to complete later this year. Early stills and props from Surveillance (including a “penis guillotine” and a “Mapplethorpe whip”), as well as items from some of Lamar’s older pieces, will form the basis of NEGROGOTHIC a Manifesto: The Aesthetic of M Lamar, a visual art show that will run from Sept. 7 through Oct. 12 at New York City’s Participant Inc. Gallery. “It’s going to be like a retrospective,” Lamar says, “but not—because I’m too young.”

A Bathroom of One's Own

First published in VICE, May 3, 2014. Read the original, with photos, here.

Twenty-five years ago today, transgender pioneer Christine Jorgensen died of bladder and lung cancer, which she believed was caused by genetics, not the fuck-ton of hormones that rocketed her to stardom as “America’s first transsexual” in the 1950s. In her honor, I made a pilgrimage to the one place I know that bares her name: the Christine Jorgensen Memorial Bathroom, an intimate museum experience inside a Brooklyn duplex apartment. What’s a more fitting way to memorialize a transgender person, who always had issues with restrooms, than to give her a personal bathroom?

The facts of the matter: In 1952, a time before ultrasounds and the Polio vaccine, Jorgensen underwent multiple experimental operations to transition her body from male to female, all while under intense public scrutiny. Tons of journalists showed up at Idlewild Airport (now JFK) to cover her return from Copenhagen, where the surgeries were performed. On December 1 1952, the cover of the New York Daily News blared, “EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY,” and an icon was born.

“Christine's celebrity happened at a very particular time in US history,” said David Serlin, a Professor of Communications and Critical Gender Studies at UC San Diego and the creator of the CJMB. He pointed out, “There was this incredible enthusiasm for science,” and Jorgensen’s transformation was seen as a triumph of modern medicine. The public’s initial response, he said, was, “We are building rockets, we can cure illnesses, and we can take a boy from the Bronx and turn him into a glamorous woman!”

Glamorous is the right word. Standing in the CJMB, surrounded by dozens of portraits of Jorgensen, I was struck by the glam and the glitz, the furs and the crystals, the elegant eyebrows and the perfectly curled lips. The CJMB is a tiny space—maybe 80 square feet of sunshine-yellow tile—and every inch is covered in Jorgensen.

Serlin first became enamored with Jorgensen in 1992, while researching her for a grad class at NYU. Years before the days of Google Image Search, he rented photos from the Corbis Bettmann Archive to accompany his article—his first major academic success. He tacked the images he didn’t use to his bulletin board, where they became a personal talisman. (A few of them still grace the walls of the CJMB.) “Then I started to ask friends of mine about items,” he recalled, and eventually he discovered eBay. “Little by little, I amassed this archive.”

In the late 90s, cash-strapped queer community organizations around the country were digitizing their holdings and selling many original archival objects. Serlin told me that he feels complicated about the provenance of some of his items, but he recognizes that the collectibles were going to be sold regardless. Some objects, like a subway poster advertising a series of articles about Jorgensen in American Weekly magazine, are so ephemeral, it’s shocking they survived at all. Serlin estimates he has nearly 150 pieces of Jorgensen memorabilia and that he installed a third of his collection in the CJMB when he moved to Brooklyn in 2002.

It’s only once I was inside the CJMB, standing face-to-face-to-face-to-face with Jorgensen, that I began to understand the magnitude of her fame. Every major magazine, newspaper, and radio show covered her transition. Books were written about her, and she later wrote Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography, which was translated into multiple languages andadapted into a movie in 1970. She also released Christine Jorgensen Reveals, an interview album where she discussed her life with Nipsey Russell, who conducted the interview under the name R. Russell. According to Newsday's obituary, she reportedly made $12,500 a week performing in a stage show in Hollywood. Jorgensen was so famous that a young calypso musician named Louis “Calypso Gene” Wolcott recorded a song about her called “Is She Is or Is She Ain’t?” (Wolcott later changed his last name to Farrakhan and joined the Nation of Islam, but the song is on YouTube.)

This question of realness would end up being Jorgensen’s undoing, Serlin told me. Part of her celebrity had to with America’s love of science, but the rest had to do with how little anyone knew about sex reassignment surgeries. Her peers, even those in the nascent homophile movements of the 50s, had no context for gender transitioning. There was no T in the vague LGB movement, and the word transgender hadn’t even been coined yet. Of course, people with cross-gender desires have always existed, and a few earlier pioneers had also undergone experimental surgical gender reassignments, but they didn’t have a public face in America until Jorgensen, according to GLAAD.

Serlin speculates that at first most Americans “really thought Christine was menstruating and had eggs in her fallopian tubes.” But after six months, the press began to ask more probing questions about what her surgeries actually entailed. When they didn’t like the answers, the country “went ballistic.” Gender panic took over, said Serlin. “They said, ‘He's not a woman. He's just a neutered faggot.’” Reputable magazines like Time stopped using female pronouns for Jorgensen, and coverage of her took on a nasty, speculative air.

America didn’t have a huge problem with someone switching between two discreet and very separate sexes, but the suggestion of some middle ground, of a spectrum between male and female, made people fearful and angry. Jorgensen’s existence and acceptance as a woman implied that gender and the body were not necessarily connected, that gender was something one worked to create. If this were true, the sex-segregated ideals of post-war suburbia would have been out the window. In the eyes of the public, Jorgensen was no longer a man-made woman, but a gender terrorist in a blond bouffant.

Though haircuts have changed, America has viewed transgender people this way ever since. What fascinates me about Jorgensen—and what the CJMB, with its reverent air of mid-century majesty, captures perfectly—is the suggestion that it didn’t have to be this way. For six months, Americans decided not to be assholes about gender. Maybe we were too ignorant to act ignorantly, but for a brief moment we decided that it was possible to become a woman. Perhaps this wouldn’t have been the case if Jorgensen wasn’t pretty (couldn’t pass, as it were), or if she wasn’t white, ladylike, and well spoken—but she was, and America loved her. Sure, we’d set the bar on womanhood almost prohibitively high—expensive experimental surgeries, massive doses of hormones—but Jorgensen proved that the game itself wasn’t rigged the way it is now.

Standing inside the Christine Jorgensen Memorial Bathroom, I saw America poised on the threshold of acceptance, and then watched us slink away, afraid to take the plunge. We’ve spent the last 60 years trying to paper over the hole Jorgensen smashed in our gender binary system, but inside the CJMB, it’s easy to imagine an America that went in another direction, where Jorgensen taught us that gender is what Americans make of it and that our bodies are not our destinies.

In the end, the CJMB isn’t only a monument to Christine Jorgensen, but also to the world that accepted her as she wanted to be seen. Visiting helps me remember that our awe came first and our hatred came after, that America stumbles towards every new thing like a delighted (but dangerous) toddler, and that our present moment is just another moment waiting to be changed.

Lena Dunham and the Renaissance of Archie Andrews (He’s Not Dead Yet)

First published on The Daily Beast, April 9, 2014. Read the original here.

Archie, that lovable doof, and his sweater set posse from Riverdale—Betty, Veronica, and Jughead—have long been bywords for the idealized adolescence of the Baby Boomers. What Norman Rockwell was to oil painting, Archie Andrews was to comic books. But with Archie himself slated to die this summer, and Lena Dunham (yes, that Lena Dunham) onboard as a new writer, Riverdale is undergoing a radical transformation.

“I'm always shocked when I hear some people think Archie the comic books are set in the ‘50s,” says Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who was recently named chief creative officer of Archie Comics. Last year, he created the critically acclaimed zombie-apocalypse-in-Riverdale themed title Afterlife With Archie. As of last month, he is the first CCO in the company’s 75 years of existence.

Aguirre-Sacasa has a long resume on the illustrated page, including many years at Marvel, perhaps the biggest name in the industry right now. But you’re more likely to recognize him as a writer for the TV shows Big Love and Glee. In an era when comics are a bigger business off the page than on it, Aguirre-Sacasa is Archie’s ambassador to Hollywood. Or as Jon Goldwater, publisher and co-CEO of Archie Comics, affectionately calls him, “Archie West.”

If Aguirre-Sacasa is the public face of Archie’s rebrand, then Goldwater is the mind behind it. He is the grandson of John L. Goldwater, one of the founders of the company, and for the last five years, he’s been working tirelessly to bring Archie back into the public consciousness. “My mantra coming in was: We have to take chances. We have to modernize,” says Goldwater. Audiences were hungry for new stories with deeper emotional resonance. This drove Goldwater to push for plots that brought familiar characters to unexpected places (like Archie marrying Veronica and Betty), as well as plots that introduced new characters that embodied the modern Archie ethos (like Kevin Keller, Riverdale’s first gay resident). “All the characters, the core of their integrity is the same,” Goldwater says, but “Riverdale has changed” to keep up with the real world.

Being a small, family-owned company, Goldwater believes, has been instrumental in Archie Comics newfound success. “We have an advantage over companies like Marvel,” he says, “because we can move and react very quickly.” He offers Aguirre-Sacasa’s Afterlife With Archie as an example. The idea was jokingly tossed around over breakfast by Aguirre-Sacasa and Goldwater’s son Jesse. By that afternoon, the company had given Aguirre-Sacasa the greenlight to develop it.

In some ways, hiring Aguirre-Sacasa could be seen as the biggest chance Goldwater has taken so far. In 2003, Archie Comics issued a cease-and-desist letter to Aguirre-Sacasa, when he mounted a play called Archie’s Weird Fantasy, which imagined the eponymous hero moving to New York City and coming out. “I know this seems like sacrilege,” he told the company at the time, “but it really comes from a deep, abiding love of these characters.” Nonetheless, he still had to rename the show.

Now, he says it feels a little bit like he’s living in “a bizzar-o universe” where these characters are finally his to play with. “You have a blank canvas,” Goldwater told him when they created the new position. “You fill it in.”

The kind of changes Aguirre-Sacasa will bring to Archie can be summed up in two words: Lena Dunham. The same day that Archie Comics announced his hire, they also announced that Dunham would be writing a four-issue arc in the mainline title in 2015—a deal Aguirre-Sacasa was instrumental in making happen. “It's going to be both a quintessential Archie story and a quintessential Lena story,” he says, revolving around a reality TV show that comes to film in Riverdale. It’s a sign of the bold moves Aguirre-Sacasa says we can expect from Archie moving forward. “We want to bring that kind of excitement and that kind of event out on a monthly basis,” he says. Imagining Lena Dunham writing Archie is like imagining my grandmother in a cameo on Girls. But it’s a deft move from a rebranding perspective. What better way to announce a new Archie era than via the pen of the Millennial It girl? Other big projects are also in the works, including a Sabrina the Teenage Witch movie (and accompanying comic) that’s currently in “very active development” with Sony. Although Archie is their flagship, Goldwater and Aguirre-Sacasa are eager to promote many of the other intellectual properties the company owns, from familiar names like Josie & the Pussycats, to less well-known ones like the Red Circle group of superhero titles. Taking a page from others in the comic book industry, they plan to push their characters in every medium possible: books, television, movies, perhaps even musicals. (Aguirre-Sacasa worked on both Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark and the musical version of American Psycho.) So far, this aggressive modernization has been able to win over both fans and critics. “Thank god for the change!” laughs Goldwater. “It's really expanded our audience.” Last year, the company won a GLAAD Media Award for their handling of Kevin Keller, and a Diamond Gem Award (given for the “the pinnacle of sales achievement”) for Afterlife With Archie. This is a big change for Archie Comics. Although the company does not release sales numbers, they’ve been trimming their actual comics book offerings for years. In 2011 and 2012, about 40 percent of each published Archie comic went unsold; to date, every issue of Afterlife has sold out. Archie Comics has made a few splashy forays into the modern entertainment market over the last few decades: the hit TV show Sabrina the Teenage Witch, the mediocre Josie & the Pussycats movie. But a sustained rebranding initiative like this is entirely new, which makes Aguirre-Sacasa’s role as chief creative officer all the more important. If he cannot guide Archie to a larger, more youthful audience, it may well become the yesteryear comic book brand some people already believe it to be.