His face slipped sideways across Nick’s as he breathed the word, the unguessed softness of his lips touched his cheeks and neck, while Nick sighed violently and ran his hand up and down on Leo’s back. He pushed his mouth towards Leo’s, and they met, and hurried into a kiss. To Nick it felt  simply like a helpless admission of need, and the shocking thing was the proof of Leo’s need, in the force and thoroughness with which he worked on him. They pushed apart, Leo faintly smiling, Nick gasping and tormented just by the hope they would do it again.

… There was something hilarious in the shivers of pleasure that ran up his back and squeezed his neck, and ran down his arms to his fingers — he felt he’d been switched on for the first time, gently gripping Leo’s hips, and then reaching around to help unbutton his shirt and get it off and hold his naked body against him. It was all so easy.

Text: Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty, excerpt
Image: Unknown, New York circa 1940s, via Varones/Flickr

The movie had its world premiere last week at the Venice Film Festival and all reports point to Ford’s freshman effort as being something of great beauty, emotion and, of course, style. Colin Firth won the festival’s Best Actor prize. During a press conference, Ford and the cast received an uncharacteristic standing ovation from the press corps. At the Toronto Film Festival a few nights later, the Weinstein Company paid a six-figure sum for the U.S. and German rights.

A Single Man is set in 1962 Los Angeles where 52-year-old literature professor and British expat George Falconer (Colin Firth) is coping — and not coping — with the accidental death of his longtime companion (Matthew Goode). Focused on the events of a single day, the story follows George as he navigates his past, his devastating grief and his present. Charley (Julianne Moore) George’s BFF and confidante, and Kenny (Nicholas Hoult) a student with designs on him, are two people who infuse George’s day with human interaction, but fundamentally this 24-hour saga is an examination, from the mundane to the sublime, of George as a solitary gay man. Sad, happy, biting, comical, George streams his innermost thoughts to us about what it means to be alive.

Beyond being an interesting character micro-study, A Single Man is an important novel in the context of gay literature. Penned five years before Stonewall, the book was scandalous in its day for the matter-of-fact treatment of the main character’s homosexuality. George is not troubled or suicidal because he is gay, as was common in fiction from that time period, he’s troubled and suicidal because his young lover was snatched away by death without any notice. Here, Isherwood freely shares George’s everyday as this man comes to terms with being a gay widower, flirts with young guys at the gym, observes how much more fit older gay men are compared to their straight counterparts and so forth. George honestly and unapologetically observes a very normal gay life lived in a straight world. This was subversive stuff in 1964.

Interestingly, David Scearce, the movie’s screenwriter, sheds light in an interview with the National Post on at least one answer to the long standing question of why this film hasn’t been made until now:

“This is my first film and my first script,” said Scearce from his Vancouver office, where he works on aboriginal legal issues. “I wrote it all on spec, and when it was done, I sent it off to Don Bachardy, who was Isherwood’s life partner and owns all the rights to his books.” Though Scearce says he knew Bachardy, he knew it was a gamble to send off unsolicited material. “But [Bachardy] was impressed with it because out of all the adaptations he’d seen, it was the only one that didn’t use a voice-over. … I used flashbacks instead.”

There are many reasons that A Single Man the movie is adding up to something to eagerly anticipate. Curiosity about Tom Ford’s signature. Participation by actors whom audiences respect tremendously. Interest in a screenwriter’s first script, adapted from an iconic gay novel. It looks like it could be magic.

A Single Man will get a limited release this year in order to be considered for the Academy Awards and a wide release in 2010. The film will be shown at the London Film Festival on 16 October followed by the Tokyo festival 19 October.

PS: Whatever you do, read the book first if you haven’t already.

John F. Kennedy is one of the most studied and written-about presidents of the 20th century. Aside from the remaining mysteries surrounding his assassination, there is little that is unknown about the life of the thirty-fifth president of the United States. Or so we thought.

In Jack and Lem, published by Avalon, writer David Pitts sets about uncovering the story of Jack Kennedy and his closest and dearest friend in the world for 30 years, Lem Billings — a gay man.

Jack and Lem met while at prep school in the 1930s and from that point on were inseparable until the day Jack Kennedy was killed. Pitts worked for two years to persuade Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to grant him research access to documents that have been locked away for decades. Letters between the two friends, recorded phone calls, and even an 800+ page transcription of an oral history that Lem Billings gave after the death of the president. Pitts also combed through hundreds of photographs never seen by the public, many of which he was allowed to publish in the book, and interviewed anyone and everyone he could who knew Jack and Lem so he could tell, as accurately as possible, the story of a president and his gay best friend.

This well-told account paints a tender, moving portrait of what the author calls “an extraordinary friendship,” the details of which enchant and move the reader. Anecdotes about Lem having his own room in the White House, how Jackie Kennedy dealt with having a third person in her marriage and other bits of lost history aren’t taught in any school text books, but they are told in this book — for the first time.

I interviewed David Pitts about Jack and Lem when this book came out. It’s important to me that this story not be forgotten and now, as we say goodbye to to Ted Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy and regard the legacy of Camelot, this seems like a good time to share it again.

Kenneth Hill: How would you characterize the friendship between JFK and Lem Billings?

David Pitts: The way I would characterize it is that is was a very close, deep, friendship across sexual orientation lines.

KH: How did you first learn about it?

DP: I first learned about the friendship from reading JFK books. I am such a Kennedy fan that I read most of the new JFK books that came out over the years. Lem was mentioned in some, but there was always very little information about him — usually one or two pages — and I just became curious about, well, who exactly is this guy? And that’s how this book that I wrote came about.

KH: How did you find out who he was?

DP: The first thing I did was to look at all the books again to see what had been said about him, which, as I said, was very little. Then I then compiled a list of people to call, people to interview that I thought might know more. I also set about trying to track down documents in various institutions — most notably the John F. Kennedy Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society. And on the latter, I hit a big brick wall early on in the project, which is why it took so long. Most of the documents, including, very significantly, an 815-page oral history done by Lem were closed to writers and authors. Many of the quotes of Lem in the book are from that document. And it was closed at the Kennedy Library and required the permission of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to access it, and he didn’t give it to me for a long, long time.

KH: How long?

DP: I would say about two years. Two years into the project before Bobby, I guess, got tired of me pestering him.

KH: Why do you think there was resistance?

DP: I don’t know. I’ve been asked that quite a few times — usually I’m asked why he in fact GAVE me the documents — but I really don’t know. I can’t answer that. He didn’t agree to an interview, I wanted an interview, as well, but he did give me the documents which in a sense were more valuable. But when he decided to give me the materials, he gave me everything without restriction, including the ability to copy them as well as quote from them.

KH: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Lem were close when Bobby was a young man, right?

DP: Yes, that’s how Bobby ended up with control to most of the materials. Lem knew Bobby from when he was very young, of course, Lem being an intimate of the Kennedys, and when Lem died in 1981 his belongings passed into the possession of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Some of his things went into the possession of his neice, Sally Carpenter.

KH: Lem was a friend of the Kennedy family during the time that JFK was alive, and also after he was assassinated. Did you have any sense that this was a story that they didn’t necessarily want to have told?

DP: No, I can’t really say that. I mean, none of them agreed to an interview, although Eunice Kennedy Shriver who knew Lem very well came very close and then she became ill. So if I was to guess, and this is purely a guess, I think Bobby Kennedy and the other Kennedys knew this story was going to come out sooner or later. They probably checked me out — I’m sure they did — and were more willing to trust someone with a liberal political bent than some conservative writer who might try to use it in a sensational way. That would be my guess.

I did talk to a friend of Bobby Kennedy when I was trying to get these materials and when I was trying to talk to Bobby, by the name of Blake Fleetwood, who’s a blogger himself on the Huffington Post. He also knew Lem. He told me that the Kennedys have been burned so many times now in these conservative times by writers, they just are very very suspicious of writers, period. It’s not about this story in particular, it’s about any story. And so I think if you take him at his word, part of the reason must be just suspicion of journalists these days.

KH: You said that this was the story of a friendship that crossed sexual orientation lines, which I think is really an interesting element of it, but talk a little bit about the depth of this friendship. The fact that it started when they were very young and, from what I read in the book, they were basically inseparable for the rest of their lives except when circumstances had them in distant cities.

DP: Yes, indeed. I think there were a number of elements to it. First of all, there were a series of bonding events early on. One was the fact that they both hated that school [Choate] in which they met. And were engaged in all kinds of pranks which almost got them expelled twice. That was obviously a bonding phenomenon. Secondly, they roomed together for part of the time at the school.

Thirdly, and I think this is really important, John Kennedy was so sick most of his life, far earlier than when most people think, including when he was at Choate, and Lem was the person at boarding school — his mother and father did not come to the school when he was ill; Lem was there. Lem was the person who was always there for him and took care of him. And then fourthly, there was the two month trip to Europe that they took, just before WWII in 1937, just the two Americans at that pivotal time, I think that was obviously a very strong bonding event.

And then over and above these issues, I would say this — and this is kind of a complicated thought because we really don’t have language to express these kinds of relationships — and that is, I’m firmly convinced after working on this book that John Kennedy’s sexual interests were in women. We don’t need much evidence of that, the evidence is all over the place. But his strongest emotional attachments were to men — and principally, to Lem. We don’t have a word for that, right? Somebody who prefers the opposite gender for sexuality, and the same gender for deep, emotional attachments.

KH: We don’t really have a word for that. I guess “man’s man” used to sort of mean that, but JFK took it so much further in a way because he loved being around men, he knew some men were attracted to him and even seemed to enjoy it. He liked the stimulation of those relationships, there was nothing sexual about it, but there was something about that male-male dynamic that fed him.

DP: I think that’s exactly right. There was one reviewer who wrote, “What’s the big deal here? This guy’s writing that JFK was comfortable with gay men, so big deal, we all knew that.” But of course it’s not the fact that he had a friend named Lem Billings who was gay. This was the closest person in all the world to him outside of his family for 30 years. He wasn’t just “a gay friend” on the side.

KH: One of the very surprising facts that comes out in this book is that Lem had his own room at the White House?

DP: Yes, that’s one of the revelations in the book that’s really surprising. And actually some of the people who were working in the White House very close to JFK didn’t know it. For example, Ted Sorensen whom I interviewed for the book, perhaps the closest aide to JFK, saw Lem around the White House all the time, but he told me he didn’t know that he’d had his own room there and was staying there so much of the time. But yeah, that’s another indication of the depth of the attachment.

One thing I was intent on doing when I wrote this book, because I thought it would be open to various forms of attack, is that I never went beyond what the documents said. The book is a lot of quotes from documents, or that interviewees said. This friendship might have contained a lot of things that I wasn’t able to find out because I didn’t want to enter the area of speculation.

KH: It seems without a doubt that Lem was in love with JFK. But it’s never stated explicitly because you don’t have any record of his ever saying that.

DP: No, I think the closest … I mean, these were more sedate times, especially where homosexuality is concerned. Even in the various documents, Lem is never overt in his statements. But there was one statement from one of the documents, and I have it in front of me here, that I think is just expresses his feelings. Here’s the quote: “Jack made a big difference in my life. Because of him, I was never lonely. He may have been the reason I never got married.”

This is somewhat of a difficult thought as well, but I think gay people had a way back then of telegraphing to future generations what their feelings were that they could not express candidly at the time. And anybody who reads some of these words today would have no doubt what Lem’s feelings were, but in the context of that time it was not obviously understood.

KH: There’s really very little discussion of Lem’s sexuality. He almost seems asexual in the book. I think there’s one incident where there’s some sort of rendezvous that was talked about, but there is an interesting passage where Jack and Lem do discuss something related to Lem’s sexuality. About a letter to Lem from Jack, this is what appears in the book:

“Jack makes a curious reference to Lem having been called a fairy, and Lem’s lack of resentment over the matter. ‘After you call someone a fairy,’ wrote Jack, ‘and discuss it for two solid hours, and argue about whether you did or did not go down on Worthington Johnson, you don’t write a letter saying that you think that fellow is a great guy, even if it’s true, which it was.’”

DP: Right. That is one example there. And you know, there might have been other examples in those letters, but we have to keep in mind that these letters went into Lem’s possession after JFK’s death, and I’m sure if there were any more candid letters — and he probably let that one slip through the cracks — that he probably would have destroyed them because he never was open about his sexuality all his life except with a few close friends.

KH: There is a real sadness about that, but I guess it’s just a sign of the times and also the fact that he wanted to protect Jack’s reputation and thought that was one of the things he had to do.

DP: Yes, that’s pretty much what the people who knew him told me, that that was more important to him than anything else. And although he lived about 10 years after Stonewall, it was still the early days after gay liberation.

KH: You wrote that there was a tension and also an appreciation that existed between Jackie Kennedy and Lem. At one point Jackie is quoted as saying, “Lem Billings has been a house guest every weekend I’ve been married.” What was that relationship about? It seems like there was acceptance and also resentment.

DP: Right, I think it was both. All the people I interviewed about the relationship between Jackie and Lem — which I think is an interesting relationship in and of itself — agreed really on the nature of that relationship. There was no disagreement among any of the people who knew them both. And that is, she liked him. She had more in common with him than she did with JFK in many ways. She was interested in the arts like he was, she had the same kind of sensibility. She also appreciated the role he played in her marriage during all the rough spots in the early days, essentially.

And the evidence that she liked him, the proof of it really, is that after the assassination when she could easily have cut him loose, she didn’t. When the British invited her to England for the memorial for JFK at Runnymede, she asked Lem to go with her. She frequently visited him in Manhattan when she lived there in the 60s, and she also went to his funeral. So the evidence that she essentially liked him is there.

On the other hand, there is also evidence that she was frustrated at times that he was always there, he was there too often, and the quote you just gave from the White House usher, J.B. West, is evidence of that as well. So it’s a mixed relationship. Probably when you think about it, it’s a marriage of three people, so that attitude is understandable.

KH: It was the ‘Me, You and DuPree’ of Camelot! Also interesting is that in instances where Jackie was unavailable to go to a dinner or on a foreign trip, Jack took Lem along — almost like his partner.

DP: I worked with a good friend of mine on this, Mona Esquetini who is much better at research than I am, and sometimes we would come across things and we’d think, wow, this is amazing. For example, when JFK went to the Eisenhower inauguration in 1953. I read in the documentation that JFK took Jackie, his wife, and that’s understandable, but he also took Lem. So he’s taking two people to the Eisenhower inauguration.

Another example that blew our minds is when Lem was writing in his oral history about the fact that he went to Glen Ora, [JFK's] summer retreat in Virginia, almost every weekend when they were in town, and he’s writing things like, “Jack went to bed at 10:00 o’clock, and Jackie shortly thereafter, and I could hear the television going…” I mean, wow, this guy is like part of the marriage.

KH: It seemed that from the way history was presented in the book that on these trips, these dinners, etc, that he just took Lem along without any explanation. Like, he didn’t feel any need to say who this person was exactly, it was just, this person is with me.

DP: Right. One of the things I learned, actually I didn’t have to learn it since I’m old enough to remember those times, is how much was left unspoken. When I talked to Ben Bradlee for example at the Washington Post, who knew both men, and the first thing he said to me when I went in to interview him, before I asked him anything, was “I suppose you know was gay. It was kind of a secret within Camelot.” So I jumped right in on that and said did you ever talk to JFK about it, and how dangerous this was for him politically, and he said, “Oh no, everybody knew but that’s not the kind of thing you talked about in those days.” It just went unspoken.

KH: I sensed, too, that Lem was sad about having been sort of forgotten by history. One passage that struck me addresses this:

In all the books about Jack Kennedy, Lem said in an interview a few years before he died, “I’m referred to as a roommate from Choate, and then dropped. I don’t particularly want to be in books, but I resent being treated as a childhood friend who could then be dropped. You never see me in the last pages, and yet I was at his house every single weekend he was president. Jack was the closest person to me in the world for 30 years.”

DP: Yes, I think you’re correct in saying that. It’s true what he’s saying there in his oral history. When you look at the various JFK books, he is usually in the earlier chapters, the friend from Choate who was involved with JFK in all these pranks, and then he’s kind of dropped, like he disappeared. The reality is of course far different as we’ve just been discussing.

I also feel he played an important role in Jack’s presidency that has been totally ignored which I’m rarely asked about either, and that is the political role that he played, even though he wasn’t profoundly interested in politics. He did learn about the Cuban Missile Crisis and other events long before other people, and listened to JFK vent — there are examples of this in the book. And so the role he played in soothing the temperament and giving advice when asked with the guy whose finger is on the button at the height of the Cold War, that’s also very important stuff that has been ignored.

KH: As you say, he wasn’t very interested in politics, but your word that he “soothed” Jack’s temperament seemed to be a running theme through the book. That, because of their deep friendship and the humor and history that they shared, Lem almost seemed like a salve, he was able to relax JFK in a way nobody else could.

DP: A friend of mine who read the book said, after reading that part of it, that Lem was the wife in the sense of playing that traditional role of the wife at that time of listening, soothing and all of the rest — because Jackie needed soothing herself. JFK’s time with her was mostly spent in reassuring her, so it was really Lem that he leaned on. Certainly in what he wanted to say politically. Now of course he could talk with political aides, but with Lem he knew he could say anything he wanted to say, and it would not be leaked, not end up in the press, and it was an important safety valve for him.

KH: Back on the issue of having been forgotten, one of the things that really struck me when I read this was that following the assassination of JFK, Lem reminded me so much of the gay lover of someone who has died where the relationship with the deceased is never publicly acknowledged. Certainly the Kennedys knew that Lem was part of the family and that he was suffering, but did you get a sense in your research that Lem himself felt cheated out of the public not knowing that he, JFK’s best friend, the First Friend, also became, in a sense, a widow that day?

DP: I’m not really sure. It’s an interesting point, and I never really asked that question and it didn’t come out in the questions. My guess would be, however, that in the context of those times, he had known from the beginning that the true extent of his affection for JFK, the true extent of this friendship, could never be public knowledge. And I think he has long adjusted to that.

Now, it may be that toward the end of his life when he was drinking more that he became a little bit more uncomfortable with the secrecy. A key interviewee in the book is Larry Quirk, the Photoplay editor who knew him for 40 years, and he said at one point Lem was thinking of writing a book in the mid-70s. Certainly that indicated he was thinking about putting the story out there, but then he retreated from it.

KH: Two things really, really touched me about this story. The first — I’ll let you tell the story of what JFK is buried with.

DP: Oh, yes. The whale scrimshaw. When I first discovered that I didn’t even know what it was, actually. Part of a whale’s tooth, I guess. And this was something that JFK had just collected over the years. And one particular collection item among the whale scrimshaw was on his desk in the Oval Office. That was a gift from Lem, and that was buried with JFK.

KH: I think that’s so profound.

DP: Yeah.

KH: The other is what Jamie Wyeth talks about in discussing the painting he painted of JFK after his assassination. In the book you write:

“Jamie Wyeth … recalls immersing himself in everything he could get his hands on about JFK before beginning to paint. But it was Lem, he says, who ‘gave me an uncommon insight,’ stemming from the fact that he had been so close to the president. ‘Lem helped me see a JFK that no amount of books, films, tapes and recordings could reveal,’ he noted. Lem spent not hours but days with him, talking about the JFK the public never knew, Wyeth added. ‘If someday you see my completed portrait of John F. Kennedy, look a little closer, for under the surface of the paint is a portrait of Lem Billings.’”

DP: Yes, those were great words from Jamie Wyeth, weren’t they. Yeah, some of the writers and artists who contacted Lem after the assassination learned … for example, JFK married Jackie in 1953 at the age of 36. By that time, he had known Lem for 20 years. So it had been Jack and Lem for 20 years at the time he had got married. Even she knew that Lem knew a lot about Jack that preceded her marriage by 20 years. That’s one reason why she wanted him to talk to the kids a lot, about the younger Jack that she never knew. She was 12 years younger than JFK as well.

KH: Well, it’s a fascinating story. I think this is a wonderful gift that you’ve given to the world, and certainly to gay readers who are constantly uncovering things that have been hidden from history that tell us so much about ourselves. Is there anything else you want to mention about the book?

DP: I guess the only thing I would mention that has been kind of surprising to me is that there have been so many books that have been written about JFK — thousands, according to the Library of Congress — and many of them are repeating the same stories about Marilyn Monroe or the Cuban Missile Crisis, but this is a new story about JFK, unknown for most Americans, and yet mainstream media has almost totally ignored it. There hasn’t been one review of this book in any mainstream newspaper, including the Washington Post, and Ben Bradlee, the most famous editor of the Post, is a key source for this book. That’s a mystery to me. I think this is a story that would interest most Americans, as well as gay Americans, and the mainstream audience doesn’t know about it. That’s been frustrating.

KH: Why do you think they’ve ignored the book?

DP: I don’t know. I’m really, really mystified because having been in the news business myself, most of what reporters are interested in above all else is news, something that’s new. If I came across a new story about a much-remembered president, I would grab it. But so far, aside from a couple of stories, one was in the New Haven Register which is near the school where they went, that’s about it.

KH: That’s interesting — and mysterious.

DP: It is. I know somebody who knows a producer at CNN and I sent over a copy of the book to them, but so far I don’t know that they’ve done anything. This is a bit of a feeling like Lem must have had that I’m having now … Well, maybe they’ll discover this book in about 10 years, but right now …

KH: That kind of blows me away. Since I read the book, I can’t stop sharing the story. Everyone with whom I’ve spoken is quite amazed by it. I hope a lot of people get to read it.

DP: I hope so, too.

Jack and Lem can be found at your
neighborhood GLBT bookstore, or any online retailer.

Photos: All photos courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
and Museum, Columbia Point, Boston, Massachusetts

Published in 2005 to critical acclaim, Mother of Sorrows is a work of ten stories that weave together spare snapshots from the life of a gay man, touching on themes of family expectations and forgiveness, growing up in suburbia, sexual oppression and acceptance, being a sissy and what happens to boys who have to hide their true nature.

These are tales of American life, inhabited by a mother who’s more than a wee dramatic and overly involved, a father who is distant, and a brother who packs a wallop of a surprise (well, several) — all told by a narrator who wants desperately to make the pieces of his life make sense, but isn’t sure how. It’s a coming out story of sorts wrapped up in one hell of a family drama, fed to you in ten perfect bits that, while not linear, accumulate into something whole and very beautiful.

The book opens with a scene that establishes the centrality of the mother in the narrator’s life. She’s a woman whose glamour captivates this young man, unleashing, or perhaps shaping, a path that will find him challenged by his own masculinity, femininity, desires, dreams, sorrow.

“Sit with me, son,” my mother said. “Let’s pretend we’re sitting this dance out.”

She told me I was her best friend. She said I had the heart to understand her. She was forty-six. I was nine.

Then, the complexity of the relationship starts to come through:

Because beauty’s source was longing, it was infused with romantic sorrow; because beauty was defined as “feminine” and therefore “other,” it became hopelessly confused with my mother: Mother, who quickly sorted through new batches of photographs, throwing unflattering shots of herself directly into the fire before they could be seen. Mother, who dramatized herself, telling us and our playmates, “My name is Maria Dolores; in Spanish that means ‘Mother of Sorrows.’” Mother, who had once wished to be a writer and who said, looking up briefly from whatever she was reading, “Books are my best friends.” Mother, who read aloud from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night with a voice so grave I could not tell the difference between them. Mother who lifted cut glass vases and antique clocks from her obsessively dusted curio shelves to ask, “If this could talk, what story would it tell?”

Author Richard McCann wrote Mother of Sorrows over a span of 18 years. The book blurs the line between fiction and memoir, but it’s McCann’s background as a poet that informs his writing style which is marked by a meticulous ability to say a great deal using language that has been distilled so finely as to inspire awe. At the end of each short chapter, the reader is left wondering how McCann could convey things that are so huge using so few words.

McCann’s literary mastery and astute observations are what call readers back to this book to read and read again.

An internationally acclaimed fashion photographer since the late 1940s, a master crafter of high fashion and seemingly effortless chic Avedon was comissioned in the Spring of 1979 by Mitchell. A. Wilder the director of the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. His task? Over five summers to scour the wild wild West of the United States and capture the battered character, soul and heartland of America resulting in an exhibition in the Autumn of 1985 with a set of prints and negatives that would become a permanent part of the Amon archives. County fairs, coalmines, truckstops and stockyards, diners and beauty parlours were his and his assistant’s hunting grounds.

Even though the book of the exhibition was first published in 1985 it somehow felt like this unique collection of images had always been here. You don’t recall a fanfare, or a declaration, a cavalcade or a ticker tape parade. This wasn’t that side of America. This was a land of elements and expanses, family, poverty and hard, hard work. It was nothing you’d ever experienced, a barely shared language yes but really no frame of reference other than an inherent, simple humanity.

These tough, battered, occasionally broken but more often noble faces calmly, solemnly stared back at you. Engaging, defying, watching. Reflecting your own thoughts, worries, hopes and way too many silent fears. As a teenage art student – all Face and i-D magazine literate, you knew your Gaultiers from your Gallianos, thank you – holding this huge, clean tome in Foyles or Waterstones and staring into the louche, creased face of the dandyish drifter worried you. You saw even the vaguest glimmer of yourself in there and it scared you ice cold. He’d lived. He knew. He’d had it all – you could see it in his eyes – and he’d lost it. And so, Child could you.

CONTINUE READING

Apple’s iTunes is getting its gay on right now with a virtual pride parade in honor of Gay Pride Month.

A rainbow-flag banner is featured prominently on the front page of iTunes on both the U.S. and Canada versions of the service. Users who click on the banner are served up a curated collection of GLBT-related music, audio books, video, podcasts and iPhone/iTouch apps.

Given the subjective nature of compilations and the space limitations that iTunes assigns to its collections, the music, books and video offerings are quite random. Lacking any theme other than “this stuff is gay,” there is an air of cliché that hovers over the picks. Even so, if Gay Pride is about the GLBT community being visible, Apple’s efforts, as general as they might be, are welcome.

There are several gems in the music collection. If your iPod is absent some classic albums, adding the ‘Best of Freddie Mercury’, Sylvester’s ‘Original Hits’ and the Village People’s ‘Macho Man’ are three must-haves for anyone wanting to pay proper homage to the heady days of the post-Stonewall 70s.

More modern audiences can nab some of the gay-latest like DJ ‘Bob Mould’s Life and Times’, ‘Yes’ by the Pet Shop Boys, and Michelle Shocked’s gorgeous new release, ‘Soul of My Soul.’ If you are looking to discover some truly queer — and more obscure — selections, try ‘The Essential Pansy Division’ (explicit, with a sense of humor), music maverick Arthur Russell’s ‘Love Is Overtaking Me,’ or ‘Rising Free, the Very Best of the Tom Robinson Band,’ whose cutting-edge work remains under appreciated.

The Pride movie downloads are a random hodgepodge of older and newer releases, too, but they are good films for the most part. Download ‘Milk’ if you’re one of the few thinking-people who hasn’t seen it (get the brilliant documentary ‘The Life and Times of Harvey Milk’ while you are at it). There are some fun women’s films offered, The ‘Itty Bitty Titty Committee,’ ‘Desert Hearts’ and ‘Liana,’ plus a couple of interesting film histories including ‘The Celluloid Closet’ and ‘The Silver Screen: Color Me Lavender.’ There are another 20 videos in the television category; no surprises of note.

A scant selection of 21 audio books seems somewhat lazy given that scads of GLBT-authored books exist on iTunes, but what does appear here is a rather smart group. David Sedaris, Ellen DeGeneres and Dan Savage are obvious picks. Impressively, some stunning works of fiction are in there such as ‘A Home at the End of the World’ by Michael Cunningham, ‘Someday this Pain Will Be Useful to You’ by Peter Cameron, and ‘Three Junes’ by Julia Glass.

Unfortunately, both the podcast and apps categories are hardly worth exploring, but it isn’t Apple’s fault. There are simply very few GLBT podcasts or apps that are any good. Gay podcasts tend to be inane and exceedingly uninteresting for some reason (why?), including most of the ones listed in this collection which were reviewed for this article. One enlightening exception to the rule is ‘Here! With Josh and Sara,’ a smart weekly show that spotlights people of note in the GLBT community. Subscribe to it, you won’t be sorry.

As far as iPhone/iTouch apps, there simply aren’t any queer apps out there that are worth downloading, free or paid. The localized guides lack depth and are basically useless. All the gay news apps are too narrowly focused and suffer from poor functionality. The only one in the Pride collection that is viable is Gay Dance Radio. iTunes shouldn’t have even included apps as an offering, unless they are trying to shame the gay community into developing some that people could actually make use of?

All said, while Gay Pride on iTunes isn’t perfect, Pride month in fact *is* about gaining visibility for the lives of GLBT people, so a rainbow flag waving to hundreds of thousands of users who hit the front page of iTunes every month is a veritable and welcome feather in the GLBT community’s hat.

Yes, Apple is a huge corporation and choices made about what products to promote are driven by business decisions, but the company has also proven itself to be strong supporters of GLBT rights.

In addition to a long history of progressive employment policies, Apple took a stand last October for gay marriage with a donation of $100,000 to fight Proposition 8, the ballot measure which sought to overturn same-sex marriage in California. (Sadly, voters passed the proposition on November 4, effectively banning gay marriage in the state.)

If iTunes’ Gay Pride collection was a Pride float, it wouldn’t win any prizes for originality, but it’s lovely nonetheless to see Apple in the parade.

‘Je crois qu’il profita, pour son évasion, d’une migration d’oiseaux sauvages.’

Text: Le Petit Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Photo: Cole Rise