Vidal loved sex, and gossiping about it: he estimated he had had sex with a thousand men before he was 25. He told his nephew Burr Steers he had successfully pursued and had sex with Fred Astaire when he first moved to Hollywood. Steers says, “He also told me Dennis Hopper had a lovely tuft of hair above his ass. He never told me how he knew that.” Another close friend of Vidal's revealed Vidal had asked, when hearing the friend was staying at the legendarily louche Chateau Marmont, "How is the Chateau?", before adding: "Brad Davis [star of Midnight Express and Querelle] was a beautiful boy and I fucked him on the bathroom floor of the Chateau Marmont." Davis, who was HIV-positive, died of a drug overdose in 1991.
For most of their lives together, Vidal referred to [Howard] Austen [his partner from 1950 to 2003, when Austen died] as his friend. His true love, he claimed, was Jimmie Trimble (above), a boy he had known at prep school who died fighting at the Battle of Iwo Jima. Vidal slept with Anaïs Nin and enjoyed close friendships with women including Claire Bloom and Joanne Woodward. He and Austen had sex with hustlers, or “trade” as Vidal called the handsome, “straight-acting” young men he liked. Paying for sex appealed to Vidal because it meant with this, as with so much else in his life, he was in control. He was mostly the “top.” In bed as in life, no one was going to screw Gore Vidal.Do we really have to wait till November?
The NLGJA 2013 Journalist of the Year is Michael Luongo, a freelance journalist, editor and photographer and New York University adjunct professor who teaches travel writing. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Bloomberg News, CNN, National Geographic Traveler, Gay City News, The Advocate, Condé Nast Traveler, Travel+Leisure, Details, Man About World and other publications, with most of his travel writing and international correspondence work concentrating on the Middle East and Latin America.
One Excellence in Journalism Awards judge commented that Michael Luongo "gains amazing access to the Palestinian, Israeli, and Egyptian worlds. His ability to weave a narrative draws the reader into his stories, be they about pinkwashing in Israel, the difficulties of being gay in Palestine, or what became of the out, gay activists in Egypt's manifestation of the Arab Spring. He also shows versatility, reporting on both the gay world for the mainstream media and on the lesser known aspects of straight Arab society in Egypt and the just plain fascinating continued existence of Samaritans in Israel."
Another judge noted: "Luongo produces well-researched and sourced work that simply isn't done by many - even any - other news organizations. His travels potentially put him - and even his subjects - at risk as he pulls together his stories. His work focuses on many under-reported topics and underserved segments, especially of LGBT life."See the full list of winners HERE.
Most of the people around Madonna at the corporate level did not get her and for the most part did not like her. You could see them recoil from her bohemianism. Everybody thought she was crazy and gross. I would never say she was a punk rocker, but she used to wear little boys' shorts, and white t-shirts with holes in them, and then she had little ring things in her ears. She wasn't the weirdest person I'd ever met, you know? I'd worked with Sun Ra! So after hanging out with the Heliocentric Worlds of Sun Ra, Madonna didn't seem particularly avant-garde.(Lucas gave a separate interview HERE in which he finally laments the fact that he was never properly credited for his huge role in the creation of Madonna's sound, producing six of the album's eight tracks.)
I told her, "The first night out of the hospital, let's go out to dinner, you, me and Mark." But I forgot about it. I get back to the office, I get a call, it's Madonna. She says, "Where are we going tonight?" I said, "Oh my god, the Talking Heads are in town, I'm going to see them at Forest Hills." She said, "We'll go together!" I introduced them to Chris [Frantz], Tina [Weymouth], Jerry [Harrison] and David [Byrne]. David gave me a thumbs-up sign. He was impressed.Sire A&R man Michael Rosenblatt:
My line was "Seymour, she's going to be bigger than Olivia Newton-John!"Art Director Carin Goldberg:
When I heard the name Madonna, my eyes just sort of rolled back in my head. I thought, "Just what we need, another gimmicky one-name girl singer who will have one album.'"Read it all HERE.
A couple more gay memoirs have come to my attention:
In the 1960s, Kamal Al-Solaylee’s father was one of the wealthiest property owners in Aden, in the south of Yemen, but when the country shrugged off its colonial roots, his properties were confiscated, and the family was forced to leave. The family moved first to Beirut, which suddenly became one of the most dangerous places in the world, then Cairo. After a few peaceful years, even the safe haven of Cairo struggled under a new wave of Islamic extremism that culminated with the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981. The family returned to Yemen, a country that was then culturally isolated from the rest of the world.Order HERE.
As a gay man living in an intolerant country, Al-Solaylee escaped first to England and eventually to Canada, where he became a prominent journalist and academic. While he was enjoying the cultural and personal freedoms of life in the West, his once-liberal family slowly fell into the hard-line interpretations of Islam that were sweeping large parts of the Arab-Muslim world in the 1980s and 1990s. The differences between his life and theirs were brought into sharp relief by the 2011 revolution in Egypt and the civil war in Yemen.
Subject: Outdated telephone songs
Here's a song that's far better than I remembered it from back in the day. But it hardly matters because the lyrics will confuse anyone under a certain age to no end. (Even more than 867-5309.)It's the Shel Silverstein song "Sylvia's Mother," sung by Bobby Bare, whose version -- in my opinion -- is better than Dr. Hook's. But I can just hear the questions: How come he's talking to Sylvia's mother; why doesn't he just call Sylvia? What's an operator? Why's he being charged 40 more cents; doesn't he have a monthly plan?
My blog is featured in Susan Olsen's tell-all about the ill-fated "Brady Bunch Variety Hour"!
The Web leads to an unexpected return to a house I grew up in.
Carlsbad, Calif. (2008)
Go Behind the Music of my high-school band, A La Plage
With Debbie Harry
With Robert Buckley
With Roger Federer
With Ed Burns
With Thomas Roberts
Click to revisit the heyday of Chelsea's 8th Avenue
You've read the blog -- now read the book!
"Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?" is available in NYC at Three Lives & Co.
Like my book on Facebook here.
