Jared Leto and the bridge of the imagination

March 1, 2014

If you were to ask me – a woman who considers herself to be a great connoisseur of beautiful men – who is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen, I’d have to say Jared Leto. He is it for me (though Johnny Depp is a close second.) I’m not talking beauty plus brains, personality, character or anything else but just sheer physical beauty. It’s no wonder that Oliver Stone cast him as Hephaestion – the love of Alexander the Great’s life – in “Alexander.”

So naturally, I was delighted to see Leto as the frontrunner for the Best Supporting Actor Oscar March 2 for his role as a transgender prostitute in “Dallas Buyers Club.” And just as distressed to see a fatuous Time magazine piece titled “Don’t Applaud Jared Leto’s Transgender ‘Mammy’,” in which Steve Friess likens Leto’s gender portrayal to the racial cliché of Hattie McDaniel’s Mammy in “Gone With The Wind.”

There are so many misguided ideas in this article that it isn’t even funny.

Scaling “Brokeback” again

January 26, 2014

When people ask me to give them the “elevator pitch” for my novel “Water Music,” I always say it’s “‘Brokeback Mountain’ meets ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’” – not because I would equate my book with those works but because it deals with gay lovers and issues of power and submission. Such is our world – with no time for anything – that we must reduce everything to labels, boxes and clichés.

Everyone who writes about gay men in love today owes a debt, however, to Annie Proulx’s sparely beautiful short story about two 1960s cowboys – shepherds really – whose love is doomed by an inability to communicate, by a closeted world and, in a sense, by the all-consuming nature of that love.

Now Proulx’s short story and Ang Lee’s equally haunting film version – starring the late Heath Ledger as Ennis Del Mar, the more constricted of the two lovers, and Jake Gyllenhaal as Jack Twist, the more expressive – have been turned into an opera by Charles Wuorinen, whose atonal style would seem pitch-perfect for Proulx’s Heminway-esque writing. (She contributed the libretto for the work, which premieres Jan. 28 and runs through Feb. 11 at the Teatro Real in Madrid.) Read more

Mother and child reunion

January 16, 2014

How heartbreaking that new film “Philomena” sounds. It’s the story of a woman in search of the love child she was forced to give up by the Irish nuns to whom she was sent after her “indiscretion.” The Sunday New York Times had an excellent, spoilers -riddled article Jan. 12 about the fate of the real child, Michael Hess, a gay man who perhaps not so improbably became a Reagan-era lawyer in Washington D.C. and died of AIDS. The emotional kicker was that he was buried in his mother’s native country in the hopes that she would find him.

Which she did. But all those years when they could’ve had a relationship. All that waste. I could weep. Come to think of it, I did.

There are few more complex relationships than mother and child, which plays a part in my just-released first published novel, “Water Music.” I’m not here to judge why women get pregnant outside of marriage, why they keep or give up their children or why they have abortions. I’ve never been pregnant. The whole thing is beyond me.

But I would like to comment on something that struck me in The Times’ article, and that is the idea that Hess’ friends and associates found him ultimately unknowable. Read more