Christopher Ciccone

From Time Magazine:

The release of Life with My Sister Madonna — the breathless tell-all from the Material Girl’s brother, Christopher Ciccone, with writer Wendy Leigh — couldn’t have been more fortuitously timed. As the book hits stores, the world’s most famous Kabbalah practitioner is fending off rumors of a pending split from husband Guy Ritchie and of an alleged affair with New York Yankees slugger Alex Rodriguez, whom she reputedly “brainwashed,” causing the dissolution of his marriage. So bright is Madonna’s star that this jumble of reheated anecdotes warranted an initial print run of 350,000 copies.

What those readers will get is a narrative that reveals less about Madonna than about the brother condemned to living in her considerable shadow. Ciccone, an artist and interior decorator, served stints as Madonna’s backup dancer, her “dresser” (a role in which his tasks included wiping sweat from her sometimes-naked body) and later as her designer. But mostly, by his telling, he functioned as her doormat. And, occasionally, her garbage can (one of his chores was allowing his sister to spit cough drops into his palm). “I find no excuse for Madonna’s grossly unfair treatment of me,” he acknowledges. She jilts him repeatedly — summoning him to New York and then relinquishing her offer of a place to stay, or forcing him to eat half the cost of a set of paintings he purchased at her behest. Yet Ciccone is unable — or unwilling — to resist her magnetism. They are no longer close — but that may be as much her choice as his.

Madonna is 27 months older than Ciccone, and she snatched his innocence around the same time she was surrendering her own. She gives him his first joint, his first ecstasy pill, his first visit to a gay club. These events foreshadowed a peculiar sort of sibling bond. Consider: Both lost their virginity in the backseats of cars to guys named Russell. True to form, he notes, she “bests” him even here: her dalliance took place in a Cadillac, his in a Datsun. It was clear during her childhood in Michigan, Ciccone says, that Madonna wasn’t shy about deploying her sexuality to get what she wanted — Bette Midler once called her “the woman who pulled herself up by her bra straps.” But while his sister wielded sex as a weapon, especially after dropping out of college to pursue stardom in New York, Ciccone’s sexuality often posed him problems. After he came out to his father, a conservative Catholic, the elder Ciccone sent Christopher a letter offering to pay for a psychiatrist to “help you with this problem.”

Of course, it’s Madonna’s love life that readers want the scoop on, and Ciccone is happy to pry open her bedroom door. He dishes on becoming Sean Penn’s blood brother and Warren Beatty’s habit of quizzing him about what it’s like to be gay. Madonna bedded so many luminaries, it seems, that some notable members of this diverse group — John F. Kennedy Jr., graffiti pioneer Jean-Michel Basquiat, basketball star Dennis Rodman and steroid-user-turned whistleblower Jose Canseco — rate no better than a passing mention. Ciccone paints Ritchie in a particularly unflattering light, claiming the director’s homophobia drove a wedge between the siblings.

Lurid details aside, the book offers a peek at a man still grappling with his sister’s dizzying fame. Ciccone calls the book a “catharsis,” and given the hurt splashed across its pages, that’s easy to believe. But it’s hard to muster a ton of sympathy for a guy profiting handsomely from a hatchet job on his own sister — regardless of how miserably she may have treated him.

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Biographer Michael Starr has written Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr, a biography of Raymond William Stacey Burr, the Canadian-born, Emmy-winning actor and vintner, best known for his roles in the television dramas Perry Mason and Ironside.

Raymond Burr, who played Perry Mason in the wildly popular television show “Perry Mason” and later in “Ironside,” lived a secret gay life in Hollywood when such a revelation would destroy a career. Burr invented a biography for himself that included a wife and son who’d died, and used his busy schedule as a way to explain why he wasn’t married. But Burr and his partner, Robert Benevides, had a relationship for 35 years that was secret to most of the world except for a handful of close friends.

Read an excerpt from the book below:

The number of magazine features and newspaper interviews focusing on Raymond’s personal life grew as Perry Mason became more and more popular. The public was interested in this veteran actor who, save for what was portrayed in the media as his brief dalliance with Natalie Wood, had one of those faces everyone knew but couldn’t quite match with a name. That was all changing now. Certainly Raymond’s face was familiar, but now the tragic tale of his dead wife and dead son assumed a life of its own. Once Perry Mason took off, the dead-wife-and-son story was repeated time and again. Raymond could have ended it all right then and there, blaming the mix-up on an overeager studio publicist or on his youthful showbiz naïveté. But he chose to continue perpetrating the fabrications by refusing to address them. He would answer the inevitable queries about his supposed marriages by reciting the facts of his brief union with Isabella Ward. If the questioning went any further in relation to Annette Sutherland or, God forbid, son Michael, he begged off with a terse, “I don’t discuss that.”

Raymond’s grueling Perry Mason shooting schedule would have made it difficult for him to have a romance with a member of either sex. So he used his long hours on the set as a convenient excuse whenever the subject of remarrying was raised. “I am an unmarried man, as opposed to a single man,” he lectured one reporter in November 1957. “A bachelor, according to the dictionary, is a man who has never been married. An unmarried man is not married at the moment. Many of these terms have fallen into disuse.”

Okay, the reporter, pressed, but there’s no wife waiting for you when you return home from the studio? “That is correct and it’s a good thing because I’m working eighteen hours a day and sometimes don’t come home from the studio at all,” he answered. “I don’t want to seem to avoid giving direct answers”—which is exactly what he was doing—

“but I’ve played attorneys so many times I’m getting to be a curbstone lawyer.”

It’s a good bet that had Raymond been married, his wife would have had a difficult time understanding his growing relationship with Robert Benevides, a young actor Raymond met on the set of Perry Mason. The handsome Benevides, thirteen years Raymond’s junior, had a small role in the 1957 sci-fi flick Monster That Challenged the World (billed as Bob Benevedes) but was having trouble finding steady work. He and Raymond hit it off immediately, reportedly after Robert delivered a script to Raymond, and their attraction to each other grew. Before too long, Robert—”a nice fellow and very cordial all the time,” said Art Marks—

was running errands for Raymond.

Read more here.

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Perry Moore’s novel Hero, about the world’s first gay superhero, is destined for television.

“It looks like we’re going to do a TV series,” Moore told NY Magazine at a party for the artist Hunt Slonem on Wednesday. “There were two networks that we pitched, and we got two offers. We’ll announce any day, hopefully, who we’re going to do it with,” Moore continued. He described the live-action series as labyrinthine and similar to Lost. “It’s not campy either — it’s not The Gayest American Hero. He just happens to be gay. It’s just one of the many things he wrestles with.”

Moore, a longtime Walden Media executive, was one of the passel of producers on the Narnia movies, but sounds dramatically more excited about the producer who’s helping shepherd Hero along: Stan Lee. “The ultimate fanboy moment,” Moore calls the first phone call from “legend” Lee. “Just to have a straight older man who’s the comic-book legend of all time … just to have him think that the next big movie is my humble little creation about the world’s first gay superhero — it was just wonderful. Wonderful! It was such a thrill. I’m talking way too much,” he said. “Fingers crossed!”

For parents and professionals alike, raising a transgender child can be confusing and challenging.

A new book published in the US tackles the issues “thousands of families face raising children who step outside of the pink or blue box.”

The Transgender Child: A Handbook for Families and Professionals deals with how to decide if a child is trans, family acceptance, the education system and medical and legal issues.

“Providing extensive research and interviews as well as years of experience working in the field, authors Stephanie Brill and Rachel Pepper explore what is currently known and understood about gender,” said the book’s publisher in a press release.

“They describe the process that many families go through after learning that a child is transgender or gender variant and lay out strategies for parents to  move from crisis to acceptance.

“Brill and Pepper cover developmental stages of the transgender child from birth to college, transition decisions, appropriate disclosure, and the educational, medical, and legal issues that parents and therapists need to know.”

Ms Pepper is the Coordinator of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies at Yale University and the author of The Ultimate Guide to Pregnancy for Lesbians.

Ms Brill founded Gender Spectrum Education and Training and wrote The Queer Parents Primer and co-authored The New Essential Guide to Lesbian Conception, Pregnancy, and Birth.
 

Source: PinkNews

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ill Doctrine is a hip-hop video blog hosted by Jay Smooth, creator of the blog devoted exclusively to hip-hop music and founder of New York’s longest running hip-hop radio show, WBAI’s Underground Railroad. Today, he posted his uber homo-positive, thoughtful reaction to the new memoir/hip-hop book, ‘Hiding in Hip Hop’ by former MTV producer Terrence Dean.  

Here’s what ill Doctrine had to say about gays in hip hop:

He also adds, on his blog:

“BTW everything I said about hip-hop in this video is pretty much equally applicable to America in general.”

Congratulations to Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, co-authors of “And Tango Makes Three” which was released in 2005. They have once again, for the second year in a row, topped the list of most “challenged” books in public schools and libraries, according to the American Library Association.

They beat out such controversial books as Maya Angelou’s memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings,” in which the author writes of being raped as a young girl; Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” long attacked for alleged racism; and Philip Pullman’s “The Golden Compass,” an anti-religious work in which a former nun says: “The Christian religion is a very powerful and convincing mistake.”

“The complaints about the penguin book are that young children will believe that homosexuality is a lifestyle that is acceptable. The people complaining, of course, don’t agree with that,” Judith Krug, director of the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, told The Associated Press on Tuesday.

The ALA defines a “challenge” as a “formal, written complaint filed with a library or school requesting that materials be removed because of content or appropriateness.”

At blurbberry.com, we are quite impressed by this ‘win.’ To beat out Maya Angelou’s life story, another book by an atheist, and HUCK FINN… WOW!! That is a tough task, and gay penguins were successful. To celebrate the book, why not purchase it here for a nephew or niece! 

From After Elton: 

“God, please take my father away. Please make him leave. I am very afraid that he’s going to do something bad. There’s something wrong with him. And I am very worried that my mother and I won’t make it. She used to say he was dangerous, and I didn’t understand. But now I do. If death is the only answer, please take him. If he doesn’t hurt me, I’m afraid I might hurt him. I’ve become quite good with the rifle, you know. I’m sure you’ve seen me. Unless you think I’m the one that’s bad and then you can take me. I won’t be mad at you.”

This prayer was young Augusten Burroughs’s way of asking his Heavenly Father for protection against his earthly father. It gains poignancy from the fact that prayer was one of the things that Augusten’s dad did not approve of: “Jesus Christ, Augusten. You’re much too old for this praying business, much too old.”

Augusten Burroughs’s childhood prayer and his sire’s disapproval epitomizeA Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of my Father (St. Martin’s Press; 256 pages; $24.95). What should have been a nurturing, supportive relationship between father and son became a lifelong struggle between a distant, disapproving and often violent father and an insecure, fearful and eventually resentful son. 

Burroughs had to wait for his father to die before he could write about him at any length. A Wolf at the Door: A Memoir of My Father is Burroughs’s long-awaited attempt to place his father at the center of his narrative. The result is a grim piece, a far cry from the wit and humor of Scissors and Burroughs’s other collections of essays and, for at least one reader, a most uncomfortable experience. It is also Burroughs’s best-written book.

Augusten Burroughs’s father was John G. Robison, head of the philosophy department at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. Those who knew the amiable Professor in his professional life would hardly recognize him as the violent, alcoholic psychopath who often terrorized his wife and two sons with his mind-boggling “games.”

It is difficult to write about one’s father, even under the best circumstances. In the case of gay men, our relationships with our fathers are often affected by their homophobia and by our fear that we disappointed our parent by being who we are.

Readers who are easily disturbed by dysfunctional family quarrels should stay far away from A Wolf at the Table. Even those of us who enjoy this type of thing will find this book a difficult read. We wonder not that it took Burroughs so long to write about his father, but feel glad that he finally found the strength to do so. A Wolf at the Table is a book that Burroughs eventually had to do and he’s done it well.

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‘About My Life and the Kept Woman’ is the autobiography by gay author, John Rechy. John Rechy published his first novel in 1963, City of Night, about hustling in the streets of L.A. Yet, at the time, he was still earning his living as a prostitute on the streets of Los Angeles. And as The Independent put it, “so began a bizarre double life… By day, he was a writer, mixing with fellow authors, even teaching at UCLA. By night, he was back on the streets, selling sex to men.”

Rechy writes, “I wanted demarcation between the different areas of my life, and I fooled myself that I could keep them separate. I wanted to be treated one way as ‘the writer’, another way as ‘the hustler’, and if they crossed over I got very confused.”

“It got ridiculous,” writes Rechy. “People hit on me all the time, far more than I say in the book. Looking back, I can see it was my own fault – I projected a very sexual image, and I shouldn’t have been surprised when people responded.” Ridiculous it may have been, but the masquerade continued well into Rechy’s thirties. “In the 1970s, when I was teaching at UCLA, I’d finish my evening classes, then change my clothes somewhat and go down to hustle on Santa Monica Boulevard. One night, a student saw me down there and said ‘Good evening, Professor Rechy. Are you out for an evening stroll?’”

“Rechy’s life changed one evening in 1981, when, still hustling in his forties, he was approached by a young man of 23. Rechy says, “This very good looking person drove up and looked at me – and I thought ‘Oh boy, no hustling tonight! This one’s for free’. So I sacrificed something like 20 bucks, and got myself a future. I really liked him, and for the first time ever I gave someone my phone number, but I was still stuck in the hustler role. I took him back to my elegant apartment, and I had to lie and tell him I was looking after it for a friend, because I didn’t want to be associated with all those pretty things. We met up a couple more times, and I finally let the façade drop when he made some comment about Luis Buñuel, and I responded. It all came out that I wasn’t just some dumb hustler, I showed him my books, and he stood there with his mouth hanging open. We’ve been together ever since, 27 years.”

His other books, including Numbers, Rushes, and The Sexual Outlaw, explore the ups and (mostly) downs of his compulsive sex life. 

Read a complete review of ‘About My Life and the Kept Woman’ in The Independent. 

From Edge Boston:

If you’ve perused the popular gay dating book “Boyfriend 101,” then you’ll enjoy Grant Wheaton’s new book, The 7-Day Dating and Relationship Plan for Gay Men. This book proclaims to have you WAKE UP AND GET REAL thanks to the advice of one of the dating gurus and professional gay matchmakers and his partner Dennis Courtney. 

While I won’t reveal the seven steps to becoming an ideal gay mate, no matter your age or creed, the chapters themselves are fun to read, easy to understand, and do provide some terrific self-insight. I loved the way each chapter had funny references to Wheaton’s real-life clients who highlight pros and cons, like his own personal Goofus and Gallant. I found it very easy to compare myself to some of the more unsavory examples in the book, and this made me pay attention even more to the advice and activities found in each of the seven steps.

The advice itself is fairly insightful and straight-forward. The seven individual topics aren’t anything new or fairly mind-blowing, but they are presented in a way that’s more akinto gay me of all ages. Each chapter contains various activities to help you further experience the advice, such as taking a simple quiz or making a list. The final chapters of the book contain general advice for a variety of dating situations that are quite amusing.

If you need to revamp your dating persona, check out the “7-Day Dating and Relationship Plan for Gay Men.” You won’t be disappointed, and you will finish this book in a week … or less!

You can preview and purchase it here

Click on photo to view gallery of winners.

Family Equality Council, a national non-profit organization dedicated to securing family equality, has announced the results of the The Second Annual Family Drawing Contest. According to their website, “thousands and thousands of folks from all over the country voted in our Second Annual Family Drawing Contest”. 

 They have released a free, downloadable eBook with all the 50+ drawings submitted and a foreword by author Todd Parr. You can download Homework, Hugs and Love: A Family Like Yours here.