Iconic: Queer Icon Kristen Stewart Playing Queer Icon Susan Sontag in Upcoming Biopic
After two successful forays into playing legendary women with two-syllable last names that start with “S,” Spencer and Seberg, Kristen Stewart — also a legendary woman with a two syllable last-name that starts with “S” — will be playing Susan Sontag in an upcoming biopic based on the biography “Sontag: Her Life” by Ben Moser. Director Kristen Johnson will be co-writing the script with legendary lesbian playwright Lisa Kron (2.5 Minute Ride, Well, Fun Home).
According to Variety, filming will begin this very month in the Berlin Film Festival, for which Kristen Stewart is serving as jury president. Kirsten Johnson, best-known for her critically acclaimed documentaries “Cameraperson” and “Dick Johnson is Dead,” said of the intent to begin in Berlin:
“We’re using Berlin as a moment to kick off the project and do documentary footage of Kristen as the head of the jury and talking to her about how she’s going to become Sontag. It will be a drama, but with a documentary aspect to it. Kirsten has a wonderful approach to storytelling, and this is reflective of that, so she will use documentary in it.”
To be honest I have no idea what that means, but despite the fact that Stewart is not Jewish and also does not remotely resemble Susan Sontag, I am absolutely thrilled by this casting choice!
Susan Sontag is a writer, philosopher and activist best known for her essays, including many that I am almost but not quite smart enough to fully understand. Sontag’s work is foundational to theory across multiple disciplines, such as her 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp” and her 1977 book On Photography. Sontag also published plays and fiction and is well-known for her political activism beginning with her opposition to the Vietnam War in the 1960s.
“Notes On Camp” was later used as a theme for the 2019 Met Gala, which Kristen Stewart attended:
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – MAY 06: US actress Kristen Stewart arrives for the 2019 Met Gala. The Gala’s 2019 theme is Camp: Notes on Fashion” inspired by Susan Sontag’s 1964 essay “Notes on Camp.” (Photo by Jamie McCarthy/Getty Images)
An accomplished bisexual, Sontag was married to writer Phillip Rieff for eight years (they married when she was 17, they had a son) before dating the legendary avant-garde playwright/director María Irene Fornés and then Italian aristocrat Carlotta Del Pezzo and then German academic Eva Kollisch.
Sontag’s romantic relationship with photographer Annie Leibowitz — which began in the late 80s and continued Sontag’s death in 2004 — aspirationally involved the two women living in separate residences in the same Manhattan apartment building. In 2000, Sontag told The Guardian that over the entire span of her life she had been in love with five (5) women and four (4) men.
Susan Sontag (1933-2004), American writer, France, on November 3, 1972. (Photo by Jean-Regis Rouston/Roger Viollet via Getty Images)
Kristen Stewart has played queer parts before: in The Runaways (in which she starred as Joan Jett), Lizzie, J.T. Leroy and Happiest Season. Also in my opinion, she played queer roles in Charlie’s Angels, The Clouds of Sils Maria and Certain Women.
Many questions remain as this project begins its journey into the world, mostly “who will be playing María Irene Fornés”? Furthermore, will Kristen be summoning Susan Sontag’s gay ghost as research for the role? Hopefully these questions will be answered in due time.
feature image shows Kristen Stewart attending the Chanel Womenswear Spring/Summer 2023 show as part of Paris Fashion Week on October 04, 2022 in Paris, France. (Photo by Kristy Sparow/Getty Images)
Back to the Beginning: 8 Authors Who Connect Our Past to the Present
Seven books that counter our presentism bias and remind us that the seedbed of our present trials and triumphs lies in the chronically underappreciated past.
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
In 1928, Virginia Woolf published a fantasy-biography of a young hero/heroine who adventures across three centuries and changes genders, inspired by Woolf’s real-life lover Vita Sackville-West. The book both subverted censorship – it was an era when homosexuality was illegal in Britain and the death penalty for it had been lifted only sixty years earlier – and revolutionized the politics of lesbian love by mocking society’s heteronormative bias with astonishing intellectual elegance. But the novel’s most abiding gift is that it is simply one of the most exquisite pieces of prose ever written, one which Vita’s son later called “the longest and most charming love letter in literature.”
Knocking on Heaven’s Door by Lisa Randall
Harvard particle physicist and cosmologist Lisa Randall takes us on a scintillating journey to the origin of the universe and the origin of our understanding of the cosmos, tracing the revolutionary discoveries once laughed off or persecuted for their subversion of dogma. Undergirding the stimulating science is Randall’s wry wit and her willingness to weave art and literature into the larger story of human knowledge, exploring our abiding relationship to certainty, doubt, creativity, beauty, and the sublime.
On Photography by Susan Sontag
Four decades before the golden age of selfies, Susan Sontag – whom I consider the most incisive and unrepeatable mind of the twentieth century – presaged the promise and peril of visual culture on the social web as we know it today. “Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted,” she admonished in 1977 – an observation that just about sums up the basic selling proposition of Instagram and Facebook. Love live Sontag.
A Rap on Race by James Baldwin and Margaret Mead
Long before there was Ta-Nahisi Coates, there was James Baldwin – a formidable writer and formidable mind who used his power as one of the twentieth century’s greatest intellectual titans to bring the conversation about race to the cultural forefront. In 1970, he sat down with legendary anthropologist Margaret Mead for an extraordinary two-day conversation, the transcript of which was eventually published as A Rap on Race. The issues they discussed – race, gender, identity, belonging, forgiveness, democracy, consumerism, guilt, responsibility – resonate with chilling timeliness today, reminding us both how far we’ve come and how far we have yet to go.
The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts
In the 1950s, British philosopher Alan Watts began popularizing ancient Eastern traditions of thought in the West. Without his legacy, we wouldn’t have yoga studios on every other city block and meditation pods at the Googleplex. There might not even be lululemon. His 1951 book The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety introduced a whole new way of understanding the self, offered an antidote to the rising force of consumerism, and planted the seed for what would become a movement of secular spirituality that continues to gather momentum today.
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius
Two millennia ago, the great Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius recorded his daily observations on living meaningfully in what is essentially a proto-blog. It endures as an astonishingly lucid, timeless, and concise packet of practical wisdom on everything from morality to money to maximizing your sanity despite daily dealings with “meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous, and surly” people.
On Lies, Secrets, and Silence by Adrienne Rich
One of the most influential poets of the twentieth century, Adrienne Rich is the godmother of giving voice to queer feminists, who had been largely sidelined by the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. A woman of unflinching conviction, she became the first and to date only person to decline the National Medal of Arts in protest against the growing monopoly of power and the government’s proposed plan to end funding for the National Endowment for the Arts. Although her poetry collection The Dream of a Common Language is a cultural cornerstone and required reading for every thinking, feeling human being, it is her lesser-known collected prose – a treasure trove of her speeches, lectures, and essays – that most directly captures her trailblazing spirit and her mastery of the written word as a tool of political and philosophical advancement.
“Regarding Susan Sontag”: A Style Guide for the Young, Queer, and Whipsmart
“And did you fulfill all of your desires?” an interviewer asks the late Susan Sontag in the trailer for Nancy Kates’ new documentary on the American writer, filmmaker, and activist Regarding Susan Sontag. Her eyes dart from side to side intently, her features soften, and she cracks a smile as she responds. “Certainly not.”
Born Susan Rosenblatt in 1933, Sontag knew from an early age that her yearnings — unlike her time allotted on this earth — were far from finite. When the literary icon died after her third battle with cancer in 2004, she was overwhelmingly known for her criticism: works such as Against Interpretation (1966), On Photography (1977), Illness as a Metaphor (1978), and a series of scathing post 9/11 essays. Yet her two posthumously-published volumes of journals offer the most insight to just who Sontag was. Her old notebooks are rife with lists: of films she’d seen, the plotlines of novels she planned to write, of vocabulary she was learning (one list of words from her late teens included the queer slang of 1940s Berkeley, where she was studying), of books she wanted to read.
Before she turned twenty, Sontag wrote herself a manifesto within those same pages:
Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager.
…All while continuing to enumerate her desires:
Qualities that turn me on (someone I love must have at least two or three):
- Intelligence
- Beauty; elegance
- Douceur [“gentleness, sweetness”]
- Glamour; celebrity
- Strength
- Vitality; sexual enthusiasm; gaiety; charm
- Emotional expressiveness, tenderness, (verbal, physical), affectionateness
These journal entries, read by actor Patricia Clarkson (The Untouchables, The Green Mile), form the backbone of Regarding Susan Sontag. The meat of the documentary includes rarely-seen clips of Sontag at events and in interview, archival footage of the cities in which she resided, and creative sequences which aren’t typically used in biographical documentaries (in one particular scene, Sontag’s profile is formed from the texts concerning her illness; another depicts sand flowing over her photo as though it is within an hourglass and time is running out). Regarding Susan Sontag also resists linearity. Interviews and photos fall in and out of sequence to emphasize how the author often contradicted herself (for example, Sontag disavowed the notion that she was a pop culture aficionada in her later years despite her initial works being so rooted in the defense of the seemingly vapid) and how her present often hearkened to her past.
While it would be easy to create a sterilized portrait of the accomplished intellectual, Kates refrains from doing so. No subject is too delicate: Sontag’s ego, contradictions, futile attempts at becoming a successful novelist, inability to play nice with other feminists, and infamous glass closet are all touched upon during Regarding‘s 90 minutes.
I found the documentary’s interviews with the family members, partners, and scholars who were closest to Sontag especially enjoyable. Despite “Susan Sontag” and “Annie Leibovitz” frequently being uttered in the same breath, Leibovitz’s only appearances in Regarding are in the form of decade-old interview footage concerning her professional collaborations with Sontag. Surprisingly, her absence is not a glaring one.
Susan Sontag and Harriet Sohmers (Sohmers was rumored to be the inspiration for Jean Seberg’s character in Breathless/À bout de souffle)
In Regarding, Kates interviews Harriet Sohmers, the art model and writer who was Sontag’s first lover. In revisiting Sontag’s first time at a gay bar as an innocent teen and their first time having sex, Sohmers is anything but shy and brings much-needed levity and theatrics to the tale of a woman who was notoriously serious. Other lovers are featured, including postmodern dancer Lucinda Childs and Cuban-American playwright Irene Fornes (with whom Sohmers also had a relationship, thus solidifying the fact that no queer woman is ever truly exempt from the lesbian spit chain). Despite not coming out until several years before her death, two of her most pivotal works — AIDS and Its Metaphors and “Notes on ‘Camp'” — arguably came into fruition because she was immersed within queer community.
Sontag’s life could easily serve as prologue to Roxane Gay’s Bad Feminist. In Regarding, Sontag smugly revisits the time her stepfather warned her that she’d never find a husband if she kept reading feverishly (she kept on reading, married, had a child, and divorced–all before her mid-twenties), and author Sigrid Nunez recounts the time the that Sontag destroyed a long-standing tradition by joining the men for cigars after a dinner party rather than lingering with the women in a separate room. But despite referring to herself as a “militant feminist” and having no qualm with taking the likes of Norman Mailer to task, she also struggled to connect with other women, whom she often found less intellectual and more petty. There was also the issue of racism, one which Sontag spoke out against during the Vietnam War (“the white race is the cancer of human history”) while remaining oddly silent during America’s own domestic civil rights struggle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cci4kh4_J2s
As Kates mentioned in interview at the Sheffield Doc/Fest, you can count on “one hand” the number of documentary films about prominent American lesbians: Edie and Thea: A Very Long Engagement, A Litany For Survival: the Life and Work of Audre Lorde, No Secret Anymore: The Times of Del Martin & Phyllis Lyon, and a promising film on a playwright Lorraine Hansberry (writer of A Raisin In The Sun) which is still in its crowdfunding stage. It isn’t often that herstory makes it onto the big screen, let alone the small screen. Viewers of Regarding are in for a real treat.
Regarding Susan Sontag, a documentary by Nancy Kates, will premiere on HBO December 8 at 9 PM EST with additional air dates throughout the season.
Read a F*cking Book: Late Summer Reading For Queers and Feminists
In a recent essay on her bibliomania, Zadie Smith writes that summer is the most forgiving time of year for compulsive reading, as “the beach is one of the few places pathological readers can pass undetected among their civilian cousins.”
Regardless of the degree of your pathology, these brand-new and forthcoming books look both super exciting and also relevant to your interests. With essays, a cookbook, historical fiction, lesbian romance, memoir, gender studies and more in no particular order*, your to-read list is about to get even longer.
*Except for Bad Feminist. Bad Feminist is first for a reason.
Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay
In her first collection of essays, writer, academic and badass Roxane Gay addresses pop culture, politics, race, class, gender and more. I honestly could not be more excited for this book. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Erika Schickel writes:
“Gay’s subtext is that to be female in this age and not be a feminist is to be a victim of internalized misogyny. This is how they get us: we are made to believe empowerment just isn’t sexy; in a misogynistic culture, if we become unlikable, and hence, unfuckable, we have failed in our primary purpose as women. In essay after essay, Gay smartly dials in on all the moral concessions we have to make if we’re going to participate in said culture […] Gay’s collection bears witness to the frustration, sorrow, and outrage that any intelligent woman feels when looking to be entertained or understood by the patriarchy. We search for ourselves and each other in the margins of the culture, where women are accorded mostly supporting roles. Sometimes that means we have to take what we can get.”
The Paying Guests by Sarah Waters
The latest novel from the author of classic lesbian fiction like Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith is set in 1922 London and features such lesbian problems as falling in love with your married tenant and accidentally committing murder with her. According to a starred review in Publishers Weekly:
“Readers of Waters’s previous novels know that she brings historical eras to life with consummate skill, rendering authentic details into layered portraits of particular times and places. Waters’s restrained, beautiful depiction of lesbian love furnishes the story with emotional depth, as does the suspense that develops during the tautly written murder investigation and ensuing trial. When Frances and Lily confront their radically altered existence, the narrative culminates in a breathtaking denouement.”
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty
Smoke Gets In Your Eyes: And Other Lessons From The Crematory is part coming of age story, part history and part memento mori. In an interview in which she describes her memoir’s target audience as “people who will die,” Doughty says:
“I came in when I was 23, thinking ‘C’mon, you love death; you got this, girl.’ But the reality of the crematory and how the death industry actually works in America was a pretty harsh wake-up call. The idea is to take the reader with me as my perceptions of death change, which hopefully will make them look at death differently as well.”
Women In Clothes edited by Sheila Heti, Heidi Julavits and Leanne Shapton
This large edited collection examines women’s relationship with clothing through personal narratives, poems, survey answers and interviews by contributors like Molly Ringwald, Roxane Gay, Eileen Myles, Miranda July, Zadie Smith, Tavi Gevinson, Kalpona Akter, Ruth Riechl and tons of others. A Kirkus review notes:
“Some flaunt attention-getting fashion choices: wearing silver Doc Martens; coloring their hair bright blue; buying a ‘florescent and hooker-ish’ dress; altering a winter coat by trimming it with lace. One woman removes all tags and labels. ‘In some superstitious way,’ she writes, ‘I feel like this allows the clothes to become more fully themselves….’ Another uses clothes ‘as a way to cast a spell over myself, so that I might feel special.’ Poems, interviews, pieces that read like diary or journal entries — all these responses help the editors fulfill their aims: to liberate readers from the idea that women have to fit a certain image or ideal, to show the connection between dress and ‘habits of mind,’ and to offer readers ‘a new way of interpreting their outsides.'”
Sexual Futures, Queer Gestures, And Other Latina Longings by Juana María Rodríguez
Juana María Rodríguez uses radicalized queer female Latina subjects as a starting point for her discussion of gestures, embodiment and sexual pleasures and practices in the social arena. According to the publisher:
“Situating articulations of sexual subjectivity between the interpretive poles of law and performance, Rodríguez argues that forms of agency continually mediate among these various structures of legibility — the rigid confines of the law and the imaginative possibilities of the performative. She reads the strategies of Puerto Rican activists working toward self-determination alongside sexual performances on stage, in commercial pornography, in multi-media installations, on the dance floor, and in the bedroom. Rodríguez examines not only how projections of racialized sex erupt onto various discursive mediums but also how the confluence of racial and gendered anxieties seeps into the gestures and utterances of sexual acts, kinship structures, and activist practices.”
There Goes The Gayborhood? by Amin Ghaziani
Ghaziani examines the future of gay villages in an American society that has become increasingly queer friendly, and uses census data, polls, primary interviews and news reports to argue that a post-gay era is dawning. According to a Publishers Weekly review that calls the book “passionate and refreshing“:
“Ghaziani’s answers refuse easy scapegoats or facile conclusions, and suggest that the cultural evolution of gayborhoods need not entail their demise. He brings much needed nuance to heated debates about the role of gay neighborhoods in wider patterns of gentrification, and illustrates how the growth of tolerance is not evenly distributed across the country, making the need for ‘safe space’ especially urgent for some LGBT constituencies.”
My Drunk Kitchen: A Guide To Eating, Drinking, And Going With Your Gut by Hannah Hart
YouTube series My Drunk Kitchen’s Hannah Hart‘s first cookbook combines recipes and photography by Autostraddle photographer/A-Camp co-director/perfect human Robin Roemer with life advice, emotional baggage, drawing, cooking tips and more. A Kirkus review notes:
“Hart’s wacky sense of humor carries on in this collection of drink suggestions, which includes fun recipes, cooking tips, photos, quotes and life lessons. Whether the author is elaborating on the basics of kitchen improvisation and ‘filling your heart as well as your stomach,’ embracing the bumpy journey toward adulthood, or exploring the boundaries of love and sexuality, Hart remains entertaining.”
Adult Onset by Ann-Marie MacDonald
The first novel from noted Canadian author Ann-Marie MacDonald since her 2003 The Way the Crow Flies is about love, family darkness and motherhood. According to the publisher:
“As a child, Mary-Rose suffered from an illness, long since cured and ‘filed separately’ in her mind. But as her frustrations mount, she experiences a flare-up of forgotten symptoms which compel her to rethink her memories of her own childhood and her relationship with her parents. With her world threatening to unravel, the spectre of domestic violence raises its head with dangerous implications for her life and that of her own children.”
Taking Fire by Radclyffe
This lesbian romance features two women thrown together by circumstance and forced to cooperate by war and fate. There is also a lot of sex. In an interview with Jody Klaire, Radclyffe notes:
“The book is an action-romance much like Above All, Honor or Trauma Alert — although it is one of the rare books I set outside the US (in part). The story begins in the jungles of Somalia and ends in the jungle of Washington, DC J. There is danger, field surgery, the clash between war and humanitarian goals — and of course, passion.”
Susan Sontag: A Biography by Daniel Schreiber
Newly translated from German, this biography of noted public intellectual Susan Sontag draws on photography, interviews and correspondence to examine her life and cultural influence. In an excerpt from the volume at Flavorwire, Schreiber writes:
“1964 was the year Martin Luther King Jr. was awarded the Nobel Prize and Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. It was the year the peace movement and the New Left began to form; the year a pop group from Liverpool crossed the Atlantic and Beatles hysteria reached the United States; and the year when acts of rebellion, recreational drugs, Eastern religion, and sexual liberation broke out of their bohemian ghetto. Even middle-class kids suddenly began to read Allen Ginsberg, study Zen Buddhism, and smoke marijuana. It was the year Andy Warhol’s muse Edie Sedgwick moved to New York and Warhol himself moved into a new studio on 47th Street in midtown Manhattan, covered it completely with aluminum foil, and thus founded the legend of the Silver Factory. It was also the year Susan Sontag became famous.”
Personally, and in the deeper future, I’m also really excited for Texts From Jane Eyre and Pen & Ink and The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects Of Discussion and a ton of other books I can’t stop adding, deleting and re-adding to my Amazon cart.
What book(s) are you most dying to read right now?