Table of contents for December 2016 in OUT

THIS PAST SEPTEMBER, several decades after ushering in the über-’90s cocktail the cosmopolitan, the man credited with its popularity, Toby Cecchini, issued a belated mea culpa. In his new book, A Proper Drink: The Untold Story of How a Band of Bartenders Saved the Civilized Drinking World, he recalls how he’d stumbled upon a low-rent version of it in the gay bars of 1980s San Francisco and jazzed it up, switching out regular vodka for Absolut Citron, grenadine for cranberry juice, and Rose’s for fresh lime juice. “Years of bartenders saying: ‘You! You invented the cosmopolitan, you fuck!’ ” he writes. “And I’d be like, ‘I’m sorry, man.’ ” That’s a little harsh. Made properly, the cosmo isn’t a bad cocktail (New York’s Temple Bar still does one of the…

WITH A RECENT amendment overturning its law positioning homosexuality as an act “against the order of nature,” Latin America’s only officially English-speaking nation is now poised to initiate every stripe of traveler into its little realm of glittering waters and drenched rain forests. While international flights converge on Belize City, most vacationers make a beeline for San Pedro on Ambergris Caye, a thin spit of offshore sand that functions as a gateway to the second-largest barrier reef in the world. The scuba diving is superlative, but weekenders needing to fully unplug can board a puddle jumper for the real Belizean experience in the southern jungles of the Toledo district. Dense with impenetrable green forests and scarred with Mayan ruins, the region flaunts its Robinson Crusoe appeal like an antidote to…

“At that time, the pub was like a neglected old lady… Now it’s unrecognizable from four years ago. We’ve got two gay football teams, a straight ladies’ dance team, and we raise money for the local hospice and for gay homeless youth.” SUNDAY AFTERNOON at the Old Ship is descending glassy-eyed into evening. Granny dances an old-timey jig while flipping off drag queens. Her children, middle-aged and ruddy, and two grandchildren sit around a corner table throwing back pints, paying no mind. The drag queen on the mic cracks a joke about the dancing old woman’s impending death. She lurches back, staggers. “Oh, fuck off!” shouts the small, round octogenarian in a lacy, white sundress. She then slides her pink satin panties down to her ankles, bends over, flips her…

ELLEN DEGENERES Entertainer of the Year In a career that’s spanned more than 35 years, Ellen DeGeneres, 58, has almost always made daily life—and not people—the butt of her jokes, including on her popular 1990s sitcom, Ellen, which was canceled by ABC in 1998, roughly a year after she (and her onscreen counterpart) came out as gay. At the time, the media response reaffirmed DeGeneres’s comedic philosophy. “I was the punch line of lots of jokes,” she says. “I laughed at some, but I realized there’s somebody on the other side of them. It’s cruel. I’ve never liked mean comedy, but that became even more important to me after I was the brunt of it.” It took roughly three years of false starts, rejection, and status quo trepidation from station…

THE HOLIDAYS come at you fast: One moment you’re planning your Thanksgiving drinking schedule, the next you’re standing in line waiting to cash in all those Christmas gift cards (because nothing says intimacy like $25 worth of Starbucks). Then it’s New Year’s, and you’re facing another 12 months of empty promises and emptier calories. The key to successful resolutions? Getting a jump on them before the ball drops. Here, a few tips to make the most of your fitness resolutions. 1. DON’T DENY YOURSELF DURING THE HOLIDAYS—BUT LET’S NOT GET CRAY One of the great joys of the holidays is guilt-free eating. If you’re one for counting calories every day of the year, Thanksgiving is your Christmas. Even if you’re not a strict dieter, we all tend to let lose…

SLAVERY DID A NUMBER on African Americans. Its worst legacy is a vile pathology of misguided ethics. Slaves were beaten—we beat our kids. Just like massa’s livestock or dogs, slaves were prized, based on fecundity, strength, stamina, virility, and pedigree. All the boastful locker room banter, the whole toxic tyranny of hyper-masculinity, stems from slavery times. Its warped standards are even biblically based. They follow from Solomon’s many wives and concubines, from God decreeing “Go forth to be fruitful,” and from St. Paul’s invocation calling same-sex love an “abomination.” What does it matter that the world is overpopulated—that blacks no longer sharecrop, making a dozen children a good thing? This matrix of hyper-heterosexuality—sex, early and often with descendants in super-abundance—assures one is straight and proclaims a worthy being. Seen in…

“We are so lucky that in America we are judged by who we are, not by who we love,” says Michael Bosworth, who has served since 2014 as both deputy assistant and deputy counsel to the president. It’s a warm September day, and the first dogs, Bo and Sunny, are frolicking on the South Lawn of the White House as LGBT members of the Administration gather for their portraits. It’s a bittersweet moment. Having been at the forefront of many of the equality initiatives of the past eight years, they feel a sense of impending departure—theirs, and the Obamas. But there’s also a distinct note of pride in their accomplishments. “Every day I have the privilege of helping tell the story of the tremendous progress America made over the last…

1. Julieta: The Anti-Almodóvar The filmmaker’s latest is a surprising but welcome change of pace. If not for its hyper-rich color palette, soap-operatic score, and familiar meditation on memory, Julieta might leave audiences wondering if they’re watching a Pedro Almodóvar film at all. Even for a director who’s spent his recent years aggressively genre-hopping (from taboo body horror in The Skin I Live In to senseless farce in I’m So Excited!), this startling foray into virtually humorless drama is an intense departure. Still, longtime fans will devour the artistry and feminism at the forefront of Julieta, an unwavering study of maternal turmoil and the type of vast changes that can take a lifetime to accept. Adapted from short stories by Alice Munro, the movie is a lengthy, almost clinical examination…

MIDWAY THROUGH award-winning author Rabih Alameddine’s new novel-in-fragments, The Angel of History, his narrator Jacob compares AIDS to a river that drowned everything he knew, saying, “I thought I had triumphed, only to discover years later that the river’s persistence, its restlessness, trickled into tiny rivulets that reached every remote corner of my being.” Like Alameddine, Jacob is a writer, living in San Francisco but raised (in part) in Beirut, Lebanon. But there the similarities end. Jacob has been struck numb and dumb by surviving the first wave of the AIDS crisis, his poetry stoppered; Alameddine burst onto the literary scene with 1998’s searing, experimental novel Koolaids, which contrasted the hell of the Lebanese Civil War with the hell of the AIDS crisis. “There was nothing reasonable about those years,”…

“I wrote a proposal in 2008 or 2009, and nobody was interested. They were convinced that everybody knew the story of AIDS, that it had been told.” IN PERSON, DAVID FRANCE is mild and avuncular, sweet-faced, soft-spoken, and quick to chuckle. The only sign of his leftist politics is the pop of fuchsia pinned to his denim jacket—an old-school activist button that reads JUSTICE FOR MARSHA (a reference to Marsha “Pay It No Mind” Johnson, the trans activist who died in 1992, and one of the subjects of France’s next documentary, Sylvia & Marsha). It’s early fall and we’re discussing How to Survive a Plague—not the Academy Award–nominated film France made in 2012, but the book France always intended to write, which was just published by Knopf. “I wrote a…

EVERY YEAR the OUT100 begins life as a kernel of an idea sometime in spring and grows, day by day, week by week, into the epic portfolio that appears in this issue. But for Out’s photo director, Greg Garry, it’s also an epic journey, as he accompanies the photographer and his crew from one city to another, coordinating schedules, finding locations, making sure everyone gets fed and watered. It’s not easy, but it has its rewards, from hanging out with a queen on a humid New York subway to visiting the set of Ellen. Sometimes you even get to pal around with the president’s dogs.…