(LONG) BEFORE STONEWALL The Gay& Lesbian Review WORLDWIDE

November–December 2018 $5.95 USA and Canada

ANDREW HOLLERAN Oscar Wilde on Tour in America TOMÁS PROWER Between the Greeks and Stonewall GEORGE AITCH Bronze Age Buddies DALE BOYER MemoirsofaKinsey6+ VERNON ROSARIO Drag Kings in the Music Halls AUBREY GARCIA BADER III Soap Operas and Social Change

Holiday Reading Amy Bloom tells all on Eleanor Roosevelt and ‘Hick’ Felice Picano looks into Michelle Tea’s non-memoir Dennis Altman queries a ‘great person’ theorist Michael Schwartz visits David Sedaris and family

David Sedaris

The Gay & Lesbian Re view November–December 2018 • VOLUME XXV, NUMBER6 WORLDWIDE

The Gay & Lesbian Review ® WORLDWIDE CONTENTS PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118

Editor-in-Chief and Founder (Long) Before Stonewall RICHARD SCHNEIDER JR. ______FEATURES Literary Editor MARTHA E. STONE Bronze Age Buddies 12 G EORGE AITCH Poetry Editor Legendary pair-bonds show up in the world’s earliest literature DAVID BERGMAN Between the Greeks and Stonewall 15 T OMÁS PROWER Associate Editors ... LGBT folks seem to disappear, but a lot can happen in 2,500 years PAUL FALLON Oscar in Blackface 19 A NDREW HOLLERAN JEREMY FOX The lessons from Wilde’s American tour made it back to England CHRISTOPHER HENNESSY MICHAEL SCHWARTZ Drag Kings in the Music Halls 23 V ERNON ROSARIO Male impersonators from the Civil War to Contributing Writers Saturday Night Live ROSEMARY BOOTH Diary of a Kinsey 6+ 25 D ALE BOYER DANIEL A. BURR Samuel Steward was a human laboratory of same-sex exploration COLIN CARMAN ALFRED CORN Soap Operas and Social Change 27 AUBREY GARCIA BADEN III ALLEN ELLENZWEIG Since the ’70s, they’ve both reflected and shaped LGBT attitudes CHRIS FREEMAN PHILIP GAMBONE MATTHEW HAYS REVIEWS ANDREW HOLLERAN IRENE JAVORS Jenny Uglow — Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense 30 R OSEMARY BOOTH JOHN R. KILLACKY Robert W. Fieseler — Tinderbox 31 A NDREW HOLLERAN CASSANDRA LANGER Julia Van Haaften — Berenice Abbott: A Life in Photography 32 I RENE JAVO RS ANDREW LEAR David Sedaris — Calypso 34 M ICHAEL SCHWARTZ DAVID MASELLO ARTHA TONE FELICE PICANO Imani Perry — Looking for Lorraine 36 M E. S JAMES POLCHIN Blanche McCrary Boyd — Tomb of the Unknown Racist 37 S ARAH SARAI JEAN ROBERTA BRIEFS 38 VERNON ROSARIO Jonathan Flatley – Like Andy Warhol ; Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls 40 P HILIP GAMBONE HEATHER SEGGEL Andrew Reynolds — The Children of Harvey Milk 42 D ENNIS ALTMAN Contributing Artist Michelle Tea — Against Memoir: Complaints, Confessions & Criticism 43 F ELICE PICANO CHARLES HEFLING Patrick E. Horrigan — Pennsylvania Station 43 C HARLES GREEN Nicola Griffith — So Lucky 44 J EAN ROBERTA Advertising Manager John Larison — Whiskey When We’re Dry 45 T ERRI SCHLICHENMEYER STEPHEN HEMRICK Nick White — Sweet and Low 46 M ARTIN WILSON Webmaster Mark Jason Williams, writer; Andrew Block, director — The Other Day 49 A LLEN ELLENZWEIG BOSTON WEB GROUP Jason Moore, director — The Cher Show 50 J OHN R. K ILLACKY ______Board of Directors OEMS STEWART CLIFFORD (CHAIRMAN) P & DEPARTMENTS ART COHEN GUEST OPINION — This Is What Theocracy Looks Like 5 J. SETH ANDERSON EDUARDO FEBLES DONALD GORTON (CLERK) GUEST OPINION —PROSPER Act Could Devastate LGBT Students 7 TIMOTHY R. BUSSEY DIANE HAMER CORRESPONDENCE 8 TED HIGGINSON BTW 10 RICHARD SCHNEIDER JR. ROBERT HARDMAN POEM — “the tsar” 14 SEAN PATRICK MULROY DAV I D LAFONTAINE ART MEMO — In 1966, a Slutty Roman Emperor Did It All 18 CHAY LEMOINE ROBERT NICOSON ART MEMO — In the Footsteps of F. O. Matthiessen 22 SCOTT BANE RICHARD SCHNEIDER,JR.(PRESIDENT) MARTHA E. STONE POEM — “Michelangelo’s David” 38 JOHN TOLEDO THOMAS YOUNGREN (TREASURER) POEM – “after i drive my boyfriend home from his hernia surgery, he sleeps” 41 PATRICK KINDIG ARTIST’S PROFILE — Amy Bloom Tells of a First Lady’s Second Love 46 COLIN CARMAN WARREN GOLDFARB (SR. ADVISOR EMER.) CULTURAL CALENDAR 48

The Gay & Lesbian Review/WORLDWIDE® (formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscriptions: Call 844-752-7829. Rates: U.S.: $35.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $45.70(US). All other countries: $55.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” © 2018 by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved.

WEBSITE: www.GLReview.org • SUBSCRIPTIONS: 844-752-7829 • ADVERTISING: 617-421-0082 • SUBMISSIONS: [email protected] Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 3 FROM THE EDITOR Holiday Issue: (Long) Before Stonewall HIS ISSUE is “before Stonewell” in two senses: its epic of Gilgamesh, with which George Aitch begins his piece, theme is all about LGBT lives and times that predate the tells of an exceedingly close friendship between the title king T1969 riots; and it precedes a special 25th-anniversary and the wild man Enkidu, but even if we assume that the two issue of this magazine—in fact, a whole book—that will com- were Western-style boyfriends, it’s still not clear what this tells memorate the 50th anniversary of the riots. The coincidence of us about (homo)sexual relations in 2nd-millennium BCE Sumer. the two anniversaries reminds us that our first year, 1994, was Another survey piece (by Tomás Prower) drops in on several marked by a special Stonewall issue and other fanfare. historical episodes from the medieval West to ancient China to The parentheses in this issue’s rubric are a hedge, as “long” see if it’s possible to talk about LGBT history as having a unity is a relative term. One essay takes us all the way back to the or at least a common thread. Bronze Age, while another is set in the 20th century. Everyone Fast forward to Oscar Wilde, whose “love that dare not speak knows that the attempt to find LGBT themes in distant times its name” was a reference to Greek pederasty—which has never and places is frowned upon by those who insist that our notion stopped us from treating Wilde as the first gay activist. Andrew of “gay” or even “homosexual” is a recent invention. But I think Holleran explores Wilde’s American tour—a madcap clash of this is precisely the point of these essays: to consider what can cultures in so many ways—which inspired the zany quality of be said about the sex-and-gender systems of the past, even while his early plays. The late 19th century was the age of the music recognizing that different cultures have arrived at widely vary- hall, one feature of which was the presence of male imperson- ing systems of both sex and gender. It’s still possible to study, ators onstage, as Vernon Rosario documents here, a motif that say, the ancient Greeks or the Zhou Dynasty without assuming made it into the Vaudeville era and onto the silver screen (think that they shared our concept of gay identity. To the extent that Dietrich and Garbo). In the 20th century, we encounter Samuel they countenanced some form of same-sex sexual contact, we Steward (in Dale Boyer’s piece), who wrote gay novels under seem to have at least one thing in common. the name Phil Andros and carefully documented his many sex- To be sure, the farther back in time we travel, the greater the ual encounters. That brought him to the attention of Alfred Kin- indeterminacy. Thus the piece on the Bronze Age relies on an- sey, for whom Steward was an entrée into a vast gay subculture. cient texts from a material and symbolic world that’s really quite At that point, could Stonewall be far behind? lost to us, in which literature played a very different role. The RICHARD SCHNEIDER JR.

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4Th Gay & Lsban Rvw / oRLdide GUEST OPINION This Is What Theocracy Looks Like the country. Such a claim is dubious, but it does point to the J. SETH ANDERSON queerness of the city. Utah is home to a high number of LGBT HE ORIGINS of the state of Utah are rooted in queer- parents; the current mayor is the first lesbian to hold the office; ness. When Brigham Young led about half of the Mor- three of seven city councilmembers are LGBT; the city coun- Tmon Church membership across the Mexican border cil voted to rename a major thoroughfare Harvey Milk Boule- illegally in 1847, he and other church leaders brought with vard; the University of Utah employs renowned psychologist them a hatred of the United States government and a devotion Lisa Diamond and queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton; the to the practice of polygamy. In the Great Basin Desert, Young city hosts the Damn These Heels LGBT film festival every and the other self-proclaimed “peculiar people” at last found July; and the Utah Pride Parade is the second largest civic event refuge from the violence and suffering they had endured for in the state. The community suffers from infighting, big egos, seventeen years. Young nurtured the religious movement he and politics, but the struggle against a common enemy helps inherited (others say stole) from Joseph Smith into a theocratic unify the community. state that continued to fracture throughout the 19th and 20th Queer people in red states are agents of change. They are centuries into rival religious movements. Nevertheless, the in the trenches of the culture wars with the battle scars to Brighamite sect maintained power and authority and the ghost prove it. For decades, LGBT people in Utah fought to make of Brigham Young haunts the city to this day. visible what the conservative culture hoped to exterminate. Utah is a land of contradictions that both reinforce and ex- Utah has long been a place for “alternative lifestyles” where plode rigid binaries and expectations. These extremes are em- the resilient and creative thrive. To outsiders, Utah may look bodied in the physical landscape. The snow-capped Wasatch like a political wilderness; but it is a wilderness rich with pe- Mountains that erupt to the east of the metropolitan corridor culiar opportunities. give way to the arid, red rock deserts in the south with their ancient and breathtaking scenery. The beauty of the state is J. Seth Anderson is a doctoral student at Boston University. His an- mesmerizing. However, for a queer person living in Utah, life cestors joined the Mormon Church in the 1830s and settled in Utah. can be simultaneously suffocating and liberating. He and his husband, Dr. Michael Ferguson, were the first same-sex First, Utah is an unofficial theocracy insofar as members couple to be married in Utah, in 2013. of the church control every level of government. In fact, no legislation passes at the state level without the tacit approval of “the Brethren,” the top-ranking men in the Church hierarchy. The Church has a long history of theological abuse against LGBT people, and these religious beliefs extend into the pub- lic sphere. However, the Mormon Church is expert at public NEW FROMWISDOMM relations, and since 2009 has invested millions to appear less homophobic. But don’t be fooled by the PR; it is an illusion. New church policies continue to attack LGBT families and SEXUALITY children, and church leaders continue to fight any advancement IN CLASSICAL of LGBT equality. Mormons won’t burn a cross in your yard or SOUTH ASIAN throw a brick through your window, but they will use legal BUDDHISM methods to strip you of liberties and protections. By José I. On the other hand, Salt Lake City bursts with gayness. Cabezón $39.95 | eBook Some media outlets delight in declaring the city the “gayest” in $19.99 This magnum opus from one of America’s George Klawitter examines foremost scholars of Marvell’s poetry to unmask Buddhism reveals the poet’s own sexuality and his the treatment of sex, reflection of prevailing sexual gender, and sexual attitudes. This book will help orientation in the both new readers, as well as Indian and Tibetan established Marvellians, to un- traditions in this rich derstand cryptic sexual mean- and readable volume. ings in the verses explicated SSaave 20% with against recent work on homo- the code SSAB20 eroticism and autoeroticism.

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Johnson John Andrew Mitchell Warren Skallman Gene Woodling Frank Carson Jeffrey Freehof John Johnson Virginia R. Mollenkott, PhD Eric Slater Michael Worley Robert Lee Caruthers George H. Frye, Jr. Toby Johnson Alfred Monetta Jeff Slayton Gary Wright Jim Cassaro Michael Fuller John E. Johnson James Moore Charles Smires David Wypij Tom Caylor James Fuqua Wayne Johnson James Mueller Andy Smith Thomas Zanoni Roberto Ceriani Frank Gagliardi Kent Johnson PhD Kevin Murtagh Donald Smith Barigar Zimmerman John C. Chamberlin Michael Galligan Daniel Jones Frank Muscarella Dennis Sondker Floyd M. Zula GUEST OPINION PROSPER Act Could Devastate LGBT Students to repay their student loan debt, while others may simply forgo TIMOTHY R. BUSSEY college and/or graduate school altogether. Though this could HE PROSPER ACT—a bill that would drastically alter have an impact across the community, it statistically could cre- several areas of higher education law—could come up ate more issues for two demographics in particular—bisexual Tfor a vote in the House of Representatives in the very and transgender persons. near future. While it hasn’t been widely discussed amid the According to demographic data from the Williams Insti- chaos in Washington, it needs to be better understand so that its tute, bisexual people report lower levels of educational attain- potentially devastaing impact becomes more widely known. Let ment than their gay and lesbian peers. Further, the National me focus here on two key ways in which it could reduce af- Center for Transgender Equality’s “U.S. Trans Survey” reports fordable access to higher education for LGBT students. that more fifty percent of transgender people don’t have a col- First, it would discontinue interest-subsidized student loans lege degree. Clearly, there are already access, affordability, and from the federal government. Unlike most student loans, inter- degree attainment issues in specific parts of the LGBT com- est-subsidized loans are only available to students with signif- munity. If passed, this bill could simply widen those gaps. icant financial need. Under this loan program, the federal Fortunately, the PROSPER Act faces some hurdles to passage. government pays the interest on the loan while the borrower is Recent circumstances, such as the Democrats’ newly proposed in school. The purpose of this program is to ensure that stu- Aim Higher Act and Secretary Betsy DeVos’proposed regula- dents with financial hardships can still have access to higher tory overhaul for defrauded borrowers, are creating more de- education, which is growing in cost annually. The PROSPER Act bates about affordable access to higher education. Even so, the would eliminate these types of loans, and this could have a dra- impact that the PROSPER Act could have on college affordabil- matic impact on a number of borrowers. ity for queer and transgender students is certainly a conversa- Economic insecurity can create a number of access barriers tion that should continue. for LGBT students, especially transgender people and people of color. The Advocate recently noted that LGBT students report Timothy R. Bussey, PhD, is the assistant director for the Office of an average of $16,000 more student loan debt compared to their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Kenyon College. straight, cisgender peers. Roughly sixty percent of LGBT stu- dents regret taking out these loans, and over 25 percent report that they have an unmanageable amount of student debt (ac- cording to a recent survey from StudentLoanHero.com). Of course, not every LGBT student qualifies for a direct subsidized loan, but the PROSPER Act’s elimination of this pro- Fabulous Harvey Milk gram certainly won’t help to alleviate the financial issues that The Rise of the Beautiful His Lives and Death many queer and transgender students continue to face. Eccentric Lillian Faderman Second, it would eliminate existing income-based repay- madison moore ment plans and Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF). In addition to restructuring student loan programs, the PROSPER Act would also “simplify” repayment for borrowers by offering only two repayment plans. These proposed plans include a stan- dard ten-year plan and an income-based plan that’s significantly different. Although several income-based repayment plans are currently offered, the Act’s new plan would be far more costly to borrowers. Under this bill, income-based repayments would be set at fifteen percent of the borrower’s income, rather than a more flexible range, and the principal amount of the loan wouldn’t be forgiven after twenty or 25 years of on-time re- payments (as is currently the case). The PROSPER Act would also have a number of other effects “moore speaks with a range of “Astirringaccount....A people—dancing icons, fashion multifaceted portrait of a on affordability by eliminating these existing repayment op- designers, musicians—to chronicle complicated man.”—San Francisco tions. Specifically, Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF)— how fabulousness, as a queer Chronicle the George W. Bush era program that forgives federal student aesthetic, allows queer people not only to achieve greater visibility, but “Elegantly written and well- Tablet loans after ten years of repayments while employed in a qual- also to reclaim that flamboyance as researched.”— ified public service—would effectively end. While the Act a means of empowerment.” Jewish Lives Pacific Standard wouldn’t directly repeal PSLF, it would eliminate the repay- — ment plans that would make future borrowers eligible for it. As such, the PROSPER Act could create a difficult situation Yale university press for LGBT students. For instance, many may severely struggle www.YaleBooks.com

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 7 Correspondence with homosexual inclinations, sympathies, A Better Model for Proust’s Duchesse The ‘Gay Genocide’ Debate Continues and apparent tendencies. To this day it is To the Editor: To the Editor: unknown how many homosexuals were This is in regard to Andrew Holleran’s The article by Jack Nusan Porter in the sent to concentration camps, or how many review [in the July-Aug. 2018] of Caroline September-October issue argues that the were killed. The paper by Venema uses the Weber’s Proust’s Duchess: How Three Cel- Nazis’ campaign against gay people did range of 50,000 to 80,000 as the number ebrated Women Captured the Imagination not rise to the level of a “gay genocide.” that were exterminated—much larger than of Fin-de-Siècle Paris . I have no quarrel Another perspective is offered in a publi- the figure of “five to 15,000” that Porter with the review, but instead with the book cation titled The Gay Holocaust: The cites. itself, which argues that three prominent Dutch and German Experience , published That said, both numbers are probably salon hostesses went into the creation of by Urania Manuscripts in 1979. Although too low, because the extermination was so Proust’s Duchesse de Guermantes in In out of print, it is available at the U.S. efficient that there were few survivors. Search of Lost Time : I would like to re- Holocaust Memorial Museum Library. It Also, because Paragraph 175 continued mind your readers of a better model for the consists of three papers—by Reimar Lenz, after the war, surviving homosexuals were Duchesse. She is Elisabeth de Gramont, Rob Tielman, and Adriaan Venema— too afraid of persecution to come forward Duchesse de Clermont-Tonnerre, a writer, translated from the German and Dutch. and give more evidence. Accepting sculptor, and leftist political activist who These authors contend that there was a Porter’s number that 50,000 to 63,000 was also a close friend of Proust and is, in program to exterminate homosexuals, and were convicted on Paragraph 175, and fact, mentioned twice in the novel. that the number killed was higher than the documentation cited by Lenz that al- The portrait of Oriane de Guermantes is quoted by Porter. The book also docu- most all who were convicted died, we ar- without doubt based on her. By digging a ments how the infamous Paragraph 175 rive at a figure closer to the one cited by bit deeper—and despite an extensive bibli- was tightened and enforced to accomplish Venema. ography (which fails to include my biogra- this intent. The Lenz paper quotes testi- Furthermore, Porter’s assertion that phy Elisabeth de Gramont: Avante- mony from four eyewitnesses who re- gays in occupied countries were not gardiste, 2004)—Weber should have dis- ported that most of those who wore the rounded up is contradicted by Tielman, covered this flower of the old French aris- pink triangle were killed, and that the ef- whose evidence shows that there was a tocracy whom Proust references in fort to liquidate homosexuals was system- concerted effort to arrest every homosex- “Sodom and Gomorrah,” when Monsieur atic and thoroughgoing. ual that they could find. That the Nazis de Charlus, chatting with the young violin- The Lenz paper also documents that were unsuccessful does not negate a “gay ist Charles Morel about the variety of pears Hitler himself was the driving force be- genocide.” In all genocides, there are some called Doyenne du Comice, advises him: hind the extermination, as told to Rudolf survivors. “You really ought to read the ravishing Diels, his initial chief of the Gestapo. The Douglas C. Cable, MD, pages written about this pear by Duchess camps to which gays were sent included Huntington Beach, CA Émilie de Clermont-Tonnerre.” Charlus Natzweiler, Fuhlsbuettel, Neusustrum, and calls her Émilie, and Proust plays his cards Sonnenburg. In Moorlager 5 at Neusus- Nietzsche’s Closet and Schizophrenia close to his chest, but the reader knows trum, one third were homosexual. At To the Editor, that he means Elisabeth Lily. Auschwitz, youths accused of being ho- While the topic of Nietzsche’s homo- The duchess Elisabeth de Clermont-Ton- mosexual were murdered by injection. sexuality [Sept.-Oct. 2018] may be taboo nerre has a central place in any book de- Convictions under Paragraph 175 rose among conservative Nietzsche scholars, voted to Proust’s duchesses. To have left from 835 in 1933 to 24,450 in the three the subject of the relationship between his Lily out undermines Weber’s scholarly years from 1937 to 1939. Dr. Rudolf homosexuality and his psychosis would credibility and her claim to having uncov- Klare, a Nazi lawyer, called for a “com- probably be even more taboo. In the bril- ered the inspiration for the Duchesse de plete cleanup [and] extermination of ho- liant book Schizophrenia: The Bearded Guermantes. mosexuals” with the “utmost severity.” Lady Disease, Michael Mahoney claims, Francesco Rapazzini, Paris, France Included for extermination were those showing numerous examples, that many if

MY ROOMMATE AND I were forced by the Lou Sullivan Diaries (1970-1980) Phillips Exeter Academy in 1962 to un- and Theories of Sexual dergo psychiatric treatment to be cured Embodiment of our homosexuality, with the result that he committed suicide and I became Follow Lou Sullivan as he struggles with a schizophrenic. Another schizophrenic, his feelings of maleness, in his troubled the German theologian Paul Tillich, relationship with his lover, through his thought that I was the Second Coming many sexual escapades, and finally, as of Christ. he begins taking hormones. Rejecting this label, I told my first lover, Mark Frechette, that he was the Lanei Rodemeyer provides a critical real Christ. After Mark starred in Anto- analysis of gender, queer, and trans nioni’s film Zabriskie Point, he was cru- theory. cified in prison in 1975 at the age of 27. Available at: www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319630335 www.barnesandnoble.com

8Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe not most cases of schizophrenia are due to idity—which I would associate with discomfiture when I was in my twenties what he calls “bisexual confusion” in Freud’s “polymorphous perversity”— and a friend tossed “queen” at me with which the psychotic person is unable to “has increased greatly over the past few regularity. I was “out” but doing my best decide what his sexual orientation and years.” to minimize any feminine gestures and gender identification might be. This is Even if one ignores the historical and ways of speaking that reinforced gay fully consistent with Freud’s idea that re- anthropological evidence for sexual and stereotypes. Carey was as non-descript and pression is the most common etiology of gender fluidity through much of human “masculine” as I but used the term with psychosis, most often sexual repression history, the early gay liberation movement, glee. How I wish I could have been as and particularly repression of homosexual both in the U.S. and in Europe, drew on nonchalant and carefree as my friend desires. radical readings of Freud to make exactly Carey, embracing “queen” as a small act It is well known that Nietzsche never the points he is now advancing. He’s mak- of defiance, much as twenty-somethings had any sexual relations with women and ing an important argument; I just wish now embrace the word “queer.” that he sought the company of women for he’d done some historical reading before Rusty Wyrick, Ghivizzano, Italy intellectual stimulation only. He would he wrote his op-ed piece. have had to suppress his homosexual long- Dennis Altman, Clifton Hill, Australia Corrections ings to survive in conservative 19th-cen- In the July-August 2008 issue, in a review tury Germany. His mental breakdown in In Praise of ‘Queen’ of the TV miniseries The Assassination of 1889, following years of psychological in- To the editor, Gianni Versace (page 50), the caption for stability, may well be traceable to his unre- I am a dedicated reader of The Review. the still shot misidentified the actor and solved sexual longings combined with the but not always the fastest, so I am only his role in a scene with Gianni Versace extreme sexual repression of his age. now replying to an article in the July-Au- (played by Édgar Ramírez). It was actually Robert Dole, PhD, Chicoutimi, Québec gust 2017 issue, Jim Cory’s “What Makes Ricky Martin in the role of Antonio a Queen a Queen?” How delightful was D’Amico. Sexual Fluidity Not a New Idea this piece! Every clique has its lingo, and To the Editor: “queen” is one of those charged words that In the May-June 2018 issue, in the article Nicholas Adjami is right to attack the belongs to us. I appreciated the way Mr. titled “Michelangelo’s Gifts to Tommaso,” simplistic rhetoric of “born this way” [in Cory reviewed a bit of the expression’s the captions for Figures 5 and 6 were re- a Guest Opinion piece in the Sept.-Oct. history, its subversive overtones, and its versed (pages 14 and 15). Clearly “A 2018 issue]. But he is remarkably unaware appropriation by those not members of Bacchanal of Children” and “The Dream of the history of our movement when he our club. of Human Life” are different matters claims that public awareness of sexual flu- I am now 55 but remember clearly my altogether. New from UC Press

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Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 9 tioning,” with three percent “Asexual/Ace” (it’s the lingo). The fact that we’re talking about nineteen-year-olds undoubtedly ac- counts for some of the equivocation—fully fifteen percent were BTW questioning or bi/pansexual—and things may sort themselves out over time. (Can one still be “pansexual” in late middle age?) But it also points to a zeitgeist of today’s youth culture beyond About the Millennials Earlier this year, Yale College surveyed a willingness to experiment: a refusal to be labeled or pigeon- its freshman class about their private lives, including their sex- holed; a sense of solidarity with outsiders of all kinds; perhaps ual orientation, and the results are in. The media sound bites en- even a dissatisfaction with the status quo, who knows? thused that over twenty percent of the student body identified as LGBTQ. The actual number was 23 per- Free at Last In September, some 1.2 billion people were lib- cent, which is indeed a startling figure in erated from a notorious anti-gay law, but amid the circus in historical terms, but to say that they Washington the media scarcely blipped when India’s Supreme identified as LGBTQ isn’t quite accu- Court overturned Section 377 once and for all. The ruling rate. A better way to express our ended over 150 years of oppression under an anti-gay law in- Straight astonishment would be to report herited from the British Raj that criminalized same-sex rela- that only 76 percent identified as tions with stiff fines and prison. There’s no clever twist to this “Straight,” which certainly allows story, save the ultimate irony that 377 was a remnant of Victo- Bi/Pan more wiggle room for alternative rian England that survived into the 21st century, even though sexualities than studies of the past. the UK overturned this law decades ago. Adding salt to the ??? And it turns out this 23 percent is a irony is the fact that the India conquered by Britain in the 19th heterogeneous lot, as it were, separat- century was an eclectically tolerant subcontinent in matters of NA Gay/Les . ing into several blocs of similar size cor- sex and gender, with deities who could switch gender and Ace responding to the four options that were switch-hit sexually. It’s all part of a colonial pattern that histo- provided, which seem to cover a wide latitute (though without rian Frédéric Martel has noted in his travels around the world. a “gender” slot). So here’s the breakdown: good old “Gay/Les- Countries colonized by Europe often claim that homosexuality bian” held fast at five percent, while the largest group was is a “Western import.” In fact, what the West exported to its “Bi/Pansexual” at nine percent. Fully six percent were “Ques- colonies was not homosexuality but homophobia.

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10 Th! Gay & L!sban R!v!w / RLdide Bert ♥ Ernie Was there ever any doubt about the nature of Bert and Ernie’s relationship on Sesame Street? If so, it was pretty well dispelled when a former writer for the show, Mark Saltzman, dis- closed that the two are “a loving couple” based upon Saltzman’s own relationship with his partner Arnold Glassman. The Blo- gosphere went wild with the news, with bitter disappointment —Edward “Blanche” Norton outweighed by a giant “Well, duh.” Remarkably, PBS issued its former Southern Decadence Grand Marshal standard denial, insisting that B&E are “best friends” and that “puppets don’t have a sexual orientation.” Okay, so tell that to Miss Piggy and Kermit the Frog, that inter- species (indeed inter- class) item! More jokes would follow. Quipped Adam Burke on Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me: “So they don’t have a sexual orientation? Yeah, but they’ve got an apartment and jobs and a sponsorship deal with the alphabet.” On the other hand, remarked Faith Salie, if they were lovers, “Ernie would totally have helped Bert out with his eyebrows.” The simple fact is that Bert and Ernie never fit into any existing model of friendship, American style. Since when do “best friends” share a bedroom (albeit with twin beds) and hang out together at bath time? It’s not that PBS needs to get any more explicit about B&E’s gayness on the show, but the de- nials are starting to wear thin.

Don’t Ask! An entire terminal (D) at Berlin International Air- port was shut down for hours one day in August after some de- vices were spotted and deemed to be “suspicious content in a luggage piece.” Passengers were evacuated, flights grounded, and a bomb squad was called in. The owner of the luggage was summoned over the PA system and duly reported to the author- ities. Even then, matters were not cleared up immediately, as the embarrassed passenger would say only that his luggage con- tained “technical stuff.” In the end he fessed up: the items in question were in fact sex toys. The authorities were reassured, passengers were allowed back inside, and flights resumed. So, that explains the embarrassment. What’s harder to explain is why it took so long for the inspectors to be convinced that these were not grenades or the like. Presumably these guys have seen it all when it comes to recreational toys, so the question be- comes: what was this dude into, anyway? Founded in the summer of 1972 byafew friends as a modest celebration, the Southern Decadence Birth of a Meme One e-zine headline wisecracked: “‘EX-GAY’ festival has since growninto one of New Orleans’s CAMPS TELL KIDS THEY ‘HAVE A GOD-SHAPED HOLE.’” Others would follow suit, and the “God-shaped hole” was born. It all largest annual tourist events,attracting started when Stephen Colbert interviewed actor Troye Sivan visitorsfrom all over the world. about a new movie he’s starring in about “ex-gay” conversion therapy called Boy Erased. In preparing for the part, Troye ex- $36.00 hardcover, 97 b&w images plained, he read the “ex-gay” literature and talked to some sur- vivors of the program, who reported that at the camps you’re told: “No, this is not you, you weren’t born like this. This is a God-shaped hole you are trying to fill with these homosexual tendencies.” Taking this image at its most literal meaning, it suggests a deity that would have to assume a very particular Available in bookstores and online at shape to do its job. It’s one of those images that you just can’t www.lsupress.org get out of your head; hence the meme.

Nov!mb!r–d!c!mb!r 2018 11 ESSAY Bronze Age Buddies

GEORGE AITCH OR THOSE INTERESTED in tracing the origins an extraordinary piece of work that made news recently when of homosexual relations in history, or in the liter- a new tablet was found that added further details to the story. ary history of the West, it is customary to begin What’s interesting about this story for our purposes is that it de- with the ancient Athenians in Greece’s Golden picts a loving relationship between two men. Age. However, it is possible to go back quite a bit The epic tells of the deeds of Gilgamesh as he rules the peo- further in time, to the epoch in which writing itself ple of the city of Uruk. When his actions become oppressive Fbegan, to the Bronze Age, which can be dated from roughly and unpopular with the people, the gods send a wild man, 3300 to 1200 BCE. At least one great epic poem survives from Enkidu, to stop him. Matched in strength, the two men quickly the Bronze Age itself, Gilgamesh, while other sagas from that become close companions and seem to be enough company for era were not written down until later. Thus, for example, the each other as to exclude everyone else. This union inspires the Iliad and the Odyssey were transcribed during Greece’s Archaic jealousy of the goddess Ishtar, who demands and then brings period (8th century BCE) but descend from an oral tradition about the death of Enkidu. Gilgamesh is inconsolable upon concerning events of the late Bronze Age civilization of Myce- Enkidu’s death and holds a lavish funeral for him that stretches naean Greece. By the same token, the Hebrew scriptures were over a period of days. largely written during the Babylonian captivity but refer to events of the late Bronze Age. Rather than become mired in debates over vocabulary, I will use the term homosexuality to refer to any intimate relationship between two people of the same sex. Of course, past civilizations used different terms than we do and de- lineated gender and sexual roles in culturally specific ways. But there’s a wealth of information out there, and I don’t think we should exclude a priori the possibility that there’s a continuous thread connecting the past to the present. The emphasis on ancient Greece in past research has had the effect of shining a spotlight on the custom of pæderasty—both in Greece and in other civilizations. For this reason, I will not emphasize the topic of pæderasty in what follows. Instead, my focus will be on adult couples of the same sex who shared an unusually intimate relation- ship, with or without the suggestion of sexual union. To the extent possible, I’d like to use a modern definition of a ro- mantic relationship as one that involves both intimacy and sex, as well as the possibility of a long-term commitment. Pæderastic associations in Greece tended to be fairly brief. For the older partner, such a connection may have co-ex- isted with marriage, while the question of consent arises with respect to the younger partner. The arrangement was Achilles bandaging the arm of the wounded Patroclus. Attic cup more of a business or educational transaction than a ro- by the potter Sosias. Early 5th century BCE. Berlin Museum. mantic one, though there were elements of courtship and declarations of love. There is a wealth of evidence in the text to suggest that Gil- gamesh and Enkidu are lovers. We see them grappling together GILGAMESH &ENKIDU &ACHILLES &PATROCLUS in mock combat as they describe each other in erotic language We begin at the beginning, with the earliest literary work of and then hold hands. When Enkidu is on his deathbed, Gil- them all, the Epic of Gilgamesh , which was written down by gamesh describes him as his beloved. His mother had prophe- the Sumerians near the end of the second millennium BCE. It is sied to Gilgamesh, “You will love him as a wife,” and when tragedy strikes, he mourns Enkidu as though mourning a dead George Aitch is a doctor in London, England, who writes in his spare spouse. Finally, in the 12th tablet, Enkidu’s ghost returns from time. His work has appeared in on-line and print venues such as Litro, the underworld and makes a passing reference to sexual union Confluence,andThe Crazy Oik. between the two men, leaving the nature of their relationship

12 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe quite clear. Nor would this interpretation be at odds with the tra- male relationship does not specify a passive and active partner ditions of neighboring peoples in ancient Mesopotamian. For (as with Achilles and Patroclus or Zeus and Ganymede); nor example, the Assyrians believed that men having sex with men does it treat the union as a transaction or cultic act of worship. brought good fortune. Instead, it seems in its simplicity to be an intimate and loving re- Moving on to another founding epic and another famous lationship of two equals, one that looks not so far removed from couple, we encounter Patroclus and Achilles in the Iliad.As the contemporary pattern of romantic love between same-sex noted, Homer’s epic was finally committed to parchment in the couples. 8th century BCE, but it is set in the late Bronze Age and de- scribes a world, that of Mycenaean Greece, that was already an- EXCURSUS. Written records from ancient times can tell us some- cient by then. (Consequently, it is full of anachronisms.) Homer thing about heroes and kings, but archæological evidence can never explicitly states that Achilles and Pa- sometimes supply information about ordi- troclus were lovers, but this did not prevent The origins of homosexual nary people. One example would be a male many subsequent Greek writers and philoso- relations in the history of skeleton buried in female attire near Prague phers from assuming that such was the case. from around 900 to 500 BCE, suggesting a In the Symposium, Plato ends up arguing that literature go back to the transgender person who was offered a burial love between two males is the purest expres- epoch in which writing appropriate to their gender. Another extraor- sion of love. A similar spin is offered in plays itself began. dinary burial site is that of an Egyptian cou- by Aeschylus, Lycophron, and Aeschines. ple, Khnumhotep and Niankhkhnum, who This interpretation was reportedly espoused by Alexander the were servants to the royal house of the Fifth Dynasty (mid-3rd Great. Thus even if Homer wasn’t exactly spelling things out, millennium BCE). The two were buried together in a pose ex- many prominent Greeks of a later age read between the lines and pressing intimacy and are widely believed to be the first concluded that Achilles and Patroclus were more than just com- recorded gay couple. rades in arms. To stay with Egypt but move up the social hierarchy, Classical historians, even those who subscribe to this view, archæologists have unearthed quite a few gay figures associ- have not always been careful to point out that this relationship ated with the royal house of the Pharaoh. For example, Pepi II was not a pæderastic one. Neither warrior was a “boy” in the Neferkare was recorded as having a relationship with one of sense implied by this model. Indeed the men’s roles and ages are his generals. From this period we also see the production of art inverted, as Patroclus, presumably the passive partner, is de- depicting intimate relations between two males or two females. scribed as being somewhat older than Achilles. The very con- Turning to Egyptian law, we find scattered references to anal cept of pæderasty did not exist in the Homeric poets’ time, and sex with a man as the receiving partner in the Book of the Dead the term “erastes,” which refers to the older partner in such a re- and elsewhere, though it is not always clear if these are per- lationship, does not appear in Homer. (By the way, a similar missive or restrictive of homosexuality. type of martial male bonding is also implicit in the 4th century BCE “Sacred Band of Thebes,” which consisted of 150 pairs of ASIA,SOUTH AND EAST male lovers chosen because they were thought to be incapable The Hebrew scriptures also gave us Leviticus, to be sure, which of fleeing from a battle if defending their beloved.) contains a measure of homophobia that is largely absent from most non-Abrahamic belief systems. Many authorities on the THE MIDDLE EAST Dharmic faiths of South Asia note that gender and sexual varia- Bronze Age references to same-sex relationships are not re- tions are often mentioned in a positive light. Many Dharmic stricted to pagan cultures but can also be found in the Hebrew deities and figures are described as intersex or able to change scriptures, which, while apparently condemning homosexual- genders. The Vedas frequently allude to a third gender known as ity in a few early passages, also portrays such a relationship the Hijira (occupying a similar role to the Thai Kathoey), though later on. I have in mind the friendship between David and sometimes these references are negative. Elsewhere in the vast Jonathan as portrayed in the book of Samuel (18:1–3): “And it Vedas we do find proscriptions against same-sex relations for came to pass, when he had made an end of speaking unto Saul, males, though female relations are not similarly prohibited. The that the soul of Jonathan was knit with the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day, and would let him go no more home to his father’s house. In Search of Lost Lives Then Jonathan and David made a covenant, because he loved by Michael Goddart him as his own soul.” In short, David and Jonathan formed a Take a Proustian journey bond of uncommon closeness and affection after defeating the Philistines. back in time like no other. Eventually, Jonathan is killed, and when David hears of his “A veritable epic of reincarnation death, he laments: “I am distressed for thee, my brother literature. A fascinating spiritual Jonathan: very pleasant hast thou been unto me: thy love to me composition of one soul’s journey.” was wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Samuel 1:26). — Kirkus Reviews The homoerotic implications of these verses have been memo- Learn more at rialized by Renaissance sculptors Michelangelo and Donatello www.goddart.com (both of whom were gay). This biblical depiction of a male-

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 13 a relationship between two legendary lovers of the Zhou Dy- nasty who famously shared a peach together. Up until the West- the tsar ern cultural intrusion, many emperors had lovers of both genders, and homosexuality was regarded as a normal facet of Sometimes it is necessary to be lonely in order life. For example, during the Warring States period (circa 450– to be right. — Vladimir Putin 225 BCE), the histories record a relationship between the King of Wei and a feudal lord. The man who wears his face for interviews In Chinese mythology and religion, we often find refer- is not who presses fingers to your lips. ences to same-sex relations. Spirits frequently take partners of If, for a foreign journalist, he is the same gender. These partnerships aren’t characterized as un- a stag that’s locked his antlers with the west, orthodox and involve physical contact and deep affection. for you, he is a gentle buck that bends Some Buddhist schools condemned same-sex relations as mis- his neck towards a pool of water. Like conduct, though most Buddhist and Taoist schools were am- bivalent or failed to mention homosexuality at all. In fact, there all sovereigns, he is hard beneath a crown, is a long recorded tradition of monastic male relations that yet diamond-fine and glitteringly cold. could be interpreted as pæderastic. How differently he holds his scepter in That said, assessing the prevalence of homosexuality in an- between your teeth. How like a bodyguard, cient Chinese literature is difficult. Often the same pronouns in your hotel tonight. To watch him strip, were used to refer to both male and female characters, which escape the tyranny of god-like clothes— complicates things for obvious reasons. One of the less am- narcotic. How his shirt weeps open, belt biguous sources is called The Intrigues of Warring States, undone, and suddenly a man, as he which records an attractive young man being planted in a court unstraps the thunderous handgun from his thigh. to negatively influence the feudal lord who ruled there. In the How quickly the king vanishes, like Zeus Zhou period, a marriage-like arrangement between two men, who once transformed into a milky bird Pan Zhang and Wang Zhangxion, is discussed. to pour, like silk, between a woman’s legs. FROM EARLY GREECE TO LATE ROME His wet white feathers shiver in the dark. To return to ancient Greece—always a homecoming of sorts— You find them in the morning, shed like pearls. the very word “lesbian” derives from the island of Lesbos, which was home to the poet Sappho around 600 BCE. Sappho SEAN PATRICK MULROY was the leader of a group of unmarried women with and for whom she wrote her love poems. She is always included in the Kama Sutra devotes an entire chapter to homosexual union and Greek canon of lyric poets and is the only woman (though not practices and also contains routine descriptions and allusions to the only LGBT person) to make this list. Her community school gender-nonconforming individuals, and it is permissive toward was a “thiasoi,” suggesting the female equivalent of pæderasty. both anomalies. (There are reports of similar behavior taking place in Sparta in- Staying in India but shifting from the sacred to the secular, volving older and more youthful women.) we also find homosexuality referred to in various codes of law In Roman culture, we start to see state acceptance (as op- in ancient times. The Manusmriti, an influential Hindu legal posed to theological acceptance) of same-sex marriage. There text written in Sanskrit, offers instructions as to the rights and appears to be an arrangement similar to civil partnerships. duties of various social categories and includes references to a Adult male citizens were expected to marry a female citizen, third gender. Another ancient Indian text, the Arthasatra, lists though it was socially acceptable for a freeborn male to take a minor punishments for same-sex acts (consisting of the small- male lover, so long as he played the active role in sex. The est of possible fines and bathing instructions). passive partner was often an object of ridicule, as we see in By the way, if we go back to history’s earliest written codes taunting graffiti and in the epigrams of Horace. However, of law, we do not find prohibitions against same-sex interac- based on works such as the Satyricon and The Golden Ass,we tions. Hammurabi himself, the giver of the first such code, re- find that behind closed doors these social controls did not portedly had sex with men, as did a number of rulers of apply—so long as the participants didn’t bring shame to their Babylon over the centuries. In the Code of Hammurabi, there families. are references to “daughter-men,” a class that can be interpreted With all of these examples to draw from—and I realize this as lesbians or transgender people. The code mentions them in has been rather a whirlwind tour—I think the evidence is pil- order to allow their marriage to other women. This is a rare ref- ing up that homosexuality is not the product of contemporary erence to lesbianism—if indeed that is what it is—a lacuna that social constructs but instead has ancient roots. What’s more, is largely due to the low status of women in these highly patri- we need not restrict our search for these roots to a study of 5th- archal societies. century Athens, which practiced a particular form of same-sex In China and other parts of East Asia, there are references relationship that admittedly differs from our own. There are de- to homosexuality recorded among the oldest literature. The scriptions of relationships from even more ancient civilizations practice here is referred to variously as “the cut sleeve,” “the that suggest a closer affinity to the modern Western pattern than southern custom,” or “the leftover peach.” The latter refers to is often acknowledged.

14 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe ESSAY Between the Greeks and Stonewall

TOMÁS PROWER VERYONE KNOWS about the ancient Greeks estranged queen to seek out a renowned hermit to whom he and their celebration of same-sex love of a cer- could confess his sins. After hearing his damning confession, the tain kind. But positive representations of queer- hermit specifically told Richard to stay away from “the sin of ness in the popular imagination appear to sodomy,” at which point Richard immediately stopped seeing disappear with the Greeks, or possibly with the Philip and took back his wife (though the couple rarely saw each Romans, to be resumed only in 1969 with the other and never produced an heir, leaving Richard’s highly in- EStonewall Riots and the revolution they unleashed. But surely capable younger brother John of Robin Hood and Magna Carta something of interest must have happened in the intervening fame to succeed him and rule the kingdom). Nowadays, the gay- 2,000 years, not only in Western societies but elsewhere in the ness of this famous figure of English history is forever immor- world as well. talized in the Academy Award-winning film The Lion in Winter Within the Euro-centered world with which we are most fa- with a young Anthony Hopkins co-starring (with Peter O’Toole miliar, those two millennia have been dominated by a Christian and Katharine Hepburn) as the tortured closet case Richard. morality that frowned upon open expressions of same-sex love. QUEEN CHRISTINA OF SWEDEN is But for all the Church’s efforts, remembered today as one of the just such expressions continued most educated women of the to erupt, often in high and visi- 1600s. Intelligent, fickle, and ble places, over the centuries. moody, she openly flaunted her And when we move to queer fondness for other women much representation in non-Western to the displeasure of her royal societies both ancient and mod- court. Pope Alexander VIII even ern, we find that anti-gay values described Christina as “a queen and institutions are by no means without a realm, a Christian universal. The point I’d like to without faith, and a woman make is supported by numbers, without shame.” And yet, she is by the multiplication of cases one of the few women to be from around the world, so let me buried in the Vatican grotto. cast a wide net across these two Christina was well known millennia to illustrate that LGBT in her own time as a cross-dress- people can be found in the most ing lesbian who caused huge unlikely of times and places, scandals when she openly re- often struggling against prevail- jected the sexual role expected of ing social norms and pressures a queen, refusing to marry and to conform. voluntarily abdicating the throne at age 28 (she died at 62). While TO BEGIN somewhere in the mid- Richard I being anointed at his coronation in Westminster Abbey. still the reigning monarch, dle of this stretch of time, in me- From a 13th-century chronicle. (Is that Richard winking at the priest?) though, she loved to dress in dieval England, we home in on an icon of heroic manhood, masculine drag and interact incognito with her subjects at the King Richard the Lionheart. Long before he gained this epithet, raunchy inns and taverns where the action was. Richard was the intimate boyhood friend of Prince Philip II of Even in the throne room, she was openly irreverent, forcing France, and their special fondness for each other carried over foreign dignitaries to acknowledge her lesbian lover. Ulti- into adulthood. Their contemporaries mention how Richard and mately, her conversion to Catholicism and ardent unwilling- Philip ate together and shared the same bed regularly. Granted, ness to produce an heir led to pressure for her to step down in some historians claim that this bed-sharing was a political state- heavily Protestant Sweden. Even when her successor, Charles ment of the times, but what’s harder to contest is Richard’s in- X Gustav, offered to marry her so she could again be queen, famous confession and penitence. she just laughed at him, moved to Rome, and began wearing According to chroniclers of the time, Richard later left his her male drag more regularly. Like King Richard, Christina’s queerness is immortalized in the classic film Queen Christina, Tomás Prower is the author of Queer Magic: LGBT+ Spirituality and which starred, appropriately enough, the ambiguously lesbian Culture from Around the World (Llewellyn Publications, 2018). Swedish-American actress Greta Garbo in the title role.

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 15 THE MIDDLE EAST is not without its gay heroes. Islam’s most is often a passage used in modern Jewish weddings between popular and universally beloved poet, Rumi, also appears to heterosexual couples, causing many to point out that the love have been a member of the tribe. Rumi was a Sufi mystic, between Naomi and Ruth is truly a romantic love. dancer, and poet who lived in Persia in the 13th century. Said to be gifted as a child, he reported having visions and being able TRAVELING EAST TO CHINA, we can find numerous examples of to express knowledge beyond his years. Once established as gay emperors, but none more so than Emperor Ai of the Han something of a famous mystic, Rumi encountered the philoso- Dynasty, who ruled China during the 1st century BCE. He made pher Shams Tabrizi, who became his spiritual instructor and ro- no attempt to hide his sexual preference for men and carried out mantic lover. a long-lasting public romance with one of his minor officials, Shams Tabrizi had been raised exclusively by women, and Dong Xian. Their relationship was the basis for the still-used his profound wisdom was matched by his rugged good looks. Chinese euphemism for homosexuality as “the passion of the Rumi and Shams complemented one another perfectly, and as cut sleeve.” This originated from a legendary incident in which, their relationship grew, Rumi brought his lover to live with him while cuddling together in bed, the Emperor wanted to get up, at his academy and began writing some of Sufism and Islam’s but doing so would risk awakening his lover, who was fast most beautiful and romantic queer poetry. Popular topics in- asleep on top of one of his large, courtly sleeves. Rather than cluded: how Shams’ beauty allowed Rumi to see the Divine, lov- take that risk, Ai cut off his sleeve and slipped away. ing the Divine through loving Shams, and sex as a sacred act. Like other openly gay Han emperors before him, Ai showed But trouble arose when Rumi’s students became increas- undue favoritism to his beloved, promoting Dong Xian to ingly jealous of Shams, whom they harassed mercilessly, to the “Commander of the Armed Forces.” Unfortunately for his lover, point where Shams had to leave the academy for the sake of his though, Emperor Ai died suddenly and unexpectedly, leaving sanity. Their time apart became the impetus for Rumi’s world- Dong Xian as the socially despised top-ranking official in an renowned philosophical works into the nature of love. emperor-less court. Dong Xian was soon ousted and forced to commit suicide. STAYING IN THE MIDDLE EAST, the Hebrew Bible’s Book of Ruth still stands as an exemplary tale of female-female love. It tells OVER IN THE NEW WORLD, the Maya held the concept of queer- of a famine that devastates Israel, causing Naomi and her fam- ness in high esteem, assigning it a special deity known as Chin. ily to flee to nearby Moab, where her husband dies and her sons According to Mayan cosmology, Chin was a demon who de- marry two Moabite women, one of whom is veloped a special attraction to a fellow male Ruth. For all the Church’s demon. Note that a demon here is under- Years later, both of Naomi’s sons die, efforts, expressions of stood as a non-divine spiritual being, with- and in a gesture of sociopolitical compas- same-sex love continued out the connotation of “evil” that it has in sion, she tells her daughters-in-law to go Judeo-Christian culture. Instigated by Chin, ahead and return to their original families to erupt, often in high the two began fooling around and develop- and remarry so as not to be strapped with the and visible places, over ing ways in which people of the same sex life-long burden of taking care of their the centuries. could enjoy one another physically, thus in- mother-in-law without a man to support troducing homosexuality into the world. The them. (This was a society in which women could not own prop- Maya regarded homosexual sex as originating from a spiritual erty and could not survive on their own. They depended upon being and as something more magical and powerful than het- their husband or, if need be, their parents for economic survival, erosexual sex. It came to be associated with pomp and circum- so this was a highly altruistic gesture on Naomi’s part.) stance and, in turn, with wealth, elitism, and aristocratic luxury However, Ruth refuses to leave Naomi, agreeing to go wher- in Maya culture. ever she goes and help shoulder the burden of living as widows On crossing into U.S. territory, one tribe of Native American in a man’s world. Ruth’s self-sacrificing dedication to her peoples that we encounter are the Zuni, who furnish one of the mother-in-law eventually catches the eye of a man named Boaz, best-known examples of a “two spirit” person who combined and the two marry and have children, making Ruth the great- and transcended the two main genders. The most famous of grandmother of David, the giant slayer and king of Israel, as these individuals was We’wha, who was born a male and was at well as Joseph, the husband of the Virgin Mary and step-father first initiated into the male mysteries of the Zuni people, only to of Jesus Christ (proving again that everyone has at least one be initiated into the female mysteries later on, an acknowledg- queer relative in their family tree). ment of her latent feminine energy, which became more pro- While not overtly lesbian, the homoerotic aspect of Naomi nounced with age. and Ruth’s relationship has been noted and debated down to the We’wha’s charisma, networking skills, and connections with last semantic detail. By far the most memorable part of the tale the white colonists who were coming into the New Mexico Ter- is Ruth’s vehement refusal to leave Naomi and remarry. The ritory brought her into close friendship with ethnologist Matilda passage claims that, while her sister-in-law kissed Naomi good- Coxe Stevenson, who was studying the Zuni. Being the featured bye, Ruth “cleaved unto her.” In the original Hebrew, the word subject of Stevenson’s well-receive literary writings and re- utilized is “dabaq,” which was used in the preceding books in search, We’wha gained prestige among the educated elite of the Torah, where it meant uniting with a spouse and being ro- American society and was eventually hired to create Zuni reli- mantically or sexually drawn to someone. Moreover, Ruth’s gious pottery for the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. passionate declaration to stay by Naomi’s side, come what may, Moving in with Stevenson, she became something of an exotic

16 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe curiosity as well as a Zuni cultural ambassador. While in Washington, she circulated among and socialized Pennsylvania Station within the highest levels of U.S. government personnel. How- by Patrick E. Horrigan ever, during her rise to influence among the politically power- ful, no one knew that We’wha had been born a biological male Award-winning author (predating M. Butterfly and The Crying Game by over a hun- Horrigan delves deep dred years). Everyone, including President Cleveland, took her into the fractured psy- for a biological woman the whole time. ches of pre-Stonewall It wasn’t until years later that Stevenson found out about gay men with the story We’wha, making a special note of it in her diary, writing of how of Frederick Bailey and she would always regard We’wha as a woman and continue to his effort to save New treat her as such. We’wha, however, didn’t encounter such open- York's grand old Penn minded white people when she moved back to New Mexico, Station from demolition where she and some other high-profile Zuni leaders were ac- in 1962. cused of witchcraft and imprisoned. But when he meets Curt, TO END THIS QUICK TOUR on the continent where our species a vibrant, immature gay originated, Africa: in Nigerian mythology Erinle is a Yoruba activist, he is overtaken “Orisha”—a spirit in human form—who is dual-gendered, able by passions he hasn't to switch from male to female and back again. As a male, he is felt in many years, put- the god of healing and the earth, masculine and powerful, im- ting everything he cares posing and unyielding. As a female, she is the goddess of the about at risk. waters, swift-flowing and life-giving. Primarily depicted as a male, Erinle switches between the two genders as needed to “This gorgeously written novel, with its echoes of Henry James serve the people. and E.M. Forster, amazingly collapses the profound grief of According to legend, Erinle was a hunter who lived in the losing the past with the fear of gazing into a new future.” — Michael Bronski, author, A Queer History of the U.S. forest for half of the year and with his wife for the other half. To amuse himself while hunting alone in the woods, Erinle www.patrickehorrigan.com used to chant and sing to himself. Enchanted by his beautiful www.lethepressbooks.com voice, various villages spread his fame as a singer, until Ogún—the Orisha of weaponry and metalworking and also a famous percussionist—heard that someone equal to him in musical ability was wandering the woods. Their encounter was amicable: Ogún offered to teach Erinle the art of drumming in exchange for singing lessons. The two became close friends and could always be seen together, roaming the forest while singing and hunting. Many believe that this relationship had a romantic and sexual aspect Erinle’s wife Oshun is among those who suspect such a re- lationship, and this gives rise to another cycle of stories. Oshun is the Orisha of luxury, pleasure, sexuality, and beauty—a chal- lenge for any husband—and her relationship with Erinle is trou- bled. Oshun was originally attracted to Erinle’s seductive mix of masculinity and femininity, especially his firsthand ability to understand the needs of a woman. They eventually married and had many children together, but Oshun is (perhaps understand- ably) jealous that Erinle spends half of every year with his male “friend” Ogún. Eventually she has the marriage annulled and leaves Erinle with their children, disavowing all of them.

NEEDLESS TO SAY, we can only scratch the surface of all the rep- resentations of queerness that have existed in and influenced human history and the arts. What about the queer-curious Odin of Viking lore? What about the third-gender māhū of Hawai’i, who preserved the hula throughout centuries of missionary op- pression? What about the queer shamans of Siberia who exist beyond the binary of male and female? And the LGBT+ rites- of-passage among the aboriginal Australians and the samurai class of feudal Japan? Other tales for other days.

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 17 ART MEMO In 1966, a Slutty Roman Emperor Did It All

CHAY LEMOINE is legendarily well-endowed, so much so behavior and matures into a gay man who’s that when Varius marries his life partner Hi- intelligent and shrewd. Along with his HILE sorting a box of donated erocles, he’s concerned how the young handsome husband Hierocles, he struggles books for a prison class I was beauty will measure up. But for young Var- to control his destiny and his legacy. He Wteaching, I noticed that the cover ius, there are also other concerns: his need fights for his sexual, political, and emo- art on a decades-old book was the work of for excitement, love, and his devotion to tional life, and he will not accept less than famed fantasy and science fiction artist the Syrian god Elagabalus. As luck would victory. He ultimately does fail, but this Frank Frazetta. The cover featured nearly have it, sex is an essential aspect of each of failure has less to do with his sexual orien- naked muscular men in a variety of poses these needs. tation than with the political maneuverings that suggested—to my “homoerotic In the early parts of the novel, Varius is of his family and the general instability of mind”—homoerotism. The back cover gave seen as a spoiled, effeminate boy. He was the emperor’s position in 3rd-century a short synopsis of the novel. just fourteen years old when he became Rome. It is this transformation that is the Child of the Sun tells the story of the emperor through the machinations of his most appealing aspect of the book. Varius youth Varius Avitus Bassianus, destined to grandmother. Although his family, senators, becomes a hero out of Greco-Roman become emperor of the Roman empire. Var- and some Roman soldiers viewed his femi- mythology, flawed but with a greatness of ius spurned woman. His erotic longings led nine histrionics as offensive, Varius himself soul. The last pages of the novel are in- to a very different kind of love. Anyone he makes no apology for his antics. There’s a tensely and unapologetically romantic. fancied was quickly offered to him. And no mix of gay personalities in the novel, cre- Child of the Sun seems to have had a man, whether solder or citizen, dared to re- fairly large printing; used copies are plenti- fuse him. As his perverted passions grew ful at on-line used bookstores. How did this more and more bizarre, even the voluptuar- novel gain such wide distribution when it is ies of Rome recoiled in horror. I glanced at so obviously gay fiction? The probable rea- the copyright page and saw that the book son is that the book tapped into a popular was originally published in 1966. I decided trope of the ’60s: the decadence of the to read the novel and was prepared to be of- Roman world. Most non-gay readers would fended by the portrayal of the gay charac- have been oblivious to the book’s authenti- ters. What I found was a book that could cally erotic gay content and assume it was have been written today without apology. all part of the sick acceptance of that behav- Child of the Sun, by Kyle Onstott and ior in ancient Roman. The back cover of the Lance Horner, is a historical novel about the book describes the book’s lurid content in a boy emperor who has become known as tone of feigned disapproval. The book re- Elagabalus (203–222 CE). The authors took sembles the sensationalist pulp fiction of the what is historically known about the young time, which is what allowed it to be pub- emperor and used it to convey the varied lished, while offering an erotic thrill to sexual and emotional aspects of gay life. some readers that comes through loud and Much of what is purported to be historical clear. truth on the life of Elagabalus was written Unlike the self-loathing protagonists of by the historical pawns of subsequent reigns other gay novels of this era, Child of the or years after his death, so that rumor and Sun gives a feeling of normality to gay sex innuendo are accepted as truth. Still, the an- and love that even contemporary novels cient character assassination makes excel- often lack. The positive portrayal of same- lent fodder for a sensationalized novel of a sex behavior in Child of the Sun makes this gay boy emperor. a book that deserves to be remembered for The novel is at times campy, kinky, hu- its innovative stance. morous, brutal, romantic, and strongly sex- Heterosexual readers of the period may ual. It is a celebration of gay sex that ated with broad strokes but never overtly have recoiled in disgust, but I’m certain that embraces the possibilities of same-sex mar- offensive. There are effeminate slaves and many gay men and boys who discovered riage and monogamy—this at a time when bisexual slaves, soldiers and farm boys who this gay gem were thrilled by Varius’ defi- homosexuality could land you in jail. The are often sexual pawns to the gayly promis- ance of convention and his ability to take book’s appearance in 1966, three years be- cuous Varius. advantage of his position as emperor to en- fore Stonewall, is truly remarkable, not only When Hierocles, a young charioteer gage in an orgy of sexual and political ad- because of the explicitness of the gay sex slave, enters Varius’ life, the novel become ventures. The events depicted may not be but also because of its acceptance of long- a gay romance complete with country get- historically accurate, but there are elements term same-sex relationships. aways, lovers’ quarrels, and pledges of life- of authenticity that were enough to touch What the book lacks in intellectual depth long fidelity. They become co-Caesars with the hearts of many young gay men who had it makes up for in sexual and emotional in- Hierocles taking the dominant role as the dreams of love and fidelity even as they tensity. When every same-sex fantasy can husband. Hierocles’ masculine beauty coun- were unable to express their same-sex feel- be instantly converted into reality, the possi- ters Varius’ feminine appeal. What began as ings in all their manifestations. bilities for erotic invention become quite a master-slave relationship becomes an wide. Varius has all kinds of fantasies; and equal partnership. Chay Lemoine’s essays and short fiction size does matter. Zoticus, his first husband, Varius eventually grows out of his erratic have appeared in a variety of publications.

18 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe ESSAY Oscar in Blackface

ANDREW HOLLERAN HEN OSCAR WILDE graduated from of the interview. It was also a time when a flood of immigrants Oxford, he had no idea what he wanted was so threatening to the Anglo-American majority that “Paddy” to do in life; all he knew was that he (the stereotypically shiftless, drunken, violent Irishman) was wanted to be famous—“and if not fa- considered, along with the poor, illiterate, and formerly enslaved mous,” he said, “I’ll be notorious.” Negro, to be closer to the apes than to themselves. Even after winning the Newdigate Prize Wilde knew he was being used, but he was still not prepared Wfor poetry at Oxford and taking a First in Greats (the Greek and for the reception he got when he landed in New York. The leg- Roman classics), his application for a fellowship in classics and end that he told the customs agent upon disembarking, “I have archaeology was turned down. So he moved to London and tried nothing to declare but my genius,” may be apocryphal, but no to make a living as a critic, going to galleries, parties, being novelist could make up most of what really happened. The train amused and amusing. But everyone was still wondering: what car in which Wilde traveled from Omaha to the Pacific Coast— does he do? The play he’d written about Russian revolutionar- at 18 miles per hour—was hung with a white sheet on which ies, Vera, or the Nihilists, was so bad nobody would put it on, the name Oscar Wilde was painted in big black letters to let peo- so in effect he was unemployed. ple know that he was about to appear at the next stop. Some- Nevertheless, people began to see him as the leader of the times Wilde would get off to stretch his legs during stops, and Æsthetic Movement—which had actually been created a gen- sometimes the actor playing Bunthorne would stroll the plat- eration earlier by people like John Ruskin, William Morris form, making fun of Wilde. At that point, Patience, and the nu- Hunt, the pre-Raphaelites, and Walter Pater. None of them, how- merous minstrel shows satirizing Wilde, were pulling in much ever, wanted to be its leader. But Wilde had attended both bigger crowds than Wilde himself. At times Wilde’s box office Ruskin’s and Pater’s lectures at Oxford. He was, in a way, the was not enough to cover the wine tab he ran up to calm his bridge between the two—between Ruskin’s belief that art must nerves after giving a lecture. have moral content and Pater’s espousal of art for art’s sake. A The problem was that Wilde’s lecture was stiff and aca- slim volume of poems Wilde published after demic—the talk you might expect from a graduation, more Pater than Ruskin, had What Wilde, the Wild Man brilliant Oxford graduate. It took him some been roundly panned for its decadent tone. of Borneo, and the Ameri- time to discover that the aphorisms he spon- And when George du Maurier decided to can Negro apparently had taneously spouted during interviews with make fun of the Æsthetes with caricatures in the press were far more entertaining than Punch, it was Wilde he used as a model. So in common was that all anything in his formal lecture, so halfway by the time Gilbert and Sullivan wrote Pa- three were considered through his tour he dumped the academic tience, the operetta that satirized the Æs- primitive throwbacks. matter and began giving lectures called “The thetic Movement, Wilde was the inspiration House Beautiful” and “The Decorative Arts.” for a character named Bunthorne. And that’s why Oscar Wilde The irony is that the man the papers were sending up as a fraud- went to the United States in 1882. That was the year the impre- ulent fop was totally sincere: he believed that art could make sario Richard D’Oyly Carte decided that sending Wilde to the everyone’s life better. But the people to whom he was deliver- U.S. would drum up publicity for the American tour of Pa- ing his lecture wanted a freak show. At Harvard, he was mocked tience, and Wilde, having no other source of income or prospect by fifty or so undergraduates who came dressed as Bunthorne, of employment, agreed to go. carrying sunflowers—the symbol of the Æsthetic Movement— Thus begins Michele Mendelssohn’s astonishing demon- and striking poses. Wilde held his ground that night and was ap- stration that just when you thought you knew everything about plauded for it. But then the same thing happened at Yale and at the life of Oscar Wilde, there’s more. Making Oscar Wilde turns the University of Rochester, only in these cases the man lead- out to be not just about Wilde, however; it’s about the U.S. at a ing the parade of Bunthorne was black. time when when P. T. Barnum was drawing them in with ex- The curious process by which Oscar Wilde turned out to be hibits like “The Wild Man of Borneo,” minstrel shows were ex- African (in both minstrel shows and popular illustrations) is ceedingly popular, and Darwin’s idea that we are descended traced in 48 glossy plates that reproduce prints, caricatures, and from apes was on everyone’s mind. It was a time when people commercial advertisements inspired by Wilde’s visit. The first paid money to attend lectures, producers were becoming skilled one is a Currier & Ives print called The Aesthetic Craze that in the art of publicity, and the press was discovering the power turns Wilde into a scrawny young black man in knee-breeches carrying a large sunflower while two African-American women Andrew Holleran’s fiction includes Dancer from the Dance, Grief, and look at him amorously above the caption: “What’s de mattah The Beauty of Men. wid de Nigga? Why Oscar you’s gone wild!” The Washington

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 19 Post published a full-page illustration bear- giving an interview, Wilde’s black valet ing two images—one, a simian-looking Making Oscar Wilde would lay his cloak out on a divan; and Wild Man of Borneo, the other, Oscar hold- by Michèle Mendelssohn then Oscar would enter in knee breeches ing a sunflower—and the question: “How Oxford. 360 pages, $24.95 and velvet coat and arrange himself in a far is it from this to this?” The Post con- languorous position, looking for all the sidered Wilde one of the “great social evils.” and predicted, with world like Sarah Bernhardt (or Lili von Shtupp in Blazing Sad- astonishing vitriol, that “All true Englishmen will be glad if we dles). All of this, Mendelssohn says, was laying the groundwork can terrify him back to Britain, so that they may kill him.” for his career in the theater. It was his tour of America that con- What Wilde, the Wild Man of Borneo, and the American firmed Wilde in his belief that everyone is playing a part, that Negro apparently had in common was that all three were con- we are all posing, and that only when masked do we reveal our sidered primitive throwbacks by a culture fascinated by Darwin true selves. and the notion that human beings are descended from apes. Bar- One of the most popular features of the minstrel show, for num had an exhibit called What Is It? in which a man of inde- instance, came at the halfway point, when a man called the In- terminate race challenged onlookers to place him on the terlocutor would sit down center stage with two men in black- evolutionary spectrum. The same question was asked of Wilde. face (most likely Irish-American actors) on his left and And when not being portrayed as either a Negro or an aborigi- right—Tambo and Bones—and ask the faux-Negroes questions nal, Wilde was attacked for being a fake Englishman. True, he’d that provided a feast of one-liners, jokes, and overall demon- gone to Oxford and spoke with a posh accent and was stration of wit. According to Mendelssohn, Wilde used this Protestant—but, a visiting British editor huffed, moment in the plays he wrote when he returned to he was Irish. And one thing was clear: there England. It’s a not unpersuasive argument. was nothing lower in the eyes of Anglos So much of Wilde’s writing consists of on both sides of the Atlantic than that. colloquies in which a “straight man” Oscar was constantly learning, (or woman) sets up the character however, and by the time he got (e.g., Lady Bracknell), who pro- to San Francisco, he was playing duces the witty aphorism. the Irish card. In the eastern Wilde, Mendelssohn suggests, cities the Irish might be living took the blackface tradition in slums; but in San Fran- of the Interlocutor and cisco they were rich, promi- turned it on the hypocrisies nent, and thrilled by Wilde’s of Victorian society. It was support for Irish independ- the Christy Minstrels that ence from England. He was critics recognized in the hit shrewd enough as well to plays he wrote when he got combine criticism of Amer- home—plays that revived ica with compliments. He an English theater that had made a point to praise Ameri- been essentially moribund, can women, and told reporters said one critic, since the days south of the Mason-Dixon line of Richard Brinsley Sheridan. that Southerners had far better The questions reporters asked manners than their northern counter- when Wilde arrived in New York ran parts. In New Orleans Wilde even found the gamut from “What are aesthetics?” an uncle who had immigrated to Louisiana to “Do you like eggs fried on both sides or and become a wealthy slave-holder—a pillar of only on one side?” and “Do you trim your fin- New Orleans society. And, to complicate things, Wilde ger-nails in the style of the Empress of Japan?” In The not only identified with the Southern aristocracy but said the Importance of Being Earnest, when Lady Bracknell interviews person he most wanted to meet, and took a train to see, was Jef- Jack Worthing as a prospective son-in-law, she investigates ferson Davis. Davis did not care about Wilde, though Walt more practical matters: “What are your politics?,” “What is your Whitman responded so warmly to Oscar's admiration the day income?,” and “Are your parents living?” But Jack’s answers Wilde visited that years later Oscar told a friend: “The kiss of are only a setup for Lady Bracknell’s immortal put-downs. The Walt Whitman is still on my lips.” tragedy of Oscar Wilde is multifaceted but one of the most tan- What the press was most interested in, however, was what talizing losses is not knowing what he might have written after Wilde thought of the United States. Like Frances Trollope and making the quantum leap from the conventional drawing room Charles Dickens before him, Oscar was asked to rate the colo- drama of A Woman of No Importance and An Ideal Husband to nials. He did not mince words. He accused the press of making the sublime nonsense of Lady Bracknell’s riposte: “To lose one up what it wanted to, claimed American men were philistine parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose workaholics who left all cultural matters to their wives, and said both looks like carelessness.” that nobody in England would have been treated as he had been But as we know, there was another tragedy. After Wilde re- on his tour of the States. And the more he did this, the more he turned from the USA, more famous than he’d ever been before, found his voice—critical, sharp, aphoristic, amusing. Before with money in his pocket, a firm grasp of publicity, and a voice

20 Th Gay & Lsban Rvw / oRLdide in which to write, he edited a women’s magazine and toured England with a lecture called Impressions of America and then wrote Lady Windemere’s Fan. Hit followed hit. Henry James, who called on Wilde at his hotel when they were both in Wash- ington (since James’ hostess Clover Adams refused to have Wilde in her house), considered Wilde “a fatuous cad, an un- clean beast.” But Wilde had a kind of success that eluded James. In another of those moments that one could not make up, James was in the audience of An Ideal Husband the night his own play, Guy Domville, was premiering nearby; and when James went down the street and took the call for “Author! Author!” he was booed off stage. And the play that replaced James’ flop was The Importance of Being Earnest. But then came Lord Alfred Douglas, the Marquis of Queens- bury, the trial, and a downfall that even James called “hideously tragic.” At one point in Making Oscar Wilde, our hero is left standing on the train platform at Clapham Junction in prison A REVOLUTIONARY EDUCATION garb and chains, being laughed at by the very public that had by Roy Luna made him famous. No wonder the story of Oscar has been dram- C’est la faute à Voltaire! atized so many times. Stephen Fry opened his 1997 movie Wilde A young man’s love for Voltaire and knowledge of his with a scene from the American tour: Oscar descending into the philosophy enable him to think for himself and evade mine in Leadville, Colorado, entrancing the muscular miners the sexual advances of the aristocrats. Zénobe must then with a lecture on Cellini. But there’s so much more in survive the dangers of a voyage to Russia as protector- Mendelssohn’s account of his trip to America. It’s odd to say librarian of the philosopher’s books, only to fall under this of a book from Oxford University Press, but someone could the dominion of Catherine the Great. He soon learns how to teach others the art of rebellion. make a movie out of Making Oscar Wilde. Reading the book, however, one finds oneself still wonder- Vol. 1: Lord of Reason (soft: ISBN# 978-0-9967031-0-9) Vol. 2: Zénobe Bosquet (soft: ISBN# 978-0-9967031-3-0) ing: Just what was it about Wilde that was so threatening to www.amazon.com | www.barnesandnoble.com | www.solutionholepress.com people? One might start with the disorienting combination of Wilde’s six-foot-four, massive frame and that soft, Pre- Raphaelite face. There was, one learns in Mendelssohn, an el- Those Close Beside Me ement of sexual jealousy in all of this: the Æsthetic dandy was thought to be more appealing to women than the masculine Bruce P. Spang man. Then there was Wilde’s telling people how they should The country is divided. live, and his audience’s resistance to the gospel of art. About the The president is reviled latter, of course, Wilde was right: the U.S. is still a country that by some, adored by will spend billions on a new bomber but refuse to support a others. Protesters and ballet dancer or even its national parks. And American men are minorities march in the still, as Wilde observed, workaholics who care mostly about streets to demand their business and leave culture to the women. And the arts, when rights to be heard. The not entertainment, are still suspect. Whether it was his androg- government increases yny, his sensuality, his snobbery, or his espousal of the gospel its crackdown on the of art, it is hard to know; but something led people to find opposition. The nation wavers on the brink of Wilde extremely threatening. disaster. But it’s not Mendelssohn concludes with a predictable claim that 1882 2018. “was a time that resembles our own in many ways,” when the U.S. “grappled with massive waves of immigration, national- It’s 1968, and for Jason, ist movements, racial and ethnic conflicts, political upheavals, a young man with a new media technologies, and a sensation-hungry press.” But in secret, the nation’s this case the pro forma observation seems quite valid. The internal strife mirrors h racial stew in the U.S. continues to bubble. Hence it’s not sur- is own struggle to find prising that Mendelssohn has essentially used Oscar Wilde to himself. A Midwesterner, he leaves his suburban home to attend Vanderbilt Divinity write a book about racial and ethnic tensions. But the irony is School in Nashville, TN where he meets a man who chal- that what the playwright learned on his American tour had lit- lenges his view of America, and he discovers a truth about tle to do with race. Wilde, who was in many ways a tremen- himself that changes his life forever. dous snob, neither sympathized as an Anglo-Irishman with American Negroes, nor seemed to be interested in the subject Available at of racial categories at all. His mind, his gift, his ambitions, lay www.amazon.com further afield.

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 21 ART MEMO In the Footsteps of F. O. Matthiessen

SCOTT BANE years by the time I was born, but history had had been Matthiessen’s office; his old-fash- been hiding in my own backyard. After ioned oak desk keeps watch on the Eliot F AT SOME POINT during your formal learning about Matthiessen and Cheney, I House courtyard. The room now houses education you read Moby Dick, The embarked on a “Grand Tour” of libraries and Matthiessen’s collection of English and IHouse of Seven Gables, Walden,orany archives to research the story of their life to- American literature. There are complete sets other 19th-century American literary classic, gether and love for one another. of the works of Emerson, Thoreau, you indirectly felt the influence of Harvard The first stop was the Beinecke Library Hawthorne, and Henry James—all the writ- scholar F. O. Matthiessen (1902-1950). It at Yale, which houses Matthiessen and ers whose work Matthiessen wrote about so was his book American Renaissance: Art Cheney’s 3,000 letters. The reading room at perceptively and sensitively. His two li- and Expression in the Age of Emerson and the Beinecke is a mid-century modernist braries encapsulate Matthiessen’s divided Whitman (1941) that defined the canon of dream—serene, quiet, and cool. It was a soul—gay books at Kittery, professional American literary classics. The book was so privilege to spend a week there. Rat and the books at Harvard. On the walls are framed influential that it helped launch American Devil, a selection of Matthiessen and documents and photographs, including Studies as a discipline, one that integrates Cheney’s correspondence, had been pub- Matthiessen’s seconding speech for Henry fields such as literature, history, film, anthro- lished in 1978, but now I got to read every- Wallace and letters from T. S. Eliot and Wal- pology, and sociology, among others. thing. When the first box arrived, I lace Stevens, among others. Several of Ch- Matthiessen also wrote influential books practically shook as I removed the cover. I eney’s paintings hang on the walls, about Sarah Orne Jewett (a distant relative on sat and read for hours and hours. From their including: Nubble Light, which features the his mother’s side), T. S. Eliot, Henry James, lighthouse in my hometown; Down East,a and Theodore Dreiser. He wrote the kind of landscape of a New England fishing village; cultural history that electrified me as an un- and what to my mind is Cheney’s best por- dergraduate, affirming that every work of art, trait of Matthiessen, done in Florence in literary or otherwise, stood on its own artistic 1926, two years after they had fallen in love. merits—but also could open a window onto I don’t really believe in ghosts, but this the historical moment of its creation. room in Eliot House tested that belief. Matthiessen was no lonely scholar, clois- Matthiessen’s books, Cheney’s paintings, the tered away in his study. Inspired by his framed letters, and the photographs all deep- mother’s Unitarian faith, he fought for social ened and solidified my sense of the two men. justice from the earliest days of his career at As with reading their correspondence in the Harvard, when he rallied influential profes- original, visiting the couple’s home in Kittery, sors and university publications in support of and seeing exhibitions of Cheney’s paintings, the owner of the Dunster House Bookshop in I could sense their presence at Harvard. Cambridge, which had been entrapped by the The final stop was Springfield, Massachu- Watch & Ward, a censorship organization, setts, to visit Matthiessen’s grave, which hap- into selling a copy of the banned book Lady pened on a cold, clear November day. From Chatterley’s Lover. Many years later, when the local bus station I set off on foot to the the U.S. attorney general published lists of F. O. Matthiessen (right) and Russell Cheney, Springfield Cemetery, where Matthiessen is nearly eighty organizations it deemed “sub- Normandy, Summer 1925 buried next to his mother. His body had been versive,” Matthiessen, a self-proclaimed so- correspondence an even clearer picture returned to the Orne-Pratt family plot after he cialist, had supported nearly ten of them. His emerged of their relationship. I was capti- took his own life on April 1, 1950, by jump- political activism reached a pinnacle when vated by the emotional connection between ing from a twelfth-story window of the he gave a seconding speech for the nomina- the two men. Moreover, I recognized all the Manger Hotel in Boston. In the years leading tion of 1948 Progressive Party presidential local landmarks and businesses from child- up to his suicide, he had been hounded in the candidate Henry Wallace. hood that served as a backdrop to their lives. press as a communist sympathizer, but What was not publicly known during A year later, as part of a one-day confer- Cheney’s death five years earlier had cast a Matthiessen’s lifetime was that he was a gay ence in Maine devoted to Cheney’s painting, shadow of depression over his life from man, involved in a relationship that looked a I had an opportunity to take a tour of the which he never recovered. Matthiessen’s lot like a marriage—in everything but name couple’s house in Kittery. The current own- grave is pleasantly situated underneath a tree and legal rights—with the American Impres- ers left the house largely untouched since at the top of a hill overlooking the grounds. I sionist painter Russell Cheney (1881–1945). their deaths. Cheney’s paintings still hung on left a pen on his grave to say thank you. Twenty years older than Matthiessen, the walls. The two men’s books lined the In 1994, a novel based on Matthiessen’s Cheney was best known during the 1920s; shelves. All the proto-gay books that existed life titled American Studies, by the late Mark his work is still held by the Smithsonian, the at the time were there: Love’s Coming of Merlis, was published to considerable ac- Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, the Age, Towards Democracy, The Intermediate claim. In 2012, an endowed chair for LGBT New Mexico Museum of Art, and the univer- Sex, and An Unknown People, by Edward studies was established at Harvard by the sity collections of Harvard, Yale, and Wes- Carpenter; Walt Whitman and Studies of Harvard Gender & Sexuality Caucus, the F. leyan. Matthiessen and Cheney met in 1924 Greek Poets, by John Addington Symonds; O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of aboard the ocean liner Paris while crossing Walter Pater’s Greek Studies; Havelock Gender and Sexuality. the Atlantic. From 1930 until Cheney’s death Ellis’ Studies in the Psychology of Sex;and in 1945, the two men made their home to- Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. Scott Bane’s journalism has appeared in gether in Kittery, Maine, very close to where The next stop was the F. O. Matthiessen Huffington Post, Santa Fe New Mexican, I grew up. Both men had been dead for many Room at Harvard’s Eliot House. The room and Poets & Writers. He lives in New York.

22 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe ESSAY Drag Kings in the Music Halls

VERNON ROSARIO ELISSA MCCARTHY’S Saturday woman, which in itself was daring for the 19th century. While Night Live impression of Sean Spicer this may not be a history of lesbian actresses or drag kings, it is (the Trump administration’s first press a fascinating analysis of gender performance. secretary) was sidesplittingly funny not Breech or trouser roles (women playing male parts) were only because of her incomparable phys- common in late 17th-century English theater. Rodger points out ical comedy, but also thanks to male im- that before the English Civil War, some women tackled male Mpersonation as a phenomenon. Kate McKinnon’s equally roles (like Hamlet) in order to expand their repertoire beyond hilarious SNL impression of Jeff Sessions exploits cross-gen- that of pretty, respectable women or great classic female roles der casting to lampoon the effeminate creepiness of the Attor- like Lady Macbeth. Eighteenth-century operas increasingly in- ney General. Male-to-female cross dressing has a long cluded trouser roles for high vocal parts if castrati were not tradition in comedy, but its inverse is a welcome addition to the available. Rodger mainly explores a more challenging histori- SNL comic armamentarium, particularly during the current cal subject than these high culture performances, since popular hyper-macho Trump administration. theater was less scripted and less documented in reviews than The history of males performing female parts has been well the opera or dramatic theater. documented, perhaps most famously in Elizabethan theater of Woven into this history of cross-dressing performance is an Shakespeare’s time. Similarly, in Japanese theater the disrepute equally complex history of popular theater, including music hall, of female actresses led to the enduring tradition of the onnagata, variety shows, burlesque, minstrelsy, and vaudeville. Many which has also been well documented. Since the 1990s, drag vaudeville performers of the early 20th century transitioned from kings have attracted much cultural and critical attention as part stage and radio to television, including the Marx Brothers, Burns of a broader efflorescence of queer and trans culture. Much less and Allen, and Jack Benny. Mid-century television variety shows scholarly attention has been paid to the history of female-to-male were a staple of American culture (for example, Ed Sullivan, performance aside from some icons like Dinah Shore, Lawrence Welk, Frank Sinatra, Sarah Bernhardt and Marlene Dietrich. Con- The first male imperson- and later Carol Burnett, Judy Garland, and sequently, Gillian Rodger’s Just One of the ators began appearing Sonny & Cher). Spanish-language Sábado Boys is a welcome and fascinating addition Gigante was popular for half a century, and to the history of cross-dressed performance on the American variety I grew up watching Sábado Sensational in and 19th-century Anglo-American theater stage after the Civil War. Venezuela, which is still running, even if the more generally. country isn’t. Consequently, SNL, with its Rodger is a professor of musicology and ethnomusicology live mix of musical acts, stand-up comedy, and sketch comedy, at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee who specializes in has a venerable history. American variety and vaudeville theater. Thanks to meticulous Of course, there were no videos to document variety stage research from dozens of archives, newspapers, and the trade productions, and while popular lyrics and music may have been press, Rodger brings to life the careers and lives of scores of published, many variety acts involved improvised humor and English and American women actresses and dancers who per- banter with the audience. Press clippings and publicity materi- formed briefly or for extended periods dressed as men from the als give us just snippets of the actual performed material, and we 1860s until the turn of the 20th century. have to trust the reviewer’s accuracy or the theater agent’s The author is up-front about the fact that she had hoped to puffery. Rodger includes several dozen publicity photos of 19th- document a genealogy for contemporary drag kings rooted in century actresses, but these provide a very stiff impression given 19th-century American theater. However, female cross-dress- the long exposure times of early photography. ing turns out to be a far more discontinuous phenomenon, with The first male impersonators began appearing on the Amer- drag kings reporting inspiration from 20th-century drag queens ican variety stage after the Civil War. Some, like Annie Hin- and tuxedoed icons like Dietrich or singer Gladys Bentley. But dle, had emigrated from England after experience in dramatic documenting lesbians among the many female cross-dressers theater. (Later English performers had experience in the British of an earlier era proved challenging to Rodger, as it has to many music hall circuit.) Hindle’s act consisted of quick costume historians of women-loving women in the past. It appears that changes while singing in her low alto voice, alternating with only one actress publicly acknowledged her marriage to a comic monologues suited to her male characters from all walks of life. “The Great Hindle,” as she billed herself, was one of Vernon Rosario is a child psychiatrist with the Los Angeles County De- the most successful of variety performers. She had a brief and partment of Mental Health and an associate clinical professor of psy- apparently abusive marriage to an English music hall per- chiatry at UCLA. former. Her published poems suggest that her primary roman-

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 23 tic attachments were to women. even as their stage act was wildly popular Then, in 1886, under the name Charles Just One of the Boys: for its transvestism and its parody of gen- Hindle, she married her dresser, Annie Female-to-Male Cross-Dressing der-bending masculinity. Perhaps it was Ryan, leading to a press scandal and the on the American Variety Stage similar to the amused cognitive dissonance charge that she had hoodwinked the public by Gillian M. Rodger of the middle-class matrons who were fans about being a male “impersonator.” How- U. of Illinois Press. 242 pages, $28. of Liberace’s campy performance while still ever, the scandal seems to have been for- believing he was straight. gotten in a few weeks. Even when a critic mentioned it a year Hindle’s success led to a number of imitators in the 1870s, later, it was incidental to his positive review. He describes Hin- as the new railway system permitted the expansion of variety dle as “the only living woman who has a living wife. By every theater further west, and despite an economic depression linked one it was agreed that her appearance was the hit of the olio [a to speculation on the railroad companies. Variety show man- song and dance routine after a dramatic act].” In her publicity agers adapted by trying to expand audiences beyond working- shot from the 1880s, she strikes a decidedly butch pose. As class men, creating respectable programs that would appeal to Roger points out, male impersonation was also a practical fi- women and families. Burlesque spectacles, meanwhile, could nancial adaptation for older actresses who could no longer pull continue to draw in working men. Class satire seems to have off youthful roles in dramatic or burlesque theater. given way in the 1870s to escapist entertainment, with a small Ella Wesner was a Philadelphian who, like many male im- number of younger male impersonators with a more feminine personators, had an early career as a dancer. She diversified her appeal. performances as she grew older to include blackface minstrelsy. At the dawn of the 20th century, live popular theater turned Her male impersonation act, with song and quick costume further toward respectable, middle-class family fare with the ar- rival of vaudeville. This development challenged the appeal of male impersonation and brought with it several political devel- opments. The renewed public visibility of women suffragists coincided with concerns about the “New Women,” who de- manded equal civil rights and chose career over motherhood and traditional feminine roles. Vesta Tilley, who transitioned from English music hall to American vaudeville, was one of the most popular and highly- paid male impersonators at this time. Critics praised her refine- ment and “slender, graceful body” while singing in a soprano voice as a man. She even exploited her high-fashion character to market men’s socks and waistcoats. Yet she explicitly dis- owned gender bending off stage. In a 1904 article titled “The Mannish Woman” in the Pittsburgh Gazette Home Journal, Tilley wrote: “While my business is that of impersonating male characters, I heartily detest anything mannish in a woman’s pri- vate life. ... By saying that I object to the mannish woman I mean it in the broadest sense and would have it understood that I refer not only to your Dr. Mary Walker, who wears male attire exclusively, but she who affects the mannish style aping in a degree the various characteristics of the sterner sex. Of the two types I hardly know which is the most objectionable.” Mary Walker, for her part, was an abolitionist, prohibition- ist, and women’s suffragist who served as a surgeon during the Civil War. She is the only woman to have been awarded the U.S. Medal of Honor. Walker lobbied for women’s dress re- form and was buried in a black suit. Such gender bending hero- Ella Wesner. Postcard photo by Sarony. ics were not to Vesta Tilley’s taste—or simply did not sell changes, was billed as “à la Hindle” and was successful from vaudeville tickets. The bawdy, butch performance of an Annie the East Coast to Texas. Wesner never married. Hindle and Wes- Hindle gave way to a reassuringly female male impersonation. ner specialized in the song and banter role of the “swell,” who By the 1920s, Roger concludes, the whole phenomenon seems was a wealthy man of leisure. One critic described the swell as to have vanished from American vaudeville, save for exotic, “an idler with a snap, a butterfly with some virility.” For the pop- foreign acts. However, even Marlene Dietrich’s iconic appear- ular, largely male audience, this dandy was simultaneously a fig- ance in a tailcoat in the film Morocco (1930) was less a per- ure of humor and of emulation, with his fashionable clothes and formance of male impersonation than a burlesque tease wealth that could attract beauties. Although the medical literature elevated to a singular display of feminine sexuality. An era of of the 1870s had begun describing “sexual inversion” and the male impersonation that poked fun at the dandy for the amuse- popular press was critical of foreign performers with “unnatural ment of working-class men had come to an end, along with a passions,” Hindle’s and Wesner’s personal lives were overlooked genre of popular live entertainment.

24 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe ESSAY Diary of a Kinsey 6+

DALE BOYER N 2011, Justin Spring’s award-winning biography, Se- ters, not even a reply. It was remarkably successful.” By very cret Historian (reviewed in the November-December short extension, one could say that Steward never asked for any- 2010 issue of this magazine), brought to light the curi- thing much from his sexual partners, either, which is perhaps ous history of Samuel Steward. Steward was a former why he was so remarkably successful. Loyola and DePaul University professor turned profes- After the shock at the number and variety of his sexual part- sional tattoo artist—a life change that was unusual ners wears off, what stands out is Steward’s sheer unwilling- Ienough. But it was his history as a sexual renegade, and his ness to let anyone else dictate how he was going to live his life. long-time collaboration with Alfred Kinsey on the famous Kin- Even as a young doctoral candidate, he very daringly touched sey Report, that constitute his legitimate claim to fame—and upon Whitman’s “Calamus” poems (the ones with overt homo- the fact that he wrote a great deal of gay literature under the sexual content) in his thesis, and also argued that Cardinal New- name of Phil Andros. Oh, and then there’s the fact that he had man was probably gay. This created no small buzz in the sex 4,647 times with over 800 different men, including Rudolph English Department, of course, but despite this controversy he Valentino, Rock Hudson (in an elevator in Marshall Field’s de- was awarded his doctorate and was eventually able to teach at partment store), Lord Alfred Douglas (Oscar Wilde’s young both Loyola and DePaul Universities in Chicago, where he lover, who lived until 1945), and Thornton Wilder. He also would remain for twenty years. Even while teaching, however, maintained friendships with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, he was continually exploring Chicago’s gay milieu, so his book André Gide, and a host of other luminaries. offers a wealth of information about Chicago’s gay past, from Born in Ohio in 1909 and living long enough to touch upon the fact that gay men cruised at Oak Street beach and tangled at every decade of the last century, Steward seems to have been Foster Avenue, to the fact that in 1950s-era Chicago—before unapologetic—even defiant—about his sex- there were gay bars—the opportunity for sex uality right from the start, professing to have Steward was a meticulous “was largely a matter of apartment living had sex with every member of his high record keeper who began and apartment encounters.” Even his even- school basketball team, four members of the tual decision to leave teaching was an act of football team, and three on the track squad. right from the start to keep thumbing his nose at society. As he was Nor, he claims, was he ever taunted for a file detailing every sexual going out the door, he had his chest tattooed this—partly, he reasons, because the men he encounter he ever had. with a winged phallus and whip, thereby lit- seduced enjoyed access to sex too much to erally branding himself, à la Hester Prynne complain, and also because of the relative lack of sophistica- in The Scarlet Letter, with an emblem of sexual defiance. tion of people in small towns: “By and large, homosexuality Friends and family were aghast at his career choice, of and fellatio were considered so unbelievable and impossible that course, but he wore his tattoos—and viewed his tattooing—not although one might be teased for being a sissy, no one could be- only as a badge of honor, but also as an assertion of sexual free- lieve that any person actually engaged in the ‘abominable sin.’ dom. It was also risky. If anyone had caught sight of his tat- This kind of thinking protected us all during the 1920s and ‘30s, toos—not to mention the erotic and very explicit illustrations and we lived happily under its shadow and cover.” on the walls of his home, or his extensive private collection of Steward was a meticulous record keeper who began right gay erotica—he might have been immediately arrested and from the start to keep a file detailing every sexual encounter he thrown into jail. This possibility did not, however, deter him ever had. He was also an avid autograph hound, obtaining sig- from his chosen course. In fact, it may have been what spurred natures from hundreds of famous and not-so-famous people. In addition, he saved snippets of pubic hairs from many sexual partners in his “stud files,” including Rudolph Valentino’s, whose sample he made the subject of a much-venerated reli- quary. This pattern of trophy hunting seems to be key to Stew- ard’s personality, but also suggests that he was always in pursuit of a little piece of something lasting from everyone he ever en- countered. Steward’s comments on his success in autograph hunting are interesting: “The trick to getting a response, I found, was never to ask any questions nor to ask for anything in my let-

Dale Boyer is the author of The Dandelion Cloud and Thornton Sto- ries. A new work, Justin and the Magic Stone , is forthcoming.

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 25 him on. Poet and writer Glenway Wescott fore. It is a thoroughly engaging work in its recounted a conversation in which he asked The Lost Autobiography own right, though there are curious omis- Steward, “Aren’t you running a frightful of Samuel Steward sions. For example, notes about Steward’s risk?” Steward’s answer: “Of course I Edited by Jeremy Mulderig encounters with both Rudolph Valentino and wouldn’t dare do it, except that my dream U. of Chicago Press. 274 pages, $30. Rock Hudson are frustratingly missing. all my life has been to be in prison, and to Steward is an engaging and erudite be fucked morning, noon and night by everyone, and beaten.” writer (his doctoral background is evident), and he offers tanta- Eventually, Steward met Kinsey, who was immediately im- lizing glimpses into such writers as Gertrude Stein and Alice B. pressed not only by Steward’s sense of liberation about sex but Toklas, with whom he carried on a friendship that spanned also by his immaculate record keeping. Over time, Kinsey decades. It also provides fascinating insights into well-known filmed him in several S/M sessions, and the two of them spent but sadly closeted individuals such as Thornton Wilder, of over 700 hours discussing such things as the link between tat- whom Steward writes: ”Thornton went about sex almost as if he tooing and sex (both involve an active and a passive partner, as were looking the other way, doing something else, and nothing well as insertion). Steward’s life as a tattoo artist eventually happened that could be prosecuted anywhere, unless frottage came to fascinate Kinsey as much as his sex life, even though could be called a crime. There was never even any kissing. ... He the unshockable Kinsey disapproved at first of his choice of oc- could never forthrightly discuss anything sexual; for him the act cupation. The moment he left academia, Steward reveled in his itself was quite literally unspeakable.” sudden, unfettered access to all the glorious young navy bodies Mulderig claims in his introduction that The Lost Autobiog- (via Chicago’s close proximity to the Great Lakes Naval Base). raphy is one of the great queer diaries of the 20th century (one He could now freely touch and decorate these men—something wonders how many of these there actually are; still, the claim he’d never been able to do as a teacher, when all he could do does not seem wildly off base). Here is a witness to some of was gaze out at all the bright, young, unavailable male students. that century’s great personalities, living defiantly through the Steward writes that many of them opened up in unexpected strictures imposed by society during those times, and asserting ways during the sudden intimacy of the tattooing session, and at every turn that he had as much right to be happy as anyone he had sex with a number of them in the back of his shop on else. (He refers at one point to his “happily wasted life.”) Mul- Chicago’s skid row (which was located in those days on State derig continues: “It would be inaccurate to say that [Steward] Street south of Van Buren). filled his life with ‘meaningless’ sex. Rather, every sexual act After fifteen years of this, legal complications arose when had meaning for him because it distanced himself further from the law in Illinois changed at some point, requiring that anyone the narrowly religious upbringing he had rejected and affirmed receiving a tattoo be at least 21. This suddenly dried up Stew- the sexuality that was so central to his sense of self.” ard’s supply of eager young eighteen-year-olds, forcing Stew- Still, one catches glimpses of a fundamental loneliness that ard to relocate, first to Milwaukee, and then to the far more even the happily shaped contours of the autobiography cannot liberated San Francisco of the late 1960s. However, the reality hide. Steward’s relentless pursuit of sex seems almost a guaran- was that Steward was now aging. Anyone else at this point might tee of ultimate isolation and, at the end of the autobiography, he have begun to think about retirement, but there was yet a third has only his dog to comfort him. As Steward writes (in a passage career in store for Steward, that of a writer of pornographic tales: that Mulderig uses as the epigraph for the entire volume): “I did “To bring pleasure to lonely old men in hotel rooms at night.” in a sense have an old artichoke heart, and the various pen names Thus was born the literary persona of “Phil I used in the things I wrote, my Sparrow Andros” (“love of men” in Greek), who name as a tattoo artist and later the Andros would go on to create a series of hustler sto- name as a writer, were like separate leaves ries such as $tud and Below the Belt, graced that are capable of being stripped away. with covers by Tom of Finland. But what was at the center?” Late in the au- All of this material, and more, has al- tobiography, Steward continues in this ready been covered in Spring’s excellent bi- vein: “Had I the capacity for love, or was I ography—so thoroughly, in fact, that one inclined to be a solitary with such a poverty might wonder at this point: is there really of spirit that I could never enlarge myself much value to reading the autobiography it- to take in another?” self? Spring’s book drew on a great variety Steward seems intent in the Autobiog- of Steward’s unpublished work, as well as raphy on the fact that he was happy; and notations in his “Stud file.” In the new book, while both Spring and Mulderig are good editor Jeremy Mulderig has set himself the at pointing out discrepancies between task of reconstructing Steward’s autobiog- Steward’s somewhat rosy account and raphy from a vastly truncated earlier work other, differing indications elsewhere, can (Chapters from an Autobiography) and from we really doubt his claim? Regardless of his unpublished, 110,000-word, shapeless what one ultimately decides, his autobi- manuscript, which is housed in the Beinecke ography is one of the most remarkably Library at Yale. The result is a reconstructed daring and unusual accounts by an un- and expanded version of 85,000 words that apologetically renegade gay man of the has never been published in this form be- Samuel Steward in 1957 20th century.

26 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe ESSAY Soap Operas and Social Change

AUBREY GARCIA BADEN III HE SOAP OPERA, that quintessentially Amer- female attorney that resulted in the birth of a child for whom ican genre, has been a fixture of popular culture Jodie sought full custody. Decades before transgender issues since the early days of radio. As such, the soaps became part of the American conversation, Jodie considered have played an important role in reinforcing and having a sex change. In spite of—or perhaps because of—the to some extent in shaping American cultural criticism of various religious groups that Soap promoted im- mores and norms governing relationships within mortality through homosexuality, the show enjoyed a four-year Tfamilies, among friends, and especially between lovers and run. Jodie remained a popular character. spouses. In the late 1970s, perhaps due to the popularity of the Jodie Soap operas have generally tried to reflect the social mores character on Soap, the enormously popular CBS-TV primetime of American mainstream society over the years. However, start- sudser Dallas focused on homosexuality—albeit for just one ing in the 1970s, a number of the daytime dramas began trying episode—when spoiled, college-aged heiress Lucy Ewing fell to work “social relevance” into their storylines. Indeed it may be for the handsome, well-to-do Kit Mainwaring. The couple made argued that the soaps have tended to run slightly ahead of the love and became engaged. However, Kit eventually came out to cultural curve in matters of sexuality in general and LGBT is- Lucy and broke their engagement. Lucy was devastated but she sues in particular. In the past four decades, the growing pres- matured enough to encourage Kit to live his life as an openly ence of LGBT characters has been a barometer of Americans’ gay man, and to assure him that they would remain friends. increasing acceptance of this minority. From virtual invisibility in the early years to the current crop of gay and lesbian charac- THE 1980SAND’90S ters who are able to live their lives authentically and without The treatment of homosexuality in primetime would have a more shame, the growing visibility of LGBT lives on daytime TV has far-reaching impact on Dynasty in 1981. ABC-TV’s answer to reflected an ongoing change in public attitudes over this gener- Dallas, Dynasty focused on the oil-rich, problem-plagued Car- ational time span. rington clan, headed by the headstrong, stern, self-made billion- aire Blake Carrington. As Blake’s apparent only son and heir THE 1970S who felt the crushing pressure of living up to his father’s high, By the 1970s, many soaps were addressing issues like alco- heterosexual expectations, college-aged Steven Carrington was holism, drug abuse and recovery, the Vietnam War, marital rape, engaged in a gay relationship with Ted Dinard. As their romance and mental illness. However, by the end of this decade, the soaps became more public, various family and friends encouraged were unanimous in their reluctance to grapple with issues relat- Steven to “act the gay away” by pursuing women. Steven’s visit ing to homosexuality. That would soon change; and over the to a female prostitute was to no avail, and his brief affair with the decades the soaps have made reasonable strides in introducing married, mentally unstable Claudia Blaisdel was not nearly LGBT characters and in addressing issues related to coming to enough to suppress his love for Ted. terms with one’s alternative sexuality and coming out to family, The Steven–Ted romance came to an abrupt, violent end friends, and the community. Fledgling efforts to present a gay when Steven’s ever hard-to-please father Blake came home relationship have culminated in the creation of a “supercouple,” from a typically difficult day as CEO of Denver Carrington. when two names become one, in the characters of Will Horton Alerted by his loyal major domo/butler Joseph Anders of Ted’s and Sonny Kiriakis—“WillSon”—on Days of Our Lives . presence on the Carrington estate, Blake, incensed that Ted Let us take a look back and trace the progression of the ways would dare infest his precious 48-room mansion, shouted: “I’ll in which American soaps have taken steps forward to embrace get him!” Upon seeing his precious son in an embrace with Ted, LGBT characters and storylines, and how soaps could progress Blake lambasted and started shoving Ted amid Steven’s an- even further in the years ahead. guished cries for him to stop. Ted hit his head in the scuffle and It was not until 1977 when ABC-TV aired its hugely popu- died. Blake was tried for Ted’s murder and, despite damning lar primetime comedy Soap—an obvious spoof of the genre testimony from both Steven and Blake’s first wife—the glam- through its focus on the hilariously dysfunctional Tate and orous, venomous Alexis Carrington, whom Blake blames for Campbell families—that viewers saw one of the soap genre’s turning Steven into a “weakling” by encouraging him to share first gay male characters, Jodie Dallas. As played by stand-up his mother’s interest in art—was sentenced to probation. comic Billy Crystal, Jodie experienced everything from a failed Steven and Alexis quickly renewed their mother–son close- romance with a closeted football player to a brief liaison with a ness after a separation of fifteen years (Blake had banished Alexis to Europe for an affair with one of Blake’s business as- Aubrey Garcia Baden III, an adjunct English instructor at Anne Arundel sociates), but it would take nearly ten years for Steven and Community College, Annapolis, acts and sings with community theaters. Blake to repair their fractured relationship, at one point with fa-

November–December 2018 27 ther and son fighting for full custody of Little Danny, Steven’s son with his social climbing first wife Sammy Jo Dean. Blake claimed that Steven was unfit to be a stable father because of his “unnatural lifestyle.” Steven eventually won custody of Danny, but only after a quickie wedding to the now widowed but still unsta- ble Claudia (with whom he had a stormy marriage be- fore their divorce). Perhaps taking a cue from his second wife, Krystle, who always embraced Steven’s homosexuality, Blake slowly came around, especially when Steven had a romance with business associate Luke Fuller. However, this gay romance also suffered a sudden, brutal end when Luke was fatally shot by as- sassins during a post-wedding massacre in the king- dom of Moldavia (which actually was a kingdom in the Middle Ages). By the time Dynasty ended its nearly decade-long run in 1989, Blake and Steven had recon- The Kiss: Will and Sonny on Days of Our Lives ciled some of their differences as father and son. Steven was pursuing a successful romance with a D.C.-based politico, Nixon creation known for its principal storylines with social rel- assuring Blake that he and his new lover were practicing safe evance—took the soap genre’s treatment of male homosexual- sex, and Blake in turn assured Steven that first and foremost he ity a step further with the character of Billy Douglass. Created wanted Steven to be happy. by head writer Michael Malone, a well-known novelist, Billy In 1983, All My Children, an ABC daytime soap known is a teenager of privilege who’s struggling to come to terms with since its 1970 inception as a drama willing to tackle social is- his sexual identity. He’s presented as a sympathetic character sues (a trademark of the show’s highly esteemed creator, Agnes that the audience is rooting for through his vain attempts to Nixon), focused on the camaraderie between established char- drown his pain in alcohol. Billy confides in a fellow newcomer, acter Devon McFadden, a divorced young mother with a long the disarming Episcopalian minister Andrew Carpenter, who as- history of failed relationships with men, and new Pine Valley sures Billy that he will come out to his family when he’s ready. resident Lynn Carson, an openly gay child psychologist. As their This conversation is overheard by a female parishioner who had friendship grew, Devon professed feelings of love for Lynn. Al- once come on to the handsome minister only to be rebuffed, and though flattered, Lynn gently rejected Devon’s romantic procla- who now sees an opportunity for revenge. The rumor she mations, claiming that Devon would always be a straight spreads about the minister unleashes a panic in town with anti- woman. The Devon–Lynn friendship was not a front-burner sto- gay undertones. ryline, but Soap Opera Digest and other magazines applauded With homophobia now running rampant, Billy tearfully the storyline for its focus on a lesbian character and a friend- comes out to his parents. His mother Virginia eventually em- ship between straight and gay characters. braces her son’s gayness and prevents Walter, the father, from Nearly five years later, in 1988, CBS’s long-running As The throwing Billy out of the house. In a series of powerful, mov- World Turns (ATWT) introduced the character of Hank Eliot. The ing scenes in and around the St. James Parish, Andrew defends show’s head writer at the time, Douglas Marland, a soap scribe his reputation and his belief that all people have a right to sex- highly esteemed for his emphasis on social issues, created Hank ual privacy, encouraging his flock to discontinue their homo- as a New York-based fashion designer whose dark-haired looks, phobic ways. They can start by sewing a panel for the AIDS warm smile, and easygoing manner quickly win over the good Quilt, which happens to be displayed nearby. Despite his fa- citizens of the Midwestern city of Oakdale, including the ro- ther’s objections, Billy publicly comes out as a young gay man mantically troubled Iva Snyder. Iva develops a romantic interest in front of the entire congregation, with the unconditional sup- in Hank, even amid hints that Hank has a secret male lover in the port of Andrew and several prominent citizens. In turn, Billy Big Apple. During a long discussion at the famed Snyder pond, leads the way in getting his fellow parishioners to have Andrew in sensitively written scenes, Hank reveals his homosexuality to reinstated as their parish minister. And he finds a boyfriend by Iva along with his five-year relationship with his lover Charles. and by. In the end, not unlike Hank of ATWT, Billy would re- Like Dallas’ Lucy with Kit, Iva expresses hurt and disappoint- main in his new soap town for only two years. ment but declares her unconditional friendship with Hank. Having no previously established ties to Oakdale, Hank THE 21ST CENTURY spent less than two years on the ATWT canvas as a supporting In the past fifteen years, several gay male couples have character, as Marland focused on other characters’ reactions achieved “supercouple” status with considerably greater (many positive, some negative) to his homosexuality. By the longevity than some heterosexual ones, albeit with various lev- end of 1989, Hank has been dispatched back to New York. Nev- els of success. Nearly ten years after ATWT introduced Hank ertheless, Soap Opera Digest commended ATWT for its ground- as daytime’s first major gay male character, teenager Luke breaking storyline, claiming that “Daytime’s last taboo [of] male Snyder had an enormously popular romance with fellow as- homosexuality” had been shattered. piring filmmaker Noah Meyer. Luke was a legacy character In 1992, ABC’s One Life to Live (OLTL)—another Agnes as the son and stepson of supercouple Lily Walsh Snyder and

28 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe Holden Snyder, and thus deserving of his own storyline. How- ever, perhaps based on the anxiety of the powers-that-be over whether viewers would accept a male couple in a fully realized TWO FOR THE PRICE OF ONE! romance, Luke and Noah’s relationship often seemed stilted. Viewers cheered when Luke and Noah had their long-awaited first kiss, then expressed their frustration when things pro- gressed no further. After a two-year waiting period, Luke and Reach Out to Noah finally had sex. However, their physical intimacy was invisible on screen. Instead, viewers were chagrined to watch “Nuke” (Noah + Luke à la “Brangelina”) making ice cream Friends This Season rather than love. Luke’s next romance with cocky medic Reid Oliver was even more frustrating to viewers, as the couple never had a chance to experience the joys of sex together be- with a gift subscription to The G&LR fore Reid died in a train crash. Meanwhile, in 2009, OLTL explored a gay romance between Special Offer: Give one gift subscription, morally ambivalent lab tech Kyle Lewis and the apparently wholesome good guy cop Oliver Fish (who is called by his last and give a second gift for FREE! name). Former lovers from their college fraternity brother days, And why not give your free subscription to Kyle and Fish became a popular supercouple as Fish struggled to acknowledge his homosexuality to his family and friends, a student, a student group, or any nonprofit and Kyle nearly married the devious Nick Chavez on the re- organization? bound from his breakup with Fish. Kyle and Fish, affectionately called “Kish” by their fans, finally reconciled and in 2010 made Just send love in a beautifully choreographed, candle-lit scene to the ro- mantic strains of Rie Sinclair & Friends’ “My Confession.” Un- this form in fortunately, despite fan outrage, Kish was written off the canvas the stapled soon afterwards. In the past several years, the most successful male super- envelope* couple has been Days of Our Lives’Will and Sonny (aka “Will- Son”). One reason for their popularity is the red-hot chemistry between the two actors who play the Salem sweethearts, Chan- Or Call dler Massey and Freddie Smith. Both are tremendous talents 844-752-7829 who seem totally at ease together, even in their most intimate bedroom and shower scenes. The same can also be said for the third party in their romantic triangle, Christopher Sean as base- ball hero Paul Norita, whose character shares a romantic his- Code: Y8HSAD tory with both Will and Sonny. The latter are legacy characters * This offer supersedes the from families that go back to the mid-1980s, proving that view- gift offer on the envelope. ers become deeply invested in characters from core soap clans. Finally, Will and Sonny are depicted not as either squeaky-clean Y8HSAD heroes or depraved psychopaths, but instead as decent but The GLReview flawed characters who can have both deep-seated trust issues and hot sex. PO Box 16477, N. Hollywood, CA 91615 So where do we go from here? As American soap viewer- Signmeup!I’ll take advantage of the 2-for-1 gift subscription offer. ship erodes—there are only four surviving daytime dramas as H 1 year at $23. — 45% off reg.! (Canada: $33. Overseas: $43.) I write—what can be done to ensure that LGBT characters re- H 2 years at $39. — 50% off reg.! (Canada: $59. Overseas: $79.) main a viable part of this still influential medium? One sug- My Name ______Zip code ______gestion would be for writers to focus on character-oriented rather than plot-oriented storylines. For example, Days of Our Gift #1 Name ______Lives fans have followed WillSon since their high school days Address ______and understand the characters’ dysfunctional family histories. In addition, the soap executives should expand their canvas to Free Gift Name ______include more LGBT characters of color—flawed yet sympa- Address ______thetic like WillSon. Imagine how fascinated viewers might be H Instead, please give my free subscription to an LGBT student org. if The Bold and the Beautiful’s new African-American triangle were revamped such that Zoe and Emma’s apparent enmity H Check enclosed to: GLR, PO Box 16477, N. Hollywood, CA 91615 masked a secret, irrepressible love for each other? The result- H Credit Card: ___Visa ___MC ___ Amex for $______ing supercouple—”Zem”—almost sounds like a new pronoun #______-______-______-______Exp.:____/____ to be embraced by the LGBT community.

November–December 2018 29 BOOKS The Man Behind the Nonsense

DWARD LEAR, born in London There was Old Man of Whitehaven, in 1812, produced some of the ROSEMARY BOOTH Who danced a quadrille with a Raven; most celebrated nonsense poems But they said, “It’s absurd to encourage this bird!” in the English language, along So they smashed that Old Man of Whitehaven. E Mr. Lear: with striking sketches, lithographs, and land- scape paintings. An admirer of Tennyson, A Life of Art and Nonsense A similarly offbeat but cheerier poem, “The Lear would in turn delight and influence by Jenny Uglow Owl and the Pussycat,” still polls as the top such major modern poets as W. H. Auden, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 480 pages, $45. children’s poem in the UK. Lear composed Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. it for the young daughter of his friend John Lear applied three critical skills to his work: a highly obser- Addington Symonds, a literary critic who had a wife but was vant eye, an ear that could capture a piano tune on a single hear- also an unabashed champion of gay love. The poem celebrates ing, and persistent focus. Next-to-youngest of 21 children or so, an unlikely duo that embarks on a sailing adventure and ends up he learned botany and drawing from well-informed older sisters, married—and wildly happy. and by the age of eighteen he had become known for meticulous Lear himself “loved men, yet dreamed of marriage,” Uglow drawings of parrots and other exotic birds, and animals in the Zo- says, and felt distress at the impossibility of reconciling these ological Society’s newly opened collection. But Lear’s talents yearnings. Though the author does not discuss the issue, at the were offset by a number of challenges. Nearsighted and bespec- time of Lear’s birth, British law prescribed the death penalty for tacled, he was bullied at school. He had epilepsy and through- out his life was prone to partial seizures, which he worked hard to hide, as well as bouts of asthma and depression. In addition, at a time when sex between men was a criminal act, Lear was almost certainly gay. Given such hurdles, how did he manage to build an imaginative, connected life? With this lively and wide-ranging biography, Jenny Uglow offers an often poignant picture of a remarkably self- aware and well-liked man. Her account of Lear’s experiences and idiosyncrasies is based on his diaries (which are at Har- vard), published letters, travel journals, nonsense books, and art. She describes a man who, when times were bleak, would seek fresh opportunities for travel and the company of oth- ers—inclinations that elevated his mood as well as his in- come as an artist. Lacking inherited money or a university education, Lear was an industrious traveler, always on the lookout for classical, biblical, or otherwise stirring sights that might appeal to Victorian buyers. Once he’d identified prom- ising scenes in Rome, Greece, Palestine, Jerusalem, Con- stantinople, India, or elsewhere, he would go off on a journey to sketch them. Lear more or less fell into the ancillary career of writing. Seldom the “life of the party,” he was yet a sought-after guest who composed limericks on the spot for the children and grandchildren of wealthy friends, many of them his pa- trons. On a whim he began to publish illustrated sets of non- sense verse, and they became hot sellers. An 1861 version, for instance, went through 24 editions in his lifetime, and has never been out of print. Lear’s limericks have attitude. As Uglow notes, they laud oddity and extol “stubborn eccentrics” who upset their neighbors, often criticizing the “disapproving ‘they’ who turn up again and again.” For example:

Rosemary Booth is a writer and photographer who lives in Cam- bridge, MA.

30 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe sexual acts between men. In 1861 the punishment was reduced love with this man,” writes Uglow. In particular, the sojourn to ten years to life in prison, but decriminalization only came in raised Lear’s hopes that he and Lushington might buy a house 1967. So it is not surprising to learn that, while he was a prolific and live out their days together. diarist and letter writer, Lear was also guarded. His diaries are It was not to be. For nearly a decade the men exchanged let- “consistently evasive about his sex life,” Uglow says, and not all ters, visited, and traveled together, but they “could not regain documents survive. For example, Lear formed a close friend- [their] intimacy,” writes Uglow, of Lear’s frustration. Lear ship with Oxford student Arthur Stanley in the mid-1830s, but reached a low point in the mid-1850s after realizing that he and their letters are lost. Similarly, after a brief trip with the Danish “Frank” would never live together as a couple, an insight even- painter Wilhelm Marstrand in 1840, Lear “burnt his diary, giv- tually confirmed by news that Lushington had gotten married. ing no reason.” Even so, Lear continued to nurture ties, befriending Lushing- Lear’s most important infatuation was with Franklin Lush- ton’s wife and serving as godparent to their children. At several ington, a crush that began when Lear was 36 and lasted until points he considered proposing to the daughter of a friend, only his death 39 years later. Most of Lear’s papers and drawings to reject the idea. “The ‘marriage’ phantasy ‘will not let me were left to Lushington, ten years younger and his executor, but be’—yet ... to envision it is to pursue a thread leading to doubt their correspondence has disappeared, along with Lear’s diaries & perhaps more positive misery,” he lamented. from two idyllic months the pair spent on the Ionian island of Uglow’s portrait of Lear is intricate and sympathetic, and Corfu in 1849. Uglow surmises that Lear fell for Lushington’s her analysis of his creative achievements sharp. She is inform- looks (a pencil portrait is included), his large and distinguished ative about English society and culture in the 19th century, as family, and his intellect (a first in classics at Cambridge). The well as events that were happening abroad. If Mr. Lear is short Corfu interlude was life changing, at least for Lear. “Nothing on details of the nonsense writer’s private life, it seems only in had happened, yet everything had happened. [He] had fallen in keeping with his exquisite perception of boundaries. The Fire That Time

HE SUBTITLE of Robert W. “but fewer than 1,000 could be called ‘out’ Fieseler’s new book about the ANDREW HOLLERAN by twenty-first century standards.” In 1972, fire in a New Orleans gay bar that according to Bob Damron’s Address Book, killed 32 people on June 24, there were two gay bathhouses, 24 gay and T Tinderbox: 1973, is “The Untold Story,” but in fact lesbian bars, and three gay-friendly restau- there have been several renditions of this The Untold Story of the Up Stairs rants. In short, it was a very gay city. It was story already: John Townsend’s Let The Lounge Fire and The Rise of also an intensely homophobic one. In 1972, Faggots Burn (2011), Clayton Delery-Ed- Gay Liberation three sheriff’s deputies in suburban Jeffer- wards’ The Up Stairs Lounge Arson by Robert W. Fieseler son Parish were fired for merely associat- (2014), Frank Perez’ In Exile (2012), a his- Liveright Publishing ing with “a known homosexual”—their tory of gay bars in New Orleans, and 343 pages, $26.95 wives’ hairdresser. At the time of the Up Robert Camina’s 2017 documentary Up- Stairs Lounge fire, one of the rites of pas- stairs Inferno. But evidently Fieseler felt there was more to tell, sages for fraternity boys at Tulane was “rolling a queer”—which or he would not have spent several years interviewing survivors meant going down to the Quarter, finding a homosexual, rob- and searching through archives before piecing the story together bing and beating him up, and returning to campus. One of these in his own, very moving book. victims, a visiting Mexican tour guide named Fernando Rios, The structure reminds one of Thornton Wilder’s classic was beaten so badly that he died; and when the fraternity boys novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in which the individual fates were acquitted of his murder—the defense argued that Rios’ of a disparate group of people united by a bridge collapse are skull was unnaturally delicate—the courtroom erupted in ap- described. Fieseler opens by introducing many of the people plause. (Clayton Delery has written a book about this case titled whom we know will end up at the Sunday afternoon Beer Bust Out for Queer Blood.) in the Up Stairs Lounge, a not very glamorous bar just on the Fernando Rios was murdered by presumably straight frat edge of the French Quarter, in fact down the street from the boys, but the Up Stairs Lounge fire was intentionally set by a Hotel Monteleone, which—ironically, or predictably, given the gay hustler who’d been kicked out of the bar earlier for punch- incredible layers of history in the Quarter—is where the gay lit- ing another hustler for stealing a john he was working on. The erary festival Saints and Sinners is held every spring. As in so irony is that the Up Stairs Lounge was not a hustler bar. Nor many books with a large cast, you find yourself going back to was it the Cafe Lafitte in Exile, where the A-list went. It was an the opening chapters to be reminded of who some of them are, unpretentious, friendly dive where a mixed group of homosex- but after a while you find yourself following the few who in- uals and their friends literally found refuge; where before clos- terest you most. ing the patrons would stand and sing “United We Stand” before In 1971, informal surveys “estimated that there were about going back to their deeply closeted lives in a city where you 75,000 homosexuals living in New Orleans,” Fieseler writes, could get fired from your job for being gay. It was a place where

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 31 the New Orleans branch of the newly minted Metropolitan Clay Shaw, the man Jim Garrison destroyed in his ill-fated at- Community Church, as small as it was, could meet, in lieu of a tempt to prove a conspiracy theory in the JFK assassination), church of their own—which is why, after the fire, the founder but one could not claim a homosexual identity in public. “Live of the MCC, Troy Perry, flew immediately from Los Angeles to and let live” was the arrangement the gay population had with New Orleans to help. the city—so that some even resented Troy Perry’s attempt to The description of the fire, pieced together bit by bit from in- advance the cause of gay rights. So life went on much as it had terviews with survivors and archival research, is so painstak- before the fire. Buddy Rasmussen, the bartender who saved so ingly done that it’s hard to read. AIDS, in the next decade, was many people by leading them to safety but who lost his own a horrifying shock; but in this fire there was no time to process lover, ended up tending bar at the Post Office, a new bar opened one’s fate or come to terms with death, much less bargain with by the owner of the Up Stairs Lounge a year and a half after the it, or try out medicines; it all happened in an instant—a fireball fire (until one night he quit in the middle of his shift and moved so powerful it was like a flamethrower once somebody made to Arkansas). Those who remained in New Orleans did what the mistake of opening the doors. The response to it, however, they could to move on, but none of them really wanted to talk was just what the response would be to AIDS a decade later: about it. the newspapers would not even use the word “homosexual” or The arsonist was soon identified, but the New Orleans po- “gay,” and in two days it was off the front page. The mayor lice did nothing, due either to gross incompetence or to a basic failed to acknowledge what had happened, while men who’d indifference to the fate of homosexuals. It was the Firefighters lost their lovers in the catastrophe had to go to work the next day Association that tracked him down—and they did that, one and remain silent while co-workers made jokes about the senses, because firefighters want to determine the cause of a tragedy (“Did you hear the one about the flaming queens?”). fire they’ve fought. It took Anita Bryant to galvanize the gay The religious establishment was unsympathetic to requests for community of New Orleans several years later. That’s when use of their churches for a memorial service. The board of a people turned out to march. But the heart of this book con- nearby Lutheran church told Paul Breton, a member of the MCC cerns the individual stories Fieseler has assembled. These in Washington, D.C., who’d flown to New Orleans to contact make his book far more than just a history of gay rights; they the comparative black congregation well outside the French make it an infinitely sad portrait of what these people went Quarter, since “they are more tolerant of aliens there.” Only the through. It’s their stories that make the book so disturbing. United Methodist Church in the Quarter finally came through One is left with the two little boys whose father dropped them and provided space for a service. off at a Disney movie, The World’s Greatest Athlete, promised Attempts to obtain coverage in the press and create a me- to pick them up when the movie was over, and then went over morial for the victims of the fire met with little success despite to the Beer Bust at the Up Stairs Lounge with his lover. He the efforts of Troy Perry. Even the owner of the Up Stairs never came back. Thirty years later, a bronze marker with the Lounge didn’t want the closet to be opened. Gay people in New names of the dead was finally installed on the sidewalk on the Orleans were accustomed to an arrangement with the authorities corner of Iberville and Chartres, “where men once ran up that allowed people to be gay behind closed doors. One could stairs,” writes Fieseler in an eloquent finish to this haunting open a gay bar or even take a prominent position in society (like book, “to find refuge.” Paris Is People; New York, Architecture

ERENICE ABBOTT was a Van Haaften traces in detail Abbott’s evo- larger-than-life photographer IRENE JAVO RS lution as a photographer. We learn that her who captured the architecture initial interest was sculpture and that this of New York City, as well as later morphed into curiosity about making B Berenice Abbott: some of its noteworthy inhabitants, from photographs. the 1930s to the 1960s and beyond. Julia A Life in Photography While out of work and starving in Paris, Van Haaften, founding curator of the New by Julia Van Haaften she fortuitously met the well-known pho- York Public Library’s photography col- W.W. Horton. 634 pages, $45. tographer Man Ray, who hired her as a lection, has written a monumental biogra- darkroom assistant. It wasn’t long before phy of Abbott’s life, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink she left his studio and set up her own rival studio specializing approach that’s brimming with facts and anecdotes about her in portraiture. There she photographed André Gide, Djuna subject’s life. Barnes, James Joyce, Jean Cocteau, and Sylvia Beach—a who’s Abbott (1898–1991) grew up in a working-class family in who of bohemian cosmopolitans. She photographed lesbian the Midwest. She fled her home as soon as possible and set journalist Janet Flanner in what has become a signature exam- off on a journey of self-discovery and self-creation as an artist. ple of lesbian photographic portraiture. Flanner is dressed in a jacket, striped pants, and a top hat adorned with costume masks, Irene Javors is a psychotherapist in private practice who’s based in and has an expression of Je ne sais quoi. Flanner (writing under New York City. the pseudonym Genêt) promoted Abbott’s work in her column

32 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe “Letter from Paris” in The New Yorker. who were “in the life” themselves knew about her lesbian af- While in Paris in the ’20s, she discovered the photography fairs. She was a drinker, smoked like a chimney, and loved to of Eugene Atget (1857–1927) and became a devotee of his dance. She had many lesbian affairs beginning with Thelma work. Atget, the quintessential flâneur, roamed the streets of Wood (the lover of Djuna Barnes). It was in her professional Paris photographing street scenes and buildings in an attempt life that she attempted to keep in the closet. Like many lesbians to document life before modernization’s final blows. Abbott em- of her generation, she wanted to be seen as an “artist”—with no braced Atget’s project and saw him as “a Balzac of the camera.” modifier placed before the word. Van Haaften notes that Abbott After he died in 1927, Abbott purchased much of his archive— was supportive of feminism but indifferent to the emerging les- over 1,500 glass negatives and 8,000 prints. Eventually, after bian and gay rights movements. In 1965, McCausland, her part- many perilous twists and turns, Abbott sold the Atget Archive ner and collaborator of thirty years, passed away, but Abbott to the Museum of Modern Art in 1968. was not mentioned in the obituary—standard practice in pre- Abbott left Paris in 1929 and set up a studio on Commerce Stonewall America. Soon thereafter, Abbott moved to Monson, Street in New York City. Her subjects were architecture and Maine, where she resided until her death in 1991. documentary work, primarily of the city itself. Her black-and- The last half of this mammoth biography includes more white photographs from the 1930s are her major claim to about Abbott’s honors and visits from young acolytes than most fame. Nightview was taken from atop the Empire State Build- readers will want or need. Van Haaften has amassed an enor- ing in 1932 and caught a spectacular view of a glittering, elec- mous amount of research, references, and an excellent index, trifying city. Abbott advocated an “egoless photography” in though I for one would have liked more analysis and less piling up of facts. An examination of Abbott’s photographs raises so many questions concerning her ideas about objectivity in pho- tography—this desire to adopt an “egoless” stance. Is such an æsthetic possible or even desirable? Could this theory be an out- growth of Abbott’s life in the closet, where subjectivity had to be hidden from view? Berenice Abbott remains a major influence in photography today. Her work is visually breathtaking—immediate, clear, and indelible. Van Haaften has written a book that’s a major resource for fans of urban and architectural photography.

Berenice Abbott’s signature photograph of Janet Flanner which the subjectivity of the photographer remained “out of the picture.” A new 55+ LGBT-focused neighborhood located in While in her thirties, Abbott was introduced to art critic and progressive and diverse Durham, North Carolina. historian Elizabeth McCausland. The two women became part- • Light-filled, accessible cottages on ners in life. They set up residence in Greenwich Village at 30 15 beautiful wooded acres. Commerce Street, where they lived in two adjoining apartments • Privacy, community, and nature at that also served as work spaces. McCausland was a member of your doorstep. the Communist Party, though Abbott, a “fellow traveler” philo- • Workshop, gardens, art studios, and sophically, did not join. That did not prevent the FBI from open- indoor/outdoor gathering spaces. ing a file on Abbott in 1951, ostensibly because of her Learn more: call Margaret at 561.714.8009 association with McCausland. The file mentions her “homo- or email [email protected] sexual associations” and the fact that she “wears slacks con- stantly.” In short, they were targeted for being lesbians. For the most part, Abbott lived a semi-closeted life. People

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 33 The Harder You Look, the Funnier It Gets

F COURSE the book is funny; imize his Fitbit steps takes over his daily it’s by David Sedaris. We’ve MICHAEL SCHWARTZ routine: “Why is it some people can man- known this about Sedaris since age a thing like a Fitbit, while other go off the morning of December 23, the rails and allow it to rule, and perhaps O Calypso 1992, when NPR first aired a version of even ruin, their lives?” That’s as close as he “The Santaland Diaries,” and the world by David Sedaris gets to introspection. And as close as he changed, if only a little. We heard a voice Little, Brown. 259 pages, $28. gets to self-deprecation, which is intro- that was matter-of-factly, unapologetically spection’s twin. Some critics have de- gay. Since then, we’ve had more evidence of Sedaris’ comic ge- scribed Sedaris’ style as self-deprecating, but that seems wrong nius, but also of something more. In addition to our laughter, to me. You can compare the other gay NPR David, the much- Sedaris has earned our respect for his skill as a writer and his missed David Rackoff, who turned the bob and weave of self- ability to induce laughter while embedding its source in some- deprecation into wryly complex art. You wanted to protect thing more ambivalent. Rackoff, even before he revealed the disease that was going to Calypso has the randomness inherent in any collection of kill him. Sedaris doesn’t call forth such feelings. He makes no stand-alone pieces, and many are typical humor one-offs: about bid for our sympathy. He describes himself almost imperson- being short, or proposing marriage to his husband Hugh, or hav- ally and leaves it to you to deprecate or not, as you wish. It may ing diarrhea while doing readings. But several of the stories cir- be his Fitbit obsession. It may be the last time he saw his sister cle back to a few locales and a few themes, and the way they Tiffany, when she showed up at the stage door after he had fin- keep turning up, like messy memories and unresolved issues, ished a show and he told the security guard to shut the door on gives the book a kind of novelistic coherence. The memories her. His sole explanation: “I couldn’t deal with her anymore.” and issues concern Sedaris’ family, and the stories often take One thing that struck me as I read the collection for the sec- place at a North Carolina resort house that he bought so he, his ond time, and read some stories for the fourth or fifth, is the siblings, his father, and Hugh could vacation together, in the tight construction that underlies Sedaris’ seemingly casual way that the family used to when they were younger and his style. For example, the story “A House Divided” is about a trip long-dead mother was still alive. But there’s a more recent death to the North Carolina beach house for a family Thanksgiving. as well: a few months before their first visit to the house, his As Sedaris boards in first class for the flight to Raleigh, a pas- youngest sister Tiffany committed suicide. The suicide hovers senger tries to open a stuck overhead compartment and says over the collection, reappearing in several stories, with more “This is like Obamacare: broken,” to general laughter. On land- details but with no answers, because something like that does- ing, a flight attendant announces that a winning high school n’t go away. soccer team is on board and asks for applause. No one in first Sedaris’ approach to this—and in fact his approach to every- class responds—Sedaris figures that the team couldn’t hear thing he has ever written—is captured in “Company Man,” him—and a drunken woman (who “was letting her hair fade when he enters in the middle of a conversation between Hugh’s from dyed red to gray”) calls them “assholes.” On the ground, mother and sister: he tells Hugh about it, who says “quietly, but not so quietly that I couldn’t hear him, ‘You really should have clapped.’” That same night, after my bath, I overheard [Hugh’s sister] They pick up Sedaris’ sister Gretchen, who tells them about asking, “Well, can’t you make it with camel butter?” a high school friend, Kevin, who was living in a Raleigh park: “You can,” Mrs. Hamrick said, “but I wouldn’t recommend “it seemed incredible to me that something like this could hap- it.” I thought of asking for details—“Make what with camel but- pen. ... Slip too far beneath the surface, and wouldn’t your fam- ter?”—but decided I preferred the mystery. ily resuscitate you with a loan or rehab or whatever it was you needed to get back on your feet?” Which leads inevitably to Preferring the mystery: that’s the constant impulse in his sto- Tiffany, who had committed suicide six months earlier. Sedaris ries. He observes acutely, he describes accurately and cleverly, remembers asking her why she never cleaned her apartment. and he never ever explains away the mystery—not when it’s Her answer—“We poor people don’t have the energy to clean something as simple as a missed conversation, or as complex as up after ourselves”—puts her in a category that excludes her suicide. Especially when dealing with his own family, he de- from her own middle-class family. Once they arrive at the scribes the most outrageous behavior without ever stopping to house, David and his sister Lisa take a walk along the beach. wonder why anyone would do such a thing. And his art is Lisa tells him that Tiffany had taken an overdose of Klonopin stronger for this refusal. and put a plastic bag over her head. Sedaris thinks of the plas- He doesn’t even attempt to explain the mysteries of his own tic bags that have words on them—“LOEW’s, it might read. behavior. In “Stepping Out,” he describes how his need to max- SAFEWAY.TRUE VALUE. Does a person go through a number of them before making a selection?” Then Lisa asks him to tie her Michael Schwartz, a longtime contributor to these pages, is a writer shoe—her pants are too tight for her to bend—and he is grate- based in Boston. ful to help a living sister.

34 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe As they decide to head home, which is about her alcoholism, and how Sedaris realizes that he doesn’t know much it destroyed. how to tell his own house from all the The title is Sedaris’ question while other similar houses on the dark beach. Hugh is reading his manuscript and goes At this moment, in his panic at being for minutes without laughing. It has an lost, he makes the observation that ties echo in the story, as he recalls that, the entire story together. Even though “Sober, she was cheerful and charis- the people who lived in these houses are matic”: “’I got them laughing’ was a pop- white conservatives who would have ular line in the stories she’d tell at the end laughed along with the Obamacare crack of the day. ... Her specialty was the real- on the plane, “we could have knocked life story, perfected and condensed. on any of these doors, explained our sit- These take work, and she’d go through uation, and received help.” When they half a dozen verbal drafts before getting finally find their house, they go in and one where she wanted it.” This could, of talk about Tiffany some more—Tiffany, course, be self-description, a point rein- who could not ask for or receive help, forced when he describes these sessions just as their high school friend Kevin as “a master class”: “One of us would tell could not. Sedaris ends by once again a story about our day and she’d interject embracing the mystery, imagining every now and then to give notes. ‘You someone on the beach looking at their don’t need all that detail about the bed- house “wondering, as we often did our- room,’ she’d say, or, ‘Maybe it’s best to selves these days, what we had done to skip the part about the teacher and just deserve all this.” cut to the chase.’” His mother’s example So this story, with its seemingly clearly taught him how to get them shaggy-dog structure of unrelated inci- laughing, and also how to write a story dents, in which basically nothing hap- that asks why they aren’t laughing. David Sedaris on The Tonight Show in 2015. pens, becomes a way to raise questions This collection marks another evo- about who gets to be included on your side and can be helped lutionary step in the Sedaris family chronicles. Previously, and who doesn’t and can’t, about how Tiffany and Kevin Sedaris’ father has seemed something of a buffoon, shouting wound up outside the group that they were born into, about the loudly and ignored by everyone, eclipsed by their mother. But, sister whose shoe you can tie and the one who’s put herself be- unlike her, he’s still here, now 94, and must be reckoned with. yond help, about how the Obamacare haters can view you as on In “The Silent Treatment,” about the silence between father and their side when you need help, even about whether you cheer son, Sedaris recalls that “Growing up, I never got the sense that for a local soccer team if they can’t hear you. It’s about the di- he particularly liked me. I didn’t feel completely unloved—if viding lines that control us even though we don’t know why. the house were on fire he would have dragged me out, though The title, “A House Divided,” turns Lincoln’s phrase into a joke it would have been after he rescued everyone else.” Now, about the beach house, which Sedaris has divided so that the he decades later, there is no improvement. and Hugh can be separate from the less desirable family mem- The collection ends with “The Comey Memo,” which is bers. But underlying this comic division is the deeper family di- about Sedaris’ father (who, needless to say, watches Fox News vision, and the story finally restores Lincoln’s meaning of and supports Trump). It is specifically about another mystery, North versus South, a blue-state/red-state conflict that Sedaris his inexplicable stubbornness, as implacable as a geological for- re-enacts whenever he returns to North Carolina. mation, in choosing to live alone in his old junk-filled house, Along with Tiffany, there’s another ghost in this collec- scrimping pointlessly, using a flashlight to save on electricity. tion—ghosts actually turn up in two stories—whose absence When Sedaris visits, the house is quiet. He fears the worst and, is felt so strongly that it’s a presence: Sedaris’ mother, who died when his father appears, he is “relieved by how relieved I felt,” about thirty years earlier. His mother has always loomed large capturing exactly the ambivalent feelings of a child toward a in Sedaris’ mental landscape, unavoidable and mysterious, and difficult parent. The collection ends on this impasse. His father has inspired his most emotionally complex stories, with her in- gives Sedaris and his sister Amy a few items specially picked explicable cruelties and even more inexplicable kindnesses, and from the junk. At the airport, Sedaris throws them in the trash: her unmistakable influence on him. For most of this book, she “It wasn’t where they belonged, necessarily. It was just where is glimpsed only briefly, in passing references. But she comes they ended up.” Like Tiffany, like everyone else in this amaz- to the fore, devastatingly, in “Why Aren’t You Laughing?” ing collection of stories. Why aren’t we laughing? Subscribe to the Digital Edition! Sign up for full Website access at www.GLReview.org

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 35 The Revolution Will Be Dramatized

OZENS OF WORKS of literary matically composed and yet realistic,” so criticism and biographies for MARTHA E. STONE that it “could have easily been true.” As young readers (but not adults) “L.H.N.” she wrote letters to the Daugh- have been written about play- ters of Bilitis magazine The Ladder, and as D Looking for Lorraine: wright Lorraine Hansberry (1930–1965), “Emily Jones” she wrote short stories for author of the classic play A Raisin in the The Radiant and Radical Life both The Ladder and the Mattachine’s Sun (1959). Compressing her life, one in of Lorraine Hansberry ONE magazine. Though Perry does not which her charisma, personal warmth, in- by Imani Perry cite J. R. Roberts, it was Roberts’ anno- tellectual confidence, hard-hitting and often Beacon Press. 256 pages, $26.95 tated bibliography Black Lesbians (1981) unpopular political and racial justice that credited Ladder editor Barbara Grier stances were much in evidence, must have been no easy task with outing Hansberry in 1970 as the author of these letters for Imani Perry, professor of African-American studies at and short stories. Princeton. In the late 1950s, Hansberry paid her first visit to Province- Looking for Lorraine is a deeply felt biography in which town. One of her lovers, whom she probably met there, was Perry expresses her feelings of oneness with Hansberry through photographer Molly Malone Cook (later the partner of poet similarities in their backgrounds and reactions to political Mary Oliver). It was in 1958 that she met James Baldwin, to events. The book also offers critiques of many of Hansberry’s whom she became “Sweet Lorraine,” and around the same time works, both published and unpublished. Its title was chosen as that she met Nina Simone, who said that when they got together, an homage to Isaac Julien’s 1989 film Looking for Langston. they never spoke of trivial matters. “It was always Marx, Lenin Langston Hughes’ poem “Harlem” contains the line that pro- and revolution—real girls’ talk.” vided the title for A Raisin in the Sun: “What happens to a dream Perry reproduces a list, both “mundane and profound,” that deferred?/ Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?/ ... Or does it Hansberry made in 1960, of her likes and hates. “I like,” wrote explode?” Hansberry, “my homosexuality.” The list of likes includes ten The youngest of four, Lorraine Hansberry was born in entries about women and one about her husband. In her list of Chicago in 1930 into a highly educated and well-to-do family. hates, “my homosexuality” is back, along with racism, death, These attributes did nothing to insulate the family from violence pain, and the writings of Genet and Sartre. and hatred, experiences that would appear in different forms in Not surprisingly, Perry devotes a good deal of attention to Hansberry’s plays and other writings. Hansberry was the first Raisin in the Sun. It was the first play on Broadway by an African-American in the women’s dorm at the University of Wisconsin-Madison when she started college as an applied arts major in 1948. Popular and quick to make friends, she took part in student productions. Her favorite play was Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, which was set in the slums of Dublin. She found, as Perry notes, that it came from “a people for whom there was poetry in everyday expression.” However, Hansberry was not interested in the academic life. She withdrew from school after two years and moved to Harlem, where she took an editorial and writing position at Freedom, a weekly newspaper published by Paul Robeson. She’d originally met Robeson, as well as Langston Hughes and W. E. B. Du Bois, when they visited her family during her child- hood in Chicago. Her politics brought her to the attention of the FBI, and their surveillance began. But, writes Perry, “[t]hey would look for everything, and see very little.” In 1953, she married editor and publisher Robert Nemiroff. Little is known of their private life, but he was a great support to her during their years together, even after their 1962 di- vorce. In Perry’s chapter “Sappho’s Poetry,” she delicately ex- plores some of what is known about Hansberry’s same-sex relationships, though this is not the major focus of Looking for Lorraine. Perry analyzes Hansberry’s unpublished play “Flow- ers for the General,” about a lesbian love affair, “melodra- Lorraine Hansberry on the roof of 337 Bleeker Street, the West Village Martha E. Stone is the literary editor of this magazine. flat where she lived with husband Robert Nemiroff. Photo by Nat Fein.

36 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe African-American woman. Hansberry was the first black in a number of writing projects almost to the moment of her woman to win a Drama Critics’ Circle Award, in 1959. The death in 1965, at age 34, of metastatic pancreatic cancer. Her show ran for 530 performances on Broadway, and its cast of lu- funeral, attended by over 700 people (including Malcolm X, minaries included Sidney Poitier and Ruby Dee. Its success al- just a few weeks before his assassination) was a star-studded lowed Hansberry to buy a building in the Village. She rented an event, featuring many of her friends from show business. Of apartment to Dorothy Secules, a successful businesswoman the many honorary pallbearers, one was Dorothy Secules. with whom she was intimately involved. There is so much more to learn about Hansberry: perhaps more Near the end of her life, she wrote in her journal: “When I will be revealed in Margaret B. Wilkerson’s Lorraine Hans- get my health back I think I shall have to go into the South to berry: Am I a Revolutionary? whose publication is expected find out what kind of revolutionary I am.” She was immersed next year. Catching Catfish Barehanded

MYSTERY inside a character Nevertheless, the author does seem to study masquerading as a sexual SARAH SARAI be inviting controversy when she writes: shell game, Tomb of the Un- “If the FBI leaders thought Martin Luther known Racist, by Blanche Mc- King, Jr. was dangerous, can’t you imagine A Tomb of the Unknown Racist Crary Boyd, is byzantine, delightful, and what they thought about radical lesbians.” terrifying. The novel’s who-done-it thread by Blanche McCrary Boyd I dragged that sentence from my apartment unwinds from South Carolina to New Mex- Counterpoint. 280 pages, $26. to the bodega on the corner and back, trying ico to Washington and back again, but it is to dissect the message or attitude. King gal- the subject matter—which includes regionalism, the challenged vanized the nation and was hated and feared by the FBI. I know American intellect, and White Power militants slithering Gol- that lesbians, radical or otherwise, could be hated (and mocked), lum-like to the surface of the melting pot—that makes us take but I doubt that we were feared by the FBI as particularly dan- notice. While the novel is raucous, funny, and intriguing, it has gerous. Were we? frightening echoes of the post-November 2016 zeitgeist. Ruby, the niece, is half Asian. Her boyfriend is a full- The action kicks off with Wheel of Fortune. Ellen Burns, a blooded Nogalu native whose mother is mistrustful of Ruby. Southerner, the novel’s lesbian narrator, is watching Pat Sajak It’s quickly revealed that everyone should be mistrustful of and company with her daft, canny mother when a newsflash Ruby. As complicated as the story gets, Boyd keeps the reader startles them. Two young children have been kidnapped from a hooked with her witty, evocative writing. Still in Charleston, New Mexico reservation, and their mother, much to Ellen’s as- Ellen settles her mother in bed, and notes: “Her hair was en- tonishment, is her long-lost niece Ruby. Ruby’s father is Royce cased in a pair of white nylon underpants to preserve its shape. Burns, Ellen’s once-famous brother, presumed dead in an FBI I had removed all of her makeup, including the lipstick on one shootout. Long ago, he authored a treasured novel, the type col- eyelid. Either she had stopped with one eye because she sensed lege students pass around and reread. He somehow morphed something was wrong or she simply got distracted.” Ellen’s in- into a notorious white nationalist, who was for a time a protégé creasingly senile mother inspires metaphors: “But if I look too of the author of the Turner Diaries, that shoddy bit of fiction long at her eyelashes they can start looking like a burned forest, that has inspired marginally literate terrorists such as Timothy or they can turn green and become a sugarcane field. I can smell McVeigh. Apparently, Royce and the Turner guy had a falling it but I’m still sitting there taking off her eye shadow. Later, out over the “issue” of Jews. Royce was opposed to slaughter- when I’m by myself, I can go back into the cane field because ing all Jews. Tomb of the Unknown Racist’s oddly specific de- I like it there a lot.” tails can be unnerving, but compelling. When she returns from New Mexico, Ellen meets some This family’s history is so complicated, and the complica- tions so likely to be part of Ruby’s crisis, that Ellen flies to New Mexico to help her niece. She secures a hotel room, locates an AA meeting, and meets up with a local and manly cop, who as- sists her in her pursuit—and with whom she becomes involved. Despite the fact that Ellen has a fling with this policemen, and even if she occasionally has sex with other men, Boyd makes it clear that she identifies not as bisexual but as a lesbian pure and simple. This insistence on a hard-and-fast sexual orientation may cut against the current need to draw precise sexual dis- tinctions, but Boyd presents it as an uncontroversial fact.

Sarah Sarai is author of the poetry collections Geographies of Soul and Taffeta and The Future Is Happy. She lives in New York.

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 37 dimwitted Charleston townswomen at the un- dertakers. Their understanding of theology and the church’s teachings on children in the after- Michelangelo’s David life would leave Aquinas speechless: “One of them told me quite seriously that although chil- When he made you The abdomen stretched, dren are allowed to age in heaven, they have to gaze at Rome, you warned those hills across the terrain, max out at about ten or eleven, before puberty of treachery. Those eagle eyes ends on a hairy pit makes them crazy.” tense. Your torso curved to a marbled manhood, AA is essential to Ellen’s notions of theol- on an axis ready for combat, flaccid, atop a sack filled ogy and to a “higher power.” Her descriptions your curls and lips tight. with sap from which springs of meetings and the program in general are You stood at counterpoint, the fulfillment of a covenant. those of a grateful recoverer. A former boozer, strained. On the right, Long may you live! she used any and all drugs—except heroin, a you hold an invisible rock. Chiseled, distinction she insists upon. In detailing the cu- mulative effect of her altered states, Ellen re- On the left, your sling. you reign as white king, lates how her interaction with language, From your collar bone, restless in a dimly lit hallway landscape, and imagination is forever changed: a slump between of unfinished sculptures. “Another thing that stays weird for me is those erect nipples. metaphors. Metaphors become like real pas- JOHN TOLEDO sageways in my head. I mean, metaphors can just be plain old metaphors, or they can make me feel as if I’ve South comes to life in the way we have come to expect of South- stuck my arm in too deep and pulled out a living fish.” In the ern writers. Blanche Boyd does not overlook essential Southern South, that’s called noodling, or so I learned from NPR: catch- themes—American themes, really—such as race and historical ing catfish barehanded. This isn’t a bad metaphor for many ex- memory. Some mysteries are “cozies” in which a sweet lady de- periences: that of reaching into murky waters for something tective pours lavender tea and reveals that the vicar did it. Tomb dimly seen, and slippery. And catfish can bite. of the Unknown Racist is a not-cozy: sensibilities are not spared. So much happens in this beautifully rendered novel. The The vigilant reader is thus rewarded.

BRIEFS

Read by Strangers: Stories more comforting. The wittily titled “Brad’s These voices can best be grasped if we lis- by Philip Dean Walker Head Revisited, ’94” is narrated by a self- ten t o them directly. Lethe Press. 215 pages, $14.50 professed porn star, and “Three-Sink Sink” ZH, for example, age 25, has thought This story collection is tautly written, un- is a manual for wannabe male escorts. things through: “In terms of sexuality, I a m nerving, and often ghoulishly funny. Most “Caravan,” which concludes the collection, fluid. I do not tell everybody I a m a ttracted of the stories are set in the contemporary is more alarming. When the regulars to women. ... I feel that when you choose to U.S. and a few in urban Japan, where emerge from the one remaining gay bar in be around a g roup of people because of everything desirable is even more com- their city, they are surprised to find a fleet who they are, you are fetishizing them to modified than in the U.S. There are three of school buses waiting to give them free some extent. I do not want to set my friends sets of stories: family dramas, the adven- rides so that they don’t have to drive home based on my sexuality.” Explains tures of male hustlers and the men who drunk. Sinister possibilities hang in the air. Aazeenarh Mohammed: “Queer women [in crave them, and tales of doomed hetero- These stories are well-crafted, and the de- Nigeria] were ... facing further marginaliza- sexual women. Walker’s ability to capture terminism in them seems characteristic of tion due to their sexual orientation, gender the inner life of his female characters has the current American zeitgeist: things are identity and sex within a h etero-patriarchal been praised, but I’m not so sure. The bad, and getting worse. societal, cultural and economic structure women in these stories all seem implausi- JEAN ROBERTA that manifests power and control in very bly isolated because of their need for male different ways than for queer men. We felt companionship, without which their lives She Called Me Woman: there was such a l ack of queer people’s s to- have no meaning. Meanwhile, competition Nigeria’s Queer Women Speak ries in public discourse, particularly of between women prevents them from bond- Edited by Azeenarh Mohammed, women.” KZ, age forty, describes univer- ing. The male characters have other op- Chitra Nagarajan and Rafeeat Aliyu sals of cowardice and fear. “ I have a f riend tions, and even though their relationships Cassava Republic Press. 340 pages, $16.95 who i s m arried. She goes to events and I are largely based on sex, their independ- She Called Me Woman: Nigeria’s Queer know about three women she has dated ence is taken for granted. Heterosexuality Women Speak is a glorious collection of 25 over the years. But on her Facebook page, is shown as problematic, but the plots set first-person accounts written by a wide she is so homophobic! She is covering up in families with a mother and father at the array of queer women throughout Nigeria and that is what everybody is doing.” center generally show the most emotional and an African diaspora influenced by em- Wr ites HK: “I live with my partner now. depth. ployment opportunities and porous bor- We see each other every day, e xcept when The stories set against a contemporary ders. The editors knew it was essential to she is in Lagos. For the first time ever, I gay male backdrop are funnier, but no insert women’s voices into the discussion. have someone taking care of me. I wake up

38 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe in the morning and she is there with a cup must contend with the collection owner’s locals, tourists, and migrant laborers, Capó of tea. It feels good to have someone there. I uncooperative family as well as difficulties charts the city’s history of motion from its feel really loved by her.” in his relationship with his boyfriend Char- earliest days through the 1920s real estate SARAH SARAI lie. Yale himself gets sick, becoming even boom and into the Great Depression. closer to Fiona, while participating in This is a book that would be very easy to Hip Sublime: Beat Writers and demonstrations. write badly, whether shallow and gossipy or the Classical Tradition Fast forward to 2015, and Fiona searches focused exclusively on a handful of prosper- Edited by Sheila Murnaghan and for her estranged daughter Claire, who may ous tourists. Capó is clearly committed to Ralph M. Rosen have fled to Paris with a boyfriend during getting it right. He is no stranger to queer Ohio State U. Press. 292 pages, $79.95 her time in a cult. Fiona stays with an old theory but is clearly more at home in the This collection of studies on the effect of friend, Richard, now a famous photogra- archives, where he has uncovered astonish- the classics on writers of the Beat poets pher preparing for a show, and encounters ing finds that recover the remarkable past of and the San Francisco school includes Jake, an American journalist fascinated by a city that too many people believe has no some gay-themed material. There are chap- Richard and infatuated with Fiona. While history to speak of. ters on Allen Ginsberg’s connection to the more connections are revealed between the CHRISTOPHER CAPOZZOLA sexually exotic writings of Catullus and on two stories, Fiona slowly understands how the long reach of Sappho into Beat writing. watching her brother and his friends die Juliet, Naked There are some tasty anecdotes tucked has impacted her relationship with Claire Directed by Jesse Peretz away in these somewhat academic chap- and others. Juliet, Naked is a deceptively simple film ters, for example regarding Ginsberg’s ex- The novel is filled with details of AIDS that touches on a number of 21st-century coriation of the prudish academic press: symptoms, such as blindness and dementia, themes. Ethan Hawke stars as the lost-but- “Why have the Loeb Library texts been which gives it a deep sadness. Yale’s final not-forgotten singer-songwriter Tucker translated so as leave out the balls?” The days are particularly heart-wrenching. But the Crowe, whose brief career decades earlier is Ginsberg chapter includes a discussion of book also contains some incredibly touching the focus of a cult-like fanclub that’s de- his poem “Malest,” a sort of queering of moments, particularly the stories the paint- voted to his music. We meet Tucker as a Catullus’ work. ings’ owner tells Yale of modeling for one of middle-aged American man when Annie, Among the other nuggets found here is a the artists, and friends caring for sick com- the British girlfriend of his number one fan, magazine dedication by Ed Sanders to, munity members. The book shows how the accidentally initiates an on-line dialog. among others, “all those groped by J. Edgar tragedies of the past affect us years later. Eventually Annie is destined to meet Tucker Hoover in the silent halls of Congress.” CHARLES GREEN in person, along with his many children Now there’s an image to spook the horses! from a series of ex-girlfriends, who all con- Sanders was a devotee of Sappho, and the Welcome to Fairyland: verge on London after Tucker has a mild chapter on his work also focuses on hers. Queer Miami before 1940 heart attack. The Beat writers had very different styles by Julio Capó Jr. One review I read thought the film was and approached issues of sexuality in vari- U. of North Carolina Press. 400 pages, $29.95 all about the angst of the Gen-Xers as they ous ways. Philip Whalen’s poem “Scenes of In one of the most innovative and important reach middle age. It was certainly about the Life at the Capitol” includes the rollicking recent works in LGBT history, Julio Capó changing American (and British) family, lines: “If Socrates and Plato and Diotima/ Jr. traces how Miami became a city where with half-siblings, blended households, and And all the rest of the folks at that party/ “leisure and entertainment were central to estranged relatives running riot (almost lit- Had simply eaten lots of food and wine every aspect of life.” Fundamentally shaped erally in one hospital scene). Or you could and dope/ And spent the entire weekend by real estate speculation and leisure argue that it’s all about modern fandom and in bed together/ Perhaps Western Civiliza- economies, Miami emerged almost the weird cults that grow up on the Internet tion/ Wouldn’t have been such a failure?” overnight in the early 20th century, market- around creative artists who burst forth and That’s a better image to leave you with ing itself as a safe gateway to the Caribbean flamed out. But it is a minor subplot that I than J. Edgar Hoover. located “just south of the South” and a found intriguing: the presence of a sassy ALAN CONTRERAS “fairyland” for tourists. An economy of lesbian character, Annie’s sister Gina. openness tolerated transgressions of gender She’s completely accepted by Annie (of The Great Believers and sexual norms, and Capó documents course) and even serves as an advisor in By Rebecca Makkai how “residents and boosters fought hard to matters of the heart—even as Gina herself Viking. $27, 421 pages both combat and capitalize on” the city’s searches for love. This tragic novel tells two interconnected early reputation. But he also shows that What’s interesting is the extent to which it stories, capturing the fear and uncertainty of there are many Floridas, all of them worth a has become routine, if not de rigueur, for an the AIDS epidemic during the 1980s and the closer examination. LGBT character or couple to be worked into lingering pain of those who lived through The most important contribution of Wel- the plot of an otherwise heterosexual indie the crisis years later. The first story, set in come to Fairyland is that it links Florida’s film (especially the romcom). Perhaps Chicago, focuses on Yale Tishman, who’s LGBT past to the labor and immigration there’s an element of tokenism here, but it helping to care for many sick and dying history of the Caribbean. Bahamian migrant sure beats invisibility. More to the point, it friends. It begins with a party held in honor laborers constructed the city, some of them reflects the reality that LGBT people have of Nico, a recently deceased friend, at- arriving in search of same-sex partners, all assimilated into mainstream families and tended by Nico’s supportive younger sister of them marked as socially deviant or queer. communities. No doubt the indie film as a Fiona. In between, Yale, a development di- Under close police scrutiny, black workers’ worldview is ahead of the cultural curve on rector at a university art gallery, discovers a experiences “often rendered Miami much this, but the easygoing sex-and-gender world collection of paintings from the 1920s that more a nightmare than a recreational play- that it envisions does have its appeal. could make the gallery’s reputation. Yale ground.” Tracking back and forth between WENDY FENWICK

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 39 Warhol Painted What He Liked

AST SUMMER, I visited Pitts- “Warhol’s liking is an attempt to imagine burgh’s Andy Warhol Museum. PHILIP GAMBONE new, queer forms of affection and relation- “A two-hour visit will be plenty,” ality and to transform the world into a place the host at my B & B told me. where those forms could find a home.” For L Like Andy Warhol Not being a fan of Warhol’s work, I con- example, in his “pads and pads and pads” sidered his suggestion a more than ample by Jonathan Flatley of cock drawings from the 1950s, we have stretch of time. Like many lay people, I U. of Chicago Press. 274 pages, $45. “a queer erotic economy ... the more the knew Warhol’s Campbell soup cans, Brillo merrier.” boxes, and his multiple-image silk-screen Andy Warhol’s The Chelsea Girls Warhol replaced binary oppositions— portraits of celebrities like Jackie Kennedy, Edited by Geralyn Huxley same versus different, capitalism versus Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean—works and Greg Pierce consumerism, original versus copy—with that Warhol’s abstract expressionist con- Distributed Art Publishers and a commitment to “commonism.” “The per- temporaries dismissed as superficial or The Andy Warhol Museum sistent focus of Warhol’s work,” Flatley even phony. I tended to concur in this esti- 328 pages, $65. writes, “was the world of common objects mation. Warhol himself famously said, “If as a world of common feeling.” Even you want to know all about Andt [Andy] Warhol, just look at the Warhol’s alleged departure from good taste is, Faltley avers, an surface: of my painting and films and me, and there I am. effort to imagine a world “where taste ceases to function as a There’s nothing behind it.” means of marking and making class positions.” Warhol’s art Five hours after I arrived at the museum, I reluctantly pulled created “an opening where nonmiserable, even joyous, plural myself away. I could have stayed there until closing. My visit queer singularity could come into being.” totally upended my hitherto unexamined dismissal of Warhol’s Flatley organizes his book around examinations of four of work. The more I looked—at the often dazzling surfaces, at the Warhol’s “tactics for attuning to likeness.” Appropriately outrageous use of color, at the exuberant celebration of “messi- enough, it begins with an examination of the artist’s wide-rang- ness” and “mistake,” at the sheer volume and range of his out- ing, brazenly indiscriminate collecting practices. Of his enthu- put—the more my previous assessment struck me as unworthy siasm for collecting things—it’s been reported that Warhol spent of this enigmatic, provocative, multi-faceted artist. more than a million dollars a year at auctions—Flatley argues Warhol was never bored. “He always found something to that collecting became another way for the artist to care about like,” writes Jonathan Flatley in his ambitious and intriguing those people and things that “just can’t fit into stock roles.” A book Like Andy Warhol. Flatley, a professor of English at Wayne misfit all through his youth and college years, Warhol aimed State University, contends that for through his epic collections to allow Warhol “liking things” was a proj- things to “misfit together.” ect he pursued throughout his ca- The middle chapters consider reer. The artist was always ready to Warhol’s similarities to the concep- pay attention to something and be tual artist Sol LeWitt and the mini- affected by it. In so doing, he un- malist Donald Judd—artists who, covered “new ways of being affec- like Warhol, modeled their tech- tively open to the world.” niques on the machine and indus- Flatley offers a compelling argu- trial work processes. For both ment against the commonplace un- LeWitt and Warhol, being machine- derstanding that Warhol’s art, “and like became “a means for reorient- its machine-like use of repetition,” ing us” in relation to our emotions. was a stance against being affected. Their imitation of the machine, Instead, he argues, Warhol “sought rather than alienating us, “rescues us to transform—even replace—the en- from our isolation by reminding us tire world, by liking it or by learning to notice the ways in which the very how to be bored by it,” which was forces alienating us may make us ultimately the same thing. alike.” Similarly, Warhol and Judd Flatley argues that for Warhol shared an affinity for “cool, non- the old Western dichotomy between composed affectless art to which same and different (and between ‘meaning’ was difficult to attribute.” hetero and homo) was replaced by In the final chapter, Flatley a “roomier orientation” where at- looks at Warhol’s interest in racism, traction, affection, and attachment the color line, and the depiction of no longer relied on binary concepts. nonwhite people—“a compelling

40 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe Chelsea Hotel, was called both “a masterpiece” and “a gallery of horrors.” after i drive my boyfriend home Gus Van Sant observes in his essay: “He was attracted to anything that would disturb the Industrial Cinema.” Warhol from his hernia surgery, he sleeps aimed for “anything that undressed the Hollywood-ness of the image.” Shot mostly in black-and-white though partially in & i keep looking at him to make sure color, the film’s twelve reels were projected in random order, in he is still breathing. how strange a side-by-side projection style that resembled the repetitions in Warhol’s silk screens and the rock-and-roll performances he it is: three small cuts & i am freshly created with the Velvet Underground. terrified of death—his, that is— In one of the book’s essays, editors Geralyn Huxley and Greg Pierce note that Warhol showed his “Superstars”—friends, of his open body never being fully colleagues, lovers—“performing things they often did in their closed. this is, i guess, the deal: for each daily lives, displaying their inherent glamour and mesmerizing viewers by doing no more than chatting with friends, lounging good morning kiss, each hand held in bed, getting their hair cut, and shooting up.” They continue: in the forsythia, a new “In keeping with the pop aesthetic, Warhol depicted common, everyday activities but reframed or refocused them in such a avenue for pain is chiseled into way as to awaken in the viewer a new awareness of their beauty the chest. when we love, it seems, we and significance.” These two books are not the place where someone un- inevitably see the body wrecked, familar with Warhol’s œuvre should dive in. Flatley’s prose the failure of some wet mechanism tucked can sometimes lapse into postmodernist verbosity and opaqueness, a scholarly idiom that this reader found at time in the gut. & yet we keep doing it, keep impossible to penetrate. Nevertheless, each essay makes a se- diving dumbly in. we keep running toward love rious and valuable contribution to Warhol studies. The illus- trations alone are well worth the price of these (somewhat the way deer run toward trains: quick, expensive) volumes. unstoppable, our eyes black & wide. These Words Are True and Faithful PATRICK KINDIG A novel by Eugene Galt feature of his work.” He shows how, in Warhol’s “Race Riot” Sam Overton is a young lawyer paintings, for example, the usual modes of “racial seeing” are with a brilliant future at one of ;2/ -3;@A: 4/+.361 4+> B95:% '00;;/9 disoriented, so that the viewer begins “to doubt skin’s function as 2/ +6. 74./9 8743-/ 700BB-/9 )963/ a sign of some truth or knowledge about the body it covers.” Butler have chance meetings To me, Warhol’s æsthetic has affinities to Buddhism, and at the courthouse complex and Flatley, though he never explicitly says so, seems to touch on then at a leather bar, the two this notion. Warhol’s insistence on absence of meaning, which ,/-75/ 47=/9:$ +6. )963/$ >27 “quiets the thinking, choosing, remembering, judging mind,” is experienced in the local gay leather scene as a Dominant, strikes me as almost Zen-like. Likewise, in his movies, multi- guides Sam in exploring his sub- ple-hour films in which almost nothing happens—a man sleep- 53::3=/ 6+;<9/% *2/@ ,/-75/ ing, the Empire State Building at night, the face of a man getting inseparable and appear set to a blow job—the viewer is “lulled ... into a different temporal- live happily and kinkily ever af- ity.” The promise of such works is that “a patient experience of ter, until a seemingly innocent boredom ... will allow unexpected and unpredictable passion— event upends everything that they think they know about each other, the nature of their relation- even ‘bliss’—to emerge.” :238$ +6. ;2/5:/4=/:% Warhol’s films—which Rajenda Roy, the chief film curator at MoMA, calls a “full-frontal attack on the square-frame, Written bygyy a gay man who has lived the life, this book, a former straight life”—were as controversial as any of his other proj- editor’s pick on Steamy Romance Books, explores the psychology ects. “Even those of us who are surrounded by Warhol’s work 70 (7536+6;&:<,53::3=/ 9/4+;376:238: ,/;>//6 5/6% '; ;35/: :/?@$ daily may find ourselves shocked by the films,” writes Patrick snarky, and philosophical, it also explores the questions of how we know what we know, why we believe what we believe, and what Moore, the Director of the Warhol Museum, which has just is- happens when our most cherished beliefs turn out to be neither sued a lavish, coffee-table book on Warhol’s most successful ;9+@$ 3; /?+536/: ;2/ +,:<9.3;3/: 70 -76- film, The Chelsea Girls. When it premiered in 1966, The ;/5879+9@ 1+@ 430/$ 67; :8+9361 ;2/ :+-9/. -7>:% Chelsea Girls, purportedly a look at people living in New York’s Paperback and ebook available on Amazon.com Philip Gambone is a regular contributor to this magazine. Audiobook available on Amazon, Audible, and iTunes

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 41 A Top-Down Theory of Progress

S AN ANTIPODEAN reviewer, lagged behind the rest of Western Europe it’s exciting to read a book that DENNIS ALTMAN in legal recognition of LGBT equality. begins with moving descrip- Other than that, are we surprised that, per tions of the votes in the New capita, Iceland and New Zealand probably A The Children of Harvey Milk: Zealand and Australian Parliaments to le- top of the list? galize same-sex marriage. The Children of How LGBTQ Politicians There is a commendable attempt to in- Harvey Milk is refreshingly ambitious in its Changed the World clude other parts of the world, but the em- global scope, even if its examples are al- by Andrew Reynolds phasis on individual parliamentarians most entirely drawn from the English- Oxford University Press means that discussion of what is, after all, speaking world. Andrew Reynolds bases his 341 pages, $34.95 the majority of the world’s population is book on extensive interviews with parlia- largely reduced to generalizations. There’s mentarians and legislators, almost all of them British, American, a revealing interview with the South African MP Zakhele Mb- or Irish. To these he adds large amounts of statistical data, so hele, but it’s included in a chapter that ends by discussing that the book reads as a strange amalgam of journalism and po- African-Americans in the U.S., a juxtaposition that is tenuous litical science, not quite succeeding as either. at best. Reynolds makes two main arguments. The first is that en- Reynolds acknowledges there have been occasional openly gaging with people who are “LGBTI” is an important factor in queer legislators in Japan, Nepal, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, but changing people’s attitudes. This is a restatement of early gay Asia receives little attention. (The long list of interviewees does liberation ideas—“Come Out! Come Out! Wherever you include Sunil Pant, the openly gay politician from Nepal, and are”—and is hardly controversial, although he provides rich activist transwoman Bemz Benedito from the Philippines.) empirical and biographical detail. His second argument relates Most striking is the lack of discussion of Latin America, which to his emphasis on the overwhelming importance of individu- has taken the lead in promoting gay rights within international als: “At its heart,” he writes, “the story of how marriage equal- forums. ity and gay rights advanced in the United States is one of There have been comparatively few openly LGBT politi- individual agency. Judges, elected officials, and civic leaders cians in Latin America, but given Reynolds’ emphasis on same- move in overlapping social circles.” Political movements seem sex marriage, he might have reflected on the fact that it was of little interest to Reynolds, whose focus is entirely on high- achieved in Mexico City, Argentina, Uruguay, and a number of profile individuals. Brazilian states before it was in the U.S. To explain how this The most striking example of this is a four-page account of occurred, and why several Latin American countries were ad- Coos Huijsen, who was apparently the first openly gay person vancing LGBT equality against American opposition earlier in elected to a national parliament, namely that of the Netherlands the decade, might complicate his triumphalist story about the in the 1970s. But nowhere does Reynolds mention that the centrality of “out” politicians. Netherlands also had one of the strongest early homophile The strength of the book is the very detailed stories of leg- movements in the world, the COC, founded in 1946 and still in islators in the North Atlantic world whom Reynolds inter- existence. Granted, this is a book about parliamentary govern- viewed, often providing us with more detail than a reader can ment, and openly gay politicians do make a difference. But assimilate. Do we really need to know the family background what Reynolds fails to consider is that often such public fig- of a number of British politicians or read blow-by-blow ac- ures were able to come out only because of long campaigns by counts of primary elections in certain U.S. states? There’s an in- social movements and their organizers, who risked far more dulgence toward those he interviews, combined with a strange than revealing their sexuality as a member of the British House lack of curiosity about the movements of which they were part. of Lords. Moreover, the lack of an index is disappointing. Because At one point Reynolds claims: “The presence of even a of the denseness of the material and the amount of information small number of openly gay legislators was associated signifi- covered, much of it not always well connected, an index would cantly with the future passage of enhanced gay rights.” But the have been extremely helpful. converse is equally true: legal recognition of gay rights makes In the end, The Children of Harvey Milk is an engrossing set it more likely that there will be legislators who are open about of journalistic pieces that shows a remarkable lack of interest their sexuality. Thus Reynolds’ own figures, in a comprehen- in the political movements and cultural changes that created sive list of publicly out politicians, shows that they come over- the world in which it is possible to elect openly gay political whelmingly from countries that have the greatest acceptance leaders. Toward the end of his book, Reynolds quotes marriage of LGBT rights. The only possible exception is Italy, which has advocate Evan Wolfson as saying: “The tendency is to think the world began the day you arrived.” If only Reynolds had Dennis Altman’s first book, Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation taken this comment to heart and done more extensive back- (1971), is relevant to this review. He is a professorial fellow in human ground reading before embarking on yet another cup of tea with security at La Trobe University. British lords.

42 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe friendly “out there” social attitude with no apparent agenda, this is possibly the best way to write a It’s Not About Me memoir—or anti-memoir. We get vivid pictures of her life FELICE PICANO and times, as well as where Tea was mentally at each time and place. She’s not afraid of opinions. Against Memoir: Regarding those famous Womyn’s Complaints, Confessions & Criticisms Music Festivals, in “Transmis- by Michelle Tea sions from Camp Trans,” she Feminist Press. 318 pages, $18.95 writes: “the real purpose is to hun- Michelle Tea. Gretchen Sayers photo. ker down in a forest with a few HE EARLY DAYS of lesbian-feminist literature boasted thousand other females, bond, have sex in a fern grove, and go to authors with big personalities—Rita Mae Brown, Ger- countless workshops on everything from sexual esoterica to Tmaine Greer, Kate Millet, and Jill Johnston, to name but parading around on stilts, processing oppressions, and sharing a few. Since then, the field has been largely bereft of such outsize how much you miss your cat.” In her essay “How Not to be A figures. True, there are many terrific mystery, science fiction, fan- Queer Douchebag,” she commands: “Stop policing each other tasy, and romance novelists, lesbian and bisexual professionals like little queer police officers. I have never seen a quadrant of who have lots of loyal supporters. For this reason, if Michelle people so ready to tear each other’s faces off as queers.” Tea didn’t already exist, she would have to be invented. As to why she titled her book as she did, Tea explains it in Luckily, she does exist, and she’s made a name for herself several essays. In “Polishness” she concludes: “Anyone would with books like Valencia, Rent Girl,andBlack Wave, as well as get sick and tired of doing the same thing for seventeen years. books about the Tarot, various anthologies, and performance When a memoir is what you’ve been doing. It means you’ve pieces through the group Sister Spit. For most of the 1990s and become horribly sick of yourself, of your narrative, and I had.” early 2000s she was the spokesperson for a generation of San Tea may have turned against memoir as a genre, but those years Franciscans, detailing the residential, literary, and intellectual writing one were certainly not wasted. changes and challenges of the city. She was also the force and ______soul behind the RADAR reading series that kept LGBT literature Felice Picano’s latest book is a memoir titled Nights at Rizzoli. alive in the Bay Area. Now in her forties, she is married and a mother and living in L.A. That should have calmed her down, but this volume is here to testify that she’s still got a lot of “living large” to do, and write about. Against Memoir, with its nod to Susan Sontag’s Against Where Were You in ’62? Interpretation, ends up being in essence a memoir in the same way that Sontag’s book was about interpretation. Dedicated fans may be able to put together a chronology of Tea’s enthusiasms CHARLES GREEN from her books, which include: men, women, punk music, the San Francisco female culture-terrorists called “The Hags,” Pur- Pennsylvania Station ple Rain, Valerie Solanas, the poem “The City to a Young Girl,” by Patrick E. Horrigan writer-performer Erin Markey, Camp Trans—the protest village Lethe Press. 217 pages, $15. outside of the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, transpeople in general, Sonic Youth, being Polish (and having a Polish-Amer- HIS NOVEL offers a powerful glimpse into gay life in ican father who walked out early), and so on. Interspersed with America before Stonewall, and a look at the complicated these themes are countless asides on topics such as: C-sections, Trelationship between two very different men. Beginning in her various last names, guest artist stature in Warsaw, Poland, 1962, the book tells the story of Frederick Bailey, a nearly mid- alcoholism and 12-step programs, drug addiction, young men dle-aged, closeted architect, who meets and falls in love with she loved for no good reason, her wife Dashiell, growing up poor Curt, a much younger man who lives more openly and recklessly. in blue-collar, Irish-America, etc., etc. Their relationship is a tumultuous one and the cause of much con- By the end of the book we feel we’ve come to know Tea as flict for Frederick. In the meantime, the latter gets dragged into well as we know the author of a more standard memoir. In her the protests against the gradual demolition of the old Pennsylva- homage to Times Square, Tea writes of her younger self: “I nia Station, which is about to be replaced by Madison Square wanted do writing, making music, maybe becoming an artist, Garden. The novel depicts a nation on the verge of social and cul- maybe I already was an artist, but I would never learn this about tural, as well as architectural, change. myself in smoky, sad, racist Chelsea, Massachusetts. I would The novel is full of historical details, both the cultural high- have to go to a city to become an artist, to become myself.” Tea lights as well as the general mindset about homosexuality held understands hyper-logorrhea, the need to write it all out, to get by and about gay men. The very first line states that Frederick it all down, no matter the topic under consideration. It’s a cool “had to be careful not to seem ‘too musical,’” while seeing a method, so casual you almost don’t see it happening. Given her production of My Fair Lady. He compares Margot Moser unfa-

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 43 vorably to Julie Andrews in the role of Eliza, finding that An- drews “had a strength, a self-possession ... that, combined with the rich beauty of her voice, ... produced for Frederick some- thing magical.” Frederick travels with Curt and other friends to The Book of Mara D.C. to attend the 1963 March on Washington, listening to singers like Joan Baez before hearing Martin Luther King, Jr.’s speech. While Curt squeezes Frederick’s hand in affirmation of JEAN ROBERTA everything said, Frederick, who “didn’t believe in causes,” makes a personal pledge of commitment to Curt. They attend a So Lucky meeting of the New York Mattachine Society, where the guest by Nicola Griffith speaker is a psychoanalyst who argues that “homosexuality is an Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 192 pages. $15. emotional disturbance.” Curt and a few others vocally protest this view, arguing that the society should “move away from the ICOLA GRIFFITH is a British expatriate who lives in respectability of debate and into the arena of social activism,” Seattle with American writer Kelley Eskridge. She’s prompting Frederick to think: “Picketing—protesting—advo- Nan acclaimed novelist who has won awards for her cating on behalf of one’s homosexual tendencies in public? That fiction in various genres, including for Hild, a well-reviewed was unthinkable.” historical novel about Saint Hilda of Whitby, a key figure in The book also captures the difficulties between Frederick the conversion of the Anglo-Saxon peoples to Christianity in and Curt. Every discussion they have seems on the verge of an the 7th century. argument. Curt is beaten up by the police and arrested at a beach Her neew novel So Lucky, a slim book about the progress for going to the refreshment stand without wearing a towel over of a little-understood chronic disease, multiple sclerosis, his bathing suit. When he tells this story to Frederick, the older seems unexpectedly narrow in scope when compared to pre- man informs him of the impossibility of challenging the rules vious efforts. However, the subject matter is partly autobio- like that. Curt frequently shows up at Frederick’s apartment at graphical. Nicola Griffith has been living with this condition unpredictable times, until finally Frederick gives him a set of for years, since her diagnosis forced her into a career change: keys. Their trip to Italy is fraught with tension, with Frederick from self-defense instructor to full-time writer. In So Lucky, trying to set the agenda and complaining about Curt wanting to a protagonist named Mara, who lives in Atlanta, is diagnosed film everything with his new movie camera, while Curt rest- in the same month that her wife of fourteen years decides to lessly asserts his independence, walking the cities late at night. leave her, and her best friend goes to New Zealand to do post- At the start, Frederick’s gay friend Sam urges caution, remind- doctoral research. Thus begins a tale about the testing of an in- ing him of Curt’s arrest at the beach: “You really want to get dividual soul, not unlike a religious fable about human mixed up with a kid who flirts with danger like that?” All signs reactions to the apparently capricious will of God. point to this relationship not ending well. Griffith’s stark, dramatic style is perfectly suited to the And yet, the two have tender moments. Frederick reads to story of a woman who loses everything she had counted on, Curt from Walt Whitman’s Calamus poems celebrating same-sex including a prestigious job as executive director at a national love; Curt later quotes a line from one of them to Frederick dur- AIDS foundation. Mara’s doctor advises her to rest, but she is ing a casual conversation. On the train to D.C., Curt rests his head determined to complete the organizational budget. After an on Frederick’s shoulder while sleeping, and to Frederick “the argument with an assistant about better accessibility for dis- pieta seemed right, not queer.” Curt accompanies Frederick to abled clients (and herself), Mara distractedly types a rude Reading, PA, to visit Frederick’s family, and the young man gets message on a spreadsheet. She is told that she needs to leave along well with the relatives, talking with Frederick’s mother, her job due to the “emotional lability” that is an apparent side- who is battling dementia. Watching these two men love and fight effect of her medical condition. A seasoned negotiator, Mara each other is incredibly moving. Pennsylvania Station perfectly asks for eighteen months of continued employment-related reflects the complexities of history and relationships. health insurance. She is offered a year of insurance, and no ______more. Charles Green is a writer based in Annapolis, Maryland. Abruptly faced with a regimen of experimental drugs, soli- tude, and fear for her future, Mara acquires a companion an- imal, a kitten as feisty as herself. She also applies her —HARVARD AFFILIATES — organizational skills to finding others with similar symptoms, Join the Harvard Gender & Sexuality Caucus! creating a patient-directed group, and applying for funding. The sporadic betrayals of her body, and the agonizing side- The HGSC is the organization for alumni/æ, faculty, and staff of Harvard effects of the drugs, are as vividly described as any battle University, now with over 5,000 members. Since 1983 the Caucus has scene. pressed Harvard to give fair and equal treatment to gays, lesbians, bisexu- als, and transgendered people—and with considerable success. The Cau- The patronizing indifference of the general public to vis- cus supports student activities, sponsors several lectures, hosts an annual ibly disabled people, and the greed of drug companies, are dinner at Commencement, and organizes social events. If you have a Har- shown clearly enough to provoke outrage. British and Cana- vard affiliation and are not now a member, please let us know! dian readers (such as this reviewer), who enjoy government- Write: HGSC/ PO Box 381809 / Cambridge, MA 02238-1809 funded health care, are likely to feel confirmed in our E-mail: [email protected] Website: www.hgsc.org disapproval of American capitalist medicine, despite modifi-

44 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe cations provided by the Affordable Care Act. avoids cliché by adding numerous details to the narrative and There is a subplot about the kind of unknown assailants by fleshing out the characters who populate his tale. We learn, that Mara, a former expert in self-defense, has trained herself for example, of the neighborliness mixed with sheer ruthless- to fight. A pattern of break-ins with physical violence against ness of the Mormon family. We’re reminded in a vivid inci- disabled people prompts her to do some detective work and to dent of men’s attitudes toward women in this male-dominated contact various law enforcement agencies. At first, she is met culture. We also get a sweeping picture of the beautiful bru- with predictable condescension. And as if that were not tality of the land. enough, a pattern of eerie sights and sounds suggests that The author does not belabor Jessilyn’s lack of femininity, Mara is either hallucinating or is haunted by some demonic her reluctance to marry, or the already well-established per- force. ception of her unattractiveness as factors that make it easy for Despite the grim subject matter, this novel is as fast-paced her to dress in her brother’s clothes. Larison leaves little doubt and engaging as a thriller. The sheer courage and determination that there are few mercies or kindnesses in store for the main of the woman warrior at its center prevents the narrative from character, either from other human beings or from the natural lagging. Although a cure for multiple sclerosis is nowhere in world. sight, the suspense is resolved in a satisfying conclusion. The focus of Jesse’s adventure isn’t acquiring wealth or ______gun-slinging fame; it is entirely a quest to find his brother. He Jean Roberta, a frequent contributor to these pages, is a widely pub- learns of a militia run by a ruthless, corrupt official who’s fo- lished writer based in Regina, Saskatchewan. cused on the “dead” part of the “DEAD OR ALIVE” notice for Noah’s capture, and he skillfully wangles his way onto the force. This becomes the turning point in the story: rather than strictly a Western adventure, it becomes a tale of male-bond- ing, a gauzy lesbian romance, and a politically incorrect bit of A Western for the Rest of Us fictional history. Along the way, Larison offers readers gifts in the form of a series of small plot surprises that make the same old story into something that feels updated and special, de- TERRI SCHLICHENMEYER spite its setting of more than a century ago. ______Whiskey When We’re Dry Terri Schlichenmeyer is a freelance writer based in Wisconsin. by John Larison Viking. 400 pages, $28.

ET in the years following the Civil War in an unnamed THE SQUATTER BY ROY LUNA state, Whiskey When We’re Dry is a Western that begins Rick, a well-adjusted, happy gay man, is suddenly made aware Swith Jessilyn Harney recalling that her mother died that there is an intruder in his life. Another consciousness has when giving birth to her, leaving her father to raise her and her barged into his mind. This interloper is a complete stranger, a brother Noah, who was five years old at the time. The father foreigner, and worst of all, a straight man. is portrayed as a good man, but, like so many men of this genre, a man of few words, stoic, and hard-bitten. His son, on the other hand, seems gallant at birth, taking care of Jessilyn when their father drinks too much. Indeed Noah is a consci- entious brother, making sure that his sister is warm, dressed, fed, and protected—until she’s thirteen, at which time Noah has a fistfight with their father (it happens a lot in Westerns) and rides away. For the next few years, Jessilyn does what she can to help her father run the ranch, but he’d hit his head on a rock in the fight with Noah and is never quite the same. Sensing the re- ality of his own decline, he helps hone her natural sharp- shooting ability for her protection, and he talks of marrying her off. Months later, he is found by his daughter, having died six days before. Still barely in her teens and finding herself adrift, Jessilyn reaches out to a neighbor, a Mormon woman who had been enlisted by the father to teach Jessilyn at least a minimum of feminine wisdom. But the Mormon family re- fuses to take her in, and that’s when Jessilyn decides to open the old wooden box that Noah had left behind, where she finds some of his outgrown clothes—things that fit her fine—and Hardcover ISBN# 978-0-9981712-0-3 | Softcover ISBN# 978-0-9981712-1-0 she becomes Jesse. www.amazon.com | www.barnesandnoble.com | www.solutionholepress.com If this transition sounds slightly hackneyed, the author

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 45 Set mostly in the Delta region of Mississippi where White was born and raised, the collection is divided into two sec- tions. In a story in the first section, “The Lovers,” a widow Tales of the Delta slowly realizes the truth about her husband’s secret life after she discovers an unrecognizable pocket watch among her hus- band’s belongings. Meanwhile, that watch’s owner—an ex- MARTIN WILSON lover of the dead husband—tries to put the affair behind him and to focus on his current love interest. The two characters Sweet and Low swirl around each other until the story reaches a surprising and by Nick White well-wrought conclusion. In “Gatlinburg,” two men head to a Blue Rider Press. 304 pages, $25. Tennessee resort to try to inject romance back into their stale relationship. And in “These Heavenly Bodies,” a trouble-mak- T MUST be intimidating for young Southern writers of fic- ing teenage boy becomes enraptured with conjoined twins who tion starting out to feel that they must measure up to writ- are spending the summer in his hometown. Iers like Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and The stories in the second section are interlinked, focusing Flannery O’Connor, to name just a few. Mississippi native on the life of one Forney Culpepper, who matures from child- Nick White is clearly aware of the legacy of these writers, but hood to early middle age over the course of six varied and he’s also ready to carve a new path in the short stories in his finely crafted stories. Even though Forney is heterosexual, debut collection, Sweet and Low. gay and lesbian characters figure prominently in the stories

ARTIST’S PROFILE Amy Bloom Tells of a First Lady’s Second Love

COLIN CARMAN Creative Writing at Wesleyan University. things: first, what a fascinating time in The interview was conducted by phone last American history this was, and second, O LOVE like old love.” So July, with an e-mail follow-up. what it would be like to have this tremen- begins the critically ac- dous love affair totally erased from the his- “Nclaimed novel White Houses, Colin Carman: First, what attracted you to tories of Eleanor, Lorena, and the country at by Amy Bloom, author of Away and Lucky this love story, this “old love” story, as you large—I mean, actively rubbed out. I am Us (both New York Times bestsellers) and put it in the prologue to White Houses? not a kid anymore and I have an interest in Come to Me: Stories (a National Book Amy Bloom: I was attracted to the Eleanor- romance in the long run, which can be Award finalist). A work of historical fiction, Lorena love affair because of the brilliant every bit as glorious as the period in which White Houses is narrated from the perspec- multi-volume biography by Blanche Wiesen two people first fall in love. tive of Lorena Alice Hickok, the AP reporter Cook and its romantic nature. I read over whose close relationship with Eleanor Roo- three thousand letters exchanged between CC: What kind of research was involved in sevelt was so intimate that the First Lady the pair, which made me think of two writing White Houses? Eleanor’s life wore a sapphire ring—a gift from Lorena, story—the public life, at least—is extremely or “Hick,” as she was known—at her hus- well-known. I know you did your home- band’s inauguration in 1933. work inside the Franklin D. Roosevelt Pres- Bloom doesn’t just wade into a hotly de- idential Library and Museum. bated issue among historians—the two were AB: The research involved a library of certainly more than “just friends,” though books about Eleanor, good and bad. Over to what extent may never be uncovered—but the past few years, there have been numer- inhabits the mind and heart of Hick, the ous books about her relationship with Wisconsin-born journalist with whom the Hickok, but those came out after I’d fin- upper-class Eleanor road-tripped alone ished the novel. One of my influences was (without the U.S. Secret Service) soon after an early book by Doris Faber called The Franklin’s swearing-in. White Houses be- Life of Lorena Hickok: Eleanor’s Roo- gins there, in the blue Buick roadster that sevelt’s Friend. In 1978, this was Faber’s ef- was the First Lady’s closet-on-wheels. fort to look at the letters after they were Bloom’s novel is a moving and psychologi- publicized. She went to a lot of trouble by cally insightful story on two levels: it treats pointing out that they do not mean what the nature of their lesbianism as self-evi- they seem to mean. There was definitely no dent, and it also embraces the fact that shortage of interesting books or debate. Eleanor and Hick were no spring chickens by the time of the Great Depression but two CC: Whenever a writer today wants to de- middle-aged women with their own compli- scribe the sexualities of people in the past, cated life histories. they have to confront the issue of language A former lecturer at Yale, Bloom is cur- that is specific to a given time and place, rently the Shapiro-Silverberg Professor of and usually not very positive toward LGBT

46 Th' Gay & L'sban R'v'w / oRLDiDe and serve as a reminder that in the macho South of the past, into corn-pone caricatures. His prose is lively but not showy, homosexuality needed to be hidden or suppressed. In “The and he prefers clarity over obfuscation. Still, his stories are Exaggerations,” Forney reflects on the life of his uncle, who layered and complex, full of the maddening mysteries that raised him alongside his aunt. Forney later realizes that Uncle make up the human condition. Lucas, a shameless teller of exaggerated yarns, was hardly the In “The Last of His Kind,” Forney is middle-aged and his sexless, confirmed bachelor that he wanted people to believe wife has left him. He’s living in his childhood home with his he was. The story concludes with a devastating moment of washed-up singer mother and his clearly gay young son grace. Henry. Near the end of the story, Forney warns his son, “You In “The Curator,” Forney is a struggling writer and also understand me ... what can happen to a person if he isn’t care- “the curator” at the museum-slash-house of a writer referred to ful?” But it’s clear that Henry lives in a new world, and a new as “the Author,” clearly modeled on William Faulkner: “Out- South, where being gay won’t defeat him the way it did his side of town, around the country, a generation of emerging ancestors. While today’s South still isn’t a bastion of toler- writers read his work, were inspired by it, and attempted to ance, it’s certainly a far cry from the world Forney’s Uncle imitate the leafy Southern voice he had perfected in his prose.” Lucas inhabited. And Nick White is proof of that—a proud If Forney is unnerved by “the Author,” it’s clear that White queer writer, telling stories about people who refuse to be in- himself is not. The story is an homage of sorts, but also a gen- visible any longer. tle rebuke to those who think there is only one type of “leafy” ______Southern author. White’s stories capture the flavor of the South Martin Wilson is the author of the novels What They Always Tell Us without turning the people who populate his fictional worlds and We Now Return to Regular Life.

people. In the book, Hick refers to “French rameters for me as a storyteller. It’s not my CC: What kind of story, do you think, in- lesbians” but didn’t have the language for cold eye looking at their bodies; it’s their volving the current First Lady and her secret sexual identity that we have now. How did loving, loyal bond, which was not without love life cannot be told in the present but you deal with this problem? ambivalence. Once I was in Lorena, the may interest readers fifty years from now? AB: Well, 20th-century Washington, D.C., language shaped it. Plus, I felt as if Eleanor AB: I don’t know why somebody wouldn’t is not 16th-century Venice. After Freud, was in good hands already. wish to write about it today. And I’m sure if people knew the word “lesbian” with all of Flaubert or Oscar Wilde or Henry James its variations. There’s always innuendo, you CC: I’m certainly not of the (old) school were still around, they could really go to know. I’m thinking of a great line of Tallu- that straight-identified artists cannot write, town on the sharp-eyed, shrewd, and bit- lah Bankhead’s: “My father warned me or even narrate, the lives of gay people. terly disappointed Mrs. Trump. about men and booze but he never men- Still, was that a consideration, or even a tioned a word about women and cocaine.” worry, for you? CC: It seems to me that many of your AB: I’m a writer. I’ve yet to meet a writer books—not just White Houses but an earlier CC: Meaning, there have always been dif- who isn’t thrilled to have a new audience. work of non-fiction, Normal: Transsexual ferent ways to describe same-sex romance? My own view is that it’s a big, variegated, CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaph- AB: Certainly. complex world out there, and that’s the rodites with Attitude—explore human sexu- world that I write about. I hope people love ality as a spectrum: the “wide bouquet of CC: How did you decide to narrate from this love story and that it breaks their sexuality,” as you put it once. Is this some- Lorena Hickok’s perspective as opposed to hearts, whether they are drawn to it for the thing you set out specifically to do? a third-person perspective? history, or for Eleanor, or a high jinx in the AB: It’s certainly something I set out to AB: As a novelist, I could see that very lit- White House, or a love story between two write about in Normal, which was a look at tle was known about [Hick], which gave me middle-aged lesbians. This is the modern a wide range of gender identifies. It’s also the greatest latitude. Little was known aside world. the case that in my fiction the wideness of from her reputation as a tough broad and a and variety within our world is always in- straight talker. She was an outsider and a CC: In 2010, you told The Guardian: teresting to me. I think that in our wish to working-class girl. There was also evidence “Being surprised that there are people in the embrace all possibilities, it’s important not of her great sense of humor. My version of world who are genuinely attracted to men to forget that each possibility, even the het- Hickok came together—true to form—as a and women is to me a little bit like being ero and the cisgender, has range, fluidity, tough, tell-it-like-it is, working-class surprised that there are people who like and surprise. woman navigating in a very privileged mi- chicken and salad.” Can you elaborate on lieu. That’s the girl for me. this? CC: Would you say there is one thread that AB: I think the word “and” should be un- connects all of your books at this point? CC: With all of this artistic license, were derlined in this quote. I realize that not AB: I think my only subject is love. As you apprehensive about “queering,” or at everybody likes chicken and salad, or even Richard Rhodes once said, “Writers don’t least sexualizing, an American icon? steak and salad, but I do. I don’t know why choose their subject, the subject chooses Eleanor Roosevelt is the stuff of eighth- it should be surprising that some people are them.” grade book reports, after all. I’m pretty sure attracted to men and to women. I was lucky I wrote one, knowing nothing, of course, enough to grow up thinking that all smart Colin Carman, who teaches English and about her “romantic friendship.” Jewish girls liked girls as well as boys, and LGBTQ studies at Colorado Mesa University, AB: The fact that White Houses is narrated it was somehow just understood that one is the author of The Radical Ecology of the from Lorena’s point-of-view created the pa- didn’t discuss it. Imagine my surprise. Shelleys: Eros and Environment.

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 47 Lizzie (Craig William Macneill) Psychological thriller tells the story Cultural Calendar of Lizzie Borden and her lover (played by Chloë Sevigny and Kris- ten Stewart) as they take an ax to the patriarchy in this modern spin. Readers are invited to submit items at no charge. Must have rele- A Long Road to Freedom: The Advocate Celebrates 50 Years vance to a North American readership. E-mail to: HGLR@aol.com. (Billy Clift) Documentary highlights watershed moments in LGBT Be sure to allow at least a month’s lead time for any listing. history through archival footage and interviews with gay celebs. Making Montgomery Clift (Robert Clift & Hillary Demmon) Festivals and Events Documentary recasts the story of the widely misunderstood Holly- FILM FESTIVALS wood heartthrob who had a secret gay life. Toronto Queer Film Fest. Nov. 1–4. Riot (Jeffrey Walker) In 1978, when the push to decriminalize ho- mosexuality in Sydney has stalled, activists resolve to make one Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada Out North. Nov. 2–4. final attempt to celebrate who they are. Huntington, NY LIGLFF Film Festival. Nov. 7–10. We the Animals (Jeremiah Zagar) Drama about 3 brothers grow- San Francisco Transgender Film Fest. Nov. 9–11. ing up in rural America, the first 2 conventionally masculine, the Cincinnati OutReels. Nov. 9–11. third embracing an imagined world all his own. Indianapolis LGBT Film Fest. Nov. 9–11. Theater / Dance Ottawa Inside Out. Nov. 9–12. Key West Film Festival. Nov. 14–18. Bernhardt/Hamlet Broadway play about Sarah Bernhardt’s 1899 portrayal of Hamlet delves into the gender politics of the age, and Montreal Image + Nation Festival. Nov. 22–Dec. 2. our own. At the American Airlines Theater thru Nov. 11th. EVENTS Summer: The Donna Summer Musical Broadway’s jukebox trib- Mid-Atlantic LGBTQA Conf. “March On: Leading the Way for a New ute to the ’70’s most fabulous gay icon. At the Lunt-Fontanne Theater. Generation” will take place at Bloomsburg U. of PA, Nov. 2–4. The View UpStairs Musical finds a young fashion designer trans- Transgender Spectrum Conf. will take place at the U. of Mis- ported to the UpStairs Lounge in New Orleans, a happening 1970s souri in St. Louis, Nov. 9–10. gay bar. Oct. 25–Nov. 10 at Out Front Theatre, Atlanta. oSTEM (Out in Science, Technology, Engineering, & Mathemat- Fun Home The musical based on Alison Bechtel’s graphic novel ics) “Making Space for Everyone” conf. will happen in Houston, will run at the BCA in Boston thru Nov. 17th. Nov. 15–18. Visit: ostem.org This Bitter Earth Play about a black playwright and his white ac- LGBTQ Tourism Forum for people in the travel biz worldwide, in tivist partner when they’re forced to confront issues of race, class, Ft. Lauderdale, Dec. 2–4. Visit: communitymarketinginc.com and gay activism. About Face Theatre in Chicago thru Dec. 8th. Creating Change Conf., the annual confab of the National This Beautiful City Musical explores evangelical resistance to gay LGBTQ Task Force, will be held in Detroit, Jan. 23–27, 2019. Visit: rights in Colorado Springs and a scandal that rocked the religious creatingchange.org right. At the Diversionary Theater in San Diego thru Dec. 9th. Sociological Explorations of Sexuality in Europe In Krakow, Poland, Feb. 14–15. Visit: esa-rn23-sexuality.confer.uj.edu.pl/cfp. Art Exhibitions Donna Gottschalk: Brave, Beautiful Outlaws Photographs from Feature Films the radical lesbian organizing in NYC and CA in the 1970s. Thru Bixa Travesty (directed by Kiko Goifman) Brazilian documentary March 17, 2019, at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in NYC. about Mc Linn Da Quebrada, a black transwoman in São Paulo Rubbish and Dreams “The Genderqueer Performance Art of whose electrifying performances take on Brazil’s macho culture. Stephen Varble” revisits the artist’s work from the 1970s. Thru Jan. Boy Erased (Joel Edgerton) Drama is the word when the son of a 27, 2019, at the Leslie-Lohman Museum in NYC. Baptist pastor in a small town is outed to his parents (Nicole Kidman LGBTQ+ San Diego: Stories of Struggles + Triumphs Curated and Russell Crowe) and forced to undergo conversion therapy. by Lillian Faderman, exhibit tells the city’s gay story in photo- Brotherly Love (Anthony J. Caruso) Drama explores a Catholic graphs. Thru Jan 20, 2020, at the San Diego History Center. Brother’s dilemma when he’s forced to choose between his divine Nightbirds Photos by Michael Fazkerley capture New York City’s calling and his love for another man. dynamic club culture personalities, 1986–1995. At the Stonewall Giant Little Ones (Keith Behrman) Drama drops in on two teenage National Museum in Wilton Manors, FL, thru Jan. 20th. boys, longtime friends with girlfriends, whose lives are upended when something unexpected happens at a 17th birthday party. The Happy Prince (Rupert Everett) Drama stars Rupert Everett CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS – THE G&LR (self-directing) as Oscar Wilde in the playwright’s last days as he The Gay & Lesbian Review accepts unsolicited manuscripts and reflects with ironic detachment upon his tragic life. proposals on all LGBT-related topics. Especially sought are propos- Hard Paint (Filipe Matzembacher) Brazilian drama about a re- als on the following themes for issues in development: pressed young man who comes alive in chatrooms when he strips • Locked Away: Prison & exile from Wilde to Genet to today. and paints his slender body with neon colors. • Critical Incidents: Key moments in LGBT history & culture. • Alternative Sexualities from “heteroflexible” to roleplay. Hot to Trot (Gail Freedman) Documentary about the little-known world of same-sex competitive ballroom dancing. Please e-mail your proposal to the Editor at [email protected].

48 Th Gay & Lsban Rvw / oRLdide THEATER Recovery, Relationship, Relapse

HE OTHER DAY is a play that emerges and sexual wanderlust returns. To grows on you—in a good way. ALLEN ELLENZWEIG what extent Mark’s more cautious and do- This bare-bones production mestic temper has encouraged Santo’s staged at the Theater at the 14th swing remains a question explored in the T The Other Day Street Y begins with two men dawdling play’s second half, which shifts the scene after a meeting of their twelve-step pro- A play by Mark Jason Williams to Amsterdam—a key place in Santo’s gram. Mark (played by David Dean Bot- Directed by Andrew Block imagination, where Anne Frank in hiding trell), the older of the two, a shy, Loretta Michael Productions has been a symbol of the many sub- middle-aged, unassuming type with The Theater at the 14th Street Y terfuges of a life of gay addiction. Mark glasses, seems at first intent to avoid the Sept. 16–23, 2008 and his sister Dina travel together to the passing inquiries of the thirty-ish Santo charming city—presented on stage as a se- (Sandro Isaack), whose long, thick ponytail whips around from ries of large projected images of classic canals and the Ho- shoulder to shoulder as he seeks to goad Mark into revelations. momonument, the site on the bank of Keizersgracht canal Santo is stocky-sexy, lounging in his chair in the sort of man- commemorating gays killed by the Nazis and memorializing spread that annoys people on the subway but here seems a se- LGBT oppression generally. Yet these greater-than-life-size ductive provocation. backgrounds seem jolting after the intimacy of the first half. A Soon enough, Santo makes his sexual interest in Mark quite more central element of this relocation is Mark meeting up clear, and the necessary start-and-stop banter ensues, with with an airport customer service agent, Steven, when Mark Santo trying to break down Mark’s obvious barriers. They finds his luggage has not made it to Amsterdam and Steven spend the night together. Neither ever suggests that it is prob- helps him track it. Suddenly, lessons learned in his relations ably off-limits to be “fraternizing” with another mem- ber of the twelve-step program. No matter: Santo is hardly one to adhere to the rules, a trait that eventually becomes the heart of a developing relationship that al- lows Mark to open up, experience real delight, and bring Santo into his home in an unlikely union of op- posites. Together, they clean up their addictions, and for a while seem to be in couple heaven. Egging on their picture-perfect but still odd-couple romance is Mark’s sister Dina (Elizabeth Inghram), a high-octane urban sophisticate in a marriage to a never-seen high-power architect. We are made to un- derstand that Dina’s life consists of presenting herself as a capable more-than-trophy wife who attends fundraisers, rushes off to meetings, and is buried in smart- phone texts prompting suddenly urgent phone calls. She is too cool to be anything but delighted by Sandro Isaak as Santo and David Dean Bottrell as Mark in The Other Day her gay brother’s serious involvement with the warm and af- with Santo re-emerge as guideposts for the possibility of a new fable Santo. That Dina herself is preoccupied by a marriage romance. that is not really fulfilling provides a kind of counterpoint to David Dean Bottrell as Mark and Sandro Isaack as Santo Mark and Santo. However, playwright Mark Jason Williams, play well separately and together. Viewing the way they navi- who’s so good at establishing relationship dynamics through gate their relationship, both through addiction, post-addiction, dialogue, has chosen to make Dina’s husband a presence and in relapse, is the core of the play’s drama; the part set in marked by absence. The role of Dina is under-written, and Amsterdam is certainly haunted by the first act—rather liter- what is there can trend into caricature despite Elizabeth In- ally, if I may chance a spoiler-alert—but ultimately the scenes ghram’s best efforts to present a conflicted character in three in Amsterdam don’t cohere to what has preceded them. dimensions. Dina’s compulsive energy, her obvious drive for- Williams has set himself a structural problem; the second sec- ward to who-knows-where, is never tested in a way that would tion has its pleasurable moments, abetted by John Gazzale as add depth to her character. the genial agent Steven, who nurses Mark through his luggage Instead, the play tracks Santo’s unwinding as addiction re- withdrawal. But the feeling that the play’s second section has not grown organically from the first takes us away from themes Allen Ellenzweig, a frequent contributor to this magazine, is a cultural of domesticity and spontaneity, possessiveness and freedom writer based in New York City. that had previously begun to emerge.

Nv'mb'r–D'c'mb'r 2018 49 Three Faces of Cher

HER FANS had a lot to cele- her TV variety star persona of the ’70s; brate this summer with her over- JOHN R. KILLACKY and the emergence of the serious actress the-top cameo appearance in into icon status in the ’90s. At times, the Mamma Mia! Here We Go three Chers were together on stage, cheer- C The Cher Show Again playing Meryl Streep’s mother (hey, ing each other on, commiserating, or belt- it’s the movies). The sequel to the 2008 Directed by Jason Moore ing out power ballads. While they all had musical comedy hit Mamma Mia! is again Oriental Theatre, Chicago great voices, the job of mimicking the set to the music of the 1970s Swedish June 12–July 15, 2018 original’s incomparable vocal acrobatics synth-rock group ABBA. The pop god- is a thankless one. dess’ brief time onscreen comes well into the movie and is a In the musical, every new plot twist brings on another song, total camp-fest, with Cher arriving by helicopter for the wed- along with a dizzying array of Bob Mackie sequined and ding of her granddaughter and singing “Fernando” to love in- barely-there gowns and feathers. The star’s infectious pop dit- terest Andy Garcia. ties should have provided ample material to tell the story of Also in Chicago, the Broadway-bound jukebox bio-musical this remarkable life. However, few of her songs were autobi- The Cher Show, featuring over three dozen of the superstar’s ographical, so it’s quite a reach to work them into the narra- hits, had its out-of-town tryout over the summer. Despite its tive. The plotline was stretched particularly thin when two actors portraying her former husbands, Sonny Bono and Gregg Allman, sing her fortunetelling song of revenge, “Dark Lady,” a number one single from 1974. Fun song, wrong moment. Juke-box musicals such as Carole King’s Beautiful, ABBA’s Mamma Mia!, and the Four Seasons’ Jersey Boys don’t always have to make sense if the music and staging are truly spectacular. After the Chicago tryout, the creative team be- hind The Cher Show have their work cut out for them to shape-shift this vehicle into true fabulousness for its Broadway debut in November at the Neil Simon Theatre. Fans adore Cher the survivor. Never the most beautiful or the most talented as a girl, she was certainly the most persist- ent. We love her, songs, showmanship, and resiliency. The preview I saw in Chicago got the requisite standing ova- tion, but it was not spontaneous. Cher her- self (one of the show’s producers) told The Chicago Tribune: “Some parts of it are really fabulous. We’re going to work on the other parts. ... And there were no The Three Ages of Cher. Teal Wicks, Stephanie J. Block, and Micaela Diamond in The Cher Show. parts where I wanted to gouge my eyes Photo by Joan Marcus. out.” Not the best way to sell tickets, per- stellar creative team—producer Jeffrey Seller (Hamilton), book haps, but a classic Cherism. by Rick Elice (Jersey Boys), and direction by Jason Moore (Av- The diva extraordinaire, at 72, shows no sign of slowing enue Q)—this Cher-apalooza was a bedazzling train wreck, down. In September, she released her 26th studio album, with designer Bob Mackie’s costumes stealing the show. which features a confectionery’s delight of ABBA-licious cov- Three different actresses portrayed the superstar at differ- ers. Another movie and a biography are in the works as well as ent ages: a young hippie Cher with Sonny Bono in the 1960s; going back on the road once again in January. Meanwhile, we can all enjoy her Twitter barrages of free association and anti- John R. Killacky is running unopposed for a seat in the Vermont House Trump screeds, which millions of her followers depend on for of Representatives this November. ballast and amusement.

50 Th Gay & Lsban Rvw / oRLdide

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