Gaya Scienza

Pinget; Still Waiting for John Cromer

First a good news, at least for me: I was finally able to order 'Mapping the Territory' (see previous post) at Amazon. And I could have ordered all the other books from Alyson, for that matter. Without shipping or handling fees. Thank you Amazon! It all was an unpleasant error. A glitch.

Robert Pinget is one of the greatest French writers of the second half of the twentieth century, although he had been somewhat ignored, not only lately.

Born in Geneva in 1919, he died in Tour in 1997. He was best known as a member of the Nouveau Roman, a group he did no feel very comfortable with. His obituary (Robert Pinget, 78, a Master Of the Nouveau Roman, Dies), published in The New York Times in 1997, provides a good summary of his life and art.

In 2004 the literary review Europe published an issue mostly dedicated to Robert Pinget. I discovered it in my library while selecting books to give away during my last stay in Paris. In a short contribution (Souvenirs de Robert Pinget) Claude Simon writes:

"J'éprouvais pour lui non seulement une réelle admiration (je tiens Quelqu'un pour un chef-d'œuvre) mais encore une sympathie particulière du fait qu'il était Genevois d'origine et ma famille paternelle de ce Jura tout proche où j'ai passé mes vacances d'enfant: je retrouvais donc dans ses livres un 'climat' (gens, parler, nature) qui m'est particulièrement cher, et même des situations (comme celle du petit garçon qui se perd dans la forêt en cherchant des framboises) dont l'ensemble constitue en moi tout un monde."

Then he adds:

"Nos rapports presque impossibles ont-ils été de ma faute, de la sienne (ou du fait de son homosexualité)?"

Even the NYT was more circumspect (but, yes, it was in another century):

"After living for some years in Paris, Mr. Pinget, who never married, opted for the isolation of a cottage near Tours in the Touraine region."

***

Instead on working on the sequel to 'Pilcrow' Adam Mars-Jones continues to write for the TLS. He recently (January 8th issue) produced a rather negative review of the play 'Rope' (Patrick Hamilton, 1929) currently shown at Almeida Theatre in London. 'Rope' is based on the infamous real-life crime of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb which is the subject of a thick volume published by Simon Baatz in 2008, 'For the Thrill of It - Leopold, Loeb, and the Murder That Shocked Chicago'.

The play was the basis of Hitchcock's movie 'The Rope', "that perverse reworking of stagecraft into self-absorbed cinematic virtuosity," writes Mars-Jones, after having commented: "The obvious way to remake the play for a modern audience would be to build this up as a gay relationship, following Tom Kalin in his film 'Swoon' (1992), based on the same crime; to say in effect, 'yes we're monsters, but you wouldn't let us be anything else, and we've come to enjoy it'."

2010.02.07

Amazon Discriminates Against Gay Publisher?

A strange thing has happened to me. This weekend I decided to buy Christopher Bram's latest collection of nonfiction, Mapping the Territory. I started ordering it on Amazon and went through the usual procedure. On the last page, just before confirming the order, I realized that, in addition to the price of the book, I was charged $15.08 for Shipping and Handling, which almost doubled the total price. Because I have a prime membership, I never pay any charge on Shipping and Handling. I went back to the Mapping the Territory page at Amazon, and read that:

"This item is not eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping. This product will incur a shipping surcharge of $3.10 in addition to the standard shipping fees."

My first reaction was to think it was an error. I contacted Amazon's Customer Service and, very quickly, received the following explanation:

Our shipping charges reflect the handling costs for assembling and packaging each order, as well as the cost of shipping. Because exceptionally large or heavy items, such as oversized books or multi-volume book sets, cost more to ship, we do sometimes need to pass these costs along to our customers. This is what happened in this case.

How strange! Mapping the Territory an oversized or multi-volume book? I contacted Amazon by phone, but, although I was taken care of very kindly, I was not able to get an explanation...

Then I tried a few other books from the same publisher (Alyson): same thing. All were subject to a surcharge and none was available for free shipping.

Had it something to do with the publisher then? I sent a mail to Alyson and got back a very clear answer: no.

One thing is very clear: it has nothing to do with the fact that Alyson is a publisher of gay books. The proof: I just ordered the first volume of Melville's works in the Library of America series. I did not pay a dime for shipping or handling.

Rimbaud (cont.)

It was a good surprise to read, in the first pages of a small book directed at the prospective professors of literature in France:

L'historicité de l'oeuvre [de Rimbaud] apparaît aussi sur un autre plan, car certains des besoins, désirs et fantasmes de Rimbaud ne peuvent se contenter des revendications communardes. À un moment qu'il serait vain de vouloir circonscrire, il a compris qu'il éprouvait des désirs qu'on ne qualifiait pas encore d''homosexuels', mais de pédérastiques (ce qui ne veut pas dire qu'il était uniquement attiré par les hommes, une lettre de Verlaine laissant entendre en 1875 que s'il donnait de l'argent à Rimbaud, son ami en ferait profiter des 'cabaretiers' et des 'filles'). Son oeuvre n'évoquera ces sentiments que d'une manière oblique, exception faite pour les parodies de l'Album zutique où il sera possible de prêter à d'autres ces désirs peu avouables, mais comme on l'a souvent dit (en général cependant dans le cadre d'une analyse homophobe jusqu'aux années 1960), il n'est sans doute pas fortuit que les poèmes de 1870-1871 reviennent avec insistance sur des thèmes scatologiques. Nos interprétations de Venus anadyomène ou L'Éclatante victoire de Sarrebrück suggèrent que la sodomie joue déjà un rôle dans l'imaginaire du poète, avant même Le Coeur supplicié de mai 1871 ou le Sonnet du Trou du Cul qu'il a composé avec Verlaine vers la fin de la même année. Que la pédérastie apparaisse sous des formes surtout obliques et souvent satiriques n'a rien de bien surprenant compte tenu de l'interdit qui planait sur de tels désirs, mais Rimbaud semble avoir pu ainsi au moins évoquer cette question, quitte à trouver d'autres moyens d'en parler plus tard, de manière plus voilée et aussi moins humoristique.

Rimbaud - Poésies, Une saison en enfer (collection Clefs concours, Atlande, 2009, 256p) is authored by Steve Murphy, one of the top experts in the French poet, and Georges Kliebenstein. It's a very good introduction to Rimbaud and it includes a nice bibliography with comments. According to the authors, the best general purpose edition of Rimbaud is the one edited by Pierre Brunel (Livre de Poche, 'Pochothèque', 1999). Et bien voilà.

2010.01.31

But let's Get Back to Our Knitting...

While in the plane, returning from Paris, I caught up with some of the newspapers and magazines I had somewhat neglected... I used to always carefully select a good book for my trips. I still do it, but most of the time, between meals, sleeping and going through the recent press, I don't have time for a book... You never know, however: long delays are always a possibility, not to mention hijackings...

In the New York Times, on January 17th, Edmund White gave a very positive review of Concerning E. M. Forster (Frank Kermode, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2009, 180p):

Sir Frank Kermode, who turned 90 last year, has written a subtle and fascinating book of criticism that obeys the delightful vagaries of rhythm more than the inflexibility of pattern.

Kermode makes neither too much nor too little of Forster’s homosexuality. He points out that Forster’s affection for an Indian student in England was what initially caused him to travel to India, a trip that eventually led to his finest novel. He also argues persuasively that Forster’s pleasure in writing his homosexual romantic novel, “Maurice,” which was published only posthumously, and in writing his gay short stories, some of which he destroyed as he went along, eclipsed the interest he’d taken in writing about heterosexual characters. If he stopped writing novels altogether for the 46 years between the publication of “A Passage to India” in 1924 and his death in 1970, it was partly because he was very comfortable financially (since his considerable royalties had topped off his inherited income) and partly because he was convinced he was not free to explore in print the only subject that now mattered to him.

I then found a short review by Mark Bostridge of a new crime book in last weekend Financial Times. I had read Mark Senderson's previous book, Wrong Rooms, published in 2003, "a moving memoir of his relationship with a young Australian called Drew, and of the loss of his lover from skin cancer," and liked it. His new book, Snow Hill (HarperCollins, 2010, 352p), not yet available in the US, is a thriller, looking worth a look:

Snow Hill can’t match the poignancy of Sanderson’s earlier work, nor is it trying to. It has a run-of-the-mill plot, but Sanderson enlivens it with elegant, unpretentious writing, a strong build-up of suspense and the portrayal of a central relationship between Johnny, the hot-shot reporter, and his old school buddy Matt Turner, a policeman from the City’s Snow Hill police station, which is both emotionally believable and intriguing.

Mark Bostridge points to the similarities and differences between Snow Hill and "Jake Arnott’s loose trilogy of 1960s-set novels, which mix gay life and gangsters", which I must admit I didn't know it.

In one of the last issues of the TLS in 2009, John Flower provides a very positive review of Jean-Luc Barré's biography of François Mauriac (Francois Mauriac - Biographie intime, Tome 1, 1885-1940, Fayard, 2009, 645p), the first to disclose his homosexual inclinations. The first volume, the only one published so far, is in fact dominated by this topic.

What the second volume of this “biographie intime” will reveal remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that the first constitutes a book that no student or specialist of Mauriac’s life and work can afford to be without.

After reading several articles on the fascinating recent book on American politics, Game Change - Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime (John Heileman and Mark Halperin, Harper, 2010, 464p), I was still hesitating to buy it (nothing gay about it). Until I read the first sentence in The Economist review of the book: "Game Change, the account by John Heileman and Mark Halperin of the 2008 American presidential race, is high-quality political porn."

By the way, I also read fairly good article by Margaret Talbot on Gay marriage in The New Yorker: A Risky Proposal, on Perry v. Schwarzenegger which just started in San Francisco.

2010.01.24

What About China?

Two Op-Ed pieces have caught my attention this week.

First Thomas L. Friedman's Is China the Next Eron? in the New York Times. To tell you the truth I have been fed up for some time with all the talking about China, its miracle, etc, etc... I started reading Mr. Friedman with great expectations... The paper starts with a promising tone:

Reading The Herald Tribune over breakfast in Hong Kong harbor last week, my eye went to the front-page story about how James Chanos — reportedly one of America’s most successful short-sellers, the man who bet that Enron was a fraud and made a fortune when that proved true and its stock collapsed — is now warning that China is “Dubai times 1,000 — or worse” and looking for ways to short that country’s economy before its bubbles burst.

In fact Mr. Friedman has the very opposite opinion, and I was soon disappointed:

I’d rather bet against the euro. Shorting China today? Well, good luck with that, Mr. Chanos. Let us know how it works out for you.

I remembered that Mr. Friedman had initially supported George W. Bush's decision to invade Irak, the worse political decision for America in the first decade of the twenty first century... So he might be wrong again.

Then, the next day, I read another Op-Ed piece, in Le Monde this time: Thierry Wolton's La Chine est-elle menacée par le "syndrome soviétique"? A must read. A very good paper.

Il est donc pertinent de se demander si la Chine, aussi mirifique qu'elle nous paraisse, ne risque pas d'être victime du syndrome soviétique, ses dirigeants finissant par être atteints des mêmes maux qui ont conduit à la chute de l'URSS. La combinaison entre notre admiration béate et un pouvoir sans partage, indifférent aux douleurs de son peuple, obsédé par ses intérêts de puissance, le tout attisé par les doutes des pays occidentaux sur le modèle libéral, autant de facteurs qui pourraient déboucher sur des lendemains difficiles.
Le jeu de miroirs entre des communistes chinois trop sûrs d'eux, convaincus par leurs propres statistiques de la réussite de leur régime, et des dirigeants occidentaux obsédés par leurs balances commerciales et leurs déficits, qui ne pensent qu'à les amadouer pour quelques parts de marché, peut faire oublier à Pékin ses fragilités intrinsèques : obsolescence d'une partie de son appareil industriel, discrimination sociale, déséquilibre entre l'offre et la demande, inflation, bulle spéculative, vieillissement de la population, catastrophes écologiques. En somme, tout ce qui caractérise une économie socialiste.
Cet aveuglement réciproque, entre Occident et Orient cette fois, pourrait conduire la Chine à vouloir aller trop loin, comme l'URSS jadis.

If I had money I would bet against China, after all...

2010.01.17

Best Gay Books of 2009: Waiting for John Cromer

The traditional lists have not provided any clear outstanding book this year...

In the TLS, fifty-seven writers make their selection from around the world. These are the gay books nominated:
The secret lives of Somerset Maugham (Selina Hastings, John Murray, 2009, 624p), which reconstruct an immensely successful writer's life in term as adroit, suggestive, eloquent and sad as the best of his own work (Roy Foster).
John Carey's compelling, revealing and very readable William Golding - The man who wrote 'Lord of the flies' (Faber & Faber, 2009, 592p). This is 'official' biography but nothing seems to have been off the record (Seamus Heaney).
Michael Bloch's enjoyable biography of James Lees-Milne (John Murray, 2009, 416p) (Simon Jenkins).
The long tradition of the Irish acting out, and up, in the US is powerfully evoked by Colm Toibin in his short novel Brooklyn (Scribner, 2009, 262p) (Paul Muldoon, also mentioned by Bernard O'Donoghue and Graham Robb).
Finely researched and documented, Ulrich Raulff's Kreis ohne Meister (C.H. Beck, 2009, 544p) examines the literary, historical and political afterlife of Stefan George, a fascinating study of myth and ideology (George Steiner), unfortunately not yet translated.

The New York Times, among their 100 notable books of the year, mentions:
The Lacuna, by Barbara Kingsolver (Harper, 2009, 528p).
Blake Bailey's Cheever - A Life (Knopf, 2009, 784p).
Edmund White's City Boy - My Life in New York During the 1960s and '70s (Bloomsbury, 2009, 304p).
Brad Gooch's Flannery - A Life of Flannery O'Connor (Little, Brown, 2009, 464p).
Thomas Mallon's Yours Ever - People and Their Letters (Pantheon, 2009, 352p).

The Economist:
William Golding - The man who wrote 'Lord of the flies' (John Carey, Faber & Faber, 2009, 592p).
The secret lives of Somerset Maugham (Selina Hastings, John Murray, 2009, 624p).

The Financial Times:
The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell published in English this year, after winning the Prix Goncourt in 2006 (translated by Charlotte Mandell).
Brooklyn (Colm Toibin, Scribner, 2009, 262p).
Hitler’s Private Library - The Books That Shaped His Life by Timothy Ryback (Bodley Head, 2009, 320p).
Animal Spirits - How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why it Matters for Global Capitalism, by George Akerlof and Robert Shiller (Princeton University Press, 2009, 264p), not really gay, but the title of which echoes Keynes.
Caravaggio: The Complete Paintings, by Sebastian Schütze (Taschen, 2009, 480p): a new catalogue raisonée in large format, published to mark four centuries since Caravaggio’s mysterious death while on the run for murder in 1610.
Sprout, by Dale Peck (Bloomsbury, 2009, 288p), for young adults.

The New Yorker:
Flannery, by Brad Gooch (Little, Brown, 2009, 464p)): the quiet life behind Flannery O’Connor’s fantastic fiction.
The Collected Poems and Unfinished Poems, by C. P. Cavafy, translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn (Knopf, 2009, 624p and 144p): Modern Greek’s great master.
Brooklyn, by Colm Tóibín (Scribner, 2009, 262p): emigration, love, and homesickness.

***

The Band of Thebes very wisely asked gay writers to name their best books for the year. Fifty-seven have answered. They provide many interesting perspectives. Read the post. Vestal McIntyre's first novel Lake Overturn (Harper, 2009, 448p) gets several mentions and is the most cited book in the lot. The translations by Daniel Mendelshon of the poems of Cavafy gets two mentions (The Collected Poems and Unfinished Poems, by C. P. Cavafy, translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn, Knopf, 2009, 624p and 144p). In the non fiction category, Christopher Bram's Mapping the Territory - Selected Nonfiction (Alyson, 2009, 300p), also gets several mentions. Stephen McCauley, without any shame, mentions a book by Sebastian Stuart, without disclosing that Sebastian is his room mate, partner, companion, significant other, husband, whatever...

***

The best books I read this year are in French: Biasi's Gustave Flaubert - Une manière spéciale de vivre (Grasset, 2009, 494p), a lively, knowledgeable portrait of the great French writer not avoiding any facets of his life (more here); Jean-Luc Steinmetz's excellent new edition of Lautréamont in La Pléiade (Oeuvres complères, Lautréamont, Gallimard, 2009, 796p) (more here).

My great disappointment is the absence of news about Adam Mars-Jones's sequel to Pilcrow, his overwhelming novel of 2008.

I leave the conclusion to James O'Neill who says to The Band of Thebes: "I regret to say I haven't read any books this year, save Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (again). There are a few gay bits in that, by they're mostly hidden in the Latin."

2009.12.13

Lautréamont in La Pléiade

Les Chants de Maldoror and their author are even more mysterious than Rimbaud and his poems. Very little is known. Jean-Jacques Lefrère has still been able to put together a thick biography (Isidore Ducasse - auteur des 'Chants de Maldoror, par le comte de Lautréamont', Fayard, 1998, 690p). His style, by moments, is very unpleasant ("le monsieur venu habiter la capitale"), with irritating easy punning. It is unfair to blame him for waiting until page 487 to ask: "Ducasse était-il homosexuel?". At least the question is there. Its frankness, though, masks a disappointing discussion.

Jean-Luc Steinmetz, in his recent excellent edition of Lautréamont in La Pléiade (Oeuvres complères, Lautréamont, Gallimard, 2009, 796p), does a better job.

The first half of the volume is dedicated to the complete works of Isidore Ducasse, the Montevideo-born author who published Les Chants under the name le comte de Lautréamont and died at 24 in Paris in 1870. In addition to Les Chants the works include Poésies I and Poésies II, as well as a few letters.

The second part of the volume, Lectures de Lautréamont, is a selection of the most significant papers published on Lautréamont since a brief review, signed Épistémon, appeared in the short-lived journal La Jeunesse in 1868, to an interview with Philippe Sollers in 1997. It is amazing that nowhere in these texts is discussed, even obliquely, the homosexual content of Les Chants. Yet, the references are clear and ubiquitous:

Ô poulpe, au regard de soie! toi, dont l'âme est inséparable de la mienne; toi, le plus beau des habitants du globe terrestre, et qui commandes à un sérail de quatre cents ventouses; toi, en qui siègent noblement, comme dans leur résidence naturelle, par un commun accord, d'un lien indestructible, la douce vertu communicative et les grâces divines, pourquoi n'es-tu pas avec moi, ton ventre de mercure contre ma poitrine d'aluminium, assis tous les deux sur quelque rocher du rivage, pour contempler ce spectacle que j'adore! (chant premier)

Steinmetz's short introduction and extensive notes shed a comprehensive light on what he describes as "une obsession, qui pour une part, semble avoir motivé l'écriture":

Le monde des pédérastes (c'est le nom que l'on donnait aux homosexuels de ce temps) environne Rimbaud et Ducasse. Milieu des séminaristes d'Un coeur sous une soutane pour l'un. Pour l'autre, réalité de l'internat, éveil sensuel dans un milieu dépourvu de femmes. Admirations et répulsions entre élèves.

Isidore Ducasse was familiar with the places where homosexuals cruised in Paris:

Cet enfant, qui est assis sur un banc du jardin des Tuileries, comme il est gentil! Un homme, mû par un dessein caché, vient s'assoir à côté de lui, sur le même banc, avec des allures équivoques. (chant deuxième)

And he had, clearly, read some of the medical books that began, by mid century, to be published on the topic of "pederasty and sodomy", in particular Ambroise Tardieu's Étude médico-légale sur les attentats aux moeurs (1857):

Ô pédérastes incompréhensibles, ce n'est pas moi qui lancerai des injures à votre grande dégradation; ce n'est pas moi qui viendrai jeter le mépris sur votre anus infundibuliforme.

Bruno Guitard wrote, several years ago, an excellent paper decrypting Les Chants de Maldoror as a love song, love between boys (Tendresse de Lautréamont, revue Europe, août-septembre 1987, nº 700-701, 68-77). The paper, which is cited by Steinmetz, argues, convincingly that homosexuality is Les Chants's generator (it would have deserved to be included in Lectures de Lautréamont...). So, as Guitard,

Lisons Lautréamont comme nous écoutons Puccini: à la fois goguenards et subjugués. Bel canto du vieil océan, aria de l'hermaphrodite, romance de Mervyn, et cette musique parfois si ténue: 'Les paupières se recherchent comme deux amis.'

2009.12.06

Edmund White's Life in New York

An interview with Edmund White on the occasion of the publication of City Boy (Bloomsbury, 2009, 298p), in the current issue of the Gay & Lesbian Review, is the best introduction to his new memoir. Here is an excerpt:

Michael Ehrhardt: Getting back to the subject of gay lit, you write about Christopher Isherwood. His novel A Single Man, published in 1964, is arguably one of the first openly gay novels that isn’t camp or tragic, as opposed to Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room or Gore Vidal’s The City and the Pillar. Would you agree?
EW: Giovanni’s Room is weird, because it’s written by a black man, but there are no black characters in it. I mean, it seems like the idea behind it is that men are desirable as long as they’re straight, but the minute they go to bed with you they become sisters, and therefore they’re bad, like trash, and all you can do is bump pussies with them. I remember when I came out in the 50’s that’s what people thought. And Baldwin just echoes that. Then there’s Vidal’s book, which is camp, with lots of campy dialogue.
ME: So, you’d agree that A Single Man was an early avatar of the positive gay novel?
EW: Yes, a hundred percent. And why was it so ahead of its time? I’d say because Isherwood was part of the original gay revolution in Berlin and actually lived in Magnus Hirschfeld’s house. Isherwood had tremendous class confidence, and he lived during the war years and afterwards in California, which is one of the great breeding grounds for modern homosexuality, and got all the fall-out of the GIs coming back from the war. Many GIs came out around that time. The army was a great breeding ground for modern homosexuality, because you had all these young men, who were far from home, who thought they would die any day, who were all thrown together in the barracks, so why not seize the moment? And a lot of those guys settled in the beach communities of California after the war, because they didn’t want to go back to Pittsburgh and get married to their childhood sweethearts.
ME: Isn’t that what a lot of the phobia is about “Don’t ask, don’t tell”?
EW: I think there is a lot of homosexuality in the Army. But I have a theory which you can agree or disagree with, that before homosexuality became so public, so vocal, and so politicized, there was a lot more casual action than there is now. I think that between AIDS and then the high profile of it, it discourages people from experimenting. I mean, I’m old enough to remember the old Mediterranean world of Greece, for instance, where almost any man, if you paid him something, was readily available.

City Boy has received mostly positive reviews. And rightly so. Despite some name-dropping and unnecessary gossips, White's memoir is full of memorable portraits, particularly those of James Merrill, Peggy Guggenheim and Susan Sontag. Many other famous, and less famous, characters appear through the pages which recount White's life in the 60s and the 70s, mainly in New York, the city where 'nothing lasts'. The memoir provides a lively description of gay life during these two critical decades, and the author portrays his sexual life very candidly. It is also the story of man becoming a writer. The books ends with the advent of AIDS, the publishing of White's (finally...) breakthrough novel A Boy's Own Story, and his departure for Paris in 1983...

2009.11.29

Lincoln (cont.); Gay Tennis Stars

Read the excellent paper by Lewis Gannett in the current issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review (A Double Standard in Lincoln Studies). It's a balanced summary of the controversy regarding Lincoln's attraction to men, including carnal attraction, not "those asexual 'romantic friendships' in vogue with certain scholars" (here we are again...). Very critical of Sean Wilentz's 'gargantuan (25,000-word) review-essay on Lincoln literature in the July 15, 2009, issue of The New Republic', he argues that, starting in the 1990's, 'Lincoln scholars relaxed evidentiary standards to accommodate a heterosexual story [Ann Rutledge] in order to ward off homo-romance stories [Joshua Speed]'.

***

A Terrible Splendor - Three Extraordinary Men, a World Poised for War, and the Greatest Tennis Match Ever Played (Marshall Jon Fisher, Crown Publishers, 2009, 321p) is an entertaining book, despite a few lengthy pages, ideal for a few days under the November Caribbean sun. It recounts one of the greatest tennis matches ever between American Don Budge and German Goettfried von Cramm in July 1937. US and Germany were tied 2-2 in the Davis Cup, and the fifth match was to decide who would play against a weakened England, and probably win the title.

The match happens in the context of the rise of the third Reich and the increasing persecution of Jews and homosexuals. The irony is that "the team playing for Nazi Germany, representing the highest ideals of Aryan athleticism and manliness, had a homosexual as its star and another - an American, to boot - as a coach." The coach was Bill Tilden, tennis's first idol, who dominated world tennis in the 20's, the star Goettfried von Cramm.

Fisher's descriptions of tennis matches somewhat reminded me of Witold Gombrowicz's Les envoûtés (The Possessed) which I read during the summer of 1977 when it was first published in French, serialized, in Le Monde. Also a nice read for under the sun...

2009.11.22

Larry Kramer on 'Retrograde' Books

The Gay & Lesbian Review, in its September - October issue, published a provocative paper by Larry Kramer, worth reading (Queer Theory's Heist of Our History). This is how it starts: "I do not understand why historians and academics, including many gay ones, refuse to believe that homosexuality has been pretty much the same since the beginning of human history, whether it was called homosexuality, sodomy, buggery, or had no name at all. Isn’t it time for us to put a stop to this nonsense that produces retrograde books." The piece, as stated in an author's note, is a compilation by the G&LR editor of two book reviews by Larry Kramer, previously posted on huffingtonpost.com and thedailybeast.com. The first book belongs to Kramer's 'retrograde category': The Overflowing of Friendship - Love between Men and the Creation of the American Republic, by Richard Godbeer, a professor of history and gender studies at the University of Miami (John Hopkins, 2009, 272p). Kramer's criticism is sharp. He adds: "Even Ron Chernow in Alexander Hamilton (2004) and James Gaines in For Liberty and Glory - Washington, Lafayette, and Their Revolutions (2007), in laying out all the intertwining relationships between Washington, Hamilton, Lafayette, and John Laurens (Hamilton's great love), admit that they could have all been having sex." And recommends reading "the great, pioneering, Boston-based gay historian Charley Shively" on Washington, Lincoln and Whitman... The second book receives a thumbs-up: "Charles Upchurch, an assistant professor of history at Florida State University, has spent ten years of his life researching Before Wilde: Sex between Men in Britain’s Age of Reform (University of California Press, 2009, 288p), and it shows." Kramer makes it a tempting read.

2009.11.15