Gaya Scienza

A New Drieu La Rochelle

Back in Paris for a few days I came across a paper by Bruce Benderson in the May issue of Têtu, the French gay monthly. Commenting on a collection of photographs by Russian artist Slava Mogutin, he gives a description of a New York I do not recognize: young go-go boys in underground bars who remind him of long gone Time Square. This is certainly something I have to explore. The New York by night I am familiar with has always seemed to me very clean and 'bon enfant'.

The International Herald Tribune has, sign of the present times, decided to replace its daily chess puzzle by a sudoku puzzle...

Among the books recently published in France I found a curious short text from Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, the infamous French writer who committed suicide at the end of the Second World War. Notes pour un roman sur la sexualité (Paris, Gallimard, 2008) had never been published before. Drieu wrote it in a small notebook in 1944. The title is misleading. In what is in fact a short, extraordinarily candid, memoir (although written in the third person), 'l'homme couvert de femmes' recounts his sexual education: his loss of virginity with a prostitute when he was 17, his many other encounters with prostitutes, the numerous sexually transmitted diseases he got as a result.
In a long introduction, Julien Hervier shows how Drieu was constantly staggering between whores, with whom he could have sex, though nothing more than a substitution for onanism, and 'clean' women he was inclined to respect sexually. A pathetic loneliness emanates from his self portrait. Maybe he was indeed an unavowed homosexual... Drieu tells us about his only sexual experience with a man. It happened a night when he was in the army during the Great War, "out of curiosity". He managed to share a bed with "one of his fellow soldiers who was brave, educated, humorous and quite handsome," and "who did not really hide his tendencies." After having given him some expectations, "he found him ridiculous and boring, even annoying, and he had rejected him with a somewhat harsh laughter." He adds in the same section of his memoir that he always had a "feminine coquetry" with the homosexuals who hated him and "saw him as an unbowed, false brother." Already when he was in his teens, Drieu had discovered that he was not so much driven by desire than longing to be desired. "It all stopped after two years. But later on, when he found himself amid true amateurs, he felt the same inclination. But then, it frightened him, more so when he felt that he had power on these men and that something within him was able to exercise that power." Yes, I wonder...

2008.05.25

I Love California; Demuth (cont.)

On Thursday the California Supreme Court reversed a ban on same-sex marriages making California the second state in the US, after Massachusetts, to allow gay and lesbian marriages. But what a state! 12% of the total US population and one-fifth of the electoral vote need to win the White House... Although Republican dominated and led by a Chief Justice appointed by Ronald Reagan, the Court resisted ideology and political pressures and came up with a fair judgment. Let's see how this decision will impact the presidential election, now that the primary campaign is almost over, and that the two major candidates are known.

A mention in The Advocate several weeks ago made me buy Joseph Olshan's last novel, The Conversion (New York, St. Martin's Press, 2008). It could have been a writer's novel, and a good one, according to the short text in the magazine. The main characters are writers gravitating around a manuscript, between Paris, Tuscany and New York. The narrator is fascinated by the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade: "Pléiade books are printed by the great French publisher, Gallimard, leather-bound volumes decorated with gold leaf, onion-thin pages that I consider to be the most beautiful mass-produced books in the world. The volumes are dedicated to the 'stars' of world literature, showcasing in the splendor of high production values a renowned author's greatest works." (Although when he lists the authors of some of the volumes owned by his lover in Paris, he wrongly includes Musil and Sinclair Lewis (sic) who were never published in the famous collection...) Unfortunately, very quickly the story becomes a little too complicated, unrealistic, while the characters lack depth, credibility, despite the author's visible efforts. In summary, a very disappointing reading...

You definitively know the famous red heart which means 'love' in logos like:

What most people don't know (a group I used to belong to...) is that the logo was created in 1977 for a tourist campaign in New York by Milton Glaser, now 78, a graphic designer, who, dismayed by the state of the city in the late 70s was glad to work without pay on the project. The State of New York has recently launched a new marketing campaign centered on the same logo. "It is one of those peculiarities of your own life where you don't know the consequences of your own actions," said Glaser to New York Times Anthony Ramirez. "Who in the world would have thought that this silly little bit of ephemera would become one of the most pervasive images of the 20th century?"

***

Coming back to Charles Demuth (see April 20 post), I found invaluable information in Speaking for Vice: Homosexuality in the Art of Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, and the First American Avant-Garde (Jonathan Weinberg, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1993). Demuth was a man of his time. Although he seems to have accepted his homosexuality and "did not worry about being tagged a homosexual", he certainly suffered from it and kept his private life secret. "He separated his art into discrete modes: the consciously avant-garde poster portrait and cityscapes, the conservative flowers and still lifes, and the sometimes erotic illustrations and nightlife scenes," which were not destined to be publicly showed during his lifetime. Jonathan Weinberg, a painter and art historian, displays a deep understanding of Demuth's erotic paintings, which are "representative of much of gay life from 1910 through 1940," and provides a fascinating book. Refering to a quotation from an interview with Michel  Foucault in 1983 ("For a homosexual, the best moment of love is likely to be when the lover is in the taxi") he follows up with: "Demuth's late erotic watercolors in particular have this quality of memory. Barbara Haskell speculates that by 1930 Demuth may have been impotent from diabetes. His return at this time to erotic figuration after a ten-year lapse may have come when he needed to remember sexual encounters to continue to think of himself as a sexual being. But all erotic pictures, early and late, share a quality of making permanent brief moments of desire and pleasure. In fact, Demuth's paintings are not seductive in the mode of much erotic art. They seem made less with the intention of eliciting desire in the spectator than with the intention of recording feelings and encounters. If for Demuth they served the purpose of recapturing the memory of sexual escapades lived or dreamed, for us they provide rare visual evidence of how many homosexuals formed intimacy during the period between wars. The illicit sexual meetings that made up so much of gay life were designed to be invisible. Demuth's paintings upset that design."

When will we see an exhibition dedicated to Demuth's erotic art?

2008.05.18

An Afternoon in New York City

After spending some time in Brooklyn last Monday, wondering if this is the place I want to move to, I decided to try Rapture, a gay bookstore and café in the East Village. Everybody needs to earn a living... I took the Q train, nicely crossing the East River on the Manhattan Bridge, with a breathtaking view of Downtown, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty on the left. But Rapture was closed (definitively says its website, although it opened only last December, but it promises to "continue to host many of the events you have come to appreciate at Rapture at other locations") and I ended up at the Oscar Wilde Bookshop...

On the display table at the center of the small front room I grabbed Hiding in Plain Sight: The Secret Life of Raymond Burr (Michael Seth Starr, New York, Applause, 2008). I had absolutely no idea Raymond Burr was gay, the so manly hero of the television series of my youth, Ironside. His intimate life is superficially explored in the book. What I found fascinating (and touching), though, is how, with only a few days to live, weakened by his fight against cancer, in September 1993, he was still answering to a reporter's questions that his deepest regret in his life was not to have found time to marry and have children. He left all belongings to his longtime companion, Robert Benevides, who shared his life for more than 30 years...

Alyson Books, in what seems a partnership with The Out Traveler, has started a series of small guides for the gay and lesbian traveler. The first in the series is dedicated to New York city, and I bought a copy at Oscar Wilde (The Out Traveler New York City, Dan Allen, Alyson Books, April 2008). It is a good thing to see a new gay guide of New York. The best one, Betty & Pansy's Severe Queer Review of New York (3rd edition, San Francisco, Cleis Press, 2003), is becoming old and will apparently not be updated... The ideas behind the new series are commendable and I found a lot of useful and interesting information. It's great to provide details about the history of New York from a gay perspective and to look at cultural events from a gay angle. I was pleased to see short texts (called Sidebars) on significant figures of New York cultural history like Paul Cadmus, Allen Ginsberg, Walt Whitman, and the less well known Mel Cheren, Carl van Vechten, Langston Hughes. In the general chapter on gay culture in New York, Dan Allan includes Sidebars on 10 Great Gay Artworks, Films, Literary Works, etc. The choices are his, but have the merit to exist. My only slight critic is that it lacks passion, humor, and that it includes a few lesbian items which really make no sense in this book mainly aimed at gays...

Monday was the Cinco de Mayo, often mistaken in the United States as Mexico's Independence Day... The weather was beautiful and on my way back to Grand Central I enjoyed seeing all the Mexican restaurants wide open, their customers enjoying cocktails and beers. I guess most of the cocktails were the disgusting beverage that the Margarita has become. Eric Felten, the fascinating author of the weekly column in the Wall Street Journal How's Your Drink, dedicated his last column to The Sultry Margarita. Read him if you are interested in the opaque history of this classic cocktail and want to learn how to make a proper one. By the way, Eric Felten has recently published an excellent book  I strongly recommend, How's Your Drink: Cocktails, Culture and the Art of Drinking Well (Chicago, Surrey Books, 2007). And it is not a collection of his previous columns (which deserve a book of their own)...

2008.05.11

Pot pourri

Sad fortnight!

Having little time to dedicate to books, because my daughters were visiting for the Spring Break, I embarked into reading what I thought would be a straightforward thriller: Christopher Rice's Bind Fall (Scribner, 2008). The plot seemed OK (an ex marine tries to reconnect with his former commanding officer who was severely injured while protecting him during their last mission in Iraq, finds him murdered, discovers he was gay, and joins forces with his boyfriend to solve the mystery), the author's three previous books were New York Times bestsellers... What a sad shock! The book is badly written, lacks depth, is full of clichés, and is pretentious. After finishing it, I learned on Wikipedia that "Christoper Rice comes from a family of authors. His parents are Anne Rice and the late poet Stan Rice; his aunt, Alice Borchardt, is a noted writer. He is also friends with fellow author Clive Barker. Rice fielded criticism that these connections, rather than his talent, resulted in the publication of his works." I wonder...

The TLS published a very positive review by Ritchie Robertson of Stefan George's new biography (Stefan George: Die Entdeckung des Charisma, Thomas Karlauf, Munich, Blessing, 2007), 'The Discovery of Charisma', concluding: "This enormously rich, deeply researched and accessibly written biography places George in the context of early twentieth-century Germany, provides memorable sketches of all his associates, avoids sensationalism, shuns facile answers to the problems his career poses, and, above all, quotes enough of the poetry to remind us that Stefan George's charismatic appeal rested ultimately on that." But I am not hooked...

Last week the New York Times, so despised by gays in the not so distant past, ran two articles of special interest to GLBTQ readers, in addition to the weekly wedding announcements which regularly feature same-sex couples. In the Sunday Style section, Tina Kelley tells the story of a couple married in 1980, with three children, living in New Jersey. In 2005, after a sex-change operation, Donald became Denise, but the couple remained married... When the parents "told their children about the pending surgery, Jessica, then 17, worried about divorce; Scott, then 14, said, 'cool'; and Alyssa, 12, cried for hours that she wanted a normal dad." Read the article (Through Sickness, Health and Sex Change) if you want to know why they stayed together, and learn more about same-sex marriages where one of the spouses is a transgender. In the prestigious New York Times Magazine, the lead article, including the first page picture of a clean gay couple, was dedicated to the young gays getting married in Massachusetts (Young Gay Rites by Benoit Denizet-Lewis). Nothing very exciting...

Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy, by Michael S. Sherry (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007) is full of interesting information, but difficult to read, loaded with quotations, and sentences like: "Dyspeptic explanations of queer creativity yielded little that was persuasive - no surprise, since most authors wanted less to explain than to disparage." Right. So what?

Queer Lives: Men's Autobiographies from Nineteenth-Century France, by William A. Peniston and Nancy Erber (The University of Nebraska Press, 2007) is a collection of short autobiographies by men who were attracted to other men, with introductions and notes putting them in context. Unfortunately the translations are uneven. The book is divided in three parts. The two autobiographies which constitute part one (Secret Confessions of a Parisian by Arthur W, "The Countess") and part three (The Novel of an Invert) are by far the most interesting. Both were coincidentally first published in 1896. Splendeurs et misères d'une courtisane mâle ou Confidences et aveux d'un Parisien was first published by Dr. Henri Legludic in his book, Notes et observations de médecine légale: Attentats aux moeurs (Paris, Masson, 1896). The document had been given to him in 1874 by "Arthur W", a 34 years old inmate at the prison in Angers. The anonymous author - his real name was Arthur Belorget - had been a male prostitute and transvestite in Paris during the Second Empire. Le roman d'un inverti-né is made of a series of letters sent to Emile Zola by a young Italian, writing in French, describing very openly his attraction to men. Zola gave these letters to his friend Dr. Georges Saint-Paul, an expert in forensic medicine, who published them under the pseudonym of Dr. Laupts in his book, Perversion et perversité sexuelles (Paris, Carré, 1896). Part two of Queer Lives includes six autobiographical texts which were case studies in works by prominent French physicians, and, more than anything else, illustrate the medical thinking about homosexuality in France at the end of the nineteenth-century.

Reviews and articles on Augusten Burroughs' last memoir (A Wolf at the Table, St. Martin's Press, 2008), including an interview in The Advocate which introduces him as "one of the most successful gay writers working today", do not incite to read the book...

I should have let it go and done what David Mixner did: take my daughters to Cape Cod to watch the whales of Provincetown (Turkey Hollow Almanach: The Whales of Provincetown).

2008.05.04