Gaya Scienza

Bits and Pieces

Andrew Sullivan has written an important short piece on gay marriage in the September issue of Atlantic Monthly (My Big Fat Straight Wedding): reflecting on California's Supreme Court May 15 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage and on his own recent marriage, he argues that "in matters outside the bedroom, American culture and law are at last acknowledging that there is no difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals." In other words, homosexuals are becoming mainstream. In 2005 Sullivan published an essay in the New Republic entitled The End of Gay Culture: Assimilation and its meaning, a stimulating and clear-sighted paper on the evolution of gay identity over the past thirty years. The New York Time published last week in its Modern Love column a text by Bob Morris on his own experience with gay marriage: "Being gay and single is becoming the new smoking," he writes. Meanwhile, in its weddings/celebrations section gay marriage announcements are becoming more and more common, involving more and more individuals from mainstream America: executives, lawyers, professors, etc.

For the Thrill of it (Simon Baatz, New York, Harper, 2008, 560 pp.) is a very comprehensive and fascinating account of the 1924 infamous murder of 14 year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago. Publishers Weekly provides the following summary: "In 1924, Nathan Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, both intellectually precocious scions of wealthy Jewish Chicago families, kidnapped and brutally murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in an attempt to commit the perfect crime. Historian Baatz, of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, replays the crime (on which Meyer Levin's 1956 novel Compulsion was based) from the killers' point of view, detailing their intense, often sexual, relationship that culminated in the murder. But they left a crucial piece of evidence and eventually confessed to the murder. Clarence Darrow cleverly had the boys plead guilty to avoid a trial, and the legendary defense attorney went head to head with State's Attorney Robert Crowe in a sentencing hearing before Judge John Caverly. Both sides trotted out psychiatrists to testify whether Leopold and Loeb were mentally ill. Darrow's gamble paid off in life sentences. Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936; Leopold was eventually paroled in 1958. Baatz gives an acute portrait of the two murderers bound together in a web of fantasy, but his heavy reliance on novelistic techniques (there!—he had done it) and meandering pacing prevent this from being as convincing as his exhaustive research deserves." The New York Times (Murder Most Rational and Confounding) and the Wall Street Journal (Low Deeds and High IQ) published very positive reviews. The crime probably provided the source for Hitchcock's 1948 movie Rope, and forms the basis of Tom Kalin's 1992 excellent movie Swoon, now available in dvd.

Tristan Garcia's first novel La meilleure part des hommes (Paris, Gallimard, 305 pp.) is a 'roman à clés' set in the Paris gay community during the 80s. Published in the prestigious Collection Blanche by Gallimard it has been hailed as one of the outstanding novels of this 'rentrée litéraire' by Le Monde ("C'était notre foutue libération des moeurs", August 29th 2008).

I discovered last week-end, while reading a local newspaper in The Pines, that Billy Budd, Melville's work with the clearest homosexual overtone, was written in Fire Island... Harry Havemeyer who published Fire Island's Surf Hotel and other Hostelries on Fire Island's Beaches in the Nineteenth Century (Mattituck, N.Y., Amereon House, 2006. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index, 178 pp.) believes Herman Melville wrote much of it while vacationing at the Surf Hotel, one of the first hotels in the island, on its western tip... What an irony!

2008.08.31

Verlaine (cont.); Matthew Mitcham

The Verlaines are important characters in Greg Herren's Murder in the Rue Chartres (New York, Alyson Books, 2007, 248 pp.) which won the Men's Mystery Lambda Literary Award earlier this year, but they have nothing to do with Rimbaud...

We might finally have the worthy successor to Joseph Hansen's Dave Brandstetter and Michael Nava's Henry Rio. Herren has created a deep and likable gay private investigator character who can stand the comparison. This is the third novel featuring the New Orleans private detective Chanse MacLeod. I have not (yet!) read the two previous ones but Murder in the Rue Chartres is a very good crime mystery book, Herren's 'richest, most complex novel to date' writes Drewey Wayne Gunn, a scholar and an expert on Gay Male Mysteries, in a very good review published in the winter 2008 issue of the Lambda Book Report.

Several weeks after Hurricane Katrina has devastated most of New Orleans, Chanse returns home. The area where he lives has not been flooded but the city he likes so much is 'broken' and still deserted. While adjusting to his changed beloved city, he has to deal with his past, the loss of his lover the previous year, and what he wants to do next with his life. In the ghost town patrolled by the National Guard he is reunited with his best friend Paige, a reporter from the Time-Picayne, now chain-smoking and drinking more than she should, Venus Casanova and Blaine Tujague, overworked detectives with the NOPD, he has known since working on the force for two years after college, before going out on his own. They join most evenings at a local pub to get burgers and drinks and share their distress... There is also the exuberant Barbara Castlemaine, a wealthy New Orleans socialite who is both Chanse's landowner and major employer. Then there is Allen, the owner of the gym where Chase used to exercise, just back too, and who might want to share his loneliness with him. "Part of what makes this novel so satisfying is that for a rare moment in a murder mystery we have round characters capable of growth and development," writes Gunn. I cannot agree more.

New Orleans is central to the novel. Greg Herren lives in the Crescent City. As his hero, he could not imagine living anywhere else. He provides an insider's description of the city, its history, and particularly its gay heritage. Written between 2005 and 2006, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, Murder in the Rue Chartres, is dedicated to 'the city of New Orleans.'

And, by the way, there is also a plot... Which brings me back to Verlaine. A few days before Katrina, Iris Verlaine, the granddaughter of the head of an old, rich and powerful New Orleans family, had hired Chanse to find her father who had been missing for more that thirty years... Upon his return to the city, Chanse learns that Iris was murdered the Friday evening before Katrina. His friends from the NOPD ask him to help them investigate the murder, which puts him back on the track of Iris' father... The novel is suffused with references to Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer which provides its epigraph: "I came out in the French Quarter years before I came out in the Garder District".

I look forward to the next Chanse MacLeod Mystery...

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Did you see Matthew Mitcham Saturday evening? He won the gold medal in the men's 10-meter platform diving competition at the Olympics destroying the Chinese dream of sweeping all 8 gold medals in the diving competition. NBC reporters, in their coverage, mentioned that Mitcham had retired from competition for 'personal and family reasons' two years ago before coming in 2007, which makes his performance even more startling. But they did not mention (nor does the New York Times) that Mitcham is one of the few high level athletes openly gay... You can read a full story on the young Australian in the August 26th issue of The Advocate.

2008.08.24

Ô saisons, ô châteaux

The New York Times published this Friday in the Escapes section a paper titled His Sanctuary From Glamour dedicated to the country house Harlan Bratcher, chief executive of A/X Armani Exchange, owns in the Hudson Valley north of New York city. In the first paragraphs of the article, we learn en passant, as happens regularly in the Times, that he shares his retreat with his partner, Toby Usnik...

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While waiting for the upcoming new edition of Rimbaud in La Pléiade I have been reading Jean-Jacques Lefrère's Arthur Rimbaud (Paris, Fayard, 2001, 1242 pp.), the most comprehensive and authoritative biography of the poet. J.-J. Lefrère, one of the most renown specialist of Rimbaud, has recently published a volume of Rimbaud's correspondence (Paris, Fayard, 2007). He is also an hematologist and a professor of medicine...

The biography is written in a lively style, which is nice considering the thickness of the book, and reads like a novel...

Very little is known of Rimbaud's inner life. He was a lonesome boy and a lonesome man. Lefrère has written a very factual account of the poet's life, based on documents he quote extensively, and, contrary to many of his predecessors, never tries to infer what his subject might have felt or thought. What we know, for that matter, is enough to make his life a fascinating story. At the end, though, there is frustration, the more so for a gay reader. Lefrère, while addressing adequately Rimbaud's homosexuality, seems a bit uneasy with it at times, and makes some surprising comments... "Alcoholism and homosexuality were not for Verlaine a voluntary upsetting of one's senses, the result of some artistic concept, but a surrender, full of doubts and remorse, to inclinations he fought against his entire life." For Verlaine... Was it for Rimbaud? "Why avoid the question, when it arises: did Rimbaud remain homosexual  during his 'second life'? Yes why? For Robert Goffin, a poet and member of the Académie royale de Belgique, Lefrère tells us, "Arthur Rimbaud's works can only be brought to light and understood through his homosexuality." Goffin wrote a book on the poet certainly worth looking at.

In fact Lefrère does not avoid the discussion, first in a several pages in one of the chapters dedicated to Rimbaud's second stay in Paris (chapter XI, Le repas des communards). "Few, if any, of the two poets' scholars would still contend that their relationship was platonic, or that it was a mere 'transient experience' for the sake of poetry," concludes Lefrère regarding the relationship between Rimbaud and Verlaine. His description of the relationship is clearly an homosexual one. For the period before met Verlaine and thereafter no documents are available, and Rimbaud's closest friends have denied any homosexual encounter. Poet Germain Nouveau's interaction with Rimbaud (they spent sometime together in London in the spring of 1874) raises questions which will probably never be answered ... For the last part of his life, in Africa, nothing. Lefrère quotes several contradictory, and unreliable, testimonies. For many years, and until his return to France after contracting the disease he would die from, he kept with him a young servant, Djami Wadaï, from Abyssinia. In his will Rimbaud took care of him... Also, although he was never involved with slave trade, contrary to what has sometimes been written, he once questioned one of his business acquaintances if he could get him two boy slaves...

I am not sure Edmund White's book, Rimbaud: The Double Life of a Rebel, to be published in October, will bring much more. An unknown text from Rimbaud was discovered last May in an old collection of l'Ardennais: a short newspaper article titled 'Bismark's Dream'. But the probability of finding one day something more intimate is  very low...

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By the way, there is an interesting exhibition (together with a catalog even more comprehensive) at the Whitney Museum in New York: the Polaroids photographs Robert Mapplethorpe took between 1970 and 1975. On view through September 14th.

2008.08.17

Ceremonies...

China is not showing the games live to its people: there is a slight delay in order to avoid any embarrassing demonstration to be viewed by its population. This is called censorship. The US did much better this Friday for the opening ceremony. NBC which bought exclusive rights for the US imposed an embargo of twelve hours... At the age of internet and worldwide communication, the Americans who woke up early to watch the opening ceremony live were up for disappointment! All day long, it was as if nothing was happening on the other side of the world until they broadcast the ceremony in the evening... Whatever! The Chinese have impressed the world! The show was amazing! President Bush, seemed to be very hot, and frenetically looked at his watch, while waiting for the US delegation to appear... President Sarkozy, with his younger son Louis, had kept his jacket and was soaked with perspiration. He stood up when the French delegation, in sad gray jackets, marched. Bush stood as well, and had put on his jacket back, when the US team entered. The Chinese did not put a lot a thought to choose their flag-bearer: they gave the flag to their impressively tall basketball player, Yao Ming. No way we could miss the red flag... Well done!

Speaking of ceremonies and competition (I should have mentioned it earlier) the 20th Annual Lambda Literary Awards, affectionately known as the "Lammys," were held last May in Los Angeles. Founded in 1996, as its mission statement says, the Lambda Literary Foundation exists to celebrate and enhance GLBTQ literature in all its dimensions. The Lambda Literary Awards, the most visible expression of its mission, recognize annually the most significant books published in more than twenty categories, from fiction to poetry to spiritual writing to best debut novel. The 20th Awards ceremony is very well described by Micheal T. Luongo for Gay City News and by Patricia Nell Warren, the author of Front Runner. Among the 21 categories represented Michael S. Sherry received the LGBT Nonfiction Award for Gay Artists in Modern American Culture (University of North Carolina Press), Andre Aciman the Men's Fiction Award for Call Me By Your Name (Farrar Straus Giroux), both mentioned here. The Men's Mystery Award went to Greg Herren for Murder in the Rue Chartres (Alyson Books) and the Men's Memoir/Biography Award to Mississippi Sissy by Kevin Sessums (St. Martin's Press). More information can be found at www.lambdaliterary.org.

glbtq.com is a good resource web site for gay literature. The site, launched in 2003, is published under the supervision of a Board of Editorial Consultants and all entries are signed. It describes itself as the largest, most comprehensive encyclopedia of glbtq culture in the world, and is divided into three sections: literature, arts and social sciences. The General Editor, Claude J. Summers, Professor Emeritus in the Humanities at the University of Michigan-Dearborn, was a pioneer in glbtq studies when the field first emerged as an area of academic inquiry. I have been visiting the site regularly and have found it to provide interesting and useful information, with a focus on the US, though. Sadly, there is no entry for Pierre Herbart, an important French writer, nor for James Kirkup, a great living poet from the UK...

2008.08.10

Bits and Pieces

I might have been unfairly tough with Paul Fisher's House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (Henry Holt & Company, 2008, 693 pp.). Charles McGrath wrote a very engaging review in the New York Times this week: "James Clan, A Family With a Load of Baggage."

Mr. McGrath, a former editor of the NYT Book Review, also reviews this week, in the newspaper Sunday literary supplement, Miranda Seymour's memoir of her highly eccentric father (Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father's House, Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, 2008, 270 pp.). George Seymour was a British eccentric as we like them even when they are not likable. His greatest love was Thrumpton Hall, the family manor house in Nottinghamshire. He married, had children, then, in middle age, started riding bikes in leather suites with young men from humble extraction. He finally settled with a late-life companion, an illiterate long-haired young man he had picked up outside a movie theater.

Joe Morris is also an eccentric, albeit from the other side of the Atlantic. At 80, after the death of his wife, he started dating again under his son's supervision. The latter, Bob Morris, who had to deal "with his own problems as a middle-aged, love-handled single man in the youth-obsessed Manhattan gay dating scene," has published a memoir on this unusual experience, Assisted Loving: True Tales of Double Dating With My Dad (Harper/HarperCollins Publishers, 2008, 288 pp.). His book is reviewed in the same issue of the Book Review.

2008.08.03