Gaya Scienza

Don Stratchey Is Back

Richard Stevenson's Donald Strachey mystery series had been unavailable since The Haworth Press was acquired by Taylor and Francis, a publisher of academic books and journals with no interest in Gay Men's fiction.

MLR Press, a small independent publisher started in 2006 by Laura Baumbach, has been bringing the novels back to life, one every month, since July.

And this month Don Strachey is back in a new mystery, Death Vows (Albion, MLR Press, 2008, 198 pp.).

Richard Stevenson was at the Oscar Wilde Bookstore, in Manhattan, last Tuesday, signing copies of his new book. A tall, skinny, man in his sixties, he looks much better than in the picture printed on the back cover of The Haworth Press edition of the series. Harboring a quiet smile, sparkling eyes, maybe a little shy, with a soft voice, he doesn't look like his gay detective, although he says about Stratchey and his partner Timmy: 'There's a bit of me in both of them - the good-boy Richard in Timmy, the bad-boy Richard in Strachey.' In the same interview posted on MLR Press website, he explains how he started the series:

I wrote it because it was what I deeply wanted to write. I wrote the first page of Death Trick [the first book in the series, 1981], and I felt as if my whole life as a writer had been leading up to that moment, and I had found my voice and my mission. And that mission was to advance the cause of gay liberation through entertainment. Joseph Hansen, with his Dave Brandstetter novels in the early '70s, had been the first creator of mysteries where the gay characters were decent and sane, and not pathetic wretches or serial killers. I wanted to do that too, but with a lighter tone and a protagonist who wasn't so sad. The biggest risk in all this was using the book for my own belated coming out. I was still married at the time. I showed the book to a grizzled old newspaper guy I knew, and he said, "Lipez, I think you were smart to use a pseudonym on this. Otherwise people would think you were queer." So I had to explain a few things.

Richard Stevenson is the pseudonym of Richard Lipez. Not bad?

Death Vows is in line with the previous eight novels in the series. A fast pace story, driven by the dialogues, often tense, filled with humor and irony, anchored in the contemporary gay community, it takes us to the Berkshires in the 'Gay Peoples Republic of Massachusetts,' where gay marriage has become a 'fine institution - except when it leads to murder...'

As Michael Nava, the author of the Henry Rios mystery series, puts it in a quote printed in the first pages of the book: 'Richard Stevenson is the most underrated of gay mystery writers.'

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If you are tired of the drama being played between Wall Street and Washington, DC, book a flight to London and lose yourself in the Bacon (Francis Bacon at the Tate Britain) and Rothko (Rothko at the Tate Modern) exhibitions...

2008.09.28

Balzac and Homosexuality

The US economy, says Roger Cohen in the New York Times, is being socialized to the tune of $700 billion ($2,000 for every person in the country) as a result of a giant mortgage-related Ponzi scheme...

Cassandras are always wrong until they prove themselves right! Paul Krugman has been warning against the major risks of the housing bubble for many years. Now, of course, he is right. In his last column he argues strongly against Henry Paulson's $700 billion rescue plan, as it is: 'If it goes through in anything like it's current form, we'll all be very sorry on the not-so-distant future.' He provides a very clear and convincing explanation of the situation.

Meanwhile, President Thabo Mbeki of South Africa, who succeeded Mandela, was forced to resign this Saturday by his own party over a power struggle with a rival. He is the one who questioned the viral origin of AIDS in a country decimated by the epidemic, and whose health minister supported treating the disease with garlic, lemon, olive oil and potatoes!

The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality by Michael Lucey, a professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley (Durham, Duke University Press, 2003, 308 pp.) has just been published in French with a translation by Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault's biographer (Les ratés de la famille: Balzac et les formes sociales de la sexualité, Paris, Fayard, 2008, 258 pp.). In the process, the Acknowledgments, the list of Works cited and the Index have disappeared... It reminded me how La Comédie humaine is full of unconventional (really queer) families, couples, individuals. A large part of the book is dedicated to discussing the character Vautrin, Balzac's 'most influential portrait of a sexual misfit', a homosexual. The Misfit of the Family is a stimulating book, although the writing is sometimes a little jargonizing (is it the translation?). The discussion makes references to works by Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu, and more surprisingly (and unnecessarily) by several critics of nineteenth-century French fiction rarely mentioned in France... In a fascinating central chapter, INTERLUDE: Balzac and Same-Sex Relations in the 1830s, Lucey provides several leads for a work, still to be written, on Balzac's homosexuality (if I may commit this anachronism). He cites studies (which he qualifies as homophobic...) by Graham Robb, Pierre Citron, Suzanne Jean Bérard, Pierre Barberis and a relatively old paper by Philippe Berthier in L'Année balzacienne, 1979: Balzac du côté de Sodome. But again the definitive book on Balzac and homosexuality is still awaited.

2008.09.21

Philandre: "In short, our fate is pleasant enough"

Théophile de Viau (1590-1626) is one of the greatest poets of seventeenth-century France. His short life was shaped by the attacks he suffered from the Jesuits for his libertine morals. Although he was widely published and read in his century, he was almost forgotten thereafter until his 'rediscovery' by Théophile Gautier in the nineteenth-century. His works are characterized by the refusal of imitation, a drive towards modernity, a very personal, naturalistic sensitivity, and above all a strong sense of freedom. Montaigne is never far away...

His homosexuality is obvious from his writings and biographical scare details. For more details in English, see the entry Viau, Théophile de, in glbtq.

Heureux, tandis qu'il est vivant,
Celui qui va toujours suivant
Le grand maître de la nature
Dont il se croit la créature.
Il n'envia jamais autrui,
Quand tous les plus heureux que lui
Se moqueraient de sa misère,
Le rire est toute sa colère.
Celui-là ne s'éveille point
Aussitôt que l'Aurore point
Pour venir, des soucis du monde,
Importuner la terre et l'onde.
Il est toujours plein de loisir,
La justice est tout son plaisir,
Et, permettant en son envie
Les douceurs d'une sainte vie,
Il borne son contentement
Par la raison tant seulement.
L'espoir du gain ne l'importune,
En son esprit est sa fortune ;
L'éclat des cabinets dorés,
Où les princes sont adorés,
Lui plaît moins que la face nue
De la campagne ou de la nue.
La sottise d'un courtisan,
La fatigue d'un artisan,
La peine qu'un amant soupire,
Lui donne également à rire.
Il n'a jamais trop affecté
Ni les biens ni la pauvreté ;
Il n'est ni serviteur ni maître,
Il n'est rien que ce qu'il veut être.
Jésus-Christ est sa seule foi.
Tels seront mes amis et moi.

(Théophile de Viau, Oeuvres de 1621, XVII, Ode)

And:

Bref, notre sort est assez doux,
Et pour n'être pas immortelle
Notre nature est assez belle
Si nous savons jouir de nous.
Notre mal c'est notre faiblesse,
Rien que nous-mêmes ne nous blesse.
Le sot glisse sur les plaisirs,
Mais le sage y demeure ferme
Attendant que tous ses désirs
Et ses jours aient fini leur terme.

(Théophile de Viau, Philandre sur la maladie de Tircis, Strophe 5)

Théophile de Viau Complete Works are available in a modern edition: Oeuvres complètes, éd. Guido Saba, Paris, Champion, 3 vol., 1999.

2008.09.14

Cardinal John Henry Newman, Gayness and Saintliness

The body of Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) will be transferred sometimes this fall from his grave in a small cemetery in Rednal, near Birmingham, to the Oratory Church in Birmingham, after the UK authorities gave their permission in August. The reburial is planned in anticipation of his being declared a saint, probably in 2009.

John Henry Newman, one of the greatest Catholic intellectuals of the modern age, is among Pope Benedict XVI's favorite authors. Newman was originally an Anglican clergyman and a professor at Oxford. He converted to Catholicism in 1845 and was made a cardinal in 1879.

The proposed 'translation' of Newman's body has angered gay-rights activists and has fueled a controversy in the English press. Newman has been buried side-by-side with his friend Ambrose St John, who lived with him from 1843 until his death in 1875, in a simple grave. It was what Newman wanted. He wrote to his executors shortly before his death: 'I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Father Ambrose St John's grave – and I give this as my last, my imperative will.' Peter Tatchell, a London-based gay-rights activist and co-founder of the queers rights direct action group, OutRage!, has published an article in the Guardian, Violating Cardinal Newman's Wishes, arguing that the Church is trying to conceal that it 'is likely that both men had a gay orientation,' and that 'homophobia is at the root of the Vatican's sordid scheme.'

The Catholic Church through the voice of Newman's biographer, father Ian Ker, a theologian at Oxford University, has refuted the allegations in an article for the Vatican’s newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, Cardinal John Henry Newman Faithfully Celibate.

St John and Newman's joint memorial stone is inscribed with the words the Cardinal had chosen: Ex umbris et imaginibus in veritatem ("Out of shadows and phantasms into the truth").

Who is right? I leave it to you.

For those who would like to dig further, The Friend (The University of Chicago Press, 2003, 392 pp.) by historian Alan Bray, provides clues from the Cardinal's diaries, letters and notes.

The Times of London reported that 'Peter Jennings, the press secretary to Father Paul Chavasse, provost of the Birmingham Oratory and postulator for the beatification of Cardinal Newman, said: "The bodies do not lie side by side. The coffins are separated by about three feet of earth."' We are, at least, reassured.

2008.09.07