Gaya Scienza

The Friendship which is Love

Two days after the California Supreme Court, shamefully revisiting its own ruling of last year, upheld Proposition 8, defining marriage as the union of a man and a woman, the 21st Lambda Literary Awards were announced Thursday evening during a ceremony in New York city.

Attendants began to gather for a cocktail at 6pm at the CUNY Graduate Center in Midtown Manhattan. Several famous faces could be spotted: Michelangelo Signorile, Sirius OutQ Talk Show's host, Martin Duberman whose Radical Acts - Collected Political Plays was among the LGBT Drama finalists, Edmund White, who seemed older and more overweight than I imagined, the team from the Oscar Wilde Bookstore who were to be awarded the Lambda Legacy Prize, Don Weise, tall and lean, visibly coming straight from his office with a black briefcase...

At 7pm we were invited to convene in the Proshansky Auditorium. Scott Nevins, the presenter, promised that the ceremony would be kept under control and not linger for hours like last year. He was a professional, after all.

A Pioneer Award went to Leslie Feinberg. Being very ill she could not be present, but she had written a long text that was read, very seriously, by a close friend. I must confess that I had not heard of Leslie Feinberg before. I must add that I am not interested in learning more about her after the long old-fashioned litany of hatred of capitalism and praise of communism we had to listen to. I had not heard anything like that in years, even in France. It was painful, in light of how gays are and were treated in communist countries...

The other Pioneer Award went to the three surviving members of the so called Violet Quill: Edmund White, Andrew Holleran and Felice Picano. There was a standing ovation.

Among the Literary Awards, divided among 22 categories, I regret that The Bishop's Daughter did not make it in the Bisexual category: Open - Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage by Jenny Block (Seal Press, 2008, 288p) was the winner. Neither Dishonorable Passions - Sodomy Laws in America 1861-2003 by William N. Eskridge Jr in the LGBT Nonfiction category: the winner was Loving the Difficult by the late Jane Rule (Hedgerow Press, 2008, 205p).

Interesting winners in other categories were: Criminal Intimacy - Prison and the Uneven History of Modern American Intimacy, Regina Kunzel, University of Chicago Press , 2008, 352p (LGBT Studies), Edward Carpenter - A Life of Liberty and Love, Sheila Rowbotham, Verso Books, 2008, 548p (Gay Memoir/Biography), First you Fall, Scott Sherman, Alyson Books, 2008, 224p (Gay Mystery).

Scott Heim won the Gay Fiction Award for We Disappear (Harper Perennial, 2008, 320p). Dennis Cooper who read his name after unsealing the envelope looked thrilled.

***

Imre is the first American novel where homosexual characters end up finding love. It was privately published in 1906 under the pseudonym of Xavier Mayne by an American writer, Edward Prime-Stevenson. Only 500 copies were printed. Prime-Stevenson was born in 1858 in New Jersey. After studying Law at Columbia University he started writing for several magazines and became the music critic of The Independent, a popular periodical from New York. After the turn of the century he made Europe his residence, traveling constantly and living in hotels. He died in Lausanne in 1942. In 1908 he published, also under the name of Xavier Mayne, a thick treaty on homosexuality, The Intersexes. Only 125 copies were printed.

Imre's style is far from great, but the story and the psychological depiction of the two main characters, Oswald, the narrator, and Imre, the Magyar officer he befriends while in the Hungarian capital, provide a touching insight of what it was like to be a homosexual at the end of the nineteenth century in America and in Europe. Some themes, like Oswald's feelings, after he comes out to Imre, convinced that his friend is heterosexual, are very modern: "My heart so lightened that I was a new creature."

Imre was never published anew since the first edition of 1906, although there have been reprints. The novel is now available in a modern edition by James J. Gifford, a Professor of Humanities at Mohawk Valley Community College in Utica, NY, and the author of a previous study of American homosexual writing in the early twentieth century. Imre - A Memorandum, Edward Prime- Stevenson, edited by James J. Gifford (Broadview Press, 2003, 192p), is an excellent edition that should allow modern readers an easy access to this literary landmark. The text is revised, useful notes are provided, an introduction describes the context in which the novel was published and tells us what is known of Edward Prime-Stevenson's life. Several appendices include extracts of contemporaries writings on homosexuality, letters from Prime-Stevenson, and a review of the novel in French by André Raffalovich published in 1907.

A copy of the original edition of Imre was sold in April for $12,000 on AbeBooks.

***

Angel Gurría-Quintana writes in the Financial Times about Colm Tóibín's latest novel:

Brooklyn is a departure from earlier Tóibín novels such as The Story of the Night or The Blackwater Lightship, in which the articulation of gay identity seemed central. It was a theme that ran quietly, too, through his previous novel, The Master, a fictionalised account of Henry James's late years. Except for a seemingly gratuitous scene involving Eilis and her Italian-American work supervisor, homosexuality is not invoked here.

Yet...

2009.05.31

Gay Rights, Bigotry and the Lack of A Champion

If you want to be exposed to first-hand bigotry, read the paper by Sam Shulman, titled The Worst Thing About Gay Marriage, in the 1 June 2009 issue of The Weekly Standard. It's intellectually frightening.

Frank Rich, in his Sunday column in the New York Times, La Cage aux Democrats, more convincingly argues that gay issues are not being tackled with in Washington because no national figure is prepared to be their champion:

So what’s stopping the Democrats from rectifying that legacy now? As Wolfson said to me last week, they lack “a towering national figure to make the moral case” for full gay civil rights. There’s no one of that stature in Congress now that Ted Kennedy has been sidelined by illness, and the president shows no signs so far of following the example of L.B.J., who championed black civil rights even though he knew it would cost his own party the South. When Obama invoked same-sex marriage in an innocuous joke at the White House correspondents’ dinner two weeks ago — he and his political partner, David Axelrod, went to Iowa to “make it official” — it seemed all the odder that he hasn’t engaged the issue substantively.

Some of the hottest topics, gays in the military and gay marriage, are well covered in the following books: Unfriendly Fire: How the Gay Ban Undermines the Military and Weakens America (Nathaniel Frank, Thomas Dunne Books, 2009, 368p), Gay Marriage: Why It Is Good for Gays, Good for Straights, and Good for America (Jonathan Rauch, Holt Paperbacks, 2004, 224p), Same-Sex Marriage: Pro and Con (Andrew Sullivan, Vintage, Rev Upd edition, 2004, 416p), Why Marriage: The History Shaping Today's Debate Over Gay Equality (George Chauncey, Basic Books, 2005, 224p).

2005.05.25

Fleet Week in New York City

The Fleet's In! (1934), Paul Cadmus, oil on canvas,
Navy Art Gallery, Washington Navy Yard

Outrage presents itself as a documentary on closeted gay politicians who work against the interests and freedoms of the LGBT community in today's America. The movie has been released two weeks ago in five theaters across the United States.

It is funny to see, again, Senator Larry Craig in Boise, Idaho, greet the press, under a beautiful sky, with the words: "thank you for coming out today"..., before stating: "I am not gay, and I have never been gay." It is moving to listen, again, Jim McGreevy, coming forward, his wife standing beside him not knowing what was happening to her, say: "I am a gay American." It is sad to watch Governor Charlie Crist getting married in Florida.

More generally, it is sad to watch all these closeted politicians, when nothing, today, justifies their remaining in the closet.

Kirby Dick, the director, interviewed by Gary Kramer in Gay City (Taking on the Closet) says: "I think the closet exists because people perceive there is something wrong - a liability - with being gay. I personally believe that they underestimate the power of coming out and being open and honest."

Outrage culminates with the story of Representative Jim Kolbe, telling of the happiness which submerged him when he came out, aged 54, in 1996, after being coerced into it by gay-rights advocate because he had voted in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act. Kolbe was successfully reelected several months later. As such, I found that the movie is more than anything else about the power of coming out.

Coming out today is not about activism. It does not mean that you define yourself by your sexuality, as it was during the post-Stonewall days. Today it's just a matter of honesty, transparency and well being.

***

Which brings me to Colm Tóibín. The great Irish novelist was recently interviewed by Alex Witchel in the New York Times Magazine just as his latest novel, Brooklyn (Scribner, 2009, 272p), was being released. It is a very good paper (His Irish Diaspora).

Brooklyn, which is his sixth novel, is relatively short, concise, the writing is simple, precise, powerful. It starts relatively slowly, but the tension rises progressively. There is no gay character in the story, set in the fifties. Some of the issues, Eilis, the lonely main character, faces, though, are very similar to the ones a young gay man could have faced in the same era: isolation, difficulty to get advice, to confide, indecision on how to direct one's own life, between conventions and the unknown... Eilis's distant mother and absent father are reminiscent of Tóibín's own youth, as is the town from where she comes, Enniscorthy, where he grew up.

Witchel writes of Tóibín who is 53:

He never told his mother he was gay. "She asked my sister, Was I happy? and my sister said, ‘Your mother wants to know if you’re happy.’ I said, ‘Yes, tell her I’m very happy.’ I think that’s an Irish thing. That American thing of coming out to the whole world and the big party, that never caught on in Ireland the same way."

***

Don Wiese, one of the most knowledgeable editors of gay literature, who was recently appointed at the head of Alyson Books, the largest GLBT publishing company, is interviewed by Natalie Hope McDonald in the current issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review. Before joining Alyson, Wiese, a veteran editor... although only in his forties, launched a line of GLBT books at Carroll & Graf, a mainstream publisher.

We're often told 'gay literature is dead' and 'no one reads,' usually by failed writers looking to justify their difficult circumstances. As a publisher, I see this differently.

Read the article if you want to know more on how Don Wiese sees the future of gay literature and publishing, as we look forward to the Lambda Literary Awards Ceremony on May 28, 2009 in New York City. Leslie Feinberg, Andrew Holleran, Felice Picano, and Edmund White will be this year’s recipients of the Lambda Literary Foundation's Pioneer Award.

2009.05.24

Errata

The Independent did publish an obituary for James Kirkup in its Saturday May 16th edition, by Richard Canning and James Fergusson: James Kirkup: Poet, author and translator who also wrote approximately 300 obituaries for The Independent.

So did The Times: James Kirkup: Poet and Translator.

These are very good papers, especially the one in The Times.

2009.05.18

James Kirkup (1918-2009), author of 'The Love That Dare to Speak its Name', Dies.

The Independent, where James Kirkup used to write obituaries, was still silent, as of my writing, about his recent death... But of course there is no rush. Wednesday a very good piece of obituary was published about James Purdy (James Purdy: Controversial writer lionised by Vidal, Albee, Williams and Sitwell) who died last March in New Jersey...

The Shields Gazette first reported the death of the great poet on Monday May 11th (Internationally Acclaimed Poet Dies):

South Shields-born poet James Kirkup, whose work earned him an international reputation, has died. Mr Kirkup, who was 91, passed away at the weekend in hospital in Andorra where he had made his home for many years. He's believed to have suffered a stroke. Mr Kirkup, who was born and raised in Cockburn Street, on The Lawe, was known around the world as a prolific poet, translator, travel writer, and the author of several volumes of autobiography. His close friend in South Tyneside, Dorothy Fleet, said: "He had been getting increasingly frail and had become virtually housebound, but he was still working and creative."

Among major newspapers, only the Telegraph and The Guardian reported his death. The paper in The Guardian is the most comprehensive. The Telegraph printed the beautiful portrait by Maurice de Sausmarez (1951, University of Leeds Art Collection) reproduced above.

In the fifties the Oxford University Press published six volumes of his poetry. Glyn Pursglove, in The Guardian, writes:

His work in this period stripped away the previous extravagance and was characterised by a new precision of language. The title poem of A Correct Compassion (1952) - an account of a heart operation - has been widely anthologised and much admired for the exactness of its observation and its language. But the poem is far more than reportage (however accomplished); as a meditation on art, on its "correct compassion", it is sophisticated and deft. As a kind of "defence of poetry", it is persuasive and moving. There is much else to admire and enjoy in Kirkup's 1950s poetry, a body of work now seriously underrated. (...)
Kirkup's later poetry became richly varied in both form and subject, characterised by an impressive openness to new possibilities. His years in Japan were reflected in his successful adoption of the haiku and (most notably) the tanka.

The Beinecke Library at Yale, after acquiring his papers, provided the following profile of the poet:

James Kirkup was born in 1918 in the county of Durham. After graduating from Durham University in 1941, he applied for conscientious objector status and spent five years in an agricultural labor camp, during which time he published his first poems. His first book, The Drowned Sailor and Other Poems (1947), brought him into contact with J.R. Ackerley, the celebrated editor of The Listener, who became a close friend. He subsequently published The Submerged Village and Other Poems (1951), A Correct Compassion and Other Poems (1952), A Spring Journey and Other Poems (1954), and The Descent into the Cave and Other Poems (1957).

Having taught for three years in Corsham, Wiltshire, Kirkup spent the following years abroad: in Sweden, Spain, and, from 1959 onwards, as professor of English at Tohoku University in Sendai, in Japan, where he remained until 1961. He returned to Japan in 1963, first in Tokyo until 1970, then in Nagoya until 1972. His Japanese stay profoundly influenced his later work: The Prodigal Son: Poems 1956-1959 (1959), Refusal to Conform: Last and First Poems (1963), Japan Marine (1965), and Paper Windows: Poems from Japan (1968). The years 1972-75 took him to the United States, Morocco, and Ireland. After teaching in Cardiff in 1976-77, he moved to the principality of Andorra in the Pyrenees, which has been his residence since, while keeping close ties with Japan. In that same year 1977, the publication of his poem "The love that dares to speak its name" in Gay News triggered the first blasphemy trial in England for more than a century.

And the last one too. It is still illegal to publish The love that dares to speak its name in England:

As they took him from the cross
I, the centurion, took him in my arms-
the tough lean body
of a man no longer young,
beardless, breathless,
but well hung.

He was still warm.
While they prepared the tomb
I kept guard over him.
His mother and the Magdalen
had gone to fetch clean linen
to shroud his nakedness.

I was alone with him.
For the last time
I kissed his mouth. My tongue
found his, bitter with death.
I licked his wound-
the blood was harsh

For the last time
I laid my lips around the tip
of that great cock, the instrument
of our salvation, our eternal joy.
The shaft, still throbbed, anointed
with death's final ejaculation.

I knew he'd had it off with other men-
with Herod's guards, with Pontius Pilate,
With John the Baptist, with Paul of Tarsus
with foxy Judas, a great kisser, with
the rest of the Twelve, together and apart.
He loved all men, body, soul and spirit - even me.

So now I took off my uniform, and, naked,
lay together with him in his desolation,
caressing every shadow of his cooling flesh,
hugging him and trying to warm him back to life.
Slowly the fire in his thighs went out,
while I grew hotter with unearthly love.

It was the only way I knew to speak our love's proud name,
to tell him of my long devotion, my desire, my dread-
something we had never talked about. My spear, wet with blood,
his dear, broken body all open wounds,
and in each wound his side, his back,
his mouth - I came and came and came

as if each coming was my last.
And then the miracle possessed us.
I felt him enter into me, and fiercely spend
his spirit's final seed within my hole, my soul,
pulse upon pulse, unto the ends of the earth-
he crucified me with him into kingdom come.

-This is the passionate and blissful crucifixion
same-sex lovers suffer, patiently and gladly.
They inflict these loving injuries of joy and grace
one upon the other, till they die of lust and pain
within the horny paradise of one another's limbs,
with one voice cry to heaven in a last divine release.

Then lie long together, peacefully entwined, with hope
of resurrection, as we did, on that green hill far away.
But before we rose again, they came and took him from me.
They knew what we had done, but felt
no shame or anger. Rather they were glad for us,
and blessed us, as would he, who loved all men.

And after three long, lonely days, like years,
in which I roamed the gardens of my grief
seeking for him, my one friend who had gone from me,
he rose from sleep, at dawn, and showed himself to me before
all others. And took me to him with the love that now forever dares to speak
its name.

2009.05.17

Rose-Leaves

The recent publication of a paperback French edition of Teleny in Jean-Jacques Pauvert's collection Lectures amoureuses (Paris, La Musardine, 2009, 192p) provided me with the opportunity to read the erotic novel attributed to Oscar Wilde. At Les Mots à la Bouche, where several copies were displayed in a stack, I was first attracted by the cover which features a portrait by Egon Schiele.

I was surprised by how explicit and detailed the descriptions of the sex scenes are...

Teleny was first published anonymously in England in 1893 by Leonard Smithers. According to Charles Hirsch, a French bookseller established in London who had seen the manuscript, the published version had been significantly amended by Smithers: the Prologue which introduced the characters was omitted, and the action was switched from London to Paris.

Hirsch came into possession of the manuscript after Smithers's death and in 1934 a French translation of Teleny, based on the manuscript, was published in Paris, under the Ganymède Club imprint, with an introduction by Hirsch. This is, apparently, the text of the current paperback edition. The manuscript has since been lost.

Teleny is thought to have been in part written by Oscar Wilde, with the possible collaboration of three close friends. Its composition is contemporary with The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), "the most explicit novel about love and sex between men that had ever been published - at least by a respectable publisher. There had been works of pornography like The Sins of the Cities of the Plain, but these had never had the mass audience reached by Dorian Gray,"  writes Neil McKenna in his excellent, though provocative, biography The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde (London, Century, 2003, 535p), adding:

Teleny tells the story of the love affair between Camille Des Grieux and René Teleny. Like many men, Des Grieux - whose initials curiously echo those of Dorian Gray - has 'always struggled against the inclinations of my own nature' and has made severzl abortive attempts to love women. When he finally confronts the fact that he is attracted to other men, Des Grieux is disgusted and revolted. He is on the point of suicide when he is rescued, spiritually, and sexually, by the darkly handsome pianist René Teleny to whom Des Grieux is irresistibly drawn (...).

Sex with Teleny is not only profound, potent and rapturous, it is also revelatory.

Teleny has received short shrift from biographers and critics. It has often been described - unfairly - as crude and coarse. In its detailed and powerful descriptions of sex between Des Grieux and Teleny, the book is certainly extremely explicit, but it is at the same time poetic, passionate and quite beautiful, and certainly not unworthy of Oscar's hand. Unlike much Victorian pornography, the central theme of Teleny is rapture: rapture at the discovery of the erotic self and rapture at erotic fulfillment. Teleny is as much about love as about sex. From shame to rapture, Des Grieux's erotic odyssey follows that made by Oscar and by many of his friends and contemporaries.

In the first part of the novel Des Grieux gives an account of some of his not-so-satisfactory sexual encounters with women. During one of them, in a dirty brothel, he hears for the first time the expression 'rose-leaf' and he is puzzled(*):

At last, the consumptive girl, clasping with her hands the backside of the other one, and thus opening the huge pulpy buttocks, called out:

'A rose-leaf.'

Of course I greatly wondered what she meant, and I asked myself where she could find a rose-leaf, for there was not a flower to be seen in the house; and then I said to myself - having got one what will she do with it?

I was not left to wonder long, for the cantinière did to her friend what she had done to her.

Needless to say that when he gets to explore his sexuality with Teleny later on, he finds rose-leaves a 'thrilling sensation.'

Most available English editions of Teleny reproduce the text of the faulty 1893 edition. The best editions seem to be the Gay Sunshine Press (San Francisco) edited by Winston Leyland (1984) and the Gay Modern Classics (London) edited by John McRae (1986). None are currently in print.

***

Graham Robb, who wrote the best biography of Rimbaud in English, reviews on two full pages the third Pléiade edition of Rimbaud's works by André Guyaux (see Rimbaud in Pléiade, version 3.0) in the April 17th issue of the TLS (Top of the class). He calls it a "splendid edition" and mentions "Guyaux's careful erudition". He adds, though: "A scrupulous textual critic with relatively little interest in biographical minutiae, and still less interest in Rimbaud's post-literary adventures, Guyaux is unusually sensitive to the poet's unrebellious side." And: "Poems of which no manuscript in Rimbaud's hand survives are printed in a smaller typeface. This is a curious act of editorial ostentation. It means that Le Bateau ivre, which is known from a copy made by Verlaine, looks less significant than some of Rimbaud's jokes and jottings: lacking official documents, the poet literally fades from sight." This is indeed annoying for a spendid edition. In his acknowledgments Guyaux thanks Graham Robb, among others, for having contributed, through intellectual exchanges, books and articles, to his better understanding of Rimbaud's works...

***

There were two good news this week, upon my return. The first was that Maine became the fifth state to legalize gay marriage, when the Governor signed the same-sex marriage bill voted by the Legislature on Wednesday. A popular challenge will probably lead to a referendum this November or on June 2010. In the meantime the new law will be suspended... The other good news was that the Obama administration has decided to reopen the access to the Statue of Liberty's Crown starting next July 4th! It had been closed for security reasons since 9/11.

2009.05.10

(*) I discovered the lovely expression last year when reading an article on gay porn in Critique (see my blog post of March 23 2008)...

Koltès, Fellow Traveler

What, today, amazes me most each time I am back in Paris is the number of good bookstores in the city. It was a great pleasure last week to be able to wander among books in the librairies lining the streets of the Quartier latin, then cross the Seine and go to Les Mots à la Bouche, the best gay bookstore in Paris, rue Sainte Croix de la Bretonnerie in the Marais. New York, in contrast, has become a desert for that matter. The price control on books in France (le prix unique), imposed by law during the first months of François Mitterand's presidency in 1981 has had a wonderful effect. I don't know how long it will last. In the meantime, let's enjoy it.

I was excited to find, among several interesting new books, a volume of letters by Bernard-Marie Koltès (Lettres, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit, 2009, 226p), the great French playwright who died from AIDS twenty years ago last April 15th at the age of 41...

This correspondence - edited by his brother François and published for the first time - is certainly very incomplete. It does not include any letter he received. Koltès, as his brother remembers in the short introduction, "didn't keep anything or barely anything, especially the letters he received. He used to live with very little: little furniture, a few books, and nothing else. Each time he would leave a place, he would give away the books and would only take a travel bag with him, and always his Rimbaud." It gives, however, a fair and interesting picture of Koltès's life.

Koltès was a very private man. He (almost) never publicly discussed his homosexuality, and his plays have no openly gay characters. His letters provide, from time to time, a few hints of his cruising, when traveling abroad. He was a frequent traveler.

I have intricate love stories every other day, and several simultaneously. But I live by myself, in a small efficiency, over a vegetables market, in the middle of the noisy Paris. I have so many things to tell you: thunderstorms over Prague, one-night loves though final, first-rate dawns, dreams, forewarnings, no memories but plenty of projects. Let's hurry!

He spent his adult life always struggling with the lack of money, moving endlessly from shared rooms to cheap hotels, to small apartments, while traveling extensively, in order, as he claims several times, to collect impressions and ideas for his writings. Most of the letters provided are to a few friends (but no lover) and his family (his mother for whom he had a very strong attachment, his brother François, his nephew Emmanuel to whom he writes simple, touching, letters each time he discovers a new country, calling him petit mec). A strange sense of loneliness emerges from them. To his mother who worried about his future he wrote:

There is also a lot of pleasure, you know, to go against the tide: in a society where money is king, not to have money; in a society where love is orderly, have dissolute love; is not more absurd, or distressing than going backwards.

Koltès was a fascinating traveler. Thanks to his detailed letters we follow him from his first trip to Canada and the US during the summer of 1968 (he is 20) to his regular stays in New York, which he fell in love with, over the last years of his life. In between, he went to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, Africa, Mexico and Central America, Brazil. He always tried to avoid a touristic approach, preferring to mingle with the locals. Cruising was his way to meet new people. He always wrote lovingly about the places he visited, despite sometimes the financial (or other) difficulties he encountered.

In 1968 while a student of journalism in Strasbourg he saw Maria Casarès act in Médée at the TNS, directed by Jorge Lavelli. It was a shock and a turning point: he would dedicate his life to dramatic art. He did exactly that. Some of the letters show how concerned he was about his writing and the quality of the translation and production of his plays.

A few days before his death his wrote, from Lisbon, to his brother François the short note which ends the present collection:

In God we trust
Do we?

Overall these letters are a touching and gay introduction to Koltès.

2009.05.03