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
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