Gaya Scienza

Thomas Mellon on 'Advise and Consent'

Last December I watched Advise and Consent, the excellent 1962 movie by Otto Preminger. The film is based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel with the same title by Allen Drury published in 1959.

Thomas Mellon, whose last novel, Fellow Travelers, I liked a lot, has written a paper on Allen Drury's Advise and Consent in the New York Times Review of Books for the fiftieth anniversary of its publication. The paper is somewhat critical...

Of course, the novel wasn't entirely believable even in its own day. (...) In its preoccupation with the mesh of personality and process, Drury's book resembles not so much any Washington novel by Henry Adams or Gore Vidal or Ward Just as it does one of C.P. Snow's schematic renditions of high drama in the faculty lounge and parliamentary cloakroom. (...) Unfortunately, Drury was the kind of nonfiction-writer turned novelist who remains better at telling than showing. (...) Even reviewers impressed by the plotting and insiderliness of Advise and Consent had doubts about its literary merits...

Despite of that, Advise and Consent

the plot [of which] turns on the blackmailing of Brigham Anderson, a young senator from Utah whose wartime homosexual affair, once exposed by extreme proponents of the nominee for State, leads the senator to shoot himself inside his office on a Sunday afternoon,

remains attractive. Maybe as a summer read?

Summer Books and The Washington Post

I came upon a great blog a few days ago. I don't remember how I found it, but what a great blog! Its focus is gay literature. Earlier this month Band of Thebes reported the amazing comments made by Dennis Drabelle, one of the World Books editors of The Washington Post. Asked to list new gay books he would recommend for summer reading, he provides the following answer:

Does it have to be a new gay book? Not many of these are being published anymore, mostly, I think, because the great gay storyline -- coming out -- isn't such a big deal anymore and has been done to death. But here's a classic you may not have read: Michael Campbell's Lord Dismiss Us, set in an English boarding school. You can find used copies online, and it's well worth doing. A masterpiece!

I thought it was an April's fool, or another kind of joke, for that matter. But it's no joke. You can check. If, at least, he had named a good book of the past, he would have been half forgiven... But Lord Dismiss Us does not seem to fit that category.

My list of summer books includes the second installment of the Frank Coffin Mysteries, Mating Season (Jon Loomis, Minotaur Books, 2009, 304p), set in Provincetown, which has been sitting on my coffee table since April, as well as Ardent Spirit the third volume of his autobiography by prolific author Reynolds Price (Scribner, 2009, 416p), the coming of age story of a young man and a writer. The book was recently reviewed in the NYRB (Sensual in the South) by Edmund White who writes:

Ardent Spirits is an innovation in that it seems to be the first time that Reynolds Price has acknowledged his homosexuality in print. In his fiction and poetry he has touched on homosexuality as a theme, but lightly and seldom at length. In his 1995 novel, The Promise of Rest, a male character comes home to die of AIDS. In Good Hearts (1988) Wesley Beavers (like Mayor Giuliani) takes refuge from a bad marriage with a gay male friend. In Tongues of Angels (1990) a summer camp experience between a boy and a counselor (never openly expressed sexually) forms a bond between the two men. In several poems there is a Housman-like lyricism about the beauty of young men's bodies.
As a writer who wants to be read by his friends and relatives and neighbors, Price has never been explicit about his own desires and has seldom touched on queer life. Bu his deep sensuality, which he freely acknowledges, has worked its way into all his evocations of heterosexuality and his Tiresias-like double vision of the two sexes. It would certainly be crudely reductive to suggest that he could have written better if he'd been more open about his own homosexuality. All on can say is that if he'd been less closeted his fiction might have been as effervescent as his new memoir and perhaps just as insouciant.

I also always like to revisit a classic during summer. This year it will be Redburn, one of Melville's early novels.

***

In the Masterpiece - Anatomy of a Classic series in Saturday's Wall Street Journal, Ms. Dobrzynski describes the 'Alexander Sarcophagus,' discovered in the mid-1800s in Sidon, and now at the Archaeological Museum of Istanbul (and not, at the British Museum, as erroneously posted previously). Despite its name it is generally considered as carved for Abdalonymos who was made Sidon's king by Alexander. Mentioning the second most prominent figures, after Alexander, appearing in its friezes she refers to Hephaestion as "Alexander's close friend from Macedonia." Come on, Ms. Dobrzynski, a little effort on this Gay Pride week-end celebrating the 40th anniversary of Stonewall...

Don't miss Frank Rich's excellent column published Sunday in the New York Times, 40 Years Later, Still Second-Class Americans. It ends with these words:

Gay Americans aren’t just another political special interest group. They are Americans who are actively discriminated against by federal laws. If the president is to properly honor the memory of Stonewall, he should get up to speed on what happened there 40 years ago, when courageous kids who had nothing, not even a public acknowledgment of their existence, stood up to make history happen in the least likely of places.

2009.06.28

Masters of Sex and Homosexuality

Dwight Garner reviews in today's New York Times Masters of Sex - The Life and Times of William Masters and Virginia Johnson, the Couple Who taught America How to Love by Thomas Maier (Basic Books, 2009, 432p).

Masters and Johnson became famous after the publication, in 1966, of Human Sexual Response, "their first book, based on more than 10 years of clinical research. It was a best seller, and it rattled the culture in much the same way the first Kinsey Report had in 1948."

Some of their later books though, adds Garner, were "increasingly ridiculed":

In Homosexuality in Perspective (1979), they claimed homosexuality could be cured - a claim that, with their names attached, is still trotted out by some social conservatives. In 1988 they published Crisis - Heterosexual Behavior in the Age of AIDS, a book that said the government was covering up the true extent of the AIDS problem. One critic called it 'a classic of the terror genre.'

If you go to The New York Times take a look at the Op-Ed pages. There is a piece by Lucian Truscott (The Real Mob at Stonewall) on his recollection of the riots which took place forty years ago. Truscott wrote an article in The Village Voice a few days after the event in 1969. His article, because of its tone which was "at times one of derision and insensitivity," infuriated the gay crowds, writes David Carter in The Stonewall Riots, and contributed to a resurgence of the rebellion. It seems Truscott has not changed a lot. He comes back to some of the controversies which in my opinion have been settled by Carter, and ends his paper, refering to Allen Ginsberg, with:

As I turned south on Lafayette Street, he waved and cried out, 'Defend the fairies!' His jolly farewell was obviously meant in jest, because after Stonewall, they didn't need defending any more.

Umberto Saba in The New Republic

Rosanna Warren reviews a new translation of Umberto Saba's poems in the last issue of The New Republic (Life as a Poem): Songbook - The Selected Poems of Umberto Saba (Yale University Press, translated by George Hochfield and Leonard Nathan, 2009,592p). She writes convincingly:

Umberto Saba, a poet of mysterious and difficult simplicity, has been ushered back into English. The translation of poetry is never easy, but Saba presents particular challenges. Leonard Nathan, the poet and veteran translator who died in 2007, and George Hochfield have for the most part improved on earlier versions, and their selection from Saba's masterwork, Il Cazoniere, or The Songbook, gives a good idea of the scope of that extraordinary monument.

Ms Warren, through examples, discusses the difficulties of translating Saba and how this new edition - which, as should be with any edition of foreign poets, is a bilingual edition - improves on some previous translations.

At one point she summarizes Saba's life:

The errant father, the lost paradise of Peppa's house, the city of Trieste, the innocent and then tormented love for his wife, melancholy, solitude, and sexual desire, including some lightly sketched yearning for boys. The publication, after Saba's death, of Ernesto, his late and unfinished novel of sexual initiation of a boy by an older man, alerted his readers to expressions of homoeroticism in the poems; but it seems fair to say that Saba's longing for women outweighed his other desires.

Is it?

The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters

The East, the West, and Sex: A History of Erotic Encounters, by Richard Bernstein (Knopf, 2009, 325p) has had extended press coverage, often positive, more recently in the New York Times Book Review this week-end (Harem Envy by Toni Bentley). Colin Thubron writes in his review in the NYRB (Madame Butterfly's Brothel) that the book provides "little exploration of homosexual contact with the East (besides a piece on Henry de Montherlant), which has its own rich and continuing history."

Leyendecker and the Arrow Collar Man

 

Do you know J.C. Leyendecker? He was one of the most famous American illustrators during the first half of the twentieth century, "the Golden Age" of the "most American of American art."

In addition to illustrating the covers of the leading magazines of the era, as The Saturday Evening Post, he created powerful advertising images like the Arrow Collar Man, an icon of masculinity, "the first male sex symbol and the first advertising star of either gender," write Laurence S. Cutler and Judy Goffman Cutler, the founders of the National Museum of American Illustration who recently co-authored a fascinating monograph on the artist (J.C. Leyendecker, New York, Abrams, 2008, 256p). Which is ironic, considering that Leyendecker was a homosexual and that the model for the Arrow Collar Man was his lover...

"Leyendecker captured lifestyles with a superior technical skills, with an imaginative use of subject, and with an originality that many have sought to imitate. In the idiom of Paul Klee, J.C. Leyendecker's illustrations were created not only by the artist's heart and brain, but also by a thinking eye. Unquestionably the greatest of the icon makers, his oeuvre stands out to this day as among the most recognizable and luminous American artist."

"Joe" Leyendecker was born in Germany in 1874 but his parents immigrated to America when he was still a kid and he grew up in Chicago. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and spent several months in Paris in the 1890s with his younger brother, also an artist. He moved to New York when his career started to kick off.

 

Very little is known about Leyendecker's personal life. He was careful not to leave any track on his homosexuality and asked that all his records and correspondence be destroyed after his death.

In 1903 he meet the man who would become his companion:

"One momentous day in 1903, a particular striking young man appeared at their door, having just arrived in the United States from Europe, where he had lived for the past year. His name was Charles A. Beach, and Frank immediately hired him in Joe's absence. When Joe returned, he could not believe his eyes: his dreams had been realized. Frank graciously allowed his brother the use of his model, and Joe and Charles Beach were inseparable thereafter, both personally and professionally, for forty-eight years. Joe was twenty-nine and Charles seventeen years old when they first met."

Towards the end of his life commissions wane. Norman Rockwell, who admired Leyendecker and was very much influenced by him, supplanted him as the best-known illustrator in America.

Leyendecker spend the last years of his life secluded in the house he had built in New Rochelle, a town on the Long Island Sound, 16 miles from New York city. He died in 1951. The New York Times wrote in its obituary:

"Known as 'J.C.' to his friends, Mr. Leyendecker was the older brother of the late Frank X. Leyendecker, magazine illustrator and cover artist. The brothers lived together here and had studios in the home. Mr. Beach also resided with them, assisted in some of the art work and posed for the original Arrow collar advertisements that 'J.C.' painted. A sister, Miss Augusta M. Leyendecker of New York, survives."

Charles, who had shared his life for so many years, died the following year...

Mount Tom, the mansion in New Rochelle, still exists. It has become a preschool and is no longer what it was. Today, the National Museum of American Illustration, in Newport, RI, has the largest collection of Leyendecker's original and vintage works from all phases of his career. The museum opened in 2000 in the Gilded Age mansion Vernon Court. It's a wonderful destination this summer for a week-end...

2009,06.21

Rainbow Pilgrimage

For several weeks now New York has been preparing for the 40th anniversary of Stonewall, "the riots that sparked the gay revolution."

The city developed a marketing campaign under the banner "Rainbow Pilgrimage" to attract even more than the 10% estimated GLBT visitors among the 47 million people who came to the city last year... What a change from the years leading to Stonewall when New York City's mayor wanted to get rid of gay presence from its streets.

The LGBT Community Center presents several Summer Exhibitions including Gay Front Liberation Front (1969-1971): A 40th Anniversary Retrospective. It's and ideal place to start visiting Greenwich Village. The New York Public Library, which houses a very extensive collection of LGTB archives, has put together a small, and touching, exhibition with photographs, newspaper articles and other materials documenting one year in the early gay rights movement, 1969: The Year of Gay Liberation, curated by Jason Baumann (read the article Looking Back 40 Years in the current issue of Gay City News). Baumann who is the library's coordinator of the LGBT collection, has a very useful blog, lgbt@nypl.

The celebrations will culminate in the Annual LGBT Pride March in Manhattan on Sunday 28 June, exactly forty years after the rebellion. If Albany can figure out the mess created by the tentative political coup by Republicans in the State Senate, and pass the bill on same-sex marriage before... it will be an apotheosis...

Most young gays don't realize how much things have changed over those years. They take for granted the freedom they enjoy today. Things did not happen by chance. There were pioneers, courageous men and women who chose to fight and exposed themselves.

Stonewall - The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter (St. Martin's Press, 2004, 352p) is the best account available of what happened, and why, during these days of 1969. The book reads like an page-turner investigation while being a wonderful scholarly achievement. It's a great read whether or not you intend to visit the city this month. As Carter writes in his conclusion:

The true legacy of the Stonewall Riots is the ongoing struggle for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender equality. While this fight is far from over, it is now a worldwide movement that has won many significant victories, most of them flowing from those six days in the summer of 1969 when gay people found the courage to stand up for themselves on the streets of Greenwich Village.

2009.06.14

Abdellah Taïa in Gay City News

Michael T. Luongo talks with Abdellah Taïa in the current issue of Gay City News. It's worth reading, though I am sure I will read his novel, Salvation Army (Semiotexte, 2009, 152p), just published in the US. The translation is by Frank Stock and there is an introduction by Edmund White.

The 35-year-old  Moroccan author has been living in France since 1998 and writes in French. Salvation Army is his latest novel and the first to be translated into English.

The Associated Press has written:

As Morocco's first high-profile, openly gay man, Taïa has made it his mission to win acceptance for homosexuals throughout the Muslim world.
Taïa has defied Moroccan society's don't-ask, don't-tell attitude toward homosexuality — and prison sentences that are still on the books in the North African kingdom — to write five autobiographical novels about growing up poor and gay in the northern coastal city of Sale.
The novels, peppered with sexually explicit passages, have catapulted him to fame in his native country and made him the de-facto poster child of its budding gay rights movement.

And New Hampshire Makes Six

New Hampshire became, on Wednesday, the sixth state to allow same-sex marriages. The third by legislation, after Maine and Vermont. Even video games are joining the party... Lyle Masaki, who writes a blog at AfterElton.com, tested Sim 3 and found out that gay couples can marry in the latest version of the popular video game!

Towleroad this week published an information that caught my attention: Gay penguins hatch, adopt chick in Germany. It's exactly the story told in And Tango Makes Three (Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, Simon & Schuster, 2005, 32p), the children book which was the most challenged book in the United States, according to the list compiled by the American Library Association, for three years in a row: 2006, 2007 and 2008. Roy and Silo, two male penguins at the Central Park Zoo in Manhattan who had become inseparable for several years, were given a fertile egg that needed to be incubated. One month later a chick, Tango, was born, after the two penguins had alternatively sat on the egg. The two happy fathers raised Tango, as any other couple...

Cynthia Crossen writes an entertaining column in the Wall Street Journal every Saturday, Dear Book Lover, where she answers questions from readers. This week a reader from New York asked her for help, since although he wanted to read before going to bed at night, he felt too tired, after spending most of his day reading at work. Cynthia Crossen suggested that he read short stories... Which reminded me of a collection of short stories I wanted to look at, not that I feel tired myself... A footnote in the very good edition of Imre that I mentioned last week referred to the "insightful Introduction" of Mark Mitchell and David Leavitt's anthology of gay writing, Pages Passed From Hand to Hand - The Hidden Tradition of Homosexual Literature in English from 1748 to 1914 (Houghton Mifflin, 1997). I did not find it at the Pat Parker/Vito Russo Center Library at the LGBT Community Center in New York. Instead I borrowed the Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, edited by the same authors (Viking, 1994, 655p). In his introduction, David Leavitt  writes about discovering his first gay books and about his feeling saddened by the stereotypes: " What I found myself longing for was a gay literature that, rather than fawning over angels made flesh, transformed homosexual experience into human drama." If that's the program of the anthology, the second story in the book, Arthur Snatchfold by E. M. Forster, fits perfectly. The note introducing the story explains:

Shortly after the appearance of his last and most successful novel, A Passage to India, Forster made the decision no longer to publish fiction since he felt he could not in good conscience write any more novels that took place in a heterosexual milieu. As he observed in his diary late in life, 'I should have been a more famous writer if I had written or rather published more, but sex prenvented the latter.' For the next forty-five years - half his life - Forster's literary output consisted chiefly of essays, memoirs, and biographies; in addition, he wrote many short stories on homosexual themes - among them Arthur Snarchfold - none of which saw publication until after his death in 1970.

I now want to read the other stories...

2009.06.07

Leonard Bernstein in The Economist

The Economist publishes a short review of Leonard Bernstein: The Political Life of an American Musician by Barry Seldes (University of California Press, 2009, 288p) in its 28 May edition.