Gaya Scienza

Merce Cunningham's Obituary

On Tuesday, The New York Times published a great obituary of Merce Cunningham, signed by Alistair Macaulay. There is a large picture of the famous dancer and choreographer, jumping, in a very Spiderman-like posture. This was in the 1950s: Cunningham "was known for his phenomenal jump, which was as remarkable as his animal-like qualities of grace and intensity." Below, a recent portrait shows his aged face and arthritic hands: "A creature of New York: Mr. Cunningham, in 2009." "He accepted an offer from Graham, and that September [1939] moved to New York. Stepping onto a New York sidewalk for the first time, he looked at the skyline and, as he often recalled, said: 'This is home.'" About that time, Cunningham and the composer John Cage, who was married, met and started working together: "Cage and Mr. Cunningham also became lovers, and the ensuing breakup of the Cages' marriage was painful. For many years only a few people realized that the Cage-Cunningham relationship was sexual. Although their offstage partnership became an open secret, the subject was not open until 1989, when Cage, answering an unexpected public question about it, surprised everyone by replying, 'I do the cooking, and Merce does the dishes.'" They lived together until Cage's death in 1992.

The Fourth Man of the Cambridge Five

Anthony Blunt, who died in 1983, was one of the famous group of Soviet spies recruited in Cambridge in the thirties. Unlike the other three, who defected to the Soviet Union, he remained in England and cooperated with the authorities when he was unmasked in the sixties. The New York Times published a few days ago an article by John Burns to report on Anthony Blunt's memoir made public by the British Library last Thursday: "The memoir offers few new insights into the details of Blunt’s spying, about which he said little in public before he died in 1983. Its main interest, according to historians, lies in Blunt’s account of his recruitment by another Soviet spy, Guy Burgess, when both were at Cambridge University in the 1930s, and in his exposition of his motives and feelings, including his disillusionment with Marxism and the Soviet Union after World War II. The memoir, intended by Blunt as a testament to family and friends, was given to the library in 1984 by the executor of Blunt’s will, John Golding, on the condition that it be kept secret for 25 years." So goes the article... Something was missing. I founded it in the delightful Portable Queer series by Erin McHugh (Secrets and Scandals, Alyson Books, 2008, 120p): "Blunt had made his first trip to Moscow in the mid-1930s, and had connected with the KGB. He was already teaching at Cambridge, and impressionable young men, students, and others (many of whom were homosexual, like Blunt) were eager to join him in working for the Soviets. Among these were two of the other Cambridge Spies, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. Kim Philby, perhaps the most famous of the group (so beloved by the Russians that they even put him on a stamp), was ardently heterosexual, with eventually four wives under his belt, but not so the others. Burgess was a raving alcoholic and a raging queen (and sometime lover of Blunt's), while Maclean played both sides of the street, both with his sex life and his political allegiance."

2009.07.26

Lincoln: 'Gaydar' vs. 'Straightdar' Among History Scholars

Lewis Gannett sent me the following comments about Sean Wilentz's article on Lincoln in The New Republic: "There's something just a little odd about Wilentz's hostility. First, he's factually wrong in characterizing C. A. Tripp's Lincoln book as "a discredited hodgepodge of supposition and deception." Sure, the book attracted a great deal of scorn. But both Richard Brookhiser in the NYT and Christine Stansell in TNR acknowledged, after heaping contumely, that Tripp might be right (I assisted Tripp with the book but don't think I misread these reviews). What gives with Wilentz's tone of barely suppressed outrage, his contempt? Stauffer doesn't deserve it! And again, it boils down to what constitutes credible evidence. Wilentz derides Stauffer's interpretation of evidence about Lincoln & Joshua Speed so curtly, it's as if Wilentz believes that Stauffer hallucinated his interpretation. This of course was a common theme in reactions to Tripp's book. All of which prompts questions about how scholars "see" history. Literally, how they envision the objects of their studies. In terms of the subject at hand one could speculate about "gaydar" vs. "straightdar." The two scopes produce radically different pictures. And they capture their images from radically different platforms. Critics characterize gaydar as the periscope of a pink submarine, toy-like and fanciful. Straightdar crashes to the surface with severe authority, bristling with sensors (and prepared to launch scary-ass missiles)." And: "Sean Wilentz is a self-righteous thug. He's eloquent and reasonably smart but utterly clueless about John Stauffer's argument, which amply points out many of Wilentz's pet issues. For example: How dare Wilentz close on a censorious, purportedly omniscient note of claiming that current Lincoln scholarship takes too little into account the fact that Lincoln was a consummate politician? Stauffer makes this clear better than anyone. What on earth is the matter with Sean Wilentz?" I cannot agree more.

David Boies on Gay Marriage in the WSJ

Read David Boies's paper in the Opinion pages of today's Wall Street Journal explaining why he and Ted Olson (the opposing lawyers in Bush vs Gore in 2000) are working together to overturn California's Proposition 8.

The Moon Walk, Duberman (again) and Lincoln (always).

I was a kid, forty years ago, when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. I didn't even know I was gay. Well, maybe I wasn't. Although the first signs of an attraction to phalli might have been my passion for rockets... I did not learn about the Stonewall Riots, which had just occurred three weeks earlier, until much later.

But I remember watching the first Moon walk on a black and white television at my best friend's grandmother's house on July 20th 1969. We were spending the long summer vacations in our country house in the Jura and we had no television set. We had woken up very early and had to wait for what seemed a long, suspenseful, time before the lunar module finally landed. I was thrilled.

This week The New York Times published several pages to commemorate the event. I was not surprised by the comments made by Martin Duberman, after reading his recent memoir:

I was underwhelmed by the whole thing. I couldn't understand why people were so excited about Armstrong's 'one small step' comment. To me, it wasn't immortal prose.
By the summer of 1969, I had become very political. I suppose that's why the Moon shot didn't mean that much. I was preoccupied with the black struggle, the war on poverty and feminism.
Three weeks before the Moon landing, the bar that I regularly frequented in Greenwich Village, the Stonewall Inn, was the scene of a pitched battle between New York's Police Department and the bar's gay patrons. As luck would have it, I didn't happen to go to the Stonewall Inn that particular night - though I later went and looked at the milling crowds and the wreckage.
That seemed momentous. Gays had taken the lessons of the civil rights and women's movements to heart. The effect of that moment are still with us, 40 years later.

The current issue of The New Republic features an interesting and controversial paper by Sean Wilentz, the politically involved professor of history at Princeton, (Who Lincoln Was). He uses Lincoln's bicentennial as an opportunity to evaluate recent publications and the state of Lincoln scholarship. He is tough with the books he reviews, in particular with Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, by John Stauffer (Twelve, 2008, 448p). I cannot resist quoting extensively his comments about what he calls the 'speculation about Lincoln's affection for men':

Stauffer nevertheless devotes the first part of his book to an examination of what he makes of the parallels. He departs most vigorously from the standard accounts by pushing hard what evidence he can muster about Douglass's and Lincoln's sexual lives and proclivities, and especially about what he imagines were their homoerotic tendencies.
Douglass lived through an unsatisfying marriage with another ex-slave, established prolonged extra-marital liaisons with at least two white women, and finally found connubial bliss late in life with a much younger woman, a former secretary, who also was white. He evinced no sexual desires at all for other men. But Stauffer, the eager student of transgressive self-fashioning and all the rest, is on the lookout, and he brings up an incident in 1838 that fleetingly appears promising. Recently escaped from slavery, standing near the Tombs prison in New York City, and disguised in what looked like a sailors' outfit, Douglass was approached by a sailor named Stuart. The two struck up a conversation, in what Stauffer says "seemed almost like a pickup." In the end, though, Stauffer admits, "the pickup stemmed more from sympathy than any desire for sex," and he drops the story.
Lincoln is another matter. Since Carl Sandburg wrote of the "streak of lavender" that he detected in Lincoln, there has been speculation about Lincoln's affection for men, and Stauffer is determined to give it one more whirl. He notes an intellectual debt to C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, a discredited hodgepodge of supposition and deception, which appeared in 2003, though he does not endorse Tripp's sensational claim that Lincoln was "predominantly homosexual." Stauffer favors the more diffuse argument, adapted from Foucault and now generally accepted in the academy, that until the words "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" were invented (some say in 1868, others in 1886 or 1892), sexual love between men was a repertory of acts and not a trait of personality. In America, so the argument goes, sexuality was much more polymorphous before the Civil War than after. Yet if Stauffer sees the antebellum sexual universe as, in his words, "very blurry indeed," he is adamant about one thing: "Lincoln's soul mate and the love of his life was a man named Joshua Speed."
Stauffer's rehearsal of the old Speed story illustrates the difference between a historian and a professor with an agenda. Joshua Speed was a young storeowner and the son of a wealthy Kentucky planter. Between 1837 and 1841, he roomed with Lincoln above Speed's store in Springfield. As was then the custom, they shared a bed ("a very large double-bed," Speed later recalled); and they became, according to numerous accounts, intimate friends, confessing to each other their hopes, fears, and ambitions, while musing aloud and gossiping about politics and (especially) literature. Stauffer works hard to suggest that what he calls this "romantic friendship" included loving sexual contact. As evidence, he presents a mish-mash of strained analogies and literary references (including, inevitably, Ishmael and Queequeg) as somehow telling. He notes that "male-male sex was also common in the military." He dismisses as "rhetorical gymnastics" David Herbert Donald's detailed denial of homoeroticism in Lincoln's and Speed's friendship. And so he concludes that "there is no reason to suppose that [Lincoln] didn't also have carnal relations with Joshua Speed."
The trouble is there is no reason to suppose that they did. Speed's letters to Lincoln during the years in question, Stauffer records, "have sadly been lost"; but Lincoln's letters to Speed betray no signs of any passion or romance, let alone a sexual bond, apart from some pledges of undying friendship. (Lincoln did, as Stauffer notes, close one letter to Speed "Yours forever"--but Donald pointed out that Lincoln used the same phrase in letters to his law partner and an Illinois congressman.) As Stauffer does not bring Lincoln's sexuality to bear either on his relations to Douglass or on any other later aspect of his life, including his marriage, it is difficult to see why the Speed story arises at all, especially given how fragmentary the evidence is. It is also difficult to understand why Stauffer would devote so much time and space to the imputation of a profound homoeroticism that, by his own admission, cannot be proved, at least with the available documentation.

You may want to read Stauffer's book...

2009.07.19

Martin Duberman's Waiting to Land

I don't know what to think about Martin Duberman's third memoir, Waiting to Land - A (mostly) Political Memoir, 1985-2008 (The New Press, 2009, 334p). I read it with pleasure and interest but was bothered from time to time by the very conventional leftist political opinions (even the Cuban Revolution seems to retain his favors, the Gulf War is criticized but there is no mention of the German Reunification...) expressed in some pages. Fortunately, most of the volume deals with gay issues. Martin Duberman was born in 1930. In Cures, published in 1992, his first autobiographical book, he recounted his struggles with his homosexuality, taking us up to 1970. His second memoir, Midlife Queer (1996), "centered on the 1970s, by which time he'd thrown his earlier doubts and become fully engaged in the worlds of gay politics and culture." Waiting to Land is far less personal, with few details about his private life, as he explains in the Preface: "Waiting to Land concentrates on different realms: public engagement and political struggle - and the inevitable controversy both arouse. Over the past twenty-five years, my political involvement has continued on a number of fronts, with my radicalization deepening, not dissipating, through the years. During the same period, the national gay movement has simultaneously increased in strength and changed its focus to an assimilationist agenda (gay marriage, gays in the military, etc.). The movement's shift in priorities has disquieted many of its left-wing members, myself included." The book, which takes us from 1985 to the present - with the bulk centering on the 1990s, mixes a commentary written by Duberman in 2008 with extracts from his diaries. Reading it is a great and entertaining introduction to the history of ideas in the gay rights movements. After all Duberman was the decisive force behind the creation of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the CUNY Graduate School, the first university-based research center of its kind in the United States. The last pages turn more personal and become even touching. Duberman, feeling old, depressed, lonely, becomes a member of SAGE (Services and Advocacy of GLBT Elders) and joins several of its discussion groups. But he is definitively at odds with the other members... "Anyway, sitting uncomfortably in a room full of fellow oldsters isn't going to do it for me. I keep hoping for a place to land, a sustainable community. The dream, improbable though it is, persists."

2009.07.12

Doug Ireland on 'Smash the Church, Smash the State'

Doug Ireland reviews Smash the Church, Smash the State! - The Early Years of the Gay Liberation edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca (City Lights Publisher, 2009, 303p) in the current issue of Gay City News (A Truly Queer History). It is a "collection of articles, largely first-person reminiscences of the earliest and most radical wave of gay liberation struggles, the bulk of them specifically written for this volume." It includes "manifestos and documents of that early period and biographical sketches of important movement figures." "Avicolli Mecca has not abandoned the anarchic radicalism of those early days. He writes in his introduction, 'In many ways, the new millennium gay movement is the antithesis of the early '70s gay liberation. It cavorts with politicians who may be good on gay issues, but not on concerns affecting other disenfranchised communities. It is in bed with the Democratic Party establishment that gave carte blanche to George Bush to wage two illegal and immoral wats in the Middle East. It courts corporate support for its gala events, even its pride parades, which used to be protest marches and celebrations of the Stonewall Riots. Now those marches seem more of a market than a movement.'"

Francis Bacon and The Wall Street Journal

Mr. Esplund who 'writes about art for the Journal' reviews 'Francis Bacon: A Centenary Retrospective' at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Thursday's edition of the Wall Street Journal. I hope the Wall Street Journal is fully aware of how lucky they are in having such a contributor, such an opinionated critic. The paper is titled 'A Histrionic Horror Show,' and starts with: 'You do not have to be squeamish to dislike the paintings of Francis Bacon (1909-1992), the Irish-born British artist who painted crucified sides of beef; screaming popes and apes with gaping mouths; headless bodies, bodiless heads; and contorted, copulating figures who resemble balls of flayed and knotted flesh.' And further down: 'The show, organized in loosely chronological order, continues through Bacon's homosexual lovers, wrestlers, murderers, self-portraits and portraits. His paintings very loosely inspired by van Gogh and those made after Velázquez demonstrate virtually no understanding of what these masters were doing.' Thank you, Mr. Esplund, for providing us with such a refreshing and enlightening review!

Bigger than Life

Jeffrey Escoffier's Bigger than Life - The History of Gay Porn Cinema from Beefcake to Hardcore (Philadelphia, Running Press, 2009, 367p) is an absorbing account of the gay porn movie history from its emergence at the end of the 60s to the current trends, in the internet era. While reading it, you definitively want to watch some of the movies described as milestones... Unfortunately not all are easily accessible.

2009.07.05