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Posted at 23:24 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
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
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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:
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':
You may want to read Stauffer's book...
2009.07.19
Posted at 23:57 in Abraham Lincoln, Martin Duberman | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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
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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
Posted at 23:22 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)