The presidential campaign is about to enter its last week and it seems
more and more likely that it's a done deal for Barack Obama... Meanwhile a
wind of panic is blowing across the LGTB community as Proposition 8,
the anti-gay marriage initiative on the ballot in California, appears
to be gaining acceptance...
The Gay & Lesbian Review, the literary bimonthly published in Boston, MA (formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review,
1994 - 1999) is a great journal for those interested in gay issues and
books. The last issue (September - October) features interesting essays
from Jonathan D. Katz on Robert Rauschenberg (based on a forthcoming
book), Rep. Barney Frank on 'This critical moment for GLTB rights', and
Martin Duberman on the difficulties of growing gay 'in the most
oppressive decade in the 20th century, the 1950's' and on the 'scars,
the deep, permanent scars that remain'... Andrew Holleran writes a very
critical review of House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family
(Paul Fisher, New York, Henry Holt and Co., 2008, 704 pp.) which I
mentioned twice in this column. His review, despite the criticism,
encourages you to read the book. It ends with:
"As a writer, I can't imagine writing a
biography. As a reader, however, I am very glad so many writers do; and
that includes Fisher. And yet, for all his book's less than chiseled
writing, the license it takes to imagine subjective states, it carries
the reader through a remarkable family saga with a jargon-free
readability that, I suspect, contributes its own portion of the truth."
In the first volume of his Chanse MacLeod Mystery series, Greg Herren,
who must be a generation younger than Duberman, also wrote a few lines
about coming of age as a gay boy:
"Gays are not the majority in this
country. When you're a kid and you can't figure out why all the other
guys are putting up posters of Christie Brinkley or whoever the flavor
of the year is, you know you're different. When you start to realize
that you're the only boy who thinks it's cool that the Chippendales
dancers are on Oprah, you know you're different. It's brought
home in many ways every day as you get older. You're not only
different, you're queer, and that's the lowest of the low. It's the
ultimate insult. There's not answer to that when they call you names in
the locker room while snapping you with rolled-up damp towels. So, you
start to act, you start to pretend. You've learned. Your behavior is
not acceptable. So you start hanging the Sports Illustrated calendar in
your hall locker. You got out for sports and excel, because you can't
be a rotten athlete - that would be queer. You lift weights, you jog.
You start lying in the showers, talking about having sex with girls,
hoping no one else notices your furtive looks at the other boys.
You start getting older. You find out
there are others like you. Maybe it's not such an awful thing. You find
someone you find attractive, and you try it. It's better than it is
with the girls. You want to do it again, and more and more often. You
start telling yourself that it's just who you are; you can't help what
you are anymore than anyone else can. You start finding meeting places
for others like you. You read books about others like you. Maybe it's
not that bad. It's just who you are. You start to feel better about it.
You start coming out to people you care about. More people know. When
they don't care, you feel better and better. Until you get to the point
where you don't hide anymore, and you aren't afraid, and it's OK."
Not as bad? Herren has just published a new Chanse MacLeod Mystery: Murder in the Rue Ursulines (New York, Alyson Books, 2008, 256 pp.).
Should Gore Vidal's The City and the Pillar be read in the
original version published in 1948 or in the revised version (with a
different ending and a more sober text, as noted in a recent TLS
column) printed in 1965 and reproduced in paperback editions since then?
2008.10.26
