Andrew Sullivan has written an important short piece on gay marriage in the September issue of Atlantic Monthly (My Big Fat Straight Wedding): reflecting on California's Supreme Court May 15 ruling legalizing same-sex marriage and on his own recent marriage, he argues that "in matters outside the bedroom, American culture and law are at last acknowledging that there is no difference between homosexuals and heterosexuals." In other words, homosexuals are becoming mainstream. In 2005 Sullivan published an essay in the New Republic entitled The End of Gay Culture: Assimilation and its meaning, a stimulating and clear-sighted paper on the evolution of gay identity over the past thirty years. The New York Time published last week in its Modern Love column a text by Bob Morris on his own experience with gay marriage: "Being gay and single is becoming the new smoking," he writes. Meanwhile, in its weddings/celebrations section gay marriage announcements are becoming more and more common, involving more and more individuals from mainstream America: executives, lawyers, professors, etc.
For the Thrill of it (Simon Baatz, New York, Harper, 2008, 560 pp.) is a very comprehensive and fascinating account of the 1924 infamous murder of 14 year-old Bobby Franks in Chicago. Publishers Weekly provides the following summary: "In 1924, Nathan Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 18, both intellectually precocious scions of wealthy Jewish Chicago families, kidnapped and brutally murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks in an attempt to commit the perfect crime. Historian Baatz, of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, replays the crime (on which Meyer Levin's 1956 novel Compulsion was based) from the killers' point of view, detailing their intense, often sexual, relationship that culminated in the murder. But they left a crucial piece of evidence and eventually confessed to the murder. Clarence Darrow cleverly had the boys plead guilty to avoid a trial, and the legendary defense attorney went head to head with State's Attorney Robert Crowe in a sentencing hearing before Judge John Caverly. Both sides trotted out psychiatrists to testify whether Leopold and Loeb were mentally ill. Darrow's gamble paid off in life sentences. Loeb was murdered in prison in 1936; Leopold was eventually paroled in 1958. Baatz gives an acute portrait of the two murderers bound together in a web of fantasy, but his heavy reliance on novelistic techniques (there!—he had done it) and meandering pacing prevent this from being as convincing as his exhaustive research deserves." The New York Times (Murder Most Rational and Confounding) and the Wall Street Journal (Low Deeds and High IQ) published very positive reviews. The crime probably provided the source for Hitchcock's 1948 movie Rope, and forms the basis of Tom Kalin's 1992 excellent movie Swoon, now available in dvd.
Tristan Garcia's first novel La meilleure part des hommes (Paris, Gallimard, 305 pp.) is a 'roman à clés' set in the Paris gay community during the 80s. Published in the prestigious Collection Blanche by Gallimard it has been hailed as one of the outstanding novels of this 'rentrée litéraire' by Le Monde ("C'était notre foutue libération des moeurs", August 29th 2008).
I discovered last week-end, while reading a local newspaper in The Pines, that Billy Budd, Melville's work with the clearest homosexual overtone, was written in Fire Island... Harry Havemeyer who published Fire Island's Surf Hotel and other Hostelries on Fire Island's Beaches in the Nineteenth Century (Mattituck, N.Y., Amereon House, 2006. Illustrations, maps, bibliography, and index, 178 pp.) believes Herman Melville wrote much of it while vacationing at the Surf Hotel, one of the first hotels in the island, on its western tip... What an irony!
2008.08.31
