Back in Paris for a few days I came across a paper by Bruce Benderson in the May issue of
Têtu, the French gay monthly. Commenting on a collection of photographs by Russian artist Slava Mogutin,
he gives a description of a New York I do not recognize: young go-go
boys in underground bars who remind him of long gone Time Square. This
is certainly something I have to explore. The New York by night I am
familiar with has always seemed to me very clean and 'bon enfant'.
The
International Herald Tribune has, sign of the present times, decided to replace its daily chess puzzle by a sudoku puzzle...
Among the books recently published in France I found a curious short text from Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, the infamous French writer who committed suicide at the end of the Second World War.
Notes pour un roman sur la sexualité (Paris, Gallimard, 2008) had never been published before. Drieu
wrote it in a small notebook in 1944. The title is misleading. In what
is in fact a short, extraordinarily candid, memoir (although written in
the third person), 'l'homme couvert de femmes' recounts his sexual
education: his loss of virginity with a prostitute when he was 17, his
many other encounters with prostitutes, the numerous sexually
transmitted diseases he got as a result.
In a long introduction, Julien Hervier shows how Drieu was constantly staggering between whores, with whom he could have sex, though nothing more than a substitution for onanism,
and 'clean' women he was inclined to respect sexually. A pathetic
loneliness emanates from his self portrait. Maybe he was indeed an unavowed homosexual... Drieu
tells us about his only sexual experience with a man. It happened a
night when he was in the army during the Great War, "out of curiosity".
He managed to share a bed with "one of his fellow soldiers who was
brave, educated, humorous and quite handsome," and "who did not really
hide his tendencies." After having given him some expectations, "he
found him ridiculous and boring, even annoying, and he had rejected him
with a somewhat harsh laughter." He adds in the same section of his
memoir that he always had a "feminine coquetry" with the homosexuals who hated him and "saw him as an unbowed, false brother." Already when he was in his teens, Drieu
had discovered that he was not so much driven by desire than longing to
be desired. "It all stopped after two years. But later on, when he
found himself amid true amateurs, he felt the same inclination. But
then, it frightened him, more so when he felt that he had power on
these men and that something within him was able to exercise that
power." Yes, I wonder...
2008.05.25
