People mistakenly think it's OK and easy to be gay in New York, said
Andrew Velez of the Queer Justice League at a protest outside Major
Bloomberg's Upper East Side residence a Saturday last month, as
reported by New York Blade. Gay men have recently been arrested
in Manhattan video stores. At least 30 'false arrests' have occurred in
2008 in six porn stores. Young attractive undercover police officers
would agree to consensual sex outside the premises with older men in
the stores. On their way out they would offer them money, then arrest
them for prostitution... One case is being investigated by the NYPD
Internal Affairs Bureau. Paul Schindler writes in the Op-Ed pages of Gay City News (Stop the Arrests):
The accounts given by several of
those arrested; the ages of the men and the fact that some of them were
tourists staying in expensive Manhattan hotels; and the relationship of
those arrests to enforcement actions, under the nuisance abatement
statute, aimed at closing the video establishments make clear what is
going on.
Doug Ireland wrote a long and very interesting article in the a previous issue of Gay City News on an upcoming book by Janet Afary, a leading Iranian scholar in exile (Iran's Hidden History). Sexual Politics in Modern Iran is to be published at the end of March by Cambridge University Press. In her book Janet Afary 'details both the long history of homosexuality in that nation and the origins of the campaign to erase its traces.' Almost
two years after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's infamous tirade at Columbia
University, 'In Iran, we don't have homosexuals,' it is a refreshing
perspective.
In these uncertain times I am embarking on a long
journey: the three-volume biography of John Maynard Keynes by Robert
Skidelsky. Published between 1983 and 2000, this still unsurpassed
account of the life of the great economist who lived through the Great
Depression was the first to take into consideration his homosexuality.
Skidelsky published an abridged one-volume version of his book in 2005: John Maynard Keynes: 1883-1946: Economist, Philosopher, Statesman (Penguin, 2005, 1056p). In the introduction he writes:
No one who has read Keynes's
correspondence with Lytton Strachey or Duncan Grant can doubt that
homosexuality for him was not just a sexual preference, but part of the
'good life' as he then defined it; and while no one would want to argue
that knowledge of Keynes's sexual and emotional leanings gives one a
better understanding of his economic theory, there are interesting
connections to be made between his economic outlook and what Schumpeter
calls his 'childless vision.'
Barely arrived in Paris I rushed to buy the new edition of Rimbaud's Complete Works in the Pléiade collection, still hot from the presses. The volume, edited by André Guyaux, is divided in two parts: Oeuvres et lettres (1868-1875)
provides, in chronological order all poetry, including the full text of
various known versions of some poems (not only variants), as well as
his correspondence for the period. Vie et documents (1854-1891),
the second section, includes, along with a biographical summary,
Rimbaud's correspondence from 1877, as well as other documents
contributing to a better understanding of his life (the files from the Brussels Affair, excerpts from Vitalie's letters and journal during her
trip to London with her mother to join Rimbaud in the summer of 1874,
etc). I haven't had time to dig into the book yet in order to provide a
meaningful review. I am surprised that, in his Préface, Guyaux does not
directly address Rimbaud's sexual attraction to men... I will come back
to it in the coming weeks.
2009.03.01
