Gaya Scienza

The Moon Walk, Duberman (again) and Lincoln (always).

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:

I was underwhelmed by the whole thing. I couldn't understand why people were so excited about Armstrong's 'one small step' comment. To me, it wasn't immortal prose.
By the summer of 1969, I had become very political. I suppose that's why the Moon shot didn't mean that much. I was preoccupied with the black struggle, the war on poverty and feminism.
Three weeks before the Moon landing, the bar that I regularly frequented in Greenwich Village, the Stonewall Inn, was the scene of a pitched battle between New York's Police Department and the bar's gay patrons. As luck would have it, I didn't happen to go to the Stonewall Inn that particular night - though I later went and looked at the milling crowds and the wreckage.
That seemed momentous. Gays had taken the lessons of the civil rights and women's movements to heart. The effect of that moment are still with us, 40 years later.

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':

Stauffer nevertheless devotes the first part of his book to an examination of what he makes of the parallels. He departs most vigorously from the standard accounts by pushing hard what evidence he can muster about Douglass's and Lincoln's sexual lives and proclivities, and especially about what he imagines were their homoerotic tendencies.
Douglass lived through an unsatisfying marriage with another ex-slave, established prolonged extra-marital liaisons with at least two white women, and finally found connubial bliss late in life with a much younger woman, a former secretary, who also was white. He evinced no sexual desires at all for other men. But Stauffer, the eager student of transgressive self-fashioning and all the rest, is on the lookout, and he brings up an incident in 1838 that fleetingly appears promising. Recently escaped from slavery, standing near the Tombs prison in New York City, and disguised in what looked like a sailors' outfit, Douglass was approached by a sailor named Stuart. The two struck up a conversation, in what Stauffer says "seemed almost like a pickup." In the end, though, Stauffer admits, "the pickup stemmed more from sympathy than any desire for sex," and he drops the story.
Lincoln is another matter. Since Carl Sandburg wrote of the "streak of lavender" that he detected in Lincoln, there has been speculation about Lincoln's affection for men, and Stauffer is determined to give it one more whirl. He notes an intellectual debt to C.A. Tripp's The Intimate World of Abraham Lincoln, a discredited hodgepodge of supposition and deception, which appeared in 2003, though he does not endorse Tripp's sensational claim that Lincoln was "predominantly homosexual." Stauffer favors the more diffuse argument, adapted from Foucault and now generally accepted in the academy, that until the words "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" were invented (some say in 1868, others in 1886 or 1892), sexual love between men was a repertory of acts and not a trait of personality. In America, so the argument goes, sexuality was much more polymorphous before the Civil War than after. Yet if Stauffer sees the antebellum sexual universe as, in his words, "very blurry indeed," he is adamant about one thing: "Lincoln's soul mate and the love of his life was a man named Joshua Speed."
Stauffer's rehearsal of the old Speed story illustrates the difference between a historian and a professor with an agenda. Joshua Speed was a young storeowner and the son of a wealthy Kentucky planter. Between 1837 and 1841, he roomed with Lincoln above Speed's store in Springfield. As was then the custom, they shared a bed ("a very large double-bed," Speed later recalled); and they became, according to numerous accounts, intimate friends, confessing to each other their hopes, fears, and ambitions, while musing aloud and gossiping about politics and (especially) literature. Stauffer works hard to suggest that what he calls this "romantic friendship" included loving sexual contact. As evidence, he presents a mish-mash of strained analogies and literary references (including, inevitably, Ishmael and Queequeg) as somehow telling. He notes that "male-male sex was also common in the military." He dismisses as "rhetorical gymnastics" David Herbert Donald's detailed denial of homoeroticism in Lincoln's and Speed's friendship. And so he concludes that "there is no reason to suppose that [Lincoln] didn't also have carnal relations with Joshua Speed."
The trouble is there is no reason to suppose that they did. Speed's letters to Lincoln during the years in question, Stauffer records, "have sadly been lost"; but Lincoln's letters to Speed betray no signs of any passion or romance, let alone a sexual bond, apart from some pledges of undying friendship. (Lincoln did, as Stauffer notes, close one letter to Speed "Yours forever"--but Donald pointed out that Lincoln used the same phrase in letters to his law partner and an Illinois congressman.) As Stauffer does not bring Lincoln's sexuality to bear either on his relations to Douglass or on any other later aspect of his life, including his marriage, it is difficult to see why the Speed story arises at all, especially given how fragmentary the evidence is. It is also difficult to understand why Stauffer would devote so much time and space to the imputation of a profound homoeroticism that, by his own admission, cannot be proved, at least with the available documentation.

You may want to read Stauffer's book...

2009.07.19

Small Annoyances

I recently visited the local Borders store in the small city where I live. I like going there, perusing the last releases, sometimes picking up a cup of coffee from the bar. They have a dedicated section of gay novels, although the best gay novelists are featured in the general fiction and literature shelves. There are few incentives today to buy books at large superstores like this one. When ordering the same book at Amazon you pay regularly at least 30% less, and with a Prime subscription, you receive it in two days, free of shipping charges.
Still, I used to often end up buying a book at Borders. I would just find an interesting book and want it right away. You know how it is.
Now - I noticed the other day that the books in the store had small anti-theft devices stuck between the pages right over the text. Of course there is no way to take them off without tearing the page which is exactly their purpose... I must say I hate these devices even when they are stuck on the back covers. But over the text in the middle of the book! I guess a newly hired employee just thought books were for decorative purpose... Or maybe it's Borders' new policy. They reached the conclusion that people don't read the books they buy anyway...

***

I am relieved I have finished Lincoln Kirstein's biography (The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein, Martin Duberman, Knopf, 2007, 736p). I have been reading it, on and off, since Christmas. It's a great book, based on a copious documentation, but I was getting bored by all the information on ballet... I read in a stretch the chapters on Kirstein's Maturity and Decline. During World War II he is appointed assistant to the monuments officer of Patton's Third Army. Amid the destroyed enemy territories they look for stolen European art in secret locations. In a salt mine at Alt Aussee, near Salzburg in Austria, they find the eight panels of the Adoration of the Lamb, the early 15th-century polyptych by the van Eyck brothers, and masterpieces by Fragonard, Watteau, Vermeer, Michelangelo... It was 'incredible in every sense of the word, literally unbelievable, and it was like all the detective stories coming true.' After the war, back in the US, he is now almost 40. He starts, with Balanchine, a new ballet company which will eventually become the New York City Ballet. He meets another of his handsome young lifelong loves, Jens Yow, and starts having more severe bouts of depression from which he recovers in Fire Island. During one of the episodes, later in his life, he assumes the identity of Othello and terrorizes a dear friend denouncing him as Iago. With his wife Fidelma, who was also subject to major emotional disturbances, they made an odd couple. At the end of her life Fidelma had to be institutionalized. In the Kirsteins' innermost circle we also find Paul Cadmus and Wystan Auden. And, of course, there are the young men who follow one another. Lincoln was wise when he chose his lifelong passion for ballet: it provided him, all his life, with a string of fresh youngsters... The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein provides an interesting picture of homosexuality in the arts society of the mid-20th century.

He also maintained a more intense, semi-paternal involvement with a small number of younger men, many of them artists whom he supported in various ways, some of whom had once been lovers or part-time sexual partners (he also still had the occasional 'quickie' - in 1953 with a married Harvard student). He agreed completely with some lines Auden had recently sent him from Ischia: 'All we homosexuals dream of one day being married to a comrade in arms. Our affairs, however, continue to be affairs between officers and enlisted men. Necessarily. Homosexuality is a feudal relationship.' And it's probably true that in the fifties and early sixties cross-class sexual contact between men was more common than subsequently; later, the modern gay movement, initially radically anti-bourgeois, became more centrist in its values, with 'ideal' relationships being defined in a manner close to 'official' mainstream views.

Lincoln was of a generation for whom sexual behavior in general was not considered the central stuff of public discourse - let alone the central ingredient of one's identity - even if privately he'd long been remarkably open about whom and what he desired.

And more sexually explicit:

As with all his young men, Lincoln accepted, even took for granted, that they would be sexually drawn to other young men - and want to act on the attraction. For himself, nearly sixty, Lincoln seemed primarily interested in affectionate cuddling and fondling,  coupled with companionship, with him playing the role of older brother-father. According to Clint [Kisner, Lincoln's latest young man], Lincoln never once had an orgasm with him and referred vaguely to some sort of 'prostatic problem.' They did go to the steam baths together once but Lincoln seemed more interested in watching than in participating. Clint asked him one day if he had sex with Fidelma. 'Well, of course,' Lincoln replied, but Clint took the answer to mean during the early years of their marriage only.

***

The New York Review of Books published in its last issue a long unpleasant and ostentatious review of Milk, full of contempt (Revolutionary Road). Hilton Als is very critical of the script and feels that Van Sant, along the way, lost interest in the story, his aesthetic being 'constricted by the fixed nature of biography.' It's a pity, on the eve of the Oscar Award ceremony, especially when Slumdog Millionaire, the favorite movie for best picture and some other big categories, has itself such a poor script.

***

To end on a more pleasant note, Saturday was the last (great) performance this season at the Met of the beautiful and ambiguous Eugene Onegin. Tchaikovsky worked on his opera while involved in what was to become his matrimonial fiasco. In a way, he could have said himself the last words he put in his protagonist's mouth: 'Disgrace! Anguish! How pitiable is my fate!'

2009.02.22

Lincoln Kirstein's Ingenuousness

I have been continuing to read Lincoln Kirstein's biography. Duberman makes a heavy use of quotes from his journal. In 1932 his father takes him to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, whose policies are mentioned in the news almost everyday in this pre-Obama presidency, would secure the nomination. Kirstein is quickly bored at the convention and spends his time visiting the city's museums and going to the movies...

He continues to have sex with men and women and writes ingenuously in his journal in the spring of 1931 about the wife of a Wall Street Journal editor that

she told him that he 'didn't really like women,' that (as Lincoln recorded her words in his diary) 'she found that out when she went to bed with me. That she enjoyed it but she could see my affections were elsewhere. For two hours,' Lincoln commented, 'I felt castrated by her perception but generally speaking pleased at having found not a lover but a friend.'

We also learn earlier in the book that

Much later in life Lincoln wrote that although his mother was 'quite without any sexual prejudice,' she had told him that his father was 'physically cold' and had 'never liked' sex much - perhaps, she added, because as a young man he'd undergone painful mercury injections to cure venereal disease. (Many years later, Lincoln suggested an additional gloss: 'After I left Boston Dad encouraged and even idolized a number of young men whom I also found attractive.')

Let's hope that 2009 will bring us more good books...

2008.12.28

Back in Paris; Best Books of the Year

I arrived in Paris last Wednesday and discovered that part of the transportation system in the northern suburbs was on strike... exactly as three months ago when I was leaving and had to hastily grab a taxi at the Gare du Nord to avoid missing my flight. What a coincidence. They now call it a social protest ("un mouvement social")... Welcome back, did I murmur to myself.

The following books would have been worth mentioning in the Best Books of the Year lists: Honor Moore's The Bishop's Daughter: A Memoir (New York, Norton, 2008, 352 pp.) disclosing her father's closeted homosexuality and Paul Fisher's House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (New York, Henry Holt and Co., 2008, 704 pp.), a gossipy and fascinating account of Henry James family, both in the non-fiction category, as well as Neil Bartlett's last novel Skin Lane (Serpent's Tail, 2007, 320 pp.) recently mentioned in this blog.

In the plane, during a flight shortened by strong winds, after perusing the newspapers of the last few days for details about Bernard Madoff's extraordinary story, I started The Worlds of Lincoln Kirstein (New York, Knopf, 2007, 736 pp.), an absorbing biography of the unconventional arts advocate by Martin Duberman, which has just been reprinted in large paperback. Like his subject, Duberman went to Harvard, although three decades later. His own road toward accepting his homosexuality was painful, as he recounts in Cures: A Gay Man's Odyssey. He is striken by the "absence of torment or guilty self-consciousness when Lincoln recorded his various same-sex adventures, sexual or emotional, in his diary."

Perhaps his nonchalance was partly playacting or self-disguise, putting a more composed face on his sexual encounters with men than he actually felt - and there is some evidence for such an interpretation. Perhaps, as an Anglophilic, privileged young man well aware of the endemic homosexuality of upper-class English boarding schools, he simply assumed that his own behavior fell easily within the normal spectrum. Perhaps his 'manly manner' and his simultaneous attraction to women ('refreshing dreams of... a golden beach with girls... all lying about to fondle'), made him feel it would be an inaccurate absurdity to label himself a 'fairy' - the current term and category, one associated with the gender transgressions of effeminacy and cross-dressing. He saw himself as quite unlike that recognizable 'type,' and in his diary periodically disparaged 'effeminate' men. He even, at one time, joined in baiting a classmate he described as a 'horrible homosexual worm... distressingly affected... [with] a bad choppy walk.'

Before my last post of the year, next week, let me wish you all a Merry Christmas.

2008.12.21