BMDC begins New Year with Fifth Wednesday!!

Happy New Year's Eve, Colleagues!

Nearly a decade ago (2009-2011), we had a practice of holding occasional “bonus" Bookmen meetings on fifth Wednesdays, which individual members hosted to discuss titles that were personal favorites but didn’t have a gay connection (or at least not a strong one).  Those books included Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Vladimir Nabokov’s “Mademoiselle O” (a short story), Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh and John Kennedy O’Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. 

Robert Muir has proposed reviving that tradition by discussing the Nikolai Gogol short story “The Overcoat,” which is widely available in various collections.  He recommends the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation, but that is in no way a requirement.  Gogol anthologies should be available in most libraries, and the Dover Thrift edition on Amazon is a steal at $3.34.

Keith Cohen, who lives in the Van Ness neighborhood, has graciously volunteered to host the meeting on Wed., Jan. 30, 2019, at 7:30 p.m.  His apartment building isn’t far from Metro and also has some parking spaces available.  I’ll send further particulars via group e-mail, but the idea is for those who are interested to respond to that message to obtain Keith's address and phone number.  (I should also mention that we'll order pizzas and split the cost.)  So stay tuned!

A Kameny cameo appearance...

I had mentioned at our last meeting, when we were discussing Lillian Faderman's The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, that I had a vague memory of local legend Frank Kameny attending one of our meetings sometime in the mid-2000s.  It was when we were meeting at Sparky's Espresso Coffeehouse on 14th Street NW, and I think it was late spring or early summer.

Tim, who would have been facilitator during the period in question, tells me he has no recollection of such a visit.  So I wondered if I might be hallucinating--until I found a 2011 e-mail I'd sent a friend mentioning that I'd met Kameny a few years before.  But I still can't recall the date, how Frank found out about the meeting, or the title we were discussing, though I presume it must have related to D.C. activism.

Could any of you who were active in the group back then corroborate my feeble memory?

Photographs before and after Stonewall

You may recall that back in September, I forwarded an invitation to participate in a Kickstarter project to republish a large paperback full of the work of photographer Fred W. McDarrah, the first staff photographer and first picture editor of the Village Voice.  I contributed to that effort, as perhaps some of you did, as well, and am delighted to report that I am now the proud owner of a handsome paperback that you, too, can purchase from OR Press.

Admittedly, it's a bit steep at $30, but in addition to many unique photos illuminating gay history, the book offers a foreword by Hilton Als and introductions by Allen Ginsberg and Jill Johnston.

When it was first issued in 1994, on the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, incidentally, the book bore the title Gay Pride: Photographs from Stonewall to Today.  Now it is called Pride: Photographs after Stonewall, and celebrates most of the period we just discussed in Lillian Faderman's The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle.

I'd be happy to bring my copy of Pride to our next meeting in case some of you would like to check it out.

Truly Putting the Gay in the Gay Nineties

Last week (Dec. 6, to be exact), Michael Dirda devoted his weekly Book World column in the Washington Post to a fascinating survey of literature from the British 1890s, which he rightly calls "the first colorful flowering of modern gay culture." Many, perhaps even most, of the figures he references will already be familiar to you, my fellow Bookmen, but Dirda includes several authors I'd never heard of—but plan to check out.

On a very much related note: Next month I'll issue the semiannual call to nominate titles for our next reading list.  I'm pretty sure I'll be recommending at least a couple of the books Dirda discusses here.

Caravaggio's "Seven Works of Mercy" — NSFT

Spot the "female-presenting nipple" of Roman Charity:

"female-presenting nipples"

A very interesting opinion piece in the Post  last week: "RIP Tumblr porn. You made me who I am." Of course I knew about Tumblr (and not for the politics of "Riverdale" — ahem!) but had little idea that this site had become such a queer matrix. Now, alas, all is revealed, including an all-purpose ign*nce on the part of CEO Jeff D'Onofrio's underlings who presumably didn't waste a second pondering whether the "female-presenting nipples" of this post's title would be Cis or Trans and are entirely ignorant of the wisdom they might receive from the lactating Madonna —

RIP indeed!

"The Immoralist" on Broadway (?!)

Ken Jost was kind enough to share the following tidbit.  Did you know that a play based on the book we discussed tonight—Andre Gide's The Immoralist—ran for three months on Broadway in 1954?  It starred Louis Jourdan as Michel, Geraldine Page as Marcelline and James Dean (!) as Bachir.

And an appreciation of the novel here by Wallace Fowlie.

Unreliable Narrators