bustin' out all over

What a month it's been, bracketed by the fiftieth anniversary of Stonewall and the two-hundredth birthday of Walt Whitman! I want to call out the best commemoration of the GGP I've read, by the art critic of The New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl, who dismisses the suitability of even unusual exhibits as being

to poetry as museum wall texts are to art works—supposedly enhancing but often displacing aesthetic adventure.

Instead he recommends (if I may paraphrase) haunching down for a good loaf with a spear of summer grass.

And while we're on the vegetal, no celebration is complete w/o an eidólon

The Boys from Oz

Grant Thompson, who--along with our own Brian Doyle--runs the Cosmos Club's gay book club, recently wrote to an Australian publisher, The Bookshop Darlinghurst, soliciting suggestions for contemporary gay novels from Down Under.  He was kind enough to share the list he received with me, so now I am spreading the wealth.

Nearly all of them are available from Amazon, so those are the links I've embedded.  But all of the titles are available from The Bookshop, in case you want to do your part for Aussie-Yank relations and order from them directly--as Grant has done and I intend to do.  :-)

Down the Hume by Peter Polites

King of the Road by Nigel Bartlett

Bodies of Men by Nigel Featherstone (available only from the publisher)

The Nowhere by Chris Gill

Fairyland by Sumner Locke Elliott

Holding the Man by Timothy Conigrave

Note that this last selection is a memoir, not a novel.  The publisher describes it as "the quintessential Aussie love story, a real-life tale of love and loss set in Melbourne and Sydney from the 1960s through the 1990s.  It holds a very special place in the hearts of Aussies, and has been adapted into a play and a movie, available on DVD."

Before and after Stonewall

This article in the June 20 New York Times offers a useful assortment of acts of resistance across the United States (and not just in big cities) to oppressive homophobic laws from the 1960s to the 1980s.  Lillian Faderman covers most of them in The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle, but several were completely new to me.

Did you know, for example, in Columbus, Ohio, David Zimmer, Orn Huntington and others organized an annual Halloween drag ball in 1964?

Or that Manonia Evans and Donna Burkett applied for a marriage license in Milwaukee in 1971?

Un-Straight Outta Compton

One of the reasons I am enjoying Lillian Faderman's The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Struggle (to which we return on July 17) so much is the way she reminds us of pre-Stonewall events and activists who have never received their just due.

For example, consider the riots that took place in the summer of 1966 at Gene Compton's Cafeteria in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco. There, a group of trans women, many black and Latinx, stood up to systematic police harassment and abuse.

Faderman's account of the revolt and its aftermath (pp. 119-120) is fine as far as it goes, but does not identify any of the participants or go into depth. But Sam Levin, writing in The Guardian, interviewed several of them for his June 21 article, "Compton's Cafeteria Riot: A Historic Act of Trans Resistance" (part of the newspaper's ongoing series, "Stonewall at 50").

Levin wastes no time in introducing us to one of them:

"Donna Personna does not want to be tolerated.

'I am to be loved, adored and respected,' the 72-year-old San Francisco woman declared on a recent morning, seated inside her fifth-floor apartment. Personna is preparing to serve as grand marshal at the city's Pride festival this year and has no patience for anyone's tolerance. "F___ that s___ ... Give me my rights!'"

As we prepare to mark the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots (June 28, 1969), that is a sentiment I trust we can all subscribe to—even if we express it more decorously.

The Good Gray Goose

I realize for some — some nearby! — we've just entered the bicentennial year but I'm going to prefer the thought that were he alive today Walt Whitman would now be in his 201st year. So, bon voyage, Walt! The End of May, 2119 awaits!

I am sympathetic and appreciative of the man, less frequently of the work. A long standing but by now somewhat dated question is whether he was his own best parodist. The competition is fierce!! Still he could throw off a great line or two (and in his quieter moments, when not outshouting Lear on the heath, whole stanzas). But I've been "working" on a Whitman cento. Haven't got beyond these first two lines

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking
We two boys together clinging
…

His greatest poem is in the making. I invite collaborators.

(And speaking of centos, I've just realized I've unconsciously been carrying one along my whole life: "Say not the struggle naught availeth / Life is real! Life is earnest!" Something I must have picked up in the nursery.)

"Walt Whitman in 1989"

Although the official "Walt Whitman 200" celebration is over, his bicentennial year is just getting started.  With that in mind, I wanted to share the following tribute to that great poet.

While researching the LGBTQ composers whose works I'll be playing in my June 23 recital, I came across a moving Perry Brass poem, the concluding movement of "All the Way Through Evening," Chris DeBlasio's 1990 song-cycle for baritone and piano (later orchestrated).  The piece is available on several different recordings, but the one I have is titled "And Trouble Came: Musical Responses to AIDS." (I've reproduced the poem below as it appears in the liner notes, with its somewhat idiosyncratic layout, capitalization and punctuation.)

Walt Whitman in 1989

Walt Whitman has come down
today to the hospital room;
he rocks back and forth in the crisis;

he says it's good we haven't lost 
our closeness, and cries 
as each one is taken.

He has written many lines
about these years: the disfigurement
of young men and the wars

of hard tongues and closed minds.
The body in pain will bear such nobility,
but words have the edge

of poison when spoken bitterly.
Now he takes a dying man
in his arms and tells him

how deeply flows the River
that takes the old man and his friends
this evening. It is the River

of dusk and lamentation.
"Flow," Walt says, "dear River,
I will carry this young man

to your bank. I'll put him myself
on one of your strong, flat boats,
and we'll sail together all the way 
through evening."

—Feb. 28, 1989, Orangeburg, N.Y.
Perry Brass

Three decades on, this poem has lost none of its power.

"gay food …

is lighter, brighter, more artistic, art-directed food that comes from the intersection of health and aesthetics

(where of course "intersection" abbreviates "intersectionality"😏). So says Simon Doonan, according to QueerBio's page on "Popular Cookbook Authors Who Are LGBTQ".

QueerBio is a useful exhaustive / exhausting / inexhaustible source of LGBTQ biographical information. Its page on Simon Doonan himself however is remarkably skimpy. Indeed it omits mentioning his memoirs as the inspiring source of the delightful BBC Series Beautiful People (which unfortunately seems no longer to be available anywhere!?).

Wikipedia unsurprisingly is more informative as is (again unsurprisingly) Simon's own website.

P.S. Actually I got on to this quote from QueerBio.com's latest newsletter and wanted to highlight the unavailable (!?) BBC series. The real story however is The Atlantic's  post of some years ago.