LGBT Jews in the Federal City

I highly recommend "LGBT Jews in the Federal City," on view at the Capital Jewish Museum through Jan. 4, 2026. As a D.C. resident for nearly 44 years now, I consider myself pretty knowledgeable about local gay history, but I learned a surprising amount--not just about the Jewish community's many contributions to advancing LGBTQ rights, but the evolution of the gay scene itself over the years. A highlight was the opportunity to listen to oral history excerpts by various members of the community, including a name that will be familiar to BookMen members, by picking up a rotary phone and dialing the number corresponding to each testimony. Very retro and very fun!

Essex's blessings

Over the years, we've read poems by Essex Hemphill (1957-1995) in various anthologies, including Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS (co-edited by our very own Philip Clark and David Groff) and Freedom in This Village: 25 Years of Black Gay Men's Writing (edited by E. Lynn Harris). But regardless of how much you already know about this luminary of the D.C. arts scene, I believe you'll appreciate "Essex Hemphill: Take care of your blessings," an exhibition at the Phillips Collection that "explores the interdisciplinary relationship between Hemphills writing and visual art." It's on through Aug. 31. (Note: Although the Phillips does charge admission, it also offers free and discounted access on certain nights.)

Passages re: A Passage to India

I didn't think to look up these contemporary reviews of E.M. Forster's A Passage to India until after we discussed it last week, but I trust you'll still find them worth your time.

First up, here is The Guardian's take:

Review A Passage to India By E. M. Forster London: Edward Arnold. Pp.325. 7s. 6d. net C. M. Fri 20 Jun 1924 13.22 EDT

The first duty of any reviewer is to welcome Mr. E.M. Forster's reappearance as a novelist and to express the hope that the general public as well as the critics will recognise his merits and their good fortune; the second is to congratulate him upon the tone and temper of his new novel. To speak of its "fairness" would convey the wrong impression, because that suggests a conscious virtue. This is the involuntary fairness of the man who sees.

We have had novels about India from the British point of view and from the native point of view, and in each case with sympathy for the other side; but the sympathy has been intended, and in this novel there is not the slightest suggestion of anything but a personal impression, with the prejudices and limitations of the writer frankly exposed. Mr. Forster, in fact, has reached the stage in his development as an artist when, in his own words about Miss Quested, he is "no longer examining life, but being examined by it." He has been examined by India, and this is his confession.

There can be no doubt about the principal faculties which have contributed to its quality: imagination and humour. It is imagination in the strictest sense of the world as the power of seeing and hearing internally, without any obligation to fancy - though Mr. Forster has fancy at his command to heighten the impression, as in his treatment of the echoes in the Marabar Caves. "Even the striking of a match starts a little worm coiling, which is too small to complete a circle but is eternally watchful." To speak of his characters as being "well drawn," would be crude; they draw themselves, and mainly in their conversation. More remarkable even than his vision is Mr. Forster's power of inner hearing; he seems incapable of allowing a person to speak out of character, and Dr. Aziz strikes one as less invented than overheard. Equally pure is Mr. Forster's humour. His people, British or native, are not satirised or caricatured or made the targets of wit; they are simply enjoyed.

The story is, essentially, that of the close contact of East and West in the persons of Dr. Aziz, a Moslem, assistant medical officers of the Chandrapore Hospital, and Mr. Fielding, principal of the College. In all the other characters the contact is governed by conventions - official or would-be sympathetic - but in them it is as close as blood itself allows. So far as affection is concerned they are friends, so that the interplay of East and West is along the very finest channels of human intercourse - suggesting the comparison of the blood and air vessels in the lungs; but the friendship is always at the mercy of the feelings which rise from the deeps of racial personality.

The action of the story is provided by outsiders; two travelling Englishwomen, one elderly, the mother of the city magistrate, and one, Miss Quested, comparatively young, who becomes for a time engaged to him. The one has a natural and the other a theoretical sympathy for the country and its people.

As the guests of Dr. Aziz they make an excursion to the Marabar Caves, where Miss Quested loses her head and accuses Aziz of having insulted her - a series of minor accidents lending plausibility to what was, in effect, an hallucination. Aziz is arrested, and East and West rally round their prejudices and conventions, though Fielding believes Aziz to be innocent, and breaks with his own order to support him.

At the trial, before a native magistrate, Miss Quested withdraws her accusations and Aziz is acquitted; but in the following turmoil Fielding, against his will, is true to his blood in sheltering Miss Quested, and he and Aziz drift apart. "Why can't we be friends now?" he says at the end. "It's what I want. It's what you want." But India answers: "No, not yet...No, not there."

Thus we are left with the feeling that the blending of races is a four-dimensional problem. In his presentation of the problem Mr. Forster leans, if anywhere, towards his own race in his acute sense of their difficulties, but not more than by the weight of blood; and, again, fairness is not the word for his sensitive presentation. It is something much less conscious; not so much a virtue as a fatality of his genius. Whether he presents Englishman or Moslem or Hindu or Eurasian he is no longer examining life, but being examined by it" in the deeps of his personality as an artist.

And here is what the New York Times reviewer thought of the novel:

August 17, 1924: "A Passage to India" by E.M. Forster

There are some novelists who creep into public esteem rather imperceptibly, and Mr. E.M. Forster is one of these. Already he has his rather small group of valiant disciples (at random one thinks of Mr. Leonard Woolf, Mr. Hamish Miles and Miss Rebecca West) who proclaim his merits with an insistence that would be provoking if there were not ample cause for the enthusiasm. A single reading of "A Passage to India" settles the question. Mr. E.M. Forster is indubitably one of the finest novelists living in England today, and "A Passage to India" is one of the saddest, keenest, most beautifully written ironic novels of the time. Saying so much one is forced to say much more, for Mr. Forster's quality is unique. In some respects it is like caviare, but not because one must cultivate a taste for it. It is difficult to conceive of any tastes being dissatisfied with "A Passage to India" unless it be fire-eating, gouty, retired Anglo-Indians now residing in Tunbridge Wells and kindred places.

"A Passage to India" is both a challenge and an indictment. It is also a revelation. But so intricately is this matter treated that the average reader is quite unaware of a smoldering subterranean passion in the depths of this carefully conceived study of two humanities -- indeed, two worlds -- in hopeless clash. A panorama of objective incidents and gestures is unfolded as one might unfold a carefully woven Indian carpet, and somehow the reader experiences an intense concern and despair before a situation that is both inevitable and impossible. Certain obvious words suggest themselves as descriptive of this book and among them are ''subtle'' and ''acute.'' But they are not exact enough to describe that peculiar cool, clarified exposition that seems to miss nothing and that is so impregnated with unexplainable implications. Almost imperceptibly Mr. Forster develops a character until the reader has acquired the most meticulous comprehension of the deepest channels of being.

Such a proceeding was of the utmost difficulty in "A Passage to India," for many of the characters who fit into the delicate structure of that book are Indians. It is easily understandable that mystery surrounds the East Indian, that his life is a conception peculiar to himself. Mr. Forster knows this and he conveys as much in his book. He also knows the Indian mind, and the clear shafts of his sentences pierce into it with a disturbing frequency until the reader is apt to wonder whether or not the Indian is as complicated a being as he seems to be. Yet in a last analysis he is. India remains India and no number of British civilians or army corps can hope to divert that huge, semi-supine, dreaming giant from immemorial methods of existence. Broken and factious, throbbing with antagonistic religious sects and castes, it yet remains sullenly itself in spite of the long decades of English rule. Mr. Forster makes it quite clear that it is no dream of the Peacock Throne at Delhi that holds India apart, but the congenital differences of birth as well. Here again is Kipling's old dictum that "East is East and West is West." Yet if the idea be given that "A Passage to India" is the usual type of Indian novel in which patriotic impulses heroically manifest themselves, a genuine wrong is done the author. Mr. Forster is quite aware that right and wrong may not be so easily separated; that, in fact, both sides may be right and wrong at the same time. His objective is to show modern life in India, in Chandrapore, and to do this he draws with a superb finality a group of Indians and British civil officers and women. The utmost care is shown in interlocking the various urges in this book. The result is a bewilderingly vivid presentation of life.

A mere resume of the novel gives no adequate idea of it, for the prime importance of Mr. Forster's work lies not so much in situation as in the development of a dozen apparently trivial incidents leading up to it. Odd words, single sentences, flashes of characterization, the general atmosphere which is so precisely built up -- these are the touches that set Mr. Forster apart as a novelist. It conveys no more than his modus operandi to state that the book circles about a young Indian, Dr. Aziz, who is unjustly accused of attempted assault by a hysterical English girl and who therefore serves as a hinge from which both humanities -- British and Indian -- break. Certain things become apparent as the book progresses and not the least of them is the stupidity of the British. There is no other word for it. This system of the conqueror which prevents an Indian from being a member of a white man's club, which assumes a cocksure knowledge of the Indian mind when that knowledge is based on a dull misconception, which eternally suspects and belittles -- this is the aspect of life in India which Mr. Forster brings out most clearly. A single episode may be noted as a fair exemplification of this. Dr. Aziz, calling on Fielding, the Englishman who stands by the Indians and commits the last sin by not blindfolding his judgment and sticking with the Britishers, gives the white man his collar button in a burst of generosity when that individual has broken his own. Later we find the City Magistrate, Heaslop, remarking: ''Aziz was exquisitely dressed, from tie pin to spats, but he had forgotten his back collar stud, and there you have the Indian all over: inattention to detail; the fundamental slackness that reveals the race.'' Here, in a nutshell, Mr. Forster intimates, is the attitude of the Anglo-Indian toward the native; the slackness is instantly assumed; the Britisher sees the surface and no more.

The Indian portraits are superb. Dr. Aziz, of course, is more fully drawn than the others, for he serves as that aspect of India which Mr. Forster is anxious to bring to the fore -- the educated Indian who understands British civilization, but who can never be really identified with it.

Indeed, one thing that "A Passage to India" seems to assert is the hopelessness of any agreement between India and her conquerors. Two peoples who will never mix are here, and when this is so there must always be two groups. The house will always be divided. The few points in this book which have been noted are but a tithe of the riches that may be found there. The crystal-clear portraiture, the delicate conveying of nuances of thought and life, and the astonishing command of his medium show that Mr. Forster is now at the height of his powers. It is not alone because the canvas is larger and the implications greater than in "Howards End" and "A Room With a View" that this is so. The real reason is implicit in the author's unmistakable growth, the deepening of his powers and the assurance of his technique. When Mr. Leonard Woolf states, ''Mr. Forster seems now to have reached the point at which there is nothing too simple or too subtle for his pen,'' he is expressing an exact truth. Certainly "A Passage to India" should greatly widen that rather small audience that has relished his novels in the past. And that rather small audience should congratulate itself on its acumen.

Finally, in 2014 (90 years after its initial book review) The Guardian named A Passage to India as #48 on its list of "The 100 best novels of the 20th century."

Tributes to Edmund White

This is by no means a comprehensive roundup of obituaries and commentaries about the life and career of Edmund White, who died on June 3 at the age of 85. But it's a start! I'll post more tributes as I find them.

Washington Post obituary

"How groundbreaking gay author Edmund White paved the way for other writers" (Washington Post)

New York Times obituary

"'The Cole Porter of Literature’: Writers and Artists Remember Edmund White (New York Times)

"The Very Gay Life of Edmund White" (New York Times)

"Books and Boys and Big Dinners at Home: How I’ll remember Edmund White" (Vulture)

Bay Area Reporter obituary

London Review of Books obituary

Remembering Ed White

At my invitation, our friend Robert Muir has shared his thoughts on the recent passing of his longtime friend, Edmund White.

"The New York Times did a comprehensive article on Edmund White after his passing, but I wanted to add some of my personal reflections.

Like many gay men of my generation, I was influenced by the novels of Edmund White and Andrew Holleran in the early 1980s. White’s trilogy of autobiographical novels: A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty and The Farewell Symphony, had a huge impact on my reading and my education on gay life. I attended many of Edmund White’s readings and book signings through the 90s and beyond. His Genet: A Biography led me into the world of Genet’s writing and life. I remember seeing a very striking Frenchman who sat with Ed at one of his readings and always wondered if that was Huber Sorin, his lover and the basis for the character of Julian in A Married Man.

Around the time when his play "Terre Haute" was set to premiere in London, I decided to reach out to Ed in a letter via Princeton where he was teaching. I was headed to London for the play, but missed him there by two days. He emailed me back and we began a 17-year correspondence over emails. In August 2008, he invited me to his apartment in New York, and we had lunch and a long chat in a Chelsea restaurant.

Since then, we’ve exchanged thousands of emails about life and literature, mostly gay literature. I’ve kept him abreast of the books we read at BookMen and he’s advised me of his thoughts on our books, as well as others. He turned me on to the works of Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and Spanish writer Javier Marias, whose novels--The Savage Detectives (2007) and The Infatuations (2013), respectively--I found to be exceptional contemporary literature. We also talked at length about Anna Karenina, which he always claimed was his favorite novel and which he reread about every three years. He also gave me a heads up on Edouard Louis as The End of Eddy was making waves.

While our book club was reading Caracole, Tim Walton and I put together a list of real-life people we believed were the basis for the characters in the novel. I sent it to Ed, and he was impressed that we got six out of the eight characters right. He told us the real names for the other two.

Ed was always so generous with his time on all things literary; quick to correct me when I was getting off track, but never in a condescending way. I feel so blessed to have known him on some level, and I will sorely miss that connection to him."

Thanks for sharing this lovely tribute, Robert!

RIP, Edmund White

Pioneering gay author Edmund White died on June 3 at the age of 85. Hailed as a pioneer of gay literature, White mined his own life story, including his vast and varied catalog of sexual experiences, in more than 30 books of fiction and nonfiction, as well as hundreds of articles and essays. Many were critical successes, and several were best-sellers, leading the Chicago Tribune to label him “the godfather of queer lit.”

We have read eight of his books over the years; in alphabetical order, they are: A Saint from Texas (discussed in 2021); Caracole (2011); City Boy (2011); The Faber Book of Gay Short Fiction, which he edited (1999); The Farewell Symphony (2013); Fresh Men: New Voices in Gay Fiction, which he edited (2006); My Lives (2007); and The Tastemaker (2019). Curiously, his breakout book, A Boy's Own Story, is not among them--an omission I trust we'll rectify with next year's reading list. (And yes, that is a hint to nominate it this fall :-). Later this year, we will discuss his Nocturnes for the King of Naples (with a new foreword by Garth Greenwell).

I am still compiling the many obituaries, tributes and reflections on White's career, and will post those in a separate entry.