Remembering the "Godfather of Queer Comics"

The Dec. 6 Washington Post ran an obituary for Howard Cruse, who had passed away on Nov. 26 in a Massachusetts hospital at the age of 75. Among many other distinctions, Cruse served as founding editor of Gay Comix, one of the first series to feature work by and for openly gay men and women.

Reading Harrison Smith's excellent overview of Cruse's life and career, I am chagrined that I'd never even heard of him—or his acclaimed 1995 graphic novel, Stuck Rubber Baby, which recounts his experiences growing up and coming out in Jim Crow-era Alabama.

Fortuitously, that book will be reissued in May 2020 in a 25th-anniversary edition with an introduction by Alison Bechdel. I've already preordered it and anticipate it could be a good candidate for our 2020-2021 reading list.

The continuing allure of "The Lure"

The Dec. 19 issue of The Guardian features an interview with Felice Picano, whose 1979 novel, The Lure, has just been reissued by U.K.-based Muswell Press with a new introduction by the author. (It has never been out of print in the United States.)

The Lure was the first gay-themed book to be picked up by the Book of the Month Club, and was an instant hit. In the Guardian interview, Picano notes that his publisher did him "a wonderful favor, writing 'Warning: Sex and Violence' on the cover". Stephen King's blurb deeming Picano "one hell of a writer" probably helped, too.

At the same time, Picano received heavy criticism for the thriller not only from the usual suspects among homophobes, but from gay activists for exposing "the dirty laundry of gay life, the whole night-time scene. In order to get mainstream acceptance, a lot of organizations said we should never show that side. My feeling was, I'm a modern author, I need to show what life is like, the good side and the shady side. I absolutely stand by that."

Picano was even shot at in his apartment while working, by an unknown assailant. "My windows were open to the street. I heard the bullets and dropped down from my desk. We found the marks on the wall."

The author speaks (our language...:-)

Thought you all might appreciate the following message I received from Torsten Hojer, the author of Speak My Language, the anthology we'll begin discussing on Dec. 17:

Dear Steve,

I trust this email finds you well and fabulous...

I thought I'd drop you a quick note to say how happy I am to discover that Bookmen DC is discussing my anthology, Speak My Language, this week. A lovely surprise! I hope you, and your members, enjoy the stories. I would love to hear of favorites and other feedback, if you have time. Maybe even a photo!

Kind regards from a very cold, rainy but festive Brighton, U.K.—and Merry Christmas.

Torsten Højer

Another book group bites the dust...:-(

Our friend Ken Jost passes on the following news:

For most of 2019, he has been attending meetings of a non-LGBTQ book group near American University with the clever name of The Book Lobby. The group, numbering half a dozen or so, operated for 20 years (about the same span as Bookmen), but has just disbanded for lack of interest in the titles suggested for the coming year.

As Ken says, "Hats off to Potomac Gay Men's Book Group [the original name of our merry band] for lasting beyond life expectancy in this area."

it's easier to hump than to dump

My favorite factoid of the year or indeed of our dying decade (or our still adolescent century) has made me second-guess my wish to be re-incarnated as an octopus—

to wit:

Flying foxes gather in all-male clusters to lick each other's … penises.

I generally despise desperate searches for validating genes ("gay") or just-so theories of domestic evolution (like the nanny uncle) but this is so camp (i.e. inverted) that my objections in brief have fallen to my ankles. The article's subtitle ("Unless it is essential to know a partner’s sex [as e.g. in creatures committed to monogamy], why bother?") pretty much gives it all away. But in case it's hidden behind a paywall, consult The Economist, Nov 28th 2019, pp 68-69. (Lagniappe: an unomitted descriptor for the flying foxes' penises!)

Retracing Zora Neale Hurston's footsteps

Zora Neale Hurston's name has come up in several of the books we've discussed this year, most notably Edward White's The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America.  So some of you may be interested in the following Bitter Southerner (great name for a magazine!) article: "The Sum of Life: Zora Nearle Hurston." (I was disappointed that nowhere does the writer even allude to her bisexuality, but the article is well worth reading nonetheless.)

When "Angels in America" came to East Texas

Those of us in the D.C. area and other blue states may sometimes take for granted our ability to attend LGBTQ-themed plays, movies, etc. without fear of harassment.  This Texas Monthly article, "When 'Angels in America' Came to East Texas," is a salutary reminder that not all our fellow Americans are so fortunate—but also, that courageous artists can make a difference.

A Big Apple / Bookmen DC connection

During my recent visit to New York City, one of my best friends introduced me to Bruce Shenitz, who—along with Andrew Holleran—edited a book we had discussed almost exactly 15 years before: The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write about Their Fathers. Understandably, my memory of the book is vague, but I recall that I enjoyed it, as did most of those present at that discussion.

We'll be discussing Matthew Lopez's play The Inheritance early next year, so I'd hoped to see it that weekend; but alas, even though it was still in previews at that point, I wasn't able to secure a ticket.   But as a consolation prize, here are reviews from the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Making Classical Music Sexy Again...

A tip of the hat to Octavio Roca for flagging this recent New York Times story "Classical Music and Fetishes Unite in Historical Center of Gay Culture."

A D.C. perspective on the Gay Liberation Front

As we prepare to discuss Martin Duberman's book   Has the Gay Movement Failed?   Philip Clark has shared the video of a June 2014 panel discussion that he organized and moderated at the Historical Society of Washington. While Philip says Duberman's summary of the Gay Liberation Front's beliefs and practices is pretty good, hearing from actual GLF members is always a good idea.

Coming Out / 2019

Last Friday was the "official" National Coming Out Day. Sunday's Post had a thoughtful piece by Richard Morgan. (He had a fairly terrifying Father's Day memoir there a few years ago.) Amazon offers a 63-page "Kindle Single" Born in Bedlam and new fans, which I guess I'm becoming, can check out his homepage Charm and Rigor (anagram lovers may enjoy a thoughtful pause first).

Memoirs of a Queer Revolutionary

I am embarrassed to admit that until recently, I had never heard of Louis Sullivan, who died in 1991 at the age of 39 from complications related to HIV/AIDS. But his Wikipedia page hails him "as perhaps the first transgender man to publicly identify as gay," and says he is "largely responsible for the modern understanding of sexual orientation and gender identity as distinct, unrelated concepts."

Mr. Sullivan also kept comprehensive diaries beginning at the age of 11, and Nightboat Books has now published selections from 24 of them as We Both Laughed in Pleasure: The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan, 1961-1991. If the fascinating excerpt in the Oct. 2 Paris Review is at all representative of his voice, I look forward to reading the book.

Is "Such Times" one of the great AIDS novels?

While preparing to lead last night's lively discussion of Christopher Coe's 1993 novel, Such Times, I first looked online for biographical background. I found remarkably few references to the author or his two novels, which should not have surprised me given the fact that his Wikipedia page is a stub.

Fortunately, Coe's New York Times obituary is a bit more informative. Note that he died 25 years ago last month, just before the paperback edition of Such Times appeared.

Next, I sought reviews and commentaries, but found few even though it appears the book has remained in print the whole period. Most of the critiques I did find were laudatory, but few went into much depth beyond calling it one of the great AIDS novels. Just how great is a question few of the writers attempted to answer, but I would certainly put Such Times at or near the top of the heap.

One happy exception to the scant discussion of the genre is "New York Stories," a 2014 essay by Jameson Currier in Chelsea Station that not only discusses Coe, but lists about a dozen other books centered on HIV/AIDS. (N.B. In my original version of this posting, I lazily used the term "AIDS novel," but only about half the titles are fiction.)

Caveat lector: Conveniently, several of the novels on the list happen to be by Mr. Currier himself.

We've already read several of them, but here are a few that strike me as candidates for our future reading lists:

Eighty-Sixed by David B. Feinberg (1986)

Ground Zero by Andrew Holleran (1988; reissued and updated in 2008 as Chronicle of a Plague Revisited)

The Body and Its Dangers by Allen Barnett (1991)

Hard by Wayne Hoffman (2006)

The Fugs Queered Everything …

even genres not (yet) in existence. Whether Clara June qualifies as Country Western … 🤷‍♂️ I dunno (and don't expect to be any the wiser after the PBS/KB 16-hour extraveeganza) but it's my favorite hillbilly tune!

( and not to pass up the opportunity to plug yet once more my all-time favorite TV dramedy: 5,6,7,8 )

Queers in "Country Music"? … Stay Tuned!

Wouldn't even draw attention to this sixteen-hour Ken Burns / PBS special beginning tonight if it were not for our having so recently read and discussed Nadine Hubbs' Rednecks, Queers, and Country Music (and there having been so much blog activity about it). Malcolm Jones in his Daily Beast preview says nothing about queers, homos, or faggots having been "left out" so … well, we'll see. I plan to watch and will alert folks to any "good" parts.

Tite Street

Greetings all.

Previewing "The Inheritance"

Early next year, we'll be reading Matthew Lopez's play, The Inheritance, which opens on Broadway in late September. Our friend Octavio Roca will get to see it as a birthday present (lucky dog) and was kind enough to alert me to this New Yorker profile of the playwright.

"Rednecks, Queers & Country Music" — oh my!

Whether because the book is written in academic style (and is more expensive than most selections on our reading list), or just because some of you were still away, we had lower-than-usual attendance for our Sept. 4 discussion of Nadine Hubbs' Rednecks, Queers and Country Music.  So I assume that means that most of you didn't buy it.

That being the case, I thought it might be useful to share a few thoughts about the book—not to entice any of you to buy it (for reasons I'll explain below) but because I believe, despite flaws in the author's framing, that her provocative thesis deserves consideration. (I won't presume to speak for anyone else present at our discussion, but I hope they'll comment if they disagree with any of the following observations.)

First, Hubbs' title reminds me of the old "Sesame Street" bit, "One of These Things Doesn't Belong." (No prizes for guessing which one in this case!) Still, I give her credit for an ambitious attempt to prove that queers do belong in a discussion of country music. Or, as the summary on the back cover puts it, "She summons the redneck and the queer to challenge the conventional wisdom that frames white working folks as a perpetual bigot class and renders their queer alliances invisible."

However, I'm sorry to say she falls far short of success on both counts.  In fact, she documents just how closely Nashville (to use shorthand for the industry) polices its performers to ensure that they don't challenge conventional thinking. Case in point: She mentions the Dixie Chicks only in passing, without acknowledging that they were blacklisted for daring to oppose the Iraq War. And as for "queer alliances," she only cites one "out" lesbian country singer (Chely Wright) and no openly gay male performers (as of 2014).

Are things better now for LGBTQ musicians than when this book came out? Undoubtedly. The crossover success of Lil Nas X's "Old Town Road" is an unmistakable sign that C&W is still evolving.

Then again, when nationally syndicated country radio host Blair Garner interviewed Pete Buttigieg back in July, Cumulus Radio spiked the broadcast—presumably because it didn't want its listeners to get the dangerous idea that gay people are actually smart and nice and moderate and relatable.

Bottom line: If you were tempted to buy this book to get dirt on secretly gay country performers, you can save your money!

Second, for what it's worth, Hubbs never explicitly says she is a lesbian. But at a minimum, she identifies strongly with the LGBTQ community. She does tell us that she comes from a white working-class family in Michigan, and grew up listening to country—but learned the hard way that if you want to fit in with urban peers, you better answer questions about your listening preferences with "anything but country" (the title of her first chapter).

I come from a similar background, though I hail from Shreveport, Louisiana. But unlike Hubbs, I am a proud member of the ABC club. However, my primary objection to the genre is not that I think it's low-class (or regard myself as too good for it). It's because as a classical musician, I find most (not all) country songs boring and predictable. (Which is also how I feel about most pop, rock, etc.)

In other words, I am a snob—just not in the sense Hubbs means.

Third, if Hubbs ever updates this book (I checked and she hasn't yet), I'm sure she'll devote at least one chapter to "deplorables"—aka Donald Trump supporters. I say that because the first half of Rednecks, Queers and Country Music makes the case that the white middle class and the intelligentsia (the demographic that used to be known as city slickers) unfairly ascribe all sorts of odious characteristics to fans of Country-and-Western music—bigotry, ignorance, homophobia, xenophobia, misogyny—to signal their (our?) moral superiority.

And that brings me to the main reason I am posting this commentary. As Democrats debate whether to court Trump supporters or write them off next year, we would do well to ponder the issues Hubbs analyzes here. While I believe she overstates the case that middle-class Americans scapegoat the less affluent, we should be careful not to assume that "rednecks" (whose tribe I may very well have joined if I were straight) are a monolithic bunch of bigots.

If anyone is still curious about this book—either because of my brilliant commentary or despite it—I'd be happy to lend it to you. Let me know.

Loved these songs, Steve …

Thanks for posting.  But I think the link to "Bobbi with an I" is incorrect — you might check it out.

"Rednecks, Queers and Country Music" Playlist

Apologies for not posting this sooner, but here are YouTube links to some of the songs Nadine Hubbs analyzes in the book we're discussing tonight, Rednecks, Queers and Country Music.

Enjoy!

Fuck Aneta Briant (sic)  David Allan Coe

Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other)  Willie Nelson

Keep It Clean, Hot Buns  Foo Fighters (original music video)

Keep It Clean, Hot Buns in KC  Foo Fighters (confrontation with Westboro Baptist protesters)

Bobbi with an I  Phil Vassar

I Love This Bar  Toby Keith

Love Who You Love  Rascal Flatts

We Shall Be Free  Garth Brooks

We Shall Be Free  Garth Brooks and the Muppets (yes, really)

Redneck Woman  Gretchen Wilson

Not Ready to Make Nice  Dixie Chicks

Working 9 to 5  Dolly Parton

Dennis Cooper on Ronald Firbank

During last night's discussion—ably facilitated by Robert Muir—of Ronald Firbank's 1926 novella, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli, several of us tried to identify modern LGBTQ writers Firbank has influenced. Philip Clark helpfully cited Dennis Cooper and pointed us to the author's blog, where Cooper posted the following essay in November 2017.

Wide-ranging, thorough and delightful, including a comparison of Firbank with James Joyce (!), the piece is well worth perusing even if you're not a fan of Firbank's purple prose. Which, honesty compels me to say, none of us was, though most of us were glad for the opportunity to read this work.

That said, I do subscribe to Cooper's assessment:

"Firbank is with doubt a minor writer (whether Joyce, for all his present 'reclame', is a major one, is a question which can only be settled by posterity), but one who, for the most part, achieved precisely what he set out to do."

scattershot or anatomizing?

In his last chapter "Descent into Hades" (i.e. Straight to Hell) William E. Jones not only places Boyd McDonald in the tradition of Cynic philosophers but also his work as a whole (and implicitly Jones' own book too) into Northrop Frye's fourth genre of literary prose—the Anatomy:

The intellectual structure built up from the story makes for violent dislocations in the customary logic of narrative, though the appear-ance of carelessness that results reflects only the carelessness of the reader or his tendency to judge by a novel-centered conception of fiction.

(Jones quoting Frey on page 194 of his True Homosexual Experiences). I regret having been unable to attend the discussion of this book, thereby learning perhaps how well discussants took this point into account.

Meanwhile, however, I want to highlight what any reader of Holleran's review will have noticed (and thanks to Steve for posting it), namely
Charles Hefling's wonderful caricature of the Reverend Boyd,

bringing to mind Sméagol's own moment in his turn to Golem.
(Hobbits are such dirty creatures!)

Holleran reviews "True Homosexual Experiences"

A tip of the hat to Tim Walton for sharing Andrew Holleran's review of William E. Jones' True Homosexual Experiences: Boyd McDonald and Straight to Hell (which we discussed last night) in the Nov. 2016 Gay and Lesbian Review. As Tim notes, "There is nothing particularly revelatory here, but a nice summary with a few observations (and, of course, very well written)."

While most of those present at our discussion were not big fans of Jones' scattershot approach to his subject, I would still recommend the book to anyone curious about STH. Of course, there's no substitute for perusing the actual magazine, which I hope to do myself one day.

Last Exit to Bettyville

Back in May 2016, we discussed George Hodgman's best-selling memoir, Bettyville, in which he alternates descriptions of caring for his aging mother and bittersweet memories of growing up gay in a Midwestern town.  I'm sorry to report that he passed away on July 22 at the age of 60, per this New York Times  obituary, which concludes with one of my favorite passages from Bettyville:

In his book, Mr. Hodgman wrote of why he decided to stay in Paris and care for his mother: He preferred her company to the empty apartment that awaited him back in New York.

"Turns out I am a person who needs people," he wrote.  "I hate that."

In 2016 Paramount Television announced plans to develop a TV show based on the book, starring Shirley MacLaine and Matthew Broderick, but the project never came to fruition.  Alas.

OutWrite DC is almost here! Aug. 2-4

The DC Center's annual OutWrite festival starts in just over two weeks.  If you've been meaning to get some duplicate or unread LGBTQ books off your shelves, please consider donating them to the Center for sale that weekend.

You can drop off your donations during regular working hours anytime before Wed., July 31, at the Center, which is located in the Frank D. Reeves Municipal Building (2000 14th St. NW, Suite 105).  Contact Kestrel Coffee at kestrel@thedccenter.org  if you have any questions.

The Theory That Justified Anti-Gay Crime

Did you know that The New Yorker has an online-only department called "Under Review?"  (Neither did I.)  It currently features Caleb Crain's review of a new book by James Polchin, Indecent Advances: A Hidden History of True Crime and Prejudice before Stonewall. 

It's anything but cheerful, going by Crain's description, but it does sound fascinating.

A second book about "ONE" Magazine

Those of us present for last night's discussion of Masked Voices: Gay Men and Lesbians in Cold War America quibbled with some of author Craig M. Loftin's conclusions, which are surprisingly upbeat about gay life in the McCarthy era.

But we all concurred that Loftin has performed a real service by analyzing hundreds of letters sent by ordinary LGBT folk from across the United States and overseas to ONE Magazine, which existed from 1952 to 1967. However, we were disappointed that Loftin generally excerpts the letters instead of quoting them more fully.

Fear not!  It turns out Loftin has published a companion volume to that study, titled Letters to ONE: Gay and Lesbian Voices from the 1950s and 1960s, that gives those (generally anonymous) women and men their say. Like Masked Voices, it is a bit pricey, but I, for one, am convinced it will be worth it.

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.

D.C. celebrates Walt Whitman's 200th birthday!

Tomorrow (May 23) the Walt Whitman 200 Festival officially kicks off with a wide variety of readings, lectures, broadcasts, art installations and much more.  (A few observances have already occurred.)

Organized by Humanities DC, in cooperation with the Whitman 2019 Consortium, the celebration will last 10 days, culminating on June 3 with readings from the poet's works at the Library of Congress, Folger Shakespeare Library and several D.C. Public Library branches.

The Omitted Walt Whitman in His Bicentennial

With Walt Whitman's bicentennial rapidly approaching--the poet was born on May 31, 1819--I was pleased to see that Michael Ruane had devoted a "Retropolis" column to that topic in the May 20 Washington Post.  Or at least I was until I actually read the piece, which never even alludes to the poet's homosexuality.  The closest he comes is a bland statement that Whitman was "earthy" and wrote about sex and death.

Nor does Ruane reference the moving words, taken from "The Wound Dresser" (an 1865 poem describing the many hours Whitman spent comforting young soldiers wounded in the Civil War), carved into the walls of the Q St. entrance to the Dupont Circle Metro station:

Thus in silence in dreams' projections
Returning, resuming, I thread my way through the hospitals;
The hurt and wounded I pacify with soothing hand,
I sit by the restless all the dark night--some are so young;
Some suffer so much--I recall the experience sweet and sad.

That inscription was placed there in 2007 as a memorial to the thousands of Americans who died during the AIDS crisis.  Elsewhere in the District, you'll find Whitman's words at the Archives-Navy Memorial Metro station, at Freedom Plaza and in Mount Pleasant.

I've written Mr. Ruane deploring these sins of omission, acknowledging that some readers undoubtedly feel that Whitman's work is all that matters, not his personal life.  But I feel sure that the poet would emphatically disagree with that dismissive view.

I'm not holding my breath for a reply, but I'll let you know if I get one.

Bookmen DC turns 20!

I've already e-mailed a readout on our birthday bash at the DC Center last Wednesday night, May 15, but here is a summary for our far-flung readership.

Eighteen guys attended, representing a nice cross-section of our membership: all the way from founding members to a first-time visitor, plus David Mariner, director of the Center.  We enjoyed  fellowship over lots of good food and drink supplied by attendees.

Two founding facilitators, Bill Malone and Greg Farber, were on hand to share memories of our group's early years, after which several other Bookmen spoke about what the group means to them.  I then wrapped things up, after which we enjoyed birthday cake and toasted our 20th anniversary.

The Blade Story

—appears on page 38 of the May 10 issue (hardcopy). Or click for pdf and download or scroll to page 38.

Publicity for our 20th anniversary!

Both MW and the Blade came through with nice write-ups about our 20th anniversary in their latest issues.  They got a few details wrong, but nothing major.

Hope to see many of you on Wednesday at the DC Center! 🥳

"The Lavender Scare" — DC Screening

This Tuesday, May 7, the Abrahamson auditorium
(free, but registration required).

We read the book (4/4/12) and Thomas Mallon's novel Fellow Travelers (and some of us got "into" Gregory Spears' moving opera of the same title). Additionally, we'll be discussing Craig Loftin's Masked Voices this July 3rd.

The Fifties — for those of us who lived through them (and even through our own 50s) there's no escaping them!

Rencontre avec Edouard Louis

Saturday 4th May 2019 — 6:30pm to 9:00pm … L'événement sera en français exclusivement, sans traduction.

New additions to our 2019-2020 reading list

I've already disseminated the winning titles from our most recent round of nominations for our next reading list to you via e-mail, but here they are for more general approbation. As always, Tim Walton enters the discussion schedule for upcoming selections in the right-hand column of the blog.

FICTION

Leading Men. Christopher Castellani. 2019, 368pp, Viking, $18.

A Brief History of Seven Killings. Marlon James. 2014, 704pp, Riverhead Books, $13

Martin Bauman. David Leavitt. 2000, 400pp, Mariner, $9

In September, the Light Changes: The Stories of Andrew Holleran. Andrew Holleran. 1999, 320pp, Hyperion, $20

Such Times. Christopher Coe. 1993, 336pp, Penguin, $15

The Lure. Felice Picano. 1979, 267pp, Bold Strokes Books, $17

Julian: A Novel. Gore Vidal. 1964, 528pp, Vintage, $14

Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli. Ronald Firbank. 1926, 47pp, New Directions, $28

NON-FICTION

Has the Gay Movement Failed? Martin Duberman. 2018, 272pp, U. of Cal Press, $17

The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone. Olivia Laing. 2016, 336pp, Picador, $13

And the Band Played On. Randy Shilts. 1988, 656pp, St. Martin's Griffin, $13

BIOGRAPHY

Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey. Mark Dery. 2018, 512pp, Little Brown, $20

City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara. Brad Gooch. 1993, 576pp, Harper Perennial, $17

MEMOIR

Shortest Way Home. Pete Buttigieg. 2019, 352pp, Liveright, $17
(NOTE: We will be discussing this book on June 5.)

POETRY

The Collected Writings of Joe Brainard. Joe Brainard. 2012, 576pp, Library of America, $19

Illuminations. Arthur Rimbaud (John Ashbery, translator). 1874, 176pp, W.W. Norton, $14

DRAMA

The Inheritance. Matthew Lopez. 2019, 350pp, Faber & Faber, $20

ANTHOLOGIES

Speak My Language, and Other Stories: An Anthology of Gay Fiction. Torsten Hojer, editor. 2015, 592pp, Constable & Robinson, $17

One of the many names David Plante drops...

In the course of making my way through the long middle section of David Plante's Becoming a Londoner, which we'll be discussing this coming Wednesday, I came across a reference that stirred a vague memory.  On pp. 267-268, Plante expresses angst over the apparent end of his friendship with a fellow American writer, also resident in London, named Rachel Ingalls.

Turns out the reason that name rang a faint bell was because Ms. Ingalls died in March at the age of 78, and the obituaries in the New York Times and the Washington Post both referenced the fact that her best-known novel, Mrs. Caliban, bears a striking resemblance to "The Shape of Water," Guillermo Del Toro's Oscar-winning 2017 film.  (Del Toro denied ever having read the book.)

It truly is a small world, after all!

Classic Literature on Goodreads

Following up on Steve's post here's a fun graphic and analysis from the Economist's  December/January issue of 1843

"None Ever Wished It Longer"

The sheer serendipity of search engines (try saying that  three times fast) never ceases to amaze me. In the process of confirming my vague memory that it was Samuel Johnson who observed of John Milton's Paradise Lost that "None ever wished it longer than it is," I came across a wonderful op-ed from the July 30, 1995, New York Times: "'None Ever Wished It Longer': How to Stamp Out Book Inflation."

In it, critic Terry Teachout deplores a trend that has only accelerated over the subsequent 24 years: mounting page counts without concomitantly greater pleasure for the reader.  He theorizes that this is rooted in the belief that "books about books are more important than the books they're about."

But Teachout does praise one book we've discussed: "John Lahr's 302-page Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton (1978), for example, is as good as literary biography gets.  Spoilsports who insist on pointing out that Orton didn't live very long or write very much should take a look at A.N. Wilson's C.S. Lewis: A Biography (1990), in which a man who published 38 books in his lifetime is summed up in 334 admirably pithy pages."

Just to be clear, I do not offer this commentary as any sort of pejorative comment about the many literary biographies we've read over the past 20 years—much less the three of them that have been nominated for our next reading list, one of which I've already read and enjoyed.  (The other two sound good to me, too.)  But I do subscribe to his main point.

See what you think.

Fifth Wednesdays

Almost twenty years ago our group was formed to discuss "gay literature (both fiction and non-fiction)". The term has been understood to include books whose subject matter is gay as well as those whose authors are. And "gay" has been comprehensively understood: certainly to include lesbians (or queers or bisexuals) and easily encompassing transgender or sexually transgressive works or authors.

Ten years ago some members expressed an interest in discussing books outside this remit. Rather than disturb the integrity of the group's original purpose we agreed to meet informally on the "extra" Wednesday of any month of which there were five. And the books we discussed:

      5/29/09  Beloved  by Tony Morrison
    1/3/2010  Life of Pi  by Yann Martel
  3/31/2010  "Mademoiselle O" by Vladimir Nabokov
  7/30/2010  The Way of All Flesh  by Samuel Butler
  3/30/2011  Confederacy of Dunces  by John Kennedy O'Toole
  5/30/2012  Things Fall Apart  by Chinua Achebe

Earlier this year the practice was revived with our discussion of Gogol's short story "The Overcoat". Other opportune dates this year await: May 29, July 30, and October 30. I think our past practice is still a good guide.

From Stage to Page

Dan Chiasson's New Yorker  review of Don't Call Us Dead  highlights the intricate transit of performance poetry from stage to page. Danez Smith broke into national attention when his poem "Dear White America" was featured on the PBS NewsHour (11/16/15). Of course he was already well known in the poetry slam world. In the PBS story there's a link to his Rustbelt 2014 reading of "DWA" but please take a look at it on the page first — page 25 of our DCUD  or online  (though it can be argued this approach is completely ass backwards).

Further readings and performances —
Split This Rock; Vintage Meets; Rotterdam 2018
— offer interesting contrasts and developments.

Finally a long PBS "Book View Now" feature from a year ago (3/9/18).

Newseum Commemorates Stonewall Riots

Our friend Ernie Raskauskas has attended a new exhibition at the Newseum, "Rise Up: Stonewall and the LGBTQ Movement," and highly recommends it.

The show explores key moments of gay rights history, including the 1978 assassination of Harvey Milk, one of the country’s first openly gay elected officials, the AIDS crisis, Rep. Barney Frank’s public coming out in 1987, the efforts for hate crime legislation, the implementation and later repeal of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” and the fight for marriage equality.

“Rise Up” also examines popular culture’s role in influencing and reflecting attitudes about the LGBTQ community through film, television, sports and music, and explores how the gay rights movement harnessed the power of public protest and demonstration to change laws and shatter stereotypes.

A yearlong program series, launched in June 2018, focuses on historic and contemporary topics from “Rise Up” and features journalists, authors, politicians and other newsmakers who have led the fight for equality. The exhibit includes educational resources for students and teachers.

The installation will be displayed through Dec. 31, when the Newseum will vacate its current location. But the exhibition will then travel around the country.

From Page to Stage, Part II

Back in December, I posted an item on behalf of Ken Jost in which he reported that a play based on Andre Gide's The Immoralist  ran on Broadway in 1954.

Guess what?  The couple responsible for that adaptation, Ruth Goetz and Augustus Goetz, had rendered a similar service to Henry James several years earlier by adapting his 1880 novel, Washington Square, into "The Heiress." I saw that play at Arena Stage last month and thoroughly enjoyed it, so I wish I had posted this notice before it closed last week.  Mea culpa!

Bookmen at the Cosmos Club

Our friend Brian Doyle, a Cosmos Club member, was kind enough to invite me to address the LGBT book club he co-founded there a couple of years ago on "Landmarks in LGBT Literature." There were about a dozen of us at today's luncheon, and we had a most enjoyable, wide-ranging discussion. With luck, we might even get a new member or two out of it.

Since I'm tooting my own horn here, I thought some of you might like to see the list of "must-reads" I presented.  As you'll see, every selection comes from the list of 300+ books (which Tim Walton regularly updates on the blog) we have discussed over two decades (our 20th anniversary will be in May), with just two exceptions:

I went with Armistead Maupin's original Tales of the City series (which I have nominated a couple of times for our list with no success) instead of either of his later books which we have read.  And I chose Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On (which we have not read, for some unaccountable reason) instead of The Mayor of Castro Street (which we have).

During my presentation, I sang the praises of Mark Merlis' An Arrow's Flight, still one of the finest novels I've ever read.

Just for the record, I made clear that this is my personal list, and does not necessarily reflect the position of anyone in Bookmen DC.  But I think it is both fairly representative of what we read and a good sampling of LGBTQ literature.

Feedback welcome!

MUST-READS IN LGBTQ LITERATURE

Compiled by Steven Alan Honley (March 2019)

Fiction
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
Michael Cunningham, The Hours
E.M. Forster, Maurice
Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt
Christopher Isherwood, Berlin Diaries
Armistead Maupin, Tales of the City
Mark Merlis, An Arrow's Flight
Mary Renault, The Persian Boy
Colm Tóibín, The Master
Virginia Woolf, Orlando

Non-Fiction
Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
John D'Emilio, Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin
Lillian Faderman, The Gay Revolution: The Story of the Sturggle
David K. Johnson, The Lavender Scare
John Lahr, Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh
Deb Price, Courting Justice: Gay Men and Lesbians v. the Supreme Court
Randy Shilts, And the Band Played On
Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

Poetry
C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems
Philip Clark (ed.), Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS
Vikram Seth, The Golden Gate
Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Plays
Tony Kushner, Angels in America
Tarell Alvin McCraney, Choir Boy
Moisés Kaufman, Gross Indecency: The Three Trials of Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

Useful Reference Works
Christopher Bram, Eminent Outlaws: Gay Writers Who Changed America
Richard Canning, Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read
Tom Cardmone, The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered
Gregory Woods, A Hiostory of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition

Whoa, Nellie's!

Regrettably, I was unable to attend last Wednesday's discussion of Choire Sicha's Very Recent History: An Entirely Factual History of a Year (c. AD 2009) in a Large City—my thanks to Robert Muir for facilitating in my stead. But I did read the book, and while I have no doubt Mr. Sicha can write, I never quite adjusted to the slipperiness of his particular blend of fact and fiction. (I gather that factor also turned off those who were present for the discussion, so I'm in good company.)

Here's an example of that sloppiness which may seem trivial, but I would contend is emblematic. On p. 88 in the paperback edition, John asks Edward where they're going that evening. The reply:

"I'm taking you to the sports bar," Edward said. "It's called Nellie's and it has an outdoor smoking section."

Longtime Washingtonian that I am, this reference naturally puzzled me. Online sleuthing confirmed that we remain the only "large city" with a sports bar called Nellie's. There actually was a Nellie's in New York City as late as 2012, but it was a restaurant in the Village, not a bar. (It appears to have closed since then.)

Since there's no indication that Edward (or any other major character in the book) ever lived in D.C., why does Sicha reference "our" Nellie's here? Especially since the bar was about to close and literally nothing happens to either character during the hour they spend there.

Surely there are plenty of bona fide sports bars in the Big Apple he could have chosen. Or bars with outdoors smoking sections, at least back in 2009. Curious and curiouser...

United in Anger

Book group members might be interested in this insightful article in The Harvard Crimson by staff writer Jensen Davis about gay students coming out and coming of age at Harvard in the 1980s, with little if any support, as the AIDS epidemic spread. Kevin Jennings' recollection at the end is especially poignant:

"What if your roommate, one of your best friends, and your first partner all died from a disease which didn’t even exist as far as you know when you’re a freshman?” says Jennings. “That’s what happened to me. I think of them all the time — whenever I’m at Harvard, whenever I’m at a reunion, I think of these guys who were killed in their very early adult lives by HIV."

[posted on behalf of our friend Ken Jost]

On the eve of the Oscars...

This year's crop of Oscar-nominated films does not feature quite as overt an LGBTQ presence as in some past lists ("Bohemian Rhapsody" and "Green Book" being among the honorable exceptions).  So I invite you to check out the following list of the "15 Queerest Sex Scenes in Film History" to make up some of that gap.

You may also find the following commentary ("What Do We Lose When We Lose Queer Sex Scenes?") of interest.

[posted on behalf of our friend Ken Jost]

NO meeting tonight, Wed., Feb. 20

I've already notified current members of this change via e-mail, but just to close the loop: Because of today's weather, the D.C. government is closed (except for essential services)--which means the DC Center, our venue for tonight's meeting, is also closed.

Fortunately, that won't disrupt our schedule too badly.  We'll simply postpone the set of short stories we were going to discuss tonight in From Macho to Mariposa: New Gay Latino Fiction (Charles Rice-Gonzalez and Charlie Vasquez, editors) until June.

"Carl Van Vechten & The Harlem Renaissance"

For anyone interested enough in Carl Van Vechten to want to find out more, I cannot highly enough recommend Emily Bernard's Carl Van Vechten & The Harlem Renaissance. I was inspired by The Tastemaker and our discussion of it, enough to make my next book Bernard's, which has been sitting on my shelf for a couple of years.

As the title indicates, she focuses entirely on Van Vechten's connection to Black culture, which allows her to go more deeply into issues of race than White. She quotes some materials that White either did not access or did not cite, and frankly, there's very little material that feels repetitive of The Tastemaker ; she's playing a different game. Although it's from Yale UP, it's also eminently readable for an academic book — Bernard emphasizes in her introduction how any time she had the impulse to make an argument, she tried to pull back and let the narrative make that argument for her.  Fascinating insights into Van Vechten's connection to such major Black cultural figures as Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson, and Ethel Waters.

I realize that some people may not want to spend any more time with Van Vechten, based on some of the negative personality traits emphasized by  The Tastemaker, but if you feel like you can stand more CVV in your life, this is the next book to read.

[posted on behalf of our friend Philip Clark]

"Paul's Case": A short story by Willa Cather

A few days ago, I posted an item about the just-released operatic adaptation of Willa Cather's short story, "Paul's Case."  Since many of you were not Bookmen members back in 2011 when we discussed the source material, here is a link to the story itself.  It's only 18 pages long, but packed with a lot of melancholy beauty (my favorite type!).

Virgil Thomson & Gertrude Stein

At our meeting last night and at dinner afterwards, there was some discussion of Four Saints in Three Acts by Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein, which Van Vechten was enthusiastic about.

The work was first performed in 1934. It had an all-black cast, but the opera doesn’t especially call for one. I saw a production in New York, which I’ve now established was in 1996, by the Houston Grand Opera with a racially mixed cast, and I think there have been productions by casts of various racial compositions.

The production I saw was directed by Robert Wilson (of Einstein on the Beach fame). It was initially beautiful to look at – cut outs of sheep that went floating off in the air – but after a while it got rather monotonous. There was not much interesting stage movement, or differentiation of scenes or characters. Snippets I’ve seen of the 1934 production were much more lively. Thomson and Stein provide virtually no guidance about staging.

Generally I find the second Thomson/Stein collaboration, The Mother of Us All, much more satisfying. The central character is Susan B. Anthony, and scenes connect with her life and work, though there is not a plot and there are plenty of Steinian touches (for instance, characters in her life, as opposed to Anthony’s, appear in the work). Susan B.’s final soliloquy is one of the most moving passages in opera that I know, and I read that the New Yorker critic Andrew Porter considered this the greatest American opera. There is a wonderful recording from the Santa Fe Opera with Mignon Dunn.

I saw Virgil Thomson in person at an event sometime in the 1970s at some performance venue in the Berkshires. It was an evening of short compositions and excerpts of his, and an interview with him. Thomson was brought up in Kansas City. The interviewer, rather breathless, asked him what it was like to be an American in Paris in the 1920s. He replied, “It was a lot like Kansas City” – and went on to explain why. 

Another Thomson line (don't know where I heard this): he and a male companion were walking up Fifth Avenue one day, and saw coming towards them two stunningly beautiful women. The women went past, Thomson sighed, and said to his friend, “You know, there are times when I wish I were a lesbian...”

Finally, Florine Stettheimer's portrait of Van Vechten.

She famously designed sets made of cellophane for the first production of Four Saints. Very evocative, I think.

"Paul's Case": The Musical!

Some of you may recall that back in June 2011, at Tim Walton's suggestion, we discussed "Paul's Case," a lovely short story by Willa Cather.  Not long thereafter, Urban Arias, a wonderful contemporary opera company right here in Washington, D.C., commissioned composer Gregory Spears to began work on an operatic treatment of the story, which debuted in April 2013.  (The libretto is by Spears and playwright Kathryn Walat.)

Sadly, I wasn't aware of that project at the time, though I have attended several other operas Urban Arias has presented since then, all no more than 90 minutes long.  And even though I'm definitely not an opera queen (not that's there's anything wrong with being one, of course!), I am an admirer of the company's productions.

"Paul's Case" uses seven singers, accompanied by piano, string quintet, harp and two clarinets; most of the company's productions use similar forces.

The good news is that Urban Arias has recorded "Paul's Case" on a two-CD set, with liner notes by Alex Ross, the New Yorker music critic.  I attended the launch reception this past Sunday and the cast performed several excerpts that definitely whetted my appetite to purchase the recording.

I'll bring a copy with me to tomorrow night's meeting, but here is the info for ordering it (in digital or hard-copy format).

Van Vechten Photos of the Harlem Renaissance

As we prepare for this Wednesday's discussion of Edward White's The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America, I am grateful to Ernie Raskauskas for alerting me to an article in the current issue of The Advocate: "Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance." The bio sketch of van Vechten is a bit anodyne, but the accompanying photographs he took of 10 African-American literati and glitterati--ranging from Alvin Ailey to Zora Neale Hurston--are riveting.  Check them out!

this might be Van Vechten's ring …

but it's cameo, not intaglio

Van Vechten's Ring

In reference to Van Vechten's ring (pg. 70), I have no idea what it looked/looks like but this is the best known copy of Michelangelo's "Leda and the Swan" by Rosso Fiorentino which hangs at the National Gallery in London.

A little literary thread-weaving: James and Ashbery

Although David Plante's Becoming a Londoner  (our newest third-Wednesday anthology selection, which we first dipped into last night) has, overall, underwhelmed me thus far, I would like to highlight a couple of passages here that do resonate with me quite powerfully.

On both occasions when we discussed John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror  collection last year, I commented that while the meaning of his poems eludes me more often than not, I have never doubted there was something significant therein.  Not an original observation, I hasten to add, but at least I'm in good company, per this passage from Plante (pp. 105-106; italics are mine):

John Ashbery has sent us a copy of the kind of publication that proliferates, mimeographed typewritten pages stapled together, this with a large black and white photograph of John on the cover, barefoot and walking near a seaside beach with bathers, the text called
"The New Spirit":

I thought that if I could put it all down, that would be one way. And next the thought came to me that to leave it all out, would be another, and truer way.

Reading, I found that, although I didn't understand what the text was about, I became more and more engaged in the writing, and I was reminded of what John said when he came to supper, that he was trying to write a Jamesian text that left out everything James would have included, character, setting, plot, for the way the Jamesian prose in itself enchants.  Even in reading a James novel it happens that I don't know what is going on but I am sustained by the wonderfully elaborate and always inventive prose.

Plante then quotes Gertrude Stein's discussion of James in her What Is English Literature, which I won't reproduce here but is worth reading.
He then ends with this:

What rises above and floats from John's poetry, it seems to me, is some sense of meaning without my knowing what the meaning is, but the sense engages me enough to make me wonder, that wonder in itself enough to keep me reading.

And speaking/writing of Henry James: My favorite passage so far in Plante's diaries (we've only read the first third of the book) is his description (pp. 132-135) of attending the ceremony where Henry James was added to Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.  (As is his approach throughout the diaries, Plante does not give the date, but it was June 17, 1976.)  In large part because Plante gets out of his own way (and the reader's) and just narrates, it is a lovely tour de force.

Sometimes Less is Just Less

Just got around to looking at Michael LaPointe's trenchant review of Andrew Sean Greer's Less in the June 26 issue of TLS  this year (sorry, behind a paywall). Disparagers of the novel's Pulitzer status will find beaucoup de aid and comfort here. And I have to admit I'm moving toward their camp. I was very interested in "Less's relationships … how they came together and unravelled" but have to admit finally that that's not fully realized in the book (e.g. how abruptly the older lover seems to drop Less after his continued, disappearing affairettes). LaPointe's final paragraph:

Perhaps it’s unfair to hold a novel to the standards of its accolades. But the fact that Less is now being published in the UK with its Pulitzer Prize branded on the cover must invite some resistance. If you’re searching for easily apprehended, low-stakes escapism then this novel might be an appropriate choice, but of a Pulitzer Prize-winner like Less, one desires more.

A link to LaPointe's homepage is in order, in particular to his recent blog post in The New Yorker revisitng James McCourt's 1993 novel Time Remaining (which is unfortunately o.o.p. and expensive.)

"The Men of the Pink Triangle"

Another contribution from our friend Ken Jost:

An acquaintance of mine, Andrew Novak, an associate professor at George Mason who is currently teaching a human rights law course in Germany, posted the following entry on Facebook in regard to the book he is currently reading: The Men with the Pink Triangle: The True, Life-and-Death Story of Homosexuals in the Nazi Death Camps.

Novak describes the book as follows: "The first, and still the best known, testimony by a gay survivor of the Nazi concentration camps translated into English, this harrowing autobiography opened new doors onto the understanding of homosexuality and the Holocaust when it was first published in 1980 by Gay Men's Press. THE MEN WITH THE PINK TRIANGLE has been translated into several languages, with a second edition published in 1994 by Alyson Books. Heger's book also inspired the 1979 play Bent by Martin Sherman which was filmed as the 1997 movie of the same name, directed by Sean Mathias."

The following comment by Novak referring  to Magnus Hirschfeld reminded me that we'd read a book about the latter's work, Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin, back in 2016:

"One of the most fascinating parts of the book for me was actually a note from the translator on page 104. The speaker (a concentration camp survivor recording his story in the 1970s) was calling for homosexual liberation. The translator wrote:

'It is ironic that a man whose testimony makes such a contribution to our history seems to have no knowledge, as late as 1970, of the first phase of the modern homosexual movement led by Magnus Hirschfeld, culminating in the World League for Sexual Reform of the 1920s. The very memory of this had been blotted out by fascism and reaction, and had to be rediscovered by the gay liberation movement of the 1970s.'”

The back story of "The Ox-Bow Incident"

Our friend and colleague Ken Jost has passed the following Hollywood nugget along for general delectation:

The Ox-Bow Incident, Walter Van Tilburg Clark's powerful novel of the American West written in the late 1930s in the shadow of Nazism, has a gay subtext that may be of interest to book group members along with the gay backstory of the film version. The leader of the lynch mob berates his young son as a "sissy" for refusing to participate in the wrongful hangings of the three innocents. The young actor William Eythe was cast as the son in the 1943 film version, which starred Henry Fonda and Harry Morgan. 

According to the IMDB database, Eythe was gay though he was linked to several actresses before forming a long relationship with another young screen actor, Lon McAllister. Eythe died at the young age of 38 in 1957 of acute hepatitis. He also suffered from depression and alcoholism: possible consequences of living a mostly closeted life in Hollywood? By the way, Eythe merits several pages of index entries in one of the book group's titles: William Mann's Behind the Screens. 

A. Less, Job-ified

Less began life as a short story "It's a Summer Day" in The New Yorker (June 19, 2017), which became the third "Italian" chapter in the novel. Pre-dating the short story was an aborted novel that became Less' own rejected fourth novel Swift. This and much more of interest can be found in a concurrent online interview.