City of Night

I'm very grateful to Michael North for sharing these photos related to John Rechy's City of Night, which we'll be discussing next Wednesday, May 1. Michael comments: "At the Library of Congress, I looked up our first edition of City of Night, which has its original dust jacket. I thought the portrait of the 'youngman' John Rechy on the back and some of the descriptions might be of interest. ... They add some interesting color and context to its publication." That they do, Michael--thanks!  

Honoring Lilli Vincenz

On April 17, 1969, the Mattachine Society of Washington held its first picket outside the White House. Today, on the 59th anniversary, the Rainbow History Project will re-enact the picket in honor of Dr. Lilli Vincenz, one of the organizers of the original demonstration (alongside Frank Kameny), who passed away last year at the age of 85. The event will take place on the White House sidewalk in Lafayette Park from 4:20-5:20 p.m., with RHP members carrying replicas of the 1969 signs and handing out literature explaining the purpose (both of the 1969 protest and the re-enactment). Paul Kuntzler, the last surviving participant of the original picket, will participate, carrying a replica of his original poster.

Serendipitously, tonight Bookmen will be discussing the second half of Eric Cervini's The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, whose Chapter 12 ("The Picket") is full of details about Dr. Vincenz and the White House demonstration. (We read the first half back in January.) 

"Having a Coke with You"

In the latest installment in the New York Times' "Close Read" series, critic A.O. Scott explores Frank O'Hara's poem, "Having a Coke with You." As he point out, it is one of some 50 poems inspired by Vincent Warren, a dancer O'Hara met in 1959, during their nearly two-year love affair. Scott works into his commentary comparisons to Shakespeare, Walt Whitman and Rembrandt, to name just a few writers and artists, but my favorite part comes at the very end:

O'Hara "was just 40 when he died, in July 1966, after being hit by a jeep on Fire Island. You can't really have a Coke with him. Except that, somehow, you can, which is why I'm telling you about it."

Visualizing book ban trends

Washington Post reporter and analyst Philip Bump recently put together an article illustrating the post-2020 surge in calls for banning books throughout the United States. Most BookMen are already familiar with this disturbing phenomenon, and I have posted other items about it on this blog. But Bump's graphic depiction of the trend, using data from the American Library Association,  has even more impact.

Check out the QLL

 News Is Out reports on the Queer Liberation Library, which it rightly calls "a new chapter in literary LGBTQ+ access and representation." Established last fall, the QLL is a free digital collection, which currently contains about 850 ebooks and audiobooks. Amber Dierking, one of its co-founders, notes: "We emphasize purchasing books from living authors and addressing demographic imbalances inherent in publishing. Our goal is broad representation, reflecting our community's diversity." 

To borrow items from the QLL, one must first apply for free membership. Members can download the Libby app or request books and audio products on the website. (The website also invites visitors to suggest books for the collection.) Digital licenses cost money, of course, and members can help by donating to the library. "That's the most direct way to support us, allowing us to expand our collection and cover operational costs," says Kieran Hickey, the QLL's other co-founder. "Engaging with public libraries for faster access to materials also supports us indirectly by demonstrating demand for queer materials, aiding their acquisition efforts.

Guess who's coming to dinner?

On March 21, 1924, exactly 100 years ago today, a dinner party helped launch the Harlem Renaissance.   As Veronica Chambers and Michelle May-Curry recount in this fascinating New York Times article, the attendees included several LGBTQ authors whose books we've read or read about over the years: Langston Hughes, Alain Locke and Carl Van Vechten. Though the gathering was barely covered at the time, requiring Chambers and May-Curry to reconstruct that glittering night, they point out that "In the decade after the dinner, the writers who were associated with the Renaissance published more than 40 volumes of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. That body of work transformed a community as well as the landscape of American literature."

Great American Novels

I can still recall when nearly every newspaper and magazine would periodically publish a  list of "Great American Novels." Indeed, if you go back through the years of this blog, you'll find many such compilations. But such roundups seem rarer and rarer these days, so I was interested in The Atlantic's list, totaling 136 novels. I'm pleased to say that I've heard of nearly all of them, though I've read fewer than a quarter of them. But I was surprised that only 12 of the titles are by LGBTQ authors and/or have prominent gay/queer themes (under 10%). That said, James Baldwin is one of the few authors to have two titles on the list: Giovanni's Room (which BookMen has discussed) and Another Country (which we have not gotten to yet). Check it out!

La plus ca Change

A decade ago, Edouard Louis published his first memoir, The End of Eddy, which we discussed in 2017. (We discussed his fourth book, Who Killed My Father, last year.) His latest book, Change: A Novel, has just been published in a translation by John Lambert. Here are reviews from the Washington Post, New York Times and The Guardian, along with an interview of the author in the Los Angeles Review of Books. It sure sounds like a contender for our next reading list!

A hopeful note from Africa

I want to thank Lee Levine very warmly for alerting me to an informative, inspiring Feb. 21 New York Times article titled "The Needle Has Been Moved." It explores the state of queer literature in Africa which, despite persecution of the LGBTQ community in many countries, is booming--especially in Nigeria. I must confess that I only knew one of the authors cited: Chiké Frankie Edozien, a 53-year-old Nigerian, whose 2017 memoir, Lives of Great Men: Living and Loving as an African Gay Man, I read and nominated for our reading list a few years ago. (I may renominate it this fall.) Here are a few other writers cited in the article whose work I want to check out:

Arinze Ifeakandu, Nigerian, 29. His debut short story collection, God's Children Are Little Broken Things, came out last year; it won the Dylan Thomas Prize for young writers and was a Lambda Literary Prize finalist, among other honors.

Abdellah Taïa, Moroccan, 51. The author of nine novels (he has made two films, as well), he is often considered the first openly gay Arab writer and filmmaker.

Damon Galgut, South African, 60. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2003 and 2010, he won it in 2011 for The Promise.

Dueling Oscars

The 10 of us who attended last night's BookMen meeting enjoyed a very lively discussion of Matthew Sturgis' Oscar Wilde: A Life (the original title; the paperback edition goes by a much jauntier handle that somehow makes me think of the "Just Jack" running joke from "Will and Grace": Oscar). The Sturgis bio, published in 2019, has many strengths: clear prose, and skillful use of insights gained from Wilde's correspondence and other primary sources that only recently became available to researchers. (To take just one example, Sturgis cites a grandson of Wilde who has evidence that Constance Wilde died of multiple sclerosis rather than complications from syphilis contracted from her husband, as earlier writers had speculated.) It is an accessible, solid introduction to Wilde's life and work, and on that basis I concur with the other attendees who said they were glad to have read it.

All that said, I don't think Sturgis' account in any way supplants Richard Ellmann's Oscar Wilde, published posthumously in 1988. I read it for the first time right before tackling Sturgis, as a way of establishing a baseline, and it was very useful. Although Ellmann's approach is highly academic and his prose is at times stodgy, he does something Sturgis does not: He is always careful to give the year in which events occur. His indexing is also much better than Sturgis's (when I looked up the reference to Constance Wilde mentioned above, none of the page numbers in the index matched the page that contains that note).  

Another reason I prefer Ellmann is that, after taking a cheap shot at his biography in the introduction, Sturgis proceeds to lift passage after passage from him! Sometimes he troubles himself to alter a few words, but most of the time he simply plunks Ellmann's work into his manuscript without giving any attribution. Not a gentlemanly act, as Wilde himself might remark.

With Ru my heart is laden...

Many of you have probably heard that RuPaul Charles just published a new book, The House of Hidden Meanings. But did you know this is actually his fourth book and third memoir? (I had no idea.) His previous books were Lettin' It All Hang Out (1995), Workin' It: RuPaul's Guide to Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Style (2010), and GuRu (2018).  Here are reviews of the new autobiography in the Washington Post, New York Times and The Daily Beast.

A portrait of RuPaul taken in an Atlanta photo studio in 1979. About half of the memoir is set there.Credit...Tom Hill/WireImage, via Getty Images

James Baldwin's best books

Although he never won any major literary prizes, James Baldwin (who would be turning 100 on Aug. 2 were he still with us) has become and more influential since his death in 1987. His appearance in the most recent episode of Ryan Murphy's "Feud: Capote vs. The Swans" on FX, as portrayed by Chris Chalk, shows us why. If watching that piques your curiosity about his books, check out this New York Times article, "The Best of James Baldwin." As it happens, our merry band has read two of his novels (Giovanni's Room and Just Above My Head), but not the other selections the article recommends. Perhaps that is a gap we can begin to fill in next year's reading list?

Gay love in the 1950s

Lee Levine was kind enough to draw my attention to this review in The Guardian of The Gallopers, a brand-new novel by Jon Ransom. It tells the intertwined stories of three gay men in England from 1953 into the 1980s (roughly the same timespan that the recent TV adaptation of Thomas Mallon's Fellow Travelers depicted). John Self concludes his review thus: "At its best, The Gallopers offers a surprising and quietly devastating account of three men, and their troubled relationship with themselves and the world they live in." I'm sold!

"This Arab Is Queer"

I'm grateful to Octavio Roca for flagging a 2022 book, This Arab Is Queer: An Anthology by LGBTQ+ Arab Writers. It certainly sounds like a promising candidate for our next reading list!

Dorian Gray on stage

As we prepare for next week's discussion of Matthew Sturgis' monumental biography of Oscar Wilde,  I found this TheaterMania review of Sarah Snook's performance in a solo show based on The Picture of Dorian Gray timely indeed. With a flock of video screens floating above her, Snook (whom many of us know as Shiv Roy from "Succession") plays every single character in Wilde's text--from Dorian, to his hedonistic mentor Lord Henry Wotton, and tortured artist Basil Hallward. It sounds amazing; here's hoping it transfers from London to this side of the pond! (This just in: The Economist's reviewer is also wildly enthusiastic about the play.)

Sarah Snook in The Picture of Dorian Gray at the Theatre Royal Haymarket 
(© Marc Brenner)

Some not-so-secret gay D.C. history

Later this year, we'll discuss James Kirchick's Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington. On Dec. 26, Kirchick published an op-ed in the Washington Post that was ostensibly about an eight-second video showing two men (one a U.S. Senate staffer who was immediately fired) having anal sex in a Hart Building hearing room. But that tawdry story was just a convenient hook to market his book. That's his right, of course, but I found his article's thesis less than persuasive: 

"Aside from a handful of far-right outlets, Washington's chattering class has shrugged its shoulders at the scandal's gay aspect, and one gathers that the city would be just as titillated if the copulating couple were straight. Fortunately, the denizens of Gay Washington no longer live in secret, and our exhibitionist former Senate staffer is being judged not from whom he loved, but for how he behaved." Seriously? 

New Year's reading resolutions

If you're anything like me, each January you chide yourself for not reading more books (and better ones) last year, and aspire to do better. This YouGov article should make us BookMen members feel much better about our starting point: "Of 1,500 Americans surveyed, a less-than-ideal 46% finished zero books last year, and 5% read just one." Analyst David Montgomery goes on to parse the findings in terms of literary genres and other variables. (You may also be interested in this Washington Post "Department of Data" article about bookstores around the country; scroll down for that section.)

Reading a mere two books a year puts us in the top half of Americans, but it's still a pretty low bar, admittedly. So how can we up our game? This July 2022 Washington Post Book World article offers 14 tips for getting out of a reading slump, some more helpful than others: "Reread an old favorite. Switch genres. Change formats. Set goals. Start small. Browse the children's shelf. Let luck guide you. Seek professional help (not what you think!). Join a book club (done!). Abandon books that don't spark joy (see the next paragraph). Do something completely different. Think about what you want to get out of a book. Force it. Have faith."

James Joyce reportedly observed, "Life is too short to read bad books." So how do you decide when to cut your losses and move on to something better? This Jan. 2 Washington Post Book World article is all over the map in terms of strategies, ranging from giving a book 50 pages to wow you (or, if you're older than that, subtracting your age from 100 to set the limit) to this: "Whenever I get bored or annoyed by an authorial tic, I immediately stop." For what it's worth, I say: Whatever your own approach, own it. And remember: You can always return to a book later in life, when it might just be perfect for you.

Happy MLK Day!

On this Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, which falls precisely on what would have been his 95th birthday, I want to share a few quotes connected to this great American that I find resonate particularly strongly with the LGBTQ community.

In his 1963 "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Dr. King famously declared: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial 'outside agitator' idea. Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds."

From The Deviant's War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America, Eric Cervini's biography of Frank Kameny--which we'll begin discussing this Wednesday--comes this quote: In June 1963, "the men's magazine Nugget published an entire profile, "The Gay Crusader," on Randolfe Wicker and his crusade against the 'corporate image' of the homophile movement. 'All embattled minority groups must eventually have a spokesman; the Negroes have Martin Luther King. Now, at long last, the homosexuals have Randolfe Wicker.'"

Finally, as I noted in an October 2023 posting here, we read John D'Emilio's Lost Prophet: The Life and Times of Bayard Rustin back in 2006. I had not yet seen "Rustin," the biopic starring Colman Domingo in the title role, directed by George Wolfe, but I have since streamed it on Netflix and highly recommend it. Rustin's relationship with Dr. King (portrayed by Aml Ameen) is a highlight, which a Jan. 8 Washington Post op-ed explores in depth.

Rest in power, Martin.

Two Queer tidbits

I am most grateful to Lee Levine for informing me that William S. Burroughs' 1985 novel Queer, which we discussed on Jan. 3, has been filmed and is now in post-production. None other than Daniel Craig (yes, the former James Bond) plays Lee, and Drew Starkey plays Allerton; Luka Guadagnino (who directed "Call Me by Your Name") directs. Leslie Manville, Jason Schwartzman and Henry Zaga are also in the cast. No word yet on a release date, but hopefully soon!

During that same discussion, Denton Welch's name came up as a major influence on Burroughs. Robert Muir kindly shares the following bio of the author, courtesy of Wikipedia:

"William S. Burroughs cited Welch as the writer who most influenced his own work, and dedicated his 1983 novel The Place of Dead Roads to him. In 1951 the English composer Howard Ferguson set five of Welch's poems (included in A Last Sheaf) as a song-cycle for voice and piano, titled "Discovery." Others who have named Welch as an influence include filmmaker John Waters, artist Barbara Hanrahan and the writers Beryl Bainbridge and Barbara Pym."

Prayers in Cold Blood

Nearly a decade ago now, we discussed Truman Capote's controversial final book, Answered Prayers. It turns out that there may be a connection between that and his earlier success, In Cold Blood, which we'll discuss later this year. A December 2012 Vanity Fair article that was recently revisited in the magazine's "Cocktail Hour" newsletter for subscribers, "Capote's Swan Dive," explores that link in the course of documenting the fallout from "La Cote Basque 1965," the notorious story in the November 1975 Esquire that would later appear as a chapter in Answered Prayers. It cost Capote nearly all his social contacts, effectively ended his career and--writer Sam Kashner posits--drove him ever deeper into addiction to the drugs and alcohol that would cut his life short less than a decade later. 

Kashner says: "His impoverished past, Truman later confided, was borrowed from the life story of Perry Smith, the dark-haired, dark-eyed murderer Truman came to know intimately while writing In Cold Blood. In a sense, P.B. Jones [the literary hustler and bisexual prostitute who attends a scandalous society luncheon in "La Cote Basque 1965"] is both Truman and Perry, a figure who haunted Truman's last decade and whose execution by hanging--which Truman witnessed--would devastate him emotionally." 

You may not find Kashner's framing persuasive, but his profile of Capote is fascinating in its own right.