"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.

BMDC begins New Year with Fifth Wednesday!!

Happy New Year's Eve, Colleagues!

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

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

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

A Kameny cameo appearance...

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

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

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

Photographs before and after Stonewall

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

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

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

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

Truly Putting the Gay in the Gay Nineties

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

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