I’ve spent almost 10 years publishing in the gay and lesbian press. Like any community, there are cold or crass or self-serving members of the gay literary world. I’ve heard tell of some and met a few others. But my great fortune has been that nearly everyone I have been in close contact with has been incredibly generous with their time, their knowledge, and their energy.

So let this edition of the Hidden History reading roundup serve as a token of appreciation to four of my favorite members of that part of my life. The authors and editors of these books are not only skilled at their craft, but they’re also great people.They’re the sorts who make everything fun and worthwhile. Thanks, folks!

Christopher Bram, The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes (2000)

A grand, sprawling epic of a novel, from a gay novelist whose books (Hold Tight; Almost History; Father of Frankenstein) have frequently been informed by more than just a dash of historical background. The Notorious Dr. August follows its narrator and title character, Augustus Fitzwilliam Boyd, through his career as a “spiritual pianist” and possible clairvoyant, and his love for Isaac Kemp, a former slave he first met during the Civil War. His life takes him across continents and over 50 years, from the battlefields of the Civil War, through Europe and into Turkey, and on back to the United States and a fiery conclusion at Coney Island. Complicated issues of race and sexuality and religion are grounded in the intricacies of messy human emotion, as “Dr. August,” Isaac, and Isaac’s wife Alice (a white governess) negotiate tricky alliances and truces over the decades of their journey. Top-drawer historical fiction, the kind that isn’t showing off its research, but instead incorporates the research into providing a setting and backdrop for the stuff of real human relationships. “Dr. August” also makes for one of the best narrators in all of gay fiction, with an assured voice both earnest and smart-aleck, the memoirs of a man with the chutzpah to tell the young man to whom he is dictating, “Write it all down, my recording angel, every word. Later we can delete and shape and lie.”

If you enjoy The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes, try Bram’s Almost History, a more modern multi-decade epic, or Exiles in America, which uses recent events to help frame another story of tangled lives and loves.

Daniel Curzon, Dropping Names: The Delicious Memoirs of Daniel Curzon (2004)

This book is unique.While the basic form of these memoirs was written in 1986, Daniel Curzon—author of Something You Do in the Dark (1971), the first gay protest novel—didn’t publish them until 2004. Instead of using the intervening time to edit the entries and ‘make nice,’ Curzon left them “pretty much as they were when I first wrote them.” The result is a hilarious, if scathing, assessment of dozens of literary and celebrity figures from the gay liberation era. Tennessee Williams (“If you don’t want people to stare at you, you shouldn’t dress like an oversized dead bear!”), Joyce Carol Oates (“an old fart in a young body”), Edmund White’s novels (“airless mansions of Art”): all of these and many more receive the razor edge of Curzon’s observations. What keeps the book level is that Curzon doesn’t hide or condone his own mistakes and prickliness; his self-criticism is as tough as his criticism of others. There are also tremendously affecting memories of fellow writers he liked very much, including Richard Hall, James Broughton, and Roger Austen.A quirky, endlessly readable quasi-autobiography of a gay writer who has, for better or worse, “kissed very little ass along the way.”

If you like Dropping Names, try: well, like I said, it’s unique; there’s really nothing like it that I’m aware of. Curzon’s fiction and plays are available through Amazon in reprinted editions; of those, I particularly recommend The World Can Break Your Heart (1984).

Lisa C. Moore, publisher and editor, In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology (2008; originally edited by Joseph Beam, 1986) and Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (originally edited by Essex Hemphill, 1991)

Lisa C. Moore, publisher of the black lesbian and gay Redbone Press, undertook the massive editorial task of reissuing these two seminal anthologies of black gay male writing. Both Beam and Hemphill died from AIDS, but these collections serve as living testament to their passion and community spirit. Nearly every important black gay writer of the 1970s and 1980s is collected here: Melvin Dixon, Reginald Shepherd, Craig G. Harris, Donald W. Woods, Samuel Delany, Assotto Saint, Adrian Stanford, David Frechette, Marlon Riggs, Ron Simmons. These books function as a roll call of poets, fiction writers, essayists, and filmmakers who helped to redefine what it meant to be a black, gay man. Race relations, masculinity and femininity, black gay history, the creation of community, the achievement of individual authenticity: all of these major themes wind throughout the writing, creating a kaleidoscope of the issues confronting black gay men during the post-Stonewall decades and up to the present day.

If you enjoy In the Life and Brother to Brother, try: any of the collections of writing by the contributors to those books. Other anthologies worth reading from the era (and that share contributors) include Sojourner: Black Gay Voices in the Age of AIDS (ed. B.Michael Hunter) or The Road Before Us and Here to Dare (ed. Assotto Saint; exclusively poetry). Redbone Press has also published a variety of book of interest to black lesbians and gay men.

Ian Young, Out in Paperback: A Visual History of Gay Pulps (2007)

I wouldn’t say that Ian Young saved my life, but the two poetry anthologies he edited, The Male Muse (1973) and The Son of the Male Muse (1983), were a tremendous source of strength to me when I was in high school. Once copies found their way into my hands, I carried them around everywhere, loving both the poems themselves and the sense of a gay literary history that they gave me.

Speaking of gay literary history, Out in Paperback is top-notch. A slim, heavily illustrated extended essay that talks of the “gay paperback explosion” of the 1950s through the 1980s, Out in Paperback also shows how the themes, motifs, and taglines on the book covers reflect the changing perceptions of gay life and community throughout the gay liberation era and the decades leading up to it. A fascinating and beautiful mini-history lesson.

If you enjoy Out in Paperback, try: Michael Bronski’s Pulp Friction, which excerpts some of the pulp novels Young depicts here and provides further historical background and analysis. Another collection of essays about gay paperbacks, The Golden Age of Gay Fiction, is tentatively scheduled for a 2009 release from MLR Press. And everyone should read Ian Young’s “gay psychohistory,” The Stonewall Experiment.

Have a suggestion for a Hidden History topic? Love, hate, agree, or disagree with something I wrote? Just want to talk? Feel free to direct e-mail to philipclark@hotmail.com.

I don’t have a long history with Oscar Wilde—I only first went in 2005, when I was up in New York City for a GLBT literary awards presentation—but I have tried to go each time I’m in the Village. I’ve found little gems there, including issues of a 1970s gay poetry magazine, Mouth of the Dragon, and a copy of Essex Hemphill’s Conditions chapbook, but my desire to go is only partly spurred by book hunting.

More specifically, it is a sense of place and community that has caused me to return so often to Oscar Wilde. It is the same sense of place and community that founder Craig Rodwell (1940-1993) was trying to engender when the store opened in 1967.

Rodwell had been one of Harvey Milk’s early, pre-fame boyfriends—historian Martin Duberman suggests that Rodwell’s founding of Oscar Wilde served as inspiration for Milk’s opening the San Francisco camera shop from which he ran his successful political campaigns. He then survived a suicide attempt before involving himself with gay activism in New York City through work with the New York Mattachine Society.

Wanting to find new office space for Mattachine, Rodwell hit on the idea of combining an office with a bookstore. This would create more accessible space for gay community members who might want to join Mattachine. Unable to draw others into his plan, he would work the summers of 1966 and 1967 on Fire Island, squirreling away what funds he could to assist in opening a bookstore on his own. One thousand dollars later, he rented a storefront on Mercer Street, purchased the few gay and lesbian titles then available that fit his ideal for the store, and opened up for business over Thanksgiving weekend in 1967.

With a stock of roughly 25 titles, Oscar Wilde was miniscule compared to later stores such as Washington D.C.’s Lambda Rising, Philadelphia’s Giovanni’s Room, or the multi-city A Different Light. While there were more than 25 gay and lesbian books available, many didn’t support Rodwell’s plan. He wanted the store to reflect a more consciously literary vision of gay life, and thus turned down stocking the era’s gay and lesbian pulp novels. Additionally, anything pornographic or anything that hinted of intergenerational sex was out. This led to confrontation with those who thought his anti-pornography stand was indicative of a sex-negative attitude, but Rodwell would continue his highly personal vision of what Oscar Wilde Bookshop should be for the rest of his time owning the store.

Almost immediately upon opening, Rodwell was forced to deal with death threats, anti-gay graffiti and smashed store windows, homophobic phone calls, and an angry landlord who had been told he was renting space to a bookstore without the nature of that bookstore being revealed. Although the landlord was eventually appeased by the clean-cut nature of most of the store’s customers, these issues were indicative of the overall environment, even in a neighborhood with the bohemian reputation of the West Village. This was still three years before Stonewall and the first New York City gay pride march and six years before Oscar Wilde would relocate to the burgeoning gay mecca of Christopher Street. Operating the store was potentially dangerous for Rodwell, and similar to young gays and lesbians now who might be nervous about being seen in a gay bar or club, some potential customers were scared to enter. The costs of being known as gay or lesbian, even in an urban environment, could be very high.

The store was met enthusiastically, though, by some in the developing gay press. Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke, lovers who had relocated from Washington D.C. to New York City and traded picketing in front of the White House for writing a gay-positive column, “The Homosexual Citizen,” in Al Goldstein’s hetero-oriented Screw magazine, praised Rodwell’s daring. A whole column in 1969, “Stalls of Balls,” promoted the store, as Nichols and Clarke noted, “It takes guts to open a business and base one’s cash and credit on books to be sold for public enlightenment about our ‘shadowy,’ ‘furtive,’ and ‘much-feared’ group.”

From these beginnings, Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop became a fixture of life in the heart of gay Greenwich Village, serving, in journalism historian Rodger Streitmatter’s words, as “an unofficial community center.” It survived for 41 years and through four changes of ownership, the longest continuous run by any gay bookstore in the United States, before sharply declining sales forced its current owner, Kim Brinster, to announce the store’s imminent demise. Some might attribute this decline to the current state of the economy, but Oscar Wilde had undergone a previous closure scare in 2003, before Deacon Maccubbin, owner of D.C.’s Lambda Rising, stepped in to save it temporarily.

Instead, this has been a slow development. Although some would look at it positively, as evidence that, with increasing mainstream acceptance, GLBT people no longer need a bookstore to function as the heart of their community, I believe such a view to be dangerously short-sighted. The death of the gay bookstore—Los Angeles’s outpost of A Different Light is also closing this spring—herald two very dark trends. First, many readers buy from generic Internet retailers like Amazon, choking independent bookstores. Second, while mainstream culture may now acknowledge a gay presence, and most mainstream bookstores may now have a gay section, mainstream culture does not know or care about the health or history of the gay community.

The co-opting of the gay community by market forces could (and should) be an entire separate column, but suffice to say that as there are fewer outlets for a range of GLBT books, fewer diverse and vital voices are going to be heard. Large publishers are unwilling to risk presenting any but the safest gay and lesbian topics (and few enough of those), and independent gay presses, many of which have attempted to nurture outsider voices, will find it harder and harder to operate without gay-specific sales venues. Reader by reader lost, Internet sale by Internet sale made, we destroy our culture.

None of this was specifically on my mind that day in February as my friend and I browsed Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop for what I knew would be the final time. The tiny store was packed with buyers drawn by news that it would soon close; I could not help but think that if only these readers had patronized Oscar Wilde while it was a going concern, there would have been no need for closure.

I picked up a copy of Tennessee Williams’ Collected Poems, and we made our way to the counter. We bantered a bit with two pleasant clerks, and when I turned down a paper “Oscar Wilde Bookshop” bag for my purchase, my friend joked, “You should take one; they’ll be collector’s items now.”

Steeling ourselves for the cold, we exited the store, and it was gone.

Thanks to Chris Bram for taking the photo; I’m glad my final visit was with you. Some research for this column comes from Stonewall by Martin Duberman and Unspeakable: The Rise of the Gay and Lesbian Press in Americaby Rodger Streitmatter.

Have a suggestion for a Hidden History topic? Love, hate, agree, or disagree with something I wrote? Just want to talk? Feel free to direct e-mail to philipclark@hotmail.com.

It’s not often that I get to address breaking news through the medium of Hidden History. Much more frequently, the stories I am covering broke decades ago—that is, if they broke at all.

It is refreshing, then, to be able to talk about events where the darker days of being gay and the more hopeful present collide. Such is the case with this week’s unanimous decision by the Historic Preservation Review Board to declare the residence of Dr. Franklin Kameny, at 5020 Cathedral Avenue NW, a D.C. Historic Landmark. This makes the house eligible to be named to the National Register of Historic Places by the National Park Service, a process that should take 6-12 months to complete and is by no means a certain success.

What is certain, though, is the deep significance of both Dr. Kameny, now 83, and his home on Cathedral Avenue to the continuing history of the gay equality movement. Recognition of Kameny’s home as an historic landmark would be another step in affording the gay rights movement the same respect as other struggles for civil rights in the United States.

Nobody needs a potted biography of Dr. Kameny from me; Craig Kaczorowski covers him adequately in the online GLBTQ encyclopedia and both the local Rainbow History Project’s website and the official nomination forms for the Kameny house as a D.C. historic landmark contain more detailed information. But even a simple list of some of Kameny’s major accomplishments is stunning:

• A Harvard-trained astronomer and former Georgetown professor, Kameny was fired from his job with the United States Army Map Service in 1957 because of his sexuality. Although his own legal battle to retain his government job failed, Kameny set in motion the process of challenges that ultimately led to the U.S. Civil Service Commission changing its discriminatory employment laws in 1975.

• Within months of losing his court battle, as the Supreme Court refused to hear his case in 1961, Dr. Kameny and his friend, the late Jack Nichols, founded the Mattachine Society of Washington D.C. This first official Washington D.C. gay rights organization is, as Dr. Kameny proudly notes, still officially active today.

• At Jack Nichols’ urging, Kameny used the Mattachine Society banner to help organize the first gay protests in front of the White House in 1965. With such activists as Lilli Vincenz (another longtime member of the local GLBT community who continues her work today), he carried signs protesting both the civil service discrimination Kameny and others had suffered and overall gay and lesbian civil rights concerns.

• Kameny successfully defended the Mattachine Society in front of a congressional committee in 1963, defeating a bill that would have removed Mattachine’s nonprofit fundraising status.

• Perhaps showing even more gusto, he faced down the FBI when its agents demanded that he stop sending the Mattachine’s newsletter, The Gazette, to FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. Even upon realizing that Hoover’s FBI was tracking and keeping files on Mattachine and its members, Kameny would not back off. Hoover was sent every issue until he passed away in 1972.

• He co-founded or was on the boards of the East Coast Homophile Organizations (ECHO) collective, the North American Conference of Homophile Organizations (NACHO), National Gay Task Force, the Gay Rights National Lobby, and the D.C. Human Rights Commission.

• In 1971, Kameny became the first openly gay candidate to run for Congress when he attempted to secure Washington D.C.’s House of Representatives seat (the non-voting role currently held by Eleanor Holmes Norton). In their 1972 memoir, I Have More Fun with You Than Anybody, Jack Nichols and Lige Clarke recalled the heady days of the campaign, when The Washington Post, The Washington Daily News, and The Sunday Star praised Kameny’s vision. They wrote of how “Kameny…dared to do the impossible, and his grand effort and that of his campaigners has brought all of us closer to the possible.”

• Not content merely to run a political campaign in 1971, Kameny also appeared at the national conference of the American Psychiatric Association, attacking psychiatrists’ callous treatment of gays and lesbians and the listing of homosexuality as a mental disorder. Owing to the efforts of Kameny and other activists, the APA removed the official “mental disorder” stigma from gays and lesbians in 1973.

• His efforts helped lead to the repeal of Washington D.C.’s sodomy laws, and he wrote the bill that ultimately had those laws overturned.

• And beyond the political maneuvers, the legal wars, and the founding of gay rights organizations, Kameny worked tirelessly on much more basic and critical outreach to help his fellow gays and lesbians. Nichols and Clarke recalled that:

Distressed men and women, the guilt-ridden, those fearful of job loss, young people and Armed Forces personnel had been able to call him late at night and even into the early hours of the morning to get precise, detailed instructions and advice. He’d tracked down blackmailers, fought bigoted employers and the government, and relieve hundred of silly guilts…not only was he “eloquent and erudite” as the Post had put it, but a kind and thoughtful gentleman as well.

Throughout these landmark events and throughout the formation and continuation of the gay civil rights movement, Kameny used 5020 Cathedral Avenue as his base of operations. When Dr. Kameny was receiving phone calls from gays and lesbians in distress, as outlined by Nichols and Clarke, he was fielding them at 5020 Cathedral Avenue. From printing flyers and press releases to planning outreach and lobbying, much organization of the Mattachine Society of Washington D.C. and its activities took place at 5020 Cathedral Avenue. And although his campaign headquarters were downtown, when Kameny took the historic step of running for Congress as an openly gay man, he was living and working out of 5020 Cathedral Avenue. It is an address that must be revered by GLBT people as a foundational site, one that ranges across more than a generation of militant gay activism and advancement.

As such, it should not be a difficult call to make the Kameny Residence a historic landmark, both in D.C. and nationally. It fulfills the requirements that an individual who lived in it was of extraordinary significance and that the site itself have deep cultural importance. But it has not
been a quick or easy process to get the D.C. designation: Washington’s Rainbow History Project, led by chairman Mark Meinke, began to gather research and organize the Kameny House’s nomination in 2003; Dr. Kameny himself helped to vet the supporting documents for historical accuracy, and Rainbow History then submitted the nomination in 2006. It took 6 years of work to get to the present day. Nor is the house guaranteed to receive national recognition. There are no GLBT sites on the National Register of Historic Places and only the Stonewall Inn has qualified for the even more exclusive list of National Historic Landmarks.

It is crucial, though, that more GLBT sites receive this kind of attention. All too often, in the absence of such recognition, sites of historic significance to GLBT culture disappear. On his blog Visible Past, dedicated to “remembering and preserving the historic sites of queer America,” Meinke notes how:

Queer physical history is largely urban. As such it often disappears beneath developers bulldozers. In Washington, DC an entire community of entertainment sites, dating from 1970, fell to bulldozers building a new baseball stadium in 2006. In Los Angeles, the two offices of the Mattachine have been replaced by parking and a newer office building.

Meinke also identifies National Park Service rules regarding the age of historic sites as a major reason why more GLBT-related locations are not included; unless the events that contribute to a site’s significance are at least 50 years old, it must pass even more rigorous scrutiny to achieve official historic status.

One area where the National Park Service has made some notable exceptions to the 50-year rule is in designating places significant to the African American civil rights movement. Such sites as the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, the site of a horrific bombing in 1963; the Dr. Martin Luther King Historic District, including his birth place and grave, in Atlanta; and the Brown Chapel A.M.E. Church in Selma, the headquarters of the Selma Voting Rights Movement, are just a few of the examples of sites of crucial importance to more recent United States history that have received official status as National Historic Landmarks.

Declaring sites such as the Kameny Residence national landmarks would therefore be a huge step for this nation. In adding them to our national rolls, the gay equality movement would be recognized as the legitimate battle for civil rights that it is. Furthermore, such a move will provide future generations of GLBT people a necessary knowledge of their past. Without a history to look back and reflect on, we have no future to look forward to.

Many thanks to Patsy Lynch for permission to reprint her photograph of Dr. Kameny with this column; click on the link to the Kameny Residence nomination to see her photograph of the house and visit her website to see more of her photography. Thanks, too, to Mark Meinke for allowing me to interview him in conjunction with this article. All opinions and any mistakes are my own.

Have a suggestion for a Hidden History topic? Love, hate, agree, or disagree with something I wrote? Just want to talk? Feel free to direct e-mail to philipclark@hotmail.com.

Beginning this week, Hidden History will appear on Mondays at noon, exploring the nooks and crannies of gay and lesbian history. Because I have had difficulty maintaining a weekly pace and I do not want the column to be rushed and of poor quality, Hidden History will now run biweekly.

It was the Monday before inauguration, and I had just finishing viewing the Manifest Hope:DC exhibit on M St. in Georgetown. To get to the gallery, I had walked from Rosslyn across Key Bridge, sliding past masses of tourists. At the show, more crowds thronged through the two cavernous floors of paintings, prints, sculptures, and mixed media, so many people that it took me over a half-hour of browsing the Obama-filled, change-themed art to find the friends I was meeting.

By the time I was ready to leave, eschewing the winding merchandise line that my friends couldn’t resist, I had had enough of jostling and noise. I love being around people, but after any mob scene like that, I need a chance at calm, to collect my thoughts in private. Running my mind through what places I could go in Georgetown for quiet, I remembered a cozy, two-floor used bookshop on P St. off of Wisconsin Avenue. With dust motes streaming through the windows and its books filed and piled onto wooden shelves, The Lantern placidly continues its operations, staffed by volunteers associated with Bryn Mawr College. It was there I retreated after the art show.

It was also there, up the narrow stairs and in a bookcase around the corner, amid straight rows of anthologies, that I found five books I knew from high school, the time when I was coming out as gay. The mid-nineties: not long ago, but a quantum leap in gay years, a time when movies with gay characters were almost entirely small-release and Ellen, Will, and other glbt figures had yet to appear on TV. These books—some of which I read, some of which I only skimmed or knew on sight—were where I discovered a history, realized a literature, saw reflections of the erotic, and made a choice: yes, I would be a part of this.

I.

The red spine of Edmund White’s short story collection Skinned Alive caught my eye first. Even though I own a copy of it, I still took it off the shelf. Inside, on the front endpaper, was an inscription:

Christmas Eve ‘95
To John –

Our 20th Christmas Eve together, it’s a wonderful life!

Love,
Rick

Of course, I wondered why the book was for sale at The Lantern. Had this long relationship finally foundered and run its course? Or perhaps more likely, had either John or Rick died, the other finding it too painful to keep this memento of a happier time? Maybe both had passed, the book with its note of love going unnoticed by whichever family member broke down their possessions, making the lonely choice of what should stay and what must go.

Whatever the reason, some change in Rick and John’s fortunes caused this book to fall into my hands. It was with a sense of honor that I read Rick’s message to his beloved. They had come together in the middle of the 1970s, the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS zone of gay sexual liberation. As they reached their 20th anniversary, I was fifteen, making my way into the stacks in Arlington, VA.’s Central Library, looking for signs of the lives of men like me. That’s where I first read Edmund White and first saw Skinned Alive.

II. and III.

Three shelves above, the thick and distinct orange spines of two Penguin anthologies drew my attention: The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories, edited by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell, and The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing, which Mitchell had edited alone.

David Leavitt was among the first gay writers I turned to, in part because he was the easiest to find. In the early 1980s, while still a student at Yale, he had published short stories in The New Yorker and, with his tales of suburban gay life, become a gay author acceptable to the literary establishment. At the time, I didn’t know this history, but I knew that his novels The Lost Language of Cranes and Equal Affections and short story collections like Family Dancing and A Place I’ve Never Been were readily available in the library. Leavitt has been derided in the gay literary community in part because of his almost-exclusive focus on the suburban middle class, but as a suburban teenager, that also made his work more accessible to me. His novels in particular can be bland, but it was a blandness of landscape that I lived in and understood.

Leavitt and Mitchell were partners—they’ve published two books together about their life in Italy—which made their collaboration on The Penguin Book of Gay Short Stories logical. It was Mitchell’s own anthology of International Gay Writing that made the most impression on me when I was younger, though. I knew of a number of American and British writers by the time I saw it, but finding names like Yukio Mishima and André Gide and Reinaldo Arenas opened up to me the lives of gay men living, literally, worlds away.

Somewhere, I heard that Leavitt and Mitchell had broken up, although I do not know whether that is true. In The Lantern, their anthologies are separated by a nondescript book in purple covers. I rearrange the volumes so that the two stand side by side. Call
me sentimental, but I prefer those stories where the men end up together.

IV.

Perhaps appropriate to its subject, the John Preston-edited Flesh and the Word lurked in the far bottom corner of the case. Preston was famous in gay sexual communities as a dominant leather top, the author of the renowned Mr. Benson, and in gay literary communities as a prolific writer and editor of everything from ‘serious’ essay collections to the kind of pornography that gets stopped at the borders. A collection of erotic gay short stories and novel excerpts by various authors, Flesh and the Word was turning into a series at the time of Preston’s death from AIDS in 1994. He died the same month that I came out to my parents, and it couldn’t have been long afterward that I first saw his name, on the cover of this very anthology.

My parents were relatively tolerant of my reading habits. They knew, I think, that I was in the process of figuring out who I was, and that for me, reading was a large part of that process. But there was no way I would be bringing home Flesh and the Word. It was there, though, among the short story collections along one wall of Central Library. I remember strolling casually into the stacks on multiple occasions, finding the book, standing to read for 10 or 15 minutes at a time, my heart pounding for more than one reason. To a casual observer, I was just a serious and studious boy, and I kept the book’s covers firmly facing the floor to avoid upsetting that impression.

There were all sorts of writers whose names I was encountering for the first time, from Aaron Travis to Alan Hollinghurst to Anne Rice publishing under various odd pseudonyms. I remember that the piece of writing that turned me on the most, though, was not originally intended for publication. Preston had access to letters that Samuel Steward—a writer and tattoo artist who published under the penname “Phil Andros” (“Lover of Men”)—had sent to gay photographer George Platt Lynes in the 1950s. In one of them, Steward describes a boyhood encounter where he tongue-bathed and was fucked in a barn by an older classmate. I remember mentally trying on both roles, and…no, I won’t say which I wanted more to be…but I remember the sly and teasing final line of Steward’s letter, vividly enough that, even after this many years, standing in The Lantern, I do not need to open the book: “So is there any wonder I’ve always liked the smell of hay and leather?”

V.

I almost turn away from the shelves before I see it: Allan Barnett’s The Body and Its Dangers.

Allen Barnett lived long enough to see his book win acclaim as a major work of gay fiction, including winning the 1990 Lambda Literary Award and a special mention from the PEN/Hemingway award committee. He did not live long enough to write any more stories.

I grew up as part of the first generation of gay youth with relatively full and accurate health information about HIV and AIDS. At the same time I was beginning to learn, in fits and starts, what would be necessary to stay safe when I began having sex, the gay world was still being ravaged by, to quote the poet Michael Lynch, “these waves of dying friends.” This is the world of the characters in The Body and Its Dangers.

In health classes, reports in the paper, and TV news accounts, AIDS took on two guises, either as frightening menace or cold statistics. Hearing of tens or hundreds of thousands dead is impressive, but too abstract to be anything but academic. Knowing that sex could open the door to death makes the disease personal, but paralyzing: how does one exist and interact and love with such a present curse?

Books by David Feinberg and John Weir and Allen Barnett, books like The Body and Its Dangers, helped me to understand the gravity of AIDS in an extremely personal way, reading of characters who had to confront the way the disease had changed their lives. But they also pointed to a gay community that had struggled yet cohered in the years since an enemy, seemingly overwhelming in its complexity, had risen and caused such destruction. In showing their characters discovering a path even in the face of such devastating loss, these books were somehow strengthening to me as a reader.

Actually, I’m a bit worried about change. I know that for the gay kids growing up and coming out now, there is a vast array of places from which to draw strength: gay characters in movies and on TV, openly gay politicians and actors and singers, the Internet providing a wealth of resources with a few searches and clicks. But the place of books in all our lives, including those of teenagers, seems under assault. Reading’s meditative effects, the attention it demands, the opportunity to contemplate that it provides: this activity and its attendant benefits are diminishing. Places like The Lantern, quiet spaces for finding and learning, are going, too, closing down and not being replaced.

I don’t buy any of the books, preferring to return them to the shelves. This is something I know: there is another boy who needs them.

Have a suggestion for a Hidden History topic? Love, hate, agree, or disagree with something I wrote? Just want to talk? Feel free to direct e-mail to philipclark@hotmail.com.

Since the column began, my favorite part of writing it is undoubtedly the reactions from readers. I highly value the comments, the questions, and the additional facts readers provide me. If someone takes the time out of their life to write to me to suggest an idea to pursue, offer a lead toward more information, or push me to reconsider a point I’ve made, I cannot help but be grateful.

In short, there are a ton of things you could be doing with your time, and if reading this column and engaging with me is one of the things you’re choosing to do, my sincerest thanks. I’ll keep trying to fill in the gaps in our history each Monday afternoon throughout the coming year.

Below the fold, you’ll find information that has come to light since some of the columns were published, often because of reader comments. From a brand-new biography of a gay pioneer to the sticky question of what Harvey Milk really said about religion, it’s all available when you click “Read more…” below.

All best wishes for 2009,

Philip Clark

Pornographers and Poets: David Trinidad, Tim Dlugos’s literary executor, continues work on a volume of Dlugos’s Collected Poems. Gay poet D.A. Powell blogs about it on Harriet, a blog sponsored by the Poetry Foundation. Meanwhile, I was invited to write an essay about H. Lynn Womack and the Guild Press; tentatively titled “The Pornographer King,” it is scheduled for publication sometime during 2009 in the anthology The Golden Age of Gay Literature, 1948-1978 (MLR Press).

The Labor Day Edition: The Edward Carpenter revival this column asked for is now in full swing! For the first time since 1980, Edward Carpenter has received the full biographical treatment. Sheila Rowbotham, who had previously written about Carpenter in her book Socialism and the New Life: The Personal and Sexual Politics of Edward Carpenter and Havelock Ellis, has now released Edward Carpenter: A Life of Liberty and Love through Verso Press. I haven’t ordered my copy yet, but this should be a really superb look at Carpenter’s life and work as an activist for homosexuals’ rights, women’s rights, animals’ rights, justice for the working class, and other forms of social equality.

The Lesbians of Michael Field (Part I and Part II): In December 2008, University of Virginia Press released a scholarly edition of some of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper’s love letters to each other, The Fowl and the Pussycat. It’s priced like an academic book (i.e., a bit steep), but it should be a fun and informative read. Who can resist a bit of romantic voyeurism?

Reading Roundup #1: Local gay book club Bookmen DC read Isherwood’s A Single Man (briefly discussed in this column), and there was friendly, funny, observant talk about this marvelous little novel. I left the meeting reading certain passages of the book in a completely different way and noticing complexities I hadn’t even thought about on first reading (including that my 1st edition of the novel was a censored version; Isherwood’s publisher required that he make a reference to masturbation less explicit).

At any rate, this is just to say: go to a gay or lesbian book club in the area this year! Read good books! Meet friendly people! Learn new things!

Alain Locke is the Key (Part I and Part II): I had the good fortune to be told by a reader that Thomas Wirth, who wrote the biography of Richard Bruce Nugent I quote from in this column (Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance), was going to be giving a lecture in Washington D.C. about Nugent and the Harlem Renaissance. The lecture, hosted by Millennium Arts, an African American cultural salon, was attended by a passionate and informed audience and was delivered by Mr. Wirth with good humor and in fascinating detail.

Mr. Wirth informed me that 1) I’d misstated his observations about the relationship between Nugent and sculptor Richmond Barthé (mea culpa) and 2) that a new biography of Alain Locke is scheduled for release from University of Chicago Press. That has since been published and is commercially available; again, the price is a tad steep, but then again, Locke is fascinating. Additionally, Mr. Wirth has been hard at work; he edited Nugent’s unpublished novel Gentleman Jigger, now available from Da Capo Press.
The talk was held in a private home in D.C., and I must say, the members of the Millennium Arts Salon were the kindest and most welcoming group of people. Check out their website and consider joining or attending one of their programs.

Return of the Disco Cellist: Wild Combination, the documentary film about Arthur Russell, was released on DVD and has been widely, widely acclaimed. As I mentioned, it completely deserves every accolade it gets. The new posthumous Arthur Russell album, Love is Overtaking Me, appeared on many critics’
10-best albums lists for 2008, including two in the Washington City Paper; David Dunlop Jr. rates it as his #1 album of the year.

Lynne Cheney is My Sister!: The Bushes, the Cheneys, and their ilk have been kicked off the national stage, their ignominious eight years in power finally repudiated, at least temporarily, by the election of Barack Obama. Maybe Lynne will now have time to pen a sequel. Then again, if the world is lucky, she won’t.

The Lesbians! Lesbians! Lesbians! Reading Roundup: A friend of mine took my advice and read Emma Donoghue’s The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits. She loved it. What are you waiting for?

Oh, and Donoghue published a new novel, The Sealed Letter. I can’t speak for it, but if it’s as good as her other writing, it’s a doozy.

Queer Quotes (Harvey Milk): I still don’t have a definitive answer, but readers jumped in to provide some information and opinions.

1) At least three people commented on Randy Shilts’s objectivity as a journalist. This doesn’t relate to whether or not Harvey Milk said that quote about religion, but it does indicate that Shilts’s books (including The Mayor of Castro Street, upon which the award-winning film Milk is silently based) should be approached with a certain degree of caution. Just so you know.

2) A gentleman on the West Coast, who heard Harvey Milk give speeches while he was alive, e-mailed me to say that he believes he either heard Milk say a variation on the religion quote or read a speech that used a variant version. While the poster reads, “I want nothing smacking, or smelling or hinting of religion,” this man suggests that the quote may have been, “I want nothing hinting, nothing even smelling of religion.” Milk may then have added the third term in one of his “political wills.”

So: the search goes on! Readers suggested that either the Randy Shilts Papers or the Harvey Milk Archives-Scott Smith Collection in the James C. Hormel Gay and Lesbian Center at the San Francisco Public Library may hold the key to this minor mystery. As soon as I can dig up anything more, you’ll hear it right here on TNG.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philipclark@hotmail.com.

A short while ago, TNG’s Michael received an e-mail from a gentleman on the West Coast. He hoped that Michael might be able to answer a question about a poster the man owned. The poster, issued by the Washington D.C.-based organization Gay and Lesbian Atheists and Humanists, featured a quote attributed to gay San Francisco politician Harvey Milk. Prophetically predicting his own assassination, Milk recorded audio tapes in which he laid forth his desires for what would happen in the event of his death, what Milk biographer Randy Shilts calls a kind of “political will.” This man’s poster attributes to Milk the quote, as regards funerals or memorials after his death, “I want nothing even smacking, or smelling or hinting of religion.”

The gentleman wanted proof of authenticity, that Milk had actually said what GALAH claimed he did on its poster. “I LOVE IT, but I can’t find any proof that he said that. Can you help me?” he asked. “Believe me, if it’s real, I’ll put it up in BIG LETTERS in my window for xmas!”

As I am the nominal historian for TNG’s merry band, Michael threw the query my way. But while I tried, I was ultimately unable to answer the man’s question with any degree of certainty. I failed, but can something still be learned from a search that failed?

Like I tell the students to whom, as a librarian, I teach research: Google is a powerful tool, but it isn’t enough. It can’t solve everything. With quotations, though, it isn’t a bad place to start. This is especially true with modern or marginalized figures. As well known as Harvey Milk may be in the gay community, as well known as he will become to wider audiences with the biopic recently released in theatres, he is not a likely figure to show up in Bartlett’s Quotations.

Several quick searches using Milk’s name and parts of the quotation yield little. In the comments section of a blog posting on the liberal Huffington Post, someone quotes Milk as having said the words, but there’s simply no way to verify the accuracy. With much more famous quotations than this, there are often attribution problems: who first said it? did someone else repeat it, and did their saying it become better known than the original? have a person’s words been misquoted? has a quotation been mistakenly or intentionally attributed to the wrong person?

Just because it’s published—online or on a poster—doesn’t ensure its accuracy. With their broad storage and access capabilities, search engines frequently become a massive version of the childhood game “Telephone.” As the words are posted, passed around, reposted, jotted down, and passed around again offline, information becomes a tangle, and unknotting it a struggle.

My next step was to try to contact the Gay and Lesbian Atheists and Humanists; presumably someone at their organization could answer questions about the poster. Their website was easy to find, but all evidence points to its being maintained without being updated. The organization appears to have been headquartered in Washington D.C. at 1718 M St. NW, with GALAH outposts in Los Angeles and San Francisco. With dead external links, its most recent newsletter from 2000, and no signs of any life after the summer of 2002, though, the website yields no current information. My attempts to e-mail GALAH also failed to bear fruit. The organization could hardly be called ephemeral: it seems to have lasted for at least seven years. It protested against the anti-gay Promise Keepers and President Bush’s discriminatory faith-based initiatives, decried the Boy Scouts’ homophobia and exclusionary practices, and endorsed a boycott against Exxon-Mobil for repealing its own non-discrimination and domestic partnership policies, among other prominent actions. But its own website makes its continued existence seem doubtful, and secondary information about it is scanty.

Having struck out online, I turned to good ol’, old-school print resources. Remembering that Randy Shilts’s biography of Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, had reprinted Milk’s “political will,” I pulled my copy off the shelf. There, I found the lengthiest statement I have seen from Harvey Milk as regards religion:

I hope there are no religious services. I would hope that there are no services of any type, but I know some people are into that and you can’t prevent it from happening, but my God, nothing religious. Until the churches speak out against the Anita Bryants who have been playing gymnastics with the Bible, the churches which remain so quiet have the guts to speak out in the name of Judaism or Christianity or whatever they profess to be for in words but not actions and deeds. God–and that’s the irony, God–churches don’t even know what it’s about. I would turn over in my grave if there was any kind of religious ceremony. And it’s not a disbelief in God–it’s a disbelief and disgust of what most churches are about. How many leaders got up in their pulpits and went to Miami and said, “Anita, you’re playing gymnastics with the Bible–you’re desecrating the Bible”? How many of them said it? How many of them hid and walked away? Ducked their heads in the name of Christianity and talked about love and brotherhood.

Where does this leave us? Certainly, Milk was virulently opposed to those figures in organized religion who did not have the courage to support equal rights for all, who could not find it in themselves to practice what they preached. There’s no evidence from this transcript, though, that the quote GALAH placed on their poster came from Milk’s “political will.”

But wait: information Randy Shilts includes with the transcript of the tape prevents any clear conclusion at all. As Shilts notes, Milk left behind three different tapes with three different people, and because “Milk spoke from only a bare-bones outline when he recorded the tapes,” each tape has differences in its wording; even whole sentences are included or dropped based on the version. For example, only one version includes Milk’s most famous quote, his desire that “If a bullet should enter my brain, let that bullet destroy every closet door.” Shilts chose the tape left with Milk’s one-time attorney, Walter Caplan, as “the best worded of the testaments,” but given Milk’s distaste for organized religion, another of the three copies could include the statement from GALAH’s poster.

Although it is something I have known for a while, what has become even more clear to me through this search is how ephemeral GLBT history can be. Harvey Milk is both a recent historical figure and a well-known one, particularly for a gay or lesbian perso
n. His life has been documented in at least one biography, two films (including a documentary), many videotapes of speeches, and countless articles. Identifying his specific words, though, can be tricky. Tracing the history and contributions of lesser-known GLBT organizations like GALAH becomes even harder.

How to solve this problem? I believe it is the responsibility of every GLBT person to serve as an informal community historian. Support gay and lesbian archives and historical groups. Save brochures and programs from organizations and events. Write about the things we have seen and done. Even print out e-mails that seem like they might be significant to a future year. No one will preserve our history for us. We are the historians who must make it happen.

Author’s Notes: I plan to attempt to track down the other two versions of Harvey Milk’s “political will” in hopes of finding a definitive answer to the question posed at the column’s outset. Spliced portions of Milk reading part of one of the wills is available on YouTube. Please contact me at philipclark@hotmail.com or place a comment on this blog if you have any more information about the quotation “I want nothing even smacking, smelling or hinting of religion” or about the GALAH organization. This column is the first of a prospective series examining the history behind famous GLBT quotations.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net.

Next week: TNG will be on hiatus, as will this column. But in the new year, look for pieces about Al Gore’s connection to a gay poet; the fabulous ’40s through the eyes of Lisa Ben; violent gay protest; and new editions of the Reading Roundup and Queer Quotes.

After my first Hidden History reading roundup, I received an e-mail from a female TNG reader. Why, she wondered politely but accusingly, were all four entries in the roundup “boy books”?

My flip answer is, “Because I’m a boy.” But that’s the logical answer, too. When I began to try to understand my sexuality during high school, it was natural for me—a heavy reader—to search for books to help. This led me to reading things like Carl Wittman’s “A Gay Manifesto” or Essex Hemphill’s Ceremonies when I was 14 or 15 years old. Too young? Some would say so, but they would be wrong, because those essays and poems and novels helped shape me—and, I think, for the better. They have set me on a course of continuing to read writing by gay males as a method for discovering the world around me.

But this doesn’t mean that lesbians are absent from my reading lists. This confused the hell out of a fellow Lambda Rising patron not so long ago. During the course of what I now suppose was an attempted pick-up in the used books section, he asked me what I had under my arm. I proudly displayed my next purchase: Sappho and the Virgin Mary, an anthology of essays about lesbianism and “the English literary imagination.” “Why would you want to read that?” he sputtered. “You’re a guy.” And here I was just thrilled I had found it for three bucks.

So, to confound everyone and redress the boy-girl book balance in this column, here are four lesbian-related titles I wholeheartedly recommend: a collection of historical short stories; a book of poems even non-poetry-lovers will enjoy; a massive sourcebook of lesbian writing; and the ur-text of lesbian bibliography and analysis. Just in time to buy ‘em for Christmas presents! Click on “Read More” to…well…read more.

Emma Donoghue, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits (2002)

Donoghue is a fabulous Irish ex-pat living in Canada; she wrote the We Are Michael Field biography that first turned me on to that highly particular Victorian/Edwardian duo. She is also, enviably, one of the few writers who is equally adept writing nonfiction and fiction. A collection of seventeen short stories, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits was inspired by odd and often obscure historical people and events Donoghue came across while researching her other books. In its pages, we’re treated to a marvelous recreation of “Effie” Chalmers Gray’s dismaying wedding night with art critic John Ruskin (“Come, Gentle Night”); one woman’s struggle with her physician’s brutal “treatment” for her back injury (“Cured”); and the aged Margery Starre’s surprising participation in the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt (“The Necessity of Burning”). My vote for the most brilliant story in this collection’s firmament, though, is “Revelations”: if you have ever wondered how religious demagogues are able to attract such followings, Donoghue makes understandable the appeal of even the most drastic among them.

Gloriously written, The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits is my favorite book of short stories.

If you enjoy The Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits, try: any of Donoghue’s other books. You want nonfiction? We Are Michael Field. A novel? Slammerkin. More short stories? Kissing the Witch or the recent Touchy Subjects.

Minnie Bruce Pratt, Crime Against Nature (1990)

At about the same time that I was interviewing Dan Savage for Lambda Book Report about his book The Kid, I first read Crime Against Nature by Minnie Bruce Pratt. The Kid was one of a number of books at the end of the 1990s that looked at lesbian and gay parenting. Parenting was, it seemed, the new big thing in GLBT life, as book after book made the gay bestseller lists. Despite many difficulties, it did (and does) seem to be a great time to be a GLBT parent.
If this is true, though, then it is criminal for Crime Against Nature to be out-of-print. Minnie Bruce Pratt’s suite of 27 poems, a Lamont Poetry Award winner in 1989, delivers a crucial reminder that it was not so long ago when being lesbian and a parent could equal shame and danger. From the opening “Poem for My Sons,” Pratt is in total control of her material, and the material is powerhouse stuff: her husband’s attempt to deny her access to her two boys unless she will “choose” not to talk about being lesbian, not to write about being lesbian, not to be lesbian. The poems are immediate, the emotions running the gamut from shame to fear, sadness to the white heat of anger. This is poetry with something at stake behind it.

The best recommendation I may be able to give for Crime Against Nature is the response of hesitant friends upon whom I have insistently forced the book. Complaints about not having the time to read a whole book of poetry have dissolved upon contact with “All the Women Caught in Flaring Light” or “My Life You Are Talking About.” Female, male, gay, straight, poetry lovers and those who scoff at verse—everyone loves this book.

If you enjoy Crime Against Nature, try: more of Pratt’s poems. Her most recent book, which also has (in case you can’t find a copy) an extremely generous selection from Crime Against Nature, is P
ratt’s “greatest hits” in The Dirt She Ate: Selected and New Poems (2003).

Terry Castle, The Literature of Lesbianism (2003)

Unlike the last two books, this over-1,000 page anthology is a bit big to curl into bed with. But compromise and don’t miss out: sit on a big comfy couch with The Literature of Lesbianism in your lap and take the time and the pleasure to delve. From the Renaissance all the way to the mid-20th century, Castle’s task is to give a representative sample of how men and women, gay and straight, have addressed lesbianism in their writing. A helpful, thoroughly readable introduction, intelligent and well-researched historical background for every piece, and suggestions for further reading supplement the diverse entries. A random sampling of those-not-to-be-missed: Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz; Aphra Behn; Christina Rossetti; Michael Field; Marcel Proust; Aleister Crowley; Angelina Weld Grimké; Amy Lowell; Ronald Firbank; lesbian blues lyrics; Elizabeth Bishop; and Mary Renault.

If you enjoy The Literature of Lesbianism, try: Lillian Faderman’s anthology Chloe Plus Olivia. It hits a few writers that Castle doesn’t and also includes selections from the 1960s through the 1980s.

Jeanette H. Foster, Sex Variant Women in Literature (originally published in 1956; reprinted in 1975 and 1985)

There’s a reason Terry Castle dedicates The Literature of Lesbianism to Jeanette H. Foster. A professor of library science, Foster is the towering pioneer in studying and making known the past’s lesbian writing. Working out of Kansas (!) in the 1950s—a time when lesbians weren’t generally discussed, let alone studied—Foster uncovered the history of discussion of lesbians from ancient times to the present. She then wrote a fascinating analysis of those works and compiled an over-800 item bibliography of literature, essays, scientific and psychoanalytic studies, and primary source materials that address lesbianism. Not only that, but she published it under her own name when most, out of necessity, hid behind pseudonyms.

Already in her sixties when Sex Variant Women in Literature was published, Foster lived long enough to see it reprinted and to see it become the standard-bearer for all those who wanted to read about or research lesbians in history. Honor her. Read her book.

If you enjoy Sex Variant Women in Literature, try: any of the works contained within. Or read the recently-released biography Sex Variant Woman: The Life of Jeanette Howard Foster by Joanne Passet.

Author’s Note: Some of the books I mention in this reading roundup are now out-of-print, even though they shouldn’t be. Fortunately, the Internet has now made it possible to easily find copies of most books, even if they aren’t available in general bookstores. If you check with your local gay/lesbian bookstore, most of them can order most gay/lesbian books, even if they don’t have them in stock. Or if you’d prefer, the website BookFinder.com can track books and provide you with price comparisons from a variety of online sellers. I can also recommend ABEBooks as an easy-to-use source for out-of-print books.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philipclark@hotmail.com.

In the next Hidden History: probably something presidential, in honor of the positive results in the recent presidential election.

In relation to TNG reader Jamie Starstar’s comment on the “Black Homophobia and Proposition 8” post, TNG’s Michael e-mailed me on Friday. “Philip,” he asked me, “do you know of this Essex Hemphill?” As I told Michael: heck, yes! I’ve been recommending Essex to nearly everyone I know for years, and he suggested that maybe I should share that recommendation with the TNG community. This week’s Hidden History is my response to that suggestion. In short: why isn’t more of Essex’s work in print?

Essex Hemphill was a D.C. native who came to attention for his searing poetry and incisive essays about being black and gay. I first read his writing when I was in high school. After finding a few of his poems in the Carl Morse and Joan Larkin anthology Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time, I discovered that my public library in Arlington had a copy of Essex’s collection Ceremonies (first published by Dutton/Plume in 1992, before Essex’s death from AIDS, and reprinted in 2000 by lesbian-owned and –operated Cleis Press). While the poetry-and-essay collection Ceremonies is now, obscenely, out-of-print, copies are not too hard to find, and anyone who cares in the slightest about the intersection of race and sexuality is ill-informed if they have not read his work.

Below the fold, I’m going to include a review of Ceremonies that was first written for my brief-lived “Clark on Classics” column. It was originally published in the April-May 2005 (13.9-10) issue of Lambda Book Report. I feel that parts are a bit stilted, but I’ve mostly left it untouched, besides updating the “availability” section. There’s also a Hemphill publications list for anyone who wants to try to track down his difficult-to-find chapbooks and those pieces that are in-print through anthologies.

Essex Hemphill Publications List (major works):

Plums (chapbook; self-published limited edition)

Diamonds Was in the Kitty (chapbook; self-published limited edition)

Earth Life (Be Bop Books, 1985) (poetry chapbook)

Conditions (Be Bop Books, 1986) (poetry chapbook)

Brother to Brother: New Writings by Black Gay Men (Alyson Books, 1991; reprinted in 2007 by local lesbian-run black gay Redbone Press. Hemphill edited this companion volume to the late Joseph Beam’s In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology; that anthology is also in-print from Redbone Press)

Ceremonies (1992/2000) (poetry and essays)

Life Sentences: Writers, Artists, and AIDS (Mercury House, 1994) (This contains the longest Hemphill poem of which I am aware, “Vital Signs.”)

Boys Like Us: Gay Writers Tell Their Coming Out Stories (Avon Books, 1996; edited by Patrick Merla) (Hemphill has an essay in this book that was published after his death)

Standing in the Gap (Dutton, 1999; I’ve found traces on the Internet that this unpublished novel of Hemphill’s was to be released by Dutton, but I can find no evidence that it ever was. I’ll have to research this.)

Review of Ceremonies:

My friend Jason and I took a class together at the College of William and Mary about the literature of the formation of male homosexual identity (the complex academic title for a course all the students simply called “Gay Lit 101”). It quickly became clear that I, a textbook-case literature fag, had very little patience for the theoretical end of the course, while Jason, a politically motivated queer theorist, had very little patience for the literature. He talked me through the vagaries of Michel Foucault (jargon makes my skin crawl), I summarized the important ideas from E.M. Forster’s Maurice for him (he couldn’t will himself through it). A symbiotic relationship all around.

To cut a long story short(er), when I tried to loan Jason a copy of Essex Hemphill’s Ceremonies, which I had read in high school, I was not surprised when he refused to read it. “What’s in it?” he asked suspiciously. “It’s mostly poetry,” I replied. Jason looked at me like I’d proposed he perform a particularly outré sexual act and quickly changed the subject.

Well, did I eventually beat down Jason’s defenses? Of course I did. True, he came back raving in large part about Hemphill’s powerful essays, but he even grudgingly admitted that some of the poetry had lit a fire under him, too.

Just as Essex Hemphill was, Jason is hyperaware of the joys and difficulties of life as a black gay man. It’s a shame that there’s so much marginalization of minority literature within our own particular GLBT minority, though. I fear that too many readers may ignore the late Hemphill’s writing precisely because of his double minority status. It’s a loss for all humanity if the ideas advanced in Ceremonies go forgotten and undiscussed.

Hemphill inveighs against those who would attack black and/or gay people, but his poetry and essays avoid being strident, the great danger of political writing. The poems deal with such current issues as racial profiling (“Family Jewels”), the poverty and danger encircling young black men in inner city neighborhoods (“For My Own Protection”), gay marriage (“American Wedding”), and the sexual objectification of black men (“Black Machismo”) and black women (“To Some Supposed Brothers”).

Consistent use of fresh language and surprising comparisons helps to make Hemphill’s work memorable. “American Wedding” turns the placement of a cock ring on one’s lover into a powerful act of union. “Black Machismo” pulls no punches as it addresses the issue of the sexual objectification of black men: “Metaphorically speaking / his black dick is so big / when it stands up erect / it silences / the sound of his voice.” Even Hemphill’s less political, more romantic poems have memorable rhythms and images, as in “Black Beans,” where one lover tells another that “Times are lean, Pretty Baby, / the beans are burnt / to the bottom / of the battered pot,” but still “Our souls can’t be crushed / like cats crossing streets too soon.” The poems in Ceremonies defy the odds: they are both topical and current, crafted
and accessible, highly specific to the black, gay experience, yet universal in their concerns.

One way or the other, the essays concern themselves with black gay survival. Whether he focuses on the drag queens featured in Jenny Livingston’s film Paris is Burning (from the essay “To Be Real”) or the homophobia contained in the work of the influential and controversial Dr. Frances Cress Welsing (“If Freud Had Been a Neurotic Colored Woman”), Hemphill ensures his audience remains acutely aware how dangerous it can be “to be a homosexual in my Black neighborhood and in society.” He says in the poem “For My Own Protection” that he wants “to start / an organization / to save my life.” The essays are further calls for this sort of organization, on a personal and a societal level. He does not, however, call for survival at any cost. In essays such as “Does Your Mama Know About Me?” and “Miss Emily’s Grandson Won’t Hush His Mouth,” Hemphill decries passive acceptance of prejudice as a means of survival. Whether attacking Robert Mapplethorpe’s objectifying images of black men or refusing to censor himself to pull down grant money or please his family, Hemphill acknowledges that mere survival is not worth being forced into silence.

If not for Cleis Press’s re-release of Ceremonies in 2000, though, Essex Hemphill’s voice may have been silenced. His early chapbooks, Earth Life and Conditions, were published in small numbers and are now virtually impossible to find (trust me, I’ve looked). And, as Charles I. Nero notes in his introduction to the Cleis edition, the papers that Hemphill wanted donated to the New York Public Library never made it there, and “efforts to contact his family for the papers…failed.” That alone should be enough to make anyone rush to find a copy of Ceremonies.

Availability: Unfortunately, Ceremonies is no longer available from Cleis Press. Fortunately, ABEBooks lists 23 copies available starting at $1.28 plus shipping. Bookfinder.com does even better, showing 82 copies in varying condition from a wide number of sellers.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philipclark@hotmail.com.

Next week: Lesbians! Lesbians! Lesbians!

Sisterhood is powerful. Need proof? Just ask our current Second Lady, Lynne Cheney, author of our topic for today’s discussion, the pulp novel Sisters.

You have to hurry, though, since dear old Lynne and her husband aren’t long for Washington. They’ll shortly be packing their belongings, bidding George and Laura a fond adieu, and shuffling back to Dick Cheney’s home state of Wyoming. That is, after all, the territory Ms. Cheney knows best, the very same territory for which she sets out in the pages of her 1981 western classic.

Ah, 1981! Now, if we use author Katherine V. Forrest’s definition of the golden age of lesbian pulp novels as 1950-1965, it seems that 1981 is a bit late for Sisters to qualify. But that’s okay, because despite the presence of lesbian characters, Sisters is not a lesbian pulp novel, dammit! So says Lynne Cheney, and so it must be.

Let’s back up a bit, though. What is Sisters all about? Why has Lynne Cheney tried to hide the book from public view? Is it really a lesbian pulp novel at all? And what does any of this matter anyway?

Set in 1880s Wyoming, Sisters follows New Yorker Sophie Dymond west as she attempts to clean up affairs following the untimely death of her sister Helen. When we learn that Helen died in a fall, there’s little doubt that Sophie’s eventually going to uncover a deeper story full of foul play. Interestingly, though, Cheney decides to throw in a lesbian subplot, as it becomes clear to Sophie that Helen had an extremely close relationship with Amy Travers, a schoolmarm who had taught both of the sisters when they were younger.

As discussed by lesbian blogger Plaid Adder in a scathing and insightful critique of Sisters, there are no sex scenes in the novel, so readers are left to follow the clues Sophie finds in deciding about the nature of Amy and Helen’s relationship. There of plenty of clues. Amy calls Helen “my dearest lover” in the inscription on a copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She becomes “my joy and my beloved” in a letter from Amy. And Amy specifically states in that same letter to Helen that she wants them to

Go away together, away from the anger and imperatives of men. We shall find ourselves a secluded bower where they dare not venture. There will be only the two of us, and we shall linger through long afternoons of sweet retirement. In the evenings I shall read to you while you work your cross-stitch in the firelight. And then we shall go to bed, our bed, my dearest girl.

What a cozy domestic scene! Since Sophie finds nothing written by Helen to Amy, the lesbian passion may be one-sided. (This would fit with the hetero-promulgated motif, discussed in detail by gay film critic Vito Russo in his brilliant book The Celluloid Closet, of there only being one “real” lesbian in any woman-woman affair.) In case there’s any further doubt in readers’ minds about Amy, though, Cheney makes sure that Sophie sees Amy arm in arm with the ungainly-named Lydia Swerdlow, causing her to think that, “The women who embraced in the wagon were…Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were.” In other words, once two lesbians actually, you know, do it, they’re going to be pretty disgusted with themselves. So the novel is definitely homophobic, but it’s also definitely dyke-y.

Vanishing without a ripple upon its release—either because very few read it, it is poorly written, or both—Sisters was barely commented on for over twenty years. Cultural critic Elaine Showalter wrote about it for a scholarly journal, but who reads most scholarly journals? All in all, there was no reason to think that Sisters would ever become a highlight in Lynne Cheney’s career. It was on its way to becoming…all together now!…”Hidden History”!

Then, in 2004, the shit hit the fan. The New American Library decided to capitalize on the Second Lady’s fame by reissuing Sisters. Lynne Cheney decided to have her lawyers get in touch with New American Library and tell them that they wouldn’t be. The announced reason? Sisters was simply not among Cheney’s “best work.” (This would lead me to ask what, exactly, we are supposed to think of as Cheney’s best work, but that would be uncharitable of me, wouldn’t it?) A seeming attempt to cover up the authorship of her “scandalous” book led every news outlet in the country to the story, discovering in the process that Sisters also contains incest, rape, and—scandalous to evangelicals, I’m sure—contraception. Horrors!

Cheney grew increasingly frustrated as the story refused to die. Interviewed by Terry Gross on National Public Radio, Cheney stonewalled, refusing to admit there even was a lesbian relationship in Sisters. In the midst of politely bridling at being asked tough questions about some attempted sexuality-related censorship by the Bush administration’s secretary of education (Buster the Rabbit, we hardly knew ye!), in the midst of desperately trying to end Gross’s line of questioning about gay marriage (“I’ve made my position clear,” she snaps), Cheney:

• admits that Sisters “is not a very good novel.”
• attempts to move the conversation along to a different topic by setting up the straw argument that she doubts many people have actually read the novel.
• tries to deflect discussion of lesbian content by claiming that she was only trying to rewrite Daphne DuMaurier’s mystery Rebecca in a Western setting. This is wonderfully funny, seeing as how DuMaurier herself was bisexual and that the character Mrs. Danvers’ obsession with Rebecca has been interpreted as coded lesbian passion. Cheney either assumes, probably correctly, that listeners will be ignorant of this, or, more likely, she herself is ignorant of it.
• will only go so far as to say “there’s a question about the relationship between two women.”

In trying to explain, Cheney says, “There’s a question about what these…what relationships that occurred in long-ago historical times meant emotionally to the people living then. I think we’re guilty of a lot of ‘present-ism.’ We take the behavior of the people in the 19th century and try to translate it into 21st century terms.”

>Let us pause. In a sense, Cheney is making a sophisticated historical argument that is also debated by gay and lesbian historians: when did gays and lesbians come to see themselves as gays and lesbians instead of just as people who sometimes had sex with members of their own sex?

Of course, this argument is completely disingenuous when considering the book Cheney actually wrote. Cheney isn’t trying to act out a complex historical situation with these characters. When she does discuss the characters’ sexuality, her actual game becomes clear: to deny the very idea of two women having sex, a cornerstone of homophobic doctrine for generations, if not centuries. When Lydia talks to Sophie about her sister’s relationship with good ol’ lesbian Amy, she characterizes it as a “passionate friendship…The flame they nurture has no heat or smoke.” In other words, no sex. Sophie, not being experienced with this kind of thing, happily accepts the explanation, concluding, “Such convictions dictated limits one could not go beyond without destroying the myth. There could be no tearing off one’s clothes and lustily hopping into bed, not if one would preserve the love-religion.” Sophie becomes a stand-in and mouthpiece for all the heterosexuals who are so terrified by lesbian sex that they need to discount its existence. Sisters winds up an incredibly appropriate title for the novel, since that is the only type of relationship between women that Lynne is willing to countenance. We need to laugh this kind of silly, phobic claptrap out of existence.

The book has continued to dog Cheney, despite her obvious desire for any discussion of it to disappear. When Jim Webb was running for senator in Virginia in 2006, the George Allen campaign attempted to smear his character by quoting sexual passages from Webb’s novels. Not only did this publicity net Webb’s books new readers, it caused Webb to bash back. The world was treated to the sight of a potential Democratic senator—you know, the party that’s supposed to support the GLBT community?—using lesbian sex as a bludgeon. Webb suggested that reporters could “go and read Lynne Cheney’s lesbian love scenes if you want to, you know, get graphic on stuff.”

Would that there were any, Jim! When Wolf Blitzer tried to ask Cheney during an interview about Webb’s comments, Cheney went apoplectic, spitting, “Jim Webb is full of baloney.” In this case, Lynne’s right; if he had read the book, he’d know that lesbians aren’t allowed to have sex in Lynne’s World.

I’ll leave you with this brief but interesting exchange from the same interview:

Wolf Blitzer: “It [Sisters] did have lesbian characters.”

Lynne Cheney: “This—no, not necessarily.”

Whatever gets you through the night, Lynne.

Author’s Note: There are currently 28 copies of Sisters being sold over the Internet, ranging in price from $77.95 up to $301.90. If you don’t mind not having a physical copy of this literary masterpiece, it is also available online in PDF format. And last (and definitely least), one of the 28 copies being sold seems to be inscribed with the following anonymous limerick:

There once was a Sapphist from Casper
Whose Dick was quite a disaster.
He was always cocksure,
But he shot premature
While she dreamed of how women would grasper [sic].

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net or philipclark@hotmail.com.

Next week: Hidden History goes on a two-week hiatus. There will be a new book club roundup in this space next week.

What can we learn from the life and work of disco producer and avant-garde cellist Arthur Russell?

How to navigate a life in two geographies: the corn fields of an Iowa boyhood and the dirty streets and echoing practice halls of a musical life in New York City. How to wring every possible sound from an instrument. How to exist in such a way that life and art are integrated entirely. How to strive for the ultimate achievement, perhaps: to craft the image, to write the words, to create the melody so perfect it seems that it can only exist in our minds, our dreams.

What can we learn from Arthur Russell’s death from AIDS in 1992, well before he realized the full promise of those recordings left behind? What can we learn from the long years that have followed?

Nothing less than the rules about how not to be lost to history.

Oskaloosa, Iowa may not be the likeliest town of origin for a gay musical prodigy, but that’s where Russell was born in 1952 and where he would continue to return throughout his life. By the mid-1970s, though, Russell was in New York City. He studied at the Manhattan School of Music, but his most famous association was with The Kitchen, the famed music, art, and performance space founded in Greenwich Village. There, he worked with experimental musicians, such as Philip Glass, and as an organizer, bringing other musicians into the fold. Russell’s key instrument was the cello, in which he had been classically trained, and his scope was broad; he also worked with David Byrne and played on the first Talking Heads single. Rumor has it that Russell was at one point considered for membership in the band.

By the late 1970s, Russell had become immersed in the downtown Manhattan dance music scene. His early disco recordings were performed or produced under a variety of guises, including the names Loose Joints and Killer Whale. These disco records (“Is It All Over My Face,” “In the Corn Belt,” “Go Bang!” and others) were full of radical improvisations and attracted the attention of both club-goers and such DJs as Frances Kevorkian and the Paradise Garage’s legendary Larry Levan. Co-founding his own label, Sleeping Bag Records, Russell released the album 24-24 Music under the band name Dinosaur L in 1982, along with a string of dance singles on a variety of labels.

Simultaneous to his disco work, Russell was creating avant-garde instrumental music, sometimes for large groups of musicians to perform. The albums Tower of Meaning (1983) and Instrumentals (1984) were the result of these experiments. On an individual level, Russell also turned in a virtuoso performance on the 1986 record World of Echo. Named one of the top thirty releases of 1986 by Melody Maker magazine, World of Echo was a one-man show, featuring Russell on “Vocals, Hand Percussion, Cello, and Echoes.” A radical and difficult attempt to fuse pop, dance, and classical textures, many consider this Arthur Russell’s masterwork. It would be the final album to see the light during his lifetime.

Known as an extreme perfectionist, Russell would frequently not finalize his songs. The 1985 album Corn went unreleased, although three different versions were completed. Another, untitled album was abandoned after five years of work between 1986 and 1990. He would walk the streets of the Lower East Side, down along the Hudson River, listening to his own music on a Walkman. This personal stash of several hundred working cassettes contained dozens of arrangements and ensembles for in-process songs as Russell ground away at his search for the perfect variant of the sounds he was aiming for.

Although he continued to record and perform until near the end of his life, Russell was increasingly ill from AIDS. In 1992, at the age of 40, he lost his battle. The tremendous output of music and ideas stopped.

For all intents and purposes, that should have been it. Artists who die of AIDS, especially those who have not been commercially viable during their lives, do not experience after-death career resurgences. Russell may have retained his tiny cult following, but there’s really no way the audience should have expanded after his untimely death. Disco mavens may have continued to hear a few of the more widely-known singles. The avant-garde instrumental work and Russell’s strange, soft, strained vocals may have retained an underground audience. But to see more albums released after his death than during his lifetime? To be on the verge of breaking into mainstream attention? No, there’s no way that should have happened.

Still, that’s precisely what has happened. As you read this column, four posthumous albums and an EP have been released, with another on the way next week. A brilliant documentary film, Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell, played the film festival circuit (including in Washington D.C. at Silverdocs) and has now achieved a major-cities release in the United States and Europe. A biography of Russell, Hold Onto Your Dreams, is slated for release in Autumn 2009. And yes, it is true that, in our age, even the underground—especially the underground!—gets co-opted for commercials; Russell’s brilliant pop single “This is How We Walk on the Moon” appeared in a British TV advertisement for T-Mobile.

The circumstances that caused this rush of attention are a primer in the wild combination of good friends and good fortune necessary to avoid being lost in history’s shuffle. How does one achieve this feat?

1) It helps to have friends, both famous and loyal. Russell’s association with The Kitchen was key. His first posthumous album, Another Thought (1994), was co-executive produced by Philip Glass, another musician rising to fame from The Kitchen’s 1970s stable. How much harder might it have been, without Glass’s participation, to get this album produced? Difficult to guess, but let’s just say it couldn’t have hurt. Few would finance the effort involved in Another Thought—sorting through 800 reels of tape with songs in varying degrees of completion in order to produce a 15-song album by a deceased underground musician—without the backing of influential voices. Other musicians Russell worked with and befriended were also key in sorting through the mountains of music he left behind.

2) Leave behind lots of easily accessible material. Undoubtedly, those who worked on culling the best and most representative work from over 1,000 tapes and 1,000 additional pages of lyrics, including dozens of alternate version of single songs, would not say that Russell’s work was easily accessible. But albums like Another Thought and Calling Out of Context (2004; assembled from the hundreds of Russell’s working cassettes) were only possible to construct at all because Russell meticulously recorded and preserved his various efforts. Even this, though, would have been in vain, if not for:

3) Putting work in the hands of a loving executor. All too often, the work of gay artists and of artists with AIDS has been lost because families, ashamed of their son’s sexuality or ashamed of his disease, have destroyed materials or refused permission to re-release work. The Wild Combination documentary, though, shows that Russell’s parents, Chuck and Emily, are tremendously proud of their son’s life and his talent. Their love extends to Russell’s life partner, Tom Lee, who has been the executor of Arthur Russell’s work and has been intimately involved in the creation of the posthumous albums. Russell absolutely could not have found a better person to execute his estate than Lee, and this is the number one reason that his work has continued to be accessible to future listeners.

Note that I haven’t even mentioned Russell’s talent. Without his talent, of course, the music could not have been created or have survived. There’s little doubt that the musical experimentation Russell engaged in shows the mark of artistic genius. But genius is not enough. Without forethought, without luck, and without love, Arthur Russell would be forgotten. It is the great fortune of all those who have listened to and loved his music that this did not come to pass.

Author’s Note: Russell’s biography, Hold onto Your Dreams, is set for publication by Duke University Press, but not until late in 2009. Several of Russell’s albums are in print and available, particularly through Audika Records. Another album, Love is Overtaking Me, is scheduled for release October 28th. The documentary Wild Combination is not scheduled to be shown in theaters in Washington D.C., but it is going to be available on DVD in November; I highly recommend this film, as it is one of the most poignant and beautiful movies I have ever seen.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philipclark@hotmail.com.

Next week: Lynne Cheney is my sister!

I was pleased to see that, as part of their Gay History Month issue, Metro Weekly included a discussion by Kevin Mumford about the difficulties of uncovering black gay history. Considering past discussions of race on this blog, Mumford’s article is highly worth reading. As one part of the article, he briefly mentions Alain Locke and other Harlem Renaissance figures. Here’s the fuller story that Mr. Mumford only had space to allude to.

For the proper lead-in to this week’s column, check out last week’s Alain Locke is the Key (Part I). There, I discuss how homosexuality was connected to the Harlem Renaissance, of which Locke was a prime mover-and-shaker.

When Alain Locke would stroll around the corner from his R Street home to 1461 S Street NW, the home of poet Georgia Douglas Johnson, to attend the Saturday Nighters salons in the 1920s, he was helping to insert himself into the heart of the burgeoning literary movement that would come to be known as the Harlem Renaissance. Locke would, in fact, become arguably the leading intellectual force behind the Renaissance. But who was Alain Locke to be able to reach this position?

From an old-line Philadelphia family, Locke graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard. He went on to attend Oxford University as the first African American Rhodes scholar in history. But owing to racism, he was only eligible to be hired by historically black colleges upon his return to the United States. Settling in at Howard University’s philosophy department, Locke would continue to teach there almost until his death.

In his over forty years at Howard, Locke was a popular professor, but was also known as rigorous and intellectually exacting. Harlem Renaissance historian David Levering Lewis quotes from one of Locke’s freshman lectures, in which he argued that “the highest intellectual duty is to be cultured” and that culture “will have to plead guilty to a certain degree” of “exclusiveness, over-selectness, perhaps even the extreme of snobbery.”

Locke would apply these standards to his editing of the landmark 1925 anthology The New Negro. A broad-ranging collection of poetry, essays, fiction, and art, The New Negro gathered together most of the important figures in what would be the Harlem Renaissance. It also laid forth Locke’s ideas about how African-American culture was to proceed. Locke agreed in essence with African-American intellectual W.E.B. DuBois’s theory of “the Talented Tenth”: that the progress and achievements of the most educated and skillful blacks would help the entire race achieve equality. At the same time, Locke did not follow DuBois’s idea that all art must have a directly political or moral purpose. His view was that artistic expression—particularly art emphasizing blacks’ racial heritage—would cause a cultural awakening among African-Americans; this awakening would help improve blacks’ self-image and sense of community. By gathering together large numbers of blacks from different walks of life all in one place, cities like Harlem helped foster the environment where this cultural awakening could occur and change lives. The New Negro was the opening salvo in Locke’s theory of cultural change.

In addition to providing a forum for up-and-coming writers through his editing activities, Locke was also closely connected with one of the main white patrons of the Harlem Renaissance, Charlotte Osgood Mason. A now-controversial figure, the elderly Mason had the interest and the money to provide African-American writers and artists with time and space to work—as long as their work matched her carefully prescribed notions of what was “African” and “primitive” enough. As A.B. Christa Schwarz writes, Locke “fulfilled the role of talent scout” for Mason, seeking out artists worthy of her patronage. At various times, Mason provided money to writers who were recommended by Locke, such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

Despite—or perhaps because of—his power to help make artistic careers, Locke was not universally beloved. A sexist, Locke allegedly told female students not to attend class; he would give them an automatic “gentleman’s C” in exchange. Even though he had assisted Zora Neale Nurston’s career, she once referred to him as “a malicious little snit.” Charles S. Johnson, another major molder of the Harlem Renaissance, once declared that Locke had been “cast in the role merely of press agent” for the movement. And although Locke didn’t feel gay novelist Wallace Thurman achieved his potential, he personally liked Thurman; Thurman, meanwhile, was caricaturing Locke as the stiff and stuffy “Dr. Parkes” in his book Infants of the Spring.

Locke’s head could also be turned by a handsome man, which may sometimes have influenced his decisions in whose career to aid. He pursued Langston Hughes before apparently giving up in frustration in the face of Hughes’s ambiguous sexuality. Locke also had a complicated relationship with Richard Bruce Nugent, the one openly gay member of the Renaissance. When Nugent was living in Washington D.C., he became friendly with Locke, who asked him to contribute a drawing to The New Negro. Upon seeing the drawing, Locke encouraged Nugent to write a story to accompany it; eventually, the story, “Sahdji,” appeared in the anthology while the drawing did not. Nugent’s first published story, “Sahdji” was changed into a ballet, and Locke published it again in his 1927 Plays of Negro Life.

The friendship was not entirely without strings, however. In Thomas Wirth’s biography of Nugent, he repeats a section of an interview Nugent gave in which he described a time where Locke:

offered me his body. A professor of philosophy and a person old enough to be your father doesn’t lie on a bed in their shorts and say, ‘Do anything you want.’ What can you do except be embarrassed? And be a little disappointed in the person who did it. I was a lot disappointed. I was traumatized by it.

He did not cut off contact with Locke after this incident, however. Locke introduced Nugent to the sculptor Richmond Barthé; Wirth doubts that Nugent and Barthé became lovers, but they were intimate and lifelong friends, and they were close enough that Barthé cast them as the Biblical beloveds David and Jonathan in one letter to Nugent. Nugent also depended on Locke for emotional support, writing to him:

I feel the need of someone to lean on so bad. What I think would be a cure seems to be such an impossibility. Am I so impossible that I can not get a friend of the sort I want. Everyone else seems to have one close friend who thinks of all the small niceties and petty things except me. With me they all either use me without reciprocation or depend on me until I feel it incumbent upon me to create something in me for them to lean on…Don’t they ever realize that a prop (of nothing more than honest affection) might help me too? Please write me soon.

Nugent would later worry, though, that rejecting Locke’s advances had cost him. He wrote years later that Locke had specifically advised Charlotte Osgood Mason against providing patronage to him.

The difficult aspect
s of his personality aside, Alain Locke could provide tremendous support to writers he befriended. Perhaps the most prominent example of his benevolence is in the case of the great gay poet Countee Cullen. In a brilliant book, Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance, independent scholar A.B. Christa Schwarz outlines Locke’s close support of Cullen. Locke was a crucial mentor for Cullen, both artistically and in understanding and accepting his sexuality. Cullen was acutely aware of the dangers of pursuing gay sex and “had a propensity to assess same-sex love negatively.” But in 1923, Locke gave Cullen a copy of British gay rights activist Edward Carpenter’s compilation Iolaus: An Anthology of Friendship, helping Cullen see the great tradition of homosexuality in history and literature.

From the number of editions in which it was published and the number of printings it received after its initial appearance in 1902, Iolaus was obviously a critical text for unknown scores of gay men. Colloquially dubbed “The Bugger’s Bible,” Iolaus was a collection of essays and primary source texts of writing about same-sex friendship and love. Cullen wrote to Locke that reading Iolaus had “’opened up for me soul windows which had been closed.’” The anthology emphasized writings that viewed same-sex sexuality as healthy, robust, and normal. Cullen asked Locke to destroy a letter where Cullen said that Iolaus had thrown “a noble and evident light on what I had begun to believe, because of what the world believes, ignoble and unnatural.” But he wrote the letter. Cullen’s worldview had changed because of Locke, and scholars believe that this is what allowed Cullen to begin to address his sexuality in his poetry.

Shortly after Alain Locke’s death in 1955, an article in The Washington Post talked about the eulogy delivered for Locke at Howard University. Many plaudits were given, including those for Locke’s “’tranquil and genial spirit,’” his intelligence, and his contributions to Howard’s curriculum revision. But the most apt was government professor Robert E. Martin’s statement that Locke was “motivated by two fundamental influences—great devotion to the intellectual life and deep concern for students.” These two factors were undoubtedly crucial for Alain Locke. They were also profoundly linked to his homosexuality in ways that are only now beginning to come to light.

Author’s note: I’ll write more about gay angles to the Harlem Renaissance in future columns. For anyone who wants to read more immediately, several books are very worthwhile. For a general history of the Harlem Renaissance, the standard book is David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem Was in Vogue. For homosexuality and the Harlem Renaissance, the best books I’ve found thus far are A.B. Christa Schwarz’s Gay Voices of the Harlem Renaissance and Thomas Wirth’s Richard Bruce Nugent bio-anthology, Gay Rebel of the Harlem Renaissance. Eric Garber’s essay that I alluded to in Part I can be found in the aptly named anthology Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past.

Next week: Hidden History takes a break for Columbus Day; in two weeks, I’ll look at how not to become lost to history.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philipclark@hotmail.com.

When you finish here, take a look at Hidden History: Alain Locke is the Key (Part II)

It would surely be an exaggeration to say that the Harlem Renaissance was orchestrated by a gay Howard University professor from his home at 1326 R Street in Washington D.C. But to say that that professor, the formidably educated and opinionated Alain Locke, was one of the keys to this awakening black literary movement of the 1920s, is surely not. To better understand how crucial Locke was in the formation of what’s now known as the Harlem Renaissance—and how central homosexuality was to the lives and work of many of the Renaissance’s major figures—first there must be:

A bit of background:

An increased demand for labor during World War I found Southern blacks engaged in a Great Migration to Northern cities. Between 1910 and 1930, an estimated one million black Southerners moved to the North, with two-thirds of that number settling in Harlem. This gave Harlem the densest population of blacks in the world, redrawing the neighborhood’s racial and social map. “White flight” in response to the influx and the purchase of real estate by both black individuals and groups like the Afro-American Realty Company led to a boom market in affordable housing. Combined with the founding in New York City of three major African American civil rights organizations within six years—the NAACP, National Urban League, and Universal Negro Improvement Association—there was a huge sense of change and progress in Harlem. A close-knit community, complete with a significant literary and arts movement, quickly developed.

A basic proposition:

Homosexuality was fully incorporated into the social scene in 1920s and 1930s Harlem.

This is hardly up for debate. The pioneering research of gay historians like Eric Garber and George Chauncey has shown the existence of underground homosexual clubs and parties; perhaps the most dramatic of these were the Harlem costume balls and drag balls, which also attracted many straight whites, taking the A train uptown to gawk at the proceedings. In his essay “A Spectacle in Color,” Garber also discusses the frequent homosexuality or bisexuality of the era’s great jazz club singers. Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Gladys Bentley, and Lucille Bogan included songs like “Sissy Blues” and “B.D. [Bulldagger] Woman Blues” in their repertoires. Meanwhile, A’Lelia Walker, the hair-straightening heiress, threw huge parties at her Sugar Hill apartment on 136th Street, attracting the attendance of celebrities, artists, and a number of socially-connected gay men and lesbians.

A literary angle:

The black literary culture of the 1920s also supported a homosexual network. Garber writes of the “literary gatherings” held at postal worker Alexander Gumby’s 5th Avenue studio, but Washington D.C. was also home to significant literary parties. Around the corner from Alain Locke’s R Street home, the widowed poet Georgia Douglas Johnson hosted the so-called Saturday Nighters at 1461 S Street NW. Key Harlem Renaissance writers—from Jean Toomer to Langston Hughes to Jessie Redmon Fauset to Anne Spencer to Zora Neale Hurston—were, at various times, attendees at Johnson’s events.

Within this artistic community, writers who were privately known to be homosexual or bisexual flourished. Hughes had both men and women hotly pursuing him, although his actual sexuality was confusing even to those attracted to him. The lesbian poet and writer Angelina Weld Grimké, who was biracial and came from a prominent Boston-area family with ties to Harvard, lived in Washington starting in 1916 and was a regular guest. The brilliant, conflicted gay novelist Wallace Thurman was friendly with Johnson, calling her “Godmother.” And Richard Bruce Nugent, the one openly gay member of the Renaissance, became close enough friends with Johnson to co-write a play with her, performed in DC in 1926.

Known more as an academic than as a writer, Alain Locke co-hosted many of these soirées with Johnson. It was here that he made or continued some of the acquaintances and connections that would thrust him into a central role in creating the Harlem Renaissance. Locke’s ideas, his interests, and his passions—both personal and literary—would help to define the nature of that Renaissance.

Next week: In part two, the cerebral and sexual sides of Alain Locke.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philipclark@hotmail.com.

Partway through writing my Hidden History column this week about gay Howard University professor Alain Locke and his influence on the Harlem Renaissance, I realized that I wasn’t doing the depth and complexity of the subject justice. I love writing these posts, but this is also the first time I’ve tried to write a weekly column. The pace is a bit much for me some weeks, and Mr. Locke will have to wait until next Monday.

What, I asked myself, could I use to fill in? I didn’t have time to begin research on a different topic, but I did want something history-related. A few readers have mentioned to me that they have liked the book recommendations with which I’m constantly burdening the comments sections on TNG. And I do read a lot of history books.

A ray of divine light came down and struck me. (Okay, maybe not divine, considering the book on hustlers I’m about to talk to you about.) What about a reading roundup, where I can talk about some of the gay books I’ve recently been reading and how they relate to our collective history?

And hence, the reading roundup is born. If anyone likes it, I’ll keep it as an occasional Hidden History special feature. All of the books are in print; if you’re intrigued by any of them, they are not hard to find.

So without further ado, you can click below the fold for brief discussions of a classic gay novel, a language poet’s book of essays, a wonderfully gossipy bio-history of mid-century gay liberation, and yes, the aforementioned history of hustling.

Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (1964)

Ranked #33 on The Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels, A Single Man could easily be higher. The plot is the simplest possible: a day in the life of George, a middle-aged, gay, college professor living in Los Angeles in the 1960s. From that slender framework, Isherwood crafts a series of extraordinarily observed scenes. Never in my reading experience have the slight details of daily life and thought received such careful attention. By setting up George’s life in the first few pages as boringly normal, Isherwood increases the power of every event that follows. Nothing out of the ordinary happens, but all these ordinary events are infused with beauty and melancholy. And in George’s angry revenge fantasies against oppressive homophobes, Isherwood sees the building rage in gay life that would lead to the increased visibility of the gay liberation movement at decade’s end.

A Single Man is going to be discussed by a local book club, Bookmen DC, on Wednesday, October 1st. Click the link to their website for more information about time/place.

Aaron Shurin, King of Shadows (2008)

Shurin is a respected West Coast language poet. His first published book, The Night Sun, came out from gay liberationist publishing company Gay Sunshine in 1976, and over thirty years later, he has released what I believe is his first book of essays. The poetic essays in King of Shadows cover a lot of territory, but the longest essays and the centerpieces of the book address Shurin’s development as a gay man. “King of Shadows” movingly recounts his participation in a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, screwing up the courage to don ballet shoes in his role as Puck. “In the Bars of Heaven and Hell” does more in a few pages to show the paranoia of living as a gay man in the 1960s than any three more-traditional histories put together; its uplifting ending is earned.

James Sears, Behind the Mask of the Mattachine (2006)

If you’re going to read a history of the early days of gay organizing, though, you can’t do much better than Behind the Mask of the Mattachine. At well over 500 pages, this is a sprawling epic of research into the earliest major and public gay rights group, The Mattachine Society. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), there’s so much gossip, in-fighting, back-biting, and general shitty behavior on the part of Mattachine participants that Sears’ retelling never becomes boring for a second. Sears, who has written multiple books about the history of gays and lesbians in the South, has here written a loose biography of Hal Call, the tremendously controversial organizer who wrested control of Mattachine from its early founders and proceeded to both take the group to new heights and drive it into the ground. Call is roundly despised in a number of other histories of the period, so Sears’ book is a welcome corrective: Call was an asshole, but a driven and productive one. Behind the Mask of the Mattachinealso illuminates how the arguments about homosexuality we’re having today are the same damned ones they were having 50 years ago. In that sense, it’s depressing as hell, but fascinating.

Mack Friedman, Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture (2003)
Speaking of fascinating, this book comes out of left field. The silly and slightly misleading title and Alyson Books’ marketing campaign made Strapped for Cash sound like a sleazy romp. Instead, it’s a deeply researched and exhaustively footnoted history that is also a sleazy romp. I heard Friedman talk about this book at D.C.’s Goethe Institute shortly after it was released, and he obviously knows of what he speaks. He has done outreach work with gay and transgendered hustler populations, so he brings street knowledge along with his academic chops. Going as far back as early colonists trading sex to mercenary sailors in exchange for p
rovisions in the early 1600s, Friedman shows the development of increasingly complex male hustler communities in major American cities. This is a brilliant and suggestive book on a topic that has received nowhere near enough research. Hidden history, indeed.

And yes, it is heavily illustrated.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net.

Next week: D.C.’s very own Alain Locke and the Harlem Renaissance – I promise!

For those of you joining us midstream, please do read “The Lesbians of Michael Field (Part One).”

If you just want the summary: ‘Michael Field’ was the literary pseudonym for the combined efforts of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper. Little-known today, they lived during the Victorian and Edwardian eras and published eleven books of poetry and thirty plays using the name. Bradley and Cooper were also engaged in a passionate and lifelong emotional and sexual relationship. In their case, “lifelong” ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie: they lived together until their deaths…and Bradley was Cooper’s aunt.

Katherine Bradley had much to do with her niece’s upbringing long before their romantic relationship began. Bradley’s older sister, Lissie, and her husband James had two children, Edith and Amy. As Lissie spent most of her short life in poor health, Katherine became an obvious maternal figure for the two children. Katherine vastly preferred Edith, who—extremely well-read, philosophical, and literary—was much less the typical young Victorian girl than her sister. By the time Katherine was in her early 30s and Edith in her mid-to-late teens, they were constantly together as a couple: socializing and sleeping together, referring to each other as “love,” “lover” and “beloved,” and beginning to write and jointly edit each other’s writing.

Lesbian fiction writer, editor, and critic Emma Donoghue wrote a short, deeply moving biography of the pair, We Are Michael Field (now sadly out-of-print). In it, Donoghue aptly notes “the two women had no precedents for this relationship; they made it up as they went along.” If their relationship had been understood during its time the way we understand it now, it would have been cause for shock and social ostracism.

So how did two nice Victorian ladies pull off an incestuous lesbian relationship without bringing the notoriously strict Victorian moral order down upon their heads? In part, the explanation lies in the changing nature of language and of gay and lesbian identity—a change that causes much early gay history to be covered up or ignored.

First, neither woman seems to have felt it necessary to define the relationship the way relationships are marked today. In her and Edith’s joint diary, Katherine compared their relationship to that of the late poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning and her husband Robert (a friend of Katherine and Edith’s). Katherine claimed that, because she and Edith collaborated in their writing, they “were closer married” than the Brownings. From this kind of comparison, she and Edith obviously took their relationship very seriously. But even in their diaries, they never used the word ‘lesbian,’ never wrote of themselves as ‘inverts’ or ‘Urningins’ or any of the other terms that were beginning to be used to put a name on their type of love. This mirrored the actions of the ‘Michael’s’ good friends, Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, a pair of gay artists who also did not discuss themselves as gay men. So the ‘Michael Fields’ could be very direct in their poetry:

I love her with the seasons, with the winds,
As the stars worship, as anemones
Shudder in secret for the sun, as bees
Buzz round an open flower (“Constancy”)

But they rarely directly defined the nature of their love. It was, in the words of Emma Donoghue, a “transitional lesbian generation” where people could know what they were about without always finding it necessary to place a term on the relationship.

In a way, their family relationship also gave them greater latitude in addressing each other passionately. As Donoghue points out, “For many Victorians, family affection was a cult. Passions for parents and siblings expressed in nineteenth-century diaries, which can sound almost incestuous to us, seemed utterly natural to them.” So in rare cases like those of the ‘Michael Fields,’ where the relationship actually was sexual, there was a built-in excuse. Edith’s phrases in their diaries, such as “My love heals me in her breast” and “we are each more of a bodily sweetness to each other,” were not that far from the over-the-top “darlings” and “beloveds” and exclamations of “you are my life” typically exchanged within the family and even among close friends.

Of course, this becomes a problem in the present day. It can be tempting for modern-day gays and lesbians, on the search for role-models and traces of their collective romantic and sexual history, to find a homosexual under every rock. It’s worth keeping in mind that our current definitions cannot always be imposed on people from the past. What sounds like love language did not always imply romance or sex.

Far more destructive, though, is the desperate attempt on the part of many researchers—motivated by garden-variety homophobia—to cover up and explain away historical gay and lesbian identities and relationships. Trying to deny the existence of same-sex desire on the part of everyone from Walt Whitman to President James Buchanan to Emily Dickinson to Michelangelo, “scholars” have argued that the passionate language they used was always simply a convention of its time period and cannot be read as evidence of sexual attraction. This out-of-hand rejection of homosexuality does unfortunate damage in attempting to fully understand historical lives.

Katherine and Edith’s poetry passionately evokes the twists in their own feelings for each other, and their use of the male pseudonym served as acceptable cover in writing love poems to each other. To try to understand their lives and work without acknowledging the erotic and emotional relationship at the core is futile. It is equally futile to discuss other historical gays and lesbians without acknowledging the nature of their sexuality and its effect on their lives.

A closing note on Michael Field: Donoghue’s biography We Are Michael Field is highly, highly, highly worth seeking out to learn more about Katherine and Edith. From their intimidatingly formal language to their occasional bouts of snobbishness to their deeply-held belief that their chow dog had been sent into their lives in order to convert them to Catholicism, the ‘Michael Fields’ were two weird, wonderful ladies. The story of their lives as Donoghue tells it makes fascinating, strangely affecting reading, and humanizes even the oddest parts of their personalities. In the absence of a lengthy critical biography—which they deserve and which Donoghue practically begs someone to write—it is the best book about them available.

Next week: (Alain) Locke and Key

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net.

When you finish here, try The Lesbians of Michael Field (Part Two)

Michael Field was a writer of the Victorian and Edwardian era. He published eleven books of poetry and thirty plays, in addition to writing countless unfinished or unpublished works and massive, voluminous diaries.

All of these works are now out-of-print. Short of a poem or two popping up in an anthology, no one reads anything Field wrote anymore. No one has ever written a critical biography of him. Brief references to him in works about more-famous artistic friends—Oscar Wilde, George Meredith, and Charles Ricketts among them—are the only place most people will ever see the name of Michael Field.

All in all, Field seems to be just one more much-published and once-praised writer who, falling off the literary map, is now doomed to obscurity.

But wait: it gets more complicated.

Michael Field wasn’t a man.

Yes, the writer that The Spectator said “is likely to be heard far and wide among the English-speaking peoples,” the writer who helped resurrect the lyrics of Sappho in his book Long Ago, the writer befriended and praised as a poet by as large a legend as Robert Browning, was a woman writing under a male pseudonym. Not that odd of a thing, really. Nineteenth century prejudices against women writers made it awfully tempting to release work under a male name. And it could work wonders for a woman writer’s literary reputation: “Michael Field” got much more attention and much better reviews before it became common knowledge that the male name hid a female writer. Use of a male pseudonym was not all that rare: the celebrated and scandalous “George Eliot” (Mary Ann Evans) had just died around the time “Michael Field” began writing.

Well, wait again: it gets more complicated.

Michael Field was two women.

Katherine Bradley (often known as ‘Michael’) was described as “stout, emphatic, splendid and adventurous in talk,” and was sixteen years older than her partner. Edith Cooper (‘Field,’ or sometimes known as ‘Henry’) had a pale complexion and spent much of her life in generally frail health, but this unprepossessing appearance masked a skillful, versatile intellect. Both tended to be formidably formal in speech and dress, and their strength of mind and love of the classical world, lyric poetry, and verse drama made them a brilliant match for each other. A love match they definitely were: in addition to their shared literary work, evidence from their poetry and from the 28 volumes of co-written diaries they left behind show that Bradley and Cooper were each other’s emotional rock and sexual alliance as well. As Katherine wrote in the first six lines from her poem “Prologue”:

It was deep April, and the morn
Shakespeare was born;
The world was on us, pressing sore;
My love and I took hands and swore,
Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers evermore.

Cooper and Bradley stayed by each other’s side until their deaths from cancer, one year apart in 1913 and 1914.

Well, what of it? There have been many longtime lesbian couples, artistic couples included.

But wait one last time: it gets more complicated.

Katherine Bradley was Edith Cooper’s aunt.

Next week: In part two of “The Lesbians of Michael Field,” learn how two nice Victorian ladies can get away with an incestuous lesbian relationship, how “Michael Field” fits into the changing nature of gay and lesbian identity, and what did the couple’s chow dog have to do with it all anyway?

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net.

Next week: The Lesbians of Michael Field (Part Two)

Today is Labor Day. {Okay, not technically. This post was originally scheduled for Monday, except that nobody would have been at work to read it.) With this edition of Hidden History, I will celebrate Labor Day in two ways. First, I will take a bit of a break by writing a slightly shorter column than usual, and one where half the words are the work of someone else. Second, the writer I quote will address the idea of the purpose—the innate “work”—of homosexual men and women.

Without further ado, here is Edward Carpenter—an early gay rights, labor, and environmental activist—commenting on the special role of homosexuals in his 1908 book The Intermediate Sex:

“[The] immense capacity of emotional love represents of course a great driving force. Whether in the individual or in society, love is eminently creative. It is their great genius for attachment which gives to the best Uranian [homosexual] types their penetrating influence and activity, and which often makes them beloved and accepted far and wide even by those who know nothing of their inner mind. How many so-called philanthropists of the best kind (we need not mention names) have been inspired by the Uranian temperament, the world will probably never know. And in all walks of life the great number and influence of folk of this disposition, and the distinguished place they already occupy, is only realised by those who are more or less behind the scenes. It is probable also that it is this genius for emotional love which gives to the Uranians their remarkable youthfulness.

Anyhow, with their extraordinary gift for, and experience in affairs of the heart—from the double point of view, both of the man and of the woman—it is not difficult to see that these people have a special work to do as reconcilers and interpreters of the two sexes to each other…It is probable that the superior Urnings [male Uranians; in modern terms, roughly equivalent to gay men] will become, in affairs of the heart, to a large extent the teachers of future society; and if so that their influence will tend to the realisation and expression of an attachment less exclusively sensual than the average of to-day, and to the diffusion of this in all directions.”

If there was a social cause in late 19th and early 20th century Great Britain, Edward Carpenter was involved with it. During his own time, Carpenter was acknowledged and greatly respected, and he should still be a well-known folk hero to progressives everywhere. For whatever reason, his influence has not expanded widely in recent times, and the only modern biography about him was published in 1980 (Chushichi Tsuzuki’s Edward Carpenter, 1844-1929: Prophet of Human Fellowship; re-released in 2005 by Cambridge University Press, but quite expensive).

Perhaps the most personal for Carpenter of the many causes he championed was that of “homogenic love”; he lived for many years with his working class lover, George Merrill, and a visit to the couple inspired E.M. Forster’s long-suppressed gay novel Maurice. In the passage above, Carpenter is obviously influenced by then-current “scientific” theories about gay men and lesbians. His idea that Uranians are easily able to see the point of view “both of the man and of the woman” reflects the theory of the time that gays have the souls of women trapped in men’s bodies, and vice-versa for lesbians. Carpenter was also a major follower of Walt Whitman’s conception of the ideal love of comrades. That an Uranian “attachment” would be “less exclusively sensual” matches Whitman’s vision.

This could be one reason for the decline in Carpenter’s influence through the years: although occasionally near-prophetic in his writings about gays and lesbians, Carpenter was in some ways bound to the now-outmoded ideas of his time.

But how outmoded are the ideas in The Intermediate Sex? How many people believe that gay men somehow understand women better because they share certain characteristics with women? How many people believe that gays and lesbians are more creative or more sympathetic because of the influence of elements of their sexuality? How many people believe that gays and lesbians have “a penetrating influence” on society far beyond their actual known numbers?

Maybe the time is ripe for an Edward Carpenter revival.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net.

Next week: The Lesbians of Michael Field

So, the question is: was Alan Murphy gay?

Or maybe there’s another question: does it matter if Alan Murphy was gay?

The first question is (relatively) objective. The second question is (completely) subjective. I don’t have a definite answer for either.

What I do know:

A friend was recently pulling old records out of his collection for me to look at. One was Baldry’s Out! by the British blues musician Long John Baldry. I slipped the inner sleeve out of the record jacket to find small caricatures of the main supporting musicians on the album. To my surprise, there was Alan Murphy cradling his guitar, long hair flowing in all directions. He looked different than I had ever seen him before.

In truth, this was the first I had seen Murphy’s name since high school. Then, I had become enamored of an ‘80s pop-rock band called Go West; songs from their ‘90s comeback album were on the radio, and I went back to find their earlier recordings. Not being a musician, I tend not to notice individual instruments so much as a band’s total sound, but on Go West’s first, self-titled album, songs like “S.O.S.” and “Haunted” had guitar solos so assured and powerful that I couldn’t not notice them. I found the name of the session guitarist listed in tiny type in the liner notes of my cassette copy: Alan Murphy.

When I noticed that Go West had dedicated their comeback album to Murphy’s memory, my interest was piqued further. A little research in a rock ‘n’ roll almanac told me that Murphy had worked with artists like Kate Bush and Go West before briefly joining as a full member of another British band, Level 42. He only recorded one album with them; on screen in Level 42’s “Heaven in My Hands” video, a gaunt Murphy can still throw himself through a vicious guitar solo, but he is obviously sick. Alan Murphy died of complications from AIDS on October 19, 1989. He was 35 years old.

Always on the hunt as a teenager for role models—or at least, in the days before celebrities shed the closet as often as they do now, a few forthright gay men whose work I could admire—I made the assumption Murphy had been gay on the basis of his AIDS diagnosis. As of 1989, gay men had by far the highest mortality rate from the disease. But could I be sure of Murphy’s sexuality because of this? Even at the time, I knew that such a link was tenuous.

Seeing Murphy’s name for the first time in so long, though, made me remember the questions I asked myself back then. The appearance on the Baldry’s Out! album seemed to be another clue. Long John Baldry had been openly gay at a time when to do so could be career suicide. He was well-known in British music circles; Elton John, who had been a member of Baldry’s band Bluesology, took his stage name in part from Baldry. But this was just another tenuous connection: if working with a gay artist made one gay, one hundred percent of the artistic community would share a sexuality.

I was sure that the Internet would yield the answers I sought. Nowadays, with constant media saturation and coverage of all details of even semi-celebrities’ personal lives, someone must have written about Murphy on the web. True—to a point. There are many sites that mention Alan Murphy, both for his own sake and for the work he did with other musicians. There’s both a well-made and attractive tribute website (complete with photographs, an informative biography and discography, and music clips) and an Alan Murphy page on MySpace. All these pages are admirably up-front about the cause of Murphy’s death; unlike when performers such as Liberace and Rudolf Nureyev were desperately trying to hide what was killing them from public view, AIDS now seems to carry much less of a stigma. Murphy’s personal life and sexuality, though, go unmentioned.

This isn’t necessarily intentional omission. These sites focus mainly on Murphy’s music. It seems a bit churlish to demand discussion of what can be such an intensely private matter as a person’s sexuality, and it isn’t quite fair to mandate that those whose interest in Murphy stems from his music also address his personal life. But for not one site even to mention in passing one of the most basic details influencing a person’s life—who it is they love—indicates either an all-too-familiar loathing to identify gays and lesbians as gay and lesbian or a strange lack of basic curiosity.

Murphy’s case highlights a truism: in order to “do” gay and lesbian history, one has to be attuned to the smallest of clues. An association, an interest, an illness, a lack of personal detail: individually or collectively, any of these could indicate a historical figure’s homosexuality—or they could mean nothing at all. When everyone is assumed to be straight until proven otherwise and when even recently, only the bravest men and women would publicize their homosexuality, there is no way to proceed into the gay and lesbian past without a nose for the vaguest scents.

My wandering through the world of online music discussion finally yielded one brief exchange about whether Alan Murphy was gay, on a Level 42 message board. This exchange may also go some way toward addressing whether the answer to the question even matters. The back-and-forth is worth reading in total, but I am struck by the attitude of the poster Mrs_Pink, which I quote as she wrote it: “It wasn’t a case of coming out but those that knew him knew that he was gay. Never liked the whole hing abotu making gay people ‘come out’ anyways! Why dont we let people be??? Gay straight – who cares i say.”

I find myself simultaneously nodding along with Mrs_Pink and furious with her. Her response seems both progressive and naïve, caring and dismissive. Her answers to the questions are black-and-white: Yes and No. I say to myself: Would that it were, for so many of us, this simple.

So, was Alan Murphy gay? Does it matter if Alan Murphy was gay?

I still don’t have a definite answer for either question.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net.

Next week: The Lesbians of Michael Field

Fall 1996:
I’m 16 and attending Washington D.C.’s Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League (SMYAL), with the tentative blessing of my parents and the forthright encouragement of two bisexual female friends, who take me down for the first time on the metro. While I’m about to meet a whole cross-section of D.C.-area gay youth, that turns out to be only the second most important development from my heading to SMYAL. Wedged in the corner of the organization’s upstairs rooms at 333 and 1/3 Pennsylvania Avenue are hundreds and hundreds of books.

Although I find lots of writers on those bookshelves, I gravitate to the poets. Writing angst-filled and mostly bad teenage poetry myself, largely about being gay, I discover the books of Walta Borawski, Dennis Cooper, Ed Cox, Jim Everhard, Essex Hemphill. Here are writers working with heady subjects, with ideas about sexuality, justice, relationships, race. They play with language and do it well. It’s a revelation.

I pick up a book called Entre Nous (pictured above). The poet’s name is Tim Dlugos. There’s a large photograph of Dlugos on the cover, and he looks like me: straight brown hair, pale skin, big plastic-framed glasses. In the biographical note at the back, it tells me that he was born in Massachusetts, but that he grew up in Arlington, Virginia—right where I live. The poetry turns out to be great, but I’m already hooked after that biographical note. So it’s possible to grow up in Arlington and become a writer? Who is this guy? What is Dlugos doing now?

The Internet barely exists in the mid-‘90s, so I check libraries, indexes, poetry anthologies, and find nothing more. I’m grasping at wind. Any trace of Tim Dlugos has disappeared—at least that this 16-year-old kid is able to find.

Summer 2005:

I’m playing around on E-bay, trying different keywords, hunting for bargains on gay novels and antiquarian books that my research has told me have gay content. Now here’s a title, along with what sounds like a pseudonymous author: Of Hot Nights…and Damp Beds by J.J. Proferes. I click on the auction, and the book’s cover shows a drawing of two highly muscled guys looking at each other and standing almost in shadow. The one in front wears a posing strap, the tiny piece of white cotton used to cover the genitals in the days when depicting naked males could get you thrown in jail. Just that cover indicated that the book was probably pornography, or what passed for it in earlier decades.

The item description is what really catches my attention: published in 1966, by Guild Press…out of Washington D.C. There’s a press publishing gay pornography being run out of Washington D.C. in the mid-1960s? Really? Well, that settles it: the book is cheap (in more ways than one!), and I buy it.

When I receive the book, the back of the title page trumpets: “A New Author Presents Five Stories of the Homosexual Scene.” There’s another clue below: readers of the stories are encouraged to write to the Guild Book Service at a PO Box in Benjamin Franklin Station to receive a 120-page book catalog. One hundred and twenty pages? They must have published a heck of a lot of books. And Benjamin Franklin Station is in the heart of downtown D.C.

My first Internet search—basic facts can be a lot easier to find than in 1996—doesn’t help much. “Guild Press” returns tens of thousands of Google hits. “J.J. Proferes,” on the other hand, isn’t that common a name, and the few hits that come back lead me to the name H. Lynn Womack, the founder and publisher of Guild Press. I’m off and running with my usual question at the forefront: who is this guy?

July/August 2008:

I take back roads and small highways to drive the 8 hours up to Ithaca, NY, passing between fields dotted with cows and tiny, depressed rural towns. Although a lot of information has been filled in, I’m still trying my best to find out: who were these gay people who lived years before me, oftentimes in the same city I frequent?

Cornell University in Ithaca holds the business papers of H. Lynn Womack and the Guild Press. By now, with the idea of writing a book, I’ve bought more of their pamphlets and magazines, tracked down authors and photographers who worked for them, and read the scant readily available articles about Womack. I’ve arranged with the rare book and manuscript library at Cornell to spend three days poring through boxes of advertising flyers, letters to photographers and authors, legal documents from Womack’s numerous court battles, and scrapbooks of newspaper clippings chronicling Womack’s rise and difficulty with the authorities. Some of these clippings are from now-defunct local newspapers, like the Washington Daily News and The Evening Star. It’s a rush to handle history like this.

The most poignant items in the crush of materials are handwritten notes from readers. One of the innovations in Guild Press-published magazines like Grecian Guild Pictorial and The Male Swinger was the advent of male-to-male pen-pal clubs. Readers used these for their stated purpose of finding correspondents, but also as a way to learn of a gay man or two living in their state, perhaps to share photographs or to meet for friendship or sex. The thin veneer of the pen-pal club allowed just enough cover that Womack and his associates could not be arrested for pandering: providing men with an opportunity to meet for then-illegal activity.

The members’ notes provide a few personal details, maybe include a picture. Faces, serious and sly, stare at me across the decades. The attached letters lavishly thank Guild Press for the opportunity to potentially meet…someone, anyone who had at least one crucial detail of their life in common with the writer. Are these men alive? Did they find a friend, through this pen-pal club or at some later time? Did they discover a way to live and achieve happiness as gay men through the years when their lives were illegal and hated? Or maybe some were outed, arrested, and shamed, their names and addresses published in the newspaper. They could have married, had children, destroyed any trace of their gay identity. At this point, there is likely no way to know. As much as I’m learning from this archive, even more questions arise. The rabbit hole of history opens and swallows these men up whole.

Finishing at Cornell, I continue my journey, eventually traveling to Toronto. There, I stay at the home of Ian Young, a longtime gay poet and publisher, and his partner, Wulf. By now, I’ve been able to find out what happened to most of the poets whose work I drank from during high school. Some seemingly disappeared, some went on to greater renown as writers. Many died from AIDS. In the basement of his home, Ian keeps a grand, sprawling archive of gay poetry books and chapbooks, history texts, and letters from authors. We spend one morning together in that basement while I comb through shoeboxes stuffed with poetry. Names both familiar and foreign rise to the surface as I remove handfuls of books at a time. Other hours, we sit in his living room, talking about gay authors. Occasionally, Ian reaches over to the shelves near his chair and pulls down items he knows I’ll be interested in, or walks from the room and reappears with a stack of books.

One stack is all sort
s of thin pamphlets and books published by Tim Dlugos over a nearly twenty-year period. I’ve already found out that Tim went on to live in New York City, become an alcoholic, kick his addiction, continue to write stunning, witty poems, and eventually die from AIDS in 1990. But these books Ian shows me contain more surprises. While I knew Tim had lived in Arlington as a boy, I didn’t know that he also kept an apartment in Washington D.C. in the early 1970s. There it was, typed in one of the books and handwritten at the head of a letter to Ian. 1437 Rhode Island Avenue NW., #608.

I look online and find that 1437 Rhode Island Avenue, a Logan Circle address, is these days advertised as The Zenith, a luxury condominium. The wonders of gentrification: a writer like Tim could no longer, I suspect, afford to live there. But now I can make a pilgrimage there to thank a man I never met, who died before I even knew I was gay, for the poetry he wrote and I read and that helped me, somehow, become the man I am today.

All of us are making our way in this world on the shoulders of those women and men who came before, whether or not we are ever fully aware of it. For those of us who are gay and lesbian, the history of those who came before is often hidden. To call history “hidden” might imply activity: that someone has willfully covered up the past. Certainly, this is true for much of gay and lesbian history—people whose identity has historically been feared and hated are less likely to leave open records of their lives, and all too often, relatives and friends have made a habit of “cleaning up” the historical record by destroying evidence. But often as not, history is actually hidden passively: by benign neglect, by accidents of memory, by simply not looking.

I feel it is our obligation as gay men and lesbians to fight this passivity by actively seeking out and learning about our history. No one will do this for us, and I fear that the world will be all too eager to let gay and lesbian histories disappear. It’s the same impulse that causes many heterosexuals to say, “I don’t mind gays and lesbians, I just wish they weren’t so open about their sexuality.” Instead, let’s be tremendously open, not only about our own lives and dreams, but about those of the people who helped us be able to proclaim them.

Postscript: I’m continuing research on H. Lynn Womack and the men who created and consumed the works of D.C.’s Guild Press. I’ve learned that David Trinidad, the literary executor for Tim Dlugos, is working on creating Tim’s Collected Poems. With its publication, hopefully one person’s life and work will be more accessible for future gays and lesbians to learn from.

Next week: A gay guitarist?