James S. was born and raised near the city of St. Louis.  A native of the state of Illinois for most of his life, he now calls the city of St. Louis his home.  He’s always had a knack for politics and the issues of the day.  Sometimes he will approach a topic from an historical point of view, while others he will come at from a moral/ethical viewpoint.  As an LGBT-community activist, he is not afraid to write what he feels needs to be said to the people.  It’s one of those times he feels his editorial can mean so much more… as he can write about the struggles he faces personally.

Statue of Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, for whom the Fabian Strategy is named

In these times upon which we live in, we continue the day-to-day struggle for our most basic rights. We fight against stereotypes, discrimination, and being second-class citizens within our own borders. With each day, we hear of setbacks but we also hear of progress. Sometimes that progress can seem very slow, moving at a snail’s pace at times, and the naysayers come out to complain that it’s not enough and that we shouldn’t be accepting the little things in exchange for the bigger goals. However, it has always been my view that we need those smaller victories on our way to fully achieving equality for our LGBT community.

During the American Revolution, it did not take long for General Washington to realize that his forces could not stand up to a full frontal and decisive battle against the superior British army. So his goal was to stay one step ahead of the British, just out of arm’s reach for as long as possible and engage in small side skirmishes, rear-guard action, and disrupting the British supply lines; something called the Fabian strategy.

The name actually derives from Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus, the dictator of the Roman Republic that had to defeat the Carthaginian general Hannibal during the Second Punic War. Hannibal had a larger Army and Fabius knew that he couldn’t defeat him head-on, so he shadowed him and wore down Hannibal’s forces. General George Washington used the same tactic to keep his army together during the American Revolution to fight another day and to wear down the British forces until they gave up and went home, which they eventually did. General Washington knew that he must exploit and take advantage of every victory, no matter how small and make the most of it. The future of his army and the cause in which they were fighting for depended on those small, yet seemingly insignificant, victories.

Today, we fight a new set of battles. These are not fought with muskets and cannons but instead within the courts and the legislatures by protesting and writing and by growing public support. Though these battles are not fought the same, they are for the same cause: for freedom, for equality, for our basic rights as citizens.  And since our cause is the same, we know this to be a just cause.

Whether we are moving across various municipalities, or from state to state, or across the entire country, all of the battles are equally important because they affect someone. And every victory, no matter how small or insignificant, should be cherished. They are all part of the greater story that we are writing together. It is always better to make some progress rather than make none at all.

One of the reasons why the American colonies split from Great Britain was because the citizens were tired of being discriminated against, of being treated as though they were second-class citizens within the British Empire. And yet, here we find ourselves yet again fighting for these exact same reasons, and it is something that has plagued our country several times throughout history. It is something we have difficulty learning despite the fact that it’s what created our nation.

We must take pride in our community and all those who fight alongside us. We must continue to work for reform and take every small victory we can get on our way to the decisive victory that will give us full equality as Americans. The Fabian strategy, that worked so well for Fabius and for General Washington, can be our greatest asset. We can wear down our opposition and make them give up and go home. Every small victory that we gain should send them the message that we will continue to fight with greater fervor and determination until we achieve victory, and that we won’t stop until we do.

By watching poll numbers over the past several years, one thing is clear: time is on our side. We must keep up the fight for tomorrow might bring us the great victory we search for.  Yes, we all want everything now, but now will soon be upon us. We must not become demoralized, we must not become impatient, and we must not give up on the just cause. Our generation, and all the generations that are yet to come, rests on what we achieve today and what we achieve tomorrow. Together, we will achieve equality for our brothers and sisters, and we will make sure history gets it right.

Julia Ward Howe

It’s Mother’s Day again?

Didn’t I just send flowers for that holiday?

Do I have to send cards to all my friends who have suddenly and uncoolly morphed into mothers?

Isn’t this just one more Hallmark holiday?

Mother’s Day, as pink and fluffy as it may be, in fact is not a Hallmark holiday – at least not originally. In the wake of the violence our country has been experiencing (and maybe celebrating, I cringe to say) this is a good time to reflect on the pacifist origins of Mom’s day.

The celebration of women and mothers can be traced back into antiquity; however the more modern movement was sparked in the end of the 19^th century with a call to women by Julia Ward Howe, a US feminist, poet and social reformer, who wrote the “Mother’s Day Proclamation”  in the wake of the carnage of the Civil War.

Here is the full text:

“Arise, then, women of this day!
Arise, all women who have hearts,
Whether our baptism be of water or of tears!
Say firmly:

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,
Our husbands will not come to us, reeking with carnage, for caresses and applause.
Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn
All that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy and patience.
We, the women of one country, will be too tender of those of another country
To allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.”

From the bosom of the devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own.
It says: “Disarm! Disarm! The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.”
Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.
As men have often forsaken the plough and the anvil at the summons of war,
Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first, as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.
Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means
Whereby the great human family can live in peace,
Each bearing after his own time the sacred impress, not of Caesar,
But of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And at the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.”

Howe believed that it was the responsibility of women to shape society,  because women were able to act without violence and war (unlike what she had witnessed in the fighting of men during the Civil War). Still, no Mother’s Day was officially established until Anna Jarvis of West Virginia convinced Woodrow Wilson to make the holiday official in 1914.

Today, Mother’s Day might be pretty commercial, but its no less a reason to recognize and support women who raise pacifistic and open-minded children, women who support their LGBTQ children, women who march and fight for the rights of their parents, siblings, children and friends to live in a world without fear of violence.

In our community, we must remind ourselves that an intellectual fight with weapons of logic and words is still our best method of winning battles.

Via ACRJ Blog

J Ricky Price is a PhD Student studying Queer Politics at the New School for Social Research.

c. David Shankbone

***

Dear Mr. Kramer,

First off, let me personally and sincerely thank you for your art, activism, and anger. I want to congratulate you and everyone involved with A Normal Heart on its success and your much-deserved Broadway run. As a young high school student from Wyoming, I used a monologue from A Normal Heart for college scholarship auditions. The scholarship I received from Whitman College allowed me to get the hell out of Wyoming in 2000. In more ways than one, your life’s work has without a doubt saved my life. Thank you for that.

With that being said, I respectfully ask you to shut the fuck up about the tragedy of my generation. I have listened to your speeches, essays, and interviews over the last decade and while I agree with so much of what you say about the joy of being gay, about the hatred that exists for people of difference, about the nature of our oppression, I cannot sit idly by as you continue to ignore my generation’s contribution to the history of LGBTQ folks. Yes, we came of age after the plague. Yes, coming out of the closet is much easier because of the path forged by the generations that came before us. Yes, we must use a condom every time we have sex. Yes, AIDS is still a neglected global crisis. Yes, LGBTQ folks are still regularly beaten and killed in this country. Yes, laws are still homophobic. Yes, the schools are still homophobic. Yes, we all live in a culture prone to historical amnesia. Yes, there is still a lot of fucking work to do.

Being a gay man in America has changed tremendously in the last twenty years: We are no longer the specter and symbol of death and this has changed our politics and activism. I do not want to evangelize today’s movements in response to your demonization of them. There are tremendous conflicts which have yet to be resolved in our community, namely racism, classism, transphobia, and ageism — all of which prevent queer communities from uniting under one giant rainbow flag. However, to wax nostalgic about a time when these differences seemingly didn’t exist is, frankly, bad history. To understand gay history is to understand that the labels we use to describe our shared experience have always been imperfect, limiting, and contested. Young folks today find empowerment in the term queer, a label you reject because its theoretical implications contradict your method of historical analysis. That is your right, but so long as you reject the work and ideas of my generation on this basis, you blind yourself to moments, projects, and possibilities where the young and the old (and the middle) can find spaces of unity.

For the past year, I have volunteered with an advocacy group for gay elders, run out of the LGBT Center in Manhattan. I wish I could say this was motivated by an altruistic nature, but unfortunately I do it because I’m a selfish academic who studies the intergenerational tension in the LGBTQ population. I am constantly shocked, however, at how many young people volunteer unselfishly for advocacy groups for gay elders, simply because they are starving for connection with LGBTQ elders. In fact, rarely do I meet a young LGBTQ person who is not intensely interested in connecting with previous generations or someone who doesn’t have some curiosity about gay history. Where are you finding all these tragic gay men who don’t care about their history? So many that you can make these universal declarations about my generation? I cannot understand or comprehend what living through the plague was like, nor can I comprehend what the movements of the 60s and 70s were like. If I know one thing about history it’s that it isn’t simple. You’ve described the plague years as ones filled with death and community. The 70s were full of sex and emptiness. There is more to these periods of history than these simple dichotomies. There is more to my generation, as well. I just ask that maybe you talk to some of us who are trying to bridge the gap before you condemn us all next time.

I have compiled a partial (and certainly not-exhaustive) list of young and old folks working on LGBTQ history projects, fighting for equality and equity through activism, and proving that my generation is not as tragic as you purport. I hope you find it useful, informative, and I hope you contact some of these projects to offer your voice, experience, and anger.

With respect,

J. Ricky Price

PhD Student, The New School for Social Research

For more information, check out:

We Are the Youth is a photographic journalism project chronicling the individual stories of LGBT youth in the United States.

FIERCE is a membership-based organization building the leadership and power of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth of color in New York City.

Bridging the Gap: Intergenerational Theater project

Queers for Economic Justice: is a progressive non-profit organization committed to promoting economic justice in a context of sexual and gender liberation.

Black LGBT Archivists Society of PhiladelphiaGenSilent: Documentary Film

I’m From Driftwood: Record and archive stories of everyday LGBTQ life in America

Impact Stories: LGBTQ Californians from the 1960s-80s

The Make It Better Project gives youth the tools they need to make their schools better now!  Through our website and YouTube channel, youth and adults can work together to make schools safer for LGBT youth right now.

North West Lesbian and Gay History Museum  Project

Ohio LGBT Oral/Video History Collections

StoryCorps: OUTLOUD

OutHistory.Org

The Twin Cities GLBT Oral History Project

Vogue’ology

The Queer Commons

Drag Kings are far from a new thing. There has long been a tradition in opera and theatre of women performing in male attire in “breeches rolls” or “en travesti.” This was explored in the novel Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters in which two “mashers” (essentially Victorian English slang for drag kings) fall in love on the vaudeville stage. American performers like Gladys Bentley and Annie Hindle, not to mention British mashers Etta Shields and Hetty King, were working the stage at the turn of the century. Kings have long been integral to the queer community: drag king Stormé DeLarverie was an integral part in the Stonewall Riots of 1969.

For what seemed an extended period of time, Drag King Culture laid dormant, then came back like a pelvic thrust around the same time as the neo-Burlesque movement of the early 00’s began to kick into gear. Suddenly, it wasn’t just a boy’s only pretty princess party, but one that got girls dressing like boys into the clubhouse.

Belgian performance artist/actor, Jessica Batut, describes her lifelong interest in gender subversion beginning when she was five-years-old when the boys wouldn’t let her play with them because she was wearing a dress, “I wanted to be dressed as a boy. I put on pants and then didn’t put on a dress again until ten years later. For me, dressing as a boy felt natural, and when I was playing, I did this unconscious male performance which started then. I’ve never really felt more girl or boy, just more like an alien,” she smiles.

She first met her alter ego “Bobby”, when she offered to play the part of a raunchy bus driver in a film by Queer Underground film-maker, Emilie Jouvet for her film Too Much Pussy, “They needed a bus driver character, and that was the beginning of Bobby. Bobby lets me express freely this crude, masculine side in me. He burps, is hairy, talks about women. He also is there for me to make fun of clichés. He is a “typical” Belgian guy who drinks Jupiler beer (whose slogan is “Men Know Why”) and yells at women from his car.  For me, performing as Bobby opens doors for my masculinity to express itself. It’s like a game, but it’s also vital to who I am.”

Kansas City visual artist, Martha Goldman, aka “Johnny Deeper” says she first got into it because, “Part of it was the girls who were doing the drag king thing weren’t getting into it that much, most were just strapping down their boobs and putting on a mustache, but they would be wearing the same stuff they wore anyway. It was disappointing because I would look at the drag queens and the work they put into their performance:  tucking and taping, false eyelashes, putting together elaborate outfits. Most drag queens don’t get up on the stage in their everyday street clothes. I’ve always been a clothes horse anyway and have always loved dressing up and wearing costumes. For me, it was this great opportunity to play dress-up.  I’m very attracted to the idea of costumes, show girls, vaudevillians. I love the concept of putting on a costume and becoming someone else. I was just like, ‘Yes! Let’s play dress up!” I dived into the transformation process:  the mustache, designing the costume, and I ended up making a fake dick out of a black condom stuffed with Polyfill which is basically what you use to fill stuffed animals with.

I always thought I would have made a fabulous gay man. Why not take on that persona for a night? Johnny is a sexy, slightly effeminate, rough trade sort of guy. I loved putting on this different identity and walking in someone else’s shoes. It gets boring to be the same old person, so to be opposite to who you usually are – someone of a different gender especially — is a profound experience. Everyone has different male/female qualities, and I think it’s important to explore that within yourself, to experience the feeling of being the opposite gender.  I think we all have this curiosity within us. This sense of make believe allows you to explore certain aspects of your identity that you maybe didn’t even know were there to begin with. It’s very empowering. “

While creativity abounds in the world of King Culture, it also has spurned its own sets of limitations and barriers.

Remarking on the standard king performances she’s seen, Jessica has noticed that, “It seems that many standard drag king shows tend to work within the normal heterosexual framework – there always seems to be this king up on stage seducing a very feminine girl. It’s frustrating because it seems like they’re just copying heterosexual relationships!”

Martha experienced different barriers when getting up on stage in Kansas City, “I got a very positive response from the drag queens, my friends and my family! For them, it was like coming to a school play to see their little girl. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a good response from the other drag kings. I don’t know what it was. Perhaps they felt encroached upon, which I didn’t mean to do. I got this impression like, “Who’s this straight girl coming in here and being a drag king?” I don’t think that my sexuality should exclude me from being able to play with gender, but it seemed like some people thought differently. “

Both women have their own ways of mixing things up a bit. Jessica tries to avoid the normative barriers by manipulating the clichés. “I start off with a very butch character and then I begin to play with his persona. I change my voice, it becomes softer. I start changing the pronoun I use when speaking of myself from “he” to “she”. I start from a recognizable image, known territory of this crude guy, and then I go on from there. I get very into it, my gestures (when I am Bobby) are quite masculine and natural and it sometimes shocks the audience when they hear my voice change. Sometimes people in the audience can’t get past the fact that I’m not a real man because I have hair on my legs! Of all the things to focus on, they focus on the hair on my legs?!”

Martha has since hung up the false cock and soul patch to continue work on her visual art, ”I think it’s important to see what it’s like when you dive into this completely different persona, you learn so much about yourself and your own wants and desires,” she says, reflecting on her experience. Jessica still performs as Bobby while in addition to this she also writes, performs Faux Femme drag, as well as acts in film, theatre and sex performance.  “I feel like I know myself better, “Jessica explains. “Bobby is very truthful, and playing this character brings me back to my childhood when I first took on these masculine attributes. It’s me, that childhood play-acting didn’t die. Performing brings me back to that truth and makes me more aware of my own human needs.”

Gender and sexuality does not remain static, despite the prevailing notions that they should. Manipulating and expressing the realm of the human experience is not the domain of any one specific group, no matter how much claim is laid. The drag king tradition is continuously evolving in all different directions while maintaining a platform for personal expression. It is up to the king or queen to make the stage a realm of exploration and discovery, and it is up to the backstage community to keep their doors open.

©Jessica Batut

Photo by Diego Medrano

Imagine a man with a sleek mustache, a boater with a ribbon, a pink ascot, and a cream, well-tailored, three-piece suit.  A hipster seeking a classy sugar daddy, right?  Nope!  Up until WWII, our dapper friend here was the height of masculinity!  You may not believe it but in the early 1900s, pink was a very masculine color.

Unless you were alive at the time (I tip my boater to you if you were), check up some gif.s and YouTube videos of The Beatles early in their career.  Watch A Hard Day’s Night.  Pretty gay, right?  Nope!  That was masculine fifty years ago.  Granted, this is Europe we’re dealing with but I think we can let that slide.

Masculinity has gone through drastic changes in a relatively short amount of time, these examples are only an obvious few.  Pat Boone, Mike Douglas, Bill Shirley and other suave singers in the 50′s had no cause to doubt their manhood; but a man who sings about dreams and his heart flying with joy today just sounds fruity.  Not only have the social standards for masculinity changed, but the scope of it has changed over time as well.

Mark Hamil has noted that, in thirty years’ time, his action figures have gained at least fifty pounds in muscle.  As the Y chromosome shrinks, so shrinks standards for masculinity.  It’s become a competition of manhood, with more and more men’s archetypes falling into girly territory.  When an individual man asserts his machismo to the point of emasculating others, it’s pretty obvious that he’s insecure in his own manhood.  On such a cultural scale, though, could insecurity alone have brought about the closing gates of masculinity?

This book explains the whole Gender Rights framework quite well.

As I do something of a Riki Wilchins impression, and riff off of Jay Carmona’s excellent explanation of why “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” repeal is a super-qualified success, I throw this discussion-point into the ether: the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” shows the need for a broader gender rights movement.

Though the survey results demonstrate a solid majority of the overall U.S. military who predict mixed, positive or no effect in the event of repeal, these percentages are lower, and the percentage of those who predict negative effects are higher, in combat arms units. For example, in response to question 68a, while the percentage of the overall U.S. military that predicts negative or very negative effects on their unit’s ability to “work together to get the job done” is 30%, the percentage is 43% for the Marine Corps, 48% within Army combat arms units, and 58% within Marine combat arms units [citation omitted].

Military combat is a very specialized field comparable to nothing in civilian life. There has to be a special bond among warriors — and only one kind of bond. The soldierly bond gets confused if some guys think their comrades are hot or if they suspect their superior is having a relationship with a fellow soldier.

It’s the same confusion that results from putting girls in the military. When an officer makes a decision, nothing should enter into it except his views on the best military strategy.

Credit: AmericasLibrary.gov

Did you learn about Stonewall in your high school history class? Did your 10th grade English teacher mention that Walt Whitman was gay? How about Langston Hughes? When you starred in your high school Spring musical, West Side Story, did anyone mention that composer Leonard Bernstein was gay, too? I’m going to bet for most of us that this information was omitted from curriculum and discussion. Gay individuals and gay themes often don’t make appearances in curriculum, and if they do, challenges of subject matter are often quick to follow. Gays aren’t the only ones who get glossed over in text books. Other minorities, often racial, are frequently framed as tangents to white progress, rather than as equal part of the history of this country. We are all “others” in the story of U.S. history.

We struggle everyday with opening up the minds of our friends and neighbors to awareness of minorities. We work to eliminate words like “gay” and “retarded” from daily vocabulary to help protect minority students, to celebrate Black history and Women’s history month, to study the Emancipation Proclamation and Martin Luther King, Jr, to create a more understanding and accepting future. We can hope that someday the history of the Gay Rights Movement will be present in every discussion about the Constitution and that it will be encouraged to discuss how the sexual or racial identity of an author, musician of director informed his or her work. We can hope.

Unfortunately, it also seems that in some places in this country’s curriculum development hasn’t just hit the brakes, it has gone in full speed reverse.

Last May in Texas, school board officials removed mention of Thomas Jefferson as an influential philosopher from the state education standards (it is suspected this decision was made because he was a Deist). They also removed description of the US Government as “democratic” in favor of “constitutional republic” and the discussion of “sex and gender as social constructs” because, as one board member saw it, high school students should not be taught about “transvestites, transsexuals and who knows what else.”

In Arizona, this past week, Superintendent John Huppenthal demanded that the Tucson school district halt their curriculum on Mexican American studies. Also, this coming February, new editions of Mark Twain’s classic and continuously relevant novel Huckleberry Finn will be released without Twain’s original use of  the “n” word, or “Injun” – both words being replaced by the term “slave.”

Dealing with 20th century remnants of fear and intolerance in our textbooks is one thing, and perhaps permits educators to use those gaps in curriculum to highlight important issues of power and institutional discrimination, but having to watch politicians rewrite American history to fit their own agendas is absolutely devastating. I acknowledge that the decision to reprint Huck Finn isn’t quite the same as the situations in Arizona and Texas, but it is a similarly aligned attempt to cause history which makes us uncomfortable to disappear. Huck Finn is the probably the most popular and widespread record of the relationships between white slave holders and slaves in the 19th century, and removing the “n” word changes our modern understanding of that relationship, just like refusing to talk about sex and gender as social constructs encourages a belief that sex and gender never played a role in politics and social issues.

For those of you who are not bothered by the absurd curriculum changes in Texas because you do not live in Texas, be aware:

“And when it comes to textbooks, what happens in Texas rarely stays in Texas. The reasons for this are economic: Texas is the nation’s second-largest textbook market and one of the few biggies where the state picks what books schools can buy rather than leaving it up to the whims of local districts, which means publishers that get their books approved can count on millions of dollars in sales. As a result, the Lone Star State has outsized influence over the reading material used in classrooms nationwide, since publishers craft their standard textbooks based on the specs of the biggest buyers. As one senior industry executive told me, ‘Publishers will do whatever it takes to get on the Texas list.’”

– Mariah Blake, WashingtonMonthly.com

We, liberal or progressive Americans, are fighting in more than one conflict today. We marched for equality in the military, we continue marching for equal marriage, we remind young people that being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning is ok, and that it will get better, but we also need to get involved in different ways for the future of young people. Queer and minority educators, queer and minority parents, as well as educators and parents who support queer and minority issues need to speak up, vote, participate in school leadership, and stay involved – so all our progress isn’t erased from history.

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 15:  Kenward Elmslie

At 81, Kenward Elmslie is the oldest writer still living who was featured in the 1984 fall reading series at A Different Light.  A postmodern poet, a librettist, a playwright, even a novelist (The Orchid Stories), Elmslie has pursued his unique artistic vision over the course of more than six decades.  It is a testament to how many books he has released and how many projects he has worked on that I have no idea which of the many he was promoting at A Different Light.

Elmslie at his 80th birthday party, Photo courtesy by Star Black

Elmslie was born into a life of privilege as the grandson of Joseph Pulitzer, and he graduated from Harvard University in 1950.  Beginning in the 1950s, Elmslie split his year between New York City and an 1840s farmhouse in Calais, Vermont, where he would spend his summers.  This house eventually became known as “Poet’s Corner,” and it was visited or provided summer residence to a number of Elmslie’s close friends from the city.

Kenward Elmslie became associated with writers in the New York School of poets, including James Schuyler, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O’Hara, starting in the 1950s.  His earliest publications were in literary magazines, such as Folder and Kulchur, that heavily presented the New York School.  New York gallery Tibor de Nagy released his first book of poetry, Pavilions, through their publication program in 1961.  By the end of the decade, Elmslie was firmly associated with the group by his inclusion in such works as the Ron Padgett and David Shapiro-edited An Anthology of New York Poets (1970).

Elmslie fell deeply in love with the young artist Joe Brainard upon meeting him in 1964.  They were partners for over the next decade and remained close friends until Brainard’s eventual death from AIDS in 1994; Elmslie was at Brainard’s bedside when he died, and some of Brainard’s ashes were spread at Elmslie’s home in Vermont.  In addition to being partners in life, the Elmslie/Brainard meeting spawned a prolific artistic collaboration, starting with The Baby Book (1965), a send-up of baby books.  Along with Brainard’s providing cover designs or illustrations for many of Elmslie’s books, the pair worked together on everything from comics to records of their readings.  Bare Bones (1995) provides Elmslie’s poetic remembrance of his relationship with Brainard.

Elmslie was also committed to a variety of musical and stage work.  His work for the stage includes librettos, such as those for The Sweet Bye and Bye and Lizzie Borden (published 1966).  He was also heavily involved in the production of The Grass Harp, for which he wrote the book and lyrics; this musical version of a Truman Capote novella lasted for only 7 performances on Broadway.  Elmslie’s offbeat website (http://www.kenwardelmslie.com/) includes sections that discuss his musical and theater collaborations, including work on The Grass Harp (http://www.kenwardelmslie.com/interactive/flash/nav_gh.html).

As an editor and publisher, Elmslie also provided a home for a number of authors through Z Press.  Z Press would publish books by Elmslie, including Tropicalism (1975) and Moving Right Along (1980), along with works by Ron Padgett (Tulsa Kid), Joe Brainard (12 Postcards; 29 Mini-Essays), Bernard Welt (Serenade), James Schuyler (The Home Book), and John Ashbery (3 Plays; The Vermont Notebook), among others.

Elmslie continues to live and work in New York City and Vermont.  His papers are held at the Mandeville Special Collections Library at the University of California, San Diego.

Recommended reading:  It’s really hard for me to make recommendations of Elmslie’s work, partially because I’ve only read a fraction of his extensive writings.  His poetry is full of dense imagery and word play, almost calculated to make someone looking to parse it lose their minds.  Bare Bones is lovely, but not quite representative.  Moving Right Along has some relatively more accessible work, but is difficult to find.  My best recommendation is to try some samples of Elmslie’s poetry on his website (http://www.kenwardelmslie.com/interactive/poets_corner/poets_corner.html), then move on to Routine Disruptions: Selected Poems and Lyrics (1998) if you like what you see.

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 14:  George Stambolian

In a reading series full of poets, novelists, dramatists, and performers, George Stambolian stands out for being best known in a supporting role: as an editor and scholar, one of the leading proponents of gay literature in the United States.  Many of the best gay novelists of the 1970s through the 1990s owe a huge debt to him for laying the groundwork that would allow their writing to thrive.

Stambolian came from a strongly academic background, attending Dartmouth as an undergraduate and eventually earning a Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin.  His particular area of expertise was French literature; he was a Proust expert whose earliest books were Marcel Proust and the Creative Encounter (1972) and Twentieth-Century French Fiction (1975).  By the mid-1970s, Stambolian was a tenured professor in French at the all-girls’ Wellesley College, and his interest in gay literature caused him to expand his course offerings, teaching a seminar on gay fiction.  This made him one of the initial wave of academics involved in gay and lesbian studies in the United States, during the early days of the gay liberation movement.

Combined interests in French and gay literature caused him to co-edit, with Elaine Marks, the book Homosexualities and French Literature (1979), which is still considered a major text in the development of gay literary studies.  (The preface was written by Richard Howard, Week 1 in this series.)  The interviews and essays contained in the book asked such essential and continued questions as how large a part an author’s homosexuality plays in his or her work and whether a homosexual literary imagination actually exists.

By this time, Stambolian was heavily involved in gay urban culture in New York City.  Gay novelist Andrew Holleran (Dancer from the Dance), in an appreciation of Stambolian written in Christopher Street in 1992, recalls seeing him in clubs like The Flamingo and The Saint, going to the gay bathhouses, and attending operas at the Metropolitan.  Stambolian parlayed his familiarity with gay subcultures into his next book, Male Fantasies/Gay Realities (1984), a collection of ten interviews with various gay “types,” including a “self-made man,” a handsome man, a masochist, and a romantic.  This book probed the collective psyche of the late 1970s/early 1980s gay male community through intense focus on the roles gay men found themselves playing within that community.  It is this book that Stambolian was promoting at A Different Light.

Stambolian’s last major publishing project was an extension of his support of gay literature, the Men on Men anthology series.  These were collections of short stories and novel excerpts by some of the best gay writers of the 1980s and early 1990s, including Sam D’Allesandro, Dennis Cooper, Allan Gurganus, Edmund White, Kevin Killian, Christopher Bram, and Robert Ferro.  (After Ferro’s death from AIDS, Stambolian helped establish the Ferro-Grumley Foundation, named after Ferro and his late partner, writer Michael Grumley; the foundation continues to support gay literature and award gay writers to this day.)  Stambolian would edit four volumes in the award-winning series before his death from AIDS complications late in 1991; future volumes would be edited mostly by David Bergman and continue until 2000.

What may be most remarkable now is that the Men on Men series was released by a major publishing imprint, Plume; this was in the brief golden period, now gone, when major publishers took gay literature seriously.  None so seriously as Stambolian himself, though.  Andrew Holleran remembered the last time he visited with Stambolian, not long before his death, and the sheer energy with which George raved about a new fiction discovery (British playwright Neil Bartlett’s brilliant Ready to Catch Him Should He Fall), talked about arranging for the book’s American release, discussed “academic studies of gender and homosexuality in fiction” and a story by Balzac, and read aloud from the new volume of Men on Men.  Would that there were more like Stambolian in the world today.

Recommended reading:  Of Stambolian’s own writing, Male Fantasies/Gay Realities is probably the most accessible and interesting to those without a particular academic background.  The Men on Men volumes that he edited, while somewhat the typical mixed anthology bag, are also worth seeking out because the individual stories or excerpts can often lead current readers to a full novel or novelist they might not otherwise have known about.

A.M. Bowen, after his chat with Sara Marcus in Why Doesn’t the DC Punk Scene Have a Bigger Queer Following Part One and Two was so well received on TNg, has decided to embark on a journey of analyzing other people and things that seemed to have missed an appearance the LGBT radar. Here’s a little taste of what’s to come:

Kanye West would probably say this if he were queer, which is to say I know this sounds egotistical and crazy, but I think it’s true for me: I had to be my own queer revolutionary.

I’m not ignoring history when I write that. I know that I wouldn’t be able to even write that if it weren’t for the litany of revolutionaries that made open queer life possible (and I use queer in the sense that it’s a much more elegant way to say lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and questioning than LGBTIQ. I like “queer” better than that unwieldy acronym).

But like many contributors to The New Gay, I concluded pretty early on in life that mainstream gay culture—as it was presented to me, at least—was bewildering. As a teenager, I liked punk rock and weird historical things, which is to say I didn’t like that which was notably mainstream-gay. The first time I tried to win a boy’s heart, in high school, I went to a bookstore with him, and tried to sell him on the merits of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. He tried to sell me on the merits of the XY magazine photo issue. At the end of the evening, we exchanged a cold handshake, and I tore up the love letter I had written him. This boy was fairly unconventional himself, but he certainly felt more comfortable with mainstream gay life than I did. I think it was clear that we didn’t get each other.

As I explored other aspects of queer life, I still found myself super-confused. Queer theory was fun (and helpful for my own conceptualization of the world), but as someone who tried to explain what I felt to family members in Judith Butler terms, I’ll say that queer theory’s usefulness is limited—unless you’re into carrying around vocabulary lists and flashcards for follow-up with your unschooled loved ones. When I learned that there is a question in the transgender community as to whether one is “trans enough” (in that one is not trans enough unless one fully transitions), I think my jaw dropped. There are good people fighting that concept, thankfully, but I’m still upset that there are constraints upon identity within the trans community.

All cultures are contradictory, and all have their own norms. But since that failed high school not-date, I wondered: what the hell is wrong with so many queer worlds? Feeling not wholly comfortable with a lot of them, I created my own queer world, delving into things I liked, regardless of whether those things had any sort of acceptance from wide swaths of queer people.

As I studied those things I liked more deeply, I found that they had cultural rhymes with queerness. Fugazi, a band I adore, was a stalwart supporter of queer rights. Teddy Pendergrass, the late R&B icon—a heterosexual male icon at that—recorded a song called “You Can’t Hide From Yourself,” a disco tune that sounds like the best coming out anthem that I’ve never heard mentioned as a coming-out anthem (though the Internet tells me Pendergrass had a gay following). And when Pendergrass got in the car accident that paralyzed him, he was traveling with a transwoman.

Thinking about these things that I liked, things with not-inconsiderable connections to the queer world, I asked, “Why don’t these things have a bigger queer following?” And thus: over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting pieces to The New Gay called, “Why Doesn’t [Blank] Have a Bigger Queer Following?”

In these pieces, I’ll explore not only these cultural icons that I adore (and deserve a deeper examination by wider swaths of queer people), but also ideas and institutions that have some connection to the queer world, but don’t have quite the following (or respect) of queer people that I’d expect. I recognize that I’m not the first person on this site to do this kind of “queer canon-extension”/“expanding what it means to be queer” work—TNG is dedicated to such work.

What I hope to bring to the aforementioned work is (obviously) my perspective: even if something (a person, institution) has a spotty past with respect to its support for queer people, I’m willing to examine, again, places of cultural rhyme between queerness and whatever the immediate subject is. Ultimately, I’m interested in how the queer world—a complicated thing with different constituencies, lest I sound too reductionist—makes and alienates allies: given any relationship between queerness and x subject, what factors, from relationship to relationship, create or hurt chances for an alliance? What general principles, if any, can be drawn from a study of how things garner (or don’t garner, but maybe should have) a queer following?

Back to that not-date in high school. I pushed W.H. Auden on that boy, and he didn’t seem interested. But an Auden line deeply informs the way I think: “We must love one another or die.” It seems overserious to reference that line, given that some of my forthcoming subjects are Teddy Pendergrass and the DC punk scene; but I also wish to explore feminism, Catholicism, police, and other institutions that have somewhere between a friendly and highly dysfunctional relationship with queerness. I wish to examine what does and doesn’t function in those relationships. Compelled by my own interests, “Why Doesn’t [Blank] Have a Bigger Queer Following?” is a study of serious and less-so things, exploring how queer people relate to institutions that have some sort of tension with queer lives. I hope to provide understanding as to why some love doesn’t occur—because, as Auden understood, we need that, or we die.

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 13:  David Roche

Of the 15 writers and activists who presented work at A Different Light, David Roche was the only one I had never heard of before.  Even after researching him, I still don’t know so much, except that he was a Canadian performance artist from Toronto who doubled as a house-cleaner.  He was well-enough known on the performance art scene that a friend, the young filmmaker Jeremy Podeswa (later a director for episodes of The L Word and Six Feet Under), created a short film from his act, David Roche Talks to You About Love (1983), which won the Audience Award at the 1985 San Francisco International Lesbian & Gay Film Festival.

Roche served as a volunteer and occasional writer for the Toronto-based gay newspaper The Body Politic (TBP) from 1976 to 1981.  He was described as “a sparkling young fag about town” by renowned Canadian playwright Sky Gilbert, about whom Roche wrote a profile for TBP.  In fact, Roche’s sparkling performances were his claim to fame.  An early 1980s extended monologue, Dirt is My Profession, found Roche presenting himself in an old-school gown and focusing on his career cleaning people’s houses.

The Podeswa documentary was not the last time Roche would appear on film.  Two years later, in 1985, Roche participated in the documentary No Sad Songs, a production of the AIDS Committee of Toronto that combined real-life stories of those with AIDS and performances by Canadian actors and musicians.  He would appear in two other gay-themed films, the musical Zero Patience (1993) and Uncut (1997).  Roche also continued with one-man shows, appearing as recently as 2006 in his autobiographical play 1969 & 1975, in which he discussed an intergenerational relationship he was in as a late teenager and his work as part of the gay liberation movement in Toronto.

Recommended reading: I’ve not read a word nor seen a frame of Roche in action.  No recommendations here!

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 12:  Jane DeLynn

From the sexually profligate Don Juan in the Village to the disturbing S&M fantasies of Leash, Jane DeLynn has been a leading—but not often discussed—lesbian novelist.  Beginning with Some Do (1978), DeLynn built a cult audience for her often dark worldview.  By the time of her appearance at A Different Light in 1984, DeLynn had released what is still her best known novel, In Thrall (1982).

DeLynn had been a graduate of Barnard College.  She next went next to the extremely prestigious University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop, where she received her fiction MFA in 1970.  (The trio of gay novelists Andrew Holleran, Michael Grumley, and Robert Ferro had graduated from the Iowa program just a few years before.)  DeLynn’s second published novel, In Thrall, the story of a teenage girl who falls in love and begins a sexual relationship with her female teacher in pre-gay liberation New York City, brought notoriety upon its release.  It was just one of several novels by DeLynn that would address the idea of women’s sexual agency.

Don Juan in the Village (1990), for example, follows a female narrator who actively seeks the kind of one-time, anonymous encounters more normally associated with gay men.  And in Leash (2002), a woman who is used to vanilla sex takes a chance and responds to an ad that causes her to engage in ever increasing intensity in a variety of S&M sexual acts with a dominant woman.  Leash was so potentially controversial that only an independent press with a history of avant garde work, Semiotext(e), was willing to publish it.  Some of DeLynn’s earlier novels were re-released by Painted Leaf Press in the late 1990s and by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2003.

Recommended reading:  In Thrall was ranked the 98^th greatest gay and lesbian novel by The Publishing Triangle, but beneath the intergenerational relationship that grabbed attention, it’s a rather banal coming out story with an unlikable protagonist.  DeLynn does nail the self-centeredness of teenagers, though, I’ll give her that.  Leash is much more interesting: bizarrely humorous, intense, and unlike nearly any other novel.

“In the Ramble”

It was rare for young Avery to find himself on a piece of New York City he’d never been to before. In the six years since moving there, he thought he’d come to know every inch of it. He’d been to Central Park enough times, but the good thirty-something acres making up the Ramble were completely unfamiliar to him until that night. Peering in from the 81st Street entrance of the park, he could make out only the lit path as it snaked its way in and disappeared. On the other side of the street, the natural history museum sat dark and dormant. During the day, it watched this block of Central Park West fill with school buses, carrying children on their field trips, with sack lunches they would eat on the steps next to Teddy Roosevelt’s horse.

Avery had just spent the evening having dinner with his boss at the West End Avenue apartment he shared with his partner of thirty-five years. “You’ve never seen Robert DeNiro in Cruising?” his boss had asked, stopping a spoonful of pumpkin soup inches from his face. The film was out for five years before Avery was even born. “It’s probably on Netflix,” his boss’s partner said. “Yep. It is.” His MacBook was opened toward him on the counter.

“No, don’t watch it—it’s a joke,” Avery’s boss said. “But you’ll get an idea of how things used to be for gay men in New York. When guys went for a blow job in the park and got a baseball bat to the skull instead.”

“It happened to a friend of ours from Columbia, right there in Central Park, in the Ramble. I want to say 1978. And it was this time of year, too, just before Halloween.”

“Fag-bashers almost took his head right off,” Avery’s boss added.

Avery would cut through the bottom left corner of the park, to get to a Q-train at 57^th Street and eventually home to Brooklyn. Though his iPod had died on the way uptown, he kept the earphones in, only listening to his own muffled footsteps. Each passing lamp post kept him from being swallowed by the black that such a moonless night provided. A shriek cried out from the backseat of a taxi as it flew by. Probably drunk college kids, coming in or out of the city, but it was just enough to startle him. He also thought he heard a cackling—maybe from the cab, maybe somewhere else—as he continued on the path and the lights of Central Park West disappeared behind him.

It was not just his own footsteps Avery soon began to hear. He stopped, yanked out his earphones, and listened. Nothing. He tried to pick up the pace, only to stop again. It sounded like heavy boots, with each step having the rattle of a chain or spur. There was nothing around him but the twisted trees, and whatever lived among them. He could see a tunnel up ahead. Perhaps it had just been some kind of echo.

The wind picked up as he neared the tunnel, like heavy breathing at the back of his neck. It almost seemed to call out to him. Averyyy… He heard the footsteps again, this time directly above as he crept his way into the darkness of the tunnel. Heavy boots, and that metallic rattle. And though he knew the tunnel was completely empty, he felt the stare of many eyes on him as he went through. He heard the whispering, the soft moans and belt buckles of the many men once there before him. As he came out, he craned his neck out to look up, but saw no one.

Avery spun around. A man was now there, standing at the other end of the tunnel. He could not see a face. The man began to walk toward him, the familiar clap of his boots coming closer and closer, until he was cloaked in darkness and Avery could no longer make him out. Then the footsteps stopped and the tunnel was silent.

Before even realizing he had stopped walking, Avery heard the sound of a zipper above him. Then he saw the black boots, a silver spur at each heel. The man from inside the tunnel was now standing on top of it, his hand digging into the open fly of his pants. He wore a leather vest, opened to show the rippling of his stomach, and the downward curve of his hip. He couldn’t have been that much older than Avery. A faint chloride smell began to permeate the air around them, the smell of soil soaked by a century’s worth of cum. His dick was out, the purple head pointed right at Avery.

Without thinking, Avery climbed up to the man, knelt before him. It was as if his limbs and mouth had been possessed, pulling the foreskin down in his teeth, running his hand up the light fur of his torso to a cold, hard nipple. The man grabbed Avery by his hair, pulling him up to his feet. He wore a leather hood, its mouth zipped shut. Avery reached up, took hold of the zipper and drew it across. A steady stream of hot blood poured out. The man pulled Avery in, and planted a violent kiss. Avery struggled to free himself, tugged at the mask until it finally came off. There was nothing underneath. No face, or head, at all. The figure, too, had disappeared before him, leaving Avery alone in the dark, his lips still buzzing and the copper tinge of blood lingering in his mouth.

A siren cut the air. It was an NYPD cruiser racing through the park, its red strobes reaching all the way to Avery before speeding off toward the east side. And the Ramble was silent once again.

Photos courtesy of my boyfriend (c)Guillermo Riveros

Check out the new guillermoriveros.com for more

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 11:  Jane Chambers

It was not Jane Chambers, but women listed as the “Friends of Jane Chambers,” who appeared at A Different Light late in November of 1984.  Tragically, Jane Chambers had suddenly died of cancer the previous year, aged only 45.  Before her death, though, Chambers had become the leading light of lesbian theater, one of the first dramatists to feature naturalistic portrayals of open lesbians and their friendship groups in her work.  Plays like A Late Snow, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove, and My Blue Heaven were gaining notice on the New York stage, and Chambers seemed poised to become much more widely known at the point of her untimely death.

Initially attempting to break into the theater when attending Rollins College in the 1950s, Chambers was angered by policies that hindered women from signing up for theater courses until all male students had been accommodated; almost 30 years later, in a 1981 interview she gave to Alvin Klein at the New York Times, Chambers still remembered how upsetting the experience was.  Leaving school, Chambers would take a variety of jobs before eventually returning to college at Goddard in Vermont, graduating in 1971.  Shortly thereafter, she would surface as both a playwright and a screenwriter for such soap operas as Somerset and Search for Tomorrow.

Chambers began to explore lesbian characters and themes in her work in 1974, when A Late Snow debuted at Playwright Horizons in New York City.  It was 1980’s Last Summer at Bluefish Cove—the story of a group of lesbian friends who vacation together each summer and the effect one’s cancer diagnosis has on their relationships—that launched Chambers to wider renown.  Initially produced at The Glines, a gay and lesbian theater project, Last Summer at Bluefish Cove would help launch the career of Jean Smart (Designing Women, 24), who won awards in both New York and Los Angeles for her role as Lil.  Follow-up plays included My Blue Heaven, which also debuted at The Glines and was on national tour when Chambers died from cancer complications in February 1983.

Her life partner, Beth Allen, would almost immediately release a book of Chambers’ poetry, Warrior at Rest (1984).  JH Press, one of the GPNY (Gay Presses of New York) collective, kept Chambers’ major plays in print through the late 1980s.  In 1998, a volume combining A Late Snow and Last Summer at Bluefish Cove was released by T’n’T Press.  Filmmaker Alison McMahan is currently at work on a documentary about Jane Chambers, The Eight Faces of Jane (http://www.8facesofjane.com/), and the Women & Theatre program of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education awards an annual “Jane Chambers Award” for “feminist plays & performance texts created by women writers that present significant opportunities for female performers” (http://www.athe.org/wtp/html/chambers.html).

Recommended reading:  Last Summer at Bluefish Cove is the easiest of Chambers’ plays to find and is very representative of her work.  It leads to the inevitable question, “Had she lived longer, what would she have done next?”

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 10:  Darrell Yates Rist

Darrell Yates Rist courted notoriety throughout his career as an open and militant gay journalist.  By 1984, he had been published in numerous magazines and newspapers, including Christopher Street, where he would serve for years as a contributing writer, Harper’s, and The New York Native.  Shortly after his appearance at A Different Light, he would be one of a group of New York activists (including writer and professor Arnie Kantrowitz and film historian Vito Russo, among others) to found the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD), still prominent today in the fight against stereotypical and harmful representations of GLBT people in the media.  He was named a writer in residence at Columbia University’s Center for American Cultural Studies.

Rist would continue to build his reputation throughout the decade, achieving true notice with the publication of his essay “AIDS as Apocalypse:  The Deadly Cost of an Obsession” (The Nation, 1989).  The essay created such a stir that Christopher Street reprinted both the essay in whole and a selection of letters written in response to it, devoting the cover of its March 1989 issue to Rist and what it termed “the most controversial essay of the year…and the firestorm it created.”  Rist’s essay, which argued that the gay community had become so obsessed with AIDS that it was ignoring other necessary fights in the struggle to make life worth living for gay people (including gay youth issues, lesbian health issues, anti-gay violence, and, in a prescient argument, same-sex marriage) brought dissent or denunciations from, among others, the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), OUT/LOOK editor Jeffrey Escoffier, and gay historian and scholar Martin Duberman, with equally passionate support from lesbian writer Jewelle Gomez, black AIDS activist Albert D. Cunningham, and writer and cultural provocateur Gore Vidal.  Rist’s fiery writing would eventually be stilled by AIDS late in 1993.

Before then, though, he would release his long-awaited travel memoir, Heartlands: A Gay Man’s Odyssey Across America (1992).  Based on multiple years of travel through small towns and rural areas, Heartlands examined how gay life operated in America outside the gay ghettos.  It drew immediate comparisons to other gay travelogues, notably Edmund White’s States of Desire (1980) and Neil Miller’s In Search of Gay America (1989), but Rist’s book had a different tone than either book and was as focused on less-traveled highways as White’s was on city environments.  Rist’s stories encompassed everyone from a gay man in prison for killing a homophobic tormenter who had outed him to his family, to a father trying to come to terms with his gay son’s death from AIDS, to gay rodeo cowboys and men living quietly in small mountain towns.  It highlighted Rist’s concern that the gay community as a whole get past its narrow focuses and try to understand and engage all its members.

Recommended reading:  Heartlands was Rist’s only book, and while it is out of print, it is easy to find used copies on the web.  The importance of Rist’s project is sometimes undone by his style, though, which tends to be verbose and to engage in ad nauseum description of the landscapes through which he is moving on his travels.  “AIDS as Apocalypse,” meanwhile, is absolutely must-reading; Rist’s ideas about the gay community, the challenges it faces, and how it apportions its energies is as relevant in 2010 as it was in 1989.  Unfortunately, unless one is willing to search for the back issues of The Nation or Christopher Street where the essay appeared, or shell out over $50 for a copy of American Radicalism (2001), which reprinted it, “AIDS as Apocalypse” is impossible to find.

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 9:  Ethan Mordden

Ethan Mordden has fashioned a dual career over the course of three decades: one as a musical theater, classic film, and opera historian and commentator and the other as a gay novelist.  His appearance at A Different Light in 1984 marked the point where Mordden’s reputation began to tip from one side of the scale to the other, as his cycle of episodic Buddies novels would begin in 1985.

Mordden was not yet 30 when he published his Better Foot Forward: The History of American Musical Theatre.  He has never left behind his fascination with the performing arts, with books including Movie Star: A Look at the Women Who Made Hollywood (1983), Demented: The World of the Opera Diva (1984), and The Happiest Corpse I’ve Ever Seen: The Last Twenty-Five Years of the Broadway Musical (2004).

He had been writing regular arts reviews and semi-autobiographical pieces for New York City’s Christopher Street magazine.  The latter were written in the voice of a character named Bud, a gay man in New York telling stories about his chosen family of other urban gay men.  In 1985, Mordden would turn a number of these writings into I’ve Got a Feeling We’re Not in Kansas Anymore, the opening salvo in a cycle that would stretch until 2005.  He would follow up with Buddies (1986), Everybody Loves You (1988), Some Men Are Lookers (1997), and How’s Your Romance? (2005), along with non-Buddies novels like the multi-decade gay epic How Long Has This Been Going On? (1995) and The Venice Adriana (1998), the story of an opera diva which synthesized Mordden’s fiction writing with his love of the stage.

Mordden’s fiction writing was well-enough known that he was able to edit Waves: An Anthology of New Gay Fiction, in 1994.  The concept of the anthology was that the writers Mordden included were supposedly part of a “Third Wave” of gay fiction, following up on the Violet Quill group of the late 1970s and early 1980s and the mid-to-late 1980s AIDS novelists.  Increasing research into the contributions of pre-Stonewall and early gay liberation novelists make Mordden’s categorizations suspect, but Waves did include some of the better-known early 1990s writers, including Michael Cunningham, John Weir, and Scott Heim.

Mordden returned to nonfiction about his beloved New York City just this past September, with the release of The Guest List: How Manhattan Defined American Sophistication, from the Algonquin Round Table to Truman Capote’s Ball.

Recommended reading:  Mordden has enthusiastic supporters and equally vehement detractors, and there’s no one work of his that has achieved universal acclaim.  With books like Walter Holland’s The March and Felice Picano’s Like People in History, How Long Has This Been Going On? was part of a spate of attempted gay epics in the 1990s.  Those who like Mordden’s work praise it highly.

Did you know Alexander the Great was a big homo, and that most of his army was too? We wonder how they felt about straight people infiltrating their ranks….

***

This is fragment of a letter found in the year 325 BC in Hellespontos near the Dardanelles… No, this is not in America, but is the place that separates Europe from Asia…

To:

Alexander the Great, the coolest and the sexiest and the man with the biggest… (There is a lost fragment at this point, but based in some other documents, scholars think that the author is probably talking about Alexander’s heart, of course!)

Dear Alex,

I have interviewed our troops as to whether there are straight people among us, as you commanded. Here are some partial results:

10 percent believe there are not straight people in Macedonia, but since we need to put some foreign people in service– the recently defeated Persians– there is a possibility that there may be straight troops. Our troops do not oppose to serving with straight people. As you know, Iran* does not have homosexuals.

10 percent believe that heterosexuality is against the law of the gods, that they are weak and that is why they like women.  They use the word “heterosexual,” instead of because hetero- is a Greek word, the same as homo. We had an interesting debate about linguistics and I lost the point. They decided to create the Coffee Party to support their stance (the name “Tea Party” was considered, but decided against as they only had coffee on hand). But they are too stupid to be taken seriously… and Jesus was not even born, so they are not fundamentalist Christian. By the way, why do we need to count the years backward until his birth? It is very complicated to calculate the dates and my Palm** goes crazy!

10 percent were too drunk to answer, as is expected from a Macedonian, homosexual and alcoholic warrior. You should be proud!

60 percent actually do not care and they say that they know straight guys in the army.

Do you know a Ion Smiq? They say that he is straight and that he is with a girl from Lesbos. Apparently she is not a lesbian, but a Lesbian who happens to be straight!  Can you imagine that? Sorry, sir, I forgot you don’t like gossips in memos. I will pass by the Pentagon to gossip personally with you***

100 percent wonder if you actually like Roxane and if you married her just because you like her, or if it was for political reasons. It is not that there is something wrong about dating a woman you know, but they have seen your male lover Hephaestion. He seems very sad and when he is drunk he weeps and… (this part of the manuscript is also lost) “All men are bitches!”  Is what the troops heard him yell…

That reminds me. I bought the flowers and the “I’m sorry” card for him that you asked for. It has tiny teddy bear, as you ordered, sir. Should I put “It’s just politics” in it?

I send you manly kisses and you will be present in my erotic dreams (please, tell me if it is possible to go further than my dreams… again. Hephaestion still doesn’t know anything about it!)

Signed,

Sam Robertson

General of HHRR and parties.

* Iran is Persia, as some of you probably don’t know.

**People did not have Ipods or Blackberries at the time: they used only Palms. At those times you actually had to put coins in some machines if you wanted to play videogames! The videogames were invented in Arcadia, and that is why they were called arcades.

***Alexander’s personal tent was shaped as a pentagon, but it looked more like a circus, especially because of the makeup some of his soldiers used distastefully. At the time it was consider very masculine.

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 8:  Judy Grahn

Although more associated with the West Coast, activist and lesbian-feminist poet Judy Grahn appeared at A Different Light in New York to share material from her recently published Another Mother Tongue: Gay Words, Gay Worlds (1984).  Another Mother Tongue is still Grahn’s best-known work of nonfiction, and in its combination of gay and lesbian lived experience, culture, and myth, it dovetails with the topics and themes of Grahn’s poetry and fiction.

Unlike a number of the authors who appeared during the autumn reading series, Judy Grahn was not born into privilege, or even into the middle class.  Growing up in New Mexico, the daughter of a cook and a photographer’s assistant, Grahn came firmly from the working class, and she has always kept one eye in her writing on the experience of working class women and men.  Grahn worked a series of jobs to help continue her schooling; this included joining the Air Force, from which she was ultimately discharged for being lesbian.

Following recovery from a coma at the age of 25, Grahn committed herself to achieving her life’s dream of becoming a poet.  In 1969, she co-founded the Women’s Press Collective (WPC), an off-shoot of the Gay Woman’s Liberation Group, in order to provide publishing opportunities for marginalized lesbian women’s voices.  Beginning in 1969, she published a series of influential and beloved books of poetry addressing the lesbian experience through the Women’s Press Collective.  These included The Common Woman (1969), Edward the Dyke and Other Poems (1971), A Woman is Talking to Death (1974), and She Who (1977).  Diana Press, an offshoot of the WPC, gathered these books into The Work of a Common Woman: The Collected Poetry of Judy Grahn, 1964-1977 (1978), which was quickly picked up by a larger publisher, St. Martin’s, for a 1980 re-release.

The 1980s would find Grahn teaming up with The Crossing Press, a small publisher in upstate New York that had a history of printing gay material; Crossing had released the first modern anthology of gay poetry, The Male Muse, in 1973.  For Crossing, Grahn would enter into a remarkable partnership, writing the introductions to Pat Parker’s Movement in Black (1983) and Alta’s Shameless Hussy (1980), editing two volumes of women’s True to Life Adventure Stories, publishing a new book of poetry, The Queen of Wands (1982), and a novel, Mundane’s World (1988), reprinting The Work of a Common Woman (1984), and writing essays to accompany work by Gertrude Stein in Really Reading Gertrude Stein (1989).

Grahn’s volume on Gertrude Stein was just one piece of an increased turn toward nonfiction.  In addition to Another Mother Tongue, which looked at gay life and language, Grahn researched and published such books as The Highest Apple: Sappho and the Lesbian Poetic Tradition (1985), which examined the work of 9 lesbian poets, and Blood, Bread, and Roses: How Menstruation Created the World (1994), an anthropological look at the influence of menstrual rituals on history and culture.

After Blood, Bread, and Roses, however, Grahn stopped publishing her own books throughout the rest of the 1990s and well into the ensuing decade.  She is currently undergoing something of a renaissance, though, with her new-and-collected poems, love belongs to those who do the feeling (2008) and The Judy Grahn Reader (2009) delighting old readers and finding new ones.

Recommended reading:  Combining important older works with new pieces, either The Judy Grahn Reader or love belongs to those who do the feeling is a good choice.  As they are in print, they’re also somewhat easier to find than her older books, although the early poetry books are beautiful small editions.

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 7:  John Preston

One of the most prolific writers and editors of the gay liberation era, John Preston was something of a publishing phenomenon by the time he appeared at A Different Light in 1984.  Just as with Armistead Maupin (Week 4), Preston had achieved his greatest fame to date with a serialized story.  The similarities ended there.  Unlike Tales of the City, Preston’s Mr. Benson, the tale of the world’s most perfect leather master and the training of his slave Jamie, was unlikely to be made into a TV minseries.

Preston grew up in New England and lived, by his recollection, in most of the major gay urban centers.  He had briefly been the editor of The Advocate (what he told interviewer Philip Gambone in the book Something Inside, was “the worst year of my life”), but realizing that could not go on living in a large city and be a productive writer, he would return to New England in 1979, settling in Portland, Maine.  By then, he had already begun to serialize what would become Mr. Benson in the pages of Drummer magazine.

The story of Aristotle Benson—suave, particular, caring, and rich, but also rough and exactingly demanding—gained Preston a huge audience in the leather community beginning with its first appearance in 1978.  A book Preston claims was the first fiction he ever wrote and that he intended as a comedy was taken extremely seriously by much of its audience.   The story was so popular that lines of t-shirts were made, emblazoned with “Mr. Benson” or “Looking for Mr. Benson,” depending on one’s BDSM orientation.  Preston would have an ambivalent relationship to his creation throughout his life, as he believed that some people who would have had sex with him were scared away by the idea that he might be Mr. Benson, while others were disappointed to find out that he wasn’t his character.  Mr. Benson appeared in book form in 1983 and has been periodically reprinted ever since.

Preston’s willingness to go to his potential audience, giving readings in nontraditional spaces like bathhouses and gay bars, increased that audience’s size and intrigued publishers like Sasha Alyson, with whom Preston began a series of books.  After Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, about a heroic, helpful drag queen, was a success for Alyson Books in 1983, Preston returned to better known territory, launching a series of four “Master” books with I Once Had a Master and Other Tales of Erotic Love in 1984.  This may have been what he was promoting at A Different Light.

Under pseudonyms, Preston had also been writing formulaic “straight” books about “the Black Berets,” a team of trained military operatives, at the rate of about one per month.  For Alyson, he created the series The Mission of Alex Kane, about a gay former military officer who, financed by the wealthy father of his dead lover, dedicates himself to protecting gays from evil societal forces.  Tossing exploitative movie producers out of windows and whipping dope peddlers into submission, Alex Kane proved to be a powerful gay revenge fantasy come to life.

An HIV diagnosis in 1986 stopped Preston’s writing for over a year, but he recovered by editing Personal Dispatches: Writers Confront AIDS (published 1989).  Although he would continue to write fiction, Preston shifted course to become a frequent anthology editor.  Collections like Hometowns: Gay Men Write About Where They Belong and Friends and Lovers: Gay Men Write About Their Families were part of a steady flow of nonfiction anthologies.  Additionally, Preston took stories by a variety of writers, which had initially been published as pornography, and repackaged them as erotica, improbably beginning the Flesh and the Word series through a major mainstream publisher, Dutton, in 1992.

John Preston would die from AIDS complications in 1994.

Recommended reading:  Mr. Benson is still considered Preston’s fiction masterwork; it holds up, although the racial stereotyping in its ending shouldn’t be overlooked.  For sheer mindless fun, the six Alex Kane books can’t be topped.  Among his nonfiction, two books of essays stand out: My Life as a Pornographer and Other Indecent Acts (1993) and Winter’s Light: Reflections of a Yankee Queer (1995).  Some of the information above was extracted from a fantastic, revealing interview with Preston in Something Inside: Conversations with Gay Fiction Writers (1999).oemHom

This post was submitted by Philip Clark, former TNG history and books columnist.

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 6:  Quentin Crisp

By the time of his death at the age of 90 in 1999, Britain’s Quentin Crisp was definitely in the running for the best-known gay man of the 20^th century, but he hadn’t come to public attention at all prior to the release, in 1968, of his memoir The Naked Civil Servant.  Justifiably widely read and still in print (from Penguin Classics, no less), the memoir detailed Crisp’s youth flaunting English gender and sexual mores.  Highly effeminate—and perhaps with a death wish—Crisp hennaed his hair, put on makeup, and walked the streets of London in the 1930s, meeting with amazement and sometimes violence from passersby.  The Naked Civil Servant goes on to discuss Crisp’s life during World War II and his later work as an artists’ model.

A 1975 made-for-TV movie version of the book, starring John Hurt as Crisp, was a sensation, and allowed Crisp to fashion a new career as a storyteller.  A one-man stage show combined a scripted opening of stories from The Naked Civil Servant with an audience participation element where Crisp answered his viewers’ questions.  Touring first in Britain, Crisp took the show to New York City and subsequently moved to America in 1981.  There, he took up film reviewing for the gay magazine Christopher Street and continued, periodically, to perform his successful shows.

A revealing interview of Crisp in the Winter 1984 issue of The James White Review, published around the same time as his appearance at A Different Light, captures a view of Crisp’s life and shows how bemused he was by living in America and its differences from England.  It also showcased some of his long-held and oft-expressed opinions, including his idea that being gay is a problem (“all problems come from within”) and arguing that gays should embrace being outsiders rather than trying to enter the mainstream (“I think it’s a mistake [to try to become an insider when one is an outsider].  I think you should stay right where you are and let the world fall around you”).  Crisp’s youthful openness about his sexuality and his world-weary persona mixed with razor wit would cause him to be beloved and virtually deified in the media (just listen to Sting’s song in praise of Crisp, “An Englishman in New York,” for example).  This is curious in light of his statements that homosexuality is “a terrible disease,” that he didn’t “believe in rights for homosexuals,” and that if parents knew a baby would be gay, they should abort it.  Despite Crisp’s greatest fame occurring during the gay liberation era, he was resolutely a pre-liberation figure in his worldview.

At A Different Light, Crisp may have been promoting his recently released book The Wit and Wisdom of Quentin Crisp.  On the other hand, the James White Review interview reveals that he was in the process of touring in Talking to Quentin Crisp, and the bookstore appearance may have been publicity for the show.

Post-1984, Crisp would continue to release books, including How to Go to the Movies (1988) and a third volume of memoirs, Resident Alien (1994).  He also managed to forge a movie career, appearing most famously as Queen Elizabeth in the 1992 film adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel Orlando.

Recommended reading:  The Naked Civil Servant is the only mandatory Crisp read.  Even books by Crisp that weren’t direct autobiography were essentially autobiographies in disguise, and his writing’s unified tone causes a lot of it to blend together after a while.  Of the rest, I’d recommend How to Have a Lifestyle (1975) as being quintessentially Crisp.

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 5:  Ron Harvie

Ron Harvie is now among the least known of the A Different Light readers from 1984.  A Canadian living in Montréal as of 1980, Harvie seemed in 1984 to be locked into a burgeoning career as a short story writer.  He had appeared in hardcover in 1980 in the anthology Aphrodisiac, a collection of fiction from the early years of the venerable Christopher Street magazine, then followed up with the short story collection The Voltaire Smile and Other Stories (1982).  This was one of the first books published by the Gay Presses of New York (GPNy) collective, a combination of Felice Picano’s SeaHorse Press, Larry Mitchell’s Calamus Books, and Terry Helbing’s JH Press.

In 1984, GPNy released Harvie’s second book, Men Working (1984), which Harvie promoted at A Different Light.  From there, inexplicably, the trail of Harvie’s writing life goes cold.  Internet searching shows that there is a Ron Harvie still living in Montréal, but I have been unable to determine whether this is the same person.  Anyone with information is encouraged to contact me through TNG.

Recommended reading:  Of Harvie’s two collections, The Voltaire Smile is the better.

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 4:  Armistead Maupin

Armistead Maupin and his husband Christopher Turner at the Sundance Film Festival, Jan. 21, 2006, Wikimedia Commons

Armistead Maupin has been known for more than three decades as the leading gay chronicler of life in San Francisco.  But he was born in North Carolina and served stints in the Navy during Vietnam—he was interviewed for Randy Shilts’ magisterial history of the purges of GLBT people from the armed forces, Conduct Unbecoming—before moving to the West Coast in the early 1970s.  There he found the format that would make him nationally known: the serial story.

Maupin had been a journalist the Carolinas, and he continued this profession in San Francisco, beginning with the Associated Press.  It was with the San Francisco Chronicele that he began what would become the long-running and successful phenomenon that is Tales of the City.  The story of Mary Ann Singleton’s arrival in San Francisco, her developing friendship with, among others, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver, and her subsequent adventures, Tales of the City was published weekly, with Maupin adding current events and celebrities to his mix of San Francisco characters.  The serial was so popular that Maupin was able to collect it into a series of novels starting with Tales of the City (1978) and More Tales of the City (1980).  By 1984, the fourth novel in the series, Babycakes, was in stores and was likely what Maupin was promoting at A Different Light.

Since 1984, Maupin completed the Tales of the City cycle with Significant Others (1987) and Sure of You (1989); this last was the only one that was written as a stand-alone novel, instead of initially appearing in serialized form.  He also published two novels separate from the Tales series, including The Night Listener (2000), later turned into a movie starring Robin Williams and Toni Colette.  But it was in returning to the character of Michael Tolliver from the Tales books in Michael Tolliver Lives (2007) that Maupin thrilled his longtime fans.  Maupin plans to release another novel in the Tales universe, Mary Ann in Autumn, late this year.  Maupin maintains a website about his life and work at http://www.armisteadmaupin.com/index.html.

Recommended reading:  All of the Tales novels are blatant page-turners, a function of both their original life as serials and a fully-realized cast of San Francisco oddballs.  The stories do start to take a turn for the unrealistically bizarre, as soap operas tend to do, around the time of Babycakes, but if you begin with the first, you’ll probably not stop until you’re done with the first six.  Opinions vary on the effectiveness of the quasi-seventh novel in the sequence, Michael Tolliver Lives.W

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Week 3:  David Leavitt

Like Sarah Schulman the previous week, David Leavitt was at the beginning of his career in 1984.  Just graduated from Yale, Leavitt had achieved massive attention the year before, when he had a short story published in The New Yorker at age 20.  Two New Yorker stories appeared in his first collection, Family Dancing (1984), which is what he was promoting at A Different Light.  As with much of his later writing, Family Dancing focused largely on middle-class gay men and their family relationships.

Within a couple of years, Leavitt had a massive hit with his novel The Lost Language of Cranes (1986), later turned into a movie.  At the same time, criticism was already aimed at him for writing safe stories about sexless middle-class gay men, as acceptable to the mainstream as possible.  While this might be a fair criticism, Leavitt’s style allowed him to become arguably the best known and most widely read gay writer in the 1980s and early 1990s.  The novel Equal Affections (1989) and the short story collection A Place I’ve Never Been (1990) trod much the same ground as previous efforts.

After enduring a decade of criticism, Leavitt seemed determined to cast aside his reputation as being a gay writer totally unwilling to write sex scenes by writing them over and over in While England Sleeps (1993).  The sex scenes were so leaden and boring, though, that Leavitt may have been holding back on including sex in his novels not to preserve his reputation as an acceptably mainstream gay writer, but simply because he’s a lousy writer of sex scenes.  While England Sleeps brought Leavitt more trouble when famed British poet Stephen Spender sued him and his publisher, claiming that the plot was plagiarized from Spender’s memoir World Within World (1951).  Leavitt was forced to withdraw the manuscript and make changes before it could be published again in 1995.

More controversy arose in 1997, when Leavitt’s novella, “The Term-Paper Artist,” seemed to be an autobiographical account of writing straight boys’ college papers in exchange for sexual favors; Esquire, which had paid a reported $13,000 for the story, killed it before publication, allegedly because it feared the sexual descriptions would offend its major advertisers.  Leavitt has since been releasing even more novels, writing nonfiction (including a biography of gay British mathematician Alan Turing and books about Italy), and editing anthologies.  When he’s not living in Italy, he’s teaching at the University of Florida.

Recommended reading:  None of Leavitt’s 6 novels after The Lost Language of Cranes is quite as good.  To my mind, he’s actually a better short story writer; A Place I’ve Never Been is very worth the time, and while it’s out of print, all the stories can be found in Leavitt’s Collected Stories (2003). “When You Grow to Adultery,” “Gravity,” and “My Marriage to Vengeance” are particularly good.  Additionally, Arkansas (1997) was overshadowed by the controversy surrounding its lead novella, “The Term-Paper Artist,” but all three of its long stories find Leavitt at the top of his form.

When I came out, harassment was an all too common existence. The “f-bomb” and the queer bomb was dropped so much during PE and ROTC, that I dare not report it to anyone. Now, a student in Wisconsin sets a precedent when a court finds a school liable to stop anti-gay abuse and awards him close to a million dollars. Now, I have reclaimed queer as my own identity and I wear it proudly. When I came out, I cowered to watch Dawson’s Creek because it had a closeted gay character who was navigating his way through high school and fear that my parents would find what I was watching suspect. Now, after Ellen and Elton, take you pick: Jack and Will, Willow, Mikey, Brian and Emmit Honeycut.

When I came out, there was one gay politician. There were no advertisements that featured queers, no LOGO, no gay TV stars, few gay actors and actresses, scant anti-discrimination legislation, one gay magazine in the newsstand, and few gay festivals. There was no gay chic, no gay Mastercard and no “gay is the new black” mentality. Now, there is all this and more.

Two events in 1997 and 1998, illustrate the newfound visibility of queers. The coming out of Ellen Morgan set an unprecedented media attention towards gay media representation. Surely, millions of people watched as Ellen stepped out of that closet and never turned back. She brought homosexuality to the main streets of USA. That following year, the brutal murder of young University of Wyoming student Mathew Shepherd displayed the ugliness and sheer brutality of homophobia. Surely, millions of people watched as the tidal wave of attention the media showed how despite how liberal times were and we had much to celebrate, there was much still to be done. He brought homophobia to the main streets of USA. Both represent the breaking down of one barrier while showing the cruelty and violence of another. This is the terrain where I found my sexuality.

This post is for everyone. To the mainstream liberal gays who are now sitting back reaping the benefits of the current wave, thinking the battles have largely been won, they haven’t. Don’t sit in the clubs and bars and watch others protest your rights to be human beings. Be vigilant. For the conservative gays who want to slip into society unnoticed, unseen and unannounced, forget it. We have blown up our closest and sky rocketed to a new position in society. To the radical queers who constantly see new frontiers around them and constantly challenge the world because their ethics simply will not let them sleep at night, your unbridled doubt that tomorrow is not guaranteed is refreshing. To the well-meaning heterosexuals who think embracing sameness and ignoring difference is the best that queers can hope for, your kind and liberal gesture is not realized. And to the not so well meaning heterosexual who view gay liberation and gay rights as a simple foot note in the decadence of an all too liberal minded society,  this is history. We will strive with our hopes and fears in this new decade in knowing that we are that name and we are here- your sons, your daughters, your mothers and fathers, you co-workers, your next-door neighbor, your preacher and your bosses. We are NOT in Kansas in anymore.

This summer, I was doing research in the George Fisher papers at Cornell University.  Fisher was an airline steward who, as a side job, ran a massive gay mail-order bookselling operation, Elysian Fields, from 1972 until near the time of his death from AIDS in 1990.

In the course of working my way through boxes of letters, catalogs, and flyers from Fisher’s business, one of them caught my attention.  It advertised the autumn 1984 reading series at the New York City outlet of the bookstore A Different Light.  Every week for 15 weeks between September 11^th and December 18^th, A Different Light hosted a free reading by a different gay or lesbian literary figure.  What was amazing was the sheer quality of this assemblage of talent.  I highly doubt that any similar reading series could be launched in one city in the U.S. in 2010 – not one with such frequency and consistency of talent.

Let’s return to the fall of 1984.  Each week, we’ll look at that week’s novelist, poet, playwright, and critic.  What had they done by 1984?  What have they done since?

Photo courtesy of WikiMedia Commons

Week 2:  Sarah Schulman

As opposed to the Week 1 reader, Richard Howard, who was already widely established as a poet and critic, Sarah Schulman was just 26 and at the beginning of her career as a national figure when she appeared at A Different Light in September 1984.  Coming out of the Downtown Arts Movement in the East Village, where she had been writing and having plays performed, Schulman had just published her first novel, The Sophie Horowitz Story.  She was a few years away from the journalism and activism that would make her reputation, along with more widely read novels like After Delores (1988).

The AIDS crisis would lend a mission to Schulman’s work post-1984.  As her friends throughout New York City continued to die, she became one of the chroniclers of the devastation of the disease within GLBT artistic communities.  Her activist work in ACT-UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power) was a natural extension of this journalism.  In 1992, she became one of the co-founders of The Lesbian Avengers, a group, as Schulman wrote in The Gay and Lesbian Review in 2003, “trained thousands of lesbians in direct action techniques”—the same sort that had been so effective in achieving public attention in the early days of ACT-UP.

Schulman also continued as a novelist, reaching what may be the heights of her fiction in the back-to-back-to-back novels People in Trouble (1990), Empathy (1992), and Rat Bohemia (1995), all set in New York City and frequently exploring the life of gay and lesbian outsiders on the Lower East Side.  At the time of the huge success of Jonathan Larson’s musical Rent, Schulman noticed distinct similarities between the plot and characters in the play and in her own People in Trouble. Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS, and the Marketing of Gay America (1998) was Schulman’s examination of the similarities between her novel and Rent, the way that Rent changed key depictions of the GLBT community from People in Trouble, and how both the AIDS and gay experiences are ripped off, without being fully understood, by mainstream culture.

Recommended reading:  While I found Empathy almost unreadable, it has a strong fan base, and Rat Bohemia is a searing look at life on the outside in AIDS-ravaged New York City.  Both Stagestruck and the journalism collected in My American History: Lesbian and Gay Life During the Reagan/Bush Years (1994) capture Schulman’s intelligent, angry nonfiction writing.  To see what she is currently up to, visit the ACT-UP Oral History Project website (http://www.actuporalhistory.org/).