Review: Sanctified – An Anthology of Poetry by LGBT Christians
Sanctifieded. by Justin Cannon
Published by CreateSpace
Reviewed by Radcliff Gregory
Homosexuality and religion have never sat comfortably at the same table, as this book beautifully illustrates. The ramifications of divine wrath are not, however, exclusive to those who go to church – in fact, they have probably been felt more by the people who don’t feel welcome. From an early age, children are conditioned to believe that God loves everyone, even murderers and rapists… but not us folk of the queer persuasion.
In fact, those who have read the Bible in context, rather than picking out convenient soundbites in an effort to justify their prejudice will know that although St Paul preached hatred of gay and transgender people, and murdered countless numbers of them, there is no record of Jesus Christ ever uttering a homophobic word. In fact, He stood up against the pre-Christian church and demanded that it opened its doors to women and all the minorities it policed and excluded.
This historical context is important, because it is so universally censored, and it is the very reason why Sanctified is so needed, whether people formally identify themselves as Christians, a different faith, or none, because the power of this erasure of fact has permeated every culture. This book reaches out to the LGBT community on a trans-spiritual level.
The majority of the poems aren’t ‘religious’, and many are not blatantly queer either, but they all speak from the psyche of real people who have felt either excluded or eventually included by their religious community, and/or their individual experience and perception of who and what God is to them. Potential readers should not fear that Sanctified is only populated by different versions of the same poem – the subject matter and poetic styles are as numerous as the poems.
Christoper Alan Gaskins plays on the notion of religious snobbery in ‘The Company I Keep’, describing his Sundays as a very special, but also very isolated, communion with God, his only confidante, mentor and psychical doctor in a world that has stigmatised and pathologised him for his “gay libido”. Nathan Brisby speculates about the last thoughts of a victim of homophobic murder, and asks whether “the sun hit your face the day they killed you/ …so you couldn’t see their evil.” Brisby makes a parallel with Christ, who was also killed for speaking out in a way proscribed by the religious and political culture of His time, and whose brutal experience touched more after death than in life. (Of course this is poetic metaphor, not a literal comparison!)
Some of the poems are stunning, such as Gregory Loselle’s ‘Magdalene Penitent, After De La Tour,” which beautifully draws out the poetic spirituality of discrete, and simple moments: a sigh by candlelight, the mute, ecstatic shock of the Resurrection.
Henry Juhala’s account of how his life as a gay man changed over the course of his life is fascinating as he writes a verse noting the status quo at four-yearly intervals of his life. In spite of growing up “in the Bible Belt where everything was straight”, he finds positive revelation in every milestone.
Thankfully, the editor of Sanctified has not constrained the contributors with any form of censorship, allowing them a greater freedom of honesty and expression. Although the authors are included in strictly alphabetical order, it is perhaps fitting that the anthology closes with the searing beauty of Fred Turpin’s poems. ‘May The Shrine Catch Fire’ draws genuine eroticism from “holy passion”, and entreats us to “Trust the power of love to heal”.
Sanctified transcends the traditionally confined spaces in which Christianity’s queer brethren are permitted to exist, and sets the authors and readers free in and beyond their faith. It is not a prerequisite to be of any particular faith or sexuality to benefit from the sense of being reached out to. For too long LGBT Christians have been forced to live with the dilemma of feeling both judged and excluded by their faith, and many of them have been made to feel isolated freaks of nature, when, in all probability, they weren’t the only gay Christian in the village.
Radcliff Gregory is the author of Everywhere, Except…, and the sold-out Fragile Art, and Figaro’s Cabin (under a pseudondym), and also anthologised in Chroma, Poemata, Coffee House and Poets International literary publications, and a dozen books by publishers including Crystal Clear, Forward Press and Poetry Now. Outright winner of six UK poetry competitions. Also writes non-fiction articles and essays on literary criticism, literature, disability and gender issues. Currently organising Polyverse Poetry Festival, which he founded. He also tries to find time to complete his first full-length prose work.Labels: Poetry Review
Review: Between Men 2: Original Fiction by Today’s Best Gay Writers
Between Men 2
Edited with an Afterword by Richard Canning
Published by
Alyson BooksReview by Jonathan Statham
It has often struck me as somehow significant that the gay section in a mainstream bookshop (if it exists) often contains a high proportion of books which anthologise short stories. Many of these are of course erotica but there is besides this a healthy supply of collections like the one currently under review: anthologies of contemporary authors using fiction to engage with and be literate about gay life (contemporary and historical). Furthermore, in the current publishing climate, it is these books which seem most happy to label themselves ‘gay’ and to take homosexuality as their explicit subject matter. Why this is the case is perhaps more problematic. What does short prose have to offer that it should be such a staple for gay readers today?
From one point of view, there seems to be a general sense that to make homosexuality the explicit subject of a novel would be gratuitous – as the editor of the current volume, Richard Canning, put it in his Afterword: “some of us live in a world where being gay may prove no big deal”. Certainly, many of these stories do take as their starting point the notion that being gay is but a part of their characters’ lives. Yet it is the strength of these stories to betray that starting point, to demonstrate instead the pervasiveness of their characters’ (homo)sexualities, the ways in which their being gay affects every relationship they have, sexual and non-sexual.
Indeed, I think the most interesting stories here are those in which the ‘couple’ is not the strict focus, because it is then that the socially pervasive character of homosexuality gets brought out, the reasons why even if it is only one part of a life it is still always a big deal (not least because it is quite frankly a big deal to have a sexuality at all). To give a few examples: John Weir acutely assesses male friendships that, as it were, cross the orientation divide. Aaron Hamburger looks at a mother emigrating to be with her gay son in America and shows how sexuality and nationality and the creation of community are complexly interwoven and not always harmoniously. Then there is Eric Karl Anderson’s (he who is also the editor of this blog) intricate story of a father and son in which the son’s relationship with his own homosexuality and that of those around him impacts upon his relationship with his father. Wayne Koestenbaum’s piece is perhaps an even more extreme example, being a posthumous dialogue between Sylvia Plath and Rainer Werner Fassbinder who both, being dead, now reside in New Jersey – their conversation revolves around Fassbinder’s erection and is many ways a debate on the emotional nuances of sexuality and sexual acts. An exploration shared, as it were inversely, by David McConnell’s story in which the sexual nature of the relationship is precisely what is in question, specifically with regard to the prescribed sexual roles, top and bottom (“mindless concepts […] which eliminated all subtlety and all fine distinctions”). In each of these stories, and others in this volume, it is a question not of making homosexuality an issue but of examining what homosexuality puts in issue, how it changes the social dynamics, creates alternative possibilities in its departure from the normative. And this is one thing the short story can do best: show how an aspect, a significant detail, a part, transforms the whole.
Patrick Gale, Richard Canning, Eric Karl Anderson
If that already sounds like the dynamic of gay liberation, its search by means of homosexuality for new socio-sexual formations, relations and communities that might free homosexuals, heterosexuals, bisexuals and the whole queer lot of us, then I think that is no accident. Furthermore, we might take the digression or departure from a focus on the conventional couple (that core model of heterocentric life and culture) negotiated by these stories as some kind of answer to a question posed to us recently by Peter Tatchell, writing in The Guardian on the eve of Stonewall’s fortieth anniversary: “are queers the new conservatives, the 21st-century suburbanites?” Well, almost we are, almost but not quite as this volume seems to bear testament. For while many of these stories take up domesticated life, they do so in order to unravel it, to reveal how it is striated not only by sexual orientations but also by race, gender, age, nationality and death and the intertwining of these things.
In addition to the stories themselves, Richard Canning has included an Afterword in which he gives us brief literary critical ‘readings’ of every story included in the volume (with the exception of one of the most striking stories, Koestenbaum’s dialogue already noted, which he mentions only in passing, possibly because his literary critical approach does not lend itself to a reading of a piece so unusual in form). However, these readings, insightful as they are, seem to do a disservice to both the stories and the reader neither of which in fact require an explanation or an interpretation (though the sense Canning sometimes provides of how the tale fits into the author’s corpus of work is certainly enlightening). The Afterword becomes interesting only as he concludes by beginning to question the collection itself, specifically “the diversity of voices and experiences collected here – and possible lack of it”. This leaves me immensely curious as to why Canning wanted to create this series of books in the first place and what he thinks the anthologisation of these writers might accomplish or work towards.
For, what I do not get, neither from Canning’s Afterword nor indeed from his selection of these specific stories, his bringing together of these particular pieces, is a sense of why this book is being made. The volume as whole, and this is no criticism of any of the individual stories, lacks a sense of purpose, a sense that it is trying to accomplish something. Of course, Canning is right when he asks “why have a set of requirements for fiction? Why “must” fiction do, or be, anything?” – except that neither ought it do or be nothing. In a particular instance it must indeed be something or we are left with a blandness, which in this case is grossly unfair to some exquisite short stories. This is not a question of establishing ‘requirements for fiction’ – certainly there is no single thing that fiction must always do – but an anthology (or any publication for that matter) is a situation for fiction in which an idea of fiction takes shape (and does so whether one intends this or not). But what Canning suggests in his Afterword is that this volume merely collects what he considers to be good writing by authors who only happen to be gay (among other things). Yet if this volume illustrates his idea of good writing then it obscures its own project as a gay collection and betrays the stories it collects. Having said that, it is noticeable that the authors are almost all novelists and it is clear to me that the short form is here neither explored for all its possibilities nor pushed to its limits to create new possibilities. Sometimes we are even given a chapter from a forthcoming novel. This seems a missed opportunity to me, as if the volume were willing its own ephemerality rather than seeking to make a genuine contribution to the ongoing process of gay culture and art through the development of form. Nevertheless, the stories here can be appreciated individually as accomplished works redolent of twenty-first century homosexuality’s search for its place and its meaning in a world ever more diverse, ever more complex and ever more changeable.
Jonathan Statham lives and writes in Manchester.Labels: Review
Ganymede: a literary/art print journal - Issue #4 Out Now!
Ganymede Issue #4Published by
LuluReview by Eric Karl Anderson
Ganymede is growing and fast. This New York City journal written by and for gay men offers a rich look at the current gay cultural climate featuring photographs, essays, reviews, poetry and short stories.
What’s so refreshing about this relatively new gay journal is the informed understanding of our queer past it brings when offering a survey of the arts. This makes for a rich portrait of how the gay community has evolved over the years while offering ground-breaking new creative work that hints at where we’re going. For instance, the first issue features an astute account by John Stahle of what New York City meant for a gay man in 1968 while also elaborating how it has transformed forty years on. Later issues have featured sympathetic new translations of Cavafy’s poetry alongside the emotional and sensual photographs by
Simon Pais-Thomas and the refreshing new fiction of NYC writer
Sam J Miller. The page numbers of Ganymede are increasing with each issue that’s published showcasing a fascinating cross section of references from an examination of Muscle Ramon, the first online male pinup brought to fame by gay bloggers, to an account by Richard Canning of an enormous auction of Yves Saint Laurent’s art collection raising funds for AIDS research.
In the new issue #4, Christopher Roland offers a snapshot account into the daily life of gay porn and bodybuilding star Matthew Rush. The atmosphere behind the camera is nothing like the horny sex being filmed. With squabbles between the porn stars’ boyfriends and the tedious wait for Viagra to kick in, a porn set is anything but erotic. Roland examines how the scattering of films these porn stars make act more as publicity for their oftentimes more lucrative escorting services.
Fabio Panichi
Fabio Panichi’s photographs create a dialogue between the mediums of painting and photography. They primarily feature instances of self-portraiture where the artist treads the line between these two in search of illumination that sometimes takes the form of a burst of light. The effect is oftentimes startling causing you to do a double-take given their surrealist Magritte-like slant. There is also a tension between literature and the visual arts evident in many photographs, depicting an oftentimes naked man grappling through an imaginative landscape seeking inspiration and knowledge where he can find it. These are very strong pictures by a skilled young photographer.
Jee Leong Koh
This issue also features a poetry slam section which showcases the debut publications of seven talented gay poets. It’s fitting that Jee Leong Koh’s poetry follows after Panichi’s photographs as Koh is in a dialogue with the visual arts as well. Simmering with violence and bodily harm, Koh’s poetry hints at a dangerous past that makes itself felt in the movements of everyday life. Some of this poetry also seeks to create a self portrait while referring to specific artists, filtering their style into the poet’s unique form of self expression. Within his poems the body is annihilated to declare an individual is not simply defined by his physical form alone. Koh skilfully uses his artistic ancestors as a touchstone to understand himself.
Zhuang Yisa
James Newborg’s poetry imbues coded meaning into everyday objects highlighting the emotional rifts between the presence of memories in our day to day interactions. Matthew Stradling is a well known visual artist, often depicting male nudes. His first published poetry in this issue explores the destructive urges of desire and the irrepressible longing for what cannot be obtained. Jon Rentler’s poetic voice is urgent and full of a lacerating tenderness, longing for a reconnection through a messy landscape of affairs and spurned lovers. Dug McDowell’s poetry explores adult themes using humorous nursery-rhyme-like rhythms. The sensuality of encounters in the outside elements is infused into the poetry of Zhuang Yisa. Matt Cogswell’s poem follows a typical afternoon which I’m sure many web-savvy men who are reading this will be able to identify. Online connections are made, lost and misfired using multiple usernames across a series of websites with the result often only being disappointment and shame.
Following these rich poems are a series of photographs by Andrea Francesco Berni. Like his sometimes collaborator and fellow countryman Panichi, Berni’s photographs include a lot of self portraiture, but contain a much more playful and relaxed feel. The pervading mood is a sense of duality and weightlessness. Apart from his work included here, Berni’s series of modern Alice in Wonderland photographs featured on Flickr are definitely worth a look.
Ryan Doyle May’s daring short story “Almost No Memory” recounts the prolonged death of the narrator’s mother. This is followed by memories of previous occasions when his father entered his bed and the sensation of their sexual exploration. When his mother died, the covert encounters between the man and boy during the night ended as well. May brilliantly writes about his protagonist slipping into his mother’s wedding dress in a desperate effort to reclaim the connection he’s lost with his father and take his mother’s place.
Daniel Rodrigob Schultz could be the Brazilian equivalent of German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. His pictures feature action shots of young attractive friends in various states of undress rollicking through the night and day, basking in the sun or caught in a moment of contemplation in the shadows.
B.R. Lyon’s evocative story “As is, I” describes what might be an imagined sensual evening in a rented apartment in Cairo. The lover is absent, but he is there in the narrator’s mind. The projected encounter feels entirely real as the narrator gropes his own body imagining that it is that of another man. A repeating image of a headless body gives a dark overcast to this night of intimate escapism.
There are three more series of self portraits which explore the male nude and a sense of splintered identity. Rene Becker’s photography offers double shots of the author “alone with himself” in a domestic setting. Many of these pictures feature Becker fighting, arguing with himself, contemplating self destruction or simply looking bored. It’s a meditation on isolation and loneliness that is easy to sympathize with.
Pablo Moran Jr
Pablo Moran, Jr’s photos also show some double takes of the author either seeking a sensual union with himself or inextricably tied to himself by a strip of fabric or barbed wire. The images where the photographer is presented alone suggest mystical experience, especially when interacting with technology.
Davide Poggi photos hint at a violent or self destructive personality, sometimes torn apart by light or crouching naked in a crumbling or desolate landscape.
Bruce Nugent
The three chapters from Bruce Nugent’s novel Gentleman Jigger provide a fascinating insight into the Harlem Renaissance black artistic movement of the 20s and 30s. Here some of the leading figures of the time from this circle are fictionalized in a group known as the Niggeratti. However, these extracts are more than just a time capsule depicting the vibrant personalities and social issues that this important group were grappling with. Nugent’s writing is direct, powerful and his descriptions of the large cast of characters are full of wonderful insights hinting at deeper psychological complexities. Nugent also was the only members of this black artistic movement that dared to openly deal with homosexuality in his prose. It’s surprising that this valuable piece of writing was only published last year by Da Capo Press and Tom Worth should be praised for resurrecting his writing.
Another historical treat included in this issue is Oscar Wilde’s story “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime.” At a dazzling social affair Lord Arthur has his palm read and is told that he is to become a murderer. He desires to marry, but decides he must fulfil his destiny and murder someone before he can be wed. The story is filled with Wilde’s typical paradoxical witticisms: “nothing looks so like innocence as an indiscretion” or “If a woman can’t make her mistakes charming, she is only a female.” It is a fine example of how the great author succeeded in turning “the conventional wisdom of the Victorians on its head” while exposing the queer nature of all humankind.
As you can see, Issue #4 offers an enormous amount of stimulating prose and photography to enjoy. The rich diversity and craft exhibited in this issue has left me with a deeper understanding about where we’ve been and where we’re going as a gay community. Ganymede is gaining momentum and is definitely a journal to watch.
Eric Karl Anderson is author of the novel Enough and has published work in various publications such as The Ontario Review, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Blithe House Quarterly and the anthologies From Boys to Men and Between Men 2.
Labels: Gay Arts Journal
Beaumen
Beaumen
By Beau
Published by
Bruno GmunderReviewed by Paul Kane
The elephant in the room with regard to books of this type - essentially, homoerotic art, collections of pictures or photos - is that their primary purpose is to provide stimuli for wanking, to be 'the stuff of one-handed reading', as Clive Barker euphemistically puts it in his preface here. So let's take this as read and say further that, if your taste runs to rugged handsome men, Beaumen will most likely push all the right buttons for you. Is there anything else to say? Besides, that is, to make the idle boast that my imagined elephant is bigger, much bigger, than yours could ever be?
Well, there is the point that art, and even the greatest art, has always had an ulterior purpose or function. Consider, say, the role of the church as a patron of the arts during the Renaissance. Or consider the way in which Andrea del Castagno obtained his nickname. In Florence, artists of note were often asked to paint descriptions of murderers on the walls of buildings. Del Castagno's efforts led to so many arrests and subsequent executions that he became known as Andrea degli Impiccati; that is, Andrea of the Hanged.
And nor should one confuse purpose or motive with merit, as even Tom of Finland did when he said, 'Yes, I consider my work pornography... my motive is lower than art.' There are plenty of dud Madonnas and kitsch Jesuses, after all, whereas Tom's work - admired by Warhol, Mapplethorpe and John Waters - has sold at Christies, been much exhibited and is now pretty much iconic.
Now we come to the book under review. Beaumen contains myriad paintings by the artist known as Beau, an artist of fine gifts. The paintings have an elegant composition and much thought, too, has gone into painting the perspective from which the scene depicted is viewed. There is a narrative to some, which makes one think we are viewing them out of context: a geeky guy peeking at a handsome hunk as he soaps and showers, a pretty boy actor stripping for a Hollywood agent, the odd S/M scene. Perhaps these were originally used to accompany a story. Other paintings are portraits of lone figures: a cowboy, a hustler, a few sailors (which reminds one that the well-respected artist Charles Demuth, too, did quite a few dodgy pictures of sailors). The overall feel is hedonistic, warm, uninhibited; in a word, pagan. There's realistic detail and gritty atmosphere and the colour has a kind of glinty vibrancy, perhaps because originally these were all works ofoil on paper.
Look at the paintings in Beaumen, do, but please try not to touch. We are not in a zoo here. Imagined elephants aside, that is...
Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. Hewelcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.comLabels: Review
Review: The Dying Gaul and Other Screenplays by Craig Lucas
The Dying Gaul and Other Screenplays
Craig Lucas
Published by
AlysonReviewed by Garth Green
I was excited when I first flicked through this book and saw the names of great films by Norman Rene, Alan Rudolph and Craig Lucas himself. On the cover is a gorgeous still from Lucas’s own directed The Dying Gaul (2005); the book’s medium - format design is compact yet classy and easily manageable. I read through it all in one sitting.
Campbell Scott’s short Foreword unfolds in sparklingly clear prose as he defines the essence of great screenplays, based on well chosen words to resemble the “ ropes in a suspension bridge”. He suggests that this is a great art which Lucas has and that his words are arranged like “great pieces of music”. Scott’s mini essays on the three screenplays in the volume, even though just a paragraph apiece manage to convey the most trenchant analysis.
There is also an interview with Lucas conducted by the book’s editor, Steven Drukman. Drukman also replays the analysis of the three chosen screenplays and places them into political, social and movie context, or what he calls “movie-land”. One gets the feeling that Drukman feels “movie-land” has replaced “wonderland” and allows Lucas to define his own roles between scriptwriting, movie directing and stage directing.
But at times reading the book is a bumpy ride, due to it’s screenplay formatting. As a university lecturer I am used to reading plays in play format, but I found reading the screenplay script with its various abbreviations and scene changes a bit heavy going and had to learn a new “ language “ as it were, in order to appreciate them. One other quibble which I have with the editing of the screenplays is the appending of the film’s cast lists and stills from the movies - why only stills from two of the three films ? - and why not full production lists of the films, noting all the details, such as the years that they were produced and released ? As the films are the finished products of the screenplay production, surely an important and essential aspect of this type of book ?
It’s a pleasure to see the female perspective on the screenplays and on Lucas’s work through the commentary of Mary-Louise Parker, who starred in Longtime Companion. She describes Lucas “ like some giant sea creature, all tentacles and neon suctions that trap and filter any conversation … “ and a writer who writes “ for people who will bother to listen; his is not a passive theater “.
While reading the book, I have borne in mind the very great pleasure that cine lovers derive from Lucas’s work and have tried to answer in my own mind why he has such popular appeal. Given that the world which he portrays for the spectator is so emotionally violent in its passive aggression, it would be quite possible to find his films both repetitive and alienating. Such is not the case, however, as his huge “ listening” audiences make clear. I may suggest that, while his narrative closure is often one of death, nonetheless the overriding message taken from his films is that there is hope. Robert Sandrich, a character in The Dying Gaul can be taken as a representative for many of the major characters in his scripts, and Lucas describes him as “ pushing all the rage down deep within, not allowing it any vent “ and yet by the end of the script we are told “ the process therefore consists in becoming what you are.” Hope comes in the form of creative choice for the protagonists even though it entails for nearly all a fatal ending. The point is, though, that each character chooses their end, working from deep rage, and that choice takes the form of a direct challenge and/or resistance to the major institutions that govern us - in particular the society of technology and surveillance, the society of consumption, the institutionally sanctioned notion of the family, and not least the society of new age religion with its therapies and new dysfunctional paradigms. Lucas amusingly ends The Secret Lives of Dentists with an image which shows us clearly this choice in operation: Dave, the dentist tells us in a voice over that “ Teeth. I am still struck by the mystery …” and we are told “ He continues probing.”
Garth Vernon Green was born and raised in Africa. He trained as a gestalt psychotherapist and is a university lecturer in comparative literature. He lives in Sweden.Labels: Review
Theatre Review: The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley
The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley
Written and Performed by Chris Goode
Contact Theatre, Manchester
Reviewed by Paul Kane
Without a doubt, this was the most beautiful and interesting play to be performed at the
Queer Up North festival; already, perhaps, it should be regarded as a classic. Let’s go through a few reasons why it was overall so fine and copacetic.
First key point to make: it has an awful lot of charm. The set, Shirley’s bedroom, vividly evokes the mid to late ‘70s: Bowie’s Aladdin Sane poster on the wall and the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK poster too. (I’d query whether they have the correct Spider Man poster on the wall, mind: wasn’t that an Ultimate Spider Man poster I espied?) Adam Smith’s opening animation is involving and fun, elegant and expressive both. Then there is Chris Goode’s virtuoso performance.
Goode plays all the parts: the storyteller/narrator; Wound Man, a superhero whose special power is to contain, and therefore take away, others’ pain; Shirley, a teenage boy still mourning for his dead brother and struggling to come to terms with his sexuality; Reg Parsley, an ideal exemplar (or should that be an Exemplar Ideal?) of the Daily Mail’s target readership; and quite a few other characters too. Throughout, Goode is engaging and amiable, his humour often silly and outrageous.
The, it has to be said very English, charm of Goode’s piece allows him to get away with delivering a message that people may not want or like to hear: that a relationship between a teenage boy and an older man may be warm, affectionate, respectful and good for both. This is not an especially complex message, but it is maybe a transgressive one, in our paedophile-paranoid times. And that Goode should use the superhero/sidekick template to sweeten this truth will likely have old Doc. Wertham turning in his grave.
The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley is absolutely enchanting, a Pythonesque brew of Kes and Dennis Cooper, with perhaps just a smidgeon of Hellraiser too. It is the best piece of British Theatre since the Katie Mitchell and the NT’s Waves.
Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. Hewelcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.comLabels: Theatre Review
Review: The Gay Divorcee
The Gay Divorcee
Reviewed by Liam Tullberg
The Gay Divorcee is Paul Burston’s fifth novel and explores themes of family, belonging and identity.
Successful bar owner and manager Phil Davies is looking forward to his civil partnership to the ever-pouting, rarely satisfied, substantially younger Ashley Grimshaw. All appears well as the big day looms ever closer, but of course, in fiction as in life, nothing ever runs smoothly, and the problem here is that Phil’s kept a rather large secret from his soon to be husband: that he was once – and technically still is - married to a woman, Hazel. And he has a nineteen year old son he’s never met and who’s closer to home than Phil can imagine. Talk about Jeremy Kyle...
The Gay Divorcee is a thoroughly entertaining read with excellent dialogue and empathetic, well-rounded characters that Burston weights appropriately. As in Armistead Maupin’s legendary Tales of the City series, the narrative alternates points of view from chapter to chapter. From Hazel’s dealing with the recent death of her long term partner, to Carl - Phil’s best mate - looking for love in the gay scene he’s long given up on, each subplot is engaging and supportive of the main conflicts of the novel. The ‘Bitchy Queen’ blog that is mysteriously created by one of the characters is particularly well dealt with, poking an acid tongue at the gay scene and drawing Burston’s attention to its shallow, inconsequential depths.
What works exceptionally well is Burston’s drawing a contrast between the London that has become home to Phil, and Bridgend, representative of the Welsh life that he long left behind. While Phil is living a hectic and seemingly fulfilled life in Soho, Hazel is at home in Wales with her mother, but refusing to be bitter towards him for the life with which he has left her. It is through this juxtaposition that Burston successfully explores the premise that family is found where it is sought, rather than being something you are born into.
Burston’s language and use of prose is confident and substantial. For example, it’s as easy for readers to visualise Phil’s bar in which regulars gather around the coveted ‘Table One’ to flick and bitch through copies of Boyz as it is to get inside the minds of the central characters.
Perhaps the only weakness of The Gay Divorcee is in the character of Ashley. Though it’s clear that this is a character to whom there are little more than two dimensions, it is rather hard to believe exactly what Phil finds attractive in him beyond the wonder of Wonderjocks. He behaves so unpleasantly throughout the novel that it’s almost as if an explanation, not an excuse, is needed for his actions. But perhaps this omission is reflective of a belief that some people simply look out for themselves, rather than anyone around them, as Ashley’s one-way friendship with Rik demonstrates through the novel.
The Gay Divorcee is a cutting and contemporary look at gay life, whether through the eyes of a gay man with a wife or a wife with a gay husband. It’s a must for anyone who’s been on the gay scene and met the many characters that Paul Burston has successfully brought to life.
Labels: Review
Review: Whoosh! A Queer Writing South Anthology
Whoosh!
edited by Maria Jastrzebska and John McCullough
Published by
Pighog Press
Reviewed by Radcliff Gregory
It has always been difficult to know whether or not there is genuinely such a genre as ‘queer’ writing, and what qualities and identities might identify work as falling into that category. There is, too, the thorny problem of whether work by and about queer writers and characters are ever representative and ‘real’, whatever that might be. Indeed, Chroma’s own Shaun Levin draws attention to this lack of accessible and recognisably queer writers in the Foreword to Whoosh!. Whatever else this anthology has to offer the reader, its queerness and realness cannot be questioned – its contributors have all been pooled from an ostentatiously queer literary network.
The poems and short stories are diverse in subject matter, with sexual orientation being one of the least prominent themes. Bec Chalkley, who has contributed articles and photographs to Diva opens the collection with her first foray into poetry. Her pieces are endearingly eccentric and vivid, sometimes crackling with brilliance, with the “axe [that]/ traced neat arcs through the dusk: a burst of steel/ and splinters, each dark hide yielding its milky sinews/ for the fire to come.” After reading Monk’s House, I’ll probably think of Virginia Woolf whenever I see a plump courgette.
Living in a society where ‘im/migration’ is a conversational and political hot potato, irrespective of our own beliefs and identity, “foreignness” has become an abused concept in nationalist mentality. Vicky_Ro’s short story, On the Mode of Existence of Foreigners is a timely wake-up call. If it is difficult to suddenly find yourself living in an alien culture, how much more disorientating it is to find yourself “other” in your ‘own’ cultural homeland. This author cleverly develops a metaphor of experiential paranoia to express the impossibility of existence.
Rod Lee expertly manipulates the reader into following a carefully constructed pace-sensitive denouement, and his work would suit public performance very well. Ode to a Night Boy cleverly draws you in, forcing you to eavesdrop deliciously, whilst doing strange things to your mind. Using full names for characters in poetry is a risky ploy, and quite a strange one for a poem where names don’t appear to be exchanged, and yet it does add to the sense of being able to see the drama.
Equally risky is writing a child as the main character in a short story designed for adults, because most of us have forgotten how our minds, abilities, identities and souls existed before social and cultural conditioning attenuated our creativity and erased that naïve sense of absolute invincibility. Airborne, by Morgan Case, is a stunning short story about the freedoms and prisons of difference, and the sometimes terrifying sacrifices we have to make to develop our special gifts and become whole.
Sue Taylor contributes a poem and a short story, the former detailing the ridiculously extensive lengths we sometimes go to for the sake of producing the all-important photographs in which it’s essential that we “cannot be faulted.” Her story featuring the ironically named ‘Swift Removals’ company vividly conjures up the sheer effort we put into building our adult lives, often so easily dismantled by other people’s fleeting manifestations of thoughtlessness.
The motifs of post-modern symbolism seamlessly undergo a new genesis in Cathy Ives’ poems And Which One Are You? and Pebble Beach. Tracy Emin and Jeanette Winterson are evoked and explored, but not plagiarised. The author then takes up the thorny question of what happens to LGBT folk when they get old and grey in a society where it seems that all services for the elderly take heterosexuality as the only possible sexual orientation. Where does the Queer community go when they get old, and how do they live and express their lives and loves? This surprising and touching story conveys and asks far more than the limits its three pages superficially imply.
Penny Lloyd’s poems explore the grey spaces in our lives, the Half Light and “predictive text intimacy” with which most of us are now familiar. She looks at the clichés and emblems that we all recognise and live by, and critiques the question marks that constantly and invisibly hang over us as the “dusk of confusion”.
Whoosh! is closed by two short stories from Nathan Hugh O’Donnell, Heatstroke and A Dark Horse. The first story casts a critical eye over the frisson of discovering what is popularly believed to be the ‘gay male lifestyle, and the eventual graduation into seeing through the perceived ‘glamour’ and ‘sordidness’. The reality of these actual, desired, supposed, and missed, opportunities are the spaces and silences between and beyond, punctuated by monotony, clumsiness and frustration – long stretches when the ecstasies, whether real or anticipated, cease to exist. A Dark Horse is an unusual exploration of grief after the death of a parent, the miscellany of conflicting and contradictory emotions convulsing out in spasms of unexpected prose, forcing the reader to really examine the words he or she is reading.
There is a rich landscape of identities to explore in this anthology, though I cannot honestly say that I felt ‘represented’ here any more than I do in most other literature, irrespective of the authors’ sexual identity. Perhaps we should not default to seeking to graft our own individual experiences on to strangers, and recognise that there are as many queer identities as there are people who identify as such.
Radcliff Gregory is the author of Everywhere, Except…, and the sold-out Fragile Art, and Figaro’s Cabin (under a pseudondym), and also anthologised in Chroma, Poemata, Coffee House and Poets International literary publications, and a dozen books by publishers including Crystal Clear, Forward Press and Poetry Now. Outright winner of six UK poetry competitions. Also writes non-fiction articles and essays on literary criticism, literature, disability and gender issues. Currently organising Polyverse Poetry Festival, which he founded. He also tries to find time to complete his first full-length prose work. Labels: Poetry Review
Film Review: Sunkissed
Sunkissed
Directed by Patrick McGuinn
Willing Suspension Films
Reviewed by Max Fincher
An arthouse, erotic thriller, this new film by director Patrick McGuinn leaves the audience to ponder whether the dark fantasies of one of the handsome young men is the destiny or tragic past of the other.
Teddy, bright, romantic and sociable, is a novelist staying temporarily in the Californian desert home of Crispin, his literary agent, to complete his novel. Arriving at the house, Teddy meets the handsome but conflicted Leo, an aspiring actor. Leo settles him into the house and the two of them get drunk and have sex. They then embark on a passionate affair together. However, all is not as it appears. We begin to wonder just what Leo’s past history is, and what will be Teddy’s fate.
Although the initial pace of the film is slow to build, the tension increases after the confessional drunken exchange between Leo and Teddy. This is a pivotal scene that reveals Leo’s backstory. As we subsequently discover, Leo comes out to his mother who denies he is gay. Teddy’s novel, (which Leo suggests should be titled ‘Goodbye’) is partly autobiographical. Teddy tells him that the experience of coming out in the mid-West was a ‘nightmare’. Leo’s story, then, is one that Teddy is, unwittingly, writing. The mystery over what happens to Teddy is intensified by a close shot later on that shows Leo’s name on the dust jacket of Teddy’s novel.
The nightmare that was coming out continues as we realize that Leo suffers either from premonitions or from flashbacks that involve violence and murder. We see Leo waking from a nightmare, and at one point, telling Teddy that he has visions that he doesn’t want to talk about with him, and that he is ‘going through some shit’. Leo’s visions or remembrances unsettle the viewer’s temporal anchors. These unnerving sequences are often filmed as rapid jump-cuts, and contrast effectively with the slower conversations between them and erotic lovemaking scenes filmed in slow motion.
That it is difficult to decide whether these visions that Leo sees are premonitions or flashbacks increases the tension and suspense, and seems intended to deliberately confuse any (straight)forward narrative chronology. The viewer is forced to piece the narrative together, but is left with no definitive answer as to what has happened or what will happen. Was Leo married to Cheryl, whom he then murdered? He tells Teddy that Cheryl was the victim of a random killer on their doorstep. But we are unsure if this is the truth or a fabrication because later we see Leo and Cheryl sunbathing, a copy of Teddy’s story beside them. Earlier, however, there is a startling shot of Teddy and Leo jumping up out of their seats in the front yard rushing towards something or someone. We are not sure if this is another fantasy of Leo’s. The line between what is fiction and fact is blurred to the extent that we feel, like Teddy, that it is impossible to know the character of Leo. Does Leo murder Teddy? We are refused any clear-cut, easy explanation, and are made to work hard to read the film’s narrative.
The effect of these temporal dislocations upon the viewer is dizzying, disorienting, perhaps even frustrating. Indeed, the prevailing mood of the film is dream-like. The cinematography aims to capture that dizzying, dreamy effect of being sunkissed, that slow, dream-like state one feels after being in the sun for too long perhaps. The breezy, ethereal soundtrack by the band The Sea and Cake emphasizes this effect, and imbues the film with an intense eroticism in its whispered, soft slow vocals and refrains. In one scene, Leo kisses a variety of men against a black background. The faces are lit brightly and shot close up, in profile accompanied by the soundtrack of a song, ‘Watch their Mouths’, that is particularly erotic. Other erotic moments include Leo and Teddy showering each other with a hose in the hot sun, and having sex in a Cherokee jeep in the desert. The overall effect feels as if the viewer is experiencing narcolepsy; there are periods of time that cannot be accounted for or are like hazy dreams.
To return to the point that Teddy, like the viewer, does not or cannot really know who Leo is, or what will happen, one perhaps needs to understand McGuinn’s inspiration for making the film. Over the course of one year, four of his close friends passed away in a series of sudden tragic deaths. As part of coming to terms with his grief, McGuinn returned to the desert, where he was brought up, to reconnect with nature. It was here that he felt that he could ‘embrace the creative forces within myself and in nature, as a source of renewal in the midst of loss.’ To some extent, the film reflects the experience of how the sudden death of those closest to us often feels meaningless and impossible to comprehend. The film resists any closure of meaning in that we are not permitted to know what happens.
At one point, we see Teddy looking up shocked into the night-time sky as a bright white light comes down from above. Perhaps it is a fanciful reading, but this moment seemed to play with the possibility of alien abduction. In another scene, Leo and Teddy are both lying down together discussing giving each other some space. The camera angle, shooting from behind their heads, makes their heads/faces appear almost alien-like, inhuman, alienated from each other perhaps. As mentioned above, there is another moment in the film, when the viewer is unsure if s/he is in present narrative time, or Leo’s dream/nightmare. Both of them jump in shock from the front porch and rush across the yard. But we are not shown what causes their shock. Later in the film, we see Leo running back to the house from a creek. The opening of the film shows Cheryll lying dead in the creek. Another of Leo’s visions shows him carrying Teddy back into the house, covered in blood and unconscious, crying over him as he lays him down on the bed. Why? Any explanation is left unclear? Has Leo murdered Teddy? Has he repressed the action, returned to the house to find Teddy missing, and then discovered him out at the creek? Does he have amnesia? Or have the aliens come for him? Teddy’s disappearance and death is the central aporia in the film’s narrative, and the essence of the film’s philosophy: death is more often than not meaningless, absurd and unable to be explained.
The ending finishes with a shot of both characters in profile, walking in slow motion to kiss against the backdrop of the pounding white waves of the Pacific ocean. In another shot, it would seem that Leo is going to walk into the ocean, his back towards us, perhaps even to commit suicide. The shot evokes the famous suicide scene with Joan Crawford in Humouresque. There are also some traces of Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. One could also read this final scene as the meeting of two halves of a divided personality which Leo stands for.
Sunkissed is a film that blends some beautiful cinematography, of the desert, of desire, and affirms the importance of both passion and truth to oneself as the source of happiness.
Max Fincher wrote his PhD at King’s College London, a queer reading of late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction that was published as Queering Gothic Writing in the Romantic Age by Palgrave Macmillan (2007). He has taught part-time on eighteenth-century fiction and women’s writing, at both King’s College London and Royal Holloway, and is an occasional book reviewer for the TLS. He is currently writing his first novel, tentatively titled The Pretty Gentleman, a queer historical thriller set in the Regency art world.Labels: Film Review
“IT’S ALL ABOUT U.S.!”
Metropolitan Lovers: the Homosexuality of Cities
Julie AbrahamPublished by
University of Minnesota PressReviewed by Richard Canning
Looking at the title, I thought: that would be a big subject. Many of the biggest cities that have played host to significant GLBT communities have already attracted full-length books disinterring their queer pasts. George Chauncey’s Gay New York (1995) was certainly the trailblazing work. It covered just a half-century of its subject – 1890-1940 - but showed not only the breadth of material that could be uncovered in such cases, but also the complex interpreting skills required of the author. Available sources range from the legal to the literary, from the medical to the political, and from the sensational popular press to the private memoir, not intended for publication. (Those including the recent past may draw on oral histories too). In many cases, particularly in the centuries in which the closet was rife, deceit, dissimulation and fabrication were commonplace, often vital strategies.
In the past fifteen years or so, the obvious US metropolises have, piecemeal, been picked off: San Francisco (1996), Boston (1999), Philadelphia (2002 and 2004!), L.A. (2006), Chicago (2008). For better or worse, Europe contains most of the other conurbations likely to have generated substantial archives. London and Paris lead the field. The most compelling characteristic of such books, at their best, results from their pluralistic, interdisciplinary character. It’s best summarized as either instability or contingency. Fault-lines emerge. Claims turn out either impossible or implausible. Anecdotes are misremembered, figures long dead reanimated; protagonists’ addresses, origins, even genders get confused. For most of our history, the subjective accounts of same-sex coupling have necessarily been cautious, evasive or indirect. Only religion, the law and medicine have historically accounted for gay men and women directly, and then rarely favorably. When reading Byrne Fone’s Homophobia: a History, I remember thinking: ‘But this is the history of homosexuality.’
It seemed likely from the off, then, that Julie Abraham, a literature professor, may have addressed too large and inchoate a subject here. The fault may lie in the sweeping tenor of her press’s P.R. unit. Hence, this perfectly engaging, reasoned and substantial investigation of GLBT writers - mostly resident in the major American cities - is unhelpfully trailed as if it had global, not national reach, and indeed stretched back to ‘the destruction of Sodom,’ allegedly our first gay city. Abraham’s assiduous pursuit of the meaningfulness of cities in the sexual travails of her literary cast – Jane Jacobs, Henry James, Walter Benjamin and James Baldwin included – has much to recommend it. What it cannot offer – pace the back cover – is a reading of ‘how gay became synonymous with urban – and why it matters for both.’ This book is about literary writing only, which cannot be taken as representative or reliable as social documentation. Abraham’s somewhat forced comparisons to social theorizations of urban growth - the Chicago school, Walter Benjamin and so on - is not the book’s strength.
To pursue that line of enquiry would, paradoxically, have required the careful tracing of a previous, non-urban gay model: the pastoral idyll, probably first manifest in Virgil’s Georgics. It was co-opted in the Renaissance by poets like Richard Barnfield and Edmund Spenser. Contrastingly, visible, high-profile or articulate gay presences in capital cities and especially at court were, at this time, innately high-risk, even if the protagonists had regal entitlement. This is what Marlowe’s cautionary Edward II indicates. It’s true that foreign cities developed reputations for sexual license, pretty much universally: this was the sin that always flourished elsewhere (though there were cities then that seem to have deserved the reputation - Florence and Venice, above all).
Though less pronounced, the mythic rural retreat would impinge on women’s writings too, whether it be in fanciful reconstructions of Sappho’s life, or in the living circumstances of the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, Lady Eleanor Butler and the Hon. Sarah Ponsonby, two 18th-century Anglo-Irish aristocrats cohabited in a house near the Welsh town which provided their nickname. Nearer the present, Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart (1964) concentrates on how small-town lesbian lives contrast with urbanity.
Male writers got over the alluring shepherd boy, meanwhile, through the Northern hemisphere’s great population movement towards cities (roughly from 1850 to 1914). Still, replacing the rural recluse with urban opportunity involved an uneven period of transition. Scott Herring’s Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (reviewed by me in
GLRW, July/August 2008) shows that the protagonist of Willa Cather’s story ‘Paul’s Case’ (1905) felt, on arriving in New York, that ‘his surroundings explained him’. But Forster’s Maurice (1917; published 1971) exhibited a stubborn, even reactionary harking back to the homosexual pastoral. It was not alone. Forrest Reid’s The Garden God: a Tale of Two Boys (1905) scandalized Henry James with its account of schoolboy protagonist Graham finding his long-sought Greek god in the incarnate form of new friend Harold Brocklehurst. (The same James, though, did somethig to ‘urbanise’ intimate relations between women in 1885’s The Bostonians). A whole genre of writing displaying public school and university homoerotics is a development of the pastoral ideal. Later, even an apparently definitively urban novel like Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939) contains its most liberated treatment of homosexuality on the Baltic idyll of Ruegen Island, far from the capital.
Abraham begins with an account of the well-trodden but useful nineteenth-century French proliferation of the GLBT “damned” – Baudelaire’s women, notoriously; Zola’s Nana (1880); men in several Balzac novels, especially the hapless innocent Lucien de Rubempré. Balzac’s bold account of the tragic ruination of Lucien by the criminal Vautrin in Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes (1847) was hugely influential, including on Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Proust’s Baron de Charlus.
Her consideration of Wilde is less convincing – in part because of generalizations made regarding his background. Nobody claims Dublin to have been at the heart of nineteenth-century Europe. Still, Wilde was not, on his arrival in London society, ‘a young man from the Provinces.’ (He traveled extensively with his family as a child, including to London, a city he also visited frequently while at Oxford). Abraham identifies the duplicity manifest in The Importance of Being Earnest’s Jack (his country name, which he adapts to Ernest for town). But Wilde’s joke is complex. It is not only, as Abraham suggests, that Jack the countryman upholds moral standards, whereas Ernest is obviously as dissolute as the city he inhabits. Rather, Wilde disarms his London audience’s prejudices about the city. In the practice of ‘Bunburying’ (inventing a brother), Jack may in fact be covering over any manner of rural excess.
Similarly, some of the ambiguity in Dorian Gray is overlooked. The novel is described as ‘a prototypical account of the modern homosexuality Wilde would come to represent.’ This argument rests on the Irishman’s subsequent experience of British “justice.” If it were as self-evident as Abraham describes it, there would have been no need for Edward Carson, Queen’s Prosecutor, to be so zealous in his clarification of what that novel “meant” – or rather, implied. As Neil Bartlett’s Who Was That Man? (1988) argues, it is simultaneously true both that everything Wilde wrote is clarified by his gayness and that, in the writings published in his lifetime, Wilde never mentioned homosexuality once.
Next Abraham compares the groundbreaking social studies of gay culture made by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld with comparable classifying tendencies in the masterpiece of the French novelist Proust. Intriguing as the idea is, it leads to the unhelpful sense that the fiction-writer’s efforts prove inferior (because less definitive) to the relentlessly prescriptive Hirschfeld’s study, The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1913). Yet which author is read today – and why? Likewise, the inventive bringing together of Radclyffe Hall and the “Chicago School” of sociology doesn’t fully come off. They remain chalk and cheese.
At this point, Abraham tires of Europe, barring two Parisian interludes. Radclyffe Hall’s merciless French capital (in The Well of Loneliness, 1928) was entirely fabricated, however - as was James Baldwin’s account in Giovanni’s Room (1956). As Herring recognized, it is truly only Djuna Barnes in English (in 1936’s Nightwood) who allowed Paris a signature presence to her urban protagonists that might be called liberating.
Otherwise, the States dominates. There’s nothing wrong in focusing on one nation’s representation of gay urban life. It might have made Metropolitan Lovers cohere better. Still, the narrowing of focus onto 20th-century American terrain should not go unexplained, especially since American cities tend to function unlike European ones. Abraham does consider apposite texts, like Jane Addams’s autobiographical curiosity, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). But the most radical changes to the way modern cities accommodated gay desires were effected, arguably, in Europe: through two world wars and social adjustments resulting from them. These wars had much less direct bearing on most American urban lives, for reasons that should be self-evident.
It feels paradoxical that when Baldwin relocated to Paris, he spoke of that city’s welcome ‘total indifference’ to him. That was as likely to relate to his ethnicity as his sexual nature. Was the boot of “identity” politics now, perhaps, on the other foot? That is, if European cultures had for centuries taken the lead in classifying human types (sexual and otherwise), had that process of classification – nurtured in American through the body politic and the Church, but also through the ready acceptance of neo-Freudian psychology – passed effortlessly to the New World? The liberation Baldwin felt in Paris was not the thrill of self- or mutual recognition, but of de-recognition. It was a new version too of the old Pastoral promise of being left alone.
By the 1970s (often seen as a highpoint of gay and lesbian literary expression), novels were ‘about to become less authoritative as accounts of gay and lesbian life,’ in Abraham’s view. There’s space to consider Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), two works sharing a country-to-town trajectory. But the proliferation of other sources (memoir, film) and the relative liberalization of news coverage and the broadcasting media per se made – Abraham is right - fiction a less vital redoubt for male and female gay readers, even as it came into its own.
At that time, America’s cities also needed economic resuscitation. Edmund White’s States of Desire (1977) celebrated gay men specifically as ‘the worker ants of our reviving cities.’ True or not, here key questions of capital, income and class finally come into play. Rental costs and living expenses had long left those GLBT individuals less able to indulge in costly metropolitan living languishing on the outskirts, in the ’burbs or in the communities and small-towns they grew up in (unless they used youthfulness or beauty as a passport – but that’s another story). Gentrification is about reconstructing the class formulation of entire neighborhoods, after all. Women and ethnic minorities were likely to be driven out by price, not welcomed in. Manuel Castells may, in 1983’s The City and the Grassroots, have thrilled over the prettiness of restored San Franciscan properties, redolent of ‘beauty, comfort and sensuality.’ But, as political responses to more recent changes to New York’s Times Square such Bruce Benderson’s Towards the New Degeneracy (1997) and Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) reveal, there isn’t ever one single model of gentrifying improvement. Gentrification destroys some cultures and traditions even as it builds, and rebuilds, others. The implications for gay men and women will be as various and as race- and class-informed as for the wider populace.
Some poignant late texts close Abraham’s considerations. Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City earn a (brief) place, though characterizing them as ‘Balzac with shorter sentences, more graphic sex, and fewer and less-refined cruelties’ rather underplays how multi-faceted and class-aware Maupin’s fictional San Francisco truly is. Likewise, it’s probably a mistake to consider a polyvalent work like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in just a few sentences.
The emergence of AIDS drastically altered the relationship between gay lives and cities – in America, in particular. The default discretion of many well-off professional gay men, especially, was compromised by tangible symptoms of disability (well-caught in the films Longtime Companion and Philadelphia). At the same time, as the incidence of HIV infection spread beyond prime metropolitan sites and narrowly conceived “at-risk” groups, the epidemic’s destructiveness could, perversely, point to something non-metropolitan GLBTers knew all along: that we’re found everywhere. This, quite properly, is not the province of Abraham’s thoughtful and engaging monograph. Still, how ironic it remains: two essentially non-literary, non-cultural forces over which we, as a subculture, have had limited control, had the biggest impact on contemporary GLBT lives across the planet: the spread of an epidemic and the rise of the internet.
Richard Canning’s anthology of gay male fiction, Between Men 2 (Alyson) is just out, as is his biography of E. M. Forster (London’s Hesperus Press). He teaches at the University of Sheffield, England, where he may be contacted. Labels: Review
