When Anyone Says “God”, I Keep My Hand Over My Wallet

E. Lynn Harris is improving as a writer. I read several of his earlier novels, mainly out of a sense of duty, trying to keep my finger on the queer zeitgeist. He’s very much in the Harlequin tradition, African-American subdivision, except that his sculpted Nubian princes fall in love with each other. If we could just get a gay black Jennifer Crusie, now, I’d be a major fan. But Harris has the worst tin ear for English prose since Rita Mae Brown (though he’s improving), and his brand-name dropping gets on my nerves. Do novels do product placements like movies do? If so, most of the production costs of I Say a Little Prayer could have been covered before it got to the publisher:
I thought about taking an Excedrin PM, but instead I put on Luther Vandross’s Dance With My Father CD, slipped back into bed, and hoped that Luther’s voice could soothe me back to sleep.

We’d planned to go to the bar at the Ritz-Carlton and eat a nice dinner to celebrate the deal with Wal-Mart. [Don’t ask.]

I took out my wallet and dropped my jeans again, kicked off my Timbs, and unbuttoned my black starched shirt.
[I guess the jeans manufacturer didn’t pony up enough for a product placement.]
Not only that, but Michael Eric Dyson and Keith Boykin make cameo appearances in the novel. But that is an improvement. As the story proceeds, the brand names appear with less monotony, and the story moves ahead vigorously, hardly tripping over the prose at all. I think it’s because Harris is getting – bless me – political.

Briefly, then: fine brotha Chauncey Greer, age 38, has never gotten over his great adolescent love, the equally fine Damien “Sweet D” Upchurch, with whom he’d formed the boy group Reunion in the 1980s, when they were both in high school. As the group approached stardom, Chauncey was purged from the group and hasn’t sung since. Eventually he founded Cute Boy Card Company, and is doing well, even to the point of signing a contract as a Wal-Mart supplier. (I can’t make up my mind whether Harris has a sense of irony, but I don’t think so. Despite their throbbing religiosity, his characters are hardcore capitalists with no evident qualms.) Now he plays the field, refusing to let any man get too close, no matter how muscular his body or how many inches he’s packing.

I Say a Little Prayer (great title; I prefer Aretha’s version to Dionne’s myself) goes beyond the Harris fiction I’ve read before, for when an antigay minister with Senate aspirations comes to preach at a revival at Chauncey’s church (it’s tiny, only a few hundred members), Chauncey joins the resistance. Gay and gay-friendly members of the church boycott the revival, and Chauncey gives up a chance to kickstart his renewed singing career by refusing to sing for the bigots, coming out to his family and friends at the alternative Day Of Absence service. This is pretty militant stuff for Harris, and I was moved to tears by the courage of Chauncey and his allies. He’s still fairly closeted by my Greyboy Liberationist standards, but everyone starts somewhere.

So, I Say a Little Prayer worked quite well for me. As I indicated, Harris still focuses on conventionally masculine men with sculpted bodies, massive members, and designer wardrobes. Chauncey attends a sex party at a private club in a “mini mansion … advertised as a private party with only fifty members invited and … offering the finest black men in Atlanta on the DL. It even included the disclaimer of ‘no queens allowed.’” He has to show hard at the door before they’ll admit him, but eternal vigilance pays off “in a carnival of handsome men with perfect bodies.” This is all very well, and not too distracting in a novel, but someday I’d like to read a story about gay men – we do exist – who go wild for non-types, men with bodies that don’t fit a particular mold, not even Bears. And Harris gives a lot of space to Skylar, a friend of Chauncey’s notable for his utter fearlessness and tackiness. (Oh, Mary, it takes a fairy to make something tacky!) Skylar plays Sutherland to Chauncey’s Malone, undercutting his guilt and gloom with queeny abandon:
“I just want all of this over. I want my life to be normal again,” I sighed.
“What’s normal besides a city in Illinois?” Skylar laughed.
Without Skylar, I Say a Little Prayer would be a dreary, if politically earnest read.

I’m usually pretty tolerant of the flaunting of religiosity, and it doesn’t really hurt I Say a Little Prayer that much. But still, for the record, I don’t believe black folks when they claim to know what God thinks or wants, any more than I believe white folks when they claim to know it. I don’t believe queerfolk who claim to speak for God any more than I believe straight folks. If there is a god with opinions that it wants us earthlings to know, it’s time to dispense with the middlemen and women, and let us know directly just what it wants of us. (No interviews, either; a deity doesn't need a press secretary.) Then we can decide if we’ll cooperate. I agree with Terry Pratchetts Granny Weatherwax, who, when reminded by Nanny Ogg that gods do after all exist, snaps, “That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ‘em.”

When Anyone Says “God”, I Keep My Hand Over My Wallet

E. Lynn Harris is improving as a writer. I read several of his earlier novels, mainly out of a sense of duty, trying to keep my finger on the queer zeitgeist. He’s very much in the Harlequin tradition, African-American subdivision, except that his sculpted Nubian princes fall in love with each other. If we could just get a gay black Jennifer Crusie, now, I’d be a major fan. But Harris has the worst tin ear for English prose since Rita Mae Brown (though he’s improving), and his brand-name dropping gets on my nerves. Do novels do product placements like movies do? If so, most of the production costs of I Say a Little Prayer could have been covered before it got to the publisher:
I thought about taking an Excedrin PM, but instead I put on Luther Vandross’s Dance With My Father CD, slipped back into bed, and hoped that Luther’s voice could soothe me back to sleep.

We’d planned to go to the bar at the Ritz-Carlton and eat a nice dinner to celebrate the deal with Wal-Mart. [Don’t ask.]

I took out my wallet and dropped my jeans again, kicked off my Timbs, and unbuttoned my black starched shirt.
[I guess the jeans manufacturer didn’t pony up enough for a product placement.]
Not only that, but Michael Eric Dyson and Keith Boykin make cameo appearances in the novel. But that is an improvement. As the story proceeds, the brand names appear with less monotony, and the story moves ahead vigorously, hardly tripping over the prose at all. I think it’s because Harris is getting – bless me – political.

Briefly, then: fine brotha Chauncey Greer, age 38, has never gotten over his great adolescent love, the equally fine Damien “Sweet D” Upchurch, with whom he’d formed the boy group Reunion in the 1980s, when they were both in high school. As the group approached stardom, Chauncey was purged from the group and hasn’t sung since. Eventually he founded Cute Boy Card Company, and is doing well, even to the point of signing a contract as a Wal-Mart supplier. (I can’t make up my mind whether Harris has a sense of irony, but I don’t think so. Despite their throbbing religiosity, his characters are hardcore capitalists with no evident qualms.) Now he plays the field, refusing to let any man get too close, no matter how muscular his body or how many inches he’s packing.

I Say a Little Prayer (great title; I prefer Aretha’s version to Dionne’s myself) goes beyond the Harris fiction I’ve read before, for when an antigay minister with Senate aspirations comes to preach at a revival at Chauncey’s church (it’s tiny, only a few hundred members), Chauncey joins the resistance. Gay and gay-friendly members of the church boycott the revival, and Chauncey gives up a chance to kickstart his renewed singing career by refusing to sing for the bigots, coming out to his family and friends at the alternative Day Of Absence service. This is pretty militant stuff for Harris, and I was moved to tears by the courage of Chauncey and his allies. He’s still fairly closeted by my Greyboy Liberationist standards, but everyone starts somewhere.

So, I Say a Little Prayer worked quite well for me. As I indicated, Harris still focuses on conventionally masculine men with sculpted bodies, massive members, and designer wardrobes. Chauncey attends a sex party at a private club in a “mini mansion … advertised as a private party with only fifty members invited and … offering the finest black men in Atlanta on the DL. It even included the disclaimer of ‘no queens allowed.’” He has to show hard at the door before they’ll admit him, but eternal vigilance pays off “in a carnival of handsome men with perfect bodies.” This is all very well, and not too distracting in a novel, but someday I’d like to read a story about gay men – we do exist – who go wild for non-types, men with bodies that don’t fit a particular mold, not even Bears. And Harris gives a lot of space to Skylar, a friend of Chauncey’s notable for his utter fearlessness and tackiness. (Oh, Mary, it takes a fairy to make something tacky!) Skylar plays Sutherland to Chauncey’s Malone, undercutting his guilt and gloom with queeny abandon:
“I just want all of this over. I want my life to be normal again,” I sighed.
“What’s normal besides a city in Illinois?” Skylar laughed.
Without Skylar, I Say a Little Prayer would be a dreary, if politically earnest read.

I’m usually pretty tolerant of the flaunting of religiosity, and it doesn’t really hurt I Say a Little Prayer that much. But still, for the record, I don’t believe black folks when they claim to know what God thinks or wants, any more than I believe white folks when they claim to know it. I don’t believe queerfolk who claim to speak for God any more than I believe straight folks. If there is a god with opinions that it wants us earthlings to know, it’s time to dispense with the middlemen and women, and let us know directly just what it wants of us. (No interviews, either; a deity doesn't need a press secretary.) Then we can decide if we’ll cooperate. I agree with Terry Pratchetts Granny Weatherwax, who, when reminded by Nanny Ogg that gods do after all exist, snaps, “That’s no call to go around believing in them. It only encourages ‘em.”

I Enjoy Being a Girl!

Tomorrow (June 28) will be Gay Pride Day, the 38th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, so it’s as good a time as any to reflect on how far we’ve come since then. And it’s true, the possibilities for gay people in the US and in many other parts of the world have increased a great deal since 1969.

People have a tendency, however, to see change as monolithic, evenly and instantly distributed throughout society, and usually on the basis of very small developments. For example, because Civil Rights laws were passed in the US in the 1960s, and because lip service is widely (but not universally) paid to equality, you’ll see claims that “society now refuses to discriminate on grounds of religion and race” by people who really do know better. (Martha Nussbaum, in this case.) Just because a law has been passed doesn’t mean it has successfully eradicated the offenses it addresses, even if it has been vigorously enforced. (Which, of course, the Civil Rights laws were not.) Nor does a law against certain carefully delineated forms of discrimination begin to take on the brute fact of racism itself, any more than laws against theft attempt to extirpate greed (let alone need) from human beings.

So, gay people have made important gains in American society, of which legal ones are possibly less important, though the legal gains have been greatly exaggerated. (Our civil rights still aren’t legally guaranteed in most of the US, for example.) But those gains are still being resisted, not just by the Religious Right but by ordinary citizens who distance themselves indignantly from such bogeymen as Fred Phelps (the Kansan who preaches that God Hates Fags). Not just by ignorant rednecks but by educated folks with good manners. And probably the most fiercely resisted change is the mere fact of our casual, unapologetic, open presence in the world.

I just finished reading Joan Acocella’s Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2000. The book is an expansion of a 1995 New Yorker article in which Acocella counted “the various ways in which Cather … had been manhandled by contemporary academic critics.” Womanhandled might be more accurate here, since most of Acocella’s targets were female, indeed feminist writers, and their thoughtcrime had something to do with seeing Cather as “a homosexual”, Acocella’s preferred if dated term. Terry Castle grants that Acocella’s “insights into Cather’s own artistic personality are stunningly clear-sighted and judiciously expressed” (Boss Ladies Watch Out! [London: Routledge, 2002], xx). I disagree. Acocella did find plenty of stupidity in the writings of contemporary academics, as who hasn’t? I too am disturbed when I see how badly many academic critics read, since it’s at least part of their job to teach reading to their students. But Acocella has stupidity of her own to spare, and much of it appears to express unresolved (at the critical level) conflicts about homosexuality in American society and art.

Begin at the end of the book, where Acocella reports on a 1997 conference in Cather’s home town of Red Cloud, Nebraska (93):

And some of the locals I talked to still don’t care for the word [‘lesbian’]. “She loved Isabelle – does that make her perverted?” said Bev Cooper. “These professors, they have to write things in order to get tenure. So they come up with these theories.” Actually, most of the Cather fans seemed inured to the issue. Sexual scandal is in fashion, said Carolyn Smith, the woman from Missouri: “They’re doing the same thing to Clinton.”

What most people objected to was not so much the idea of homosexuality, as the invasion of privacy. … But these people value their privacy, and not just about sex. Antonette Turner said that when My Ántonia was published, the Pavelkas were not proud that a novel had been written about their family. They were ashamed, because the book told how poor they had been. If Cather failed to dig the dirt on her characters’ sex lives, and her own, that was due in part to local training. In Red Cloud, you don’t have to be a lesbian to keep certain things to yourself.

No one knows whether Cather had some kind of sex with Isabelle McClung or Edith Lewis, the two women with whom she lived for long periods of her life. If she did, however, that would not “make her perverted.” Nor are the lesbian critics who believe that Cather was lesbian interested in stirring up “sexual scandal” – they don’t see lesbianism as either perverted or scandalous. It might not surprise worldly cosmopolitans that backward Midwesterners should hold such views, but Acocella (dance critic for The New Yorker, mind you) obviously shares them. For her, it’s very important that Cather never did the nasty with a woman, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just ‘digging the dirt.’

It’s so important that she lies about Cather’s own practice, for Cather certainly did “dig the dirt” on the folks in Red Cloud, including their sex lives. As Acocella observes, Cather used the lives of the people she knew for her fiction, including Ántonia’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy and the various drunken piano teachers whom she based on her own teacher and friend Herr Schindelmeisser. Acocella stresses “how minutely autobiographical Cather’s work was, just like Proust’s. Whatever names she gave to the little towns she described in her novels, they were all Red Cloud, and filled with Red Cloud people” (32). And as Acocella points out, this invasion of their privacy made them “ashamed.” Given her “local training,” Cather must have known what she was doing. But at least she didn’t call anybody a homosexual.

Acocella is aware that professional and literary critics before second-wave feminism had read Cather badly, in the service of their own agendas: she devotes two chapters to Marxist, masculist, and right-wing (especially Catholic) attempts to appropriate her, or to revile her for failure to toe various party lines. Some of these remind me of what someone (Robert K. Martin, I think) said about Whitman: some critics held that Whitman could not be a homosexual, because he was a great poet, while others held that he couldn’t be a great poet, because he was a homosexual. Many people would argue that an artist’s sex or sexuality should not be a factor in how we read his or her work; but what about cases like Whitman’s where it’s part of the work? Whitman wrote many poems celebrating what he called “the love of comrades” or “adhesiveness”, poems so ripely erotic in their imagery that they upset many male readers (while thrilling many others). You can argue about Whitman’s sexuality, but the sexuality of his poetry is intrinsic to its art.

But even those who want to keep artists’ sex lives out of criticism often can’t resist dragging in the topic themselves. Acocella quotes a famous early essay by Cather, in which Cather contrasted the actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. Bernhardt “has a much-advertised love life, but Duse seems to have no husband, no friends” (14). Cather sees Bernhardt’s florid, emotive acting style and Duse’s reserved containment as somehow connected to their styles in love, and Acocella goes along with her. “Cather was only twenty-two when she wrote this, but she seems to have seen her life before her: strait is the gate. Like Duse, she will not marry, not dissipate. And her art will be like Duse’s. She will not express things, but contain them.” (As it happens, though, Duse was married, divorced, and had numerous affairs, including a long, well-known one with Gabriele D’Annunzio, which ended when D’Annunzio gave the lead in one of his plays to Bernhardt instead of Duse. Oops.)

But it’s “the feminists” who really get Acocella’s goat, especially Jane Rule, the (American-born) “Canadian novelist and critic, [who] had matter-of-factly declared that Cather was homosexual” (43) in her 1975 book Lesbian Images. This Acocella regards as such a bombshell that she uses it to close a chapter, though she returns on 53 to “Rule, the woman – herself a declared lesbian – who first said in print that Cather was homosexual”, and again in an endnote. Acocella is also honked off at Sharon O’Brien, whose biography of Cather first set Acocella on her hobbyhorse. But Rule is the serpent in Eden: “The thought [that Cather might have been lesbian] clearly crossed many minds, but since it was not voiced in print, it did not become a subject” (101n5).

Acocella should have read Rule’s discussion of Cather with more care. Rule pointed out that earlier (male) critics had hinted at Cather’s sexuality, but only through innuendo and solely to discredit her. Rule also showed how those critics maliciously misread her. Cather, in their minds, couldn’t be a great writer because she was a dyke; Acocella holds that she couldn’t have been a dyke because she was a great writer. That she could have been both is evidently unthinkable.

Acocella can even forgive Joanna Russ for treating Cather as a dyke, because Russ sees Cather as “innocent” (73), which Acocella misreads as a declaration of Cather’s personal sexlessness. Which is the core of Acocella’s argument, stunningly enough: “What the evidence suggests is that Cather was homosexual in her feelings and celibate in her actions” (48; compare 79, where Cather is “presumably homosexual”). How quaint. This ploy has often been used before – by Justin Kaplan in his 1980 biography of Walt Whitman, for instance. It’s also, no doubt coincidentally, the position of the Roman Catholic Church: homosexuality is not in itself sinful, but homosexual acts are, especially if you get caught.

Since it’s virtually impossible to prove that long-dead people had sex of any kind, this claim is inarguable on its face, but it embodies some interesting assumptions. It’s less important whether Cather did or didn’t have a genitally-expressed sex life than why people like Acocella think it’s scandalous to suppose that she did, and praiseworthy to suppose that she didn’t – always without any material evidence either way. She cites Lillian Faderman’s 1981 tome Surpassing the Love of Men as one of the works which “gave me hope for a sane feminist criticism”, no doubt for its insistence that women who formed romantic friendships never Did It. But she misunderstands Faderman (another “declared lesbian”) too: Acocella shares the medical hostility to eroticism between women which Faderman decried.

Acocella also minimizes Cather’s youthful “William Cather” period, when she wore her hair cut short in a flattop (as Terry Castle says, she looked like the lesbian folksinger Phranc) and affected jacket, suspenders, a derby. “But what Cather did is not that remarkable. The William Cather period began and ended with adolescence. Around eighteen she got rid of the derby and grew her hair out. It seems late in the day to have to say that for certain girls, adolescence, with its enforcement of sex roles, is a disaster …Those were the days before such behavior placed one under suspicion of being a lesbian.” But they didn’t spare one’s being thought “eccentric”, let alone a “hermaphrodite,” as Cather was remembered in Red Cloud civic legend into the 1970s. Not so unremarkable. While many girls do indeed rebel against femininity in adolescence (more power to ‘em!), only the more “remarkable” resist heterosexual marriage altogether in favor of lifelong relationships with women. (Acocella says hopefully that “Cynthia Griffin Wolff is at work on a biography of Cather. To judge from her recent essay ‘New Cather Biographical Data,’ she has new evidence for heterosexuality and is interested in it.” And she’s not afraid to use it! To date, however, her biography has not been published. And how revealing that Acocella doesn't regard evidence of an active heterosexual life to be discrediting to Cather; only a homosexual one.)

She ought to have paid more attention to Faderman’s quotation from Cather’s role model Sarah Orne Jewett, who gently chided Cather for giving My Ántonia a male narrator: “The lover is as well done as he could be when a woman writes in the man’s character – it must always, I believe, be something of a masquerade … and you could almost have done it as yourself – a woman could love her in the same protecting way – a woman could even care enough to wish to take her away from such a life, by some means or other.” Faderman comments, “The letter must have made Cather blush – but Jewett probably would not have known what she was blushing about” (202). Jewett recognized, as later queer theorists would, that Jim Burden was a stand-in for Cather herself; and Faderman assumes that Cather was aware enough of the medical attack on lesbianism that she’d have blushed to acknowledge her love for Ántonia.

So. Nearly forty years after Stonewall, and even a sophisticated New York dance critic still regards homosexuality as a scandalous accusation, and an active homosexual love life as incompatible with artistic or other achievement. (She has to know of great artists in dance, at least, who aren’t celibate.) To repeat: I don’t know whether Cather had a sex life or not, but neither does Acocella. What’s revealing is that she thinks such a sex life would be discrediting to Cather, and must be denied with all the vehemence and bad arguments she can muster. Nor is Acocella alone in her proud heterosexual vigilance ... but of that, more another day.

I Enjoy Being a Girl!

Tomorrow (June 28) will be Gay Pride Day, the 38th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, so it’s as good a time as any to reflect on how far we’ve come since then. And it’s true, the possibilities for gay people in the US and in many other parts of the world have increased a great deal since 1969.

People have a tendency, however, to see change as monolithic, evenly and instantly distributed throughout society, and usually on the basis of very small developments. For example, because Civil Rights laws were passed in the US in the 1960s, and because lip service is widely (but not universally) paid to equality, you’ll see claims that “society now refuses to discriminate on grounds of religion and race” by people who really do know better. (Martha Nussbaum, in this case.) Just because a law has been passed doesn’t mean it has successfully eradicated the offenses it addresses, even if it has been vigorously enforced. (Which, of course, the Civil Rights laws were not.) Nor does a law against certain carefully delineated forms of discrimination begin to take on the brute fact of racism itself, any more than laws against theft attempt to extirpate greed (let alone need) from human beings.

So, gay people have made important gains in American society, of which legal ones are possibly less important, though the legal gains have been greatly exaggerated. (Our civil rights still aren’t legally guaranteed in most of the US, for example.) But those gains are still being resisted, not just by the Religious Right but by ordinary citizens who distance themselves indignantly from such bogeymen as Fred Phelps (the Kansan who preaches that God Hates Fags). Not just by ignorant rednecks but by educated folks with good manners. And probably the most fiercely resisted change is the mere fact of our casual, unapologetic, open presence in the world.

I just finished reading Joan Acocella’s Willa Cather and the Politics of Criticism, published by the University of Nebraska Press in 2000. The book is an expansion of a 1995 New Yorker article in which Acocella counted “the various ways in which Cather … had been manhandled by contemporary academic critics.” Womanhandled might be more accurate here, since most of Acocella’s targets were female, indeed feminist writers, and their thoughtcrime had something to do with seeing Cather as “a homosexual”, Acocella’s preferred if dated term. Terry Castle grants that Acocella’s “insights into Cather’s own artistic personality are stunningly clear-sighted and judiciously expressed” (Boss Ladies Watch Out! [London: Routledge, 2002], xx). I disagree. Acocella did find plenty of stupidity in the writings of contemporary academics, as who hasn’t? I too am disturbed when I see how badly many academic critics read, since it’s at least part of their job to teach reading to their students. But Acocella has stupidity of her own to spare, and much of it appears to express unresolved (at the critical level) conflicts about homosexuality in American society and art.

Begin at the end of the book, where Acocella reports on a 1997 conference in Cather’s home town of Red Cloud, Nebraska (93):

And some of the locals I talked to still don’t care for the word [‘lesbian’]. “She loved Isabelle – does that make her perverted?” said Bev Cooper. “These professors, they have to write things in order to get tenure. So they come up with these theories.” Actually, most of the Cather fans seemed inured to the issue. Sexual scandal is in fashion, said Carolyn Smith, the woman from Missouri: “They’re doing the same thing to Clinton.”

What most people objected to was not so much the idea of homosexuality, as the invasion of privacy. … But these people value their privacy, and not just about sex. Antonette Turner said that when My Ántonia was published, the Pavelkas were not proud that a novel had been written about their family. They were ashamed, because the book told how poor they had been. If Cather failed to dig the dirt on her characters’ sex lives, and her own, that was due in part to local training. In Red Cloud, you don’t have to be a lesbian to keep certain things to yourself.

No one knows whether Cather had some kind of sex with Isabelle McClung or Edith Lewis, the two women with whom she lived for long periods of her life. If she did, however, that would not “make her perverted.” Nor are the lesbian critics who believe that Cather was lesbian interested in stirring up “sexual scandal” – they don’t see lesbianism as either perverted or scandalous. It might not surprise worldly cosmopolitans that backward Midwesterners should hold such views, but Acocella (dance critic for The New Yorker, mind you) obviously shares them. For her, it’s very important that Cather never did the nasty with a woman, and anyone who thinks otherwise is just ‘digging the dirt.’

It’s so important that she lies about Cather’s own practice, for Cather certainly did “dig the dirt” on the folks in Red Cloud, including their sex lives. As Acocella observes, Cather used the lives of the people she knew for her fiction, including Ántonia’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy and the various drunken piano teachers whom she based on her own teacher and friend Herr Schindelmeisser. Acocella stresses “how minutely autobiographical Cather’s work was, just like Proust’s. Whatever names she gave to the little towns she described in her novels, they were all Red Cloud, and filled with Red Cloud people” (32). And as Acocella points out, this invasion of their privacy made them “ashamed.” Given her “local training,” Cather must have known what she was doing. But at least she didn’t call anybody a homosexual.

Acocella is aware that professional and literary critics before second-wave feminism had read Cather badly, in the service of their own agendas: she devotes two chapters to Marxist, masculist, and right-wing (especially Catholic) attempts to appropriate her, or to revile her for failure to toe various party lines. Some of these remind me of what someone (Robert K. Martin, I think) said about Whitman: some critics held that Whitman could not be a homosexual, because he was a great poet, while others held that he couldn’t be a great poet, because he was a homosexual. Many people would argue that an artist’s sex or sexuality should not be a factor in how we read his or her work; but what about cases like Whitman’s where it’s part of the work? Whitman wrote many poems celebrating what he called “the love of comrades” or “adhesiveness”, poems so ripely erotic in their imagery that they upset many male readers (while thrilling many others). You can argue about Whitman’s sexuality, but the sexuality of his poetry is intrinsic to its art.

But even those who want to keep artists’ sex lives out of criticism often can’t resist dragging in the topic themselves. Acocella quotes a famous early essay by Cather, in which Cather contrasted the actresses Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse. Bernhardt “has a much-advertised love life, but Duse seems to have no husband, no friends” (14). Cather sees Bernhardt’s florid, emotive acting style and Duse’s reserved containment as somehow connected to their styles in love, and Acocella goes along with her. “Cather was only twenty-two when she wrote this, but she seems to have seen her life before her: strait is the gate. Like Duse, she will not marry, not dissipate. And her art will be like Duse’s. She will not express things, but contain them.” (As it happens, though, Duse was married, divorced, and had numerous affairs, including a long, well-known one with Gabriele D’Annunzio, which ended when D’Annunzio gave the lead in one of his plays to Bernhardt instead of Duse. Oops.)

But it’s “the feminists” who really get Acocella’s goat, especially Jane Rule, the (American-born) “Canadian novelist and critic, [who] had matter-of-factly declared that Cather was homosexual” (43) in her 1975 book Lesbian Images. This Acocella regards as such a bombshell that she uses it to close a chapter, though she returns on 53 to “Rule, the woman – herself a declared lesbian – who first said in print that Cather was homosexual”, and again in an endnote. Acocella is also honked off at Sharon O’Brien, whose biography of Cather first set Acocella on her hobbyhorse. But Rule is the serpent in Eden: “The thought [that Cather might have been lesbian] clearly crossed many minds, but since it was not voiced in print, it did not become a subject” (101n5).

Acocella should have read Rule’s discussion of Cather with more care. Rule pointed out that earlier (male) critics had hinted at Cather’s sexuality, but only through innuendo and solely to discredit her. Rule also showed how those critics maliciously misread her. Cather, in their minds, couldn’t be a great writer because she was a dyke; Acocella holds that she couldn’t have been a dyke because she was a great writer. That she could have been both is evidently unthinkable.

Acocella can even forgive Joanna Russ for treating Cather as a dyke, because Russ sees Cather as “innocent” (73), which Acocella misreads as a declaration of Cather’s personal sexlessness. Which is the core of Acocella’s argument, stunningly enough: “What the evidence suggests is that Cather was homosexual in her feelings and celibate in her actions” (48; compare 79, where Cather is “presumably homosexual”). How quaint. This ploy has often been used before – by Justin Kaplan in his 1980 biography of Walt Whitman, for instance. It’s also, no doubt coincidentally, the position of the Roman Catholic Church: homosexuality is not in itself sinful, but homosexual acts are, especially if you get caught.

Since it’s virtually impossible to prove that long-dead people had sex of any kind, this claim is inarguable on its face, but it embodies some interesting assumptions. It’s less important whether Cather did or didn’t have a genitally-expressed sex life than why people like Acocella think it’s scandalous to suppose that she did, and praiseworthy to suppose that she didn’t – always without any material evidence either way. She cites Lillian Faderman’s 1981 tome Surpassing the Love of Men as one of the works which “gave me hope for a sane feminist criticism”, no doubt for its insistence that women who formed romantic friendships never Did It. But she misunderstands Faderman (another “declared lesbian”) too: Acocella shares the medical hostility to eroticism between women which Faderman decried.

Acocella also minimizes Cather’s youthful “William Cather” period, when she wore her hair cut short in a flattop (as Terry Castle says, she looked like the lesbian folksinger Phranc) and affected jacket, suspenders, a derby. “But what Cather did is not that remarkable. The William Cather period began and ended with adolescence. Around eighteen she got rid of the derby and grew her hair out. It seems late in the day to have to say that for certain girls, adolescence, with its enforcement of sex roles, is a disaster …Those were the days before such behavior placed one under suspicion of being a lesbian.” But they didn’t spare one’s being thought “eccentric”, let alone a “hermaphrodite,” as Cather was remembered in Red Cloud civic legend into the 1970s. Not so unremarkable. While many girls do indeed rebel against femininity in adolescence (more power to ‘em!), only the more “remarkable” resist heterosexual marriage altogether in favor of lifelong relationships with women. (Acocella says hopefully that “Cynthia Griffin Wolff is at work on a biography of Cather. To judge from her recent essay ‘New Cather Biographical Data,’ she has new evidence for heterosexuality and is interested in it.” And she’s not afraid to use it! To date, however, her biography has not been published. And how revealing that Acocella doesn't regard evidence of an active heterosexual life to be discrediting to Cather; only a homosexual one.)

She ought to have paid more attention to Faderman’s quotation from Cather’s role model Sarah Orne Jewett, who gently chided Cather for giving My Ántonia a male narrator: “The lover is as well done as he could be when a woman writes in the man’s character – it must always, I believe, be something of a masquerade … and you could almost have done it as yourself – a woman could love her in the same protecting way – a woman could even care enough to wish to take her away from such a life, by some means or other.” Faderman comments, “The letter must have made Cather blush – but Jewett probably would not have known what she was blushing about” (202). Jewett recognized, as later queer theorists would, that Jim Burden was a stand-in for Cather herself; and Faderman assumes that Cather was aware enough of the medical attack on lesbianism that she’d have blushed to acknowledge her love for Ántonia.

So. Nearly forty years after Stonewall, and even a sophisticated New York dance critic still regards homosexuality as a scandalous accusation, and an active homosexual love life as incompatible with artistic or other achievement. (She has to know of great artists in dance, at least, who aren’t celibate.) To repeat: I don’t know whether Cather had a sex life or not, but neither does Acocella. What’s revealing is that she thinks such a sex life would be discrediting to Cather, and must be denied with all the vehemence and bad arguments she can muster. Nor is Acocella alone in her proud heterosexual vigilance ... but of that, more another day.

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That!

Published in GCN, April 1980. At least one more book on the straight woman/gay man constellation appeared in the 1980s, and I was given a review copy but I don't think I ever finished the review. The archetype persists, through Will and Grace to numerous pop books on gay men and women, like 1997's Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man, written by (you guessed it) a gay man and his straight woman friend.

What annoyed me about The New Couple was its assumption that heterosexuality was an ideal for everyone, including gay men. (As you'll see if you read the review, a lesbian/straight man "new couple" - let alone lesbian/straight woman, or gay man/straight man - wasn't on the authors' radar.) The anthropologist Margaret Mead was reported to have said something like "Exclusive heterosexuality is as sick as exclusive homosexuality." Which is true: zero equals zero, by which I mean that neither is sick. It's revealing how the postulate that exclusive homosexuality is "sick" managed to sneak in there, isn't it?

The New Couple: Women and Gay Men
Rebecca Nahas and Myra Turley
Seaview Books, 1979

It is a commonplace of sexual folklore that homosexuality involves fear or hatred of the opposite sex, and yet as a corollary of the equally popular notion of gays as an intermediate sex it is taken for granted that gay men enjoy the company of women. Lately it seems that articles purporting to explore this paradox have been getting more common – the Village Voice rediscovers it every other year or so, most recently on December 24, 1979, and Christopher Street touted two articles on the cover of its October / November 1979 issue – so I was not surprised when a book, The New Couple: Women and Gay Men, turned up in the bookstores, and one of its authors turned up with live exhibits on Phil Donahue. Tomorrow, the Sunday Supplements.

I am immediately distrustful of books entitled The New anything, and I made no exception in this case, especially when I learned from the Donahue show that Naha and Turley’s utopian vision involves sexual relationships between gay men and straight women, including marriage. It also became rapidly clear as I read the book that in the authors’ universe gay women are a fringe phenomenon: the word “women” in the title means straight women, though one lesbian and one bisexual woman are among their interviewees.

The New Couple divides relationships between women and gay men into three categories: “Traditional couples,” defined as “Women and gay men, some married, who attempt to ignore, hide, or change the man’s homosexuality”; “Marginal relationships,” involving “Women and openly gay men who are not romantically involved, but are professional and/or social friends”; and “New couples,” who are “Women and openly gay men who have a primary, not necessarily exclusive, love commitment.” These categories are somewhat arbitrary – how “primary” some of the new-couple relationships are is arguable, as is the marginality of some of the marginal relationships – but then they are more designed to help market the book than to cast light on what is going on. What really differentiates “new” from “marginal” couples is that “new” men are able and willing to relate sexually and romantically to women, and “marginal” men are not. The authors not only take for granted that an exclusively homosexual man is less liberated than a bisexual one, they hint that he is unhip and probably neurotic. “The homosexual mindset can be just as narrow and exclusionary as any heterosexual approach to male/female relationships,” they chide: “… homosexuality was used as a reason not to have a successful [heterosexual] relationship.” Seems like a pretty good reason to me.

Of course, the woman in a new couple has to be a pretty special person herself. She must be “very warm, very motherly,” “not bitchy … not threatening … warm and open and love,” “diffident, unassuming, and pleasant,” must have “an ability to relate openly and affectionately to people regardless of their sexual orientation,” in short she must be “a very warm person, she wants to make you feel comfortable.” She should not be “a typical fruit fly, a woman who dresses a little bit sleazier than the norm,” and “misfits whom nobody likes” need not apply. But happily, according to one of the authors’ informants, “Gays are good at helping you decide what to wear. They like you to look well if you’re going to be with them.” In other words, they don’t have much tolerance for a woman who isn’t feminine in a very traditional way. But if she gives and accepts and relates openly and affectionately and doesn’t bitch or threaten or assume, if she lets herself be dressed up like a Barbie doll, she may graduate from traditional to marginal relationships, until she meets a gay man with whom she can have a primary, new-couple relationship – until he meets Mr. Right and moves out, anyway, or as sometimes happens, moves Mr. Right in.

Reading The New Couple, I would never have guessed that there is such a thing as gay male misogyny. But at best we are susceptible to the everyday woman-hating that pervades the society that reared us; at worst we are a subculture where the words “bitch,” “slut,” and “fish” are staples of repartee. The New Couple merely gives the impression that a woman who doesn’t get along with gay men must be a misfit whom nobody likes, perhaps because she bitches or threatens or isn’t motherly enough. There is not a hint that a woman might have something else to do with her life than mother gay men.

Lip service is paid to the gay liberation and women’s movements, but references are almost invariably to mental-health professionals with the feminist consciousness of an alpha-male Hamadryas baboon. The literature on homosexuality is represented by Bieber, Bergler, Ellis and Socarides at least as often as by Hooker, Hoffman, Bell and Weinberg. The only gay writers cited at all often are Howard Brown and John Rechy, and the only feminists cited are Elizabeth Janeway and Betty Friedan. Some of the gay men interviewed have been active in the gay movement, but none of the women seem to have been involved as a feminist.

There is a small but important truth, however, hidden here in the tangle of footnotes and pop-sociological platitudes: people don’t fit into categories, whether homosexual/heterosexual or traditional couple/new couple, and successful relationships may develop where they are least expected. Although “new couples” are supposedly “only as old as the gay liberation movement,” one mentioned in this book was in progress in 1964, five years before Stonewall. Just as there have always been healthy, happy gays, surely there have always been successful “new couples” that no one heard about because they didn’t end in the divorce courts or psychiatrists’ offices. What we need most is not trendy books with more useless categories, but a society that will encourage us to find happiness in our own weird, unlikely ways.

Not That There's Anything Wrong With That!

Published in GCN, April 1980. At least one more book on the straight woman/gay man constellation appeared in the 1980s, and I was given a review copy but I don't think I ever finished the review. The archetype persists, through Will and Grace to numerous pop books on gay men and women, like 1997's Sex Tips for Straight Women from a Gay Man, written by (you guessed it) a gay man and his straight woman friend.

What annoyed me about The New Couple was its assumption that heterosexuality was an ideal for everyone, including gay men. (As you'll see if you read the review, a lesbian/straight man "new couple" - let alone lesbian/straight woman, or gay man/straight man - wasn't on the authors' radar.) The anthropologist Margaret Mead was reported to have said something like "Exclusive heterosexuality is as sick as exclusive homosexuality." Which is true: zero equals zero, by which I mean that neither is sick. It's revealing how the postulate that exclusive homosexuality is "sick" managed to sneak in there, isn't it?

The New Couple: Women and Gay Men
Rebecca Nahas and Myra Turley
Seaview Books, 1979

It is a commonplace of sexual folklore that homosexuality involves fear or hatred of the opposite sex, and yet as a corollary of the equally popular notion of gays as an intermediate sex it is taken for granted that gay men enjoy the company of women. Lately it seems that articles purporting to explore this paradox have been getting more common – the Village Voice rediscovers it every other year or so, most recently on December 24, 1979, and Christopher Street touted two articles on the cover of its October / November 1979 issue – so I was not surprised when a book, The New Couple: Women and Gay Men, turned up in the bookstores, and one of its authors turned up with live exhibits on Phil Donahue. Tomorrow, the Sunday Supplements.

I am immediately distrustful of books entitled The New anything, and I made no exception in this case, especially when I learned from the Donahue show that Naha and Turley’s utopian vision involves sexual relationships between gay men and straight women, including marriage. It also became rapidly clear as I read the book that in the authors’ universe gay women are a fringe phenomenon: the word “women” in the title means straight women, though one lesbian and one bisexual woman are among their interviewees.

The New Couple divides relationships between women and gay men into three categories: “Traditional couples,” defined as “Women and gay men, some married, who attempt to ignore, hide, or change the man’s homosexuality”; “Marginal relationships,” involving “Women and openly gay men who are not romantically involved, but are professional and/or social friends”; and “New couples,” who are “Women and openly gay men who have a primary, not necessarily exclusive, love commitment.” These categories are somewhat arbitrary – how “primary” some of the new-couple relationships are is arguable, as is the marginality of some of the marginal relationships – but then they are more designed to help market the book than to cast light on what is going on. What really differentiates “new” from “marginal” couples is that “new” men are able and willing to relate sexually and romantically to women, and “marginal” men are not. The authors not only take for granted that an exclusively homosexual man is less liberated than a bisexual one, they hint that he is unhip and probably neurotic. “The homosexual mindset can be just as narrow and exclusionary as any heterosexual approach to male/female relationships,” they chide: “… homosexuality was used as a reason not to have a successful [heterosexual] relationship.” Seems like a pretty good reason to me.

Of course, the woman in a new couple has to be a pretty special person herself. She must be “very warm, very motherly,” “not bitchy … not threatening … warm and open and love,” “diffident, unassuming, and pleasant,” must have “an ability to relate openly and affectionately to people regardless of their sexual orientation,” in short she must be “a very warm person, she wants to make you feel comfortable.” She should not be “a typical fruit fly, a woman who dresses a little bit sleazier than the norm,” and “misfits whom nobody likes” need not apply. But happily, according to one of the authors’ informants, “Gays are good at helping you decide what to wear. They like you to look well if you’re going to be with them.” In other words, they don’t have much tolerance for a woman who isn’t feminine in a very traditional way. But if she gives and accepts and relates openly and affectionately and doesn’t bitch or threaten or assume, if she lets herself be dressed up like a Barbie doll, she may graduate from traditional to marginal relationships, until she meets a gay man with whom she can have a primary, new-couple relationship – until he meets Mr. Right and moves out, anyway, or as sometimes happens, moves Mr. Right in.

Reading The New Couple, I would never have guessed that there is such a thing as gay male misogyny. But at best we are susceptible to the everyday woman-hating that pervades the society that reared us; at worst we are a subculture where the words “bitch,” “slut,” and “fish” are staples of repartee. The New Couple merely gives the impression that a woman who doesn’t get along with gay men must be a misfit whom nobody likes, perhaps because she bitches or threatens or isn’t motherly enough. There is not a hint that a woman might have something else to do with her life than mother gay men.

Lip service is paid to the gay liberation and women’s movements, but references are almost invariably to mental-health professionals with the feminist consciousness of an alpha-male Hamadryas baboon. The literature on homosexuality is represented by Bieber, Bergler, Ellis and Socarides at least as often as by Hooker, Hoffman, Bell and Weinberg. The only gay writers cited at all often are Howard Brown and John Rechy, and the only feminists cited are Elizabeth Janeway and Betty Friedan. Some of the gay men interviewed have been active in the gay movement, but none of the women seem to have been involved as a feminist.

There is a small but important truth, however, hidden here in the tangle of footnotes and pop-sociological platitudes: people don’t fit into categories, whether homosexual/heterosexual or traditional couple/new couple, and successful relationships may develop where they are least expected. Although “new couples” are supposedly “only as old as the gay liberation movement,” one mentioned in this book was in progress in 1964, five years before Stonewall. Just as there have always been healthy, happy gays, surely there have always been successful “new couples” that no one heard about because they didn’t end in the divorce courts or psychiatrists’ offices. What we need most is not trendy books with more useless categories, but a society that will encourage us to find happiness in our own weird, unlikely ways.

Backpacking First Aid

Since i were young i kind of wonder why my parent took days to prepare a journey to mountain or to national park in my province, at least a day before. There's so much to be pack beside clean clothes.
All we want is perfect holidays. Being sick or injured not in our plan.
But in case that's happened we should prepare some additional for our journey.. just in case !

Having some basic first aid knowledge is a skill every backpacker needs. Being outside and in the wilderness environment requires the need for basic first aid skills because anything can happen. You will likely be miles away from any help and need to be able to handle emergencies when they arrive on your own.

You need to assemble a first aid kit. You'll pack this as part of your essential gear. It should prepare you for almost any situation and allow you to handle emergencies until help arrives. Here is what should be in it:

* Band aids of different shapes and sizes
* Antibiotic ointment
* Hydrocortisone cream
* Moleskin
* Alcohol pads
* Ace bandages
* Hand sanitizer
* Gauze pads
* First aid tape
* Cold pack
* Powered energy drink (If you were to get stranded it can be used to help keep your energy up)

Here are some basic points of first aid that you should familiarize yourself with:

- Prevention. You should understand what you can do to prevent accidents. This will go a long way to helping keep you safe on the trail. You should always make sure your equipment is in good shape. You also need to wear protective gear. Have a good plan for your backpacking trip and tell someone about it so they can be aware if you should become missing. You should learn about poisonous plants so you know what to avoid. You should also learn about basic survival skills.

- Keep all supplies sanitary. This includes trying to clean hands as best as possible before treating a wound or injury. Bacteria grows quickly and once it is introduced to an injury things can get worse quickly.

- Use only what you need and refill your kit before every trip. You do not want to use all the bandages on a small cut that doesn't really need them and then later when you really need one they are gone. Additionally, you do not want to let your kit run low on supplies. Not having what you need is almost as bad as not having a kit at all.

While getting your kit in order and reading over the above advice is a good start, you should also take a first aid course to brush up on the basics, so if you should ever need them you know them.

For a check complete list what you might need on your journey (depend on your destination and length of traveling) you might should check this website :
http://www.21stcenturyadventures.com/advice/lists/backpackingFirstAidChecklist.html

Its printable !

Tolliver Always

2007 has been a pretty good year for gay fiction, with a number of important (to me, anyway) writers putting out new work: Neil Bartlett’s Skin Lane, Emma Donoghue’s Landing, Samuel Delany’s Dark Reflections, Sarah Schulman’s The Child (which I haven’t seen yet). In the past week I’ve read two new novels that update established characters, long-awaited by their fans (including me).

According to several reports I’ve seen, Armistead Maupin denies that Michael Tolliver Lives is a new installment of his Tales of the City series, but I haven’t seen his rationale. It would almost have to be hairsplitting, maybe based on the switch from third to first-person narration that has characterized his books since Maybe the Moon. So, as the title suggests, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver is the viewpoint character, but we learn what’s up with everyone else, though not everyone makes an appearance. Of all the characters Michael has most in common with his creator – Southern boy relocated to San Francisco, has a new younger husband – so at times I wondered whether the voice was that of Mouse or Armistead. But don’t forget the differences: Michael’s a PWA and Armistead is not, Michael is fifty-six (my age) and Armistead is half a decade older, Armistead is an internationally known writer and Michael’s a nurseryman and gardener.

The book is sexier than its predecessors, though Maupin’s been moving in that direction all along. Remember that the series began to appear in the 1970s, and it was bold enough back then to have unapologetically, openly gay characters in fiction from mainstream publishers like Harper, let alone the San Francisco Chronicle, where Tales first appeared as a serial. Maupin is still tamer in that respect than many gay male writers; he’s simply matter-of-fact about sex, as he is about everything else, which I appreciate. I noticed from some of the customer reviews on Amazon.com, though, that not everyone does.

If you’re familiar with the series, you’ll want to read Michael Tolliver Lives, so if you haven’t read it yet I won’t summarize it. Suffice it to say that for me, anyway, Maupin did an excellent job of returning to characters he hadn’t written about since Sure of You appeared in 1989. Michael really feels like an acquaintance I’d lost touch with for a couple of decades – he’s changed with age but he’s recognizably the same person. Those of us who followed the series in its heyday came to feel about each book as the latest batch of news from beloved friends. (Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip, which has been running since the early 1980s, has the same effect on people.) I’ve never been sure whether Maupin counted as a “great” writer, whatever that means, though both Christopher Isherwood and Edmund White have compared him to Dickens. He makes it look so easy, doing what he does, that it’s easy not to take him seriously enough. (Just how much of a writer he is, is shown by his film projects. I finally saw The Night Listener last week, which he co-wrote and co-produced, and it was a turkey, far inferior to the book.) Maupin has created a world that a great many people want to visit, and if you haven’t done so yet, you should.

Then there’s Nicola Griffith’s Always, her third novel about Aud Torvingen, five years after its predecessor Stay. Griffith’s two science fiction novels, Ammonite and Slow River didn’t impress me (though lately I’m tempted to reread them and see how they look to me now), but The Blue Place, which introduced Torvingen, blew me away. For a while I reread it at least every year. It’s a strange, dark, very violent book, and Torvingen – a six foot tall Norwegian lesbian ex-cop resident in Atlanta – is a remarkable creation.

What I found most compelling about The Blue Place was the sensuousness of its writing. Aud (who, like Michael Tolliver, narrates) attends to everything she does – playing pool, having sex, working wood, killing a man with a flashlight, flying over the North Atlantic – with total concentration, and tells us about it with You Are There vividness.

I had been working for the last two weeks on a chair of English pine. My hand slid down the wood, zzst zzst, and buttery shavings curled to the floor. Zzst zzst. English pine is darker than its acid-yellow American cousin, so rich it makes you want to reach out and put it in your mouth. The grain is finer, denser, a little less spongy, such a joy to plane that when I first started working it I often took off more than I needed for the sheer pleasure of watching the blade slide through it. Zzst zzst. The shavings piled up. Sunlight, shivered and greened by the foliage outside the window, warmed the heaps, filling the room with the simple, uncomplicated scent of fresh-cut pie. Zzst zzst. I could feel my face relaxing, the muscles around my ribs letting go.

Always interlaces two stories in alternating chapters. In one, Aud goes to Seattle with her coffee-vending friend Dornan, to meet her diplomat mother and her mother’s new husband, and to tend to properties there that were left her by her late father. Though it’s supposed to be a short visit, she immediately begins digging into the city, looking for buried bodies – no particular reason, it’s just Aud’s way. In no time at all Aud finds that there’s hanky panky around a warehouse she owns, being used by a film company to shoot a TV pilot. Working at the shoot is Victoria “Kick” Kuiper, former stuntwoman and caterer extraordinaire, with a muscular body to die for.

The other story begins the previous year in Atlanta. Aud had decided to teach a class in self defense for women, in the basement of a New Age bookstore. She drew a varied crew of students, and struggled to get them to break through their Southern feminine conditioning and learn to get angry, to hit back. Much of this thread consists of lectures by Aud, Socratic dialogues with her students. We learn quickly in the Seattle thread that something had gone seriously wrong with this group, but just what is withheld until the end of the book. (It’s not much of a surprise.) Aud feels that she’s failed, a factor in her running away to Seattle.

Aud is often accused, even by her creator, of being cut off, detached, isolated. I’ve never been able to see this. A friend once told me that she’d been critical of my own defenses, until she realized how vulnerable I am. Of course. Aud’s vulnerability is deeply buried under her own formidable defenses, but Griffith gives us glimpses. I have the impression that some people think one should simply go out and (figuratively) lie in traffic, because being run over – or running over other people - builds character. Ever since I figured it out, I knew that I had better things to do with my life than get hurt simply for the sake of proving my vulnerability. I never take dares. Aud seems to me very connected to other people, and she takes those connections seriously.

Her most strained relationship is with her mother, whom we’ve met only over the phone in the previous books. (Aud hasn’t seen her in person either for many years.) I don’t believe that Aud sees how much she is like her own idea of her mother: formidable, coldly rational, emotionally controlled. So it’s a bit of a surprise, to Aud and to the reader, when we meet Else Torvingen in person, that she turns out to be a good deal warmer and more likable than Aud’s portrait of her. (She’s also a fan of Hothead Paisan.) It may be that her relationship with her new husband has changed her, but I suspect that years and distance have built up a caricature in Aud’s mind. The images, the stereotypes we construct of people, have as much to do with our own wishful thinking—what we want them to be—as with the people themselves. (In my own mind, for example, my 4’11” mother is still twelve feet tall, as she seemed when I was a child.)

Always is a vast book, almost 500 pages of small type, yet it moves along briskly. It’s packed with lore about martial arts (Griffith is a martial artist herself, who taught women’s self-defense classes in England before she moved to the US), cooking, the politics of real estate development, art, woodworking, cooking for people on chemotherapy, multiple sclerosis (Griffith was diagnosed in 1993), and more. It pulled me along as if Aud herself had a grip on my wrist and were making me keep up with her long-legged stride. Fortunately I could close the book when I just couldn’t keep up anymore, but I always returned for more as soon as I could. Griffith says there will be more about Aud; as with Michael Tolliver, I’m looking forward to it.

Tolliver Always

2007 has been a pretty good year for gay fiction, with a number of important (to me, anyway) writers putting out new work: Neil Bartlett’s Skin Lane, Emma Donoghue’s Landing, Samuel Delany’s Dark Reflections, Sarah Schulman’s The Child (which I haven’t seen yet). In the past week I’ve read two new novels that update established characters, long-awaited by their fans (including me).

According to several reports I’ve seen, Armistead Maupin denies that Michael Tolliver Lives is a new installment of his Tales of the City series, but I haven’t seen his rationale. It would almost have to be hairsplitting, maybe based on the switch from third to first-person narration that has characterized his books since Maybe the Moon. So, as the title suggests, Michael “Mouse” Tolliver is the viewpoint character, but we learn what’s up with everyone else, though not everyone makes an appearance. Of all the characters Michael has most in common with his creator – Southern boy relocated to San Francisco, has a new younger husband – so at times I wondered whether the voice was that of Mouse or Armistead. But don’t forget the differences: Michael’s a PWA and Armistead is not, Michael is fifty-six (my age) and Armistead is half a decade older, Armistead is an internationally known writer and Michael’s a nurseryman and gardener.

The book is sexier than its predecessors, though Maupin’s been moving in that direction all along. Remember that the series began to appear in the 1970s, and it was bold enough back then to have unapologetically, openly gay characters in fiction from mainstream publishers like Harper, let alone the San Francisco Chronicle, where Tales first appeared as a serial. Maupin is still tamer in that respect than many gay male writers; he’s simply matter-of-fact about sex, as he is about everything else, which I appreciate. I noticed from some of the customer reviews on Amazon.com, though, that not everyone does.

If you’re familiar with the series, you’ll want to read Michael Tolliver Lives, so if you haven’t read it yet I won’t summarize it. Suffice it to say that for me, anyway, Maupin did an excellent job of returning to characters he hadn’t written about since Sure of You appeared in 1989. Michael really feels like an acquaintance I’d lost touch with for a couple of decades – he’s changed with age but he’s recognizably the same person. Those of us who followed the series in its heyday came to feel about each book as the latest batch of news from beloved friends. (Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip, which has been running since the early 1980s, has the same effect on people.) I’ve never been sure whether Maupin counted as a “great” writer, whatever that means, though both Christopher Isherwood and Edmund White have compared him to Dickens. He makes it look so easy, doing what he does, that it’s easy not to take him seriously enough. (Just how much of a writer he is, is shown by his film projects. I finally saw The Night Listener last week, which he co-wrote and co-produced, and it was a turkey, far inferior to the book.) Maupin has created a world that a great many people want to visit, and if you haven’t done so yet, you should.

Then there’s Nicola Griffith’s Always, her third novel about Aud Torvingen, five years after its predecessor Stay. Griffith’s two science fiction novels, Ammonite and Slow River didn’t impress me (though lately I’m tempted to reread them and see how they look to me now), but The Blue Place, which introduced Torvingen, blew me away. For a while I reread it at least every year. It’s a strange, dark, very violent book, and Torvingen – a six foot tall Norwegian lesbian ex-cop resident in Atlanta – is a remarkable creation.

What I found most compelling about The Blue Place was the sensuousness of its writing. Aud (who, like Michael Tolliver, narrates) attends to everything she does – playing pool, having sex, working wood, killing a man with a flashlight, flying over the North Atlantic – with total concentration, and tells us about it with You Are There vividness.

I had been working for the last two weeks on a chair of English pine. My hand slid down the wood, zzst zzst, and buttery shavings curled to the floor. Zzst zzst. English pine is darker than its acid-yellow American cousin, so rich it makes you want to reach out and put it in your mouth. The grain is finer, denser, a little less spongy, such a joy to plane that when I first started working it I often took off more than I needed for the sheer pleasure of watching the blade slide through it. Zzst zzst. The shavings piled up. Sunlight, shivered and greened by the foliage outside the window, warmed the heaps, filling the room with the simple, uncomplicated scent of fresh-cut pie. Zzst zzst. I could feel my face relaxing, the muscles around my ribs letting go.

Always interlaces two stories in alternating chapters. In one, Aud goes to Seattle with her coffee-vending friend Dornan, to meet her diplomat mother and her mother’s new husband, and to tend to properties there that were left her by her late father. Though it’s supposed to be a short visit, she immediately begins digging into the city, looking for buried bodies – no particular reason, it’s just Aud’s way. In no time at all Aud finds that there’s hanky panky around a warehouse she owns, being used by a film company to shoot a TV pilot. Working at the shoot is Victoria “Kick” Kuiper, former stuntwoman and caterer extraordinaire, with a muscular body to die for.

The other story begins the previous year in Atlanta. Aud had decided to teach a class in self defense for women, in the basement of a New Age bookstore. She drew a varied crew of students, and struggled to get them to break through their Southern feminine conditioning and learn to get angry, to hit back. Much of this thread consists of lectures by Aud, Socratic dialogues with her students. We learn quickly in the Seattle thread that something had gone seriously wrong with this group, but just what is withheld until the end of the book. (It’s not much of a surprise.) Aud feels that she’s failed, a factor in her running away to Seattle.

Aud is often accused, even by her creator, of being cut off, detached, isolated. I’ve never been able to see this. A friend once told me that she’d been critical of my own defenses, until she realized how vulnerable I am. Of course. Aud’s vulnerability is deeply buried under her own formidable defenses, but Griffith gives us glimpses. I have the impression that some people think one should simply go out and (figuratively) lie in traffic, because being run over – or running over other people - builds character. Ever since I figured it out, I knew that I had better things to do with my life than get hurt simply for the sake of proving my vulnerability. I never take dares. Aud seems to me very connected to other people, and she takes those connections seriously.

Her most strained relationship is with her mother, whom we’ve met only over the phone in the previous books. (Aud hasn’t seen her in person either for many years.) I don’t believe that Aud sees how much she is like her own idea of her mother: formidable, coldly rational, emotionally controlled. So it’s a bit of a surprise, to Aud and to the reader, when we meet Else Torvingen in person, that she turns out to be a good deal warmer and more likable than Aud’s portrait of her. (She’s also a fan of Hothead Paisan.) It may be that her relationship with her new husband has changed her, but I suspect that years and distance have built up a caricature in Aud’s mind. The images, the stereotypes we construct of people, have as much to do with our own wishful thinking—what we want them to be—as with the people themselves. (In my own mind, for example, my 4’11” mother is still twelve feet tall, as she seemed when I was a child.)

Always is a vast book, almost 500 pages of small type, yet it moves along briskly. It’s packed with lore about martial arts (Griffith is a martial artist herself, who taught women’s self-defense classes in England before she moved to the US), cooking, the politics of real estate development, art, woodworking, cooking for people on chemotherapy, multiple sclerosis (Griffith was diagnosed in 1993), and more. It pulled me along as if Aud herself had a grip on my wrist and were making me keep up with her long-legged stride. Fortunately I could close the book when I just couldn’t keep up anymore, but I always returned for more as soon as I could. Griffith says there will be more about Aud; as with Michael Tolliver, I’m looking forward to it.

The Grand Old Party

Published in GCN, April 1980. I was embarrassed, as I was typing this in, to notice that I wrote confidently about the bulk of Maugham's writing as if I knew it. In fact I'd only read Of Human Bondage, and one or two his stories, and though I've had his collected stories on my shelves for many years, that is still all I've read. Time to do something about that, I guess.

Maugham

by Ted Morgan
Simon & Schuster, 1980

“Gossip is the food of the gods,” the noted raconteur and bon vivant Andrew Sutherland once remarked, and I don’t doubt that W. Somerset Maugham would have agreed with him. Gossip was the dust into which Maugham breathed the breath of life to make his best fictions, and what was the Villa Mauresque intended to be but his own private Olympus, where the witty and notable could sip ambrosia and be brilliant, with Maugham presiding over it all as Father Zeus? Complete, as Ted Morgan’s biography of Maugham reminds us, with thunderbolt.

Of course, Maugham’s fondness (indeed avidity) for gossip stopped short of his own affairs, and in his will he directed not only that all recipients of his letters should please destroy them, but that his estate should give no assistance to biographers. He had indulged in a certain amount of autobiographical writing, in which he had told the world as much as he was willing it should know. If he could not prevent the writing of biographies, he could at least hope to limit their revelations and their reliability. It is not surprising that few if any letters were burnt, but it is surprising that Maugham’s literary executor should have broken down and given his imprimatur to Ted Morgan’s Maugham, citing Morgan’s “scrupulous research” and “the fact that he had not attempted to pass any moral judgment on any character concerned.” About this “fact” I will have more to say presently.

The trouble with gossip about the great – and a biography is gossip – is that we who read it may not ourselves be great enough. We may titillate ourselves with shock that the famous (like our parents, another revelation from which many of us never quite recover) have genitals and use them. We may grab too eagerly at the subjects weaknesses for evidence that he was no better than we are, worse even, and so we are justified in being complacent.

As much generosity of spirit is required to write a biography as to read one. The biographer, flush with knowledge and power, may take too much pleasure in bringing a legend to earth. Maugham’s best fiction was an invitation to join him on a lofty, omniscient level where to understand all was to forgive all, to be as worldly and unshockable as the Old Party himself, to feel empathy with rather than smug superiority to the frailties of others. Biography can offer the same invitation, provided its literary model is Madame Bovary and not the National Enquirer. Mr. Morgan, it seems to me, tends toward the latter.

On one hand, reading Maugham requires the reader to play biographer. Mr. Morgan has certainly done his homework, and has assembled a huge mass of data – letters, gossip, interviews, summaries of Maugham’s books and plays with excerpts from reviews, passages from memoirs by Maugham’s friends and enemies, and trivia such as the number of the stateroom Maugham once occupied on the Queen Mary – and dumped it all together, undigested, imposing on it only a chronological order. Someone could write a fine shorter book on Maugham using this one as a source, and I wish someone (preferably gay) would. I can’t imagine anyone reading Mr. Morgan for, or with, pleasure. At best his prose is competent. It’s a pity he didn’t have the humility, as Maugham did, to ask a grammarian to pick over his manuscript.

On the other hand, where Mr. Morgan has made some effort to digest his material, I find myself grateful for the large amounts he leaves more or less untouched. He has a tendency to attribute statements to his sources indirectly so that it is hard to tell where the source ends and he begins. For example, he neds a long paragraph footnoted to Lady Alfred Ayer with the comment, “Homosexuality … had contributed to the death of the heart.” Who is passing judgment here? That Alan Searle’s “sexual services were still needed” by Maugham in his seventies is attributed to Searle, but judging by direct quotation from Searle elsewhere I don’t believe he would have worded it so clinically. Would Mr. Morgan sum up a heterosexual marriage in such terms as “In addition, he provided sexual relief whenever Maugham required it”? Barbara Back’s parties may have been known to heterosexual London “for the size of their heterosexual contingent,” a bigot’s way of saying that gays at at her parties were not required to wear a straight façade. If the isle of Capri became “a sanctuary for the third sex,” a sanctuary was, after all, needed. Mr. Morgan may feel impressively Olympian when he adopts these clinical, patronizing, and snide turns of phrase, but I have the impression that homosexuality makes him uncomfortable. But he is such a bad write that I can’t be sure.

Mr. Morgan is also given to facile psychologizing, so that he hardly needs the moral judgments which Maugham’s executor praised him for eschewing. He tries to pin Maugham’s misogyny on feelings of abandonment caused by his mother’s death when he was eight. “Women, going back to his mother, were a disappointment, an unreliable species,” he speculates on Maugham’s motivation. “He appears to have enjoyed turning [actresses] down for parts, as if through them he were punishing all women,” Morgan writes later, as though Maugham weren’t equally petty in the exercise of power over men. He seems to think Maugham’s homosexuality was caused by his misogyny, but if that were true there would be few straight men in the world. He goes on at great length about Maugham’s stammer – there are twenty-eight entries under “Maugham, W. Somerset, stammer of” in the index – citing “the list of negativistic syndromes developed by the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan,” into which “Maugham’s behavior fits quite neatly.” The fact that “its origins are quite unknown” does not prevent Mr. Morgan from saying things like “a stammer is something you do to yourself,” “a way of telling the world that he was not like others,” “a way of guaranteeing the situation that you foresee.” “The stammerer has some quarrel with himself, he sets up his own roadblocks.” With comments like these, who needs moral judgments?

Still, the book is valuable. Everything you ever wanted to know about W. Somerset Maugham, plus much else, is in it: Maugham’s unhappy childhood, his wretched marriages (to Sylvie Barnardo and Gerald Haxton – Maugham once said of Haxton to Godfrey Winn, a young writer, “You do not know what it is like, Godfrey, and I hope you never will, to be married to someone who is married to drink”), his humiliating senescence (“If you think I’m gaga, you should see Winston [Churchill]”, he told S. N. Behrman). Yet he was a fascinating figure: his writing career spanned sixty-five years, he was famous for most of it, and he hobnobbed with the literary and social lions of three generations. It’s easy to despise him – he made it easy – and as a role model for gays he had little to offer. He never spoke up for the repeal of the British Sexual Offenses Act (but neither did W. H. Auden or that old darling E. M. Forster), and he never spoke again to one man who tried to get him to do so. But Maugham himself summed up the matter best, in a passage about Wagner quoted by Morgan:

I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving some of their virtues.

The Grand Old Party

Published in GCN, April 1980. I was embarrassed, as I was typing this in, to notice that I wrote confidently about the bulk of Maugham's writing as if I knew it. In fact I'd only read Of Human Bondage, and one or two his stories, and though I've had his collected stories on my shelves for many years, that is still all I've read. Time to do something about that, I guess.

Maugham

by Ted Morgan
Simon & Schuster, 1980

“Gossip is the food of the gods,” the noted raconteur and bon vivant Andrew Sutherland once remarked, and I don’t doubt that W. Somerset Maugham would have agreed with him. Gossip was the dust into which Maugham breathed the breath of life to make his best fictions, and what was the Villa Mauresque intended to be but his own private Olympus, where the witty and notable could sip ambrosia and be brilliant, with Maugham presiding over it all as Father Zeus? Complete, as Ted Morgan’s biography of Maugham reminds us, with thunderbolt.

Of course, Maugham’s fondness (indeed avidity) for gossip stopped short of his own affairs, and in his will he directed not only that all recipients of his letters should please destroy them, but that his estate should give no assistance to biographers. He had indulged in a certain amount of autobiographical writing, in which he had told the world as much as he was willing it should know. If he could not prevent the writing of biographies, he could at least hope to limit their revelations and their reliability. It is not surprising that few if any letters were burnt, but it is surprising that Maugham’s literary executor should have broken down and given his imprimatur to Ted Morgan’s Maugham, citing Morgan’s “scrupulous research” and “the fact that he had not attempted to pass any moral judgment on any character concerned.” About this “fact” I will have more to say presently.

The trouble with gossip about the great – and a biography is gossip – is that we who read it may not ourselves be great enough. We may titillate ourselves with shock that the famous (like our parents, another revelation from which many of us never quite recover) have genitals and use them. We may grab too eagerly at the subjects weaknesses for evidence that he was no better than we are, worse even, and so we are justified in being complacent.

As much generosity of spirit is required to write a biography as to read one. The biographer, flush with knowledge and power, may take too much pleasure in bringing a legend to earth. Maugham’s best fiction was an invitation to join him on a lofty, omniscient level where to understand all was to forgive all, to be as worldly and unshockable as the Old Party himself, to feel empathy with rather than smug superiority to the frailties of others. Biography can offer the same invitation, provided its literary model is Madame Bovary and not the National Enquirer. Mr. Morgan, it seems to me, tends toward the latter.

On one hand, reading Maugham requires the reader to play biographer. Mr. Morgan has certainly done his homework, and has assembled a huge mass of data – letters, gossip, interviews, summaries of Maugham’s books and plays with excerpts from reviews, passages from memoirs by Maugham’s friends and enemies, and trivia such as the number of the stateroom Maugham once occupied on the Queen Mary – and dumped it all together, undigested, imposing on it only a chronological order. Someone could write a fine shorter book on Maugham using this one as a source, and I wish someone (preferably gay) would. I can’t imagine anyone reading Mr. Morgan for, or with, pleasure. At best his prose is competent. It’s a pity he didn’t have the humility, as Maugham did, to ask a grammarian to pick over his manuscript.

On the other hand, where Mr. Morgan has made some effort to digest his material, I find myself grateful for the large amounts he leaves more or less untouched. He has a tendency to attribute statements to his sources indirectly so that it is hard to tell where the source ends and he begins. For example, he neds a long paragraph footnoted to Lady Alfred Ayer with the comment, “Homosexuality … had contributed to the death of the heart.” Who is passing judgment here? That Alan Searle’s “sexual services were still needed” by Maugham in his seventies is attributed to Searle, but judging by direct quotation from Searle elsewhere I don’t believe he would have worded it so clinically. Would Mr. Morgan sum up a heterosexual marriage in such terms as “In addition, he provided sexual relief whenever Maugham required it”? Barbara Back’s parties may have been known to heterosexual London “for the size of their heterosexual contingent,” a bigot’s way of saying that gays at at her parties were not required to wear a straight façade. If the isle of Capri became “a sanctuary for the third sex,” a sanctuary was, after all, needed. Mr. Morgan may feel impressively Olympian when he adopts these clinical, patronizing, and snide turns of phrase, but I have the impression that homosexuality makes him uncomfortable. But he is such a bad write that I can’t be sure.

Mr. Morgan is also given to facile psychologizing, so that he hardly needs the moral judgments which Maugham’s executor praised him for eschewing. He tries to pin Maugham’s misogyny on feelings of abandonment caused by his mother’s death when he was eight. “Women, going back to his mother, were a disappointment, an unreliable species,” he speculates on Maugham’s motivation. “He appears to have enjoyed turning [actresses] down for parts, as if through them he were punishing all women,” Morgan writes later, as though Maugham weren’t equally petty in the exercise of power over men. He seems to think Maugham’s homosexuality was caused by his misogyny, but if that were true there would be few straight men in the world. He goes on at great length about Maugham’s stammer – there are twenty-eight entries under “Maugham, W. Somerset, stammer of” in the index – citing “the list of negativistic syndromes developed by the psychoanalyst Harry Stack Sullivan,” into which “Maugham’s behavior fits quite neatly.” The fact that “its origins are quite unknown” does not prevent Mr. Morgan from saying things like “a stammer is something you do to yourself,” “a way of telling the world that he was not like others,” “a way of guaranteeing the situation that you foresee.” “The stammerer has some quarrel with himself, he sets up his own roadblocks.” With comments like these, who needs moral judgments?

Still, the book is valuable. Everything you ever wanted to know about W. Somerset Maugham, plus much else, is in it: Maugham’s unhappy childhood, his wretched marriages (to Sylvie Barnardo and Gerald Haxton – Maugham once said of Haxton to Godfrey Winn, a young writer, “You do not know what it is like, Godfrey, and I hope you never will, to be married to someone who is married to drink”), his humiliating senescence (“If you think I’m gaga, you should see Winston [Churchill]”, he told S. N. Behrman). Yet he was a fascinating figure: his writing career spanned sixty-five years, he was famous for most of it, and he hobnobbed with the literary and social lions of three generations. It’s easy to despise him – he made it easy – and as a role model for gays he had little to offer. He never spoke up for the repeal of the British Sexual Offenses Act (but neither did W. H. Auden or that old darling E. M. Forster), and he never spoke again to one man who tried to get him to do so. But Maugham himself summed up the matter best, in a passage about Wagner quoted by Morgan:

I do not believe they are right who say that the defects of famous men should be ignored. I think it is better that we should know them. Then, though we are conscious of having faults as glaring as theirs, we can believe that that is no hindrance to our achieving some of their virtues.