gold-catalinarobayo: August 2008

SAME-SEX MARRIAGE AND VISITING LOVED ONES IN THE HOSPITAL DO NOT BELONG IN THE SAME SENTENCE

By now we all know what Obama said about us in his acceptance speech, but here it is in total:

I know there are differences on same-sex marriage, but surely we can agree that our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters deserve to visit the person they love in a hospital and to live lives free of discrimination.

Now I can't criticize the "live lives free of discrimination" part...amen to that. But as for hospital visitation, don't all hospital patients deserve visits from the people they love?? Don't all gay people deserve this...and isn't marriage a completely different issue?? By putting these two concepts in the same sentence, Obama has fallen into the rhetorical morass created by the marriage equality movement.

The rhetoric goes roughly like this...A lesbian is denied the ability to see her hospitalized partner; spouses are allowed to visit each other in the hospital; therefore lesbian (and gay) couples must be allowed to marry so they can visit each other in the hospital. So then Obama steps into this conversation, saying that we can't agree on marriage but we can agree that couples who can't marry should still be able to visit each other in the hospital.

But try this. Hospital accreditation standards include those who play a significant role in a patient's life, even if not legally related, within the definition of family. Neither gay nor straight couples should have to marry to visit each other in the hospital. Gay people without partners need assurance that those they love and consider family will be allowed to visit them in the hospital. Consider that LGBT people may be more likely than heterosexuals to move away from unsupportive families of origin and/or to more accepting cities or towns.

If we make any discussion of hospital visitation policies about same-sex couples, we are going to miss the vast numbers of unpartnered LGBT people who don't want their estranged parents given hospital access while their closest friends are kept out or who don't want to be left all alone because their families of origin live at a great distance and their families are choice are excluded.

In 2007, Virginia passed a law that requires hospitals to allow patients to choose their visitors. Gay and straight; coupled and not. That's the law Obama should support...along with a federal advance health care directive registry. He should also support LGBT equality..including in access to marriage...but not in the same sentence.

It's Just a Jump to the Left, and Then a Step To the Right

Back to Korea (only figuratively, alas) for a bit.

A 400-day long strike has just ended, over a manufacturer's move to replace irregular workers by outsourcing. The union seems to have won only a minimal concession from the company, and some issues (like punitive damages demanded by the company) remain unsettled.

The Korean police have overstepped again. The Hankyoreh reports that a court declined to issue arrest warrants for seven members of the Socialist Workers League of Korea, whom the police had "apprehended in their homes" on August 26. That leaves me a bit confused -- they were arrested and held without warrants? The Korea Times, which notes the case in passing, says that the men were "detained." I suppose there's a distinction that escapes me there, but in any case the men were released.

The Hankyoreh has an interview with one of the detainees, SWLK President Oh Se-cheol (at left, appropriately enough, in the photo above from The Hankyoreh).

The close of the Korea Times piece is revealing:

It's imperative for the Lee administration to take bold measures to address the police problem. The mission of the police is to protect the lives and assets of citizens by maintaining law and order. The government should no longer delay police reform to ensure the rule of law, the very foundation of a democracy.

Oh, come on. The "police problem" is basically the Lee administration problem. That President Lee has been using to police to punish citizens who had the bad taste to criticize him is not news. And now Lee's ruling Grand National Party has announced its intention "revise laws in September to drastically limit the freedom of expression, demonstration or rally in the name of establishing the rule of law." That's the only "rule of law" that interests Lee and his cronies.

In addition, the GNP clarified it would support a 'pro-business policy agenda,' saying it would strive to pass various bills that would abolish the investment ceiling for family-run business conglomerates investing in their affiliates and soften restrictions governing holding companies in the regular session of the National Assembly next month.

A KT article from August 29, refers to "violent candlelight rallies" (though the vigils were overwhelmingly nonviolent) and quotes "GNP floor leader Hong Joon-pyo [who] said those who seek violent, illegal protests are not entitled to enjoy the freedom of association." Somehow I don't think Mr. Hong had in mind the pro-Lee demonstrators in June who attacked other protestors, or those who committed arson at the entrance to a TV broadasting company.

Meanwhile, as Korea anticipates "a US-type financial crisis in September," the government has also announced plans to counter Korea's high suicide rate, "the disgrace of the nation":

According to the OECD's 2006 report on health, South Korea had the highest suicide rate of 21.5 out of every 100,000 people, almost double that of other member countries.

Hungary, Japan and Finland followed in the list, with 21, 19.1 and 18 people, respectively.

According to the health ministry, the growing number of single-parent families and social and economic burdens tend to incite people to kill themselves.

It is necessary to spread respect for life to prevent suicide, he added.

Remember that Korea's suicide rate doubled after the 1997 financial crisis because of destructive economic policies imposed from outside Korea, and has never gone down to pre-crisis levels since. I get the impression from this article that what most concerns the government is the "disgrace," the shame before other nations. But the anti-suicide plan will at least focus particularly "on strengthening the social and economic safety net for those in the low-income bracket and the aged, they said."

As short-term measures, the Ministry of Land, Transport and Maritime Affairs is seeking to establish more screen doors at subway stations to prevent people from committing suicide by jumping in front of trains.

The Ministry of Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries plans to regulate purchases of poison pesticides in a bid to reduce the number of suicides.

It's Just a Jump to the Left, and Then a Step To the Right

Preaching To The Perverted

Immediately after watching this clip, I went looking for Terrance Dean’s Hiding in Hip Hop at the library, and I must report regretfully that it is, as Jay Smooth suspected, a “tell-all memoir,” though it's not that “saucy.” Dean lays on the misery very thick (not without reason: his mother and two younger brothers died of AIDS, among many other hardships he’s suffered) interspersed with basically pornographic accounts of his many sexual encounters with males, laden with loving, drooling accounts of his tricks’ muscular bodies and generous endowment -- not that there’s anything wrong with that! – and names changed to protect the guilty. If I knew more about hiphop, I could probably identify many of them, as some customer-reviewers at Amazon claim they can.

Reading Dean’s account of his down-low sexual odyssey, I suddenly remembered a remark in Kobena Mercer’s ambivalent attack on Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of black men (in Welcome to the Jungle [Routledge, 1994], 185):

In post-Civil Rights, post-Black Power America, where liberal orthodoxy provides no available legitimation for such folk myths, Mapplethorpe enacts a disavowal of this ideological “truth”: I know (its [sic] not true that all black guys have huge willies) but (nevertheless, in my photographs, they do).

This is part of Mercer’s explication of one of Mapplethorpe’s photographs, “Man in Polyester Suit.” However, it happens not to be true that all the black men in The Black Book have “huge willies.” And look at it this way: I know that not all black guys have huge willies, but nevertheless, in E. Lynn Harris’s novels, and in Terrance Dean’s sexual memory, they do. It seems that Dean never got down on the down low with even one brother who wasn’t fine, sculpted, and hung, with “luscious lips [and a] hard thick muscle standing at attention between his legs” (128), a “massive hardness” waiting to be squeezed, pulled on, and sucked. Even granted the special circumstances in which Dean moved (the upper echelons of the entertainment business) and granted that Dean probably selects the high points of his many one-night stands, I find this implausible. And that makes me wonder how reliable his story is in general.

I’ve also seen Mapplethorpe disparaged because he liked his young black men to be as “street” as possible. Judging by Dean’s experience, this is not a fetish limited to gay white men: gay black men also crave “thugs,” “hoods,” guys who radiate toughness and aggressive virility. And not only gay black men feel that way: Dean isn’t the only witness to rappers’ need to put up a tough front for their ostensibly straight audiences. As Jay says on his blog, everything he says about hiphop in the clip “is pretty much equally applicable to America in general.”

For most of Hiding in HipHop, though, Terrance Dean describes his resistance to thinking of himself as gay. Mostly he refers to himself as “down low,” and it’s interesting to see the varied meanings that now-trendy term carries. First, it means “secret” or “hidden”, or as we white gay men would say, “closeted.” But there’s an important difference. It seems to me that “closeted” is generally a word we apply to others, not to ourselves, while “down low” is becoming an identity for significant numbers of African-African men who have sex with other African-American men. There’s a paradox there, since one of the hallmarks of men who have sex with men is that they reject any identity label: they just happen to have sex, evidently by accident, with dozens or hundreds of other men, but they’re not gay or bisexual. (This tendency is not restricted to non-white men: when gay anthropologist Bill Leap observed male sexual encounters in the locker room and sauna of an upscale health club in Washington D.C., he found that gay men generally exchanged phone numbers and met elsewhere, while the men who had sex in the club vehemently denied that they were even bisexual, let alone gay.) Yet “down low,” which used to refer to any ‘illicit’ sexual relationship, heterosexual or homosexual, is becoming an identity of its own: Dean refers to down low clubs and parties, to his “down low family,” and so on. I suspect that in time we'll see men identify publicly as “down low,” forgetting the contradiction in being openly hidden. (But then, “gay” has similar contradictions, having gone from an in-group code word to a public identity, and now to a pejorative.)

At other times, “down low” has other connotations for Dean, as when he mentions that he and another man “didn’t enjoy being around crowds of gay men. We were down low and we liked being low-key.” In this context “down low” seems to translate as “straight-acting” in gay white men’s jargon. Again, “When I got back to MTV, I noticed there were quite a few openly gay black men, who I stayed clear of because I still wasn’t comfortable being around obviously gay men.” Dean here confuses “obviously gay” with “openly gay.” “Openly gay” means that one’s gayness is an acknowledged public fact, whether or not one fits popular stereotypes. Being openly gay, explicitly declaring which team we bat for, has been important for precisely those of us who wouldn’t stand out in a straight crowd, so that we wouldn’t be mistaken for straight. “Obviously” gay men may not need to declare themselves, though I’ve met a fair number of screaming queens who were sure that no one knew about them.

One of the more painful aspects of Dean’s story is that for all his intelligence and education – he did well in high school and was offered scholarships to several colleges, finally attending Fisk University – he has shut his eyes to everything that has been happening among gay people in his lifetime. Not just white gay people, either, though if he read anything about the history of white American gays he might spot immediately the similarities between the down-low life he knows and white gay life down to the late 1960s: not just the fear of exposure and violence, but the feelings of inferiority and shame, the double lives and isolation.

But Dean seems not to have ever encountered the voices of African-American gay experience. In his strange and conflicted book On the Down Low: a journey into the lives of “straight” black men who sleep with men (Broadway Books, 2004), J. L. King remarked, “It’s a helluva lot easier for white folks to accept homosexuality, because they have their ‘out’ Elton Johns and Ellens, their Queer as Folk and Will and Grace. ... Could a famous, popular black athlete ever come out like the Olympic diver Greg Louganis and get the same treatment?” Leaving aside the minor point that Louganis isn’t “white” but Pacific-Islander, like the former NFL player Esera Tuaolo (and see Keith Boykin’s article on black gay athletes), I’ll see King’s Elton John and raise him Little Richard and RuPaul. Black folks have their Meshell Ndegeocellos, their Alice Walkers, their Ma Raineys, their James Baldwins, their Audre Lordes, their Samuel Delanys, and a good many more.

It’s a pity that Dean apparently never stumbled on a copy of Joseph Beam’s Black Gay anthologies In the Life and Brother to Brother, or Marlon Riggs’s poetic video work Tongues Untied, though they appeared just as he was coming of age. At one point, when Dean is struggling especially hard in “the down low lifestyle,” he re-commits himself to church, “reading books on spirituality.” Why not some books on sexuality, or the intersection between sexuality and spirituality? By the end of Hiding in Hip Hop Dean has finally decided to come out, and he’s surprised by the amount of support he receives from his family, but he is still clearly extremely conflicted. Maybe his next book will have some better news.

Preaching To The Perverted

Is That A Hypodermic In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?

According to this article (via), skinny boys are now all the rage in fashion ads and runways.

In the late 90’s designers like Miuccia Prada, Raf Simons, and Hedi Slimane embraced an alternative male. He is slim, youthful, lean, frail, sensitive, lyrical, and odd, a little too odd at the time. This was not a man, it was a boy, and he did not go to the gym he went to the library, and in instead of growing muscle he cultivated interests. … And we find ourselves today in 2008 and those odd skinny creatures are ruling the runways. It’s almost impossible now for any muscle stud to find work in Paris or Milan save for a few fashion dinosaurs that still live out their heydays in the 90’s. Muscles have vacated the realm of luxury and have become especially low brow. The meek truly shall inherit the earth.

Until next week or whenever the fashion changes again, that is. I don’t think this is quite news – wasn’t there a media fuss a few years ago (1995, in fact) over Calvin Klein’s “heroin chic” ads, to say nothing of Twiggy (whose spare figure was called boyish) in the 1960s? I’m no fashionista, but this isn’t exactly insider knowledge: I believe I picked up on the CK brouhaha in the Village Voice.

I’ve always liked skinny boys myself, back before it was permitted by Our Shadowy Fashion Overlords. (Though I must say, some of the young men pictured here look downright anorectic; contrary to what Coco Chanel or the Duchess of Windsor or whoever it was said, you can be too thin.) But while the fashion world was catching up with me, I moved on to short, stocky, even chubby Latino men with strongly Indian features. Since I’m clearly prescient, forward-looking designers will want to start retooling for their Spring 2038 line, Aztec Campesino Chic.

What really annoys me about the piece, though, is not its failure of memory – we live in the United States of Amnesia, darlings, and this is a relatively trivial (if not benign) example. No, it’s the assumption that history moves in lockstep:

The male figure and visage, constantly idealized, is constantly morphing. In the 50’s it was solid and broad with large but poorly defined muscles. The face: reserved, strong jawed, and stoic, a man back from the war and ready to live the American Dream. In the 70’s the figure became leaner, sportier, and much furrier, think Burt Reynolds, (a young) John Travolta, and Mark Spitzer. It was a look that exuded sex on a more carnal level. But in the 80’s and into the 90’s the male ideal mutated into an inflated, steroid ridden, massive hulk.

Whose “male ideal”? A relative few designers, casting directors, and photographers I guess. But in any of those periods there were plenty of exceptions to the “ideal”: in the 50s, for instance, James Dean didn’t look like he’d just come back from the war, to say nothing of Sal Mineo or Elvis Presley. (Our blogger also seems to have confused Mark Spitz with “Mark Spitzer”, but the 70s was a long time ago.) No matter how often it’s pointed out that historical change doesn’t happen this way – that trends overlap, older strata coexist with newer ones – many people persist in talking as though yesterday goes into the dustbin of history, today is sparkling new, and Tomorrow Belongs To Me. Nor are individuals so simple: when I was younger I liked skinny boys and chunky boys, blonds and brunettes (and redheads). I rarely liked facial hair, but then every so often someone would come along and transcend type. I still like skinny boys, too, as well as barrel-chested morenos with bushy bigotes. I know that I’m far from alone in this charming messiness; what continues to mystify me is that so many people apparently want to think of themselves as being so narrow, so limited.

And what’s the post’s title about: “In Which Physical Perfection Becomes Profane Idolatry For the Masses”? They wish. Just because I want to get someone into bed, it doesn't mean I idolize him. But those who have something to sell – or who, as in this blogger’s case, identify with those who have something to sell – naturally wish they could make you buy their brand and none other. But it doesn’t work that way in the real world, and a good thing too.

Is That A Hypodermic In Your Pocket, Or Are You Just Happy To See Me?

According to this article (via), skinny boys are now all the rage in fashion ads and runways.

In the late 90’s designers like Miuccia Prada, Raf Simons, and Hedi Slimane embraced an alternative male. He is slim, youthful, lean, frail, sensitive, lyrical, and odd, a little too odd at the time. This was not a man, it was a boy, and he did not go to the gym he went to the library, and in instead of growing muscle he cultivated interests. … And we find ourselves today in 2008 and those odd skinny creatures are ruling the runways. It’s almost impossible now for any muscle stud to find work in Paris or Milan save for a few fashion dinosaurs that still live out their heydays in the 90’s. Muscles have vacated the realm of luxury and have become especially low brow. The meek truly shall inherit the earth.

The male figure and visage, constantly idealized, is constantly morphing. In the 50’s it was solid and broad with large but poorly defined muscles. The face: reserved, strong jawed, and stoic, a man back from the war and ready to live the American Dream. In the 70’s the figure became leaner, sportier, and much furrier, think Burt Reynolds, (a young) John Travolta, and Mark Spitzer. It was a look that exuded sex on a more carnal level. But in the 80’s and into the 90’s the male ideal mutated into an inflated, steroid ridden, massive hulk.

Dorothy (Del) Martin, 1921-2008

Okay, I'll get on the bandwagon, though I can't imagine everyone who cares hasn't already heard: Del Martin (on the right in the photo below), one of the cofounders of the pioneering Lesbian organization Daughters of Bilitis, died Wednesday at the age of 87. She's survived by her wife of 55 years, Phyllis Lyon (on the left).

I can't remember when I first heard of this enduring couple. They've been there, like parents, on the LGBTQ+ π scene ever since I came out in 1971. I met one or two of the other homophile-generation founders -- Franklin Kameny, Barbara Gittings -- but never Martin and Lyon, though I knew all about them from their joint book Lesbian/Woman. I knew more about them, in fact -- their lives, how they met, the work they did together -- than I know about my own parents, who were never obliging enough to write a book together.

And as with parents, there comes a day when the older generation of activists, the forerunners. are no longer there. But their having lived makes a huge difference. Courageous people like Martin and Lyon, Harry Hay, Kameny, Gittings, and so many others, changed our world -- and by "our", I mean straights too.

Dorothy (Del) Martin, 1921-2008

McCain and McAbel

I'm currently reading Richard Barrios' Screened Out: Playing Gay from Edison to Stonewall (Routledge, 2003), which amounts to a supplement to Vito Russo's groundbreaking The Celluloid Closet (Harper, 1981). Barrios covers a lot of ground that Russo couldn't: a good number of the films he discusses were hard to find in the 1970s when Russo was doing his research, and some were thought lost. Barrios also had access to a lot of archival material from the studios that probably wasn't available to researchers forty years ago. Screened Out is as good a read as The Celluloid Closet, and where the books overlap it's interesting to compare Barrios' take on certain films with Russo's. I may write about it more later, after I've finished it, because I have some quibbles here and there (surprise, surprise). But here's an interesting bit from pages 128-129, comparing a latter-day crusader against smut and violence in the movies with the censors of the 1930s:

On September 27, 2000, a congressional panel, chaired by Sen. John McCain (Rep., Arizona, convened a day of hearings in which the heads of major film studios were compelled to defend their marketing practices. A series of school shootings in the late 1990s, climaxing with the horrifying tragedy of thirteen dead students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, had compelled some members of Congress to shine an unforgiving glare on the industry. In the aftermath of Littleton, the American film industry served as an eye-catching and easily attackable target – the great corrupter of the young – and the themes continued to resound to Congress and in the concurrent presidential campaign. Specific and heavy criticism was directed toward the guidelines by which R-rated films could be advertised to children under seventeen. “I don’t understand this language,” McCain complained to the executives, referring to the studios’ marketing policies. “I think it’s filled with loopholes. … Why don’t you just simply say that you will not market to children this kind of R rated material, that you will not market to children this kind of R rated material, that you will not market it to children under seventeen, period.” …

... followed by this footnote a page later:

Senator John McCain’s words, all these years later, seem quite in tune with the days of the Payne study and Our Movie-made Children: “I’d love to be the Super Censor,” he told an interviewer following his committee’s hearings. “I’d love to sit and watch movies every day and say which ones are suitable and which ones are not.”

I'll bet he would, that ol' horndog.

(Photo above from Weekly World News -- it must be true, right, or they wouldn't have published it!)

McCain and McAbel

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I Must! I Must! So I Can Read Photo Captions!

Here's one of those pictures that reminds me I need to work on my Korean. In the center is former Korean President Noh Mu Hyun; just to the right of him in the picture is the brilliant director Lee Chang Dong, one of my favorite filmmakers and one of the best in the world today. (I strongly recommend his harrowing second film, Peppermint Candy, though all of them are worth seeing.) Lee served as Minister of Culture during Noh's term of office, which goes some way to explain why he's there. But beyond that I'm lost, though I'm proud of myself for recognizing Lee in the picture even before I spelled out the caption.

It looks like the administration of current President Lee Myung Bak is continuing to try to intimidate dissenters. It's an advantage governments have over movements for social justice -- they don't have to work in plain sight. Whatever can be said against the candlelight vigils of the past summer, they had no real secrets. That may be why Lee and his supporters had to invent paranoid fantasies about North Korean funding and such. Regardless, Lee could retaliate by picking off his opponents when they didn't have the safety of numbers, by having them arrested and otherwise harassed one by one. The protests took place where they could be seen; the arrests, the trials, will happen with much less publicity. One flaw of the protests would seem to be that they didn't anticipate such tactics, or at least didn't plan how to respond to them.

Meanwhile, Lee's approval ratings have gone up slightly, probably in large part as a result of South Korea's strong showing at Beijing. Whether this rise will survive little problems like the declining currency, Koreans' discontent with law enforcement, and other worries about the economy, will have to be seen.

I Must! I Must! So I Can Read Photo Captions!

Sauder Village

The rug retreat at Sauder Village in Archbold, OH was another great week. This is a picture of my classroom. I am supposed to be sitting in the corner of the room between Pam and Jan who are hard at work. I just had to get closer to the wool table to be sure I did not miss something so I took a picture while I was over there. My teacher was Anita White and I used the week to work with

As Obama Sinks Slowly on the Right

I've been very critical of Obama's remarks on Latin America, particularly his declared intention to continue the embargo against Cuba and his ign'ant attacks on Hugo Chavez. But Laura Carlsen has an interesting piece at Counterpunch, analyzing "A New Partnership for the Americas", a paper released by Obama's campaign after his pandering speech in Miami last May. Carlsen does a nice job, and raises some good points, but I think she's too optimistic with her talk of the necessity of a "leap of faith" (Jump! Jump!), and I'm taken aback by her claim (quoting the Miami speech!) that Obama's "perspective also seems to recognize that Latin America has come of age and validates in principle the reform experiments in the region that the Bush administration has vilified."

"Come of age"? Back in the 60s some of us used to question whether the United States was "ready for self-government," mocking a common American excuse for keeping various countries under our or European heels. I still don't see anything in the vacuous campaign rhetoric of Obama's Miami speech to indicate that he even understands what is at stake. It seems that he also "vilified" the reform movements in the region, and seems to think that the oppressive "governments that cared more about their own power than their peoples' progress and prosperity" emerged out of nowhere and survived without U.S. support. In Miami he said, "It's time to press Haiti's leaders to bridge the divides between them." Has Obama ever said anything about the U.S.-backed coup that removed Aristide from office in Haiti and established the current regime that he's now criticizing? Does he know anything about the active role the U.S. has played in stifling democracy in Latin America and elsewhere? It doesn't look like it, and that is inexcusable.

Has the U.S. come of age? It doesn't look like it to me. Carlsen finishes with the hope that "If the Obama campaign continues to build a grassroots base ... we have the raw material for making change." I don't think that any politician is going to build a grassroots base that will undercut him. The democracy movements that swept the U.S. in the 1960s weren't built by John F. Kennedy. Don't look to Obama's own machine to produce opposition to his policies.

As Obama Sinks Slowly on the Right

Twilight of the Clones

Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath (Da Capo Press, 2008) is a partial reprint of Andrew Holleran’s Ground Zero (William Morrow, 1988). Holleran explains in his introduction that

Dale Peck and the English editor Richard Canning were upset that certain books written during the AIDS epidemic by people like Allen Barnett, Harry Kondoleon, Christopher Coe, David Wojnarowicz, and John Weir were not only out of print but, they felt, had not received their due because of the times in which they were published. So they spoke to Don Weise, an editor at Carroll & Graf, about launching a series of reprints, a series now in abeyance because of the demise of that publisher. (Ground Zero was the only one that squeaked through.) What drew Weise to the project, however, is still valid: He was afraid that this part of gay history was being forgotten [page 2].

I share that concern, though I’m not sure that other parts of gay history are being remembered any better. From time to time I ask volunteers for our local GLB Speakers Bureau what is the most recent gay-related book they’ve read, and the most common answer is, “Um … I don’t remember …I don’t think I’ve read any.” It seems to me that these people, just by virtue of volunteering to speak publicly about being gay, would be more motivated than most GLB people to have read something. When other queerfolk of my generation remember how they scoured their libraries for any information about homosexuality they could find, and marvel (or lament) that today’s gay kids can see gay characters on TV, I have to remind myself that we bookworms were as atypical then as now.

So, it’s good that Holleran’s writings from the peak years of the AIDS crisis, which appeared as essays in the pioneering gay glossy Christopher Street, are back in print. They are primary sources for what it felt like to live in gay Manhattan during the early 1980s, and as always with Holleran's work they're beautifully written. If you’re concerned about history, though, you should probably skip Holleran’s introduction, because it’s a mess. He confuses the gay psychologist Walt Odets with his playwright father, Clifford Odets (3); he includes Samuel Delany (whose surname he misspells, but then so does almost everybody) in a list of writers who “wrote nonfiction that many consider their best work” (8) out of the AIDS crisis, all of whom also died of AIDS. Delany is still alive, and while he’s written important nonfiction, I’m not sure that his writings about AIDS are considered his best work. In the same list Holleran includes “Alan Barnett”, probably a misspelling of Allen Barnett (whose name, as you can see above, he does know how to spell correctly), who is known not for nonfiction but for a single volume of fiction, The Body and Its Dangers and other stories (St. Martin’s Press, 1990).

I know, I know: these are details – but there are more of them, and they’re the kind of details that should have been checked before putting them into print. There are also dubious historical judgments, like his defense of Arlene Croce’s denunciation of dancer / choreographer Bill T. Jones’s Still/Here – which she refused not only to review but even to see – as “victim art.” Holleran says, “When the dance critic Arlene Croce asked in The New Yorker how she was supposed to criticize a ballet about AIDS by a choreographer who had AIDS, she was predictably assailed for inquiring, but her question was valid. Who had the right to write about AIDS at all, much less make judgments? The only people, it seemed to me, with authority to do so were people with HIV” (6). Consider the errors of fact in his summary: Still/Here was a combination dance and theatre piece not a “ballet”, it was not only about AIDS but about other life-threatening conditions besides, and Croce didn’t defer to the authority of PWAs but denied that the work had any validity at all. (There’s an abstract of her polemic here.) And if only people with AIDS had the right to write about AIDS at all, what was Holleran doing?

It seems that Holleran still feels defensive about his lack of involvement in AIDS activism; he returns to the issue several times in the introduction:

Years ago a friend who had been as skeptical as I about Act Up at the beginning, but started going to its meetings after deciding the protests had accelerated medical help, accused me – after his death, through a mutual friend -- of not doing enough about AIDS. This has always bothered me. Last fall, reading the latest volume of Gore Vidal’s memoirs, I came upon this line: “I am also chided for not doing enough about AIDS, but my virological skills are few.” That’s it. If a virus could only be stopped by a scientist, it seemed to me at the time, all the rest of us could do was stand by friends [14].

Everyone has to make his or her own decisions in these matters, and I’m not casting the first stone at Holleran for not joining ACT-UP. What annoys me about his apologia (and Vidal’s, come to that) is the assumption that either you invented a cure in the laboratory, or you did nothing. By Holleran’s own standards, an uninfected person had no business even writing about it. What he’s doing here is not just justifying his own inaction, it’s devaluing the action of others, who not only ‘stood by friends’ but stood by people they didn’t know. It’s one thing for Holleran to have felt this way in the 80s; it’s another to try to exalt it now. (It may be worth noticing that among the writers on AIDS Holleran doesn’t mention is the lesbian novelist, playwright, and AIDS activist Sarah Schulman.)

What struck me as I read Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited was how different the tone and mood were from Ground Zero as I remembered it. This is partly because Holleran left out “six satires on safe sex” that appeared in the original. My count disagrees with his, though: as far as I can tell, seven essays from the original edition were left out and replaced with other (quite good) pieces. Holleran kept one of those satirical pieces, “Beauty NOW”, abandoned three (including an essay on Henry James), and added yet another, “My Little Trojan.”

But even the essays that remained from the earlier edition seemed to read differently after twenty years. This may be partly because I’ve read the books Holleran has written in the interim, and except for some of the stories in the collection In September, the Light Changes, his writing has descended more into gloom and – dare I say it? I dare – self-pity. How much this reflects Holleran’s own personality I don’t know, and it doesn’t matter: I’m talking about what he writes and publishes. His most recent book, the novella Grief, is about a gay man in late middle age coping with his mother’s death, and the title accurately reflects its mood. The novel The Beauty of Men, parts of which originally appeared as essays in Christopher Street, was about a middle-aged gay man who mourns his increasing inability to play the game of Fast Food Sex (as Holleran had called it before) that had been his preferred pattern in gay life. Unlike Holleran, who writes and teaches, the narrator of The Beauty of Men seems to have no life outside of the baths and other cruising places, except for visiting his mother in the nursing home. Holleran's fictional world has, if anything, shrunk over the past three decades.

Holleran’s sense of the country he inhabits also seems skewed. Reflecting on the spare, puritanical paintings of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Thomas Eakins, he wrote (62):

We have always been two countries – Puritan and Cavalier – as there are two cities in New York right now: the infected and uninfected. One country is chaotic – illegal immigrants, heart transplants [?], pornography and drugs, homosexuals and AIDS. The other has been around much longer, and speaks from these paintings. Nothing decorative, nothing baroque. No crosses, and no Virgin Marys. No birth, and no death. Just the trackless forest, the mountain pass, the shaft of sunlight landing on a clearing in the valley, the solitary sitter.

How can a southerner like Holleran write as though America equals New England? The “Puritan” strain has not “been around much longer” than the “Cavalier” – among the English, Cavaliers beat the Puritans to the New World by a couple of decades, and of course the Spanish, with their crosses and Virgin Marys, were earlier by a century. To say nothing of the people who were already there when the Europeans landed bearing plague: people with towns and farms and their own lives. Even the Puritans weren’t as colorless as Holleran wishes to believe. No, Holleran sees America this way because he wants to see it this way, just as he wants to ignore all gay men (let alone lesbians) outside the clone subculture. It’s part of what, with perverse pride, he and “the Jesuits call ‘morose delectation’ – an addiction to melancholy” (3).

In the essay “Tuesday Nights” he writes about a gay men’s discussion group he attended in Gainesville, Florida:

Ten years ago I would never have come to a meeting of this sort. People who belonged to groups like this, or went to the gay churches, were, I assumed, people who did not have the nerve to look for a partner in the actual world: the baths, beaches, and bars. In the old days tricking was how we met people. … How to integrate our homosexuality with the rest of our selves, our lives – our family, our society, our upbringing – was a problem a minority, not a majority, of the gay men I knew were able to solve before the plague [203, 205].

I notice that when Holleran writes “we,” he usually means “I.” Like many who write about the gay male fast lane, Holleran has paid lip service to the notion that such men are only one subgroup among gays – Doomed Queens, he called them in his first novel Dancer from the Dance (Morrow, 1978, page 249):

And even so, do you realize what a tiny fraction of the mass of homosexuals we were? That day we marched to Central Park and found ourselves in a sea of humanity, how stunned I was to recognize no more than four or five faces? Of course our friends were all at the beach, darling; they couldn’t be bothered to make a political statement.) I used to say there were only seventeen homosexuals in New York, and we knew every one of them; but there were tons of men in that city who weren’t on the circuit, who didn’t dance, didn’t cruise, didn’t fall in love with Malone, who stayed home and went to the country in the summer. We never saw them.

But in most of his writing he and his narrators simply equate that “tiny fraction” with (male) homosexuality tout court. Like too many gay men I’ve known, Holleran has painted himself into a corner, called that little spot the world, and then complained because it’s so cramped and isolated. Holleran really ought to get back in touch with his inner Sutherland. Let me quote Holleran to himself once more, from Dancer again, page 51:

“You know, I hate being gay,” said the boy, leaning over toward Sutherland.“I just feel it’s ruined my life. It drains me, you know, it’s like having a tumor, or a parasite! If I were straight I’d get married and that would be it. But being gay, I waste so much time imagining! I hate the lying to my family, and I know I’ll never be any of the things they expect of me,” he said, “because it’s like having cancer but you can’t tell them, that’s what a secret vice is like.”

Sutherland was speechless at this declaration; he sat there for a moment, and then he said, “Perhaps what you need … perhaps what you need,” he said, in a speculative tone, "is a good facial.”

Twilight of the Clones

Dale Peck and the English editor Richard Canning were upset that certain books written during the AIDS epidemic by people like Allen Barnett, Harry Kondoleon, Christopher Coe, David Wojnarowicz, and John Weir were not only out of print but, they felt, had not received their due because of the times in which they were published. So they spoke to Don Weise, an editor at Carroll & Graf, about launching a series of reprints, a series now in abeyance because of the demise of that publisher. (Ground Zero was the only one that squeaked through.) What drew Weise to the project, however, is still valid: He was afraid that this part of gay history was being forgotten [page 2].

It seems that Holleran still feels defensive about his lack of involvement in AIDS activism; he returns to the issue several times in the introduction:

Years ago a friend who had been as skeptical as I about Act Up at the beginning, but started going to its meetings after deciding the protests had accelerated medical help, accused me – after his death, through a mutual friend -- of not doing enough about AIDS. This has always bothered me. Last fall, reading the latest volume of Gore Vidal’s memoirs, I came upon this line: “I am also chided for not doing enough about AIDS, but my virological skills are few.” That’s it. If a virus could only be stopped by a scientist, it seemed to me at the time, all the rest of us could do was stand by friends [14].

Holleran’s sense of the country he inhabits also seems skewed. Reflecting on the spare, puritanical paintings of Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent, and Thomas Eakins, he wrote (62):

We have always been two countries – Puritan and Cavalier – as there are two cities in New York right now: the infected and uninfected. One country is chaotic – illegal immigrants, heart transplants [?], pornography and drugs, homosexuals and AIDS. The other has been around much longer, and speaks from these paintings. Nothing decorative, nothing baroque. No crosses, and no Virgin Marys. No birth, and no death. Just the trackless forest, the mountain pass, the shaft of sunlight landing on a clearing in the valley, the solitary sitter.

In the essay “Tuesday Nights” he writes about a gay men’s discussion group he attended in Gainesville, Florida:

Ten years ago I would never have come to a meeting of this sort. People who belonged to groups like this, or went to the gay churches, were, I assumed, people who did not have the nerve to look for a partner in the actual world: the baths, beaches, and bars. In the old days tricking was how we met people. … How to integrate our homosexuality with the rest of our selves, our lives – our family, our society, our upbringing – was a problem a minority, not a majority, of the gay men I knew were able to solve before the plague [203, 205].

And even so, do you realize what a tiny fraction of the mass of homosexuals we were? That day we marched to Central Park and found ourselves in a sea of humanity, how stunned I was to recognize no more than four or five faces? Of course our friends were all at the beach, darling; they couldn’t be bothered to make a political statement.) I used to say there were only seventeen homosexuals in New York, and we knew every one of them; but there were tons of men in that city who weren’t on the circuit, who didn’t dance, didn’t cruise, didn’t fall in love with Malone, who stayed home and went to the country in the summer. We never saw them.

“You know, I hate being gay,” said the boy, leaning over toward Sutherland.“I just feel it’s ruined my life. It drains me, you know, it’s like having a tumor, or a parasite! If I were straight I’d get married and that would be it. But being gay, I waste so much time imagining! I hate the lying to my family, and I know I’ll never be any of the things they expect of me,” he said, “because it’s like having cancer but you can’t tell them, that’s what a secret vice is like.”

Sutherland was speechless at this declaration; he sat there for a moment, and then he said, “Perhaps what you need … perhaps what you need,” he said, in a speculative tone, "is a good facial.”

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