gay men and Oz

“What is it about gay men and The Wizard of Oz?” [a student asked.] Thirty or so pairs of eyes focused on me. … Never a teacher to discourage genuine curiosity, I searched my gray cells for record of a study on the subject. It was an unsuccessful split-second search. I fell back on my natural insight, born of years of watching The Wizard of Oz since its first showing on television, and even more years of humming ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’ whenever things got tough.

… “Most of us little gay boys felt as if we were growing up in black-and-white Kansas, when what we really wanted was to live in the Technicolor place where people wear funny hats and pink taffeta and burst into song and dance whenever they wanted without anyone thinking it was weird or sissy.”

… I challenge [skeptical gays] to listen at your next party … and count the number of references to Oz in the conversations.”

It’s a theory. I have better thoughts on the queer-friendliness of L. Frank Baum’s books than for the MGM movie. In his community college English class Robert Gorman makes no mention of the Oz books. Perhaps he never read them. 

I didn’t fall in love with the MGM Wizard of Oz. It wasn’t my Oz. Oz was the books. That’s where I went to be transported. 

That said, the movie is an excellent piece of filmmaking. Besides the big Hollywood musical treatment, all of which works, the MGM movie retains the essence of Baum’s book — Dorothy’s agency. The little girl is the leader. I think it’s also important that the qualities her friends seek are ones they prove they already have — smarts, courage, love. Dorothy gets home, naturally, but she gets there because she has acquired the power to do so, not because she is helpless and has to be rescued. The male authority figure turns out not to be the source of power, but a sham. 

Why would gay men identify with a girl? Because she is worth identifying with. She’s not arrogant; she’s practical. She’s doesn’t intend to take over; she’s just living her life, trying to help her friends and herself. Dorothy remains ordinary, and yet shows how powerful that can be.

source:

The Empress is a Man: stories from the life of Jose Sarria

by Michael Robert Gorman

1998. The Haworth Press, New York

I swear I won't call no copper, if I'm beat up by my papa. Tain’t nobody's business

In his recent memoir Siya Khumalo includes feminist critiques of men and homophobia. 

I once heard some of my friends discuss violence against women. Without exception, they, male and female, agreed it was unacceptable for a man to hit a woman who is not his own girlfriend. Consider, also, a conversation I overheard at a bus stop. ‘I don’t date a man who doesn’t beat me,’ one woman was saying. Her friends thought this was excessive; it was enough for him to warn and threaten to beat her, wasn’t it?

But the first woman’s argument was, how would she know that he really cared to have her (and have her to himself) unless his jealousy and possessiveness boiled over now and then? … By offering her body to patriarchy’s son, this lady at the bus stop was serving her role in the tribe perfectly.”

The woman who needed to be beaten, Khumalo says, was helping to reinforce the culture of wife-beating. She had become an advocate for her own victimization, seeing violence against women as a necessary proof that men were … I don’t know … too stupid to resolve disputes without fists? so incontinent with their feelings that they easily lost control? only strong enough to pick a fight with a weaker opponent? 

Hatred of gay people is of a piece with wifebeating, Khumalo says. 

Homophobia isn’t a stand-alone prejudice. It’s normalised so all other violence and bigotry may be tolerated when it comes.

Tolerable prejudices are the gateway drug to harder stuff, the solvent in which the next scapegoating prejudice can dissolve.

No one who hates his brother, whom he has seen, can claim to love God, whom he has not seen.

source:

You Have to Be Gay to Know God

Siya Khumalo

2018. Kwela Books, Cape Town, South Africa

the secrets mothers keep

One of my last reads of 2023 was a memoir by a gay black South African. I enjoyed the book. Khumalo has a sharp mind and sharp tongue. 

Here’s the passage where he comes out to his mother:

[O]ne week after my thirteenth birthday, I decided to tell my mother [I was gay]. … One of the magazines in the house had a story about a gender non-conforming man. I took it to her and said, ‘I’m like him.’ I couldn’t say, ‘I’m gay.’ She replied, ‘I know.’

‘How? Since when?’

‘I’ve known about you since you were two. A mother just knows.’

‘When were you planning on saying something?’ I asked, absurdly wanting to say, ‘You’ve kept my attraction to guys a secret from me for ten years?’

Her view was that God had sent me to shake up … the world.

Mom goes on to call her son a blessing. If by some magic he turns het, that’s okay, but it’s not something to wish for, she says.

I wondered … whether her openness to loving a gay kid was what had let me slip into actually being gay. Had she never been that open to the possibility, I realised, I’d have never felt safe enough to discover the truth. Wait. Did reality scare me so much that I was willing to resent Mom for loving me and hate myself for facing the truth?

Yeah, Mom. If you weren’t such a good person I wouldn’t be gay! You needed to be meaner! 

Fortunately, our hero gets over that toxic mindset. 

source:

You Have to Be Gay to Know God

Siya Khumalo

2018. Kwela Books, Cape Town, South Africa

Best Poems of 2023

These are the poems, the best poems, the poems that made reading the lesser poems worthwhile because I knew I would find poems that were this good if I just kept looking, but, really, reading the other poems was okay even so, there being poems among them that were quite enjoyable and even the ones that I left behind after that quick read usually did things that I go to poetry for, that is, weird stuff or a heightened sense that what was being said was more than just a message but an incantation of sorts, a calling forth of powers beyond the denotative, a scrawling on the wall of a door that, once you push on it, gives into a room or a world or a limitless void, a place wholly new, or familiar and not, the fragrance of it stuck in my nose, a hunger meeting the hungers I failed to fully stuff up with bonbons and bon mots and bonfires, hunger to hunger hanging over the swamp, a miasma as pretty as a pail of pickles at the end of the rainbow freeze-dried and shellacked to the skin of a tuba. 

James Cagney ….. Between a Rock Wall and an Immigrant

Katerina Canyon ….. I Left Out ‘Bells and Whistles’

Michael Koch ….. Color Of

Michael Koch ….. Tempus Fugit, Part Two

Jeanne Lupton ….. tanka: “new house”

Rebecca Radner ….. I dreamed my daughter

Rebecca Radner ….. I thought I’d lost my keys

Rebecca Radner ….. My old friend Ferenc

Kelly Shaw ….. haiku: “at the county fair”

Orhan Veli Kanik ….. For You

Orhan Veli Kanik ….. Mahmut the dreamweaver

Julia Vinograd ….. An Extra Thanksgiving with a Friend

Julia Vinograd ….. Poem (homage to the surrealists)

Julia Vinograd ….. Remembrance of Things Present

**

When I read a book of poems, I keep handy a small stack of placemarks. Should I read a poem I want to revisit, I tuck a placemark in next to it. Before leaving the book I go back to the marked poems and reread them. Often that’s it — I take out the placemark and move on. But those poems I’m not ready to let go I read a few more times over the course of days or weeks. If I decide it’s a poem I will want to read again and again as the years go by I copy it out by hand and add it to a three-ring binder. At the beginning of every year I read aloud the poems I copied out the previous year. And, of course, any time during the course of my days I can pull a binder from the shelf and reenter poems that worked for me — and rarely do they not work all over again. 

Titles Read in 2023

January

Akitsu Quarterly

winter 2022. Robin White, editor

Can’t and Won’t: stories

Lydia Davis

Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino

Happy-Go-Lucky

David Sedaris

The Caged Owl: new & selected poems

[the “New Poems” section]

Gregory Orr

Lumen de Lumine

Norman Dubie

Ledger

Jane Hirshfield

Walking the Dog in a Time of Rage

Phil Taggart

Strange Fruit: Billie Holiday, cafe society, and an early cry for civil rights

David Margolick

Entire Dilemma

Michael Burkard

My Queer War

James Lord

Liebestrasse

Greg Lockard, writer; Tim Fish, artist

Astro City, v.14: Reflections

Kurt Busiek, writer; Brent Eric Anderson, Alex Ross, artists

Contemporary Macedonian Poetry

edited & translated by Ewald Osers

The Complete Peanuts, 1965-1966

Charles M. Schulz

February

King-Cat Comix and Stories #82

John Porcellino

Lone Rock Falls

a comics anthology Donna Almendrala, Kat Efird, Nomi Kane

We Are Mermaids

Stephanie Burt

How Did We Ever: selected poems, 2012-2022

Rebecca Radner

Love Falls on Us: a story of American ideas and African LGBT lives

Robbie Corey-Boulet

How to Write an Autographical Novel: essays

Alexander Chee

Concerning the Book That Is the Body of the Beloved

Gregory Orr

March

American Studies

Louis Menand

Passion

Brane Mozetic, translated by Tamara Soban

Ten to One: selected poems

Bob Perelman

The Line of Beauty

Alan Hollinghurst

The Grand Piano: an experiment in collective autobiography, 1975-1980, Part 4

Carla Harryman, Kit Robinson, and eight other poets

Trash Panda, v.4, winter 2022/23

Martian: the Saint of Loneliness

Jams Cagney

Hymns of St. Bridget & other writings

Bill Berkson & Frank O’Hara

But Then You Danced: tanka

Jeanne Lupton

Radical; Life with Larry; In the Popular Lane; These Songs

four chapbooks by Jeanne Lupton

A Still Life

minicomic by Josue Cruz

HI8TUS

a one-shot comic by Josue Cruz

Astro City, v.16: Broken Melody

Busiek, Anderson, Ross

How Beautiful the Beloved

Gregory Orr

April

Blondie: against the odds, 1974-1982

booklet accompanying 3-CD set

Planisphere

John Ashbury

Amerigo: the man who gave his name to America

Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

Astro City, v.17: Aftermaths

Kurt Busiek, Brent Anderson, Alex Ross

Surviving Home

Katerina Canyon

River Inside the River

Gregory Orr

Broken Vessels: essays

Andre Dubus

Father and Son

Majid Naficy, translated by Harriet Tannenbaum & the poet

The Sum of Us; what racism costs everyone and how we can prosper together

Heather McGhee

On Elizabeth Bishop

Colm Toibin

Anthology of Chinese Literature: from early times to the fourteenth century

edited by Cyril Birch

May

The Grand Piano: an experiment in collective autobiography, Part 5

Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, et al

Fathoms: the world in the whale

Rebecca Griggs

Getting It Together

Sina Grace & Omar Spahl, writers; Jenny D. Fine, art

Number One Is Walking: my life in the movies and other diversions

Steve Martin; drawings by Harry Bliss

My Life as a Traitor

Zarah Ghahramani with Robert Hillman

Greenlight Your Book: how writers can succeed in the new era of publishing

Brooke Warner

We Were Eight Years in Power: an American tragedy

Ta-Nehisi Coates

June

Secret Life 

Theo Ellsworth; an adaptation of a story by Jeff VanderMeer

Berkeley Noir

edited by Jerry Thompson and Owen Hill

Abba Gold, part of the 33 1/3 series

Elizabeth Vincentelli

Nova Express: the restored text

William S. Burroughs; edited by Oliver Harris

The New Los Angeles Poets

edited by Jack Grapes

In the Name of Identity: violence & the need to belong

Amin Maalouf

July

Barbaric Vast & Wild: a gathering of outside and subterranean poetry from origins to present

edited by Jerome Rothenberg & John Bloomberg-Rissman

Borderland: a journey through the history of Ukraine

Anna Reid

Exhibits

John Yau

Poetry, June 2008

Christian Wiman, editor

Tales from the Ant World

Edward O. Wilson

August

The Life and Times of Little Richard, the quasar of rock

Charles White

Berlin Diptychon

poems by John Yau; photographs by Bill Barrette

Don’t Take Photos of the Landscape; Take Portraits with a View of the Background If You Want

Sara Camhaji; translated by Robin Myers

Anthology of Chinese Literature, v.2: from the 14th century to the present day

edited by Cyril Birch

The Passionate Spectator: essays on art and poetry

John Yau

Eruptions of Inanna: justice, gender, and erotic power

Judy Grahn

Practising Angels: a contemporary anthology of San Francisco Bay Area poetry

edited by Michael Mayo

September

Deaf Utopia: a memoir — and a love letter to a way of life

Nyle DiMarco with Robert Siebert

My Troubles with Crumb, a 2-vol oversized comic

Matt MacFarland

Meditations, a 7-page comic story in b&w trade-paperback-sized prints

Gerry Chow

The Taste of Blood

Linda Lancione

Girlwater

Emerson Murray

Grown-Up Elementary

D’Mani Thomas

Out of Print

Julian Poirier

Street Theology 

Michael Koch

The Dream That Is Childhood: a memoir in verse

Sandra Wassilie

Fuck You — Aloha — I Love You

Juliana Spahr

Late Along the Edgelands

Eric Falci

A Union Like Ours: the love story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney

Scott Bane

Black Hope

Marsha de la O

Etymologies

Walter Ancarrow

October

On Writing and Failure

Stephen Marche

Pamela: a novel

Pamela Lu

Marry Me a Little: a graphic memoir

Rob Kirby

Oz Squad: March of the Tin Soldiers

Steve Ahlquist, illustrated by David Lee Ingersoll

A Symphony for Broken Instruments: selected & unpublished poems

Julia Vinograd; edited by Bruce Isaacson

November

The Out Side: trans and nonbinary comics

edited by The KAO with Christensen & David Daneman

All of the Marvels: a journey to the ends of the biggest story ever told

Douglas Wolk

Carrying the Darkness: the poetry of the Vietnam War

edited by W. D. Ehrhart

The Third Book of Oz: the collected and complete Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz and The Woggle-Bug Book

L. Frank Baum; edited by Martin Williams; illustrated by Eric Shanower

We’re Still Here: an all-trans comics anthology

edited by Tara Madison Avery & Jeanne Thornton

I Am Listening to Istanbul: selected poems

Orhan Veli Kanik; translated by Talat Sait Halman

December

EROica

William F. DeVault

Lightning Flowers: my journey to uncover the cost of saving a life

Katherine E. Standefer

The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making

Catherynne M. Valente; illustrations by Ana Juan

The Throwback Special, July 22, 2023

edited by Dan O’Connell (Dan O.)

Complete Poems

Orhan Veli; translated by George Messo

The Nothing

Hanif Kureishi

Talk to Me: listening between the lines

Anna Deavere Smith

You Have to Be Gay to Know God

Siya Khumalo