“restored to its element”

Jean Cocteau is probably most famous for Beauty and the Beast (1946). Worth seeing, if you haven’t. An autobiographical account of his gay life is included in a collection of pre-Stonewall gay writings. I was charmed by Cocteau’s description of the penis, which I here reproduce for your delectation: 

“[T]hat fabulous little undersea plant, forlorn, inert, shipwrecked on the frothy fleece, which then stirs, unwrinkles, develops, rouses itself and hurls its sap afar when once it is restored to its element of love.”

source:

“The White Paper” by Jean Cocteau

Calamus: male homosexuality in twentieth century literature, an international anthology

edited by David Galloway and Christian Sabisch

1982. Quill/William Morrow & Co., New York NY

Nature. It’s what we’re a part of.

A dispatch from rural Canada:

June and Judy, a lesbian couple, “built their own loghouse” “on the Northumberland Straits” in Nova Scotia. “June [is] an AI tech [that’s artificial insemination, not artificial intelligence]. She works for a breeders’ co-op.”

“One of the standard arguments against homosexuality is that it’s unnatural. In her work, June regularly encounters evidence to the contrary. To get the best draw of semen from a bull, the goal is to achieve the best ejaculation possible. It happens that some bulls would rather mount a steer or another bull than any available cow; they choose a male every time — and the breeders, some of them rabidly anti-gay, never make a peep of protest.”

“Unnatural”? Yes, it’s a perennial anti-gay nonsense argument. But now and then there’s a colorful anecdote about same-sex horniness outside the human species. 

source:

Out Our Way: gay and lesbian life in the country

by Michael Riordon

1996. Between the Lines, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

word of the day: raglan

word of the day: raglan

 context:

“[During an] 1895 interview, [Peter] Doyle brought out a raglan of [Walt] Whitman’s and explained, ‘I now and then put it on, lay down, think I am in the old times. Then he is with me again. … When I get it on and stretched out on the old sofa I am very well contented. It is like Aladdin’s lamp. I do not ever for a minute lose the old man. He is always near by.’” [ellipsis in the original]

definition (Merriam-Webster): a loose overcoat with raglan sleeves; raglan sleeves are sleeves that extend to the neckline with slanted seams from the underarm to the neck

Peter Doyle was one of Walt Whitman’s lovers. Whitman only had a few with whom he was together long enough that one could see the two as a couple. Whitman loved getting his portrait taken but he was typically solo. There’s a well-known photograph of Peter and Walt facing each other, clearly gazing into each other’s eyes. 

They parted ways, but not acrimoniously. Peter Doyle came to Walt Whitman’s graveside service. It seems he “almost was not admitted.” There were, however, at least two close friends of Whitman who remembered Doyle and made sure he could stay. One of them, Horace Traubel, conducted the 1895 interview three years after Whitman’s death. 

source:

Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman’s working class camerados

edited by Charley Snively

1987. Gay Sunshine Press, San Francisco, CA

word of the day: supererogation

word: supererogation

In his search for the source of Walt Whitman’s oracular verse Gary Schmidgall believes he has found in it opera. Whitman was a big opera queen! Schmidgall makes a good case — it’s certainly fun to read. The opera singer who had the greatest impact was an Italian named Marietta Alboni. Schmidgall quotes Whitman rhapsodizing over Alboni many times, even decades after her year in America. But Schmidgall also provides plenty of contemporary critical praise by other authors, from the dignified — “power, strength, and volume” — to the sensuous — “bubbling, gurgling, gushing” — to this bon mot combining the audience’s experience of the pre-air-conditioned summer theater of New York and the joyous reaction to the diva, “Men dissolved in rapture and perspiration simultaneously.”

Context for today’s word:

“‘The fame of this great artist is so thoroughly established in this City, and her performances so equal in their perfection,’ wrote Curtis in the Tribune, ‘that criticism has become almost a work of supererogation.’”

definition (Merriam-Webster): the act of performing more than is required by duty, obligation, or need

source: 

Walt Whitman: a gay life

by Gary Schmidgall

1997. A William Abrahams Book, Dutton/Penguin Putnam, New York

“This is a life different from anything I had imagined.”

Excerpts from “None, I think,” a poem by Lise Menn:

“This is a life different from anything I had imagined. 

You are not here, you will never be here again.

There is no point in waiting for you.

You are, of course, everywhere, 

In this house full of our lives together.

But all thoughts of you are recollections.

There is nothing more to anticipate.

Everything about you is back, back, in some past, dreamed or remembered.

I live in a strange, quiet place.”

These are fewer than half the lines of Lise Menn’s poem about life after her husband died. I recognize in them my own experience. I did not know how to imagine a life without my husband. I did not try. Despite the oncologist’s dire prognosis, Kent seemed to be doing okay. He was alive. I wanted to live with him while he was alive. Even now, I don’t know what I could have done to prepare for his death. 

When Kent was first diagnosed with cancer 14 years ago, he found an estate attorney to make him a living trust. In the early weeks of this year Kent asked a lawyer friend for current recommendations so that I would have someone to help me administer the trust. Because of the trust no court had to get involved. That was Kent looking out for me. 

Kent and I were together for 30 years. Kent was my only long term relationship. We met when I was 28. Back in my teens and twenties I was mostly alone. I didn’t have a series of boyfriends. I wanted one. I wanted a lover very much, and I felt terribly lonesome. I did make friends here and there, and I didn’t live a sexless life. But I didn’t get the intimacy I yearned for. Not until Kent. 

I’d been going to a board games night at the LGBT community center in Berkeley. The people there were nice enough, but I wasn’t spending time with them beyond the games. (I was surprised when I’d hear others laughing about going sailing together or some other outing.) When Kent showed up he was taken with me right away. Six years older, he was close to my age. He displayed a sharp wit and I liked looking at him. Kent had had boyfriends before me. I don’t know how long he was with any of them, but I got the feeling he was the marrying kind. Relationships break up. I think my longest was three months, but if you add up all the time he and I were actually together it was more like two weeks. 

Kent liked to tell a story about how we met. We were playing Trivia Pursuit. We may even have been on the same team, and this question came up: “In the 1980 election who was the dream team?” Kent was bowled over when I knew the answer. Some politicos thought it would be amazing to have presidential candidate Ronald Reagan choose ex-Pres Gerald Ford as his running mate. That would be a dream team! I was fourteen at the time, but I was paying enough attention to politics that I picked up this tidbit. It didn’t seem to me a president would want as his VP a former president. You want the vice president (and everybody else) to be clear on who’s in charge. Ronald Reagan had the same thought, I guess. 

30 years of memories is something, isn’t it? I feel lucky I had all that time with him. He is everywhere in this house full of our lives together. But Kent is not here. And I have to figure out a new life without him. You may hear me saying the same thing next month or a year from now. I really don’t know. I am the one in the present, the one who has to look to a future. I want a lover. I want company. It seems so strange that any person coming into my life will be wholly different, not Kent at all. 

source: 

The Widows’ Handbook: poetic reflections on grief and survival

edited by Jacqueline Lapidus and Lise Menn

2014. Kent State University Press, Kent OH

“a worldwide punishing squad”

After my last blog post offered up a rather meager serving of hope for LGBT progress in Africa, you might wonder if there’s something more you can do. Well, John Waters (you know, the Pink Flamingos writer/director) has given it some thought.

“It’s illegal to be gay in seventy-six countries around the world,” John Waters says. How can that be changed? The gays have gotta rise up! Waters makes a few suggestions on how we could do that. 

Let’s drop a massive stink bomb on Uganda and have our own [gay] navy ‘Seal and Squeal’ squads round up all the American Christian evangelical preachers who went there and provoked Uganda’s parliament to try* to pass a bill to impose the death penalty ‘for the offense of homosexuality.’ We’d spray their thinning hair with industrial strength hair spray and light a match. Voooom! Off with their hairdos. Then we’d track down the snitches who obeyed the other, more liberal Ugandan law that required heterosexuals ‘to report a gay person to authorities within twenty-four hours of hearing of their homosexuality of be jailed for up to three years in prison.’ Why this twenty-four-hour grace period? I wonder. So straights could get their hair done, flowers arranged, homes interior-decorated before the most obvious of their gay merchants were hauled away? Fag hags would be forced to go underground, where they would form their own railroad of resistance to smuggle out queers and lesbians of all degree of butchness, man of whom would later form the Lavender Avengers, who would lead a worldwide punishing squad of queer revenge.

_______

* "Try” no more; Uganda has the evil law on the books. 

source:

Mr. Know-It-All: the tarnished wisdom of a filth elder

by John Waters

2019. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York

Cause for hope in Africa? Or just more lies ...

LGBT news out of Africa is often bad. In spring of 2023 Uganda enacted a new death-to-the-gays law. The first attempt several years ago got struck down by the Ugandan Supreme Court. Ghana’s legislature just passed — by unanimous voice vote — a whole new anti-gay law. The president of Ghana hasn’t yet signed it. Do the politicians who enact these laws really consider queer people a threat? Or are they pandering to an anti-gay populace? Are they merely trying to distract observers from the lousy jobs they’re doing? Whatever the motivation, laws like these have only one effect — pain. They certainly don’t help anyone.  

Chike Frankie Edozien quotes Goodluck Jonathan, Nigeria’s former president, at a London conference saying about an anti-gay law he himself promulgated:

“When it comes to equality, we must all have the same rights, we must all have the same rights as Nigerian citizens. In the light of the deepening debates for all Nigerians and other citizens of the world to be treated equally and without discrimination, and with the clear knowledge that the issue of sexual orientation is still evolving, the nation may at the appropriate time revisit the law.”  

Were Jonathan’s words in London a good sign or just pandering? He probably got asked about the law. I imagine Jonathan knew that justifying himself by condemning the gays in a forum in London would not go over well. 

Just days after his pronouncement came the grisly massacre of forty-nine gay people by a deranged gunman at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. [The ex-president of Nigeria] sent out a message of condolence to the grieving families via Twitter. That small gesture … understandably confused [readers, Goodluck Jonathan having been responsible for] an extremely anti-gay law for which there had been small public clamor.

When the anti-gay law in Nigeria was originally enacted there was criticism by at least two African presidents. Former presidents, anyway. “[F]ormer Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano came out forcefully against it.” Fetus Mogae, former president of Botswana, also spoke up for LGBT equality. “A change in attitude is underway," Edozien says. “The fact that Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Djibouti, Guinea Bissau, Cote d’Ivoire, Niger, Mali, Lesotho, Mozambique, Sao Tome, the Seychelles, Rwanda, the two Congos, the Central African Republic, and South Africa don’t criminalize their gay citizens leaves me hopeful.”

Unlike Uganda in its embrace of American hate-evangelist Scott Lively, South Africa refused entry in 2016 to “Steven Anderson, a pastor at Faithful Word Baptist Church in Tempe, Arizona” who was plotting an anti-gay crusade. “South Africa ha[s] again led the way, becoming the first African nation to expressly ban someone from entry because of his homophobia.”

This isn’t my first post about a former African leader saying something hopeful once he was no longer in power. Check out this from Feb 2023: Human beings who can do what they like 

source:

Lives of Great Men

by Chike Frankie Edozien

2017. Team Angelica, London UK

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