CHROMA

Review: Whoosh! A Queer Writing South Anthology

Whoosh!
edited by Maria Jastrzebska and John McCullough

Published by Pighog Press

Reviewed by Radcliff Gregory

Labels: Poetry Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 10:09 AM 0 comments

Film Review: Sunkissed

Sunkissed
Directed by Patrick McGuinn

Willing Suspension Films

Reviewed by Max Fincher


An arthouse, erotic thriller, this new film by director Patrick McGuinn leaves the audience to ponder whether the dark fantasies of one of the handsome young men is the destiny or tragic past of the other.

Teddy, bright, romantic and sociable, is a novelist staying temporarily in the Californian desert home of Crispin, his literary agent, to complete his novel. Arriving at the house, Teddy meets the handsome but conflicted Leo, an aspiring actor. Leo settles him into the house and the two of them get drunk and have sex. They then embark on a passionate affair together. However, all is not as it appears. We begin to wonder just what Leo’s past history is, and what will be Teddy’s fate.

Although the initial pace of the film is slow to build, the tension increases after the confessional drunken exchange between Leo and Teddy. This is a pivotal scene that reveals Leo’s backstory. As we subsequently discover, Leo comes out to his mother who denies he is gay. Teddy’s novel, (which Leo suggests should be titled ‘Goodbye’) is partly autobiographical. Teddy tells him that the experience of coming out in the mid-West was a ‘nightmare’. Leo’s story, then, is one that Teddy is, unwittingly, writing. The mystery over what happens to Teddy is intensified by a close shot later on that shows Leo’s name on the dust jacket of Teddy’s novel.

The nightmare that was coming out continues as we realize that Leo suffers either from premonitions or from flashbacks that involve violence and murder. We see Leo waking from a nightmare, and at one point, telling Teddy that he has visions that he doesn’t want to talk about with him, and that he is ‘going through some shit’. Leo’s visions or remembrances unsettle the viewer’s temporal anchors. These unnerving sequences are often filmed as rapid jump-cuts, and contrast effectively with the slower conversations between them and erotic lovemaking scenes filmed in slow motion.

That it is difficult to decide whether these visions that Leo sees are premonitions or flashbacks increases the tension and suspense, and seems intended to deliberately confuse any (straight)forward narrative chronology. The viewer is forced to piece the narrative together, but is left with no definitive answer as to what has happened or what will happen. Was Leo married to Cheryl, whom he then murdered? He tells Teddy that Cheryl was the victim of a random killer on their doorstep. But we are unsure if this is the truth or a fabrication because later we see Leo and Cheryl sunbathing, a copy of Teddy’s story beside them. Earlier, however, there is a startling shot of Teddy and Leo jumping up out of their seats in the front yard rushing towards something or someone. We are not sure if this is another fantasy of Leo’s. The line between what is fiction and fact is blurred to the extent that we feel, like Teddy, that it is impossible to know the character of Leo. Does Leo murder Teddy? We are refused any clear-cut, easy explanation, and are made to work hard to read the film’s narrative.

The effect of these temporal dislocations upon the viewer is dizzying, disorienting, perhaps even frustrating. Indeed, the prevailing mood of the film is dream-like. The cinematography aims to capture that dizzying, dreamy effect of being sunkissed, that slow, dream-like state one feels after being in the sun for too long perhaps. The breezy, ethereal soundtrack by the band The Sea and Cake emphasizes this effect, and imbues the film with an intense eroticism in its whispered, soft slow vocals and refrains. In one scene, Leo kisses a variety of men against a black background. The faces are lit brightly and shot close up, in profile accompanied by the soundtrack of a song, ‘Watch their Mouths’, that is particularly erotic. Other erotic moments include Leo and Teddy showering each other with a hose in the hot sun, and having sex in a Cherokee jeep in the desert. The overall effect feels as if the viewer is experiencing narcolepsy; there are periods of time that cannot be accounted for or are like hazy dreams.

To return to the point that Teddy, like the viewer, does not or cannot really know who Leo is, or what will happen, one perhaps needs to understand McGuinn’s inspiration for making the film. Over the course of one year, four of his close friends passed away in a series of sudden tragic deaths. As part of coming to terms with his grief, McGuinn returned to the desert, where he was brought up, to reconnect with nature. It was here that he felt that he could ‘embrace the creative forces within myself and in nature, as a source of renewal in the midst of loss.’ To some extent, the film reflects the experience of how the sudden death of those closest to us often feels meaningless and impossible to comprehend. The film resists any closure of meaning in that we are not permitted to know what happens.

At one point, we see Teddy looking up shocked into the night-time sky as a bright white light comes down from above. Perhaps it is a fanciful reading, but this moment seemed to play with the possibility of alien abduction. In another scene, Leo and Teddy are both lying down together discussing giving each other some space. The camera angle, shooting from behind their heads, makes their heads/faces appear almost alien-like, inhuman, alienated from each other perhaps. As mentioned above, there is another moment in the film, when the viewer is unsure if s/he is in present narrative time, or Leo’s dream/nightmare. Both of them jump in shock from the front porch and rush across the yard. But we are not shown what causes their shock. Later in the film, we see Leo running back to the house from a creek. The opening of the film shows Cheryll lying dead in the creek. Another of Leo’s visions shows him carrying Teddy back into the house, covered in blood and unconscious, crying over him as he lays him down on the bed. Why? Any explanation is left unclear? Has Leo murdered Teddy? Has he repressed the action, returned to the house to find Teddy missing, and then discovered him out at the creek? Does he have amnesia? Or have the aliens come for him? Teddy’s disappearance and death is the central aporia in the film’s narrative, and the essence of the film’s philosophy: death is more often than not meaningless, absurd and unable to be explained.

The ending finishes with a shot of both characters in profile, walking in slow motion to kiss against the backdrop of the pounding white waves of the Pacific ocean. In another shot, it would seem that Leo is going to walk into the ocean, his back towards us, perhaps even to commit suicide. The shot evokes the famous suicide scene with Joan Crawford in Humouresque. There are also some traces of Hitchcock and Ingmar Bergman’s Persona. One could also read this final scene as the meeting of two halves of a divided personality which Leo stands for.

Sunkissed is a film that blends some beautiful cinematography, of the desert, of desire, and affirms the importance of both passion and truth to oneself as the source of happiness.


Max Fincher wrote his PhD at King’s College London, a queer reading of late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction that was published as Queering Gothic Writing in the Romantic Age by Palgrave Macmillan (2007). He has taught part-time on eighteenth-century fiction and women’s writing, at both King’s College London and Royal Holloway, and is an occasional book reviewer for the TLS. He is currently writing his first novel, tentatively titled The Pretty Gentleman, a queer historical thriller set in the Regency art world.

Labels: Film Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 5:17 PM 0 comments

“IT’S ALL ABOUT U.S.!”

Metropolitan Lovers: the Homosexuality of Cities
Julie Abraham

Published by University of Minnesota Press

Reviewed by Richard Canning


Looking at the title, I thought: that would be a big subject. Many of the biggest cities that have played host to significant GLBT communities have already attracted full-length books disinterring their queer pasts. George Chauncey’s Gay New York (1995) was certainly the trailblazing work. It covered just a half-century of its subject – 1890-1940 - but showed not only the breadth of material that could be uncovered in such cases, but also the complex interpreting skills required of the author. Available sources range from the legal to the literary, from the medical to the political, and from the sensational popular press to the private memoir, not intended for publication. (Those including the recent past may draw on oral histories too). In many cases, particularly in the centuries in which the closet was rife, deceit, dissimulation and fabrication were commonplace, often vital strategies.

In the past fifteen years or so, the obvious US metropolises have, piecemeal, been picked off: San Francisco (1996), Boston (1999), Philadelphia (2002 and 2004!), L.A. (2006), Chicago (2008). For better or worse, Europe contains most of the other conurbations likely to have generated substantial archives. London and Paris lead the field. The most compelling characteristic of such books, at their best, results from their pluralistic, interdisciplinary character. It’s best summarized as either instability or contingency. Fault-lines emerge. Claims turn out either impossible or implausible. Anecdotes are misremembered, figures long dead reanimated; protagonists’ addresses, origins, even genders get confused. For most of our history, the subjective accounts of same-sex coupling have necessarily been cautious, evasive or indirect. Only religion, the law and medicine have historically accounted for gay men and women directly, and then rarely favorably. When reading Byrne Fone’s Homophobia: a History, I remember thinking: ‘But this is the history of homosexuality.’

It seemed likely from the off, then, that Julie Abraham, a literature professor, may have addressed too large and inchoate a subject here. The fault may lie in the sweeping tenor of her press’s P.R. unit. Hence, this perfectly engaging, reasoned and substantial investigation of GLBT writers - mostly resident in the major American cities - is unhelpfully trailed as if it had global, not national reach, and indeed stretched back to ‘the destruction of Sodom,’ allegedly our first gay city. Abraham’s assiduous pursuit of the meaningfulness of cities in the sexual travails of her literary cast – Jane Jacobs, Henry James, Walter Benjamin and James Baldwin included – has much to recommend it. What it cannot offer – pace the back cover – is a reading of ‘how gay became synonymous with urban – and why it matters for both.’ This book is about literary writing only, which cannot be taken as representative or reliable as social documentation. Abraham’s somewhat forced comparisons to social theorizations of urban growth - the Chicago school, Walter Benjamin and so on - is not the book’s strength.

To pursue that line of enquiry would, paradoxically, have required the careful tracing of a previous, non-urban gay model: the pastoral idyll, probably first manifest in Virgil’s Georgics. It was co-opted in the Renaissance by poets like Richard Barnfield and Edmund Spenser. Contrastingly, visible, high-profile or articulate gay presences in capital cities and especially at court were, at this time, innately high-risk, even if the protagonists had regal entitlement. This is what Marlowe’s cautionary Edward II indicates. It’s true that foreign cities developed reputations for sexual license, pretty much universally: this was the sin that always flourished elsewhere (though there were cities then that seem to have deserved the reputation - Florence and Venice, above all).

Though less pronounced, the mythic rural retreat would impinge on women’s writings too, whether it be in fanciful reconstructions of Sappho’s life, or in the living circumstances of the ‘Ladies of Llangollen’, Lady Eleanor Butler and the Hon. Sarah Ponsonby, two 18th-century Anglo-Irish aristocrats cohabited in a house near the Welsh town which provided their nickname. Nearer the present, Jane Rule’s Desert of the Heart (1964) concentrates on how small-town lesbian lives contrast with urbanity.

Male writers got over the alluring shepherd boy, meanwhile, through the Northern hemisphere’s great population movement towards cities (roughly from 1850 to 1914). Still, replacing the rural recluse with urban opportunity involved an uneven period of transition. Scott Herring’s Queering the Underworld: Slumming, Literature, and the Undoing of Lesbian and Gay History (reviewed by me in GLRW, July/August 2008) shows that the protagonist of Willa Cather’s story ‘Paul’s Case’ (1905) felt, on arriving in New York, that ‘his surroundings explained him’. But Forster’s Maurice (1917; published 1971) exhibited a stubborn, even reactionary harking back to the homosexual pastoral. It was not alone. Forrest Reid’s The Garden God: a Tale of Two Boys (1905) scandalized Henry James with its account of schoolboy protagonist Graham finding his long-sought Greek god in the incarnate form of new friend Harold Brocklehurst. (The same James, though, did somethig to ‘urbanise’ intimate relations between women in 1885’s The Bostonians). A whole genre of writing displaying public school and university homoerotics is a development of the pastoral ideal. Later, even an apparently definitively urban novel like Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (1939) contains its most liberated treatment of homosexuality on the Baltic idyll of Ruegen Island, far from the capital.

Abraham begins with an account of the well-trodden but useful nineteenth-century French proliferation of the GLBT “damned” – Baudelaire’s women, notoriously; Zola’s Nana (1880); men in several Balzac novels, especially the hapless innocent Lucien de Rubempré. Balzac’s bold account of the tragic ruination of Lucien by the criminal Vautrin in Splendeurs et miseres des courtisanes (1847) was hugely influential, including on Wilde’s Dorian Gray and Proust’s Baron de Charlus.

Her consideration of Wilde is less convincing – in part because of generalizations made regarding his background. Nobody claims Dublin to have been at the heart of nineteenth-century Europe. Still, Wilde was not, on his arrival in London society, ‘a young man from the Provinces.’ (He traveled extensively with his family as a child, including to London, a city he also visited frequently while at Oxford). Abraham identifies the duplicity manifest in The Importance of Being Earnest’s Jack (his country name, which he adapts to Ernest for town). But Wilde’s joke is complex. It is not only, as Abraham suggests, that Jack the countryman upholds moral standards, whereas Ernest is obviously as dissolute as the city he inhabits. Rather, Wilde disarms his London audience’s prejudices about the city. In the practice of ‘Bunburying’ (inventing a brother), Jack may in fact be covering over any manner of rural excess.

Similarly, some of the ambiguity in Dorian Gray is overlooked. The novel is described as ‘a prototypical account of the modern homosexuality Wilde would come to represent.’ This argument rests on the Irishman’s subsequent experience of British “justice.” If it were as self-evident as Abraham describes it, there would have been no need for Edward Carson, Queen’s Prosecutor, to be so zealous in his clarification of what that novel “meant” – or rather, implied. As Neil Bartlett’s Who Was That Man? (1988) argues, it is simultaneously true both that everything Wilde wrote is clarified by his gayness and that, in the writings published in his lifetime, Wilde never mentioned homosexuality once.
Next Abraham compares the groundbreaking social studies of gay culture made by German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld with comparable classifying tendencies in the masterpiece of the French novelist Proust. Intriguing as the idea is, it leads to the unhelpful sense that the fiction-writer’s efforts prove inferior (because less definitive) to the relentlessly prescriptive Hirschfeld’s study, The Homosexuality of Men and Women (1913). Yet which author is read today – and why? Likewise, the inventive bringing together of Radclyffe Hall and the “Chicago School” of sociology doesn’t fully come off. They remain chalk and cheese.
At this point, Abraham tires of Europe, barring two Parisian interludes. Radclyffe Hall’s merciless French capital (in The Well of Loneliness, 1928) was entirely fabricated, however - as was James Baldwin’s account in Giovanni’s Room (1956). As Herring recognized, it is truly only Djuna Barnes in English (in 1936’s Nightwood) who allowed Paris a signature presence to her urban protagonists that might be called liberating.

Otherwise, the States dominates. There’s nothing wrong in focusing on one nation’s representation of gay urban life. It might have made Metropolitan Lovers cohere better. Still, the narrowing of focus onto 20th-century American terrain should not go unexplained, especially since American cities tend to function unlike European ones. Abraham does consider apposite texts, like Jane Addams’s autobiographical curiosity, Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910). But the most radical changes to the way modern cities accommodated gay desires were effected, arguably, in Europe: through two world wars and social adjustments resulting from them. These wars had much less direct bearing on most American urban lives, for reasons that should be self-evident.

It feels paradoxical that when Baldwin relocated to Paris, he spoke of that city’s welcome ‘total indifference’ to him. That was as likely to relate to his ethnicity as his sexual nature. Was the boot of “identity” politics now, perhaps, on the other foot? That is, if European cultures had for centuries taken the lead in classifying human types (sexual and otherwise), had that process of classification – nurtured in American through the body politic and the Church, but also through the ready acceptance of neo-Freudian psychology – passed effortlessly to the New World? The liberation Baldwin felt in Paris was not the thrill of self- or mutual recognition, but of de-recognition. It was a new version too of the old Pastoral promise of being left alone.

By the 1970s (often seen as a highpoint of gay and lesbian literary expression), novels were ‘about to become less authoritative as accounts of gay and lesbian life,’ in Abraham’s view. There’s space to consider Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle (1973) and Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance (1978), two works sharing a country-to-town trajectory. But the proliferation of other sources (memoir, film) and the relative liberalization of news coverage and the broadcasting media per se made – Abraham is right - fiction a less vital redoubt for male and female gay readers, even as it came into its own.

At that time, America’s cities also needed economic resuscitation. Edmund White’s States of Desire (1977) celebrated gay men specifically as ‘the worker ants of our reviving cities.’ True or not, here key questions of capital, income and class finally come into play. Rental costs and living expenses had long left those GLBT individuals less able to indulge in costly metropolitan living languishing on the outskirts, in the ’burbs or in the communities and small-towns they grew up in (unless they used youthfulness or beauty as a passport – but that’s another story). Gentrification is about reconstructing the class formulation of entire neighborhoods, after all. Women and ethnic minorities were likely to be driven out by price, not welcomed in. Manuel Castells may, in 1983’s The City and the Grassroots, have thrilled over the prettiness of restored San Franciscan properties, redolent of ‘beauty, comfort and sensuality.’ But, as political responses to more recent changes to New York’s Times Square such Bruce Benderson’s Towards the New Degeneracy (1997) and Samuel Delany’s Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (1999) reveal, there isn’t ever one single model of gentrifying improvement. Gentrification destroys some cultures and traditions even as it builds, and rebuilds, others. The implications for gay men and women will be as various and as race- and class-informed as for the wider populace.

Some poignant late texts close Abraham’s considerations. Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City earn a (brief) place, though characterizing them as ‘Balzac with shorter sentences, more graphic sex, and fewer and less-refined cruelties’ rather underplays how multi-faceted and class-aware Maupin’s fictional San Francisco truly is. Likewise, it’s probably a mistake to consider a polyvalent work like Tony Kushner’s Angels in America in just a few sentences.

The emergence of AIDS drastically altered the relationship between gay lives and cities – in America, in particular. The default discretion of many well-off professional gay men, especially, was compromised by tangible symptoms of disability (well-caught in the films Longtime Companion and Philadelphia). At the same time, as the incidence of HIV infection spread beyond prime metropolitan sites and narrowly conceived “at-risk” groups, the epidemic’s destructiveness could, perversely, point to something non-metropolitan GLBTers knew all along: that we’re found everywhere. This, quite properly, is not the province of Abraham’s thoughtful and engaging monograph. Still, how ironic it remains: two essentially non-literary, non-cultural forces over which we, as a subculture, have had limited control, had the biggest impact on contemporary GLBT lives across the planet: the spread of an epidemic and the rise of the internet.


Richard Canning’s anthology of gay male fiction, Between Men 2 (Alyson) is just out, as is his biography of E. M. Forster (London’s Hesperus Press). He teaches at the University of Sheffield, England, where he may be contacted.

Labels: Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 4:06 PM 1 comments

Review: Watermark by Mark Jenkins

Watermark
Mark Jenkins

Published by Bruno Gmunder

Reviewed by Michael Gellings

Labels: Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 4:24 PM 0 comments

Review: Second Thoughts: More Queer and Weird Stories

Second Thoughts
Steve Berman

Published by Lethe Press

Reviewed by Liam Tullberg


Steve Berman’s second collection of short stories, ‘Second Thoughts: More Queer and Weird Stories’ more than delivers on its title’s promise.

Following 2001’s ‘Trysts: A Triskaidecollection of Queer and Weird Stories’, in this selection, Berman introduces readers to an original take on the fairytale of the gingerbread man in ‘Bittersweet’, talking (and tempting) boxer shorts in ‘Always Listen to a Good Pair of Underwear’, and a man whose thoughts appear as words on his flesh in ‘Tearjerker’.

The range of subject matter is diverse, but perhaps the most apposite and ambitious of Berman’s thirteen tales is ‘Secrets of the Gwangi’. With tongue firmly in cheek, Berman explores the creation of a film featuring gay cowboys and ferocious pterodactyls from which the gay cowboys are later axed at the fictional studio producer’s request. ‘More dinosaurs and less fagelehs,’ the studio exec tells the writer. ‘That’s what makes a movie.’ The ending to this fragmented fiction is touching and believable, and one to a story that, in the following Author’s Note, Berman asks the reader to decide is utterly true or utterly false.

Each of the stories that make up this book is accompanied by such an Author’s Note in which Berman discusses the background and purpose of the piece. The tone is informal and the device effective, giving the reader a greater insight to the writer while enhancing the impact of the tale.
Though Berman’s style varies greatly throughout the 200 plus pages of this selection of stories, it is consistent in its quick pace, punchy dialogue and confident originality. No two stories are the same, but are linked in their fine marriage of reality and surrealism.

This collection is excellent for readers of the lesser-found gay supernatural fiction, or anyone appreciative of twisted tales in their many forms.


Liam Tullberg is a Bristol-based author currently working on his novel, From the Darkness, and can be contacted through www.liamtullberg.com

Labels: Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 8:47 AM 0 comments

Review: Bears – Gay Erotic Stories

Bears
Edited by Richard Labonte

Published by Cleis Press

Reviewed by Len Lukowska
I do think it’s good to find porn that celebrates older, big, hairy guys. There are a range of ages in the book, and some hot intergenerational stuff, but the average age of the men in this book is probably about forty, which is pretty cool in a gay porn world which often favours buff young things with cheekbones. ‘Leather Bear Appetites’ by Jeff Mann is particularly memorable and sees a middle aged guy pondering his history of sexual and romantic conquests and defeats and getting slightly worried about his belly and the aging process along the way. His love of Bourbon and food matches his love of sex, so as well as descriptions of him, for example, being bound and gagged and fucked by a top half his age, the story is full of graphic images of Southern cuisine and is written in a sexy Southern drawl.

There are lots of fairytale and fantasy stories in this book which have a very playful feel. The idea of being a Bear is taken to a new level in ‘Into the Woods’ by Karl Taggart in which the narrator ends up getting fucked by the missing link between man and beast who lives wild in a cave in the forest. This is my pick for hottest action.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to imagine what might happen in ‘Justin Gold and the Three Bears’ by Michael Lassel. Justin Gold is a stuck up, vacuous gay boy and son of a top plastic surgeon. Justin has pretentious, judgemental friends to match and they all enjoy a beach holiday together. Justin decides to take a short break from the beach bitching with his companions and heads into the woods where he stumbles upon a messy, dirty cottage and three beary men who fill him with disgust until he discovers his hard-on, which doesn’t take long. He is never seen again.

It’s quite hard to review porn on its literary merits because maybe that isn’t the point. I’ll get to it, my copy of Bears doesn’t fall open at certain pages because I found the action so hot. It is chock full of descriptions of hairy backs and hard cocks but nothing that quite made me feel the action full enough. But, if even the mention of a chubby guy with a big beard and a thick cock is enough to get you off, you might want to check this out.


Len Lukowska is a writer, layabout, performer and library assistant. Len keeps a blog at www.switswoo.blogspot.com, lives in London at the moment and can be contacted at hlukowska@gmail.com.

Labels: Anthology, Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 3:38 PM 1 comments

Review: Some Girls’ Mothers

Some Girls’ Mothers
edited by Anne Caldwell

Published by Route Publishing

Reviewed by Radcliff Gregory

Labels: Anthology, Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 7:16 AM 0 comments

Review: Banalities by Brane Mozetic

Banalities
Brane Mozetic; translated by Elizabeta Zargi and Timothy Liu

Published by A Midsummer Night’s Press

Reviewed by Jonathan Statham

Labels: Poetry Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 5:02 AM 2 comments