CHROMA

Review: After My Own Heart by Sophia Blackwell

2012-01-23T17:23:00.006Z

AFTER MY OWN HEART
by Sophia Blackwell

Published by Lime House Books

Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson

Evie Day is a woman in her late twenties who feels like she should be settling down. She has a steady job in public relations and lives with her girlfriend Kate. Independent, proudly queer and slowly making a name for herself as a guitarist/singer she seems settled. Things become unhinged when Evie and Kate accompany their friend to a motivational group that tries to help people find their path in life. The group which is supposed to be inspirational ironically makes Kate break down and later on she admits she’s been having an affair. The couple separate and Evie struggles to overcome her heartbreak and get back on her feet. She meets a beautiful and charismatic burlesque artist and becomes reacquainted with a handsome old friend named Roshan. Desiring both, Evie struggles to figure out who she really wants to be with. Over the course of a difficult year she learns that it’s not necessarily her own misfortunes or sexual confusion which are stopping her from progressing in life the way she wants to. She’s been suppressing feelings of inadequacy largely carried over from childhood and the breakup of her eccentric parents’ marriage. Only when she develops self confidence and security in herself can she begin to build a more stable life.

Sophia Blackwell has written an engaging and meaningful novel that anyone who has ever struggled to find their feet in life will be able to relate to. Set against the backdrop recognizable London scenes, the author writes about the vicissitudes of daily life and the agonizing state of heartache with admirable skill. She excels at depicting small instances of injustice that queer people experience in everyday situations – not necessarily outright homophobia but the niggling assumptions and attitudes of some straight people. A happily married woman Evie meets at a wedding party insists she ought to settle down to be happy. At her job she’s put in the position of promoting a homophobic rapper. Evie is a character who defiantly asserts her opinions as a queer sexually active woman. She states, “People think men are the only ones who can’t resist sex. People are wrong.” This includes a fluid attitude towards sexuality and how labelling one’s sexuality can also be a kind of trap. At one point Evie reflects, “One thing my friends and I all agreed on back then was just how flexible we were about our sexualities, when really we clung to them like life floats.” She trods upon shaky ground with some of her lesbian friends when she begins sleeping with a man. This doesn’t mean she’s not gay. She follows her heart and goes with who she desires. It just takes some time to understand what she really wants. Sophia Blackwell is an established performer and poet who has written an assured debut novel that is a pleasure to read.

Watch an interview with the author here:

After My Own Heart by Sophia Blackwell from Limehouse Books on Vimeo.

Eric Karl Anderson is author of the novel Enough and has published work in various publications such as The Ontario Review, Velvet Mafia, Ganymede Stories One and the anthologies From Boys to Men, Between Men 2 and 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everyone Must Read.

Review: Hymn by John Barton

2011-03-18T15:17:00.001Z

HYMN
John Barton

Published by Brick Books

Reviewed by Gregory Woods

The pithiest thing about the Canadian poet John Barton’s new collection, HYMN, is the pun in its title, suggesting a hymn to him (whom?). The word also always brings ‘hymen’ to my mind—but perhaps, in this case, that is one distraction too far. In an interview on his publisher’s website, Barton says, ‘Hymn puts words to the music of disappointment and aspiration that gay men often feel in the pursuit of—and during the detours they take, consciously and unconsciously, on the way to and away from—love.’ This parenthesis, this detour on detours, is typical of Barton’s work at its best and worst—the individual reader can make this qualitative choice. There are times when it is the length and convolution of his sentences that absorbs one’s attention, rather than the argument itself.

Of course, when I suggest of a poet that he uses too many words, I feel like Joseph II: ‘Too many notes, my dear Mozart!’ And Barton is indeed prolix—but that is not necessarily a bad thing. The Canadians, too, have learned from the greatest bard of their southern neighbours, Walt Whitman, how to encompass an expansive society on an enormous land mass in verse that is both capacious and yet also, somehow, to the point. But the main technical dialectic with which Barton engages is Ezra Pound’s. There is some purpose for any modern, Anglophone poet in countering the rules of Imagism as laid down before the First World War by Pound, or at least in straying from them when the mood strikes. There is no absolute reason why poetry should state things more briefly than prose would. Why should it not luxuriate in the flow of language for its own sake? Barton is clearly aware that, as well as the Chinese and Japanese miniaturists, Pound also admired the profuse verbosity of Chaucer and Browning.

In a poem addressed to ‘Drella’ (Andy Warhol), Barton refers to his characteristic grammatical unit as ‘this kleptomaniac run-on sentence’, suggesting that the point of the thing, like that of Whitman’s lists, is accumulation rather than the ravelling of an involved argument. I am all for complex sentences—there are not enough of them in modern poetry. (A plague of parataxis in Britain has left most of our lyric poets incapable of stringing together a two-clause sentence without fucking up its grammar.) But I do not consistently feel the same confidence in Barton’s control of syntax, when he is digressing, that I do feel when going along with the grammatical arabesques of Marcel Proust or Henry James, when circumlocution and prolixity seem so tightly harnessed to the complexity of the thing being said and the meticulousness of the thought process. Those two great masters of digression never ramble. They never lose their concentration; and as a result, when reading them, neither do I.

Contrary to the publisher’s website—which speaks of the whole of Barton’s book as a ‘journey in search of love through the contemporary homoerotic male body’, adding that ‘Hymn stokes the fires of homoerotic romantic love with its polar extremes of intimacy and solitude’—it is really only in the fourth of the book’s five sections that Barton explicitly dwells on many aspects of contemporary gay life and the ancient variants it seems to echo. His long poem ‘Days of 2004, Days of Cavafy’, about and addressed to Constantine Cavafy, speaks of the great Greek poet’s relationship with the classical world as a kind of mutual or reciprocal invagination: ‘the whole of an ancient world inside you / and you inside it’. Here, for the second time in the book, the lines are so long that the poem is printed at ninety degrees to the convention, so that one has to hold the book sideways, reading one page above the other. This cleverly discomfiting ploy subverts one’s confidence and makes the very act of reading seem strange—‘queer’, if you must. Usually, one only holds a book this way up to look at certain kinds of illustration from a fresh angle.

The poem is broad in its sweep as well as its line. Violating one of the sacred principles of Foucaultian queer theory, it claims connections between the sexual lives of men in different places and different times: ‘men who travel lives not too indifferent / to our own, travelling from Sparta to Thermopylae, from Sussex Drive to Albion Road’—the latter being streets in Ottawa. At first, ‘indifferent’ looks like a malapropism for ‘similar’; but one soon understands that each generation of man-loving men takes an interest in others both past and future, with an associative desire that is wishful and wistful, all the more powerful for the distances it manages to span.

By the end of the poem, it is clear that Barton is looking back to the ancient Greeks, not merely from Cavafy’s modernity, nor even from his own post-modernity, but from some imagined future point, from which even our most cherished technological and verbal innovations (an earlier poem has invoked Cavafy in the abbreviations of text-speak) will seem primitive. When he addresses ‘men of the future looking backwards’ he inevitably echoes our position in relation to Cavafy, or Cavafy’s to Plato, and takes bodily possession of the words such men once addressed, and continue addressing, to posterity.

Barton’s versions of gayness are full of paradoxes, not merely mimicking (as so much modern camp does badly) the wit of Oscar Wilde, but purposely convulsing our chronologies and complacencies by questioning what we take for granted as their logic. The poem ‘Fucking the Minotaur’ threads its way through the labyrinth of a gay bathhouse and the less convoluted maze of the metro journey home, interestingly concluding that the latter is by far the more erotic space. In another poem, Barton’s take on ‘Amnesia’, that condition so perfectly confuted in its own etymology, has gay men going about their business among the heritage sites of modern Athens, not only making (in Browning’s evocative phrase) ‘love among the ruins’ but reviving what entropy had once undone. It is as if the poet were to counter the pessimism of Eliot’s claim, ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruins’, not much less than a century later, with a sentiment of his own: these ruins I have shored against my fragments.

Gregory Woods is Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His critical books include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), both from Yale University Press. His poetry books are published by Carcanet Press. His website is http://www.gregorywoods.co.uk/

Review: Ganymede Unfinished

2010-10-20T17:21:00.003Z

Ganymede Unfinished
Bryan Borland (ed)

Published by Sibling Rivalry Press

Reviewed by Gregory Woods

The gay literary and cultural journal Ganymede had only been going since 2008, and had only appeared in seven issues, at a rate of three a year, when its founder and editor, John Stahle, died at the age of sixty. Contributors used to be sent an electronic copy. I do not know how many of the relatively expensive hard copies were printed, but they will soon be collectors’ items.

Ganymede Unfinished is a final, tribute issue, put together by Bryan Borland with some of the materials that might have made up the eighth issue. It is an apt tribute to Stahle, serious and stylish; even if it is, perhaps, less selective than he might have been with some of its weaker material. The creative content gets off to a reassuringly solid start, with fine poems by Jee Leong Koh and Matthew Hittinger. Most of the poets are young, but there are a few names I recognise from a while back: Walter Holland, for instance, whose A Journal of the Plague Years I first read back in 1992.

Stahle was interested in promoting new work—and did so very generously—but he was concerned, also, to connected it with gay literature from the past. This volume continues that tradition, with a brief selection of work by the Victorian poet Digby Mackworth Dolben and a really useful essay by Perry Brass on the gay poetry magazine from the 1970s, Mouth of the Dragon. Brass is highly critical of that magazine’s editor, Andrew Bifrost, in ways that shed a contrastingly felicitous light on Stahle.

There are some negligible items in prose: a hyperbolic and platitudinous review of Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots, for instance; and a simplistic and narrow essay on the figure of the gay hustler in movies. There is a short story whose dramatic pacing is stalled by cliché and redundancy. (I gave up quantifying the redundancies in these two short clauses: ‘I was puzzled by his perplexing behavior; his reverence and concentration were profound and focused’.) And there is a blithely uncritical interview with Garrett Graham, the founding spirit behind the Free Independent Gay State (FIGS) Party, which aims to purchase a piece of land somewhere and construct a gay nation on it. It is hard to decide which aspect of Graham’s world-view is more delusional, his vision of the past or that of the future. For anyone with a healthily sceptical attitude to the late twentieth century’s crude constructions of sexual identity, his dream of a gay state can only be a laughable nightmare; and yet this interview does nothing to subject it to even the faintest expression of doubt.

A third of the whole, just about a hundred pages, is taken up by a novella, ‘Diary of a Sex Addict, by Scott Hess. I have long been on record as being no great admirer of sex-addiction fiction: it seems to me as boring as the people it concerns. So I shall never subject myself to the experience of re-reading John Rechy’s novel Numbers (1967) or Renaud Camus’ Tricks (1981). By contrast, Hess’s story has the virtue of relative brevity, but, even so, it could do with being trimmed by a third. I did eventually get into the rhythm of it, and one of its characters, whom the narrator calls Swan, is enough of a curiosity to be compelling; but the narrator himself is, like all sex addicts, too much of a cipher to be of much interest, except, perhaps, to his own kind (but even this is moot). To that extent, he is portrayed with some skill.

I do have doubts about some details of Hess’s technique. Do diarists really use the historic present in this way? (‘We have sex that night and I am afraid I stink of the restroom.’) And do they explain their lives like this? (‘Rudy and I met in a sex club in a two level bar way downtown. My friend Joe, who traffics with trannies and porn actors and poets, runs the place...’) But, notwithstanding my broader objections to the single-mindedness of the story’s narrator, there is enough here to suggest that Hess is a writer worth watching.

I was pleased to be a contributor to Ganymede number seven, and was hoping to send more poems to John Stahle. His journal had all the advantages, by way of efficiency, that come from being more or less a one-man band. (My poems were accepted within two days, and I received proofs two days later; whereas I am no longer surprised to have to wait a whole year for the editors some British poetry magazines to make up their minds. I told John he must be the fastest editor in the West, but it may just be that my poems caught him in the right mood just before a deadline.) Sad to say, Ganymede now suffers the main disadvantage of such an outfit, in that it will follow its editor into gay literary history.

Gregory Woods is Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His critical books include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), both from Yale University Press. His poetry books are published by Carcanet Press. His website is http://www.gregorywoods.co.uk/

Announcing GFEST 2010: London's gay arts festival

2010-10-09T17:37:00.000Z

GFEST – Gaywise FESTival, 'London's LGBT and queer cross - art festival for all', has announced an exciting and ambitious 2010 programme. The festival will take place across London in prestigious venues such as V&A and The National Gallery.

GFEST – Gaywise FESTival is the premier LGBT annual cross-arts festival in London - a platform for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT) and queer artists. It is produced and organised by arts charity Wise Thoughts.

GFEST 2010 runs for two weeks from Monday 8 November 2010 to Sunday 21 November 2010.

The full festival programme can be found on GFEST website: http://www.gaywisefestival.org.uk

The festival focuses on three categories covering Short Films, Visual Arts and Performances. Complimenting the programme are a series of talks, debates and parties. The festival is a hugely successful art event where thousands of Londoners enjoy and benefit from the showcase of emerging and established gay talent.

NIRANJAN KAMATKAR, the artistic director of GFEST said, "We are proud to present the LGBT and queer artistic talent including the International artists, filmmakers and performers." He added, "I am confident that GFEST 2010 programme is a thrilling mix of diversity with the widest possible range of life-changing artistic expressions from the LGBT community."

Review: Stranger in Town by Cedar Sigo

2010-10-02T17:40:00.004Z

Stranger in Town
Cedar Sigo

Published by City Lights Press

Reviewed by Colin Herd

‘I have tried above all to bring an allure to poetry.’

The phrase ‘Stranger in Town’ always makes me think of the 1965 record by Del Shannon, a stomping strum-along with an intoxicatingly high-fluting falsetto chorus: I’m not afraid of what he’ll do to MEEE! Until now, that is. From this day forth, ‘Stranger in Town’ will be indelibly associated in my mind with Cedar Sigo’s new book of poems, from City Lights, just as captivating as the Del record, and a lot more rock and roll.

Sigo’s collection is the fourth to be published under the City Lights Spotlights imprint, a series that has been so choice thus far, publishing superb volumes by Norma Cole, Anselm Berrigan and Andrew Joron, that it promises to be as inspired, exciting and innovative as the famous Pocket Poets series was fifty years ago from the same press. Incidentally, the fourth Pocket Poet was ‘Howl’. But it’s not the Beats that Stranger in Town recalls, so much as the great poets of the San Francisco Renaissance, John Wieners in particular, but Jack Spicer, Stephen Jonas and George Stanley too. The connection makes itself felt in a number of ways: the investment in and thoughtful commitment to fresh and thrillingly inventive lyric poetry, the engagement with visual art, the strong sense of community, and, of course, San Francisco itself, its veiled, hilly cityscape a perfect analogy for the soft, lyric textual mist, a mist that only ever allows partial clarity, through which, in the title poem, Sigo’s lyric makes its downhill track:

‘I enjoy reading signs
through the fog-

-HOTEL HUNTINGTON-

Then that evening
and all of
Fox Plaza was the same white
A permanent
stripe
on my blue bike

I raise my hood
I think there are other lost men
in surrounding blocks
alike in their thinking’

I love this poem’s balance between edgy, piecemeal, collaged line-breaks- that ‘HOTEL HUNTINGTON’, literally like a stuck-on sign- and the sense of a continuously unfolding and emergent narrative. Continuously emergent because always glimpsed arriving, never quite arrived, something’s always hidden and held back, a quality dramatized in the poem ‘Showboat’:

‘I thought you were coming toward me
a few blocks earlier
down Hyde St. It was a man weak
and crushed beneath this gray wig
for women. I can’t believe that
it’s really you.’

And later in the same poem: ‘None of this/concerns the poem as pure entrance’, where the double meaning of ‘entrance’, as in ‘spell-bound’ calls to mind the Berkeley workshops Spicer ran in 1957, entitled ‘Poetry as Magic’. As does another wonderful poem, ‘$$$Expensive Magic$$$’:

‘the questions fall
around allure. Poems floated
from the hearth
sparks
out the mouth. I am wound up, bored
we are only strangers on our way’

Cedar Sigo

In the short poem-essay ‘The Sun’, he sets out, frankly, charmingly, and extremely thoughtfully, his poetics:

‘Poetry can be a difficult field to enter into, as I find people sometimes think of it as old fashioned. It is this assumption that drives me to try & keep current. I do not just want to interest academics. Skaters are more dear to my heart.’

But every poem in the book articulates this poetics of magic. Sigo’s poetry is magical, glamorous and exciting. It has a great deal of, to use his word, ‘allure’. The prose poem ‘My Drawings’ describes obsessively drawing genies in ballpoint pen: ‘There was never a man or woman holding the lamp. It was more being able to get the smoke turning into the genie’. That’s what Cedar Sigo does in these poems, again, again and, gloriously, again.

Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical).

Review: The King of Carnaby Street: the Life of John Stephen

2010-09-25T17:26:00.000Z

The King of Carnaby Street: the Life of John Stephen
Jeremy Reed

Published by Haus Publishing

Reviewed by Richard Canning

John Stephen’s name may have faded from general consciousness today just as clearly as it was unknown when the 18-year-old, near penniless Glaswegian arrived in London in 1952. But, as this first book about the man who singlehandedly reinvented Carnaby Street and, arguably, more than any other, defined the Mod look, reveals, Stephen deserves to be better remembered.

One reason why his profile may have disappeared since his suicide in 1969 is that Stephen of necessity kept certain parts of his life far from the public eye (‘please don’t mention my name, mention my clients’ was a typical comment). Happy to be photographed in one of his endless Carnaby Street fashion emporiums, or with a Mod girl contrivedly on his arm at a P.R. event, Stephen secretly lived in a secure gay relationship with Bill Franks in a luxurious flat in Jermyn Street. In the 1960s, of course, lots of things were hip and new and fashionable. But homosexual acts were still illegal, and being known as gay was a career cul de sac like no other.

Stephen’s first job was in Covent Garden’s Moss Bros., where he was able to learn the virtues of old-fashioned tailoring. To survive in the city, he took a second job, as a coffee bar waiter. Much of the fifties can be described as a long, challenging apprenticeship, but Stephen’s positivity, good looks and determination saw him through to owning a succession of lines of men’s and women’s leisurewear which would grace the entire decade he can be said to have defined – and which neatly, and chronologically, defined his own career success.

Stephen first moved into tiny premises on the then neglected Carnaby Street in 1956. His extravagant, tightly-cut designs for men had much in common at the time with the gear paraded in the windows of nearby sex stores frequented by gay men. But Stephen saw the opportunity for the sort of crossover success which, one feels on reading this book, may simply never have happened without him. Prominent public figures such as Sean Connery, George Melly and even Pablo Picasso might be seen dressed in Stephen’s threads. From 1960, both Billy Fury and Cliff Richard were regular customers. More occasional clients included the Yardbirds, the Kinks and the Rolling Stones. Professional scouser and “comedian” Jimmy Tarbuck, astonishingly, modelled for Stephen.

The only peer in terms of commercial acumen and association with the 60s zeitgeist was Mary Quant, whose name became as associated with her territory (Chelsea) as strongly as Stephen’s with his. Yet when young girls gathered on the TV set of groundbreaking music show Ready Steady Go (from 1963), they invariably aped presenter Cathy Kirby in dressing in Stephen’s outfits more commonly than Quant’s.

In many respects, the arc of Stephen’s life will strike anyone who knows the life story of Joe Meek, 50s/60s music producer and subject of the play and movie Telstar as depressingly familiar. (Meek himself, and his blond rocker boy “find” Heinz were both customers). He experienced sudden success, fame and wealth, only for it to lead him in endless, often self-destructive pursuits of unavailable boys, chemicals and (ever more frequently) in drink. Theirs is something of the myth of Narcissus here, too: Stephen himself was of very handsome appearance – as striking as the pop stars he dressed. But he was very short and, in fact, physically rather frail. By the age of 30, indeed, he was one of the very few who could comfortably get into the Mod trousers he designed, with their 26 inch waists and drainpipe legs. Jackets tended to be made with chests running from 34 to 38 only.

It’s a fascinating story, told in detail and with a boisterous enthusiasm. There are some wonderful vignettes, too – such as the image of Marc Bolan, wearing full make up and working as a Soho rentboy, scouring the bins around Carnaby Street for clothing cast-offs. But by 1965, with Stephen’s empire at its peak, and Georgie Fame opening his eighth store on the same street, the end was already in sight. Though Stephen would try hard to accommodate the aesthetic values and predilections of the first wave of hippies – and can even be said to be responsible for the adoption of paisley and striped kaftans by the new breed – he could see that a more fundamental shift away from the styles associated with him, and the Mod look in general. (Although the ‘glam’ look of the mid-70s has something borrowed from Stephen’s innovations, it acted, often, against the fundamentals of epicene body shapes and types; full-on hippie culture, meanwhile, grew ever more layered and bulky, in clothing terms – which would have been anathema to Stephen, had he witnessed it).

He dressed the Bee Gee Barry Gibb in 1968, the year in which Gibb was crowned Best Dressed Man (great photograph!). However, by then, Stephen not only had little left to achieve. His commercial stock was also challenged from the myriad flatterers and thieves, who would imitate Stephen designs, running up versions in cheaper cloth, on sale within days of Stephen unveiling his new collection. Reed interprets the late sixties as marking a progressive, pronounced sense of defeat in the Scotsman who had achieved so much: ‘The sixties were breaking up around him like the electronic sequences of red and blue Piccadilly neon.’

Like Stephen, Reed is a natural dandy, bon viveur and show-off, and the identification with his subject on occasion brings rewards. He seems to have been privy to much of Stephen’s life through conversations with his partner, Bill Franks, who is thanked here, but not exactly credited. In fact, there do not appear to many other sources – a pity, since many figures here of the period surely could have been persuaded to speak, and might have produced a more rounded character psychologically.

And Reed’s prose style won’t be to everyone’s taste; and there is so much repetition and indirection here that I began to long I had taken one of the many pills which got Stephen through a 16-hour day, and which Reed himself may perhaps have ingested, in order to come up with sentences such as: ‘Change was in the air, no matter how tentative, rather like a carjacker nicking the cellulose gloss of a polished wing before slashing it.’ Huh? This sentence is more of a car crash (something else with which Stephen was familiar). At 264 pages, The King of Carnaby Street feels, if anything, inappropriately bloated for its subject, and there are many moments of simply terrible infelicitous style. Take these two sentences:

In the face of anarchic turbulence beginning to infiltrate sixties culture, as the break-up of its earlier holistic grouping of fashion, music and a revisioned youthful ideology founded on the look of its identity, and liberated hedonism as its incentive to party, Stephen restructured the suit on a superb Mod line that deconstructed formal wear into a casual elegance that defined the basic principles of modernism, and as such could have been designed for the wardrobe of a Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg Avengers shoot. A Stephen first that was based on classic Mod principles of incisively clean and precisely detailed styling, his leisure knitted suits, coming at a time when confected decoration predominated as the fashion signifier, was a lost opportunity for Mods to regain an endemic fashion ascendancy and additionally to reinvent the ubiquitous role the suit played in society.

I know what Reed means, more or less, but the inelegance of the prose acts sharply against the precepts for which Stephen should be known: simplicity, directness, sharpness.

He was fully aware of his own talents, making his death at the young age of 35 all the more tragic… although the fact that he lived a literal half-lifespan has a certain apposite orderliness. (Stephen had first taken an overdose at the age of 30). He could, on occasion, parrot others’ high estimate of himself. He took to referring to his emporium thus: ‘Carnaby St is my creation. In a way I feel about it how Michelangelo felt about the beautiful statues he had created.’ Michelangelo Buonarotti, who was abnormally uninterested in clothing, his own hygiene or “look”, instead poured his aesthetic instincts into works of art which endure. Today, fashion continues, like all popular cultures, to rob relentlessly and ungenerously from its own trailblazers. Thus, while it isn’t fair to say that John Stephen does not have a legacy, it is certainly true that he is too rarely associated with what he individually made happen in late 50s and 60s London. John Stephen brought to life the idea of the savvy, fashionable teen rocker, and then the Mod, and kickstarted the cult of youth and adolescence which has taken hold of British culture now for fifty years.

Richard Canning. Canning’s most recent book is a biography of E M Forster (Hesperus Press).

Review: Frostbitten by Mark Walton

2010-09-08T11:37:00.002Z

Frostbitten
Mark Walton

Published by Epic Rites Press

Reviewed by Colin Herd

The first chapbook from epic rites press in their ‘Workers in Blood’ series, Frostbitten is the debut collection from 2008 London Slam! Championship-winner Mark Walton. It’s a great title. It perfectly captures the numb but raw sensation that many of these poems leave you nursing. But whereas frostbite effects the body-parts farthest from the heart, the extremities, the twenty-two poems that make up Frostbitten are mainly bruised love poems, written in an intimate and highly personal first person voice, often addressing an unnamed and varying ‘you’. The language is shorn, plain-spoken and no-holds-barred. Walton’s poems deal with clubbing, dating, sex, break-ups and in some of the most emotionally powerful poems, the threat of HIV.

As you might expect from the first collection of a Slam! champion, the poems in Frostbitten rely heavily on rhythm and sound-patterning. There’s always a danger that these effects do not work as effectively as text in a book. But when it works, it really works. The following example from ‘For a Friend’ reminds me a little of T.S. Eliot; the seedily sibilant half-rhymes of ‘kisses’, ‘recessed’ and ‘darkness’ almost seem like they could be off-cuts from the first stanza of Alfred Prufrock.

Boyfriend-dodging
for stolen kisses
in recessed darkness.

You rubber clad,
mohawked,
dangerous looking.
A friendship seeded in furtive
sucksuckfumbled moments.

The ‘furtive’, ‘seeded’ & ‘fumbling’ sound plausibly like Eliot too, but it’d have to be an Eliot that had been rubbing up against Joyce like a bear against a tree to come up with that delicious sounding portmanteau, ‘sucksuckfumbled’. Another excellent moment is at the start of the poem Home, which was one of the highlights of the collection for me:

From a distance
you appear opaque,
like a jumbled
and chaotic cityscape.

Functions, styles, vernaculars,
crawling over one another.
Competing for attention.

Hard surfaces reflecting.

The inversion of the rhyme of ‘opaque’ and ‘cityscape’ is ingenious and beautiful, like a confusing, skewed reflection. But Walton can be equally effective when rhyming more conventionally, such as this beguiling tercet from ‘The Maze’, which features a double rhyme- ‘scattered’, ‘shattered’ and ‘mind’, ‘kind’:

My memories of meeting you
are kind of scattered.
My mind shattered by pills.

At times, though, Walton’s use of rhyme and repetition, which I can imagine working very well in performance, doesn’t translate so successfully to the page. Examples such as the one that follows from a poem about coping with HIV feel heavy-footed to me, a relentless punchy rhythm on the word ‘new’ that seems to overplay and undermine the genuinely touching, frightening final couplet.

I have new tricks,
and new hopes.

I have a new pulse,
and new fears.

I have new rhythms,
and new rhymes.

I have new freedoms,
and new deadlines.

I have both the shortest
And the longest of times.

In spite of these instances of awkwardness, the greatest and most welcome strength of Walton’s collection is its honesty and his willingness to take his poems to all aspects of his relationships and complex desires.

Come the night
let me learn
your nocturnal pathways,
and if I should dive into you,
let me emerge
bloodied and juice stained.

Walton writes inventive and daring performance-lyrics about contemporary gay life, and, frankly, that’s rare. I look forward to a second collection. A percentage of profits from Frostbitten are being donated to the Terrence Higgins Trust.

Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical).

The Green Carnation Prize Longlist 2010 Announced

2010-09-01T17:30:00.009Z

The Green Carnation Prize is a new UK award given to works of fiction or memoir by gay men. The judges have debated long and hard to come up with the following longlist:

Generation A by Douglas Coupland (Windmill Books)
Bryant and May Off the Rails by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday)
Paperboy by Christopher Fowler (Doubleday)
In A Strange Room by Damon Galgut (Atlantic Books)
God Says No by James Hannaham (McSweeney’s)
London Triptych by Jonathan Kemp (Myriad Editions)
Mary Ann in Autumn by Armistead Maupin (Doubleday)
Children of the Sun by Max Schaefer (Granta)
Man’s World by Rupert Smith (Arcadia Books)
The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas (Tuskar Rock Press)
City Boy by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)

The shortlist will be announced on November 1st and the winner on December 1st.

I'm pleased to see books on this list which I've read and admired this year especially God Says No by James Hannaham (which was also shortlisted for the Gay Debut Fiction category I helped judge in this year's Lambda Awards). This is an exceptionally original book about an amiable closeted overweight man struggling to come out and survive a pray-away-the-gay ministry where he tries to convert to heterosexuality to save his marriage.

Damon Galgut's new novel In A Strange Room is a strange book indeed. I finished reading it last week and I'm still puzzling what to make of it. Recording three journeys which the central character "Damon" takes in foreign countries this is a mediation on identity and belonging of the kind which is often experienced when traveling in totally unfamiliar environments. What's most unusual about this book is the form of narration where the author frequently moves back and forth between the first and third person when describing Damon's journeys. It suggests a dual relationship the self in the present has with the self of the past, memory and experience intertwining in a way that is both maddening and mystifying.

Click on the titles above for a past review of Man's World and interview with Edmund White about City Boy.

Eric Karl Anderson

Women on the Move: Three New Films Reviewed by Sophie Mayer

2010-08-28T17:15:00.004Z

Perestroika
directed by Sarah Turner
The Headless Woman
directed by Lucrecia Martel
Villa Amalia
directed by Benoit Jacquot

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer

In Lesbian Visibility, film theorist Amy Villarejo suggests that maybe out-there L-Word style representation isn’t the equality it’s cracked up to be. Instead, she suggests, lesbians can change the objectifying visual field by being craftily invisible, unavailable to voyeuristic eyes. It sounds counter-intuitive and like a return to the days of Queen Victoria’s ignorance, but Villarejo’s not suggesting that films like The Kids Are All Right should be banished because they basically turn lesbians into straight couples in order to make them visible in mainstream media (except for that bit where Jules has sex with a guy, hmmm, oh wait, that’s another article). What she’s interested in is non-mainstream films by lesbian filmmakers that don’t contain the obligatory – what to call it: snuggle shot? – but still allude to a queer, female sensibility.

For some reason, several of these films involve trains (Ulrike Ottinger’s Johanna of Arc of Mongolia and Yvonne Rainer’s Journey to Berlin/1971 spring to mind), and three recent films suggest that being on the move (not just on trains: think Thelma and Louise!) might just be a way of making lesbians visible without, yknow, the purple silky panties approach that Channel 4 took to advertising the L-Word. Sarah Turner’s Perestroika, released on September 1 by the ICA, is closest to the fabulous feminist experiments of Ottinger and Rainer, mixing video from the 1980s with digital film and stills from 2007 to tell the interconnected story of two journeys that Turner made on the Trans-Siberian Express.

Unlike the fabulously camp journey Delphine Seyrig experiences in Johanna of Arc, Turner’s journeys are fascinating but hot and uncomfortable: and the journey in 2007 is emotionally wrenching because Sîan Thomas, the friend who took her to Russia in 1987, died in 1992, and this is Turner’s first return. As she repeats the journey, she is haunted by memories of her friend (some of which she videoed) and by memories of pre-perestroika Soviet Russia.

The film itself is haunted by various apparitions, including Turner herself, only visible as a reflection in the night-darkened windows. The voice-over narrator speaks as the filmmaker we glimpse in the window, but this ‘Sarah Turner’ suffers retrograde amnesia, a fictional lens Turner introduced to look at memory and loss. The film ends at Lake Baikal, the site of a slow ecological catastrophe, where it appears that flames are rising from the freezing waves. Through the hallucinatory intensity of the train journeys, this image makes terrible, perfect sense.

So, you’re wondering, where’s the lesbian in all of this? The narrator speaks repeatedly to or of ‘you,’ addressing someone who is travelling with her, who is just visible in a repeated sequence in which Turner stumbles to the restaurant car. Most of the voices (but not all) in the film are female, and there is an underlying sense in which it is a beautiful, unconventional love story between Turner and her loved-and-lost friend Sîan. Turner appears only one unreflected: in a photograph shot by Thomas in which she is filming with her video camera. When we see the footage of Thomas taking the photograph, it has an aliveness that – with the faces blocked by cameras – is heartbreakingly inaccessible. Intense currents swirl around and through relationships between women, to the hypnagogic rhythm of the train that connects us with both dream and desire.

Equally dreamy/nightmarish in its evocation of female subjectivity is Lucrecia Martel’s brilliantly opaque film The Headless Woman. Out now on DVD from New Wave films, The Headless Woman continues Martel’s exploration of her home province in Argentina, Tucumán, which was brutally suppressed during the junta. Motivations are often mysterious, characters are afflicted with lassitude then suddenly ravenous with desire, dialogue is elliptical: her films seem like they are being made as if under political censorship, full of oblique but loaded references, and a vertiginous sense of threat.
At the centre of this unstable world, where nothing is what it seems, is a dentist called Veronica whose Christian name seems to certify the truth of what she witnesses. The problem is that Veronica, driving along an empty road, doesn’t see what it is she may have hit. Even the graze on her head that testifies to the accident is erased when her husband makes her hospital attendance disappear after it transpires she might have killed a young indigenous boy whose body is found in a drain after torrential rains. Veronica is caught between polite society – her husband, lover, friends, sister – who want her to remain untroubled by inequality and her role in it, and the possibility of rebellion, embodied in her favourite niece, Candita.

Candita is played by Inés Efron, the lead from XXY, and her role in that film is just under her skin here, not least when she swims languidly across the new pool while the adults lounge around. But her queerness is also part of the narrative: much to her mother’s disapproval, she has a girlfriend, a campesina who is the fastest-moving and most directed person in the film, riding alongside Candita’s mother’s car on her motorbike, and guiding Veronica through the rural community where the boy’s family lives. Candita, seeing Veronica’s sympathy with her rebellion, attempts to seduce her with a ferocious kiss: Veronica refuses her, and from that moment, she turns back to her old life, refusing the possibility of movement (across class boundaries, as well as literal freedom of movement) that Candita both seeks and holds out.

Ann Hidden, in Benoit Jacquot’s Villa Amalia, makes the choice that Veronica can’t – but her choice is guilt-free, and this new French film (on DVD from Peccadillo Pictures) is a lighter-hearted affair. Although it deals in death, divorce, disappeared dads and other life-changers, it does so with inimitable French style. Everything in the film looks glorious, and it looks all the more glorious as Ann leaves her stultifying life of apparent love and success in Paris to disappear in Italy (note to fashion editors: in doing so, she leaves behind this season’s camel, chignon and white shirt look to adopt a Mediterranean wardrobe of non-maxi flowered dresses and short hair, making clear that minimalism is for people with empty lives). While the character of Ann takes a tranche of Under the Sand, adds a soupçon of The Page Turner and jusqu’un peu of Catherine Deneuve in Les voleurs, Isabelle Huppert makes the somewhat hackneyed role of the fortysomething Parisienne restlessly rediscovering her erotic and artistic life her own by train, mountain and boat. She doesn’t fly because she doesn’t want to be traced via her passport – but that seems secondary to the need to show a woman, alone, on the move, changing direction.

Of course, the film’s distributed by Peccadillo so it comes with certain expectations – and fulfils them, but quietly. Ann’s childhood best friend Georges tells her he’s gay with a shrug, and later gets beaten up while cruising on the island of Ischia, where Ann has retreated. Ann leaves behind her cheating lover Thomas and doesn’t so much come out as come alive: literally, when she is rescued from the sea by – typically! – gorgeous Giulia, out for the day on her friend Carlo’s boat. She and Giulia form an instant attraction of silent glances, and – typically! – shack up after their first night together.

Don’t expect hot sex, though: everything in this film is as hidden as Ann’s (not-so-subtle) stage name (her absconded father is Jewish: she has presumably changed her name to hide that legacy and to hide from him). Huppert’s strong face and awkward-graceful motion convey the sense of Ann’s turbulent and dramatic interior world, expressed through her piano compositions but not language – and, when she returns to Ischia at the end, perhaps a peace in being so far from metropolitan culture, hidden in her new love.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Theatre Review: Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens at the Shaw Theatre

2010-08-21T06:54:00.005Z

Elegies for Angels, Punks and Raging Queens
by Bill Russell and Janet Hood

Shaw Theatre, London, 10-28 August 2010
directed by John-Jackson Almond
musical director Michael Roulston

Reviewed by Richard Canning

This revival of the song cycle by Bill Russell and Janet Hood (which first ran at the Kings Head Theatre, Islington in 1992, but received its world premiere in 1989) must come as a surprising choice – if only because nowadays we know all too well that trying to promote any work of art concerned with the AIDS epidemic is beyond a Sisyphean adventure. The Shaw Theatre is to be applauded, then, for having the conviction to go ahead, setting aside commercial considerations and tackling what is very much a less-heard and seen subject today.

One of the four original singers reprises her role: Miquel Brown – mother of Sinitta, but also fondly remembered by gay men for 1980s Hi-Energy classics such as So Many Men, So Little Time - once again sings as Angela. She is joined by Jonathan Hellyer (playing Brian), a.k.a. the Dame Edna Experience, making his London theatre debut, Leon Lopez (as Doug), and Anna Mateo (as Judith). Hellyer does a great job of his “own” chief song, And the Rain Keeps Falling Down, but is a more subdued stage presence than anyone who has seen him doing cabaret at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern would suspect. Lopez and Mateo in particular are very strong vocally, as well as demonstrating a stage presence which, inevitably, not all of the thirty cast members playing the smaller roles can match (though Titti La Camp as a drag queen is a definite exception).

The aim of the piece – a combination of songs and monologues - is to pay tribute to all those lost to the AIDS epidemic, by virtue of retelling the life stories (and, inevitably, in part, death stories) of thirty people who succumb to it. Each participant is thus given a few minutes on stage to tell it from his or her point of view. The actors then remain on stage, witnessing the other contributions and continuing to inhabit their roles.

The first thing to concede is that the cumulative effect of hearing so many diverse tales of loss, prejudice, deceit and ill fortune is as moving now as it was 17 years ago. That does not prevent me from feeling, however, that the status and purpose of the piece today is not fully clear. Russell has written new monologues for this revival, a good number of which take us, logically enough, to the non-Western terrains with which we now associate the most devastating human experiences of the syndrome. Some are very effective, even taking advantage of moments of winning humour – as when a South African woman begins her monologue with the words: ‘The only thing worse than a man is a politician.’ The conceptual difficulty, however, is, of course, that the original production of Elegies was conceived at a time when the lack of effective treatments for HIV/AIDS had left those turning HIV-positive with few expectations other than their short- or medium-term demise. The drug treatments which would act therapeutically to minimize HIV’s destructive effect upon immune systems rolled out unevenly, but from the USA in 1996, and across Europe in the following years.

The new monologues in Elegies articulated on stage successfully move on the production’s accommodation of the epidemiological reality today, but by introducing the subject of drug treatments, and their uneven presence in different global contexts, it makes the “unadjusted” tales here – those penned in 1993, which inevitably make no reference to drug treatments - feel historical. Thus, the thirty characters listen to, and respond to, a huge variety of reminiscences, but the audience becomes aware that these couldn’t, or didn’t, inhabit the same chronological context.

It’s a small quibble, certainly, since theatre can, and should, be able to remake the world, showing it to us anew. Still, it made me aware of another reservation I felt: that the integrity of each story, with one following the other, interrupted after each block of four or five by the next song, did not help make the evening feel fundamentally dramatic. Conflict and argument have, naturally, played a central role in many or most AIDS dramas, from early candidates such as Larry Kramer’s The Normal Heart and William Hoffmann’s As Is (both 1985), through to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America (1992) and British dramatist Jonathan Harvey’s two epidemic-related works, Hushabye Mountain (1999) and the recent Canary (almost a pastiche of Kushner). In the case of Elegies, however, the evening’s raisons d’etre – to celebrate the diversity of lives lost; to counteract shame, prejudice and secrecy; to offer the broadest range of perspectives on the syndrome – are all worthwhile.

But there is an inevitable simplicity of message, in consequence. It might be summed up as “positivity.” Certainly it is threatened, just for one moment, by the case of the muscle-boy addicted to Crystal Meth, who admits to knowingly exposing numerous online partners to HIV. (A very topical moment, this, given the ongoing trial in Germany of a pop singer with AIDS who is alleged to have failed to communicate her HIV-status to sexual partners). But before and after him, the subtext of the evening seems to involve undifferentiated celebration – as in one of the song titles, Heroes all Around. There’s nothing implicitly wrong with this. It’s just that it can feel like the audience is witnessing a self-help group, rather than being inducted into the uncertainties and complexities which theatrical narrative can offer.

The monologues themselves – rendered in verse - are somewhat uneven, though the best have the same lyrical directness and honesty as the dramatic poems in Thom Gunn’s extraordinary collection, The Man with Night Sweats. A shopaholic girl was especially winning, summarizing her post-diagnosis take on life thus: ‘If spending makes you feel alive, die before the bills arrive!’ The songs, meanwhile, are delivered with enthusiasm and accomplishment. The best can certainly hold a candle to those found in West End musicals embracing much more conservative storylines. The only really wrong note is struck by the unaccountable decision to have the production wrap up with a few lines (only) of Miquel Brown singing the disco anthem So Many Men, So Little Time as the entire cast leaves the stage. Certainly, it’s a vintage tune, invoking a particular time period and gay subculture very strongly. But its lyric – written with explicit appeal for sexually busy gay men in the early 1980s – threatens to complicate, even overshadow the clear steer towards plurality and diversity in the preceding two hours, as well as, rather bafflingly, to take the audience back to a specific and historical moment at the show’s close; a time, perhaps, before which any of these losses would have taken place.

Still, this is a committed (and huge!) cast, performing for free, and The Terrence Higgins Trust is benefitting from every ticket sale. There’s plenty to think about here, and many moments to savour.

Richard Canning. Canning’s edition of AIDS fiction, Vital Signs (2008), is available from Da Capo Press.

Review: The Last Bohemians: the two Roberts – Colquhoun and MacBride

2010-08-14T13:27:00.000Z

The Last Bohemians: the two Roberts – Colquhoun and MacBride
by Roger Bristow

Published by Sansom and Company

Reviewed by Richard Canning

This book is both a celebration of the works of two Scottish painters whom Bristow thinks particularly overlooked, and also, inevitably, a human story that is intrinsically sad. ‘The Golden Boys of Bond Street’, as Colquhoun and MacBryde were known in forties London, each looked set to change the face of twentieth-century British art for a time. One of the challenges facing Bristow, in this first joint biography and critical assessment, is to figure out precisely why they are now so forgotten.

Colquhoun was nominally bisexual; MacBryde exclusively gay. But this was a couple whose relationship obviated any need for categorization: they became inseparable; lovers, collaborators, mutual critics, and – progressively and ultimately self-destructively – drinking companions. Both came from Ayrshire from poor stock; both studied at the Glasgow School of Art; both were smitten by the inter-war Parisian bohemia of Montparnasse; both sought fame and renown in London, a city whose values, character and fellow citizens Colquhoun and MacBryde struggled first to understand, then to accept.

Bristow has studied a huge volume of material in building this shared portrait, though it must be said that much of what he quotes – particularly notes taken by the artists themselves – proves rather unenlightening. As observers, they were keen visual artists, but unexceptional wordsmiths. Thus, on a first trip to Italy, Colquhoun reports Michelangelo’s ‘tremendous command over the design of the human figure.’ In Venice, he notes, ‘our first impression was of “water”. It was beneath our feet in the canals and waterways…’ Summing up La Serenissima, he signed off: ‘Venice is indeed a beautiful city… it belongs entirely to the past.’

Admittedly, these words were not intended for publication. Still, both painters luckily prove much more adventurous and idiosyncratic in oils than with words. Influences ranged from Matisse, Gauguin and Rouault to Chagall, Cezanne and Wyndham Lewis, who was not known for tolerating others’ works, let alone praising them. However, Wyndham Lewis – then writing as art critic for The Listener – found much to praise in a 1947 exhibition at the Lefevre Gallery of both Roberts’ works. Yet even this praise finally can be seen to have done for the pair, by yoking them together. Wyndham Lewis initially celebrated Colquhoun as the finest young British artist, but corrected himself, writing: ‘Perhaps I should say Colquhoun and MacBryde for they live together, their work is almost identical and they can be regarded as almost one artistic organism.’ Bristow goes to great lengths to distinguish between Colquhoun and MacBryde’s artistic trajectories. Yet it remains true that in the eyes of critics, art collectors and ‘the Establishment’, their closeness became a confusion and an impediment.

A sense of entitlement coupled with chippiness at English mores and manners did not help. While they began to absorb other influences, closer to home – Sutherland, Nash and Piper – and were certainly capable of producing works as original and distinguished as anything by these three, they lacked the social grace and occasional deference which oils the wheels of any artistic career. Certainly Francis Bacon lacked such grace too. But Bacon - whom they would come to know as a young unknown, and who would before too long find his reputation eclipsing theirs – was an exceptional case, and an exceptional talent. There is a certain justice, for all the fine illustrations included in The Last Bohemians, in considering Colquhoun and MacBryde something no artist wishes to be called: merely very, very good.

They gravitated towards Celtic dissidents in London, so Dylan Thomas was an obvious intimate. Since they all drank to excess habitually, they inevitably stumbled across the roué of Soho roués, penniless writer Julian Maclaren-Ross. Other fellow travellers included the Scottish poet George Barker and the peculiar homosexual artist John Minton, whom Colquhoun and MacBryde generously took in as lodger. But Minton, far from proving a stabilizing influence upon a relationship already characterized by violent extremes, developed an obvious crush on Colquhoun. When it was resisted, he began bringing other men back to stay, enraging MacBryde. As early as 1944, an acquaintance had noted that the pair ‘seemed to carry a violence’ around with them. This very much understates the case. Repeatedly, one or other is found knocking the other one out.

Mysterious Figures, 1960 by Robert Colquhoun

Bristow admirably sketches in how the softly-softly artistic subculture – however relatively tolerant, compared to English society at large – could nevertheless inhibit gay creators. Minton would die of a drug overdose by 1957; Colquhoun and MacBryde responded to their shared failure to achieve a stunning (and financially empowering) breakthrough with recourse to ever larger quantities of alcohol. The situation was always exacerbated by the unstated rivalry within their relationship. Each had a moment of sensing his own imminent breakthrough – notwithstanding Wyndham Lewis’s comments – and, though implicitly each was supportive of the other, it is inevitable in any artist to consider one’s own reputation by way of comparing it to one’s nearest peers.

By 1947, Colquhoun and MacBryde could no longer subsist in London, and took advantage of the offer of free accommodation and studio space in Lewes, East Sussex. A succession of less helpful rural retreats followed – unavoidably, since Colquhoun and MacBryde consistently proved incapable of moderating their drinking and violent outbursts, or showing any sign of gratitude to their progressively put-upon hosts. These - including the writer Elizabeth Smart - were often friends or former friends, who felt a kind of guilt or regret at their diminishing careers, more than any strong personal warmth. Bristow’s final chapters are bathetic more than anything else, with tales of the Scots upsetting English village life, sometimes getting banned from one village pub to another and thus setting out on ever lengthier, ever crazier searches for drink. Whenever money ran out, they would simply insist that others paid.

Colquhoun lived long enough to see a small revival in his career in the form of a major exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1958, which was well-attended and positively-reviewed. But few paintings sold. In an act of bizarre timing, filmmaker Ken Russell then determined to shoot a study of them for the BBC’s Monitor programme, aired in 1959. Russell struggled to animate the pair, or even to catch them sober. More work and more drinking followed, until, in 1962, Colquhoun suffered a massive heart attack, dying in MacBryde’s arms. Four years later, the near-destitute MacBryde was knocked down in a street in Dublin. He suffered a broken back and died shortly afterwards.

Excepting a play about them written by John Byrne and staged at the Royal Court in 1992 (and condemned by Bristow as trading in gossip and folklore), these two artists have, effectively, vanished in the near half-century since their deaths. Bristow is to be credited with telling an important, if self-evidently cautionary tale about two promising careers. As he concedes, however, The Last Bohemians will stand not only as a tribute to what Colquhoun and MacBryde achieved, but also as an indication of what they might have done in very different circumstances.

Richard Canning’s most recent book is Brief Lives: E M Forster (Hesperus Press).

Review: Collected Plays of Mart Crowley

2010-08-11T12:51:00.001Z

The Collected Plays of Mart Crowley

Published by Alyson Books

Reviewed by Giuseppe Albano

Unlike many contemporary writers who just happen to have written for the stage, nobody could accuse Mart Crowley of being a closet novelist. In the six plays collected here, the dialogues and stage notes show a vivid sense of theatricality and are the work of an author who is deeply concerned with the ‘Society of the Spectacle’, to borrow Guy Debord’s phrase. Just look at the lushly fetishistic descriptions of the sets: that of Avec Schmaltz (1984) ‘could be a Hallmark card or a window in Bloomingdale’s’, while that of The Men from the Boys (2002) should, we are told, be ‘Abstract and stylish... Dramatic and anal. And, of course, it should positively scream “taste”’. In Crowley’s worlds image and impression are everywhere and are, at least initially, everything, but there are shocks aplenty when the superficial sheens are blasted away to reveal just how damaged, frightened, and alone his psychologically complex characters are.

And so most of Crowley’s human creations lead necessarily duplicitous lives: there is the one they want others to believe they are, and the one they themselves want to believe they are not. Nowhere are the effects of this more painful than in For Reasons that Remain Unclear (1993), in which a seemingly innocuous chance encounter in the Eternal City between an aging Roman Catholic priest and a smart Hollywood scriptwriter turns into a tense, emotionally violent playoff between a paedophile and his former prey. Wised up audiences, will, of course, recognise the thematic signs before they are spelled out, but this doesn’t weaken Crowley’s power as a dramatist. His purpose is less about lulling his audiences into a false sense of security than inviting them to watch as his characters are slowly shaken out of theirs. If this process is sometimes predictable in terms of the plot – the loudening church bells at the start of For Reasons can only mean one thing: that a crescendo of difficult truth is building – the very inevitability makes it all the more theatrically compelling.

Mercifully, the rest of the collection is far less distressing. Best (and best-known) of the bunch is Crowley’s first work, The Boys in the Band, a wise-cracking bitch-fest which hit the stage running in January 1968 and changed both the face and the pace of gay drama forever. Flash forward three and a bit decades and Crowley was serving up the sequel, The Men from the Boys, whose dialogues are as reassuringly quick-fire as the original gang returns to commemorate the passing away of Larry (who, shock horror, hasn’t died of AIDS – ‘We know what you thought! Gay men do die of other things!’ Michael reminds us). These two plays in themselves make this collection worth forking out for and, taken together, provide a thrilling reminder of just how entertaining a group of gay men in a room drinking together can be. To the untrained ear, the characters might seem to do little else than snarl and bark at one another, but listen a little closer and we hear that even at their most cutting, the party members throw each other the best lines by opening up opportunities to come back with ever wittier comments. (Who said gay people don’t make great team players?)

There is, however, one sad thing about this book that just won’t go away: the fact that its author only managed to complete six stage plays in four decades. If Crowley had spent less time working on shoddy TV shows like Hart to Hart and the Colbys, who knows what theatrical legacies he might have left?

Giuseppe Albano lives and works in London. His translations of poems by Annelisa Alleva were recently published in La Casa Rotta (Jaca Book, Milan, 2010).

Theatre Review: Desire - the new gay musical

2010-07-31T13:07:00.002Z

Desire: the new gay musical

Homo Promos Theatre Co.
Music by Peter Murphy
Book and lyrics by Peter Scott-Presland
Based on “States of Desire” by Edmund White

The Albany, Deptford, June 30-July 2

Review by Richard Canning

All credit to Homo Promos, a gay theatre company of 22 years standing, for not taking the easy route. Desire, composed by Peter Murphy, with libretto by Peter Scott-Presland, who also directed, has been ten years in the writing, and features a company of ten singers, four dancers plus full band. Together, those involved in staging this new musical version of American author Edmund White’s pioneering 1980 book States of Desire: travels in gay America all but outnumbered its enthusiastic audience, at one of just three stagings in a very ungay redoubt of South London, on the eve of London Gay Pride.

Scott-Presland had written to White, asking for permission to turn his journalism into a song cycle as early as 1985. He then slowly travelled around the country whose gay subculture White had studied a decade or so earlier – the difference, of course, being the onset of the AIDS epidemic. AIDS – first reported in 1981 - could not even have constituted a footnote in White’s account, though in a 1986 reprint, White added an extensive ‘Afterword’ which reflects on the early, darkest years of ‘plague’ thinking and suffering. Desire draws on this in its final minutes, thus offering a signpost towards the present day; White’s characters inevitably display seventies values, fashions and political positions. This also, rather emphatically casts the hopes, fears, aspirations and plans of its many protagonists into shade. You wonder, and are indeed encouraged to wonder, which, if any, will survive.

Murphy and Scott-Presland have structured their musical largely according to White’s book, which is essentially a collection of unlinked pieces of travel journalism, ordered geographically from West to East. Thus Desire opens on Los Angeles, perhaps a less obvious introduction to the American gay dream than the second city it, and White, tackled: San Francisco. (One curiosity, incidentally, about the recording history of the Village People, was that they racked up songs with pretty much every American city or town of gay repute in the title… It must have been hard, here, to resist the urge to do something with the People, I thought … though, curiously, many of the cast of Desire had VP-style names; there was even a Randy).

The numbers are delivered with assurance and brio throughout. Personally, I enjoyed the comical ones more than the moments of Les Miserables-style earnestness; I’d take ‘Let’s Play Cop’ or ‘Why Can’t I Get Laid?’ (brilliantly delivered by Joe Shefer) over ‘We Can Change Our Lives’ any day. But then I’m a homosexual without the ‘musicals’ gene. Sometimes, too, the ambitious attempt to distill White’s accounts of rather nuanced political questions is not fully realized. A song about the Seattle community’s fights against ‘Initiative 13’, for instance, ended up simply proving confusing – chiefly since police officers were shown wearing gay leather caps.

The middle sections of States of Desire generated the second part of Desire’s first act, and a succession of less likely gay homes is introduced: Kansas, Santa Fe, Salt Lake City, Houston. This is where the sophistication of White’s approach strikes home. Decades ahead of others, he sought to transcend the clichéd-but-true abbreviations and shorthand of early gay subculture (the ways in which – still today – we can often feel that the bar we are in might be anywhere on the planet) by insisting on gay men’s individuality, singularity and (dare we admit it?) even maturity. In striking respects, contemporary gay culture often felt shallower and lesser than what was being represented on stage, for all the political, social and legal liberalization of the intervening decades (though this is very much an uneven picture in the States, today. Having given birth to gay liberation, America now finds itself trumped by European countries’ legislatures, and those of many other nations too). Of course, you can argue that this largely involved replacing one set of stereotypes with a few more, but, when the cast sweetly partner and sing ‘The Cowboys are Waltzing in Houston Tonight’, who is complaining?

Act Two moves through the South – New Orleans, Fort Lauderdale, Memphis. One of the best vignettes in White’s book relates to a Tennessee-born and –bound couple, Carter and A.J. The best of the night’s songs is generated by their bickering and self-imposed misery in refusing to agree where to move to, though both concede that anywhere would be more rewarding than redneck Memphis: hence, ‘Lord, will we ever get out of here?’

When we hit the East Coast, Desire bucks White’s book’s organisation, starting with the city he closes on, Washington D.C. The tune is decent – ‘Senator, a Word in your Ear’ – but I felt the reorganization a pity. By closing on the seat of government, White was predicting, quite correctly, that the decades to come would find American government perpetually preoccupied, for good and bad, by the question of gay rights, in a way that had never been witnessed or foreseen.
Murphy and Scott-Presland instead progress by way of Boston to Fire Island (which features an accomplished number about a gay houseboy, ‘The Best Job in the World’) and New York City. White’s own love of Manhattan was, perhaps, so acute that he deliberately buried the very long chapter on it before tackling Boston or Washington, to avoid accusations of Big Apple-centrism. However, Desire’s reordering means that New York City – in truth, for the past century, the cradle of American gay dreams, cultures, lifestyles, books, plays, fashions and lives – is musically represented only by Desire’s reflection on the onset of AIDS, ‘Erase the Tapes.’ There’s nothing wrong or inaccurate here. It’s just a pity that the metropolis to which huge numbers of provincial American gay men have moved since time immemorial becomes identified only with the panic, misery, fear and loss of the early 1980s.

Still, ‘Erase the Tapes’ – sung by all the cast – was a moving and bold closing song, very much the equal of material in the small number of AIDS musicals generated to date (William Finn’s March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland; Bill Russell’s Elegies for Angels, Punks, and Raging Queens - soon itself to be revived at London’s Shaw Theatre) – poignant and welcomingly unforced.

The staging of Desire was… budget-friendly, perhaps, but intelligent in its use of a slideshow backdrop. Excerpts of White’s commentary were interpolated throughout by a narrator-figure. This gave us the virtue of White’s insights, but at the same time distracted from the efficacy with which his journalism allowed each character to speak for himself, in his own idiom and very much on his own terms. Choreography was as broad-ranging and substantial as the show itself – even including a Native American piece.

In a sense, States of Desire, for all its merits, is inevitably a historical tome, and to a degree I share White’s own incomprehension at why anyone would conceive a musical around it today. But Desire did much to justify the premise, odd as it might be. It – and especially its cast, among whom I might single out Michael Woodhams’s superlative delivery - deserve a wider, bigger production – and audience. Do keep your eyes peeled.

Richard Canning’s most recent book is E M Forster: Brief Lives (Hesperus Press. His 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read and Between Men 2 (both 2009), featuring McConnell, are published by Alyson Books.

Review: Subtle Bodies by Peter Dubé

2010-07-24T13:49:00.003Z

Subtle Bodies
Peter Dubé

Published by Lethe Press

Review by Colin Herd

The work of Montreal-based writer Peter Dubé has consistently tapped into the fruitful vines that intertwine the political and aesthetic project of French Surrealism with a contemporary, radical artistic practice. His earlier fictions, such as ‘Hovering World’, his 2002 novel, and ‘At the Bottom of the Sky’, a collection of interlinked short stories that came out in 2007, have at their core a commitment to and investigation of the transformative power of desire and subjectivity, an exploration of psychological states and their relation to truth and reality, which ultimately and sometimes in subtle ways tip over into marvel, fantasy and the realms beyond ordinary perception. In 2008, Dubé edited the anthology ‘Madder Love: Queer Men and the precincts of Surrealism’, which featured the work of a range of contemporary queer writers, including many younger writers. In a substantial and personal introductory essay, Dubé recounts his interest in and fascination with Surrealism, confronting head-on the problem of André Breton’s evident homophobia and flashing his torchlight towards reclaiming ‘what is beautiful, complex and untamed in surrealism for queers’.

‘Subtle Bodies’, Dubé’s second novel, due out from Lethe in August this year, is a further stone in the path towards this reclamation, a fiction based on the suicide of the French Surrealist René Crevel. Dubé transforms extensive research on Crevel’s life and career into a headily poetic meditation on surrealism, homosexuality and politics. Crevel is both one of the most interestingly complex figures associated with the Surrealist movement, and, from where I’m sitting, one of the most attractive. His novels are also perhaps the central point where experimental queer fiction and Surrealism meet. As the poet Edouard Roditi has written, Crevel was a ‘marginal or different kind of Surrealist’:

‘Whereas Aragon made his career as a novelist only after abandoning Surrealism, and also became overtly homosexual, much to the surprise of many of his communist friends, only after the death of his wife, the Russian-born novelist Elsa Triolet, Crevel continued for several years to be the only novelist, avowed homosexual, and Paris society playboy of the Whole Surrealist group.’

In tender, taut and lyrical prose, Dubé’s novel re-establishes homosexuality as an important tenet of Crevel’s writing, inseparably in-bed with his commitments to Communism and Surrealism. In one particularly strong passage, Crevel delivers a speech in front of the Worker’s League, with the Surrealists also present. Crevel’s passionate speech points towards a kind of utopia at the heart of which are desire and sensitivity. For all its poetry and visionary beauty, for all its ambition, Crevel’s speech bombs and is received with silence and a lack of understanding. By fictionalizing Crevel’s life, though, Dubé points towards an imaginative reality where the utopia described might just be in reach, where Crevel’s dream of a desire-based socialist society could exist:

Imagine, I said, a world built for your desires, for your enjoyment, for the actualization of your dreams and pleasures, and their proliferation. A time and place in which the sensual and intellectual functions of work were given as much value as the instrumental requirements. Imagine a land where public spaces are decorated and work places gilded. A city designed as much for leisure as for labor because there was no difference detectable between them.

The anxiety caused by Breton’s silent but strong disapproval of Crevel’s homosexuality is a central theme of Dubé’s novel, which imaginatively reconstructs the thoughts, memories and voices that flood Crevel’s mind as the gas from his oven floods his flat, on the 18th of June 1935. Three chapters make up the novel, entitled ‘Bodies of Speech’, ‘Bodies of Desire’ and ‘Bodies of Power’, but the thematic division that those designations suggest is much less clear-cut, much more overlapping within the text itself. Dubé’s first chapter begins at the end of his narrative, with Crevel pouring a glass of pastis and turning on the gas, triggering a memory of his first encounter with Breton. Desperate to impress the by all accounts very impressive Breton, Crevel ingratiates himself to him, and the group that is to become the Surrealists, by performing séances (insincere, in the first instance). To the delight of Breton and others, Crevel meditates and delivers spectacular, darkly bizarre, irresistible and sometimes violent spoken-word performances. Rather than communicating with any force beyond the grave however, Crevel’s narratives come from the recesses of his desire and his soul. Crevel is tortured by his fraudulence in these séances, but eventually consoles himself that by speaking automatically and spontaneously from his desire and his soul, he is in fact doing what he pretends to do. By confronting his darkest desires and investigating his sexual imagination, Dubé’s Crevel almost feels like a forebear of a contemporary writer like Dennis Cooper.

‘Subtle Bodies’ is therefore an important creative-critical text that should prompt a reassessment of Crevel’s writing. This is especially important for a writer like Crevel whose work has consistently been mis-understood and mis-represented, most notoriously by Ezra Pound. But that agenda doesn’t take away from its own qualities as a novel. Dubé captures the foreboding atmosphere of Paris in the 30s, and particularly impressive is the way Dubé renders the ‘voices’ that plague Crevel almost as characters in their own right, distinct from Crevel’s own voice, both frightening and plausible. ‘Subtle Bodies’ succeeds on all fronts.

Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical).

Star Trek: What’s LGBTTQQI2 Got To Do With It?

2010-07-17T02:10:00.003Z

In conjunction with the new Utopia issue of Chroma, here is a special feature about the queerness of Star Trek by May Lui.

There has always been a sprinkling of queer presence in the Star Trek franchise, even though most of the representations have been fleeting and most often fail the ubiquitous “queer agenda”. Smile.

In this essay I will describe a brief overview of each of the five Star Trek series in relation to queerness, and then do a more micro level critical review and analysis, with a queer and anti-racist lens, of five specific episodes from the Star Trek genre, and two character analyses.

There is a certain irony in how we search for representation of ourselves within a mainstream network television context. How queer/ radical can it possibly be? We one thinks about the machinery that is selling advertising, and the effort to appear to as wide an audience as possible, and of course the inevitable “community standards”, leads network television to be somewhat of a dubious place to find good representation.

And while Star Trek has had a reputation for pushing against that, somewhat, what with the interracial kiss between Kirk and Uhura, and other moments I’ll be mentioning in this essay, ultimately, there is a culture of conservatism, of being connected to the status quo.

But what is it about the Star Trek series? The tight outfits? Which lend one to more overt thoughts than show like “Law and Order”? The fact that it’s set in the future, so there’s a safety in distance, especially around more “controversial” social issues? The metaphor of the different races of aliens standing in for various cultures and cultural values of planet Earth’s inhabitants still matters, providing the emotional distance and symbolism that’s sometimes necessary for people to truly “get” social issues that may seem abstract. I’m not sure.

And yet, we search, and sometimes we find. None of the episodes or representations we find are earth-shattering, but sometimes, it’s enough to just see a glimmer, and to know that shows such as Star Trek reach so many people, and can carry impact.

….

TOS= The Original Series
TNG= The Next Generation
DS9= Deep Space Nine
V= Voyager
ENT= Enterprise

In TOS the homoerotic analysis of the connection between Kirk and Spock has been done to death, far more prolifically than I could cover in this space, and I need to confess that TOS was never my favourite of the series, simply because I was born too late to find the buttons and flashing lights “cool” in any way. This series was the birth of slash fiction though, for which we are all forever grateful – and which YouTube has made ever more visible and possible.

Then there’s TNG, the most mainstream and well-loved series. And it’s time for true confessions. When I was in graduate school many years ago I took a popular culture course in sociology and wrote a basic “script” for TNG as my final paper. The theme was on same-gender/queer attraction and what happens on The Enterprise when the crew no longer carries the restraints of heteronormativity. I will be discussing the only three remotely queerish episodes I could think of from the TNG archives, “Angel One, “The Outcast” and “The Host”.

The structure of the DS9 series was the most “unlike” the classic Trek framework. It was set on a space station, not on a ship, and the cast was divided, half Starfleet and half a motley assortment of folks who neither respected nor valued the presence on the space station. The presence of Starfleet at DS9 can be critically read as an occupying army, even as they were presented as benevolent. This is being told from their perspective of course. Politically, I fell this series took the most political risks, with the parallels between the Cardassian occupation of Bajor and the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the occupied territories. Obviously looking into this in more depth is beyond the scope of this paper. This series also lacked the presence of a “hot babe” character, inserted to appeal to the “geeky straight boy” demographic, even though both Kira Nures and Jadzia Dax were extremely cute. The DS9 series is famous by now for one of the few amazing woman/woman kisses on network television, between Dax and her former wife Lenara, in “Rejoined”.
Then we come to Voyager, which, for the presence of four characters of colour (Tuvok, Chakotay, Harry Kim and B’elana Torres) is my favourite of the Treks. The character of the Doctor has always seemed queer to me, and the episode “Body and Soul” shows us the Doctor residing inside the body of Seven of Nine.

When Enterprise first aired, I called it a “white boy fest” It didn’t appeal to me, the characters we all fairly flat in terms of personality, and the lack of a strong presence of people of colour left me feeling unenthused. While I watched very little of it, my sources tell me there were no episodes with any queer content, either straight up (ha ha) or sub rosa.

Episode Reviews: Summary

There are two episodes featuring straight women which attempt to challenge both gender roles and sexuality (sometimes). TNG’s “Angel One” and Voyager’s “Body and Soul”.

As for an overt attempt to address both gender identity and desire, The TNG episode “The Outcast” was widely viewed at the time as an attempt to portray the “reversal” of what homophobia would look like on a genderless planet, in which some folks exhibited gender, considered unnatural.

I will look at the character of Neelix, the Talaxian cook, ambassador and child care worker from Voyager.

And while not technically queer, Dr. Phlox who is a Denobulan from the series “Enterprise” is from a race of people with a markedly queer take on relationships, monogamy and family structure. I figure he’s worth a mention.

And finally, two episodes featuring the Trill have always stood out for me as distinctive moments where sexuality, gender identity and sexual orientation combine: TNG’s “The Host” and DS9’s “Rejoined”. A fascinating species, they were the most radical species to challenge the mainstream audience around who gets to be what gender, and the attraction to partners that Trills may have throughout their many lifetimes.

ANGEL ONE
This episode aired during the first season of TNG. There’s a planet in which women are dominant and men are submissive. The women are tall, statuesque, Amazon-like, and are the leaders of the small colony. Men are portrayed in more sexualized ways, are interestingly “feminized” since they are shorter and slighter than the women, have higher voices and have less body hair. Their attire is very much about revealing skin and being less intelligent and having less value than women. Yet the women are not similarly “masculinized” (more body and facial hair, deeper voices). This is of course to maintain commercial value to the viewers who are very restrictedly grounded in traditional notions of femininity.

Riker, who beams down with Yar and Troi, the two female bridge officers, dresses in the manner that men dress, and is giggled at by Troi and Yar.

But a pause for a moment to consider markers of gender and queerness, and how even in the ways the characters played out in this episode, including a make-out session between Riker and the leader, named Beata, heterosexuality was continually marked and reinforced. It seemed like a desperately challenging writing job, to switch the gender roles (somewhat) and yet to doggedly maintain heteronormativity.

One example of this inability to be removed from the here and now in which the episode is talking place, happens during the make-out session. Riker and Beata are about to kiss and he pulls back (perhaps a belated attempt to remain a professional and detached Starfleet officer) and she says, coyly, head turned to one side “Don’t you find me attractive?” This threw me out of the story. If we recall that the character is the leader of a community, and she is a member of a species in which women are dominant, that struck me as something that this character would never say. That is the line of someone who is has less structural power in a society.

And if we think about attraction and how it’s mostly sexually constructed, if the norm is large tall woman with short slender man, then wouldn’t Riker in fact, not be attractive to most women on Angel One? Wouldn’t he be a bit of a freak? Wouldn’t it be even queer to like a man such as Riker?

DS9 BODY AND SOUL
Before I get into analyzing this episode I would like to look at the characters of the Doctor, and Seven of Nine.

The Doctor was portrayed in very queer ways throughout the series. He had a queer aesthetic about him, and presented without the hyper masculinity that is so often portrayed as straight (Tom Paris, Chakotay, even Tuvok and Harry Kim are most assuredly straight). The Doctor is soft spoken and intellectual and a bit arrogant. He speaks in a sincere and often sing-song voice. He’s also portrayed as “soft” and emotional, in his struggle to become more than his programming as an Emergency Medical Hologram.

The character of Seven of Nine was introduced in Season Four. She was the first “babe” regular of the series, given that the other blond character, Kes, was more of a child-imp-elf than a babe. As a former Borg struggling to regain her humanity, she was the classic “fem-bot” of science fiction. A gorgeous woman by society’s standards, with robotic feelings and mannerisms, seemingly devoid of emotion who soeaks in the technical-geek way that the majority demographic of Trek loves.

I really enjoyed this episode, mostly because we got to see the character of Seen of Nine transformed. With the emotional and demonstrative Doctor “inside of her” and controlling her, the audience saw the character in ways we had never seen before.

So we have on mainstream television, the character of a straight woman, playing a character who is a straight man who is played gay. Victor Victoria, 24th century style.

The synopsis is that Kim, Seven and the Doctor are captured by a race of people who see photonic lifeforms, such as the Doctor, as illegal. The photonics on their world seem to have been used in subservient ways and have staged a revolt. To survive, the Doctor hides inside Seven, and takes over her body and functioning.

Seven is shown experiencing senses such as smell and taste, eating and enjoying food, getting thoroughly drunk, and being flirted with and responding to flirting. She’s bubbly and perky, exactly how the Doctor would be. Sort of. The male captain develops a crush on Seven, and the heterosexual and homophobic Doctor inside Seven, rebuffs him repeatedly. At the same time, the Doctor inside Seven develops romantic and sexual feelings for a female tactical officer serving in the medical bay on the ship that’s holding them captive.

In one scene, the captain prepares a romantic date with Seven, and when he kisses her, is quickly rejected by the Doctor.

Captain: I’ve never met a woman like you before.
Seven/Doctor: There are no women like me.

And in the goodbye scene between the Doctor and the captain the Doctor says “There are many women who would enjoy the company of a man like you, I’m just not one of them.” Love it!

THE OUTCAST
The brief synopsis of this episode is there is a race of people, the J’naii, who are androgynous and do not live in a world with gender, which is considered freakish and unnatural. This premise is fascinating, since any first year student in women’s studies or gender studies should be able to tell you, gender IS freakish and unnatural. The levels of societal restrictions of behaviour based on gender are huge and immense. Anyone who has bumped up against the boundaries of how gender is performed can tell you what that’s like.

Riker, the epitome of masculinity, embodies the sexuality that had been imbued in Kirk. The Star Trek people didn’t want to duplicate these features in yet another captain of the Enterprise so all the “hot sex with aliens” storylines go to Riker. It’s Riker who falls in love with Soren, a J’naii who was born, as once in a while J’naii are born, with gender. She lives a life of secrecy and shame.

I can see how social issues needs to be couched within the content of “alien” cultures, since many mainstream folks would reject them outright if this show was straightforwardly about gender and sexual orientation, but of course it still irks me that it has to be couched, since it can then be misread.

Riker falls in love with Soren, their affair is discovered, and she is to undergo “psychotectic therapy” to restore her to her natural state, that of being genderless. Riker and Worf attempt an illegal rescue but it’s too late, she has already begun the treatment and no longer is in love with Riker.

I’d like to talk about the J’naii as a race. All the actors who play J’naii are women with stern faces and low-pitched voices. Like how most alient races are portrayed, they all have the same hairstyle. While this collapsing of difference is always annoying (even while one may see a Black or Asian J’naii or in other episodes Latino or South Asian Romulans) when dealing with gender, and genderlessness, the issue of looks and presentation become heightened. We are always looking for markers of gender, as it’s something that we’ve been taught to find real, and to make real.

NEELIX
The character of Neelix, the sexless boyfriend of Kes, the elf-woman-child is extremely stereotypically gay. He is a heterosexual man, yet he is in touch with his feelings, dresses in bright clothing, has a hairdo that defies description and all the jobs he does can be seen as stereotypically femininen. He’s the cook who’s cooking is made fun of, he gets people to talk about their feelings, he rarely expresses anger, he does child care for his god-daughter Naomi Wildman, he’s not in Starfleet (which has a way of de-masculinizing most men in Trek) he’s short and he’s a bit of a buffoon, therefore not a physical threat to anyone.

When I see Neelix with Kes I just get a lesbian-fag vibe from the both of them. She’s “cute” and “adorable” and has a femmy baby butch way about her, if that makes any sense. Neelix is simply gay, and fabulous.

DR PHLOX
There are a number of parallels to be drawn between Dr. Phlox and Neelix. Both are odd-looking aliens, the only of their kind on their ship, both present a softer, kinder masculinity, something almost always read as queer in Western culture, but the most queer aspect about Dr. Phlox is the way relationships are structured in his society.

So Dr. Phlox’s society states that everyone can have up to three spouses, and each of his three wives have two other husbands.

Wow.

Yes it’s still heterosexual, since I suppose they figured they could only rock so many boats, but when I heard that first reveal I was quite impressed. Especially because the character was presented as a down-to-earth person, practical, and not particularly sexually alluring. Since all the yammerings about “sin” and “fornication” come about from the usual suspects when any talk of consensual polyamory, non-monogamy and alternative ways of demonstrating romantic love, relationships and child-rearing goes on in the mainstream. As we well know, showing in a positive light anything other than strictly heterosexual, nuclear family, and strict gender roles was a huge risk for prime-time network television, even if buried in a character that was marked with “otherness”.

And I like to think that in a society that open, that fluidity of gender as well as queer attractions and orientations, would go right along with their open practice of multiple marriages.

THE HOST
Beverly Crusher falls in love with Odan, a Trill and embarks on a rocking love affair. We learn the Trill are a “joined” species, with the essence of the person being not in the physical body they inhabit, but in the host, a squishy gooey stomach-looking thing that lives inside the outer shell, technically like a parasite inside a host body. The host of the Trill Odan becomes ill and dies. While waiting for the new body, Crusher realizes that the Trill needs a temporary body, and Riker (again, Riker!) volunteers.

The first fail is that Odan, inside the body of Riker, succumbs to his feelings for Beverly and they have sex. If Beverly, like the rest of us, is trained to look only at the physical body of a person, and if she’s never been attracted to Riker before, why would she be attracted enough to him to have sex with him? It seems implausible, and even a bit insulting to straight people, that they can just have sex with whoever, as long as it’s the correct gender.

So we all know how it turns out. Riker’s body starts to die, Odan is removed from Riker just in time, and the new host body arrives. Crusher says “Send him in” and in walks a woman (5 mins in video below). She stares at the woman, and rejects her as her lover Odan. After the surgery, Odan comes to see Beverly one more time, and again she rejects him. His signature move (smooth move by the way) is to take her hand and kiss the inside of her wrist. The female Odan does this, and leaves. The queer audience is left with the knowledge that Crusher has given up on a great love, simply because of her own homophobia. But we also know that of course this love affair had to end.

As the first introduction to this groovy species, we are set up for much more interesting combinations of Trill relationships with the character Jadzia Dax in DS9.

REJOINED
As a permanent member of the crew, all the Trill moments that DS9 explores, are from Jazdia’s perspective, unlike “The Host” in which it’s all from Beverly’s perspective.

Dax talks about having been a man, and having been married to various women, as well as the husbands she’s had when she’s been in other female bodies. Heteronormativity prevails, as well as serial monogamy, and of course essentialist notions of gender.

But.

The idea that the host, Dax, has had multiple relationships, with women and men, lovers, spouses, partners, speaks to a queerness not seen before on Trek. Bisexuality is too pale a term to describe it, but the richness of this kind of sexuality held within people of a species is fascinating to me, and perhaps speaks to the best of any science fiction/ speculative fiction genre, in that it nudges our imagination to see and feel a world beyond what’s in front of us.

In “Rejoined” Dax is reunited with the host that was her wife from when she was Torias Dax. The rules of Trill are that once a host body dies, as Torias did, contact and interaction with past family members, including past spouses, is forbidden. Dax’s former wife, Lenara Kahn, comes aboard DS9 as part of a Trill science team.

The plot point of this “forbidden” stuff is interesting, as it allows other members of the science team, including Lenara’s brother, to police the behaviour of Lenara and Dax not because of homophobia, but because of the Trill rules. They would be acting this was if Dax the symbiont was inside a male host too, dontcha know?

And the kiss. Ahh the kiss. Super wow.

During some experiments, there is an explosion, Lenara is almost killed, and Dax risks her own life to save Lenara and realizes her feelings. She will risk being expelled from Trill, and dying when the host Jadzia dies. But of course, Lenara is not able to take that risk, and leaves, breaking both their hearts, and most of ours while watching this episode.

And while I love that this was done with Dax being in the body of a woman, what if the character of her former wife had been in the body of a man? Or if Dax was still Kurzon? That’s the thing with Trills, so many queer possibilities!

May Lui is based in Toronto, Canada and loves writing about pop culture and politics. Her blog is http://maysie.ca

Poetry Review: Tiresias’s Confession by András Gerevich

2010-07-10T14:47:00.006Z

Tiresias’s Confession
András Gerevich

Published by Corvina Books

Reviewed by Colin Herd

'Tiresias's Confession', published by Corvina, provides the first full-length opportunity for an Anglophone readership to enjoy the poetry of András Gerevich, though Chroma readers may remember the title poem from its appearance in issue 5. As the title might suggest, many of Gerevich's poems are characterized by intimacy. Invariably lyrics written in the first person singular, they describe and disclose intimate scenarios, often to do with longing and desire. In 'The New Garbage Boy', the speaking subject watches the ‘muscular, suntanned arms’ of the ‘garbage boy’, until the boy meets his eyes with a ‘blur of shame mixed with pride’. In ‘Cage’, a teenager enters a church secretly in love with his best friend and finds himself unable to articulate a prayer in the ‘grating’, ‘noiseless’ suddenly John Cagean soundscape. Some of the most effective poems in the volume are when this film of intimacy clings tightest around the body, when disclosure is pushed inventively towards the erotic; for example, ‘Marmaris’ is a series of haiku, the first of which reads:

‘In a racing car
the buzz of a wasp:
your body beneath clothes’.

Part of the attraction of these erotic lines and poems is that it is here that Gerevich cuts through and interrogates what at other times feels like an uncomfortably high investment in a stable subject position and lyric voice. In ‘Marmaris’, the focus is squarely on the lover-figure and the Turkish Port City. It becomes difficult to tell which way the metaphors are working. Is Marmaris like a lover or his lover like Marmaris in these images?

‘Date clusters dangling,
bustle on the shore:
your hairy chest.’

In ‘Mediterranean’, which feels like a companion piece, sexual union undoes individuality and cannibalizes self-hood: ‘Our bed is rocking like the sea beneath a ship’; ‘The cells of my body are shoals of excited fish’; ‘The gulls are ripping the kraken to shreds: it chews and digests its own body’. I love the indulgently erotic language play here: the cells/shoals/gulls half-rhyme and the sibilance of ‘sh’.

One of the quirks of this book is that there are five different translators, credited below each poem. I half-wondered whether this might result in five different András Gerevichs but in fact that isn’t, that I’ve been able to tell, the case. Of all five, perhaps George Szirtes’s translations are the most linguistically rich and playful, less stark, though this could be reflected in the original Hungarian. One of Szirtes’s translations is the title poem. Last in the volume, together with three others that also take Greek mythological figures as their rudder: 'Odysseus', 'Patroclus' and 'Tiresias's Prophecy', they form a kind of suite and take a side-step away from the unguardedly autobiographical content of much of the book. The two Tiresias poems bring that referential touchstone into focus. Tiresias is re-imagined in a contemporary half-reality, half-dreamscape, caught in-between, on a bench in one poem and on a bus in the other. Tiresias is caught in what might clumsily be termed a crisis of gender identity. Gerevich’s intimate and confessional style are perfectly suited to evoke his character’s real-life gender uncertainty and then even more touchingly his dream-life gender identification: ‘I have no idea what I am,/ old or young, boy or girl’; ‘in my dreams I am always a woman,/ wild and desirable, and wholly out of reach,/ adored and admired by men.’ It’s a testament to Geverich’s skill that he’s able to re-cast and humanize well-trodden Tiresias in a way that feels like a good fit, but unexpected at the same time, like putting on a sweater that should be way too large but it feels just snug.

Poems from New England, Provincetown, the Med, Hungary and London suggest that Gerevich is enviably well traveled and on the evidence of this book, I’ll be willing to follow him wherever his poems go next.

Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical).

Film Shorts Review: Boys on Film 2

2010-07-03T11:22:00.001Z

Directors: Till Kleinert, Håkon Liu, Mathieu Salmon, Soman Chainani, Julián Hernández, Craig Boreham, Trevor Anderson, Arthur Halpern, Tim Hunter

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Max Fincher

Boys on Film 2: In Too Deep is the second instalment of a three-volume series released by Pecadillo that showcases international short filmmakers’ work.The nine films in this collection are by turns erotic, funny, imaginative, artistic and tender. The directors have either won awards at short film festivals or have been shortlisted for such.

Many of the films explore how the boundaries of relationships are tested between men. The opening film, the superb Cowboy, directed by Till Kleinert, explores bi-sexuality. An estate agent, scouting out a remote farm as a possible investment, meets a taciturn, limber boy. The boy tells him he has slept with all the girls in the village and is kept a prisoner by the farm’s owners. They have sex, in a scene that is powerfully erotic as the estate agent realizes he desires the boy more than his girlfriend. However, the following morning, a nasty surprise lies in wait in the form of a rabbit trap, and the combine harvester the boy has been repairing. Kleinert does an excellent job of establishing a foreboding atmosphere of menace, through images of the derelict farm at sunset and a soundtrack of deep-toned synth chords.

Both Working it Out and Love Bite also show how relationships are tested, but making us laugh in the process. While working out at the gym, Marcus and Peter encounter a hunk called Jeremy. In a very funny scene, Marcus takes out his jealous frustration by pounding the cross-trainer when Peter, friendly and open to a threesome, chats to Jeremy. Meanwhile, Love Bite plays ironically with the conventional coming-out moment between two teenagers. Instead of Noah admitting that he would like to suck his school chum Gus in the way Gus suspects, Noah sucks him in quite a different way.

Similarly, Kali Ma, Weekend in the Countryside and Lucky Blue all explore teenage sexuality and love, but in very different moods. Kali Ma made me laugh out loud in its story of a protective, food-loving Indian mother who goes on the warpath to take revenge on her son’s homophobic tormentor. With a literal tour-de-force performance by Khamini Khanna involving a pepper spray, a felt tip pen and her sari, the boys ultimately become friends under the terrifying command to ‘eat!’ by Mum. Weekend in the Countryside explores how friendship between boys can be mistaken and turn nasty. Pierre and Marc go on a weekend holiday to Marc’s father’s home in the countryside. When Marc tries it on with Pierre (a beautiful girlish-looking boy) and is turned down, Pierre is traumatized by his three Alsatian dogs in the grounds. Pierre leaves with the parting shot by Marc that he is a ‘faggot’. Håkon Liu’s Lucky Blue offers us a promising, tender vision of teenage self-discovery between two boys, one of whom, Olle, expresses his longing through karaoke. Set on a campsite in Sweden, there is a touching gentle feel to this film, epitomized by the fluttering, caged canary, Lucky Blue, that escapes into freedom.

Isolated and remote spaces where desire and sexuality can be explored are a theme of this collection. Bramadero, by Julian Hernández, is set inside a skyscraper under construction in Mexico City. The silence of the film (there is little music and no dialogue) contrasts strikingly with the sense of a perpetual buzz of the city in the background. As the camera lovingly circulates around the sculpture-like bodies of Hassen and Jonás, they engage in a pas-de-deux of narcissistic desire and sex. Erotic, artistic, and at moments, disquieting, we experience the pleasure of sex in a public space that is imagined as an intimate, private world.

The potential to create interior, imagined spaces to achieve happiness and sexual fulfilment define the remaining two films in this collection: The Island and Futures and Derivatives. The Canadian filmmaker, Trevor Anderson, takes a homophobic email that says ‘all gays should be put on an island to give each other AIDS’, as inspiration to narrate in an ironic tone his musings about what such an island could be like. A homotopia where sex is readily available, there are endless cocktails, parties and moonflowers, and HIV positive people are elevated to the status of gods, Anderson observes that the fantasy of the island ‘has a long history’. A clever use of animation creates a colourful, optimistic paradise that turns around such bigotry. Opening up the mind to new experiences and perceptions also characterizes Futures and Derivatives. Three lawyers at a law-firm hire a temp overnight to produce a presentation to an important client in the morning. The presentation is invaded by butterflies and strange colourful, psychedelic creations that sends each partner into a dizzying new world of personal possibilities, allowing them to see themselves in a new light.

An accomplished collection that is amusing and inventive, Boys on Film 2 shows us the ability of shorts to capture powerfully mysterious, erotic and wonderful moments.

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.

Art Review: Primitive by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

2010-06-28T15:29:00.007Z

Phantoms of Nabua
by Apichatpong Weerasethakul

BFI Southbank until July 3
Chroma Launch event July 2

It’s not every issue of Chroma that has an image by a Palme d’Or-winning filmmaker on the cover. Maybe it’s the Utopia theme, but there is a significant serendipity that brings the magazine together with Apichatpong Weerasethakul (known to his English-speaking friends and fans as Joe) the winner at this year’s Cannes Festival for his film Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, which has as multiple an origin as any queer utopia could wish. Chroma launches at the BFI on Friday 2nd July, the penultimate day to see Apichatpong’s Phantoms of Nabua in the Gallery (free entry). Part of a project that included a spaceship, a Monkey Ghost, reincarnation and adolescent sexuality and, as political protest, Phantoms of Nabua echoes many of the themes found in our Utopia issue.

During an on-stage conversation at the BFI (which he nearly couldn’t attend due to the closure of the British Embassy in Thailand during the red-shirt protests, and due to the Home Office’s highly restrictive artist visa rules – reminders that we live far short of utopia) shortly after his win at Cannes, Apichatpong said that he’d become interested in Boonmee as a teenager, after hearing about him from a priest in Khon Kaen where he grew up. It was when he travelled to the village of Nabua, in the Isan province in the north-east of Thailand, that Apichatpong was reminded of Boonmee, a resident of Isan. His interest in Boonmee was, literally, reincarnated through his work with the young men of Nabua, a generation raised fatherless after an infamous conflict. As Apichatpong notes, “This small village was one of the places the Thai army occupied from the 60s to the early 80s to curb the communist insurgents. The soldiers erected a base to administer the villagers' daily activities. The locals were psychologically and physically abused on the grounds of withholding information. Women were raped. Some were murdered in their homes. Consequently, the villagers, mostly farmers, ﬂed into the jungle. Most of them didn't understand the word Communism though they were accused of being communists,” leading to the gun battle that sparked a long-running conflict. Working over several months with the young men, Apichatpong created PRIMITIVE, a video installation that fuses their relationship with their absent fathers (and with the current Thai government) with the story of Boonmee’s reincarnations.
PRIMITIVE itself has been incarnated in multiple forms: as a multi-film installation, as an online installation at Animate Projects, one of the co-producers, and as a limited-edition artist’s book created by CUJO, an artist’s book magazine series that’s part of Edizioni Zero, Milan. CUJO kindly gave Chroma permission to reproduce two images and two short texts from this black-and-red book that combines fragmentary diary entries, film scripts, excerpts from the Boonmee book and sketches of the Monkey Ghost to accompany the black-and-white (and red-and-black) photographs taken during the making of the short films in Nabua. While Apichatpong’s work has a deserved reputation for a whimsical, dreamy, often erotic, gentleness, here the political subtext of his work – or rather, the way that his political intelligence is compatible, and entwined with, his lyrical sensibility – becomes visible. Opposite a brush-and-ink drawing of what might be a volcano stands the text: “They then became victims of Field Marshal Sarit Dhanarajata’s Article 17.” Flares shoot up brilliantly white into huge night skies in some photographs. Young men in military uniform mug for the camera – are they performers, or soldiers? Isan is a poor province, and many of the young men have joined the army that fired on their fathers. According to Apichatpong, some of the young men he worked with were stationed in Bangkok during the recent protests, and faced the possibility of being ordered to shoot protestors, history repeating itself as if the hauntings that Apichatpong had staged in Nabua for PRIMITIVE were coming, perversely, to life.
Premiered at the Haus der Kunst in Munich at the end of the Berlin Film Festival last year, PRIMITIVE travelled to FACT in Liverpool, and one film – Phantoms of Nabua, a haunting late-night jungle excursion marked by flares and a fireball, a film at once teenage kicks and traumatic echo – is currently screening in the Gallery at the BFI. The young soldier-actors appear again here to viewers lounging on the floor in the dark, an unusual position for public film viewing in the Western world. There are boys kicking a fire-ball, watching a giant screen, playing a war/game under a blinding sodium light. The lines between sport and battle, between making a movie and re-opening a conflict, are deliberately blurred as the film interrogates the conventions of the Hollywood war movie (including some explosive special effects), and particularly the jungle-set Vietnam movie, to produce a very different portrait of the male psyche.
It’s impossible not to see, in the films of boys running joyfully/angrily through the streets, or playing sweetly/bored-to-aggression by the river, a queer sensibility – nowhere more than in the burning red night-vision light of desire that illuminates and shadows the young men sleeping in the balsa-wood spaceship that they built in a field as part of the project. These saturated images, reproduced stunningly in the CUJO book, glow with a particular intensity that shows an utterly original artist fusing a new kind of queer cinema: one in which the politics of desire and the desires of politics are utterly entwined. Utopias don’t come easily: like the spaceship, which never takes off but instead becomes an unofficial youth hang-out and sleepover, they have to be fashioned and they never quite function as they’re supposed to. In Apichatpong’s vision, utopia is not created through the drive towards a better future, but by return, reincarnation, reproduction. It’s hard not to be haunted by these irresistible ghosts – and, of course, by the fact that Uncle Boonmee is the only Palme d’Or-winning film ever to feature a princess having sex with a talking catfish.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Review: Love Speaks Its Name

2010-06-19T16:49:00.001Z

Love Speaks Its Name
Gay and Lesbian Love Poems
Edited by J. D. McClatchy

Published by Everyman’s Library

Reviewed by Paul Kane

Just under 150 poems are contained in this compact volume, arranged in various sections which follow the process of falling in and out of love: Longing, Looking, Loving, Ecstasy, Anxiety and Aftermath. In life, the last two are optional and not really to be recommended, but if everyone and in particular poets skipped them, our literature would be much the poorer. 'Domestic as a plate' (a simile taken from Millay's poem ‘Grown-up’) does not really cut it.

Among the poets represented here are the famous and the indisputably great - Sappho, Shakespeare, Whitman, Lorca, Auden, Elisabeth Bishop - yet there are poets to be discovered in these pages too. One such is Naomi Replansky, whose poem 'The Oasis' traces a renewal or a reawakening of love. Here's the last verse:

I thought the desert ended, and I felt
The fountains leap.
Then gratitude could answer gratitude
Till sleep entwined with sleep.
Despair once cried: No passion’s left inside!
It lied. It lied.

There are a number of Cavafy's sensual and elegiac poems: all about beautiful sexy young men who will yet grow old and die. A single theme, virtually, but he riffs on it superbly. ‘The Badgaged Shoulder' is an astounding poem, especially when read in the light of the tragedies wrought by AIDS. That last line – ‘the blood of love against my lips’ - induces a very definite frisson.

It was a welcome experience to encounter Housman's verse once more. On one level he is an unpretentious and uncomplicated poet and there is nothing fancy about his verse forms at all. But the direct way in which he communicates emotion is extraordinary: heart to heart. Every poem of Frank O’Hara’s is wonderful and there are four here. Once heard, his voice is irresistible Finally, the editor has made the commendable decision to include a quartet of song lyrics - such as Noel Coward’s ‘Mad About the Boy’ - along with the regular poems.

This is a fine anthology, although there are some notable absentees: John Ashbery, Genet and Jeremy Reed, the translator of Genet's poems, being three.

Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. He welcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com.

Theatre Review: The Importance of Being Earnest

2010-06-09T23:02:00.001Z

The Importance of Being Earnest
By Oscar Wilde

Directed by Chris Honer

Library Theatre, Manchester: Saturday 5 June - Saturday 3 July 2010

Review by Paul Kane

Russell Dixon (Lady Bracknell), Photo by Gerry Murray

With this strangely delightful production the Library Theatre, for the moment at any rate, loses its home. It will leave the current venue, where it has been performing plays for over half a century, once the current run of The Importance of Being Earnest comes to an end.

Little, precious little, is taken seriously in Wilde’s great play; it can hardly keep a straight, or indeed an earnest face. Despite this jollity – and it almost goes without saying that it is a supremely entertaining play – there is an unflinchingly subversive reach on show here. Everything is mocked, all is fair game: Wilde’s wit shoots down all the conventions and core values of his age. And in doing so he makes us smile.

The masterstroke of this production is to cast Russell Dixon as Lady Bracknell: he is superb, a queerly arch gatekeeper. To have a man in the role of this senior, authoritative ma’am – and for it be unremarked upon by Algernon and the rest - casts a most peculiar light on proceedings

You knew where you were with Lady Bracknell, or at least you thought you did. She was the most strait-laced of Wilde’s creations. She was the one who pulled all the other characters into line, and into happy marriages. Now that we discover that she is a genderqueer matron, her moral compass seems decidedly dodgy. Or off kilter somewhat. Something is happening, but you don’t quite know what it is.

It is fun, though.

The doors have not closed quite yet, but it is clear that the Library Theatre has saved the best till last.

The Importance of Being Earnest is showing at the Library Theatre until 3 July. Don’t miss it.

Poetry Reviews by Gregory Woods: Mute and Handmade Love

2010-05-29T01:04:00.001Z

Mute
By Raymond Luczak

Handmade Love
By Julie R. Enszer

Published by A Midsummer Night’s Press

A Midsummer Night’s Press has published several poetry collections in this diminutive but handsome format (roughly six inches by four, in old money). You can fit each volume into a tiny pocket without disrupting the lines of your tailoring. But don't be deceived by this convenience into thinking that because the books are small they are insubstantial. They are full-length collections aiming to pack a punch. Prominent among them is Brane Mozetic’s remarkably vigorous and intelligent collection Banalities, which the press issued at the end of 2008.

Raymond Luczak has had a distinguished career in the USA as an advocate for deaf people’s rights, within both the lesbian and gay subculture and the broader range of communities. I foreground this theme, just as I do his gayness, because he does so himself, both in this book and elsewhere. He has written drama, fiction, poetry and non-fiction for many publications about sexuality, disability and—well—life itself. He is also a film-maker. Each section of this new book of poems has an epigraph about silence, but he does not go very far in exploring this. He keeps mentioning it, to be sure, but that is my point: that is not silence. His prolific verbalism is hardly ever modulated with moments of silence. Everything is about expression—not a bad theme for a poet, but one to be taken with a pinch of salt. Poets learn the limits of language.

His didactic opening poem, ‘How to Fall for a Deaf Man’, presents itself as a manual of courteous flirtation, full of practical advice (‘Do not ask him the sign for FUCK. / He is tired of showing how’), but, over six lively pages, proves more interesting as a cheerful record of the erotic life as lived by the deaf among the hearing. Intercourse (let’s call it) takes place amid a flurry of expressive gestures—as if the natural flexible-wristedness of gay men had been accorded an additional élan by the muffling of voices. Sad to say, I think Luczak spoils this poem with its bathetic closing couplet: ‘Discover how much water and sun love takes / to grow, and how much can sprout in your hands.’ The image is not particularly fresh and appears, here, as a distraction from the poem’s celebration of the social and erotic.

Desire is interlaced, in other poems, with loss and grief in a way that we have come to expect from the gay liberationist generations that survived the worst emergency of AIDS and the wave of homophobia that worsened it. Luczak’s elegies commemorate not only individuals but also the optimism of an era whose hopes were so violently dashed—if, perhaps, to be partially and belatedly fulfilled around the turn of the new century. These moods are part of a general subcultural record.

Restricted hearing and signing are Luczak’s constant themes, but I looked for something more distinctively ‘deaf’ in matters of form and technique. The deafness of a poet is intrinsically no more paradoxical than Beethoven’s or, more recently, the percussionist Evelyn Glennie’s. The paradox, if any, is more likely to be in my response, as a hearing reader of poetry (even when reading in silence). I find myself wanting there to be a qualitative difference—evidence, perhaps, of an increased sensitivity to the sound of words, or to their appearance on the page—in the way he uses language, or at least in the way he reflects on its use. This may be to place an unreasonable demand on him, but why should that stop me making it? I expect a great deal of the poets whose work I am going to learn to like, and what I expect of them may be contingent on all sorts of external factors. I am not an equal opportunities reader.

Speaking of which, I really cannot pretend to have liked Julie R. Enszer’s book. For a start, a passage from the poem ‘Constantin Brancusi’s The Kiss’ filled me with misgivings: ‘This is what I despise about poems— / the way they isolate / distill life to only the good parts / they never capture this— / harsh words in morning or constipation or warts’. This suggests that the speaker (for let us suppose it is not Enszer herself) has not read much poetry. It is certainly hard to believe that an American poet could say such a thing in earnest. Does she not remember the ‘venereal sores’ in the Preface to the 1855 first edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass? That said, I rather liked the poem ‘Further Evidence’, which is witty in both form and mood: a villanelle about a worrying vaginal discharge.

The collection’s title contains a decent Sapphic pun (handmade/handmaid) that promises a much lighter touch of sexually playful language than she delivers. ‘Morning Post’ is little more than the superfluous over-extension of an unoriginal erotic joke. ‘I know what women want to eat in the morning,’ it begins, elaborating on the fry-ups the speaker used to prepare on Sunday mornings for her straight girlfriends after their Saturday-night assignations with men. But she finally met a woman who had, like her, other oral pleasures in mind—to eat not bacon and eggs but pussy (her word). ‘I know what women want to eat in the morning,’ the poem ends, having taken seven quatrains to make a point that a haiku might have made with greater poise. Unless we are meant to read it as signalling that the poem itself is in dire need of a break from the mundane, a line like ‘Sauces can satisfy the need to break from the mundane’ really does not deserve to have survived the drafting process.

More often than not, her verse is prosy—but without the rigorous control of form and precision of lexis that makes its prosiness seem appropriate to anything but prose. Time after time, she drifts off into an essayistic mode that lays claim to an engagement of the emotions without showing any spark of passion in the language: ‘Now, I have more investment in sex as an older person, / becoming one myself, though, I hasten to add, not nearly / as old as you’; ‘Perhaps our innate / biological being compels us to couple, demands / that we find a spiritual, emotional, and sexual mate’; ‘I want to respect your gender identity and not reconsider / my own sexual orientation and erotic predilections’. I am not sure that such sentences are even elegant enough for a didactic essay, let alone a love poem. In ‘Dear Donald’, imagining herself in her sixties, having sex in the afternoon, she says ‘It is deeply pleasurable and erotic’. If a poet cannot convey this dull message by tone alone, let alone by sensuous imagery, she is in trouble. In a poem on the eponymous friends in the sitcom Will and Grace, she says she has ‘No words to describe the unlikely partnership, // but ample support, chaste affection, retained / sexuality’. (Retained?) In one love poem she refers to girly nicknames as ‘diminuitive feminizations’ [sic].

Perhaps her method works out at its best when she really, consciously and ostentatiously, strains the prosaic syntax, as in ‘Making Love After Many Years’, which, after a brief opening statement (‘It isn't easy’) otherwise consists of a single long sentence that sprawls out over two pages. This, at least, looks deliberate. Which is more than can be said for her collection’s shoddy proof-reading. One poem even has a phantom footnote number, but no footnote (presumably, to explain the word ‘hooning’, in case her use of it is too smudgy for the reader to follow). Feeling in need of a tonic—and yearning for radicalism of content strengthened, rather than held in check, by rigorously disciplined technique—I ran off to my bookshelves for a volume of Marilyn Hacker.

Gregory Woods is Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His critical books include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), both from Yale University Press. His poetry books are published by Carcanet Press. His website is http://www.gregorywoods.co.uk/

Theatre Review: MUST – The Inside Story

2010-05-26T17:56:00.007Z

MUST – The Inside Story

By Suzy Willson and Peggy Shaw
Performed by Peggy Shaw

Fuel
Library Theatre Company, until 26 May 2010

Reviewed by Paul Kane

Shaw’s mesmerizing performance flowed from beginning to end.
She touched upon the body as intimate stranger, our own portion of nature. Her own body and what had happened to it (accident and injury), the manipulation of the bodies of those close to her (her mother’s ECT in the ‘50s, the recent death of her sister), the body of the earth.

In constraining identity and making what or who we are possible, the body is pretty much key. That much is obvious, perhaps too obvious. For it has until fairly recently (I’m thinking in particular of Maxine Steets-Johnstone’s work and the so-called ‘corporeal turn’) been curiously overlooked.

How Shaw worked: a stream of striking poetic images, delivered with panache. Gusto, a vividness of presence, is what she showed in abundance. There was music, also, and a series of archive medical images (of the heart and the microbiology of the blood and diverse innards) and an animation involving skeletons in a cemetery.

It is not often that a play or performance piece can so aptly be described as ‘excoriating’. Let us therefore rejoice in the fact that here the word fits like a glove. And let us also rejoice in the existence of the astounding Peggy Shaw.
MUST – The Inside Story is showing at the Library Theatre in Manchester until 26th May, as part of the Queer Up North festival.

Review: The Silver Hearted by David McConnell

2010-05-22T01:36:00.001Z

The Silver Hearted
David McConnell

Published by Alyson

Reviewed by Richard Canning

First, an admission: I know and like David McConnell, and his previous writings. I’m hoping you won’t feel that discounts this review. McConnell’s first novel, The Firebrat (2003), was the one-that-got-away; a masterpiece, published by a tiny American press that shortly afterwards was closed down. McConnell has since had work published variously elsewhere, including two inventive short stories in my own collections Between Men and Between Men 2. In the first, he told a story of condensed genius about playground regard, affection and longing between two pubescent boys. Typically esoteric too, for my essay collection 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read, McConnell chose the world’s oldest “novel”, Gilgamesh: not exactly an easy sell, and not self-evidently “gay”. He made it work. Fluent in French, he reveres obvious lodestars like Jean Genet and Marcel Proust. But among McConnell’s favourite books too is Julien Gracq’s The Opposing Shore (originally Le ravage des syrtes), a novel which won its author France’s illustrious Prix Goncourt in 1951 (though Gracq, a self-effacing geography schoolteacher, who died only recently, refused the honour).

Gracq – a cult author in Anglophone circles – is one helpful way to approach McConnell’s dense yet limpid prose in The Silver Hearted. The Opposing Shore, though quite different in many respects, is set along coastlines and features boats and shipping in a historically indeterminate place and time. It has been described as ‘a novel of waiting’: Gracq dares to let nothing happen, but makes it happen with great sensual and symbolic richness. Thus he approaches the texture of our everyday lives more closely than in the plotted literary novel.

McConnell too seems to conduct a dare, allowing his short yet vividly impressionistic novel to meander, advance, retreat and reverse. Expectation is all. At times its plot even threatens to implode. Our protagonist and narrator needs to move a stack of coin around and out of a port city undergoing a revolution. To do so, he can call on few to assist. One ready recourse, however, is a young, somewhat worldly sailor, Topher, whom he not only learns to trust, but comes to be infatuated by. The boy, however, interprets the travails found in the novel as a personal learning curve, and presses the narrator to acknowledge the profound moral implications of what they have done.

To describe The Silver Hearted in terms of story, however, is to do it a disservice. Because of its seafaring setting, it is easy to see why American critics made the comparison with Joseph Conrad. But, though Conrad – like Melville and so many other storytellers using the high seas – had something to say about male-male intimacies onboard (see Conrad’s story ‘The Secret Sharer’, described as ‘a simple tale’ by its protagonist, and with resonances for the reader of The Silver Hearted), he was hardly a writer who embraced the vicissitudes of human desire. In this sense, McConnell proves nothing like the more immediate candidates for inspiration; he is, instead, very much our contemporary, and his narrator emotes, thinks, argues with himself… but above all, he desires. In a sense, he is introduced in a state of desire, and the state never leaves him. The novel ends impressionistically, with him registering on a galleon ship ‘the wonderful expressions of concentration on the handsome faces of the men.’ The title of the novel itself pays a sort of tribute to the dominance of this state of longing.

It is truly a novel of atmosphere, and, in conveying atmosphere, McConnell proves a supreme stylist. Take, for example, the deliberate, sustained imprecision with which his narrator records what he perceives of the ethnic minority of “Mandarins”:

It was tricky not to fall into a corrupt “noble savages” way of thinking about these people. Their terracotta faces rarely betrayed anything but stoicism, dignity or laughter, though their uniformly dark eyes were always full of amusement, something confusingly cruel and humane at the same time. Whether they were Parsi or Malay or both, at origin, no one knew. Whatever they were, they weren’t Chinese, certainly not Chinese officials – the term “Mandarin” had been used for convenience by the first Westerners in the country and only described their control over trade and the elaborate formality of their culture. They had no name for themselves at all, not even “the people” like the Inuit. Their population wasn’t large. They were outnumbered many times over by the Karak Indians, who had almost no hand in the country’s affairs.

The principle here is one of ongoing concessions, economically revealed. McConnell’s narrator concedes one thing after another, about the many things that cannot be known, inferred or said about this people. Their essence recedes further inside, as he unpacks one Russian doll after another of presumption, inference and conjecture.

Though peopled with a series of significant characters, The Silver Hearted allows them to come front-of-stage, and then to retreat. Each remains blurry, compared to the figure of Topher, whom the narrator records repeatedly, but if it is also obsessively, he is not about to reveal this. Indeed, his obsession is all the more realized for not idealizing its subject. Our desires, indeed, rarely idealize the object of our desire; rather, we oscillate absurdly between judgment and indulgence, between infatuation and contempt. This contrariness McConnell captures with perfect subtlety, as here:

He pretended not to hear, then, like a child, folded his arms on the table and laid his head on them. His fragmenting blue eyes were alert but dissociated from anything in the shadowy room. He was clearly exhausted. In a few days he’d become deeply tanned, which made the down on his jaw stand out like frost. His savaged fingertips rhythmically made dimples in his upper arms. Even slack, the muscles were too massive for his age.

Typically sensual, without being overt, this set of observations indicates how, in McConnell’s fiction, an erotic charge accompanies the everyday. Indeed, it may need the excuse of the everyday in order to thrive.

David McConnell

Another winning moment revels in the narrator’s self-consciousness. Perhaps we have not been given such a self-aware, apparently honest figure in fiction since Ford Madox Ford’s Good Soldier: high praise indeed:

Over the spiked coffee I explained to Topher that I was going to need help with my cargo. I pronounced “help” strangely, since it was hard asking for anything even when money would smooth the way. I couldn’t get “help me” to sound desirable or natural. I made it sound like indenture or something awful. He shrugged and seemed to think the whole conversation unnecessary. He worked for the captain, I was a passenger, of course he’d help me. I took a different tack. I asked him where he came from.

Here, perfectly wrought, is the misery of getting the acquiescence you want, but for the wrong reason. Topher will be his… but it seems that he can never signify for Topher. The commercial aspect of their exchange chokes out what is, to the narrator, plausible: a human connection. Over and over McConnell nails such paradoxical human moments: the vulnerability in our most confident gesture; the boredom that attends an instance of apparently pure triumph; the tenderness with which we inflict brutal punishment.

This is an utterly beautiful novel, simple but ambitious, knowing but never self-conscious, literary without ever proclaiming its own worth. It deserves acclaim, attention, awards and… your attention. Equally, you deserve the experience of reading this repeatedly astonishing book.

Richard Canning’s most recent book is E M Forster: Brief Lives (Hesperus Press. His 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read and Between Men 2 (both 2009), featuring McConnell, are published by Alyson Books.

Theatre Review: Road Movie

2010-05-19T16:55:00.002Z

Road Movie

Written by Godfrey Hamilton and performed by Mark Pinkosh

Starving Artists
Library Theatre Company, until 22 May 2010

Reviewed by Paul Kane

The words you remember are 'I want a cure and I want my friends back' and they are spoken by Joel, Mark Pinosh's principal heteronym. Although a monologue, Pinkosh brings to life myriad characters in turn, Joel being the sole abiding presence.

Pinkosh is electric on stage, his face intense and incredibly expressive, his arms animated and urgent, as he brings Joel and Scott's story fully to life. Faux-naif and faux vain, he was. Despairing and then joking, playing the audience for all he was worth.

Those who help us are human too - they have only the same resources we do, no more. One take-home message.

'I want a cure and I want my friends back.' Yes, but if only one wish could be granted, which would you choose?

Road Movie is showing at the Library Theatre in Manchester until 22nd May, as part of the Queer Up North festival.

Review: The Rising of the Ashes

2010-05-15T02:04:00.001Z

The Rising of the Ashes
by Tahar Ben Jelloun
translation by Cullen Goldblatt

Published by City Lights

Reviewed by Colin Herd

Tahar Ben Jelloun’s The Rising of the Ashes, out this year from City Lights, presents the original French text alongside an English translation by Cullen Goldblatt. The book consists of two long poems and an author’s preface. The first poem, from which the volume takes its title, concerns the first Gulf War and is dated 1991. The second poem is titled ‘Unidentified’ and is a response to the treatment of Palestinians in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories in the 1980s.
As Goldblatt notes in his introduction, The Rising of the Ashes first appeared in 1991 as a bilingual volume with an accompanying Arabic translation. Reading it then must have felt like a very timely, responsive, urgent experience and it is telling (and not-a-little depressing) that the poems feel no less urgent and timely nearly ten years later, in an atmosphere just as sticky with complex violence.

The preface is relatively short but definitely punchy, its stark sentences bristling with political and poetic engagement. Ben Jelloun reveals the urgency with which he felt these poems rise: ‘So poetry rises. Out of necessity. Amidst the disorder where human dignity is trampled, poetry becomes urgent language.’ Ben Jelloun articulates the profound necessity of speaking in the face of violence, when ‘silence could be akin to an offence’. But urgency, of course, is one thing, while agency is a completely different other. Running counter to (but alongside) that feeling of urgency is a strong sensation of the inadequacy and impotence of words and poetry, what Ben Jelloun calls ‘the powerlessness of language in the face of history’s extreme brutality’. Yes, ‘poetry rises’, but it rises like ashes and Ben Jelloun’s urgency is always tempered by the searching, and very healthy question: what can poetry actually do?

‘Why is our history littered with defeats?
Is it a failure of language?’

I found it interesting to think of the title-poem alongside a contemporary French text, Jean Baudrillard’s The Gulf War Did Not Take Place, in which the French philosopher claimed that factors such as television coverage and the war’s gross one-sidedness undermined and unraveled the reality of the violence and suffering that took place. Ben Jelloun’s verse is something like a special T.V. camera, a camera that is able to overcome the symptoms of simulation that Baudrillard describes and present the suffering of war’s aftermath in a manner that is dignified and genuine. One of the most potent indications of the wreckage of war’s aftermath is in the following lines, where even the metaphors Ben Jelloun turns to are rooted in the remnants of destruction:

‘This body that was a dream is a wrecked house.
There is neither door nor window
just a lacerated mattress, a cooking pot, a stale loaf
of bread, a coat on a hook, gutted walls, grey dust
and the previous year’s calendar.’

Ben Jelloun is more famous as a novelist, and where he really hits his stride is when he makes use of novelistic techniques in his poetry, techniques like observed detail, deft characterization and even ‘speech’:

‘Guests arrived saying: “War is not an excuse!”
But the house is no longer a dwelling
it is absence and silence.
On a section of wall
the portrait of the dictator is intact
flies deposit their droppings upon it.’

I know I just said that’s novelistic and I stick by it, but the use of ‘upon’ instead of ‘on’ in that line, (making ‘deposit’ half-rhyme with ‘upon it’) shows what perfect ‘poet’s ears’ both Ben Jelloun and Goldblatt have.

The long poem ‘Unidentified’ makes up the second half of the book. It reads like a catalogue of dates and names, breathing dignity into the victims of intolerable, unbearable but not Ben Jelloun insists unutterable cruelty. It makes at times very hard-going, harrowing reading. The following quotation is from a section called Fatima Abou Mayyala:

‘They came in through the roof
they closed the doors and windows
they stuffed a fistful of sand into her mouth and
nostrils, Fatima.
Their hands ripped her stomach
blood pooled
they urinated on her face.’

He doesn’t allow us to blink or turn away from the horror, but his next breath reveals Fatima’s dignity:

Fatima took the statue’s hand
and walked lightly between the trees and the sleeping children.
She reached the sea
her body raised above death.

In a paper at the Long Poem Conference at Sussex University last year the poet Rachel Blau du Plessis spoke of the long poem in terms of temporality and scale, claiming that long poems ‘concern things that are too large in relation to things that are too small… By too large I mean the universe, the earth, our history and politics, our sense of the past and our more febrile sense of the future’. Her thoughts seem particularly applicable to these two long poems, which address large-scale political history, while drawing attention to its constituent individual tragedies, in a medium that does feel much too small but at the same time the only one available, poetry. The febrile sense of the future suggested in these poems is of course our present, and of that, The Rising of the Ashes is eerily, engagingly and urgently penetrating. Always an interesting writer, this book proves Ben Jelloun to be an exciting, accomplished poet too.

Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical).

Review: Patrick Procktor

2010-05-08T01:42:00.001Z

Patrick Procktor: Art and Life
By Ian Massey

Published by Unicorn Press

Reviewed by David Plante

It puts me at an odd angle to review a book about someone I knew, a book in which I am in fact quoted. My first reaction is to remember Patrick Procktor as I knew him. My partner, Nikos Stangos, and I used often to invite him to supper at our flat, sometimes with the poet Stephen Spender. The image comes back to me of Patrick wearing a tight translucent shirt and a pale green flimsy feminine scarf tied about his long thin neck. He had a nasal laugh, rather like a snort; he would raise his head in a slight jerk, his sharp chin jutting, and look away, and when he looked back it was as if from on high. I wondered what really he’d laughed at—perhaps at me. He always made me feel I lacked daring in dress, in gestures, in talk, in artistic originality. He was to me all daring.

Yet what most struck me about Patrick was his grounding in deep culture. His appreciation of Baudelaire, in French, was just one of the constant surprises of his serious knowledge of literature. And of course there was his ability to access the Russian writers in Russian. But, as if it were a pretension to be serious about such knowledge, he all too often presented a self that was more pretentious in his dandy-ism. I remember his carrying a book covered with fancy paper, in fact a novel by Dickens; and I thought it was typical of Patrick to disguise his serious interest in literature within decorative paper, as he disguised so much that was serious in him by decoration.

And how to square his socialist vision (I think of the very moving photograph in his memoir of him on a collective farm in Soviet Tashkent in 1956, translating for visiting Lancashire Weavers) with that dandyism? At the opening of the show in 19-- of his Great Leap Forward painting commemorating Chinese Communism, I was impressed when he said he thought someone from the Chinese Embassy might appear, and I thought: really, Patrick knew everyone. That he seemed to know someone at the Chinese Embassy made all his other acquaintances, such as his druggy friend the fashion designer Ossie Clark, ideologically equal. Or it could have been that in the 60s when young people carried Mao’s Little Red Book about, Patrick thought of an acquaintance at the Chinese Embassy as fashionable as knowing Ossie Clark. With Patrick, one never knew.

Procktor's 'First Day of Sun'

Ian Massey in his book, Patrick Procktor, Art and Life, is fully aware of how one never could know Patrick. For the life, he relies largely on reminisces of friends, very much like my reminisces which Massey’s book has inspired. Though I have my own doubts about the work, Massey’s enthusiasm is convincing. ( I see so many of the views Patrick painted in Venice, Egypt, China as obvious as postcards, but Massey argues that it is the deftness of the use of the paint that makes the difference, and so it does.) And the book expands beyond Patrick himself into the world he represented so centrally with his lovers and friends, starting most dramatically in the years of the 1960s when, it seemed suddenly, nothing was taken for granted, everything was to be experimented with and open to discovery, especially in sex and drugs. (My only wish is that Massey had been a little less discreet in exploring the sexual relations of Patrick’s lovers.) The book covers the decades following the 60s during which so many of the promises ended—in the case of Ossie, in his murder, and, in 2003, with the sad death of Patrick, far gone in alcoholism.

The last time Nikos and I saw Patrick was when we were out shopping in Marylebone and came across him, in carpet slippers and walking his dog. He asked us to join him for a drink in a pub, where we sat at a small table on which he leaned an elbow, his hand delicately to his cheek. He was drunk already and seemed to be supporting himself with that poised hand. He pursed his lips, thinking, and I hoped he would finally say something equal to his intelligence, but then he told us that he and his son Christopher were living on grilled sausages, and I had a vision of a grill dripping with grease.

Years before—oh, some thirty five years before he died in 2003-- Patrick had done a watercolour of Nikos and me lying side by side naked on a bed. Someone bought it; I should like to know what happened to it.

Patrick Procktor, Art and Life is more than a biography, it is social history at its best, creating a world seen anew by those who lived it, and wondered at by those for whom it is now seen as daringly original as it really was.

David Plante is author of many books including The Francoeur Trilogy, The Catholic, Difficult Women and The Pure Lover.

Poetry Reviews by Sophie Mayer: Two Ways to Picture a Life by

2010-05-01T01:20:00.000Z

The Joshua Tales
By Andra Simons

Published by Treehouse Press

Kendra Ezekiel, the illustrator of The Joshua Tales, calls her work ‘collagraphs.’ It’s an evocative description for Andra Simons’ texts themselves: short blocks whose apparent simplicity – and complicity with the paragraph, the prose poem – is insistently but subtly disrupted. There’s play with the font, kerning, colour, and repetition of words; wide gaps between phrases; a solitary word “rise” on the page at the centre of the poem.

The second poem, ‘Joshua’s Birth,’ is interrupted by an asterisk in the second of its three lines that points to an italicised headnote above the poem, and twice its length. The poem talks about Joshua’s birth, the headnote of colonialism’s. Throughout the book, the tensions between the individual and history will visibly divide the page, yet collide upon it.

That division/collision echoes the narrator’s relationship to Joshua, as described in ‘Joshua has Sex’:

Joshua, by my side/myside, watched as I made love to the copper man, mimicking every movement like a third grade ballerina. Joshua’s brown lips kissing the darkened centre of the room.

I, not wanting to teach him that love can only survive in cages, let my lover surrender Joshua. I by his side/hisside watched as he made love to the copper man.

Joshua opened his mouth. Arched. Reached out with his tongue. He Sang. Joshua raised his wrists and soared.

The / cleaves in both its senses. I (all we know about I is that they teach poetry) withdraws, as they do throughout the book, giving over space and sense to Joshua, who meets the President of the United States (in the book’s most deadpan poem: read it for yourselves!), flies a kite and generally enjoys the gifts of presence. After he meets Eve, Joshua sails home to the island of Pocaroja, and Joshua leaves the narrator to ‘train under her palms.’

What he learns in this final identification between the individual and history is pain: ‘Like her he aborted his babies like her.’ The next three poems are called ‘Joshua weeps for the first time’, ‘Joshua’s Rape’ and ‘Joshua’s Death.’ Presence, being in the world, has opened Joshua to pain. His rape is hauntingly described much like a self-birth, and it’s this act that brings Joshua and the narrator together.

Joshua meets many people on his travels, including God and Lucifer, but the most crucial is the Jazz Singer, ‘the darkest green sister’ whose singing ‘Bitter and softly’ gives the poem its tone, its musicality (as Joshua ‘Sang’) and its cyclical form. Like the mosaiced, textured, tessellated images, these poems build on each other by degrees and rotations. The final poem, ‘Joshua Here,’ returns cyclically to the words of the first poem, ‘Joshua’, but ends with the affective, elusive affirmation of presence and action (and an echo of marriage as a ceremony of love as union-in-duality): ‘I do.’

The Silver Rembrandt
By Kate Foley

Published by Shoestring Press

Ekphrasis – the description of a work of visual art within a poem – has been a hallmark of lyric poetry since the Romantics. Keats’ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ related poetic truth to visual beauty and even TS Eliot’s cynical reductio ad absurdum (‘In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo’) in ‘The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock’ couldn’t reduce the desire of poets to use the visual arts to write beyond language.

Kate Foley’s long poem sequence ‘The Silver Rembrandt’ is not Romantic-with-a-capital-r, or even romantic, in the conventional sense. It explicitly eschews the idea of the Genius whose gift surpasses ordinary human concerns, but at the same time searches for a more expansive definition of the self than ‘lover.’ In looking closely at Rembrandt’s painting, and particularly those that contain self-portraits, Lily, the poem’s narrator, searches for a way that is between life and art.

The sequence is formidable both for its narrative clarity, equal to Jackie Kay’s, and its intense release into moments of stilled lyric that offers us the opportunity to find what, in her first sexual experience,

Lily has begun to know

that to live in your matchless skin
you must leave simple, good enough bare
to find naked

Finding naked is the book’s work, shaped as specifically female and working class, as it looks for a place in contemporary aesthetic culture that defies John Berger’s astute observation that men in Western art are naked, women nude. What Rembrandt offers Lily is not just – or not so much – the inspiration to pursue her own art, which she comes to realise is mediocre, but what she encounters first in his work, when her teacher sends the class a postcard of ‘Old Woman Reading’. ‘It isn’t her face’ the description begins, ending: ‘what counts / is the glowing gospel of her hand.’

Through her relationship with Frances, the birth of their autistic son, the dissolution of their relationship and Frances’ death, Lily somehow has within her that ‘glowing’ kernel, but only activates it when she returns to Amsterdam and is adopted by two young squatters. They introduce her to mime artist Wim, who says he ‘will teach her Rembrandt’, and so she ends the poem as the silver Rembrandt of the title, ‘juggl[ing] light’ not on a canvas but with, and in, her body.

This bodiliness, in which the body is – and replaces – art and religion as belief systems, surfaces in the other poems that make up the book: the ‘iron, salt and a hint of honey’ in a lover’s post-running sweat in ‘Running Woman’ or ‘the Buddhas of Bamiyan / made part of our own flesh’ in ‘When the Buddhas of Bamiyan Fell’. So when old age’s ‘tender paradigm shift from words to touch’ is invoked in ‘Thrift’, Foley subverts the tragic narrative of ageing towards something elevated. Not transcendent: the material world that Rembrandt worked so lovingly in light and dark remains the book’s touchstone. In the final poem, ‘Prayer,’ the poet prays ‘to our piano / your hand strokes every day,’ the piano at once word and sound and image, and at the same time a body, a conduit of touch, as these poems are.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Reviews: E.M. Forster biography and new short story collection The Obelisk

2010-04-24T15:07:00.002Z

Brief Lives: E. M. Forster
By Richard Canning

Published by Hesperus Press

Reviewed by P.P.O. Kane

Although just a little over a hundred pages in length, Richard Canning’s biography ably covers Forster’s life and work, and it traces too his influence on later writers, notably David Leavitt.

The big question for many will be: why didn’t Forster write any other novels after A Passage to India, which came out in 1924. (Maurice, though published posthumously in 1971, was actually written in 1914.) That question has not really been satisfactorily answered – at a best guess it seems that Forster simply became bored with people and with writing about them. As he said to Sassoon (quoted here on page 77), ‘I shall never write another novel after it [A Passage to India] – my patience with ordinary people has given out.’

Nonetheless, Forster had a full and apparently fulfilled life thereafter - it was hardly one long, maudlin silence. He worked for the BBC and did much to promote and encourage other writers: Cavafy, T.E. Lawrence and Ackerley being three among many. His collaboration with Britten and Crozier on Billy Budd was a great success and he still wrote books, but just not novels. (Britten was incidentally an astute critic; see his observation on Forster’s novels on page 39 here.)

One advantage of this book over P.N. Furbank’s classic biography, published in the late 70s, is that Canning is able to make use of Forster’s broadcasts for the BBC and his correspondence with Isherwood, material which has only recently (since 2008, in fact) become generally available.

Besides this, Brief Lives: E. M. Forster is an erudite and engagingly written study and it gives a real sense of the great writer’s life and achievements.

The Obelisk
By E.M. Forster
Foreword by Amit Chaudhuri

Published by Hesperus Press

Reviewed by P.P.O. Kane

This book is a collection of eight stories, all with a gay theme or aspect. On my understanding, they were originally published in 1972, so some two years after Forster’s death.

‘The Open Boat’ is the longest story and also the best.
It focuses on a relationship across ethnic boundaries between Lionel (‘Lion’) and Cocoanut, and is mainly set during one intense night. Forster captures perfectly the claustrophobic atmosphere of the crowded boat returning to India, the oppressive, casually racist culture (‘a touch of the tar brush’ is a phrase that recurs more than once, and is spoken by more than one character), and Lionel’s divided loyalties and distraught state of mind. There is no happy ending here.

A couple of other good stories are ‘Dr. Woolacott’, which recalls some of L.P. Hartley’s macabre and mysterious tales, and ‘Arthur Snatchfold’. In the latter effort, a knight of the realm has a dalliance with a young working-class man who, when caught and questioned by the police, doesn’t give him away – in fact, he lies to protect him. When gay love was outlawed, the stricture of the law was circumvented by the courage and loyalty of largely unknown men. Forster celebrates that here – and the eponymous hero in particular – but his story would surely have had a greater impact if it had been published when it was written. A point one could make about Maurice too. (And, yes, I realise I’ve lapsed into 'D.H. Lawrence' scolding mode here.)

The title story, ‘The Obelisk’, is pretty good too and had a neat twist at the end. Along the road to a local landmark, a middle-aged couple meet a pair of sailors… Forster is particularly good at getting inside the head of Hilda, the wife, here.

‘The Classical Annex’ is another story I liked; it is fantastic and erotic and has a supernatural element too. Behind it, there’s a sense of the queer in everyday life: there are certain things (like watching wrestling, for example) that straight and gay men might enjoy, but for different reasons. If you point out certain aspects of those said things to straight men, though, they are liable to be aghast.

Somehow, the remaining three stories didn’t really catch fire for me. Of these, ‘The Life to Come’ is probably the pick, but it kept on leaping forward five years a shot, so diluting any built-up tension. It had its moments, but in the round presented a sketchy impression. Perhaps it was a sketch for a novel that Forster was unable to write.

Overall, The Obelisk is a fine collection, with ‘The Open Boat’ and ‘Dr. Woolacott’ ranking among Forster’s best. And these are pretty much the best stories to be found anywhere.

P.P.O Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. He welcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ppokane@europe.com.

Review: Bruno Gmünder

2010-04-07T06:02:00.000Z

Young Men on the Rise by Falcon
Cazzo’s Men Factory by Frank Burkhard
So Sexy It Hurts by Patrick Mettraux
The Boys of Bel Ami by Howard Roffman
Raging Stallion: To the Last Man by Kent Taylor & Geof Teague
Time Less by David Vance

Published by Bruno Gmünder

Reviewed by Gregory Woods

The German publishing house Bruno Gmünder has been producing high-quality books of the male nude for almost two decades. Some are photographic essays by well-known photographers (Benno Thoma, Jeff Palmer, Tom Bianchi); others are the side products of, and advertisements for, porn companies (Falcon, Raging Stallion, Cazzo, Kristen Bjorn); and some are both (Howard Roffman’s Bel Ami boys). Production values are high: most of the volumes seem intended to be consumed, or owned, or displayed on the coffee table, as if they were art books. If accepted as such, it may be that their photographs are to be appreciated for such qualities as their technique, composition, lighting; and even the bodies they display should be enjoyed purely for their formal plasticity—rather than for the sexiness that is confirmed by that dubious aesthetic measuring-rod, the viewer’s erection. (If ever bought by or for straight women, the books are not marketed as such.)

Even if the measuring-rod cannot discern the difference, some people call this kind of product ‘eroticism’, to distinguish it from ‘pornography’. But the publishers seem happy to think it as porn. Pornography is a matter of physical facts and predicted outcomes. It proves itself: here are the bodies, here is the spunk. Either you are turned on by the bodies and what they do, or you are not. The moment you step outside the magic circle of pornographic complicity—when desire is replaced, or at least distracted, by boredom, or disapproval, or revulsion, or the urge to laugh—it will fail in its task, which was to inveigle you into its sphere of enchantment and compel you to take pleasure in or from yourself. It does not matter if this moment of stepping-outside happens after the climactic moment of your pleasure—indeed, this is to be expected. Pornography is not, as it were, built to last.

When you cease to comply with the ‘piece’ (as works of art tend to be called these days, as if none of them was ever complete in itself) you are likely to start noticing the wrong things: the wallpaper and duvet covers, the cheerful dog wagging its tail beside the bed, the photographer in the mirror, whatever. I remember a Scandinavian porn mag I picked up, in the early 1980s, at a stall outside Rome’s main railway station. Almost at once, I noticed that the four boys in it were wearing watches, and that the times on these told a different story from the narrative order of the photographs. For reasons I no longer remember, I spent some time trying to reconstruct the ‘actual’ sequence of the participants’ couplings and climaxes. I suppose I was seeking authenticity. I had bought the magazine for truth, not fiction; or for as near to the truth as a sequence of photographs can ever provide. Those watches raised a nagging question of narrative structure: what had been wrong with the actual sequence of events, that required re-ordering; and how had the re-ordering improved the narrative effect? Perhaps there had been too much contingency in the original events, when what was needed was a build-up of suspenseful predictability. Perhaps the boys themselves—like me, their eventual consumer—had been distracted or delayed in their pleasures. Perhaps they had come too soon or too late, had laughed or gagged, been bored or revolted…

Magazines have now been superseded by websites, so it comes as something of a surprise to find that the market for these glossy books continues to flourish. The difference from the internet is, of course, that when you are online you are always promised more; and the promise of more always bears within it the possibility of better. The surfer of internet porn is inevitably unsatisfied, despite the surfeit of beguilements available to him. (Perhaps that is the fate of the masturbator in any case.) He is for ever moving on, on the off-chance that the next click is going to activate the perfect pleasure. On the other hand, the book of pleasures has the virtue of being finite. It demands the frugality of making do. Somewhere between its covers you must find your satisfaction. It is as if Charles Dickens were to say—as well he might—you can find all of the world out there, but you will find enough of it in here, here in the book.

Raging Stallion’s To the Last Man is shot on farmsteads in the American West. This is the world of the cowpoke (whoever he may be). All of the models are white, most bearded, some verging on middle age. Stetsons are obligatory. While it may be that each picture of an individual man implies a character and a narrative (Jake has got bored with hammering in all those fence posts and has unbuttoned himself to cool off...) the viewer is discouraged from asking potentially disruptive, rational questions. Has the health-and-safety man okayed this close juxtaposition of knob-end and tank-tracks?
Don’t these men ever feel self-conscious in the face of the rational scrutiny of the horses? Above all, why are they hanging around these ranches with their knobs out? Clearly, because they want me, in particular, to see how well endowed they are. Each of them looks as if he thinks he deserves a medal, whereas what I actually want to give him is a dollop of sun cream.

Cazzo’s men tend to haunt derelict buildings, soiled and oily among fragments of old machinery, sensibly booted but otherwise more or less naked. They cultivate the styles of sadomasochism without forking out for its prohibitive paraphernalia. Tattoos and piercings add to the look, even while somewhat undermining it by seeming suspiciously fashionable. Likewise, one or two of their beards look so carefully topiarised as to seem distractingly narcissistic. Men Factory is both an environment and a process, both a space in which men act out their exaggerated versions of manliness and the mass production of images of these performances, for mass consumption by men in less obviously virile occupations. As heavy industry is outsourced to the so-called Far East, the men who used to work in it can now get jobs in that most emblematic of the service industries, porn. Oh, brave new world!

To tell the truth, I have always had a soft spot (if that is the right expression) for the Bel Ami product. It is one of the miracles of our times. The company is now a huge, Fordist concern, mass-producing images of (to use a rather repellent American expression) ‘twinks’: boys in their late teens and early twenties, often blonds, generally depilated, invariably pretty-faced and large-cocked. I always wanted to write to Margaret Thatcher to congratulate her on what she called ‘winning the Cold War’, since Bel Ami was one of the first cultural outcomes of the parting of the Iron Curtain. The early videos showed rather idyllic versions of central Europe: inefficiently farmed, pastoral landscapes, untouched by tractor or harvester, entirely peopled by well-built twinks dressed in promisingly fragile scraps of denim.

Howard Roffman has photographed the Bel Ami boys a number of times. On this occasion, they are on holiday in some kind of closed resort in South Africa, but without the slightest sign of Africa itself: they could be in California or Florida or Australia or on the Mediterranean coast. There are beds and sofas indoors, and a swimming pool outside. Some shots seem to have been taken at some distance from the building complex, but these are all on a beach that could be in any location where sand and sea and sun coincide. That, I suppose, is the point: nothing should be culturally specific. White boys on holiday: the world is theirs.

Speaking of which—the book is somewhat marred by Roffman’s complacent introductory remarks: ‘It takes forever to fly from San Francisco to Cape Town, South Africa. When you get there, you have to drive past miles of corrugate shanty towns cordoned off with barbed wire before you get even close to the lush seaside resort city. It’s a trip I wouldn’t take without an awfully good reason.’ Poor love! But the strain of being driven past all that barbed wire must have made his assignment all the sweeter—spending eight days photographing fifteen young, white porn stars while they were shooting a new film with ‘legendary’ director George Duroy. As well as liking their own bodies—pretty much an essential qualification for the porn model—the Bel Ami boys do genuinely seem to like each other’s; and each other’s company, besides. Indeed, some of my favourite images are those in which boys sit side by side, proudly discussing their erections as if they had sculpted them themselves.
By contrast, Falcon is not a company primarily renowned for its twinks, and the youths in Young Men of Falcon strike me as looking rather creepy, strangely disturbing, as if one’s fantasy life had been invaded by an aimless troupe of ghosts. I can’t quite put my finger on the source of this feeling—perhaps something of complacency in the way they meet the camera’s enquiry. A paper leaflet promoting this volume calls it a classic (never a particularly convincing way of marketing something brand new) and says it is ‘bought to stimulate arousal’. The photographs are succinctly described: ‘explicit, posed, young men, hairless’. Explicit because there are plenty of full-frontals, many of them with erections. Posed, I suppose, because the models are intentionally showing themselves off, in every case but one staring straight into the camera lens; no snatched shots of incidental nudity. Young men, of course, because they are older than boys but can still qualify, for a few years, as twinks. Hairless, in this case, means only one thing: they are facially clean-shaven. None has a bald or shaven head (that would be moving into more ‘mature’ territory) and none has been, so far as I can tell, even partially depilated in the manner of the Bel Ami boys: indeed, some of these guys have pretty furry chests, bellies and limbs. Not twinks in the purest form, then.

David Vance’s photographs, in a book rather presumptuously called Time Less, seem to be striving for a classicism that is not so much timeless as dated. They remind me, at times, of Christian Coigny, whose work was fashionable in the 1980s, and, at others, of Herbert List’s far more famous work from the 1930s. In a brief introduction, David Leddick invokes all the usual suspects—the Greeks, the Romans, Donatello, Michelangelo—but I got little more than an impression of a humourless, muscular classicism that tries to attribute to mere flesh a sculptural immortality that cancels out its humanity and, therefore, its sexiness. Maybe that is the point.

Patrick Mettraux’s book So Sexy It Hurts is much more relaxed. Although his models are always unsmiling, the clothes, situations and poses he puts them in seem dedicated to the proposition that sexy can also be funny—and imaginative. None of them is straightforwardly naked. They are (un)dressed in street styles, but there is no particular effort put into persuading us that they are actually from the streets, and all of the shots are taken in the studio. Some wear jeans, some tracksuit bottoms, some football shorts, some jockstraps. Many are covered in a sheen of sweat, one in soil, one in oil, one in green and red paint, and one is liberally slathering himself all over from a giant can of Nivea. All are fetishised in a variety of ways—but never with the predictable paraphernalia of standard rubber- or leather-gear. (It may be that Arthur Tress is the originator of some of this work.) They play at being boys without trying to look boyish. Several are playing with inflatable toys—but not sex toys. Several are masked—but not with SM masks. One is riding a large toy giraffe, another a china tiger. One has a fluffy monkey stuffed down the front of his Y-fronts. One unshaven thug sucks his thumb in an overtly aggressive manner; and yet the two guys holding pistols look as gentle as they come. There isn’t a penis in view—unless you count the image of one printed on the front of one guy’s underpants—and yet the whole collection is gloriously, pervily sexy.

For all that some of these picture books are nice objects in themselves—suitable as gifts on certain kinds of occasion—economic reality seems to dictate that the internet will inevitably prevail. What that means, on present evidence, is that there will be a growing proliferation of self-made images, all showing the same basic icon: the Narcissus of postmodernism, gazing into his own eyes as if into those of the world, with his dick in one hand and in the other the dull fish-eye of his camera-phone, both of them pointing into the mirror. When I remember that my own adolescence was illuminated by erotic imagery I found not in picture books but in the written word—European and American novels, for the most part—I can’t help thinking that my masturbatory life was admirably educational. The perfect training, I suppose, for a literary academic. I hope I do not sound too much of a party-pooper when I suggest that, in the flamboyant festival of images the internet is providing today, something may have been lost.

Gregory Woods is Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His critical books include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), both from Yale University Press. His poetry books are published by Carcanet Press. His website is http://www.gregorywoods.co.uk/

Film Review: Kakera – A Piece of Our Life

2010-03-31T17:21:00.005Z

Kakera
Directed by Momoko Andô

Opens April 2 at the ICA in London

Kakera tells the story of a relationship between two young women in Tokyo. Well, not exactly a relationship: a kind of complex diagram of tangents, angles, obliques, axes, intersections and vanishing points. It’s like Hal Hartley didn’t lose contact with the real world after Amateur, but moved to Japan to pursue his relationship geometries: Kakera is strongly reminiscent of Trust or The Unbelievable Truth in its washed-out palette and tone, at once deadpan and quirky, often gently nostalgic for things even as they are occurring. Some of the Tokyo street scenes, accompanied by ringing guitar chords, are clearly a reference to Lost in Translation, but the protagonists – Haru and Riko – are both Japanese (and there are some Yasujiro Ozu references to recall the Japanese tradition of quietly observational love stories).

But like the protagonists of Sofia Coppola’s film, and of Hartley’s films, they are fish out of water, moving to their own rhythm that’s just a little different from the rest of the world. It has the quiet, everyday texture and delicacy of new manga as pioneered by Frédéric Boilet, which focus on love, sex and real people rather than superheroes and wide-eyed cuties. Not that Haru and Riko aren’t, in their own way, wide-eyed cuties. Haru is a dreamy-eyed literature student drifting along in a relationship with her toy gun-carving boyfriend, while he dithers over dumping his former girlfriend. After an unsatisfying morning with him (he has holes in his socks! clearly no good will come of this) she stops in a café for a hot chocolate, and a stranger comes over and wipes away her milk moustache.

Talk about meeting cute: Riko says she doesn’t usually do this, and hands Haru a beer mat with her number and an adorable sketch. Attracted to Riko’s attraction, Haru calls her – the first in a series of ringing phones that will be ignored by their owners and initially answered by other people, just one of the tangents by which communication proceeds. Riko takes the afternoon off and they wander around the zoo then head back to meet her parents. Haru wonders nervously about where their friendship is heading, and Riko tells her that she thinks gender is as arbitrary as whether the zoo was open or not.
It’s a film that likes to make much of its metaphors: Riko works as a prosthetics modeller, while Haru suffered from paralysis from the waist down as a young teenager. Her boyfriend has forceful sex with her limp, numb body while a WWII movie plays in the background. Sometimes this literalisation can be dazzlingly beautiful: as when Haru fantasises diving into a starlit pool as she dissociates from the rape. Other times, as when Riko, frustrated by Haru’s uncertainty, starts a relationship with a striking dom for whom she’s modelled a prosthesis, it seems a little too forcibly and neatly quirky. Riko also swims dangerously close to the clichéd crazy lesbian: possessive, irrational, manipulative yet self-sacrificing, wearing a hideous pink furry cardigan.

But the film pulls back at the end, through a series of missed calls, to something more opaque and melancholically hopeful than the expected psycho denouement. And then there’s a prolonged scream over the final credits, followed by more of those plangent guitar chords. If you’ve missed Hal Hartley, or longed for a lesbian Lost in Translation, or wished that yuri manga was a little more true to life, or you’re just in the mood for girl-meets-girl with prosthetic boob jokes, then Kakera is a dreamy-eyed way to spend 90 minutes.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Review: Everyday Angels by Maria Jastrzębska

2010-03-27T01:43:00.000Z

Everyday Angels
Maria Jastrzębska

Published by Waterloo Press

Reviewed by Colin Herd

As an epigraph to her new collection ‘Everyday Angels’, Maria Jastrzębska writes that,

‘In each film of Krzysztof Kieślowski’s sequence Dekalog, actor Artur Barciś appears briefly as an incidental character who gazes but never speaks and is said to represent a knowing witness or an angel.’

By doing so, she invites the reader to under-study the Artur Barciś role, gazing at and witnessing the emotional, personal, ‘everyday’, situations her poems evoke. These situations are often memories from childhood or young adulthood told in the first person. Such as, being called a ‘bloody foreigner’ at the side of her Mother in a supermarket by a woman jumping the queue. Other customers fail to spring to their defence. Narrated through a child’s perspective, the poem begins like so:

‘The big shop-
I helped carry the bags
which left my hands stinging,
red stripes across the palms.’

It ends on a note of determination and a sense of injustice that stings much more sorely:

‘Bladdifor aynerr.
The grown ups would pass this word
Between them like a novelty,
scoffing- something to get used to

like soggy sausages or smog.
I refused to go there again,
so my mother went on her own,
each week carrying all the bags home.’

You get a sense here of the understated but no less exquisite complexity of Jastrzębska’s phrasing. I particularly like the subtly potent, territorial half-rhyme of “home” and “own” and the stinging red stripe on the palms, so suggestive of the Polish flag.

At the heart of ‘Everyday Angels’ is a sequence of prose poems called ‘Dementia Diaries’. In it, Jastrzębska writes a section in the voice of each of the main players in the drama of her parents’s dementia. It’s the emotional highpoint of the text, in which complex family tension and awkwardness are laid bare, alongside the faltering perspectives of her parents. Jastrzębska shows great skill in communicating not only frustration and sadness, but also joy and love. The voice of Mrs Alicja plucks that string most pronouncedly:

“Thick as thieves those two. I call them my two love-birds . Fall asleep holding hands. In the night she rolls over onto his side of the bed, wraps her skinny little body around him and that big man squeezes right onto the edge of the bed to make room for her.”

Again, Jastrzębska‘s phrasing is delightful, the way her sentence, too, rolls over, wraps its skinny body and then, squeezes word-heavy to the edge of the bed.

Then there are the poems of sexual-awakening, such as the humorously titled but vaguely disturbing ‘Autobiografia di uno piccolo pezze di merda’ and ‘Veil of Tweed’, in which the poet remembers her eighteen-year-old self through its relationships (and its movies):

‘I fled from you into the arms of a biche
with long lashes, sulky lips. At least
her hair was long, even though it all ended
in tears. It might as well have been me

slumped, sobbing face pressed
against a bathroom door, behind which
Anouk Aimée made love with a real man.’

Jastrzębska shows a wonderful ability to combine warm, plain-spoken and tender vocal presence with a bracing and sometimes startling freshness of expression. Reading ‘Everyday Angels’ feels like washing your face. You’re comforted, reassured and drawn in by her warm tones. The sensation, as Jastrzębska puts it memorably in one poem, is as,

‘warm water slipping on the skin.
Delicious task.’.

And then, from somewhere, she delivers an exfoliating blow in which you wake up to the almost unbearable sadness or humour or cruelty of a situation as it is revealed with spare, unflinching honesty and most of all rapier insight. You emerge feeling different, feeling good, feeling like you’ve scrubbed at some of the pimples on the face of what is to be.

In other words, this is another storming success for Waterloo Press, whose books are not only expertly selected but designed with such care, and flair too.

Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical).

Review Persistent Voices: Poetry by Writers Lost to AIDS

2010-03-20T07:58:00.005Z

Persistent Voices
edited by Philip Clark & David Groff

Published by Alyson

Reviewed by Richard Canning

I remember once mentioning to the novelist Edmund White a book project I had in mind called Gay Graves. Not a great title, for what on reflection wasn’t a good idea either. On my travels around Europe and beyond, I’d found myself making detours to visit the tombs of GLBTQ writers I revered. Often they’d be found in strange places (Genet’s on the edge of a cliff in Larache, Morocco), or be marked by weirdness or bombast (Winckelmann in Trieste) – or, just the reverse, scarcely prove noticeable at all (Proust in Pere Lachaise, Paris). There were stories behind these eccentricities, I thought. I’d come up with a jaunty narrative line, linking together a dozen such sites into some sort of single idea about the way marginal writers had been remembered on their graves.

White turned with uncharacteristic ferocity and told me what an awful thing I’d dreamt up. ‘After all, the way someone dies and is buried doesn’t say anything about how they lived! Especially with gay lives. It’s a pointless, senseless, misguided idea.’ Inevitably, the shadow of the unspoken epidemic bore over what he was saying. I binned the thought immediately.

The incident came back to me when reading Persistent Voices, which – first off – you should know as a wonderful resource, and a great addition to the canon of post-war (mostly male) gay verse. It’s not a book about HIV, and the editors note with satisfaction that ‘a majority of the poems included here are not about AIDS at all.’ Indeed a good number of authors featured are represented by poetry written before 1981, the year the syndrome was first written up. Selections are presented alphabetically by author surname; one of the pleasures is in moving – sometimes clearly, sometimes opaquely – between the 1970s, 80s and 90s and their sharply different contexts for gay men.

Still, it’s while noting the many pleasures here, and the intelligence of the selection and editing, that I’m stuck with a problem concerning Persistent Voices’s raison d’etre. It’s the same as White’s objection to my own fallacious enterprise. Why select poets simply according to their medical condition, unless that condition became the governing subject around which the poems are based? And – churlish as it may be - if you do use this criterion, why then bend the rules, to accommodate poets who, suffering from ill health, committed suicide?

Rachel Hadas

Some writers here effectively came to poetry because of their HIV status. Two were nurtured by poet-tutor Rachel Hadas, in a groundbreaking creative writing class for early casualties, wonderfully written up in her (ed.) Unending Dialogue: Voices from an AIDS Poetry Workshop (Faber & Faber, 1991). Glenn Philip Kramer, is represented by three poems, including ‘What happens’:

What happens
do we become dust
do we dance with friends gone
awaiting friends to come…

The talent of the other, Charles Barber, is best shown by ‘Thirteen Things about a Catheter’:

A fish,
Hung from a pole,
Striped with words of caution:
“To expire in ninety-one”
(Like me?)

Hadas recounted in Unending Dialogue how she developed her students’ ideas and reaching out towards a personal poetic style, by introducing them to apposite verse from different contexts – to Tennyson, for example, and the work of other elegists. She also shared her own poetry. In Persistent Voices, though, we lack this context: Hadas has not died. Nevertheless, she has written some of the most memorable verse about HIV/AIDS.

Other poets can be said to have written their best work on or as a result of their diagnosis and struggles with ill health – notably Tory Dent, whose single selection from the brave, idiosyncratic collection HIV, Mon Amour (1999) seems oddly frugal. The book was, after all, nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and won the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award. Perhaps there were problems with permissions. Two selections from Dent’s Black Milk (2005) make the cut, however, including ‘Immigrant in my own life,’ with its threnody-born pulsating rhythm:

I don’t know my name, what I am without disease,
Foreign sky, foreign street, foreign trees with their foreign leaves.

Dent and Cookie Mueller are the sole female voices here, understandably: women tended to succumb to AIDS-related conditions much more quickly, having invariably been diagnosed as suffering from the syndrome much later than their male peers. Given the small window of time often afforded this group before its members got sick, it is obvious why so few left us much literature. Gay male poets dominate, among whom there are familiar names, such as Sam D’Allesandro, Paul Monette, George Whitmore and the outstanding Tim Dlugos, who has four selections from his volume Powerless, and a fifth poem cannily unearthed from the much-missed Patrick Merla-edited journal James White Review.

The James White Review also discovered a poet I wasn’t aware of – J M Regan, whose ‘Partial Luetic History of an Individual at Risk’ is perhaps the most ambitious poem here, bending the nonsensical world of AIDS biomedicine and treatment into verse characterised by wonderful, intentionally flawed rhymes:

My Jewish doctor loves me truer,
sitting rigid at the bare Care Center
like a gaunt tree,
and the air of a bored whore,
one eye on her watch,
one hand in her snatch.

Joe Brainard is also present. And here’s a cavil: some nine pages is given over to excerpts from the book I Remember. It’s a great and important gay poem – but, unlike most of the material here, it is readily available elsewhere, and, dating from 1970, inevitably makes the reader wonder: how, and why, should Brainard’s AIDS-related death come to define his poetical gifts? On the other hand, it comes as a shock to find Brainard’s 1971 poem ‘Sick Art’ jauntily pronounce:

Today, with modern art, it is not easy to spot diseases and physical disorders.
Many doctors, however, have noticed a strong relationship between various skin diseases and the paintings of Jackson Pollock.
Fungus infections are very common in the art of the Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Then again, Steve Abbott’s ‘Elegy’ – ‘The dead/ communicate to us in strange ways, or is it only because it is so/ ordinary we think it strange’ – turns out to have been published in 1978. It’s a fine reminder that gay authors in the midst of the 70s culture of erotic abandonment were never only writing, or thinking, about sex.

James Merrill, certainly the poet with the biggest reputation today, was known to have addressed AIDS with characteristic obliqueness in his final collections. Three poems serve him well – particularly ‘Farewell Performance’, dedicated to Merrill’s friend, the critic David Kalstone:

Art. It cures affliction. As lights go down and
Maestro lifts his wand, the unfailing sea change
starts within us. Limber alembics once more
make of the common

lot a pure, brief gold.

Sadly, Clark and Groff haven’t included the second poem Merrill wrote for Kalstone, ‘Investiture at Cecconi's’ – though it can be found in Michael Klein’s anthology from 1992, Poets for Life: Seventy-six Poets Respond to AIDS.

Klein and Richard McCann followed this important collection with a second, Things Shaped in Passing, in 1997. I don’t want to compare these with Persistent Voices; there ought to be space on your bookshelves for all of them. But it is hard, once encouraged to think about the subject of HIV/AIDS, not to regret the forced exclusion in Persistent Voices of some great poets who either escaped HIV infection themselves, or have not died of AIDS: Thom Gunn, perhaps, most famously (The Man with Night Sweats collection), but also Olga Broumas, Rafael Campo, Mark Doty, Marilyn Hacker, Rachel Hadas, Richard Howard, Richard McCann, J D McClatchy, David Trinidad and Gregory Woods.

Nonetheless, Clark and Groff are to be congratulated for the breadth of their research. Most but not all of the contributors write in English; worthy exceptions include the Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, best known for his prose works, and the Spanish author Jaime Gil de Biedma, whose four poems, finely translated by James Nolan, include ‘Pandemic and Celeste’:

To know love, to learn about it,
It’s necessary to have been alone.
And it’s necessary to have made love
On four hundred nights – with four hundred
different bodies. Its mysteries,
as the poet said, are of the soul
but a body is the book in which they are read.

Donald Britton

Persistent Voices comes from a U.S. publisher, but Clark and Groff fortunately offer five poems by an acclaimed young English poet of the 90s, Adam Johnson, whose laconic tone is masterly: ‘I had not reckoned that the sky would fall.’ (‘The Departure Lounge’). They’ve also, I’d venture, (re-)discovered at least one genius: Donald Britton, whose only collection in his lifetime, Italy (1981) is impossible to find, and whose three previously unpublished pieces here are just fantastic. Take ‘Hart Crane Saved from Drowning (Isle of Pines, 1926)’:

Fish-eye, coruscated scales of surf, the bird
With a note Rimbaud speaks of as “making you blush” –
coral negatives plushed gold and azure plaster
in the harbour: death could come like a blackout drunk.

Others achieve their best effects with a directness, transparency and simplicity of lexicon that indicate that the bare realities of AIDS are stark enough; hence David Matias’s ‘Fooling the Forsythia’:

Another friend died. Howard. He’ll be missed.
He and all the others who have demystified death.

Sparest of all is Melvin Dixon’s unforgettable ‘Heartbeats’, entirely comprising spondees, or stressed feet:

Test blood. Count cells.
Reds thin. Whites low.

Dress warm. Eat well.
Short breath. Fatigue.

Night sweats. Dry cough.
Loose stools. Weight loss.

Get mad. Fight back.
Call home. Rest well.

Sometimes – and to risk contradicting myself – knowledge of the author’s demise affects how I responded to a poem. I liked very much Jim Everhard’s ‘Sexual Liberation in a Desperate Age’, with its admission that ‘even in a dangerous time/ i’m still interested, still amused.’ But how moving are these late, paradoxical lines too:

my heart regenerates
even when my body is busy dying,
unfooled as it is by a few boyish gestures.

Of course, the subject of AIDS, whilst apparently having fallen into a historic hole in publishing, and barely ever mentioned by anyone, anywhere, proves far from distant to us, whatever our own circumstances. It touches on any number of classic poetical themes all too readily; particularly the truth that Nietzsche pointed out – that death is the only certain event in life. Or as Reginald Shepherd’s ‘You, Therefore’ has it:

You are like me, you will die too, but not today.

Persistent Voices is a rich, and richly achieved assortment, capturing three decades of inspiring (mostly) gay voices in times of opportunity and deprivation, release and constraint, fear, hope and love.

Richard Canning is Senior Lecturer and Academic Co-ordinator at Bishop Grosseteste University College, Lincoln. He is author or editor of eight books: Gay Fiction Speaks and Hear Us Out (Columbia), Brief Lives: Oscar Wilde and Brief Lives: E M Forster (Hesperus), Between Men and Vital Signs: Essential AIDS Fiction (Carroll & Graf) and Between Men 2 and 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (Alyson).

Lammy Awards 2010 Finalists Announced

2010-03-16T10:41:00.009Z

Congratulations to the Lambda Literary Awards finalists.

Click on links to Chroma reviews of some of the shortlisted titles below and check out Lambda's beautiful new website which received an overhaul recently. Antonio Gonzalez has made substantial improvements to the site with lots of content making it an invaluable resource to the LGBT writing and reading community.

LGBT Anthologies

Gay American Autobiography: Writings from Whitman to Sedaris, edited by David Bergman
Moral Panics, Sex Panics: Fear and the Fight Over Sexual Rights, edited by Gilbert Herdt
My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them, edited by Michael Montlack
Portland Queer: Tales of the Rose City, edited by Ariel Gore
Smash the Church, Smash the State! The Early Years of Gay Liberation, edited by Tommi Avicolli Mecca

Bisexual Fiction

Arusha, by J.E. Knowles
Holy Communion, by Mykola Dementiuk
The Janeid, by Bobbie Geary
Love You Two, by Maria Pallotta-Chiarolli
Torn, by Amber Lehman

Lesbian Debut Fiction

The Creamsickle, by Rhiannon Argo
The Bigness of the World, by Lori Ostlund
Land Beyond Maps, by Maida Tilchen
More of This World or Maybe Another, by Barb Johnson
Verge, by Z Egloff

Gay Debut Fiction

Blue Boy, by Rakesh Satyal
God Says No, by James Hannaham
Pop Salvation, by Lance Reynald
Shaming the Devil: Collected Short Stories, by G. Winston James
Sugarless, by James Magruder

Gay Erotica

Rough Trade: Dangerous Gay Erotica, edited by Todd Gregory
Impossible Princess, by Kevin Killian
I Like It Like That: True Tales of Gay Desire, edited by Richard Labonté & Lawrence Schimel
The Low Road, by James Lear
Eight Inches, by Sean Wolfe

Lesbian Fiction

Dismantled, by Jennifer McMahon
A Field Guide to Deception, by Jill Malone
Forgetting the Alamo, Or, Blood Memory, by Emma Pérez
Risk, by Elena Dykewomon
This One's Going to Last Forever, by Nairne Holtz

Gay Fiction

Lake Overturn, by Vestal McIntyre
The River In Winter, by Matt Dean
Said and Done, by James Morrison
Salvation Army, by Abdellah Taia
Silverlake, by Peter Gadol

Lesbian Memoir/Biography

Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, by Mary Cappello
Mean Little deaf Queer, by Terry Galloway
My Red Blood: A Memoir of Growing Up Communist, Coming Onto the Greenwich Village Folk Scene, and Coming Out in the Feminist Movement, by Alix Dobkin
Likewise: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag, by Ariel Schrag
The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith, by Joan Schenkar

Gay Memoir/Biography

Ardent Spirits: Leaving Home, Coming Back, by Reynolds Price
City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960's and 70's, by Edmund White
Deflowered: My Life in Pansy Division, by Jon Ginoli
Once You Go Back, by Douglas A. Martin
The Pure Lover: A Memoir of Grief, by David Plante

Impossible Princess by Kevin Killian

2010-03-06T10:35:00.000Z

Impossible Princess
Kevin Killian

Published by City Lights

Reviewed by Colin Herd

‘What portion of one’s personality is a fiction?’ So asked San Francisco-based writer Kevin Killian in his contribution to Biting the Error, the crucial and exciting anthology on narrative that came out in 2004, edited by Mary Burger, Robert Glück, Camille Roy and Gail Scott. It’s a question that swims through Killian’s most recent book of fiction, the collection of short stories Impossible Princess, published by City Lights very late last year. It swims through, dives in, submerges itself, reemerges and winsomely skinny-dips in the at times murky, at turns sparkling ponds of Killian’s energetic, muscular, sassy, exquisite prose. Forgive me getting carried away: I really fell in love with this book.

And it’s very easy to do. There are ten stories in Impossible Princess, each one a tight weave of theatricality and “reveal”, stagey acting out of fantasies and creeping self-realizations; in other words: fiction and personality. Killian’s characters often don a tight-robe, seamlessly acting at the surface but revealing conflicted psychologies below. Take Chris, from ‘Too Far’, which is set (believe it or not) in County Durham and co-authored by Thom Wolf. Chris is a near-forgotten former manufactured-pop-star who has reinvented himself as a credible DJ (Kris) and lives in fear of being recognized as a teen idol. In the process of his transformation we are told he has spent ‘years in the gym… looking for what he calls solid definition’. Or take the story ‘Rochester’ coauthored with Tony Leuzzi, in which characters Kevin and Tony hilariously perform a mentor-pupil relationship involving applesauce while a chimpanzee with the ability to predict the future composes Kevin’s celebrated books on a typewriter in the next room.

At the core of the book (well it’s the sixth of ten stories), ‘Dietmar Lutz Mon Amour’ is more personal and revealing, in spite of its flouncy and glamorous title. It’s a very beautiful love story in fact, told in large part through conversations between a writer, Kevin Killian, and an artist, Dietmar Lutz during the latter’s time in California. At times, Killian’s prose is searing in its honesty like the California sun, or soaring in it’s self-knowledge like the paper airplanes Kevin and Dietmar float into Anton LaVey’s locked up estate:

‘I realized I could go on lying to Dietmar Lutz- or were they lies? They were kind of the truth!- and enchant him for a while, by identifying his pleasure centers and manipulating them across the chasm of cultural difference that made us one man here driving, the other man there, filming our approach to the Black House of Anton LaVey. Thus love gives savor to the lie, injects flavor into the apple’s core.’

The sort of home-turf cultural imperialism that Kevin self-consciously explores here is made more poignant because Dietmar and Kevin’s love story is played out alongside reports and conversations about Mark Bingham, one of the passengers (and heroes) of Flight 93. It suggests a darker more threatening edge between fiction and personality, an edge that is expertly sharpened in the final story in the collection: ‘Greensleeves’, in which a married man tortures his wife’s colleague past breaking point by including his brother in their dom/sub relationship. At the seam between fiction and personality are territorialism, violence and possession.

I’ve always loved that famous photo of Marilyn Monroe reading (and near the end of) Ulysses, while sitting on a climbing frame. It’s definitely got something of the reveal and the staged about it. This book amply shows that the world (and Kevin Killian) deserves a snap of Kylie Minogue in a similar pose, reading (and near the end of) Impossible Princess.

Colin Herd is a poet based in Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in 3:AM, Dogmatika, Gutter, Shampoo, Velvet Mafia and Mirage #4/Period(ical).

Review: The After-Death Room – Journey into Spiritual Activism

2010-03-03T12:52:00.007Z

The After-Death Room
by Michael McColly

Published by Soft Skull Press

Reviewed by Kevin Franke

Michael McColly is an American HIV+ journalist, yoga teacher and former Peace Corps volunteer. His book charts, through a mixture of journalism, travelogue and memoir, a journey that leads him to search out African-American preachers in Chicago, Buddhist monks in a Thai monastery, traditional Zulu healers, male sex workers in India, and mullahs in Islamic Senegal. He sets out to explore the world of HIV/AIDS activism from the point of view of an HIV+ person.

He starts his rather haphazard odyssey in South Africa in 2000, having been invited to teach a yoga class as part of an international AIDS conference. He has found in yoga a way of keeping healthy and sane since his own diagnosis in 1996, and he finds great satisfaction in teaching yoga to others along his journey. Yoga becomes his way of connecting more deeply with people when the pain of their situations becomes too much for him.

He soon realises that he is unable to separate the journalist from the person, as the various projects he visits in Thailand, Vietnam and India force him to confront his own attitudes towards the illness and his own health. The journalistic begins to fuse with the personal. There are references to his less-than-perfect health as he travels, though this is never fully explored in the book. This is as much a book about the various organisations that he reports on, as it is a journey of transformation for him personally. He has given up much in order to go on this journey; selling his furniture and giving up his apartment in order to fund his travels. Will it have been worth it in the end?

He comes across an inspiring collection of individuals in the countries that he travels to. He meets people that have been driven to activism mostly through being diagnosed themselves. HIV means something very different in these places than back home, still forming a death sentence for most people due to the unavailability of antiretroviral drugs. For most of these people their only option is to keep themselves as healthy as possible, often using alternative/traditional healing methods, but they know that the disease will ultimately kill them. It becomes a constant challenge for Michael to have to face these people, knowing that he has such easy access to the drugs that could keep them alive.

Michael McColly

Along the way there are some bizarre episodes, such as the mass vaccination of HIV positive people at a football stadium in Bangkok, with a non-proven and questionable drug claimed to be both treatment and cure. Or the museum attached to a Buddhist monastery, preserving the bodies of people that have died from AIDS in formaldehyde tanks.

The book is not always successful in balancing the reportage with the personal (spiritual) journey. It often jumps too quickly from one country or project to another, and therefore lacks a certain structure. But it powerfully tells the stories of the grassroots activists and unsung heroes of the HIV epidemic, and beautifully charts one man’s journey from the shock of his own HIV diagnosis, and the disconnection from life that can often follow, to the recapturing of a part of himself lost long ago.

Review: A Single Man

2010-02-24T18:02:00.005Z

A Single Man
Directed by Tom Ford

General Release from 14 February 2010 (UK)

Reviewed by Paul Kane

A film of quite singular beauty; its power to move derives from a number of elements, of which one should mention, above all, Colin Firth’s immense lead performance.

The world of this film – America in the early 1960s, at the time of the Cuban missile crisis – is as perfectly realised as in any of Tim Burton’s Gothic creations. Indeed, the period detail and digital colouring is so distinctive and realistic as to be oddly disconcerting, placing the viewer at once in a world unlike our own. It is wonderful to look at.

Tom Ford's direction moves the story along at a stately tempo, and the music aids in this respect too. Abel Korzeniowski and Shigeru Umebayashi's score is sublime.
One cannot help but feel that a film as well made as this - as intelligent, clear-sighted and well-observed - is a tribute to Isherwood himself (he of ‘I am a camera’ fame) and not just an adaptation of one of his many fine novels.

Ford’s directorial debut is a masterpiece, compelling and irresistible.

Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. He welcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com.

Review: Out in the Country: Youth, Media, and Queer Visibility in Rural America,

2010-02-13T14:11:00.000Z

Out in the Country
Mary L. Gray

New York University Press

Review by Sophie Mayer

Rural America gets a pretty bad press in queer culture: think of the no-way-out brutality of Brokeback Mountain or the teenage boy who phones Harvey in Milk in a sub-plot that suggests glimpses in national media and a bus ticket to San Francisco are the only lifelines available for young people growing up LGBTQ in the heartland. Indiana-based communications professor Mary L. Gray begs to differ. Her work for Internet start-up PlanetOut made her wonder about the value of nationwide, and even transnational, media to those living at a distance from hubs of community, services and cultural institutions, and particularly to young people exploring their identities.

She grew frustrated with the presumption that access to media, and queer visibility therein, was the most important factor for queer youth removed from urban centres, and set out to study queer youth activism in the Midwest. Having grown up in rural California, she experienced a sense of familiarity as she traversed rural Kentucky and its borders while researching her book. The title of her prologue “Never Met a Stranger” suggests a counter-view of non-urban America: one in which local community, with its complex of delicate interconnections and old-fashioned manners, overrides individual difference. One Kentucky interviewee, Shaun, comments that Brokeback was “just ridiculous” as “it seemed unfathomable that such extreme violence would be exacted by a mob of people you considered neighbors” (115).

What she found was a complex web of support both likely – local PFLAG chapters – and unlikely – the Homemakers Club – that “used the powerful institution of the family to bridge the divide between queers as strangers and LGBT young people as local sons and daughters” (58). This small, interconnected world of neighbourly groups and local organising can be “all too much drama,” as one gay PFLAG put it, but it also challenges some of the more oppressive stereotypes, maintained by both mainstream and alternative media, of rural America. Gray describes drag revues at Wal-Mart, Pride meetings at Christian bookstores, queercore punk at Pulaski High School and a strange but welcome blend of radical activism and politeness. the Highland Pride Alliance’s website “invites you to enter with the following clarification: ‘The Contents of this page are of a Homosexual Nature (not sexually explicit) so if you find Gays, Bisexuals, Lesbians, and Transgender people gross and against your beliefs or if your not interested in supporting the Gay, Bisexual, Lesbian, and Transgender Community Please Click Exit and Have a Nice Day!’ ” (103-04)

The nitty-gritty of the book is as all-American as that final exhortation. Details of high school gay-straight alliances, the Discovery Channel, and church meetings are context-specific – but the discussion of online identities has become more relevant, with the impact of social networking, since Gray undertook her research in the days of limited online access. Her argument that online networks provide “queer realness,” rather than reductive virtuality, is well worth reading in depth, as is her overarching discussion about the relativity of rural and urban areas as safe spaces. Gray takes issue with Samuel Delany’s observation that “small towns…contempt for difference [is] the driving force behind New York City’s moral cleansing [under Rudy Giuliani post 9/11],” arguing instead that rural community can create acceptance through knowability and interconnected responsibility, while urban alienation leads to a fear of difference (114).

As she concludes in her reflections on the politics of same-sex marriage in the US, however, what might stitch families and high school communities together has little effect at State Capitols. As Amy, one of Gray’s correspondents put it, “Even if everyone has a gay cousin, they [the voters] don’t think there are really very many gay people here, so why should they do something for gay people?” (180) That lack of strength-in-numbers – intensified by court challenges to public school programmes, urban migration (for work as much as community), and intensive online activity in virtual communities – may be the most pronounced difference between urban and rural areas. This book is an effective and often affecting read for those, whether homophobic politicians or liberal organisers, who would deny that “there are really very many gay people” out in the country.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Review: Man’s World by Rupert Smith

2010-02-06T08:10:00.007Z

Man’s World
Rupert Smith

Published by Arcadia Books Ltd

Reviewed by Max Fincher

Man’s World, Rupert Smith’s latest novel, is a novel that explores friendship and desire between men, particularly how and where it shades into queer love. Contrasting both the 1950s and modern-day gay London, Man’s World’s highlights how society and gay life has changed dramatically, but also perhaps suggests that there are some continuities in the experience of friendship.

Michael Medway, a reserved, ‘artistic’, amateur photographer, is enduring his national service at RAF Neville in Lancashire, in 1957, and keeping a secret diary of his experiences and desires. He is befriended by another outsider who doesn’t fit in, Stephen Poynter. Stephen is openly mocked and taunted by the other men for his effeminacy and is bullied by the sexually-repressed, homophobic Sergeant Kelsey. Michael shuns Stephen’s initial attempts at friendship, afraid that he will be tarred with the same brush and be labelled a queer. Stephen acts up his flamboyant nature, cross-dressing and trying to seduce Michael by leading him into the back of a disused ambulance. Telling Michael to run away, Stephen is caught and discharged from the RAF, moving to London to work as an art director at Muscle Boy magazine. Unable to admit to his homosexuality, Michael secretly desires and fantasizes about the universally popular Mervyn Wright, the class clown and prize-winning boxer on the base. Handsome, charming, narcissistic with a Greek-god body, Wright is a jack-the-lad ‘straight-boy’ fantasy.

Taking inspiration from the models who pose in physique magazines like Health and Strength and Man’s World, Michael initially photographs Wright to promote his boxing matches. Wright asks him to take more pictures of him to help him be discovered as a body-building star in the magazines, and to realize his ambitions of working in the film industry. Wright’s enthusiasm and tactile physicality, contrasted with Michael’s quivering reticence and neurotic self-doubt, is tantalizing. The passages that describe their photographic sessions together are intensely erotic as Michael’s increasing sexual arousal is established gradually. Michael realizes that Wright really wants to have sex with him, and not the girls Wright tries to pick up when they go away together on a wild weekend in Blackpool. Back at their hotel room, drunk and frustrated, Wright asks Michael to photograph him nude:

He unlaced his shoes, pulled off his socks. His trousers fell around his ankles. He had an erection. I kept shooting....
‘How about it?’
‘What?’
‘Want a piece of the action?’
‘I...’
‘Come on,’ he said, in his gangster accent, ‘give a buddy a helping hand; He thrust his hips forward, eyes closed, lips parted.
It would all be forgotten in the morning.
I put the camera down carefully on the bed and squatted in front of him. His groin was at eye level. There was a small wet spot on the fabric of the pouch. Wright pushed closer.
I had a brief flash of clarity – I saw a dirty old man kneeling before a drunken airman in a cheap boarding house, about to take the step that would turn him from latent to practising.
It was a step from which there was no return.
I took it.’

Smith effectively portrays the power of the closet over Michael. When he visits London, Stephen tells him: ‘You’re living a lie. You’re pretending your normal because you’re scared to death of being one of us.'

Michael and Wright eventually leave the RAF (after Michael has a spell at RAF Halton in Buckinghamshire, where the doctors try to cure him) and they set up home together in London through Stephen, who gets Michael a job as a photographer and introduces Wright to the influential Edward Templeton. However, Wright does not think of himself as gay, or even queer, and is no way loyal to Michael sexually, even if he loves him. We learn that throughout their relationship Wright had ‘a wandering eye. Men, women, you know – he wasn’t fussy.’

Smith has a fine ear for realistic dialogue, and he acknowledges that a number of people contributed their memories in researching the novel. In the second narrative of the story, which is set in modern-day London, Stephen appears as a wonderfully authentic character. A fiery, feisty, camp old queen whose tender sensitive spirit is still evident in his fierce protectiveness of Michael who has recently lost Wright. Stephen is unafraid to tell a few home truths to what he sees as the indifference of Michael’s young gay neighbour, Robert, who lives in the flat below him. Michael and Robert become friends, and through Michael, and Stephen, Robert discovers a lost secret world of late-1950s London, a world of high-society parties, secret bars, and police raids.

Like Michael, Robert keeps a diary, writing an online blog of his thoughts and feelings about his life and friends, and his experiences of being gay in London in 2010. In particular, Robert reflects on his friendship with Jonathan, a superficial, narcissistic, selfish drama queen:

Jonathan is my best friend, my “sister”, more like family than family, and although he’s a constant source of irritation I could never really chuck him. I like to think that we’d do anything for each other, that we’d be ‘there for you’ as they say on Friends, although if this was actually put to the test, I wouldn’t put money on the outcome.

In fact, the novel explores the limits of friendship between gay men, what it means to be a good friend, and the delicate balance between putting oneself first and behaving selfishly. Robert refuses to bail out Jonathan when he gets into hot water with the grotesque pimp and drug-dealer Hadley and owes him three thousand pounds. Similarly, when Wright is charged with the murder of Gerald, a photographer who supplies pornographic photographs to high-society queen Edward Templeton and his friends, Michael begins to doubts the limits of his love for Wright:

The only person who never gets the blame is Mervyn Wright – the man who loves another man, who used his body to get him and who wasn’t averse to trading it for fame and fortune either. How much can I do for Mervyn? And what is the point? I f he gets off this time, he’s going to turn his back on me and everyone else.

There is an authentic realism in Smith’s depiction of both the hidden party-world of the 1950s, and a wry observation of a certain contemporary gay world that is solely dedicated to shopping, drugs and fucking. The characters that Robert meets, particularly the rampant sex-fiend Stuart, the boy-next-door Simon at the office, Hadley, with his uber-fashionable party-set in a Shoreditch loft-conversion, are all convincing and are painted with a dry humour. There are some very funny sharp observations of character and situation, and some classic one-liners to remember: ‘...the idea of being a VIP in a sex club is like being on the guest list at the clap clinic’. When Robert goes to a contemporary art exhibition organized by Hadley, his introduction by the easily-impressed Jonathan to the self-important pretentious artist, Nicolae Vladimirescu, is very funny:

‘Hi Nico,’ says Jonathan, ‘great show.’
‘Yes,’ says Nico. ‘The creative power of the universe flows through me.’ He makes a gesture with his hands – very large, hairy-backed hands that would be more at home wrapped round a pickaxe.
‘How did you make them?’
‘It’s a very complicated process,’ he says, ‘based on the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure. I write thesis on him at university.’
‘Wow,’ says Jonathan. ‘I did a thesis too. Mine was about...’
‘The art world at home...pffff.’
‘Oh yes,’ says Jonathan, ‘it’s so hard to get shown...’
‘So I come to England and here I find wealthy collectors.’
‘Fascinating choice of subject matter,’ I say. ‘The pigeon, for instance.’
Nico shrugs. ‘I hate fucking pigeons,’ he says, and walks off, as if mortally offended.

Smith alternates each chapter between the two narratives, encouraging us to draw parallels between the respective friendships and emotional roller coasters of Michael and Wright, and Robert and Jonathan. Michael and Robert have much in common in searching for love with narcissistic personalities. They are both dominated in their friendships, even bullied into decisions by their friends that go against their better judgment. Yet at the same time, they show a strength and emotional resilience. Both are level-headed, with their feet firmly in the ground, and loyal in the face of adversity. Father-figures to their more extrovert, wild friends, both characters come to understand how their friendships shape their lives, and for Robert, that friendship can cross the generation gap. He comes to realize that it’s all been said, felt and done before.

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.

Review: Intersex (for lack of a better word)

2010-01-23T11:01:00.004Z

Intersex (for lack of a better word)
Thea Hillman

Published by Manic D Press

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer

“I believe in speaking to people in a language they’ll understand. I’ve got CAH [congenital adrenal hyperplasia] when I talk to doctors; I’m intersex when I talk to activists; I’ve got a medical condition when I talk to my boss.” (“Condition,” 148)

What about when Thea Hillman talks to her audience – whether live or reading? Intersex (for lack of a better word) is a story of, literally, coming to terms (or, better, defining one’s own terms rather than being defined by someone else’s), first with a childhood diagnosis of CAH, then through her own shifting gender and sexual identities, and continuously with perceptions both within and outside her social worlds of family, friends and, increasingly, the interlocking sex-radical/queer/trans/intersex communities of the Bay Area. Intersex, far from being a three-act Hollywood melodrama of finding (or accepting) oneself/falling in love/reuniting with family/triumphing over (or through) the medical establishment/insert autobiographical cliché here, is a radical adventure through narrative instability and the erotics of constant redefinition.

Told in fragments each titled by, and circling around, a single word (starting with “Haircut” and ending with “C/leaving”), Intersex is an openwork text full of better words that – as Hillman suggests – speak vividly to different listeners of subjective and social experiences around the slippage, claiming and shifting of identity. Pieces such as “Opinion” (an op-ed on Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex) and “Already” (a scorching erotic encounter) differently but consistently apply careful pressure to the word intersex as a portmanteau that contains “a bunch of people who have a variety of bodies, some radically different from each other, and even more different experiences” (148).

So, for lack of a better word, the book could have been called Human. There’s something for everyone here: family Christmases and sex parties rub up alongside each other provocatively; school bullies and shit bosses are seen off, years – but only pages – later, by activist community; the ordinary misery of break-ups mingles with the extraordinary trauma of invasive medical encounters. The second half of the book, in pieces like “Allies,” “Out,” and “Community,” explore the tension between waving intersex aloft as a banner under which a community can gather in order to educate and create change, and its inexactness.

That inexactness creates the space for Intersex: for its tapestry of individual, contradictory, telling details that, told with such precision and care, texture a life (Gram’s Alzheimer’s, the anal fins of mosquito fish, Queeruption), and for Hillman’s ability to combine skilfully the telling of a tale and the revelation of its import, not only for people living sex and gender differently, but for what those experiences might bring to the political sphere at large.

In “War,” Hillman writes: “Being in love is the opposite of being at war… I take the war on terror personally because the war on terror is really a war on difference, because my body strikes terror in the hearts of other Americans. My body and the bodies of the people I love are the most intimate sites of American imperialism” (95-96). Thea Hillman is who we need in the battle for hearts and minds.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Review drop, anchor by Ben Barton

2010-01-16T01:54:00.003Z

drop, anchor
Ben Barton

Published by erbacce-press

Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson

Ben Barton’s poems construct a portrait of an individual starting from birth through the course of life encountering lovers and enduring the death of family members. There is an immediate sense of the fragility of life in the opening poem ‘The Re-Birth Remembered’ which describes how the narrator was born alongside a twin who was still born. That one should be taken home to be swaddled and loved while the other is shut in the dark and buried, their fates decided by trivial chance, seems an intolerable injustice that makes the narrator demand that they both be remembered.

These restrained poems don’t strive for deeper meaning because the profundity is there in the situation or encounter. Each is charged with an emotion refracted through a snapshot of a particular situation. From ecstatic bliss “ten thousand sparklers went off in my head” to the pulsing everydayness of desire “I like to watch the men’s crotches bobbing with the tarmac bumps,” the grave humour of hiding from landlords demanding money “too scared, even to piss in the centre of the bowl” and the bitterness of loss/missed opportunities “Another year has passed without you here.” These poems create feelings which resonate and an ambiguity about the choices one should make.

Ben Barton

Civil partnerships don’t necessarily make gay domestic harmony just because a contract has been signed. Although no one actually believes making a life-long commitment instantly resolves all those messy relationship problems (what David McConnell refers to as the “enchanted bed” of marriage), there is a buoyancy of feeling and vague expectation of unanimity between partners caused from legal reform which allows same sex couples to experience something akin to marriage. The happy gay home is called into question in the poem ‘Pink House.’ Small seemingly trivial arguments can erupt into bigger issues and it ends with the heavily ironic thought “Homo sweet homo.”

Like the final poem which describes a casual encounter: “It’s time to go home I guess,” the reader is left with a sense of longing for more. With a new book of poetry and a string of super 8 films in production the prolific poet/film-maker Ben Barton doesn’t seem to be slowing down. See http://roundeyebooks.blogspot.com/ for current events and projects.

Review: The Phoenix by Ruth Sims

2010-01-09T01:40:00.001Z

The Phoenix
by Ruth Sims

Published by Lethe Press

Reviewed by Liam Tullberg

The Phoenix is a richly-written Victorian saga that explores the lengths one will go to for true love.

At the heart of the novel is Jack Rourke, a strong-willed, morally-malleable young man destined to escape his impoverished and abusive homelife. The death of his sickly twin, Michael, at an early age ignites a fury in Jack that leads him to murder his cruel, tyrannical father. On the run, he disappears into the winding streets of London and soon finds the home and family he never had in the local theatre where, with the help of kindly Lizbet, he is reborn as Kit St. Denys.

When an accident on stage brings Dr Nicholas Stuart into Kit’s life, the attraction for both men is immediate and, despite themselves, they are irreversibly drawn together, their stark contrasts the ground on which their relationship is built; Kit gregarious and creative, Nicholas withdrawn and logical. Their affair appears doomed from the start, their inner conflicts as strong as those around them in a society in which homosexuality could lead to imprisonment and social exile. Sims writes these issues with compassion and clarity, not allowing historical fact to slow or impend upon the engagement and enjoyment of fiction.

While Jack is clearly the protagonist of The Phoenix, Sims has created a truly empathetic, plausible character in the initially arid, insular Nicholas. Introduced through his fervently religious family, Nicholas’s cold character thaws out on every page and he is a character with whom one wills Kit to share his life. His wife, Brownlyn, is also written with tenderness and not allowed to become the caricature harpy that would no doubt have made the reader’s emotions towards her two-dimensional at best.

Throughout the novel, it’s clear to see that, for both Kit and Nicholas, the bond of family is near-impossible to break. Kit cannot shake the feeling that, as his father had always told him, he is worthy of nothing, and Nicholas is forever bound by the guilt born of his family’s religion. It is within these flaws that their love and need for one another grows and the novel reaches a dramatic, unforgettable ending.

The Phoenix is an engaging and exciting read that is written with enough historical detail to create a picture in the readers’ mind’s eye, but not so much as to distract from the excellent characters and winding plot. Likewise, the dialogue feels true to the period, but is not cumbersome or difficult to manage.

While the story of The Phoenix may be set in the late 19th Century, it’s one of love, lust and loss that is as pertinent as present day tales. Each of us has our demons and it is how we exorcise them that tells the truth about our character.

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

Film Review: All Over Me

2010-01-02T11:58:00.004Z

All Over Me
dir. Alex Sichel

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer

In her autobio-stage show Paradoxical Undressing, Kristin Hersh tells the story of an early show with Throwing Muses, the band she put together with her sister Tanya Donnelly when they were still in high school in the early 1980s. Coming offstage after playing a spot in a punk show, the band encountered a fan who asked, “What did you say your band name is? Throwing Up Mucus?” There’s a gulf between what he thought he heard with his punk ears on and the nascent riot grrrl protest of the band’s actual name – but there’s also a truth. Riot grrrl, inspired by punk and feminist performance art in equal measures, threw the concept of the muse out the window with songs that often threw bodily fluids and processes in audience’s faces; metaphorically, for the most part, although Donita Sparks from L7 did throw a bloody tampon into the crowd at Reading in 1992. Embodiment, angst, rage, wild emotion: all those things girls were supposed to keep under wraps burned through in the long hot summers after the ’87 crash.

Riding the crest of riot grrrl, All Over Me brings feminist protest and adolescent vomit in equal measures as it plunges the viewer into the woozy world of Hell’s Kitchen summer with fifteen year olds Claudia (Alison Folland, who popped up in I’m Not There alongside Kim Gordon), known as Claude, and Ellen (Tara Subkoff, a New York hipster who’s in We Live in Public). They’re trying to form their own band, inspired by Helium (lead singer Mary Timony appears in the film as a member of the comedically-named grrrl band CoochiePop), Patti Smith, Babes in Toyland, and Sleater Kinney, who all appear on the soundtrack. Ellen’s a little distracted by neighbourhood bad boy Mark (Cole Hauser, who went on to play tough in the Riddick films and K-Ville), while Claude’s a little distracted by Ellen’s distraction. While Ellen goes boy-crazy (literally, as Mark turns her on to coke and booze), Claude finds herself drawn to pink-haired guitarist Lucy (Leisha Hailey, who grew up to become Alice on The L Word). What seems like a classic love triangle is given edge and dimension when Mark is unsettled by Claude’s new neighbour, Luke (Pat Briggs, lead singer of Psychotica), a queer musician who has befriended Claude’s shy workmate Jesse (Wilson Cruz, aka Ricky from My So Called Life).

Hello? How have you not bought the DVD already? Riot grrrl, Wilson Cruz, Leisha Hailey with pink hair, and thanks to Lisa Cholodenko and Maria Maggenti in the credits… As if that’s not enough, Sylvia Sichel pens dialogue that sounds, yknow, how actual teenagers, like, speak or whatever, while her sister Alex keeps the camera intimate and mobile, like a more chilled-out Spike Lee joint. Unlike the Campion sisters, they weren’t able to sustain their filmmaking partnership, only creating this jewel of a film. Maybe that’s because it’s so of its time and place: a time when grrrls could do anything and everyone pitched in to help. Maybe it’s just me (I’m listening to Helium as I write this) but somehow All Over Me’s timeliness is also its timelessness, in the way that the music brings the swirl of adolescent feeling to the surface.

This is the ur-queer film, way more so (and way less pretentious) than Go Fish – and possibly the only film ever to catch the moment of infinite possibility that was mid-nineties riot grrrl, capturing how it felt to be bouncing up and down in a club full of grrrls in ripped jeans and home-cut hair, comparing guitar licks with boys wearing nail varnish. Claude might be broke, but she has an electric guitar, roller skates, Patti Smith on CD, and a paintbox. Long before Naomi was dreaming of Emily to the strains of Sleater Kinney on Skins, the Sichel Sisters (director Alex and writer Sylvia) were doing it for themselves, setting queer teenage hearts aflame with a film that’s part love story, part rocking soundtrack and all heart. These girls rule!

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Queer Books of 2009

2009-12-26T10:50:00.010Z

Queer Books of 2009

A large number of fantastic new queer books were published in 2009 - too many for us to cover in the blog. Best-selling queer authors like Colm Toibin (Brooklyn) and Sarah Waters (The Little Stranger) published impressive novels without any overt queer themes. Bright new talent like Vestal McIntyre (Lake Overturn) and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore (So Many Ways to Sleep Badly) published novels which tread new territory previously unexplored in queer fiction. Rakesh Satyal (Blue Boy) and Abdellah Taia (Salvation Army) breathed new life into the coming of age novel with spectacular debuts. G. Winston James (Shaming the Devil) and Jameson Currier (Still Dancing) published varied and startling collections of short stories. Edmund White and David Plante published memoirs that shed new light on queer experience. With fresh and savy growing publishers like Alyson, Red Bone Press, Lethe Press and Young Offenders Media giving burgeoning queer talent a voice, there will be plenty of new queer literature to look forward to in the new year.

For a more comprehensive look at what queer writers have been reading over the past year, the informative and well-maintained blog Band of Thebes has gathered an impressive array of 56 queer writers to give their 2009 recommendations. Click here to read the list.

Review: Wilde Stories 2009: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction

2009-12-12T05:38:00.003Z

Wilde Stories 2009: The Year's Best Gay Speculative Fiction
Edited by Steve Berman

Published by Lethe Press

Reviewed by Paul Kane

These eleven stories display a match made in heaven and, on occasion, consummated in hell: speculative / slipstream literature conflated with a queer/LGBT sensibility. Joel Lane’s Behind the Curtain, a skewered take on the vampire tale, is a case in point. Set amid a landscape of urban decay and environmental collapse, it has a protagonist intent on cruising for a bruising; or a bloodletting, anyway. Vampire romance, as a genre, is all the rage with adolescent girls at the minute; this story is a more carnal version of the form.

The most impressive piece of fiction is AKA St. Mark’s Place by Richard Bowes, though the ending is a bit perfunctory, mind. In essence, the story traces the relationship between three troubled souls - Judy, Ray and BD - from the mid-'60s to the early 1970s. Their relationship, a tangle of fate, is not so much a love triangle as a triangle of intimate complicity; and the most effective passages evoke the frisson of feeling that occurs when you notice properly who people are, how they see themselves. The clairvoyant element here adds a layer of mystery, but does not dispel the gloom of two take-home truths: families are ramshackle dwellings, unstable and insecure, is one; another: the abused will somehow tend to become abusers.

Another highlight of the collection is a tale entitled Bluff, by that formidably accomplished writer, L.A. Fields. His contribution touches on lust, longing, a little death (in the Elizabethan sense, natch) and maybe the larger one. Though a small example of what he can do, it is effective nonetheless.

Finally, to end, comments on a couple of other contributions. I’m Your Violence by Lee Thomas starts out as a police procedural in the vein of James Ellroy: a grisly sex murder, the leading turn an act of near-cannibalism. It then veers off in a weird (or an even weirder) direction but a fruitful one, with an interesting moral ambivalence at its core. As a writer, Thomas is a real find and his protagonist here, a detective by the name of Dean Kaiser, is surely too intriguing a character to be limited to a run-out in just one story. Echo by Peter Dube is different again, having a thread of subtle disquiet which evokes that dark genius Thomas Ligotti, or some of the rare fictions of Guy Davenport. It seemed to tell of a curious fate, yet was as much a meditation on memory and lost time. A strange, suggestive story.

Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. Hewelcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com

Review: Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read

2009-12-09T10:59:00.007Z

Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read
Edited by Richard Canning

Published by Alyson Books

Reviewed by Max Fincher

‘Must read’ or ‘must do’ lists rouse my hackles, initially at least. My immediate feeling is: ‘Why must I?’ Why should I read this or that book in preference to another? Or one I have chosen to read or had recommended to me? It is similar to the mixed feelings you might experience being told to read certain ‘classic’ works of fiction at college or university, because they are somehow inherently ‘good for you’. We all know what is good for us (sometimes we even enjoy it) but we don’t always necessarily want to be good all the time. However, this collection of essays in no way attempts to persuade you why you must read these books along the arguments of their literariness, popularity or for self-improvement reasons; in fact, one or two of the essays argue against reading their choice. Instead, the reader is given very personal reflections by the contributors on the pleasures they have yet to discover. After putting off reading Moby Dick for years, I might now try reading the novel, as well as revisiting again, with a better understanding, Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood.

So Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read ‘...isn’t a canonical book’. As Richard Canning makes clear in his introduction, there is no overarching grand narrative that links the selections together according to some linear, developmental history. The range of books covered is not merely limited to novels either. Letters, diaries, poetry, and autobiography are included, and the essays span Plato, Gilgamesh and the Bible to contemporary fiction by Herve Guibert, Rebecca Brown and Matthew Sadler. This is not intended to be a comprehensive survey or history of gay literature in the manner of say Gregory Woods’s A History of Gay Literature, but is a highly subjective and personal choice of works by both new and established contemporary writers. There are gaps and holes between writers and periods and ‘the babble of gathered voices’, gaps that we can fill in if we choose. Inevitably, everyone will have their own ‘must read’ list. But as Canning says to focus on who is left out is to miss the point: ‘the value of this book not by what isn’t here, but by what is’ (p.xiv).

And for some readers there may be surprising omissions. Forster, Gide, Genet, Joe Orton, Armistead Maupin, Alan Hollingshurst and Sarah Waters are all absent. One aspect of this collection that makes it immensely readable and enjoyable, is that the essays are not consistently in the vein of classic biographical or literary-critical appreciations. Instead, many contributors offer subjective viewpoints, reminiscences and musings on the process of reading, the writers or describe how certain characters changed or affected them personally. Many essays read against established interpretations. For instance Robert Glück’s reads Edmund White’s, A Boy’s Own Story as a transgressive piece of fiction that argues against reading the novel as an example of ‘crossover’ literature with mainstream audiences. Regina Marler admits she doesn’t like Henry James’s The Bostonians, finding James’s characterisation of the latent lesbian attraction between the characters of Olive and Verena ‘mean-spirited’, ‘spiteful’ and ‘grotesque’.

Frequently, the essays are stylistically inventive, as in Kathy Acker’s appreciation of the fiction of William Burroughs. In addition, there are exciting cross-currents occurring between readers and writers, where sexuality is not a centrifugal point: straight and lesbian women read gay men’s writing, and (previously straight) and gay/bisexual men read straight women’s fiction. The essay by Mark Behr on The Color Purple is a shining example, and shows the power of fiction to both transform and connect people.

Herman Melville

Out of the fifty books chosen, I have read six: Horace Walpole’s Letters (only selections; reading all thirty-four volumes would take forever); Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited; James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; Mary Renault’s The Persian Boy; Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. For my Christmas holiday reading, I decided I would choose five books to read. Vestal McIntyre’s description of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick as ‘...a story bursting at its seams, assembled and sewn together as roughly as Frankenstein’s monster’ and Melville’s daring, experimental language intrigues me. I have shied away from modernist fiction, but perhaps Melville will engage me. Second on my list is Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. Edmund White describes how Yourcenar’s had an unconventional upbringing, tutored by her father in Latin and Greek, and how she is ‘a philosophical writer with a deep and wide culture’. I am hoping to discover a brilliant historical fiction writer, to see how she portrays ‘one of the great same-sex love stories of all time’. Thirdly, I would like to read Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems. David Bergman has whetted my interest by describing Ginsberg’s curious mix of spirituality and explicit sexuality, his inclusive and embracing attitude to other people, and how the experience of reading his poems is like ‘holding the book and holding the man’. J.R. Ackerley’s autobiography, My Father and Myself, is, according to Andrew Holleran, ‘a wonderful comic portrait of people with an almost Dickensian cast’. I am anticipating from Holleran’s description something in the realm of Alan Bennett’s wonderfully observant character-sketches, Talking Heads, mixed with Kenneth Williams’ diary. Holleran’s description of Ackerley as ‘entertaining’, ‘acerbic’ and ‘never boring or monotonous’, suggests a pleasurable journey of exploration of a complex man’s relationship with his father and his own sexual feelings. Finally, I would like to read Andrew Holleran’s own novel, Dancer from the Dance, to submerge and lose myself in a heady era of ‘intense artifice’, the disco moment of the 1970s, and to discover perhaps the ‘first real novel of Gay Liberation’, which as Matias Viegener says is ‘a wild and unexpected fulfilment of Walt Whitman’s utopian call for the “love of comrades” to “sing the body electric”.

Reading the essays in this collection has opened my eyes to the diversity of voices and his(her)stories that are out there for us all to explore and experience. You may find your assumptions and expectations about a particular work or writer confirmed or overturned, but hopefully you will make new discoveries. I am hoping my own selections will be entertaining, challenging and informative, and that each will contain something that, in some small or large way, changes my own ‘certainties’. To this end, I would like to conclude with a quotation from Mark Behr’s essay on The Color Purple, as a coda for why everyone must read:

The Reader doubts, often. From book to book, his doubts multiply. The Reader believes that if more people were less certain more often, and tasted the emancipation that comes with doubt, there would be fewer wars and fewer hungry and unhappy and angry people in whose eyes he sees himself reflected.

Review: Ganymede Stories One

2009-12-02T03:18:00.002Z

Ganymede Stories One
edited by John Stahle

Published by Ganymede

Reviewed by Marc Bridle

This anthology brings together short stories published in the first six issues of Ganymede; and like all anthologies it is a hit-and-miss affair. But what sets it above many similar collections is both the quality of the writing and the audacity of its editors in establishing a new gay literary benchmark for anthologies of this kind. The (mostly) contemporary prose in these 200 pages is seen squarely in the context of a Nineteenth Century aesthetic, one that stretches from the horse-drawn hansoms of gas-lit London to the bloodshot-eyed edginess of modern day San Francisco and Paris.

From Andrew J. Peters’ adorably amusing gay fairytale, The Vain Prince, to Cyrus Cassells’ aphoristic Another Horse on Your Horse Ranch established principles of prose are overturned. Peters’ fairytale anti-hero, Adalbert, is rather like a queer Turandot, and his prose swaggers along like a drunken queen in a nightclub, the very antithesis of what a fairytale should be. The opposite are Cassells’ exquisitely drawn short paragraphs, dexterously poetic and dripping in color like a golden-tongued seraphim. Elsewhere you can clearly see an individual writer’s non-literary influences. B.R.Lyon’s As is, I aspires to the condition of music, as does Marc Andreottola’s Lots. What sets Andreottola’s story apart from others here is the filmic quality he brings to his narrative. Just as a filmmaker can focus on one image and make the viewer seem unsettled so does Andreottola: “All the entertainer could see was the thigh of the Stump, a strong meaty thigh. The thigh activated the entertainer somehow, like a switch. He felt like the thighs could crush him like a nutcracker.” On a completely different level, John Stahl’s brilliantly articulated Memories of Inexpression shows that evocative writing doesn’t need to be a dialogue. With Beckett-like precision Stahl’s prose bears the imprint of isolation and memory like few other pieces in this anthology.

Gay writing is universal and it is, therefore, good to see the Ljubljana-based writer Boris Pintar included in this anthology. Slavic Thicket: Two Stories, translated from the Slovene by Rawley Grau, is coruscating. Whether by design or by translation his writing positively reeks of scents; pissing is not so much about the act as it is about the smell. In fact, this is prose that assails the senses in every way: cocks are eye-balled, sniffed and licked; nostrils are there not just to smell the aphrodisiac of sex but to snort coke, poppers and glue. Paragraphs are long – but never over long – but their very tightness leaves one feeling rather as if one has been clubbed over the head. They are brutal. The only other story which comes close to this kind of semi-pornographic wasteland of spunk and hard fucks is Eric Karl Anderson’s Beauty Number Two.

There used to be a time when gay literature had one ubiquitous theme: HIV and AIDS (think especially of the works of Hervé Guibert or David Wojnarowicz) so it was astonishing to find that the acronym HIV appears twice and AIDS just once in this entire anthology, and even then in just one story: Beauty Number Two. Anderson is certainly neither quixotic nor passive about it (“I’ve had enough of this fucking AIDS death camp”) but neither is he remote from it (“He is HIV positive: each revelatory fact makes him more perfect in my fevered imagination”). And jostling with the poetry of Anderson’s prose is a veritable shopping list of modern-day triviality, from celebrity blow-jobs to branded underwear, all neatly bound together in a very Noughties framework of queer happiness.

Cyrus Cassells

Which is, I suppose, what Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson might have been doing in the Nineteenth century. The inclusion of works by Wilde and Stevenson, taking up a full quarter of the pages here, strikes me as problematical, though it does underline the extent to which some recent gay writing has retrenched to a more inverted form of beauty. Neither author could be said to be a model for Dennis Cooper’s anti-queer deviancy, but I can see the partial influence of their aesthetic on some of the writers appearing earlier on in this collection. Stevenson’s The Adventure of the Hansom Cab is indeed evocative, but its links to anything gay are tenuous. It reminds me more of the subtle homoeroticism of a Mapplethorpe still life. Wilde’s Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime is more semi-comic than semi-erotic; it’s inclusion based on the assumption that it is a rarity amongst Oscar Wilde’s prose works is, I think, unfounded.

Nevertheless, their prominence in this collection doesn’t detract from the sheer overall quality of the writing elsewhere, which is uniformly of a high standard. The sharp-edged writing of these authors might have benefited from equally sharp writing to stand beside them – perhaps some Samuel R Delaney (unfamiliar to many, even in North America) or a translation of some of Pierre Guyotat’s Prostitution, for example. Production values are high, and similar in style to Ganymede’s quarterly journal. Lavish black and white photographs are interspersed throughout, including some of the authors - who tend for the most part to be an attractive bunch. A perfect stocking filler – or as Marc Andreottola might have put it in his story a “dirty black sock” filler.

Marc Bridle is a critic and writer. He is based in Vancouver and London.

Review: The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love

2009-11-28T10:51:00.000Z

The Cinema of Sally Potter
By Sophie Mayer

Published by WallFlower Press

Reviewed by Dr Kate Ince

Despite the wide coverage Sally Potter’s films have received since her early experimental shorts and Thriller in 1979, Sophie Mayer’s The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love is only the second full-length study of Potter’s career. It has arrived at almost the same moment as Potter’s sixth full-length feature Rage, which is no coincidence, since Mayer explains that her book was delayed by the announcement, during the summer of 2008, that Rage was complete and would be screening at the 2009 Berlin Film Festival. She has undoubtedly risen to the ‘exhilarating, if unnerving challenge’ (p.9) of weaving the film into her manuscript in limited time, though was aided in this (as in many areas) by interviews with Potter and contact with Potter’s production company, Adventure Pictures.

The dynamism and sheer energy of Potter’s 1970s work in performance, dance and Expanded Cinema (as well as of her career as a whole) has influenced the structure of Mayer’s book, whose fourteen sections alternate between close commentary and analysis of Potter’s six features and eight chapters named after the activities of Working, Moving, Colouring, Listening, Feeling, Loving and Becoming. The active force of these present participles matches and draws on the passionately positive kind of change and transformation to be found in so many of Potter’s narratives, encapsulated by critic Jackie Hatfield’s description of what the existential was for the ‘synesthetic, sensuous, experiential, live and time-based art called expanded cinema’, ‘a kind of becoming: for the artist through process, and for the audience through reception’ (p.77). Issues of sensuous experience and the effect on viewers’ bodies of films’ sensuality have been uppermost in critical writing about cinema during the 2000s, since the appearance of Laura Marks’ The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment and the Senses (2000), and although Mayer’s book impresses more by the range of sources it draws upon than by their connectedness to one another, and she perhaps resorts after only a short while to using Marks’ key term ‘haptic’ rather loosely, she convincingly brings out Potter’s affinity with the existential-phenomenological notion of the ‘lived body’, as shown in a remark about how, in The Man Who Cried, Suzie’s songs resonate with the viewer’s bodily movements and gestures though an ‘associative “empathy”’ (p.148), and in her observation of ‘two contrasting strategies that ‘touch’ us haptically [in Potter’s films]: firstly, how performers use their bodies in ways that carry over from her live work; and secondly, her use of film forms such as the close-up and rhythmic editing shows us these bodies in motion’ (p.6). Mayer also picks up on the feminism implicit in this haptic visuality and pervasive embrace of sensuous experience, and particularly well when she defends Potter against the many criticisms made of her decision to play the fictional character ‘Sally’ of The Tango Lesson herself, by acknowledging that this choice stemmed from a certain narcissism, but insisting that ‘Potter and her eponymous character lay claim to a bodily autonomy and pleasure that confused male reviewers who ‘conflate[d] female autonomy and authorship with narcissism’’ (p.20).
The Cinema of Sally Potter: A Politics of Love is a lengthy book, in which Mayer sometimes seems to get so engrossed in her material that she forgets Potter altogether (for example when discussing colour in film on pp.106-7). More judicious editing might have been advisable, as well as some reinforcement of argumentation: although the latter is strong and convincing in ‘Listening’, it is much weaker in the Thriller chapter and some others. More than a touch of romanticization of bodily labour is detectable in ‘Working’, where Mayer describes labour as ‘graceful and received with gratitude’ (p.50), and picks out ‘work’s grace’ as a ‘revolutionary gesture’ (p.42). She can also be much less idealising about the positivity of Potter’s filmmaking, however, as in ‘Moving’, where she suggests the relevance to Potter’s work of the ‘truly ethical apprehension of beauty’ theorised by Elaine Scarry in On Beauty and Being Just (2006) (p.82). She deploys Maria Lugones’ notion of ‘world-travelling’ so suited to the international wanderings of Potter’s characters carefully, specifying that it is used by Lugones to mean travelling ‘into others’ worlds through performance’ (p.89) rather than any more literal tourist-style journeying. And there is nothing saccharine about the thesis of a ‘politics of love’ included in the book’s title, which Mayer seems to have developed from theorist of the postcolonial Michael Hardt, who is quoted asserting the centrality of ‘this political character’ to premodern notions of love such as Christian and Judaic notions of ‘a constitution of the community’ (p.25). There is no disguising that Mayer’s book is as much a deeply personal appreciation of Potter’s work and career as it is an academic study, but Mayer avows as much early on when she describes the transformative experience viewing Orlando at the age of fifteen was for her, and explains that her book is ‘about an ‘inner exchange’ between one viewer and the films’. Her book is obviously just as much a labour of love as Potter’s films, and she gives eloquent testimony to the ‘giant leap’ she feels responding to them to be, a leap into a shared and immersive space of fantasy (p.70). The most important reason for the greatness of Sally Potter’s cinema, she is ultimately arguing, is that it requires and teaches us to look in a new way, with a ‘loving eye’ (p.135) that encourages and instils a mutual regard between seer and seen. To look upon someone or something is no detached, disinterested activity, but a transformative and enabling act that can, to quote Celeste from The Gold Diggers, ‘chang[e] what is there’ (p.238).

Dr Kate Ince is Reader in French Film and Gender Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Review: Beauty Salon by Mario Bellatin

2009-11-14T17:58:00.002Z

Beauty Salon
Mario Bellatin

Published by City Lights

Reviewed by Eric Karl Anderson

Whatever expectations about plot and character development you’ve come to expect from reading fiction should be left behind when reading Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin. One might pick up the novella Beauty Salon with its cover photo of empty pink chairs and hairdryers expecting a domestic female drama. Instead, we are introduced to the transvestite narrator who has transformed his beauty salon into a hospice or “terminal” (as he calls it) to care for the diseased homeless in the final stages of a terminal illness which has swept the globe and will soon obliterate this entire unnamed city. Rather than spend time ruminating on this mysterious plague, the narrator gives detailed accounts of the multiple kinds of fish he’s raised and how his care for them has been superseded by his duties to the dying patients he takes in. Intricate descriptions of the different kinds of exotic fish he’s raised are offered, but we are barely given any idea how the disease manifests itself with the patients of the terminal or the consequences of this plague to society. The effect of this is disconcerting and strangely moving revealing the degrees to which the narrator must emotionally distance himself from the world he inhabits.

Bellatin gives us a modern pared-down rendering of Samuel Butler’s satirical utopia Erewhon. Illness might as well be a crime in this sternly benevolent transvestite’s converted “Salon to the Stars” given the dingy beds, minimal food and lack of attention the patients who spend their final days in the terminal receive. Empathy is forsworn in favour of detached care. One patient who arrives even receives a beating from the narrator. Only men are allowed to have beds in the converted terminal; women are left to die in the street. Later on in the book, the narrator reflects how he mistakenly developed an emotional attachment to one of his very first patients. In conclusion to his debate about how the diseased should be cared for it becomes clear that their treatment is of little consequence given that this procession of dying men are all soon going to end up in similar anonymous graves.

Mario Bellatin

Bellatin is a writer who is likely to become just as well known for his behaviour in real life as for his often disturbingly bizarre prose. He frequently poses for photos wearing an array of elaborately-designed prosthetic arms given that he is missing most of his right arm and is playful in interviews, in one case inventing a Japanese writer with an enormous nose who he claims influenced his own writing. With his pared down style and conscious experimentation in prose, Bellatin shows an affinity to the Nouveau Roman and its focus on objects rather than the traditional elements of the novel. Bellatin seeks to portray fragments of experience rather than a coherent world. Characters aren’t defined by descriptions, but remain only as emotionally-charged glimmers in the narrator’s memory. Bellatin’s fiction is very fresh and invigorating if not always satisfying. The book closes with an impending sense of doom. The reader is left searching for the beauty in life like the narrator who looks for his remaining exotic fish hidden behind a film of algae which has coated the inside of the tank over a long period of time. You can barely see it, but you know its there.

Eric Karl Anderson is author of the novel Enough and has published work in various publications such as The Ontario Review, Ganymede Stories One and the anthologies From Boys to Men, Between Men 2 and 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everyone Must Read.

Theatre Review: Primavera presents Origin of the Species

2009-11-07T01:18:00.000Z

Origin of the Species
Written by Bryony Lavery

Arcola Theatre, London
until November 21st 2009

Reviewed by Richard Canning

This is a seriously entertaining revival of a most intelligent and witty play. An early work of lesbian playwright Bryony Lavery, it’s a two-hander about Darwin’s theory of evolution, as the title suggests. This production, ably directed by Tom Littler and featuring excellent performances by Marjorie Yates as Molly and Clare-Hope Ashitey as Victoria, is thus also a timely treat, given the plethora of commemorations attending the 150th anniversary of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

The drama draws on the true story of Louis and Mary Leakey’s pioneering 1950s and 60s anthropological research into the Olduvai Gorge region of Tanzania, the so-called ‘cradle of mankind’, named for the prehistoric human remains uncovered there. Its ‘homo habilis’ is a precursor of homo erectus, who in turn morphed into our present-day species, ‘homo sapiens’. Lavery has Molly, a bluff, elderly Yorkshirewoman, recounting her time joining the Leakey digs, from which she has brought back several skulls, as well as (and at this point the plot slightly awkwardly abandons all verisimilitude for fantasy) a complete skeleton, which reconstitutes itself as a wild young black woman, speechless embodiment of this earliest form of man. Molly names her “Victoria” – after her grandmother, though, naturally, there are colonial cadences too – and befriends the young woman (though there’s no hint of anything more than friendship and kinship), schooling her in the English language (which proves relatively straightforward) and native customs and perceptions (much trickier).

The challenge must be – within this poignant, fundamentally comic scenario – to avoid the semblance of colonialist instruction detracting from the true lessons emerging from the couple’s exchanges, which are colour-neutral. Clearly, given the play’s intentionally absurd premise, it may seem churlish to insist on the dangers of interpreting Molly’s often patronising tutelage too literally, and in colour- and culturally-sensitive terms. Generally, the play steers a sensitive course through this problem. But there are moments where it struggles to provide an oppositional voice to Molly’s articulation of how the “primitive” in front of her might, and indeed will, develop into a fully-fledged homo sapiens; a near insurmountable difficulty, given Victoria’s struggle to master speech. There is one moment, though, in the first half, where she inadvertently trumps Molly’s ready cultural assumptions. A few more such rhetorical reversals would have strengthened the play’s fundamental determination to question “civilised values” in the round.

Bryony Lavery

The other chief way in which the play suggests that mankind’s evolution has not been the straightforward flight towards achievement and liberty comes in its striking final moments. Molly celebrates the arrival of the New Year, and, given that the play has been conceived around the idea of the entire history of Earth being mapped onto a single year, wonders whether mankind can survive after the clocks strike. “Mankind”, of course, is itself a provocative term, given the play’s other prominent theme: the male-centred nature of recorded human history, anthropological and otherwise. Molly concedes that, when she first uncovered Victoria, she had been looking for a man, specifically, not a woman; yet her delight in her ward causes her to question all manner of man-dominant ideas. Her education, she reveals, had been entirely devoted to the mantra: “man – him - his”. Victoria counters by revealing that it had been woman who first learnt how to take and use fire – a critical moment, obviously, in the development of the species - not man, as is traditionally recorded in myth.

The man-bashing is sometimes a little unabashed, or at least somewhat “period” in feel, and one senses that the playwright might have longed to push the Molly-Victoria relationship further, since, as it stands, the role played by sexual instinct in mankind’s development, isn’t glanced at. Still, Origin of the Species remains a witty, smart treatment of some complex ideas. The commendable production at the Arcola feels fully evolved.

Richard Canning is a writer and academic, based in London. His latest book is the edited collection Fifty Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (Alyson, 2009).

Call for Submissions: Read these Lips

2009-11-04T05:04:00.001Z

Read These Lips is a free e-book project dedicated to lesbian literature. In our fourth year, we are inviting submissions to our anthology series.

We seek multi-dimensional literary writings that speak the possibilities of lesbian lives. We feature popular genre as well as cross-genre works.

Submissions are open from 1 November 2009 to 31 January 2010. Please read our Submissions Guidelines and our previous anthologies for guidance.

Early expressions of interest are encouraged. Please direct all correspondence to submissions@readtheselips.com

Film Review: Greek Pete

2009-10-31T08:29:00.001Z

Greek Pete
dir. Andrew Haigh

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Max Fincher

Greek Pete gives us a glimpse into the world of Pete, a very popular London-based escort who was voted best escort at the World Escort Awards in Los Angeles in 2008. A mix of documentary and fiction, we see the real personalities behind the profiles, and an original view of the escort world.

Pete admits, unsurprisingly enough, that he wants to make ‘as much money as possible’. We see how using Internet chat rooms and websites, and being London-based are essential to being successful. Included is footage of Pete fucking one client, participating in a threesome for a film and some erotic photographic shots of him acting out fetish fantasies involving boot sniffing. He gets through as many clients a week as he possibly can, even taking a call while tucking into his Xmas turkey dinner.

The film challenges any expectations or prejudgments the viewer may bring that the escort is to be pitied, condemned or seen as somehow having no feelings or the perception that they are unintelligent. Pete is perhaps smarter than the viewer gives him credit for as we can infer from Pete’s opening monologue to the film. He asks why we are watching. If our motivation is for voyeuristic reasons, this is ok, ‘as long as you pay me for it’. Good-looking, sexy and well-hung, Pete ticks all superficial boxes to be an escort. But there is something more to him as a person. And it is here that the film’s strength lies in showing us that Pete is more than just a good fuck or wank fantasy.

What emerges distinctly is that, despite his ambition, Pete comes across as very likeable and charming. Confident and articulate about being an escort, he clearly takes a pride in doing the job well, boasting that his many clients return to him repeatedly. One scene in particular shows him chatting with an accountant, describing how excited he is to be going to Los Angeles and the importance of having a work-ethic in life. At no point do we doubt that he takes his work seriously, but perhaps sometimes too seriously. The film at no point patronises him or us.

However, Pete’s matter-of-fact, self-aware attitude does make the viewer question whether Pete really wants to be an escort. There is a sense that something is missing. Particularly after the ‘high’ of being in the spotlight of the World Escort Awards. We see him watching himself alone in his apartment and calling up his friends to proudly tell them how happy he is. In an earlier monologue to the camera, he reflects somewhat regretfully on how he was surprised that his Mum doesn’t accept his ‘choice’ of career, and tells us that his father would be ‘ashamed’ of him. We are left to our own conclusions as to whether Pete is in the right job or not. He never indicates whether he enjoys his work or not. However, what emerges strongly is that he enjoys sharing stories and experiences with his friends and his new family. At times, his melancholy mood suggests that possibly his feelings about being an escort are more complex than they appear.

By contrast, Pete’s boyfriend (also an escort) whose screen name is LondonboyKai, appears withdrawn, vulnerable and more susceptible to his emotions. Dependent on Pete for somewhere to live, he dislikes Pete’s business interrupting their lives. We see a side of Pete that is less pleasant in his treatment of Kai who takes second place to his work. Kai is subject to Pete’s rules and his criticism of his drug dependency. The film draws our attention to the fact that there are darker sides to escorting. When he receives a call from someone in Vauxhall who asks whether Kai can take ‘hard fucking’, Kai says he can and agrees to do ‘G,K or C’ and golden showers. However, he laughs nervously while talking to the client. The film does not shy away from the fact that many escorts need so many clients to pay for their drug dependency. Pete is aware of the realities and dangers escorts face, including ‘gift-giving’ (the deliberate passing on HIV). He tells us that some of the younger boys will ‘say yes to anything’, and we are in fact left to wonder if Kai has in fact been abused in some way.

This honesty is moving and refreshing. The director, Andrew Haigh, commented that ‘I wanted the film to be truly authentic’ and that he wanted to ‘try and get closer to the reality and focus on the everyday nature of things, the nuts and bolts of the job, the real personalities behind the online profiles and magazine adverts’. Undoubtedly, this is achieved. We see that escorts have lives, histories and aspirations like any other person’s whose job does not define who they are.

Review: Ganymede Poets: One

2009-10-24T08:14:00.007Z

Ganymede Poets: One
Published by: Ganymede Books

Reviewed by Gregory Woods

I have been reading gay poetry anthologies in any language with which I’m familiar ever since I began to write a doctoral thesis on homo-erotic poetry in the mid-1970s. Not just anthologies from our own time, but also those from the distant past, put together for private collectors who wanted to read celebrations of their own erotic interests. This makes me, at once, both the best and worst person to review a new anthology. Best because I know the competition; worst because I’ve seen it all before.

Ganymede Poets is an anthology of the thirty-eight gay male poets who appeared in the first six issues of the New York gay literary magazine Ganymede. Like the magazine itself, the book is beautifully produced, lavishly illustrated with black and white photographs, all loosely related to the themes of the poetry.

Judging by their biographical notes, many of the poets collected here have postgraduate degrees in creative writing. The standard reaction to this, here in the UK, would be a kind of affected ridicule, spluttering along the lines that no decent writer needs to be taught how to write. Well, just tell yourself that when you next read a British anthology of gay poetry! If nothing else, at least these guys have read other poets. Most of them write what is called ‘free verse’, but it is informed free verse. Apart from a couple of non-American contributors, I think it’s safe to say that virtually all of them are familiar with the poems of William Carlos Williams; many with Ezra Pound and others. They know where to put the words on the page. They know the limits of their ‘freedom’. By contrast, generally speaking, most of the contributors of free verse to anthologies published in Britain seem never to have heard of Williams, let alone read him with any care. And that is not to mention Charles Olson or George Oppen or Louise Glück…

So what impresses me here, before we even begin on the content, is the quality of the verse. Christopher Gaskins, for instance, impresses me not so much for what he says as by the way he says it in lean, sinewy, unsentimental free verse. The same might be said of Matthew Hittinger’s syllabics and Jee Leong Koh’s disciplined, rhyming quatrains. And there are always individual lines to take one’s fancy: I did enjoy this sentence from R.J. Gibson’s ‘On Main Street’: ‘Like some classist / prat in a Forster novel with a boner for the help, you want a little trade’.

Matthew Hittinger

All the poets are somewhat overshadowed, as you might expect, by a selection of Daniel Mendelsohn’s translations from the Greek of Constantine Cavafy. But to read Matt Cogswell’s ‘How I Spent the Afternoon’ straight after Cavafy’s ‘Their Beginning’ (one of my favourite ‘gay poems’) is not conspicuously to move from a great poet to a mediocre one so much as to make a cultural shift from an absolute, classical belief in the power of art to memorialise its fleshly inspirations, to something much more tentative and speculative, an attempt to grasp the slippery pleasures of virtuality in the medium of solid print. In the end, the fundamental motivation is pretty much the same as Cavafy’s.

After so much talk of technique, I suppose it might make sense to give a clearer view of the experience of reading the book from cover to cover. (I never just dip into poetry books, whether multi-authored anthologies or single-authored collections.) There is more queer life between these covers than in virtually any gay novel you might care to name. The difference is that, here, you can’t rely on the infantile joys of passively listening to a linear narrative and waiting for what’s going to happen to happen. Here, a whole world of queerness will pass before your eyes (and through your ears) in a fragmented and contingent order (the authors are presented alphabetically), raucous with expressions of desire and longing, articulated by a range of voices, mostly young but otherwise pretty varied in attitude and background; and you will feel at times a part of it all, and at others apart from it all. Read it as a strangely irrational postmodern novel—with sexy pictures.

Gregory Woods is Professor of Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His critical books include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987) and A History of Gay Literature: The Male Tradition (1998), both from Yale University Press. His poetry books are published by Carcanet Press. His website is www.gregorywoods.co.uk

Review: ANGELS OF ANARCHY: Women Artists and Surrealism

2009-10-21T15:15:00.002Z

Angels of Anarchy
Manchester Art Gallery
until 10 January 2010.

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer

For one moment, standing in the (suggestively) red velvet-lined gallery on the top floor of Manchester Art Gallery, it was like WWII had never happened. Not, perhaps, in any vastly significant way: it’s that, by exhibiting the work of women artists from the ‘teens to the 1970s together, Angels of Anarchy suggests a continuity uninterrupted by the scattering and decimation of European artists, or by the re-domestication of women in the US and UK in the 1950s. Instead, it places side-by-side the work of artists who, after the London-Paris heyday of Modernism, often worked in isolation from each other and from the mainstream art world. Sisterhood is powerful, and here the women interact through their strange and vibrantly erotic works.

The story of Surrealism, Cubism and all the other fun –isms of the 1920s has been told many times, but until the groundbreaking work of Bonnie Kime Scott, it was most often told as an Exquisite Corpse composed of famous men, with women as little more than the objects they passed between them. While Paris Was a Woman and Women of the Left Bank definitively marked the lesbian desire circulating in literary expat circles, the world of the visual arts – overshadowed by the overpowering figure (and sex drive) of Pablo Picasso – has remained far more straight and macho, with women artists often downgraded to helper or muse.
It’s certainly true that many of the artists in this exhibition were married to, or lovers of, male artists or writers such as Man Ray, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy, often to more than one. It’s also true that they spent a great deal of time in each others’ company, as witnessed by Lee Miller’s extraordinary portraits of artists Dorothea Tanning, Nusch Éluard, Léonor Fini, Leonora Carrington, Valentine Penrose, Dora Maar, Eileen Agar and Meret Oppenheim. Miller, once Man Ray’s shadow, has been rehabilitated by Carolyn Burke’s biography and last year’s exhibition at the V&A – which didn’t include these photographs, significant both for their incredibly 21st century styling (Dora Maar’s alice band could be in this month’s Vogue, for whom Miller worked in the 1940s) and for the world of female friendship and aesthetic endeavour they suggest. There’s nothing overtly lesbian in the gazes or poses – unlike the work of Claude Cahun, which also feature extensively in the exhibition – but there is an intensity, a bodiliness, that suggests just how liberated these women were through another woman’s gaze.

Cahun, the radical genderqueer photographer whose story is beautifully told in Barbara Hammer’s documentary Lover Other, is not the only queer artist in the show; Frida Kahlo is represented rather beautifully by work that encompasses her bisexuality. There’s Diego y Frida 1929-1944, in which the two artists’ faces form a bi-gendered composite, but also by a short film shot by photographer Lola Alvarez Bravo (who also shot a number of powerful portraits of Kahlo that feature in the exhibition). Kahlo emerges from a dark room into daylight, where she kisses a young blonde woman (Tina Misrachi) on the ear, then follows her back into the room before shutting the French windows with an expression of desire and defiance. Once in the room, the two women engage in an eye-to-eye wordless conversation of extraordinary intimacy. One critic suggests that Misrachi represents Kahlo’s death but I think that’s over-reaching: there’s no need to assert a symbolic layer of meaning when the gestures and expressions speak so powerfully for themselves.
Elsewhere, symbolic meaning opens up the work to queer possibilities (Mimi Parent’s Maitresse, a whip made of two blonde braids! Francesca Woodman’s three kinds of melons! Léonor Fini’s painting of Leonora Carrington in a dark bedroom, wearing a black leather cuirass and scarlet boots! all those magnificently mixed-up Exquisite Corpse bodies!), not least in what’s probably my favourite objet of the show: Dorothea Tanning’s Pincushion to Serve as Fetish. In the catalogue photograph, it looks a lot like Free Willy, but there’s more than one organ pulsating amongst the black velvet and peach satin. For a start, the piece morphs as you walk around its glass case, flashing an orifice here and some cryptic chalk marks there. Silver pins glint like piercings against the velvet. It’s a brilliantly deadpan reworking of a domestic, feminised object, an unravelling of the double meaning of fetish (ritual object, like a voodoo doll, and Freudian sexual tic), a well-constructed craft object, and the single most lickable, strokable piece of art I’ve seen this year (well, since Roni Horn’s big pink sweetie/heart/cunt at Tate Modern).

No stroking allowed, of course, but the rich erotic energy of this show does make you wonder who might have been stroking who (or wanted to), and how that flow of desire might have lent its charge to the vivid and riveting display of female sexuality. Enter between the walls of red velvet and see for yourselves.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Exclusive Interview with Edmund White by Richard Canning

2009-10-17T07:47:00.013Z

New York City Boy: A Conversation with Edmund White, on the US publication of City Boy, 9th October 2009

By Richard Canning

Photo of Edmund White in Venice in 1974, with Alfred Corn (left) and David Kalstone (right)

RC: You open with a description of 70s New York: 'grungy, dangerous, bankrupt' but artistically in its zenith. That's pretty evidently meant to contrast with present-day Manhattan. Are there any major cities today which feel especially creative?

EW: I've just spent two months in Madrid, which seems vibrant and alive, full of young people who inhabit the center and who stay up all night, a gay life that is flourishing... New York seems to have lost its edge.

RC: By page two, you're hanging around, hoping to bump into Susan Sontag or Paul Goodman, author of the journal Five Years, a big deal in its day for its openness about his bisexuality and erotic adventures. The contrast in subsequent reputations of this pair is rather poignant, isn't it? As you point out, Goodman is scarcely recalled today, and almost never read. I wondered if, in the seventies, when the "newness" of gay art and culture and writing was so obvious, you remember having some sense of the people and works that would last? And, in the thirty years that have followed, have those instincts clarified or changed much?

EW: I think I thought that Sontag's reputation would last because she had so much integrity, was so high-minded and so uncompromising - and because every line she wrote contained a unit of thought. I think I was right. Though people might gibe about those very qualities now, nevertheless she remains a beacon of high culture and seriousness. I also felt that John Ashbery and Elizabeth Bishop and James Merrill were all making lasting contributions, though to my surprise Bishop has nosed her way to the front, and Merrill is now in third position. So I guess I'd say I could spot a winner but couldn't predict the order of celebrity they would eventually assume.

RC: One of your first lovers then, Stan, you describe as having a 'classic' look of beauty which was 'generally acknowledged.' Rather cleverly, I thought, you don't describe him in too much physical detail; the reader can then supply his or her own version of that classical beauty. Do you accept that these things are culturally specific, even as they feel universal, eternal or classic?

EW: I guess we all prize virility, even a joli-laideur now, more than we did back then. Stan had a John Barrymore kind of classical handsomeness that would still be appropriate to a marble statue.

RC: You confess in the book to having been politically apathetic: You also imply that this apathy was widely shared; that nobody thought of there being a gay community or society. Would you say that artists in particular shied away from political engagement? And how much do you think AIDS would change all of this? (After all, you co-founded GMHC).

EW: I felt generally alienated from the culture and its ideals. I was terribly cynical and astounded that people got so worked up over a "little thing" like Watergate or Chappaquidick, or even cheating over Twenty Questions. I assumed everyone was cheating all the time. This cynicism and a complete sense of disaffection and disabuse kept me away from politics in any form. Larry Kramer sort of shamed me into joining (and eventually heading) GMHC, but I was happy to duck out as soon as possible. Partly I had an artist's fear of unnecessary and time-consuming entanglements that other people could do just as well or better.

RC: One of the best things about the book is its tender, considered account of long-term friendships, which 'feed the spirit' - in particular, through the examples of Marilyn Schaefer, still with us, and David Kalstone, who died. Perhaps this is a topic which fits uneasily in fiction, since its very constancy risks being undramatic; it's easier to think of fiction bringing to life dramatically the experience, say, of the betrayal of friendship. Were you aware of this book offering the chance to document such friendships, finally?

EW: It seems to me that many people count relatives and mates as their best friends. Some people are extremely attached to childhood friends. I suppose the chance of meeting people later in life and cultivating an intense friendship with them is rare - and perhaps gays, with their (previous) lack of interest in family life and marriage, were best suited for developing these intense friendships later in life (even if "later" is defined as occurring in one’s twenties or thirties).

RC: You describe escaping to Puerto Rico with Stan for holidays, and sexual release there. I suppose it goes without saying that racial politics in gay culture has changed a lot, in the last thirty years. Would you comment? And do you worry about how you represent the racially other in your writings?

EW: Of course there is rather a "colonial" sound to my Puerto Rican adventures, but I think most Blacks and Puerto Ricans, for instance, would rather be loved and admired for the wrong reasons than ignored altogether. Anyway, City Boy is quite clear about the moment it is concentrating on. It would be ahistorical to attribute to my narrator attitudes that didn't come into being till much later.

RC: I loved the comment that gay "intellectuals" in the seventies found that, through their learning, they simply had more evidence arguing against their own existence - they could 'torment' themselves 'with extra zeal' with Freudian ideas. On the other hand, extensive reading in literature has often been described as liberating, particularly at this time, for its offering of role models in fiction and so on, if not always positive ones. Did you encounter, let's say, untutored gay men whose self-understanding seemed more positive and mature than others', in Manhattan in the seventies? And were the books with gay themes that people devoured appreciated, would you say, for featuring gay content at all, or (especially) for featuring positive gay storylines?

EW: I think I was thinking of "non-intellectuals" who weren't aware of Freud's prejudices against homosexuality as a form of character disorder or infantilism. They were the lucky ones because they didn't dwell on all the ways in which they were "sick." I wasn't (as you suggest) thinking about those who were versed or unversed in gay literature written by gays. It's true that if all you'd read was Giovanni's Room or Death in Venice or even Proust, you'd come away with a strange view of gay experience. On the other hand, Andre Gide's journals were nourishing because he seemed a self-respecting man with far-flung interests.

RC: You mention revering writers such as Elizabeth Bowen and Graham Greene, considered to have rather unelevated prose styles; 'readable' authors, as well as Henry Green, whose prose is somewhat more challenging, surely. Your own fiction has often been viewed as split into two camps – the ‘readable' autofictional works, and the more baroque, stylised novels such as Forgetting Elena, Nocturnes and Caracole. Would it be fair, by now, after Fanny and Hotel de Dream, to argue that the 'readability' has won out in your case?

EW: I suppose I lost interest in the degree to which prose seemed "experimental." What interested me in Graham Greene was the extremely subtle use of figurative language (he's really the best in the business for similes and metaphors). With Bowen it was the easy way in which she could embed apothems in her running narrative, something I've carefully emulated, though it gives a "moralistic" and slightly old-fashioned tone to the writing. Henry Green is a comic genius and his seemingly rattle-brain (but actually very scheming) women are hilarious, and his idiosyncratic use of dialogue is dazzling. I also like his way of letting a sinister subplot slowly emerge. I agree with Ian McEwan that these are writers who've been upstaged in literary history by more obvious experimentalists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, though Bowen and Green are better than Woolf.

RC: You make a true, and rather comic observation: that gay men always feel too old, wherever they are, whatever they are doing. It's poignant, because at first that sounds like a terrible curse or imposition. But once you've appreciated the truth of it, it could become liberating, no? Particularly for... a relatively senior gay man... (Coughs).

EW: Yes, it is liberating to put all that worrying behind one. Now I have a Spanish boyfriend who appreciates me because I have white hair and I'm chubby - I'm his type! I never would have guessed that when I was young. When I look at the photo Alfred Corn just sent of me when I was thirty-four, I remember I hated my looks then, and thought I was ugly, though in fact I was quite presentable.

RC: I wanted to ask if there's anywhere in the US you could imagine living today, outside Manhattan? City Boy seems to suggest not. You spent a period in San Francisco, and even that didn’t work out...

EW: I always get this lonely forlorn feeling in other American cities, though I do like to spend a month a year in Key West, and could easily spend more time if I had the money or opportunity. It might be fun to teach for a semester in New Orleans or Austin, but otherwise I'm not too tempted by other cities, especially since I don't drive.

RC: There's a provocative moment, where you describe the 'three great geniuses of the twentieth century' as 'Stravinsky, Nabokov and Balanchine.' I laughed, because it follows a comment about New Yorkers at that time being 'still obsessed with a hierarchy of the arts and the idea of the Pure.' So, here's another hierarchy! I don't expect you to back down. But it's intriguing that you linked these three because of their imperial Russian ancestry, their time in France and their later careers in America... Could you say something more about what you mean here by 'genius', or about the way this succession of transplants may have informed it?

EW: All three of these geniuses are Romantics, or at least are addicts of beauty and a certain dreamy vision of beauty. But at the same time all three are witty and crisp and decidedly "modern." Balanchine, in his big white ballets like Symphony in C, or Nabokov in the love passages in Lolita and Stravinsky in the romantic grandeur of The Fire Bird... In these works, we feel the grandeur and scope of Imperial Russia. But all three could be very angular and witty as well - Stravinsky in Jeu de Cartes, Balanchine in Agon, Nabokov in Pale Fire. And all three are always renewing themselves - Nabokov in his very late Look at the Harlequins! (which is a delicious parody of autofiction and its coarsest preconceptions), Balanchine in a big story-telling ballet such as Don Quixote (precisely the opposite of everything he'd otherwise stood for) and Stravinsky in his late, twelve-tone scores such as Dumbarton Oaks. I think all three were "light" and flexible and unsentimental, though very romantic because of their years of contact with French culture.

RC: I can't have been the only person waiting for your take on Susan Sontag, which turns out to be very balanced, and nuanced. You've space for her good qualities ('protective and generous', etc.). On the other hand, I wondered about some of the apparently neutral observations: 'Susan was also like a queen in that she had a full life, largely ceremonious'; 'Her genius was in saying the obvious in a strong and dramatic manner.' This one, though, took the biscuit for humour: 'She should have been given the Nobel Prize. That would have made her nicer.' Ouch! Could you reflect on the uses of humour in the memoir form? Have you erred, ever, or been misinterpreted in the way you've laughed about people from your past, or your interactions with them?

EW: Of course the people I write about and their friends are never happy. James Grauerholz just wrote a pretty wounded e-mail to me about my treatment of him and William Burroughs. He thinks I failed to see their love for each other. He also thinks I didn't really "get" Burroughs. Craig Seligmann, who wrote a book about Sontag and Pauline Kael, said I was trashing Sontag, which shocked him since I'd already attacked her in Caracole. So I guess we should ask the victims of my humor what they think. I, of course, think I was pretty even-handed. I was determined to be objective or at least fair about Sontag...
RC: The book ends with AIDS, which, once again, introduces the essential nature of human friendship. It's a logical close, and leads to your departing for Paris, which you've sketched a little already (in Sketches from Memory, also published as Our Paris). It also brings us to the present, in that we know that the author of City Boy is now ensconced in Chelsea. Where do you go from here? It feels as if this may have drained the pool of material for memoir, at least for now. Do you have a fictional project in mind?

EW: I'm a hundred pages into a novel about a straight man and a gay man who are best friends. I'll follow them through three decades. Then I'd like to do a memoir about Paris in the 1980s. And eventually a memoir about my nephew, Keith Fleming, who committed suicide last spring, and his mother, my sister, whom I've almost never written about.

RC: So much to look forward to. Thanks so much for your time.

City Boy: My Life in New York During the 1960s and 1970s appears from Bloomsbury in the UK on 4th January 2010. Richard Canning has known Edmund White for over fifteen years. He interviewed White for his first book, Gay Fiction Speaks (Columbia University Press, 2000), and included his story ‘The Painted Boy’ in the anthology of gay fiction Between Men, as well as the story ‘An Oracle’ in an anthology of fiction about AIDS, Vital Signs (both Carroll and Graf, 2007). White has also contributed an essay on Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memories of Hadrian to Canning’s latest collection, 50 Gay and Lesbian Books Everybody Must Read (Alyson, 2009). In the same book, White’s novel A Boy’s Own Story is discussed by San Franciscan author Robert Gluck. This year, Canning has also seen the publication of a second gay fiction anthology, Between Men 2 (Alyson), and a brief biography of E. M. Forster (Hesperus, November), following his first, on Oscar Wilde (Hesperus, 2008). He can be contacted at r.canning68@googlemail.com.

Film Review: The Celluloid Closet

2009-10-14T07:14:00.009Z

The Celluloid Closet

dir. Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman

Reviewed by Max Fincher

The re-release of The Celluloid Closet, originally screened in 1995 on Channel 4, is based on Vito Russo’s groundbreaking study, The Celluloid Closet (published in 1981, and reissued in 1987). One might ask whether we need to be reminded of Hollywood’s history of predominantly stereotypical and negative portrayals of gay and lesbian people, at this particular moment, given the success of independent queer film making. Nevertheless, this history warns gay film makers and audiences against complacency.

Russo’s study was one example of a self-conscious attempt by many gay and lesbian writers and academics in the late 1970s and early 1980s to reclaim gay identities and histories as their own. Several studies in film, literary criticism, history and sociology revealed hidden histories of gay life and identities that were often denied or simply invisible in the presence of an institutionalised version of history, always heterosexual. Watching this documentary again, we are reminded of how sophisticated gay and queer representation has become since the mid-1980s. But we are also reminded how Hollywood can still blows bubbles of homophobia to audiences through the veil of comedy, in for example films like Bruno, even if we overlook its irony.

In fact, comedy is a film and television genre where gay men still often find themselves predominantly (mis)represented. There is a lack of serious drama about gay lives and/or history. As Lilly Tomlin, the narrator, explains, ‘homosexuals on screen either inspired fear, pity or were to be laughed at’. The documentary’s narrative (written by the novelist Armistead Maupin) centres on examples around these three themes. Shots from Chaplin’s films like ‘The Soilers’ and ‘Wanderer of the West’, and an excerpt from a Laurel and Hardy film, emphasize how double entendre, cross-dressing, camp performance and close friendships between men could all signify to audiences ‘in the know’ that there might be seeing something more on the screen than just campy antics. Queer goings on in silent film morphed in the 1930s to the figure of the sissy. In films like The Gay Divorcee (1934), Myrt and Marge and Call Her Savage (1932), the sissy was present and ‘occupied the space between men and women’, and was often the butt of jokes. Harvey Fierstein confesses that he likes the sissy and would prefer ‘visibility at any cost’. One of the entertaining aspects of this documentary is the impressive array of commentators, including actors, scriptwriters, film-makers and film historians, who are all often witty. Significantly, Quentin Crisp is included, and as he says of the sissy: ‘there is no sin like being a woman’.

Or, in the case of Marlene Dietrich and Greta Garbo, like being a man. Carefully selected performances of these two sexually ambiguous actresses are included to point up the lesbian subtexts to both Morocco (1931) and Queen Christina (1934) through the vehicle of cross-dressing. Epstein and Friedman capture these ‘fleeting’ moments in the style of the documentary which alternates between fast-paced montage shots, and longer excerpts from key films discussed in the book. These snapshots are intercut with both informed historical context, along with personal reminiscences and thoughts on how many people looked for images of themselves on screen, with the figure of the closet dominanting both the production and reception of the films.

From the mid-1930s, with the advent of the Hays Production Code, it became increasingly more difficult for screenwriters and directors to represent any kind of sexuality on screen, let alone gay and lesbian sexualities. Novels were rewritten as screenplays and they were heavily edited, overseen by Hollywood’s censor, Joseph Breen. The lesbian became stereotyped as a monster, a predator on the young, innocent or virginal, as in Dracula’s Daughter (1936) and Rebecca (1940), while gay men were cast as sociopathic murderers, most notoriously in Hitchcock’s films, Rope (1948) and Psycho (1960) or as tragic alcoholics as in A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. The ‘Legion of Decency’ enforced a series of rules and as Gore Vidal comments: ‘It was like working under the Kremlin. You just couldn’t use the word’.

Nevertheless, many writers and directors managed to bypass the dull-witted censors by writing between the lines or directing actor’s gestures and looks carefully, enabling the audiences to infer that that there was a hidden level of meaning, oblique, but always present. In the 1950s, described by Jan Oxenberg as ‘a decade of towering dullness and stupidity’, icons of (supposedly) straight masculinity like James Dean, Marlon Brando and Rock Hudson ruled the screen. Any whisper of effeminacy signalled that a man might be queer. Musical scores could also encode gay desires. Full renditions of ‘Secret Love’ by Doris Day, and ‘Ain’t There Anyone Here for Love’ by Jane Russell (Gentleman Prefer Blondes, 1953), are included, both of which can be read to represent how gay men felt, particularly as Russell camps her performance up in a gym full of indifferent buff male athletes!

Gore Vidal notes that writers became very adept at projecting subtexts into their screenplays, and directors into their actors’ performances. For Ben Hur (1959) Vidal proposed to the director, William Wyler, that the story of Ben Hur should be about the rekindling of a love relationship between Ben Hur (Charlton Heston), and Messala (Stephen Boyd) his Roman teenage friend. Wyler advised that Heston who should never know that the story was about homosexual love, or he would never agree to it, while Stephen Boyd, who played Messala, should be in the know. Our awareness of this anecdotal knowledge allows us to see how the performance of Boyd is supercharged with desire, and is a delicious irony. It is now impossible not to read the film as a story of love between two men, now we know both Vidal and Wyler’s intentions. As such, The Celluloid Closet draws our attention to where the traces of gay sexuality are in supposedly ‘heterosexual’ stories.

Epstein and Friedman signal the importance of Dirk Bogarde’s performance in the British film Victim (1961) as tacking homosexuality head on in contrast to Hollywood’s reticence. Hollywood literally made victims of gay men and women from the 1960s onwards, although the trend started earlier with Rebel Without a Cause (1955). We are shown a montage of characters’ deaths whose sexuality is suspicious. The sequence culminates in a climatic scene from Suddenly Last Summer (1959). The character of Catharine (played by Elizabeth Taylor) screams manically for help on a mountain top while her queer cousin Sebastien, the perfect homosexual, ‘one without a face or a voice’, is devoured by a group of young male cannibals on the remote island of Lope de Vega. Catherine’s call for help perhaps signifies that this was how audiences themselves were feeling when confronted by so many repeated tragic and negative images. Hollywood suggested that the natural trajectory for a gay man or woman was either suicide (The Children’s Hour, 1962) or violent murder (The Detective,1968) often at the hands of those who were repressing their sexuality. Armistead Maupin confesses that he was scared when he saw the film Advise and Consent (1962), one of the first to feature a gay bar: ‘I felt that the end of that road would be suicide’.

In the 1970s, two films seemed to offer promise that there could be more positive alternatives: The Boys in the Band (1970) and Cabaret (1972). Throughout the 1970s, despite increased visibility, stereotypes still abounded with the audience laughing at characters predominantly rather than with them, a phenomenon that continues to this day. We are reminded of how subtle, and not so subtle, homophobia in Hollywood could be with the use of the word ‘faggot’ in films from the 1980s, and from personal testimony. Ron Nyswaener, the screenwriter of Philadelphia (1993) relates his experience of going to see the controversial film Cruising (1980) where he and his boyfriend were chased out of the cinema by a group of homophobic thugs and they were gay-bashed. When Twentieth-Century Fox released Making Love (1982), the film was prefaced by titles warning that ‘it may be too strong’ for audiences. Hailed as the first sensitive depiction of love between two men, (a precursor to Brokeback Mountain almost) the studio head of Fox declared to the producer that it was ‘a god-damned faggot movie’ at the pre-screening and walked out. As did audiences.

Epstein and Friedman’s narrative is, inevitably, more circumscribed than Russo’s book which covers many more examples and many films from the late 1980s and early 1990s are included in a montage. Sadly, this re-release might have included an extra on what has happened to gay representation since the 1990s, although the extras do include deleted scenes and a fascinating interview with Vito Russo. The viewer is taken up to the time of Philadelphia (1993) and Thelma & Louise (1991) and there are some revealing anecdotes from Tom Hanks and Susan Sarandon on their views of these landmark points in their careers and gay film. Nevertheless, an impressive spectrum of films is covered. Informative, humorous, moving, and sometimes painful to watch, this is one of the most significant documentaries on gay film history in the last twenty years. Hopefully, it will educate a new generation of audiences on where current representations have come from, and how Hollywood ‘taught straight people what to think about gay people’. And as Maupin observes: ‘Hollywood still runs scared’.

Film Shorts Review: Here Come the Girls

2009-10-10T10:13:00.001Z

Multiple directors

Cast: Nathalie Toriel, Yolonda Ross, Lucy Liemann

Peccadillo Pictures DVD

Reviewed by Sophie Mayer

Film festival shorts programmes can be melancholy affairs: not because of the films per se, but the feeling that these slices-of-life or fragments of wild imaginations may be seen here and never again. More often than not, shorts don’t act as calling cards for the big-ticket feature, and the director of that film you loved is never heard from again. It’s like a brief pick-up, a smile and dance in a bar or a single fuck at the baths: you’re haunted by the question, could they have been the one?

All of shorts on Here Come the Girls have played their parts in film festival programmes, both queer and general, many of them winning awards as well as the prized Official Selection tag, so the DVD is like a festival of festivals curated across the last ten years of lesbian cinema – which is looking pretty healthy. There’s a diversity of content, narrative styles, performers and tones across the collection, from Suzanne Guacci’s sweet two-hander of domestic metaphors A Soft Place to Roberta Munroe’s Dani and Alice, a hard-hitting short about partner violence between two African-American lesbians that pays stylish tribute to 1980s issues-led TV movies while subverting their conventionally tragic endings (which contrasts again with Monroe’s very different, Whit Stillman-meets-The L Word/lesbian Woody Allen witty short Happy Birthday).
And there’s a diverse group of artists being recognised: several of the directors are either accomplished feature filmmakers – all hail Guin Turner! and friend-of-Chroma Inge ‘Campbell’ Blackman, recently feted at NY’s Queer Black Cinema festival – or went on to make features, like Laurie Colbert and Dominique Cardona (Finn’s Girl). Munroe made her films with the prestigious Fox Searchlight Directors Program (after several years as a Sundance programmer) and Cassandra Nicolaou, whose first feature Show Me starred Ginger Snaps cutie Katherine Isabelle, is a graduate of the Canadian Film Centre’s Resident Programme. While fellow Canadians Colbert and Cardona tell the tale of two school-age best friends experimenting with desire and identity (if you like boxing, you’ll love this short), Nicolaou tells a story of older lesbians, a lifelong couple facing up to dementia and terminal illness, in what could be called a lesbian Away from Her.

But it’s the emerging directors whose films charmed me the most, maybe because they came of age, as artists, in an era when they have models like Blackman, Munroe and Turner to look up to – and to challenge. Angela Cheng’s Wicked Desire is American indie at its best: the warmly quirky observation of Me, You and Everyone We Know, the blue-collar grittiness of Boys Don’t Cry and the almost poetic strangeness of Wild Tigers I Have Known. I hope Cheng gets funding for her feature soon, because Wicked Desire is bursting at the seams with great ideas, as it follows a young girl reading dimestore romance novels, flirting with the Thai boy next door, and discovering that her sister Jessica is enrolled as a boy at school.
Abbé Robinson’s Private Life also blurs the boundaries between lesbian, trans- and straight identities and desires, offering the challenge of ‘fluidity’ to lesbian cinema – all in 1952 Yorkshire. Drawing on the same historical taproots as Sarah Waters blockbusting novels, Robinson uncovers and tells a slender tale of female-female desire between the mill boss’s daughter and a young female mill hand who meet cute at a backstreet jazz bar in Leeds. Class, race, and gender really are meshed in this touching tale, which combines the sexy camp of La Cage aux Folles (as Ruth swaps her evening gown for pal Louis’ sharp suit so he can attend a boys’ night as Lauren Bacall) and the English romanticism of Brief Encounter: Never has Leeds railway station looked more dreamy.

So far, so narrative and character-driven. The two superstars, Turner and Blackman, offer more conceptual and experimental delights. Turner’s Late is a surprisingly complex and bittersweet film based on a simple conceit: the viewer listens to a series of answerphone messages left for Maggie as the camera pans around her apartment. It’s a neat solution to the thrills of the thriller and Maggie’s apartment is given incredible texture and vividness by the production designers. Texture, colour and style are entwined with the substance of Blackman’s Fem as well, a catalogue film unlike any I’ve seen before, a pin-up calendar of almost overwhelming femme variety. Beginning with Eve in the garden, the film reclaims lushness and excess, the camera lovingly recording every curve that each performer gladly exhibits. It’s a mutual seduction poetically voiced by Split Britches’ Peggy Shaw, and is definitely the short to show your next hot date. At one point Shaw praises the gorgeous femmes for “inventing new rules from old games.” Each filmmaker here takes up that challenge differently, but few are as successful as Blackman at inviting the viewer to play.

Sophie Mayer is a writer, editor and educator. Find out more at http://www.sophiemayer.net/

Review: Another Love by Erzsebet Galgoczi

2009-10-03T09:19:00.002Z

Another Love
By Erzsebet Galgoczi

Published by Cleis Press

Reviewed by Paul Kane

The most important character in this novel, Eva Szalanczky, is killed off in its very first pages, shot while attempting to cross the Hungarian border. Yet the crucial question of what motivated Eva’s act, whether it was a genuine effort to escape to the West or at root desperation, a reckless gesture that was tantamount to suicide, is what consumes the bulk of the book.

Janos Maros is the army officer who identifies Eva’s body. An old childhood friend, he is driven to investigate her life – to traces its pattern, to somehow get inside her head. Maros is made aware of the overt political stance that she took as a journalist; this in 1959, some three years after the Soviet Union quashed the popular uprising (revolution, counter-revolution, call it what you will). He learns about Eva’s life as a lesbian and skirts around the periphery of a gay subculture of secrecy and clandestine liaisons, with a fair incidence of blackmail and the occasional murder. Inevitably, perhaps, Maros’ unofficial investigation encounters resistance from the state security service, as it spirals out to encompass the repressive political climate that was Hungary in the 1950s. Ultimately, Maros is forced to confront his own life and the choices and compromises – both personal and political - that he has made.

Erzsebet Galgoczi

Another Love has something of the flavour and atmosphere of Josef Skvorecky’s Lieutenant Boruvka novels, but with an excoriating political edge. Here, though, the mystery is not ‘Who done it?’, but ‘Why?’ What is it that impels Eva headlong toward what she believes is right, impervious to danger, armed with simply a wayward notion of truth?

The novel was filmed as Another Way in 1982, directed by Károly Makk, with the Polish actress Jadwiga Jankowska-Cieslak in the lead. By most accounts, the film too is worth seeking out.

Paul Kane lives and works in Manchester, England. Hewelcomes responses to his reviews and you can reach him at ludic@europe.com

Review: Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun

2009-09-26T00:02:00.002Z

Leaving Tangier
Tahar Ben Jelloun
Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

Published by Arcadia Books Ltd

Reviewed by Max Fincher

Honest, informative and moving, Leaving Tangier by Tahar Ben Jelloun is a novel that explores the struggles facing young Moroccan people who want to leave their country in search of a better life. It is a novel that explores dreams, aspirations, isolation, and the need to find a better existence, but leaves us with an overwhelming sense that these dreams are eventually disappointed.

The central character, Azel, has studied law and lives with his mother, Lalla Zohra, and his sister, Kenza, in Tangier. Unemployed, he feels disaffected, and frustrated at not fulfilling his potential. His sister, Kenza, works as a nurse in a private clinic for a miserly surgeon. Azel spends his days in the local cafe where: ‘Long pipes of kif pass from table to table while glasses of mint tea grow cold, enticing bees that eventually tumble in, a matter of indifference to customers long since lost to the limbo of hashish and tinselled reverie’ (p.1). Jelloun evokes a sense of endemic apathy in Azel’s community, where everyone yearns for what they think is a better life across the 8-mile stretch of water to mainland Spain. Azel’s narrative voice is dream-like. He exhorts the young people of Tangier not to ‘give in to the siren call of sadness’ but to believe in the figure of Toutia, a mythical, redemptive woman who offers them hope to cross to Spain.

Al Afia, a local crook and pot dealer, also arranges for people to be smuggled across the water. He is hated by Azel, who holds him responsible for the tragic death of his cousin Noureddine in a boat crossing, along with several others who drowned. A brutal, hard man, Jelloun’s description of Al Afia’s regime of corruption is portrayed with unflinching honesty: ‘he buys everyone, of course, this country is one huge marketplace, wheeling and dealing day and night, everybody’s for sale, all you need is a little power, something to cash in on’ (p.6). ..we stink of corruption, it’s on our faces, in our heads buried in our hearts’ (p.6). Jelloun captures the sense of powerlessness that young men like Azel feel against the corruption of men like Al Afia, who can arrange freedom for a price who dominates their lives: ‘a man so feared, so loved, - or rather, protected – by those who lived off his generosity’ (p.9). Corruption extends everywhere. When Miguel is beaten up by the police who arrest him on a false drugs charge, the police use the opportunity to rape him in prison. Azel calls on Miguel, a wealthy Spanish art dealer who picked him up in the café, to come to his rescue. Employed as a waiter at one of Miguel’s parties, Miguel arranges for Azel to live with him in his villa in Barcelona. For Azel, Miguel epitomizes elegance and luxury, and as Azel hopes, his salvation to a better life abroad.

Miguel’s characterisation follows a long line of gay men, both literary and factual, who enjoy Moroccan men as exotic commodities, as sexually available for a price. We are told that Miguel ‘loved the ‘awkwardness’ of Moroccan men, by which he meant their sexual ambiguity’ (p.32). Azel is entranced and blinded by Miguel’s glamorous lifestyle in Tangier, only to be deeply disappointed when he arrives in Barcelona and is treated like a house boy. Azel encounters prejudice from Carmen, Miguel’s old housekeeper, who represents the conservative traditionalist fears about immigrants. Unhappy, he secretly seeks affection from a prostitute, Soumaya, also an emigrant from Tangier.

Azel and Miguel’s relationship gives us an insight into contemporary Moroccan attitudes to homosexuality that points up how difficult it is to grow up gay in Muslim culture. Azel repeatedly refers to himself as a ‘prostitute’ or a ‘whore’ to Miguel, while at the same time pursuing a relationship with Soumaya where he attempts to prove his masculinity to himself. Azel’s confesses that his relationships with girls were episodic but straightforward: sex was the object, nothing else’ (p.20). He admits to his girlfriend, Siham, that he doesn’t like anal sex: ‘When I was a kid, in my times, I did it a few times with boys, never with girls. I don’t like it much’ (p.25). What emerges in the novel is the overwhelming disdain that Moroccan men, even gay men Moroccan men, feel for the figure of ‘a zamel, a passive homosexual. The ultimate shame!’ Al Afia is a contradiction to Azel’s mind: ‘A man so powerful, so good, lying on his belly to be sodomized!’ That Siham confesses that she can take it both ways, and prefers anal sex because it preserves her virginity, may be one explanation for Azel’s disgust. When Abdeslam, Noureddine’s brother confesses to Azel that he likes having sex with men and to keep it a secret to himself, Azel is shocked: ‘You’re a homosexual’. Abdeslam denies the label, arguing that for him it’s a matter of what he prefers at any given time: ‘I switch back and forth’. What emerges is that Azel views his sexual relationship with Miguel purely as an economic transaction, as another part of his job. There is a culture of secrecy and repression in Moroccan society over men admitting that they desire each other, especially passively, which is associated with Western-European society: ‘In our country, the zamel is the other guy, the European tourist, never the Moroccan, and no-one ever talks about it but it’s not true, we’re like all the other countries, except we keep quiet about those things’ (p.107). Internalized homophobia and repression still operate powerfully in the minds of men like Azel, who admits to not loving Miguel and to their relationship being one based on selfish reasons on both sides.

Azel confesses to Siham, that he feels guilty about having sex with Miguel. He feels desperate that he will end up ‘doubting my own sexuality’. It is difficult to gauge how far Azel is bisexual, confused or suffering from denial and internalized homophobia (p.66). At one point in his diary he notes his complex feelings about being Miguel’s lover, and his fears over what he thinks his mother would think of him: ‘How can I tell her that her son is just an attaye, a faggot, a man who crawls on his belly, a cheap whore, a traitor to his identity, to his sex?...One can’t talk about such things’ (p.68). Later, Miguel reflects that ‘He was always watching himself, afraid of his impulses and couldn’t manage to be spontaneous when they made love’. However, the novel shows that Miguel’s treatment of Azel, treating him like a slave, commanding him to perform the role of a submissive servant and sex object hardly helps matters. We discover that Miguel has adopted two twins, and admits that the ‘gesture is both selfish and generous’, as he is afraid of dying old and alone. His need for Azel is just as selfish: to make him feel younger and desired. Nevertheless, Azel also uses Miguel: he asks him to marry his sister, Kenza, in order that she can secure a visa. As Miguel observes: ‘...there was something in Azel’s eyes that was difficult to put into words, a kind of pseudo-smile, an implicit way of revealing and inadmissible form of deception’ (p.92). By agreeing to marry Kenza though, Miguel hopes to ‘make Azel more manageable’. At no point does the reader feel that Miguel is a victim of a fortune hunter like Abbas, a man whom Azel become friendly with in the barrio of Barcelona, and who later confesses to cynically exploiting rich old gay men, one of whom turns out to be Miguel’s friend.

Jelloun is aware of how, historically, Morocco has lured Western gay writers, like Jean Genet, because Moroccan men have been seen as sexually available. Miguel self-consciously compares himself to Genet at one point in the novel, but one feels that this is a fantasy Miguel indulges in as a self-consciously civilized, middle-class aesthete: ‘Azel thinks I’m Jean Genet, you know – that French writer who used to come to Tangier, a rebel, a great poet, a homosexual who had served time prison for theft....It’s curious – even though I’m sure Azel hasn’t read Genet, he must think he’s pleasing me by acting like street trash. (p.132). Earlier, we are told that ‘Miguel had read the works of Jean Genet and wondered why he loved to say that Tangier was the city of perfidy’ (p.92). Perfidy, or deceit, is the essential theme to many of the lives and stories told here, most notably for how Jelloun feels that the socio-political conditions of Morocco has frustrated and disappointed their dreams and aspirations. Both Azel and Kenza practice deceit, and are in turn deceived by a dream of a paradisal European life that turns into nightmarish struggle to survive economically and socially.

Tahar Ben Jelloun

A multitude of stories are told in Leaving Tangier, of lives lived under the yoke of poverty, oppression and corruption. The stories of Azel’s family – his protective mother, Lalla Zohra who survives selling contraband luxury products, his sister Kenza, his wife, Siham and his friend Malika, educated but enslaved in the local shrimp factory – all give the reader an insight into how hard life can be. As we later learn, even Miguel’s story is similar to Azel’s own. Miguel’s friend Gabriel tells Azel that Miguel’s family were poor and that ‘like you, he had to follow a man, a rich and powerful English lord’. Each of the characters’ narratives in turn draws out unexpected congruences and parallels between each other, and each story fits into the web of shared experiences.

Leaving Tangier is also important for how it explores some of the potential causes and reasons for the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Morocco. We are shown how intelligent, talented young people can be twisted by desperate circumstances to believe in fundamentalist rhetoric that, while seeming to offer freedom and independence, is ultimately restrictive and oppressive. Unconvinced by the arguments of a man he meets in the café, who tries to recruit him to an Islamist cause, Azel is warned that he will miss Tangier once he leaves: ‘You’ll miss your culture, your religion, your country. We are against emigration, legal or clandestine, because our problems are things we have to solve here and now, without counting on others to fix them for us’. Mohammed Labri, Azel’s friend, joins a fundamentalist cause when he experiences life in Brussels, to disappear to Pakistan ‘never to be seen again’.

Importantly, the novel does not give us a one-dimensional perspective of how and where racism occurs. Azel is shocked and disgusted when he discovers that Kenza is having sex with Nazim, a Turkish man living in Spain whom she befriends. After abusing Nazim to Kenza, she asks him which other nationalities he hates and if this includes Arabs. His reaction shows that he is filled with self-loathing: ‘Arabs? I could never stand them. I’m an Arab who doesn’t like himself’ (p.144). Despite being treated badly by people like Carmen, and ultimately Miguel, Azel’s emotional immaturity and possessive attitude to his sister’s relationship prevent him from him seeing that his own view of Nazim is no different to the way that some Spaniards think of him. More broadly, the novel shows that crossing the water is two-way traffic; the Spanish or ‘Spanoolies’ as they termed who have emigrated to Morocco suffer from the same kind of attitudes that Moroccans encounter in Spain. Jelloun’s reminds us of how fragile a country’s social-political conditions can be and how these conditions can change with time. Not so long ago, it was Morocco that was perceived as a haven for the Spanish from the repressive tyranny of Franco’s regime in Spain. We see Miguel discovering a journal of his father that gives and account of the lives of political refugees in Morocco in the 1950s, and Miguel’s surprise at discovering that it was the Spanish who were the ‘illegal aliens’. When Kenza tried to commit suicide, Miguel finally understands the devastating psychological effects of unhappiness and broken dreams: ‘Miguel now realized that there was something terrifying about the loneliness of immigration, a kind of descent into a void, a tunnel of shadows of warped reality’ (p.199).

Fittingly, the novel finishes on the theme of return with a poetical, dream-like chapter that depicts a universal voyage back to Tangier under the guidance of Toutia, and which symbolizes an infinite number of journeys that have been both desired and undertaken for centuries. As in other of his novels, Jelloun employs the everyman figure of Moha, ‘a holy fool’, an itinerant storyteller who appears and who symbolizes Morocco’s hopes and dreams. As Don Quixote explains to the captain and those assembled: ‘He’s the immigrant without a name! This man is who I was, who your father was, who your son will be...we all hear the siren call of the open sea, the appeal of the deep, the voices from afar that live within us, and we all feel the need to leave our native land, because our country is not rich enough, or loving enough, or generous enough to keep us at home’ (p.219).

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.