CHROMA

Review: After My Own Heart by Sophia Blackwell

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.

Labels: Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 5:23 PM 0 comments

Review: Ganymede Unfinished

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/

Labels: Ganymede Unfinished, John Stahle, Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 5:21 PM 1 comments

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

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).

Labels: Biography, Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 5:26 PM 0 comments

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

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.

Labels: Painters, Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 1:27 PM 0 comments

Review: Collected Plays of Mart Crowley

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).

Labels: Mart Crowley, Review, Theatre

posted by Eric Anderson @ 12:51 PM 0 comments

Review: Subtle Bodies by Peter Dubé

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).

Labels: Lethe Press, Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 1:49 PM 1 comments

Review: The Silver Hearted by David McConnell

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.

Labels: Alyson Publications, David McConnell, Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 1:36 AM 0 comments

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

Brief Lives: E. M. Forster
By Richard Canning

Labels: Biography, Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 3:07 PM 0 comments

Review: Bruno Gmünder

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/

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posted by Eric Anderson @ 6:02 AM 0 comments

Impossible Princess by Kevin Killian

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).

Labels: Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 10:35 AM 0 comments

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

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.

Labels: Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 12:52 PM 0 comments

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

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/

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posted by Eric Anderson @ 2:11 PM 0 comments

Review: Man’s World by Rupert Smith

Labels: Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 8:10 AM 0 comments

Review: Intersex (for lack of a better word)

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/

Labels: Review

posted by Eric Anderson @ 11:01 AM 0 comments