LGBT Literature

[Sybarite]

What is LGBT literature?

'LGBT' is such an extraordinarily wide spectrum to start with.

Gore Vidal, Manuel Puig, Jeanette Winterson, Virginia Woolf, Armistead Maupin, Colm T?ib?n – not necessarily everything that they have written, but it pervades what they write on a certain level.

Lesbianism is mentioned even in a novel such as Mrs Dalloway, although nobody would call it a lesbian book as such. Ignoring the obvious Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit from Winterson, there are hints of sexualities beyond straight in Sexing the Cherry, for instance.

Maupin and T?ib?n both include gay characters as a matter of course in their work, although their books are far from being exclusively about gay characters and experiences.

Vidal plays games with sexuality and gender – see Myra Breckinridge – while Live from Golgotha features several gay and bisexual characters, grafting Classical sexuality onto the Biblical world.

Then there's Thomas Mann and Joe Orton and EM Forster and Alice Walker and Sarah Waters ...

The breadth is wonderful – a real rainbow.

If a writer writes from experience, then sexuality will be present in their work. But how much can it change attitudes? If Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin could have a serious effect on how African Americans and the issue of slavery were seen, then it seems reasonable to suppose that the increasing profile of LGBT writers in the mainstream can only help to extend understanding of LGBT people and help LGBT people themselves realise that they're not alone.

So perhaps this also illustrates one possible answer to a question posited by a thread elsewhere: 'is fiction important?' Yes, it is.

[spooooool]

And Radclyfffe Hall, i think supported by the miners union when her book went to trial - if you see what i mean, it's been ages since i read it and as i remember it it's not terribly well written, but important yes. Genet, Gide, was Denton Welch gay? I used to know someone whose brother was an editor at Gay Mens Press, which dates me a bit, but still

[Stewart]

Maupin and T?ib?n both include gay characters as a matter of course in their work, although their books are far from being exclusively about gay characters and experiences.
I think you can lump Michael Chabon into that category.


The breadth is wonderful ? a real rainbow.
I think I can name more LGBT writers than I can works that deal with the topic - off the top of my head: Witold Gombrowicz, Jane and Paul Bowles, Juan Goytisolo, Michael Cunningham, and Vikram Seth - and since I haven't read those names I have no idea if it evens plays a part in their work. About ten years ago the horror/fantasy writer, Clive Barker, wrote Sacrament, which felt like his most personal novel in that it dealt with a gay protagonist and, scrape away the fantasy elements, it dealt with friends dying young, the end of the family line. Having read much of his work, it's probably the best, although most fans are more likely to go for the the-weirder/gory- the-better opinion.

Anyway, just for you I've added to the forum an old review of Gilbert Adair's Buenas Noches Buenos Aires (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/european-literature/6089-gilbert-adair-buenas-noches-buenos-aires.html), which was a novel written to put his homosexuality at the forefront of his fiction, since it usually lurks in between the lines.

[Sybarite]

I deliberately just picked a few to start the thread off, but it's perhaps a surprising number, when you consider how, until relatively recently in many countries, homosexuality could land you in prison – and of course it remains a very dangerous thing to be even now in some places (never mind homophobic crimes in others).

Wikipedia has a fairly extensive list of writers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT_writers), although this isn't complete: I mentioned Mann, for instance, while they don't. They haven't got Thom Gunn listed there either.

And thanks for the review, Stewart.

[Sybarite]

... Wikipedia has a fairly extensive list of writers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_LGBT_writers), although this isn't complete: I mentioned Mann, for instance, while they don't. They haven't got Thom Gunn listed there either...

They have now. It was probably about time I registered on Wiki.

[Bjorn]

Ignoring the obvious Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit from Winterson, there are hints of sexualities beyond straight in Sexing the Cherry, for instance.
I've yet to read a Winterson book that doesn't have LGBT themes - either explicitly or in the background. I get the impression she does it both for private reasons - "write what you know" - and as a literary technique; as if she deliberately wanted to NOT write about the same old gender roles, or at least not JUST about them but explore how people relate to each other outside the traditional male/female black/white this/that dynamics. Similarities rather than differences; putting the "homo" in "homosexual", if that's not too strange a phrase.

The wikipedia list doesn't include Tove Jansson. This is a fault. :cool:

But I'm curious; what constitutes LGBT literature? The sexual orientation of the writers, whether their fiction deals explicitly with the subject or not? Or fiction dealing with the subject, regardless of the writer's orientation? Fiction dealing with the problems faced (Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, Al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building or by all means The Portrait of Dorian Gray spring to mind) or fiction that just treats it as no big deal (Johanna Sinisalo's Only After Sundown/Troll: A Love Story, for instance)?

ETA: And I suppose someone needs to at least mention the name Poppy Z Brite.

[Sybarite]

... But I'm curious; what constitutes LGBT literature? The sexual orientation of the writers, whether their fiction deals explicitly with the subject or not? Or fiction dealing with the subject, regardless of the writer's orientation? Fiction dealing with the problems faced (Sarah Waters' The Night Watch, Al-Aswany's The Yacoubian Building or by all means The Portrait of Dorian Gray spring to mind) or fiction that just treats it as no big deal (Johanna Sinisalo's Only After Sundown/Troll: A Love Story, for instance)?

I think that it has to be there in the writing ? but whether that's as a major or dominant aspect, or as background, I don't think it really matters. Perhaps more importantly is that representations of LGBT life and experience are presented essentially positively and certainly truthfully.


... ETA: And I suppose someone needs to at least mention the name Poppy Z Brite.

And indeed why not? :D

[Ramblingsid]

Has anyone mentioned Alan Hollinghurst yet? I am never sure whether I like his novels or not for some reason.

The most remarkable book by a gay author I have read though was not a novel at all - but Derek Jarman's Last Diaries (not sure that was what they were called but you get the idea) which covered the period up to his death. It's possibly the most moving book I have ever read.

[miercuri]

I think Sarah Waters should be added to the list, I haven't read anything by her yet, but quite a lot about her and I was quite intrigued. Lesbianism with a Victorian twist.

edit: now I noticed Sybarite mentioned her in the first post.

[lionel]

To me, the prominent omissions from Wikipedia?s list are the ?Pre-Stonewall? novelists Rhys Davies and John Hampson. Hampson was a friend of W. H. Auden, who had married Thomas Mann?s daughter Erika for political reasons, and Hampson had in a similar homosexual/political spirit to Auden?s (?What are buggers for??) married Erica?s friend Therese Giese. Hilariously, the details of this are in Walter Allen?s As I Walked Down New Grub Street.

Like Hampson, Davies at the time (and this was obviously between the imprisonment of Wilde and the (partial) legalisation in the late 1960s) used certain codes for homosexuality, such as pale, weedy males not interested in sports or other ?masculine? pursuits. Apparently (according to the critic Andy Croft, that is), all of Hampson?s novels (including his most famous Saturday Night at the Greyhound) are covertly about homosexuality, although as I?ve not read all of Davies?s novels I can?t say the same for him, but I suspect that this is the case. I made a minor study of Davies?s The Withered Root (1927) and Rings on her Fingers (1930), and the paragraph below is an extract from it about the latter. My study concerns the outsider in literature filtered through a Sartrean existentialist point of view, and I would willingly forward the full section to anyone interested:

?In the novel, Edgar inherits a flourishing draper?s business from his father. To many people, though, he is more a figure of ridicule than respect in the small town: he has ?a certain delicacy, verging on the feminine?, dresses ? like Davies himself ? in spats and carries a malacca stick, and introduces powder puff and scents into the store, where he is seldom in the flannel department; it is even jokingly suggested, when he is taking part in an amateur production of Romeo and Juliet, that the nurse would be a suitable role for him. Modelled in part on Emma Bovary, Edith adopts a dominant position from the beginning of their relationship by making Edgar wait a relatively long time before accepting his marriage proposal; technically, the marriage in the beginning is a disaster for her, and she feels frustrated and yearns for adventure, preferably far from Wales. Edith?s central problem is that her marriage has freed her economically but not existentially, although her Lawrentian friend Raglan is wrong when he tells her before the wedding that she is deceiving herself.?

Below is a link to Auden?s famous homosexual poem ?The Platonic Blow?, although I suppose I should warn anyone offended by graphic sexual descriptions that this is not for them (although surely there?s a counter-argument that no one seriously interested in literature will be offended ? that, after all, is partly what literature exists for: to push boundaries).
http://www.lapetiteclaudine.com/archives/Auden_The_PLatonic_blow.txt

[Stewart]

I think that it has to be there in the writing ? but whether that's as a major or dominant aspect, or as background, I don't think it really matters. Perhaps more importantly is that representations of LGBT life and experience are presented essentially positively and certainly truthfully.
Have you read Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin? It's worth reading.

[titania7]

: Below is a link to Auden’s famous homosexual poem ’The Platonic Blow’, although I suppose I should warn anyone offended by graphic sexual descriptions that this is not for them (although surely there’s a counter-argument that no one seriously interested in literature will be offended – that, after all, is partly what literature exists for: to push boundaries).

Lionel,
I am offended by things in what I read all the time....and yet, I am certainly seriously interested in literature. I would say, although boundary-pushing is definitely a part of what literature is all about, it's probably more about creative self-expression
than anything.

But in regard to my being offended by what I read....

I've come to realize (and this helps a great deal) that:

a) I can always stop reading the book
b) the book wasn't written for me
c) it's my reaction to the material rather than the material itself that is causing me to feel "offended."

This last point is a concerted effort on my part to bring a psychological aspect into the mix. There are some psychologists and psychiatrists who will actually tell a rape victim, for example, that their reaction to the crime is just as significant as the crime itself. A highly debatable conjecture, I suppose; yet, at the same time, our reactions to everything we read and all that we experience can truly have a HUGE and often disastrous affect on our lives.

I enjoyed the excerpt from your study on Rings on Her Fingers (1930). I believe this was the Davies book on which your essay is based? Anyway, thanks for sharing it with all of us. I would like to read the rest (can e-mail or private msg me if you like--or if I don't hear from you within a couple of days, I'll msg to remind you).


Cordially,
Titania

[lionel]

although boundary-pushing is definitely a part of what literature
is all about,

D. H. Lawrence was of course one of these boundary pushers, and in Rhys Davies's strange autobiography Print of a Hare's Foot (in which he includes not only his own biography), he says that Lawrence told him that he'd made it possible for such people as Davies to speak far more freely about sexual matters. I doubt that Lawrence actually said this to Davies ? Davies is noted for twisting the truth in his autobiographical accounts, and this smacks of a retrospective observation ? but it's nevertheless true.

Davies is now perhaps best known in Lawrence studies as the person who smuggled Lawrence's Pansies, a book of erotic poems, from Lawrence's home in the south of France through the customs to England. As far as I know though, these were poems dealing with heterosexual sex, the representation of which Lawrence was noted for, particularly of course in Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Lawrence's Aaron's Rod and The Rainbow also contain homoerotic scenes; Lawrence's wife Frieda strongly suspected that her husband had had a relationship with a Cornish farmer; although Rhys never said in public that that he was gay, Lawrence knew very well that Davies was playing some very odd games with gender in The Withered Root; and Lawrence always seemed to surround himself by gay men. Nevertheless, Lawrence's attitude to homosexuality was ambivalent.

[titania7]

Lionel,
Lawrence's attitude to homosexuality may have been "ambivalent"; however, according to the bio written on him by Jeffrey Meyers, Lawrence definitely did have a homosexual relationship with the Cornish farmer, William Henry Hocking. In the Story of the Eye
thread, I link to a revealing essay Doris Lessing wrote on Lady Chatterley's Lover. Those who haven't read it might find it of some interest.

Lawrence definitely did push boundaries through his literature. The Rainbow
features a chapter that includes a lesbian relationship between Ursula Brangwen
and a woman schoolteacher, and Women in Love has some homosexual insinuations between the two men, Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin. In the film version of this book,
directed by the ever-controversial Ken Russell, there is a nude wrestling scene that these two male characters take part in that certainly seems homoerotic (I did not find it
erotic--but I suppose gay men might).

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a very steamy read. It might have been
more arousing if the character of Mellors, the gamekeeper, hadn't been so difficult to admire. I wrote in an earlier post on this
book that Lawrence felt "all 17-year-old girls" should be
given a copy. From his essay, A Propos of Lady Chatterley's
Lover, I will let Lawrence elucidate his point:

"...When we read of the case of Colonel Barker, we see what
is the matter. Colonel Barker was a woman who masqueraded
as a man. The 'Colonel' married a wife, and lived five years
with her in 'conjugal happiness.' And the poor wife thought all
the time she was married normally and happily to a real
husband......The situation is monstrous. Yet there are
thousands of women today who might be so deceived,
and go on being deceived. Why? Because they know
nothing, they can't think sexually at all; they are
morons in this respect. It is better to give all girls
this book, at the age of of seventeen."

Now everything is clear. Lawrence wrote Lady Chatterley's
Lover for the purposes of sexual education ;).

I do think this book has been vilified too much. Even by today's
standards, it's a wee bit raunchy. At the same time, it is
beautifully and poetically written (if not, admittedly, one
of Lawrence's greatest achievements).

One reason Frieda decided that Lawrence was gay was
because of his penchant for anal sex. She even told their
circle of friends and acquaintances about Lawrence's
sexual inadequacies. Apparently, anal sex was the only
sex that Lawrence found truly fulfilling. He had a bit
of a love/hate relationship with women. He abhorred
the predatory type of female--and felt that a woman's
clitoris was a "weapon" she used against men.
One can only blame his feelings on general
ignorance.

I've never read Pansies, but there is a passage in
the Jeffrey's Meyers bio where he quotes Lawrence
as saying that two of his copies of Pansies were
confiscated by Scotland Yard--all because of
the "fuss" over Lady Chatterley's Lover.

I'm going to start a Lawrence thread sometime during
the next few months. I really feel it's necessary.
He's an important writer whose works have sparked
a lot of debate.

~Titania

"Some things can't be ravished. You can't ravish
a can of sardines. And so many women are
like that; and men."
~D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

[adaorardor]

I think you can lump Michael Chabon into that category.


I think I can name more LGBT writers than I can works that deal with the topic - off the top of my head: Witold Gombrowicz, Jane and Paul Bowles, Juan Goytisolo, Michael Cunningham, and Vikram Seth - and since I haven't read those names I have no idea if it evens plays a part in their work. About ten years ago the horror/fantasy writer, Clive Barker, wrote Sacrament, which felt like his most personal novel in that it dealt with a gay protagonist and, scrape away the fantasy elements, it dealt with friends dying young, the end of the family line. Having read much of his work, it's probably the best, although most fans are more likely to go for the the-weirder/gory- the-better opinion.

Anyway, just for you I've added to the forum an old review of Gilbert Adair's Buenas Noches Buenos Aires (http://www.worldliteratureforum.com/forum/european-literature/6089-gilbert-adair-buenas-noches-buenos-aires.html), which was a novel written to put his homosexuality at the forefront of his fiction, since it usually lurks in between the lines.

Gombrowicz was gay?? Documentation on this?

[adaorardor]

Has anyone mentioned Alan Hollinghurst yet? I am never sure whether I like his novels or not for some reason.

The most remarkable book by a gay author I have read though was not a novel at all - but Derek Jarman's Last Diaries (not sure that was what they were called but you get the idea) which covered the period up to his death. It's possibly the most moving book I have ever read.

I looove Hollinghurst. Question about the end of his The Folding Star, though:

Is it clear what happened to Luc? Do we know for sure that he committed suicide (by drowning himself, moreover- what's with the last sentence)? Are we sure that the protagonist's dangerous friend (forget his name at this instant) didn't kill him, as it's hinted he killed "Rose"? Or are we supposed to be left wondering?

[Sybarite]

Gombrowicz was gay?? Documentation on this?


In his serialised Diary (1953-68) Gombrowicz alluded to his homosexual experiences...

Full article (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witold_Gombrowicz).

And if you want some 'fun', there's this extraordinary piece of bigoted crap (http://wyborcza.pl/1,82049,4293859.html), which mentions the issue.

[Stewart]

Gombrowicz was gay?? Documentation on this?Here's one example from a Q&A with the Polish culture minister regarding Gombrowicz's place in the school syllabus: Polish culture minister defends Gombrowicz (http://wyborcza.pl/1,82049,4293859.html):

[Eric]

Sybarite, what does the "T" stand for? I worked out "lesbian, gay and bisexual". But I couldn't see the "T". Maybe "transsexual", like Jan (former James) Morris.

Anyway, there are far more in authors in the LGBT category than are generally noticed. Not just the "come-out" people who took pride in their sexuality, but also careful people like E.M. Forster, who remained in the closet, and wrote "Maurice" on the quiet.

But you have to be careful with tarring them all with the same brush, lumping all the non-heteros together. Now that homosexuality is acceptable in most civilised Western circles, some authors even cash in on the aura. Literary quality is something beyond whom you want to have sex with. And as I often say, shelving gay literature separately in bookshops, means that the bookshops are continuing the apartheid, as it is not likely that any but the most open-minded heterosexuals are likely to be attracted by shelves full of one kind of sexuality. I'd like to see them all mixed in together on bookshop shelves.

Actually, when I recently wrote about Witold Gombrowicz and the other two Polish authors, I was going to write "bisexual", as he used to pick up young boys in the harbour of Buenos Aires. But I suppressed this, as I thought people would think that Eric was grandstanding again. Actually, the second author in what I term the triumvirate, Witkacy, is also rumoured to have had relations with the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, with whom he visited the Trobriand Islands on a research trip. (I think Schulz, with his masochism was in the hetero camp, though.)

I have noticed that there is sometimes a link between homosexuality and children's writing. For instance, the books by Tove Jansson who lived for many years with her (female) painter friend Tuulikki Pietil?, as suggested by Bj?rn. Some homosexual writers retain a childlike quality.

Yes, I have to mention Estonians. One of the most accomplished refugee authors, Karl Ristikivi, was a closet gay. I was told this by two Estonians, on quite separate occasions. I had already translated most of his novel "Night of Souls", but being a bit of a dummy, I didn't spot the fact that many of the epigrams at the heads of chapters were by gays: Housman, Morgenstern, Whitman, the Finnish poet Uuno Kailas, plus people of equivocal sexuality, such as Poe, T.S. Eliot, Lewis Carroll, Dorothy L. Sayers, and others. And the Estonian author T?nu ?nnepalu / Emil Tode (pseudonym) is openly gay.

And I have heard that D.H. Lawrence's and Daphne du Maurier's sexuality were ambivalent. There are LGBT writers from all over the world, over many decades: Gide and his little Arab boys, Mann and his famous Tadzio, and also with Tonio Kr?ger's friend (whose characteristics are transferred, in part, to Clavdia Chauchat in "The Magic Mountain"), Katherine Mansfield's bisexuality, Angus Wilson, Alan Bennett (who only came out of the closet recently), Colette, Yourcenar, Karin Boye, Mary Renault, Ali Smith, Gertrude Stein, Truman Capote, Juan Goytisolo, Georges Eekhoud, P?ter N?das, Gerard Reve, Hennie Aucamp, Joan Hambidge, Jens Bj?rneboe, Eva-Stina Byggm?star, Edith S?dergran, plus the huge number of other authors mentioned at: Category:Gay writers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Gay_writers) and Category:Lesbian writers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lesbian_writers)

And so it goes on. That's lists for you. If you stuck to translating gay LGBT authors alone, you'd manage to have a hell of a lot more authors brought to the UK than we have now!

But you can't deny one thing: if an author is bisexual, s/he can see their characters from both points of view - handy when writing literature.

Personally, I feel that it is important to know an author's sexuality, have it at the back of your mind when reading their work, but to read books by both the kind of sexuality you may identify with, and other. Otherwise, heterosexual men will never even read books by, for instance, heterosexual women. So they never find out how the other half feels. That would be a pity.

[titania7]

Eric,
I was unaware of Katherine Mansfield's bi-sexuality. I did wonder
a bit about her, after reading the Intro to Lawrence's Women in Love. I don't know whether or not you know that Mansfield was the basis for Guthrun Brangwen in this book? At any rate, it is a bit surprising that Mansfield was bi-sexual, as she had so many affairs
with men and also had a great yearning for children. She and her husband, John Middleton Murry, did spend time staying with the Lawrences. Murry was to write later, regarding these experiences, "Here (with the Lawrences)....the heights are always wuthering."
Mansfield also had choice words regarding D.H. and Frieda, "I don't know which disgusts one worse--when they are very loving and playing with each other or when they are roaring at each other and he is pulling out Frieda's hair and saying, 'I'll cut your throat, you bitch.'" Sounds like such an affectionate marriage, doesn't it?

At any rate, Lawrence's plans for a quartet among Mansfield, Murry, and Frieda went awry. In his novel, Women in Love, he is able to "live" out his fantasy. In real life, things were different. He did manage to coerce a befuddled Murry into swearing an oath of
"blood brothership" (a scene that's echoed in Women in Love). However, Murry and Mansfield only stayed with the Lawrences from April until mid-June. The year, lest you wonder, was 1916.

I did not know that Dorothy Sayers was bi-sexual either. Where
did you find this out about good ole Dorothy, Eric? Goodness, she had a child out of wedlock (by a married man--didn't know he was married at the time, however....)
and dedicated herself to writing on the subject of religious theology in her later years. One can only imagine what secrets she disclosed to her priest at confession (she was a devout Catholic).

I agree regarding reading books by authors whose sexuality you
identify with. I am a heterosexual lass myself; so, books by
heterosexual men would be in order, wouldn't they? Thankfully,
I was not so deluded to imagine that the male/female relationships
that Lawrence depicts in his novels are "normal," by any means.
Heavens, taking his books too much to heart might be enough to make a girl enter a nunnery (and I'm not Catholic).

~Titania

[lionel]

Has anyone mentioned Patrick White?

[jackdawdle]

But you can't deny one thing: if an author is bisexual, s/he can see their characters from both points of view - handy when writing literature.might've come in handy to proust as he had made an artistic gaff to depict his narrator, marcel who is hetero, being angry and jealous at the sight of his girlfriend getting intimate with a lady friend.

[Sybarite]

Sybarite, what does the "T" stand for? I worked out "lesbian, gay and bisexual". But I couldn't see the "T". Maybe "transsexual" ...

Correct, Eric.

It's an odd one to include, in many ways, since it's about gender rather than sexuality, but transsexuals currently have no other group to be part of, so the 'LGBT' formula has been generally accepted in recent years. In many ways, I think there was more resistance to including bisexual from some.

[Eric]

Mansfield. There's a very full article on her at...

Katherine Mansfield, 1888-1923 | NZETC (http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Whi071Kota-t1-g1-t8.html)

...which hardly touches upon bisexuality at all, and list loads of men she "went out" with. But I've definitely read about this somewhere.

A more gay-oriented website goes into it in some more detail:

Katherine Mansfield - Queer History New Zealand (http://www.gaynz.net.nz/history/KatherineMansfield.html)

And a Telegraph article says:



According to the different claims of her various biographers and critics since then, she's been a sweet and wholesome tragic victim, a selfish dark-eyed piece of trouble, a feminist, an anti-feminist, a satirist, a sentimentalist, a miniaturist, an overinflated reputation, a repressed lesbian, a colonial bisexual angel-devil plagiarist original.

Quite a gal, what? You end up not knowing what to believe.

Source: So many afterlives from one short life - Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2007/04/07/bokatherine.xml)

*

Yes, Sybarite, the transsexual thing is curious. Literally the only transgender author I can think of is the former British Intelligence officer and father of five children James Morris, who became travel-writer Jan Morris. S/he seems to have gone back to his/her wife in his old age. They evidently remarried this year.

See: Jan Morris - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Morris)

*

I cannot deny that I get a bit of an "I'm the only gay in the village" feeling when homosexuals make pariahs of bisexuals, regarding them as impure in some ways. I think when you look into authors and homosexuality, those feelings of ambiguous sexuality, as I suggested above, are valuable for authors describing both sexes. People such as Proust, Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, maybe Gide, maybe Julien Green. And read what the Wiki says about Oscar Wilde's sexuality:

Oscar Wilde - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde#Sexuality)

That's enough sex for now. The story I'm translating ends in a (heterosexual) blow job.

[Sybarite]

Mansfield. There's a very full article on her at...

Katherine Mansfield, 1888-1923 | NZETC (http://www.nzetc.org/tm/scholarly/tei-Whi071Kota-t1-g1-t8.html)

...which hardly touches upon bisexuality at all, and list loads of men she "went out" with...

There's still extraordinarily little serious work that's been done on bisexuality ? well, in many ways, on the whole spectrum of human sexuality, which has been limited for so long by cultural rather than scientific proscriptions. Sue George's Women and Bisexuality (1993) made an honourable effort to deal more thoroughly with what constitutes bisexuality. Part of the difficulty is that it differs so much from one individual to the next. At its most simple, bisexuals are attracted sexually (not necessarily emotionally) to people of both sexes. Those in the middle, so to speak, are attracted to both sexes equally. But many others will be attracted to one sex more than the other, to greater of lessor degrees.

And much of the question remains as to how people self-identify ? which starts to address your points about Oscar Wilde.


... Yes, Sybarite, the transsexual thing is curious. Literally the only transgender author I can think of is the former British Intelligence officer and father of five children James Morris, who became travel-writer Jan Morris. S/he seems to have gone back to his/her wife in his old age. They evidently remarried this year...

The use of LGBT here is not so much a question of whether there are writers that can be shoehorned into every aspect of that description, but as the current common usage.

But Patrick Califia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Califia) is another such example of a transsexual writer. And there is quite a list here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Transgender_and_transsexual_writers).


... I cannot deny that I get a bit of an "I'm the only gay in the village" feeling when homosexuals make pariahs of bisexuals, regarding them as impure in some ways...

I think that it was initially for understandable reasons ? in that, by and large, bisexuals didn't need to 'come out' in society in the same way that gay men and lesbians did, if they didn't actually want to stay in the closet their entire lives. Bisexuals generally didn't have the same pressure on them to make that choice. And there was also a reluctance to acknowledge a wider spectrum of sexuality than the comfortable poles of hetero and homo. The suggestion to bisexuals that: "You just haven't made your mind up yet" was still prevalent even within the last decade or so.

In organisations where sub-groups are officially labeled, then it took some heavy debate and so on to change groups from LG to the more inclusive LGBT.

And Lionel ? thanks for another name.

[Eric]

Never let it be said that Eric doesn't have serendipity finds. I remembered the interesting Finnish author Sofi Oksanen, whom I've introduced here on a thread of her own, and I was just checking that she has "come out" in this respect, as I'd hate to embarrass a closet. But it's OK, she's listed on the new English Wiki entry as bisexual. So I'm in the clear if I mention it (along with her erstwhile bulimia):

Sofi Oksanen - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sofi_Oksanen)

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/0f/Sofi_Oksanen.jpg/180px-Sofi_Oksanen.jpg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Sofi_Oksanen.jpg)

On her Wiki website, I espied, to my surprise, a further Wiki website: one on bisexual writers:

Category:Bisexual writers - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Bisexual_writers)

Most of the names mean nothing to me. But I have heard of Acker, Beckford, de Beauvoir, Brophy, George - 6th Baron Byron, Cocteau, Colette, Aleister Crowley, Jack Kerouac, Harold Nicolson, Stephen Spender, etc.

By which firm criteria or evidence these people appear on this Wiki list I do not know, but it makes interesting reading.

*

Before I say bi-bi to this topic, two names I've come up with all by myself are that of the Finland-Swedish poet Edith S?dergran, who had crushes on her male teacher at German school in Saint Petersburg, but rather fancied Hagar Olsson, another accomplished Finland-Swedish literary figure. Oh, and Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, who we've met on the Polish literature thread.

[Mirabell]

A writer who needs to be named here is, of course, James Merrill.

[Eric]

Did Merrill write a number of books? I'm thinking especially the one he got the National Book Award for in 1979.

[Mirabell]

Did Merrill write a number of books? I'm thinking especially the one he got the National Book Award for in 1979.

yes he wrote several books and won almost every possible prize, including the Bollingen.

[Mirabell]

I may have forgotten to mention why he's important for this thread. Not because he was gay, but because his poetical work on the one hand contains many elegies to friends who died of AIDS (to which he himself would succumb), which I count among the most moving elegies of the latter half of the twentieth century. On the other hand his incredibly masterful long poem "The Changing Light at Sandover" contains a strange, (queer ;)), almost celebratory discussion of homosexuality, wherein gays are the cream of the crop, as far as god and his angels are concerned, the apples of His eye, so to speak. Most of this is put forward in that mad wild middle section "Mirabell's Book of Numbers" (oh ah I get ya now, Eric. Sorry.)

[Sybarite]

I may have forgotten to mention why he's important for this thread. Not because he was gay, but because his poetical work on the one hand contains many elegies to friends who died of AIDS (to which he himself would succumb), which I count among the most moving elegies of the latter half of the twentieth century...

Have you read Thom Gunn's The Man With the Night Sweats, Mirabell?

It's essentially the same thing ? a volume of poetry about what was happening around him; about friends dying etc. Incredible. very moving stuff.

[Mirabell]

I've been considering getting Thom Gunn's collected poems for a while now...maybe this will provide the final push...such an uneven poet...

[lionel]

Titania, I should have responded to your post earlier, but anyway here goes:


Lady Chatterley's Lover is a very steamy read.

Says who? The stuff in this book is now very tame. I remember my father in the early 1960s putting the first paperback edition of this down on the kitchen table when he came back from work, as if it were some animal he'd just bagged from the factory. I picked it up, my father glared at me, and my mother apologised for me because, of course, I hadn't intended to read from this book, had I?

Yeah, of course I had, but I couldn't admit this in a respectable working-class famiy kitchen, and I subsequently found it amusing that my father lent this book to my uncle with a warning that he shouldn't leave the book lying around as it contained 'terrible' language. (I later tracked this evil book down ? when I knew they were out for a long time ? at the bottom of a suitcase resting on my parents' bedroom ceiling. My mother couldn't really read much, and I'm certain that my father had only read the few bits he could object to (and I doubt if he ever read an entire book in his life), but they knew there was something wrong with this book.)


It might have been more arousing if the character of Mellors, the gamekeeper, hadn't been so difficult to admire.

More arousing? Hell, he aroused Lady Chatterley. Sorry, that was cheap, but Lawrence obviously didn't intend a clearcut interpretation of the character. Lawrence sometimes said some odd things, but then if the media are hanging on your every word (and Lawrence was a kind of superstar of the time) there would have been many unacceptable things said in spindoctorless times.


Even by today's standards, it's a wee bit raunchy.

Is it?


One reason Frieda decided that Lawrence was gay was because of his penchant for anal sex.

I don't read it that way. Anal sex was a revelation to Lawrence, certainly ('Look! We have come through!'), but he was also terrified of homosexual behaviour. (Was Lawrence's adverse reaction to some of Bertrand Russell's colleagues intellectual or sexual?) Heterosexual anal sex seemed to be perfectly all right for Lawrence. Let's not even think about anything else that Frieda said in retrospect :).

[Eric]

By the way, D.H. Lawrence was, of course, very much from the working-classes that Lionel mentions. So anal sex and homosexuality were not the sort of things he would have been discussing with mum and dad in the kitchen.

In the Wiki article on Lawrence it says:



The fourth child of Arthur John Lawrence, a barely literate miner, and Lydia (n?e Beardsall), a former schoolmistress, Lawrence spent his formative years in the coal mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire.

Apart from his being an only child, this is exactly the same background as that of my own father: son of a northern miner who cared bugger-all about reading, and his more educated wife, who played the piano at chapel.

*

Prudery varies from society to society, but sadly, those that have been built upon working class romanticism, such as Russian Communism, have been puritan in the extreme. In the Soviet Union, masturbation, homosexuality, and other sexual matters, were simply censored out of every piece of literature by the state censors, Glavlit. For the Soviet reader, these rather commonplace matters simply didn't exist. Nor were books involving such things translated into Russian. There were no contraceptives available, except one - abortion. Soviet sex is a contradiction in terms.

So, in the Estonian novel I'm reading now, a youngish boy is tricked into thinking he is in bed with a lovely young lady (it is dark). He is approaching her from behind with his member. In fact it's a bald bloke, but he doesn't twig till he pulls at the "gorgeous bird's" hair - which comes off. 'Twas a wig. The young boy, not being homosexual, is not amused. The author does, however, have the young lad wanking all over the place, and finally giving the janitor's (caretaker's) wife a quick one.

Now, these episodes, in the Toomas Vint novel "The Janitor's Wife", are pretty unshocking by Western standards, but in its ex-Soviet 1995 context, you have to see it differently. Only four years after Estonia was released from the tight strictures of Soviet puritanism, an author wrote what, by post-Soviet standards, is a porn novel. Vint himself says, in an interview I've just translated:



When the first part of the trilogy "The Janitor’s Wife" first appeared in 1995, it almost caused a scandal with its many erotic episodes. How does its reception then compare with how it is received by readers over ten years later?

In Russian times, censorship was particularly severe, so that a text never became erotic. For some reason, there was a special taboo regarding masturbation, you were not even allowed to allude to it. The Estonian literary world appeared to have taken puritanism as the norm. In "The Janitor’s Wife" there was a candid description of a young man’s sexual awakening, and this was bound to attract a counter-reaction. The more malicious critics called it a porn novel, and the cultural editor of one daily tried to fish out my own sexual preferences. Nowadays, it just makes people smile. The taboos no longer exist, the frontiers have been extended. But I do not like a crude text. Erotic tension arises from the situation, not from obscene expressions.

Russia itself is now wallowing in sex and pornography. After 70 years of Communism, and a further 15 of capitalism, Russia's one of the most porn-soaked countries in the world. So their stocks & shares may be plummeting, and Putin may be swinging the sceptre (through Medvedev) - but they've still got oil, gas and porn.

[Eric]

P.S., as this is the homosexuality thread, please read this article, mostly from a lesbian point of view, about Soviet and Russian attitudes to homosexuality, written in about 1999:

Anne Buetikofer -- Homosexuality in the Soviet Union and in today's Russia (http://www.savanne.ch/tusovka/en/pilot/homosexuality-russia.html)

And the Wiki, as usual:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gay_culture_in_Russia

[Mirabell]

From Sandover


Erection of theories, dissemination
Of thought - the intellectual's machismo.
We're more the docile takers-in of seed.
No matter what tall tale our friends emit,
Lately -you noticed?-we just swallow it.

[spooooool]

i like that!

Gunn i'll have read years ago, i wish i remembered more about him. And i mean the verse in particular,


cheers,
Spooooool

[Mirabell]

i like that!



sandover is madness rhymed, metered and in caps
and sadly I will gloss over all of this in my thesis
when and if I finish it
I wish I could just work on stuff
I have notes for five different papers
(plus two novels and a dozen poems)

[titania7]

The stuff in this book (Lady Chatterley's Lover) is now very tame. [quote/]

Perhaps what I meant to say is that I consider it to be a steamy read. Compared to some of the things several of the listmembers have read and are reading, I'm sure it is, in fact, "tame." I've actually not ever read any pornography (unless you count parts of The Story of O, which I skimmed online. And for the record, it wasn't my cup of tea :)). I've never watched any porn films, either. Thus, I'm not all that accustomed to parts of the male and female anatomy being discussed in such graphic detail in the literature I read. I'm a devotee of classic writers at heart--I love Jane Austen, Honore de Balzac, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. For me, after reading Sons and Lovers and Women in Love (which, for those who don't know, is not a lesbian novel--it's about two sisters and their male lovers), Lady Chatterley's Lover was a bit of a surprise. I mean, I basically knew what to expect; at the same time, I wasn't immune to it. It did affect me.

Obviously, your taste in literature is different than mine is or than it has been. I, for instance, very much enjoy Victorian writers--who, by the way, were not driven by the idea of "pushing boundaries." I don't think Jane Austen was trying to create controversy when she wrote Emma. Nor do I think George Eliot was attempting to cause a scandal when she wrote Middlemarch. And are we really to say that these great novels are of lesser value, than say, the work of Anais Nin or Henry Miller?

[quote: lionel] I remember my father in the early 1960s putting the first paperback edition of this down on the kitchen table when he came back from work, as if it were some animal he'd just bagged from the factory. I picked it up, my father glared at me, and my mother apologised for me because, of course, I hadn't intended to read from this book, had I? [quote/]

Yeah....well, I came from such a conservative background that I would have been given a beating I would have never forgotten had my father caught me reading The Rainbow or Women in Love. I might have been killed if I had tried to smuggle in a copy of Lady Chatterley's Lover. And, by the way, I ain't kidding. My father was a tyrant and when he got angry, he was a devil. I wasn't even allowed to go see a Disney movie. As for curse words, even "gee" and "darn" were prohibited.

[quote: lionel] More arousing? Hell, he (Mellors) aroused Lady Chatterley. Sorry, that was cheap, but Lawrence obviously didn't intend a clearcut interpretation of the character [quote/]

I was really just making a personal comment on Mellors. Nothing I say is written in stone. It's all about individual opinions when it comes to our personal "take" on what we read. Isn't that so?

As for Mellors, I think Lady Chatterley would have found nearly anyone arousing. She was married to a man who couldn't have sex with her, and she was clearly a very passionate woman. I don't think her being "aroused" by Mellors was a definitive indication of his level of sexual or physical appeal.

You asked if this book really is raunchy, yes? Well, according to what I'm used to reading, it is. According to my personal standards, it is. According my own individual code of conduct, it is. I don't, with my friends, male companions, or family, use words like "cunt" and "fuck." I'm not personally turned on by anal sex. So.....yeah, to me the book is raunchy. And not necessarily in a good way. At the same time, I did finish reading it. Believe me, I have NO qualms about not finishing a book if I see no merit in it. It wouldn't matter if I had spent $50 on it. I don't feel I have to explain this, either. Life's just too short to keep reading something you don't like. I do believe Lady Chatterley's Lover has artistic and literary merit. And incidentally, Lionel, that's what I look for most in a novel--not boundary-pushing.

[quote: lionel] Anal sex was a revelation to Lawrence, certainly ('Look! We have come through!') [quote/]

Well, good for him. I obviously wouldn't have been the right woman for him to marry.

[quote: lionel] ...but he was also terrified of homosexual behaviour.
[quote/]

Homophobia is very common in men and women with repressed homosexual tendecies. I have a friend whose first husband was gay, and she tells me that he was always poking fun at gay men, calling them all sorts of derogatory names. Many times I think our being "terrified" of something--such as gays or lesbians, for example--is more of a reflection upon us than it is upon them. We aren't actually "terrified" of them nor are we scandalized by their behavior. We're frightened at what they evoke in us--at the reaction we feel inside to them. I think it takes a HUGE amount of courage to strip ourselves bare--not literally, but psychologically--and look at the face behind the mask we wear to the outside world. Lawrence clearly was unable to accept his inherent desires. I do believe he was attracted to men. But because of the time he lived in, he had to "conform" to society's mold--i.e., he had to marry and have what appeared to be a "normal" life. His marriage to Frieda was fraught with much tension. And honestly, if a man doesn't want to have any sex with a woman besides anal sex, I think he's pretty screwed-up, too. Was he gay? Well, that is a matter of opinion, I guess. Does having a passionate affair with a man make a man gay? Or, if he's also having sex with women, isn't he bi-sexual? Maybe "bi-sexual" would be the most fitting term to describe Lawrence's sexuality.

[quote: lionel] Heterosexual anal sex seemed to be perfectly all right for Lawrence. Let's not even think about anything else that Frieda said in retrospect :).

But why not, Lionel? Aren't we almost compelled to let Frieda's remarks about her husband enter into the picture? Personally, I don't think we should exclude any pertinent information. Seriously, think about it: who would have known Lawrence better than his own wife? Frieda must have had reasons--and valid ones--for thinking Lawrence was a "closet" homosexual. Only she really knew what these reasons were. I daresay she didn't discuss all of them with everyone, perhaps not even with anyone.

Coridally,
Titania

[lionel]

Women in Love (which, for those who don't know, is not a lesbian novel--it's about two sisters and their male lovers

Which reminds me that one of the sons and one of the lovers in the title Sons and Lovers also refer to the strong incestuous undertow inthe novel.


[Lady Chatterley] was married to a man who couldn't have sex with her

The Chatterley mansion was almost certainly modelled on Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, the home of the Sitwell family. Although Sir Clifford?s misfortune was in part Lawrence underlining the real obscenity ? war ? this is also interesting from the gay angle: Sir Clifford himself was partly modelled on the gay writer Osbert Sitwell, who wasn?t too pleased when he found out what Lawrence had done to him. Another example of Lawrence?s sexual ambivalence, perhaps, but also of his humour.


I don't, with my friends, male companions, or family, use words like "cunt" and "fuck."

Obviously, Lawrence's use of 'fuck' and 'cunt' was part of the boundary pushing, and Lady Chatterley's Lover was a great breath of air for millions of people. (I just wrote 'Laddy Chatterley', and would like to see it as a Freudian slip, but I don't really think Lawrence was playing gender games in the anal sex scene!) This rather weedy man, who didn't lose his virginity until he was well into his twenties, was an unlikely sexual trailblazer (and I won't bother quoting what has become Larkin's clich? about when sexual intercourse began): you may enjoy the 19th century novel, but I hope no one wants to return to the days when millions of sexually frustrated women (such as Christina Rossetti, who had the genius to channel her frustration into such (oral) sex-dripping masterpieces as 'Goblin Market') just withered away, while unmarried men had to use prostitutes or ? if they were lucky enough ? an obliging but far more sexually liberated female gypsy. But Larkin was right: it was a kind of breaking of the bank in the sixties, and although some of the excesses of the time may have been pretty silly, at least future generations can enjoy the new freedoms.

I come from a family which never used words like 'fuck' and 'cunt', but then my parents were far too 'respectable' for my liking. My partner received her early education in a Roman Catholic convent school, and hated it. We're very grateful to such people as D. H. Lawrence, who paved the way for more liberal behaviour. But the sexual revolution (of which the free use of language, including discussion without petty limits, is an integral part) passed some people by in England. And in large parts of America too. (That last sentence isn?t a value judgement, Titania, and I?m certainly not knocking your views, just stating a fact.)


quote: lionel] Heterosexual anal sex seemed to be perfectly all right for Lawrence. Let's not even think about anything else that Frieda said in retrospect

But why not, Lionel? Aren't we almost compelled to let Frieda's remarks about her husband enter into the picture?

That was a rather badly expressed remark on my part, but I was thinking of all the people, after his death, who claimed Lawrence said or did something, from Frieda herself, through Catherine Carswell, Richard Aldington, Dorothy Brett (squawking about finally bedding him and then he couldn?t get it up), Rhys Davies, and so on. The anecdotes seem endless, although I?m sure there are many inventions among them.

I live just a few miles from his birthplace, so you can imagine the industry here.

[Jayaprakash]

Wikipedia describes Dominique Fernandez as an 'openly gay French novelist', although I see he was married to a woman for 10 years and had two children; presumably this was before he came out.

I'm currently reading, in translation, his novel Porporino or the secrets of Naples (Porporino, ou les mysteres de Naples in the original), first published in 1974. It's the diary of a fictional castrato, and it deals with issues of gender identity, among other things.

The 'Editor's Foreword' provided as a framing device says it would be 'tempting to establish an analogy between the vogue of the castrati in this earlier world and...the hippie protest...the love of music and the love of love, boys with long hair, girls with narrow hips...'. In the diary itself, Porporino says 'two centures hence, I imagine that I would see young people living in communities, wreathed in garlands, with the attributes of both sexes indistinct, boys wearing long hair and girls short hair, their ways of dressing almost identical...'

It's interesting, he seems to be building a portrait of a sort of universal utopian transsexualism, a condition in which sexual signifiers are defused and irrelevant.

[Mirabell]

The book you mention just reminded me of another major LGBT writer, Samuel R. Delany, who continually writes back against tired old gender and sexuality divisions, especially in novels like Triton (in reprint renamed: Trouble on Triton), which dissolve these boundaries though of as fixed. An excellent writer to boot.

[Jayaprakash]

Aha! I've been wanting to mention Delaney on this thread for a while actually. Also worth noting is Dhalgren which contains much explicit sexual content, involving homsexual and bisexual acts, as well as in one case a tree. These scenes were very explicit, but seemed more about exploring power dynamics and the ways in which people deal with extreme situations than about titillation, a subversion of expectations which is just one of many (others involving structure - this is a completely circular novel - and genre, Delaney breaking further beyond SF boundaries than he'd ever done before at that point, and yet still engaging in a dialogue with the tropes of the genre) in this huge, sprawling novel, as confounding as it is lyrical.

Later he moved from SFnal content to books that dealt almost exclusively with sex and sexuality, such as Equinox, which I have under the title The Tides Of Lust. It's dauntingly pornographic, but I think its themes are better essayed in Dhalgren.

[Mirabell]

I know this may become a staple rant as so many of Eric's but I think you are selling SF short if you say that Delany's work in Dhalgren or Stars... is "breaking SF boundaries". I think his work is perfectly within the limits of SF, in the spirit of SF, a logical development of SF. A development you can see within his own work, seeing as he started out with classical golden age-style SF, and slowly shed the narrow constraints of that type while understanding his craft and genre better.

[Jayaprakash]

Shall I simply rephrase it as 'stretching SF boundaries'? That's more accurate anyway. SF is all about going beyond the boundaries of the known after all.

[Mirabell]

SF is all about going beyond the boundaries of the known after all.

Yes, exactly.

[Mirabell]

who broke down crying in white gymnasiums naked and trembling before the machinery of other skeletons,

who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication,

who howled on their knees in the subway and were dragged off the roof waving genitals and manuscripts,

who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists, and screamed with joy,

who blew and were blown by those human seraphim, the sailors, caresses of Atlantic and Caribbean love,

who balled in the morning in the evenings in rosegardens and the grass of public parks and cemeteries scattering their semen freely to whomever come who may,

who hiccuped endlessly trying to giggle but wound up with a sob behind a partition in a Turkish Bath when the blond & naked angel came to pierce them with a sword,

who lost their loveboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftsman's loom,

who copulated ecstatic and insatiate and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last gyzym of consciousness,

who sweetened the snatches of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but were prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked in the lake,

who went out whoring through Colorado in myriad stolen night-cars, N.C., secret hero of these poems, cocksman and Adonis of Denver?joy to the memory of his innumerable lays of girls in empty lots & diner backyards, moviehouses' rickety rows, on mountaintops in caves or with gaunt waitresses in familiar roadside lonely petticoat upliftings & especially secret gas-station solipsisms of johns, & hometown alleys too,

who faded out in vast sordid movies, were shifted in dreams, woke on a sudden Manhattan, and picked themselves up out of basements hungover with heartless Tokay and horrors of Third Avenue iron dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,

who walked all night with their shoes full of blood on the snowbank docks waiting for a door in the East River to open full of steamheat and opium,

who created great suicidal dramas on the appartment cliff-banks of the Hudson under the wartime blue floodlight of the moon & their heads shall be crowned with laurel in oblivion,

who ate the lamb stew of the imagination or digested the crab at the muddy bottom of the rivers of the Bowery,

who wept at the romance of the streets with their pushcarts full of onions and bad music,

who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts, who coughed on the sixth floor of Harlem crowned with flame under the tubercular sky surrounded by orange crates of theology,

who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow morning were stanzas of gibberish,

who cooked rotten animals lung heart feet tail borsht & tortillas dreaming of the pure vegetable kingdom,

who plunged themselves under meat trucks looking for an egg,

who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for an Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade,

who cut their wrists three times successfully unsuccessfully, gave up and were forced to open antique stores where they thought they were growing old and cried,

who were burned alive in their innocent flannel suits on Madison Avenue amid blasts of leaden verse & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion & the nitroglycerine shrieks of the fairies of advertising & the mustard gas of sinister intelligent editors, or were run down by the drunken taxicabs of Absolute Reality,

who jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Chinatown soup alleyways & firetrucks, not even one free beer,

who sang out of their windows in despair, fell out of the subway window, jumped in the filthy Passaic, leaped on negroes, cried all over the street, danced on broken wineglasses barefoot smashed phonograph records of nostalgic European 1930s German jazz finished the whiskey and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in their ears and the blast of colossal steamwhistles,

who barreled down the highways of the past journeying to each other's hotrod-Golgotha jail-solitude watch Birmingham jazz incarnation,

who drove crosscountry seventytwo hours to find out if I had a vision or you had a vision or he had a vision to find out Eternity,

who journeyed to Denver, who died in Denver, who came back to Denver & waited in vain, who watched over Denver & brooded & loned in Denver and finally went away to find out the Time, & now Denver is lonesome for her heroes,

who fell on their knees in hopeless cathedrals praying for each other's salvation and light and breasts, until the soul illuminated its hair for a second,

who crashed through their minds in jail waiting for impossible criminals with golden heads and the charm of reality in their hearts who sang sweet blues to Alcatraz,

who retired to Mexico to cultivate a habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys or Southern Pacific to the black locomotive or Harvard to Narcissus to Woodlawn to the daisychain or grave,

who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their insanity & their hands & a hung jury,

who threw potato salad at CCNY lecturerson Dadaism and subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of the madhouse with the shaven heads and harlequin speech of suicide, demanding instantaneous lobotomy,

and who were given instead the concrete void of insulin Metrazol electricity hydrotherapy psychotherapy occupational therapy pingpong & amnesia,

who in humorless protest overturned only one symbolic pingpong table, resting briefly in catatonia,

returning years later truly bald except for a wig of blood, and tears and fingers, to the visible madman doom of the wards of the madtowns of the East,

Pilgrim State's Rockland's and Greystone's foetid halls, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, dream of life a nightmare, bodies turned to stone as heavy as the moon,

with mother finally *****, and the last fantastic book flung out of the tenement window, and the last door closed at 4 A.M. and the last telephone slammed at the wall in reply and the last furnished room emptied down to the last piece of mental furniture, a yellow paper rose twisted on a wire hanger on the closet, and even that imaginary, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination?

ah, Carl, while you are not safe I am not safe, and now you're really in the total animal soup of time?

and who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

who dreamt and made incarnate gaps in Time & Space through images juxtaposed, and trapped the archangel of the soulbetween 2 visual images and joined the elemental verbs and set the noun and dash of consciousness together jumping with sensation of Pater Omnipotens Aeterna Deus

to recreate the syntax and measure of poor human prose and stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,

the madman bum and angel beat in Time, unknown, yet putting down here what might be left to say in time come after death,

and rose incarnate in the ghostly clothes of jazz in the goldhorn shadow of the band and blew the suffering of America's naked mind for love into an eli eli lamma lamma sabacthani saxophone cry that shivered the cities down to the last radio

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

Allen Fuckin Ginsberg. How come he hasn't been mentioned here?

[lionel]

Allen Fuckin Ginsberg. How come he hasn't been mentioned here?

Maybe because Sybarite posted a Wikipedia link to literary gays, where he is mentioned. And, of course, Kerouac wasn't entirely hetero: he gave Ginsberg the occasional hand job, and spent a night with Gore Vidal.

[Eric]

Mirabell, could you explain #47? Out of context, the quote is rather puzzling. Where precisely it from. I find this kind of Whitmanian listing-shocking rather unreadable.

I see where Titania's coming from, when she says:


I'm a devotee of classic writers at heart--I love Jane Austen, Honore de Balzac, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Charles Dickens, and Fyodor Dostoevsky. For me, after reading Sons and Lovers and Women in Love (which, for those who don't know, is not a lesbian novel--it's about two sisters and their male lovers), Lady Chatterley's Lover was a bit of a surprise. I mean, I basically knew what to expect; at the same time, I wasn't immune to it. It did affect me.

I am not prudish. As you will have seen, I have described some pretty raunchy scenes, even in the novel I'm reading right now. But as I have pointed out, I feel that porn is porn and lit is lit. The Vint novel I'm reading with it's transvestite, masturbation & copulation is borderline in this respect. The reasons for it are outlined on the Vint thread. But personally, I am happier with Vint when he plays games, is subtle, political, social and describes evocative landscapes. So, as this is the homosexuality thread, which are the classic novels of homosexual love, as opposed to turgid descriptions of turgid members or double dildos?

Both sexes are capable of feelings and ?sthetic appreciation, whether they are straight or gay. But I sometimes feel that the boundary between loving companionship in novels and having it off is deliberately blurred by booksellers, to get people with a prurient interest to buy the book. The reader thus conned may come away disappointed: the book will satisfy neither the urge to read pornographic descriptions for physical arousal, nor do they enter a world of love, style and ?sthetic appreciation. They are left in reading limbo.

Everybody makes a big thing about Virginia Woolf's bisexuality, but I believe I read somewhere that when she tried going to bed with one of her lady-friends, it did not satisfy her sexually. When reading Woolf, sex doesn't matter, and class only matters in as much it explains certain social mores.

[lionel]

This is an interesting review of Andrea Weiss's In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story:
LRB ? Colm T?ib?n: I Could Sleep with All of Them (http://www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n21/toib01_.html)

[Mirabell]

Mirabell, could you explain #47? Out of context, the quote is rather puzzling. Where precisely it from. I find this kind of Whitmanian listing-shocking rather unreadable.

This is from HOWL, first section. Before the onset of lists, the poem begins thus


I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn
looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machin-
ery of night,


Here is the complete thing.
http://members.tripod.com/~Sprayberry/poems/howl.txt

[lionel]

Everybody makes a big thing about Virginia Woolf's bisexuality, but I believe I read somewhere that when she tried going to bed with one of her lady-friends, it did not satisfy her sexually. When reading Woolf, sex doesn't matter, and class only matters in as much it explains certain social mores.

Woolf was an extremely complex person with a very troubled sexuality. No one knows to what extent her sexual problems can be attributed to being sexually abused at an early age:
Virginia Woolf/Psychiatric history/sex (http://www.malcolmingram.com/sex.htm)

As regards class, in Virginia Woolf: The Intellectual and the Public Sphere, Melba Cuddy-Keane makes out a very good case for Woolf being far removed from the elitist many seem to think she was: for instance, Woolf (whose husband was a socialist, of course) said something about having met intellectual domestics, but duchesses who were far from intellectual.

[spooooool]

Yes, exactly.

I wish i could read Delaney, i've tried several times to read Dhalgren and it all but made me dizzy. Only Blanchot (who comes so close to reproducing the stuff of creativity - at least as i understand it from my own writing, but without poetry at the end of it, so to a negative of sorts) made for the same thing in me. And Angela Carter, whose work i love but always makes for sensory overload.

To stray even vaguely back on topic and all apologies if it's been mentioned before, but. As a novel, there's "the left hand of darkness"

[Eric]

Thanks, Mirabell. Blimey. I've never read any Ginsberg, though I'd heard about him, as his "Kaddish" was translated into German by Anselm Hollo, the same Finn who translated a couple of Jaan Kross novels into English.

But for me this style with its spray of associations and allusions is too manic. For me, it's in the same league as "Finnegans Wake" and Whitman.

[Irene Wilde]

But for me this style with its spray of associations and allusions is too manic. For me, it's in the same league as "Finnegans Wake" and Whitman.

For me, that is part of its appeal, but then I've had plenty of manic moments in my life over the years. And next from the top on my TBR happens to be "Finnegan's Wake" (well, my fourth try at scaling it anyway).

Anyway, what a great thread, and as the orginal poster (was that you, Syb?) said, what diversity! I don't think I saw Christopher Isherwood mention, though maybe he was mentioned by link. Nor did I see Somerset Maugham, but again, there might have been a link thingy that led to him, nor Tennessee Williams.

And playwright, novelist, composer, and sunshine of my life Noel Coward.

[Irene Wilde]

...angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,

That line still gets me. :) Thanks for quoting it, Mirabell.

[Eric]

There's nothing wrong with being manic, now and again. Otherwise I would never have collated all those reviews of Estonian authors and commented on, and translated, bits.

It's just that I find all this who, who, who, stuff totally overpowering, and while it may come across with great verve when read on stage, it prevails against sitting down in an armchair and reading this nihilistic rant.

I'm accused of ranting here by some, but few people can compete with Ginsberg on that score.

He is also counting on the shock value of homosexuality. Like all adolescents, he knows that if he describes buggery mixed in with a bit of mild misogyny, on-the-roadishness, plus a load of North American geographical references, he is bound to gain a coterie of adepts. I would rather not join, thank-you. I wish to be vulgar on my own terms.

[Irene Wilde]

I never think of poetry as something to be read in an arm chair. To me it should be dynamic and read aloud. "Howl" read allowed is poignant and powerful. And I think I disagree on the homosexuality being there for shock value. I think it is a proclamation of existence. "Howl" is pre-stonewall, so in a way it foreshadows the 60s when many gays reached the point where they were fed up, had enough, and were willing to risk everything just to be who they were. In that respect, the references to homosexuality weren't shocking, they were courageous. But the world is big enough for more than my opinion. Please be vulgar on your own terms, or be free on your own terms, but save the armchair for Dickens, and read poetry aloud, standing, pacing, sitting on a rock in the middle of nowhere shouting to the heavens.

[Eric]

I suppose that when Ginsberg howled originally, homosexuality was frowned upon, even illegal. So, I suppose he was making a stance.

But I cannot deny that I tend to gravitate towards literature that can be read in an armchair, where layers and rhythms can be appreciated and savoured. I've always found poetry readings unsatisfactory, because they are held in places where people are not always listening with rapt attention, but are sliding in and out to get another drink. It's like those dreadful readings at bookfairs where the same sense of bustle prevails.

I find a lot of readings false in this respect. I feel that turning something that is complex, where you have to leaf back, check references, etc., into stage art is a risky business. Too much art of any sort nowadays is performance art. I feel that thoughtful, restful, subtle art is not being promoted as much as readings, readings, readings. People reading for half-an-hour out of their latest novel just ain't my thing. I'd rather buy the book and read it in bed.

Discussions about novels and poetry, also workshops, seminars, reading circles, etc., are quite a different kettle of fish. The initial "work" has been done at home, and then for the social side of things, you can still mix with people in discussion. And write little discussion papers to be read out, perhaps, like they do at university. But the reading of the raw text, beyond a few paragraphs, palls.

[Irene Wilde]

I suppose how you process information can account for how one person likes their poetry over another. Personally, I used to struggle reading Shakespeare's plays in high school, until some bright person (I think it was Ian McKellen in a documentary) tipped me off to something -- Shakespeare's plays are plays, written to be acted on a stage, not read in an armchair. At that point, I began acting out my English homework and somehow it all began to make sense. Hearing the words put them in a form my brain could process meaning out of more than reading them on the page. The same for poetry. But I am straying from topic, so to put it back, I'll ask can we add Shakespeare to the LGBT mix? After all Sonnet 20 sounds at least bi:


A woman's face, with Nature's own hand painted,
Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;
A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted
With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;
An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,
Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;
A man in hew all hews in his controlling,
Which steals men's eyes, and women's souls amazeth.
And for a woman wert thou first created;
Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,
And by addition me of thee defeated,
By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.
But since she prict thee out for women's pleasure,
Mine be thy love, and thy love's use their treasure.

[Sybarite]

Excellent points, Ms Wilde.

I was doing an Open University course a couple of years ago and we were studying some sonnets, including some by Shakespeare. Can't imagine why I had forgotten one of my household gods in this.

Thank you, one and all, for broadening this thread out ? for broadening my knowledge ? and for making it a really interesting discussion.

Personally, I haven't so much gone looking for LGBT literature in the past decade as found myself reading quite a large amount of literature that could be so classed.

A slight point: Eric, you described this as "the homosexuality thread". No, it's not. If we have to define it thus, it's the LGBT thread. That might seem like pedantry, but for bisexuals and transsexuals, it's not.

As for your point about love stories, Eric: it's an interesting one. But we're still at a stage where, although the constituent parts of the LGBT community have come a long way (in terms of being able to be out of the closet ? in the West, at least), people are still seen as 'different', as 'abnormal', as inherently sinful, by virtue of their innate sexuality (or sex discomfort).

So a lot of LGBT-themed literature is, for the greater part, I suppose, more about a non-conventional lifestyle, if you will. Similarly, if things continue to move in a certain direction, then we'll probably reach a time where Pride marches no longer take place and people will look back at the idea of them as historical curiosities. And that's why it's important to note that LGBT literature is not just 'homosexual literature' ? because, in a quite different way to, say, Estonian literature, LGBT literature is often a statement of identity and a help toward acceptance of an identity and a way of teaching others about that identity (in all its own diversity).

If that makes any damned sense!

[lionel]

I suppose that when Ginsberg howled originally, homosexuality was frowned upon, even illegal. So, I suppose he was making a stance..

Ginsberg wasn't only making a stance about homosexuality, of course, but making a huge howl against the stultifying conformity in American society at the time. Howl is a wonderful, and major, poem of rebellion. To visit the still-extant City Lights bookshop in San Francisco (where Ferlinghetti famously published Howl), the remarkable Vesuvio caf? next door, and the other Beat-related areas around Columbus Avenue are wonderful antidotes to the Golden Gate Bridge walk, the cable cars, Fisherman's Wharf, and any other sights the SF tourist industry lines up for you. (And incidentally, anyone straying from the tourist areas of San Francisco wiil find loads of unusual secondhand books on sale at San Francisco library or Fort Mason.)

[Eric]

Irene #60, I agree absolutely that only reading plays is not ideal. Given the sheer complexity of the archa?c vocabulary, puns, allusions, everyday implements in Shakespeare, I'm sure that you get far more out of a Shakespeare play when watching it, if you've read the text through first. Then, when you've watched the play, you can read the text again with more understanding. But this is a lot of work. So you really have to be devoted to Shakespeare to do this - i.e. reading the play twice and watching it in between.

I got a lot out of Strindberg (late Strindberg) by first reading, then watching. His "Dream Play" and "To Damacus" are improved if you know more of the allusions. But he's not as complex as Shakespeare. And the English translations are from the 20th century, so much more accessible in language terms than Shakespeare.

Sybarite: as for LGBT, I fully appreciate the differences, but the kernel of the whole matter is surely sexual interest, or love, involving people who happen to have been born the same gender-wise. The heterosexual part of bisexuality is surely not so much talked about, and transsexuals and transvestites surely have a whole number of other often very physical issues, such as whether they were put, by God or evolution, into the right body.

Sybarite, you say:



But we're still at a stage where, although the constituent parts of the LGBT community have come a long way (in terms of being able to be out of the closet ? in the West, at least), people are still seen as 'different', as 'abnormal', as inherently sinful, by virtue of their innate sexuality (or sex discomfort).

Surely, now is the time to consolidate LGBT literature, start writing books that combine the subtlety of "Brideshead Revisited" with something more involving feelings, rather than only sex. I think most of us have got the message that LGBT people want to live normal lives and not be harassed if they live with someone of the same sex.

In our pretty civilised Western societies (especially here in Holland, where I have never seen public acts of homophobia involving insult or violence), I think that LGBT people have got to start moving on from Gay Pride parades. These tend to suggest that such people are insecure and want to keep reminding people about their sexual preferences. Surely LGBT people can nowaday live quiet lives and don't have to dress in leather and act camp, just to prove that they should be accepted. This is where Trotsky's permanent revolution failed: you can't keep things at fever pitch all the time. As people grow older, they want security, whatever their sexual proclivities.

I want to see novels where LGBT people don't always push sexuality to centre stage.

Finally, Estonian literature is very much a statement of identity, albeit national identity, not sexual identity. After being imprisoned in the Soviet Union for over 50 years, every book published in the Estonian language is a statement saying: "we too are civilised, literate, and here to stay". But also there, if you bang on too much about past hurts and ills, readers will turn away. I translated the Kross novel partly to help people understand, just like gay authors will write books to get outsiders to understand. But there comes a point when people will begin to look for other dimensions in literature, whether the educative nature of a novel is national or sexual.

Both LGBT literature and Estonian literature must move on, keep fresh, not get into a rut.

[Irene Wilde]

I think most of us have got the message that LGBT people want to live normal lives and not be harassed if they live with someone of the same sex...

Both LGBT literature and Estonian literature must move on, keep fresh, not get into a rut.

I so wish I shared your confidence, Eric. But in both cases, the LGBT community and Estonia, liberation and freedom are new and fragile things. I was in Estonia during Russia's recent, um, skirmish in Georgia. People were feeling just how fragile their independence is. Today in California, people are voting on a measure that would deny gays and lesbians the right marry -- only won less than a year ago. And hate crimes against gays in the US, it was reported recently, is increasing. Complacency would be folly in both instances. Yes, show the whole spectrum of human experience whether one is writing LGBT, Estonian, English, Jewish, American, Russian or any other kind of literature, but I think the world is a long way from being able to "move on" from oppression.

[Mirabell]

think that LGBT people have got to start moving on

Oh it is so nice to hear nice elder heterosexual men admonishing us.
Quiet lives. Damn why can't we remember.
I'll ask my husband...oh no wait...

[Irene Wilde]

Oh it is so nice to hear nice elder heterosexual men admonishing us.
Quiet lives. Damn why can't we remember.
I'll ask my husband...oh no wait...

It appears, as of this morning, we still need a few more gay pride parades here in California. :( Maybe another novel or two. Mirabell, we'll get you married off yet.

[Mirabell]

It appears, as of this morning, we still need a few more gay pride parades here in California. :( Maybe another novel or two. Mirabell, we'll get you married off yet.

i'm currently in a relationship with a woman. sorta hoping that lasts till the maggots get me.
If that wasn't clear, I am the "B" in LGBT.

[Irene Wilde]

i'm currently in a relationship with a woman. sorta hoping that lasts till the maggots get me.
If that wasn't clear, I am the "B" in LGBT.

Congratulations on your happiness, I hope it continues.

I'm not a big believer in marriage, but I think people who want to should be able to, whether they are L, G, B, T or plain vanilla and this vote last night, while a set back, is only one step on a long journey.

Returning to subject, anyone mention Reinaldo Arenas yet? I've only read "Before Night Falls," but what a fascinating life!

[Eric]

I've not visited this thread for a few days, because I have to admit that homosexuality is not one of my prime concerns. But obviously, you meet LGBT people in all walks of life.

Irene is less sanguine than I am. But if there are enough straight people that speak out against queer-bashing and other forms of minority persecution, then this would act as NATO does to dissuade Russia from provoking the Balts too much.

I think we must distinguish between marriage and legal rights of cohabitation. What the neo-cons get up-tight about is that they regard marriage as a lifelong (well, OK, not often in reality) pact before God to honour one another and bring up children. Whereas left-wing people, who are often agnostic or athe?st anyway, focus on the right to share and inherit property legally and without discrimination. Surely, one is religious and emotional, the other legal-financial, as well as emotional.

My question is: is it necessary to have Christian, Jewish, Muslim, etc., rituals in church that bind couples of the same sex (only till death them do part, anyway)? Or should homosexuals be satisfied with full legal rights, and let the religious part go? And what will happen if one religious community accepts gay marriage, but not the other? Do you have to become an apostate to marry someone of the same sex?

Mirabell is right that it doesn't affect me personally, but I do think about these things, and have arrived at no conclusions.

I have to say that I cannot follow this vacillation on the part of the Californian authorities. One minute it's legal, the next they cancel the law. What are they playing about at, over there? See, for instance:

California Gay-Marriage Ban Creates Legal Uncertainty (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/07/california-gaymarriage-ba_n_142013.html)

Calif. gay-marriage ban creates legal uncertainty - Yahoo! News (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081106/ap_on_re_us/gay_marriage)

But note what the second of these two articles says:



A 2003 California law already gives gays registered as domestic partners nearly all the state rights and responsibilities of married couples when it comes to such things as taxes, estate planning and medical decisions. That law is still in effect.


So I think that we must know exactly what the old and new laws say, before condemning or approving. But all this legal wrangling causes insecurity and worry.

[Irene Wilde]

"Domestic Partnership" is the "separate but equal" answer to gay rights California cooked up a few years back. But in the United States, according to our Supreme Court, going back decades now, "separate is inherently unequal." And, if you look closely, "domestic partnerships" offer "nearly" all the rights of married couples, not "all" the same rights.

This isn't about forcing religions to perform same-sex marriages, it's about the state recognizing that the LGBT community deserves the same recognition and rights under the law as straight people. I don't know how the law works in other countries, but in the US, marriage grants certain legal rights -- regarding property, taxation, inheritance, medical benefits, end-of-life choices in case of emergencies, adoption, and other things that have nothing to do with churches or religion. The official and legal recognition that same-sex relationships have the same value, impact, and rights as any straight relationship was just voted away, through an effective use of out-of-state money, the LDS church, and scare tactics about homosexual sex being taught to 7-year-olds in the public schools, and people who think that legislation can shove their religious beliefs down the throats of the rest of us.

Sorry if this is too political, Stewart. I'm still flamingly pissed off over what happened here, which probably shows. You can delete me if I went too far, I won't have any objection.

[Mirabell]

Or should homosexuals be satisfied with full legal rights

oh right, we passed the patronizing advice and swiftly moved on. gahd, why can't we ever be satisfied. It's so good there's good straight men to show us the way.

[lionel]

I think we must distinguish between marriage and legal rights of cohabitation. What the neo-cons get up-tight about is that they regard marriage as a lifelong (well, OK, not often in reality) pact before God to honour one another and bring up children. Whereas left-wing people, who are often agnostic or athe?st anyway, focus on the right to share and inherit property legally and without discrimination. Surely, one is religious and emotional, the other legal-financial, as well as emotional.

Just to introduce a personal element into this, I've lived with a woman for nearly 15 years and the death of the relationship would come if we married: I've been married three times, and none of those marriages lasted long. It's something, I believe, to do with legality: legality is nice, normal, and cosy: I don't do nice, normal, or cosy.

But if other people want to get married ? lesbian, gay, or straight ? I don't see why any religious fundamentalists or any other fanatics should stand in their way. What's the problem with these people?

Nor do I see what direct bearing this has on literature, but who cares?

[saliotthomas]

I hate been call "strait",i mean it's a bit of an insulte,isn't it.I'd rather be "gay" than facking "strait".Hetero doesn't sound to good ether,bit like a desease or something.

[titania7]

Oh, I don't know, Thomas....I don't mind being called "straight" so very much. I've been called other things that some people might find more objectionable, such as "eccentric," for example.

To be branded a "Heterosexual" is something I'm rather proud of.
Even if the word itself does sound a bit like.....well, I don't know.....a medical condition, maybe?

However, I think the important thing is to free ourselves from
the negative associations we attach to ALL labels, don't you?
For instance, when is "cancer" going to be spoken of without dropping one's voice to a whisper? And when can we talk about AIDS and HIV without being worried that we're going to offend someone??

Just some thoughts,
Titania

[lionel]

I hate been call "strait",i mean it's a bit of an insulte,isn't it.I'd rather be "gay" than facking "strait".Hetero doesn't sound to good ether,bit like a desease or something.

Yeah, I don't think I disagree, but I just used the terms 'gay or straight' in reference to a certain speech at Grant Park. What other terms do we have? Language is a problem.

[lionel]

To be branded a "Heterosexual" is something I'm rather proud of.

Hang on a second, Titania. They brand cattle and other animals, and in my ignorance I'm not certain that most slaves weren't branded, but I can't say I'm proud of my heterosexuality. Why should I be ? I am certainly not proud to be white or European. But I'm frequently ashamed of being who I am, and of the atrocities perpetrated in the name of people I'm supposed to be a part of.

[titania7]

Ok, maybe "brand" was the wrong word.

I think the important point I was trying to make is that, in saying we're ashamed of any label that might be attached to us, we're not accepting who we are. Homosexuals, as well as heterosexuals, should accept themselves completely. Even if I'm not proud of what other Americans have done, I'm still proud to be an American. Even if I don't like the behavior I see other women exhibit, I'm still proud to be a woman.

I feel like we're creating more injustice when we start talking about being ashamed of the labels other associate with us. It makes me think of mental illness, and how many people misunderstand things like schizophrenia and bi-polar disorder. I have a family member with the latter; so, I'm sensitive about this.

Moreover, I have had two family members who have battled advanced stage cancer, and it aggravates me that people still consider cancer to be a "dirty word." I know certain people who won't even talk openly about being a cancer survivor--because the word Cancer (perish the thought!) is part of that term.

Must we be so disinclined to accept ourselves for exactly what we are?? And if so, why? What's wrong with your being white and European? What's wrong with me being white and American? What's wrong with my hair being red?? Am I making sense?? Once we start having problems with who we are, what we look like, etc., we're not going to be left with a shred of self-confidence.

And if there are "gay pride" parades, what's wrong with heterosexual pride? Are we now saying it's better to be gay than "straight"???


~Titania

[amanda]

And if there are "gay pride" parades, what's wrong with heterosexual pride? Are we now saying it's better to be gay than "straight"???

No, no one is saying that it's better to be gay than straight, but not for a second is gay pride equivalent with straight pride. There is a huge difference between being proud of being glbt despite a society that tells (when you are represented at all) you at every turn that you should be ashamed, that you are immoral or the cause of society's downfall, and that you don't deserve human rights, is at all comparable to being proud of being (with regards to sexuality) exactly what society wants you to be, with all the privileges that entails.

Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack II (http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~hyrax/personal/files/student_res/straightprivilege.htm) / straight privilege - Google Search (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=straight+privilege&aq=f&oq) / Heteronormativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronormativity) / Heterosexism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosexism)


Can we all please now get back to talking about GLBT literature, not whatever straight people want to discuss?

[Mirabell]

No, no one is saying that it's better to be gay than straight, but not for a second is gay pride equivalent with straight pride. There is a huge difference between being proud of being glbt despite a society that tells (when you are represented at all) you at every turn that you should be ashamed, that you are immoral or the cause of society's downfall, and that you don't deserve human rights, is at all comparable to being proud of being (with regards to sexuality) exactly what society wants you to be, with all the privileges that entails.

Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack II (http://www.cs.earlham.edu/%7Ehyrax/personal/files/student_res/straightprivilege.htm) / straight privilege - Google Search (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=straight+privilege&aq=f&oq) / Heteronormativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronormativity) / Heterosexism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosexism)


Can we all please now get back to talking about GLBT literature, not whatever straight people want to discuss?
#

Thank you. A LOT. I'm currently traying very hard to keep my composure. Straight people's advice. Golly. What would we do without them.

[Mirabell]

The grand Mark Doty must be named here and poems like "Homo will not inherit". It's not a great poem, I'll grant you that. But I used to know the poem by heart, murmuring "I tell you what I'll inherit" under my breath:


Homo Will Not Inherit

by Mark Doty

Downtown anywhere and between the roil
of bathhouse steam—up there the linens of joy
and shame must be laundered again and again,

all night—downtown anywhere
and between the column of feathering steam
unknotting itself thirty feet above the avenue’s

shimmered azaleas of gasoline,
between the steam and the ruin
of the Cinema Paree (marquee advertising

its own milky vacancy, broken showcases sealed,
ticketbooth a hostage wrapped in tape
and black plastic, captive in this zone

of blackfronted bars and bookstores
where there’s nothing to read
but longing’s repetitive texts,

where desire’s unpoliced, or nearly so)
someone’s posted a xeroxed headshot
of Jesus: permed, blonde, blurred at the edges

as though photographed through a greasy lens,
and inked beside him, in marker strokes:
HOMO WILL NOT INHERIT. Repent & be saved.

I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit: the margins
which have always been mine, downtown after hours
when there’s nothing left to buy,

the dreaming shops turned in on themselves,
seamless, intent on the perfection of display,
the bodegas and offices lined up, impenetrable:

edges no one wants, no one’s watching. Though
the borders of this shadow-zone (mirror and dream
of the shattered streets around it) are chartered

by the police, and they are required,
some nights, to redefine them. But not now, at twilight,
permission’s descending hour, early winter darkness

pillared by smoldering plumes. The public city’s
ledgered and locked, but the secret city’s boundless;
from which do these tumbling towers arise?

I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit: steam,
and the blinding symmetry of some towering man,
fifteen minutes of forgetfulness incarnate.

I’ve seen flame flicker around the edges of the body,
pentecostal, evidence of inhabitation.
And I have been possessed of the god myself,

I have been the temporary apparition
salving another, I have been his visitation, I say it
without arrogance, I have been an angel

for minutes at a time, and I have for hours
believed—without judgement, without condemnation—
that in each body, however obscured or recast,

is the divine body—common, habitable—
the way in a field of sunflowers
you can see every bloom’s

the multiple expression
of a single shining idea,
which is the face hammered into joy.

I’ll tell you what I’ll inherit:
stupidity, erasure, exile
inside the chalked lines of the police,

who must resemble what they punish,
the exile you require of me,
you who’s posted this invitation

to a heaven nobody wants.
You who must be patrolled,
who adore constraint, I’ll tell you

what I’ll inherit, not your pallid temple
but a real palace, the anticipated
and actual memory, the moment flooded

by skin and the knowledge of it,
the gesture and its description
—do I need to say it?—

the flesh and the word. And I’ll tell you,
you who can’t wait to abandon your body,
what you want me to, maybe something

like you’ve imagined, a dirty story:
Years ago, in the baths,
a man walked into the steam,

the gorgeous deep indigo of him gleaming,
solid tight flanks, the intricately ridged abdomen—
and after he invited me to his room,

nudging his key toward me,
as if perhaps I spoke another tongue
and required the plainest of gestures,

after we’d been, you understand,
worshipping a while in his church,
he said to me, I’m going to punish your mouth.

I can’t tell you what that did to me.
My shame was redeemed then;
I won’t need to burn in the afterlife.

It wasn’t that he hurt me,
more than that: the spirit’s transactions
are enacted now, here—no one needs

your eternity. This failing city’s
radiant as any we’ll ever know,
paved with oily rainbow, charred gates

jeweled with tags, swoops of letters
over letters, indecipherable as anything
written by desire. I’m not ashamed

to love Babylon’s scrawl. How could I be?
It’s written on my face as much as on
these walls. This city’s inescapable,

gorgeous, and on fire. I have my kingdom.

[Irene Wilde]

Can we all please now get back to talking about GLBT literature, not whatever straight people want to discuss?

Sounds good to me.

Where do you put "Brideshead Revisited?" When I read it, I completely classified the relationship between Charles and Sebastian as gay. Yet the oh-so-Catholic author, said, "no, no, no, no, no." I'm willing to overlook Waugh's denials and see the story the way I saw the story when I read it and the way many people have interpreted it over the years. If people perceive a story as having LGBT themes, despite whatever the author claims, does it qualify?

[Mirabell]

If people perceive a story as having LGBT themes, despite whatever the author claims, does it qualify?

Yes. Yes, of course.

[spooooool]

i agree with Amanda and Mirabelle about this, since what theyre talking about is ostensible neutrality that isn't. I also loved what Titania had to say about labels and what they connote and it would indeed be wonderful if we could get past and over them, but theyre sometimes, often difficult to elude even as a positive reclamation, and for what it's worth i love able bodied people, some of my best friends are and i try to put them at their ease and all, but i couldn't eat a whole one, ;)

[Mirabell]

There's also Frank Bidart


Adolescence

He stared up into my eyes with a look
I can almost see now.

He had that look in his eyes
that bore right into mine.

I could sense that he knew I was
envious of what he was doing—; and knew that I'd

always wish I had known at the time
what he was doing was something I'd always

crave in later life, just as he did.

He was enjoying what he was doing.
The look was one of pure rapture.

He was gloating. He knew.

I still remember his look.
If I Could Mourn Like A Mourning Dove


It is what recurs that we believe,
your face not at one moment looking
sideways up at me anguished or

elate, but the old words welling up by
gravity rearranged:
two weeks before you died in

pain worn out, after my usual casual sign-off
with All my love, your simple
solemn My love to you, Frank.

[nnyhav]

Boston Review: Stacey D'Erasmo: The End of Sexual Identity (http://bostonreview.net/BR33.5/derasmo.php)

[Bjorn]

It just struck me that nobody's mentioned Bret Easton Ellis in this thread, which seems an oversight. Or possibly simply that since most of his books have main characters who seem to embody everything bad about hetero-patriarchal whatsit, people assume that he's like that himself. (Hell, him having a wife and a kid is one of the strongest early hints that Lunar Park isn't the autobiography it claims to be.)

[Eric]

Yes, Irene, I spotted the "nearly" as well, but forgot to ask what it meant in detail.

If we return to literature, the key question is: is the author any good? Curiously, Ellis only came out in 2005, five books into his œuvre. I wonder how this revelation of sexuality affected the way readers looked at his books, if at all. A bit like when E.M. Forster's "Maurice" finally came out.

I do think we should maintain literary standards and those of equality when looking at LGBT literature, so that we don't judge a book as good or bad just because it brings up LGBT themes. In the same way that not every man-woman love story is propaganda for a hetero lifestyle, homosexual authors could perhaps write love stories, rather than promotional literature. Literature is more that propagating the acceptance or rejection of a LGBT lifestyle.

Another thing that I wonder about is whether that one type of gay (specifically male) literature will continue to centre around bathhouse and park settings, where casual sex is focused on. During times when homosexuality was illegal, I can understand the frustrations of such males wanting sex. But now that homosexuality is legal in the Western world (though not, of course, in every part of Africa and Asia!), cannot the literature shift away from casual relationships and move on to long, lifelong, homosexual relationships, such as those of Marguerite Yourcenar and Tove Jansson?

Mirabell, the two poems you quote are nothing out of the ordinary. But I can imagine some people saying you are homophobic and anti-American if you choose not to like them...

The following article suggests that Bidart was a poet in the first instance, and that many of his poems did not touch the subject of homosexuality:

Poetry Foundation: The online home of the Poetry Foundation (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=572)

His other subjects include child murder, madness, anorexia and necrophilia, as well as homosexuality.

[Mirabell]

child murder, madness, anorexia and necrophilia, as well as homosexuality.

very nice list of yours there. well done.
plus I notice that half of this post contains a rephrasing of the same advice you dispersed some postings ago.
you did answer your own question in your own post, but I leave that for you to find out.

[Irene Wilde]

I do think we should maintain literary standards and those of equality when looking at LGBT literature, so that we don't judge a book as good or bad just because it brings up LGBT themes. In the same way that not every man-woman love story is propaganda for a hetero lifestyle, homosexual authors could perhaps write love stories, rather than promotional literature. Literature is more that propagating the acceptance or rejection of a LGBT lifestyle.


Just this week I watched two films based on plays by gay writers: Noel Coward's "The Astonished Heart" and Tennessee Williams' "Streetcar Named Desire." Neither is a "gay" story, per se, both stand on their own merits without "propagating the acceptance or rejection of a LGBT lifestyle." "Streetcar" won a Pulitzer. Each can be seen through the prism of the LGBT or not, but become more interesting and more complex when they are, and both demonstrate that there is more in LGBT literature than bath-house sex with strangers.

I think people see in literature what they want to see. For instance, through my own filter, my own prejudice, if you will, I look at sci-fi/fantasy and see genre pulp put forth by second-rate hacks for a less discriminating audience. Of course (before everyone here gives me a cyber-beating), that's not the case and there are many first-rate writers and classic stories that have come from that genre. I see what I want to see.

[lionel]

Where is Edward Carpenter in all this? Creator of a gay alternative community in Derbyshire, England, he made rope-soled sandals and other things as well as poems and other literature. Visited by such major figures as E. M. Forster, Carpenter tends to be forgotten, although a huge biography has now been published on this fascinatiing character.

[lionel]

And how could anyone forget Fitz?Greene Halleck? Well, quite easily, as he was never a gay icon like Carpenter, but he's still an interesting, if forgotten, gay poet:

The Fitz-Greene Halleck Society (http://www.kenanminkoff.com/Halleck.html)

This is a shot I took of his statue in the Literary Walk in Central Park this June, but the sun got in the way whichever way I looked.

http://bp3.blogger.com/_ndofb8keJ6I/SHYVnJzjVyI/AAAAAAAAAbw/WCFtyTSzTEQ/s400/halleck.jpg

[titania7]

Nice photo, Lionel. I hadn't ever heard of Fitz-Greene Halleck before. Thanks so much for the link and, most of all, for bringing him to my attention.

You're an excellent photographer, by the way. We needed you at my great aunt's Halloween birthday party. My great-uncle is one of those 'hit-or-miss' (mostly miss) photographers. You never know quite what you're going to end up with. But, usually, you might as well expect the worst. Then, of course my great-aunt "doctors" the photos up, which makes things still more....shall we say....hmmm.... interesting!?! ;) This last time around, she decided I looked too
pale and "washed out" in the pictures (my hair is light auburn and my skin is very fair); so, she "heightened" my coloring. Now I look like I belong in a circus instead of at a family birthday party! :eek:

~Titania

[Sybarite]

<snip>

Excellent post, Amanda.

Personally for me, after reaching my later thirties and feeling nothing but shame and guilt over my bisexuality (since we're being very specifically open), then Pride marches etc are not so much a statement of pride per se as a statement of a lack of shame and guilt.

I've also become aware, since it certainly didn't begin as a conscious thing, that I enjoy a lot of LGBT art (music, film and books). Perhaps we're drawn to what reflects our own experiences?

Anyway, I'm getting loads of recommendations here ? so thank you all.


I do think we should maintain literary standards and those of equality when looking at LGBT literature, so that we don't judge a book as good or bad just because it brings up LGBT themes. In the same way that not every man-woman love story is propaganda for a hetero lifestyle, homosexual authors could perhaps write love stories, rather than promotional literature. Literature is more that propagating the acceptance or rejection of a LGBT lifestyle.

I'm not quite sure where to begin with this.

My initial reaction could be characterised as :eek:

My subsequent reaction is :mad:

And I'd possibly finish with a LOL if there was one here.

Eric, your first point is entirely fair enough ? but then nobody here has suggested otherwise so it's rather redundant.

Equally, nobody has said that "every man-woman love story is propaganda for a hetero lifestyle".

Why do you care what "homosexual authors" write? Why are you obsessed with "love stories"? And why would a 'love story' not be "promotional literature", but anything else would be?

It's like Section 28 all over again.

Why do you seem to have such a problem with people writing about what they know ? about their own experiences, their own lives, if those experiences and lives differ from yours?

And of course "literature is more that propagating the acceptance or rejection of a LGBT lifestyle" ? but since nobody has suggested otherwise (there are lots of different threads about literature on this forum ? and not about LGBT, since you don't seem to have noticed), then what is your point? Are you actually suggesting that that is what you think LGBT literature is? Have you failed to read or grasp a great deal of the conversation on this thread?

[Mirabell]

@sybarite: I think there's a certain embattled feeling at the while male heterosexual end, which leads to a kind of, let's call it: over-reaction. Saving as much of what used to be right.

I think, and it may be similar with you, that bisexual people, who have had both sorts of relationships can feel how society changes depending on who you're with. That makes the -understandable- attitude of Eric's, who says: why can't they have done with this? Stop wearing leather and do marches. Behave like normal people. Stop writing about your weird sex all the time, write like normal people. BUt then he does not take simple love poems by a homosexual as homosexual. Homosexuality is one among many topics of deviant behavior, like murder. It has to be explicitly addressed to count. So all the homosexual writers who have written about love without anyone noticing that they wrote about same-sex relationships do not *happen* in that sort of mindset, because anything unmarked is automatically heterosexual (and male).

I tend to feel guilty sometimes for the relationship I am in now. I am inconspicuous. Am I hiding? Lord why am I writing this?

[Mirabell]

Tony: Ending the LIfe
by James Merrill


Across the sea at Alexandria
Shallow and glittering, a single shroud-
Shaped cloud had stolen, leaving as it paused
The underworld dilated, a wide pupil's
Downward shaft. The not-yet-to-be-mined
Villa, a fortune of stone cards each summer
Less readable, more crushing, lay in wait
Beneath the blue-green sand of the sea-floor.
Plump in schoolboy shorts, you peered and peered.
For wasn't youth like that - its deep charades
Revealed to us alone by passing shades?
But then years, too, would pass. And in the glow
Of what came next, the Alecandria
You brought to life would up and go:
Bars, beaches, British troops (so slim - yum yum!),
The parties above all. Contagious laughter,
Sparkle and hum and flow,
Saved you from weighty insights just below;
Till from another shore
(Fol?grandros, the western end of Crete)
Age, astonished, saw those heavy things
Lifted by tricky prisms into light,
Lifted like holy offerings,
Gemlike, disinterested,
Within the fleet
Reliquary of wave upon wave as it crested.

I let my beard grow.
The locals took it for a badge of grief.
Had someone died?
Of course beards came in every conceivable format -
Dapper, avunular, deadbeat...
Mine warned of something creepier - uh-oh!
For over throat and lips had spread a doormat
On which to wipe filth brought in from the street.

Unfair! The boys were talkative and fun;
Far cleaner than my mind, after a bath.
Such episodes, when all was said and done,
Sweetened their reflective aftermath:
The denizens discovered in a dive
Relieved us (if not overlong or overmuch).
?Just see,? the mirror breathed, ?see who?s alive,
Who hasn?t forfeited the common touch,

The longing to lead everybody?s life
- Lifelong daydream of precisely those
Whom privilege or talent set apart:
How to atone for the achieved uniqueness?
By dying everybody?s death, dear heart ?
Saint, terrorist, fishwife. Stench that appalls.
Famines, machine guns, the Great Plague (your sickness),
Rending of garments, cries, mass burials.

I?d watched my beard sprout in the mirror?s grave.
Mirrors are graves, as all can see:
Knew this emerging mask would outlast me,
Just as the life outlasts us, that we led?
And then one evening, off it came. No more
Visions of the deep. These lines behave
As if we were already gone ? not so!
Although of course each time?s a closer shave.

One New Year?s Eve, on midnight?s razor stroke,
Kisses, a round of whiskies. You then drew
Forth from your pocket a brightness, that season?s new
Two drachma piece, I fancied, taking the joke
- But no. Proud of your gift, you warned: ?Don?t leave
The barman this. Look twice.? My double take
Lit on a grave young fourteen-carat queen
In profile. Heavens preserve us! and long live

Orbits of Majesty whereby her solar
Metal sets the standard. (A certain five-dollar
Piece, redeemed for paper - astute maneuver -
Taught me from then on: don?t trust Presidents.)
Here it buys real estate. From the packed bus?s
Racket and reek a newly-struck face glints
No increment of doubt or fear debases.
Speaking of heavens, Maria, a prime mover

In ours, one winter twilight telephoned:
Not for you to see her so far gone,
but to pick up, inside the unlatched door,
A satchel for safekeeping. Done and done,
You called from home to say. But such a weight,
Who lifted it? No one. She'd had to kick,
Inch by inch, your legacy down the hall,
The heavy bag of gold, her setting sun.

The sea is dark here at day's end
And the moon is gaunt, half-dead
Like an old woman - like Madame Curie
Above her vats of pitchblende
Stirred dawn to dusk religiously
Out in the freezing garden shed.

It is a boot camp large and stark
To which you will be going.
Wave upon wave of you. The halls are crowded,
Unlit, the ceiling fixtures shrouded.
Advancing through the crush, the matriarch
Holds something up, mysteriously glowing.

Fruit of her dream and labor, see, it?s here
(See too how scarred her fingertips):
The elemental sliver
Of matter heading for its own eclipse
And ours ? this ?lumi?re de l?avenir?
Passed hand to hand with a faint shiver:

Light that confutes the noonday blaze.
A cool uncanny blue streams from her vial,
Bathing the disappearers
Who asked no better than to gaze and gaze?
Too soon your own turn came. Denial
No longer fogged the mirrors.

You stumbled forth into the glare -
Blood-red ribbon where you'd struck your face.
Pills washed down with ouzo hadn't worked.
Now while the whole street buzzed and lurked
The paramedics left you there,
Returning costumed for a walk in Space.

The nurse thrust forms at you to sign,
then flung away her tainted pen
...Lie back now in that heat
Older than Time, whose golden regimen
Still makes the palm grow tall and the date sweet?
Come, a last sip of wine.

Lie back. Over the sea
Sweeps, faint at first, the harpist?s cord.
Purple with mourning, the royal barge gasps nearer.
Is it a test? A triumph? No more terror:
How did your namesake, lovesick Anthony,
Meet the end? By falling on his sword

- A story in Plutarch
The plump boy knew from History class.
Slowly the room grows dark.
Stavro who?s been reading you the news
Turns on a nightlight. No more views.
Just your head, nodding off in windowglass.

[lionel]

If people perceive a story as having LGBT themes, despite whatever the author claims, does it qualify?

An author might own the copyright of a work, but can never own its meaning.

[lionel]

To mention Rhys Davies again, and a time when homosexuality had to be discreetly alluded to by indicators of difference, there are hints at the persecution of homosexuals in Honey and Bread (1935)as revealed by the exaggerated anger caused by an inseparable pair of ganders which refuse to associate with the other geese: ‘They ought to be killed, indeed, straight away’, and ‘It isn’t natural at all, and never ought to be’. But the sensitive protagonist Owen sees things very differently, and his voice is full of understanding and tolerance:

‘Nature is very strange on occasion […] She doesn’t always behave strictly as men expect her to. It seems that she likes to tease us sometimes […] I should just leave the poor ganders to themselves if they were mine. They seem so content with each other.’

It’s clear that this is a coded plea for the toleration of homosexuality by Davies. And of relevance to this are the coded words and ‘parables’ of homosexuality that Bozorth, in Auden’s Games of Knowledge: Poetry and the Meanings of Homosexuality, analyses in Auden’s poetry, and which would only have been understood by a few of the poet’s friends.

[Mirabell]

"One of the triumphs […] is in Merrill’s portrayal of the domestic situation in which it all takes place. It is also, not incidentally, the most convincing description I know of a gay marriage. Much of what makes any marriage successful is the ability to take the importance of one’s partner for granted, to depend on the other’s love without being in a state of continuous erotic or passional tension. Merrill’s indication of these abilities is the firmer for being indirect. The men’s life together is presented to us in detail which is almost casual: we see them choosing wallpaper, keeping house, traveling, entertaining,
and above all sitting at the Ouija board."

From Thom Gunn's review of Merrill's poems "Ephraim" and "Mirabell's Book of Number".

[Irene Wilde]

You mean they don't sit around in leather chaps destroying "traditional" marriage and plotting to recruit an army of children to take over the world? :eek:

Sorry, it's just that I'm off to a protest in about two hours -- so my friends, neighbors, colleagues, and fellow-Californians can enjoy the simple pleasure of picking out wallpaper in state-recognized wedded bliss.

[Mirabell]

You mean they don't sit around in leather chaps destroying "traditional" marriage and plotting to recruit an army of children to take over the world? :eek:


;) Listened too much to Eric, have ya?

I just quoted that passage in my thesis and thought it would fit here. Interestingly (or not) I barely mention homosexuality over the course of the whole thing, apart from my discussion of Tony: Ending the Life (see some postings earlier). Merrill's poetry does not invite this sort of reading, really.

[Mirabell]

http://shigekuni.wordpress.com/2009/04/13/outrageous/

[Bjorn]

Yeah, I just saw that here (http://www.journalfen.net/community/unfunnybusiness/100114.html).

[Mirabell]

in fucking credible.

[Bjorn]

Amazon's explanation:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists.

Some - far from all (http://community.livejournal.com/meta_writer/11992.html?style=mine) - of the books which are now effectively gone from non-specific searches as being "adult" material:

Annie Proulx, Brokeback Mountain
Jeanette Winterson, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
Sarah Waters, Tipping The Velvet
Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man
Patricia Highsmith, The Price of Salt
The Story of O
Lesl?a Newman, Heather Has Two Mommies

Oh, and the top search result for "homosexuality" on Amazon now that all of this disgusting porn has been removed?

A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality by Joseph Nicolosi and Linda Ames.

[Mirabell]

one of the links in my blog post leads to a writer of YA novels. YA!

It's lovely though to see so many people rousing so quickly. Internet is great.

[beelzebubbles]

Well, they didn't remove anything but the sales ranking, which unless you are the author or the publisher, who cares?

But now it's back. Woo hoo!

Seriously, it sounds like a tempest in a teacup.

As for Sarah Water's, Tipping the Velvet-- literature, shmiterature, who cares that book is hot! Though my favorite book by Water's is Affinity.

[beelzebubbles]

I have a question for anyone who may watch television.

I read that A.M. Homes wrote some show in the third season of The L word.

I was wondering if anyone has seen this and if they would recommend it.

I saw the first couple shows of this series and found it to be pretty boring.

Does anyone have any idea or am I talking to the wrong crowd?

[Mirabell]

I have a question for anyone who may watch television.

I read that A.M. Homes wrote some show in the third season of The L word.

I was wondering if anyone has seen this and if they would recommend it.

I saw the first couple shows of this series and found it to be pretty boring.

Does anyone have any idea or am I talking to the wrong crowd?


I'll watch anything and I found THe L Word pretty boring, too. Dropped off after a few episodes, as well.

[nnyhav]

via bookforumblog, a special issue:
Jacques Ranci?re on the Shores of Queer Theory
b o r d e r l a n d s e-journal (http://www.borderlands.net.au/issues/vol8no2.html)

[miercuri]

I was really impressed with Josh Kilmer-Purcell's memoir I Am Not Myself These Days. It chronicles the author's first year in NYC, in the mid 90's, working as an advertising art director by day and as drag queen in East Village clubs by night. But that is just the background. In truth, it is a love story and one of the most touching I have read this year.

[Liam]

Thinking of getting this, after flipping through a hardcover copy at my school library:


http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41kDRjDuz0L._SS500_.jpg

Beautiful photography coupled with some deep (and a little disturbing) reflections on gender, sexuality, and culture. Mirabell, I'm sure, would be interested in taking a look.

[lenz]

Just read The Vera Wright Trilogy by Elizabeth Jolley, Anglo-Australian writer. It's a partly autobiographical set of novels in which the female protagonist has several relationships that might be understood as bisexual, although it's a bit vague. The sexual tension in a nurse's residence is interesting - but not explicit - being more about love or obsession with "others." Class difference is a big deal in 1940s, 50s and even the 60s, but the first person narrator always desires upward class mobility while attaching herself (stupidly, IMO) to men and women who are either manipulative or sexually ambiguous or both. It's a very strange book stylistically - It reminded me of Jean Rhys, but with an almost opposite narrative personality. I ended by liking it for its psychological insight, as well as for the troublesome narrative style - lots to think about.

[doramider7]

Has anyone mentioned Alan Hollinghurst yet? I am never sure whether I like his novels or not for some reason.

The most remarkable book by a gay author I have read though was not a novel at all - but Derek Jarman's Last Diaries (not sure that was what they were called but you get the idea) which covered the period up to his death. It's possibly the most moving book I have ever read.
I think Sarah Waters should be added to the list, I haven't read anything by her yet, but quite a lot about her and I was quite intrigued. Lesbianism with a Victorian twist.

edit: now I noticed Sybarite mentioned her in the first post.

[sebaldetude]

No, no one is saying that it's better to be gay than straight, but not for a second is gay pride equivalent with straight pride. There is a huge difference between being proud of being glbt despite a society that tells (when you are represented at all) you at every turn that you should be ashamed, that you are immoral or the cause of society's downfall, and that you don't deserve human rights, is at all comparable to being proud of being (with regards to sexuality) exactly what society wants you to be, with all the privileges that entails.

Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack II (http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~hyrax/personal/files/student_res/straightprivilege.htm) / straight privilege - Google Search (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=straight+privilege&aq=f&oq) / Heteronormativity - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heteronormativity) / Heterosexism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heterosexism)


Can we all please now get back to talking about GLBT literature, not whatever straight people want to discuss?
Brilliant, Amanda
Why will (SOME, not all)NON LGBT people never understand that we (lgbt people) DO NOT WANT TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD- we just want equality, legally and socially. In the Uk we legally (nearly; only in the last c. 10 years) have it; socially we do not. "Why not Straight pride"; "why are you{lgbt people} people always going on about it"; the next one will be "why do you need a seperate thread for lgbt lit"; very few would imply such things re race issues, for example. i find these views offensive. And, thank goodness for people like Amanda and Mirabell; there are posts by one particualar gentleman who protests, whilst not being particuarly interested in "the homosexuality" thread(later changed in a panic to lgbt ), a lot.I hopethe rest of the thread moves back to lgbt writers or marvellous non-lgbt writers(Sebald is one of this rare breed) who wrote re the destruction,marginalisation and invisibilisation of lgbt people in many cultures, holocausts, horrors, which in some countries, are still pertaining. That is why still, especially in some, oppressed, unenlightened countries, we have gay Pride;not "straight pride"
.And,whilst i generally believe in freedom of speech, this kind of stuff is disappointing, offensive and should be moderated, ie removed; it is distressing, as a human being and as a gay person, to see it on such an otherwise excellent forum. Steve

[Mirabell]

Thom Gunn: The Man with Night Sweats

I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.

My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.

I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,

A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.

I cannot but be sorry
The given shield was cracked,
My mind reduced to hurry,
My flesh reduced and wrecked.

I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead

Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.

I was talking to a fellow member of the LGBT community who was writing a paper on AIDS and literature, and I spent a lot of today following the trail in my books, and ended up, as usual with Thom Gunn. The collection "The Man WIth Night Sweats" must be among the most moving in modern poetry.

[Liam]

Just mentioned this title on the French Literature thread:

The Inverted Gaze: Queering the French Literary Classics in America (http://www.amazon.com/Inverted-Gaze-Queering-Literary-Classics/dp/1551524104/ref=sr_1_203?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310945029&sr=1-203) by Francois Cusset

From the editorial blurb:


François Cusset, author of the acclaimed book French Theory, investigates the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars in this thought-provoking and free-minded journey across six centuries of literary classics and sexual polemics.

Cusset presents the foundations and rationale for American queer theory, the field of study established in the 1990s and promulgated by writers and scholars such as Judith Butler, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Michael Warner (in the wake of Michel Foucault), which challenges a supposed "heteronormative" ideology in our culture.

He provides an overview of their reinterpretation of the French literary canon from a queer perspective, then deliberately goes further, confronting that same canon with a lively form of general suspicion—seeking gender trouble and sexual ambiguities in the most unexpected corners of French literary classics, in which macho heroes turn out to be homosocial melancholics and the most seemingly submissive housewives are great vanguards of lesbian liberation.

Cusset's survey includes medieval and Renaissance literature, works from the Age of Enlightenment, nineteenth-century avant-gardists such as Charles Baudelaire and Honoré de Balzac, and twentieth-century modernists such as Marcel Proust and Jean Genet.

Bold in its themes and propositions, The Inverted Gaze (a translation of the book Queer Critics) is an extraordinary work about French literature and American queer politics by one of France's biggest intellectual stars.


http://img.tesco.com/pi/Books/L/08/9781551524108.jpg

[Liam]

There's a new journal (http://www.amazon.com/Assaracus-Issue-05-Journal-Poetry/dp/1937420108/ref=sr_1_406?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1325478351&sr=1-406) of "gay poetry" out this month: Assaracus.


http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/514FDI87EBL._SS500_.jpg


Well, I'm grossed out and repulsed. Poets must be poets, not gay or black or female, otherwise they are mere mouthpieces for a cause. So I think I'll be passing over this, though wake me up when Cavafy's collected poems is finally out from Vintage later this year! :)

[herenerves]

Today I've found The city and the pillar Gore Vidal in my old library and I started to read it. It's such an inspiring story and it's full of very well characterizations. You know, it's simple for an author to talk about homosexuality in the America of 30/40/50 (I've already red about these kind of stories and I don't always liked them), but Vidal found the right point of view to analyze the feelings of these persons, without any cliches.

[Helga]

Hello,

My name is Helga, I live currently in Russia.

My main job is writing on LGBT subjects in order that to assert the beauty of susch love (only the true love). Of late, I have finished a biography of T.E. Lawrence. Presently I am trying to publish my works (five books written in the last four years) but here it is almost impossible. Editors only seek commercial profit, and readers... Where are they, my readers?

Who are interested, write to me, please. I am lonely and now on the edge of despair with all this problems. (No lesbians!)


With warm greetings,