LGBT Literature

[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

[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

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.