2011, 2012, and now 2013 for Mothers' Day. What's a gay man have to do to get some frontage? Well, look to the past. Two years before DOMA, ten years before Massachusetts enacted marriage equality, Tina Brown ran the pink cover below left in 1994. Of course as George Chauncey proved, queer visibility was rampant in the 20s and 30s. Just look at these not-so-ambiguous covers, like the crude number from 1939 showing limp-wristed men leaving Sloppy Dicks.
How did Janet Flanner get the first installment of her famous "Letter from Paris" published in The New Yorker (which would run her column fortnightly for fifty years) and how did she get her pen name Genêt? Both answers: Harold Ross. A restless Hoosier educated in Chicago, Flanner had left Manhattan and her husband to travel in Europe with her lover Solito Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson) and from Paris she wrote to Jane Grant, Ross's wife. In 1925 Ross was still struggling to find the top notch writing he wanted for his new magazine, less than a year old, and he decided to publish Flanner's letter without asking her permission and therefore needed a nom de plume, choosing what he mistakenly thought was French for Janet.
Flanner knew virtually every important person in Paris for decades but also wrote about Algeria, Hungary invaded by the Russians, the Sinai War, and dozens of other topics in her signature style. She won a National Book Award in 1966. The center of a far reaching circle of lesbian friends, she was a constant presence at Natalie Barney's salons and in Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's living room and with the many other prominent lesbians discussed in Paris Was a Woman and, more obliquely, in her own otherwise outstanding memoir Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939. She was equally at home with Gide and Cocteau as she was with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she never lost her knack for being at the elbow of history: She was on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer when they had their famous fracas and rather than ducking she came between them. Although they occasionally had separate affairs, Flanner and Solano remained committed to each other and lived together for fifty years. Solano died in 1975, when she was eighty-seven; Flanner died in 1978, when she was eighty-six. Last fall she was the cover girl for the Hide/Seek catalog.
Two weeks ago, you learned Daniel Mendelsohn at twelve began "to understand what I was and what I wanted; and I knew that I wasn't alone" after finding the young gay lovers in Mary Renault's Fire from Heaven
As journalism morphs toward tv, even The New Yorker's nonfiction now requires video chats. Luckily, he's a natural, at home in Chelsea. For more, get his NBCC nominated Waiting for the Barbarians
The New Yorker now costs seven dollars an issue. Write a funny caption for that.
One of the magazine's problems is generational, frantically pimping their iPad app to readers who at heart live in the 19th century. The new TV critic, Emily Nussbaum, pens a long essay about Ryan Murphy's gay camp ethos but you may sense some editorial creaks as she tries to convey her young, city ideas to an aging Westchester audience. Eighties' drag queen Lady Bunny but no Daniel Halperin
"In 1964, Susan Sontag, in her essay Notes on Camp
described it as “a solvent of morality,” and that phrase hints at what is appealing about Murphy’s shows: his Tourettic impulse to offend, even in the midst of the sweetest love story. Camp originated as a private language, in an era when survival as a gay man meant learning to break codes—of male and female behavior, of normality and status. Murphy has taken this vernacular of the closet, and bent it, hard, toward an era of outness. It’s a mighty queer gambit, and one that aligns Murphy with a subset of gay showrunners whom I’ve rarely seen lumped together in critical conversation, perhaps for fear of risking offense.
"Among these is Alan Ball, who created Six Feet Under(the drama that produced David Fisher, the first truly complex gay male character on TV) and True Blood
(with its dicey vampirism-as-gay-rights metaphor). There’s also Kevin Williamson, the creator of Dawson's Creek
and the new horror show “The Following,” and the executive producer of “The Vampire Diaries”; Desperate Housewives
’s Marc Cherry, who named every episode for a Sondheim reference; and Michael Patrick King, the man behind both the exquisitely campy Sex and the City
and the execrably campy “2 Broke Girls.” In addition, there’s Silvio Horta, the creator of ABC’s sweet telenovela adaptation Ugly Betty
an underrated comedy-drama that managed to celebrate both Queens and queens.
"Like several of these showrunners, Murphy loves divas and zingers. But he stands out for his aggressive attempts to punch right through TV’s lazier habits, stitching genres together like a mad scientist. Murphy’s finest set pieces evoke Charles Busch and Bertolt Brecht as well as Lady Bunny, theatrical figures willing to risk the ridiculous for a shot at the transcendent. If this approach occasionally results in episodes that resemble the bat-winged pig fetus from American Horror Story
’s experimental lab, so what? Shock has value, too: it wakes us up."
Growing up in a Minnesota town of 413 people, Lori Ostlund became a traveler in earnest after grad school in 1991 when she moved to Spain and frequently crossed over to Morocco. She has since lived in Albuquerque, Malaysia, San Francisco, and now Chapel Hill where she is the Kenan Visting Writer at UNC. Her smalltown upbringing and various journeys are all reflected in her outstanding first book, The Bigness of the World [Kindle]. It won a Flannery O'Connor Award, the California Book Award for First Fiction, and a Publishing Triangle Award for debut fiction. Two of its stories appeared in the Best American Stories 2010 and the PEN/O. Henry Stories 2011. In a starred review, PW said, "Each piece is sublime." She says on her site, "I find a lack of curiosity unforgivable." Read her.
How did Janet Flanner get the first installment of her famous "Letter from Paris" published in The New Yorker (which would run her column fortnightly for fifty years) and how did she get her pen name Genêt? Both answers: Harold Ross. A restless Hoosier educated in Chicago, Flanner had left Manhattan and her husband to travel in Europe with her lover Solito Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson) and from Paris she wrote to Jane Grant, Ross's wife. In 1925 Ross was still struggling to find the top notch writing he wanted for his new magazine, less than a year old, and he decided to publish Flanner's letter without asking her permission and therefore needed a nom de plume, choosing what he mistakenly thought was French for Janet.
Flanner knew virtually every important person in Paris for decades but also wrote about Algeria, Hungary invaded by the Russians, the Sinai War, and dozens of other topics in her signature style. She won a National Book Award in 1966. The center of a far reaching circle of lesbian friends, she was a constant presence at Natalie Barney's salons and in Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's living room and with the many other prominent lesbians discussed in Paris Was a Woman and, more obliquely, in her own otherwise outstanding memoir Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939. She was equally at home with Gide and Cocteau as she was with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she never lost her knack for being at the elbow of history: She was on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer when they had their famous fracas and rather than ducking she came between them. Although they occasionally had separate affairs, Flanner and Solano remained committed to each other and lived together for fifty years. Solano died in 1975, when she was eighty-seven; Flanner died in 1978, when she was eighty-six. Last fall she was the cover girl for the Hide/Seek catalog.
This week, The New Yorker's lead story is a lumbering, 12,800-word rehash of gay Rutgers student Tyler Clementi's suicide and his roommate's upcoming trial for invasion of privacy. The magazine too rarely covers gay topics, and this, their one take on gay teen suicide, doesn't include any of the major issues facing most gay teen suicides. It's like reporting on Africa by touring the Seychelles. People are drawn to this case because it exploits fears of internet exposure and because it's just plain sad. Yet it has nothing to say about actual bullying, unresponsive or complicit school officials, family rejection, extreme isolation, religious bigotry, or antigay politicking, or about unlikely pockets of support. Many people will read the piece and come away thinking it's a heartbreaking tale of a lonely college kid who made a terrible choice on a bad night... but what are angry gays complaining about? (Clementi was not outed by the hidden webcam and a total of maybe seven people saw images for a few seconds of him and another guy with their shirts off and their jeans on. His text messages after discovering the spying are full of lols and hahahaha and that all in all his roomie was "pretty decent," though hours later he did request a roommate change.) If you can get past sentences like "His sexual self—born on the Internet, in the shadow of pornography—seems to have been largely divorced from his social self," read the whole essay here.
Readers who are not sufficiently depressed by the main story can dwell on the scene of closeted Anderson Cooper at Rutgers a year later to host a tv special called "Bullying: It Stops Here," where a CNN manager talked to the student audience prior to taping to "coach them on how to express shock or grief while watching the panel."
A great writer exploring this subject could produce another In Cold Blood. The place to do it is Tennessee, whose legislature is still deliberating their "Don't Say Gay" bill. The state offers plenty of grotesque hatred like Rep. Floyd of Chattanooga standing by his statements that he would "stomp a mudhole" in any man [trans] who tried to use the women's dressing room while his wife or daughter was there. But, less publicized, even rural Tennesseans have shown a tremendous outpouring of gay support. Two recent suicides there were Phillip Parker, 14, whose parents repeatedly complained to his school, and Jacob Rogers, whose friends say he was abused "every day in every class." As I wrote last week, Rogers asked for an Easy Bake Oven when he was six and shot himself at eighteen.
In this week's New Yorker, music critic, sometime DJ, and married gay Alex Ross looks at Oscar Wilde's full career and zeroes in on the pivotal changes he made prior to submitting The Picture of Dorian Gray
Ross finds the two recent biographies to be "almost comically contradictory portraits."
Thomas Wright's Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde
Neil McKenna's The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde
Later, Ross argues:
"The gay strain in Wilde’s work is part of a larger war on convention. In the 1889 story “The Portrait of Mr. W. H.,” a pseudo-scholarly, metafictional investigation of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a boy, Wilde slyly suggests that the pillar of British literature was something other than an ordinary family man. In the 1891 play “Salomé,” Wilde expands a Biblical anecdote into a sumptuous panorama of decadence. Anarchists of the fin de siècle, especially in Germany, considered Wilde one of their own: Gustav Landauer hailed Wilde as the English Nietzsche. Thomas Mann expanded on the analogy, observing that various lines of Wilde might have come from Nietzsche (“There is no reality in things apart from their experiences”) and that various lines of Nietzsche might have come from Wilde (“We are basically inclined to maintain that the falsest judgments are the most indispensable to us”). Nietzsche and Wilde were, in Mann’s view, “rebels in the name of beauty.”
Readers may find the timing of the piece curious, as if the editors had sidelined it until the slower August stupor. Parsing these Dorian Gray changes was a literary pasttime four months ago, with the April publication from Harvard of the "uncensored" version, which alas only restores 500 words. Music fans may wonder how Ross can work in Neil Patrick Harris and Tony Kushner while excluding The Smith's many references to Wilde and, most important, Pet Shop Boys' quote from his sentencing, And I, my Lord, may I say nothing? in "DJ Culture." Devastating and danceable.
Don’t let his placid English face fool you: David Hockney's art has been one revolution after another. However beautiful, most of what he’s done upends convention or expectation. As early as 1959-60 and 1961, with Erection and the Whitman-titled We Two Boys Together Clinging, he was boldly painting gay love. Once he saw southern California, he began to use color in more startling ways. He painted gay couples, such as Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, exactly as he depicted straight couples, in 1968, when the rest of the world certainly didn't see them that way. His photomontages, or “joiners” primarily from 1970-1986, virtually reinvented how one could use a polaroid. He created wild stage sets for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, La Scala, and the Met. And, in 2001, he proposed a shattering theory that the Old Masters did not paint freehand so much as follow images projected onto their canvas via camera obscura techniques. (This might solve the mystery of why details at the edges of their paintings are inexplicably blurry or out of focus.) Thirty years after his iconic A Bigger Splash, Hockney created A Bigger Grand Canyon, a series of 60 rectangular paintings fitted together to form one giant picture. Even more recent work has included painted installations illuminated with black light, as at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Jack Hazan’s documentary captures every angle of Hockney's intense romance with Peter Schlesinger, who appears nude in his most famous pool pictures. To celebrate his 70th birthday in 2007, Hockney showed his recent paintings of his native Yorskhire, like the one above, at the Tate Britain in London. A new passion is the Brushes app on iPad, with which he has drawn three covers for The New Yorker. Three hundred of his iPad drawings displayed at the Berge-YSL Foundation in Paris last year made gay Awlist Choire Sicha mad: He "hated" the "mostly crap" "garbage."
Pulitzer Prize-winner Joseph Lelyveld has just published a new biography of Gandhi Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi and His Struggle with India [[Kindle]] making the case that the love of his life was Hermann Kallenbach (seated, right), a German-Jewish bodybuilder and architect. From the Wall Street Journal's review:
"Yet as Mr. Lelyveld makes abundantly clear, Gandhi's organ probably only rarely became aroused with his naked young ladies, because the love of his life was a German-Jewish architect and bodybuilder, Hermann Kallenbach, for whom Gandhi left his wife in 1908. "Your portrait (the only one) stands on my mantelpiece in my bedroom," he wrote to Kallenbach. "The mantelpiece is opposite to the bed." For some reason, cotton wool and Vaseline were "a constant reminder" of Kallenbach, which Mr. Lelyveld believes might relate to the enemas Gandhi gave himself, although there could be other, less generous, explanations.
"Gandhi wrote to Kallenbach about "how completely you have taken possession of my body. This is slavery with a vengeance." Gandhi nicknamed himself "Upper House" and Kallenbach "Lower House," and he made Lower House promise not to "look lustfully upon any woman." The two then pledged "more love, and yet more love . . . such love as they hope the world has not yet seen."
"They were parted when Gandhi returned to India in 1914, since the German national could not get permission to travel to India during wartime—though Gandhi never gave up the dream of having him back, writing him in 1933 that "you are always before my mind's eye." Later, on his ashram, where even married "inmates" had to swear celibacy, Gandhi said: "I cannot imagine a thing as ugly as the intercourse of men and women."
The Indian state Gujarat, birthplace of Gandhi, has already made sale of the biography illegal. Several Indian newspapers have condemned the "predictable," "kneejerk" ban.
You know Paul Rudnick squealed when he heard the news. Today the New Yorker runs his humor piece, "I Was Gandhi's Boyfriend," narrated by a hot dumb blond ice dancer named Kelly:
I first met him when he came to see my ice show in Nepal, which was called “Holiday on Dirt.” Gandhi came backstage and he told me, “I very much enjoyed watching you pretend to ice-skate, in your tight pants.” I asked him, “Um, so why are you wearing a diaper?” And he explained that his outfit was a traditional Indian dhoti, and I said, “Well, you look like the New Year’s baby.” And he said, “You are so handsome when you are not speaking.”
How did Janet Flanner get the first installment of her famous "Letter from Paris" published in The New Yorker, which would run her column fortnightly for fifty years, and how did she get her pen name Genêt? Both answers: Harold Ross. A restless Hoosier educated in Chicago, Flanner had left Manhattan and her husband to travel in Europe with her lover Solito Solano (née Sarah Wilkinson) and from Paris she wrote to Jane Grant, Ross's wife. In 1925 Ross was still struggling to find the top notch writing he wanted for his new magazine, less than a year old, and he decided to publish Flanner's letter without asking her permission and therefore needed a nom de plume, choosing what he mistakenly thought was French for Janet.
Flanner knew virtually every important person in Paris for decades but also wrote about Algeria, Hungary invaded by the Russians, the Sinai War, and dozens of other topics in her signature style. She won a National Book Award in 1966. The center of a far reaching circle of lesbian friends, she was a constant presence at Natalie Barney's salons and in Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein's living room and with the many other prominent lesbians discussed in Paris Was a Woman and, more obliquely, in her own otherwise outstanding memoir Paris Was Yesterday, 1925-1939. She was equally at home with Gide and Cocteau as she was with Hemingway and Fitzgerald, and she never lost her knack for being at the elbow of history: She was on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971 with Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer when they had their famous fracas and rather than ducking she came between them. Although they occasionally had separate affairs, Flanner and Solano remained committed to each other and lived together for fifty years. Solano died in 1975, when she was eighty-seven; Flanner died in 1978, when she was eighty-six. Last fall she was the cover girl for the Hide/Seek catalog.
"Arbiters of fashion generally agree that Balenciaga, the son of a Basque fisherman and a seamstress, was the greatest couturier of the last century. Dior considered him the primus inter pares, and Chanel conceded that Balenciaga alone could construct a perfect garment from start to finish with his own hands, whereas everyone else was merely 'a designer.'"
To comprehend his genius you could inspect the three hundred original designs he created each year from 1937 to 1968, but you'd still be lost about his legacy; or you could simply read Judith Thurman's New Yorker essay "The Absolutist," which includes the quote above and is a highlight of her brilliant Cleopatra's Nose. She discusses Balenciaga's business partner and greatest love, Vladzio Zawrorowski d'Attainville, as well as the benefits of being gay to Yves Saint Laurent and the current Balenciaga designer Nicolas Ghesquière: "A sense of dislocation often hones the instincts of a gifted gay youth from the provinces... They are able to recognize a closeted seductress -- a Buñuel heroine, like Belle du Jour -- and help to realize her potential for transgression."
Despite his success and his unmatched status as The Master, Balenciaga suffered a series of devastations: In 1947 Dior got credit for the New Look, when Balenciaga had been showing mid-calf skirts, full bust jackets, and small waists for years; in 1948 his partner died; and over the next two decades the world edged away from couture to ready to wear. Although he triumphed time and again with his tunic dresses in 1955, his sack dresses in 1956, his pairing of tall boots with harlequin tights and shorter hemlines, and his maverick use of special fabrics like plastics for rainwear, he decided to close his business in 1968 rather than lower himself to the faster, cheaper standards mandated by ready-to-wear. Four years later he died in his native Spain.
The New Yorker's greatest editor, William Shawn, notorious for wearing wool sweaters and coats in July, could not bear even to read about cold places. When John McPhee suggested a piece on Newfoundland, Mr. Shawn paused an uncomfortably long time then asked, "Is it cold there?" He killed the proposal. McPhee needed two years to win permission to write his book about Alaska, Coming into the Country, and when he first pitched his geologic magnum opus, Annals of the Former World, Mr. Shawn replied, "All right. But readers will rebel." It won the Pulitzer Prize. When Ian Frazier explained at length how he wanted to write a profile about a place -- Great Plains -- as if it were a person, Mr Shawn inquired, "Would it be funny?"
Before these anecdotes last night at the 92nd St Y, McPhee read from his new book, Silk Parachute, which is not his most addictive work but does include what has already become his most anthologized essay, seven marvelous pages about his mother. It's his 32nd book and he has taught journalism at Princeton for the past 35 years; one of his former students is now his boss, David Remnick.
Ian Frazier, known to his fishing buddies as Sandy, has just published his 11th book, Travels in Siberia and by all accounts it is his crowning achievement. The excerpts published earlier this year displayed its full range: history, travel, sociology, humor. Cursed with a very faulty vehicle for weeks of driving across rural Russia, he is finally told, "What is wrong with the car cannot be explained with words."
Friend and cohort Mark Singer was intermittently amusing in his extended introductions and question prodding, weakened by over-familiarity and insider chortling. Nevertheless, a bubble of seriousness occasionally floated to the surface: Did you realize McPhee in his tennis profile traced Arthur Ashe's lineage, ancestor by ancestor, all the way back to Africa? It was published in 1969, seven years prior to Roots.
A thrilling evening, not least because McPhee really perked up and wanted to talk Alaska with me afterward.
Several top UK authors have reconfirmed selections from last week's Band of Thebes' queer lit list by choosing the same titles as their favorite of 2010 in the Guardian's annual survey.
A.S. Byatt named Neel Mukherjee's A Life Apart
Byatt, and Pankaj Mishra, also named Yiyun Li's stories Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. Byatt said, "She is becoming, indeed is, a great short story writer." Lucy Jane Bledsoe had praised the one lesbian tale in the collection.
Bledsoe's top choice was echoed by Booker winner Roddy Doyle, who said lesbian Emma Donoghue's Room "reminded me of reading Catch 22 when I was 15 – the same excitement, the same 'I've never read anything like this before.' The whole book is absolutely fuckin' brilliant."
Like Tom Dolby and Matthew Gallaway on Thebes, Costa winner A.L. Kennedy picked Bill Clegg's memoir Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man for the Guardian, calling it "an honest and wonderfully crafted book by a man as intoxicated by language as he was by crack. Not at all the standard recovery memoir, it has real literary depth and complexity of construction without seeming in any way contrived." (Clegg also contributed to Thebes' poll.)
Author of four collections of stories, Helen Simpson chose Muriel Spark: The Biography, as did Sandy Leonard. Simpson said of Spark: "Immune to emotional blackmail, refusing to play the victim, she was big on revenge for even the slightest of slights, and refused to cook, clean or go downstairs in front of men ('I have a fear of being pushed from behind')."
Other queer picks:
Jeanette Winterson and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie selected lesbian Jackie Kay's memoir Red Dust Road
Jackie Kay, in turn, chose Kazuo Ishiguro's Nocturnes, Petina Gappah's An Elegy for Easterly: Stories, and Rupert Thomson's This Party's Got To Stop.
Julian Barnes and William Boyd included Stephen Sondheim's Finishing the Hat
William Dalrymple chose gay traveler and novelist Bruce Chatwin's forthcoming collection of letters, Under the Sun.
Michael Holyrod selected Sjeng Scheijen's Diaghilev: A Life.
Tessa Hadley named Colm Toibin's January release, the story collection The Empty Family
Colm Toibin chose two straight novels, David Grossman's To the End of the Land
+ + + +
Elsewhere in LGBT selections, The Atlantic's very weak and scattered jumble (Sarah Silverman's The Bedwetter?) does at least include Patti Smith's Just Kids.
And The New Yorker's unimaginative roundup only has Diaghilev, Room, By Nightfall
Pushing the "out" in Shouts & Murmurs, Paul Rudnick exposes the hidden gay lives of Mr. Peanut, his new sidekick Benson, and a dozen other brand icons: Mrs. Butterworth & Mrs. Paul, Mr. Clean, Buster Brown, the Cracker Jack sailor, and the Keebler elves. He writes:
"After watching Portia de Rossi promoting her new memoir
about her anorexia, her struggle to come out as a lesbian, and her eventual happy marriage to Ellen DeGeneres, I feel emboldened. (Although I regret that, because I am a carbohydrate, Portia may fear me.) And after seeing Ricky Martin discuss his new memoir, about his coming out and his joy in becoming the father of beautiful twin sons, I think it’s time to tell the world that Benson and I will soon be adopting a jumbo cashew and a pair of Jordan almonds; some people will call it bridge mix, but for Benson and me it’s our family.
"As I reveal in my own upcoming memoir, “Right in the Nuts,” I had an agonized childhood. I was born and roasted on a dusty peanut farm down South, and my earliest memories are of being attracted to a macadamia named Jimmy Ray...
"Most of the peanuts I grew up with were destined for brittle or Goobers, but I always had a hankering for show business—maybe it’s the cholesterol. But the fear was always there. Would the Planters people ever hire me as their mascot if they knew my secret? I had no role models; it wasn’t until years later that I found out about Mrs. Butterworth’s decades-long relationship with Mrs. Paul, and even today Christian fundamentalists preach that it’s sinful to pour maple syrup on fish sticks."
A single issue of the best magazine in America is now six dollars.
In the past twenty years, a hardcover collection of Alice Munro's stories has increased about forty percent, first class postage rates have less than doubled, and The New Yorker's cover price has more than tripled. From December to January it jumped a dollar. Recent history:
The New Yorker 1st Class Stamp Alice Munro Book
1991: $ 1.75 .29 $ 18.95
1993: $ 1.95
1994: $2.50 $ 23.00
1996: $2.95 .32
1998: $3.00 $ 24.00
2000: $3.00 .33
2001: $3.50 .34 $ 24.00
2003: $3.95 .37
2006: $3.99 .39 $ 25.00
2007: $4.50 .41 $ 25.95
2009: $4.99 .42
2010: $5.99 .44 $ 25.95
Are you getting fifty percent more value than four years ago?
Ad pages are down significantly and The New Yorker's production costs have risen. The editors insist on whoring up the text with photos, as if the nation's finest writers' words are no longer enough to get you to read them. Has the artwork ever increased your pleasure in the fiction? Tell me exactly how much a three-inch tall, four column, four-color bird's eye photo of the Dresden skyline enhanced your understanding of the place, compared to a single sentence of George Packer's prose: "Dresden is the Blanche DuBois of German cities -- violated, complicit in its violation, desperate to recover its innocence."
In its glory years with two short stories per issue, the magazine was designed so that it had to be read. Now, with micro summaries in the Table of Contents, teaser blurbs beneath the headlines, and captions under the illustrations, consumers can get the gist of each piece by quickly leafing through the pages. At enormous expense, they've tarted it up so more people will look, and fewer actually read. Still the best, it has become skimmable. Or, violated, complicit, and desperate.
I haven't read the three Salinger appreciations (mildly interested in Lillian Ross's memories) but even without those, this week's issue is stronger than all of January: lots of first rate regulars, plus a goat poem by Mark Doty, finally another piece from John McPhee (about pickerel fishing in New Hampshire), a story by Robert Bolano, a music piece by Alex Ross, and a big profile of Tonéx.
Tonéx ("toe - nay") is the 34 year old Grammy nominee, Stellar Award winning black gospel singer who, a few years after getting divorced, came out. No surprise, his star in black church music imploded. The best part of the article comes from the Bishop Yvette Flunder:
"In her view, gospel music is gay music with vanishingly few exceptions; she estimates that the proportion of gospel performers who are, or have been, same-gender-loving might be as high as ninety per cent. 'And I'm being conservative,' she says... Gospel music has offered generations of same-gender loving singers a place to call home, in exchange for their obedience, or their silence. This tricky and sometimes hard bargain shaped the genre, guiding its transfigured love songs, its expressions of praise and sorrow, its twinning of the orthodox and outrageous. And there's no telling what gospel will sound like when that tacit arrangement no longer holds."
With Ben Yagoda's new book as a starting point, Daniel Mendelsohn offers readers of this week's New Yorker a kaleidoscopic essay on the history of memoir. He says the current
craze for introspective writing started a little more than sixteen
centuries ago with St. Augustine's Confessions. One of the highlights of the piece is Mendelsohn's disclosure that his own memoir, The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity
Fifteen years ago, I found myself unable to complete a study of contemporary gay culture that I’d contracted to write. The book was meant be a more or less straightforward examination of the way in which the books, movies, and art that gay people were producing, and the way they partied, shopped, traveled, and dined, reflected gay identity. But the deeper I got into the subject, the harder I found it to isolate just what “gay identity” might be—not least because I and most of the other gay men I knew seemed to be torn between the ostensibly straight identities and values they’d been brought up with (domesticity, stability, commitment, mortgages) and the “queer” habits and behaviors made possible in enclaves that were exclusively gay. Because I didn’t want to suggest that I somehow stood outside those tensions and instabilities, I felt I had to write, in some part, about myself.
Clear-eyed as ever, Mendelsohn ends with a detail about the hazards of recollection. Flying home from Europe where he and his brother were working on Daniel's award-winning book The Lost about his search for exactly what happened to relatives who perished in the Holocaust, a group of high school students in the back of the plane started singing a seventies pop tune.
Matt turned to me with an amused expression. “Remember we sang that in choir?” he asked.
I looked at him in astonishment. “Choir? You weren’t even in the choir,” I said to him. I’d been the president of choir, and I knew what I was talking about.
Now it was his turn to be astonished. “Daniel,” he said. “I stood next to you on the risers during concerts!”
Matt was talking about a shared history from 1978—a comparatively recent past. The people we’d just spent ten days with, struggling to find the keys that would spring the locks of their rusted recollections, had been talking about things that had happened sixty, seventy, even eighty years before. I thought about this, and burst out laughing. Then I went home and wrote the book.
Lingua Franca co-founder, Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and Whiting award winner Margaret Talbot writes a 10,200 word piece on the gay marriage court fight in today's New Yorker to coincide with the opening day of the California case brought by strange bedfellows David Boies and Ted Olson. Delving directly into the question of how sincere conservative Olson is on this issue, Talbot quotes him saying:
“Separate is not equal. Civil unions and domestic partnerships are not the same as marriage. We’re not inventing any new right, or creating a new right, or asking the courts to recognize a new right. The Supreme Court has said over and over and over again that marriage is a fundamental right, and although our opponents say, ‘Well, that’s always been involving a man and a woman,’ when the Supreme Court has talked about it they’ve said it’s an associational right, it’s a liberty right, it’s a privacy right, and it’s an expression of your identity, which is all wrapped up in the Constitution.” The Justices of the Supreme Court, Olson said, “are individuals who will consider this seriously, and give it good attention,” and he was optimistic that he could persuade them. (The losing side in San Francisco will likely appeal to the Ninth Circuit, and from there the case could proceed to the Supreme Court.) Olson’s self-assurance has a sound basis: he has argued fifty-six cases before the high court—he was one of the busiest lawyers before the Supreme Court bench last year—and prevailed in forty-four of them.
Plenty of people, including gay legal scholars, say defeat is inevitable. The high court doesn't lead on divisive issues like this; after all, the Loving decision was 1967, not 1959 when the couple was arrested. Recent losses in California, Maine, and New Jersey further hurt the chance of success, they say.
Yet Talbot shows the defenders of hetero-only marriage have no legal leg to stand upon. The procreation argument failed to sway the judge in pretrail hearings:
THE COURT: The last marriage that I performed, Mr. Cooper, involved a groom who was ninety-five, and the bride was eighty-three. I did not demand that they prove that they intended to engage in procreative activity. Now, was I missing something?
MR. COOPER: No, your Honor, you weren’t. Of course, you didn’t.
THE COURT: And I might say it was a very happy relationship.
MR. COOPER: I rejoice to hear that.
And the argument that gay marriage harms straight marriage disintegrated in the opposing lawyer's mouth:
Judge Walker kept asking Charles Cooper, the lawyer defending Proposition 8, how exactly it did so. “I’m asking you to tell me,” he said at last, “how it would harm opposite-sex marriages.”
“All right,” Cooper said.
“All right,” Walker said. “Let’s play on the same playing field for once.”
There was a pause—it seemed like a long one to people in the courtroom, though it was probably only a few seconds. And Cooper said, “Your Honor, my answer is: I don’t know. I don’t know.”
Claudia Roth Pierpont surveys the contemporary Arabic novel in a long piece called Found in Translation. A rather unimaginative roundup aimed at absolute novices, her essay does correctly highlight Alaa Al Aswany's novel The Yacoubian Building
