GLR Taken In by Art Book Hoax
From the Editor:
We’ve been punked! The last issue included a review by Jim Nawrocki of a book, Bruce Sargeant and His Circle, by Mark Beard, ostensibly about the life and work of an early 20th-century artist. For those of you who don’t already know—and many apparently do, judging by the number of letters we received—Bruce Sargeant is a fictional artist created by none other than Mark Beard.
One correspondent, John Harris of New York, NY, wondered if the review could be a “double bluff, and Nawrocki is yet another version of Beard.” Nah. Jim is alive and real and living in San Francisco, a regular and highly valued writer for this magazine. He admits to being taken in—as does this editor and the five (count ’em!) proofreaders who went over this article. Apparently the Beard/Sargeant ruse is not as well known as some of our readers believe.
What’s more, the handsomely produced book offers no obvious clue that this is other than a straightforward art book. The inside flap, written in deadpan dustcover-ese, informs us that Sargeant was an artist who lived from 1898 to 1938, whose “hidden” work “is only now being brought to light.” An introduction and timeline offer biographical details and treat this as a remarkable find—which doubtless it would be were the paintings authentic. The fact that Beard is a living artist whose works were all painted after Stonewall makes them less remarkable, to be sure, not only because painting semi-naked men is scarcely a risky enterprise any more, but also because they all portray essentially the same lean, handsome, athletic young man in various garbs and guises.
Since all the letters we received make essentially the same point—albeit in different and often entertaining ways—I thought I’d print two highlights, followed by Jim Nawrocki’s response.
Richard Schneider, Jr.
From Drewey Wayne Gunn, Kingsville, TX:
Discover magazine used to include at least one prank article in its April issue. I kept reading the review of Bruce Sargeant and His Circle thinking some clue would be dropped that it was your April Fools joke, but finally had to conclude that Mark Beard had once again masterly entrapped the reviewer. For Beard is the single artist of all the paintings and the invented biographies of the five artists presented in the book.
Beard was born in 1956 in Salt Lake City. A painter, sculptor, and theater set designer, he and his partner have worked in the same studio in New York City since 1994; it was featured in New York magazine, May 15, 2008. A wealth of material is available about him on the Web, but one has to play detective to sort out what is real and what is invented.
From W. Stephen Breedlove, Philadelphia:
Bruce Sargeant is Mark Beard’s alter ego. The other four artists featured in the book are also personae of Beard, who painted in each artist’s style, posed as the artists for the photographs that appear in the book, and created the artifacts that accompany the paintings. Savvy readers of the book might suspect that something is amiss when the bizarre cause of Sargeant’s death [in a wrestling accident]is mentioned. This beautifully produced book is a wonderful testament to Mark Beard’s artistry.
Jim Nawrocki Responds:
I have to admit that I considered responding to all this by saying that my review was simply an attempt to meet Beard’s ruse with one of my own, i.e., it was a straight-faced parody of art reviews. But it wasn’t. I fell for Beard’s elaborate scheme hook, line, and sinker. I’d never heard of Sargeant, but his work seemed similar enough in spirit to others from the period (e.g., J. C. Leyendecker), that it didn’t seem a stretch to believe he was exactly what Beard said he was, a neglected artist who deserved to be reconsidered.
Were there clues I should have caught? Sure. Knowing what I know now, I can’t believe I didn’t spot the signs of fakery in the photographs of the “artists” that Beard created for the book. I understand that Beard’s project has long been known to New Yorkers and others in the art world. I’m not a New Yorker. I’m not an art expert. And I’m not an academic. I like to think that I’m reasonably well read and canny enough to not be taken in by something like this, but taken in I was. My hat is off to Mark Beard for creating such a richly imagined fantasy.
More Faerie Fallout
To the Editor:
After reading two articles on Radical Faeries in two consecutive issues [actually, Sept.-Oct. 2010 and Jan.-Feb. 2011], I feel moved to add my two cents.
As someone with experience in and understanding of both the Old and the New Left, a participant in the New York Gay Liberation Front that launched the post-Stonewall era, a resident of an intentional gay community in rural Massachusetts (founded in 1973), an avid gardener, and a committed environmentalist, I should have been a likely candidate for the Radical Faerie movement.
But why I never became a Radical Faerie is in part indicated by the content of your two articles. The Faerie movement’s egotistical leadership competition, dogma of a sort, and a troublesome brand of gay elitism or “specialness” should be very apparent to the readers of these articles. I suspect that not many of your readers, having been introduced to the Faeries in the GLR, are making plans to attend the next Faerie gathering.
Don Kilhefner says in his article that “dogma was shunned.” And yet, there was an obligatory “spirituality” and adherence to the idea of a “gay consciousness.” I refer here to Harry Hay’s idea that gay men were placed on earth (by deities?) because we have something special to offer humankind, as if lesbians and heterosexuals cannot offer those things, such as appreciation of nature, beauty, art, peace, sharing, kindness, etc.
However, I was and still am an atheist and comfortable with modern science, but not with talk of “past lives” and “tree spirits.” The conformity essential to supposed Radical Faerie identity—obligatory dressing up and/or nudity, the adoption of a “fairy name,” and a tendency toward separatism (which I experienced as an unpleasant rejection by both lesbians and heterosexuals), was useless and counter-productive to me.
In some ways, the unkindest cut was the way that the Faeries basically took over RFD magazine, founded in 1974 in Iowa as “a country journal for gay men everywhere,” which they transformed into their own exclusive journal. It also became clear to me that many gay men with rather standard professional lives in urban settings were going to Faerie gatherings as a sort of escape to a freedom and affection for nature that they were unable to enjoy in their daily lives.
I am proud of my life as a man with a strong gay identity, connected to a mainstream rural community yet adhering to essential values related to gay awareness and social justice. While others may have a need for bonfire rituals and a belief in the supernatural, and I wish them well, I simply have other interests.
Allen Young, Orange, Mass.
To the Editor:
Over the past few months, I have become increasing annoyed as I read in the GLR of several men, each in his own way claiming ownership rights of the Faerie creation myth. My blood really began to boil when I read in the January-February issue that “The Faerie movement was organized principally by three individuals…” Anyone who has ever been around the Faeries on any level knows that they could never be “organized,” much less organized by mere mortals. What seems to be lost in the two articles that you have published so far is the lack of focus on what individuals were doing in the community long before others began arguing over who created the name. I remember a faerie ethic and emerging identity coming about much differently and earlier than was claimed.
In the summer of 1975, Murray Edelman, Arthur Evans, and others publicized their “fairy circles” in San Francisco. These groups were open to all gay men and included talking circles, ritual, and conscious exploration of gay-specific spirituality. Arthur had just published his doctoral dissertation, Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture. It served as sort of a springboard for what was to unfold in the fairy circles. Arthur, Murray, and others (Assunta quickly comes to mind) were already calling themselves “fairies.” All were present for the next quantum leap of Fairydom.
In the summer of 1976, the call went out for a gathering in October called “Faggots and Class Struggle” that was to become the first fairy sanctuary near Wolf Creek, Oregon. The call came from leftist gay men living in politically-based collectives on the West Coast. Wolf Creek was on a very active leftist political axis that included Seattle, Portland, Eugene, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.
Early on in the gathering, the “sissies” began meeting separately from the group as a whole, largely in response to feeling alienated from the majority, the “stifs” or straight identified faggots. Their hegemony was identified as perhaps the primary obstacle to minority and non-bourgeois-identified gay men emerging from oppression. Indeed a “Sissy Manifesto” was produced at that gathering. “Sissy” and “fairy” began to be used interchangeably at this point. Stifs were both reviled and revered. They were assured, aggressive in belief, and very male, easily dismissing any phenomena that did not fit into their cosmology of gay oppression. They also were not much interested in being sexually available to the sissies/ fairies, who were mainly quite effeminate. Ideas from Arthur Evans’Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, then in ascendancy, were incorporated into the sissy analysis, with muted acknowledgement of obscure Marxist texts, especially those dealing with “nature.” Politics was beginning to fail us. We needed something more, or at least more fun. In hindsight, it appears that we were looking for a spiritual component in our lives, but our shared political rigidity was not quite ready for spirits yet.
There is much in the historical record to support a self-generated mass phenomenon occurring at this gathering. Morning Due, a far left men’s magazine out of Seattle, devoted a special double issue to the gathering, complete with the sissy/fairy analysis of the orgy at the Tee Pee. Fruit Punch, the gay men’s radio collective from KPFA-FM Berkeley devoted countless hours to the emerging politics of “Faggots and Class Struggle.” I should know, I did I lot of it. It’s almost embarrassing now to listen to our naïve, twenty-something self-righteousness. We all knew the socialist revolution was just around the corner, we just didn’t know why it was taking so long.
When I first became bothered by what I saw as an attempt to grossly revise historical fact, I communicated with everyone I could think of who was at that gathering. I wanted to make sure that dementia had not crept up on me. Apparently it has not. Of the dozens at Wolf Creek almost 35 years ago, very few of us survive, but most remember events as I do. However valuable it may be for some individuals to claim the faerie origin myth, it just did not happen that way. Maybe they thought they could pull it off because most of us are dead. The origin of the faeries was essentially an unplanned phenomenon that arose spontaneously.
An important, if not primary, aspect of this creation was a response to perceived oppression of some gay men, the effeminate, by other gay men. The sissies/fairies were trying to make sense out of their perception that bourgeois gay men and ideology were screwing them over (and not in a good way). I remember interviewing a sissy/fairy in my Fruit Punch role. S/he claimed to be a reincarnated wood nymph. The stifs had no rational response to this kind of thing. Their power was effectively neutralized on at least one plane. How could you win an argument with a wood nymph?
I am sincerely grateful to groups like the LGBT History Society for its efforts in archiving our past. I hope my memories add to the conversation on the creation of the Faeries. I also hope that by going back to original texts and oral histories stored in our gay institutions, some of the more outrageous claims of individual ownership of group-generated identities will be corrected.
Kevin Burke, Laytonville, Calif.
An Overlooked Twist in Phillip Morris
To the Editor:
While the history of cinematic responses to hiv/aids has yet to be written, I Love You Phillip Morris [reviewed in the March-April 2011 issue]may have a special place in that history as arguably the first mainstream film to make use of an AIDS diagnosis and death as a scam by a completely healthy gay man. It is a not insignificant element in the film’s plot that Lerone Landis overlooks in his review. The review’s appearance in an issue devoted to “The Arts in the Age of AIDS” would seem to make this oversight all the more curious.
Kevin J. Harty, Philadelphia
An Appreciation for the Poet Prokosch
To the Editor:
Prokosch! The name still gives me a shiver and takes me back (per the review in the Jan.-Feb. 2011 issue). As someone who lived through most of the period when Frederic Prokosch lived, I think I understand what he went through and what he had to do to survive as a writer and a gay man.
If poetry was Prokosch’s first obsession, the reality was that he could only get his poetry published by writing novels. And if his other obsession was spending his life in the less stifling, more liberated air of Europe, writing poetry would never pay for that. So gradually his poetry was eclipsed by the more lucrative fiction writing. But with the uncertainties of a freelance income, one had to be a first-class hustler, which Prokosch was, and a brilliant one who used his good looks to the max. In this I’m reminded of several of my literary friends who rejected the world of jobs and were always reinventing themselves, such as Paul Bowles, similar to Prokosch in many ways but managing his career more successfully.
Even though we never met, I was always aware of Prokosch. As an enlisted man during World War II, I was captivated from the start by his novel The Asiatics, which I discovered in the Tinker Field (Okla.) base library, and for the first time in my life I wrote a fan letter to an author. It may well be this influence that set me wandering across Asia in later decades. I next found him after the war in Oscar Williams’ anthology of modern poetry, my bible at the time. There was Prokosch’s picture in the spread of thumbnail photos, a novelty of the book that made it immensely appealing to poetry aficionadas like me. Astonishingly, Prokosch was the only poet who was sexy. Yes, there were pretty faces, but Prokosch had the body—he was a real athlete. And, like Dunstan Thompson, W. H. Auden, and Hart Crane, he was among a handful of well-known gay poets.
Unfortunately for his ambitions, the poems were slight. But back then, so little could be told in poetry, especially by a gay man. Not only the world he grew up in, but the world of modern poetry was insanely homophobic. What’s more, the idea that a poet could have the body of an athlete was an alien, even a forbidden, concept.
So, it’s thrilling to have a life of Prokosch at last. But wait: there’s barely a mention of Hedy Lamarr. The movie of Prokosch’s novel The Conspirators, set in wartime Lisbon, has an unforgettable scene—Lamarr, making love to her SS officer lover in full Nazi regalia, moves down his body and disappears below the screen to give him a blow job!
Edward Field, New York City
Britten, and Others, Merit Consideration
To the Editor:
Billy Glover’s letter regarding Daniel Burr’s review of A Great Unrecorded History and your response (March-April 2011 issue) prompt the following observations.
I am in the midst of the fifth volume of the letters of the late Benjamin Britten, a musical giant whose greatest works were written to be sung by his life partner, the tenor Peter Pears. Some of the letters address their relationship, but equally important if not more are so are those that focus on the creative process, the composer’s collaboration with librettists, performers, producers, and those who lived around him. The letters are surrounded by copious, often lengthy editorial notes, which identify the people and circumstances about which the composer writes; some of the letters are repetitive in that Britten corresponded with many people, and some of the notes repeat what was noted earlier in the volume.
Britten was a significant figure in the English musical scene in the 20th century and remains so today, and I’d far prefer to have this repetition than to have someone else decide what is and what is not worthy of my attention. The same, I would have to say, would apply to Isherwood’s Diaries: let me decide what I want to read, and if I feel like skipping pages here and there, I will.
David R. Hoffman, Harrisburg, PA
Activist Responds to Critical Letter
To the Editor:
I’m sorry if I offended Barbara Hoffman back in the early 80’s [responding to her letter in the March-April 2011 issue], and I’m amazed she remembers it verbatim. (Did I really say that about not wanting my taxes spent “to pay someone else’s rent”?). But I believe the real debate back then was over whether “affordable housing” was a gay rights issue. Many didn’t think so, and I was trying to build bridges from the left to the right among us, personally registered Independent as I recall that I was. This type of bridge building is still what we need to do now to win our equality. Clearly, with thirty percent of us voting for Republicans in the 2010 midterms, “GLBT” does not equal “liberal,” and it is this confusion that has made civil rights a partisan issue, which the Democrats now covet but don’t act on.
As for the American Equality Bill, I sure appreciate your endorsement of its worthiness, at least in principle. Let’s join forces on it. I’m a radical faerie now and you would like me much better (maybe).
Todd Fernandez, New York City
Correcting Donald Windham’s Obit
To the Editor:
With reference to your obituary of Donald Windham (Jan.-Feb. 2011), I would like to point out a small error. Sandy Campbell was indeed the publisher of several of Donald’s books, but he was not the owner of the Stamperia Valdonega in Verona. At the time Tanaquil was published in 1972, Valdonega was a prestigious printing company owned by Martino Mardersteig. This press also printed Elie Nadelman by Lincoln Kirstein for The Eakins Press in 1973.
Richard-Gabriel Rummonds,
Port Townsend, Wash.
Correction
In “From Russia with Inspiration,” Dean Wrzeszcz’s piece about Sergey Diaghilev (March-April 2011), an error occurred in the sentence that reads (page 28): “When his father successfully petitioned for bankruptcy in 1890, it fell on Sergey to shoulder the financial burden of his younger stepbrothers with money inherited from his birth mother.” Diaghilev had no stepbrothers; the reference was instead to his half-brothers.
