September-October 2020
Flowers’ poems are slippery things. They slide so smoothly between memory and dream, fantasy and reality, the present and childhood, that I sometimes didn’t notice the transitions. Nor do I think he wants us to know exactly where we are. All experiences are mixed in the solvent of language or superimposed on each other.
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In William Benemann’s insightful study, the driving urge for Ishmael and many others to take to the sea may have been about more than depression or adventurism. It just may have been because sailing ships offered one of the few places where one can express same-sex desire.
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Warhol highlights the line that connects the artist to Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists. In fact, Warhol was originally called a neo-Dadaist. In one of its many digressions, the book describes at length the French artist Yves Klein, perhaps best known for his 200 blue monochrome paintings, and their influence on Warhol.
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Jackie Shane was a trailblazer in the world of soul music for queer and trans people. (She re-emerged decades later, an anthology of her music was released in 2018, and she was nominated for a Grammy for Best Historical Album.) She lived authentically and unapologetically until her death in 2019. During her short career, she exhibited many of the characteristics Sasha Geffen examines in Glitter Up the Dark: How Pop Music Broke the Binary.
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Holly George-Warren’s new biography, Janis: Her Life and Music, is large and immersive despite Janis’ short life. As most of her fans know, Janis Joplin was a charter member of the “27 club,” a list of rock musicians who died at that age. Janis’ off-and-on love affair with various kinds of dope clearly contributed both to her roller-coaster life and to her death, which—despite rumors of suicide and even murder—is described in excruciating detail as an accidental overdose on heroin.
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Kahlo approached painting with a “fearless spirit,” says art historian Celia Stahr, whose new book Frida in America offers an intelligent and lucid investigation of the artist’s formative years.
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WHEN I SAW the title of this Faulkner study, researched and written by a professor of English and gay studies at the University of Wisconsin-Platteville, my first reaction was a “What?” of disbelief. I’ve read most of Faulkner’s novels and many of his short stories and the gay hypothesis never occurred to me. Faulkner struck me as the epitome of the straight, married, traditional Southern author, living his life far from the up-to-date delights of the metropolis.
But it appears that I didn’t read closely enough …
MoreEVERY LANGUAGE makes assumptions and embodies biases so deeply embedded as to be invisible to its speakers. Every so often a cultural prejudice of this kind comes to light, as when people began to point out that English and many languages take for granted a gender dualism that’s typified by the third-person singular pronouns “he” and “she.” People who had once been silenced by this prejudice began to assert that this binary language did not correspond their sense of themselves as human beings.
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Physical human contact, or even proximity, could now be deadly. So what about dating? hooking up? sex outside the home? Surprisingly, Grindr, Scruff, and their ilk have not disappeared. In fact, reports indicate that they are as busy as ever, but in a different way. Welcome to dating without meeting, hooking up without being there, virtual Tuesday night orgies on group video. Some of the hookup and dating apps themselves have adapted, adding video links for users who are so inclined.
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ERIC CERVINI is the author of The Deviant’s War: The Homosexual vs. the United States of America. The book is both a biography of gay rights activist Frank Kameny and a history of the times in which he lived and organized the first protests for homosexual rights in the 1950s and ‘60s.
This interview was conducted as part of a live, on-line series titled “Zooming through Queer Culture.”
