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The Gay & Lesbian Review

A bimonthly magazine of history, culture, and politics.
Archive for "November-December 2010"

Browsing: November-December 2010

November-December 2010

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“THE MOMENTS when notoriety began to transform” the lives of Allen Ginsberg’s friends were the moments—among many others—that Ginsberg chose to capture in this fascinating new addition to our knowledge of the Beat Generation. Earl A. Powell III, director of the National Gallery of Art, wrote the foreword to Beat Memories, the catalog for an exhibit at the National Gallery earlier this year (May 2 to Sept. 6). But they’re much more than just images: each is captioned by what in many cases is a miniature diary entry.

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IN SECRET HISTORIAN, Justin Spring offers a compelling, well-written account of Samuel Steward’s many lives as an accomplished professor and teacher, a respected novelist writing as Phil Andros, and a skilled tattoo artist and pornographer. Steward knew many of the noted artists and personalities of his era—André Gide, Gertrude Stein and Alice Toklas, Thornton Wilder, Thomas Mann, George Platt Lynes, and Alfred Kinsey, among others—but Steward himself has remained a footnote in the cultural and sexual history of the mid-20th century.

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OVER THE LAST 25 years or so, there has been an amazing proliferation of thinking, writing, and publishing in the area of same-sex relations and religion. This work runs the gamut from highly specialized academic texts to run-of-the-mill scholarly articles, confessional memoirs, edgy pieces in magazines such as White Crane, and everything in between. One prevailing theme characterizes this massive output: it adopts a defiantly positive attitude with respect to the interface of same-sex desire and religion. Queer scholars and writers now rarely insist on defining religion as a uniformly oppressive force; instead, they prefer to examine the unexpected richness found in the encounter.

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“WHAT IS an Itkin anyway?” The rhetorical question was put to me as I was sitting in a Manhattan leather bar one summer night in the mid-1970’s. My companion that evening was apparently a pretty boy in full leather, actually an attractive young woman by the name of Dusty Verity, a former circus performer who had written me a fan letter the previous week and had now turned up at the Eagle’s Nest in very becoming drag. We were discussing mutual acquaintances and soon discovered that we both knew the notorious anarchist bishop, Mikhail Itkin.

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FOR MOST OF US who have ever traveled to East Asia, the trip involves a several-hour flight across the Pacific. For Lucy Horne, her first excursion to Japan took her a full two weeks. She traveled by train. “Denmark to Warsaw, Moscow, Vladivostok,” she tells me the afternoon we meet. “And then over to Japan. I don’t like plane travel. You miss what’s in between. I wanted to know what was in between.”

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“DID HE BROWN YEH, Jimmy?” one young man asks another in Roddy Doyle’s popular novel The Commitments, referring to the local priest. “No,” Jimmy responds. “He just ran his fingers through me curly fellas.” The church has little effect on the unemployed young men in Doyle’s 1987 novel about a would-be soul band from north Dublin, which is the basis for Alan Parker’s 1991 film.

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The following article provides an update to a “Guest Opinion” piece that I contributed to the January–February 2006 issue of this magazine. It is also my addition to the series of articles published under the heading “Gay Rights in the Age of Obama” in the March–April 2010 issue.

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AT NOON on Wednesday, March 28, 1894, thirty-year-old Guy T. Olmstead shot William L. Clifford in the back four times—once in his “loins” and three times in the back of his head—as Clifford walked north on Clark Street, approaching Madison Avenue in Chicago’s Loop. When the shots rang out and Clifford fell, a lunch-hour crowd burst out of local restaurants and swarmed Olmstead, who made no effort to run away. They yelled, “‘Lynch him!’” as Olmstead waved his pistol, swore, “‘I’ll never be taken alive!’” and yelled at the top of his voice, “‘Don’t take my gun; let me finish what I have to do.’”

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