and he drank. i suspect he drank—seriously drank—most every
day of his adut life.
i probably knew John as well as anyone. and to me much of
his inner life remains something of a mystery. i have no clear idea
of his romantic passions, or even really of his sex life, although
clearly his passion for wearing uniforms—police uniforms for spe-
cial occasions, often security guard uniforms as everyday work
wear—was a hint of his erotic fantasy life. coming of age in a
movement predicated on the insistence that the “personal is the
political,” John remained resolutely private.
John was passionate about two things: community and writing.
he was actively, and continuously, involved in its creation, as
writer, organizer, speaker—often as gadfly. he was a founding
member of the
Fag rag
collective in 1971. he helped found the
Good Gay Poets collective in 1973, even though he professed to
hate poetry. (as usual, his perversity emerged, as he secretly wrote
it and published his collected poetry last year.) he was a founding
member of
The Boston Gay review
, a gay male literary journal, in
1976. he wrote numerous articles for Boston’s
Gay Community
News
and had a column in
Philadelphia Gay News
in the 1970s
and ’80s. For nearly twenty years he wrote a monthly column,
“common sense,” for
The Guide
, a Boston-based gay travel and
political magazine. as a publisher, he started Manifest Destiny
Press in the 1970s and calamus Books, a press that emerged from
the bookstore in 2002.
John’s essays and columns, often iconoclastic and cranky, were
very important for mapping out new ways of thinking. he emu-
lated h. l. Menken, but with a queer sensibility. he was, in many
ways, an editorialist of the first rank. But John never became the fa-
mous fiction writer he wanted to be (who does?). he wanted to be
Gore Vidal—urbane, original, on point, always on target. his self-
published novels
inferno Heights
and
doubly Crost
(both 2009)
are frenzied, metaphysical, hallucinogenic gay fantasias on poli-
tics and life that feel stuck in the satiric traditions of James camp-
bell and carl Van Vechten. John’s encyclopedic knowledge of
american literature was amazing, but he was often tripped up by
imitation. on the other hand, his short stories—collected in “some
short stories about nasty People i Don’t like” (1977) and “last
Gleamings” (2013) are deft and smart. “how to Write a short
story” is as good as anything Dorothy Parker ever wrote.
John’s genius was in creating spaces for people to come to-
gether. The salon is a european notion, but John was a master at
creating these in the Boston queer community. When John was the
cashier at Boston’s south station cinema—Boston’s first gay porn
theater—its office and lobby became the public meeting place of
writers, artists, and assorted intellectuals, all mingling art and pol-
itics with the occasional dip into the theater’s back rooms for sex.
in the 1980s, when John managed Glad Day Bookshop, first on
Winter street and then Boylston street, he recreated this same set-
ting (alas, without the back room). in 2000, after Glad Day closed,
he opened calamus Bookstore—truly his own space—an environ-
ment that fostered a vibrant community of gay intellectuals.
Michael Bronski’s latest book is
“You can Tell Just By looking”: and
20 other Myths about lGBT life and People
. The above was ex-
cerpted from a piece that appeared in
Gay city news
. (The full text
can be found at:
/)
John Mitzel: writer, Bookseller, Boston institution
M
ichael
B
ronski
J
ohn MiTZel, the proprietor of calamus Bookstore—
Boston’s GlBT bookstore—died on october 4 in his home
inarlington, Massachusetts. his death was the result of a long
series of physical ailments, some related to alcohol and most re-
cently a battle with oral cancer. Mitzel—as he was publicly known
to everyone, though some friends, myself included, called him
John—was, for over four decades, a central figure in Boston’s
queer community. i have such a long history with John, it is almost
impossible to detail everything he meant to me, or what he did for
the lGBT community in Boston.
John and i met in 1971, soon after i arrived in cambridge, at
a
Fag rag
meeting.
Fag rag
, the first national gay male periodi-
cal, had started the year before. it was published by an anarchist
collective and connected to Gay Men’s liberation, Boston’s GlF.
coming from gay liberation circles in new York, i immediately
joined GMl. By 1973, John and i were fast friends and probably
spoke on the phone almost every day since then.
John, born in 1948, was a private person. as compulsively gre-
garious as he was, he almost never spoke about his inner life. he’d
been institutionalized, was rumored to have received shock treat-
ments in his teens for being gay. he seemed to be completely es-
tranged from his biological family, though this changed later in
life when he become close to his parents and his brother David.
IN MEMORIAM
10
The Gay & lesbian review
/
worldwide
Get your shades on for this cool collection of 7 short stories
about gay men faced with challenging, funny, and sometimes
terrifying circumstances.These provocative tales include:
• A gay couple who move into their first home together only
to find their next door neighbor is a homophobic IraqWar vet
with post-traumatic stress disorder;
• An adventurous gay
retiree who boards Amtrak
for Detroit to celebrate the
music of his youth at a
Motown anniversary cele-
bration, but encounters a
brash and ageist former
gay porn star who gives
new meaning to the word
"attitude"; and
• A lovesick young man
in 1974 who drives from
Indiana to conservative
Orange County in south-
ern California in hope of
reuniting with his lover,
who has left him unex-
pectedly at the insistence
of his parents.
SHADES OF GAY
By Steven Kerry
Available at:
