G LR k July-August 2022 The Lure of the Sea $5.95 US & Canada Terence Stamp as Billy Budd, 1962 ROLANDOJORIF Melville at Sea IGNACIODARNAUDE Paul Cadmus’ Art of Cruising MARTINDUBERMAN Joe Carstairs: Fastest Woman of Her Day WILLIAMBENEMANN Sailors on Trial in 1842
We’re stronger when we work together. And so are you. Uniting the wisdom, skills, and innovations of both Columbia and Weill Cornell Medicine for our patients. In medicine, the more experience the better. At NewYork-Presbyterian, cardiothoracic surgeons Dr. Takayama and Dr. Iannacone show what can happen when two top-tier medical schools collaborate. Together, they raise the level of care for New York—and the nation.
The Gay & Lesbian Review July–August 2022 • VOLUME XXIX, NUMBER 4 The Gay & Lesbian Review/WORLDWIDE®(formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscriptions: Call 844-752-7829. Rates: U.S.: $35.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $45.70(US). All other countries: $55.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” © 2022 by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. POEMS &DEPARTMENTS A New England Romance 12 ANDREWHOLLERAN Harvard prof F.O. Matthiessen and artist Russell Cheney in love Sex and Gender in Native America 15 VERNONROSARIO The term “Two-Spirit” belies a plethora of variations on a theme Paul Cadmus’ Art of Cruising 18 IGNACIODARNAUDE The Fleet’s In!set the stage for those raucus free-for-alls The Sea and Sexual Freedom 22 ROLANDOJORIF From Typeeto Billy Budd, Melville longed for something lost at sea “A Dab of Tar on a Sailor’s Posteriors” 25 WILLIAMBENEMANN — From an 1842 trial that delved into the secret lives of sailors The Fastest Woman of Her Day 28 MARTINDUBERMAN Joe Carstairs raced speedboats in the 1920s—and often won CONTENTS FEATURES REVIEWS GUEST OPINION— “Don’t Say Gay” Comes from a Tired Playbook 5 CASSANDRALANGER CORRESPONDENCE 6 IN MEMORIAM— Steve Neil Johnson, A Weaver of Mysteries 9 JOHNCOOK BTW 10 RICHARDSCHNEIDER JR. POEM— “Sonnet for This Queer Body” 17 MARINACARREIRA ART MEMO — Hemingway and Hart Crane: Blood Brothers? 31 MARKSHULGASSER POEM— “Sheilah Graham and Me (Age 14)” 44 JOHNHARRIS ART MEMO —Welcome to the ’70s! 45 RAYMOND-JEANFRONTAIN CULTURAL CALENDAR 46 ARTIST’S PROFILE— José Villalobos, Installation & Performance Artist 47 NEIL ELLIS ORTS POEM— “Moses Parts the Red Sea” 49 REMI RECCHIA James R. Gaines —The Fifties: An Underground History 32 HILARY HOLLADAY Michal Witkowski —Eleven-Inch 34 PHILIP GAMBONE Susan McCabe —H.D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism 35 CASSANDRALANGER Morgan Thomas —Manywhere: Stories 36 ROSEMARY BOOTH Charles J. Shields —Lorraine Hansberry 37 CHARLES GREEN James Kirchick – Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington 38 MARKMORAN Ulrich Baer, ed. – My Own Dear Darling Boy: The Letters of Oscar Wilde... 40 JEANROBERTA BRIEFS 41 Putsata Reang —Ma and Me: A Memoir 42 MARTHAE. STONE Toni Mirosevich —Spell Heaven and Other Stories 42 RUTHJOFFRE José Carregal – Queer Whispers: Gay and Lesbian Voices in Irish Fiction 43 DALE BOYER Shola von Reinhold —Lote 44 REGINALDHARRIS Terence Davies, director —Benediction 48 ALLENELLENZWEIG Peeter Rebane, director —Firebird 50 BRIANBROMBERGER WEBSITE: www.GLReview.org • SUBSCRIPTIONS: 847-504-8893 • ADVERTISING: 617-421-0082 • SUBMISSIONS: Editor@GLReview.org Editor-in-Chief and Founder RICHARDSCHNEIDER JR. ____________________________________ Literary Editor MARTHAE. STONE Poetry Editor DAVIDBERGMAN Associate Editors SAMDAPANAS PAULFALLON JEREMYFOX MICHAELSCHWARTZ Contributing Writers ROSEMARYBOOTH DANIELA. BURR COLINCARMAN ALFREDCORN ALLENELLENZWEIG CHRIS FREEMAN PHILIP GAMBONE MATTHEWHAYS ANDREWHOLLERAN IRENE JAVORS JOHNR. KILLACKY CASSANDRALANGER ANDREWLEAR DAVIDMASELLO FELICE PICANO JAMES POLCHIN JEANROBERTA VERNONROSARIO Contributing Artist CHARLES HEFLING Publisher STEPHENHEMRICK Webmaster BOSTONWEBGROUP Web Editor KELSEYMYERS ____________________________________ Board of Directors STEWART CLIFFORD ART COHEN(CHAIR) EDUARDOFEBLES DONALDGORTON(CLERK) ROBERT HARDMAN JAMES HARRISON DAVIDLAFONTAINE ANDREWLEAR RICHARDSCHNEIDER, JR. (PRESIDENT) MARTHAE. STONE THOMAS YOUNGREN(TREASURER) WARRENGOLDFARB(SR. ADVISOR EMER.) WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118 The Lure of the Sea WORLDWIDE July–August 2022 3
Summertime: ‘The Lure of the Sea’ FROM THE EDITOR 4 The G&LR married with children, allowed his authentic self to roam. Melville qualifies as a case study for a thesis that William Benemann has advanced in his book Unruly Desires, namely that working as merchant marines was often the best option for gay men in the Age of Sail, far from the watchful eyes of constables and priests. Here he focuses on an incident aboard a U.S. ship whose captain was put on trial in 1842 for devising a curiously pornographic punishment for an insubordinate sailor. The trial touched upon a truth about life at sea that was rarely acknowledged in polite society. When sailors come ashore, they are of course notoriously rowdy and randy and on the prowl. Their shenanigans were captured famously, and scandalously, by Paul Cadmus in his 1934 painting The Fleet’s In!, which depicts gay and straight cruising and schmoozing. As Ignacio Darnaude points out, this painting is one of several in which Cadmus depicted the harbor as a place of sexual temptation and discovery. A very different set of ambitions lured Joe Carstairs to the sea, where she raced speedboats at the highest level of competition, winning the coveted Duke of York trophy in 1926. Often sporting male attire and making little secret of her love of women, as Martin Duberman elaborates here, Carstairs was an American patrician whose friends included Marlene Dietrich and Tallulah Bankhead, both known for their flamboyant sexuality. RICHARDSCHNEIDERJR. THE PHRASE “land’s end” has been applied to any number of seaside locales, perhaps most famously to three places in the U.S.: Provincetown, Key West, and San Francisco. The fact that all three are well known as LGBT meccas is surely not a coincidence. There’s something about these hard-to-reach coastal spots that has made them havens of tolerance and diversity, accepting of artists and gay people and other social outliers. In literature and the arts, the lure of the sea has found its expression in a number of important LGBT works. One thinks of Jean Genet’s shockingly uncloseted tale of sailors inQuerelle, or of Gore Vidal’s merchant marines in The City and the Pillar, arguably the first openly gay novel published in English. Going back in time, we have a novelist like Thomas Mann, for whomDeath in Venicewas a way to explore his non-terrestrial desires; or Herman Melville, whose early years at sea furnished the material for his tales of manly adventure. Melville’s personal sexuality is still debated, but one could argue that he created some of the gayest novels ever written. It’s possible to readMoby-Dick as an allegory of good and evil, but that doesn’t explain why, when we read it in high school, some of us were inexplicably fascinated by this exotic world of men. And then there’s Billy Budd, which presents a case of simmering lust directed toward a beautiful young sailor. AddingTypee to the mix, Rolando Jorif argues that the sea is where Melville,
Not satisfied with plying his machinations on students from kindergarten through twelfth grade, DeSantis and his cohorts are now looking for ways to extend their control of speech and morals to the university level. The word is out that professors at public institutions who are openly gay or sympathetic to LGBT rights will be scrutinized accordingly in hiring and tenure consideration. Now that “Don’t Say Gay” is law in Florida, DeSantis and his cronies are building on their sinister success by banning books. So far they’ve excluded over fifty textbooks that teach math in favor of books from just one company, Accelerated Learning. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin was the CEO of an investment firm that acquired Accelerated Learning, which is a leading contributor to DeSantis’ campaign. We have seen repeatedly how the Republican Party uses the politics of fear to silence its opposition. We need to recognize that they are actively conspiring to roll back gay rights. We’re seeing an insurgency of conversion therapies in some states. How long before they come after gay marriage? For anyone concerned with our hard-won rights, “Don’t Say Gay” is a matter of life and death. We must push back for the sake of today’s youth. We must demand safe spaces for young people to explore their authentic identities and protect their right to be who they are. Cassandra Langer is a frequent contributor to these pages. ‘Don’t Say Gay’ Comes from a Tired Playbook CASSANDRALANGER WITCH HUNTS have always been as American as apple pie. Ambitious politicians running for office have often found it expedient to create “enemies of the people” to get elected or to increase their power. Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida was working from this playbook when he pushed through his “Parental Rights in Education Bill,” otherwise known as “Don’t Say Gay,” which evokes memories of Joseph McCarthy, the Johns Committee, andAnita Bryant from times we thought we had left behind. The “Parental Rights” law prohibits any mention of sexual orientation or gender identity from kindergarten to third grade and prohibits instruction on these topics that is not “age appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students” in all grades through high school. What’s “appropriate” is to be decided by the parents in a given school district—even though parents are not trained professionals in child development or classroom instruction. Guidance counselors and certified classroom teachers have always been a lifeline for teenagers questioning their sexuality or gender identity, providing safe spaces where children could explore being themselves. Now teachers will be prosecuted by a “special magistrate” appointed by DeSantis and company for counseling students on these subjects. Those found to be in violation will be fired. GUEST OPINION July–August 2022 5 AMPLIFYING QUEER HISTORIES & PERSPECTIVES s T w laiming T “ Rec o-Spiritsis that we’ve been waiting for a readable and reliable gui history of America’ wo-Spi —RACHEL HOPE CLEV author of Charity and Sy BEAC Br From the New author of oo collection of love, religion, a m the book ! Finally, de to the rit people.” ES, lvia ON.ORG AVAILABLE IN PRINT, imes ork T Y best-selling klyn 4 !(-, *3.79+'% )&%$ poetry explores queer and belonging through odern lens. * L f de AUDIO, AND EBOOK /2 %$(&5 (1 8 %,8-- $("+'% )0/$ (#2 GBTQ+ rights that reveals how the ar right weaponizes social issues to clare whose lives are valuable—a whose are expendable ON SALE SEPTEMBER 2022 & nd
Dorothy Healey’s CP Tenure To the Editor, I very much enjoyed reading the recent G&LRPride Issue: Radical Pursuits [MayJune 2022). I especially appreciated the way that the discussion was framed in the editor’s introduction. In that issue, I read with great interest Martin Duberman’s article on the historical relationship of the American Communist and Socialist parties to homosexuality and the LGBT+ movement. As always, Duberman sheds a discerning light on a fascinating topic. There is, however, one minor error in Duberman’s description of Communist Party leader Dorothy Healey. I knew Dorothy starting in the early 1970s, and I made a documentary about her in the 1980s titledDorothy Healey: An American Red (available on YouTube). Duberman’s article asserted that Dorothy left the CP in 1968 following the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Actually, while she did resign from leadership in 1968, she did not leave the Party until 1973. Her reasons for leaving the CP were many, but her key reason was the lack of democratic process within the Party. As Duberman correctly noted, Dorothy left the CP but remained a committed leftist her entire life. In a public statement about her CP resignation on her KPFK radio program, she said: “My hatred of capitalism, which degrades and debases all humans, is as intense now as it was when I joined the Young Communist League in 1928. I remain a communist ... albeit without a party.” Eve Goldberg, Santa Rosa, CA Lynes Missed That Dinner Party To the Editor: In Joseph M. Ortiz’ review of Allen Ellenzweig’s George Platt Lynes [MarchApril 2022], he makes a slight error concerning an important gathering in New York in 1949 at which several literary titans of the 20th century converged. He describes a dinner party hosted by publisher Monroe Wheeler and his partner, writer Glenway Wescott, whose guests included novelist E. M. Forster, his lover Bob Buckingham, and sexologist Alfred Kinsey. Ortiz may have inferred from the following sentence in the book (page 427) that Lynes stayed for dinner: “When Monroe invited George and [his mother] Adelaide Lynes to pre-dinner cocktails so they might meet E. M. Forster in the company of Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey...” However, he did not stay, and Ellenzweig does not state that he did so. Forster biographer Wendy Moffat put it this way: “It was a disarming idea to start with George, like an amuse-bouche. He lingered just long enough to persuade [Forster and his married lover Bob Buckingham] to have their portraits taken the following week at his studio. Then the Lyneses evaporated.” As Moffat also reported, Wescott wrote in an October 10, 1971, New York Times article titled “A Dinner, a Talk, a Walk with Forster” that the fourth dinner guest (in addition to Forster, Buckingham, and Kinsey) was “old friend of his and mine, Joseph Campbell, the Sanskrit scholar, who has both professed and written about comparative mythology.” He did not mention Lynes and his mother having been there for cocktails. As one would expect only two years after Stonewall, Wescott described Wheeler only as “my best friend” and Buckingham as Forster’s “friend of long standing, Robert Buckingham, a big, boyish man, a police officer, who (with his wife May) provided a family life when Forster wanted it in his later years.” For those unaware, Buckingham and his wife (who sometimes claimed she didn’t know of her husband’s sexual relationship with Forster) named their son after Forster, as did another of his lovers. Michael Bedwell, Terre Haute, IN Peter Tatchell and Parliament To the Editor: Regarding your introductory statement about British activist Peter Tatchell [“From the Editor,” May-June 2022 issue], a small clarification is in order. Tatchell has never served in Parliament. He ran as a Labour candidate in a safe Labour seat in 1983 but lost dramatically after a concerted anti-gay campaign against him was mounted. I was living in London at the time and remember that campaign vividly. The attacks on Tatchell were vicious—and effective. Gregg Blachford, Montréal, Québec Virginia and Vanessa Stephen To the Editor: In a review of The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway [March-April 2002], Vanessa Bell is identified as Virginia Woolf’s “friend.” Bell was actually Woolf’s older sister. Virginia and Vanessa were both daughters of Leslie Stephen and Julia Prinsep Jackson; Woolf and Bell were their married names. By the way, while Woolf’s importance as a novelist is universally acknowledged, few people are aware that Bell was an accomplished painter—an early Modernist—and a member of the famed Bloomsbury Group. Peg Cruikshank, Scarborough, ME Corrections In the May-June 2022 issue, in the caption for the still from the filmGreat Freedom, the actor on the left is Thomas Prenn (not Georg Friedrich) in the role of Oskar. The May-June 2022 issue contained a typo in the obit for Stephen Sondheim. He passed away on November 26, 2021 (not 2022). The March-April 2022 ran a poem by Joan Cofrancesco in which Jackson Pollock’s name was misspelled. We regret the error. Correspondence *('& %$(#" ! ?<&&# 9&$6&&3 $6( 6(1&3/(3& - +(&$) $C& ($C&# - CA>$(#A;-8 3('&8A>$/>&$ A3 $C& +#&;-#A(<> 8-$& 52$C -30 &-#8" .,$C ;&3$<#A&>E *A'A3D $C#(<DC $6( 6(#80 6-#> -30 $C& ;(3>$-3$ $C#&-$ (B &@+(><#&) $C&" 3(3&$C&8&>> 1-0& >AD3A=;-3$ ;(3$#A9<$A(3> A3 +(&$#") =81) +>";C(-3-8">A>) -30 >+A#A$<-8A>1E :C&A# >$(#" C-> 1<;C $( >-" $( +#&>&3$70-" 4<&&# 8AB& -30 A$> ;C-88&3D&>E 666E(@B(#0E<3A'&#>A$"+#&>>>;C(8-#>CA+E;(1 6 The G&LR
New fromUniversity of Toronto Press @utpress “By carefully examining the lives of gay men in the postwar era, Samuel Clowes Huneke’s gracefully written and deeply researched book provides new insights into the differences – and similarities – inWest and East German states and society.” JAMES J. SHEEHAN Stanford University “Fascinating, important, pioneering! Homophobia and queer liberation, racism and anti-racism, sexism and anti-sexism, colonialism and anti-colonialism – they’re all profoundly entangled in Marhoefer’s lively, original study of Magnus Hirschfeld’s life and times.” JONATHAN NED KATZ author of The Daring Life and Dangerous Times of Eve Adams PAPER 9781487542146 PAPER 9781487523978
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male protagonists—one a prosecutor, one a vice cop—as they navigate the investigations of tricky murders and other crimes over the course of four decades of L.A. gay history, from the 1950s through the 1980s. Collectively, these books formThe L.A. After Midnight Quartet. He was also the author of a novel for young adults featuring a gay teen protagonist (Raising Kane), a stand-alone thriller (This Endless Night), and a children’s book (Everybody Hates Edgar Allan Poe!) under the pseudonym Rathbone Ravenford. Together with cowriter Gary Stephens, he also wrote several telenovelas, which included Palero. Johnson moved from New York City to L.A. in 1987, together with his boyfriend Don Hoover, who died of AIDS in 1989. Johnson was active in the L.A. Gay Writers Group with Stuart Timmons, Peter Cashorali, Rondo Mieczkowski, and Eric A. Gordon, among others, for as long as it lasted, and he continued sharing critical readings of the surviving members’ writings. In October 1989, Johnson met Lloyd Brown; the two were married in October 2014 (soon after gay marriage become legal in the U.S.), and Brown survives him. Johnson is also survived by a sister, Stephanie, and a brother, Gary, both of the Seattle area. The cause of death was reported as complications from non–small cell lung cancer. John Cook is a writer based in Los Angeles. Steve Neil Johnson, a Weaver of Mysteries JOHNCOOK APIONEERING gay author of nine novels for adults, young adults, and children, Steve Neil Johnson died in Los Angeles on December 13, 2021, just one day shy of his 65th birthday. Most of his fiction was in the mystery/suspense genre and featured gay male protagonists. He was twice a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Best Gay Mystery, for Final Atonement (1992) andThe Yellow Canary(2012). For his contributions to gay literature, he was also honored by the ONEArchive at the University of Southern California Libraries. Born in Seattle on December 14, 1956, Johnson grew up there but left in the early 1980s to live in New York City with, as he liked to put it, “just a backpack (with a pair of cowboy boots tied to the back).” Producing his fiction in his free time, he worked the typical writers’ assortment of odd jobs starting in the mid-1980s. These included assisting earlyAIDS researchers, notably Mathilde Krim, and working for the first openly lesbian District Attorney of Brooklyn, Elizabeth Holtzman. It was at the latter job that he began formulating the ideas and characters that would form his first novel, Final Atonement, featuring gay homicide cop Doug Orlando, who would also appear in his second novel, False Confessions (1993). In recent years, Johnson completed a four-novel mystery series (The Yellow Canary, The Black Cat, The Blue Parrot, and The Red Raven) interweaving the changing lives of two gay IN MEMORIAM July–August 2022 9
youngest member upon his election in 2020. Cawthorn is a Trump Republican who looks like a matinee idol from the ’50s and gets around in a wheelchair. He spews homophobic rhetoric with the best of them but lives with a staff member named Stephen Smith who’s clearly his lover. Reportedly there’s a ton of incriminating evidence in the form of photos, videos, and screenshots of intimate scenes. This and other revelations—including complaints of sexual harassment by other staffers—caused a panicky Cawthorn to marry his girlfriend before the 2020 election. But guess who accompanied them on their honeymoon to Dubai: Stephen Smith! After Cawthorn took office, the panic shifted to Congressional Republicans, who launched an investigation into his “inappropriate relationship.” His next move was to tell the media that Republicans in Congress had invited him to sex orgies and offered him cocaine—which is when his Party support collapsed altogether. In defeat, the never charming Cawthorn vowed revenge on his enemies, declaring that “It’s time for dark MAGA to take command.” That sounds scary, but it’s something we should probably know about. God Hates Inflation Right-wing pundit Charlie Kirk likes to blame transgender people for various social ills, including—wait Let the Sun Shine In Invent a new problem, and right away you’ve created an opportunity: you can be the guy with the solution! Such is the formula that Tucker Carlson has perfected on his Fox News show. For example, Carlson has promulgated the meme that male testosterone levels are declining worldwide— part of the right-wing narrative that masculinity is on the ropes. He recently brought on a guest named Andrew McGovern who had an explanation for the decline: men just aren’t letting their scrotums get enough sunlight these days. And the solution? It’s called “testicle tanning,” and it involves exposing the boys to what McGovern calls “full body red light therapy.” But go back: Does he mean to imply that at one time men’s scrotums didreceive enough sunlight? When was that? Then, too, if people are covering up more these days, it’s because we now understand the dangers of ultraviolet light. Making a point of exposing one’s reproductive organs to UV rays makes about as much sense as not getting vaccinated for Covid. Are these guys actively trying to kill their viewers? Dark MAGA The brief saga of Madison Cawthorn has come to an end (for now) with his defeat in the Pennsylvania primary. His meteoric rise to the U.S. Congress made him its BTW 10 The G&LR
for it—rising inflation! He doesn’t directly connect the two phenomena but focuses instead on people’s beliefs about inflation and gender. What they have in common, Kirk avers, is that both are governed by “laws of nature” that people disregard at their peril. Just as you can’t create wealth simply by increasing the money supply (which is what causes inflation), you can’t change your gender through a simple act of will. But even if we accept both of these propositions, Kirk never explains how they’re causally connected. In the end, he falls back on the old Pat Robertson playbook of divine wrath and retribution—wrath over the visibility of transpeople, retribution as rising inflation—with no attempt to disguise the mash-up as other than completely arbitrary. One could just as easily start with the current wave of anti-trans legislation in the U.S. and posit that God has brought inflation to the land as punishment for these wicked laws. The End of Sex Aprominent white nationalist, Nick Fuentes is telling his male supporters that having sex with women is gay. He makes this astonishing assertion thus: “Having sex in itself is gay. ... Think about it this way: What’s gayer than being like ‘I need cuddles. I need kisses. I need to spend time with a woman.’ That’s very sus[pect].” In other words, the sex act is a girly thing, so by abstaining totally, Fuentes boasts: “That makes me really more heterosexual than anyone.”A leader of the rightwing “Groyper Army,” a violently racist, anti-Semitic group that participated in the Jan. 6th uprising, Fuentes has admitted that he once kissed a girl in high school, but after that he never wanted to kiss a girl again. At some point he starts to sound like General Jack Ripper inDr. Strangelove, whose disgust over spilling his “essence” with a woman leads him to start a nuclear war. It’s tempting to see Fuentes’ views as bizarre and unprecedented, but really it’s an old obsession he has stumbled upon, a rejection of (heterosexual) sex because of its association with women and the values they represent (love, nurturance, compassion). From the Puritans to the Nazis to today’s white nationalists, it’s baked into authoritarian movements past and present. Now It’s Official To be covered inThe New York Times can be newsworthy in itself, even when the item being reported on isn’t newsworthy at all. Two cases in point: 1. A retrospective on Ed Koch, NewYork’s mayor from 1978 to ’89, addressed what has been an open secret for decades: the mayor was gay. Since Koch never came out publicly, The Times’ story had the effect of making it official by—well, by beingThe Times. While presenting the ample evidence for Koch’s gayness, the paper didn’t address its own reticence on the topic. Some would call it complicity in Koch’s closetedness when he was mayor, which coincided with the height of the AIDS crisis in NewYork. His desire to protect his secret may well have played a role in his slow and inadequate response to the plague. 2. On a less sinister note, The Times ran a lengthy piece on the fact that many lesbians like to read romance novels, treating it as a hot new trend. Ahem, this very magazine ran feature articles on lesbians’ love of romance fiction in 1995 and 2006. What The Times article did, yet again, was to make this phenom official for the general public. So be it. Summer is here, and anyone walking along Herring Cove Beach in Provincetown on a sunny day can discover it for themselves. July–August 2022 11 r i m o M e w N e A 4 .*'7 !/4! 34$ tory about the l , i I, Rob Graves “ s -.40"71 2& !(4")4 fe of Robert Graves— w and honest s a ra i w w w . I R o b Available at All —Andrew J. Mattle, LMHC, and can heal and *6 /%3 '%(0*576 ife th o a l but als G r a v e s . c o m M jor Online Retaile s Executive Director, CMH Counseling create recovery. 7$$ 461 4##7-!46#7 at was a case study a r
BOTH RUSSELL CHENEY, the visual artist, and F. O. Matthiessen, the Harvard professor who founded the field that we now call American Studies, came from wealthy families. The Cheneys owned an entire town in Connecticut, South Manchester, where they housed the people who worked in their silk manufacturing factory, a business that did millions of dollars every year until the Depression and the rise of artificial fabrics. Matthiessen’s father owned Westclox, the clock manufacturer, not to mention thousands of acres in California that he eventually developed. Both men went to Yale, where each was admitted into the senior society Skull & Bones. Though there was a 21-year age difference between them—Cheney was born in 1881, Matthiessen in 1902—they both belonged to the same America, really, one in which colleges like Yale and Harvard educated young Protestant males from “good” families with inherited wealth. Now all that’s changed. If you were to walk across Harvard Yard today between classes, you’d see a student body that looks more, as the saying goes, like America—though Asian-American parents have accused the university of using an admission process that discriminates against Asians in a lawsuit that’s currently being argued before the Supreme Court. But in the 1920s, Harvard and Yale were still associated with what we now call privilege. Matthiessen, who was raised by his mother after his parents’ divorce, grew up in Tarrytown, New York, where he was enrolled at the Hackley School. At that time he would go into Manhattan to hook up with men he picked up in theaters, public washrooms, and parks. Psychiatrists would later attribute Matthiessen’s attraction to older men to his lack of a father figure, and perhaps that was a factor when, still in college, he met Russell Cheney on a ship coming back from Europe. It was love at first sight—on Matthiessen’s part at least. After graduating fromYale, the much older Cheney had been studying for more than a decade with artists like American Impressionist William Merritt Chase, and he had already had shows at galleries in New York. A much more worldly man, Cheney had to warn Matthiessen that the euphoria he was feeling was more about finding another homosexual in whom to confide than it was a great love: “The base of our love is not physiESSAY A New England Romance ANDREWHOLLERAN cal but intense understanding of a mutual problem,” Cheney wrote to the younger man. But Matthiessen would have none of it; he believed he’d found the person in whom he could find both emotional and sexual happiness. “My union with you during those seven weeks brought me to a state where I thought that for the first time I knew the meaning of love,” he wrote Cheney after a trip they took, “and perhaps felt some ability to express this white sacred flame in my life and work.” After returning to the U.S., they went their separate ways, Matthiessen back to college, where in 1923 he was tapped by the senior society Skull & Bones, Cheney to his family’s compound in Connecticut. But they began a correspondence that was published in 1978 as Rat & The Devil: The Journal Letters of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney—a selection of the some 3,100 letters they exchanged over the course of their lives. Rat was the nickname given to Cheney by his Skull & Bones classmates; Little Devil was Matthiessen’s. It seems incredible that one of the things one did when being initiated into Skull and Bones, a club whose membership was composed of the sons of the New England Protestant elite, was to confess one’s sexual past to fellow members. Cheney was alarmed when Matthiessen told him that he planned to tell them about his love for Cheney. But a Skull and Bones brother who went on to become the editor of Fortune magazine was nothing but encouraging: “Thank God you found it!” he wrote Matthiessen. “Vision—love—sympathy... I only know that you have found what you needed—what we all need—what we are 12 Andrew Holleran is the author of the new novel The Kingdom of Sand. F. O. Matthiessen The G&LR
put on the earth to find.” The reaction Cheney got when he told a homosexual friend what Matthiessen had done was less idealistic; he simply warned Cheney to be discreet. And so began a lifelong relationship. Matthiessen went on to get a doctorate at Harvard, and become a beloved head tutor at Eliot House—even though he disliked “the arid remoteness from actuality of academic life,” as he wrote Cheney, and asked: “My God, why have most people connected to a university given up all desire to live?” And then there was the closet. Matthiessen knew very well that had he come out, he would not have been allowed to teach at Harvard. (“Have I any right in a community that would so utterly disapprove of me if it knew the facts?”) Later he would run up against President James Bryant Conant’s plans to make Harvard a great research institution, thereby reducing the role of the tutorial in a Harvard undergraduate education (which, to Matthiessen, was its essence). He disliked the “piddling little papers” that doctoral candidates wrote that only inspired other piddling little papers. Nevertheless, Matthiessen turned his dissertation into a book. Years later, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman(1941) made him a full professor and arguably the leading literary critic in America. Cheney, on the other hand, was marginalized as a New England regionalist whose paintings may be found at museums like the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. In A Union Like Ours, Scott Bane carefully tracks both men’s careers through the changes inAmerican culture that they were either reflecting or contributing to. Cheney struggled with critics who derided him for being too much in the thrall of American Impressionism at a time when the art scene was embracing Modernism. Matthiessen’s political causes got him in trouble with the FBI. Convinced that economic inequality was deforming his country’s politics, he not only supported the American labor movement but refused to hide his admiration for Soviet Russia. What Bane’s extremely readable book is about, however, is the relationship between the two men and their struggle to make a home for themselves, physically and metaphorically, in a country that had not even begun to imagine gay marriage. At first the two men seemed mismatched. Matthiessen’s euphoria at having found the love of his life was countered by Cheney’s suggestion that this camaraderie did not mean they had to have sex with one another. We never learn what their sexual arrangement was. Cheney seems to have been interested in rough trade. In later years he would pick up hitchhikers, who on one occasion not only beat him up but stole his car. But such escapades were part of his appeal for Matthiessen. Whether or not Cheney was a father figure, it seems clear that Matthiessen regarded the painter as a free spirit whose knowledge of the world and love of art were preferable to his own cerebral way of regarding things. While Matthiessen would devote himself politically to “the People,” Cheney was attracted to persons— many of them working-class fishermen in Maine, where he and Matthiessen later bought a house near Portland—the sort of men that Marsden Hartley, another gay painter, used as subjects in his portraits. Bane’s smart, sensitive study of a gay couple has its share of phrases like “might have been” and “probably,” which is all a biographer can do when inner thoughts have not been recorded on paper. Within these limitations, however, Cheney comes across as a recognizable type—an artist who got drunk, picked up hitchhikers, befriended working-class men, and suffered a New England Brahmin’s sense of his family’s expectations—whereas Matthiessen remains a bit out of reach. Considered a “stuffy formalist” by some of today’s critics, the high-minded idealist who found his way to cruising spots in New York when only a teenager seems to have wanted nothing more than a way to “express his love.” But he was full of contradictions—a progressive socialist who was simultaneously the head tutor in Harvard’s preppiest house, a man who was loved by his students but could be angry and brusque, someone both extremely ambitious and combative, but so depressed that at one point he checked himself into McLean Hospital in Belmont (near Boston) for treatment. The Cheney family soon suspected that Matthiessen was more than a friend to their sibling. One relative, a brother-inlaw, hired a detective to spy on the couple—anticipating the way the FBI would later open up a file on Matthiessen for his political sympathies. Several of Cheney’s friends believed that the source of hia limitations as an artist were his inability to separate himself from his family and its large compound in South While still in college, F. O. Matthiessen met Russell Cheney on a ship coming back from Europe. It was love at first sight—on Matthiessen’s part at least. July–August 2022 13 history of a politic provocative rom A ally divisive era. ance set against the Monsieur .com BuckJones
Manchester. It was only when Cheney and Matthiessen purchased a house in Kittery, a coastal town in southern Maine, that the two men finally had a place of their own. There, like Willa Cather and Edith Lewis on their island off the coast of the same state, they could entertain friends, who knew about their relationship—in other words, like Cather and Lewis, the male version of a Boston marriage—an arrangement that seems to have been much less tolerated when the lovers were men. But in Kittery they seem to have found happiness. Cheney began painting new subject matter, and Matthiessen was already a full professor after the success of American Renaissance. G&LR poetry editor David Bergman claims that “Matthiessen and Cheney constructed much of their sexual identities from what they read.” Among the books in their house in Kittery, for example, were volumes by John Addington Symonds, Havelock Ellis, Edward Carpenter, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, and Marcel Proust. Matthiessen’s own work enlarges our view of being different. Before the writers Matthiessen credited with the American Renaissance—Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Hawthorne—American literature had been part of a more “genteel” tradition featuring writers like Washington Irving and William Cullen Bryant. Hawthorne investigated in The Scarlet Letter what we might call a secret vice; Whitman was the bard of manly love; and the two Transcendentalists were, to say the least, free spirits. What none of these writers dealt with, however, was what came to blight the happiness Matthiessen thought he’d found with Cheney—not just the tuberculosis Cheney battled for much of his life, but the fact that he turned out to be a classic alcoholic. As such, Bane’s book eventually becomes a very sad story. A cold, disillusioned note enters Matthiessen’s letters to Cheney after yet one more relapse, and treatment at institutions like McLean and the Hartford Retreat. Various theories about the cause and cure of alcoholism determined the care that Cheney received at each place. But all of them associated drinking with “sensitivity,” and “sensitivity” with homosexuality. At one point he was subjected to medically induced seizures and shock therapy. No one seemed to realize that the problem was addiction. Two months after he had returned to Kittery after drying out in 1945, he died in his sleep of a thrombosis. From then on, Matthiessen seems to have been doomed. The main reason was the loss of Cheney. But at this point, he was also being watched by the FBI. The bugaboo of American politics was Communism, and Matthiessen’s support for Harry Bridges, the union organizer, and his favoring the election of Henry Wallace in a presidential election, were enough to cause suspicion. Given what Putin has done in Ukraine, it’s especially depressing to read Matthiessen’s comment on the Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia after World War II. “The Czechs regard the Soviet Union with gratitude for their liberation.” Or his answer when Mary McCarthy, at a peace conference in New York in 1949, asked him what would have happened had Thoreau practiced civil disobedience in Stalin’s Russia: “I do not think that Thoreau or Emerson could exist very well in the present Soviet Union. Nor do I think that great figures like Lenin could have existed very well in twentieth-century America.” TheBoston Herald’s story about this exchange called Matthiessen a Communist dupe. Years ago, when I learned that a Harvard professor named F. O. Matthiessen had committed suicide because of depression induced by world events, I thought it odd that politics could lead a person to kill himself. After reading A Union Like Ours, it seems clear it was the loss of Cheney, the aridity of spirit, and sheer loneliness, that led Matthiessen to jump out a hotel window in downtown Boston in 1950. He had lasted no more than four years without Cheney. Bane wonders what might have happened had Matthiessen met Harry Hay, arguably the founder of the modern gay rights movement; Hay’s campaign might have been the perfect union of Matthiessen’s idealism and his sexuality. Bane’s answer is mixed: “Matthiessen would have been unfazed by Hay’s membership in the Communist Party. But in response to Hay’s more self-assertive stance on homosexuality, Matthiessen would likely have retreated. The tragedy of Matthiessen’s premature death is that he could have lived to see the Stonewall Riots of 1969 marking the beginning of gay liberation.” Philosopher Hannah Arendt said that the task of man is to make a home for himself on earth, and that is what Matthiessen was trying to do with Cheney, successfully at times, particularly when they set up their household in Kittery. On those Thanksgiving days when they hosted friends, they were simply a gay couple whose cats were named Pretzel, Zuzu, Miss Pansy Littlefield, and Lady Vere De Vere. But then Cheney’s addiction to alcohol became insurmountable. Reading the last part of A Union Like Ours is akin to reading The Lost Weekend. It does not, however, make the story of Matthiessen and Cheney any less heroic. They were, after all, attempting to create a life for which society would have no tolerance for decades to come. In 2009, the Harvard Gay & Lesbian Caucus raised $1.5 million to fund the F. O. Matthiessen Visiting Professorship of Gender and Sexuality. What its namesake would have made of choosing one’s pronouns is no more predictable than what would have happened if he had met Harry Hay. But surely the words Matthiessen wrote to Cheney at the beginning of their relationship are all the more admirable because of that: ”We stand in the middle of an unchartered, uninhabited country. That there have been unions like ours is obvious, but we are unable to draw on their experience. We must create everything for ourselves.” And so they did. 14 The G&LR A UNION LIKE OURS The Love Story of F. O. Matthiessen and Russell Cheney by Scott Bane Univ. of Massachusetts Press 302 pages, $24.95
ASHORT REVIEW of Gregory D. Smithers’ Reclaiming Two-Spirits would report that he presents an LGBT-affirmative history of gender fluid Native Americans and how they had been valued as shaman healers within Indigenous communities. Centuries of European colonization and Christian evangelizing replaced this reverence with homophobia. Since the 1960s, brave LGBT Native activists and artists have battled homophobia within their families and racism in the dominant LGBT movement to reassert their sexuality and culture with its deep spiritual roots in the Two-Spirit tradition among First Nations. A longer treatment is going to be politically bumpier and conceptually more complicated. The term “Two-Spirit” was only adopted in 1990 at the Third Annual Intertribal Native American/First Nations Gay and Lesbian Conference in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The attendees wanted an alternative to the term “berdache,” which had been applied by Europeans in reference to Native American boys who dressed as girls and performed in sexual rituals. “Berdache” had also been adopted by some gay Natives and anthropologists. The delegates also sought a panIndian English term for over 150 words in different Indigenous languages for diverse phenomena involving people whose gender and sexuality (to use Western concepts) shift between female and male. They transition from one gender to another, inhabit an intermediate gender (sometimes called “third sex” or “third gender”), or are fluid in their gender through their lifespan. Since 1990, the term Two-Spirit itself has come to mean many things. Most generically, it’s an umbrella term for “gay Indians” or “LGBT Native Americans” (according to the Minnesota Two Spirit Society). More narrowly, the term can be restricted to those who blend male and female spirits and are charged with ritual duties of reconciling these and establishing balance. There have been varied Native critiques of the term. Why choose one English term in place of the hundreds of Native words that are not quite reconcilable? The Navajo wordnádleeh suggests fluidity and has been translated as “constant state of change ... and nádleehí means one who is in a constant state of change.” The Blackfoot ninauh-oskitsi-pahpyaki can be translated as “manly-hearted woman.” The Creenapêw iskwêwisêhot refers to “a man who dresses as a woman.” AMescalero Apache man could be Nde’isdzan, a “man-woman.” Even if we force these different words into Western boxes, they still seem to refer to different Western concepts of crossESSAY Sex and Gender in Native America VERNONROSARIO Vernon Rosario is a historian of science and an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA. dressing, third gender, gender transitioning, gender fluidity, or gender nonbinariness. Anthropologist Alice Kehoe has pointed out that in some Native cultures a person might be the incarnation of more than two ancestor spirits. Thus the term “two spirit” buys into the very bifurcation of gender that it should reject as foreign and colonizing. However, there seems to be general agreement that Two-Spirit is an identity term restricted to Native Americans and should not be appropriated by non-Native New Age LGBT people aspiring to spiritual enlightenment. Ojibwe journalist Mary Annette Pember voiced her anger about the popularization of the term: “My concern is not so much over the use of the words but over the social meme they have generated that has morphed into a cocktail of historical revisionism, wishful thinking, good intentions, and a soupçon of white, entitled appropriation.” Gregory D. Smithers is acutely aware that he’s stepping into highly contested territory with his sweeping history of TwoSpirit people. In a work that repeatedly claims to be engaged in scholarly decolonization of the history of Native sexuality, he has to acknowledge that he risks being criticized for an act of colonization as a white, Australian, heterosexual, cisgender man. Still, Smithers, a professor of American history at Virginia Commonwealth University, is uniquely qualified for the task, having authored several books on Indigenous history and being proficient in Cherokee. Written Cherokee, a syllabary developed in the 1820s by Sequoyah, was the first Native North American language to have a written form. The lack of Indigenous written records is a core challenge to historians of the First Nations north of the Rio Grande (whereas a number of Mesoamerican civilizations, notably the Olmecs, Mayans, and Mixtecs, had writing). We are dependent on the accounts of European explorers, colonizers, and missionaries or the transcribed oral accounts of Natives who cooperated with them. What credence can we lend these texts, often by writers completely ignorant of and hostile to the cultures they were “discovering”? Smithers’ work is broadly divided in two parts. First, he engages in a “decolonizing” examination of these early European accounts (largely through translations of the originals and contemporary scholars’ publications about them) and two centuries of anthropological research, also by non-Native (but presumably better intentioned) academics. Second, Smithers weaves together his own extensive archival research on, and interviews with, contemporary LGBT Native American activists and artists, tracing the reinvention of Two-Spirit identity. And reinvention it is. As noted above, many Natives are uneasy that there exists a monolithic “Two-Spirit” shamanistic phenomenon. What does seem startlingly clear is that, in hundreds of EuroSince 1990, the term Two-Spirit has come to mean many things: “LGBT Native Americans”; or those who blend male and female spirits. July–August 2022 15
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