GLR November-December 2022

G LRThe Empty Couch $6.95 US, $7.95 Canada The Kerouac Century, BY HILARY HOLLADAY The Case of Gordon Merrick, BY ANDREWHOLLERAN Thom Gunn, a Poet on the Move, BY ALFREDCORN Inside the APA’s Vote to Delist How Psychiatrists Came Around The Vote That ‘Cured’ Millions Rise & Fall of the Medical Model k November–December 2022 50 years ago, a mental illness was abolished LAWRENCE HARTMANN JACK DRESCHER BARBARA GITTINGS VERNON ROSARIO

Eric Anderson & Thomas Depriest James Hess & In memory of Charles Michael Manganiello Roger Beck Robert Hardman Robert Herald S. Longcope Jr. The Shilts Literary Trust Bill Arning Michael Barrett In memory of Wade S.Bentson Ken Borelli Samuel D. Brown Denis Cagna & Carlos Medina Mike Carson & Ron Steigerwalt, PhD Richard Abram & Paul Chandler Eric Allman & Kirk McKusick William E. Arndt Bruce Arnold & James Labi Gary Arthur Scott Bane Kenneth C. Beachler Richard Bekins Allen W. Bernard Charles Bjorklund & Sted Mays Michael K. Boe Rodney Boren Jerry A. Boyd Dale Boyer & Scot O’Hara Peter Cannon Linton Carney & Jay Welch Jim Cassaro Paul Cellupica Robert Chaloner Gary Clinton Robert Cloud Steve Coe Ray Coe Anonymous (2) Stanley Abercrombie John Healy Adams Alan Ahtow Iory Allison Richard Alther James Doig Anderson William Arndt Dr. Mark S. Arseneau James Arthurs James Avila Bruce Selden Babski Tom Baker Alan Baldwin Michele Aina Barale Matt Basta Jeffrey Begeal Joseph Bell Nicholas Benton Steven Berlin Jerry Bernhard GianMario Besana Larry Best Bjorn Bjorklund Rosemary Booth & Jerry O’Leary Steven Bourne Courtney Bowen Bradley O. Brees Steve Fernandez Brennan Jim Brogan Simon Callow Peter Cameron Ronald Campbell Vic Carlson Dwayne Thomas Neal Maury Newburger Robert Nicoson Trent Norris & Jack Calhoun George Robb Michael A. Evans & Bruce S. Sawyer Curtis Scribner Seth Grosshandler & Kim Wainwright James & William Harrison Michael Jarvis & Craig Larson John C. Knepper Harold Koda Carroll Edward Lahniers Mark Mullin Robert J. Christie & Kevin A. Ceckowski Art Cohen James J Dowd Jr. Stephen Driscoll Heyward Drummond Kevin Duffy & Gene Boyett Brock A. Harring Jim Thomas & Fred Provencher Douglas J. Warn Robin Weingart & Claire Zeppieri Robin Weingast Louis Wiley Jr. Thomas A. Zanoni Richard C. Alter & Eric D. Johnson Richard A. Barker & Matthew E. Schlansky Matthew Black David B. Bockoff, MD John Bogner Alfred Brown Kevin Burns Stewart Clifford John Hager Leland Hall John Hudson Jeffrey Johnson Daniel Jones William Kux David LaFontaine William Lauch Paul Loeffler & Mike Sullivan Robert Giron John P. Gooding Bill Gorodner James Gother Patrick Gourley William J. Gracie Jr. & Daniel J. Fairbanks Mikel Gray Clifford L. Gregory & Thomas T. Bishop Michael Craft Stanley Cushing & Daniel Lyons Michael Denneny Robert Dockendorff Ed Donahue Martin Duberman John Finley & Stan McGee Kenneth Fulton Marc Geller Joseph Melillo Al Monetta & Bruce Voss Brian Oleksak & Gonzalo Avila Jack Padovano & Phillip Baker Bertram Parker In memory of Larry Phillips Robert Roehm Ron Seidle David Peckman & Michael Baffa Allan Phillips Charles Popper William R. Powell Terence Quirk Luana Rathman Charles Roberts & Craig Combs Rex Roberts Harry M. Rosenberg G. Louis Rowles William Rubenstein Stephen T. Russell Paul Schilling Jan Schoenhaus Mit Seiler & Marshall Lee Laurence Senelick Dr. E. C. Sheeley A. V. Shirk Harvey Silberman Joel Simkins Donald Mitton Smith Richard C. Snider John O. Snyder David Lane & Grayson Less Malcolm Lazin Gary Lea John Lloyd Robert Lobou Gregory Manifold Gerald Markovitz Vic Marriott Alberto Martin & Jerry Popolis Raymond Matta M.D. Steven McCollom Kevin McNamara In memory of Jason T. McVicker Evan Mogan James Moore Stephen T. Moskey David Murdock Gordon Nebeker Michael G. O’Connell III Roderick F. O’Connor M.A. Ortiz & N.J. Cassun Roger Parris & Michael Longo Daniel A. Pavsek, PhD Thomas J. Gormly Ken Greenstein Garth Greenwell Michela Griffo Michael Hammett Bob Hellwig & Gordon Whitaker James Hendrick Ted Higginson Steve Hoffmann Dr. Jeffrey Hudson-Covolo Thomas Huish & John Mathewson Ronald Hunt Scott Hunter Alice Jay Kent Johnson, PhD Michael R. Kauth, PhD Michael Kelly Joseph Kerr Brian Kieley Clay M King & Iain J King David J. 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DeAngelo George Dearani Blase DiStefano Jack Dodson Karen Doherty Ronald Durnford Edward E. Eliot Davis Elliott & Tim Jolley J. Yusuf Erskine Carlton D. Evans Lillian Faderman Jason Fichtel Charles Fischetti & Michael Chalmers Joseph T. Flynn, MD FRIENDS OF THE REVIEW FRIENDS OF THE REVIEWare readers who donated $150+ toThe Gay & Lesbian Review, a 501(c)(3) educational corporation, in 2021. All gifts are fully tax-deductible. SUSTAINERS ($600–1,199) BENEFACTORS ($1,200–4,999) SUPPORTERS ($150–299) SPONSORS ($300–599) LEADERSHIPCIRCLE($5,000+) Neil Spisak Andrew Stancliffe Jodie Stanton Dennis P. Stradford Bill Strong Dan Studer John Thomas Morris Thompson Paul Travis Andrew Turrisi Robert Walker Stewart Watson Jr. Martin Webb & Charles Venable Richard Weeks & Robert Shavin Michael Weidemann Marc Weiner John Weingartner Lyndon Wester Charles Whelan Allan Wing & Frank Barringer Jeffrey Ryan Robert Saltzman Sam Sanders Steven Sayers Kevin Schack Thomas Schoff Darrell g.h. 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The Gay & Lesbian Review November–December 2022 • VOLUME XXIX, NUMBER 6 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.: $41.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $51.70(US). All other countries: $61.70(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 The Kerouac Century 10 HILARY HOLLADAY The ambiguously straight novelist loved to write about men The Curious Case of Gordon Merrick 13 ANDREWHOLLERAN The Lord Won’t Mindmade him famous but blew his literary cred Thom Gunn, a Poet on the Move 16 ALFREDCORN Encounters with a renegade writer who resisted close ties Rise and Fall of the Medical Model 20 VERNONROSARIO The history of an error from before Freud to the APA’s 1973 vote The Vote That “Cured” Millions 24 BARBARAGITTINGS Direct action is what spurred the APA to delist homosexuality Inside the APA’s Decision to Delist 27 LAWRENCE HARTMANN Organizing behind the scenes made the critical difference How Psychiatrists Came Around 29 JACKDRESCHER The G&LRtalks with an eminent LGBT psychiatrist CONTENTS FEATURES REVIEWS GUEST OPINION— How Dobbs v. JacksonImperils LGBT Rights 5 TIMOTHY F. MURPHY CORRESPONDENCE 6 BTW 8 RICHARDSCHNEIDER JR. POEM— “My Life As Elizabeth Taylor” 12 JOHNHARRIS POEM— “Calendar Girl” 41 BONNIE J. MORRIS POEM— “First Nations Man in a Montreal Sauna” 43 ROBERTHAMBERGER ART MEMO — Confronting the Erasure of LGBT Art 45 IGNACIODARNAUDE CULTURAL CALENDAR 46 ART MEMO — Julius Eastman, Iconoclastic Composer 48 JOHNR. KILLACKY Fever Spores: The Queer Reclamation of William S. Burroughs 33 CHARLES GREEN Édouard Louis —A Woman’s Battles and Transformations 34 PHILIP GAMBONE Patricia Grayhall —Making the Rounds 35 ROSEMARY BOOTH Randall Kenan —Black Folk Could Fly: Selected Writings 36 ANNE CHARLES Peter Jordaan —A Secret Between Gentlemen 38 WILLIAMBURTON Alexander Monea – The Digital Closet: How the Internet Became Straight 39 REGINALDHARRIS Meredith J. Batt & Dusty Green —Len & Cub: A Queer History 40 STEPHENHEMRICK Marpheen Chann — Moon in Full: A Modern Day Coming-of-Age Story 42 MARTHAE. STONE Joshua Whitehead —Making Love with the Land: Essays 42 JEANROBERTA Jim Grimsley —The Dove in the Belly 43 DALE BOYER BRIEFS 44 Gallery exhibition and catalog —Luigi Lucioni: Modern Light 47 CASSANDRALANGER Stephen Dunn, creator —Queer as Folk 50 COLINCARMAN 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 ART COHEN(CHAIR) EDUARDOFEBLES DONALDGORTON(CLERK) ROBERT HARDMAN DAVIDLAFONTAINE ANDREWLEAR RICHARDSCHNEIDER, JR. (PRESIDENT) MARTHAE. STONE THOMAS YOUNGREN(TREASURER) STEWARTCLIFFORD(CHAIR EMER.) WARRENGOLDFARB(SR. ADVISOR EMER.) WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118 The Empty Couch WORLDWIDE November–December 2022 3

DSMdecision and its aftermath. He suggests that most psychiatrists at this time still believed that homosexuality was a mental illness but grudgingly voted to delist in an APA-wide vote the following year. After that, the medical model fell into fairly steep decline, and the APA has been a leading opponent of “conversion therapy” for many years. The collapse of the medical model invites the question of where it came from initially, and a thorough answer is provided in a reprised piece by Vernon Rosario, who traces the origins of “homosexuality” as a medical condition to late 19th-century Germany. It made its way from Europe to the U.S. and eventually into the first DSMin 1952. This was the era in which treatment for homosexuality included electro-shock, aversion therapy, and even chemical castration. Indeed “the couch” was only the mildest intervention that was used. Clearly the APA’s turnabout was a response to changes in “the Zeitgeist,” which was exploding with Women’s Lib, the Sexual Revolution, and post-Stonewall activism. Barbara Gittings embodied all of these strains as a radical lesbian feminist, and she was one of the people on the famous John Fryer panel (along with Frank Kameny). In a speech that’s reprinted here, she describes the background to the APA panel and the importance of its decision, which made it possible for the gay liberation movement to go forward, unencumbered by the stigma of mental illness. RICHARDSCHNEIDERJR. LET US celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the American Psychiatric Association’s decision to delist “homosexuality” as a mental illness in its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM). This is the bible for psychiatric theory and practice, the arbiter of what is “normal” and what is pathological, so the inclusion of homosexuality was a constant drag on any effort by gay people to gain social acceptance or to organize a political movement to that end. The reversal came late in 1973 when the APA board voted to declassify homosexuality as a psychiatric condition. But the most dramatic and memorable event came a year earlier at their annual meeting, which featured a panel of gay and lesbian activists, one of whom, John E. Fryer, appeared in a mask so that he could tell his story as a gay psychiatrist, which he did with passion and eloquence. This event was discussed in an article by Malcolm Lazin in our May-June 2022 issue, which elicited a letter to the editor from Lawrence Hartmann, a psychiatrist who played a major role in the decision to delist, who points out that the APA’s decision was the culmination of a lot of hard work and persuasion inside the organization. In an Open Letter, Dr. Hartmann takes us behind the scenes and reveals what it took to get the board to reverse its position on a critical social issue. Another influential member of the APA, Jack Drescher, is interviewed in this issue about his extensive research on the Holiday Issue: ‘The Empty Couch’ FROM THE EDITOR 4 The G&LR JEWISH LES COLLECTED POE an ch CTIVIST BIAN A A t MS OF A PIVOTA en d political activist, Ir , viv ild Holocaust sur or ailblazing lesbian poe r L uth to t ce " # his - 8 a t, co eve ha “Ire he %, &, vid 31# each for tr nnect and r e y turn, a deep desir r t. A able hear s a vulner ant intelligen s vibr na’ able work. r incompar 11#%(8,- ," '"(5 5#2*) , ,7 8) (!# '*)( %,/+1#( oice. T merican v ual A +')4 8) 2 68(21 2-$ 8-$ h illu roub People in T ah Schulman, author ~Sar .” t ese pages anscend minates and tr ess.org Visit weslpr Call 800-537-5487 orite booksell our fav om y der fr Or le of s er examining A volume From n P $29 95 . many Ger twentieth-century in early and stigmatizatio ment empower caught between queer lives and Ka Edited by ersity of y the Univ ed b tribut Dis aper . olina Kühn r ff Mirjam Zado .ed s.uchicago ess www.pres Chicago Pr u

the Fourteenth Amendment “protects any rights that are not enumerated in the Constitution.” The fact that society has integrated the rights articulated in Lawrence andObergefell does not protect them from constitutional challenge. SettingLawrenceaside would return us to the era of Bowers, allowing states to criminalize homosexuality at will. Some states still have anti-sodomy laws on their books. For example, a Kansas statute prohibits sex “between persons who are sixteen or more years of age and members of the same sex.” The federal Defense of Marriage Act also remains on the books. Such laws will come into force if Lawrence falls. Justice Thomas is not alone in the court’s history challenging the Lawrence decision. The late Justice Antonin Scalia believed that decision was a constitutional disaster. He declared that the question of whether to criminalize sodomy or not belongs to state legislatures; it does not fall to courts to decide. He said that the authority for change of this kind belongs to the people, not to a “governing caste that knows best.” But this approach carries a danger to LGBT rights by reopening the door to moralistic uses of the law. Over the decades, the court has strenuously debated whether the government may enact laws in the name of morality. When the Supreme Court struck down Colorado’s Amendment 2, which prohibited the state from conferring any protective status on “homosexual, lesbian, or bisexual” people, Justice Scalia objected vigorously. He defended the amendment as “designed to prevent piecemeal deterioration of the sexual morality preferred by Coloradans.” Turning constitutional rights back to the states opens the door to morality wars. That a majority of Americans favors some right to abortion did not protect that right at the constitutional level. That a majority of Americans favors protection for same-sex relationships may not matter to a fundamentalist court either. Dobbs v. Jackson is a potential wrecking ball for LGBT rights. Those rights now need both activism and legislative protection equal to the implicit and explicit threats to be found in this fateful Supreme Court decision. Timothy F. Murphy, PhD, is professor of philosophy in biomedical sciences at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. HowDobbs v. Jackson Imperils LGBT Rights TIMOTHYF. MURPHY LGBT RIGHTS and abortion rights orbited separately for decades around the Constitution, never quite coming into direct contact. The Supreme Court’s Dobbs v. Jacksonputs them on the same constitutional page. AlthoughDobbs concerns itself with abortion, the decision seriously menaces LGBT rights. The concurring opinion by Clarence Thomas explicitly calls on the court to “correct the error” in Lawrence v. Texas (protecting same-sex relationships) and Obergefell v. Hodges (recognizing same-sex marriage). At stake is the logic that advanced LGBT rights through the courts. InBowers v. Hardwick (1986), the court asked whether the Constitution “confers a fundamental right upon homosexuals to engage in sodomy.” In answer to a question framed that way, the court found that sodomy had no place in the Constitution or in the fundamental rights “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” InDobbs, the Roberts court uses the same tests to strip away the constitutional right to abortion. In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito maintains that Dobbs concerns itself with abortion alone, but Dobbs did not just strike downRoe v. Wade, it struck down the reasoning by which abortion rights are constitutional: the idea that the right of privacy extends to abortion. By his own reckoning, Justice Thomas offers a “more fundamental” reason whyRoewas defective. He argues that the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires only that states follow their rules when depriving anyone of life, liberty, and property. By itself, Thomas says, the Fourteenth Amendment confers no other rights: the very idea of “substantive due process” is a contradiction in terms. Thus armed, the current majority on the court might well find that LawrenceandObergefell were mistaken because rights to “sodomy” or same-sex marriage are not explicit in the Constitution, have no firm place in the nation’s history, and/or are not protected by the Fourteenth Amendment. Reconsideration of LawrenceandObergefell would not automatically mean that the rights protected by the decisions would disappear. Those rights could possibly rely on other constitutional grounds for support. Thomas casts cold water on such prospects. He doubts GUEST OPINION November–December 2022 5 29:B4 D>I( D( 29 /9;(4#!:% -(BFF 594# 0(%7(4 (+0."', 3 N A ne he —B At E h es Bookstor , NPR ONDELLO M OB ersed Sondheim most well-v ve xpected tidbits to delight e e of fascinating insights a trov ow Availabl ite.” n nd e v e eryw er 4;A <:#>9A< 9%&02-+ 1/!' 1' &0 (03'+#"2% $'-44 )0+# *'%.'+ 2>A 39%5A" 0& :;A9> A(!3#>2:9#% #? @8AA> A693+ 4;A '&<:A>& #? "A<9>A 2%" <:9%= #? >A7A$:9#% ">96A 2 $;93" :# 69#3A%$A+ .#&< A%:A> :;A ?#>A<:- %296A :# *;2: 38>5< *9:;9%+ / !2$5 #? !#! <:2><,:8>%A",3#6A>< <:>95A 2 :A>>903A 02>=29% :# !>A<A>6A :;A9> &#8:;+ ):< $;2>2$:A>< 2>A =%#<:9$< 2%" '&<:9$<- #=>A< 2%" @8AA%< *;#<A "A?92%$A #? :;A %#>'2:96A 0#:; 390A>2:A< 2%" $#%?9%A<+ tamupress.com/book Don’t Make Me Do Something We’ll Both Regret: Stories BYTIMJONESYELVINGTON

Where Harry Hay Found ‘Mattachine’ To the Editor: We read often in these pages that Harry Hay was a seminal voice and organizer in the “homophile” movement of the 1950s. In reference to the mention of him in the JulyAugust 2022 issue, in the essay titled “Sex and Gender in Native America,” I felt that one important detail was left out. It concerns the derivation of the very word “Mattachine,” which we recognize as the moniker attached by Hay to his nascent organization but often without understanding its significance. I am hardly an expert in this area, but I do live and work among a community here in what is now southern Arizona, that includes among its diverse population a sizeable minority of people affiliated with the Yaqui, also known as the Yoeme, tribe. With a long and rich tradition in neighboring Sonora, Mexico, these indigenous communities were seeking refuge in the U.S. to escape an oppressive regime to the south in the early to mid-20th century. They were finally granted full legal protections and (limited) land rights here in the 1970s. Among the traditions shared by these tribes is a set of elaborate ceremonies leading up to Easter in which a number of the dances are performed, including those of Los Matachines. Each group has distinctive costumes and movements that tell the Passion narrative in a uniquely syncretic fashion. Anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing the matachíncome into the plaza knows that they are accompanied by one or more boys, each dressed in a sky-blue frock. It’s a fast, uplifting dance step that all the men do in unison, which someone more knowledgeable than I might be able to interpret. Be that as it may, the gender transgression of young males in feminine attire is unmistakable. Clearly Harry Hay did his homework when naming the Mattachines. Alex Kouvel, Tucson, AZ A Poet’s Choice To the Editor: I read with interest the review of the late Jim Nawrocki’s collectionHouse Fire: Stories and Poems [in the Sept.-Oct. ’22 issue]. First of all, I was saddened to learn of his passing in 2018. I write now to fill in some information from my perspective as former editor of White Crane Journal. The review states that “A manuscript of his poetry was selected as the winner of the 2009 James White Poetry Prize, but for some reason it was never published.” Jim was indeed named as the winner of the prize, which was offered byWhite Crane in celebration of its 20th anniversary. The judge for the prize was the esteemed poet Mark Doty. The main prize was publication of the winner’s work as a book, along with a cash award. The reason the book never came out is that Jim declined to have it published when he learned that White Crane was a print-on-demand publisher. Apparently he believed this method of publication was unsuitable for his work. Fair enough, but I wanted to make the point that it was Jim’s decision not to go forward with the book at that time. I am pleased to learn that his work has at last seen the light of day. Bo Young, Granville, NY The Night I Met James Kirkwood To the Editor: Regarding the Art Memo “Welcome to the ‘70s!” (July-August 2022) about James Kirkwood: when I was in high school in the early 1970s, my mother brought home two of James Kirkwood’s books: Good Times/Bad Times andThere Must Be a Pony. (What was she thinking?) I barely remember them, and the online descriptions of them don’t sound promising, but they had a profound effect upon me as an upand-coming lesbian. I was moved to write to Mr. Kirkwood, and we had an infrequent twelve-year correspondence. Around 1974, when I was in college, there was a production of P.S. Your Cat Is Deadin Buffalo, NY, so I arranged for four of us college kids to meet up with Mr. Kirkwood prior to a performance. He was very gracious, funny, and kind. I’d like to think he is remembered that way, and, according to a brief article from 2012 inThe East Hampton Star, he is: ”He was vital, witty, and intelligent, loyal and generous to friends and family.” I particularly liked the quotations at the end of the book—this one from a fellow playwright, Terrence McNally: “People will still say out of the blue, ‘God, I miss Jimmy.’ ... When people say ‘Jimmy,’ they don’t have to say ‘Jimmy Kirkwood’—and it’s a pretty common name. But he was Jimmy and people still miss him and I can’t think of many people that you can say over fifteen years after they’ve left, ‘Oh God, I miss Jimmy.’” Diane Hamer, Georgetown, MA The TimesOwes It to C. A. Tripp To the Editor: The history of C. A. Tripp by Martin Duberman was very interesting, especially Mr. Duberman’s description of his personal connection with several of the people he included in “When C. A. Met Alfred, Part 1” [Nov.-Dec. 2021]. I was shocked to read about the sneering reception that Mr. Tripp’s book, The Homosexual Matrix, received in the New York Times (though not at all surprised at that reaction in 1975). I subscribe toThe International New York Times, which also furnishes online access. I Correspondence 6 The G&LR *('& %$(#" ! ?<&&# 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

was curious to know whether the NYThad ever issued a “mea culpa.” My search of their archives resulted in scant mention of either the book or Mr. Tripp between the publication of the review and Tripp’s obituary in 2003. Interestingly, the latter provided a more positive impression of The Homosexual Matrix but was deafeningly silent about their 1975 book review. As you may know, The Times has been publishing memorials to people who died in obscurity or underappreciated before the newspaper became “woke.” Perhaps Mr. Duberman or The G&LRcould reach out to The Times to suggest that Mr. Tripp deserves a similar “overlooked no more” article. Rusty Wyrick, Ghivizzano, Italy That Underreported Dinner Party To the Editor: In a Letter to the Editor in the July-August issue, Michael Bedwell tells of a 1949 literary gathering for novelist E. M. Forster, who was visiting America, hosted by New York socialites Monroe Wheeler and his lover Glenway Wescott, whose 1971New York Times article is the source of this information. Photographer George Platt Lynes, with his mother Adelaide, came for cocktails to meet Forster and his “friend of long standing” Bob Buckingham and arrange to photograph them later in the week. At the dinner party, after the Lyneses left there remained the two hosts; Forster and Buckingham; and two more, perhaps incongruous, guests: sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey and comparative religion scholar Joseph Campbell. I was intrigued that Campbell had been invited. The reason, I assume, is that Forster was the celebrated author of A Passage to Indiaand Campbell was an Indologist and Sanskrit scholar. This dinner sounds like a fairly gay event. I am always happy to gain evidence of Campbell’s open-mindedness in this regard—and at a time (1949) when it wasn’t the norm. Campbell himself was not gay; his first real girlfriend was Adelle Davis, later the health food maven and inventor of tiger’s milk, and he was famously married to Broadway choreographer Jean Erdman. Gracious and open-minded—that’s how I experienced Joseph Campbell. In 1971, I was a young ex-monk, a hippie, a grad student in comparative religions, and a budding, outspoken gay activist. And I worked at a Jungian-oriented seminar center north of San Francisco, which is how I met and befriended Joe. I continued on the team that put on his appearances in Northern California and carried on a personal correspondence with him through the ’70s. Only half jokingly I fancy myself “Joseph Campbell’s apostle to the gay community.” His explanation of religion saved me from my 1950s Catholic upbringing. As editor of White Crane Journal and writer about gay men’s spirituality, I’ve touted his perspective as a naturally gay way to understand religion. Such an understanding can be a positive cure for the homophobia and confusion that traditional religion imposes on gay and sex-variant people. My gay spirituality books are about how Campbell’s understanding of myth as a clue to the nature and patterns of consciousness explains the religious problems away. So I can’t help but wonder about the exchange between Campbell and Kinsey. An Internet search on this dinner party will bring up Wescott’s article with its couple of sly hints at the conversation. It did not make it into any of Campbell’s published journals, the director of the Campbell Foundation told me, but those journals are now in the New York Public Library’s Joseph Campbell Collection and are open to the public. If any G&LRreader would peruse Joe’s journals for 1949, I think we’d all love to know what he wrote about that evening. Toby Johnson, Austin, TX November–December 2022 7 University of Minnesota Press Available at better bookstores or to order call 800-621-2736 • www.upress.umn.edu “Groundbreaking . . . attentively engages the ruptures and omissions through which queerness, race, and disability co-emerge.” —M. REMI YERGEAU, author of Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness O N D I S A B I L I T Y A N D R H E T O R I C A L A B S E N C E ALSO OF INTEREST Isherwood on Writing: The Complete Lectures in California Christopher Isherwood Edited by James J. Berg Isherwood’s lectures on writing and writers, now all available for the first time in this updated paperback edition

species is anything but binary, displaying a riot of possibilities from fish and birds to the higher mammals. As luck would have it, mermaids are especially prone to gender fluidity in folklore— where, by the way, they tend to be mostly green. Not Welcome A slice of home security footage that went viral shows two Mormon missionaries arriving at a front door somewhere in Indiana and noticing a doormat with the words “Gayest Place in Town,” whereupon they take one look at each other and bolt. The blogosphere loved it because it shows these two soldiers of God dressed in regulation short-sleeved dress shirts, ties, and slacks being scared off by a doormat. The two women who live in the house, who became instant (albeit short-lived) celebrities, told the press that they were just thankful for “the fact that it actually worked! … It was a great investment.” The doormat served to amuse their friends “with the added benefit of keeping religious zealots from knocking on our door to tell us about their god.” The Greatest Good One by one, the vestiges of British homophobia in the Empire are falling. Singapore is the latest former colony to repeal the infamous Section 377, which criminalized sexual acts “against the order of nature” (for males only). It’s not surprising that Singapore, known for its uptight conserSlippery Creatures Daily Wirehost and columnist Matt Walsh usually sticks to transgender issues in his online rants and in his infamous film documentary What Is a Woman?, but he gave those folks a break in order to denounce the latest Disney movie, a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid with a Black girl (Halle Bailey) in the lead role. Walsh was upset about the casting because “it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have someone with darker skin who lives deep in the ocean. I mean, if anything, not only should the Little Mermaid be pale, she should actually be translucent.” Okay, then, let the search for a translucent actress to play the part begin! Walshdoes understand that mermaids are creatures of fantasy and don’t have to obey the laws of science, right? He goes on: “She should be totally pale and skeletal where you can see her skull through her face. And that would actually be a version of The Little Mermaidthat I would watch.” At this point he seems to have drifted into another kind of fantasy altogether, but whatever. Walsh’s shtick is to gin up scientific-sounding, but actually quite absurd, theories to bolster his racist, transphobic, and misogynistic positions. When it comes to gender, the attempt to show that “the binary” is rooted in nature is especially doomed to failure. As ecologist Joan Roughgarden has shown in these pages (and in her books), gender in other BTW 8 The G&LR

vatism, was a holdout in this respect. Singapore is probably the closest thing we have on earth to Plato’s Republic: a city-state whose avowedly benevolent, albeit dictatorial, government regulates every aspect of social life to achieve the ultimate in order and harmony. It’s the dream of Jeremy “greatest good for the greatest number” Bentham and various utopian novels on up to B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two, which imagines a republic of optimal outcomes through the rational control of behavior. Singapore clearly aspires to be such a utopia, so when it outlaws gum-chewing or swearing in public, it’s only to ensure that no one is offended or likely to step in a wad of Wrigleys. It is what U.S. conservatives would call the ultimate “nanny state.” Thus we can be sure that if Singapore repealed 377, it was all in the interest of the greater good. But Plato already knew that. The extremism of the religious Right has gone so far that its proponents are running up against an inconvenient obstacle: the Bible itself. Two recent examples with an LGBT theme: MakingOur Case The American FamilyAssociation has come out swinging against Christians who aren’t sufficiently anti-gay and all but admitted that the trouble with these groups is that they’re adhering to a biblical version of Christianity rather than the intolerant one that they prefer. The AFA, which is officially listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, issued a warning about what they called “gay Christianity” and provided a handy list of statements to watch out for, such as: “Jesus never mentioned homosexuality even once”; “The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about inhospitality and greed, not homosexuality”; “The Bible doesn’t say anything about sexual orientation.” What’s odd is that these are all true statements, and the AFA makes no attempt to refute them. They even produced a 2.5-minute video that consists mostly of LGBT people expounding on the biblical case for gay equality. Of course, the AFA is presenting these views as something to be shunned. Apparently the goal is to alert the flock pre-emptively to any biblical passages that could be interpreted as supporting LGBT rights, or human rights in general. Pay no attention to those passages that preach tolerance and equality; move along! Banning Books Is Bottomless A school district in Texas actually banned the Bible itself for a time—along with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, The Diary of Anne Frank, and many other titles that were found to be in violation of the Keller district’s guidelines on sex and violence. The Bible was banned for its “sexual content, violence, including rape, murder, human sacrifice,” and so on. Some of the 41 banned books were later reinstated, but the point was made: any book is fair game if you look hard enough for something to be offended by, including the very book whose religious teachings these school boards are ostensibly trying to uphold. Needless to add, the book-banning effort in Keller is part of a movement in red states across the U.S., and the resonance with past episodes of book-banning is obvious. Today such bans are a largely symbolic gesture, since kids find out about sex and gender on the Internet and not at the library. But it has always been about the symbolism. What the Nazis were saying when burning whole libraries was: “If we can burn your books, we can burn you.” And that’s a sobering message in any age. November–December 2022 9

AS JACK KEROUAC’S centennial year draws to a close, I have been contemplating the open book of his sexuality. He married three times, had countless affairs with women, and was not above crude expressions of homophobia. However, he allied himself with his gay friends Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in the creation of the Beat Movement, and, according to Ginsberg, there were times when Kerouac had sex with him or other men. Kerouac didn’t hide his strong feelings for Neal Cassady, fictionalized as Dean Moriarty in On the Road; nor did he mind admitting in Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy to a youthful crush on another boy. Given that he was writing and publishing during an era when the admission of such feelings rarely appeared in mainstream literature, Kerouac deserves credit for his sexual candor. A native of Lowell, Mass., Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac (1922–1969) was the youngest of three children born to Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac, a working-class couple with FrenchCanadian roots. The Kerouacs’ oldest child, Gerard, died at age nine of rheumatic fever when Jack was four. It was a signal trauma in the future author’s life and—along with his Roman Catholic mysticism—accounts for the strains of sorrow and morbidity that run through his books. Those same strains show up when his fictional personas attempt to have serious relationships with women. Sometimes their discomfort shades into appalling misogyny, as in this passage fromVisions of Gerard (1958): “Praise a woman’s legs, her golden thighs only produce black nights of death, face it—Sin is sin and there’s no erasing it—We are spiders. We sting one another.” Kerouac’s association of hetero sex with death may have made it easier for him to justify his occasional forays into homosexuality, even though he shared many of the anti-gay prejudices common in mid-20thcentury America. In Doctor Sax (1959), a darkly whimsical novel about his early years written in the free-flowing style he called “spontaneous prose,” Jackie Duluoz’ retrospective descriptions of himself indicate that he had a queer childhood full of fear, fantasy, and wide-ranging passions. At one point, he confesses his love for a schoolmate: I was in love with Ernie Malo, it was a real love affair at eleven—I tiptoed on his fence heartbreakingly across the street from school—I hurt him once with my foot on the fence, it was like hurting an angel, at Gerard’s picture I said my prayers and prayed for Ernie’s love. ... Ernie was very beautiful to my eyes—it was before I began to distinguish between the sexes— ESSAY The Kerouac Century HILARY HOLLADAY Hilary Holladay is the author of Herbert Huncke: The Times Square Hustler Who Inspired Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation and coeditor of What’s Your Road, Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. as noble and beautiful as a young nun—yet he was a little boy, tremendously grown up (he became a sour Yankee with dreams of small editorships in Vermont). The story of Ernie Malo goes no further inDoctor Sax, but the same character shows up in Maggie Cassidy (1959), also written in spontaneous prose and growing out of Kerouac’s high school love affair with a girl named Mary Carney. Like the narrator of Doctor Sax, Jack Duluoz recalls praying at the photo of his brother “to insure the friendship, respect and grace of Ernie Malo. ... I found him as beautiful as seven times the pick because his rosy cheeks and white teeth and the eyes of a woman dreaming, of an angel maybe, bit my heart.” Unlike most of his literary contemporaries, Kerouac did not 10 The G&LR

dismiss what he called the “little dramas” of early love and desire. Just a couple of pages before the tangent about Ernie Malo, Jack Duluoz remembers an evocative episode involving his friend Lousy: “The first night I met [Pauline] all I could do was smell her hair in my bed, in my hair—told this to Lousy, I smelt her in his hair too. It interested Lousy. When I told him we’d finally kissed the night before ... Lousy wanted me to kiss him like I had kissed Pauline. We did it, too; the others didnt even stop talking about the team.” Perhaps the other boys sitting around Jack’s bedroom didn’t suspect that the kiss was anything other than play-acting—or maybe they saw it as part of a homoerotic world they already had experienced on their own. In any case, Kerouac’s willingness to include these brief episodes about Lousy and the alluring Ernie Malo in novels published in the 1950s is remarkable. It is as if he’s daring his critics to object while privately wagering that most everyone has had early experiences that fall outside the straight and narrow. In On the Road (1957), Kerouac’s alter ego Sal Paradise doesn’t kiss Dean Moriarty or pray for Dean to love him back. However, Sal cannot stop rhapsodizing over the young car thief and womanizer that many would find unsettling. Early in the novel that popularized the Beat Movement, Sal Paradise compares his new friend to “a young Gene Autry—trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a sideburned hero of the snowy West.” Soon thereafter, caught up in the excitement that Dean has brought to his stagnant existence, Sal acknowledges the transactional nature of their budding relationship: He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and “how-to write,” etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relationship), but I didn’t care and we got along fine—no pestering, no catering; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends. I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. Sal’s infatuation with a known hustler had begun even before they met, when he read letters Dean wrote from a New Mexico reform school to a mutual friend. That friend has no interest in tutoring Dean when he arrives in New York City with his new bride, but Sal is happy to let the restless, oversexed young man take up his time. Dean’s raw physicality and nonsensical babbling pull Sal back from the edge of despair. On one occasion, after he and Dean have had a falling-out, Sal tries to make a life for himself in Denver, where Dean grew up. But without his friend around, Sal slips into a terrible depression. With money he gets from a female friend, he takes off for San Francisco and arrives in the middle of the night at the home Dean shares with his second wife: “He came to the door stark naked and it might have been the President knocking for all he cared. He received the world in the raw. ‘Sal!’ he said with genuine awe. ‘I didn’t think you’d actually do it. You’ve finally come to me.’” It turns out that Dean is miserable in his marriage, in poor health, and desperate to leave. Sal thinks: “I was glad I had November–December 2022 11 come, he needed me now.” He offers to pay Dean’s way back to New York and proposes they then go to Italy. It’s as close as he comes to admitting he loves Dean and wants him to himself: I tried to remember everything he’d done in his life and if there wasn’t something back there to make him suspicious of something now. Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said—“Come to New York with me; I’ve got the money.” I looked at him; my eyes were watering with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now his eyes were blank and looking through me. It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tormented mental categories. Something clicked in both of us. In me it was suddenly concern for a man who was years younger than I, five years, and whose fate was wound with mine across the passage of the recent years; in him it was a matter that I can ascertain from what he did afterward. He became extremely joyful and said everything was settled. Self-conscious and unable to talk about what has just happened between them, the two men stand on the sidewalk near Dean’s home and behold a Greek wedding party—an ancillary sign that they are officially a couple. Their trip back East reveals that Dean cannot commit to Sal any more than he can to his many female lovers, but it is a sweet and telling moment nonetheless. By the end of On the Road, Sal wants to believe he has found “the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always InOn the Road, Kerouac’s alter ego Sal Paradise cannot stop rhapsodizing over the young car thief. almost lost A photogra for ver phic history e view of Ca e ary Re — photographs.” es in the es endur t Cub Coa e o tic gaz ologe “The unap Lit booksh t der now a r Or nada e amazing s eith and f L elane.com goos or g en K op.or

searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly.” Sal tells Dean that he and his girlfriend Laura intend to save their money and move to San Francisco. Dean shows up at their apartment soon after, a gibbering wreck. He eventually confesses “in a sudden moment of gaping wonder” why he rushed across the country: “Well and yes, of course, I wanted to see your sweet girl and you—glad of you—love you as ever.” In full retreat from this tender declaration, Sal rejoices when Dean’s wife in San Francisco invites her wayward husband to come home. Dean asks him for a ride to Penn Station, but Sal turns him down because Remi, a tiresome and pompous friend of Sal’s, doesn’t want Dean along on the double date he has planned for the evening: “So Dean couldn’t ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave at him. ... Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought specially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Avenue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again.” The novel closes with a one-paragraph prose poem, a paean to Sal’s travels and his continued longing for the friend he has abandoned just as Dean earlier in the novel had abandoned him: “The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.” This fa12 The G&LR mous ending brings together Sal Paradise’s awe of the beautiful country he has traveled with his love for the friend he longs to be with but can no longer follow to the ends of the earth. The presence of his “girl” signals that he has chosen, more or less by default, the conventions of the straight world. Kerouac himself did not necessarily think this was the right choice. In response to a letter from Elbert Lenrow, whose course on the 20th-century American novel Kerouac had taken at the New School for Social Research, he rebuked the older man for criticizing the ending of On the Road: “Almost like a child you incensedly cry to me ‘Since when is a bookie more important than a man in a motheaten coat’ (concerning the last scene in the book) as tho it was my own MORAL IDEA, as tho I was a spokesman for such ideas, instead of an American Novelist working in the field of Realism.” His distinction between his own views and his character’s actions belies the common assumption that Kerouac’s novels are just thinly veiled autobiographies. Perhaps more to the point, he does not condone Sal’s decision to let Dean walk away. At the end of his letter to Lenrow (written late in 1957), Kerouac makes another important point that shows both his fragile ego and his awareness of the warping power of prejudice: “But I am well loved. Every single woman I’ve met in the past week (excepting dikes) has wanted to make love to me (married or not), at least secretly. I am well loved by almost all men. It’s the SYSTEMthat rejects me, and you, and all of us. The system of ignorance. It bears watching, that lil old system.” He doesn’t specify whether the men who love him want to make love to him as all the straight women do, but he certainly doesn’t foreclose that possibility. And he’s right about “the system”—the systemic prejudices that infiltrate the minds and hearts of individuals. Kerouac himself was not immune to ignorant prejudice, including homophobia, but at his best he was more self-aware than most and able to bring solace and pleasure to the legions of readers who came to love not only his books but the man himself. If Kerouac had lived to see his hundredth birthday, I think that realization would have made him smile. Like Elizabeth Taylor I was raised—I thought I was raised—at MGM. A life of being coddled, fussed over in limousines on my way to the set…. Harris, you play shortstop!a gym teacher once barked. Fine,I said. Where’s that? The look I got. Worth diamonds. Rubies. I wear those jewels still. JOHNHARRIS My Life As Elizabeth Taylor

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