ALTHOUGH PETER DUBÉ is best known as poet, his new book, Desire as Praxis, contains nonfiction prose. I thought at first it might be a historical survey of queeridentified surrealists and their work, but Dubé does something stranger and more interesting. He explores various ways in which the ideologies and practices of surrealism overlap and intersect with those of the early gay liberation movement. The original surrealists, who came to prominence in Europe after World War I, wanted to transform art and society by merging the conscious and unconscious. Led by the author André Breton, their goal was to combine the unreality of dreams with the reality of the objective world. Their desired result was something that would surpass the real: the surreal. According to Dubé, the gay liberationists of the late 1960s and early ’70s had a very similar goal. They, too, wanted to change art and society by bringing what had long been repressed into the open, although in their case the repressed force was homosexual desire. Members of the gay liberation movement wanted to create new ways of seeing and experiencing the world by bringing previously hidden queer desires into America’s cultural consciousness. As Boston activist Charles Shively wrote in a 1974 manifesto: “Our desires are not false, nor an expression of hunger, appetite, want: our desires ... are creative, they are the road to creating, to modification of reality.” Referring to gay manifestoes like Shively’s, Dubé notes: “In these affirmations we hear a call for social and psychic transformation not dissimilar to that of surrealism: a demand to transform the mind and the world, and for non-conformism.” Dubé acknowledges that some of the original surrealists would have been unhappy with his comparison of their movement with gay liberation. Breton in particular expressed disgust at homosexuality multiple times, but Dubé is interested in the ideas and practices of the movements, not the personalities of their individual members. Perhaps the greatest similarity is that Art and Sexual Liberation PETERMUISE DESIRE AS PRAXIS Towards a Queer Surrealism by Peter Dubé Rebel Satori Press. 234 pages, $24.95 thing. Baldwin confessed: “I am not at all ashamed of having loved anyone I’ve loved, or of having been loved. I am ashamed of the times I’ve failed love.” Baldwin wrote about the horror of violence and machismo and always seemed to be encouraging us to be better with others and ourselves. Baldwin alluded to certain dark occurrences during his childhood but recognized that his memory of these events was blurry, often unreachable. Zaborowska senses his frustration in trying to mine the traumas of his youth, imagining that he must have often thought about his past with a sense of loss and bewilderment. She imagines him thinking: “What was that injury and what caused it? Being born to an unwed mother? His bitter conflict with his stepfather? His ambivalence about his sexuality? A bodily or psychological trauma too unspeakable to name, or recall?” Baldwin channeled his confusions into his writing. Baldwin felt a continual sense of distress at the fraught relationship between Black people and Jews. Many of his earliest mentors and supporters—Robert Samuel Warshow of Commentary, Sol Levitas of The New Leader, and Randall Jarrell at TheNation—were Jewish. He felt Black hostility to Jews was unwarranted and recalled fondly many Jewish friends, some of whom he had crushes on. One of his Jewish friends introduced him to Beauford Delaney, a queer, Black, bohemian painter who was older and loved and nurtured Baldwin for several years. Delaney introduced him to music, dance, paintings, textiles, and sculptures. They went to jazz clubs together and Delaney helped him adjust to the secular culture of Greenwich Village, where Baldwin began having several love affairs. Baldwin spent years of his last decades in France, Turkiye, and elsewhere. He made friends with two women, the Norwegian journalist Gidske Anderson and the American economist Mary Painter. These women became pivotal to his new writing, thinking, and his emotional life. They advised him on love affairs and pointed out to him how his novels often contained stereotypical depictions of men and women that were without sufficient texture. These female friends opened his mind to considering what it might be like to inhabit a female body and the fluidity of gender, thoughts he hadn’t had before. He began to find all binaries stifling and yet still struggled with guilt, shame, and sadness about his homosexuality. He recognized that men needed to understand female sexuality if they were to attain the humanity he longed for himself. He started to understand the undercurrent of connection between homophobia, misogyny, and racism, and how they acted on one another to keep women powerless and men like him fearful and ashamed. He realized how sad he was that he was never able to have his own children. In 1985, in an essay for Playboy, “Freaks and the American Ideal of Manhood,” he wrote: “We are rarely what we appear to be. We are, for the most part, visibly male or female, our social roles defined by our sexual equipment. But we are all androgynous, not only because we are all born of a woman impregnated by the seed of a man but because each of us, helpless and forever, contains the other—male in female, female in male, white in black and black in white. We are a part of each other.” Baldwin had clearly come to new reckonings about the complexities of sexual identity. Born in 1924, Baldwin died in 1987 before seeing the ideas he was writing about reach a full blossoming. Zaborowska has written an extraordinary biography that exposes a certain tenderness in Baldwin that is sorely missing in our harsher times. 40 TheG&LR Peter Muise is the author of Legends and Lore of the North Shore (2014) and Witches and Warlocks of Massachusetts (2021).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTk3MQ==