$6.95 US, $7.95 Canada Forgotten Histories GLRk September–October 2025 WILLIAMBENEMANN The Rise of the Retail Queen in 19th-century America ANDREWHOLLERAN The Attraction of Confederate Gentlemen DENISE NOE Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sexual Adventurer HARLAN GREENE The Zionist & the Anti-Semite A Love Story VERNON ROSARIO The French Evolution of Sexual Identities DENNY NIVENS The First LGBT Riot Happened in 1953 Edmund White
The Gay & Lesbian Review September–October 2025 • VOLUME XXXII, NUMBER 5 The Gay & Lesbian Review/WORLDWIDE®(formerlyThe 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. Subscription 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.” ISSN: 1077: 6591 © 2025 by Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. WEBSITE: www.GLReview.org • SUBSCRIPTIONS: 847-504-8893 • ADVERTISING: 617-421-0082 • SUBMISSIONS: Editor@GLReview.org Editor-in-Chief and Founder RICHARDSCHNEIDER JR. Managing Editor JEREMYC. FOX Literary Editor MARTHAE. STONE Poetry Editor DAVIDBERGMAN Associate Editors SAMDAPANAS PAULFALLON MICHAELSCHWARTZ Contributing Writers ROSEMARYBOOTH DANIELA. BURR COLINCARMAN ANNE CHARLES ALFREDCORN ALLENELLENZWEIG CHRIS FREEMAN PHILIP GAMBONE MATTHEWHAYS HILARYHOLLADAY ANDREWHOLLERAN IRENE JAVORS JOHNR. KILLACKY CASSANDRALANGER ANDREWLEAR JAMES POLCHIN JEANROBERTA VERNONROSARIO Contributing Artist CHARLES HEFLING Publisher STEPHENHEMRICK Webmaster BOSTONWEBGROUP WebEditor ALLISONARMIJO ______________________________ Board of Directors ART COHEN(CHAIR) ROBERT HARDMAN STEPHENHEMRICK HILARYHOLLADAY DAVIDLAFONTAINE JIMJACOBS ANDREWLEAR RICHARDSCHNEIDER, JR. (PRESIDENT) THOMAS YOUNGREN(TREASURER) STEWARTCLIFFORD(CHAIR EMER.) WARRENGOLDFARB(SR. ADVISOR EMER.) WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118 WORLDWIDE POEMS &DEPARTMENTS CONTENTS FEATURES REVIEWS INMEMORIAM—Remembrances of Edmund White 5 DIMITRIS YEROS DAVIDBERGMAN LEORACICOT BTW 8 RICHARDSCHNEIDERJR. ART MEMO— Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sexual Adventurer 24 DENISE NOE POEM— “Argentina” 28 TREBORHEALEY POEM—“MRI” 37 BILLYCLEM ARTIST’S PROFILE — Martin Sherman onBent and Its Relevance 42 TIMMILLER POEM— “Meditation” 46 AMYSPADE CULTURAL CALENDAR 47 Nicholas Boggs —Baldwin: A Love Story 31 REGINALDHARRIS Robert W. Fieseler —American Scare 32 FREDFEJES Nathan Kernan —A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler 34 ALANCONTRERAS Frank Pizzoli –Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work 35 HANKTROUT Don Romesburg – Contested Curriculum: LGBTQHistory Goes to School 36 JOHND’EMILIO BOOK BRIEFS 38 David Medina —Shakespeare’s Greatest Love 40 CHARLES GREEN Olivia Wolfgang-Smith —Mutual Interest 41 ANNE CHARLES Brian McNaught —A Prince of a Boy 44 DANIELA. BURR Ria Brodell —More Butch Heroes 44 JOANILACQUA Eli Clare—Unfurl: Survivals, Sorrows, and Dreaming 45 JOHNR. KILLACKY Michael Koresky —Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age... 46 ROBERTALLENPAPINCHAK ARTS BRIEFS 48 Looking for Love in Mostly Wrong Places (film roundup) 49 RICHARDSCHNEIDERJR. Forgotten Histories The Ascension of the Retail Queen 10 WILLIAMBENEMANN “Counter jumpers” were 19th-c. sales clerks, and so much more The Attraction of Confederate Gents 14 ANDREWHOLLERAN Civil War-era letters and photos hint at soldiers’ intimate relations A Romance Almost Lost to History 17 HARLANGREENE A famous Zionist and an anti-Semitic poet shared a youthful secret The French Evolution of Identities 19 VERNONROSARIO Following WWI, lesbians emerged as a recognizable social type First to Riot: The Girls of Los Guilucos 21 DENNYNIVENS Lesbians led the revolt at the California institution in 1953 Techv. Hate: Can AI Make Us Safer? 26 SHAHEENASHEIKH It can block hate speech, but it can also isolate our online spaces Léon Delafosse of the Belle Époque 29 CHARLES TIMBRELL The celebrated pianist ran with Proust, Sargent, and the smart set September–October 2025 3 GLRk
4 TheG&LR T W erman ed.” ible nPost ory.” Times se.” , led NCE: BY JOHN LOUGHERY, AUTHOR O “Aswee — exception “Loughery w THEO OF hhisto eping and ric ork —Warren Goldstein, TheNewY o nally intelligent pr writes calm, controll OTHER SIDE OF SILEN “A book…sub y informed a Adeepl —L AVAILABLE A btleand —Martin Dube evenhande ely accessi andentir ashington , The Lillian Faderman W p g Moving to early 20th-century America, Harlan Greene writes of an improbable love affair between two young men who would both go on to become prominent writers and educators. George Sylvester Viereck was a widely published poet and journalist who was later convicted of being a Nazi provocateur, while Ludwig Lewisohn was a popular novelist and possibly the most famous Zionist of his generation. Edna St. Vincent Millay is the subject of an Art Memo by Denise Noe, who brings out a side of the poet that the anthologies tend to ignore. Many of her poems express a fascination with women and even a sexual attraction to their beauty, while her private life reveals an exuberant history of relations with both men and women. Staying in this time frame but moving to France, Vernon Rosario explores an underground culture that long predates the arrival of a lesbian movement as such. New sexual identities for women emerged after World War I, but the subculture they formed, however rich and durable, kept a mostly low profile. Back in the U.S., an incident in 1953 gets Denny Nivens’ vote as the first LGBT riot in history. It happened at a northern California “school” for girls too young for adult incarceration at a time when just being homosexual could land you in prison or an asylum. Los Guilucos was a little of both, and its lesbian inmates played a key role in the fracas. RICHARDSCHNEIDERJR. NOTWITHSTANDING this issue’s theme, the cover features Charles Hefling’s gentle caricature of writer Edmund White, who passed away in June and is remembered here by three friends. It could be said that “forgotten histories” are the stock-intrade of this magazine: the discovery of people or places whose history has been neglected or actively suppressed. Many of these articles take this excavation a step further, bringing out activities that were deliberately hidden or disguised: underground worlds that didn’t leave a record by design, or episodes whose participants actively covered their tracks. The cases are presented in roughly chronological order. The earliest comes from our resident sleuth, William Benemann, who reports on a curious phenomenon of mid-19th-century America: a growing sales force of men who worked the counters in the new department stores and were often available for a variety of services, including sexual ones. After a promising start, their obvious queerness brought the “counter jumpers” into ill repute by the time of the Civil War. Speaking of which, an article by Andrew Holleran takes us to the Civil War era and a discourse on the homoerotic character of public posters and private photos and letters, especially in the South. Here the issue is that much of this is operating at the level of subtext or innuendo; but the author of Confederate Sympathies offers many intriguing facts to make his case. Early Fall: ‘Forgotten Histories’ FROM THE EDITOR
EDMUND WHITE, a dear friend, died suddenly in his New York apartment on June 3rd after suffering from a gastroenteritis infection. He was 85. He’d written more than a dozen works of fiction, four plays, numerous essays, and biographies of Arthur Rimbaud and Marcel Proust. His “magnificent” biography of Jean Genet, as critics called it, earned him the Pulitzer Prize. He received many other honors as well, including the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, at least two Lambda Literary Awards, and the rank of Officer in the Order of Arts and Letters from the French government. A devoted philhellene, he visited my country several times and spent three or four summers in Crete. I met him in New York in 2002 and we became friends immediately—unsurprisingly, since we shared many acquaintances. He was charming, soft-spoken, modest, kind, and often quietly ironic, with a sharp wit. A true cosmopolitan, he was a leading citizen of the gay community, which saw him as an icon. With his novel A Boy’s Own Storyin 1982, he launched a trilogy that would become the iconic coming out story for a generation. He lived on 22nd Street in Chelsea—an area I often visited because the gallery I worked with was nearby. His apartment was small, fairly tidy, and, like most writers’ homes, crammed with books. The walls were covered with small paintings and photographs. During my stays in New York, we would mostly meet at the local Greek restaurants, which had the best food. Over time, Edmund, who was never the athletic type, began gaining weight, and in 2012 he suffered two strokes. Not long after, in 2014, he had a heart attack. Not having seen him since before the pandemic, I visited Ed on May 21st—a gray, chilly day with a light drizzle. His husband, Michael Carroll, opened the door. Edmund was sitting right by the entrance in the dining room, which he used as a study. The living room now looked less orderly, filled with even more books, photos, and all kinds of objects. Despite his health problems, he was in good spirits—cheerful and welcoming. He could no longer walk and relied on Michael’s help. Before I could sit down, he said: “Go inside, straight down the hall. In the bedroom you’ll see your photograph—TheBoy with the Fishes.” Out of modesty, I hesitated, but he insisted on showing me how much he appreciated me. So I went, thanking him. When I returned, he was on the phone. He explained to the caller that he had a visitor and promised to call back later. After he hung up, he said to me: “He’s a student of mine from the Philippines. He wanted to kill himself—he’s heartbroken, and now he’s all alone, without friends. I’ll talk to him later.” Before I left, the young man had called back three or four times. Then Edmund showed me the latest book by the great Chinese writer Yiyun Li, who had stopped by earlier and given it to him as a gift. “Two of her sons have committed suicide,” he told me, sadly—perhaps unaware of the rather heavy atmosphere he was creating. To shift the mood, I asked how his latest book, The Loves of My Life, was doing. “You know,” he said, “some readers love my books, and others don’t. Do you remember the guy who tore intoHotel de Dream?” Of course I did—the book had moved me deeply, and I’d sent Edmund a warm and admiring email. He replied immediately, saying how much it meant to him—how comforting and encouraging my message had been, a balm for his soul. He’d just read a scathing review that had shaken him. “It was the most cruel and devastating review of my life,” he wrote. “What else are you working on?” I asked. “I have a new book coming out in January,” he said. “Right now I’m working on a biography of the brother of King Louis XIV of France.” In a low, mischievous voice full of innuendo, he began to explain teasingly what I already knew: “You know, he dressed as a woman—with all the accessories. He was married twice, had children, had lovers and a mistress!” He especially emphasized “and a mistress!” laughing uproariously—and of course I joined him. “Are you still a Lesbian?” was his favorite joke—a question he’d ask me every year, just to see if I was still going to the island of Lesbos for the summer. Then he began reminiscing about his summers in Chania, Crete, where he’d stayed in what had been a beautiful governor’s mansion (our mutual friend Charles Henri Ford had bought a house in the same town): “The mansion was lovely, and had a courtyard. A nice Englishwoman IN MEMORIAM Remembrances of Edmund White (1940–2025) September–October 2025 5 DIMITRIS YEROS Last Meeting with a Friend
MY FAVORITE ED WHITE STORY took place in Yale’s beautiful Beinecke Library, where I was doing research for a book on the Violet Quill. Yale had purchased Ed’s papers, and I was the first person to open the boxes in which he had unceremoniously dumped the contents of his drawers; the cartons were filled with kibble and dog treats, napkins, matchbooks with phone numbers hurriedly scribbled inside, and other detritus of a busy life. When I lifted one stack of papers, a photograph of Ed—not just naked but with a full erection—floated off the top and across the reading room. I tried to grab it, but the glossy sailed above the heads of the academics and toward the window. When I finally got hold of the photo, I expected to see everyone looking up at me angry and shocked, but no one noticed the frenzied pirouette to reclaim the pornographic image. The tale says more about scholars than it does about the 9x12 glossy of Ed’s attractive naked body. Still, it seems only proper that he should appear improperly undressed in so hallowed a place. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should say that Ed and I had wonderful sex on multiple occasions. Nothing special given his estimated 3,000 partners.) It has always been the louche parts of Ed’s work that I’ve thought deserved notice—his willingness not just to reveal what others would deem abject, but to thrust the abject their way. The last book White published during his life, The Loves of My Life, is subtitledA Sex Memoir, not a subject that an eminent man of letters in his eighties is supposed to write about: the book is filled with explicit sex. One notable example occurs after a sexual escapade with Stan Redfern, a friend from college who visited White days before his death. While still young, they vacationed in Puerto Rico, where they picked up two locals who “fucked us in the same room on twin beds without sheets while laughing and chatting”: “I shit out my partner’s semen (which we call his ‘babies’). I was pleased to see how copious it/they were. It wasn’t part of our intimacy repertoire for me to ask Stan how much sperm he’d harvested.” The brief passage plays with the notion of what is said and left unsaid in their “intimacy repertoire.” As a result of the language rules, White can speak of the copiousness of his partner’s ejaculation, while he cannot question Redfern about the consistency of his bowel movement. The delicacy of the language is mirrored in White’s uncertainty whether he should refer to jism in the singular or plural. Sex is not at the center of this passage; it is semen and shit, which regresses to the childlike reference to sperm as “babies.” The passage ends withharvested, a turn toward the pastoral. So, what begins as lines out of William Burroughs or John Rechy turns into child’s play that ends with a suave gesture towardThe Shepheardes Calender of that other Edmund, Edmund Spenser. Or perhaps we are meant to picture that very American scene—two innocents being cornholed in a hayloft above an International Harvester. What other American writer can in the space of three sentences evoke four very different cultural settings through the magic of his diction or can make us so fully aware of language as anthropological artifact that causes both wincing and laughlived there, married to an American soldier. Charles Henri Ford visited us regularly because the wife used to type up his manuscripts. One day, while he was talking to the American soldier, the man said: ‘Well, I threw out all my old letters.’And Charles said: ‘You must never throw them out—you could sell them to Harvard for millions of dollars!’” And Edmund burst out laughing at our friend’s ironic advice. The poet James Merrill and the painter John Craxton also lived in Chania. They were all close. “Craxton used to ride back and forth from London on his motorcycle,” Edmund said, both impressed and slightly alarmed. And then, dropping his voice conspiratorially again: “You know, my friend James Merrill, he knew many of those Athens palace guards.” As time went on, I asked if I could take his picture to capture a few more cherished memories. He gladly agreed. But when I picked up my camera for our final meeting, a kind of melancholy came over me. I didn’t feel capable of capturing anything truly evocative. Still, I took a few photos—ones that may some day have value, but only as documents. A week later, when Michael told me of Edmund’s sudden death, I was overwhelmed by shock and grief. He was one of the last of a remarkable era—one that had everything: love, freedom, revolution, companionship, endless parties, romance, pleasure ... and many deaths too, which made some people stronger. It was also an age of great writers, artists, and thinkers. I count myself among the lucky ones who lived through that time—and had the chance to know people such as Edmund. ______________________________________________________________________________ Dimitris Yeros is an Athens-based artist and photographer whose works have been shown at dozens of solo exhibitions around the world. Edmund White in 2002. Photo by Dimitris Yeros. 6 TheG&LR &BOOKLOVERS READERS ATTENTION Tim’s Used Books 242 Commercial Street, Provincetown, MA timsusedfilms@gmail.com | 508-487-0005 | Open year-round. Are TIM’S USED BOOKS of Provincetown has been traveling throughout the Northeast since 1991, buying book collections, large and small. Scholarly, gay interest, the arts—all genres. Immediate payment and removal. DAVIDBERGMAN Ed’s ‘Intimacy Repertoire’
I FIRST CAME TO KNOW Edmund White through his work, of course, which was de rigueur reading for gay guys coming of age in the 1970s and ’80s. Years later, we met through social media exchanges, after which he invited me to West 22nd Street to act as a fill-in caregiver-typist-companion. Ed was recovering from a series of small strokes in 2012 and didn’t want to be left alone. His boyfriend (later husband) Michael Carroll was leaving for Chapel Hill to help his friend Phil move from there up to Boston. In Michael’s absence, I was hired to give Ed a hand with his new book manuscript, Inside a Pearl: My Years in Paris. Through our correspondence, he learned that I was a French major and devoted Francophile. He and Michael got a kick out of the fact that I’d been friends with writer M. F. K. Fisher and had had dealings with Lowell native Bette Davis. Ed’s daily regimen was this: up early, breakfast, usually consisting of cereal, strong coffee, a sweet roll, perhaps while checking his email, catching up on correspondence. This was followed by work, dictating what he’d written the night before. He wrote longhand in black ink. Right away, he asked me how a sentence or two could be improved. But this was the renowned Edmund White, and I said, “I wouldn’t presume—,” to which he purred: “Please do.” Ed had a habit of quite suddenly running the palm of his hand over his face, from forehead to chin, in one, rapid movement. Before I realized this was a nervous tic, I took it to mean he was exasperated with my work performance. Work would wrap up around noon for lunch, usually restaurant sushi or a sandwich (always Ed’s treat). This would often be followed “for fun” by Ed giving a lecture at one or another prestigious venue around town before coming home to get ready for his guests. Ed loved to entertain; he would arrange the most delightful gatherings in the manner of what his lifelong friend, artist Marilyn Schaefer, called “dumpling evenings,” intimate get-togethers and dinners (never more than six guests). Ed had an almost psychic knack for bringing people together who would get along famously. A string of literary lights passed through that lovely room: John Rechy, Benjamin Taylor, Joyce Carol Oates, Barry McCrea, Gabe Hudson, J. D. McClatchy, Chip Kidd, Christopher Bram, Alfred Corn. Ed kneweverybody. He kept a heady schedule (I had a hard time keeping up). There was an Auntie Mame aspect to Ed’s character; in the middle of work or business, he’d be seized with an idea: “Let’s go to the theater!” “Let’s go try this new restaurant!” He’d grab his coat (he was fond of an old Miyake frock) and head us out the door. He loved squiring me and others around Manhattan and was a kid on Christmas over the latest Broadway play—he disdained musicals—or restaurant. In Ed’s company, there was never a dull moment. After a performance of Balanchine’s Jewels at Lincoln Center, we spied Peter Martins in the lobby and went over for a chat. During my work visits, we ran into Alan Cumming strolling the Garment District; Charles Blow in the men’s room at Babbo; Thomas Mallon in City Hall Park; Mark Doty, Sarah Schulman, and a rising Ocean Vuong in the East Village’s Phoenix Bar. Ed was inordinately generous; he liked handing out wads of cash. One time, in payment for what didn’t amount to more than a morning’s work, he slipped $500 into my hand. He was possessed of a voracious appetite—for food, for people, for sex. There’s no describing what a brilliant, fertile mind he had, or what delightful company he could be. He was capable of expounding on Balzac and Proust one minute and be collapsed on the floor in laughter the next, possibly over a joke about actresses with serial husbands (like Liz Taylor and Hedy Lamarr) and what a nightmare they must have been to live with. He got a charge out of seeing how a guy my age could be so gullible, and once had me convinced that he’d composed the national anthem of Burma. When I was back home, he had the disarming habit of ringing me up, saying not “hello” but chiming excitedly “Write this down!” and would dictate an anecdote he’d remembered and wanted preserved. Ed would retire early to his bedroom, but I don’t think he ever slept; he’d be up all night writing, listening to the radio, or reading. He read at an almost extraterrestrial speed, and one bedtime I remember he began Lanny Hammer’s thousand-page biography of James Merrill, and by morning had finished it. Ed usually played opera while he wrote; he said music facilitated his writing. Michael Carroll was the opposite, needing complete silence. When he wrote, he wore ear plugs. Both he and Ed were thoughtful hosts. Remembering that Miloš Forman’s Amadeus was one of my favorite films, Michael went out and rented it, and they ran a private screening in Ed’s bedroom. A very special Christmas Eve. I’ve kept thousands of emails that Ed sent me through the years. Whenever I need a lift and a laugh, I pull one up and feel much better. Ed’s company, whether in person or on the page, made of life something sparkling, something special. The thought that this reservoir of creativity has left us forever is shocking. _____________________________________________________________________________ Leo Racicot, a poet, essayist, and food writer, is the author of Alone in the Yard and See You Again in the Spring: Remembering M. F. K. Fisher and Her Circle of Friends. ter? What made the gay culture of White’s time so rich was its ability to combine high and low cultural registers seamlessly— fromLa Traviatato The Anvil and back again. But there were limits to this exposure, things that because of the “intimacy repertoire” must remain unsaid. In The Loves of My Life, White wrote: “I’ve always thought that writing about someone is the kiss-off. ... My husband is Michael Carroll, whom I’ve been with since 1995. I’ve never written about him; he’s too precious to me.” In our last email exchange, I asked Ed about the expression “kiss-off,” which sounds rather noir. He wrote back: “I meant that we factor into our feelings about lovers, their own ambitions and hopes and goals, whereas a portrait in words freezes someone in a moment in time and, finally, is dismissive. It is about someone’s being, not their becoming. Most people live a bit or a lot in the future, whereas a portrait freezes them in this moment. That’s why people resent writers, who seem to be getting the last laugh.” One’s “intimacy repertoire” doesn’t stifle expression but allows people and things the space to grow, to develop, to change before language freezes them. As the author of three biographies, he allowed even the dead the dignity of remaining unsettled. White would want an unquiet grave and to resist anyone who thought he (or she) was getting the last laugh. ______________________________________________________________________________ David Bergman is the poetry editor of this magazine. September–October 2025 7 LEORACICOT Vignettes from Memory
Tom Armitage & Paul Selwold Richard A. Barker & Matthew E. Schlansky Michael Barrett Richard Bekins Allen W. Bernard Ken Borelli Thomas Bower Samuel D. Brown Wendyn Cadden Denis Cagna & Carlos Medina Michael Carson & Ron Steigerwalt, PhD Art Cohen Geoff Corso & Marshall McClintock John Newmeyer Trent Norris & Jack Calhoun Brian Oleksak & Gonzalo Avila Jack Padovano & Phillip Baker Curtis Scribner RonSeidle Stephen B. Thayer & Howard E. Terry In memory of Jacob Trumbower Dean Waller Douglas J. Warn Stewart Watson Jr. Robin Weingast & Claire Zeppieri Chuck Whelan Thomas A. Zanoni Thomas Huish & John Mathewson Michael Jarvis & Craig Larson John C. Knepper David LaFontaine Carroll Edward Lahniers William Lauch Paul Lerner & Stephen Reis Charles W. Leslie JohnLloyd Fred Martin Raymond Matta M.D. Al Monetta & Bruce Voss Mark Mullin Maury Newburger Robert Nicoson Stanley Cushing & Daniel Lyons James J Dowd Jr. Heyward Drummond Bill Evans Fantastic Fund of the Sacramento Community Foundation Marc Geller William J. Gracie Jr. & Daniel J. Fairbanks Stephen Graham Seth Grosshandler & & Kim Wainwright John Hager & Ron Geatz James & William Harrison David Hopmann & James Taul Jr. Anonymous (3) Iory Allison Eric Allman & Kirk McKusick Richard C. Alter & Eric D. Johnson Harry Anderson RodBoren JerryBoyd Kevin Burns Antonio Calcagno Donald J. Cimilluca Stewart Clifford RayCoe Michael Craft Mitchell Crane Paul Loeffler & Mike Sullivan Kevin McNamara Joseph V. Melillo Andrew Miller & Bell Yung Martha Miller Thomas Emil Nixon & DanSherbo John T. Nolan Roderick F. O’Connor David Peckman & Michael Baffa In memory of Larry Phillips Harry Rosenberg Robert Ross Dennis Hall Leland Hall James S. Heuer Charles D. Hewett Robert Heylmun Joseph Hoesl John Hudson Michael P. Hughes & Mark A. Plants Alice Jay Jeffrey Johnson David J. Klein GaryKrivy Bill Kux Raymond J. DeAngelo Dr. Rolf Danner & Jeff Rothenbach Jack Dodson Carl Duyck William Fanning FredFejes Kenneth Fulton David Garrity Thomas Gerber John A. Gibson Robert Giron & Ken Schellenberg Thomas J. Gormly James Gother Kevin Schack Jan Schoenhaus Michael Schwarz Dr. Milton W. Seiler Jr. & Marshall W. Lee Laurence Senelick Gyorge Shalvoy Jeffrey Sharlach Michael Siegel Kirk S. Thomas Jim Thomas & Fred Provencher Bill Watson Louis Wiley Jr. Philip Willkie FRIENDS OF THE REVIEW FRIENDS OF THE REVIEWare readers who donated $150+ toThe Gay & Lesbian Review, a 501(c)(3) educational corporation, in 2024. All gifts are fully tax-deductible. SUSTAINERS ($600–1,199) BENEFACTORS ($1,200–4,999) LEADERSHIPCIRCLE ($5,000+) Anonymous Eric Anderson & Roger Beck In memory of Wade S. Bentson In memory of Charles S. Longcope Jr. Michael Manganiello SueReamer In memory of Jim Stepp Thomas B. Depriest Robert Hardman James Hess & Robert Herald Harold Koda Paradise Regained Of all the indignities suffered by Oscar Wilde after his 1895 arrest—the public humiliation, the two years of hard labor in Reading Gaol, exile in France after his release—we haven’t talked about the heartache of losing his library card. It turns out his reading card for the British Museum Reading Room was revoked when his legal troubles erupted. Thus it is heartening to know that the British Library has reinstated his library card after 130 years. In a ceremony that only the Brits could pull off without looking hokey, the reinstated pass was presented to Wilde’s grandson, Merlin Holland, a Wilde scholar and biographer. Describing the symbolic restitution as “a lovely gesture of forgiveness” by which his grandfather would have been touched, he hastened to add that Oscar would probably not have accepted the blanket pardon enacted in 2017 for the 50,000 to 100,000 men convicted of “gross indecency” over many decades: “Oscar didn’t think there was anything wrong in same-sex love,” so there was nothing to pardon! One final question: given that Wilde was in no position to return any borrowed books after the arrest, is it safe to assume that any outstanding fines for late books were forgiven? Those Best Laid Plans “Nobody represents anything,” pronounced Nan Goldin in these pages many years ago; everyone is an individual. In that spirit, kudos to Vivian Jenna Wilson on her debut performance at L.A.’s “Save Her” fundraiser in June, where @Vivllainous crushed it with her dramatic dancing and song. But the fact that Vivian is the progeny of Elon Musk makes it impossible not to read alittlesomething into it. We won’t rehash Elon’s politics, but matters of paternity are more interesting. The best guess is that he has fourteen children, most or all of whom were conceived artificially to ensure that they’d be male. This army of sons appears to be part of his ultimate mission (world domination?), so the arrival of Vivian as a trans woman could carry any number of lessons. Vivian’s perBTW
Jerry Ammer & Jim Machocek Randall Arndt Bruce Arnold & James Labi Gary M. Arthur TomBaker Terry Belanger Joseph Bell Charles Bjorklund & Sted Mays Matthew Black William R. Bonsal Steven Bourne Dale Boyer & Scot O’Hara DavidBray Jason Cannon & Andy Ball James Carnelia Stephen Carney Jim Cassaro Patrick Cather William J. Cavanaugh Paul G. Cellupica Roberto Ceriani Robert Chaloner Gary Clinton Robert Cloud Justin Coveyou David Crocker Fred Cummins Patrick Curtin Dr. John Adam Vince Aletti Paul Anagnostos & Brian Price Richard Alther James Doig Anderson Gary Alan Anderson William Arndt James Arthurs Michele Aina Barale Raymond Bashista DavidBeck Carl W. Becker Michael Beek BruceBell David Benson Mashey Bernstein David Bjork Bjorn Bjorklund ErikBlanc Michael K. Boe Rosemary Booth & Jerry O’Leary Peter Brenner JimBrogan Jeffrey Brosnan Thomas Burke Peter Cameron Daniel Campbell Victor Carlson Frank Carson Larry G. Carter, PhD George Castleman Stan J. Pogroszewski Charles Popper, in honor of Leland Perry William R. Powell JerryRehm Stuart L. Rich George Robb Rex A. Roberts Charles Roberts & Craig Combs Dr. G. Louis Rowles Stephen T. Russell Paul Schilling Doug Serafin Camilla Serrano George W. Shardlow, PhD In memory of Victor Shargai Richard Shirey A.V. Shirk, in memory of Bill Costley Harvey Silberman Eric Slater Richard Smith John O. Snyder Neil Spisak Andrew Stancliffe Robert Starshak, M.D. Dennis P. Stradford DanStuder John David Tekian Gerald Markovitz & Cameron Jobe Wayne P. Marshall Joaquin Martinez-Pizarro Danny C. Matherly Bill Mayhan John W McKenna Richard Meiss Robert Melton Russell Miller Nick Mischel Enrique Moreno Skip Moskey & Kevin Hamilson James A. Mueller David Murdock Anthony Napoli Gordon Nebeker Michael Neisen JohnNoran Kurt Ollmann Joe Ortiz & Paul Hinkle M.A. Ortiz & N.J. Cassun Dean Papademetriou Michael A. Pargee Roger Parris & Michael Longo Daniel A. Pavsek, PhD John J. 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News Flash: Marriage Equality Lowers Divorce Rates! Aswe mark the tenth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage, LGBTQNation.com reminds us that ten years ago a key argument against marriage equality was that it would cause heterosexual divorce rates to surge. The logic was convoluted, but they needed to show that gay marriage actively harmed marriage as an institution. Same-sex marriage, they claimed, “will entrench an understanding of marriage that elevates adult fulfillment over children’s needs.” But since parents often stay together solely for the kids, the demotion of “children’s needs” will release parents (i.e., fathers) from any such concern, and off they’ll go. So, here we are ten years later and—wait for it—divorce rates for straight couples are significantly lower than before (from 9.8 per thousand in 2012 to a mere 7.1 in 2022), a statistic that probably has nothingto do with same-sex marriage. Haters Gonna Hate A story widely reported in the UK concerned the felling of a very old, solitary, almost sacred tree near Hadrian’s Wall in the north of England, the site of marriages and memorial services and countless photo ops. Two men were caught after clever sleuthing and have fessed up, offering no explanation beyond that they did it for the fun of it. The judge sentenced Daniel Graham and Adam Carruthers to an unusually harsh 51 months in prison for the sheer cruelty of their deed. In due course it was learned that only nine days earlier they’d been arrested for a hate crime—a physical assault on a gay man accompanied by anti-gay slurs at a rest stop—but the Cumbria Police had declined to bring charges due to “insufficient evidence.” Two unrelated crimes, but why doesn’t it surprise us that the same two guys who got off on killing a beloved tree also enjoy attacking the occasional gay person?
EVERYONE FROM THE ASTORS to the gutter sweepers called it the Marble Palace, though that wasn’t its name. A. T. Stewart & Co. graced the east side of Broadway, the unfashionable side, the side where the merciless afternoon sun turned the sidewalks to griddles and sent New Yorkers scurrying to the shaded shops on the better side. Despite the store’s déclassé location, when the Marble Palace opened its doors in 1846, The New York Herald gushed at its elegance: “The walls and ceiling are painted in fresco, and the tinting and design are exquisitely chaste, classic, and tasteful— There is one large chandelier in the main hall, that is not surpassed in beauty by anything we have ever seen.” The ceiling was supported by fluted columns of glistening Italian marble, topped with ornate capitals carved into an intricate design of a cornucopia and a caduceus of Mercury, the god of commerce. This was no garish display of mercantile ostentation. “Its decorations, in general and in detail, are of the most chaste and classic description. There is no gaudy gilding or tinsel show to disgust refined taste, but everything is ornate and elegant.” The focal point of the new emporium—one soon to be copied by stores in Boston, San Francisco, and London—was an elegant central dome soaring ninety feet above a circular sales floor. When Stewart built a new store a few blocks away, near Astor Place, his signature dome was replaced by an even larger atrium, with five mezzanine levels enclosed by massive iron balustrades. “Leaning over one of these balustrades, and looking up or down, the sight is brilliant and attractive,” wrote one critic. “Thousands of persons are scattered about the floors making purchases. Hundreds of clerks, salesmen, and cash boys are busy serving them, and the buz [sic] and hum of human voices under the vast roof sounds like the droning of a hive of bees.” That buzz could have been much louder. It was the custom in New York stores at the time for clerks and patrons to wrangle over the price of the items for sale, turning every hat shop in Manhattan into the souk of Algiers. Stewart found the practice gauche and unrefined, and in his Marble Palace he initiated a policy of fixed pricing. He knew what each item in his inventory had cost him to acquire and how much the current market would bear, and he set his prices accordingly. But having banned vulgar haggling from his store, Stewart needed to find another way for his sales clerks to nudge reluctant purchasers. He decided to use sex. A contemporary business writer deESSAY The Ascension of the Retail Queen WILLIAMBENEMANN William Benemann is the author of Unruly Desires: American Sailors and Homosexualities in the Age of Sail, and the forthcoming When We Found Each Other: Gay Men in 19th-Century America. scribed it in more elegant terms: “He had noticed that the ladies, in ‘shopping,’ were given to the habit of gossiping, and even flirting with the clerks, and he adopted the expedient of employing as his salesmen the handsomest men he could procure, a practice which has since become common. The plan was successful from the first. Women came to his store in greater numbers than before, and ‘Stewart’s nice young men’ were the talk of the town.” Fortunately for Stewart, it was easy in New York to procure handsome young men who liked to gossip and flirt. In the 19th century, the city’s population exploded, increasing from 200,000 in 1830 to more than half a million in 1850. By 1870 that number had almost doubled. Clerks were the thirdlargest occupational group in New York, drawn primarily from the ranks of newly arrived immigrants and strapping country boys fresh off the farm. They were young: In a sample taken from records covering the period 1850 to 1855, between sixty and seventy percent of the clerks were under the age of 25, almost all of them unmarried and living unsupervised in ramshackle boardinghouses. In the past, clerks had been primarily apprentices, starting at the bottom rung with a dream of eventually climbing to the top. But now there were not enough ladders to climb, and any young man hired as a clerk faced the prospect that he might not ascend much higher in his profession. The sudden influx of young single men living without parental control set off alarms and triggered a barrage of conduct books aimed at alerting young men to the dangers of city life. “The newly-arrived boy or young man plunges into trouble and danger the hour he sets foot in the city,” one book warned. Perhaps the gravest danger lurked in the young man’s own boardinghouse: Evil company is often elegant, delightful, and fascinating; and inexperience cannot escape the coils of the gilded serpent. What is greatly to be deplored is, that associates of this sort do not wait to be sought out, but make the first advances, and not unfrequently lie in wait for the new arrival. Unless the novice is on his guard against these seducers, he will certainly fall. Most deadly is the poison, when evil companions are under the same roof, perhaps at the same table, or even, by a wretched custom, in the same bed. Better to be chained to yellow fever or small-pox, than joined to a vicious room-mate. Clerks who managed to fend off their bedmate’s gilded serpent might still become enmeshed in New York’s rampant sex culture, and for heterosexual men working in department stores, being familiar with the city’s brothels and sex workers could actually improve one’s chances of advancement. Stewart’s strategy of employing handsome clerks to flirt with his customers was only one nod to the adage that “sex sells.” There were also By the 1830s, male store clerks had become a recognized subcategory of the labor market: they were the “counter jumpers.” 10 TheG&LR
cruder applications of the principle. Buyers from Chicago and St. Louis and Cincinnati would travel to New York twice a year to order inventory for their local stores. These men were far from home, well aware of New York’s “sporting” culture of gambling dens, saloons, and brothels, and eager to sample the sins of the big city during their brief visits. Store owners often turned to their young clerks to act as sex guides to the back alleys and elegant bordellos of Manhattan. Clerks would trade tips with one another about the best places to engage sex workers, both for themselves and for their outof-town clients, frequently sharing unnecessarily detailed descriptions of their encounters. Historian Patricia Cline Cohen writes: “the intense curiosity about each other’s performance suggests that for these young men, heterosexuality had a homosocial dimension.” It was, Cohen maintains, as though the clerks were saying to one another: “Look at the prized woman I sleep with, have sex with her, and thus learn something of how I experience sex. Their eagerness to imagine friends having sex … suggest[s] the culture of sexuality in this circle of young men had homoerotic dimensions.” § IN THE CITIES OF 19TH-CENTURYAMERICA, store clerks were so numerous that they became a recognized subcategory of the labor market, one with its own amusing stereotype. By at least the mid-1830s, many were being referred to as “counter jumpers.” It began as a term of mild mockery, but as the decades passed and the phalanx of retail clerks grew and developed distinctive traits in the public imagination, the epithet became more aggressively dismissive, slowly curdling like sour milk. At first it made gentle fun of the obsequious young men so eager to serve customers that they scurried from counter to counter, smiling and bobbing, abasing themselves to make a sale. As the workforce expanded to include more farm boys and aspiring immigrants posing stiffly behind the counters of elegant department stores, the term was used to deride the hayseed rubes and striving foreigners who ludicrously aped their betters— counterfeit gentry whose thin veneer of sophistication could so easily and humorously crack. When store owners like Stewart encouraged their clerks to charm their female customers through smiles and banter, counter jumpers began to be viewed as dangerous seducers. Female customers tended to shop in the fancy department stores without male companions, and handsome young men showering them with attention could, it was feared, turn the heads of impressionable girls and neglected wives. Particularly fraught were encounters involving the sale of perfumes or intimate apparel. At the end of a day of flirting with respectable women, a stereotypical clerk decked himself out in the latest garish fashions—much of which he could barely afford on his salary of five dollars a week—and strutted the streets of Manhattan, a raffish dandy who sported with his pals in taverns, gambling “hells,” and brothels. Counter jumpers were maligned as predatory rakes and foppish seducers. They were unmanly and unambitious parasites, afraid of hard work and motivated only by the pursuit of pleasure. On the eve of the Civil War, the public’s disdain for department store clerks had fallen far below gentle ridicule and taken on toxic—though utterly confused—gender implications. Explains historian Brian Luskey: “Male clerks were at once heterosexually rapacious as well as effeminate, deviant dandies who lingered on the margins of Victorian America’s sexual categories. The sporting press responded to their ambiguous sexual identities by coupling them with sodomites whose ‘unnatural sexuality’ also troubled contemporaries.” A reputation for seducing female customers and for riotous carousing in brothels was no protection against the suspicion of secret sodomy. Some even suggested the opposite: that clerks who “spent their leisure hours curling each other’s hair” used their effeminacy as a clever ruse “to get otherwise respectable young ladies to spend the evening in their boardinghouse rooms.” In a society obsessed with ferreting out fakes and confidence men, store clerks were seen as masters of deception, men adept at hiding their true selves, effeminate wraiths only pretending to be real men—or dangerous seducers hiding behind a pansy façade. Even Walt Whitman disparaged store clerks as milksops who fell far from his ideal of the brawny blue-collar worker. In an 1856 article in the magazine Life Illustrated, Whitman depicted them as “a slender and round-shouldered generation, of minute leg, chalky face, and hollow chest—but trig and prim in [the] great glow of shiny boots, clean shirts ... [and] startling cravats, and hair all soaked and ‘slickery’ with sickening oils. Creatures of smart appearance, when dressed up; but what wretched, spindling, ‘forked radishes’ would they be, and how ridiculously would their natty demeanor appear if suddenly they could all be stript naked!” Of all the many critics of New York’s retail clerks, perhaps only Whitman would picture them with their clothes off. § COMMENTS ON THE EFFEMINACYof store clerks were common in the popular press. Alice B. Neal in Godey’s Lady’s Book wrote sardonically of an imagined visitor to New York who had been September–October 2025 11 FromVanity Fair, January 28, 1860. The caption reads: “Shakespeare for the Counter-Jumpers. ‘You should be women./ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/ That you are so.’ —Macbeth, Act 1, Scene 3.”
“introduced to the wonders of Stewart’s marble palace” and “the smiles, and bows, and politeness of the perfumed and bewhiskered young gentlemen who unfolded the muslins, and rolled up the ribbons, and sorted the gloves for you. Did it not strike you as an exceedingly noble and manly employment, so befitting masculine strength and energy?” Freeman Hunt, writing in his Merchants’ Magazine, was more pointedly dismissive: “I almost lose my temper when I see a fellow standing six feet in his stockings, or a neat dapper-dandy of less dimensions, ‘dressed to kill,’ measuring out a yard of ribbon or tape, or descanting on the color or shade of a piece of silk, placing it in folds to hold in different lights, in order to show ‘how beautifully it would make up.’” It was the satiric magazine Vanity Fair that subjected store clerks to the most demeaning treatment in the form of a vicious, yearlong assault of articles, poems, and cartoons, most written by Fitz-James O’Brien and illustrated by Frank Henry Temple Bellew. O’Brien and Bellew were the first American journalists to carry on a sustained, targeted attack on a profession perceived to be dominated by gay men. The issue for January 28, 1860, was savage in its denunciation. “These wretched effeminate, mostly uneducated, creatures, smirking and smiling all day long across a counter; these fellows whose highest ambition it is to be able to measure merino with grace, and sell sarsenet with suavity; these muscle-less, slim-shouldered, flat-chested bipeds are at the bottom of one of the greatest social evils of the present time.” O’Brien let it be known that he would be publishing no gentle satire in the coming issues of Vanity Fair, and that he had no intension of backing off his campaign. “The subject is one so important that we cannot, even if we would, be funny while treating it. But we do not intend to let it drop. We will, if we can, kill these heroes of the ell-wand [measuring stick] by inches.” Over the next months, O’Brien labeled retail clerks “the knights of simperdom,” and wondered: “Could they get their bread and butter, their lemon-soda and cinnamon cigars, by working as men, after having so long been something less than women?” His articles dripped with contempt for the men’s appearance. “They are curled and dyed and dressed and scented, regardless of all expense. ... Their hands are white and their nails oval. They all look as if each was the twin brother of the other.” (Evidently the clone look has a long history.) One particularly derisive poem announced: “I am the Counter-jumper, weak and effeminate/ … I am the shelves on which lie the damaged goods;/ the damaged goods themselves I am,/ … For I am the creature of weak depravities.” The most revealing of Bellew’s illustrations for Vanity Fair was titled “Shakespeare for the Counter-Jumpers” and was captioned with a quotation from Macbeth’s first encounter with the three Weird Sisters: “You should be women,/ And yet your beards forbid me to interpret/ That you are so.” The drawing shows the interior of a dry goods store in which customers are being waited on by five clerks, all of them men with beards, mustaches, or muttonchops, and all wearing billowing Victorian dresses. The facial hair is significant. These are not O’Brien’s “muscle-less, slim-shouldered, flat-chested bipeds,” nor Whitman’s “wretched spindling forked radishes”; they are closer to Freeman Hunt’s “fellow standing six feet in his stockings.” The counter jumpers in Bellew’s drawing are clearly not lacking in testosterone. They are just men doing something that society tells them men shouldn’t do. The disconnect between text and image hints at the irony of O’Brien’s repeated attacks on the counter-jumpers. O’Brien was himself something of a parading peacock, known for his signature loud plaid suits, and he was a fixture at Pfaff’s beer cellar in Greenwich Village, the most popular hangout for New York’s artsy bohemian crowd. Historian Ruth L. Bohan suggests there was a reason store clerks were singled out for so much unearned hostility: Despite their considerable animosity toward the counter jumper and the world he represented, the writers and artists at Vanity Fair saw in this much-maligned figure’s oppositional posture toward the dominant culture visceral reminders of their own precarious status as members of the city’s Bohemian community. Like counter jumpers, Bohemians operated on the margins of nineteenth-century bourgeois society. ... Like the counter jumper, the writers and artists at Pfaff’s continually flouted society’s norms, performed no hard physical work, and often attracted attention with their flamboyant attire. They were also journeymen in their fields who spent their evenings socializing in the saloons with their male friends while simultaneously striving to propel themselves up the next rung of the literary ladder. The close parallels with the lives of silk-and-ribbon clerks were unsettling for these men, so the public’s attention needed to be redirected, distinctions needed to be made. The men in New York’s bohemian crowd prided themselves on their blithe refusal to bow to societal norms, including those concerning sex—but there were limits. It was fine to vogue and camp and frighten the horses, so long as one didn’t actuallyhave sex with another man. Whitman was called out for crossing that non-negotiable line. When O’Brien reviewed the 1856 edition of Leaves of Grass, he praised its “manly vigor, its brawny health,” and yet denounced it also as “the coarsest indecency.” Whitman, he charged, “roots like a pig among a rotten garbage of licentious thoughts” and returns “with a seemingly exhaustless prurient pleasure to the same licentious phrases and ideas.” Whitman might insist to the public that he is merely being frank and natural “with all this muck of abomination soiling the pages,” but O’Brien was led to ask, “What Centaur have we here, half man, half beast?” In this early review O’Brien revealed the animus he would later unleash on retail clerks. Men who were perceived to be having sex with other men were not just unmanly, they were not even a “third sex.” In O’Brien’s view they were an entirely separate species. On the Origin of Species had recently been published and its theories had begun to seep into New York’s intelligentsia. Perhaps the cruelest assault in Vanity Fair was published under the title “Natural History, the Counter-Jumper.” The debt to Darwin is clear. This truly singular and beautiful animal exists throughout the civilized world, but is only found in perfection in large cities. Its favorite haunts in this region are about the middle of the metropolis—in Broadway, Grand and Canal-streets, the Bowery, and vicinity. It is generally about the size of the human species, and bears a resemblance to man, as well as to the ape tribe, with which it is often classified, I think erroneously. So far as my studies go, I consider the COUNTER-JUMPER nomore 12 TheG&LR
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