The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review
The Harvard Gay & Lesbian ReviewThere follow brief excerpts from some of the many articles that have appeared in The Review over the past year-and-a-half. You may jump directly to excerpts from articles by Andrew Holleran , Camille Paglia , David Bergman , Karla Jay , Edmund White or Marina Tsvetaeva . Please note that these passages are abstracted from much longer articles!
The frontier may have closed, but finally in Lowell House, I myself was opening up. I began noticing people besides Joel and Dick; making other friends. One was an assistant professor of English who gave me a part in An Evening with Oscar Wilde in the common room, and who led a seminar on Tennessee Williams I took, and whose own book on Emily Dickinson had just come out. Road-signs, it would seem, at this distance. But sexuality is not so easily perceived when young. Once after lecturing on Walt Whitman, we went to lunch in the dining hall, and when we asked if we could sit at his table with him, he looked up, sighed, and said: "If you promise not to ask if Whitman was homosexual." I hadn't been about to, but, like my experience at Student Health, this confirmed my impression that homosexuality was a neurotic bore, a tiresome insecurity of anxious undergraduates and nothing more. Yet I was also aware of this professor's close friendship with another tutor in the house, and the fact that he was 35 and unmarried-a fact that must have allowed me to feel closer to him than to other instructors. I was aware, too, of other friendships; another tutor, in particular, and a sophomore, who were both very handsome and went out together in the evening so well dressed they looked like Edwardian fops. And two students, a sleepy-eyed blond and a dark-haired fellow with a faint case of acne who would walk around our courtyard in spring in black leather pants, actually cracking a big black whip. .... [Top]
Here is my working hypothesis about gay men: It is not homosexuality that is inborn; homosexuality is an adaptation after the fact, an adaptation to a certain kind of personality which may in fact be inborn. Researchers were suggesting as long as 25 years ago that artists-all artists, gay or straight, but visual artists particularly-possess from earliest childhood a kind of perceptual openness, a kind of hyper-responsive-ness to color and form. This trait could even have some relationship to autism, in which there's a tremendous influx of sensory phenomena that the person has difficulty organizing. I think that this hyper-responsiveness may be what begins the pattern that ends up in male homosexuality. .... This boy is different from the outset. He is "sensitive"; he is dreamy. The mother knows he's different and he knows it, too. It is not that he wants to become his mother, but he's attracted to what is in his mother's boudoir: the fabrics, the objects that make up her world. He is drawn to the beauty, the tactile pleasure of the fabrics in her closet: the silks, the nubby wools, and so on. .... The boy is also attracted to her makeup, not because he wants to put it on, but because the lipsticks are essentially paint. He admires the beauty of the perfume containers, these beautiful objects on his mother's dressing table. This boy's mother likes him because he is more like her: He is quiet; he is integrated much better into her world. .... [Top]
Dear Bruce, I must admit that I never really understood this distinction between "subculture-oriented" and "mainstream" gays. Whenever I thought I was getting a clear notion, you'd say something that thoroughly confused me. Here, for example, is how you describe the "subculture-oriented gay" living "near one extreme" of the gay lifestyles: he is a person "born into a more or less ordinary family in Wisconsin or Missouri or Georgia" who comes to live in a gay ghetto, work at a "marginal [or] at least vaguely artistic" job, patronize gay businesses and cultural events, belong to "at least one AIDS-related organization," and whose "'life-style' would probably be considered aggressively nonconformist by most Americans." What first struck me about this description is that it doesn't seem to me extreme at all. I know a lot of people a lot more "deviant" than this man. In fact your aggressive nonconformist in many ways appears to be a model citizen. After all, here's a guy who works for a living, pays his taxes, obeys the law, contributes to the local economy, remains politically informed and civically conscious, helping out people less fortunate than himself. If most people regard him as "aggressively nonconformist," where's the sin? Isn't this a land of liberty and freedom where people are supposed to be allowed to live as they choose as long as they don't hurt anyone? What's the difference between being a "nonconformist" and "individualistic"? In your disdain for the "aggressively nonconformist," I am reminded of John Stuart Mill, who wrote in On Liberty: In this age, the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service. Precisely because the tyranny of opinion is such as to make eccentricity a reproach, it is desirable, in order to break through that tyranny, that people should be eccentric...." You might find that those nipple clamps and bike pants are not an enemy of democracy, but two of the foot soldiers in the war against "the tyranny of opinion." [Top]
RYAN PROUT: You talk about writers like Marguerite Yourcenar and Nietzsche, who don't so much evolve as endlessly tease out themes set very early on in their lives. Do you see your own writing as evolutionary? EDMUND WHITE: I think it took me quite a while to reach homosexuality as the primary subject matter of a novel. It was partly a question of my own need to undo a strictly personal reticence in talking about that material. I was able to do this in my writing. In Nocturnes, for instance, I dealt with the problems I had with my father on a fantasy level and translated them into extremely different terms that would have been unrecognizable to him. Then, in A Boy's Own Story, which I wrote after his death, I was able to tackle him as a subject much more directly, simply, and factually. In the same way, I think Caracole was an attempt to look at the interrelationship between sex and power, but again on a fantasy level in a so-called heterosexual world. It's not a gay book. After Caracole, in The Beautiful Room is Empty, I was able to approach the same subject matter, sex and politics, sex and power, but homosexually and autobiographically. In other words, I would say that oftentimes I seem to need to go through a stage of trying out new material on a fantasy level before I can deal with it autobiographically. But I like both kinds of writing. When I started off as a writer I was very impressed by a remark of Valery's: He said that if you were a good writer you should lose with each new book the admirers you had gained with the preceding one; in other words, you should be radically changing each time you write. I felt that people would be dazzled by how virtuoso I was and how I never was repeating myself. But, in fact, everybody now discusses my oeuvre, tiny as it is, as though it's totally coherent, which surprises me because I don't see the coherence myself. But I'm happy that people discuss it at all. [Top]
In principle, the dances seemed like a perfect antidote to the bars. In our post-Stonewall political fervor and naivete, we believed that if gay men and women came to the dances, they would join the movement and show up the following Sundays at our meetings, which in the beginning met in a Village church or Alternate U. before moving uptown to another church in Chelsea (the movement got me into far more religious institutions than my family ever could have). We were more than slightly Quixotic in that out of 400 or 500 revelers, maybe three or four would show up at a meeting. We did best if someone got a crush on a GLF member-that might ensure meeting attendance so long as the dalliance lasted. The lights would be dimmed, and fast dancing records would be played by a volunteer DJ. The room was often thick with the smell of pot and poppers, and many of my friends also took "up-pers" to keep going until the dance ended at about two or three in the morning. Only about ten percent of the crowd were women. The lesbians couldn't even see each other as we were engulfed in a dimly lit, densely packed, swirling sea of men who were generally taller than we were. It also annoyed some of the lesbians that the men could take off their shirts while we could not-it was often intensely hot. Between the smell of amyl nitrate and the river of men's sweat, many of the women felt as if we had stumbled into the men's locker room at the YMCA. [Top]
And here the smiling young girl who does not want anything foreign in her body, who wants neither him nor anything of him, who wants only mine, meets at the crossroads another me, a she, whom she does not have to fear, from whom she does not have to defend herself, for this other cannot do harm to her, just as one (at least in youth) cannot do harm to oneself. Certitude is most illusory and it vacillates from the first glance of distrust toward the girlfriend only to collapse under the heavy blows of the heart of her hatred. But let's not anticipate: for the moment she is still happy and carefree, free to love from the heart, without the body, to love without fear, to love without doing harm. And when harm is done-she discovers this is not harm at all. The harm-is [...] shame, regret, remorse, disgust. The harm the betrayal of her soul with a man, the betrayal of her childhood with the enemy. But there is no enemy because it is all still me, always me, a new me yet one who has been asleep inside of me and awakened by the other me, there, before me, externalized at last, and finally lovable. She did not need to deny herself in order to become a woman, she only needed to let herself go (from the very depths of her being)-to let herself be. No crack, no break, no stigma. [Top]
