GLR January-February 2023

his sexual encounters (including ones with Rudolph Valentino and Rock Hudson). Fritscher’s affection and admiration for Steward are palpable. Similarly affectionate portraits emerge in chapters on Tennessee Williams and Thom Gunn. The essay on Williams, “We All Live on Half of Something,” first ap peared in Playbill: On Stage for the New York Art Theater Production of Something Cloudy, Something Clear in Sep tember 2001. The production was shut down by the horrors of 9/11 but came back on September 20th and closed on October 1st. Fritscher knew and interviewed Williams, whom he dubs “the most poetic of American dramatists and the most dramatic of American poets.” He asserts percep tively that “gorgeously doomed, Williams’ characters live as erotic castaways.”As for Williams’ legacy, Fritscher writes: “In Stella’s ‘Stanley,’Williams and Brando launched a new postwar torn-T-shirt standard of masculine beauty. Their rough-trade blue-collar male sex appeal sold tickets and lib erated pop culture’s gaze at men in the conformist 1950s.” Fritscher’s essay on Thom Gunn is one of the longer and more personal in the book. These two titans of leather dressed literature met in 1969. Reaching into Gunn’s col lection Fighting Terms , My Sad Captains , My Cambridge , The Man With Night Sweats and others, as well as his memories of days and nights with Gunn, Fritscher constructs an intimate portrait of his dear friend, the Cambridge-educated British poet who emigrated from the U.K. to the U.S. and became a gay icon as well as an internationally celebrated poet. Fritscher is alert to every nuance in Gunn’s poetry and clear-eyed about his ulti mately self-destructive drug use (Gunn died of an overdose in 2004). This is an exquisite, very moving essay. I have devoured Jack Fritscher’s writing in all its forms since the 1970s, so I am well acquainted with his vast knowledge not only of the leather community but of pop culture in general, his

Something Sweet Between us, it is no discordant tune, this—

but harmonious, lyrical, like piano violin duets of Brahms, or amorous,

muscular prose style, his engaging wit and humor, his fervid dedication to Leathermen and Leatherwomen around the world, and his commitment to preserving gay history. Even so, Profiles in Gay Courage astonished me with its depth of feeling and its perfect reconstruction of that glorious, heartbreaking time be fore, as Fritscher has put it, the free-sailing 1970s ran into the iceberg known as AIDS. The book made me sadly nostalgic for those days and nights of “libidinous joys only!” Profiles in Gay Courage is much, much more than a nostalgic recollection of those days. It will serve as an invaluable resource for anyone re searching gay history in the 20th century. muted—the trill in both of our voices audible. Soft-fingered piano notes, from a Shostakovich fugue or a Beethoven sonata’s legato— what is this melody?— then flood of the chorus: again rising guitar, pulsing drums, vibrato, Billie’s “what we’ve been missing,” heart in it, sadness muted—the trill in both of our voices audible. A MY S PADE like Coltrane ballads. You write in my crescendo, then your coda, with its intense, incessant bass, and I imagine our composition’s lyrics, like haunting, high Radiohead or scat’s staccato, like gruff-voiced Art Blakey with his hand out, sadness

A Shoah Survivor Whose Cause Was Race

L ONNEKE GEERLINGS opens her biography of Rosey E. Pool, I Lay This Body Down , by depict ing her subject getting off a cattle car destined for Auschwitz. Convincing the authorities that she was a guard who had lost her identifying armband, combined with her fluent German, served to win her a temporary reprieve. In any event, this quick-witted evasion both saved her life

member of the Jewish Council, a group whose actions were condemned after the war, and her socialist and anti-fascist ac tivism was disregarded. In addition, be cause she had gained weight while in hiding, Geerlings speculates that people may have questioned the circumstances of her captivity or even whether she had been imprisoned at all. It may be that this postwar rejection in

A NNE C HARLES

I LAY THIS BODY DOWN The Transatlantic Life of Rosey E. Pool by Lonneke Geerlings Univ. of Georgia. 234 pages, $34.95.

and forever marked her with survivor’s guilt. (This condition became more acute after she learned, years later, that her parents and brother had died in the camp.) A second deliverance oc curred when Pool was able to go into hiding because of her pre war artistic and resistance connections. Geerlings reports that at the end of the war, Pool’s survival was greeted with suspicion and even cruelty. She had been a Anne Charles cohosts the cable-access show All Things LGBTQ . January–February 2023

her home country is what led Pool to turn her attention to other struggles. Geerlings explains that, although she had not met “one single Negro” before the war, she began to embrace Black interests and causes wholeheartedly. The apartment in London that she shared with her lesbian lover, German-Jewish radiolo gist Ursel (“Isa”) Eisenburg, became a center of the Black At lantic Network. While the nature of their relationship ostensibly remained a secret, the two women organized informal salons where they entertained Black writers and intellectuals from

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