GLR January-February 2025

card his rough mining costume, buy a fifteen-dollar suit of ready-made slops, and stride up and down Montgomery Street with his hat tipped over one ear and looking as satisfied as a king. The sarcastic stares which the drifting stream of elegant fashion cast upon him did not trouble him; he seemed quite un aware.” Once when Gillis did overhear a snide comment about his cheap store-bought clothes made by one of the city’s better tailored dandies, he immediately challenged the man to a duel: “Double-barreled shotguns loaded with slugs; distance, thirty feet.” The dandy backed down. “He instituted no quarrels him self but whenever a quarrel was put upon him he was on deck and steady.” § I TWAS J IM G ILLIS IN THE CABIN on Jackass Hill, his back to the fireplace and his hands folded behind him, who first delivered “The Burning Shame” for Mark Twain’s amusement, but the story had a long history. Englishman Francis Grose in his Clas sical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongu e (1785) defined the slang expression: “A lighted candle stuck into the parts of a woman.” Literary scholars, evidently unaware of Grose’s Dictionar y, sensed that there was something sexual going on in the “Burn ing Shame” story that Twain felt compelled to suppress, but— blinded by heterosexual presumption—guessed that it was a “phallic dance” that the naked king had performed. They sug gested that after painting himself with all the colors of the rain bow, the king donned an enormous phallus to wave in the faces of his all-male audience. “No one acquainted with fraternity ini

his hands crossed behind him, and deliver himself of an elab orate impromptu lie—a fairy tale, an extravagant romance— with Dick Stoker as the hero of it as a general thing. Jim always soberly pretended that what he was relating was strictly his tory, veracious history, not romance. Dick Stoker, gray-headed and good-natured, would sit smoking his pipe and listen with a gentle serenity to these monstrous fabrications and never utter a protest. Gillis and Stoker’s cabin was described by a contemporary as “the headquarters of all Bohemians visiting the mountains.” It was a backwoods salon of sorts, a makeshift gathering place for the artistic and literary types among the miners, and the part ners welcomed many guests, including Jim’s brothers Steve and Billy. In the notebook he kept during his weeks in the moun tains, Twain jotted down a description of the cabin’s rough but cozy interior: “No planking on the floor; old bunks. Pans & traps of all kinds—Byron, Shakespeare, Bacon[,] Dickens, & every kinds of only first class Literature.” In Roughing It Dick Stoker appears as Dick Baker, and Twain writes of him: “He was forty-six, gray as a rat, earnest, thoughtful, slenderly edu cated, slouchily dressed and clay-soiled, but his heart was finer metal than any gold his shovel ever brought to light.” Jim Gillis was better educated than his partner, better than most of the men on Jackass Hill. He knew Latin and Greek, and had earned a medical degree in Memphis before heading west. “I think Jim Gillis was a much more remarkable person than his family and his intimates ever suspected,” Twain wrote of his friend. “He had a bright and smart imagination and it was of the kind that turns out impromptu work and does well, does it with easy fa cility and without previous preparation, just builds a story as it goes along.” He was a natural storyteller who “would have been a star performer if he had been discovered.” Jim Gillis did have one eccentricity. “About once a year he would come down to San Francisco,” Twain remembered, “dis “He was painted, all over, ring-streaked-and-striped.” — Mark Twain

taking the city by storm An art midst of the Queer Craze that i Adams lands in New York in the Twenties Paris, Henrietta“Henri” Fresh off the boat from Roaring s e ” g Hamilton Lodge Masquerade Renaissance luminaries at the stars rub elbows with Harlem and the Cotton Club. Broadway performers at the Astor Hotel the party, flocking to see queer binary. Jazz-age revelers crash from the tyranny of the gender and drag balls, which free her clandestine worlds of speakeasi night, she ventures into the critic by day and lady lover by taking the city by storm. An art era crackdowns, Henri calculate forever. Faced with Depression Ball. But the revelry can't last g q r r reaching consequences. prompting a decision with far the risk of fighting back,

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l li Margaret Vandenburg is a , a An American in Paris include essayist whose previous books novelist, playwright, and i h d marg , a portrait of a family Front TheHome Natalie Barney, and salons of Gertrude Stein and romp through the sapphic

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AB BLE AS AN AUDIOBOOK

January–February 2025

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