GLR January-February 2025

fascism in Italy and Germany on the eve of World War II: If one is a man, still the woman part of his brain must have effect; and a woman also must have intercourse with the man in her. Coleridge perhaps meant this when he said that a great mind is androgynous. Perhaps a mind that is purely masculine cannot cre ate, any more than a mind that is purely feminine. For one can hardly fail to be impressed in Rome by the sense of unmitigated mas culinity; and whatever the value of unmit igated masculinity upon the state, one may question the effect of it upon the art of po etry. The Fascist poem, one may fear, will be a horrid little abortion such as one sees in a glass jar in the museum of some county town.

serves as a reminder that history repeats itself, for better or for worse. Forewarned is forearmed, provided we’re willing to fight back this time around. As I wrote in Craze : Just as surely as the Jazz Age catalyzed a queer Renaissance, the Depression era thrust us back into the Dark Ages. I’m tempted to say the rest is history. But that would only account for the worst of times. The best of times deserves its own chap ter ... the story of the first flowering of queer culture in Amer ica. If it happened once, it can happen again. What’s past is prologue, remember?

Here Woolf sounds the alarm, citing “unmitigated masculinity” as the root cause and primary beneficiary of binary gender pol itics. Gertrude Stein echoed her assessment of the threat, warn ing that “there is too much fathering going on ... father Mussolini and father Hitler ... and father Franco is just com mencing and there are ever so many more ready to be one.” We would do well to heed their warnings as yet another cult of masculinity fuels the current backlash against nonbinary gen der equality. Celebrating the centennial of the Queer Craze amanw WaltW ongofMy A Gay Man’s Odys

LAVELLE PORTER — elebrated.” dandc at should be witz has left all Whitman lovers a gift th ritical texts. Arnie ligh ful blend of creative and c andade tf ant document of post-Stonewall literary ok is an import piritual icon. ueer folks who came to see Whitman as a s vesof life, as it was in Kantrowitz’s own life, and the li onstant presence in it all, Whitman’s poetry is a c ts aftermath. ival ini tragic losse from AIDS, and surv s f i rn gay rights movement, upheaval, through the mode a rica, through wars and p of twentieth-century Ame n. Daniel Dell Blake is a character who lives against the celebration of life in all of its exhilaration, pleasure, and m it is named like the poe Song of Myself, itman scholar. truggle, ay liberation s lf a leader in the g who was himse a litical legacies, written Whitman’s spiritual, liter y, and po ary nlightening novel inspired is an entertaining and e yself ssey of Self-Discovery f o r

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January–February 2025

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