GLR January-February Supplement 2024

G L R ! BOOKS

January-February 2024

Volume XXXI, Number 1

30th Anniversary Issue Supplement

Another Brother Who Made It Happen

B ILLY STRAYHORN (1915– 1967) was a mid-20th-century jazz pianist, arranger, and com poser who toiled for three decades under the long shadow of Duke Ellington. The two men met in 1939, and Ellington immediately hired Strayhorn as second piano and arranger for the Duke Ellington Orchestra. In that capacity, Stray horn also composed many of the jazz stan

sician” as saying: “Strayhorn ... had the strength to make an extraordinary decision ... not to hide the fact that he was homosex ual. And he did this in the 1940s, when no body but nobody did that. Billy could have pursued a career on his own ... but he’d have had to be less than honest about his sexual orientation. Or he could work behind the scenes for Duke and be open about being gay. It really was truth or consequences, and

H ANK T ROUT

QUEER ARRANGEMENTS Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collabora ti on by Lisa Barg Wesleyan Univ. Press. 288 pages, $24.95

Billy went with truth.” This consideration also informed Stray horn’s decision to live for extended periods in Paris, the center of European jazz, where he experienced only a fraction of the racism and homophobia he encountered in the U.S. Also of note is Barg’s examination of Strayhorn’s relation ships with Lena Horne, Herb Jeffries, Rosemary Clooney, and

dards associated primarily with Ellington: “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Johnny Come Lately,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Something to Live For,” “Lush Life,” and more. He composed major sections of the song suites attributed to Ellington, such as “Black, Brown and Beige” and their resetting of “The Nutcracker Suite.” He also made groundbreaking vocal arrangements for Ella Fitzger ald, Lena Horne, Rosemary Clooney, Billy Eckstine, and other jazz singers of the ‘40s, ‘50s, and early ‘60s. Since Strayhorn’s death, a handful of writers have worked to rescue him from Duke Ellington’s shadow. David Hajdu’s 1997 biography LushLife and Walter van de Leur’s Something to Live For: The Music of Billy Strayhorn have solidified Strayhorn’s position as a major force in American jazz. To those titles we can add Lisa Barg’s new Queer Arrangements: Billy Strayhorn and Midcentury Jazz Collaboration , a scholarly examination of Strayhorn’s work and life as a queer Black artist working in a time of overt racism and homophobia. Barg approaches Strayhorn and his working relationships through the three lenses of queer theory, critical race theory, and musicology. There are lengthy sections of the book that are rife with insider lingo and academic jargon from those three sub disciplines. Some passages are nearly indecipherable without a dictionary of queer Black music theory. The book reads like a graduate school thesis or a forced “publish or perish” project (with 48 pages of footnotes) and clearly was not written for the casual reader. If, however, you’re able to wade through the jargon, this book contains some interesting revelations about Strayhorn’s life and work. For example, regarding his decision to work somewhat anonymously as Ellington’s arranger and sometime co-com poser, Barg quotes “an anonymous fellow Black gay jazz mu

Hank Trout is the former editor of A&U: America’s AIDS Magazine.

Ella Fitzgerald, all of whom benefited from Strayhorn’s friend ship as much as from his skill as an arranger and pianist. Lena Horne, in a 1980 interview, commented: “We were both at that time necessary to other people, me as a provider, Billy as Duke’s collaborator. But when we were together we were free of all that.” Strayhorn’s relationship with Horne was that he wrote, arranged, and polished songs for her nightclub act. (“Billy re hearsed me. He stretched me vocally ... he wrote arrangements that had my feeling in the music.”) It was, Barg remarks, an ex ample of “queer collaborative dynamics at the intersection of the personal, social, and the musical.” Similarly, when it came time to write arrangements for the album Blue Rose: Rosemary Clooney and Duke Ellington and His Orchestra , Strayhorn and Clooney became “soulmates.” Clooney was pregnant and spent a great deal of time in bed as

Strayhorn took care of her and nursed her back to health. When they did work together, Clooney remarked: “[I]t was like I was working with my best friend. I wanted to do my best for him ... [he] was so completely unthreatening and uncontrolling and so completely in charge.” One of the longest sections of the book concerns the cre ation of Strayhorn’s solo project The Peaceful Side , recorded in late-night sessions in an underground studio in Paris with local musicians. Unfortunately, parts of this section are among the most difficult to read. Barg’s intricate reading of Strayhorn’s scores for some of the songs is as complicated as a critic’s ex plication de texte of James Joyce. The section does, however, at test to the freedom and joy that Strayhorn experienced while working with French jazz musicians, most of them queer and Black as well.

Will & Grace & Maurice

C AN YOU IMAGINE an odder throuple? Two books that have on the surface nothing to do with one another and yet form a fas cinating contrast. Maurice is the movie made by James Ivory and Ismail Merchant from E. M. Forster’s novel, which he wrote in 1913—before, one is amazed to learn, he’d ever had sex—but refused to publish in his lifetime, choosing instead to circu late it only among his friends. Will & Grace is an American sitcom that premiered in 1998 on NBC, ran for eight successful sea

and the instances in which it finally was not. Then, too, there was the humor. In one show, Karen, Grace’s heterosexual assis tant at her design business, asks Jack why gay people always resort to sarcasm. But that’s the pot calling the kettle black, since, at a certain point, Karen becomes the mouthpiece for a cynical sort of gay humor that leaves even Jack, Will’s gay best friend, in the dust. In fact, as is so often the case with sitcoms, the two leads in Will& Grace had the show stolen from them by their sidekicks, Jack and Karen. Eventu

A NDREW H OLLERAN

WILL & GRACE by Tison Pugh Wayne State U. Press. 125 pages, $19.99 MAURICE by David Greven McGill Queen’s Univ. Press. 183 pages, $19.95

sons, and then, when Trump appeared on the scene, was revived for three more less-than-stellar seasons. Maurice is placed by media professor David Greven in a tradition of melancholy and lyrical gay films exemplified by Ang Lee’s Brokeback Moun tain , and later Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me By Your Name . Will &Grace ’s pedigree is more I Love Lucy . When Will & Grace opened, Debra Messing (Grace) pro claimed that “It’s not a gay show. ... The heart of the show is the life and times of two best friends,” and director James Burrows ( Cheers ) declared that “ Will & Grace is my only show that may be perceived as having made a social statement by making au diences feel okay about gay people, but we never set out to do that. It just happened.” “To these statements,” Tison Pugh re sponds, “the only fitting reply is: balderdash, bunkum, and tom myrot.” In fact, gay life was the main subject of the series, one that required walking a fine line between offending the main stream audience—what the creators referred to as “the grand mothers of Oklahoma City”—and dealing with the issue head-on. Opinions will differ as to how they did in that regard. There is, for example, an entire chapter in Pugh’s book devoted to the “gay kiss”—all the ways it was avoided, season after season, Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022). 2

ally, it became for me the Jack & Karen show, and finally just the Karen show. That’s because you never knew what was going to come out of Karen’s mouth, but you knew it would be nasty, over-the-top, and imbued with what Mary McCarthy called the “comedy of coldness.” For this reason, there was something hard-nosed about Will &Grace . It always felt like it was coming out of some gay bar in West Hollywood: tough, seasoned, cynical. But, in reality, the show was tasked with a very serious mission: to get the grandmothers of Oklahoma City to be comfortable with gay people. And the way to do that was with gags and zingers. The problem, Pugh points out, is that sitcoms by their very nature are conservative—especially when linked to big corpo rations like NBC. The main characters cannot evolve or change; they’re what people tune in to see each week. Thus, in Will & Grace , the writers had to come up with minor characters, and many subplots, to deal with all the issues that gay people face in real life. The page or more in Pugh’s book that lists the minor characters and plotlines that were spun to cover the varieties of gay experience is impressive. You’d need a diagram and pointer to follow the story lines. In the two-part finale of the original se ries, Will & Grace not only end up married to other people, but their children have met in college and are about to be married to each other. How’s that for a traditional ending? (When the series was revived for three more seasons, this fairy-tale ending

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was revealed, as in the famous episode of Dallas , to be a dream, so the show could continue with its original premise.) The task E. M. Forster set for himself in Maurice was simpler: to give two gay characters a happy ending. His inspiration was the gay activist Edward Carpenter, whose live-in, working-class lover Forster met on a visit to their cottage in England— an encounter whose highlight was a friendly hand on Forster’s butt. But in Forster’s novel the happy ending is not marriage and a cottage, it’s escaping into the “greenwood”—that mythic, storied England of Sherwood Forest, where two lovers can live free of social disapproval. Maurice and Alec Scudder may be headed off to some cottage in the Cotswolds, or to Buenos Aires, or to World War I; we do not know. But they’ve found each other, and that’s all they need. It’ll be them against theworld. The trustees of the Forster estate

Jhabvala, declined to work on the project because she felt the same way. Nor was Maurice —which is analyzed almost scene by scene by Greven—well-received even by the gay English film critics when it came out. Merchant-Ivory had already ac quired the reputation of making “heritage” films—too faithful to their sources, too full of beautiful clothes, rooms, country houses. Maurice was subject to the same reproofs. A Room with a View had made over $23 million; Maurice made just over two. (Their next film, Howards End , re turned them to commercial success.) David Greven, however, makes clear in an autobiographical note that Maurice had a tremendous effect on people like himself: lonely gay men who were still closeted when they saw it. Since Maurice , we’ve had Brokeback Mountain and Call Me By Your Name .As for Will & Grace ’s legacy, Pugh credits it with not only making Americans more

James Wilby as Maurice Hall in Maurice.

balked when Merchant and Ivory—who had just had a big suc cess with A Room with a View , with its famous scene of men skinny-dipping in a pond—asked permission to make a movie of Maurice . The trustees felt the work was not up to Forster’s best. Merchant-Ivory’s frequent screenwriter, Ruth Prawer

comfortable with homosexuals but with removing the stigma of actors playing gay roles. “As with every groundbreaking pro gram,” he concludes, “ Will & Grace leaves behind a complex and contradictory legacy, as it shifted the television landscape for the better simply by depicting gay characters.” /0DE/FG DF DHIGJFDIG JGDH/IK L G

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January–February 2024

3

Dramatist of Our Lives

M UCH TO THE IRE of the gay press, Terrence McNally (1938–2020) resisted being called a “gay playwright.” Arguing that the term was “ghettoizing,” he protested on more than one occasion that “I’ll accept the label of ‘gay playwright’ only when Arthur Miller is routinely re ferred to as a straight playwright.” Yet it is difficult to think of another playwright who

and of silver screen goddesses in Kissof the Spider Woman (1993), and audiences gasped at his use of full-frontal nudity in Love! Valour! Compassion! (1994) to ex plore the bonds that connect gay men. Two late period plays— Some Men (2007) and Mothers and Sons (2014)—movingly chronicled the changes in gay life from the 1920s to the present day and dramatized the homophobia, both external and internal

R AYMOND -J EAN F RONTAIN

A MAN OF MUCH IMPORTANCE The Art and Life of Terrence McNally by Christopher Byrne Applause Theatre and Cinema Books 378 pages, $36.95.

ized, that diminishes gay life. Christopher Byrne’s biography is welcome on several counts. First, despite the choppy way that it consigns McNally’s plays, operas, and work for television to separate chapters, the book does offer an accurate overview of McNally’s life that’s surprising in some of its details. For example, while McNally had spoken publicly about his parents’ alcoholism and his fa ther’s beating him for his artsy behaviors and sassy comebacks as he grew up in Corpus Christi, Byrne is the first to report that McNally’s mother “interfered” (Byrne’s word) with him during his teenage years, which perhaps explains the sexually troubled relationship between mothers and sons in his plays. Second, Byrne was able to interview a number of McNally’s collaborators—including actors Nathan Lane and Christine Baranski, director John Tillinger, and Manhattan Theatre Club Artistic Director Lynne Meadow—allowing him to offer valu able insights into how several of McNally’s plays evolved from early rehearsals to opening night performance. I chortled to read that The Lisbon Traviata was originally commissioned by Na tional Public Radio as a radio play, but that the government supported broadcaster dropped its option because it was uncomfortable with the play’s frank look at contemporary gay life. Likewise, it is illuminating to read the participants’ recol lections of the rocky development process of Lips Together, Teeth Apart (1991), now widely considered to be one of Mc Nally’s greatest works. There is, however, much that disappoints in this biography. As Byrne himself says in his preface, he is not attempting to offer a “definitive biography.” McNally once described himself as “a serial monogamist,” and, while Byrne offers a handsome portrait of the playwright’s relationship with his surviving spouse, lawyer and Tony Award-winning producer Tom Kir dahy, he passes much too quickly over McNally’s earlier ex tended relationships with Edward Albee and Robert Drivas. McNally has spoken or written about each of these relation ships, particularly on the influence of Drivas’ AIDS-related death upon his evolution as a playwright, but Byrne doesn’t use these reports to flesh out his narrative. The narrative is also undermined by the number of key fig ures whose testimony Byrne did not capture, many of whom died while the book was in progress (notably: actors Marin Mazzie, Charlotte Rae, Doris Roberts, Angela Lansbury, and Marian Seldes; playwright Edward Albee; and McNally’s close friend, Molly Jones). Of greater concern is the fact that the book

has represented gay life as fully as McNally, or who has done more to advance gay rights, including marriage equality and support for people with AIDS. From the start of his career, McNally dared audiences to re consider what they thought of homosexuality. Fully four years before Stonewall, his first Broadway play, And Things That Go Bump in the Night (1964), offered the first unabashedly gay character who is neither a neurotic nor a predator. Ten years later, in The Ritz , he not only dared to set a riotous farce in a gay bathhouse with actors dressed only in skimpy towels, but made a running sight gag out of the shocked expressions on the faces of heterosexual inter lopers who inadvertently stumble upon the group sex ual activities occurring in the steamroom. At the height of the AIDS epidemic, when people were suddenly terri fied of physical contact, he depicted one character ten derly sucking the blood from another person’s cut finger in Frankie and Johnny in the Clair de Lune (1987), dram atizing the simple reality that we die, not physically be cause we’ve had sex with another person, but emotionally when we’re too frightened to risk life-enhancing intimacy. McNally’s plays rarely failed to arouse controversy over their gay content, most infamously when, in Corpus Christi (1998), he retold the life of Jesus Christ in terms of a gay teenager’s coming of age in 1950s Texas, turning the marriage feast at Cana into an argument for same-sex marriage, and the healing of a leper into compassion for a person with AIDS. Mc Nally was traduced by religious conservatives in the tabloid press, the theater was forced to install metal detectors to pro tect theatergoers against bomb threats, and a fatwa (still in ef fect when McNally died more than twenty years later) was issued against the playwright by the Muslim Defenders of the Prophet Jesus. Homophobic critics ridiculed his celebration of gay men’s love of opera divas in The Lisbon Traviata (1989) Raymond-Jean Frontain’s most recent book is Conversations with Ter rence McNally . 4 Terrence McNally, 2019. Todd Hido photo.

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Poet of a Generation and Its Misfits is undocumented, so one is unable to check, for example, on the source of a misstatement within a quotation. What’s more, much of the writing is syntactically sloppy and badly punctuated. Finally, I’m troubled by Byrne’s failure to understand the guiding principle of McNally’s life and the humanity of his art. All through his career, McNally was at pains to stress the equal importance of every person in the human community. (“We’re each special. We’re each ordinary. We’re each di vine,” Joshua teaches his disciples in Corpus Christi .) Yet riff ing on the title of the musical A Man of No Importance (2002), Byrne has titled his biography A Man of Much Importance . McNally had a healthy ego and could resent slights, as anyone who provoked his anger knows. But ultimately he was com mitted to maintaining the difficult balance between applauding individual accomplishment and celebrating the community of equals.

A S A WRITER and commentator for Rolling Stone and NPR, Will Hermes has zestfully illu minated the zeitgeist of various musical movements, placing them within their historical and cultural settings. His lat est book is an examination of the compli cated genius of Lou Reed, the drug-taking, gender-bending avatar of the leather, goth,

fired Warhol. After the group’s second re lease, the jazz-inflected White Light/White Heat , went nowhere, Reed kicked Cale out of the band. The remaining members sol diered on for two more studio albums be fore Reed finally left in 1970. Over time, these early records have achieved cult status, their songs covered by David Bowie, Patti Smith, R.E.M., and

J OHN R. K ILLACKY

LOU REED: The King of New York by Will Hermes Farrar, Straus and Giroux 529 pages, $35.

glam, and punk music scenes. Many books have been written about the legend, but Lou Reed: The King of New York maywell be the definitive biography. Hermes provides a detailed catalogue raisonné of Reed’s early Velvet Underground albums and examines his later record ings, including the David Bowie-produced Transformer ,which featured “Walk on the Wild Side” as well as recordings that were ignored at first (but now venerated): the operatic “Berlin,” the nihilistic “Metal Machine Music,” and the politically charged “New York.” Reed’s early life was undistinguished. Growing up on Long Island, he played doo-wop in a high school band. In his first year at NYU, he had an emotional breakdown and underwent electroconvulsive therapy. It’s not clear whether he was treated for depression or for being gay. He was an unreliable source about his own history. Researching the biography, Hermes found the musician often changed stories about his past de pending upon the audience. In 1960, he transferred to Syracuse University, where he met guitarist Sterling Morrison and con tracted hepatitis from dirty heroin needles. After graduation, he quickly thrived in New York’s avant-garde scene, performing at happenings with Morrison, along with John Cale droning on his viola and Moe Tucker playing drums. The group called themselves the Velvet Underground. The quartet fell into Andy Warhol’s demimonde, with its drag queens, starlets, sex, drugs, and all forms of artmaking. Warhol offered to produce the band’s album but insisted that the German model Nico join the group as their chanteuse. Warhol got top billing on the front cover via his (now infamous) silkscreened photograph of a banana. The Velvet Underground & Nico were only billed on the backside of the album. Because of its dissonant sound and transgressive lyrics, the record gar nered little radio play. Within a year, Nico was out, and Reed John R. Killacky is the author of Because Art: Commentary, Cri tique, & Conversation . January–February 2024

Cowboy Junkies, among others. Reed once joked with Brian Eno that, although sales for these albums were meager, “everyone who bought a copy started a band.” During the ’70s and ’80s, Reed’s perpetually shapeshifting musical output (and provoca tive personas) made him the godfather of indie/alt rock. While

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his street cred grew, much of his out put at this time was initially maligned. In addition to music, the restless Reed continued to pursue prose writing at a high level. His pieces appeared in The NewYorker and The New York Times Magazine , and he published three photobooks. In 1989, Reed and Cale reunited to present Songs for ’Drella: A Fiction, a stark, elegiac homage to their es tranged mentor Warhol, who had died two years earlier. (Their nickname for him was “Drella,” a contraction of Cin derella and Dracula; Reed was called “Lulu,” according to Cale.) Perform ances premiered at the Brooklyn Acad emy of Music’s Next Wave Festival. Amphetamines, heroin, cannabis,

with multidisciplinary artist Laurie Anderson. They became the quintes sential New York hipster elders before Reed died, after a failed liver trans plant, in 2013 at the age of 71. Even as he was beset with failing health, Reed was planning new projects. Anderson described his death to Hermes: “His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open ... He wasn’t afraid.” Lou Reed’s final words: “Take me into the light.” In eulogies, poet and musician Patti Smith called him “our generation’s New York poet, championing its misfits as Whitman had championed its workingmen and Lorca its persecuted.” Singer Michael Stipe praised him as a “queer icon”

Transformer album cover, 1979.

and alcohol fueled Reed’s prodigious output, but this appetite wreaked havoc on his bandmates, road crew, colleagues, friends, and family. Hermes delves into the musician’s destruc tive behavior, particularly toward Cale, the ethereal violist whose monotonal surround sound provided such an effective contrast to Reed’s four-chord beats and primal lyrics. Another target of Reed’s misbehavior—in this case, domestic violence— was Rachel Humphreys, his trans partner during the ’70s. Reed and Humphreys separated, and the musician married Sylvia Morales in 1980. She helped Reed get clean and suc cessfully licensed his work for use in films and commercials. After divorcing Morales in 1990, Reed blissfully settled down

who, in the late ’60s, “proclaimed with beautifully confusing candidness a much more 21st century understanding of a fluid, moving sexuality.” Will Hermes reveres Lou Reed’s music, and he expounds on his love in this voluminous, well-researched biography. Each of Reed’s albums is accompanied by discussions filled with riveting backstories and sympathetic analysis of his songs. So, on the one hand, Lou Reed: The King of New York is a delightfully deep dive into what looks to be a canonical legacy. On the other hand, Her mes should also be credited for not shying away from the harsher realities of Reed’s life: the abusive behavior driven by his per sonal demons. He was a brilliant but flawed monarch.

The Invisible Man

B AYARD RUSTIN, strategist and spokesman for nonviolence, civil rights, and social justice, left an astonishing legacy. His extraordinary life story is that of a Black, openly gay activist who combined a paci fist’s vision with an electrifying presence to motivate political action in the mid-20th century. Rustin organized the 1963 March

ars titled Bayard Rustin: A Legacy of Protest and Politics. Long is a former professor of religion at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. As he notes in his introduction to this stim ulating collection, Rustin was a compli cated figure with wide-ranging skills and achievements. The nineteen essays focus on Rustin’s work from the perspectives of

R OSEMARY B OOTH

BAYARD RUSTIN A Legacy of Protest and Poli ti cs Edited by Michael G. Long NYU Press. 256 pages, $27.95

on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and his leadership con tinues to shape movements like the Black Lives Matter protests today. Interest in Rustin’s life and work has been growing. Previous works of note include John D’Emilio’s 2003 biography, which probed the impact of Rustin’s work and his struggles to maintain a public leadership role, and a collection of Rustin’s impassioned correspondence titled I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin’s Life in Let ters , edited by Michael G. Long and published in 2012. Long has now edited a collection of essays by a range of Rustin schol Rosemary Booth is a writer and photographer who lives in Cam bridge, MA. 6

history, political science, law, sociology, theology, cultural stud ies, and organizational activism. An incisive opening essay by political scientist Erica Chenowith, “Rustin’s Legacy of Civil Resistance in the U.S.,” gives a useful chronology of the ac tivist’s work, including his conscientious objection to war in the 1940s, his steering of bus boycotts and early marches for free dom and integrated schools in the 1950s, and his leadership in the March on Washington, which prompted the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of the mid-1960s. Along the way, he founded or helped form such civil rights groups as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and the Student Non-Violent Coordinat ing Committee (SNCC), and he marshalled them into powerful

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coalitions. Agitating for passage of New York’s Gay Rights Bill in the 1980s, Rustin would declare gay people to be “the new barometer for social change.” The essays supplement existing scholarship with details on how Rustin translated vision into action as a pacifist, a civil rights leader, and an advocate for social and economic justice. Focusing on his relationships with fellow leaders in those strug gles, they offer fresh observations on Rustin’s experience as a gay man in an intensely homophobic era. In “Rustin’s Resist ance to War and Militarism,” for instance, sociologist Sharon Erickson Nepstad describes his “earliest forays into activism [as] provocative nonviolent direct action.” Born in 1912 to an unmarried teenager from a large family, Rustin absorbed an attitude of pacifism, tolerance, and inclu sion from the maternal grandmother who raised him. He grew up in West Chester, Pennsylvania, a station on the Underground Railroad, where a Quaker family had purchased his great-grand parents’ freedom, and Quaker values informed his approach to life. Rustin adamantly opposed war, for example, an attitude that landed him in federal prison during World War II for “re fusing military service and alternative civilian public service,” while exhorting others to do the same. Five essays explore Rustin’s connections with other lead ers, including his mentor, A. Philip Randolph, the intellectual and labor activist who founded the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first Black labor union in the U.S., in 1925. Another of his collaborators was African-American rights and grassroots activist Ella Baker, who joined Rustin to exploit the momen tum of early bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama. And there’s an essay on Malcolm X, the African-American Muslim minis ter and activist, who publicly challenged Rustin’s pacifist stance but later became a close friend. Disagreements marked other relationships too. “Rustin and King: Stony the Path They Trod,” by journalist and biographer Jonathan Eig, for example, describes the trouble Rustin had, try ing to convince Martin Luther King, Jr., who was twenty years younger, to adopt a nonviolent strategy for his nascent civil rights crusade. The task wasn’t easy. Eig recounts Rustin’s shock at finding guns (intended for self-defense) when he first visited King’s Montgomery home, and notes the unrelenting persistence needed to convince King that nonviolence was the morally right, as well as more powerful, approach. Rustin faced pushback for being a pacifist and even stronger resistance for being openly gay. Two essays explore this aspect of his life and experience. D’Emilio’s piece, “Troubles I’ve Seen: Rustin and the Price of Being Gay,” supplies a salient pré cis of the activist’s struggles during a time of blatant, intractable homophobia. “The decades during which he was most active as a radical fighter against racial injustice and for world peace— the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s—can reasonably be described as the worst time to be queer,” D’Emilio says, citing President Eisenhower’s 1953 executive order banning “sex perverts” from all federal and government contractor jobs. At the time, homo sexual behavior was criminalized in every state. Rustin was ap prehended more than once on “morals charges”—having sex with another man—and his arrest at a critical juncture cost him the backing of several civil rights leaders for a leadership role in the March on Washington. Fortunately, Randolph, who was overseeing the effort, knew Rustin’s involvement was critical

and quietly put him in charge, with astounding results. As D’Emilio notes, “before the internet, social media, and texting from mobile phones, he and his team succeeded in getting 250,000 people to the nation’s capital.” Rustin died in 1987. An insightful essay by his surviving partner Walter Naegle titled “The Legacy of Grandmother Julia Rustin” traces her influence. Julia and Janifer Rustin routinely welcomed Black luminaries to their West Chester home, among them James Weldon Johnson, who wrote the Black National An them “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” and activist, educator, and feminist Mary McLeod Bethune. Julia’s Quaker upbringing re inforced her belief in nonviolence and inclusivity, values she in stilled in her grandson. Rustin saw his grandmother as “a dealer in relieving misery,” Naegle says, and must have sensed her open-mindedness when, as a young teenager, he took a chance and confided in Julia that he found himself attracted to his male classmates. Naegle reports that Rustin told him that her response had been: “Well, I suppose that’s what you need to do.” The essays in this lively, thought-provoking collection am plify what is known of Rustin’s trials and achievements. They offer inspiration for progressives and democratic socialists today by showing how Rustin lived openly and without apol ogy as gay man and a pacifist. The collection also amplifies Rustin’s voice, which rang out to ensure that marginalized voices would be heard. Reportedly, Rustin sometimes inter rupted heated meetings by breaking into song, and clips of him singing spirituals in his melodious tenor voice can be found on YouTube.

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Portraits in Dialog

P EOPLE from marginalized groups have always left their mark on art history. Yet it’s only in more re cent times that the world has rec ognized these contributions. Now, under intense social pressure in the 21st century, many museums have been nervously tak ing stock of their holdings, bemoaning the gaps in the range of artists and artworks that their collections contain, and looking for creative ways to fill them—without alienating their more mainstream (i.e., straight, white) audience. One such experiment recently took place at New York City’s Frick Madison, temporarily housing parts of the Frick Collec tion—which includes Old Master paintings and other European art—while the museum’s permanent home undergoes renova tion. The museum commissioned four New York-based artists to create new works during this transition. From September 2021 through September 2022, the portraits hung (one by one) in place of works out on loan. That project, “Living Histories: Queer Views and Old Mas

The project’s curators, Aimee Ng and Xavier F. Salomon, paired each contempo rary artist with an Old Master: Salman Toor with Vermeer; Doron Langberg and Jenna Gribbon with Holbein the Younger; and Toyin Ojih Odutola with Rembrandt. The coupled artworks hung in isolation on nearby walls, “in conversation.” In Toor’s moody green painting, Mu seumBoys , two partially dressed men ap

M ICHAEL Q UINN

LIVING HISTORIES Queer Views and Old Masters Edited by Aimee Ng, Xavier F. Salomon, and Stephen Truax GILES. 112 pages, $34.95

proach a glass vitrine that showcases two naked men tangled in what Toor calls a “fag puddle ... heaps of exhaustion and lust.” Perhaps to compensate for insecurity about showing it along side Vermeer’s famous Officer and Laughing Girl , Toor piled on the imagery: a condom, a urinal, a dainty shoe, and so on. “If I were to redo this painting, I’d take out some of the stuff,” he acknowledges. Doron Langberg’s Lover depicts a bare-chested man in dark underwear sitting cross-legged on a colorful couch. Wisely, Lang berg has chosen to use a canvas the same size as Holbein’s Sir Thomas Moore , which immediately establishes a relationship be

tween the two works. The pairing also benefits from its psychological tension: Moore, draped in fur and velvet, holding a folded paper in his hand, almost seems to gaze longingly at Lang berg’s near-nude lover, who looks with down cast eyes at a sheaf of papers in his lap. What am I Doing Here? I Should Ask You the Same , by Jenna Gribbon, depicts her scowling partner Mackenzie sitting on a green chair in a purple suit with a red coat draped over her shoulders, one breast flashing a fluo rescent pink nipple. Holbein’s Thomas Crom well looks bundled up and disapproving on the adjacent wall, clutching a piece of paper as if having just dashed off a complaint about her indecency. He seems to glare at Mackenzie while she gazes out at us. Odutola’s The Listener is the only drawing in the exhibit (part of a larger series), a char coal, pastel, and chalk sketch of an imagined queer, African, female warrior. Her muscles’ light and dark shadows mirror the folds in Rembrandt’s gown, stretched tightly against a

Paired paintings at the Frick: Hans Holbein , Sir Thomas Moore , 1527. Doron Langber, Lover , 2021.

sagging body in his late-in-life Self-Portrait . The contemporary works’ shocks of color and flamboyance contrast with their Old Master counterparts as well as their aus tere surroundings at the Frick. They have youth’s fresh advan tage, like showing up to a black-tie event in jeans and, rather than looking out of place, making everyone else seem overdressed. But they also feel a little random, like a classical music playlist with one TikTok-trending song thrown into the mix. Pairing paintings might create a “dialogue,” but who decides what these strange bedfellows are saying to each other?

ters,” is now recapped in a book by the same name, which in cludes essays about the works on display and interviews with the living artists. Much of it wrestles with questions of inclu sion: Whose pictures deserve to hang on a museum’s walls? Is there an institutional responsibility to represent different kinds of art and artists outside its established purview? What types of people are encouraged to walk through a museum’s front door? Michael Quinn writes about books in a monthly column for the Brook lyn newspaper The Red Hook Star-Revue . 8

TheG & LR

New books from Duke University Press

Platinum Bible of the Public Toilet Ten Queer Stories CUI ZI’EN PETRUS LIU and LISA ROFEL, editors “Artist, activist, pioneer, and provocateur, Cui Zi’en is known for shaking up the world of Chinese queer cinema and standing at the forefront of the queer rights movement in China. Now, for the fi rst time, a selection of his avant-garde literary works is available in English. This collection reveals Cui Zi’en’s strange literary universe, brimming with the uncanny, the philosophical, and the beautiful.”— Michael Berry , author of Enter the Clowns: The Queer Cinema of Cui Zi’en The Bars Are Ours Histories and Cultures of Gay Bars in America, 1960 andAfter LUCAS HILDERBRAND “ The Bars Are Ours is a joy to read. Lucas Hilderbrand is able to insert himself into his narrative in ways that make it come alive and, at the same time, steps back and analyzes. The stories are so compelling! Some made me laugh, some left me teary-eyed, and some offered eye-opening insights into a history that is shamefully undertold and underappreciated.”— John D’Emilio , author of Memories of a Gay Catholic Boyhood: Coming of Age in the Sixties

dukeupress.edu

The Randy Years of a Punk Musician

A HOST of accolades marks Sean DeLear’s posthumous reputation: “the Queen Mother of alternative music,” “a punk rock fairy godmother,” “a walking work of art,” “a person who single-handedly made counterculture feel viable,” AND “a fierce, fully formed faggot.” To use an expression DeLear often applied to others, he was a “bitchin’ babe.”

pean art collective Gelitin and performing as a solo cabaret artist. DeLear was born Anthony Robertson

P HILIP G AMBONE

in 1965 to evangelical Christian parents, among the first Black couples to move to Simi Valley. While the diary provides lit tle information about his early life, we do learn that Sean and his friend David were “doing things since we were about eight or nine.” Whatever those things were, they left DeLear with an early and remarkably guilt-free outlook on sex. The diary, which DeLear began on New Year’s Day 1979, when he was fourteen, was found after he died in 2017. The en tries, mostly a paragraph long, take us on a stream-of-con sciousness ride into the mind of a typical teenage boy with a precociously playful curiosity about gay sex. A lot of the diary focuses on the kinds of activities we might expect of any ado lescent boy: fleeting crushes, high school sports, a prize pos session (a Minolta XG-7 camera), boredom with school, a paper route, trying out for a part in Bye Bye Birdie , saving money to buy a waterbed, happy expressions of surprise at how popular he is at school, posing for the big ninth-grade photo, renting a

I COULD NOT BELIEVE IT The 1979 Teenage Diaries of Sean DeLear Edited by Michael Bullock & Cesar Padilla Semiotext(e). 215 pages, $16.95

“He was so many things,” writes Michael Bullock, co-edi tor of DeLear’s teenage diary I Could Not Believe It , recently issued by Semiotext(e): “punk musician, intercontinental scen ester, video vixen, dance-track vocalist, party host, heavy-metal groupie, marijuana farmer, and even Frances Bean Cobain’s babysitter.” DeLear was the lead singer of the power pop-punk band Glue, which was a vital element in the Silver Lake scene of the 1980s and ’90s. Adored for his matter-of-fact androgyny and his “lyrical and vocal tempestuousness,” he later went on to collaborate with performance-based artists, joining the Euro Philip Gambone, a regular contributor to TheG&LR , is the editor of Breaking the Rules: The Intimate Diary of Ross Terrill .

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tux for the formal, picking up his copy of the yearbook. “I want everyone to sign it that is popular,” he writes. It comes as no surprise that DeLear loved music, which he listened to on 8-track cassettes. The list of his favorite artists brings us right back to the late ’70s: Donna Summer, the Village People, Sound Factory, Sister Sledge, Cheryl Lynn, Peaches and Herb, Machine, Blondie, Bonnie Pointer, Sylvester, Rick James, Led Zeppelin. His high school seems to have been a progressive one. In addition to the usual subjects, he takes classes in oceanography and photography (his favorite). Still, he finds school a bore. When his report card comes out during the fall of his freshman year, all his grades are Ds and Fs. He keeps re solving to get his act together, but at age sixteen, he drops out. Sean is also gay, and he uses the diary to explore his grow ing understanding of what that means. He puzzles over who is and isn’t gay in his class. He’s keen to pick up more informa tion about homosexuality, and does so by reading The David Kopay Story and stealing copies of Blueboy , Honcho , and Man date . But reading is not enough. He can’t wait to see “all that fat cock” in PE class. He makes forays to malls and bowling al leys, where he picks up “a wide variety of tricks.” Soon he has taken to “working the streets, just being your typical little hus tler boy.” He tries on heels—“but they were not big enough so I have to go somewhere else”—and flirts with bisexuality: “So what, so I want to go to bed with a man or a women [ sic ]—no biggie is it?” At the end of June, he sucks his first uncut cock, then goes to his friend Lori’s house and sucks on her boobs. “My

first girlfriend,” he writes. Arrested for masturbating in a pub lic restroom, he has to attend counseling sessions. The shrink turns out to be “pretty cool.” Sean wants to be hypnotized in order “to skate better, do my schoolwork, not lie, not cuss, bowl and golf better, and not be shy around people I don’t know.” A month before his fifteenth birthday, he gets a fake ID so he can go to a gay bathhouse. Still, he worries about being busted if he gets it on with an adult. Sean’s diary shifts between a sweet, almost childlike preoc cupation with the quotidian details of a high school freshman’s life and candid accounts of his sexcapades. Often, within the same paragraph, his attention is drawn to both the puerile and the prurient. At the end of the school year, for example, he wants either a Mickey Mouse watch or the book Marilyn Monroe Con fidential . That summer, he makes and films a Claymation fea turing Mr. Bill of SNL fame. Later, in the same entry, he wishes he “could fuck or suck some man for money.” Those kinds of quirky juxtapositions became an essential feature of his per sonal and professional self-presentation. In his introduction to the diary, Brontez Purnell writes: “So very little is written about the lives and the bold sexuality of young queers, and specifically young Black queers, that I also have to give regard that there is something ultimately explosive about this text.” DeLear often ended a diary entry with the ex pression “Oh Well.” It was a kind of offhand expression of ac ceptance—radical acceptance, I’d say—at simply being the “super bitchen” young person he was. He remained “super bitchen” his entire short, glittering life.

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January–February 2024

11

phones and typewriters. No one seems to own the pre-Internet personal computers or brick-size cellphones of that era. Among the eight characters given their own chapters, there’s the secretary who’s being brutalized by her husband and the young married policeman who tries to help her. There’s the po liceman’s wife, who’s suffering from postpartum depression and perhaps other kinds of mental illness. There’s the closeted bi sexual high school student who struggles with his weight. There’s the town’s sole physician, who’s the recipient of many of his patients’ secrets, whether physically revealed or shame fully confessed. And there is the doctor’s wife, who’s in love with her best friend and trying to keep their relationship hidden so as not to ruin their own lives and those of their husbands and children. “After all these years together, Bev’s heart still cart wheels against her ribs at Tru’s touch, the feel of her mouth warm and soft against her own. It was never like this with any man, not even Bill when he was lean and long-haired and al ways laughing. Bev had no idea it could be like this.” Eventually, two crises disrupt the superficially peaceful con tinuity of the town. A life is saved, and a life is lost. From there the novel veers off to follow the aftermath of the tragedy while leaving behind the fallout from a disaster averted. Bowring does a beautiful job of revealing how those left in the wake of the death handle its impact, from the man whose enthusiasm for hunting deer is spoiled during a weekend in the woods, to the descent into alcoholism and seclusion of the character arguably the most devastated by the loss. Unsurprisingly in such a small community, people exchange opinions about both incidents with sympathy and admiration, blame and disdain. Particularly well conveyed throughout is the men’s taciturn discomfort with grief, fear, and loss of control. Despite the characters’ ambivalence about the gifts and punishments the town offers its residents, the novel ends on a note of hope—if not of transformation, then at least of a change for the better. The two other queer characters, older women long married to men, are portrayed in rather affectionate terms. They’re both strong personalities whose devotion to each other is apparent to anyone who pays attention. Their relationship is one of the two highlighted love stories in the novel, both of which are tragic. For Bev and Trudy, their rare time alone together must be care fully planned, because neither is willing to upset her stable life either by living as an out lesbian couple or by pulling up roots and moving away. Even so, after selecting a Dolly Parton song on the jukebox at the local bar, “Bev leads Trudy in a practiced two-step, both of them laughing, breathless. ... Everyone else goes back to drinking, or shooting pool, or staring at the TV. But Alice watches the couple in the middle of the room. Two bodies in complete sync, moving through the neon glow. ... Sway, and step, and sway. Love, and love, and love.” Throughout the novel, the prose coaxes the reader to slow down to the pace of the town, to imagine the isolation of its in habitants, a population bereft of dreams or ambitions. Impres sive for its careful, comprehensive portrait of memory, love, grief, and community, The Road to Dalton encourages accept ance of its flawed characters. They are doing the best they know how in a place where the only expectations are of birth and mar riage and death. ________________________________________________________________ Martha K. Davis is the author of the novel Scissors, Paper, Stone.

Those Little Town Woes

M ARTHA K. D AVIS

THE ROAD TO DALTON by Shannon Bowring EuropaEdi ti ons. 250 pages, $18. D ALTON is a fictional small town in northern Maine, but it’s clear that Shannon Bowring knows the territory first hand. The place itself might be considered a character, perhaps the main character, because of how it shapes and re stricts the people who live there. Half the town works at the lum ber mill, the one industry that keeps the area going. Except for the mill owner’s family, everyone barely gets by with their job at the mill or as a waitress, a cop, a librarian, or a farmer. Peo ple occasionally pay for services with odd jobs or food they’ve grown or fished. The town is remote and insular—one of those places where everyone knows everyone else’s business. Set in 1990, each chapter is narrated by a different character, and gradually it becomes clear that this device is creating a kind of community within the larger town, with no one person at the center of the story. As with her rich descriptions of the landscape and the weather, Bowring weaves in period details like corded

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