GLR July-August 2023

I reviewed Stéphane Bouquet’s previous work, Other Loves , in the these pages a few years ago (May-June 2020). Other Loves is only partially poetry (four poems, a play, and three short stories). Actually, I’m not entirely sure whether the play is really a play or instead a poem with a dramatis personæ. Either way, it’s dazzling, especially if you’re on Bouquet’s approximate wavelength. In a similar fashion, Bouquet’s short stories are so poetic they might be considered poems as well. The play, titled Monsters , which occupies the bulk of the book, has many echoes of Waiting for Godot : bleak and funny at the same time. It’s one of the more unusual works of art I’ve ever reviewed, and is def initely not for everyone. Bouquet can be hilariously irreverent, then turn right around and stab you in the heart with something so beautifully expressed it takes your breath away. He can write lines like: “these days/ the Marie Antoinettes/ of the financial aristocracy/ stuff themselves with gluten-free/ brioche.” And like this: “He’s sitting/ so close oh I’d love/ to write one more sad ness on the inaccessible shelter/ of his shoulders.” Taken as a whole, Common Life looks at life and the interactions of people in all their shallowness, absurdity, and pathos. His work is hip, fun, smart, perceptive, and unexpectedly moving. Christopher Soden’s Gusher , a slight reworking of his ear lierwork, Closer , is the poetry of an older gay man lamenting, and ultimately triumphing over, the internalized homophobia endured by his generation. The poems are of lust and desire afraid to express itself, finally yielding at moments to gushers of emotion and regret. If Soden’s work doesn’t display the bril liance and playfulness of Bouquet’s or the gravitas of Klepfisz’, he makes up for it with the authenticity and relatability of his ex periences. Lamenting the vestiges of shame brought about by his biblical upbringing, the general hostility of American soci ety toward any impulse thought to be “unmanly,” and the lack of support from a parent, he can still find the courage to write of an abusive father: “I cannot believe it/ has taken me so, so many/ years to stumble upon this/ epiphany. I cannot believe/ I’m telling you I love him.” ____________________________________________________ Dale Boyer is the author of Columbus in the New World: Selected Poems .

reaches his ninetieth birthday. In it, he covers some familiar ground— coming out at a time when it was exceedingly difficult to do so (he was born in 1930), his experiences in psychotherapy—but more than in previous memoirs, he’s willing to speak out about matters that he was reluctant to speak of before. At ninety, one imagines, he doesn’t re ally care if he offends anyone or if someone disapproves. He discusses what it’s like to grow old and struggle with the in evitable health crises—in his case,

involving his heart. Aging as a gay man is a topic that’s not often addressed head-on, and it’s refreshing to find someone willing to do so. Duberman admits that he sometimes finds it difficult to concentrate on his work. He struggles to fit into a community in which youth and beauty are the coin of the realm. The personal story he tells is both touching and instructive, but Duberman goes beyond the autobiographical in this book and addresses the institutional settings with which he interacted. Two things stand out. First is the degree to which homophobia persisted in academia well into the 1980s and 1990s and be yond, even in New York City, and even in the relatively rarified intellectual circles in which he traveled. Second is the story of how difficult it was to establish CLAGS and the many obstacles he encountered, and the ongoing challenge of keeping it rele vant to all segments of the community. Early on it had seemed that the best possibility for a gay studies center was at Yale, Duberman’s alma mater, and he writes with brutal honesty about the resistance he met from the Yale administration and from John Boswell (1947–1994), the eminent gay historian on the Yale faculty. In the end, the center landed in New York, and it was the first serious institutional center for queer studies in the U.S.—a major breakthrough for LGBT studies as a valid scholarly pursuit. The snobbery and biases Duberman encountered at Yale are part of the story, as is the paltry financial support he initially received for CLAGS from the powers that be at CUNY. Much later, a provost at CUNY would describe CLAGS to me as his institution’s crown jewel, but Duberman makes clear that the administration at first wanted to acquire this jewel at bargain basement prices. There is some score-settling in this part of the narrative, along with a dollop of kvetching, but mostly Duberman tells his story straightforwardly. It is, of course, his story, and others may contradict him on various points, including his description of the infighting on the CLAGS board. Such is the nature of a mem oir: it is one individual’s story, one point of view. But, of course, it’s an amazing story by someone whose point of view is informed by firsthand participation in the un folding of LGBT history from life before Stonewall through the era of Gay Liberation and, in turn, that of the AIDS crisis. This brave and searingly honest memoir is both a personal story and a vital institutional history of the LGBT struggle to date. ____________________________________________________ H. N. Hirsch, emeritus professor of politics at Oberlin College, is the author of the novel Fault Line and the memoir Office Hours .

A Life in History

H.N.H IRSCH

REACHING NINETY by Martin Duberman Chicago Review Press. 352 pages, $30. M biographer, playwright, activist, organizer, and essayist, he was the founder and first director of CLAGS , the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies at CUNY, and has been a major force for the advancement of LGBT scholarship. He has also produced a series of memoirs. The latest, Reach ingNinety , is a summing up of a long and remarkable life as he ARTIN DUBERMAN has been an important public intellectual and a major figure in the LGBT move ment for many decades. As an openly gay historian,

July–August 2023

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