GLR July-August 2024

Summer Escapes: ‘Sanctuary’ FROM THE EDITOR

T HE IMPULSE for any minority to seek out safe spaces or sanctuaries exists in proportion to the oppression they suffer in their social world. From the Catacombs of Rome to the colony of Plymouth, the upshot of this quest is well attested. Members of sexual minorities have undoubtedly been forming their own private communities for centuries— would Plato’s Symposium be an early example?—but it was only in the 19th century that sexual identity became a criterion for forming associations of like-minded individuals. Most of the early associations of LGBT people arose in large cities like New York, London, and Paris. An exception is explored here by William Benemann, who takes us to a small island called Tuckernuck off the coast of Nantucket, which it self is the “far out” island for Bay Staters. There, a wealthy physician named Sturgis Bigelow built a summer home in 1871 and turned it into a retreat for men who shared an interest in the arts and exotic travel and each other. The island’s isolation pro vided a perfect spot for both quiet contemplation and manly in teraction of all kinds (including sports!). A century later, in the 1970s, a community for lesbians called the Pagoda was taking shape in St. Augustine, Florida. The Pagoda provided a similar kind of refuge from the outside world, like Tuckernuck attracting people who were focused on the arts. The colony was initially purchased by members of a dance company called Terpsichore that expanded their mission Correspondence

to include theatrical and musical training and performance. They also expanded its living capacity to fourteen cottages in addition to a large main building. A more famous example of an artists’ commune was Andy Warhol’s Factory, whose name implies that it was a hive of in dustry for Warhol’s art. And while art was certainly produced there, Alfred Corn makes the point that most of the Factory’s denizens were not there to work. Many were druggies and mis fits—most were “queer” in one way or another—who sought refuge in a space that allowed them to be as crazy or creative as their situation dictated. For Warhol, they were all part of his tableau for the manufacture of pop culture parodies. Most everyone reading this has probably experienced the sense of safety and exhiliration that gay and lesbian bars and clubs have provided since long before Stonewall. The impor tance of their function as sanctuaries rises in proportion to the anti-gay hostility of the surrounding world. Thus, for example, as Lucas Belury explains here, for a city like San Antonio in the 1970s, the arrival of a club called the SA Country was a huge deal for an LGBT population living in a Texas border city with a large Army base nearby. There were frequent raids both by MPs and local police. In what became a landmark case, the SA Country sued the city for the right to safe haven, and—spoiler alert—the good guys won this time. R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .

his marginal aristocratic station. Ultimately for me, his artistic relevance is in autofic tion and the intentionally blurred facts and fictions of the “New Narrative.” Mark Timothy Hayward, Los Angeles Another Amber Hollibaugh Memory To the Editor: Thanks for John D’Emilio’s tribute to his friend, the wonderful writer, activist, and femme extraordinaire Amber Hollibaugh [March-April 2024 issue]. In 2000, Duke published her book My Dangerous Desires: A Queer Girl Dreaming Her Way Home . When Amber improbably worked for the staid AARP, she curated a panel of minority speakers that included Anita Hill, Dolores Huerta, Wilma Mankiller, Buddhist priest activist Angela Oh, and me. We each had five minutes to talk. Amber had us paid $5,000 each. Peg Cruikshank, Scarborough, ME Openly Gay Art Needs to Be Seen To the Editor: I enjoyed your San Francisco-themed issue [March-April 2024], and was happy to see Ignacio Darnaude’s article on the exhibi

tion of the work of artists Paul Wonner and William Theophilus Brown. The show trav eled to Memphis from the Crocker Museum in Sacramento, where I reviewed it for Squarecylinder and the Bay Area Reporter. Curator Scott Shields and the Crocker Art Museum deserve commendation for elevat ing the profile of Wonner and Brown. We live in difficult times when LGBT people are being pushed back into the closet, or worse. And yet, blue-chip gay artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol are largely immune from at tack. Even Robert Mapplethorpe, now fully monetized, is no longer shocking. Kenji Yoshino, in his book Covering , describes how marginalized minorities adopt survival strategies of hiding and concealment. That wasn’t necessary for artists like Agnes Mar tin or Ellsworth Kelley; they lived discrete lives and worked abstractly. Artists such as David Park encoded what many read as gay imagery, but critics still generally ignore such interpretations. It is not to diminish Wonner and Brown’s art to point out that their need to hold down jobs and sell their artwork may have caused

Don’t Forget, Byron Had Another Side To the Editor: William Kuhn’s Art Memo in the May June 2024 issue, “Why Lord Byron Still Matters,” takes a decorous view of Byron’s life and sidesteps the relevance of his work today. For two centuries now, Byron’s “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” mys tique formed the archetype of the “live hard, die young” ethos. For all his sexual fluidity, he never took a stand in defense of same sex attraction (Wilde), or opposite-sex at traction for that matter. Rather, he left a self-indulgent debris trail of unrequited family, liaisons and debt stretching from London to Athens. If Kuhn had no qualms about applying trauma-informed perspectives to Byron’s bi ography, then it seems only fair to view his life through privilege and the problematic escapades of Empire. Capable of both ex traordinary generosity and selfishness, Byron is most famous for being infamous, and, as a libertine expatriate, he milked his celebrity for all it was worth. His idiosyn cratic epic poems are steeped in exoticism (and eroticism) enabled by the privilege of

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