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Correspondence

Anyone who has had the pleasure of see ing the matachín come into the plaza knows that they are accompanied by one or more boys, each dressed in a sky-blue frock. It’s a fast, uplifting dance step that all the men do in unison, which someone more knowledge able than I might be able to interpret. Be that as it may, the gender transgression of young males in feminine attire is unmistak able. Clearly Harry Hay did his homework when naming the Mattachines. Alex Kouvel, Tucson, AZ A Poet’s Choice To the Editor: I read with interest the review of the late Jim Nawrocki’s collection House Fire: Sto ries and Poems [in the Sept.-Oct. ’22 issue]. First of all, I was saddened to learn of his passing in 2018. I write now to fill in some information from my perspective as former editor of White Crane Journal. The review states that “A manuscript of his poetry was selected as the winner of the 2009 James White Poetry Prize, but for some reason it was never published.” Jim was indeed named as the winner of the prize, which was offered by White Crane in celebration of its 20th anniversary. The judge for the prize was the esteemed poet Mark Doty. The main prize was publication of the winner’s work as a book, along with a cash award. The reason the book never came out is that Jim declined to have it pub lished when he learned that White Crane was a print-on-demand publisher. Appar

ently he believed this method of publication was unsuitable for his work. Fair enough, but I wanted to make the point that it was Jim’s decision not to go forward with the book at that time. I am pleased to learn that his work has at last seen the light of day. Bo Young, Granville, NY The Night I Met James Kirkwood To the Editor: Regarding the Art Memo “Welcome to the ‘70s!” (July-August 2022) about James Kirkwood: when I was in high school in the early 1970s, my mother brought home two of James Kirkwood’s books: Good Times/Bad Times and There Must Be a Pony . (What was she thinking?) I barely re member them, and the online descriptions of them don’t sound promising, but they had a profound effect upon me as an up and-coming lesbian. I was moved to write to Mr. Kirkwood, and we had an infrequent twelve-year correspondence. Around 1974, when I was in college, there was a production of P.S. Your Cat Is Dead in Buffalo, NY, so I arranged for four of us college kids to meet up with Mr. Kirk wood prior to a performance. He was very gracious, funny, and kind. I’d like to think he is remembered that way, and, according to a brief article from 2012 in The East Hampton Star, he is: ”He was vital, witty, and intelligent, loyal and generous to friends and family.” I particularly liked the quotations at the end of the book—this one from a fellow playwright, Terrence Mc Nally: “People will still say out of the blue, ‘God, I miss Jimmy.’ ... When people say ‘Jimmy,’ they don’t have to say ‘Jimmy Kirkwood’—and it’s a pretty common name. But he was Jimmy and people still miss him and I can’t think of many people that you can say over fifteen years after they’ve left, ‘Oh God, I miss Jimmy.’” Diane Hamer, Georgetown, MA The Times Owes It to C. A. Tripp To the Editor: The history of C. A. Tripp by Martin Du berman was very interesting, especially Mr. Duberman’s description of his personal con nection with several of the people he in cluded in “When C. A. Met Alfred, Part 1” [Nov.-Dec. 2021]. I was shocked to read about the sneering reception that Mr. Tripp’s book, The Homosexual Matrix , re ceived in the New York Times (though not at all surprised at that reaction in 1975). I subscribe to The International New York Times , which also furnishes online access. I

Where Harry Hay Found ‘Mattachine’ To the Editor: We read often in these pages that Harry Hay was a seminal voice and organizer in the “homophile” movement of the 1950s. In reference to the mention of him in the July August 2022 issue, in the essay titled “Sex and Gender in Native America,” I felt that one important detail was left out. It con cerns the derivation of the very word “Mat tachine,” which we recognize as the moniker attached by Hay to his nascent or ganization but often without understanding its significance. I am hardly an expert in this area, but I do live and work among a community here in what is now southern Arizona, that includes among its diverse population a sizeable mi nority of people affiliated with the Yaqui, also known as the Yoeme, tribe. With a long and rich tradition in neighboring Sonora, Mexico, these indigenous communities were seeking refuge in the U.S. to escape an op pressive regime to the south in the early to mid-20th century. They were finally granted full legal protections and (limited) land rights here in the 1970s. Among the traditions shared by these tribes is a set of elaborate ceremonies lead ing up to Easter in which a number of the dances are performed, including those of Los Matachines. Each group has distinc tive costumes and movements that tell the Passion narrative in a uniquely syncretic fashion.

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was curious to know whether the NYT had ever issued a “mea culpa.” My search of their archives resulted in scant mention of either the book or Mr. Tripp between the publication of the review and Tripp’s obitu ary in 2003. Interestingly, the latter pro vided a more positive impression of The Homosexual Matrix but was deafeningly silent about their 1975 book review. As you may know, The Times has been publishing memorials to people who died in obscurity or underappreciated before the newspaper became “woke.” Perhaps Mr. Duberman or The G&LR could reach out to The Times to suggest that Mr. Tripp deserves a similar “overlooked no more” article. Rusty Wyrick, Ghivizzano, Italy That Underreported Dinner Party To the Editor: In a Letter to the Editor in the July-Au gust issue, Michael Bedwell tells of a 1949 literary gathering for novelist E. M. Forster, who was visiting America, hosted by New York socialites Monroe Wheeler and his lover Glenway Wescott, whose 1971 New York Times article is the source of this in formation. Photographer George Platt Lynes, with his mother Adelaide, came for cocktails to meet Forster and his “friend of long standing” Bob Buckingham and

dence with him through the ’70s. Only half jokingly I fancy myself “Joseph Campbell’s apostle to the gay com munity.” His explanation of religion saved me from my 1950s Catholic upbringing. As editor of White Crane Journal and writer about gay men’s spirituality, I’ve touted his perspective as a naturally gay way to under stand religion. Such an understanding can be a positive cure for the homophobia and confusion that traditional religion imposes on gay and sex-variant people. My gay spir ituality books are about how Campbell’s un derstanding of myth as a clue to the nature and patterns of consciousness explains the religious problems away. So I can’t help but wonder about the exchange between Camp bell and Kinsey. An Internet search on this dinner party will bring up Wescott’s article with its cou ple of sly hints at the conversation. It did not make it into any of Campbell’s pub lished journals, the director of the Camp bell Foundation told me, but those journals are now in the New York Public Library’s Joseph Campbell Collection and are open to the public. If any G&LR reader would peruse Joe’s journals for 1949, I think we’d all love to know what he wrote about that evening. Toby Johnson, Austin, TX

arrange to photograph them later in the week. At the dinner party, after the Lyneses left there remained the two hosts; Forster and Buckingham; and two more, perhaps incongruous, guests: sexologist Alfred C. Kinsey and comparative religion scholar Joseph Campbell. I was intrigued that Campbell had been invited. The reason, I assume, is that Forster was the celebrated author of A Passage to India and Campbell was an Indologist and Sanskrit scholar. This dinner sounds like a fairly gay event. I am always happy to gain evidence of Campbell’s open-mindedness in this regard—and at a time (1949) when it wasn’t the norm. Campbell himself was not gay; his first real girlfriend was Adelle Davis, later the health food maven and in ventor of tiger’s milk, and he was famously married to Broadway choreographer Jean Erdman. Gracious and open-minded—that’s how I experienced Joseph Campbell. In 1971, I was a young ex-monk, a hippie, a grad stu dent in comparative religions, and a bud ding, outspoken gay activist. And I worked at a Jungian-oriented seminar center north of San Francisco, which is how I met and befriended Joe. I continued on the team that put on his appearances in Northern Califor nia and carried on a personal correspon

“Groundbreaking . . . attentively engages the ruptures and omissions through which queerness, race, and disability co-emerge.” —M. REMI YERGEAU, author of Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

O N

ALSO OF INTEREST Isherwood on Writing: The Complete Lectures in California Christopher Isherwood Edited by James J. Berg Isherwood’s lectures on writing and writers, now all available for the first time in this updated paperback edition

D I S A B I L I T Y

A N D

R H E T O R I C A L

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University of Minnesota Press Available at better bookstores or to order call 800-621-2736 • www.upress.umn.edu

November–December 2022

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species is anything but binary, displaying a riot of possibilities from fish and birds to the higher mammals. As luck would have it, mermaids are especially prone to gender fluidity in folklore— where, by the way, they tend to be mostly green.

Slippery Creatures Daily Wire host and columnist Matt Walsh usually sticks to transgender issues in his online rants and in his infamous film documentary What Is a Woman? , but he gave those folks a break in order to denounce the latest Disney movie, a live-action remake of The Little Mermaid with a Black girl (Halle Bailey) in the lead role. Walsh was upset about the cast ing because “it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have someone with darker skin who lives deep in the ocean. I mean, if anything, not only should the Little Mermaid be pale, she should actually be translucent.” Okay, then, let the search for a translucent actress to play the part begin! Walsh does understand that mermaids are creatures of fantasy and don’t have to obey the laws of science, right? He goes on: “She should be totally pale and skeletal where you can see her skull through her face. And that would actually be a version of The Little Mermaid that I would watch.” At this point he seems to have drifted into another kind of fantasy alto gether, but whatever. Walsh’s shtick is to gin up scientific-sound ing, but actually quite absurd, theories to bolster his racist, transphobic, and misogynistic positions. When it comes to gen der, the attempt to show that “the binary” is rooted in nature is especially doomed to failure. As ecologist Joan Roughgarden has shown in these pages (and in her books), gender in other BTW

Not Welcome A slice of home security footage that went viral shows two Mormon missionar ies arriving at a front door some where in Indiana and noticing a doormat with the words “Gayest Place in Town,” whereupon they take one look at each other and bolt. The blogosphere loved it because it shows these two sol diers of God dressed in regula

tion short-sleeved dress shirts, ties, and slacks being scared off by a doormat. The two women who live in the house, who be came instant (albeit short-lived) celebrities, told the press that they were just thankful for “the fact that it actually worked! … It was a great investment.” The doormat served to amuse their friends “with the added benefit of keeping religious zealots from knocking on our door to tell us about their god.” The Greatest Good One by one, the vestiges of British homo phobia in the Empire are falling. Singapore is the latest former colony to repeal the infamous Section 377, which criminalized sexual acts “against the order of nature” (for males only). It’s not surprising that Singapore, known for its uptight conser

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vatism, was a holdout in this respect. Singapore is probably the closest thing we have on earth to Plato’s Republic : a city-state whose avowedly benevolent, albeit dictatorial, government reg ulates every aspect of social life to achieve the ultimate in order and harmony. It’s the dream of Jeremy “greatest good for the greatest number” Bentham and various utopian novels on up to B. F. Skinner’s Walden Two , which imagines a republic of opti mal outcomes through the rational control of behavior. Singa pore clearly aspires to be such a utopia, so when it outlaws gum-chewing or swearing in public, it’s only to ensure that no one is offended or likely to step in a wad of Wrigleys. It is what U.S. conservatives would call the ultimate “nanny state.” Thus we can be sure that if Singapore repealed 377, it was all in the interest of the greater good. But Plato already knew that. The extremism of the religious Right has gone so far that its proponents are running up against an inconvenient obstacle: the Bible itself. Two recent examples with an LGBT theme: MakingOur Case The American FamilyAssociation has come out swinging against Christians who aren’t sufficiently anti-gay and all but admitted that the trouble with these groups is that they’re adhering to a biblical version of Christianity rather than the intolerant one that they prefer. The AFA, which is officially listed as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, is sued a warning about what they called “gay Christianity” and provided a handy list of statements to watch out for, such as: “Jesus never mentioned homosexuality even once”; “The story of Sodom and Gomorrah is about inhospitality and greed, not homosexuality”; “The Bible doesn’t say anything about sexual orientation.” What’s odd is that these are all true statements, and the AFA makes no attempt to refute them. They even pro duced a 2.5-minute video that consists mostly of LGBT people expounding on the biblical case for gay equality. Of course, the AFA is presenting these views as something to be shunned. Ap parently the goal is to alert the flock pre-emptively to any bib lical passages that could be interpreted as supporting LGBT rights, or human rights in general. Pay no attention to those pas sages that preach tolerance and equality; move along! Banning Books Is Bottomless A school district in Texas ac tually banned the Bible itself for a time—along with Toni Mor rison’s The Bluest Eye , The Diary of Anne Frank , and many other titles that were found to be in violation of the Keller dis trict’s guidelines on sex and violence. The Bible was banned for its “sexual content, violence, including rape, murder, human sacrifice,” and so on. Some of the 41 banned books were later reinstated, but the point was made: any book is fair game if you look hard enough for something to be offended by, including the very book whose religious teachings these school boards are ostensibly trying to uphold. Needless to add, the book-banning effort in Keller is part of a movement in red states across the U.S., and the resonance with past episodes of book-banning is obvious. Today such bans are a largely sym bolic gesture, since kids find out about sex and gender on the Internet and not at the library. But it has always been about the symbolism. What the Nazis were saying when burning whole libraries was: “If we can burn your books, we can burn you.” And that’s a sobering message in any age. November–December 2022

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ESSAY

The Kerouac Century H ILARY H OLLADAY

A S JACK KEROUAC’S centennial year draws to a close, I have been contemplating the open book of his sexuality. He married three times, had countless affairs with women, and was not above crude expressions of homophobia. How ever, he allied himself with his gay friends Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs in the creation of the Beat Movement, and, according to Ginsberg, there were times when Kerouac had sex with him or other men. Kerouac didn’t hide his strong feelings for Neal Cassady, fictionalized as Dean Moriarty in On the Road ; nor did he mind admitting in Doctor Sax and Maggie Cassidy to a youthful crush on another boy. Given that he was writing and publishing during an era when the admission of such feelings rarely appeared in mainstream litera ture, Kerouac deserves credit for his sexual candor. A native of Lowell, Mass., Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac (1922–1969) was the youngest of three children born to Leo and Gabrielle Kerouac, a working-class couple with French Canadian roots. The Kerouacs’ oldest child, Gerard, died at age nine of rheumatic fever when Jack was four. It was a signal trauma in the future author’s life and—along with his Roman Catholic mysticism—accounts for the strains of sorrow and morbidity that run through his books. Those same strains show up when his fictional personas attempt to have serious relation ships with women. Sometimes their discomfort shades into ap palling misogyny, as in this passage from Visions of Gerard (1958): “Praise a woman’s legs, her golden thighs only produce black nights of death, face it—Sin is sin and there’s no erasing it—We are spiders. We sting one another.” Kerouac’s associa tion of hetero sex with death may have made it easier for him to justify his occasional forays into homosexuality, even though he shared many of the anti-gay prejudices common in mid-20th century America. In Doctor Sax (1959), a darkly whimsical novel about his early years written in the free-flowing style he called “sponta neous prose,” Jackie Duluoz’ retrospective descriptions of him self indicate that he had a queer childhood full of fear, fantasy, and wide-ranging passions. At one point, he confesses his love for a schoolmate: I was in love with Ernie Malo, it was a real love affair at eleven—I tiptoed on his fence heartbreakingly across the street from school—I hurt him once with my foot on the fence, it was like hurting an angel, at Gerard’s picture I said my prayers and prayed for Ernie’s love. ... Ernie was very beautiful to my eyes—it was before I began to distinguish between the sexes— Hilary Holladay is the author of Herbert Huncke: The Times Square Hustler Who Inspired Jack Kerouac and the Beat Generation and co editor of What’s Your Road, Man? Critical Essays on Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

as noble and beautiful as a young nun—yet he was a little boy, tremendously grown up (he became a sour Yankee with dreams of small editorships in Vermont). The story of Ernie Malo goes no further in Doctor Sax, but the same character shows up in Maggie Cassidy (1959), also writ ten in spontaneous prose and growing out of Kerouac’s high school love affair with a girl named Mary Carney. Like the nar rator of Doctor Sax, Jack Duluoz recalls praying at the photo of his brother “to insure the friendship, respect and grace of Ernie Malo. ... I found him as beautiful as seven times the pick because his rosy cheeks and white teeth and the eyes of a woman dreaming, of an angel maybe, bit my heart.” Unlike most of his literary contemporaries, Kerouac did not

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dismiss what he called the “little dramas” of early love and de sire. Just a couple of pages before the tangent about Ernie Malo, Jack Duluoz remembers an evocative episode involving his friend Lousy: “The first night I met [Pauline] all I could do was smell her hair in my bed, in my hair—told this to Lousy, I smelt her in his hair too. It interested Lousy. When I told him we’d fi nally kissed the night before ... Lousy wanted me to kiss him like I had kissed Pauline. We did it, too; the others didnt even stop talking about the team.” Perhaps the other boys sitting around Jack’s bedroom didn’t suspect that the kiss was anything

come, he needed me now.” He offers to pay Dean’s way back to New York and proposes they then go to Italy. It’s as close as he comes to admitting he loves Dean and wants him to himself: I tried to remember everything he’d done in his life and if there wasn’t something back there to make him suspicious of some thing now. Resolutely and firmly I repeated what I said—“Come to New York with me; I’ve got the money.” I looked at him; my eyes were watering with embarrassment and tears. Still he stared at me. Now his eyes were blank and looking through me. It was probably the pivotal point of our friendship when he realized I had actually spent some hours thinking about him and his troubles, and he was trying to place that in his tremendously involved and tor mented mental categories. Something clicked in both of us. In me it was suddenly concern for a man who was years younger than I, five years, and whose fate was wound with mine across the passage of the recent years; in him it was a matter that I can ascertain from what he did afterward. He became extremely joyful and said everything was settled. Self-conscious and unable to talk about what has just happened between them, the two men stand on the sidewalk near Dean’s home and behold a Greek wedding party—an ancillary sign that they are officially a couple. Their trip back East reveals that Dean cannot commit to Sal any more than he can to his many female lovers, but it is a sweet and telling moment nonetheless. By the end of On the Road, Sal wants to believe he has found “the girl with the pure and innocent dear eyes that I had always

other than play-acting—or maybe they saw it as part of a homoerotic world they already had experienced on their own. In any case, Kerouac’s willingness to include these brief episodes about Lousy and the alluring Ernie Malo in novels published in the 1950s is re markable. It is as if he’s daring his critics to

In On the Road , Kerouac’s alter ego Sal Paradise cannot stop rhapsodizing over the young car thief.

object while privately wagering that most everyone has had early experiences that fall outside the straight and narrow. In On the Road (1957), Kerouac’s alter ego Sal Paradise doesn’t kiss Dean Moriarty or pray for Dean to love him back. However, Sal cannot stop rhapsodizing over the young car thief and womanizer that many would find unsettling. Early in the novel that popularized the Beat Movement, Sal Paradise com pares his new friend to “a young Gene Autry—trim, thin-hipped, blue-eyed, with a real Oklahoma accent—a sideburned hero of the snowy West.” Soon thereafter, caught up in the excitement that Dean has brought to his stagnant existence, Sal acknowl edges the transactional nature of their budding relationship: He was simply a youth tremendously excited with life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and to get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him. He was conning me and I knew it (for room and board and “how-to write,” etc.), and he knew I knew (this has been the basis of our relation ship), but I didn’t care and we got along fine—no pestering, no catering; we tiptoed around each other like heartbreaking new friends. I began to learn from him as much as he probably learned from me. Sal’s infatuation with a known hustler had begun even before they met, when he read letters Dean wrote from a New Mexico reform school to a mutual friend. That friend has no interest in tutoring Dean when he arrives in New York City with his new bride, but Sal is happy to let the restless, oversexed young man take up his time. Dean’s raw physicality and nonsensical bab bling pull Sal back from the edge of despair. On one occasion, after he and Dean have had a falling-out, Sal tries to make a life for himself in Denver, where Dean grew up. But without his friend around, Sal slips into a terrible de pression. With money he gets from a female friend, he takes off for San Francisco and arrives in the middle of the night at the home Dean shares with his second wife: “He came to the door stark naked and it might have been the President knocking for all he cared. He received the world in the raw. ‘Sal!’ he said with genuine awe. ‘I didn’t think you’d actually do it. You’ve fi nally come to me.’ ” It turns out that Dean is miserable in his marriage, in poor health, and desperate to leave. Sal thinks: “I was glad I had November–December 2022

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searched for and for so long. We agreed to love each other madly.” Sal tells Dean that he and his girlfriend Laura intend to save their money and move to San Francisco. Dean shows up at their apartment soon after, a gibbering wreck. He eventually con fesses “in a sudden moment of gaping wonder” why he rushed across the country: “Well and yes, of course, I wanted to see your sweet girl and you—glad of you—love you as ever.” In full retreat from this tender declaration, Sal rejoices when Dean’s wife in San Francisco invites her wayward husband to come home. Dean asks him for a ride to Penn Station, but Sal turns him down because Remi, a tiresome and pompous friend of Sal’s, doesn’t want Dean along on the double date he has planned for the evening: “So Dean couldn’t ride uptown with us and the only thing I could do was sit in the back of the Cadillac and wave at him. ... Dean, ragged in a motheaten overcoat he brought spe cially for the freezing temperatures of the East, walked off alone, and the last I saw of him he rounded the corner of Seventh Av enue, eyes on the street ahead, and bent to it again.” The novel closes with a one-paragraph prose poem, a paean to Sal’s travels and his continued longing for the friend he has abandoned just as Dean earlier in the novel had abandoned him: “The evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.” This fa

My Life As Elizabeth Taylor

Like Elizabeth Taylor I was raised—I thought I was raised—at MGM. A life of being coddled, fussed over in limousines on my way to the set…. Harris, you play shortstop! a gym teacher once barked. Fine, I said . Where’s that? The look I got. Worth diamonds. Rubies. I wear those jewels still.

J OHN H ARRIS

mous ending brings together Sal Paradise’s awe of the beautiful country he has traveled with his love for the friend he longs to be with but can no longer follow to the ends of the earth. The presence of his “girl” signals that he has chosen, more or less by default, the conventions of the straight world. Kerouac himself did not necessarily think this was the right choice. In response to a letter from Elbert Lenrow, whose course on the 20th-century American novel Kerouac had taken at the New School for Social Research, he rebuked the older man for criticizing the ending of On the Road: “Almost like a child you incensedly cry to me ‘Since when is a bookie more important than a man in a motheaten coat’ (concerning the last scene in the book) as tho it was my own MORAL IDEA , as tho I was a spokesman for such ideas, instead of an American Novelist working in the field of Realism.” His distinction between his own views and his character’s actions belies the common as sumption that Kerouac’s novels are just thinly veiled autobi ographies. Perhaps more to the point, he does not condone Sal’s decision to let Dean walk away. At the end of his letter to Lenrow (written late in 1957), Ker ouac makes another important point that shows both his fragile ego and his awareness of the warping power of prejudice: “But I am well loved. Every single woman I’ve met in the past week (excepting dikes) has wanted to make love to me (married or not), at least secretly. I am well loved by almost all men. It’s the SYSTEM that rejects me, and you, and all of us. The system of ig norance. It bears watching, that lil old system.” He doesn’t spec ify whether the men who love him want to make love to him as all the straight women do, but he certainly doesn’t foreclose that possibility. And he’s right about “the system”—the systemic prejudices that infiltrate the minds and hearts of individuals. Ker ouac himself was not immune to ignorant prejudice, including homophobia, but at his best he was more self-aware than most and able to bring solace and pleasure to the legions of readers who came to love not only his books but the man himself. If Ker ouac had lived to see his hundredth birthday, I think that real ization would have made him smile.

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