GLR November-December 2023
Animated publication
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November–December 2023
Notes from Underground
A KRAM H ERRAK Loving Fassbinder
E MILY L.Q UINT F REEMAN An Artist Who Survived
the Holocaust M ARK O LMSTED
Prison and Privilege M ICHAEL R OSENFELD Georges Eekhoud’s Forbidden Foray L EE L ANZILLOTTA An ‘Androgyne’ Blooms in 1899 Gay Assimilation, Chinese Style BY A NDREW H OLLERAN Just How Chaste Were the Shakers? BY W ILLIAM B ENEMANN H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), The Everything Poet BY H ILARY H OLLADAY
$6.95 US, $7.95 Canada
El Hedi ben Salem and Rainer Werner Fassbinder
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The Gay & Lesbian Review November–December 2023 • VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 6 WORLDWIDE
Editor-in-Chief and Founder R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review ® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118
C ONTENTS
Notes from Underground
Literary Editor M ARTHA E. S TONE Poetry Editor D AVID B ERGMAN Associate Editors S AM D APANAS P AUL F ALLON J EREMY F OX M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ Contributing Writers R OSEMARY B OOTH D ANIEL A. B URR C OLIN C ARMAN A NNE C HARLES A LFRED C ORN A LLEN E LLENZWEIG C HRIS F REEMAN P HILIP G AMBONE M ATTHEW H AYS A NDREW H OLLERAN I RENE J AVORS J OHN R. K ILLACKY C ASSANDRA L ANGER A NDREW L EAR D AVID M ASELLO
F EATURES
Loving Fassbinder 10 A KRAM H ERRAK
El Hedi ben Salem’s fateful years with the workaholic filmmaker
Georges Eekhoud’s Forbidden Foray 13 M ICHAEL R OSENFELD
The Belgian writer went where no one had gone before, in 1899
An Artist Who Survived the Holocaust 17 E MILY L. Q UINT F REEMAN
The Nazis burned her work but never found Gertrude Sandmann
Prison and Privilege 20 M ARK O LMSTED
How being gay (and white) determines your social position inside
Gay Assimilation, Chinese Style 24 A NDREW H OLLERAN
LGBT life goes on in private, but signs of a “movement” are few
The Sweat of Vile Bodies 28 W ILLIAM B ENEMANN
The Shakers renounced all sex, but some men found outlets...
R E V I E W S
Tan Twan Eng — The House of Doors 31 H ANK T ROUT Ethan Mordden — Gays on Broadway Kelly Kessler, ed. — Gender, Sex, and Sexuality in Musical Theatre 32 R AYMOND -J EAN F RONTAIN Lara Vetter — H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 34 H ILARY H OLLADAY Patrick Gale — Mother’s Boy 35 D AVID B ERGMAN Jess Cotton — John Ashbery (Critical Lives) 36 A LAN C ONTRERAS Matt Baume — Hi Honey, I’m Homo! 38 B RIAN B ROMBERGER McKenzie Wark — Love and Money, Sex and Death: A Memoir 39 A LLISON A RMIJO B RIEFS 40
F ELICE P ICANO J AMES P OLCHIN J EAN R OBERTA V ERNON R OSARIO Contributing Artist C HARLES H EFLING Publisher S TEPHEN H EMRICK Webmaster B OSTON W EB G ROUP WebEditor A LLISON A RMIJO ______________________________ Board of Directors A RT C OHEN ( CHAIR ) E DUARDO F EBLES R OBERT H ARDMAN D AVID L A F ONTAINE J IM J ACOBS A NDREW L EAR R ICHARD S CHNEIDER , J R . ( PRESIDENT ) M ARTHA E. S TONE T HOMAS Y OUNGREN ( TREASURER ) S TEWART C LIFFORD (C HAIR EMER .) W ARREN G OLDFARB ( SR . ADVISOR EMER .)
Stephen Greco — Such Good Friends 42 F ELICE P ICANO Patrick E. Horrigan — American Scholar 43 J EAN R OBERTA Ronya Othmann — The Summers: A Novel 43 A NNE C HARLES Amy Schneider — In the Form of a Question 44 W ILLIAM B URTON Justin Torres — Blackouts 45 C HARLES G REEN Emma Donoghue — Learned by Heart 46 C LAUDE P ECK Ira Sachs, director — Passages (film) 50 A LLEN E LLENZWEIG
P OEMS & D EPARTMENTS
5
C ORRESPONDENCE
8 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .
BTW
P OEM — “Huff” 18 T IM S TOBIERSKI A RT M EMO — How an “Androgyne” Upended Gender in 1899 23 L EE L ANZILLOTTA P OEM — “Touch” 26 M ARK E VAN C HIMSKY P OEM — “When You’re in Love with a Friend’s Partner,” 40 M ICHAEL M ONTLACK C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 47 A RT M EMO — The French Lieutenant-Colonel’s Men 48 D ALE B OYER
The Gay & Lesbian Review/ WORLDWIDE ® (formerly The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review, 1994-1999) is published bimonthly (six times per year) by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc., a 501(c)(3) educational corporation located in Boston, Mass. Subscriptions: Call 847-504-8893. Rates : U.S.: $41.70 per year (6 issues). Canada and Mexico: $51.70(US). All other countries: $61.70(US). All non-U.S. copies are sent via air mail. Back issues available for $12 each. All correspondence is sent in a plain envelope marked “G&LR.” © 2023 by The Gay & Lesbian Review, Inc. All rights reserved. W EBSITE : www.GLReview.org • S UBSCRIPTIONS : 847-504-8893 • A DVERTISING : 617-421-0082 • S UBMISSIONS : Editor@GLReview.org
November–December 2023
3
Holiday Issue: ‘Notes from Underground’ FROM THE EDITOR
O UR THEME is a nod to Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Un derground and focuses on several people who, like the “Underground Man” in the Russian novella, lived in the shadows of mainstream society, which they grasped more clearly than others from their perspective as outsiders. What has forced them underground is their status as members of a sexual minority, which in turn becomes a critique of the society that has ostracized them. To take these figures in chronological order, the first was a younger contemporary of Dostoyevsky who also wrote strange novels, one of which was in fact titled A Strange Love . Here and elsewhere, Georges Eekhoud was remarkably candid both in his departure from society’s sexual mores and in his denun ciation of their petty tyranny. And he was way ahead of his time, advancing a vision of sexual minorities forming their own com munities on the margins of mainstream society. In the same year that A Strange Love was published (1899), a memoir came out titled The Autobiography of an Androgyne that documented the double life of writer Jennie June, who used masculine pronouns and described himself a “Hermaphrodi tos.” Shockingly explicit for its time, the book was published privately and distributed only to doctors and professionals. Sounding remarkably 21st-century, June proposed that “there are no sharp dividing lines between the sexes.”
Jumping ahead a few decades, we meet an artist named Gertrude Sandmann who went “underground” in a more literal sense. A lesbian and a Jew living in Nazi Germany, Sandmann remained in Berlin throughout World War II, holing up in secret spaces, protected by friends. Even as her work was being de stroyed by the Nazis, she was deleting all traces of herself as a person, and it worked. She died in 1981. Rainer Werner Fassbinder is thought of as an “underground” filmmaker in that he worked outside the studio system and cre ated alternative films about the lives of marginal people pitched to the “art house” crowd. Akram Herrak focuses here on Fass binder’s love affair with a Moroccan man named El Hedi ben Salem, an actor who shared the director’s passion for a life of spontaneous outbursts and intense highs and lows—exactly the kind of life that bourgeois society frowned upon. Another kind of “underground” life is exemplified by writer Mark Olmsted, who spent the better part of a year in prison in L.A. County and kept a diary, which he turned into the criti cally acclaimed book Ink from the Pen . Here Olmsted writes about a system of privilege that determines an inmate’s posi tion in a well-defined social system, one in which being gay marks you as damaged goods but can also be a ticket out of some of the worst features of prison life. R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .
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4 collection; what Conlon says about gender’s spectrum can also be said for this book: ‘it will move across you do not be afraid.’”—Carl Phillips, author of Then the War Paper $16.95 Otherwise Essays Julie Marie Wade “Wade’s work illustrates the courage and creativity necessary to come into one’s own hard-won rage—and joy.”—Lia Purpura, author of All the Fierce Tethers Paper $18.95 $ 5CDA;!:9D:" ?A 9!AC :=/ 9;:=C< C7 " 9 7C<8/< 4
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,-"$"!#% $&' ( ',-)*! Distributed by the University of Chicago Press www.press.uchicago.edu TheG & LR 4 Correspondence was good friends with the guy who ran the flower shop in the Park Plaza Hotel, who in turn was friends with the guys at the front desk. As luck would have it, Cardinal Medeiros had a group of people staying at the Plaza that same weekend, so our friends at the front desk just billed an extra suite to the Cardinal’s tab. It was admit tedly not a huge suite, but a nice large room on the second or third floor—large enough for a cast party, and it was free, courtesy of the Cardinal. The afternoon before the show, he came over to the theater to be interviewed by Michael Bronski for TheBoston Phoenix . After Michael left, Robert told me that he had a tradition (superstition?) of al ways masturbating on the stage before a show, to bless the theater, as it were, by spewing his offering across the stage. He asked if I wanted to join him. I politely de clined, but sent him upstairs to make his of fering. (After reading about his time at the Caffe Cino I can see how this “tradition” may have started.) We had a successful run that weekend, and Triangle went on producing gay the ater for a total of eighteen seasons (al though on many different stages). So, who knows, maybe his offering to the theater that June afternoon worked. I would like to think it did. David Hough, Boston, MA To the Editor: The essay “Robert Patrick at the Caffe Cino” contains an error in the description of Patrick’s comic play about God raping the Virgin Mary. The author of the essay com ments that the bawdy dialogue is “in the service of undercutting pious belief in the Immaculate Conception.” The Immaculate Conception is a 19th — century Catholic doctrine that the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM) was conceived by her mother, Anne, without Original Sin, so that she could give birth to Jesus. The BVM’s conception of Jesus is called the Virgin Birth. Protestants and other Chris tian denominations believe in the Virgin Birth, but not in the Immaculate Concep tion, which is accepted by Catholic de nominations. Downplaying the Catholic adoration of the BVM was an important Ritual and Robert Patrick at Ca ff eCino To the Editor: I read with interest your recent article ti tled “Robert Patrick at the Caffe Cino” (Sept.-Oct. 2023). It brought back memories of the weekend in June of 1980 when I had the pleasure of meeting him. I was the founder and first artistic director of the Tri angle Theater Company, Boston’s first gay theater, and our first production was an evening of three one-act plays, one of which was Patrick’s TheFog . While I was negotiating the rights to the play, he offered to come up for the opening, as he was going to be out in the Midwest somewhere getting an award from the International Thespian Society (the honors organization for high school theater). Ap parently, he cranked out so many one-act plays that a lot of them were done at high school state theater contests. So, he negoti ated with them to fly him to the conference, and then afterwards to fly him to Boston. My job was to find him a hotel and get a train ticket back to New York. Fortunately, one of my board members November–December 2023 5 aspect of the Protestant Reformation. Con fusion of the terms is a common miscon ception (pun intended). Michael Sirmons, Austin, TX Leaving Laudy To the Editor: A recent “BTW” item [Sept.-Oct. 2023 issue] reported that billboards have appeared in Florida and Texas sponsored by Massa chusetts with the slogan “Massachusetts for us all,” encouraging red state residents to consider moving to a more welcoming state in New England. The item mentioned that states like Georgia and Arizona might be better places for former red state gays to make an impact. In 2011, after living in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, DC, my husband and I began our retirement in ultra-gay Wilton Manors, Florida. We enjoyed living in the liberal and LGBT-welcoming Ft. Lauderdale area, but by 2020 we found ourselves donat ing to U.S. Senate and other candidates in Georgia and concluded that Florida was un likely to become a blue, or even a purple, state anytime soon. We moved to Savannah, Georgia. After we left Florida, the increas ingly rabid Governor DeSantis redoubled his abuse of Florida’s large LGBT population in his quest for higher office. Georgia is not yet a gay utopia, but we have some national sway as Georgia voters and our liberal, quirky, and youthful Savan nah community gives us hope for the future. Some of our Florida gay friends have also begun heading to friendlier locales. Voting with one’s feet sometimes sends the proper message to tyrants. We’re glad TheG&LR continues to connect us to the larger national LGBT community. Dan Layman & Eric Miller, Savannah, GA Keeping up with the CPUSA To the Editor, Regarding your review of Bettina Aptheker’s Communists in Closets in the May-June 2023 issue, Vernon Rosario does a fair and honorable job in reviewing it. However, a few errors crept into his review: The caption on the author photo states that Aptheker “is a noteworthy CPUSA ac tivist in her own right.” “Was” is the correct tense of the verb here. She has not been a Party activist for many decades. [Please note that captions are written by the editor.] Some of Rosario’s statements about Eliz abeth—Betty (not “Betsy”)—Millard are questionable. And I write, by the way, as an intimate friend of hers from the day I met her in 1957 until she died in 2010. He writes: “She continued a lifelong career in Communist-associated publications and in ternationalist women’s groups.” If Betty joined the CPUSA in 1940 and left it in the mid-50s following the Khrushchev revela tions about Stalin, that adds up to maybe sixteen or seventeen years of Party activism. She did not publish in Party organs after that, nor was she committed to any “interna tionalist women’s group” after that point. A period of under two decades is hardly “life long,” especially if you live to 98! Betty’s 1948 pamphlet was titled “Woman Against Myth,” not “Women Against Myth.” As for the claim that, if anything, the CPUSA became “ more homophobic [e]ven as the USSR was collapsing,” Rosario notes that at the Party’s 1991 National Convention, “it also debated and lifted its six-decade ban on homosexual membership.” That sounds more like a sign of progress than of deeper entrenchment. I don’t say this to defend the CPUSA ’s policy before, during, and for a long time after those years, but logically his state ment doesn’t make sense. Indeed, from the outside I was among the Party’s most persist ent critics on this score. The CPUSA is fully on board now with LGBT struggles, and publishes regularly on this topic, both on its own website and in the pages of its flagship daily online publication People’s World . Sadly, in some circles with a long memory, the odor of its past history still hovers over it. I for one #)%@4 2@%@96@&' (<. .+)@4 =.6&' (@*+@<4 (?9+@&' /179<@ >)9+, .0 2.44 =@++)66 &'()+- 0*& ,./&1 I >3-<053 R0 N33 R<3 54M3 0M I9 3=R1I01K49I1- 2I9) 0V> N023 I9K 39R4V3 0R<31N) CR 4N I :&45R- L53IN& 1-) P =?@ -/ $%& O0NN &13 R =?@ 89:)/! .0 9 "9, 2)33)& !'--" I -0&9: 2I9,N NR1&::53 BI- *4$31IR4094NR 4N R<3 < 239R I9K "36 U01>#N V050 3 (4RV<355#N 232041 RI>3 60 94: , #)$@+91./)4< "0 !%&'( 0KKN) I:I49NR N33249:5- 49N&120&9RI$53 <093NRT &9V39N013KT I9K N023R423N 01M&5 V0&9R31V&5R&13) H4LL43 /I::0R N 13IK31N 09 I %0&193- R<10&:< R<3 EFGF QR0936I55 O40R C9 B133964V< >,.02.426 09 ;<09) .9+ 6 -//1 3522 :92096 !6).026<"# -//1"6226<" .9+ $
'.<9"(*/% TheG & LR 6 have moved on and accepted its advances as sincere and thoroughgoing. Eric Gordon, Los Angeles An Inconvenient Truth about Leyendecker To the Editor: Two recent articles—David Masello’s “The Eye of the Beholder” (May-June 2023 issue) and Ignacio Darnaude’s “Leyendecker the Sly” (Sept.-Oct. 2023), discuss the life and career of J. C. Leyendecker (1874–1951), the influential and prolific American illustra tor who was recently the subject of an exhibi tion at the New-York Historical Society. While the articles—and presumably the exhi bition as well (I haven’t had the good fortune of seeing it yet)—appropriately analyze and document Leyendecker’s sexual orientation as a motivator for his presentation of Ameri can masculinity in the decades before World War II, both leave out any mention of the wide range of Leyendecker’s subjects in his art other than those of young men. Darnaude mentions that Leyendecker painted 322 Saturday Evening Post covers. What he didn’t mention, even in passing, was that a substantial portion of those covers were populated with male adolescents or pre adolescents in situations typical of their age groups and of the period in which they were depicted. For example, his Post covers for August 19, 1911, and May 22, 1915, depict unabashed skinny-dipping—with rosy cheeks at both extremities! A Web image search with the terms “Leyendecker” and “New Year’s” yields an almost annual parade of infants and toddlers from before 1910 to the late 1930s, many of them tastefully un clothed, typical—even expected—in an era whose standards were far different from those of today. His final Post cover, from January 2, 1943, has a helmeted but other wise naked toddler blasting apart a swastika with a bayoneted gun strategically—symbol ically?—placed across his nether bits. This is not to suggest or imply that Leyen decker had any unhealthy interest in children. It suggests that Leyendecker had at least an appreciation, if not a fondness, for boys and boyhood. His images were very much in tune with the times. In short, mothers loved them. The reason this is important (IMHO) is the same as the apparent reason it wasn’t men tioned in the Leyendecker articles: it isn’t po litically correct these days to focus on a gay man’s interest in boys. However innocent— or even helpful—an interest in boys and boy hood might be, somewhere around 1980, gay men agreed to the Faustian proposition that they would disavow any attraction to anyone “underage.” (“Control feminists” developed this notion further to encompass all men and most child-adult [male] interactions except those in an immediate family. Does the term “stranger danger” ring a bell? As an “equality feminist” myself, I work daily to counteract this noxious trend.) There is nothing wrong with a discussion of how an artist’s sexuality may have guided his art, and how that art may have influ enced society. Anyone with the chutzpah to depict his lover’s face and body, however stunning, as J.C. Leyendecker did in ads, story illustrations, and magazine covers for over forty years deserves to be studied, if not admired. This proposition, however, like any investigation of the past must not be emasculated by revisionist history. It must consider the whole picture. Gerald Jones, Ph.D., Sun City, CA Know Your Middle English To the Editor: In his review of a new book on medieval ism in the Sept.-Oct. 2023 issue, Vernon Rosario claims that in “The Miller’s Tale” in The Canterbury Tales , “Absalom sodomizes [Nicholas] with a hot poker.” But this is not what Chaucer actually says in the poem. Ab salom simply smacks Nicholas’ bare butt with the poker: “And Nicholas amydde the ers he smoot” (“And he smacked Nicholas in the middle of the ass”), meaning across the butt, not in it. To “smack” is not the same as to “insert.” George Klawitter, Notre Dame, IN November–December 2023 7 BTW Find the Fit Let’s say you’re a conservative activist whose idée fixe it is to fight “transgenderism” in public schools, and you want to do something truly gonzo to make your point and get people fired up. Naturally, your first instinct would be to con struct a sixteen-foot penis sign with President Biden’s face on the head and the words “ BIDEN SUCKS ” in giant letters above the image. And that is exactly what Virginia GOP Central Com mittee Representative Ron Hedlund did over the summer. In truth, the rest of us are still scratching our heads to “find the fit” between Mr. Hedlund’s stated desire to protect the children from transgenderism and the penis sign, which also included thewords “ SHIT IS FUCKED UP AND STUFF .” Another fun touch is that the penis appears to be ejaculating, and the droplets are la beled “My Kids” with a helpful arrow pointing upward. No doubt Freud would have a field day with a man who sees his kids as drops of semen (his own?); but the trans connection is still unclear. Another sign read “Stop grooming our children,” which is a big part of Hedlund’s spiel. So... the penis represents Biden, who’s the Groomer in Chief, and… then what? Anyway, it’s worth noting that the demonstration occurred at the RF&P Park in Henrico County, VA, where kids were playing a base ball game just meters from the sign. Well at least they weren’t exposed to anything trans-related. Books 1, Thieves 0 Books are being banned all over the coun try, and citizens in places without bans are taking matters into their own hands. Take the case of Amy Vance and Martha Mar tin, whose branch library in San Diego wasn’t on the banned bandwagon, so they decided to check out any books they deemed “inappropriate” and simply not return them to the li brary. The scheme quickly blew up in their faces. Their mistake was writing a letter declaring their intentions to head librarian Misty Jones, who in turn issued a statement defending the four teen books that the women were expropriating. Once San Diego councilmember Marni von Wilpert got wind of the gambit, the story hit the local news and even went national, complete with von Wilpert’s request for the public’s help in support of a be leaguered library. Before long, the library had received gifts to taling $45,000 and cartons of LGBT-themed reading and programming materials with which to expand its collection. So now if Ms. Vance and Martin decide to rip off books they don’t like, they’re going to need a bigger backpack. TheG & LR 8 An Eye for an Anus Some citizens of Palm Springs, CA, are fighting a proposed sculpture that’s part of an AIDS memorial and that may or may not look like a human anus. The claim that it does has a group of residents up-in-arms and demanding a re design, and the artist, Phillip K. Smith III, has agreed to take an other swipe at it. The artist explained that it’s supposed to look more like an eye “that allows ... a view beyond what is directly in front of you.” What’s important, of course, is not the artist’s intent but the fact that people saw an asshole (was it the ridges around the rim?), which could just be a function of the demographics of Palm Springs (would straight peo ple have seen a sphincter?). But whether real or imagined, it’s the kind of thing that, once the anal association is out there, the concept is pretty well doomed. It is an AIDS memorial, after all. You Want Birth Cer ti ficates? A bit of agitprop in Italy bears mentioning for its sheer aptness and elegance. It seems the Miss Italy Pageant has enacted a rule that all contestants must be able to prove that they are “women from birth.” So, to protest the ban on trans women, Italy’s trans men are entering local pageants around the country, and, because they can prove they were recorded as female at birth, there’s nothing to stop them from signing up. So far over 100 trans men have entered, and an Instagram influencer has been documenting their sto ries. It’s a somewhat bitter pill to swallow, because it means they’re forced to resurrect their deadnames and former identi ties, but they say that it’s worth it to defend other trans people facing discrimination. Needless to say, the pageant authorities’ skirts are in a knot, not so much over the unwanted contestants as the unwanted publicity: the stunt has succeeded in making the pageant a bit of a laughingstock. Karma Chameleon An ”ex-gay” activist in Uganda named El isha Mukisa was jailed for homosexuality under a law that he had fervently lobbied for. Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill— which was heavily underwritten by American evangelical groups—was signed into law last May. A leading advocate for the Anti-Homosexuality Act, Mukisa spoke before Parliament, calling himself a “victim of homosexuality.” Activist Frank Mugisha called the situation “laden with irony” but denied that he felt schadenfreude; the arrest simply underscored the crisis for gay Ugandans. As for Mukisa, we’ve seen such men so many times before: the anti-LGBT fanatic whose zealotry is a charade to hide his secret self. We’ve also seen our share of “ex-gay” claimants getting caught in flagrante , and each inci dent is another nail in the coffin of the claim that being gay is a “choice,” which is the axiom on which the whole “ex-gay” movement rests. It’s what makes it possible to un-choose your sexual orientation—with a little help from your local “conver sion therapist.” What a case like Mr. Mukisa’s shows is that it’s possible to choose your political positions and your public image, but that is not the same as choosing who you are. November–December 2023 . r isMcMur istChr egon, artis ry Or w by Portland, also features original art ork b LIVE.LOVE.LEO. suits of happiness. ti the ever-el observa ions on lusivepur s, ideas, and iter's thought t reflect the wr poems aphical s tha ra a collection o utobiogr is a of 55 semi-au LIVE.LOVE.LEO. ROLOGY O NSPIRED BY AST RY I A POETIC JOURNEY OF SELF-DISCOVER l " the combina about this book i "Th so —R. Hender g hi b k i ou! Thankyo inspiration to me rd rean t "Yourwor dsar on !" e. i n hecombina t tiono thing he coolest thing .ANDitw artwork and w p poetry wil ca ." ur ll of d f is y. l classupy py offee table. coff you ff —G. F onsec live-lov by.com/book/ e-leo https://store.bookbab 9 ESSAY Loving Fassbinder A KRAM H ERRAK I PROBABLY HAD the same reaction as the rest of the audience in 1974 while watching Ali: Fear Eats the Soul for the first time. I must have been around fifteen or six teen, being slowly introduced to arthouse film as my cu riosity and passion for cinema grew, and I was beginning to hear the name of Rainer Werner Fassbinder. In the film ( Angst essen Seele auf in the original German) I was sur prised by the Arab music I heard, and by the appearance of El Hedi ben Salem on the screen—tall, dark-skinned, and unmis takably Berber. Over the next hour and a half, I sat mesmerized by the beautiful magic of Fassbinder’s film, which was so sim ple yet so profound. Being Moroccan and seeing a Moroccan actor in such a wonderful film filled me with great pride and joy. The moment the credits rolled, I had to know more. The Arab star of the film, El Hedi ben Salem m’Barek Mo hammed Mustapha, was born in 1935 in the midst of the French occupation of Morocco. He had an upbringing and an early adult life that were typical for the time, and they could not have foretold what the future held in store for him. He came from an old Berber tribe by the name of Haratin, which had small pop ulations in Morocco, Mauritania, Algeria, and Tunisia. The Haratin are believed to be the descendants of former Sub-Sa haran slaves. They are Muslims and known to be hard workers, taking jobs in agriculture, physical labor, and occasionally war. At the age of fifteen, Salem* married a thirteen-year-old girl, and together they settled in a small village near the Atlas Moun tains in Morocco. Very little is known about Salem’s life in Mo rocco, except that it was unremarkable for its time and place, and that he and his wife had five children. At the age of 36, Salem left his wife and children and headed for Europe, finding himself in France, where he met the person who would change his life forever, for better or for worse. He met Fassbinder in 1971 at a gay swimming pool in Paris, and they hit it off and started a romantic relationship, which meant that Salem had become part of the director’s infamous entourage. Rainer Werner Fassbinder (1945–1982) is a significantly more recognizable name than is El Hedi Ben Salem, and, in cinephile circles, he needs no introduction. As a director, actor, and playwright, he was one of the pioneers of the German New Wave in cinema, and he remains one of the most important names in German film history. Born in 1945 to a doctor father and a translator mother who split up shortly after his birth, he _______________________ * El Hedi ben Salem is properly referred to by his full name to distin guish him from his father, but here we’ve adopted the convention of calling him simply “Salem” for the sake of brevity. Akram Herrak is a writer and film critic from Morocco, writing for multiple online magazines about film and literature. He is also a mu sician, a photographer, and a semi-professional chess player. grew up with his mother and her many lovers, some of whom he quarreled with. Having a busy single mother meant that he grew up with very little company or authority, so the movie house became his babysitter. In Germany during World War II, all movie productions were strictly controlled by the Ministry for Public Enlighten ment and Propaganda and all films made in that period were produced with the sole purpose of indoctrinating the masses. After 1945, Germany, like many other countries that partici pated in the war, started receiving American films that were made during the war. Having earned their profits back home, U.S. promoters exported these films at such low prices that they crushed any local competition. So, young Fassbinder grew up absorbing the works of Michael Curtiz, Orson Welles, and Dou glas Sirk, watching at least one film a day throughout his child hood, sometimes up to four. El Hedi ben Salem in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, 1974. In these years, he and his mother were often separated be cause she was recovering from tuberculosis, and he was looked after by friends and acquaintances. He got used to a certain free dom and became a young delinquent. He also came out as a ho mosexual at a very young age. He was sent to boarding school but left before his final exams at age fifteen, going to live with his father in Cologne. The two didn’t get along, but living with his father allowed him to immerse himself in the world of liter ature and drama while doing random jobs during the day to earn money. At age eighteen, he returned to Munich in order to attend night school in drama, which he did for two years. During that period, he met many people who would become permanent members of his clique and his team, and who would work with him for the remainder of his career, most notably Hanna Schygulla and Irm Hermann. He joined what was known TheG & LR 10 as the Munich Action-Theater in 1967, which later became bet ter known as the Anti-Theater, a group he quickly took over, something he accomplished through the force of attraction and fascination that he exerted over its members. Some of Fassbinder’s negative traits started to emerge, such as the manipulation and the emotional abuse to which he fre quently subjected members of his entourage. At the director’s insistence, they all lived and ate together, a practice that lasted for many years. Fassbinder would reveal personal secrets about each particular member in front of the whole troupe, which con two women and his friendship with another man. Due to its slow pacing and its robotic acting, the film got very poor reviews at the Berlin International Film Festival that year. But before pro duction was over, Fassbinder was already cast as the lead actor for Volker Schlöndorff’s Baal . Indeed, Fassbinder’s short ca reer was marked by obsessive productivity. He made up to four or five films a year, and by his death at age 37, he had 44 film credits to his name. He had his first national success with The Merchant of Four Seasons in 1972, but it was in 1974 that he made his breakout film Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, which was shot in fifteen days. It was only intended as a way to pass the time between two other projects, but it ended up winning the International Critics Prize at Cannes that year, and it in troduced Fassbinder to international audi ences for the first time. From then on, his films would be released internationally and sisted of fifty people or more, just to get an emotional response out of them. He would cast his actors based on favors and personal closeness to him, so they were always trying to get on his good side to ensure a role in his next project. He created a tense workspace in which actors graded each other, so there was always a lot of jealousy and rivalry. As Coming from very di ff erent backgrounds, Salem and Fassbinder met by chance, and their story together is one to rival a Greek tragedy. the leader of the Anti-Theater, he directed many plays, notably his own Katzelmacher , which deals with the plight of foreign workers in postwar Germany. His directing style in the theater anticipated that of his earlier films, marked by robotic, stilted, emotionless delivery in melodramatic tales. While he had made a couple of earlier short films, Fass binder didn’t get to direct his first feature film until 1969. The filmwas Love Is Colder Than Death , a gangster movie that im itates similar films from Hollywood from the 1930s up to the 1950s, starring himself as a criminal torn between his love for often won major awards. Eventually, movie theaters around the world would organize retrospectives of his work, and he be came a symbol of underground cinema everywhere. Fassbinder’s personal life was anything but a triumph and was always chaotic. Ever since his childhood, he had been out spokenly gay, though he had relations with a number of women. He was married for two years, to Ingrid Caven, who once said of him: “Rainer was a homosexual who also needed a woman. It’s that simple and that complex.” He also had many male lovers, something that West Germany wasn’t exactly thrilled by beneat Thestor th the heels ry that echo s. w York’s long tradition of dra istories, this is a comprehen brant character portraits a ag STARRED review Publishe s ee , rsW kly ance and queer activism.” oes —P performa guide to New lesser-known hi “Filled with vib nsive nd UseGLITT Until Dec 31, 2023 TER for 20% at Bookshop.org November–December 2023 11 at this time. He became something of an antihero, often show ing up in the press and ever the subject of rumors and scandals. Starting in the 1970s, when he became a heavy drug and alco hol user, he came to be seen as an “Antichrist” figure, which he played up in public. Coming from entirely different backgrounds, Salem and Fassbinder met by chance, and their story together is one to rival a Greek tragedy—full of love, hurt, art, and doom. After their 1971 meeting in Paris, they traveled back to Fassbinder’s home in Munich, where they started a passionate and turbulent affair. During the following year, Fassbinder would try to play father to two of Salem’s sons, an attempt that proved disastrous. One was sent back to Morocco in a confused state, and one got caught up in legal troubles due to paternal neglect, as his father was now entranced by his new lover. Salem was cast in minor roles in three of Fassbinder’s projects between 1972 and 1974, including two of his most celebrated works: The Merchant of Four Seasons (1972) and World on a Wire (1973). In the following year, Salem took center stage as the title character, an immigrant worker, in Ali: Fear Eats the Soul .The film’s story is simple enough: an immigrant worker from Mo rocco gets together with an old cleaning lady from Germany, a widow with grown-up, married children. Their relationship cul minates in marriage, one that defies all of postwar Germany’s social norms and prejudices. It’s a fascinating film that man ages not only to criticize contemporary society and all its ha treds, including the remnants of fascist thinking, but also to paint a beautiful image of pure love that transcends seemingly insurmountable barriers. It’s not hard to see that the film is a re flection of Salem and Fassbinder’s relationship, taking the form of the latter’s doubts and insecurities as they creep into the nar rative. The relationship devolves into a toxic dynamic in which the physical attractiveness of one partner crosses swords with the power and talent of the other. Nor was this dynamic unique to their relationship, for it was always the case with Fassbinder that his lovers had to live by his rules to secure a role in his next film. Fear Eats the Soul was a major success, but by the time it was released, Fassbinder and Salem’s relationship had started to go downhill. They made a couple more films together, notably Fox and His Friends (1975), a film shot in Marrakech, Mo rocco. Fox and His Friends starred Fassbinder as Fox, a naïve gay man working in a carnival who’s suddenly out of a job after his boss is arrested. He’s picked up by an older man, who takes him to a party where he first meets Eugen (played by Peter Cha tel), a rich gay man who looks down on Fox and insults him even though he’s attracted to him physically; and they end up in bed together. The following day, Fox wins the lottery and Eugen’s feelings of disgust suddenly turn into love and warmth, and the couple starts living together. Eugen tries to mold Fox into the image of a cultured man of wealth and taste, though Eugen really just wants to enjoy the simple pleasures of life, notably Fox’s body. He also takes advantage of his lover’s for tune, until Fox is left with nothing, and his prospects look bleak. Salem plays the role of a male escort that Fox and Eugen sleep with during a trip to Marrakech. At some point during or after the making of Fox and His Friends , Salem and Fassbinder’s relationship reached its in evitable end. The readiest explanation for the breakup impli cates Salem’s volatile temperament, especially when drunk, but other factors were surely at play. The night of the breakup, Salem went to a bar, got extremely drunk, and stabbed three people, wounding them badly. Fassbinder and his friends tried to sneak him out of Germany, but he was captured at the French border and sent to prison in France, where he would spend the remainder of his life. Fassbinder continued making one film after another, enjoying great success, but at the cost of his men tal and physical health. His drug addiction got worse along with his obsessive productivity. Two years after his arrest, Salem killed himself in his prison cell. He had started life as a Berber in the Atlas Moun tains in Morocco, married young, had kids, and worked at a conventional job. He’d left Morocco to chase a better life in Europe, met Fassbinder, and the rest is history. The news of his suicide was withheld from Fassbinder until the very end. A year later, another of Fassbinder’s lovers, Armin Meier, killed himself as well. Fassbinder would not find out until 1982 during the making of what would be his last film, Querelle . Its plot revolves around the title character in Jean Genet’s novel, a sailor with dubious morals who sails into Brest and goes into a brothel, where he meets his brother and starts exploring his homosexual fantasies. The film was dedicated to El Hedi ben Salem. Shortly after he finished filming it, Fassbinder died of a drug overdose at age 37. Forty years later, his name is forever engraved in the annals of cinematic greats, even as that of El Hedi ben Salem is largely forgotten. TheG & LR 12 ESSAY Georges Eekhoud’s Forbidden Foray M ICHAEL R OSENFELD I N 1965, Guild Press published Georges Eekhoud’s queer novel Escal-Vigor under the title A Strange Love , with a picture of a handsome, bare-chested young man on the front cover (Figure 1). The back cover doesn’t reveal any details about the author, and the front flap includes scant biographical details: “Georges Eekhoud is one of the leading writers of this century, and this beautifully written book was one of the pioneering works of fiction dealing with the subject matter of homoeroticism.” The back flap lists his publications, with French titles, but no dates (this list is re produced inside the book too). The title page reveals that A Strange Love has a subtitle, Escal-Vigor , followed by “From the French of George Eekhoud.” However, nothing indicates that this novel was first published in 1899, and anyone picking up the book would be led to believe that it was by a contemporary writer. The introduction takes a somewhat militant stance—Eekhoud is described as “one of the best-known classical writers of modern Belgium”—but does not provide any context. A Strange Love is compared to Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray , and Eekhoud’s acquittal on “Friday the 26th of October, 1900” is mentioned. Readers would no doubt have been disappointed to discover that the most erotic scenes in the book involve two passionate kisses. An English translation of Escal-Vigor was published in 1909 by Charles Carrington. Panurge Press reprinted this translation in 1930 and Guild Press in 1965. There are no significant dif ferences between these translations except for the illustration by Carroll Snell in the 1930 edition, which depicts a woman in the foreground who’s baring her bosom and showing one nipple. remembered today as a queer pioneer: Escal-Vigor is consid ered the first novel in Belgium to depict love between two men, and his queer short stories are still published in French editions and were translated into Spanish as recently as this year. Eekhoud was orphaned at a young age and taken in by his wealthy maternal uncle, an industrialist. He enjoyed a privi leged upbringing at the exclusive Swiss boarding school Brei denstein Institute, where he received an excellent education and learned several languages. It was here that he first understood his queer desires. In notes he prepared later in life, he revealed his special friendship with Giuseppe Facchini, a “handsome and strong” sixteen-year-old from Bologna. His friend “was more than a brother” to him and took care of him “better than any mother” when he injured his ankle and was bedridden. Eekhoud also recalls that Giuseppe gave him all of his choco lates and a book by Victor Hugo. He was also fascinated by an other schoolmate: “Boratto was well built, handsome like Saint Sebastian, with frizzy hair, a matte and slightly olive com plexion, big lips and large eyes.” Eekhoud recalls that this friend used to strip his shirt off to show his muscles and would perform gymnastics for his friends; he admits openly that he felt “passion” for him. Boratto would “gently tease him and The drawing also shows a furious and violent crowd throwing stones and, in the background to the right, a well-dressed man hovering over a shirtless man. This il lustration is a dramatized and eroticized version of the final scene of the book (Fig ure 2). Eekhoud was born in Antwerp, Belgium, in 1854. He died in Brussels in 1927 after a long career as a pres tigious novelist and journal ist, as well as a critic of art and literature. He’s mainly Michael Rosenfeld, a postdoctoral fellow in queer literary history at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium), is co-editor of The Italian In vert: A Gay Man’s Intimate Confessions to Émile Zola (2022). 13 Figs. 1 (left) and 2 (above): 1965 and 1930 editions of A Strange Love. November–December 2023 Eekhoud: he published La Nouvelle Carthage (1888, 1893)—translated into English as The New Carthage (1917)—which was widely praised as a masterpiece. In 1893, he was awarded Bel gium’s most prestigious literary award for this novel. We know very little about Eekhoud’s extramarital love life before 1892, but on Feb ruary 22nd of that year, he met Sander Pier ron, a twenty-year-old typographer’s assistant. The 270 letters sent by Eekhoud to Sander be tween 1892 and 1927 allow us to follow the evolution of their friendship. Eekhoud uses common pleasantries in his first letters to Sander, calling him “dear friend” or “dear Sander.” A few months later, the tone changes when he writes “dear little Sander” or “ mydarling ,” and in February 1894, “ My darling, my beloved .” Eekhoud uses English to express his love, no doubt so that his wife would not under stand (Figure 4). (Here and following: italics are used for pas sages that Eekhoud wrote in English.) The correspondence is filled with statements of undying love: “I have a never-ending affection for you, a love that will only end with my life ... Tell yourself that I’m all yours; that everything I can do for you will be done, that no one, you hear, loves you like I do” (April 12, 1893). Other excerpts clearly in dicate that this is not platonic love: “my beloved little Sander ... Yes, my dearest, I too love you more than anyone else in the world, and every day I find myself feeling more and more at tached to you. ... I kiss you with all my heart ... thousand kisses; our souls are full of love; Thousand kisses my loving and most beloved Sander ... thine for ever, thy only, Georges; My heart full of joy and of love, all spread and smelted in thee, my only love ” (September 1893 to May 1894). Although Eekhoud’s diary was heavily censored and even partially destroyed—by himself or his inheritors—fragments survive that also testify to the sexual nature of this relationship: “Excellent evening of excitement with Sander” (January 28, squeeze his cheeks” while fixing his “velvety eyes in mine.” These infatuations would inspire his writ ings on queer love (Figure 3). At age eighteen, Eekhoud was unsure of his future path, and first decided on a military ca reer. He was admitted to the prestigious Royal Military School in December 1872, only to be summarily dismissed in June 1873. The official reason was an unsanctioned duel with his friend Camille Coquilhat. However, the exact circumstances remain murky and the relevant page in the official record has been ripped out. Eekhoud started working as a corrector for a local newspaper in Antwerp, to which he also contributed articles on various topics. With his grandmother’s fi nancial assistance, he published three volumes of po etry between 1877 and 1879, which passed wholly unnoticed in literary circles. During these formative years, he met the young generation of Belgian writers and established ties that would serve him well in the future. In 1881, Eekhoud moved to Brussels and started working as a journalist for the important daily newspaper, L’Étoile .He also contributed regularly to Belgian avant-garde literary journals. His first volume of short stories, Kermesses (“Country Fairs”), was published in 1884, to critical acclaim. The author’s queer desires appear in the suggestively erotic tone used by the narra tor to describe male characters in some of these stories. For ex ample, one character is an “eighteen-year-old brunette, slender, a little pale, shy and girlish,” while others are depicted as “solid square and muscled guys, with brown fuzzy hair.” In one story, a female character observes a soldier getting undressed, as the narrator describes the scene: he has “a head of frizzy chestnut hair shaped like a helmet ... a slightly aquiline nose ... a square chin and broad shoulders.” The reader becomes a complicit Peeping Tom when the soldier “unbuttons his tunic, takes off his belt; and shows his pectoral muscles in their full glory.” In 1887, in an effort to keep up bourgeois appearances, Eekhoud married his grandmother’s former housekeeper, Cornélie Van Camp (1847–1920), and a year later they adopted his wife’s orphaned niece and nephew. In the meantime, same sex attraction had become a more visible theme in his fiction. Nouvelles Kermesses [“New Country Fairs”], his second vol ume of short stories, was published in 1887. “Fit for Service” is the story of Frans Goor, a poor villager who’s selected for the army draft. The narrator describes the young man’s perfect naked body during the physical examination by the medical board. The doctors admire Goor’s pectoral muscles, probe his “intimate parts,” and declare him fit for duty. Garrisoned in Brussels, Frans is witness to strange activities at night in the dor mitories: he sees other soldiers’ in “strange postures” and hears “moans of love, the suppressed sighs, the empty kisses.” These same soldiers try to seduce him, but to no avail; Frans is in love with a girl from his village. This refusal to indulge in queer sex uality leads to his downfall. When Frans refuses his sergeant’s advances, the latter accuses him of theft and threatens to strip search him. Frans throws a jug at the sergeant’s head, wounds him, and is then sentenced to five years in the brig. Ashamed of his behavior, he takes his own life. The following years brought success after success for Fig. 3. Georges Eekhoud in 1872. TheG & LR Fig. 4. Eugène Laermans. Sander Pierron , 1896. KIK-IRPA Brussels. 14
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