GLR November-December 2024

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November-December 2024

The Gossip Issue

A NDREW H OLLERAN 1774: A ‘Buggerer’ on Trial in the British Army

I GNACIO D ARNAUDE The Love Song of Lorca and Dalí S ALAH B ACHIR How to Mobilize Celebrities A NDREW W HITE D. H. Lawrence’s White Peacock V AL H OLLEY

Bernstein’s Man at Tanglewood F RANK R IZZO Glamour Before the Windham-Campbell Prize

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The Gay & Lesbian Review November–December 2024 • VOLUME XXXI, 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

The Gossip Issue

F EATURES

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 H ILARY H OLLADAY A NDREW H OLLERAN I RENE J AVORS J OHN R. K ILLACKY C ASSANDRA L ANGER

“The men were always Murmuring.” 10 A NDREW H OLLERAN

The trial of Robert Newburgh roiled the Redcoats as rebellion brewed

D. H. Lawrence’s White Peacock 13 A NDREW W HITE

Male nudity and same-sex situations were present from the start

The Love Song of Lorca and Dalí 15 I GNACIO D ARNAUDE

Nod if you knew that the great Spanish poet and painter had a fling

1947: Tales of Tanglewood 20 V AL H OLLEY

How Richard Romney derailed Leonard Bernstein’s marriage plans

Celebrities, and How to Mobilize Them 23 S ALAH B ACHIR

Matthew Hays chats with a superstar philanthropist

A Power Couple Leaves a Legacy 25 F RANK R IZZO

They ran with the stars and funded the Windham-Campbell Prize

R EVIEWS

P OEMS & D EPARTMENTS G UEST O PINION — News Flash: Lesbians Are a Trending Category 5 A NN M C C ANN C ORRESPONDENCE 6 BTW 8 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . A RT M EMO — What Lorca and Dalí Almost Had 18 E MILY L. Q UINT F REEMAN P OEM — “La Cosa con Plumas” 26 M ATEO A CUÑA E XCERPT — A Letter to “Donnie,” from Tennessee 28 A RTIST ’ S P ROFILE — Judy Grahn: Poetry Taking On the Patriarchy 30 A NNE C HARLES P OEM — “At Twenty-Six” 41 M EGHAN S ULLIVAN P OEM — “In a Real Winter” 46 G ARY Z EBRUN C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 47 Paul Alexander — Bitter Crop 31 R EGINALD H ARRIS Katherine Bucknell — Christopher Isherwood Inside Out 32 D ANIEL A. B URR Louis Bayard — The Wildes: A Novel in Five Acts 34 H ANK T ROUT Neil J. Young — Coming Out Republican: A History of the Gay Right 35 A LAN C ONTRERAS Chris Dupuis — Winter Kept Us Warm 36 N ILS C LAUSSON Eleanor Medhurst — Unsuitable: A History of Lesbian Fashion 38 J EAN R OBERTA Books of poetry by Carl Phillips, Julian Carter, and Alan Felsenthal 42 D ALE B OYER Suzanne M. Scanlan — Esther Pressoir: A Modern Woman’s Painter 43 M ARTHA E. S TONE Gil Cuadros — My Body Is Paper: Stories and Poems 43 M ICHAEL Q UINN Jason Schneiderman — Self Portrait of Icarus as a Country on Fire 44 B RUCE S PANG Greg Kearney — An Evening with Birdy O’Day 45 T HOMAS K EITH Jacob Israël de Haan — Pathologies 46 B RIAN A LESSANDRO B RIEFS 48 Domestic Modernism: Russell Cheney and Mid-Century American Painting 50 S COTT B ANE Three books from the Syrian Diaspora 39 C HARLES G REEN Maya Cantu — Greasepaint Puritan 40 J OSEPH M. O RTIZ

A NDREW L EAR 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 S TEPHEN H EMRICK H ILARY H OLLADAY D AVID L A F ONTAINE J IM J ACOBS A NDREW L EAR

R ICHARD S CHNEIDER , J R . ( PRESIDENT ) T HOMAS Y OUNGREN ( TREASURER ) S TEWART C LIFFORD (C HAIR EMER .) W ARREN G OLDFARB ( SR . ADVISOR EMER .)

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. Subscription 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.” ISSN: 1077: 6591 © 2024 by 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 2024

3

Holiday Season: ‘The Gossip Issue’ FROM THE EDITOR

T HIS ISSUE is set to land on the eve of the election, an event that seems so fraught as to be unapproachable from where we sit. So let us focus instead on a lighter topic. “Gossip” for us is not about today’s Hollywood stars, but concerns notable LGBT figures who made waves in their time and continue to stir our fascination, prurient or otherwise. We begin with a scandal that unfolded in the Colonies shortly before the American Revolution. Robert Newburgh, a British chaplain, was accused by two grenadiers of being a “buggerer.” Andrew Holleran takes us through the strange world in which such a charge could be leveled on scant evi dence—okay, Newburgh was a flamboyant dresser—and it was up to the accused to take legal action to clear his name. Fast forward to the early 20th century and novelist D. H. Lawrence, whose books scandalized the reading public on both sides of the Pond. Lawrence was the first great writer in Eng lish to include explicit sex scenes in his novels, and, as Andrew White argues here, his interest in sex included a fascination with the male body, which shows up in several intimate scenes in volving naked men in pairs. A similar fascination was shared by Salvador Dalí, whose paintings of familiar objects in unfamiliar settings include phal lic configurations and hints of homoerotic contact. But if his work is open to interpretation, his personal life—as documented here by Ignacio Darnaude—leaves no doubt about his affair

with one of Spain’s greatest poets, Federico Lorca, a gay man whose writings and drawings are a testament to his courage to be himself in dangerous times. One of the juiciest stories in this issue is Val Holley’s tale of Leonard Bernstein’s summer of ’47, when he was supposed to be planning his marriage to Felicia Montealegre but instead had a steamy fling with a handsome admirer, Richard Romney. This affair really was the stuff of gossip; what’s amazing is that Bernstein somehow kept it going while his busy conducting schedule never missed a beat. Frank Rizzo reports on a couple that made no secret of their love. Donald Windham and Sandy Campbell met as young men and stayed together for decades, hobnobbing with writers like Tennessee Williams and Truman Capote and, in Wind ham’s case, becoming a successful novelist in his own right. Campbell’s fortune enabled the pair to establish the generous Windham-Campbell Prize for eight writers each year. Another gay man who has used his largesse to benefit the arts is Salah Bachir, who’s interviewed here by Matthew Hays. A successful media impresario, Bachir has a knack for mobiliz ing celebrities—and he knows them all—to raise funds in sup port of artists and institutions as well as LGBT communities and causes. His new memoir, First to Leave the Party , reflects on the many famous people that Bachir has befriended and coaxed over the years. R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .

CHRISTOPHER BRAM full of gentle shocks of r messy and real, like life Andy’s story is emotion for rock concerts, sex, p and trips to gay Greenw sey in197 d s lungesu r p M uth f F th f F k t (ada Au — i

recognition.” itself. This fine first novel is nal and sex , un y and tender, y, f n photo shoots, and love. wich Village in its party years 78, with his bes riend Elena, t f us deep inside An y Pollock’s d

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GUEST OPINION

News Flash: Lesbians Are a Trending Category A NN M C C ANN

unproblematic, or won’t that it won’t be a little sad or messed up or scary or disillusioning. It’s that they all feature women like me or women I could be like, or want to be like, or would never want to be like. We aren’t one-dimensional characters anymore. We aren’t jokes. We aren’t just about sex. We live rich lives both on and off the page. We have a rich history that seems to be adapting at warp speed right now, changing society. Chappell Roan has given femme lesbians an icon to be as crazy and full of feminine rage as we want, with our lipstick smeared and our heels high. Renée Rapp and Billie Eilish give us permission to be pre sentationally fluid and lyrically audacious. Melissa and Tracy gave us permission to come to the window and save a little money and go somewhere together. Our elders give us per mission to keep going. The lesbian renaissance is here, but it is built on the backs and many others. Many of them crept, whispered, crawled, and used gender-neutral pronouns in their work so we could run, jump, and scream: “I’m a woman and I love pussy!” We aren’t the number one trending pornography category; we are the number one trending pop album category. And a whole lotmore. _______________________________________________________ Ann McCann, a senior editor at Fruitslice magazine, a digital quar terly featuring queer artists, writers, and creators. l f Jonathan W A unique exploration o Jo Williams and th ciety Jargon So y. he

J ENNA ORTEGA kisses Sabrina Carpenter in Sabrina’s new music video, and we swoon. “It’s a lesbian renais sance!” declares an influencer on the Internet. Chappell Roan is at the height of the music industry after coming out as a lesbian, as are Billie Eilish and Renée Rapp. Renée also gave face and voice to the rebooted Regina George—the original beloved by so many sapphic Millenni als. Billie describes how she’d “eat that girl for lunch” in her newest album, including duets with Charli XCX in which she assures us that “Charli likes boys, but she knows I’d hit it” (in the song “Guess,” written by Charli XCX) In the re cent past, we’ve gotten sapphic representations from Janelle Monet, and every 1990s lesbian collectively screamed in ex citement when we got to claim Raven Simone. Last year, we got to see Tracy Chapman sing “Fast Car” on stage at the Grammys—unapologetically Black and butch, with graying locs. It’s true! Lesbians—collectively and specifically—are having a moment: some sort of huge, culture-shifting, para digm-tilting rise in society right now that’s not trending as a porn category. The most recent lesbian renaissance—no doubt there were previous ones—occurred during the AIDS crisis, when lesbians both saved lives and came into their own. Tracy Chapman released her single “Fast Car” and her self-titled album in 1988. Melissa Ethridge would release “Come to My Window” a few years later (in 1993), and K.D. Lang would pose for her infamous Vanity Fair shoot with Cindy Crawford that same year. And this renaissance doesn’t just apply to the music in dustry. As a writer, I am also a reader, and the amount of queer literature I have stacked in my apartment is more than I could read in a year or a decade. I can’t help but think of high school, when I had just come out and read Annie onmy Mind , by Nancy Garden, for the first time. It was the very first time I ever saw a positive storyline in a novel that reflected my life. It wasn’t pulp, and there was no gay death trope. It was just two teenage girls in love—just as I was. Now I stare at stacks of books with unapologetic lesbians centered on their covers. It is not that every story is pristine and clean and

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Correspondence

spected by literary scholars in several coun tries. Continental Europe had little interest in the other English Romantic poets, but Byron was admired by both Goethe and Pushkin, whose Eugene Onegin would not have been written with out the example of Don Juan , from whose general import Pushkin de parts, a natural thing for a different genius. In an era when a sex-posi tive stance and nonbinary sexuality are both widely accepted, Byron qualifies as an unsaintly patron saint and deserves our irreverent veneration as both a major author and a bold challenger to conven tional mores. Alfred Corn, Providence, RI Be tt e Midler: Accept No Subs ti tutes To the Editor: I love TheG&LR andwas thrilled to see that my new book On Bette Midler: An Opin ionated Guide (Oxford) was re viewed in the September-October issue. I’ll skip over the fact that Robert Allen Papinchak’s Brief

isn’t really a review but instead a laundry list of Midler career highlights. But the ac companying photo credited as “Bette Mi dler in her ‘Hell in a Handbag’ show, Continental Baths” is not

Lord Byron: S ti ll Beloved To the Editor: While of course he always writes well, I found myself puzzled by Andrew Holleran’s review-essay about Lord Byron in the Sep tember-October issue (“The Broken Dandy”). Puzzling, because he seemed to imply that Byron is an unimportant figure, a mere literary and sexual curiosity. He writes: “Byron is probably not read today in the way he was in the early 1800s.” No, but no popular author of that period is: the read ership today is smaller but better qualified. In my lifetime, I’ve known a very large number of poets and prose writers, and all have expressed admiration for and delight in his work—which, apart from the poetry, includes a wonderful journal and many bril liant letters. This past April, 100 or more people at tended a centenary celebration for the great Romantic at Westminster Abbey, a gather ing of scholars, writers, and readers, all de voted to the author of Don Juan . It’s unfair to expect Holleran to be aware of TheByron Journal , an international publication brought out by Liverpool University and re

even that of the book’s well-known and highly identifiable subject. Midler never did a show called “Hell in a Handbag” at the Continental or any where else. In fact, the photo is performer Caitlin Jackson playing Midler in a Chicago-area tribute show called “Bette: Live at the Continental Baths” pro duced by Hell in a Hand bag productions back in 2015-16. I know Midler is now considered a legacy artist and may not be so familiar to younger staff members, but it’s hard to believe someone at The G&LR didn’t catch this goof! Kevin Winkler, New York, NY

The real Bette at the Baths.

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Reality Bites After Log Cabin Republicans (LCR) president Charles Moran went on X to proclaim that the RNC Platform had been “stripped of all anti-LGBT language,” he was shocked when rank-and-file Republicans called him a “pedophile,” a “groomer,” “disgusting,” etc. One tweeter was sure he had MPox. But could Moran really have been so surprised? One has to be impressed by the stamina, the sheer moxie, of the LCR for sticking with a party that clearly wants no part of them. And think of the mental gyrations required to make this work—so much for cognitive dissonance theory! Perhaps a clue can be found in Moran’s claim that his party’s platform was free of anti-LGBT language. This is simply not the case. There were plenty of references to banning LGBT content from schools and rolling back legal protections for transgender people. Dog whistle phrases like “Sanctity of Marriage” (their caps) and “freedom of religion” were there, along with an explicit vow to keep “Christian-hating people” out of the U.S. Whether Moran really believed what he said or just wanted to rally the troops, this speaks to a fundamental truth about his party and its leader: it really doesn’t matter if a statement bears any relation to real ity, even when it’s a factual matter that’s easily checked. So what if aerial photos clearly show that the inaugural crowd in 2017 was nowhere near as large as Obama’s? It’s as if “free dom of religion” had been expanded from the world of spirits to encompass the world of things, as in a theocratic dystopia, as in 1984 . Don’t look up! Man Bites Dog Many cases have we followed of anti-gay cler ics or politicians getting caught doing what they denounce, but here’s one that doesn’t follow the usual script. Monsignor Jef frey Burrill isn’t just an anti-gay priest; he is, or was, the gen eral secretary of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, which has an expressly anti-LGBT mission. It all came crash ing down in 2021 when an exposé in ThePillar magazine dis closed Burrill’s activities on Grindr, which led to a bathhouse hookup. Usually at this point we report on the rogue’s efforts to deny or deflect the charges, or, as a last resort, to come clean and vow to get help. Instead, the Monsignor is suing Grindr for breach of privacy in a California Superior Court, claiming that the app failed to protect his data and never informed him that a third party could gain access to it. Whether he had a reasonable expectation of privacy is what the $5 million lawsuit will turn on. Grindr has faced similar complaints in the past. Maybe it’s simply not possible to thwart every possible breach of security (the method used to identify Burrill was devilishly convoluted), and we’re all sitting ducks—in which case we should just put away the Grindr and head to the nearest gay bar. Wag theDog We rarely call attention to the failings of worthy LGBT causes or communities, but when The New York Times runs a 3200-word article on its investigation into financial im proprieties at a major LGBT organization, we have to sit up.

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The org. is GLAAD —née the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation—and the piece describes a pattern of lavish spend ing on luxury travel and extravagant expense accounts for top staff, notably CEO Sarah Kate Ellis. Armed with bills from ski resorts and home remodeling companies, the piece makes the case that GLAAD is more-or-less rotten to the core. Keep in mind that the prototype for GLAAD , founded in 1985, was the Anti Defamation League of the B’nai B’rith, whose grim mission it is to root out anti-Semitism wherever it lurks. In contrast, GLAAD is known for its star-studded award ceremonies in New York and L.A. Yet, as recently as 2013, the org. was broke and in debt—until the arrival of Ms. Ellis, who had the idea to turn GLAAD into a fundraising machine through the use of high-pro file events and celebrity guests / award winners (Ellen, Oprah, et al.) to justify those $500-a-plate dinners. And it worked! Rev enue quadrupled in a few years and has continued to spike, which is what allows for those glamorous resorts and giant salaries (Ellis’ new contract includes an annual $1.3 million compensation package through 2027). But here’s the thing: while GLAAD still engages in a few anti-defamation activities, such as a “Studio Responsibility Index,” clearly its main mis sion is to hand out media awards on both coasts to gay-friendly celebs. But these are also its main fundraising events, which means that GLAAD ’s core mission is, in effect, fundraising. “Every Sperm Is Sacred!” Thus declared a memorable song in Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life , a jab at the Catholic Church’s opposition to birth control. One was reminded of this anthem by a legal case in which a sperm donor is suing a les bian couple for parental rights over the child that he sired sev eral years ago. While the couple had agreed to inform their progeny of her paternity, they specifically ruled out co-parent ing. This has not prevented stud Chris Edrington from asserting such a right based on Minnesota state law. A judge ruled that the statute is there to protect the donor from parentage claims, not to be a “sword” for the donor to assert such a claim. The ruling takes us back to an early lesbian-feminist goal of achieving in dependence from men, and men’s relentless unwillingness to let go. Okay, so the women needed a man for one microscopic cell; the judge ruled that this contribution did not entitle him to muscle his way back into their lives. Sucking At It It’s getting harder to be a man in America, least wise a straight man who treasures his masculine bona fides. They keep thinking up new rules! Now we learn that it’s con sidered a little suspect for a man to drink from a straw in pub lic or to eat ice cream; who knew? But so it has been decreed by Fox News and its host Jesse Watters, who ridiculed VP can didate Tim Walz for violating the straw taboo. And if it sounds like they’re just making up these rules as they go along, Wat ters seems to have it all worked out—no straws, no ice cream, and no corn dogs, we assume—and then he waits for someone to be tripped up by the latest decree. Still, going after Coach Walz on this account seems foolhardy; the easy rebuttal is that he’s so confident of his masculinity that he can even get away with sucking on a straw. Of course, all of this is happening under the overarching rule that stuffing your face in front of a camera is never a good look. Such is the price one pays when running for high office in America.

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ESSAY ‘The men were always Murmuring.’ A NDREW H OLLERAN

M OST PEOPLE think the Irish appeared in America in the 19th century, when famine forced millions of people to flee Ireland for the New World. But the truth is that the Irish were here long before that, and they belonged to a very distinct social class called the Protestant Ascendancy: the Anglo-Irish who comprised the British Army, keeping order in the colonies. The 18th Regiment was even called The Royal Irish and was stationed for the most part in a large barracks in downtown Philadelphia, where they wore handsome uniforms, lived with

the rumor that two captains in the Irish Royals began circulat ing around the barracks, so that when Newburgh finally arrived for his new post, the other officers treated him coolly or with disdain for reasons he did not understand. The reason was sim ple: they thought he was a buggerer—not what you want as your regimental chaplain. There was one other thing that marked Newburgh as a ho mosexual in the eyes of Captain Chapman, one of his two chief accusers. One day after Newburgh’s arrival, Chapman was out walking with a fellow officer when he galloped by looking, in Chapman’s words, “More like a fashionable Groom or Jockey”

their wives and children, went to the the ater, and got along well with the local colonists, who footed the bill for their presence. In the 1770s, being in Philadelphia was a lot better than being sent to the frontier. Illinois, for example, was so in hospitable for the Anglo-Irish that they considered it as bad as Senegal. But in Philadelphia, at that time the largest city in the colonies, they could enjoy life a bit more, though all this did not prevent the boredom that pushes many a peace time army to cause trouble. They also had to deal with alcohol, poverty, and venereal disease (without penicillin). In his new book Vicious and Immoral , John Gilbert McCurdy reports on at least one case of child abuse whose de tails are still sickening to read about. And then there were the class resent ments that the “subalterns” (anyone below the rank of captain) felt vis-à-vis the officers who outranked them. As one of the sergeants said about the City of Brotherly Love: “The men were always Murmuring.” Enter Robert Newburgh, a graduate

than a clergyman. Chapman described his garb during one of the trials that New burgh would later initiate to clear his rep utation: “Close Light Coloured Surtout, with a Scarlet or Crimson falling Collar, with a round Buck Hat, perfectly in the Stile of a Groom.” Chapman claimed that “at other times he has seen him in the Barracks and streets at Philadelphia in a Dress that had not the Least resemblance to that usually worn by [a] Clergyman: one Dress that he has seen him in, as mostly as he can recollect, is a Light Coloured frock made of Bath coating, Close Buck or Lambskin Breeches, white Silk Stockings and a Smart Fashionable Cocked Hat, in short what is now termed a Maccaroni Dishabille.” White stockings were newly fashion able then, and so was the Maccaroni—a term for men dressed in spots and stripes and other outrageous clothes, who were precursors of the English dandy—not quite cross-dressers but men dressed to get attention. At that time, as McCurdy points out, what one wore was related to the social order and was essential to the maintenance of the British Empire, which

Grenadier, Yorkshire Regiment, 1770. P. W. Reynolds illustration.

of Trinity College Dublin, a man whose uncle was a friend of the Duke of Devonshire, obviously fond of fashionable clothes, and rumored, before he sailed from Ireland to become the Royal Irish’s chaplain, to be what was then called a “buggerer.” The basis for this rumor was Newburgh’s sleeping in the same bed with his servant, something he had done since childhood be cause of an illness (which is never identified) that caused him to need help in the night. The last part, however, was left out of Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand. His other novels include Grief and The Beauty of Men .

may have been another reason Captain Chapman was appalled by Newburgh’s get-up. The irony is that the uniforms worn by the Royal Irish—copiously displayed in this beautifully pro duced book—were so gorgeous that there’s something incon gruous, if not sad, about dressing like a popinjay only to go into battle and get blown apart. The British grenadier, a fashionista’s dream, wore a hat as tall as a Pope’s mitre—all blown to smithereens during confrontations with the American rebels in Concord, Lexington, and Boston. The rumor that Newburgh slept with his servant, along with his taste for fashionable dress—and, one suspects, a superior education and social status

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relative to the two ambitious captains, Batt and Chapman, who had classified Newburgh as a buggerer before he even got off the boat in Philadelphia—makes for a story as gripping as The Children’s Hour or even Othello . The heart of Vicious and Immoral is the sequence of trials initiated by Newburgh to clear his name. In those days, if someone called you, say, a witch, and you did not respond, it was taken for granted that you were a witch. Failure to contest the charge was an admission of guilt. And so, Newburgh sued

of Enlightenment, as were the French Revolution and English philosopher Jeremy Bentham’s argument that there was no rea son to punish homosexuals. (Thomas Jefferson disagreed, and recommended castration.) In a fascinating epilogue, McCurdy traces the parallel tracks of homophobia in English and Amer ican culture. There were no polls at the time of the American Revolution, but he makes the case that in the 1770s and be yond, the new nation did not really care about buggery in the way the English did. There were more important things to deal

Captain Batt for what we would call defamation. Then Captain Chapman sued Newburgh for perjury and other charges that went back and forth and culminated in two court-martials, one in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, the other in New York City. There was also a trial of an enlisted man whom Newburgh, as his chaplain, had tried to help, giving rise to homosexual innu

with, which led to a vaguely tolerant and more relaxed attitude toward homosexual relations. It’s remarkable that England executed men for homosexuality for many years— unlike France, for instance—and remained virulently homophobic until and beyond the trial of Oscar Wilde. English noblemen had to live abroad if they were suspected of

Robert Newburgh, fond of fashionable clothes, was rumored even before becoming the Royal Irish Company’s chaplain to be a “buggerer.”

endo, and still another for child abuse that somehow involved Newburgh because of a remark he allegedly made about it. At a certain point the trials begin to blur. One, for instance, was about a captain’s refusal to assign Newburgh the rooms in the barracks that the chaplain felt he deserved—rooms that hap pened to be near the outhouse, which was rumored to be a pick-up spot (does anything change?). This book contains both transcripts of the court proceedings as kept by the British Army and McCurdy’s commentary on them. At first Newburgh’s legal strategy was to track down the particulars of a sexual act he was accused of so that he could re fute it. When that went nowhere, he switched to a defense of his moral character, which should have cleared his name as well, since it was assumed that a person of good character could not be a sodomite. All this was happening, it should be mentioned, on the eve of the American Revolution. General Gage, the man who prom ised King George III that he would keep the colonies in Britain’s hands, had many things on his mind, so it’s remark able that he responded to Newburgh’s petitions for a full court martial while having to decide where and when to move his troops to suppress the nascent uprising. Newburgh was con cerned with clearing his reputation, the general with keeping the colonies in British hands. It is a wonder that he answered Newburgh’s letters at all, but he did—with admirable patience and courtesy. This moment in time leads McCurdy to expand his inquiry with the question: Did homosexuality have anything to do with the American Revolution? It seems at first a stretch to link the two, but McCurdy has a case. The two men who befriended Newburgh were both subalterns. One of them, a man named Fowler, insisted that Newburgh clear his name, because only then could they remain friends. But one wonders if Fowler was not using this challenge to Captains Chapman and Batt to tor ment his superiors. Fowler not only testified in Newburgh’s de fense; he married an American woman and became an American after the Revolution, which raises the possibility that Fowler was just using his testimony to challenge the British occupying force. And there’s more. The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, McCurdy stresses, were both products of the Age

same-sex desires. In the U.S., it was more “Come back to the raft, Huck honey” (the title of Leslie Fiedler’s famous essay on the homoerotic strain in American literature). The frontier meant that you could always go west. It wasn’t until the 1950s, when Senator McCarthy conflated homosexuality and Com munism, that the two countries began to share the same level of homophobia, though the U.S. never made sodomy a capital offense. So, although it’s hard to say that homosexuality impacted the Revolution directly, anger against the British (and their

“ Worldwise sheds a long overdue light on one of the most fascinating figures of the twentieth century.” Brian James Baer, author of Queer Theory and Translation Studies: Language, Politics, Desire

Paperback | $32.95 | 288pp

M Q McGill-Queen’s University Press mqup.ca @McGillQueensUP

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laws) and a general tolerance brought about by freedom and sheer space con spired to ensure that the colonies did not make such a big deal about what men did with one another. As for Reverend New burgh, was he even gay? Historians are helpless without records, and at a certain point after the court-martial in New York, our hero simply fades from the page. On

somehow an elusive figure no matter how much sympathy one feels for what he had to endure. But the pleasures of Vicious and Im moral do not depend on what we think of Newburgh. McCurdy’s slice of history is written with an eye for detail that puts us back in an era that is largely ignored these days. It’s not just the central story that en

VICIOUS AND IMMORAL Homosexuality, the American Revolu ti on, and the Trials of Robert Newburgh by John Gilbert McCurdy Johns Hopkins Univ. Press 376 pages, $34.95

grosses us; it’s the wealth of detail, the re-creation of a time in American history when Britons were turning into Ameri cans. When Newburgh arrived, the British clergy was already associated with same-sex activity, and so was the Army. Sol diers stationed in London were known to sell their favors to the rich and entitled (a practice that, as readers of J. R. Ack erley’s classic memoir My Father and Myself already know, lasted to the late 19th century, when Ackerley’s father was kept by a Belgian aristocrat who later gave him his start in business). Then there was Isaac Bickerstaff, who served in the Royal Marines during the Seven Years’ War—an Anglo-Irish lieu tenant who, upon retiring, moved to London and started writing comic operas like Thomas and Sally and Love in a Village . In 1772, at the height of his success, newspapers reported that Bickerstaff “grew enamoured, the other night at Whitehall, with one of the Cenitnels and made love to him.” Newburgh would have understood, McCurdy writes, that the gravity of this inci dent was not just that Bickerstaff had committed buggery but that he had made the Army an object of ridicule. A piece of dog gerel mocking “these enlighten’d times” in which Bickerstaff did “for grenadiers imprudent burn” even asked: It’s nice to know there were all levels of response to the charge of buggery, including mocking and sophisticated ones, though Newburgh’s accusers were not among the latter. After the court martial’s mixed verdict, they tried to get him transferred to— where else?—Illinois. As for Newburgh, one hopes he found happiness, but we shall never know. McCurdy never takes a definitive position on his subject’s homosexuality. Reading this book, one is hard pressed to say; but I suspect he was. That’s based in part on the way McCurdy ends his book with what happened to the various characters in this legal donnybrook. Newburgh’s detractors, Batt and Chapman, got married to women, rose through the ranks, and served in other theaters. But, McCurdy writes: “the former chaplain’s life after the l8th Regiment took a different route than either the captains or the subalterns. He never married or had children; he neither settled down in England nor pioneered a new life on the American frontier. Instead, Robert Newburgh’s manhood was queer, and it followed a separate path.” Like Bickerstaff—or Lord Byron, for that matter—he ended up an exile from his own country. Newburgh wound up off the coast of Brittany, taking his secrets with him. He wandered off the pages of the historical record into oblivion, from which Vicious and Immoral has now rescued him. Of manly love, ah! Why are men ashamed? A new red coat, fierce cock and killing air Will captivate the most obdurate fair.

May 13, 1775, Newburgh (who had previously expressed a dis like of America) sailed to London, switched his commission from the 18th to the 15th Regiment, and sailed back to Amer ica in time to participate in the British invasion of New York. After that, he saw duty in the Caribbean, where, after the British defeat in Grenada, he resigned his commission and took a post as a hospital chaplain on the island of Belle-Île-en Mer, a French territory off the coast of Brittany. And there he re mained until his death in 1825. In the end, one doesn’t know what to make of him. Was there something narcissistic about the clothes, even the insis tence on clearing his name? Was he just a drama queen? One can only imagine what General Gage thought of his case; pre sumably he wished it would disappear. The transcripts do not make everything clear. For instance, the court-martial found that Newburgh had lied when he said that Captain Chapman had offered to settle their case out of court. But what was the meaning of the comments the chaplain made about the awful child abuse trial that preceded his own litigation? He remains

taking the city by storm An art midst of the Queer Craze that i Adams lands in New York in the Twenties Paris, Henrietta“Henri” Fresh off the boat from Roaring s e ” g Hamilton Lodge Masquerade Renaissance luminaries at the stars rub elbows with Harlem and the Cotton Club. Broadway performers at the Astor Hotel the party, flocking to see queer binary. Jazz-age revelers crash from the tyranny of the gender and drag balls, which free her clandestine worlds of speakeasi night, she ventures into the critic by day and lady lover by taking the city by storm. An art era crackdowns, Henri calculate forever. Faced with Depression Ball. But the revelry can't last g q r r reaching consequences. prompting a decision with far the risk of fighting back,

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l li Margaret Vandenburg is a , a An American in Paris include essayist whose previous books novelist, playwright, and i h d marg , a portrait of a family Front TheHome Natalie Barney, and salons of Gertrude Stein and romp through the sapphic

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AB BLE AS AN AUDIOBOOK

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ESSAY

D. H. Lawrence’s White Peacock A NDREW W HITE

“‘F ETCH A TOWEL,’ he called, ‘and come on!’” So begins Cyril and George’s steamy swim in D. H. Lawrence’s first all-male erotic scene, which is found in his debut novel, The White Peacock . And Lawrence didn’t stop there. His fiction would go on to feature a massage in which one man rubs “every speck” of his male friend’s “lower body,” including the “abdomen, the buttocks, [and] the thighs” with oil; a four-para graph naked wrestling match in which the word “penetrate” ap pears three times; and a chthonic ritual in which one man blindfolds and binds another from head to toe with belts of black fur while feeling him all over, including in the “loins” and “se cret places” while guiding him through the invocation of an Aztec god. Briefly stated, for an ostensibly heterosexual writer, Lawrence sure found a lot of ways to introduce male nudity and intimate male-to-male contact into his fiction! Were he alive today and facilitating a wilderness retreat for men, I’d be the first to “fetch a towel and come on.” The narrator of The White Peacock is the first of Lawrence’s fictionalized self-portraits. Cyril Beardsall is an artist, and his body recalls a description that Lawrence wrote of himself in a letter when he was 23: “I am thin ... my skin is very white and unblemished; soft.” In the eighth chapter of The White Peacock , Cyril and his hunky farmer crush, George, jump into a pond with George’s dog, chase each other, laugh, and end up in each other’s arms: “The sweetness of the touch of our naked bodies one against the other was superb.” Men from different social classes going skinny-dipping is one of many parallels between E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), and The White Pea cock (1911). (Fans of the former may have wondered how the bourgeois Lucy and her railway clerk swain George would have fared had they not crossed social barriers to marry. TheWhite Peacock provides an answer. Read it and weep.) That Cyril enjoys naked snuggling with a man comes as no surprise. The only kisses he receives from women are “honor ably” transacted in “a most correct manner” under mistletoe at a Christmas dance. On the other hand, the fine physiques of other male characters are of great interest, and are promptly com mented upon. Cyril is queer-coded in other ways, obligingly lis tening to Wagner and collecting Aubrey Beardsley prints. As they climb back on land, Cyril and George compare and joke about each other’s bodies, and Cyril says: “I had to give in, and bow to him, and he took on an indulgent, gentle manner. ... [H]e knew how I admired the noble, white fruitfulness of his form.” While George “polished his arm, holding it out straight and Andrew White, based in Philadelphia, works in libraries, museums, and sometimes at the zoo. Now and then he publishes a short story.

solid” and “rubbed his hair into curls,” Cyril watches “the deep muscles of his shoulders” and in his state of distraction forgets to dry himself off. So George takes over, “as if I were ... a woman he loved and did not fear. … [T]o get a better grip of me, he put his arm round me and pressed me against him. [O]ur love was perfect for a moment, more perfect than any love I have known since, either for man or woman.” In the same 1908 letter in which Lawrence described his own physique and complexion, he also wrote: “The man I have been working with in the hay is the original of my George. ... I am very fond of my friend, and he of me. Sometimes, often, he is as gentle as a woman towards me.” This man was Alan Chambers, the brother of Jessie Chambers—the woman who worked so hard to launch Lawrence’s career as a writer, and one of the first women whose kisses moved Lawrence’s heart and “sex fire.”

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