GLR September-October 2023
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G LR k
September-October 2023
Cracking the Closet
M ITCHELL S ANTINE G OULD Emerson s Manifesto, Thoreau sNature I GNACIO D ARNAUDE Leyendecker the Sly M EGHAN T IBBITS -L AMIRANDE 1928: Out Came Hall and Woolf
W ILLIAM B ENEMANN Stephen Crane s Nights on the Town R AYMOND -J EAN F RONTAIN Robert Patrick at the Caffe Cino Whither Women s Bars and Clubs? BY A NDREW H OLLERAN The Quest for Sex in Medieval Times BY V ERNON R OSARIO TheWife of Gentleman Jack BY A NNE L AUGHLIN
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Stephen Crane
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The Gay & Lesbian Review September October 2023 VOLUME XXX, NUMBER 5 WORLDWIDE
Editor-in-Chief and Founder R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . WORLDWIDE The Gay & Lesbian Review ® PO Box 180300, Boston, MA 02118
C O ONTENTS
Cracking the Closet
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
Emerson s Manifesto, Thoreau sNature 10 M ITCHELL S ANTINE G OULD
Waldo s plea for sexual honesty could have been meant for Henry
Painted Angels and Tainted Fruit 14 W ILLIAM B ENEMANN
Stephen Crane s walks on the wild side crept into his writings
1928: Out Came Hall and Woolf 17 M EGHAN T IBBITS -L AMIRANDE
The Well of Loneliness and Orlando were published just months apart
Leyendecker the Sly 20 I GNACIO D ARNAUDE
The men of Arrow and Ivory Soap seem to be hiding something
Robert Patrick at the Caffe Cino 25 R AYMOND -J EAN F RONTAIN
The late playwright wrote the shows that launched Off-off-Broadway
Splendor on the Patio 27 A NDREW H OLLERAN
Awriter s visit to every lesbian bar in the U.S. reveals a storied past
The Quest for Sex in the Middle Ages 30 V ERNON R OSARIO
Medieval imagery animates today s underground sexual subcultures
R E V I E W S
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 HAIREMER .) W ARREN G OLDFARB ( SR . ADVISOR EMER .)
David Román and Sean F. Edgecomb, eds. The Taylor Mac Book Rebecca Batley AnnWalker ; Jill Liddington As Good As a Marriage
33 T HOMAS K EITH 34 A NNE L AUGHLIN 35 H ANK T ROUT
Joseph Plaster Kids on the Street
36
B RIEFS
Thomas Mallon Up with the Sun: A Novel
39 B RIAN B ROMBERGER
40
P OETRY B RIEFS
Richard D. Mohr The Splendid Disarray of Beauty Catherine Lacey Biography of X: A Novel Ari Shapiro The Best Strangers in the World Dennis Altman Death in the Sauna
41 M ICHAEL Q UINN 42 M ONICA C ARTER 43 D ANIEL A. B URR 44 W ILLIAM B URTON
Jon Towlson Midnight Cowboy 45 J AMES G ILBERT Queer Maximalism x Machine Dazzle (art exhibit) 48 M IKE D RESSEL Stephen Kijak, director Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed (film) 50 C OLIN C ARMAN
P OEMS & D EPARTMENTS
5
C ORRESPONDENCE
8 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .
BTW
A RT M EMO How Allen Ginsberg Humanized Madness 24 S TEVAN W EINE P OEM Physical Education 28 A LLEN S MITH P OEM The faggot trusted no-one 32 S IMON M ADDRELL A RT M EMO A 1953 Novel about Inverts and Social Class 38 M ICHAEL S CHWARTZ P OEM Strange Meeting, Thanksgiving, 1983 44 J OSH B ARTON A RT M EMO Mary Oliver, a Poet of Beauty and Grief 46 D AVID M ASELLO C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 47
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
September October 2023
3
Early Fall: ‘Cracking the Closet’ FROM THE EDITOR
I N OLDEN TIMES the concept of the closet didn t exist, and the idea of comingout had yet to be invented. Never theless, starting in the 19th century, a number of artists and writers found ways to crack the closet by expressing their sex uality between the lines or in the interstices of their work. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were non conformists in so many respects; it s hard not to wonder about their sexual feelings and fantasies. There s a growing consensus that Thoreau was queer in some sense beyond his cabin dwelling, couch-surfing ways. He left some clues behind in his writings concerning his love of men, including Emerson him self. Over the years, their friendship followed the arc of pas sionate lovers: effusive declarations followed by jealous fits of pique and, finally, anger over being jilted. Mitchell Santine Gould argues here that part of Emerson s Self-Reliance can be read as a manifesto for people to tell the truth about their sex ual nature, however unconventional. Later in the century, a writer who expressed a surprising cu riosity about homosexuality was Stephen Crane, best known for The Red Badge of Courage . William Benemann discusses a number of incidents in which Crane placed himself in the com pany of New York s homosexual underground, ostensibly to conduct research for a novel (never written) about a starry-eyed youth who comes to New York and ends up as a street hustler. The year 1928 saw the publication of two novels in England
that explored the outer limits of gender and sexuality for the time (see Meghan Tibbits-Lamirande s piece). Radclyffe Hall s The Well of Loneliness dealt explicitly with sexual inversion and featured a protagonist who might be considered transgender today. The hero in Virginia Woolf s Orlando starts as a man but becomes a woman early on and stays that way through the multi century epic. Orlando is, in fact, based on Woolf s real-life fe male lover, Vita Sackville-West. Moving into the 20th century, Ignacio Darnaude revisits il lustrator J. C. Leyendecker, whose work for Ivory Soap and Arrow Collars gave him plenty of opportunities to draw pictures of well-dressed, and at times scantily dressed, American men. There s always a perfectly innocent explanation for the intimate scenes involving two men at the club or in the locker room, but modern eyes can t help but detect an undercurrent of desire. Leyendecker was, in fact, a gay man, and the model he used in many of his works was his lover, Charles Beach. Playwright Robert Patrick, who passed away earlier this year, catapults us into the 1950s, when he wrote a slew of plays for the Caffe Cino in Greenwich Village, many of which fea tured gay characters and sexual extravagances of all kinds. The Cino was an important cultural institution that splintered and evolved into what came to be called Off-off-Broadway still a hotbed of sexual experimentation to this day. R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .
TheG & LR
4
Correspondence
1989. (Michael was wrong about this being the only Blitzstein biography. In 2012, Ox ford published Howard Pollack s also 600+ page Marc Blitzstein: His Life, His Work, HisWorld .) After my book was published, we gradu ally lost contact. In 1990, I moved to Los Angeles, and my life started flowing in other directions. I cherish my brief associa tion with Michael and am grateful that he trusted me with this project which, among other things, added to the world s under standing of a significant gay American life. Eric A. Gordon, Los Angeles In Defense of Samuel Barber To the Editor: I found the review of Howard Pollack s Samuel Barber: His Life and Legacy ap pallingly dismissive of a major American composer. His list of works is not as long as one might wish, but the quality of what we have is superior. Mr. Berrong focused on Barber s vocal and orchestral work and made no mention of his piano works or many of his briefer orchestral scores. His Piano Sonata (1949) is among the half
with Michael, hand over finished chapters, and discuss my progress. I never knew he lived just blocks from me. He was modest, professional, and discreet. Aside from our literary connection, we did not pursue a per sonal friendship. Early on, I asked him: How long a book do you want? He an swered: There s never going to be another book about Marc Blitzstein, so yours will always be the standard reference. Include what you believe readers will want to know. The biography topped out at just over 600 pages. He shared some advice about trimming a manuscript: Cut three lines from every page! He did not mean this literally, but he did mean there s fat on every page that you can always eliminate. I continue to look for ex cess verbiage everywhere, both as a writer and as an editor myself. Michael assigned my manuscript to an in-house copy editor, who said she d never encountered a draft that needed virtually no editing. Pleased as I was to hear that, it meant that Michael and I spent little time together working out kinks in the book. Mark the Music: The Life and Work of Marc Blitzstein was published in
Gra ti tude for Michael Denneny sVision To the Editor: Michael Denneny s G&LR obituary [July August 2023 issue] was the first I d seen, prompting me to find others, including a livestream of his author appearance at Poli tics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C., just weeks before he died. In 1986, my literary agent Frances Goldin started submitting my project for a biography of composer Marc Blitzstein, and no pub lisher seemed interested. Until, at her re quest, I also included three finished chapters to show my quality as a writer. Immediately she heard back from Michael Denneny of St. Martin s Press. Later, from Michael, I learned that he hadn t known about Blitz stein, but he called his friend, the up-and coming conductor Bruce Ferden, who knew of Blitzstein and told him, yes, such a biog raphy would make an important contribution. Michael also okayed a heftier advance than originally floated, without which I would not have been able to give it my full time. From the Upper West Side, I would bicy cle down to the Flatiron Building to meet
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September October 2023
5
dozen greatest sonatas written by a modern American and is likely to outlast anything John Adams or Philip Glass produced for the piano. Of course, Antony and Cleopatra was a disappointment, perhaps because he made the mistake of trying to incorporate avant garde procedures and techniques incompati ble with his sensibility and gift for melody. It s true Barber was ignored by the American avant-garde, but it s also true that the avant garde of that period has been ignored by American audiences of serious music. Whose string quartet will bear comparison to Barber s? His works will continue to find an audience because pianists, violinists, singers, and conductors want to perform them. Walter Mosley, San Francisco To the Editor: For decades I ve admired the editorial brilliance of TheG&LR , particularly its in sightful and clever choice of writers for par ticular assignments. So it was disappointing to read Richard M. Berrong s review of the new biography of Samuel Barber by Howard Pollack. Berrong s superficial, simplistic im pressions unfairly demean the achievements of a sensitive and gifted composer. Berrong s deprecation of Barber s opera Antony and Cleopatra is basedon amateurish, inaccurate generalities about dissonance and unusual harmonies and an endless string of fragments suggesting no clear direction. His comment that it would take composers like John Adams and Philip Glass to show how avant-garde opera could be both musically innovative and emotionally appealing suggests that Mr. Berrong has never heard an opera by Britten or Janá č ek or Shostakovich. Worst of all, he entirely misapprehends the qualities that characterize a great com poser, chastising Barber because he never really created a distinctive line of his own. In fact, the greatest composers didn t create new styles; they infused existing styles with their own genius. Bach didn t create the Baroque; he culminated that style. Mozart was the capstone of the Classical period, not its progenitor. On the other hand, the influ ence of Arnold Schoenberg a brilliantly original musician who did create a new mu sical language was short-lived. Readers are advised to listen to some of Barber s music and judge for themselves. Bob Goldfarb, New York City Richard Berrong Replies: The second of these two letters does as good a job as I could of dealing with one of the objections to my review in the first: Mosley too finds Antony and Cleopatra a lesser work, and for reasons similar to mine. (Antony, not Anthony; we all make spelling
mistakes.) It is the only one of Barber s works of which I spoke negatively, pace Goldfarb, and I don t think I demeaned it. As far as chastising Barber for not creat ing a distinctive style, those were not my words but Pollack s, as I indicated with quotation marks. We all miss things, no matter how carefully we reread our work. Mosley makes an important point regard ingBarber s chamber music that I should have addressed. I checked the 2021-22 reper tory of a dozen major American orchestras to see how often Barber s symphonic works are being performed today. No orchestra did more than one, some none at all. I did not have any way of determining how often his small-scale works show up in chamber music performances, however. There I sus pect Mosley is right: Barber s songs, espe cially, are probably still regularly done. Richard Berrong, Cuyahoga Falls, OH Can a Loaded Word Be Disarmed? To the Editor: As an eighty-year-old lesbian, I was shocked to see in the May-June 23 issue the headline Blackbeard sBitch. Itwas the title of a review of the HBO series Our Flag Means Death . Theword bitch is commonly used to denigrate women. Its use in TheG&LR was an unwelcome re minder of the disgust some gay men feel toward women. It wasn t even an appropri ate use of the word, as the HBO series shows Stede Bonnet, the putative bitch to Blackbeard, loved and nurtured him. For this he is called a bitch? Quite the disappointment that a publica tion for the homosexual community, of which I am a member, uses the same gross vocabulary to describe women, femaleness, loving natures used by rednecks. Betsy Tabac, Tallahassee, FL Editor sReply: The headline was written by me, and surely I did not wish to offend. But it seems to me the word bitch has moved beyond its exclusive association with women to refer, often humorously, to anyone who is defeated or humiliated in a social context. Thus Trump was sometimes mocked as Putin s bitch. A cartoon in The New Yorker several years ago shows an overstuffed American breakfast (pancakes, eggs, bacon, sausage, etc.) next to a measly French croissant and demi-tasse, with the caption: Welcome to America, bitch. I think this usage describes to a tee the relationship between Blackbeard and Stede in Our Flag Means Death . Vaughan Williams Not OneofUs To the Editor: Now wait just a minute. I ve lived and worked in classical music for decades, and I
have never heard even the slightest sugges tion that Ralph Vaughan Williams was gay as stated in your introduction to the Pride Issue in May-June 2023. The composer is being confused with Griffith Vaughan Williams (1940 2010), who was an outspo ken British champion of gay and lesbian rights and, so far as I know, no relation to Ralph Vaughan Williams. Robert Wennersten, Saint Joseph, MO Editor sReply: Thanks for setting me straight (as it were) on this point. I was going by memory from a series of three pieces that the late Ned Rorem contributed back in 2000. I ve now had a chance to check the record, and it turns out there were a couple of versions of the top ten composers list. In the gay five list that I recalled, please replace Vaughan Williams with Leonard Bernstein. In another piece, he offered a longer list that seems even more gay-heavy than the afore mentioned: Of all the arts in which gay men have played a prominent role in this century, music is the one that they seem to have dominated. How many are left once we eliminate the following names? Bernstein, Britten, John Cage, Copland, Peter Maxwell Davies, Heinz Werner Henze, Daniel Pinkham, Poulenc, Rorem, Thompson, Tip pett; and, more recently, David Del Tredici, Tyson Street, and John Corigliano. Correc ti ons A number of readers pointed out a rather egregious error in Richard Berrong s review of Samuel Barber (July-Aug. 2023): the misspelling of American composer Aaron Copland s surname. As familiar as the edi tor and five proofreaders are with Copland, we all somehow missed that errant e. In the same review, it s stated that Samuel Barber and his partner lived in Capricorn, an estate located outside Philadelphia. Capricorn was actually located in Kisco, NewYork. In the May-June 2023 issue, the caption for a portrait of Henry James gives the wrong date for the painting. The correct year is 1913 (not 1922; James died in 1916). In the May-June 2023 issue, a photo accom panying an Art Memo on poet George Cecil Ives is not of Ives but instead of an Aus tralian rugby player named George Treweek. A review on the art of J. C. Leyendecker in the May-June 2023 issue states that Charles Beach, who became Leyendecker s lifelong partner, was hired by the artist in 1900. In fact, Beach was hired by the artist s brother Frank in 1903.
TheG & LR
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to increase profits. The Times deep dive into internal memos re vealed that Gilead withheld the new drug a major improve ment over the existing version of Tenofovir until just before the patent expired on the older version. The strategy was to run out the old patent before the generics hit the market, and then go live with the new version. Apparently this practice is wide spread in the industry, where it s known as product hopping. What makes it especially cynical in the case of HIV is the pe culiar lethality of AIDS and the severity of the side effects of many antiretrovirals including Tenofovir. Indeed, some 26,000 patients who took the older version are suing Gilead for exposing them to potential kidney and bone problems. The Times learned that the improved Tenofovir could have been available as early as 2004, but Gilead stopped working on it ex pressly to prolong its monopoly. It was finally released in 2015, adding over a decade to its patent, which will remain in force until at least 2031. Because that s howit s done. BlueShi ft The battle between the red and blue states took a turn when Massachusetts hired some billboards in Texas and Florida to promote the Commonwealth while subtly criticizing the homophobia of the two host states. The billboards say sim ply Massachusetts For us all and show pictures of happy LGBT couples. Governor Maura Healey (D), an out lesbian, is sued a statement explicating the message: To anyone consid ering where they want to live ... we want you to join us here in Massachusetts. The fact is, many people are talking about leaving the Don t SayGay state in search of bluer pastures. So, if this is an early salvo in a demographic war, this Boston
The Farther Right The headline began, Fox News Promotes Glory Holes, and the mind raced to make sense of it. Who would accuse the news organ of the religious Right of pro moting those outlets for public sex? Turns out it came from an even more right-wing source, Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire . The basis for the story was apparently a memo from Fox Corp., in a modest effort at inclusivity, encouraging employees to read a memoir by trans journalist Meredith Talusan titled Fairest . The book includes a description of glory holes, which Walsh turned into an endorsement of their use, a howto for public sex. The meme then bounced around the echo chamber until Fox News was practically drilling the holes between the stalls. Charlie Kirk of Turning Point USA wondered: Why is Fox subsidizing gloryholes for their employees? In a similar vein, when Chick-fil-A issued a pro forma statement in support of Pride month, calls for a boycott came not from the Left but from the Far Right indeed from the Farther Right, for which even Fox News isn t ideologically pure enough. Hopping Product An investigation by The New York Times re vealed that Gilead, one of the world s largest drug-makers, de liberately slow-walked a promising new HIV therapy in order
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based magazine welcomes you with open arms. On the other hand, if tipping the demographic balance is what s at stake, why not consider a move to blue-shifting Georgia or Arizona? Mas sachusetts is already blue enough! Mr. and Mr. Nobody We need to talk about the U.S. Supreme Court s 6 3 ruling in 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis , which held that the state of Colorado could not compel a website designer to create a wedding site for a gay couple. It was a blow to LGBT rights and followed a similar (but narrower) ruling on wedding cakes in 2018. But then a strange thing happened: it was dis covered that the gay couple in the case didn t exist! The lawsuit had been brought by a hate group called Alliance Defending Freedom on behalf of one Lorie Smith, who claimed that mak ing a gay website violated her religious beliefs. Critics of the ruling argued that the gay couple s nonexistence de-legitimized the ruling. And yet, is it possible that the plaintiffs did us a favor by this ruse? What it underscores is that the case was not about the people requesting the website (or cake, etc.), but instead about the creation of a product with explicitly LGBT content. Presumably the ruling also protects someone from having to make a website or cake promoting, say, a neo-Nazi organiza tion. It could be a slippery slope to a more sinister kind of dis crimination in which the people aren t hypothetical Samuel Alito may be licking his chops but for now there s no actual gay couple being barred at the door. Ribbit KarlMarx dictum about history repeating itself, first as tragedy and then as farce, is playing itself out yet again. If ever there was a tragedy on the political stage, it was the assassina tion of Robert Kennedy, the great hope of antiwar Democrats, in 1968. And now we have presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr., who popped up during the Covid crisis as a strident anti vaxxer and soon began to promote zany conspiracy theories to rival those of Alex Jones (often the same ones). Of late he sbeen talking a lot about frogs, many of which, he claims, are transi tioning from male to female due to the presence of the chemical atrazine in their ponds which also explains a purported rise in transgenderism in humans and a general feminization of Amer ican men. Frogs, of course have a longstanding connection with the LGBT community and especially with bisexuals (for whom there are frog pins, frog banners, etc.). The main reason is that frogs are amphibious, which is probably why Kennedy went after them as well. Frogs (like bisexuals) often get a bum rap. In any case, every study has shown that atrazine is not in our water and doesn t have this effect on humans. Robert Kennedy Sr. is famous for saying: Some men see things as they are and ask, Why? I dream things that never were and ask, Why not? And then there are the men who see things that never were. September October 2023
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ESSAY Emerson’s Manifesto, Thoreau’s Nature M ITCHELL S ANTINE G OULD
Mitchell Santine Gould, a gay historian with a spcial interest in Whitman and Quakerism, lives on the coast of Oregon. Live no longer to the expectation of these deceived and de ceiving people with whom we converse. Say to them, O fa ther, O mother, O wife, O brother, O friend, I have lived with you after appearances hitherto. Henceforward I am the truth s. ... I shall endeavour to nourish my parents, to support my fam ily, to be the chaste husband of one wife, but these relations I must fill after a new and unprecedented way. I appeal from your customs. I must be myself. I cannot break myself any longer for you, or you. If you can love me for what I am, we shall be the happier. If you cannot, I will still seek to deserve that you should. I will not hide my tastes or aversions. ... If you are true, but not in the same truth with me, cleave to your companions; I will seek my own. I do this not selfishly, but humbly and truly. It is alike your interest, and mine, and all R ALPH WALDO EMERSON S 1841 essay Self-Reliance contains one of the most stir ring coming-out challenges ever written. This is not the traditonal reading of the great Amer ican essay, to be sure, but I believe that Self Reliance must be understood in the context of Emerson s awareness of unconventional sexual desire, bolstered by his intimate friendship with Henry David Thoreau. Emerson was born in Boston in 1803 and died in Concord, Massachusetts, in 1882. Waldo was ordained as a Unitarian minister in 1829, and the response to his eloquence and per sonal charm promised job security. But secretly, Emerson was experiencing a crisis of faith, and his sermons minimized doc trine to focus on personal spiritual experience, arguing that each seeker s unique encounter with a universal moral law was what really mattered. His first book, Nature , appeared in 1836, and in 1841 and 1842, he published Essays : First Series and Es says: Second Series .The First Series includes his most impor tant essay, Self-Reliance. L OVE M E FOR W HAT IA M T RANSCENDENTALISM , the philosophical movement that Emer son did so much to develop and promote, captured the attention not only of theologians and thinkers but also of the general pub lic, largely because it provided people with pragmatic guidance for the conduct of life. Self-Reliance brilliantly explores this theme: Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. ... Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Everyone agrees that Self-Reliance is an indictment of mindless conformity and a challenge to think for oneself. But it has rarely been recognized as one of history s first manifestos for people to be honest about their sexual nonconformity. To quote a key passage at length:
men s, however long we have dwelt in lies, to live in truth. Does this sound harsh to-day? You will soon love what is dic tated by your nature as well as mine, and, if we follow the truth, it will bring us out safe at last. Hiding in plain sight since 1841, this mandate to be true to oneself may speak forcefully to contemporary LGBT people who have had the experience of coming out as gay. On the other hand, the speaker swears to remain the chaste husband of one wife. Emerson was married and sworn to fidelity to his (second) wife. However, it seems quite likely that his first marriage to a beautiful woman who was dying of tuberculosis involved tender affection but not sexual relations. His second marriage produced four children. By 1833, Emerson seems to have calculated that he was
Henry David Thoreau
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overdue for another marriage, and he found a relatively wealthy 31-year-old woman named Lydia Jackson. Emerson s decid edly bloodless, businesslike marriage proposal, coming in Jan uary of 1835, defined the terms of their union: he would treat herwith deep and tender respect, sinceher earnest and noble mind inspired so much goodness in his soul. Nevertheless, he dampened any romantic expectations by assuring her that his love could only manifest itself in a new and higher way. He declared that she was so in love with what I love that no re moteness of condition could separate us perhaps a veiled
F OREVERA S ORTOF B EAUTIFUL E NEMY A FTER A LONG HISTORY of denial by academic historians and crit ics, Thoreau s sexual nonconformity is a matter of widespread agreement, if not consensus. However, no one has gone so far as to suggest that he was Emerson s lover. Emerson s account of how they first met has a starry-eyed quality: He was not quite out of college ... when I first saw him. Emerson helped examine Thoreau for a Harvard rhetoric class on February 25, 1835, which was one month after his marriage proposal to Lydia
reference to his nontraditional sexual orien tation. His essay Spiritual Laws declared that the soul harbors a photometer, a metaphorical irritable goldleaf and tinfoil device for measuring light. According to Louisa May Alcott, he defended his lack of affectionate gestures to [Lydia] by say ing he was a photometer not a stove: he could measure light but not radiate heat.
Jackson. Thoreau, who was fourteen years younger than Emerson, graduated in 1837 a few months after the publication of Emer son s first book, Nature . Thoreau s Harvard classmate David Greene Haskins found it remarkable tosee how Thoreau had so quickly undergone a chemical transformation into Emerson s doppelgänger, due to his frequent contacts
Self Reliance has rarely been recognized as one of history s first manifestos for people to be honest about their sexual nonconformity.
Emerson s own brush with a same-sex love affair was first proposed in 1976 when Jonathan Ned Katz published his groundbreaking Gay American History . Emerson s baffling, paralyzing crush on Harvard classmate Martin Gay is fairly well documented by Katz and his successors. However, the field of Transcendentalist studies has largely chosen to trivialize its im plications when it hasn t avoided them entirely. This tendency is nowhere more apparent than in Emerson s relationship with Henry David Thoreau.
and intimate intercourse with Mr. Emerson, beginning from the very time of his leaving college. InThoreau s mannerisms, said Haskins, and in the tones and inflexions of his voice, in his modes of expression, even in the hesitations and pauses of his speech, he had become the counterpart of Mr. Emerson. Hask ins swore that he could have recognized Thoreau s original voice in the dark, but in Emerson s study, he decided to delib erately close his eyes while they conversed and found himself unable to determine with certainty which was speaking. The
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future poet James Russell Lowell was exquisitely amused by the results of the same experiment. Biographers have always expected readers to shut their eyes to the remarkable contrast between Emerson s delight in finding Thoreau and his fussy remarks about the women in his life. In April 1838, with Thoreau by his side, his familiar sur roundings suddenly acquired a novel and compelling salience: the valley forming a great mountain amphitheatre that echoed with gladness to the voices of crows and piping frogs. The valley now made worlds enough for us. Whenhe ventured out of doors to view the first glimmering star, the piping of a frog seemed to challenge him: Well do not these suffice? Here is a new scene, a new experience. Ponder it, Emerson. Thoreau responded in the same month with a poem about his Friendship with Emerson. Although their Love cannot speak, the rhapsody acknowledges their kindred shape and similar loves and hates especially their kindred nature, which proclaims them to be mates,/ Exposed to equal fates,/ Eternally. The poem marks them as two stalwart oak trees who could, with pride, withstand any storm. The secret to their sur vival was to barely touch above ground, while Down to their deepest source ... [t]heir roots are intertwined. A year later, Thoreau handed Emerson his poem Sympa thy, dedicated to a gentle boy, the preadolescent Edmund Sewell. It was premised upon the dicey notion that I might have loved him,/ Had I loved him less. Emerson called it The purest strain, and the loftiest, I think, that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest. On the other hand, one finds it difficult to gloss over the physicality of another Thoreau poem, which begins: I was made erect and lone,/ And within me is the bone. During two prolonged periods between 1841 and 1848, Thoreau lived in Emerson s house. On April 26, 1841, he moved into the prophet s chamber at the head of Emerson s stairs and began a phase of his life that included fawning over Lydia via unctuous notes, doing the family s gardening, and repairing anything that broke. He delighted in Emerson s children, be coming a second father to them. In November 1847, when Emerson was away in Europe and Thoreau was acting head of the household, little Eddy asked him pointedly: Mr. Thoreau, will you be my father? By June 1841, Emerson was seeing in Thoreau a wood god, probably a reference to Pan. Presumably the legs that Emerson called strong were as hirsute as his arms, further ce menting his association with a satyr. Thoreau himself delighted in the comparison: Perhaps of all the gods of New England and of ancient Greece, I am most constant at [Pan s] shrine. Being Thoreau, however, meant also being deeply conflicted about its sexual connotations. In the Higher Laws chapter of Walden , he acknowledged his fear that humans are such gods or demigods only as fauns and satyrs, the divine allied to beasts, the creatures of appetite, and that, to some extent our very life is our disgrace. He could not speak about purity, he said, with out betraying my impurity. Shape-shifting into a good river-god, my valiant Henry introduced Emerson to the riches of his shadowy starlit, moon lit stream. This lovely new world had all along lain close to the vulgar trite one of streets & shops. On the river, they left
all that behind with a stroke of a paddle. Take care, good friend! Emerson thought, as I looked west into the sunset overhead & underneath, & he with his face toward me rowed to wards it, take care; you know not what you do, dipping your wooden oar into this enchanted liquid, painted with all reds & purples & yellows which glows under & behind you. In truth, there was more than a trace of wishful thinking in Thoreau s vision of two oaks withstanding the frigid storm of hostility. Concord s general store became a great news room, as some locals sat constantly on its porch, letting kernels of gossip simmer and whisper through the community. He found these worthies leering at him with a voluptuous ex pression. Every traveler, he swore, had to run the gauntlet, and every man, woman, and child might get a lick at him. His torment was increased by a still more terrible standing invita tion to call at every one of these houses. His primary recourse was to carry out his errands as quickly as possible, or to turn away from the incivility and focus on loftier thoughts. Some times, however, I bolted suddenly, and nobody could tell my whereabouts. In 1851, looking back on his years in Concord, he wrote: There is some advantage in being the humblest cheapest least dignified man in the village so that the very sta ble boys shall damn you. ... Methinks I enjoy the advantage to an unusual extent. All the ink that has been spilled about Thoreau s motives for retreating to his Walden hermitage may just be so much poppycock if it doesn t include this feeling of persecution. But Thoreau also learned to distrust Emerson s position as his only safe refuge. By September 1841, his once-flattering habit of aping all things Emersonian, coupled with his lack of ambition, was beginning to wear even upon Emerson. Even more galling was what Emerson called in 1843 the old fault of unlimited contradiction : Thoreau the provocateur habitu ally replaced an obvious and sensible word with its exact op posite. In 1853, Emerson complained: He wants a fallacy to expose, a blunder to pillory ... requires a little sense of vic tory. Thoreau s most toxic, maddening perversity took the form of his love-hate relationships although in all fairness, Emerson s other friends often accused him of the same thing. Richard Bridgman concludes: The paradox is evident. Thoreau resented criticism but at the same time, privately charged with self-disgust, felt the need for it. But his champi oning of hate as an essential component of friendship reached such obsessive proportions at times as to become grotesque. Indeed, Thoreau s poem Indeed, Indeed I Cannot Tell in cludes the lines: O, I hate thee with a hate/ That would fain annihilate;/ Yet sometimes against my will,/ My dear friend, I love thee still. By 1843, Emerson felt forced to contrive a plan for Thoreau to escape small-minded Concord, offering him a position as a tutor to Emerson s young nephew in New York. Thoreau was a fish out of water on Staten Island. In the midst of his despair, he sent Emerson a marvelously schizoid letter thanking him for years of kind treatment, while mocking his own genius for turn ing love into hate: But know, my friends, that I a good deal hate you all in my most private thoughts as the substratum of the little love I bear you. Thoreau s sojourn in the real world was short-lived. For the rest of the decade, Emerson and Thoreau accused, bruised, and
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