GLR September-October 2024

GLR k

September–October 2024

The Scientists

W ILLIAM B ENEMANN Pervert Patient Zero W ENDY F ENWICK How Evelyn Hooker Rattled the APA D AVID L. C HAPMAN AKeeper of Atomic Secrets V ERNON R OSARIO The Origins of Transgender Science

Three ‘Song Languages’ BY J OAN L ARKIN Byron’s Sexual Mutations BY A NDREW H OLLERAN ‘I always had crazy boyfriends.’ —B RUCE L A B RUCE

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BloodLoss A Love Story of AIDS, Activism, and Art KEIKOLANE

When Monsters Speak A Susan Stryker Reader SUSAN STYKER edited by MCKENZIE WARK

QTR A Journal of Trans and Queer Studies in Religion JOSEPH A MARCHAL and MELISSA M. WILCOX, editors A new open-access journal dedicated to expanding knowledge about the rich and complex connections between religion, gender, and sexuality

ING

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The Gay & Lesbian Review September–October 2024 • VOLUME XXXI, 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 ONTENTS

The Scientists

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 Broken Dandy 10 A NDREW H OLLERAN

Lord Byron transcended all boundaries of sexual taste and morals

“I always had crazy boyfriends.” 13 B RUCE L A B RUCE

Phil Tarley talks with a (very) independent filmmaker

Pervert Patient Zero 16 W ILLIAM B ENEMANN

In the 1880s, US medicine was discovering a new sexual anomaly

How Evelyn Hooker Rattled the APA 20 W ENDY F ENWICK

Her landmark study upended the medical model of homosexuality

The Birth of Transgender Science 23 V ERNON R OSARIO

Endocrinologist Harry Benjamin grasped the role of hormones

Secrets & Truths & Claude Schwob 26 D AVID L. C HAPMAN

The chemist’s gayness was an open secret at the Manhattan Project

R E V I E W S

RuPaul— The House of Hidden Meanings: A Memoir 29 M ICHAEL Q UINN Cynthia Carr — Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar 30 H ANK T ROUT Books of poetry by Michael Klein, Christopher Soden, and Tony Leuzzi 31 J OAN L ARKIN Michael Nott — Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life 33 J OHN R. K ILLACKY Kenneth Elliott — Beyond Ridiculous 34 R AYMOND -J EAN F RONTAIN Diarmuid Hester — Nothing Ever Just Disappears 35 C HRIS F REEMAN Will Brantley, editor — Conversations with Sarah Schulman 36 A NNE C HARLES Édouard Louis — Change 37 E DUARDO F EBLES Musih Tedji Xaviere — These Letters End in Tears 38 M ONICA C ARTER Emily Garside — Seasons of Love: Why Rent Matters 39 J EAN R OBERTA Chukwuebuka Ibeh — Blessings 39 T ERRI S CHLICHENMEYER B RIEFS 42 Luca Guadagnino, director — Challengers 45 C OLIN C ARMAN Zach Meiners, director — Conversion 46 A LLEN E LLENZWEIG Four independent films 47 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R . Jane Schoenbrun, director — I Saw the TV Glow 49 P ETER M UISE Brilliant Exiles: American Women in Paris, 1900-1939 (exhibit & catalog) 50 C ASSANDRA L ANGER

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

P OEMS & D EPARTMENTS

5

C ORRESPONDENCE

8 R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .

BTW

P OEM — “The Faultline” 22 A LFRED C ORN A RT M EMO — The Front Runner at the Fifty-Year Mark 25 N IKOLAI E NDRES P OEM — “Pearl Bar, Cinco de Mayo.” 32 JSA L OWE P OEM — “The Bolognese” 40 F REYA J ACKSON A RT M EMO — Discovering Gisèle Freund, Photographer 41 E MILY L. Q UINT F REEMAN C ULTURAL C ALENDAR 44

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

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“T HE SCIENCE of homosexuality” has headlined two issues of this magazine to date. This issue is more about the scientists themselves and their times, though most of our subjects did in fact make important contributions to LGBT science. Sexuality as a subject of scientific inquiry can be traced to mid-19th-century Germany. Part of the impetus was the discov ery that there were sexual anomalies to be explored, including the newly minted “homosexuals.” As William Benemann docu ments here, this approach was finding its way to the U.S. by the 1880s, when physicians began to publish papers about patients who suffered from what was seen as a nervous disorder: a sex ual attraction to one’s own sex. And while the doctors prefaced their research with the obligatory moral outrage, they tended to regard these patients as a curiosity to be explained—the better to find a cure for what ailed them. The neurological model soon gave way to the psychiatric paradigm of Freud and his followers, as “sexual disorders” were annexed by the psychiatric establishment and cata logued in the APA’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM )—which is where “homosexuality” remained for many decades. In the 1950s, along came Evelyn Hooker to carry out a study that marked the beginning of the end for the pathological model. As Wendy Fenwick argues, Hooker chal lenged not only the notion that homosexuals were “mentally Fall Rising: The Scientists FROM THE EDITOR

ill” but the very legitimacy of the APA’s claim to jurisdiction over people’s sexual orientation. While “homosexuality” was dropped from the DSM in1973, the “T” in LGBT has remained. “Gender dysphoria” refers to a mismatch between one’s current gender identity and one’s as signed gender at birth. Vernon Rosario reveals that the crucial re search on this topic was undertaken by German-American physician Harry Benjamin. Trained in endocrinology in the early 20th century, he started out promoting slightly crackpot treat ments for sexual disorders but became intrigued by the connec tion between gender and hormones, and found himself working with Christine Jorgensen in the 1950s, which launched his pio neering research into transgender healthcare. Claude Schwob was a radiochemist who’s the only known LGBT scientist to have worked on the Manhattan Project during World War II. While working with Robert Oppenheimer on the testing of materials to be used in the first atom bombs, Schwob had a steady boyfriend and made no attempt to hide his gayness, which apparently was an open secret. David L. Chapman argues that Schwob was remarkably free of shame throughout his life, even when the FBI went after him, and he spent much of his later life photographing young men in various states of désha billé and sexual entanglement. His vast collection of photos is preserved in the GLBT Historical Society archives. R ICHARD S CHNEIDER J R .

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Correspondence

Kip Dollar. That is certainly how it felt back then. The account of The Country doesn’t mention Michael Stevens. Stevens had been a very popular antiwar political science pro fessor at U.T. San Antonio in the ‘70s. When he split with his wife and came out gay, he was denied tenure. In a progressive style retaliation, he organized the San Anto nio Gay Alliance (SAGA) and started a community newspaper called The Calendar . I moved back to my hometown from San Francisco in 1981 to be a gay thera pist. I quickly became Michael’s protégé and Secretary of SAGA. Hap Veltman was on the board of SAGA. He was very publicly gay and expected respect and in fluence for who he was. And he was very helpful and generous with the commu nity. During the Gay Alliance period in the ‘80s, an out-front community formed with such staples as a business associa tion, a chorus, the AIDS Foundation, Gay Pride Day picnics and marches, and the annual “Gay Fiesta.” SAGA tried hard to be racially and sex ually inclusive. I want to note that the Latina women’s and lesbians’ community developed in parallel under the leadership of Graciela Sanchez of the Esperanza Peace and Justice Center. We were all try ing to address the very issues that Kip cited: we strove to achieve visibility and thereby overcome those conservative forces. That Lucas Belury reports that he grew up feeling accepted as mixed-race,

Hispanic, and queer suggests that we were successful. Toby Johnson, Austin, TX To the Editor: As a native San Antonian who came of age in the late 1970s, I enjoyed Lucas Belury’s article on the San Antonio Coun try nightclub. Although formally opened in 1973, the bar was named after an earlier gay bar located several miles outside of the city, literally in “the country.” The remote setting of this predecessor bar allowed it to operate with less scrutiny by civilian and military police. Legend has it that in this former bar, same-sex couples danced together openly, but a lookout kept watch at the door. If po lice arrived to raid the bar, the lookout would blow a whistle and each dancer would quickly find an opposite-sex partner to dance with until the police left. When Hap Veltman opened “The Country” in the middle of San Antonio, he took the name of that former hidden establishment and proudly asserted the right of LGBT+ peo ple to gather openly in the middle of our city. I met my now-husband when he was sta tioned at U.S. Army Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio in the 1980s. He quips that the U.S. Army’s “off limits” list in those days was more useful in finding gay bars than Bob Damron’s Address Book !One wonders who in the U.S. Army was charged with doing the required “research”

San Antonio in the ’70s: Being There To the Editor: Thanks for the article about San Antonio in the 1970s [July-August 2024 issue]. Lucas Belury recounted the story of bar owner Hap Veltman’s legal actions to stop the Military Police from entering his bar in search of military personnel, demanding to see people’s ID’s. This was during the Vietnam War era, and soldiers were everywhere. There were something like ten or twelve military bases around the city. Hap’s bar was the popular, trendy San Antonio Country, which we called The Country. His 1973 success in opposing the MP’s helped not just his own bar but of all the bars in the city. There were even more gay and lesbian bars than there were bases! San Antonio had a thriv ing gay nightlife. It even dubbed itself “the Drag Capital of the World.” Veltman’s influence went well beyond his ownership of a gay bar. He and his fa ther, a real estate developer, were key to the modernization of San Antonio. Hap owned a couple of downtown restaurants. He flipped the front entrances from street level to downstairs river level (which had been the back door to the garbage cans), thus improving and commercializing the River Walk—which today gives the city its character. A bronze plaque pro claims: “‘Hap’ turned an underutilized river into the vibrant district that it is today.” In 1980, The Country was forced to close in a homophobic legal challenge brought by the energy company next door, whose new building needed a park ing lot. What seemed like a defeat proved a major upgrade. The money from the sale of The Country bought the historic build ing on Bonham Street, named for one of the heroes of the Alamo, which became the Bonham Exchange—with its naughty pun on “bottom”—next-door to, but fac ing in the opposite direction of, the Alamo. The Bonham was much larger and more visible, with theater and ballroom space for community meetings and events, a de facto community center. Belury quotes from the 2019 documen tary Hap Veltman’s San Antonio Country by filmmaker Noi Mahoney (available on YouTube). The comment about San Anto nio being “hush-hush and low key ... be cause you have a Hispanic community, a Catholic community, and a heavily mili tary presence,” was said by my partner

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to find all the local gay bars for this listing. Although there is more progress to be made, we’ve come a long way since the difficult days described in the article. Still a “military city” and now the seventh largest city in the U.S., San Antonio wel comes active-duty personnel at its LGBT+ establishments. Thankfully, raids by the military police are a relic of the past. Jim Germann, San Antonio, TX Allen Barne tt Is Worth Knowing About To the Editor: Walter Holland’s recollection of Allen Barnett [in the July–August 2024 issue] is greatly appreciated. I think The Body and Its Dangers is one of the great works of AIDS literature, and have been frustrated that Barnett seems to have been forgotten by gay letters. Holland’s personal recollec tions provide biographical information not available elsewhere. Twenty years ago, I repeatedly hit a blank wall when conduct ing research for an encyclopedia article on Barnett, only to receive a letter from the late Michael Denneny offering some of his memories of Barnett—but only after the article had appeared, so this material ar rived too late for me to use. Raymond-Jean Frontain, Conway, AR

actor in the film, had contacted me about having “an event” in Hartford. I was the founding member of the AIDS Ministry Program of Connecticut and the Connecti cut AIDS Residence Coalition. That night, we held a fundraiser. The message was: enjoy the film at the local Hartford cineplex and then come back to the Hartford Stage Company for an after party reception. Mark Lamos and Stephen Caffrey spoke about making the movie and about our efforts. We raised thousands of dollars to help provide housing for people living with HIV / AIDS , many of whom had lost their housing because of discrimination. Over the years, wherever I’ve been work ing, I have proudly hung the signed poster in my church office. The Rev. Thaddeus Bennett, Conway, MA Correc ti ons In the May-June 2024 issue, a piece titled “The Making of Longtime Companion” refers to a play by Terrence McNally as Our Sons . The correct title is Mothers and Sons . Also in the May-June issue, a review of Conversations with Terrence McNally changed the preposition in his play Frankie and Johnny in the Claire de Lune . N ew from the University Press of Mississippi

Charles Silverstein’s Achievement To the Editor: Thank you for the obituary for my dear friend Charles Silverstein, PhD [March April 2024 issue]. For the record, he was a psychologist, not a psychiatrist as stated in the obituary. Furthermore, Charles was still in training and had not yet received his doctorate when he made his case for removing homosexual ity from the American Psychiatric Associa tion’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ( DSM ). The fact that a fledgling psycholo gist helped bring about changes in the DSM is, to my way of thinking, an even more im pressive accomplishment than it would have been had he been a psychiatrist. Jack Drescher, MD, NYC An Opening Night in Har tf ord To The Editor: Regarding an article titled “The Making of Longtime Companion ” that appeared in the May-June 2024 issue: when Longtime Companion was released in May 1989 and premiered in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago, it also premiered in Hartford, Connecticut. Mark Lamos, direc tor of the Hartford Stage Company and an

Thirty years of interviews spanning the career of the novelist, playwright, and gay activist whose works include Rat Bohemia , The Child , and Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987-1993

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In Our Mailbox There could be any number of reasons for us to display this cover of The New York Review of Books from May 9, 2024, one of which is slightly sentimental. The NYRB has been a role model for this magazine from the start, some thing to aspire to: a relentlessly intelligent biweekly that reaches a readership of the literate and the curious, reassuring us all that such a readership exists. And yet, it could also be said that this love affair with the NYRB has been somewhat un requited: For all its coverage of every topic known to humans, matters of particular interest to LGBT readers have not always been front-and-center. That’s why this cover came as such a shock (and the illustration inside was way more explicit, though no frontal nudity). One strains to recall a past cover that even hinted at male hotness in this way, and by an icon of gay male sexuality, Tom of Finland, whose works are recogniza ble to virtually every gay man in America above a certain age (fifty?). One suspects this is not the case for the bulk of the NYRB ’s readers, for whom the article provided a helpful tuto rial on Tom’s men and the things they do, in language that al lowed for references to “beautiful buttocks” and “the sailor’s dick”—not to mention a brilliant analysis of Finland’s art, with observations like “it’s so hypermasculine that it bends toward BTW Two Gift Subscriptions For the Price of One!

high femme” and “the scenario ... incorporates our position as voyeurs mirroring” those in the picture itself. AgingOut Celebrity gossip isn’t our usual stock-in-trade, but if it were, surely the name Matt Bomer would have popped up more than once. The dreamy actor is openly gay and isn’t afraid to take roles in gay movies (such as the remake of The Boys in the Band ) in addition to his “mainstream” roles (think Justice League ). Well, Matt is reported to have signed on for a role in the forthcoming parody of The Golden Girls ! (Need less to say, it won’t be the first! There have been numerous par odies over the years, including many high Camp versions with the four female roles played by guys in drag.) Anyhow, now that the news about The Girls has settled in, what’s up with that casting? Nathan Lane makes sense, but Matt Bomer is young enough to have played one of the “Kens” in the recent Barbie movie. And yet, he’s poised to step into the role of Rose (as “Jerry”). Apparently 46 in gay years (Matt’s age) is equiv alent to 63 in Betty White years (her age when she started as Rose). Nevertheless, if they’re still planning to go with the lov able dummy routine, Matt as gay Rose is probably too old for the part by now. Trey’s Fi ft een Minutes Meet Trey Samuel Fetzer, a twenty year-old Ohio State University student who’s seen here urinat

ing on a rainbow flag that apparently he spotted on someone’s front porch one night last winter in the Wein land Park neighborhood of Columbus, Ohio. Trey was caught in the act by a surveil lance camera and can be heard saying “Fuck the gays” repeatedly while relieving himself of one-too-many beers, we assume. The perp faces charges of criminal

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mischief, disorderly conduct, and criminal trespass, which could add up to a big fine and probably probation. If there’s an irony here, it is that several still photos of Trey went viral, which is to say that his penis became an object of interest for the millions who voyeuristically caught this act of vandalism. How Trey would feel about that is hard to gauge. “What would Freud say,” as we used to ask, about a guy who whips it out on a Klieg-lit front porch and pees while uttering “fuck the gays”? No doubt he basked in the virality of the moment; in the Age of TikTok, it’s all about getting your fifteen minutes. Follow the Sex Three separate items in this cycle’s BTW in cubator seem worth noting without too much fanfare, but to gether they point to a grander theme: • The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) voted to officially oppose in vitro fertilization (IVF) and fight to have it outlawed. • More states in the South and Midwest passed laws that seek to limit transgender rights, including access to medical care or to appropriate restrooms or other facilities. • The rate of abortion in the U.S. has actually risen since the Dobbs decision gutted abortion rights in 2022. What they have in common can best be observed in the SBC’s reasoning on the need to avoid “the unethical circumstances that happen when sex and conception are divided.” With that in mind, consider the jump in U.S. abortions from 82,000 per month before Dobbs to 86,000 today. The best explanation is that Dobbs acted as a stimulus for the production and use of self-administered abortion drugs, which can now be bought at your local drugstore (often OTC) or online. Their use continues the trajectory started by “the pill,” which expressly decoupled sex from procreation. In a related vein, the original argument against “sodomy,” which goes back centuries, was based on the assertion that all non-procreative sex was off limits and sinful, and it remains the underlying taboo: namely, the notion that sex can be an end itself, just for the hell of it. The persistence of the anti-sex ideology in the U.S., notwithstanding the late Dr. Ruth, is a vast mystery, to be sure, one that has real-world conse quences both expected and un-. Meta ban The widening net of books being banned in school libraries is bound to swallow up some unexpected and even ironic titles. As noted previously, a number of districts have banned the Bible for its violence and sexual situations. In the latest incident, a Florida school board has banned a book titled Ban This Book, a children’s title by Alan Gratz that was re moved from shelves in Indian River County school libraries by order of the county school board. The irony was not lost on the reporters and commenters who cited this incident—but it also makes perfect (non-ironic) sense. The message of Gratz’ 2017 book is that book-banning is wrong and should be resisted, which is just the kind of message that any book-banning offi cial would instinctively want to ban. Also, of course, the book’s title seems to be a direct taunt aimed at just such officials. What the board may not have foreseen is that banning a book called Ban This Book would be catnip for precisely the kinds of peo ple who buy books. Sales on Amazon soared and the number of ratings had leapt to almost 1,500 at press time. So, ban away; it only makes the book look sexier.

THE POWER O Y MIDLIFE OFGAY

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ESSAY

The Broken Dandy A NDREW H OLLERAN

G EORGE GORDON, LORD BYRON was not only a brilliant correspondent but something that seems no longer possible, at least since the death of Rod McKuen—a best-selling poet—though Byron, as an aristocrat, refused to accept the money earned from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage . It was only his debts and his desire to fi nance a campaign to free Greece from the Ottoman Empire that forced him to demand his royalties years later. Byron is probably not read today the way he was in the early 1800s. Keats, who envied Byron his success, is considered the great Romantic poet these days. But it was Byron who was the famous genius during that period in early 19th-century England known as the Regency. And now, the 200th anniversary of his birth has brought forth a burst of books like Andrew Stauffer’s recent biography, though Byron may be of interest today more for the rainy summer he spent on the shores of Lake Geneva in a villa near a house rented by the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary Godwin Shelley than for his own work—a sum mer made famous for Mary writing Frankenstein and Byron’s doctor John Polidori writing the short story “The Vampyre”— two landmarks in the history of Gothic fiction. Byron was born with a deformed foot—turned inward—a handicap that, a friend said, was something he thought of every day of his life. He compensated, perhaps, by taking very long swims—heroic swims, quite literally, since they were inspired by the ancient story of Leander swimming the Hellespont to be with Hero, one of the legends Byron discovered as a youth who read voraciously. In the water he must have felt his hand icap disappear. On land he was enraged when he overheard one of the women he was pursuing ask her maid: “Do you think that I could care anything for that lame boy?” Yet when he grew up, that lame boy was catnip to women. His face transfixed them—though it’s hard to tell from the many illus trations in Stauffer’s book what he really looked like. The paintings turn him into a swarthy sheik. Only one drawing, seen from behind, conveys good looks. The others are all over the place. He had, for instance, a tendency to put on weight, which led to strict diets and purges he called “Reductions.” But women were mesmerized by his wit, reputation, appear ance, and conversation. He used the word “motility” to explain his extreme mood swings. By this he meant his acute impressionability—he felt too deeply—but feeling is what the Romantic Age was all about. He was variously kind, generous, egotistical, arrogant, effemi nate, depressed, gay (in the old sense), and possibly bipolar. His friend Lady Blessington said that “if ten individuals undertook Andrew Holleran’s latest novel is The Kingdom of Sand. His other novels include Grief and The Beauty of Men .

Thomas Phillips. George Gordon Byron (1788–1824), 6th Baron Byron, Poet. Government Art Collection (UK).

the task of describing Byron, no two of the ten, would agree in their verdict describing him, or convey any portrait that resem bled the other ... and yet the description of each might be cor rect.” In her own estimation, she wrote: “were I to point out the prominent defect of Lord Byron, I should say it was a flippancy and a total want of natural self-possession and dignity.” Which we can take to mean that he was funny. He loathed what he called “cant” (hypocrisy), and all one has to do is read his satires to appreciate the stinging sense of humor. He mocked his fellow poets for their “ rabies of rhyme” in a book he published early in his career attacking the Scotch and English critics who had dismissed his youthful endeavors. But Byron’s poems rhyme as cleverly as those of his predecessor Alexander Pope, though their subject matter is very different. His two long narrative poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan , were taken to be what we would call autofiction—a thinly veiled record of the author’s life. And this made Byron

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the original Byronic man—“mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” in the famous words of Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his many conquests as a “broken dandy” (his own self-description) in the adulterous roundelay of Regency London. Like his father, whose nickname was “Mad Jack,” Byron committed incest, fled abroad to escape his debts, and died at 36—though his father was probably a suicide, while Byron died of a malarial fever in Greece, exacerbated by the bleedings and purges ordered by doctors that Byron detested. He had been mo lested as a child by a nurse who not only imbued him with Scot

colo Giraud. And when he really began to travel—to Greece, Albania, and Turkey—he discovered the pleasures of the Turk ish baths: palaces of “sherbet and sodomy.” But his real enthu siasm was for married women, especially Italian ones. He was attracted to dark skin—and tight vaginas, we learn in one youth ful letter—though he had a phobia about watching women eat. Still, the bisexuality, the incest, the sheer sexual appetite (“I fucked her twice!” every day, he boasts of his first Venetian af fair in a letter to a friend), seem superhuman. Lady Caroline Lamb was not the only one to call Byron

“mad.” Wordsworth said he was insane and warned that his epic poem DonJuan was a threat to the English character. His half-sis ter Augusta assured his estranged wife that Byron was “a maniac .” The poet Percy Shelley called Byron both “mad” and a “genius.” Goethe agreed with the latter. Part of the madness was what seems to

tish Calvinism’s sense of innate sinfulness, but also, when Byron was nine, “used to come to bed to him and play tricks with his person.” This went on for two years before she was discovered and dismissed. His first great love was for a youth named John Edelston, who sang in a private choir created by a friend of Byron’s at Cam

Byron went on to have a yearlong a ff airwitha Greek born French teen ager named Nicolo Giraud when he moved to Athens.

have been a sexual mania. Sex was linked in Byron’s life to what he considered the two pillars of his being: a love of free dom and a hatred of “cant.” Sex was life—“Is it not life,” he asked a friend about something he had just written, “is it not the very thing?”—no matter how many people got hurt in the mêlée. The most touching case was his illegitimate daughter Allegra, who was handed off to various people as a child and finally stashed in a convent, which, at the age of five, she begged her father to visit; instead he left town. This led to a great depression when she died soon after that of cholera

bridge, which led classmates to wonder: “What does he do with those choirboys?” Before that, there was a circle of friends Byron called The Band of Thebes—friends he made at Harrow before matriculating at Cambridge (from which he graduated without ever having to take an exam, simply because he was an aristocrat). Erotic friendships at Harrow were hardly unusual; such crushes were part of an English upper-class education. But Byron went on to have a yearlong affair with a Greek-born French teenager named Nicolo Giraud when he moved to Athens, which was after an affair with his half-sister Augusta in London. The latter caused a scandal. § A NDREW S TAUFFER ’ S extremely readable biography Byron: A Life in Ten Letters is based on a simple but very effective design. Stauffer, who seems to have read everything there is to read about his subject, has selected ten letters (out of 3,000) that Byron wrote at different stages of his tumultuous career, and has then proceeded to tell us what was going on in Byron’s life when he wrote them. In Stauffer’s view, Byron was attracted to taboo sex. The or gies with prostitutes and actresses that he took part in as a young rake were standard fare for the time, but youthful frivolity gave way eventually to adultery with married women, until Caroline Lamb’s vengeful novel about her own obsession with him (along with rumors of sodomy) ruined his reputation in the drawing rooms of London. So he fled to the Continent. In Italy, things were reversed: you could have sex with a woman as long as she was married, but not before, which would ruin her prospects. The love of Byron’s life was an Italian countess whose husband allowed Byron to live with them in one of the many villas Byron moved among over the course of his brief life. Byron was always ambivalent and at times tortured by his failure to achieve what Stauffer sees as his desire for a stable family life. It was this search for a home, in Stauffer’s view, that led Byron to marry the heiress Annabella Milbanke, with whom he had a daughter Ada, who was removed from his influence not long after their marriage, after his half-sister revealed the truth about their affair. Once Byron left England, he was even freer, as an English lord, to do what he wanted. In Athens he had the affair with Ni

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while still in the convent. Children could be inconvenient. Because homosexual acts were punish able by death in England, those who could afford it had to live abroad during those years, and Byron was among them. But he was notorious even in a society that was es

nicating his way across Europe? Ten nessee Williams put him in his play Camino Real as one of several figures from literature to whom Williams was drawn. (Proust’s great homosexual char acter Baron de Charlus was another.) But what Byron stands for now, if anything, is

BYRON A Life in Ten Le tt ers by Andrew Stau ff er Cambridge University Press 401 pages, $29.95

pecially venereal (gonorrhea is mentioned frequently in his let ters). And then there was the drinking and the gambling. Byron was in almost constant debt for most of his life. Like the Bloomsbury set whose members were hopping from bed to bed a century later without regard to gender, Byron refused to be confined by middle-class morals. Even today, it’s hard to rec oncile the man who could write that pæan to the vagina with the one who fell in love with fifteen-year-old choirboy John Edelston, and later with Nicolo Giraud. Perhaps homosexuality gave him some sort of freedom that he couldn’t find in rela tionships with women. How often he frequented the Turkish baths and brothels is unknown. But on his final trip to Greece to help finance its war of independence from the Turks, con scious of his fading powers, he returned to adolescents—in cluding a fifteen-year-old page named Loukas Chalandritsanos. Loukas, though happy to accept Byron’s money and favors, did not return the poet’s amorous interest. § S O WHAT DO WE MAKE of Lord Byron today? Was Byron sim ply the first sex tourist—an oversexed British aristocrat for

debatable. The Romantic movement, which Byron epito mized, is usually characterized as a reaction to the 18th cen tury’s Age of Reason and the Industrial Revolution. We too are living in a scientific age, of lithium batteries and algo rithms, and are so industrialized that we cannot find ways to dispose of the products with which we have trashed the earth. But we’re not as comfortable with sexual mutations as Byron was. Contrast any of his letters with an essay The New York Times recently ran on polyamory, which read somehow as if an open marriage was a new way to prepare meatloaf. Gone are the days of Boyd McDonald’s Manhattan Review of Un natural Acts ! Each addition to the LGBT lineup (Q, I, A, et al.) seems to make us less free, not more, because they all turn into identity politics, and there’s nothing less fluid than iden tity politics. Byron seems unimaginably slippery in compari son. All that we know for sure is that, when he made an effort to settle down and married Annabelle Milbanke, he soon dis covered that he couldn’t stand the uxorial role, and he gave up his wife and their baby daughter (Ada Lovelace, who grew up to be a mathematician responsible in part for the develop ment of the computer). He was, to say the least, conflicted: a man whose sex life still astounds us for its plenitude and indifference to societal norms. And yet, while described as having an effeminate voice by one of his observers, his masculinity seems never to have been questioned, even when he was in love with a beautiful young man (he was never attracted to older men). Was he ever penetrated, or was he always the penetrator? Byron may have escaped the binary by just ignoring it. But what aspect of Byron’s sexuality is heroic today? Adultery is commonplace, bisexuality is still regarded with skepticism and rarely dis cussed, and trans issues have come to be the new battleground. Byron was his own sexual identity. He and the nonbinary move ment may have nothing to do with each other. Yet Byron’s indifference to sexual classification, along with his lordly command of the English language, makes his life and work rejuvenating today—and shockingly contemporary. Today he may seem like a character in Bridgerton , but consider the following excerpt from Canto the Eleventh of Don Juan , in which Juan is presenting his credentials to the diplomatic es tablishment of England: Juan presented in the proper place, To proper placemen, every Russ credential; And was received with all the due grimace By those who govern in the mood potential, Who, seeing a handsome stripling with smooth face, Thought (what in state affairs is most essential) That they as easily might do the youngster, As hawks may pounce upon a woodland songster. Unless I’m crazy, he’s describing in the last two lines what we would call chicken hawks.

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INTERVIEW

Phil Tarley talks with a (very) independent filmmaker

‘I always had crazy boyfriends.’

B RUCE LABRUCE’S CINEMA occupies a limi nal space between haute couture pornography and experimental narrative film. The prolific artist-provocateur is releasing his new book, The Revolution Is My Boyfriend , to coincide with his fifteenth feature film, The Visitor . LaBruce is also a savvy cultural critic and contributed an article titled “Notes on Camp—and Anti-Camp” to this magazine in 2014 (March–April issue). A hallmark of his sui generis œuvre is the delightful metafictions of his cosmology. One of his first big films, Hustler White , references Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boule vard , and his new feature film, The Visitor , pays homage to Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Teorema . A fan of his moviemaking, I must confess I also collect his still photographs. My favorite LaBruce movie, L.A. Zombie ,

B RUCE L A B RUCE

starring mega-pornstar François Sagat is mega-hard to stream. The plenitude of pithy penises often mark LaBruce’s films as too dirty for narrative platforms and too arty for porn sites. I interviewed LaBruce in his Toronto home from my West Hollywood apartment via Zoom on May 1st. Spencer Toulouse, my assistant, facilitated the research, recording, and transcrip tion of the interview. Phil Tarley: My sources tell me that you grew up in or around Toronto—are they right? Bruce LaBruce : I grew up on a farm 150 miles northwest of Toronto. I came here to study film and dance. PT: I think of you as a highly transgressive artist, as much of your work flagrantly violates conventional morality. What in spires you to take on the standard rules and norms? BLaB: Outsiders and misfits—the kind of people who test the conventions of society. In the 1980s, I was in the punk move ment, and I always had crazy boyfriends, like hustler boy friends, and I lived with female strippers. I surrounded myself with people who inhabited the fringes of society. These are the characters who interest me. Many of my films are based on fetishes. Fetishists tend to be outsiders. But everyone has a fetish of some sort. Even with a fetish that seems really per verse, you can have a romantic connection to the fetish object. Even if it’s an amputee stump or a dirty foot, you can still feel an almost religious devotion to it. These characters and their fetishes have always interested me. PT: What, may I ask, are your fetishes? BLaB: I’m a basic foot fetishist. I have a hustler fetish. I have a skinhead fetish. Most of my films feature skinheads in one form or another, whether they are skinheads, monks, or punks. It’s the actual shaved head that sets me off. PT: Interesting. Even though your characters do nasty, kinky things to each other, they’re often very tender, and there’s a love between them, a light and airy sweetness. Can you talk about that? BLaB: Well, part of it is like what I was saying about fetishists. People think they’re nasty and dirty, and they don’t have any real human emotions. I always found them very human, and spiritual. Just because you look like a mean, ag gressive punk or skinhead doesn’t mean that you don’t have a gentle or empathetic side. Insane characters actually have a heart as well. In Hustler White , Piglet, the skinhead hustler— all he wants is a kiss. He doesn’t care what anyone does to him, all this extreme sadomasochism, choking, and autoerotic

Phil Tarley’s essays and photography have appeared in LAWeekly , The WOW Report , The Advocate , Out magazine, Genre , and others. Bruce LaBruce, 2024. Above and cover photographs by Amanda Majors.

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