The Gay & Lesbian Review

Correspondence

bany, New York, to coincide with the grant application review period. GLR ’s standing as a journal with a “worldwide” readership provided more evidence of Cherry Grove’s historic significance be- yond its regional GLBT audience. GLR contributed greatly to an unimagined “happy ending” to the present-day Cherry Grove story. Reading Dolores Klaich’s generous, as- tute tribute to May Sarton and Sarton’s rude response [Nov.-Dec. 2013] reminded me of my own awkward encounter with Ms. Sarton. She had come to the Bay Area for poetry readings. The three I attended were jam-packed, a sea of white-haired women. I went early to the first, at San Fran- cisco State, and there outside the audito- rium was Sarton, by herself. I introduced myself and said that I would soon read a paper about her on a Modern Language Association panel titled “Non-declared Lesbian Writers.” “But,” she said indig- nantly, “I’m a declared lesbian writer.” Oops. She must have been thinking of her 1965 novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mer- maids Singing , but I knew from reading the reviews that her coming out was so muted that it escaped reviewers’ notice. Ten years after the poetry readings at which Sarton was such a star, she was back in San Francisco. I was able to inter- view her at the home of her gay male friends in Noe Valley. She seemed to be very interested in the gay movement and to see herself as part of it. After Sarton died, a woman knocked on the door of Doris Grumbach in her coastal Carl Luss, New York City My Tense Moment with May Sarton To the Editor:

village of Maine. “You,” declared the visi- tor emphatically, “are the new May Sar- ton.” Grumbach was aghast. Margaret Criukshank, Corea, ME What Robert Craft Was to Stravinsky To the Editor: In his vulgar speculation about the sources of Robert Craft’s income [in a re- view of Craft’s book, Stravinsky: Discov- eries and Memories in the Jan.-Feb. issue], Alfred Corn seems to have forgot- ten that Mr. Craft was, throughout his more than twenty years as a virtual mem- ber of the Stravinsky household, a busy conductor whose pioneering concerts and recordings of modern music (eight vol- umes of Schoenberg, the complete music of Webern) and older music (Gesualdo, Monteverdi, Schütz, Bach, Mozart) intro- duced many Americans (including Stravinsky) to rarely performed music that they might not have discovered otherwise. This is in addition to his contributions to literature as the co-author of Conversa- tions with Igor Stravinsky (1959) and five subsequent books of “conversations” on which Craft and Stravinsky collaborated up to the time of the composer’s death in 1971. In his years with the Stravinskys, Craft also prepared the orchestras for the mae- stro’s concerts and recordings and shared conducting duties with Stravinsky, espe- cially during the composer’s last years. But for Craft’s influence, Stravinsky al- most certainly would not have written the masterpieces of his later years— In Memo- riam Dylan Thomas , Agon , Anticum Sacrum , Threni , or Abraham and Isaac . If Craft benefited from the association with Stravinsky, the benefit was mutual.

Update: Cherry Grove Theater Lives! To the Editor: My essay “America’s First Gay Town” introduced a historic Cherry Grove, New York, to your readers in the Nov.-Dec. issue. The essay concluded with a refer- ence to the listing of Cherry Grove’s “Community House and Theater” on the National Register of Historic Places by the U.S. Department of the Interior on June 4, 2013. On December 11, 2013, Governor Mario Cuomo announced New York State’s “Regional Economic Development Council Awards,” which included the Cherry Grove Community Association, Inc. community house as a recipient of a $335,000 matching grant. The award to restore the building will be administered by the NYS Parks, Recreation and His- toric Preservation Office. Receiving this award completes a “Cin- derella” story of sorts. The association, prompted by a question from its legal counsel—“Are you historic?”—embarked on a twelve-month project. It was advised to lobby state and federal elected officials and to research and apply for historic recognition. The goal: to raise awareness of Cherry Grove’s importance in the pre- Stonewall era to GLBT people and to the nation’s history, and to become eligible for government grant assistance to pre- serve its community house. Cherry Grove’s profile was elevated from that of a locally known GLBT resort to a nation- ally-recognized GLBT historic site in the National Parks System’s Fire Island National Seashore . I want to thank GLR for its coverage. Your magazine’s cover, masthead and essay were forwarded to panelists in Al-

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