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 Robert Lowell Memoirs:  I II III

Edited and with a Preface by Steven Gould Axelrod & Grzegorz Kosc

Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 384 pgs; photos 

Robert Lowell emerged as one of the most celebrated poets of the mid-20th century, as well as a sought-after academic, lecturer and socialite, but he was equally famous for his very public episodes of outrageous behavior ignited by cycles of depression that landed him at the Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic for what would now be diagnosed as bipolar disease.

So much has been written about Lowell’s life and work, and by Lowell himself, a through the glass darker self-portrait ‘My Autobiography’ written at a crucial time in his life. It is part of a new collection of Lowell’s previously unpublished prose edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc. The editors preface each of the book’s distinct sections and, when needed, bring context with concise footnotes.

A photo of Lowell as a young man graces of ‘Memoirs’ and you immediately want to know what is behind his steely gaze and you find out quite a bit, however fragmented. The first section ‘My Autobiography,’ Lowell wrote during his stay at Payne Whitney. in 1954 as part of his treatment therapy. Under the circumstances of his experiencing a breakdown,

Lowell writes not only a clear-eyed character studies of his parents, Robert, and Charlotte (nee Winslow). It is written from the perspective of the Lowell as a toddler to age 13. His writing is so dynamic that you are just swept along, never mind that he is describing astute emotions and thoughts experienced at that age.

His adversarial relationships and lineage inspired (however darkly) some his most lauded books of poetry, ‘Life Studies’ and it was well known that Lowell also believed that that his bouts of manic depression fueled his most dynamic poetry.

He viewed his father as a self-absorbed military officer and his mother, a steely Bostonian who resented the uprooting duties required of an officer’s wife.

Bobby was alienated from both of them for in different ways in vividly unsentimental terms, but reliving all of his resentments in his memoir, with droll, if sometimes merciless accuracy about his parents’ dysfunctional marriage. His mother bitterly resented being away from what Robert describes when Robert Sr. was commissioned to other cities. Charlotte wanted to live in what her son calls ‘Antebellum Boston’ and observes the customs of the gentry with snarky Jamesian precision. The most animated are his intimate remembrances of many of his noted Lowell and Winslow relatives.

However formulated Lowell’s prose writing stuns in its energy and objectivity. Stylistically it is as unforced, crafted, and vivid as anything he achieved in verse. A sense of raw discovery about his own nature, wry observation of the titled world around him, a astute observer of family demons that would haunt his poems that established his style and craft in such collections as ‘Lord Weary’s Castle’ ‘Life Studies’

Lowell reports on his family’s dysfunction, and his own volcanic anger, with ugly episodes of acting out. He mocks a friend, for instance, after she urinated at her desk. In another incident he started punching boys on the playground and hurling manure at 3^rd grade students during a playground recess.

Both rational and irrational behavior are chronicled by Lowell in the ‘Crisis and Aftermath’ chapters of the book, with such droll titles as ‘I had periodic wild manic explosions’ ‘ Seven years ago, I had an attack of pathological enthusiasm’ and ‘For Two Years I’ve Been Cooling Off’ and other short essays in which Lowell describes his experiences of breakdown, treatment, and incidents at Clinic.

Again, the verisimilitude of the prose and his dynamic style, just sweeps you along, but raises questions about and how much of the stories are spun for effect. It is total recall, or the feral expressions of a literary savant, or performative?

In one episode he describes what was going through his manic mind when he attacked a fellow patient listening to another patient play the piano in the day room at Payne Whitney. Annoyed by the pianist’s tight dress and the man’s yellow socks so much so that he pulls the man off the chair by is feet.

He recalls detouring his travels deliberately when he was informed his mother died in Italy after a series of strokes and he had to bring her body back to the US. And Even after his father’s death, Lowell’s bitterness is expressed on an unpublished ‘draft’ poems collected in his private archival documents.

The final section of the book- ‘My Life Among Writers’-he weighs in on his peers and his sharp assessments of their literary merits and deficits of heavyweights including T.S.Eliot, Anne Sexton, Silvia Plather William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, et al. The best among them is his portrait of social theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt who he obviously admired personally and for her work,

After Lowell’s dynamic and incisive writing in ‘My Autobiography’ and ‘Crisis and Aftermath’ the final chapters on writers and an appendix with ‘Fragments’ of Lowell’s private prose, everything from a single page essay on his parents bickering to his mother’s compulsiveness neatness, and notes on his grandfather’s funeral, but will be of interest to devoted Lowell readers as extra pieces of the puzzle.

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Rediscovering Kerouac

The Library of America’s definitive collections of Jack Kerouac’s writing continue to reveal the full impact of his work on the American literary landscape. In 2012 they published a complete collection of his poetry and have followed up with “The Unknown Kerouac” a volume of previously unpublished private journals and newly translated stories written originally in French-Canadian patios, Kerouac’s first language.

By the 60s Kerouac was decidedly out of the spotlight and admitting his disdain for the “On The Road” myths that clung to him, as well as his image as the leader of the glamorous Beat generation writers. He was much more concerned about being judged on the merits of his entire literary legacy.

“The Unknown Kerouac” goes a long way in revealing the full scope of Kerouac’s artistic ambitions. Editor Todd Tietchen deftly introduces each story in context of Kerouac’s life, and details how some of these early writings anticipate his later, more famous books. Jean-Christophe Cloutier, in his introduction, explains the precision and artistry of translating the patios manuscripts.

Born Jean-Louis Kérouac in Lowell, Massachusetts in 1922, Kerouac was the second son Joseph Alcide Leon Kerouac and Gabrielle-Ange Levesque. His parents spoke French at home and Jack did not learn any English until he was five. Kerouac’s brother Gerald died at age ten, and the author wrote about their immutable bond in ‘Visions of Gerald.’

Jean-Louis was a star student and athlete in high school and entered Columbia in 1940, excelling in French and literature courses. He was sidelined in a football accident and a year later he was in US Navy boot camp at Newport, disastrously it turned out, sent psychiatric observation for repeated “insubordination.” During the 40s in New York, Kerouac becomes friends Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, John Holmes, Lucien Carr and other writers and poets of the so called ‘Beat Generation.’

Kerouac’s “Journal 1951″ written during his time at a Veteran’s hospital and a trove of personal he personal journals, full of full of confessionals, poems and musings and is his blueprint for the kind of American writer he wanted to be. His literary heroes included Dostoyevsky, Melville and especially Marcel Proust. Among other things, he formulates his theories of his so called ‘spontaneous’ aesthetic, inspired in part by jazz improvisation.

This volume includes the first time English translations of Kerouac’s novellas ” The Night is My Woman” (‘La Nuit est ma femme’) and “Old Bull in the Bowery” (‘Sur le chemin’). ‘Night’is exemplar of Kerouac sensualist atmospherics and visceral dialogue. “Bull” is his 1952 memoir of the “escapade of mistakes” as it recounts Kerouac and Neal Cassady as kids in 1935 along for the ride with male relatives on a desperate trip in New York. This surreal retelling stylistically is, Kerouac writes Cassady “the solution” to the Road plots.

The altogether astounding “Memory Babe,” written in 1957, is his verite memoir of his family life in Lowell, written in 1957, he summons the 13- year old Kerouac’s “Versailles of the child mind.” Tietchen rightly cites the memoir as part of Kerouac’s “comprehensive literary ethnography” of French-Canadian life of that era “mapping and preserving a lost world.”

“I Wish I Were You” is a noir portrait of his New York contemporaries in the 40s was published posthumously in 2008. It is his first portrait of what Kerouac’s “found” generation of New York Bohemia. Startling in its psychosexual frankness, Kerouac rewrote the 40s version he co-authored with William Burroughs.

This new collection is an essential volume for Kerouac fans, for those who have only read his most famous book; this volume is a chance to rediscover a brilliant writer before, during and after that mythic trip On the Road.

The Unknown Kerouac | RARE, UNPUBLISHED & NEWLY TRANSLATED WRITINGS
Todd Tietchen, editor, Jean-Christophe Cloutier, translator http://www.loa.org

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Ludwig unplugged
Beethoven | The Man Revealed
By John Suchet

Beethoven The Man Revealed is John Suchet’s unconventional biography of Ludwig van Beethoven, that does indeed reveal the flawed, tragic man behind the iconic artist. Suchet acknowledges that much of this is well-trod material, from sources long out of print and has never been organized and told in a single modern volume. Suchet, a BBC classical radio host and Beethoven scholar, explains in his afterward to the book that his is not a bio for musicologists, but for the interested lay reader. Indeed, the composer‘s messy life is as dark, enigmatic and majestic as some of this music.

Beethoven was a tortured artist, egotistical, sometimes maniacal genius in very distilled terms. Almost all of Beethoven’s triumphs were accompanied by calamity or near disaster. Few people realize that he started to have trouble with his hearing while still in his 20s, was plagued with several health problems in his life and that he was a lonely man unlucky in love. The author gives a fascinating, if incomplete account, vis-à-vis the musical universe Beethoven created. Suchet deftly condenses the musicological aspects and makes it vital to the narrative of the composer’s life. Not a small feat.

Suchet’s is confident in reconstructing dialogues between Beethoven and some of his family members and musical contemporaries that fill in narrative gaps, sometimes with his own fertile imagination. Some of which, however authentic, can be read with caution, even skepticism.

In contrast, Suchet’s authority is in little doubt as he recounts, for instance, the raucous premiere of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Beethoven, by then was almost completely deaf, conducting the musicians and singers some of whom almost stormed out of the performance because of the unprecedented musical demands of the work. There even had to be a shadow conductor behind Beethoven, as insurance that it would come off, since Beethoven couldn’t reliably hear the musicians.

Beethoven volatile personality is front and center throughout the book, puncturing more romantic perceptions. Ludwig often acted out with vengeance when crossed. Beethoven was head of his blood family at a young age. He hated his father, a minor composer and musician, who became raging alcoholic to the extreme embarrassment of his son. His often toxic relations with his brothers continued through his life. After his brother Carl died, he tried cruelly took legal action to separate his wife Johanna from their son Karl. Beethoven used his clout to lay legal claim to his nephew as his own. Even though he cared for him financially, his tyrannical ways drove his nephew away..

Beethoven’s problems though, rarely interfered with his composing and as his fame grew through Europe, he was becoming a more and more isolated and eccentric celebrity. He became an object of ridicule for his unkempt appearance and erratic public behavior in Vienna. Adding to the tumult the fact that the city was repeated in the path of the Napoleonic wars and under repeated siege. Still Beethoven was visited by royals and connected patrons; as well as his musical contemporaries from Schubert to Haydn to Rossini. It is an amazing tale of a singularly brilliant career. Touching, incisive and in the end chapters, even symphonic, Suchet’s biography of Beethoven is engrossing and disquieting portrait of an elusive, brilliant and troubled artist.

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Singer Michael Callen died in 1993. He may be most remembered as a member of the a cappella group The Flirtations, but that not was what first put him in the national spotlight.

Poet Essex Hemphill died in 1995 and may be remembered from the infamous PBS broadcast of Marlon Riggs’ documentary Tongues Untied, but he was already a famous out poet-performer in his own right. The achievements of these two artists turned AIDS activists, fighting on the front lines during the height of the epidemic, are chronicled in Martin Duberman’s moving dual biography Hold Tight Gently.

The title in fact comes from Hemphill’s groundbreaking book Brother to Brother, a collection of stories, essays, and poems by and for gay black men. Callen and Hemphill were fearless activists and were among the inestimable number of American gay male artists lost in the first 15 years of the AIDS epidemic.

Duberman not only has complete command of the social and political landscape of the AIDS era, he was intimately involved with advocacy himself and writes from the inside track of the heroic and sometimes desperate measures of gay organizations in fighting for medical and civil rights of people living with AIDS.

Time has not softened Duberman’s scalding assessment of the governmental indifference, medical politics, and prevailing homophobia that cost so many gay lives.

The author also doesn’t pull back from revisiting the often-counterproductive infighting of a community overwhelmed with loss and at war with the straight world. His perspective and analysis of this monumentally important movement of AIDS activism, is, from several angles, rescued history. Strategically, Duberman includes some of his own diaries entries the grimmest years of the epidemic.

Callen and Hemphill were artists at the height of their creative powers when they were diagnosed with HIV-AIDS. As different as they were in background, careers, families, and relationships, they were on some parallel tracks with a selfless and fierce commitment to AIDS activism, despite personal sacrifices.

Callen, a gay white man from the Midwest moved to New York to perform and after his diagnosis fought for AIDS patient advocacy. He was first diagnosed with AIDS in the early 80s and early on worked to get information about diagnosis, treatment, and prevention to the gay community in New York. He was a long-term AIDS survivor and fierce advocate for getting explicit information out about safe sex, working tirelessly for advocacy of people with AIDS being part of the medical and social response to the epidemic.

He appeared before congress to bring AIDS awareness and expose political hypocrisies and homophobia. Callen knew as much or more about the medical facts and theories of AIDS and worked with everyone from Dr. Mathilde Krim to gay citizens and all minorities dealing with AIDS.

Hemphill, a black gay man from Washington, DC, worked to bring together the disparate voices of black gay men, lesbian writers and artists in performance and print in DC, Philadelphia, and eventually on a national level, artists and activists reaching out for visibility, dialogue and inclusion, in what was to become dubbed the Second Harlem Renaissance. He fought for recognition of gay identity, challenging national African American civic and religious leaders to deal with acceptance of GLBTQ minorities within hetero-normative minority communities.

Both Callen and Hemphill retreated from activism and returned to the sanctuary of their creative lives as their health declined and creating some of their best work evocative of their artistic, political, and gay lives. Callen writing and recording songs that would result in his finest vocal collection of his material as a solo artist and his collaborations with the Flirtations. Duberman includes some of Hemphill’s most stirring poetry from his final book Vital Signs.

At the height of the AIDS epidemic, Duberman founded CUNY’s Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies to further LGBT scholarship and curriculum. This book stands among his finest achievements, as impressive, in different ways, as his masterful 2007 biography of American art and ballet curator Lincoln Kirstein.

Like it is in that work, Duberman’s objective analysis, as well as his activist voice, is incisive, passionate, and poetic.

– See more at: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/hold-tight-gently-michael-callen#sthash.3GdjIaGk.dpuf

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Dan Savage’s latest

Columnist Dan Savage, the gay author, activist and relationship guru to a large straight readership via his syndicated column Savage Love, is also a media hottie, seen frequently on CNN and HuffPost.

He is, happily, anathema to the religious right and the GOP hacks, who want to diminish his clout. They are wasting their sanctimonious breath. He is after all the perpetrator of the infamous cyber bomb that will forever, link politician Rick Santorum to…a byproduct of…well you know the rest. He weighed in on many of the words and deeds of all of the toxic spawn of the GOP primaries and he is more popular than ever.

Savage pulls few punches on a whole range of issues in his new book American Savage, a collection of essays about sex, politics, religion, media, gay-parenting, social-networking, realpolitik and homophobia. The book is also a snapshot memoir of Savage’s 17 year marriage with his husband Terry and their 15 year old son DJ, who they adopted at birth. His essays are witty, personal and economic in detangling complex social issues past buzzwords or media scenarios.

Whatever methods Savage uses to expose hypocrisies, he is in fact never more eloquent, lacerating or witty when he goes after anti-gay politicians with facts, history and logic that eviscerates the anti-gay myths, lies and aspersions leveled toward gays and minorities.

For GLBTQ Americans, Savage is no less than a hero, for his most inspired It Gets Better Project, his anti-bullying campaign. His and Terry’s outreach to GLBTQ teens who live in oppressive or abusive circumstances or are struggling with their sexual identity. Everyone from President Obama to the San Francisco ball team have made IGB videos.

In one of the book’s most poignant pieces My Son Comes Out, Savage turns his son’s announcement that he is straight into a snapshot of how normal such a scene now is. A normal a scene as a Norman Rockwell painting. Meanwhile, it is also routine for MJ to get dropped on his grandparents so his parents can attend the Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco for a day in the sun for s&m carnivale.

Savage is an absolutist about safe, consensual sex, no matter what kink is explored. He has given tutorials to many a straight young man on the location of the clitoris. Savage writes about sex not only in healthy, practical and clinical terms, but as a vital pursuit of remaining a happy, healthy and fulfilled human being.

His uninhibited scholarship of sex education spills over into politics. Savage, is nonetheless, just as frank in exposing right wing political machinations as they apply to issues not only about gay civil rights, but about physician assisted suicide for terminally ill patients. In his essay ‘Extended Stay’ he writes movingly about his mother’s right to die with dignity and her stated desire to be kept out of pain. “It wasn’t a choice that the Catholic Church, Pope Benedict, or Joel Connelly had a right to make for her.” he writes.

In ‘Bigot Christmas’ recounts Savage’s now infamous ‘dinner table’ debate with Brian Brown, head of the antigay group YouTube debate with Savage faces down the antigay dragon with logic and a money shot provided not by Savage this time, but his husband Terry, who had had enough of suffering fools gladly (even for the famous husband) Terry asked Brown “Do you think our son should be taken away from us?” Let’s just say that the bigot’s answer did not sit well with the gay father, husband and homeowner. Huh… cue Jaws music.

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Who’s Yer Daddy? 
Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners

Inaugural Poet Richard Blanco shaking hands with the President (photo: RichardBlanco)

Terrace Books | http://uwpress.wisc.edu
Hardcover, $26.95, e-book $16.95

Jim Elledge and David Groff, the editors of Who’s Yer Daddy? Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners note in their introduction that some contributors had bristled at the bawdy implications of its title and explained that they chose it for a sense of fun and for those offended few to focus on the subtitle.

The book appears almost a year after Christopher Bram’s vital history Eminent Outlaws, which tracks the gay male writers who busted open the literary closet vis-à-vis the post-WWII gay civil rights movement. This anthology is a great companion volume.

39 authors weigh in on their “daddy’s” from the semi-closeted world of Walt Whitman, Thomas Williams, Gore Vidal, James Baldwin and Truman Capote through The Violet Quill revolution and the era of out-and-proud gay writers. Some influencers and mentors are not gay men. Richard Blanco, President Obama’s inaugural poet weighed in with Making a Man Out of Me, an essay about his grandmother as his main literary influence by trying to butch Blanco up. Her harshness drove Blanco to escape in his literary world that would validate his dream of being a gay writer.

Just as present in these essays, are straight men and women, as well as GLBTQ icons Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, among others, are cited by several of their gay male literary decedents.

Stage artist-writer Tim Miller’s Jumpstart ruminates on having the literary DNA from Nijinsky to Allen Ginsberg and everybody in between. Meanwhile his longtime husband (unofficially) Australian writer Alistair McCartney’s essay Teenage Riot charts his booky puppy love with Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde and Jean-Paul Sartre, among other usual suspects.

Kenny Fries’ How I Learned to Drive, The Educations of a Gay Disabled writer is a condensed, but no less moving account of Fries connecting with other writers, notably his 20 year friendship with poet Adrienne Rich, facing the prejudices and isolation of writers with disabilities. Like many of these essays, you hope the author considers expanding to memoir. so compelling , writes of being isolated as a disabled American and his connection to the poetry of Adrienne Rich, connecting him to his brethren of writers facing the same hostile and disconnected world.

The pre-Stonewall stars icons are present (including Judy). Editor Groff threading the ballsy camp of Bette Midler as an invaluable literary persona in the same essay as he writes of the towering elegies of Paul Monette’s ‘Love, Alone’ particularly his poem ‘Buckley’, where he eviscerates William F. Buckley’s diatribe that called for tattooing PWAs as diseased humans. Indeed, a repeated theme in the essays is the profound impact of the AIDS era.

“There was a lot of work being done in the gay community to heal the pain of AIDS and how it affected us.” Noël Alumet (author of Letters to Montgomery Clift) states in Vanity Fairey Interviews sites everyone from Shel Silverstein’s children’s classic The Learning Tree to Arnie Kantrowitz’s Under the Rainbow as literary passions.

The universal theme of reconciled loss is an eloquent, quiet theme through many of these essays. Saeed Jones’ hauntingly poetic Orpheus in Texas is a memoir of a father he never knew, but presence he still feels. The raw emotional loss poetically told through the Orpheus and Eurydice myth against the Texas landscape with the coda “Well aware that this rejection may be my equivalent of looking over my shoulder and trying to ask loss one more question.”

Brian Leung’s tremulously fab of The Seismology of Love and Letters tracks his stability handling earthquakes in San Diego, but growing up Chinese-American he sought the comfort of Edmund White and Elizabeth Bishop, when it came to earth shattering gay romance. As a budding writer he was told that he wasn’t gay or Chinese enough. By the time the earth shifts everyday at the height of the AIDS era, he is an artist chronicling his times- powerfully, poetically and on solid ground.

This anthology is a joyous, unexpected book, so full of drama, comedy and lessons learned. The landscape of gay literati that is connected vitally to personal liberation as the beautiful open rooms of the every expanding GLBTQ library.

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This review fell through the cracks at HuffPost so I’m punting it over to AT2.

J. Edgar’s G-men on campus

Subversives
The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power
Seth Rosenfeld
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Hardcover | $40.00

reviewed by LJW

Seth Rosenfeld’s Subversives chronicles the unlawful policies of FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover during the 50s and 60s, that were aimed at students, faculty and others Hoover and his operatives deemed a threat to America. Those in bed with Hoover included then California governor Ronald Reagan, who was completely invested in tactics to smear, intimidate and disrupt academic freedom at UC Berkeley.

This book is a defining document of a largely untold story of oppression by the US government against its own citizens. Rosenfeld is a passionate investigative reporter and a fierce meticulous researcher. Rosenfeld actually started the book 30 years ago as a student journalist and eventually had to sue under the Freedom of Information Act for the most vaulted FBI files and Hoover papers that were still embargoed. Without knowing fully what was in them, Rosenfeld had to lobby in advance that the release of this material would be vital to the public interest. Talk about a literary Catch-22. Much of it was, indeed, explosive. Hoover sanctioned wire-taps, pay-offs, spies, loyalty oaths, doctored evidence, press smears, fictional dossiers, misappropriation of government funds and stealth operations that were clear abuses of power.

Before getting around to the so-called radicals on the Berkeley campus, Hoover was already conspiring with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in investigating Hollywood, ostensibly to flush out communists, but actually was maintained for its network of informants and keeps everyone in line for fear of a smear. At the top of the heap of informants was Ronald Reagan, then president of the Screen Actor’s Guild, a political star on the rise, who was feeding the feds rumors about his colleagues to both HUAC and Hoover.

When Hoover’s investigations turned up no concrete evidence on any of the key players among the student protesters, he didn’t back off. Rosenfeld chronicles the full scope of corruption and Hoover’s broad attacks on intellectuals, artists and faculty at Universities around the country. When campus protest started to focus on the war in Vietnam and started to spread quickly to involve colleges and universities across the country, Hoover tried to intimidate and smear the groups as anti-American and treasonous. Reagan, in a landslide victory in his campaign for governor of California, used local and federal force to bust up protests at UC Berkeley and other hot spots of social activism.

Rosenfeld vividly brings the turbulent era to life, by not going over well-trod territory. Subversives is a deft bio-history of the lead characters driving the events at Berkeley, including Clark Kerr, the liberal leaning, but vilified from all sides, president of the university. Kerr became a political target of Reagan and was unceremoniously dumped by the politicized board of Regents at Berkeley. Kerr went on to define policies of academic freedom at schools and was the architect of such progressive programs as Pell grants.

At the heart of the book is Rosenfeld’s portrait of Mario Savio, the troubled freedom fighter who became the ad hoc leader of the Free Speech Movement, and was targeted by Hoover and Reagan even after he was no longer directly involved. He became an iconic symbol of the student counterculture movement that defined the 60s. An Italian-American New Yorker headed for the priesthood, Savio became a brilliant physics student, bailed on a promising career to be part of the freedom riders working for black voter registration in Mississippi, which inspired him to mobilize the FSM on the Berkeley campus. Savio overcame a lifelong stutter when he spoke in public, faced down the academic hierarchy at Berkeley.

Clark Kerr and the Regents at UC sided with the Constitution on the rights of the FSM on campus, to the consternation of Hoover, who was planting stories in newspapers that Savio and the FSM was in bed with the communists. As villainous as Hoover come off, Rosenfeld really turns the heat up on Reagan, particularly over his militaristic handling of the People’s Park standoff, where he imposed martial law at Berkeley.

 has dissected one of the fabled periods in American history, with lazar-beam veracity and craft. Rosenfeld digging out the final truth, you can almost see him typing bleary-eyed FBI notes with neon lights slashing through his windows. Meanwhile, this is a completely engrossing book of real citizen heroes towering over the Orwellean tactics Hoover’s private mafia.

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Sex and Punishment by Eric Berkowitz
Counterpoint Press

Eric Berkowitz’s Sex and Punishment | Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire is bursting with shocks that would even make Ripley’s toes curl. The author chronicles the wages of the sexually forbidden for as proscribed by cultures, governments, religions and the odd jealous mob who hates it when others are getting more than they are. This compendium is as explicit as the subject matter demands, but Berkowitz is not aiming at prurient interest, he is a serious sexual anthropologist ala Margaret Meade.

The real scandals are not about who is doing what to whoositz, but the bigger issue of who is punishing them and why. The offenders, at various times, were subject to a trove of horrors- stonings, castrations, burnings, chastity belts, foreskin seals, racks, stocks, torture, rape (used as a punishment) and the ever popular- public humiliation.

Some of Berkowitz’s stories are so far back that you question his source material, but he verifies as much as possible. The book chronicles sexual customs that were borne from pagan mores and cultures that are eventually adopted by organized religion.

The negative attitudes around homosexuality, for instance, was largely tolerated (if stigmatized officially) just so it was hidden. The down-low, indeed, has ancient roots. Take for example his revelation concerning some ancient Jewish codes- “sexual pleasure was never forbidden among Hebrews as long as it occurred while husbands and wives were producing more Hebrews”

One theme that resonates through the ages is that women have been subjugated to male dominance over their mind and bodies for millennia, bears repeating, especially vis-à-vis the fervent rise of anti-feminism that is sweeping the nation.

Religious persecution of sexually active people is, of course, a dominate theme, In 334 AD, for instance, with the masses mostly illiterate, Pope Augustin, made up the rules, while enjoying the pleasures of the flesh himself. Obviously, it was all about his eminence’s ego as much as his orgasm.

Forget the wrath of God, as mobs dragged people from their stone and straw huts and tried them in the streets for sexual improprieties. Later, soldiers and prelates scoured the land for satyrs and nymphomaniacs. Who doesn’t love stories of married bishops taking the night off from whoring to administer condemnations to anything but the missionary position between one man and one woman.

Even though Berkowitz hits on such topical themes as the gay marriage debate and the fact that some states are moving legislation that would bar the word ‘gay’ in public schools, the book may be ancient history, but it’s legacies are applied history.

The book ends, prematurely, with the trials of Oscar Wilde. I was looking for more recent examples of petty, moralistic cruelty. But, Berkowitz nonetheless writes a great chapter on Oscar and Bosie, with the Crown’s own relatives on the down-low (again!) the societal hypocrisies, the queens scrambling to France or beards and all of those canoodling rent boys playing it as it lays.

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Ah Yes, They Remember It Well

“Double Life A Love Story from Broadway to Hollywood”
By Alan Shayne and Norman Sunshine

TV producer Alan Shayne and painter-sculptor Norman Sunshine may have been an A-List gay power couple in the 1960s, but they were not publicly out, not only because of their careers, but because they came of age in the era of internalized homophobia.

Their journey together started in the antigay 1950s, and they tell their story in their touching memoir Double Life. The title refers to their lasting relationship and having to remain publicly in the closet.

Now, as they mark their 50 year relationship, they are a relatively newlywed couple, having tied the knot in Massachusetts where gay marriage is legal. Norman and Alan tell their stories in alternate first person chapter, with their view of who they were individually and what they were doing as a couple.

When they met, Shayne was a struggling Broadway actor and told he would never be a star by a powerful agent. Sunshine, a Los Angeles émigré who escaped the suburban life to become a graphic artist in New York and meet men out of the purview of his family who wanted him to go into the family furniture business. Even though they were instantly attracted to each other, they couldn’t have seemed more incompatible when they clumsily started dating and looking for every reason not to be together. Their attraction won out.

Both men had experienced traumatic same-sex incidents as teens and in adulthood remained conflicted about embracing their gayness. Shayne was in fact seeking de-gaying therapy, but his analyst was more progressive, encouraging him to pursue his relationship with Norman.
Shayne married a high profile lesbian, as a marriage of professional convenience, to a star of New York café society, but after she met another woman, the arrangement dissolved with bitterness. The pre-Stonewall period in New York, when they were first exploring their relationship in a closeted world and an exciting gay town, is vividly recalled.

Sunshine was responsible for the career defining ‘What becomes a legend most’ ad campaign for Blackgama furs, left the high pressure ad world to become a full time artist, but had to make up for a lot of lost time in the fast changing contemporary art world. Shayne left acting to become a casting director, working with David Susskind and the notoriously difficult producer David Merrick, before becoming a producer and eventually powerful head of Warner Brothers television. Even though it was an open secret, his high stakes money job forced him to be pretend Norman didn‘t exist.

The stresses of their jobs eventually strained their relationship, but outside of a few painful flirtations and a bout or two of cheating, the couple continued to strengthen their relationship. Sunshine even returned to New York at the behest of Frances Lear, recently divorced from TV producer Norman, to launch her magazine. Frances, the real life model for Bea Arthur’s character “Maude” had a love-hate relationship with him.

Celebrities pop-up in some hilarious anecdotes. Shayne never forgot what it was like scrapping by for acting jobs and was known for fairness and respect in his treatment of actors, even as a mogul. He was also one of the first casting agents to hire blacklisted writers at the end of the McCarthy era. He punctures some sacred stage and film stars, but not maliciously- including Marlon Brando, Lena Horne, Katharine Hepburn, Lee Radziwill and one priceless encounter with Bette Davis. Actually Shayne’s Hollywood stories, mostly about highly commercial TV shows (Bourne Identity, The Thorn Birds) are not as interesting as Sunshine’s descriptions of the ad and art worlds of the time.

The couple only touch glancingly on the devastation of AIDS in the arts, mostly recounting the heartbreak of watching the decline of their neighbor and friend Rock Hudson. Mostly though, this is a candid and inspirational memoir of love and commitment told by both men with heart and humility. Actually, their story could make a hell of a mini-series. Let’s see, Rock would be easy to cast, but who really could play Davis?

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HIDE/SEEK Difference and Desire in American Portraiture
Smithsonian Books

HIDE/SEEK is the exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery which became a political cause celeb over a short film by David Wojnarowicz that depicts ants swarming a crucifix. It has been deemed anti-religious by right-wing politicos, who also claim, falsely, that a gay exhibit is funded with public money. Even more shocking than the censoring is that the National caved-in and removed the purportedly offending work. (See Robert Nesti’s EDGE commentary) A stinging reminder that homophobia thrives and Jesse Helms gay art bashing equals state-sanctioned censorship.

The film has been removed from the exhibition, but is being shown, in protest, at other galleries and is getting a lot of hits on YouTube. The benefit of censorship is that more people want to judge for themselves. For its part, The National asserts that they weren’t buckling under political pressure, but that they don’t want the totality of the exhibit to be lost in the debate (or further maligned).

You couldn’t blame anyone for boycotting over the censorship, but if it doesn’t matter to you the book of the exhibit is a must see and read for art lovers and anyone interested in GLBTQ cultural history. It displays an unprecedented collection of over 100 years of art by and for GLBT viewers. In addition to sterling plate transfers of the art and photography, the book has invaluable commentary by gay historian Jonathan Katz and curator David Ward. It fills in so many missing figures and creative motives, indeed, gay aesthetic of the history of American art. And as Katz and Ward illustrate a visual language before there was a legal vocabulary of gay life.

Of course, some of the most famous gay icons appear- Bessie Smith, Gertrude Stein, Frank O’Hara , Walt Whitman, Lincoln Kirstein, Allen Ginsberg- works from

Thomas Eakins, Romaine Brooks, George Platt Lynes, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Demuth, Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Andrew Wyeth, Andy Warhol, Keith Haring, Annie Lebowitz and Robert Mapplethorpe. But just as interesting are the dozens of other lesser know figures pushing the bar at a pivotal time in gay culture.

 

Bravery is an accumulated theme of the book from nudes from the 1900s that document secret lives, to the boldness of Demuth and Brooks in the 20s depicting explicit gay subcultures, to the uncompromising courage of the artists in the 80s with confrontational art about AIDS and homophobia as they were witnessing the decimation of their colleagues to a mostly indifferent public perception.

Katz and Ward’s study and annotation of the art work is in your face art and artist history, elegant and extravagant commentary that doesn’t back away from the sexual lives of the artists that was fueling their work. It is provocatively revisionist. Katz’s style is both succinct and stream of consciousness- This isn’t beach reading or a cover table decoration.