March-April 2018
Black men, with our posturing and profiling and mean-mugging and such, disclose to the world and to each other that we are unbreakable, never vulnerable or scared; and then we wonder why we are seen as so hard and perhaps even harsh.
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MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD (1868–1935) was hailed in the press as the “Einstein of Sex” during an American lecture tour in 1930. He was a leader among the pioneering sexologists of the late 19th century, and the first openly homosexual one.
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Call Me by Your Name seems far more old-fashioned than [Brokeback Mountain]. Although set in 1983, the film of André Aciman’s novel is reminiscent of the sort of thing that happens in novels of the 19th-century Russian writer Ivan Turgenev. (Indeed, the first chapter of Aciman’s new novel, Enigma Variations, is a rewrite of Turgenev’s First Love, with a gay twist.)
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Édouard Louis: It would be naïve to say that I am not a part of the bourgeoisie: I went to school, I studied, I have more money than my parents, I live in Paris, I travel. So all the evidence is that I am bourgeois. …
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“The bonds between the two friends were so strongly rooted in intellectual, psychological, societal and spiritual affinities that they created together a single life. … Their mutuality in living was so authentic that this book should have been a biography of Marguerite Yourcenar and Grace Frick, with a subtitle: Inventing a Single Life.”
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Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine began a tumultuous relationship, full to the brim with brawls, alcoholic foolishness, and above all a sexual passion that brought them to the heights of ecstasy and the depths of despair.
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Two of Voltaire’s best friends were gay, and I have my suspicions about a third, the Marquis d’Argenson, the creator of the Arsenal Library. The three of them were among those he called his “angels,” who helped him to vanquish his enemies. With his trademark tolerance and humanity, Voltaire accepted his gay friends with aplomb, created gay characters who were villainous for other reasons, and lived his final days succored, and loved, by intimate friends who were “anti-physiques.”
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The organizers of Trigger can be commended for including contributions by pioneering artist Nayland Blake, whose “fursona” is hybrid bear-bison “Gnomen,” who playfully morphs into a different species and gender right before our eyes.
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Only at the last page does the reader fully understand that there are no heroes or villains in this fictional world, no sick puppies or paragons of mental health and political correctness. While it captures a contemporary zeitgeist, this book seems likely to last.
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The plot of Less is well constructed, with lots of amusing incidents. The fun begins in New York City, with Less almost missing his interview with Mandern due to a broken clock in the hotel lobby and a mistaken assumption by his escort.
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