‘David Hockney: A Rake’s Progress’ by Christopher Simon Sykes
Posted on May 5, 2012 by Nels P. Highberg in Bio/Memoir, Reviews
I doubt I am the only middle-aged gay man in the contemporary United States whose first memories of British artist David Hockney’s work center on his paintings from the late-60s and early-70s featuring swimming pools. He captured the water’s undulations as reflected in the bright Los Angeles sunshine with a range of deep blues and greens punctuated by a pop of yellow or red. What really caught my eye, however, were the men who appeared in this painting or that, especially the nude backside of his then-partner Peter Schlesinger rising out of the pool. Decadent was not a word I would have conjured at the time, but that is how this world seemed to me. This nude man was outside, after all, even if he was in the backyard of a private home. There was no hiding, no secrecy, no invisibility in this world. I never forgot it. (more…)
‘An Arab Melancholia’ by Abdellah Taïa
Posted on May 1, 2012 by Anthony Darden in Bio/Memoir, Reviews
As the aftermath of the civil uprisings that influenced the Arab Spring settles into a precarious political movement seeking democracy, there will no doubt emerge among the voices of dissenters a voice that will challenge the political rhetoric promising an equalitarian society, a voice that will challenge the morality of a people and the ideals of a culture. (more…)
‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’ by Jeanette Winterson
Posted on February 28, 2012 by Terri Solomon in Bio/Memoir, Reviews
Jeanette Winterson’s new memoir returns to the scenes of her semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (1985), published when Winterson was twenty-five. Like the car crash you crane your neck to see, readers will once again encounter the harrowing insanity of her adoptive mother, Mrs. Winterson, “a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge.”
For us as humans, telling ourselves our own story orients us in our mind and in the world. It says, I am here, in this place, and this is who I am. This truth telling (or for some, artful self-deception) does not need to be recorded for many individuals. For Winterson, whose early life is abusive and chaotic and cold, the art of writing is a necessity.
“There are markings here, raised like welts. Read them. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. Rewrite the hurt. It’s why I am a writer—I don’t say ‘decided’ to be, or ‘became’. It was not an act of will or even a conscious choice. To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs. Winterson’s story I had to be able to tell my own,” she writes.
So Winterson gives us part two of her life, with added years of experience, including applying to read English at Oxford, which she recalls as “the most impossible thing I could do,” losing her mind and then regaining it, and seeking her birth mother. She also recalls and relates the first sixteen years of her life, ruled by the madness of Mrs. Winterson, a woman who was “larger than life…like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable.”
Mrs. Winterson figured prominently in Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and it is intriguing for the reader to be privy to Jeanette Winterson’s telling of two stories—one fiction and one fact. She writes, “…the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.”
And yet this is a book of survival.
Books are a way up and out for Winterson, her means to persist and exist. For anyone who has ever lost him or herself in a book or fallen in love with language, Winterson’s reflections on the importance of literature and reading will ring true. In the world she grew up in, “books were few and stories were everywhere, and how you tell ‘em was everything.”
This tale is not always easy to stomach, but it’s a good read on so many levels—Winterson is a detailed and likeable narrator; the descriptions of working-class Manchester, U.K. in the 1960s and early 1970s are forcefully drawn, as if with a blunt pencil in the hands of Mary Cassatt; and her search for her mother, the young girl who gave her child up at six weeks old, is intertwined with musings on love that most readers should find touching.
It won’t spoil the book’s ending to share the last line of Winterson’s memoir—“I have no idea what happens next” (It will make sense in context, I promise.). But don’t rush through Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? just to satisfy your insatiable curiosity. This is a book worth spending time on.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
by Jeanette Winterson
Grove Press
Paperback, 9780802120106, 240pp.
March 2012
‘For the Ferryman: A Personal History’ by Charles Silverstein
Posted on February 27, 2012 by Tom Eubanks in Bio/Memoir, Reviews
“We were like Achilles and Patroclus, for two decades, political soulmates side by side battling against homophobic institutions,” writes Dr. Charles Silverstein, in For the Ferryman (Chelsea Station Editions), of his relationship with a beautiful, doomed soul named William Bory. But Silverstein’s “personal history” gives the reader a different tale: twenty years of dark and stormy nights between a modern-day Magnus Hirschfeld and a tragic beloved. Once Bory succumbs to drugs and disease, Silverstein quotes Proust: “We pick out in love only those who are capable of satisfying our senses and agonizing our hearts.” (more…)
‘Folsom Street Blues: A Memoir of 1970’s SoMa and Leatherfolk in Gay San Francisco’ by Jim Stewart
Posted on January 27, 2012 by Sassafras Lowrey in Bio/Memoir, Reviews
Memoir provides readers with the chance to hold a life in our hands, to flip pages and uncover the truth of another. For queers there is a particular power of reading about the lives of our people, in trying to understand who we are through a connection to a historical legacy most of us did not grow up having a knowledge of. Jim Stewart’s Folsom Street Blues: A Memoir of 1970’s SoMa and Leatherfolk in Gay San Francisco is a gritty and intimate look at sex, kink, and art. Beginning after Stewart arrives in San Francisco hungry for community, we follow as he fixes up the apartment that will become his home, play space and art studio. (more…)
‘Blind: A Memoir’ by Belo Miguel Cipriani
Posted on January 17, 2012 by Laura Heston in Bio/Memoir, Reviews
Book jackets are always asking us: What would you do if…? And a memoir allows us a peek into someone’s experience to learn from them, feel some catharsis, and know more about ourselves once we’ve read it. Blind: A Memoir (Wheatmark) by Belo Cipriani asks: What would you do if you were blinded mid-life by people who used to be your friends? Most of the answers I can come up with are rather ugly, and I don’t think I am alone in that. The beauty of this book is that the author takes us beyond the event and shows the reader how, rather than being a death, a catastrophic injury can signal a new life. This author details how he adjusts to this new life with a sense of humor, patience, and no small amount of grace.
This book reminds us how vulnerable we all are to each other. We have to trust our bodies to strangers every time we leave the house. Belo’s blindness came at the hands of his childhood friends. We see some insight into their lives in a few chapters, but they seem to disappear from the narrative without warning. The author never details a falling out or last big fight, these friends just seemingly drift apart, only to be reunited through an act of violence the author never saw coming.
Sudden blindness means relearning things most of us take for granted and Cipriani details them all: cooking, walking to work, making friends, buying clothes, and meeting guys. Blindness also means losing the ability to see one’s self, but, as Cipriani tells us, not the “vanity” that comes along with being human. Belo discovers a world of technology aimed at helping the blind tell time, text friends, and know the colors of their shirts. The biggest thing I learned from this book is that most sighted people know nothing about the blind. Cipriani puts this comically when he says,
The class of blind people that most sighted individuals seem to be familiar with is a category I refer to as “Super Blind.” This cohort includes Helen Keller, the guy that climbed Mt. Everest, and the comic book superhero Daredevil.
This memoir is full of comic lines like that one. And that, to me, is the most comforting and the most unsettling part of it. By approaching the subject matter with humor and lightness, readers may come away with some increased compassion for the blind, Hey, they’re just like us! But it suggests little in the way of action, as if the blind already have all the resources they will need, and provides little catharsis.
Perhaps I am an emotional masochist when it comes to what I read, mostly period-pieces about the impossibility of lesbian love written by certain British novelists, but I wanted this book to hurt me and it didn’t. The bad feelings, anger, depression and frustration, are present in Blind but they are under some heavy gloss. Certainly, some readers will see this as an asset. Instead of wallowing in self-pity this person is proactive, goal-oriented, and open to change. Cipriani asserts that his life hasn’t ended by being blinded and that he aims to live a life just as full as his sighted one. He takes his audience with him, showing them a wholly different sense of reality without vision, but without the icky feelings I think most of us would have. The benefit of this is that we get to see a memoir of tragedy from another side, that of rebirth. Within two years, Cipriani learns to walk without sight, continues to date men, gets a high-quality job in his field, practices the acrobatic art of capoeira, goes back to school for an MFA, and becomes an advocate for other blind people. Cipriani may claim to be an ordinary person, but he comes off looking pretty Super after all.
Blind: A Memoir
by Belo Miguel Cipriani
Wheatmark
Paperback, 9781604945553, 173pp
June 2011
‘The Vicious Red Relic Love’ by Anna Joy Springer
Posted on December 30, 2011 by Sassafras Lowrey in Bio/Memoir, Reviews
Anna Joy Springer’s The Vicious Red Relic Love (Jaded Ibis Press) is a hauntingly important contribution to LGBTQ literature that chronicles a time and place in truly innovative ways. Springer’s “fabulist memoir” is glorious, disturbing, and pushes past the limits of style, form, and our own community imagination. Springer uses journals, letters, myth, and doodles from feminist class lectures to create a interlocking puzzle map that guides readers on an intoxicating journey through the dyke community in 90s San Francisco. We are introduced to characters living, dead and imagined who guide us as readers on a journey through heartbreak, disease, and self-discovery. (more…)
‘Small Fires’ by Julie Marie Wade
Posted on December 27, 2011 by Sara Rauch in Bio/Memoir, Reviews
Small Fires (Sarabande Books), a new collection of essays by Julie Marie Wade, is a meticulously constructed body of writing that plumbs the depths of family connection and explores a childhood experienced not peripherally but confronted head on. In Small Fires, Julie Marie Wade, who won a Lambda for her memoir Wishbone, considers family and memory with a poetic eye and unabashed tongue. With her carefully chosen words and a studied deliberateness, Wade proves unafraid to delve into her past—to skillfully reconstruct the events of her youth, from the horrifying to the sentimental to the self-conscious and beyond. (more…)
‘Halsted Plays Himself’ by William E. Jones
Posted on December 18, 2011 by Jeffrey Escoffier in Bio/Memoir, Reviews
As an iconic figure of gay erotic film and of the leather world in the early seventies, Fred Halsted is at a unique disadvantage. Though his work is revered and his reputation formidable, very little is known about him and his most important work is unavailable. In 1972, at the age of thirty-one, Halsted released L.A. Plays Itself, a film which drew upon Kenneth Anger’s surrealist eroto-expressionism, and went way beyond Anger’s sublimated homoeroticism to explicitly portray gay male S/M sex. In 1969, when Halsted first decided to make a sexually explicit film, he decided to create a part for himself, and then be that part. In this same period he had also begun to explore his sadism.
When L.A. Plays Itself opened at the Paris Theater in Los Angeles in June 1972, gay porn cinema was just slowly beginning to emerge from the world of peep shows and beefcake magazines. Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand – the first widely recognized gay porn and a huge hit – was playing to gay and straight audiences in New York and Los Angeles. L.A. Plays Itself followed Boys in the Sand at the 55th Street Playhouse in New York soon afterwards and almost immediately was declared a masterpiece. It was included, with Sex Garage, a short “sequel,” in the film collection of the Museum of Modern Art.
LA Plays Itself and its sequels were very different films than any of the other porn films being shown in theaters during the early seventies. “In my films,” Halsted explained, “I am not that interested in cum-shots or erections or sucking or fucking. I am more interested in what is going on in the psyche and not the action itself.” Instead Halsted sought to make artistic and philosophic statements about sex – in particular about S/M sex. The fist-fucking scene that concluded L.A. Plays Itself introduced the practice to the American public as a form of sexual play. Halsted noted, “I consider myself a pervert first and a homosexual second. Sadism is more basic to my personality than homosexuality.”
In Halsted Plays Himself Los Angeles-based artist and experimental filmmaker William Jones has brought together a variety of materials that will help, hopefully, revive an appreciation both for Halsted’s work as well as of the man himself. Almost half of the book is a short biography. Halsted was strikingly handsome and masculine. But as Jones shows he was also alcoholic and tortured by self-doubt and insecurities that undermined his public persona as the ultra top—the role he chose to play in his own movies. One of the few films still available where you can see him in that persona is Joe Gage’s El Paso Wrecking Corp.
Jones has included a portfolio of photographs and illustrations, a number of fascinating reviews of L.A. Plays Itself, Sex Garage, and Sex Tools published when the movies were released, several in-depth interviews with Halsted, and some of his pornographic writing. The book feels like a time capsule. These pieces took me back to early seventies—when I first read about and saw the films at New York’s 55th Street Playhouse—in fact, the only time I ever the saw the films in the form that Halsted himself had given them. When I was working on Bigger than Life, my history of gay porn cinema, I never managed to see the film that is supposedly preserved in the MOMA film archives. I had to rely on my and other peoples’ memories and a badly reproduced and incomplete video tape version made in the 1980s.
The one area of Halsted’s life that Jones doesn’t explore sufficiently is Halsted’s radical philosophy of sex. Several years ago Patrick Moore devoted a chapter to Halsted in Beyond Shame: Reclaiming the Abandoned History of Radical Gay Sexuality. Halsted believed that the erotic is transgressive and sacramental, that it is inherently violent and involves acts of violation. “Sex is not ‘coming,’ that is superficial sex,” he once explained. “Mine is personal cinema. I don’t fuck to get my rocks off. In the best scenes I’ve ever had, I haven’t come. I am not interesting in coming. … I am interested in getting my head off, my emotions off—and if I get my dick off, my rocks off, it really doesn’t matter that much to me. … I am interested in emotional satisfaction and intellectual satisfaction.” In some ways, Halsted seems to have anticipated Foucault’s view of S/M as a “creative enterprise” which imagined “the desexualization of pleasure.”
We should be grateful to Jones for pulling together all these materials. I hope future editions might also be able to include the long interviews with Halsted from Paul Alcuin Siebenand’s 1975 dissertation. Hopefully Jones’ book will generate further interest in Halsted and spur H.I.S., the company that controls the rights to Halsted’s work, to re-issue DVDs of L.A. Plays Itself, Sex Garage and Sex Tools, his great trilogy of erotic films.
Halsted Plays Himself
By William E. Jones
Semiotext(e) Native Agents Series, MIT Press
Hardcover, 9781584351078, 216pp
October 2011
‘Seriously…I’m Kidding’ by Ellen DeGeneres
Posted on December 4, 2011 by Christopher Urena in Bio/Memoir, Reviews
Ellen DeGeneres’s third book, Seriously…I’m Kidding (Grand Central), is a series of slice-of-life vignettes that are lighthearted and uplifting. It seems to be this book’s mission to leave a permanent grin on the readers’ face (which may make you want to avoid reading this in public). (more…)
