Perhaps the media is tired of watching conservative Christians et al. frothing at the mouth over gay marriage. There is more news this week about serious gay novels and biographies than there is over insecure hissy fits of the terminally intolerant. Perhaps this is, as both the New Republic (6/3) and the NY Times (5/16) report, because ordinary conservative church-goers are yawning big-time over the marriage issue. ‘The Reverend Louis P. Sheldon, chair of the Traditional Values Coalition, said ‘I don’t see any traction. The calls aren’t coming in, and I am not sure why.” Perhaps its because most church-goers simply can’t understand how letting two people of the same sex express their commitment to each other through marriage in any way threatens the ability of two people of the opposite sex to do the same.
So, let’s look at some High Gay Culcha— The NY Times (5/31) likes Colm TóibÃn’s novel The Master, a meditation on novelist Henry James. TóibÃn who has written on gay issues before and is himself gay writes of James’ ‘… feelings of guilt, evasiveness and homosexual longing, sometimes to startling effect.’ The effect being James and Oliver Wendell Holmes in bed naked. (This is not admittedly high on many peoples’ homoerotic fantasy list.) Jamesian readers will like the book which mimics the master’s lack of plot action in favor of character nuance, while non-Jamesians will dislike it for exactly the same reason.
The Guardian (5/29) reviews Isherwood by Peter Parker. (Yes. That Isherwood. Author of The Berlin Stories which became the play I Am A Camera which became the film Cabaret.) Isherwood led an intensely documented (by himself) life, and comes across rather schizophrenic. The reviewer can’t make up his mind as to whether Herr Issyvoo (Christopher’s Berlin landlady’s name for him) is naughty (lusted after teen-age boys), nice (poet W. H. Auden loved him), or nasty (was vicious to his mother). Parker highlights Isherwood’s split personality in his study of Hinduism in which Isherwood tried chastity and self-discipline though he was ‘a skeptical, sybaritic, chain-smoking, egotistical and morally confused atheist.’
Jeanette Winterson has said of herself ‘I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write.’ The Guardian (5/29) reviewed her new book Lighthousekeeping and provided an interview covering Winterson’s personal and literary life. One can see why she has material for novels—she was raised in a Pentecostal family in England and ran away after falling in love with another girl. After a few adventures she applied to Oxford, was turned down, and camped out on its doorstep until she was accepted. Her first novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit gained her a lesbian following which has not abated. The new book concerns a younger person, Silver, apprenticed to an older talkative lighthousekeeper, Pew, and the results of their home/livelihood being automated out from under them. Silver and Pew may or may not be women, a device Winterson has used in fiction before.
Other reviews of gay authors’ lives and work: The Nation (6/14) takes a look at the life and works of Alan Ginsberg. The Guardian (5/29) reviews the work of Somerset Maugham, and recalls a line from the story ‘Judgement Seat’ that Maugham puts in God’s mouth: ‘I have often wondered why men think I attach so much importance to sexual irregularity.’ Clue phone for the Rev. Sheldon.