The Chicago Tribune (6/15) reviews a new musical Queen Lucia based on E. F. Benson’s 1920 English novel. If ever a play had gay credentials without being overtly gay, this would be it. Benson was gay, there is a proto-gay character, Georgie Pillson, and the novel (and it sounds like this musical) is infused with camp. (And someone really, really needs to do a play of Benson’s life. His siblings all turned out to be gay writers. His father was the Archbishop of Canterbury and his mother, as soon as the youngest child was of age, ran off for the rest of her life to Majorca with her female lover. We’re talking Victorian times.)
It’s a new century and cities are full of gyms. What do you do, asks The NY Times (6/16), if you’re a guy who really wants to be p.c. and you really find other guys having sex in your locker room or sauna? You do … not much. Many people talk of, ahem, bumping into such activities but unless it is reported to the various boards of health agencies (which would then close the gyms), nothing gets done. There are virtually no complaints. Says comedian Timothy Young, who happened on such an event in his Y.M.C.A steam room in Brooklyn, he told the gentlemen, ‘Go ahead, I don’t care.’ But later in his routine he said ‘Oh, yes, these steam rooms are wonderful. I even hear they have a workout room upstairs.’
Poor John Boswell who looked 14 when I met him 20 years ago (he was in his 30s) and looked 15 when he died a few years later is being defended for his gay scholarship in a new book, The Friend by Alan Bray. Boswell, who wrote that not only was homosexual love much practiced in the Middle Ages but that gay marriages existed then too, was heavily cricitized by other historians. As more and more evidence surfaces, the critics are changing their minds. Bray’s book tells of Knights buried, in love, together with the epitaph ‘love joined them while they lived, may the earth join them in their burial’, the book tells of Irish same-sex marriages in the 1100s, lesbian marriages (approved of by relatives) in the 1800s, the same marriages in Byzantium and even tales of such love in tavern and alehouse ballads. By the way, among other things, new research skewers the whole pure ‘Platonic’ love thesis: those folks really had physical sex with each other.
And to continue the tradition that men-at-arms may become men-in-arms, the Chicago Tribune (6/15) tells us that a male sergeant and a male Warrant officer were married at a military base in Nova Scotia. The soldiers were married by a United Church Minister because the base chaplain, an Anglican, refused. This is the Canadian army, of course.