"Where the Wild Things Are Gay"

Tomorrow is Judy Garland’s birthday. It is also Maurice Sendak’s birthday. I’m not exactly torn, but I did want to share this little piece I wrote about Where the Wild Things Are, so I’ll do it today so it doesn’t get lost. I tried very hard to get this published, because I thought it was good and completely original, but I got no bites. It did, however, get cited (as an unpublished manuscript) in a couple of scholarly books on children’s literature, which I’m proud of. I’ve entertained thoughts of rewriting it without all the footnotes, as more of a magazine-style essay. Maybe some day.

Anyway, here it is:

Where the Wild Things Are Gay

A young boy is at odds with his parents. He feels like he doesn’t belong. When he tries to express his true nature, he is punished, banished, abandoned by his family. He runs away to a place where he can be himself, a place where there are others like him. At first, the others are threatening, but they recognize that the boy is one of them. They welcome him into their lush, exotic world of all-night dancing and howling at the moon. The boy is ecstatic but eventually becomes tired and homesick. He says goodbye to his new friends, who are sad to see him go, and he returns home to make peace with his family. Most homosexual men who came out any time since the turn of the 20th century will recognize this as the “coming out story.” It is also the plot of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are.

The coming out story that gay men tell contains certain basic elements which changed little from the 1930s, when Sendak was growing up, to the 1960s, when Where the Wild Things Are was published. They include a) a feeling in early childhood of being “somehow different” usually accompanied by feelings of shame and fear, b) later, usually in puberty, more specific feelings of same-sex desire, c) some attempt to express these desires, which causes conflict with parents and community, d) leaving or being ejected from home, e) finding acceptance in a new “acquired family,” and f) some attempt to reconcile the new life with the old. This story, which has by its repetition through generations taken on the quality of myth, parallels the trajectory of Max’s story.

Julia Mickenberg, in “Jews in American Children’s Literature,” writes that early in his career

Sendak was told by publishers that his characters weren’t “American” enough, and he was urged to study popular children’s books: what he saw were kids who looked nothing like him, in a world far removed from his own childhood experiences: “The books were filled with blond children with little turned-up  noses, who all bounced about in poppy fields. And my drawings were of naughty, bug-eyed immigrant kids who looked like me,” he told a reporter for the Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles in September 2002 (Mickenberg 16).

If we can say that Sendak put his Jewishness into the character of Max, can we also speculate that his queerness is there as well? “… I am trying to draw the way children feel – or rather, the way I know I felt as a child,” says Sendak in a 1966 New Yorker profile (Hentoff 39). By this logic, I propose a reading of Where the Wild Things Are as a fairy tale for homosexual boys. 

The coming out saga starts in early childhood. Gay men who grew up in the early twentieth century often remember tentative erotic experiences as early as five or six years old. These memories are often associated with discomfort, pain, confusion, and the knowledge that these new feelings cannot be shared with parents. The similarity of these childhood memories quickly becomes obvious in compilations of oral histories such as Keith Vacha’s Quiet Fire: Memoirs of Older Gay Men and Nancy and Casey Adair’s Word is Out: “At about seven or eight years old I was very well aware of my differences; I knew I preferred male companions to female” (Vacha 121). “I remember the pain of being different” (Vacha 12). “I just knew somehow that I was terribly different, an outcast” (Adair 55). Sometimes the feelings are more explicit: “I was looking through some old pictures about a month ago and found one of me at the age of seven. I was sitting in a canoe with a banner across me like a Miss America. It’s the nelliest thing you ever saw. I thought, ‘My God, how can a kid at seven know what he’s going to be?’ But I must have. I can remember when I was about six or seven being groped by a guy who ran a construction crew. Then I remember falling madly in love with a kid in grade school. God, he hurt my feelings! I kissed him once and he started calling me a sissy” (Vacha 170). Sendak’s pictures depicting Max’s misbehavior suggest that it arises from sexual energy, as pointed out by Roderick McGillis in The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature: “Freudians might well gaze knowingly at the nail Max hammers and the crack that it penetrates in the wall. In fact, for those who look for this sort of thing, the book is replete with images of phallic aggressiveness: the strong vertical lines of erect trees, bedposts, Max’s scepter, his ship’s mast, and the horns of some of the Wild Things” (McGillis 80).

Child psychologist and fairy tale theorist Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment, writes that a story for children must

give full recognition to his difficulties, while at the same time suggesting solutions to the problems which perturb him. In short, it must at one and the same time relate to all aspects of his personality—and this without ever belittling but, on the contrary, giving full credence to the seriousness of the child’s predicaments, while simultaneously promoting confidence in himself and in his future” (Bettelheim 5).

But in 1964 when Where the Wild Things Are came out, a boy’s nascent recognition that he was sexually attracted to other boys would likely have aroused revulsion in his parents rather than a desire to help the child integrate that part of his personality. Patricia Cohen, in a 2008 New York Times interview with Sendak, noted that his life has been scrutinized in hundreds of interviews in his long career and asked if there is anything he has never been asked. He answered, “Well, that I’m gay. All I wanted was to be straight so my parents could be happy. They never, never knew.” Being out to friends and colleagues but not to family was common not only among homosexuals of Sendak’s generation but until at least as recently as the generation coming out in the sixties, the time of Where the Wild Things Are (Adair 95, 107, 128, 180).

Though children are now, for better or worse, exposed to many images of homosexuals and homosexuality in the popular media, in the mid-sixties there were few, and they were negative. Homosexuality was the monster so horrible it was kept hidden from children, and even from adults except to warn or alarm them. A child who was sophisticated or curious enough to read his parents’ magazines would have come away terrified if he recognized himself as one of the freaks described in such articles as “Homosexuality: Sin or Disease?” (Christian Century 1099), “Homosexuals Need Help” (“Society should not be misled by propaganda efforts of organized homosexual groups trying to gain ‘acceptability’ for homosexuality, a psychotherapist warns”) (Science News-Letter 102), or a 1964 Time article about two men in North Carolina who were sentenced to long prison terms for committing a single homosexual act between consenting adults. The article notes that one of the men’s sentences was “twice as long as the one North Carolina gives an armed robber, three times longer than a train robber’s, 30 times longer than a drunken driver’s” (Time 1964). The following year Time published the only slightly more encouraging, “Psychiatry: Homosexuals Can Be Cured” (Time 1965). A breakthrough 1964 article in The New York Times, “Speaking Frankly On a Once Taboo Subject,” said that though it was not known how many homosexuals there were in the United States, what was “far more important is that many – perhaps most – are desperately unhappy about it. … They avoid normal sexual activity because they have developed overwhelming fears of their sexual capability and enjoyment with members of the opposite sex. Having been thus cut off from the normal channels for romantic and sexual gratification, homosexuals seek it with members of their own sex. Nevertheless, although basic sexual urges may thus be fulfilled to varying degrees, a feeling of complete attainment of romantic longings probably never occurs” (Times 106).

If gay kids did not pick up the message that they were criminal, sick, evil, and destined to spend their lives miserable and alone, they picked up no message at all. Even Dr. Spock, whose popular books on childcare encouraged post-WWII parents to take a softer, more tolerant approach toward their children, and who addressed at length the sensitive topic of child sexuality, did not mention even the possibility of same-sex orientation in children. It is not surprising that a homosexual child would begin to recognize that he is an alien in his own family.

The next leg of the coming out journey occurs at adolescence or young adulthood when the boy makes some attempt to express his sexual desire and is thrown out or leaves home. When Max puts on his wolf suit and brings out his wild side, he is sent to his room without supper. Even recent studies, in a time of increased tolerance and understanding, show that teen runaways are disproportionately homosexual. A study on the impact of Lawrence v. Texas (the 2003 Supreme Court decision which effectively invalidated laws against sodomy in the United States) in The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology notes that “[i]n major urban centers like New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, up to half of all of [teenagers who live on the street] may self-identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT). Nationally, between eleven and forty percent of homeless youth are thought to be LGBT. … [M]ost homeless LGBT youth have been kicked out of or have run away from home…” (Wardenski 1363). Of course, not all gay boys are thrown or forced out of their homes. Many, like Max, leave of their own accord. One of the subjects of Word is Out says that he “decided the best thing I could do would be to leave so as not to disgrace my family, and they wouldn’t have to deal with it” (Adair 5).

At the culmination, the climax, of the coming out myth, the boy seeks and discovers, in a bar, or at a peace rally or protest march, maybe a gay pride parade, that there are others like him. The despair of abandonment changes to a flush of freedom to be himself for the first time in his life. “I … went to this bar – when I was about eighteen – and I learned that it was a bar full of people all of whom liked to have sex with each other. It really opened my eyes. I said, ‘Wow! Look at all these people relating to each other, and they’re having fun… this is for me! I’m one of these people” (Adair 69). Max is giddy, delighted to be leaving home. His frown disappears as soon as the trees start growing in his room, and his grin grows from impish to content by the time he’s on a boat headed across the ocean. And the wild things are thrilled to see him. Even before he subdues them with his eyes, they are smiling expectantly. The text tells us they are roaring “their terrible roars,” but they’re smiling ear to ear. Max’s conquering of the wild things reads more like seduction than subjugation. The wild things are playful and coy, never really threatening.

Though Where the Wild Things Are is known now as one of the most popular and praised children’s books ever published, it was controversial at first. Librarians and parents were afraid the monsters would traumatize young readers. Bruno Bettelheim articulated these fears in a review of the book in Ladies’ Home Journal:

What [Sendak] failed to understand is the incredible fear it evokes in the child to be sent to bed without supper, and this by the first and foremost giver of food and security—his mother. The basic anxiety of the child is desertion. … We’re never going to get a child to believe that he’s really in control of his fantasies if, at the very beginning, the stage is set to show him that if you look clearly at your fantasies and are open about them, you’ll be deserted (Ladies’ 48).

Bettelheim is right that children fear desertion; but, what better antidote than reassurance that there is a place where he won’t be deserted for expressing himself fully? (Later, Bettelheim, after writing The Uses of Enchantment in which he formulated his ideas about the psychological function of fairy tales for children, changed his mind about Where the Wild Things Are.) The fear that the monsters will scare children, expressed in these early reviews, is a parent’s fear. Kenneth Kidd, in  his essay “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams: Maurice Sendak, Picturebook Psychologist,” suggests, by way of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, that Sendak’s way around this parental fear is through the role of an “eccentric, gifted uncle”:

… I suggest that authors for boys especially tend to adopt an avuncular sort of relation to their young subjects and readers, presenting themselves as lay boyologists or character builders.  “Forget the Name of the Father,” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick urges us. “Think about your uncles and aunts” (Sedgwick 59).  In Sedgwick’s reading, the “avunculate” or the social formation of aunt and uncle (which may or may not involve blood relation) can provide relief from and alternative wisdom to the traditionally nuclear family, especially for queer kids (Kidd 225).

Sendak has often spoken of himself as an adult who, unlike parents, understands what it is like to be a child.

The traditional psychological interpretation, as expressed by Sarah Gilead in “Magic Abjured: Closure in Children's Fantasy Fiction” says that Max conjures up the dream of the wild things in order to confront and befriend them as they represent his anti-social anger. In the end, Gilead says, “the dissolution of the dreamworld implies that the dreamer has introjected the messages conveyed and can now achieve intrapsychic and communal integration” (Gilead 280). I do not mean to discount this more universally appealing interpretation of the story: that Max takes his journey in order to make peace with his inner monsters. But by following the trajectory of the coming out myth, Sendak has created a tale that can advise and comfort young gay boys. Bettelheim says that “as with all great art, the fairy tale’s deepest meaning will be different for each person, and different for the same person at various moments of his life. The child will extract different meanings from the same fairy tale, depending on his interests and needs of the moment” (Bettelheim 12). Max’s tale would have been a great comfort to a child negotiating a world of contingent approval and conditional love, to know of the possibility of a secret erotic world of wild pleasure where love and approval might be chaotic, dark, and exhausting, but not conditional, not contingent on conformity to a heterosexual ideal. At the end of the story, Max goes home reassured that, no matter how much he may feel at odds with his family, there is another family, his family of wild things like him who dance and howl with joy in a land far away but reachable. Returning home, he stands at the prow of his boat looking serious, calm, and satisfied.

Notwithstanding his mother’s gesture of forgiveness (his supper waiting for him upon his return), there is no reason to assume that, in the end, Max has left behind his wild friends in favor of home and heteronormativity. Perhaps he will always feel a tension between two worlds, as many gay men have felt torn between their biological and acquired families. Max is home, for now, but he’s still wearing his wolf suit. And the moon shining through the window suggests that it was not “just a dream,” that the world of wild things will always be available.

Works Cited

Adair, Nancy, and Casey Adair. Word Is Out: Stories of Some of Our Lives. San Francisco: New Glide Publications, 1978. Print.

Bettelheim, Bruno. Rev. of Where the Wild Things Are, by Bruno Bettelheim. Ladies’ Home Journal Mar. 1969: 48. Print.

- - -. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Vintage Books, 1975. Print.

Bieber, Irving. “Speaking Frankly on a Once Taboo Subject.” The New York Times 23 Aug. 1964: n. pag. Print.

Cohen, Patricia. “Concerns Beyond Just Where the Wild Things Are.” nytimes.com. The New York Times, 10 Sept. 2008. Web. 13 Aug. 2009. <http://www.nytimes.com/‌2008/‌09/‌10/‌arts/‌design/‌10sendak.html?_r=2&sq=sendak&st=cse&scp=1&pagewanted=print>.

Gilead, Sarah. “Magic Abjured: Closure in Children’s Fantasy Fiction.” PMLA 106.2 (1991): 277-293. Print.

Hentoff, Nat. “Profiles—Among the Wild Things.” The New Yorker 22 Jan. 1966: 39-40, 66, 70. Print.

“Homosexuals Need Help.” Science News-Letter 13 Feb. 1965: 102. Print.

Kidd, Kenneth. “Wild Things and Wolf Dreams: Maurice Sendak, Picturebook Psychologist.” The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature. Ed. Julia Mickenberg and Lynne Vallone. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

“The Law: Out of the Briar Patch.” Time. Time, 25 Dec. 1964. Web. 13 Aug. 2009. <http://www.time.com/‌time/‌magazine/‌article/‌0,9171,830980,00.html>.

McGillis, Roderick. The Nimble Reader: Literary Theory and Children’s Literature. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996. Print.

Mickenberg, Julia. "Jews in American Children's Literature," Jews in American Popular Culture, ed. Paul Buhle. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2007

Overholser, Winfred, M.D. “Homosexuality: Sin or Disease.” The Christian Century 11 Sept. 1963: 1099-1101. Print.

“Psychiatry: Homosexuals Can Be Cured.” Time. Time, 12 Feb. 1965. Web. 13 Aug. 2009. <http://www.time.com/‌time/‌magazine/‌article/‌0,9171,840542,00.html>.

Sendak, Maurice. Caldecott & Co. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988. Print.

Vacha, Keith. Quiet Fire: Memoirs of Older Gay Men. Trumansburg, New York: The Crossing Press, 1985. Print.

Wardenski, Joseph J. “A Minor Exception: The Impact of Lawrence v. Texas on LGBT Youth.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 95.4: 1363-1410. Print.

Then, Again.

The corner of Ashland and DeKalb. We passed this sign nearly every day on the way to catch the D train. (Photo by John Wynne.)

Denise sent me another batch of photos she and John took during their visit to New York in the mid-80s. Brian and I were living in Ft. Greene, at the time.

Denise on the Brooklyn Bridge. (Photo by John Wynne.)

John on the Brooklyn Bridge. (Photo by Denise Hawrysio..)

This is, I think, the landlord’s dog, who killed our cat Sparky. The dog lived in the back yard. (Photo by John Wynne.)

Me in our apartment at 231 Ashland Place. (Photo by John Wynne.)

Brian in our apartment at 231 Ashland Place. (Photo by John Wynne.)

I love this photo. I don’t know the location. (Photo by John Wynne.)

Then.

This week an old friend unexpectedly said hello on Facebook and sent me images of some photos she’d run across as she was looking through old albums while isolated at home in London. Apparently I’m not the only one that the cancelation of our normal life, and fear of the future, has sent searching the archives. They were taken by her and her partner John in New York and London in the 1980s.

These fragments feel almost overwhelmingly precious now because they are fragmentary, because, for most of us, there is so little evidence. And even more so because Denise has lost the negatives, so her prints are all that’s left except these scans, photographs of photographs. Now with social media and cameras in our phones we see images of ourselves immediately and everywhere, no waiting, and we assume this material will survive as a comprehensive record. But images of vacations, special occasions, maybe a random assortment of everyday scenes is the most that most of us have of that time in the past, the only visual record there ever was. Denise and John are artists, so these snapshots are more than snapshots. But they are snapshots.

(My favorite thing about these images is the occasional fleeting, natural smiles. Now, we are so used to being photographed, we’re so used to seeing images of ourselves, we’ve honed our poses, our expressions, even children, for the camera. Smiles (or some other memetic expression like duck-face) are compulsory. They didn’t used to be. As self-conscious as we’ve become, in a way, pre-social media, we were more self-conscious around cameras because the appearance of one was unusual. Often we didn’t know what to do with ourselves, so our self-consciousness showed up in photos as something maybe a little awkward, a little vulnerable, whereas now our self-consciousness is perpetual and we’ve learned how to protect ourselves from appearing vulnerable in photos.)

Most of these shots are New York (I recognize the facade of Mike’s Bar & Grill, the restaurant where I waited tables), at least one is London, I think. Denise and John visited us in Ft. Greene, and we visited them in London. Both these visits happened between 1985 and 1989. I no longer remember the dates or the order or sequence. Does it matter?

Everyone seems to want to know how this pandemic is like AIDS, how these times are like the 1980s. Of course there are resonances, but most of the time I don’t know what to make of them. I don’t know what’s important or illuminating. Mostly, this present time feels completely different from then. As terrifying as the plague years were, as angry as we were much of the time, what I remember most clearly is joy, laughter, wild creativity, and freedom. Mostly freedom. Looking through that lens, I don’t know what to make of what’s happening now.

Denise and Brian, Post Office. (Photo by John Wynne.)

Denise and Brian, bodega. (Photo by John Wynne.)

My boyfriend Brian, top middle, on his right is John, Denise’s partner. I’m sitting in front of John, next to Denise. The other two look very familiar but I can’t place them. except that I think they were Italian. (After I posted this, Denise wrote to tell me that the two men on the left are her dear friends, Martin Klug and Jacque Vignault. Not Italian at all. So much for my memory.) (Photo by John Wynne.)

Steven and Denise, Mike’s American Bar & Grill (10th Ave. and 46th St.). (Photo by John Wynne.)

I think this is the “kitchen” in our Ft. Greene apartment. The landlord had wedged a sink and stove into the tiny room over the stairs, with the fridge just outside it in the bedroom. (In these Brooklyn brownstones that were originally single-family homes, this small room would have been called the “dressing room.”) (Photo by Denise Hawrysio.)

“New York City?!”

My husband and I are holed up in a rented house on the coast of Maine. We’ve been here since last Thursday and plan to stay until early May, inasmuch as anyone can know right now what they’ll be doing in early May. 

Two weeks ago we started to think, “We can work anywhere there’s internet, why don’t we get away for a few weeks, some place nice?” The day after we booked the house and rental car, I saw an article, I think in the Times but it could have been the Post, about year-round residents in the Hamptons clashing with people arriving from the city to hunker down in their summer homes, and a queasy feeling in the pit in my stomach started to grow. Over the course of the week between making plans and leaving, the articles starting pouring in and stacking up. People not far from the town in Maine where we were headed were threatening to blow up the bridge from the mainland, police in Rhode Island were pulling over cars with New York plates. Each article was more and more breathless and alarming than the last: hordes of rich, entitled New Yorkers were streaming like cockroaches out to the hinterlands to spread the virus. Lock your doors.

Truth be told, my husband had been working at home for two weeks and we were starting to get on each other’s nerves, each trying to carve out space to work undistracted by the other in our one-bedroom apartment. But everybody is dealing with the same tension right now, so exactly no one was going to be sympathetic. Even before the flurry of anti-New Yorker media, I had more or less decided I would lay low on social media about our whereabouts because, I told myself, it was just kind of dickish to be like, “Hey look at this beautiful spot,” while so many people we know don’t have the opportunity or means to leave the city.

I was even reluctant to share our plans with close friends, but you’ve got to let your friends and family know your whereabouts, especially in such uncertain, risky times. Everyone we told said, “That’s such a good idea, I’m glad you’re getting away,” — still, I was feeling more anxious by the hour.

I couldn’t really work out how much of my distress was real guilt (were we doing something selfish and harmful?) and how much was a narcissistic fear of being thought poorly of, by my friends and my wider circle of acquaintances on social media. The initial impulse behind leaving was based on our own comfort; it wasn’t consciously connected to a desire to reduce our risk of exposure to the virus. We just wanted to be some place with a little more room, a little outdoor space, to not exactly take a vacation but treat ourselves after the cancellation of basically everything we’d looked forward to in the last year. But with some thought it became obvious that we would be reducing our own risk, and, if we had already been exposed to the virus, reducing our chances of passing it along. On a walk one evening last week on the sidewalk outside our co-op, a group of children all about five or six, came at us on scooters three abreast with their parents a few steps behind, leaving no room for us to pass. It was clarifying: New York is too dense for anyone to hope to keep six feet apart.

In the city, we live in a building with thousands of other people, all sharing the same elevators, hallways, doorknobs, and laundry room. Here, we are quarantined for 14 days and have not seen a soul but the couple we rented the house from and only from a distance of at least 10 feet. We didn’t touch anything on the way up. So, now that we’re here, my mental conflict has eased up. I’m sure we made the right decision — for the public good and for our own comfort. But the moral certitude meter these days is off the charts. The exhortation on social media and on handwritten signs in apartment windows, “STAY THE FUCK HOME!” means, ostensibly, don’t go to parties or gather in the park or leave your apartment for anything but groceries, but it started to feel like a threat aimed right at us. Not far down the coast a day or two ago, an armed mob of vigilantes cut down a tree and dragged it across the driveway of some temporary residents to make sure they didn’t leave their house.

As late as yesterday I was still being very cagey about our whereabouts except with close friends and family, but then I read this short piece by Masha Gessen in the New Yorker and finally felt like I had permission to get over myself and relax. When they come for us with torches and pitchforks — either on Twitter or down the driveway — I will at least be fairly confident of my innocence.

I want to say for centuries, but I know at least for the entirety of my memory, New York has been vilified by … who? farmers, country mice, real Americans? … as a hotbed of disease, a moral sewer, a breeding ground for pestilence. It’s nothing new.

There is a delicious irony in the implication that someone from New York, a city with half a million Mexican immigrants, couldn’t possibly know anything about Mexican cuisine, but that’s a topic for another day.

Rat.

Yes, New Yorkers should be worried about rats coming up through the plumbing.

In 1985, my boyfriend Brian and I, because we couldn’t find an apartment we could afford in the East Village, moved from his place on 11th and C (where the rent was, I think, under $200 but hadn’t been paid in months) to a floor-through in a Ft. Greene brownstone.

The apartment had a dilapidated romance about it and could, at night, say, decorated for Christmas, be kind of beautiful with its crumbling ceiling molding and painted wide-plank floors and Edwardian proportions, but in the light of day it was obviously, to say the least, worse for wear.

One of its charming features was that the bathroom and a tiny room over the stairs that we used as our music studio were outside the apartment, off the hallway. One night soon after we moved in, I got up in the middle of the night to pee, walked down the hall, opened the bathroom door, and, half asleep, flipped on the light to find a large rat thrashing and squealing in the toilet. Maybe it was me squealing.

I slammed the door shut, ran back into the apartment, and woke up Brian. We got a broom and, from as far away as we could get, pushed the bathroom door open with the broom handle. The rat was gone, and the floor and walls of the bathroom were splashed with water. There were piles of rat poop in the toilet and on the floor. The door had been shut, so clearly the rat had left by the way it came in.

I still think about that rat when I get up in the middle of the night to pee. Eventually, after many years, I got so I could sit on the toilet without turning the bathroom light on first, but for years I couldn’t.

Loving Judy.

There are fans of the artist and her art and there are fans of the gruesome spectacle of a celebrity falling apart in public. Fans of the art find their greatest pleasure in the recovery, the reassurance that the gift is still intact and powerful. We want Judy at the top of her game. Carnegie Hall, not Talk of the Town. But our love is not a completely pure love — we have some kind of love-adjacent relationship with the downfall, too, with the bottoming out. It’s necessary for the comeback. Part of loving Judy Garland has to be loving her ability to dig herself out of a deep hole and triumph, over and over, again and again. We follow her struggles, our hearts are heavy with her sorrows, we worry for her, and then that small, sad, terribly exposed woman summons some kind of Herculean strength and walks out on that stage and fucking nails it. For us. We love her, in some part, so intensely because we know how badly she needs us to love her.

But the other fans, the ones who honestly can’t even tell the difference between the artistry of Judy Garland — one of the greatest vocal talents* of all fucking time — and Renee Zellweger’s caterwauling,** and so don’t, either, make any distinction between tabloid photos of Judy, drunk and disoriented, and tabloid photos of Britney Spears, bald and drunk and disoriented. Or tabloid photos of Amy Winehouse, disheveled and falling down, or whoever. Each one is an “OMG did you see her??” moment of thrill at witnessing someone who was at the very top — worshipped and adored by millions — laid low.***

For some reason, to see a person humiliated, broken, mutilated, dead, obliterated, is a human urge. We slow down to see a body in a bag loaded into an ambulance, we love a perp walk or someone losing their shit in a McDonald’s, we click on a video of someone being shot or stabbed, we stare at crime scene photos of corpses in puddles of blood, we love the ending of Bonnie and Clyde, when they’ve been riding high for two hours, getting away with it, and now we want to see them fall out of that car, riddled with machine-gun bullets, and hit the dirt in slow motion. 

But the difference between the two films, Judy and Bonnie and Clyde, is hopefully obvious. Bonnie and Clyde is complex, compassionate, original, provocative. The lurid ending is not there just to satisfy the audience’s bloodlust, it’s about the audience’s bloodlust. It’s not that there’s nothing interesting about Judy Garland’s harrowing last weeks, that there’s not material there for an interesting film, an honest film, even a monumental film. They could have made a great movie about the public’s fascination with Judy’s worst moments instead of making a film that just revives and sustains it. But Judy is a paint-by-numbers biopic that even by the low bar of its genre was mediocre.

*She’s also one of the greatest actors, a fact that gets lost because of the force of her singing talent. I think that’s one of the reasons it’s hard to watch Zellweger “do” Judy Garland. Zellweger is talented but I just kept thinking that if you gave that role to Judy she would blow Renee out of the water and make the film seem much better than it is in the bargain. 

**Judy Garland’s many performances of Come Rain Or Come Shine are some of the best among hundreds of extraordinary performances of a great artist. (Lucky for us and for the future, it was recorded for her TV series.) Zellweger’s performance of Come Rain Or Come Shine in Judy is, well, I love Renee Zellweger so I’m just hoping I will eventually forget it and move on.

***Again, I want to say that I’m a fan of Rene Zellweger, and I’m thrilled to see her make a comeback of her own, but there’s something gimmicky and cynical about casting her as Judy, the queen of comebacks, making her final comeback among so many.

RIP Steve Martin Caro.

When I was around 25 and just starting to record with my band The Woods, Robin Crutchfield of DNA and "No Wave" fame (whose band Dark Day I was playing cello, badly, in), told me that my voice sounded like Steve Martin, the lead singer in The Left Banke, which I'd never heard of.

I still don’t know a lot about Martin or The Left Banke, except this album, which might be their only one, which I wore out on cassette, and which is sublime. Martin’s voice is transcendent, one of my favorite pop voices of all time, based on a really small body of work. I continue to be massively flattered to be compared to him. I’ve always strived for that kind of clarity, but needless to say I’ve never reached such heights. My favorite tune was always She May Call You Up Tonight. I used to poo-poo Walk Away Renee because it was more famous and I was a snob, but looking back I can see how of course it was the biggest hit. It’s undeniably gorgeous.

Steve Martin Caro (he added the surname later because of confusion with the more widely known comedian/novelist/Broadway musical writer) died this week. A funny coincidence is that members of The Left Banke (though not Martin) went on to form another band, Stories, whose big hit Brother Louie was the first record I bought with my own money, a 7” 45 I got at the record store in the Devington Shopping Center on Arlington and 46th St. in Indianapolis. I rode my bike there to buy it when I was 12.

January.

I’ve been having these dreams lately — I asked C if he has dreams like this and he said yes, so I assume they’re one of the various broad categories of dreams that everyone seems to dream in common, like you’re trying to get somewhere and you keep getting waylaid, or flying, etc.; which, isn’t that strange but somehow reassuring? before you even get to consider how weird dreaming is, at all, and that we all do it and no one really knows why or even what it is? — anyway, I’ve had these dreams the last several days where nothing to speak of happens, I’m just sitting around feeling as if something has gone badly. Not something specific, or not that I remember when I wake up. Just something. The dream is just the feeling: worry, dread, embarrassment, something like that.

I have these dreams from time to time. I hate them. I hate them because that feeling is more or less what’s in my head about 80% of my waking life, and I feel as though I should get a break from it when I go to bed.

Maybe the dreams are about the heaviness of reckoning. January is for assessing. Where am I? What have I done? What is still to do? It’s all very serious and very …. visible, I guess? with the leaves gone and the air so clear and no Christmas shopping and no planning and traveling and no decorating and no mailbox full of catalogs and Christmas cards and no letters full of vacations and illnesses. December is a rainy night in heavy traffic with construction on the New Jersey Turnpike. January is a two-lane highway in West Texas it’s noon and there’s no one on the road but you, what’s in front of you in front of you and what’s behind you behind you.

January is when you’re supposed to do all those things you’ve put off (“December is CRAZY, but I’ll definitely get on it after the holidays!”). It’s not easy. I feel drained after Christmas, and picking up the ball requires me giving myself a good talking to, but I do love the cold clarity of January. Checking to-do’s off lists, archiving emails I didn’t respond to until now, pulling the trigger, the just fucking do it-ness of January.

I ordered new ceiling light fixtures for the kitchen and the hallway. I’ve hated the lighting in both those spaces ever since we moved in 4 years ago. The hallway light might as well not even be a light it’s so dim, and the kitchen has this I guess you’d call it track lighting but it has hanging things on it that I’m constantly bumping into. So. The new ones — one a vintage glass fixture I found on ebay and the other from Home Depot — are arriving by UPS tomorrow! I think we’ll have to hire someone to install them. I wish C or I was comfortable doing this kind of work. You’d think in a household of two husbands one of them would be that husband, but no. There should be like a rent-a-husband service for these things. But you shouldn’t have to pay them because husbands do that stuff for free. Okay it’s not a good business model.

Career-wise, art-wise, I’m ready to put together a reading of my new musical, Jack. Not a public reading but just me and 10 actors in a room so I can hear what my words sound like coming out of people’s mouths instead of bouncing around in my brain. It’s a very new experience doing something like this alone. (The only thing I can compare it to is my film Life in a Box, which I spent over a year working on by myself in a room, logging and editing sequences, but there were always others involved in various ways even if I was for much of that time the only one making creative decisions.) Momentum is so much easier in a team, and these practical non-writing tasks get divided up. The expectations of your collaborators pushes you along when you get sluggish.

A friend offered me space for a reading; now I need to find 10 actors (three of them teenagers, one elderly woman, and others of various ages and genders). I’m increasingly anxious contemplating that this will be the first time anyone has read the work but me. I’ve shared a handful of songs with a few friends but no one has heard the whole thing.

That’s what I’ve got cooking so far this year.

A New Year.

Sometimes when I’m reading a book, I’ll have an odd compulsion about turning a page, maybe there’s a particularly long sentence running from one page to the next, a reluctance causes me to have to flip back and forth a couple times trying to hold the old page in my mind as I venture into the new one. New Year’s Eve can be like that, too. As midnight gets nearer I’m anxious to hold the disappearing year in my mind, in my heart, to try to see it, understand it, take and hold it all within me before I let it go and move on.

This would seem to call for a kind of New Year’s Eve that I have rarely had. Something simple and reflective. Quiet conversation. No whooping, no Times Square on the TV.

I have a, well if I’m honest I have a dozen or so, alternate lives that I think about, ways things might be if I’d made different choices, and in one of them I’m in control of December. I don’t know why I hold onto these desires — how very un-Buddhist they are — but I do. I love winter, for so many reasons, not least of which is the turning of the year, the longest night, the long vigil, the sun coming back, the renewal, another chance, hope. But December in real life is a race to feel those things, to have that inner experience, to do that work before some date on the calendar that says “Flight to ….”

Not since my early twenties have I spent the winter holidays at home, and that was because for a couple years I couldn’t afford to travel. And then there was another year or two in my forties when my mother and I weren’t seeing eye to eye and I stayed home, though home that year was a camper parked somewhere in the Rocky Mountains, I think.

In my twenties, and even in my forties, if I even thought about it I would have thought there were plenty of years to come and if I missed a Christmas with my family there would be so many more it didn’t matter. Close to sixty now, my mother already gone and all family holiday traditions coming unmoored, I’m practically counting them down. So, now, I am always at someone else’s home for Christmas, and often for New Year’s Eve. I chose to make my life far away from my family. I got married, with the give and take of considering someone else’s family holiday traditions. And gay uncles, when it comes to family gatherings, are more often guests than hosts. That is the way things are.

Or maybe I just want to control everything.

How ungrateful I am. How selfish and mean. How ungracious to each and every one of my generous, wonderful, loving family who, to a person, open their homes and lives and holiday rituals to me.

New Year’s Eve 1989 I was alone in Brooklyn. I had pulled the rug out from under my life. I had recently deserted the man I was with for 6 years, and I was living alone for the first time in my life, in Boerum Hill in an apartment I couldn’t afford. (Incidentally, in that 6-year relationship we hadn’t spent one Christmas or any other holiday with his family or mine — or together, for that matter. In fact I never met his family. He was not out to them.) That New Year’s Eve, I avoided plans. I bought potato chips and Doritos and onion dip and whisky and I spent the night alone (well, not alone, my cats Honey and Jimmy were with me — my ex-partner got the dog) watching American Family. Channel 13 was showing the whole series. As I remember, I stayed up all night and watched it from beginning to end, but it’s possible I fell asleep. There was whisky.

I’ve been thinking about 2019, full of, like all years, like everything, wonderful and terrible things. The older I get the more I experience a kind of involuntary gratitude — or something like it that I find impossible to adequately describe — for all of it. The things so marvelous I think I probably don’t deserve them. The awful things I think I just can’t bear but do.

And there are things that cut deep because they remind me of the whole, they place me in a life, or in a sequence I recognize as my life despite how random everything seems close up. In 2019:

A piece I wrote was published in an online journal called Statorec, an essay in which I alternated between my recollections of my life in the East Village in the 1980s with excerpts from letters my friend and roommate Joan (who commissioned the essay as part of an artist’s book she created) wrote to me from Berlin and upstate New York from 1983 to 1989. It was one of those rare pieces of work that became, in the end, more or less what I imagined and hoped it would be. The experience of writing it, of evoking those years when we were young artists trying to figure it out, the experience of collaborating with Joan, my friend of almost 40 years, my first roommate in New York, was deeply moving.

In February I flew to Knoxville to see Valley High School (from Huntsville Alabama) perform my musical LIZZIE in a regional theater competition (they won their state competition!). So high schools are performing my work. High schools are performing my work.

In April, I had lunch with two friends from college, Dottie and Keith, whom I hadn’t seen in decades. Dottie was the first straight person I came out to, at 18. And Keith I had such a crush on. We did our damndest to share the last 40 years of our lives with each other. I saw in their faces, and maybe they saw in mine, the young, overconfident, terrified people we’d been drawn to all those years ago, and the older, smarter, happy, wounded people we’ve become.

C and I did get home from North Carolina early enough on New Year’s Day to throw some black-eyed peas and a ham hock in the pressure cooker. And I had some greens in the freezer, the first time in many years I’ve made this traditional good luck meal, so I’m feeling sanguine about 2020.

Photography.

I post a lot of photos, most of them from a big collection of slides my dad shot from the late 50s through the 60s and had digitized several years ago. Dad was an accomplished and talented, and, at that time prolific, photographer, and many of his photographs are by any standard excellent.

But we all loved taking pictures. My first camera was a Brownie that my dad gave me when I was around 9 or 10. I loved that camera and, in retrospect, am very moved to see all the little and big ways my parents encouraged every creative impulse I had. Dad taught me all about how photography works, how to focus and compose a shot, how to develop the film in his basement darkroom. (His inflexibility regarding what makes a good photo probably pushed me away from photography but likely pushed me toward other modes of expression that he knew less about, like visual art and theater.)

My Grandma Lenore always had a cheap Instamatic camera with her and was always trying to get everyone in the same room so she could take a “family portrait.” And I got a cheap camera too, once I got to about high school age. Growing up, there were always cameras around and there was always my dad telling everyone they were doing it wrong. And there were always lots of photos and photo albums and lots of trips to the Fotomat. Most are not what you’d call “good” photos, but I treasure them.

You can always tell Grandma Lenore’s photos because the subject is half out of the frame and there’s a big sort of blank area taking up most of the image. This drove my dad crazy. I guess they actually are pretty terrible photos, as photos — the above is not intentionally a photo of 3 ships on a wall, but I sure am glad to have a photo of those ships — still I love them I suppose mostly because they make me think of Grandma Lenore, but there’s also something wonderful and dynamic about the weird framing, like the camera is trying to escape her hands.

(The kid on the left is Mark King who lived down the street. Once my brother and I were at his house for a sleepover. In my memory it’s around Christmastime but memory is unreliable. We were in the basement, in sleeping bags but not sleeping, talking and laughing, it was very late. Mark’s father burst through the door at the top of the stairs, dragged Mark out of bed, took off his shoe and beat the crap out of him with it. Mike and I were terrified and didn’t say a word. Everybody beat their kids back then, but Mark’s dad was especially harsh. Back then, we called it “strict.”)

In the photo above, I’m wearing a sweater vest Grandma Lenore crocheted for me. By the early 70s, she’d more or less given up painting and entered a long phase of compulsive crocheting. Everyone she knew had piles of odd-shaped “blankets” in odd, unplanned, color combinations and proportions. She made ponchos for my sister, hats she called tams for EVERYONE, and sweater vests for me and my brother. Ugly is not even the word.. I knew that at 10, but it was a painful dilemma for me because I so worshipped Grandma Lenore. I had to wear them. And to school. To not would have been a serious betrayal. But I mean, look at that thing.

Grandma Lenore taught me to crochet and I also became a little compulsive about it. I totally sympathized with Grandma. Crocheting was fun, but patterns and planning and all that were not. (The most ambitious I got was, around the age of 12 or 13, I crocheted a new wardrobe for my sister’s Barbies. I liked small projects I could finish in a day or two.)

I’m guessing Mom took this one. Her sense of composition was also, by Dad’s standard, lacking, but it wasn’t as crazy as Grandma Lenore’s. That’s Grandma Lenore of course in the spider web dress. The tree is the same tree as the one in the shot above. Around the time my sister was born, we got an artificial tree which lasted well into my 20s, maybe longer.

These 3 photos happen to be from one of my grandmother’s scrapbooks, which I took when she died. She often wrote directly on photographs, dates and names, I guess so no one would forget. I used to think it was overkill, but I appreciate it now because, though I don’t forget who these people are, I often have trouble pinpointing dates.

Thanks giving.

When we were kids, we spent Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods, either at home or, alternating years, at their house in Dayton Ohio. Before my sister was born, the Bidgoods didn’t have any children so it was just my brother and me and adults. My parents and the Bidgoods had been close friends since they were newlyweds and lived in the same apartment building in Waukegan, Illinois, and they sustained their friendship with this Thanksgiving tradition, which we all loved and looked forward to. Dad and LeRoy Bigood shared in interest in aviation. Verna had been a schoolteacher and she was “educated,” a quality my parents, neither of them college graduates, placed a high, almost mystical, value on. LeRoy and Verna both chain-smoked, their humor was a little sarcastic, and they always included the kids in the conversation. Verna could be caustic at times, or so it seemed to me at that age, but I loved her. The meal was traditional, except that Verna, beside the mandatory pumpkin, made what she called an apple custard pie (I think sometimes it’s called French apple), that I had mixed feelings about. It was unusual and sophisticated to my aspirational little boy mind, but to be honest I really preferred Mom’s more traditional apple pie. I would have a slice of each.

Around the time my sister was born, the Bidgoods adopted a child, then another, then Verna, who’d been unable to get pregnant, did, and eventually as my brother and I got older and eventually moved on, my brother into the Navy, I to college and then New York, the Thanksgiving tradition dissipated. I feel a little sad not to remember if my parents and sister, who is six years younger than me, continued to spend Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods; for me it’s a memory that sits squarely in the mists of my childhood.

I think of Thanksgiving with the Bidgoods as sort of the ur-Thanksgiving. The air outside is getting sharp, the kitchen is a little too warm, the day is long, lots of conversation, laughing and conversation, and then a thrilling moment when everything is on the table untouched, the turkey, sagey stuffing, mashed potatoes with tons of butter and cream, gravy for it all, pumpkin pie with whipped cream, the amazing abundance of it.

Thanksgiving the two years I was in college at Miami, was bus trips to New York, marathon Broadway weekends, and Thanksgiving dinner at Tavern on the Green. Later, in the mid-80s, with Brian my first longtime boyfriend, we had big dinners for friends in our Fort Greene apartment with the kitchen that consisted of a sink and stove crammed into what in the original brownstone had been a dressing room over the stairs. (There was a hole in the floor behind the stove, and once our cat Sparky climbed back there and jumped through the hole onto the stove in the apartment below, scaring the crap out of the elderly Chinese mother-in-law of our landlord who was cooking at the time. A couple years later, in an unrelated incident, the elderly woman’s Rottweiler mauled Sparky to death in the backyard.) Our fridge was in the bedroom. One fall my sister was in New York for an internship, living a few blocks away with a friend. We cooked for two days and between the two of us managed to get pretty close to Mom and Verna’s version of all the traditional dishes. That was the year we had 25 for dinner.

Jay, my partner through, roughly, my 30s, and I hosted a couple of small Thanksgivings in our tiny studio on East 10th St. for stragglers and orphan friends. I remember a staggeringly good chocolate cake that one guest brought, which I ate too much of and had to lie immobile on the futon for half an hour because I thought I might actually explode and die.

Years later, when I was living in Austin — Jay and I had separated but were living in a big house with friends and my life was more untethered to anything than at any other time and there have been untethered times … oh, it’s too much back story for right now — I made a pot roast instead of turkey, and we played an epic air hockey tournament with friends that I still recall as one of the sweetest moments of my life.

I’m thankful for it all.

Now I’m older and married and probably as stable as I am capable of being and we spend Thanksgiving alternating years with my family and my husband’s family. His family Thanksgiving has moved from his parents’ home to his brother and sister-in-law’s and my family has moved to my sister’s family’s home. The year after Mom died, my sister and I made Thanksgiving dinner in her kitchen for the last time. Soon after, my father cleaned out most of Mom’s kitchen stuff, not keeping much more than he needs for the simple meals he heats up and eats. My sister is vegan now, but she gamely roasts a big turkey at her house for the carnivores. We’ll be there next year.

This year we’re with my husband’s family in North Carolina. The meal, mostly prepared by C’s brother but everyone helped, was traditional and delicious. No apple custard pie, but there was pear-cranberry. I did very little of the cooking, but I made the gravy, a task which has a high satisfaction to effort ratio.

My History of Violence.

I assume everyone has seen or at least heard about these videos of a high school boy confronting a bully. I’ve been watching them over and over. It’s — understatement! — an emotional ride, as I imagine it is for most queer people who were once high school kids, and I admit that’s why I’m a little obsessed with it, but it’s interesting on many other levels as media, as popular culture.

There’s the whole wooly conversation about who witnesses these moments of crisis in people’s lives, about surveillance, about virality, about how bullies have access to a large audience, but also the bullied have access (without or without consent) to a large audience. Smarter, more patient people than I study this stuff.

But something that fascinates and puzzles me is the “performance” of the kid (and I suppose performance more generally in heightened moments like this). I keep coming back to the boy’s affect as he threatens the bully, which is very different from his (natural?) affect in the talk show appearances:

“Back the fuck up out my face, now, ‘cause I’m not playin’ witchoo.”

“Call me a fag one more fuckin’ time and I will pop yo ass.”

“Wassup?” “Wassup?” “Wassup bitch?”

Being careful not to get myself in trouble here, is his affect and language not a performance of a black stereotype? And why? Is there a general perception that this “gangsta” stereotype is intimidating? Is that a go-to “threatening character,” like how a kid in the 1920s might have taken on an exaggerated Al Capone-type demeanor?

I’m not suggesting it’s a conscious choice this boy made, and I’m definitely not accusing him of some kind of racist blackface performance. A charge like that would, I think, overshadow most of what’s interesting in the analysis of his performance. Complicated, for sure, and of course part of the larger topic of white people and hip hop, cultural appropriation, and white kids more generally adopting so-called urban black affectations.

I also wonder — though I suspect here that I’m stretching it a bit — how the possibility of this moment being videotaped and broadcast (whether or not anyone involved has specific knowledge at the time that they are being recorded, but it’s just a thing that happens these days so it must register somewhere in people’s minds) might affect the performance.

When I was in 5th grade, there was a boy named Bobby Tate who tormented me relentlessly. (He was in my class nearly every year from 1st grade, so it had been going on for a long time.) I don’t remember what he said, what he called me. I know it wasn’t “fag.” I don’t remember hearing that word until at least 7th or 8th grade, but maybe “sissy”? I did my best to ignore him — Is “ignore a bully and he’ll go away” the worst advice ever in the history of childhood? — but I think that only encouraged him. I was miserable. One day, I don’t know what if anything was different that day, I exploded. I jumped him. We scuffled and ended up with him behind me with his arms wrapped tightly around my waist trying to take me down. I managed to pull one of his arms off me and I began twisting it with all my strength. He let go, and I kept twisting his arm as hard as I could. He screamed with pain and begged me to let go. I did. He never bothered me again. I was happy to have resolved the situation, but shaken by my rage.

When I was a sophomore in high school, a boy named Bill Conrad took a mind to walking behind me in the hallway and muttering epithets. Again, I don’t think he used any f-words, but I do remember that a favorite was “woman.” (Try and tell me homophobia and misogyny aren’t the same damn thing.) Interesting background on Bill Conrad is that in 8th grade, both of us fairly often came up with excuses to get out of gym glass. We weren’t friends, but I remember feeling some solidarity in those moments sitting on the bleachers together while the other kids played basketball. (I don’t remember what our excuses were, but I’m guessing the teacher was just glad to have a reason to not deal with us. Bill Conrad was the fat kid, I was the fag.) So, anyway, I have no idea why he chose me to torment, but it went on for weeks, and finally one day I turned around and said, “You’re FAT!” and that was the end of that.

I have mixed feelings about responding to hate with violence, but I’m generally against it. I actually feel much less regret about the physical violence toward Bobby Tate than the psychological violence toward Bill Conrad. But in the case of Jordan Steffy, is socking that little asshole in the face a level of violence to be concerned about?

Years from now, when you talk about this -- and you will -- be kind.

I got up at 4:30 this morning to finish reading a book so C — because I’ve been raving about it and he wanted to read it next and I only had about 40 pages left — could take it with him on his trip to see his family this weekend, and he was leaving for the airport at 6:45. I didn’t set the alarm or anything, I’m not that thoughtful — most mornings at 4:30 I’m lying in bed awake thinking, “I should just get up,” and sometimes I do. (The book was The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide, which you’d probably call postmodernist except it was written in 1915, and it’s a ride.)

All of which is to say that by 11:30 I was already feeling like I’d had a day. I was tired of reading (after my regular morning news fix I started Palimpsest, Gore Vidal’s memoir), not ready for a nap, or lunch, or much of anything, so I decided to rent a movie. (As fascinating as the impeachment hearings are, I can only take so much at a stretch.)

I have no idea where a sudden urge to watch Tea & Sympathy came from. I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen the movie, I read the play in college, which was a long time ago, but I was in the mood for something cinematic and nobody does Cinematic! like Vincente Minnelli. In case you’re unfamiliar: Tea & Sympathy is a gorgeously filmed 1956 melodrama directed by a closeted homosexual about a prep school boy accused of being a homosexual (though it’s the 50s so they’re not allowed to actually say it), but who is not an actual homosexual but just artistic and sad, who loses his virginity to a beautiful older woman who loves him because he reminds her of her dead first husband who was also sensitive but not actually homosexual and, though the older woman and her second husband, whom she leaves after her affair with the boy, live the remainder of their days alone and contemplative (she) and bitter (he), the boy grows up to write a tender, sweet roman à clef about his school days and his affair with the older woman and life is good because he’s not actually homosexual. And there’s a whore who works in a soda shop.

It was great. I wish I’d bought it for $9.99 instead of renting it for $2.99, because I would definitely watch it again a couple times at least. I mean, Deborah Kerr.

You’d think I might enjoy a bachelor weekend now and then, but I just don’t. Absence makes the heart, blah blah, but my whole week every week is a cycle of him leaving in the morning, having my own time all day, and then in the afternoon looking forward to him coming home from work. I get enough absence. I don’t like sleeping here alone; there are unidentifiable noises in the walls. If I sleep with the bedroom door closed, I start to wonder what’s lurking on the other side, and if I leave it open I am exposed to … I don’t know, bad things out there.

I’ve had a miserable cold all week and just today I am emerging from the fog. I’m still coughing a lot, but I’ve turned a corner. I feel light and overstimulated. Maybe I should watch another movie. Where does one go from Vincente Minnelli? Douglas Sirk? A nap? Or Liza Minnelli! Maybe I should watch Liza With A Z. Yeah maybe not. I’m already overstimulated. All that Halston and Fosse might give me a coronary. Better go with something artistic and sad, like me — though to be clear I am an actual homosexual.

Good Morning, Baltimore.

My old friend, artist and singer-songwriter Linda Smith, who I played with in my first band in the mid-80s, The Woods, went to see a licensed production of LIZZIE in Baltimore last night and sent me a note this morning to say that she thought it was excellent. (It got great reviews.) Linda hadn’t seen the show before, and for years I’ve wondered what she would think of it. I was playing with Linda when I first started writing songs. I looked up to her and probably imitated her more than I knew at the time.

She told me that this production was in an old warehouse full of lots of artist studios, and she sent a couple photos of the venue and set that she took before the show. They reminded me of the old days at the Pyramid Club, all that performance art and drag shows — theater — with a DIY punk aesthetic.

So many circles overlapping: Linda, Baltimore, the Pyramid Club, this exact moment in my career. I don’t suppose it will ever not be awesome knowing that there are all these productions of our show happening everywhere on just about any given day, so many that there’s no way we can see them all, but I kinda wish I’d gotten on a train and gone down to Baltimore to see this one!

Scuttled.

I’ve been doing some housekeeping today, and while I was updating things on my web site I thought I’d listen to this demo we made of one of the songs I wrote for our Hester Prynne musical that never went anywhere. It made me melancholy; one, because our Hester Prynne musical never went anywhere, and two, because I still, even while daily witnessing our Democracy corrode from the inside out, I still feel all the wide-eyed Emersonian yearning I put in this song. I still believe every word of it. I don’t know what I would do or who I would be if I didn’t.

Heritability.

This started out as a comment on a friend’s Facebook post about The Inheritance, the new 7-hour gay history play on Broadway that my husband and I saw this month (part one a couple weeks ago, and part two early this week). It is, we’re told though I haven’t read the novel, very loosely adapted from E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End. If you pay attention to theater news or gay news or both, you have probably heard about this play, or will soon. The Broadway production is still in previews but is opening soon.

You should see it, if theater or history or literature is your thing. It’s sprawling and fascinating. There’s a lot to chew on, and I know responses are and will be all over the place, but I will say this by way of recommendation: audience members all around us were sobbing through much of it and gave it a real standing ovation, like the old-fashioned kind that happens spontaneously instead of just “oh, all right I guess I’ll stand since I can’t see through the people in front of me.”

I'm not going to get into a big critique of the show. But gay “scholar me” got the better of “politic theater professional me,” and I will share one thought because it’s stuck in my craw:

There is a scene, a moment, late in the play — I don’t think this is a spoiler really, but if you plan to go, and you don’t want to know ANYTHING before you see it, this is your alert — which reenacts an anecdote Forster related in a letter, the text of which is in the graphic above. This scene, Forster’s telling of it, is practically scriptural. It’s like a station of the cross on the way to 20th century gay history, literature, culture. Without this moment, we would have nothing. If you care about these things, you know this story. I’m especially attuned to it right now because I use it in the new piece I’m working on. Here’s my draft text, from a line delivered by one of the characters in my show:

“The novelist E.M. Forster, in 1912, visited Edward Carpenter, the Victorian socialist, nudist, feminist, vegetarian, sandal-maker, and open homosexual and his working-class lover, George Merrill, at their cottage in rural Northern England, a pilgrimage that was made for decades by artists and radicals, writers and streams of curious young men. Forster wrote in a letter that, during a visit, ‘George Merrill — touched my backside — gently and just above the buttocks. I believe he touched most people’s. The sensation was unusual and I still remember it, as I remember the position of a long-vanished tooth. It was as much psychological as physical. It seemed to go straight through the small of my back into my ideas, without involving any thought.’ When Forster got home, he wrote the first gay novel, Maurice.”

But in The Inheritance, Merrill does not touch Forster gently on the small of his back, he grabs a handful of his ass and leers. A light touch on the small of the back is incredibly erotic but also tender. It is very different from a frank sexual come-on. The subtlety of the touch is what makes this seminal moment so powerful. If Merrill had just stuck his hand in Forster's crack, would Forster have suddenly and completely understood the connection between desire and love — would he have had the sudden insight that physical intimacy between men is not just illicit lust but something deep, essential, holy — that led him to write Maurice, a radically new kind of gay story that ends happily for the two lovers?

So okay, I will admit that, of course, one reason I’m so worked up about this is that another playwright beat me to my thing. But mostly I’m shocked that he got it so wrong, in a play that is explicitly ABOUT history and literature and the transmission of culture.

The Rose Tattoo

I saw the Roundabout’s production of The Rose Tattoo yesterday. If you ever thought of The Rose Tattoo as minor Tennessee Williams, this production will disabuse you of that notion. It’s gorgeous, tense, funny, sexy, heartbreaking, chilling. I loved everything about it. Marisa Tomei will knock your socks off.

Seeing it on Columbus Day weekend heightened the immigration politics in the play for me. It's set in a community of Italian immigrants on the Gulf Coast in the 1950s. There aren’t many white people in the story, but the ones there are don’t much like or respect the Italians.

There's a character called The Strega (the witch) who lives next door. I don’t know if Williams specifies her ethnicity in the text, but in this production she’s clearly a white lady in contrast to the Italian-Americans at the center of the story. The Strega mostly lurks in the periphery, but from time to time she steps out and addresses the audience with bigoted comments on the main action. The audience we saw it with laughed with her. Not at her. Their laughter seemed to me to indicate clear identification with The Strega’s view. (Were the character Italian, her comments would of course sound very different, and mean something different, in that context.)

It almost felt like a test. The character is played by Constance Shulman (my husband tells me she’s well known from Orange Is The New Black) who delivers these lines with sharp comic timing, so you know they’re jokes, but they seem to have no other content besides ridicule. They’re only funny if you find Italians laughable.

If it was a test, the audience failed it. Their laughter was shocking and creepy.

It's National Coming Out Day.

Steven and Eduardo, summer 1983, camping near Phoenicia, New York.

This is an excerpt from Jack, the piece I’m working on:

“Here’s something on the reliability of memory, on how stories get told, and on whether or not they are true and whether or not it matters: after two years in New York, broke and not sure what to do anymore, I decided to return to Greencastle, live with my parents, and attend DePauw University long enough to finish an undergraduate degree. I was 22. But that summer, two months before I was to leave New York, I fell in love with a boy, Eduardo. This was the summer of 1983. In the fall, I brought Eduardo home to Indiana to meet my family. Both Eduardo and I had bleached our hair platinum blond and wore oversized Bermuda shorts and black boots. We looked like every other kid in the East Village that summer. But this was Indiana. I hadn’t yet told my parents I was gay. The bus dropped us off in front of the Greyhound station, which was at Marvin’s Pizza Place but not the old Marvin’s, which had been torn down. There was a new building on the same site and it doubled as the bus station. Eduardo and I went straight to the library a few blocks away to meet my mother who would drive us home. Our appearance there made a stir. A janitor at the library taunted my mother about her queer son, she cried that night and pleaded with me to cut my hair. I did. For her. A few days later, Eduardo went back to New York, and I remember waiting with him for the bus at dawn on a bench in front of Marvin’s, the smell of his shoulder, how sad I was. That’s my coming out story. My mother tells a different coming out story that takes place four years earlier during my first visit home my freshman year of college in Ohio. She and I and Dad are having lunch at Moore’s Bar downtown on the courthouse square, where they served, where they still serve, the best tenderloin sandwiches in town. Mom says I told them I was gay that day over lunch and my father told me about his father, Ed, and told me that it was fine that I was gay, that they knew already, but to be careful because there are men who will hurt you if they find out. I have no recollection of having said anything about being gay that day, but I had pierced my left ear and I remember how strongly Mom disapproved. In my mother’s version of my coming out story, which I don’t remember, there is a conversation where I say the words, ‘I’m gay.’ In mine, there is not.”

John Addington Symonds, 1840 – 1893.

Tomorrow is the birthday of John Addington Symonds. I'm sure I've gone on about him here before so I won't again. To oversimplify, when we look at the history of the "modern lgbt rights movement," all roads lead back to a handful of guys, mostly English, in the second half of the 19th century, one of whom (and for my money the most remarkable) is John Addington Symonds.

Most of Symonds’s personal papers were burned after his death by his biographer. You might or might not be surprised how often that happened. Homophobia is a forest fire raging through gay history. Vast fields of research are just smoke and cinders now. But, incredibly, Symonds autobiography survived and was published in the 1980s as “The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds.” It’s quite a read.

We stand on awesome shoulders.

Correction.

So the joke or the stereotype or whatever is that people curate what they share on social media to make their lives look full of love and fun and cake and beautiful things for which they are daily grateful, with the intention of making their friends envious, and I always kind of thought, Well, i don’t do that. I share everything.

But of course, I do, I mean, the good stuff is the stuff you want to tell people about. I don’t feel like my intention is to arouse envy, but I’m sure somewhere in the back of my mind I’m trying to present my life as enviable.

Yesterday I posted a picture of beautiful flowers I had just planted and a sweet memory that they evoked, and later I posted a brag photo of the pizza I’d just pulled out of the oven because I thought it looked gorgeous and I was proud of it. There was nothing untrue about either of those photos or the moments associated with them. I do have a pretty good life that I love and I do put a certain amount of effort into noticing the good things and feeling grateful for them.

But that doesn’t mean most days there isn’t a parade of annoying shit going by, and I am easily irritated, easily hurt, given to complaining and bad moods that spiral downward quickly. So, in the spirit of telling the truth about my Sunday, or at least painting a more comprehensive picture, here’s the other stuff.

When I got up at 7 (I can’t sleep late even on the weekends, no matter how little sleep I’ve had), I opened the dishwasher to retrieve my favorite coffee cup ( a hand-painted mug I bought in Deruta on our first trip to Umbria 2 years ago), and the door fell off. I had turned on the dishwasher before I went to bed Saturday night, but all the dishes were still dirty.

(BACKGROUND: A few months ago, we couldn’t get the dishwasher door to shut, rendering it useless, so we bought a new one. But after 2 delivery attempts (the first time the cabinet needed to be modified before they could install it; the second time, we discovered that the new one plugged into a socket but the old one was hardwired so there was no outlet where we needed one), we pushed the old one back in and suddenly the door was shutting again, so we kept it.)

This time, though, the door completely came off the hinges. C and I are both avoiders when it comes to big household projects like this. Our deal roughly is that he has to go sit in an office all day, so I take care of the home stuff. Despite its evocation of a 1950s marriage, it’s a good arrangement, and it works well. I love the cooking, hate the cleaning, don’t mind the rest of it. He doesn’t necessarily love getting up at dawn and going to the office, but he has a job he’s good at that provides us with a comfortable life. But when it comes to tasks like figuring out how the fuck to get a new dishwasher installed, we’re both like “No, you’re the husband,” “No, YOU’RE the husband.”

So the first thing I got to do Sunday morning was pull all the dishes out of the broken machine and wash them in the sink like a normal 50s housewife. It was a LOT of dishes. It was steamy in the apartment because on Thursday when I was cleaning the house I decided to clean the kitchen grime out of the air conditioner. The previous owner of our apartment put a massive a.c. unit in our little kitchen, which is probably the worst place imaginable for a massive a.c. unit. (It’s meant to cool the whole apartment, so of course in order for it to be comfortable in the living room in August, the kitchen has to be as cold as a walk-in fridge.) Every time I use the stove I have to turn the a.c. off because it sucks the flame out from under the pan on the stove. And the cold air blows directly onto whatever you put on the counter. It’s a daily pain in my ass (as if summer isn’t annoying enough). Also it basically functions as a kitchen exhaust fan, and if you’ve ever worked in a restaurant kitchen you know how disgusting those get. So I pulled it apart, cleaned the grime out of every crevice I could get to, and ordered a new filter on Amazon, free overnight delivery. Thursday evening it was pretty cool out, so I figured we wouldn’t need the a.c. anyway.

Amazon sent a big box of paper cups instead of an a.c. filter. A weekend without a.c. is not the worst thing in the world, it would have been worse if it had been July, but it was uncomfortable. Our concrete and steel building heats up all day in the sun and stays warm, and it’s been muggy the last couple of days.

BUT, I turned that shit around. In the afternoon, I walked down to Trader Joe’s and bought red and gold chrysanthemums to plant and I planted them. I also picked up some nice cheese, and I made cocktails, and we had a Saturday happy hour on the balcony. It was a gorgeous, sunny day and I am grateful beyond words to have a small balcony where we can sit in the shade for a few minutes with flowers and cheese and a cocktail and my husband who tries so hard to keep me content and quite often succeeds.

And then I made a truly exceptional pizza that tasted every bit as great as it looked.