Picano and Me

So I’ve been reading a lot in two areas:  Let’s call them “counter-culture” and “gay.”  By counter-culture I mean of the ‘50s, ‘60s, and maybe ‘70s:  The Beat writers and their offshoots:  Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burroughs…Kesey, Hunter Thompson.  And the gay writers I’m talking about are the people associated with the Violet Quill of the ‘70s and ‘80s, but have been writing ever since; people like Edmund White, Andrew Holleran, and Felice Picano.

 

I have some mixed feelings about all of them.  The Beats I respect, but they certainly were a bunch of highly individualistic people.  I’m more conflicted about the Violet Quill; is it some kind of latent residual homophobia on my part?

I’m now halfway through Picano’s “memoir in the form of a novel, Ambidextrous.  I wasn’t expecting to like it.  My first attempt to read it ended when I got bored with his descriptions of being able to write with both hands as a child.  It just didn’t seem interesting.  And I seen reviews talking about all the childhood sex he describes in the book.

But I’ve gotten interested in his story, for reasons I hadn’t anticipated.  I’d read the sequel, Men Who Loved Me, first; so I knew about the years of his young adulthood.  He seemed much more freewheeling than I.  In fact we seemed quite different.  But now—

Well, I discover he had a run-in with a teacher in the fifth grade; quite a bit of trouble with that teacher, actually.

I had trouble in the fifth grade.  Whereas Picano’s teacher bullied him, my own teacher merely teased me.  My perception—well, it might as well have been bullying.  Now it might be considered mild psychological bullying.

But I believe my teacher simply liked me and didn’t know how to express it.  I was fairly shy at the time, in a new school and a new environment because of my own circumstances of growing up with the U.S. military.  Anyway, I hadn’t been expecting that Picano and I would have an unpleasant fifth-grade experience in common.

And a bit further on into the story:  Descriptions of model airplanes.  Picano’s friend makes airplanes out of balsa wood.  I myself bought plastic models and assembled them.  Picano describes the different airplanes that were modeled, plus the decals, the paints, etc.; and hanging them from the ceiling.  

As a child, I assembled some airplane models; though I didn’t concentrate on planes.  I made several large ship models; a large model of the Eiffel Tower; cars; etc.  

In short, as far as Picano’s description of himself at the age of eleven or twelve, I could relate to that; in spite of the fact that he was talking about New York City and its suburbs, while I would be talking about the tidewater area of Virginia, about seven years later than he is describing.

Picano’s descriptions have moved me along a bit towards continuing with my own novel based on my early life.  And for that I thank him!

I’ve also been taking another look at Kerouac’s Doctor Sax, another novel dealing with a boy who is eleven or twelve—but that is a totally different type of work!

Book Review: The Beauty of Men (Andrew Holleran)

As I’ve read The Beauty of Men over the past several months, I’ve been reading sections at our South Bay Writers Open Mic and commenting that “this book ought to be horribly depressing; but it’s so beautifully written that I keep reading.”
 

True—although it did take me awhile to finish.  I realized, after I got about halfway, that “nothing was happening.”  That’s a cliché, of course.  Peeved readers love to complain about how “nothing happens” in books like Kerouac’s On The Road.  But it seems to me, if writers are supposed to “show not tell,” then it isn’t a question of whether something “happens” or not.  It’s a question of whether the reader is being given an experience.  

I felt I was experiencing something in Holleran’s book.  With him, I always feel I’m experiencing something.  I may or may not like it—but that’s a separate question.

Lark, the protagonist in The Beauty of Men, has moved to Florida to care for his quadriplegic mother.  Behind him lies New York and the gay life of the late 1970s (portrayed in Holleran’s book Dancer from the Dance).

We share the experience of visiting the nursing home, and imagine what it must be like for his mother to have spent the last twelve years there.  And we experience what it is like for Lark to make his regular visits and to live now in Florida, after his endless partying in New York and the onset of the AIDS epidemic.  We’re carried back to those earlier times and we experience the deepening epidemic, which leads one to believe that “everyone is dying.”

Yet life goes on.  Lark hangs out by a boat ramp at an out-of-the-way lake, hoping to pick up men.  He does—and falls in love with a man who after one night refuses to have anything more to do with him.  Lark pines, Lark drives past the man’s home.  This goes on for a year.  Finally—around page 200 (spoiler!)—the man confronts him.

I love Holleran’s writing style.  This is what keeps me reading.  If you can read this without becoming depressed—and without insisting that something “happens,” this might be a good book for you.

Polyamory: The Beauty, The Pain, The Commitment, The Challenge

I was still rather depressed when I woke up Saturday morning.  How, I wondered, will I ever market my poly-pagan novel when my friend who wrote the gay novel says there’s no market for that?

But I get up and head for the local park for another friend’s Ceremony of Commitment.  She and her lover are committing to a life together.  Not a simple wedding, since they are each married to someone else.  But the spouses are there and fully participating in the ceremony, conducted by a man who looks the part of a Rabbi (I don’t know whether he actually is or not).  Family members are also present.  I hear friends speaking of their own poly experiences, or of their newness to the poly concept.  It is moving to hear people speak of opening their lives to include their spouses’ lovers.

Then I’m off to a Pagan Beltane ritual, which begins with a May Pole dance.  Then comes the actual ritual, with much talk of flirtation and merriment and rutting, the season of the Lady and the Goat.  And in fact the weather has turned warm and inviting.

Nevertheless, I’m still absorbing the news of the Cleveland women imprisoned for ten years, and other people’s stories of rape and abuse.  I’m still thinking about the Pantheacon workshop on Sex Positivity.  How do we promote sexual health and sanity in a world where sexuality is so often and easily turned to abuse?

And that evening I watch the film Pariah with my girlfriend.  It’s the story of an African-American woman coming to terms with her attraction to other women, and society’s reaction to it.

Well—we must find our way forward, together.

Film Review: "Resident Alien"

Last thoughts for now, maybe, on Quentin Crisp and my own reaction to him.  Last night I watched, once again, the documentary Resident Alien, released in 1990.  This morning I again tried to track down who the various people in this documentary were.

It’s an odd documentary.  In some ways, the sections I like most are the staged scenes.   The film begins with a black-and-white parody of….well, my guess is a cheap, sensational, (bad?) science fiction film of the early 1950s—perhaps even something by Ed Wood.  Crisp walks down an empty alley in New York and is suddenly confronted by a bum declaring “I know you!”

In another scene, John Hurt, who played Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant, faces Crisp through a fake mirror.  The two smile, nod, and acknowledge one another.  It’s charming.

But the film as a whole is a documentary that doesn’t quite document.  But I suppose that’s one style of “documentary.”  Crisp amazes me with the number of people he knows (not really surprising, since one of his ambitions was to know everyone in the world!).  Thanks to this film, I’m now familiar with the the writers Hunter Madsen, Marshall Kirk, and Guy Kettelhawk; the painters David McDermot and Peter McGough; the painter Franco; the chanteuse Holly Woodlawn; the performance artist Susana Ventura (aka Penny Arcade); the painter Patrick Angus; and the writer Felicity mason (aka Anne Cumming).  I haven’t run into this many “friends of the main character” since I started reading about William S. Burroughs—and they’re all generally interesting folks!

But I had to work at this, since the film simply follows Crisp around as he visits these people or they talk about him.  The film uses no captions to identify anyone; you have to pay attention (or rewatch repeatedly).

And I’m not sure I learned much from this documentary that I didn’t already know from Civil Servant or the sequel, An Englishman in New York.  Several people have made the case that Crisp was a profoundly unhappy individual and an embarrassment to the Gay Movement.  But he never intended to be a part of any “movement.”  He held what seems a rather Calvinist view of humanity (“If people got what they deserved, everyone would starve”), and yet what impresses is the extent to which he seems to have been at peace with himself.  He realized early on what he was and how he wanted to live; he proceeded to live that way.  By age seventy he had become “one of the stately homos of England”—but not a celebrity until the release of Civil Servant.  Moving to New York in the aftermath of the film, he did become a celebrity; and seemed to feel that he and the human race had at last met and accepted one another.  He still generated controversy and hostility, but he felt accepted in New York, apparently, in a way he had never felt accepted in London.

Finally, he was witty, he was provocative—he’s been called the closest thing to Oscar Wilde that we’ve had recently.  In life he seems to have been a warm and considerate if somewhat distant person.  Considering the gender issues he grew up with and faced head-on when British society would have preferred to ignore them, that’s not bad at all.  Certainly a person worth knowing and knowing better.

Review: "An Englishman in New York"

Two watchings now of An Englishman in New York and I’m still processing what to make of it.  It isn’t straight-forward, at least for me.  The Naked Civil Servant, which dealt with Quentin Crisp’s life in England seems simpler, more funny.  Its sequel strikes me as more problematical, more ambiguous.  Of course, the story of a man growing old is bound to be different from the story of a man coming of age.  But the films also deal with different places and times.  New York is not London.  And the 1970s and 1980s are not the 1930s and 1940s.

For now, I just want to say a few things about the second film, the film about New York, share my initial reactions, and suggest some deeper issues.

With the BBC broadcast of The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp has become a celebrity.  He is invited to New York to speak.  This is around 1980.  Arriving in Manhattan, he immediately falls in love with it.  And New York seems to fall in love with him.  But not for long.  Crisp misjudges the growing AIDS epidemic.  Fearing that the straight world will once again saddle homosexuals as the bearers of disease, Crisp suggests that AIDS is just the latest “fad.”  His remarks spark outrage, event cancellations—and even threats of violence against him personally.

In the meantime, Crisp has been introduced to the New York gay scene, and been asked to leave a gay bar because he and his friend were not dressed in the “appropriate” garb—in this case, construction outfits, leather, or shirtless.  It’s a change for Crisp, who in England had always been bullied for not looking “straight.”  But this is New York after Stonewall.

Now, feeling like a relic of a bygone time, he meets Susana Ventura, aka Penny Arcade, who invites him to join in her performance art.  He is still relevant, she tells him, pointing out the prevalence of gay-on-gay discrimination, pointing out the rise of the commercialism of the “pink dollar,” decrying the party culture of body building and drug taking where deviation from the new gay “norm” means expulsion.  Crisp continues onstage into his eighties.

He has also met a young artist, Patrick Angus.  Crisp helps to win him some recognition, despite mainstream feedback that his paintings are “too gay” and “dirty.”  Angus lives long enough to see some success, before dying from complications of AIDS.

By the end of the film, Crisp has become an icon all over again.  He is now donating thousands to AIDS research.  Speaking at a gay club in Florida, he sums up his attitude towards life, urging people to ask themselves, “Is there anything inside that you have not yet unpacked?”  He dies having returned to England for a speaking tour.

That’s the outline.  Within this lie questions about the value of being yourself, being who you are; questions of how to behave when you are part of a despised minority.  What is the value of art and artifice for an individual?  What is the value of politeness and civility?  

Crisp had an oddly Calvinist attitude.  He said he didn’t believe in “rights.”  If everyone got what they deserved, he said, everyone would starve.  And he didn’t believe in an afterlife.  He made other controversial remarks in addition to the “AIDS fad” remark, but they aren’t covered in this film.

I plan a report, though, on the related documentary, Resident Alien.  Curiously, the documentary was released in 1990, when Crisp was still alive.  An Englishman in New York appeared in 2009, ten years after his death.  In some ways the film builds on the documentary.  Curious also is the interaction between Sting and his song/video (“An Englishman in New York”), and Crisp, and the documentary (in which Sting appears).   But more on that later.