Category Archives: History

April 26, 2011

The Wild Honey-Suckle

By Joe

Each evening during this time of year when I walk outside I am overwhelmed by the beautiful sweet smell that flows on the breeze and envelopes the sky.  The smell is that of wild honeysuckles which grow on the fence around the side of my house. There may be many things that I don’t like about the South, but the smell of wild honeysuckle in late spring is something that I will always love and cherish.

The Wild Honey-Suckle by Philip Freneau

Fair flower, that dost so comely grow,
Hid in this silent, dull retreat,tumblr_ljpbjr4Bd51qf3353o1_400
Untouched thy honied blossoms blow,
Unseen thy little branches greet;
     No roving foot shall crush thee here,
     No busy hand provoke a tear.

By Nature’s self in white arrayed,
She bade thee shun the vulgar eye,
And planted here the guardian shade,
And sent soft waters murmuring by;
     Thus quietly thy summer goes,
     Thy days declining to repose.

Smit with those charms, that must decay,
I grieve to see your future doom;
They died–nor were those flowers more gay,
The flowers that did in Eden bloom;
     Unpitying frosts, and Autumn’s power
     Shall leave no vestige of this flower.

From morning suns and evening dews
At first thy little being came:
If nothing once, you nothing lose,
For when you die you are the same;
     The space between, is but an hour,
     The frail duration of a flower.

In the picture above, the model is not holding honeysuckle, but it’s the closest thing I could find.

Philip Freneau, 1752-1832, American poet and journalist, b.Philip_freneau New York City, grad. Princeton, 1771. During the American Revolution he served as soldier and privateer. His experiences as a prisoner of war were recorded in his poem The British Prison Ship (1781). The first professional American journalist, he was a powerful propagandist and satirist for the American Revolution and for Jeffersonian democracy. Freneau edited various papers, including the partisan National Gazette (Philadelphia, 1791-93) for Jefferson. He was usually involved in editorial quarrels, and, influential though he was, none of his papers was profitable. His political and satirical poems have value mainly for historians, but his place as the earliest important American lyric poet is secured by such poems as “The Wild Honeysuckle,” “The Indian Burying Ground,” and “Eutaw Springs.”

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/philip-morin-freneau#ixzz1KVIHwdwl

3 Comments | posted in History, Nudity, Poetry

April 25, 2011

Lies and Controversy

By Joe

tumblr_lfm4mzkerD1qajhgvo1_500

On August 21, the gay blogger and youtuber, Davey Wavey (www.breaktheillusion.com), posted a video blog about the “7 Huge Gay Lies” that gay men tell.  In the video, Davey explained that the majority of gays lie about:

  • how many partners they’ve ever had
  • using gay hookup sites
  • cheating on their boyfriends
  • their penis size
  • their fetishes
  • having safe sex
  • their age

This caused a shitstorm of controversy which, sadly, led Davey to take down the video and post this one instead.  The controversy around the video was led by another gay blogger and youtuber named Tyler Oakley, who claims that these are just negative stereotypes and teach young gays bad habits, while also denying ever lying about any of the above. (I’ll take him at his word on this.)  I personally have never lied about any of the things above either, though Tyler goes further to state that not only has he never lied about any of these things, but that he has never done any of them.  In a comment on Davey Wavey’s original video he stated:

  1. I’m honest on how many partners I’ve had.
  2. I’ve never used a hookup site.  I met my boyfriend on a blind date.
  3. I’ve never cheated.  I have respect for them and myself.
  4. I’ve never been in a situation where someone has asked me for my penis size, so I’ve never had a chance to lie about it.  Maybe I have a higher standard for the conversations I have.
  5. I only have safe sex with committed tested partners.
  6. I’ve never lied about my age.

You should stop perpetrating stereotypes.

Now, if these is true, great for Tyler.  Like I said before I won’t say he is lying because maybe he is not.  But, I have a few things to say, and I will go through them point by point (all seven of them).

First of all, I am as honest about how many partners I’ve had as I can be, though the exact number is a little fuzzy. (I’ll be the first to say that I had my slutty phase, but I don’t think it was too slutty of a phase.) There are some hookups, that I would like to forget, but I have a pretty good memory of them.  To give an example of one of the ones I would like to forget was a guy that I met online.  He was a fellow teacher (special ed, which in my opinion makes him a pretty special person).  We seemed to have a lot in common, and I enjoyed our chats.  We decided to get together for some “fun.”  We were chatting after we met up, and he was talking about his kids.  Now, I always refer to my students as my kids, so I didn’t think anything more of it.  Then he made a comment about his wife.  We were kind of in the heat of the moment, and I put it at the back of my mind while we were both naked.  In retrospect, I should have stopped him and sent him on his way.  I believe in being faithful to a partner, and I felt disgusted with myself for fooling around with a married man.  It is not one of the highlights of my life.  Not all men are honest about the number of partners they’ve had.  I’ve run into this many times.  We should be honest with each other, and Davey is right that not all of us are.

As stated in the previous paragraph, I have used gay hookup sites.  When you are a gay man in the South, there are several good reasons for this.  1)  There aren’t a lot of places to go meet other gay men, especially while living in small towns or rural areas.  2)  Not everybody has friends who know other gay friends to set them up on blind dates, and it can be hard to find us in a small community. 3) Sometimes we need to be discreet.  There are other reasons, but these are the three biggies.  Good for Tyler for not using gay hookup sites, but what is wrong with it?  Those sites are not just about sex and immediate hookups, though many guys think of them as such.  I have met some great people that I have had a lot of fun with, sex or not, on these sites, and I will not lie about it (though maybe I will be vague about it to some of my straight friends).  The point is, why lie?  It is nothing to be ashamed of. (And on a side note, we know Davey Wavey has used hookup sites because he has blogged about it, and his naked profile pics are all over the internet.)

I personally have never cheated in the traditional sense of the word, except for the special ed teacher, and that was accidental.  I didn’t’ think I had to ask if he was married or not.  I was naïve, and I have since learned.  Furthermore, you all should know that I am a Christian.  In my belief, lusting in one’s heart (as Jimmy Carter put it), masturbating to the image of another man, checking out that hot guy across the room, etc., are all forms of cheating. That brief though is a betrayal of your partner, and you are not being completely faithful to your partner.  The old saying “Just because you are on a diet, doesn’t mean you can’t look at the menu,” is actually just plain wrong.  If you are in a committed relationship, then why would your eye wonder.  Truth be told, it is human nature for our eyes to wonder.  How do we remedy this?  I honestly don’t know, but I have no doubt that we should be honest with our partners.  Lies only lead to problems.

Now, penis size… OMFG!  I mean really.  If I had a dollar for every time a man lied to me about his penis size, I might not be a millionaire, but I’m pretty sure I would be comfortably well off. If I had a dollar for every time any man has lied about his penis size to me or not, I would be at least a billionaire.  Tyler wrote, “I’ve never been in a situation where someone has asked me for my penis size, so I’ve never had a chance to lie about it.  Maybe I have a higher standard for the conversations I have.”  Really, he has never had that conversation with someone else. I’ve had that conversation with straight men and gay men alike and numerous female friends.  When it comes down to it, most men lie just a little.  I don’t, because honestly, I’m happy with my size.  I wish it were a bit longer, but I’ve never had a complaint. And as for Tyler’s statement, “Maybe I have a higher standard for the conversations I have” what kind of fucking boring life does Tyler live.  I mean really. (Maybe that is not fair, but I dislike it when people try to act like total goody two shoes.)  What the hell does this guy talk about.  It is certainly not all that I talk about, but there is nothing to be shameful or deceptive about.  I have friends who are very open about these kinds of things, and a couple of beers, sex talk, and you have a fun night ahead.  (A tidbit of historical gossip here, the only man in history that it was widely rumored during his lifetime to have a huge penis is Marcus Antonius.  Believe it or not, in Ancient Rome, this was a slur.  He was seen as being led around by his cock, and subsequently, Cleopatra.  If it was so big, how did he keep it hidden under that short leather skirt?) Enough said. Just be honest about your size.

Okay, so I will admit that I don’t always tell everyone I am with about my fetishes. If a guy were to ask, I would tell.  We all have things that we find sexually exciting.  By the way, Tyler did not address this lie.  Does he tell all of his partners about his fetishes? Why did he leave this out? Maybe he really is just completely boring (again, maybe not fair).  I’ve never read his blog, and after seeing how he reacted to Davey’s video, I don’t think I want to.

As for safe sex, I haven’t always been safe.  I was the top in unprotected anal sex once (long story that involves and orgy and a guy that put my dick into his ass before I knew it, and in the heat of the moment I went with it).  Tyler wrote, “I only have safe sex with committed tested partners.”  Again good for him, but he never says that he is always honest with them.  Also, no sex is totally safe.  Tests are not always accurate. Partners are not always faithful, no matter what we want to believe.  Oral sex is not completely safe (though deemed low risk if you don’t swallow) even if you use dental dams and condoms.  Condoms can break.  All kinds of problems can happen.  Abstinence and solo masturbation are the only truly safe sex.   All the rest is “safer” sex.  Again, this is something that I am honest about. There is no reason to lie.  Better to be safe than sorry.

I will not, have not, and never will lie about my age.  A year older is a thing to celebrate, and it  beats the hell out of the alternative (i.e. death).  I am happy that I am a 33 year old man.  There are more things that I wish I had done before this age (finished my PhD for one), but we all have some regrets.  It doesn’t make me ashamed of my age.  Have men and women ever lied to me about their age?  Yes, they have, and they will continue to do so as long as we have an emphasis on youth. Be honest and be proud.

I don’t think (in fact, I know) Davey Wavey was not trying to perpetuate stereotypes, but in is touch feely gay guru way was talking about honesty.  Davey Wavey, from all of his stuff that I have read and watched, tries to get us as gay men to love ourselves and to guard ourselves against the ever prevalent self-hatred that so many of us face at on time or another.  I am sorry that he took down the video.  I didn’t get to see it before it was taken down, but I can’t believe it was offensive as Tyler lambasted him for.  What Davey is like in real life is, I hope, very close to the personality he portrays on his blog and videos. I may not divulge my completely true identity here, but I endeavor to be honest about who I am.  Some of my readers who have gotten to know me outside of my blog would, and again I hope, describe me as a loving and caring person.  And as a human being, I may have a temper on occasion and my students get to see it every so often.  None of us are perfect.  I still work very hard to follow my two main rules in life:

Do unto others and you would have them do unto you.

and

Judge not, lest ye be judged.

I don’t always succeed, but I do my very best.  I am sorry that the gay community lashed out at Davey Wavey for being honest about what he sees as problems in the gay community.  Never has there been a civil rights movement (at least not in my knowledge), that have taken criticism about and especially from within their community well.  A few weeks ago, I was honored to hear a conference paper about homophobia in the African-American Civil Rights Movement.  The main person that the presenter was discussing was a gay man (and as I write this I can’t remember his name) who got moved to a behind the scenes position, and eventually out of the movement, because of his perceived sexual immorality, i.e. his homosexuality.  However, it was this particular person, who while Martin Luther King, Jr. was receiving the Nobel Peace Prize was called upon to ask King and the other ministers gathered to “stop having orgies in the hotel.”  The point is that until we start working together instead of letting the green monster of jealousy and our own ignorance about our community, we cannot move forward.  We will only move backwards.  Yes, the GLBT community is very diverse, but we have one thing in common, and that is that we are GLBT, we love someone of the same sex, and we have a long road ahead of us for equality.

Further Reading:

There are many other reactions: negative to either Davey or Tyler. I think if you read Tyler’s original post and his reaction to Larson’s “open letter” you will see that Tyler probably took Davey’s comments the wrong way, at least in my opinion.  This post is most of all to address the “7 Huge Gay Lies” that Davey outlined in his post.  I think the original message is worth reading and that the vitriolic reaction to it tells us (sadly) a lot about the gay community.

For something of more of a lighter mood click “more” below.  Warning it contains graphic nudity.

 

It will not get bigger just because you lie about it.

I wonder if Pinocchio ever grows a mustache, LOL.  I’ve never been a huge fan of shaved pubes.

tumblr_lfzk6r4kSK1qge0mdo1_400

Be happy with what you’ve got.

4 Comments | posted in History, Inspiration, Miscellaneous

April 22, 2011

Federico García Lorca

By Joe

ecc136e4c1c9b6e1_LittleAshes750I recently watched the movie Little Ashes, a 2009 Spanish-British drama film, set against the backdrop of Spain during the 20s and 30s, as three of the era’s most creative young talents meet at university and set off on a course to change their world. Luis Buñuel watches helplessly as the friendship between Salvador Dalí and the poet Federico García Lorca develops into a love affair.  Years ago, I had read a book about García Lorca and had found him to be fascinating, so I wanted to see this movie.  (I’ve always found Dalí to be a little strange, I had to watch the film Buñuel co-wrote and directed with Dalí, Un chien andalou (1929), or An Andalusian Dog.  No matter how much I try I cannot forget the scene in which Simone Mareuil’s eye is seemingly split open with a razor blade. It still freaks me out to think of it.)
García Lorca’s death had been mentioned and discussed in the novel Wild Man by Patricia Nell Warren.  It always saddened me that this genius had been murdered by Franco’s death squad because of his political views and possible homosexuality.  Therefore, after seeing the movie Little Ashes, I wanted to do a post about his poetry.  Whether his poetry is about repressed homosexuality or not, is really not for me to say.  I am not an expert on his poetry.  I merely find it beautiful and wanted to present it with my interpretation.
Salvador-Dali-Federico-Garcia-Lorca-salvador-dali-from-little-ashes-6459167-800-600As for García Lorca’s homosexuality or bisexuality, I don’t think there is much of a historical debate about it.  While it is widely acknowledged that Lorca was infatuated with Dalí, for years the artist denied entering into a relationship with Lorca.  Dalí stated:

He was homosexual, as everyone knows, and madly in love with me. He tried to screw me twice …. I was extremely annoyed, because I wasn’t homosexual, and I wasn’t interested in giving in. Besides, it hurts. So nothing came of it. But I felt awfully flattered vis-à-vis the prestige. Deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dalí’s asshole. He eventually bagged a young girl, and she replaced me in the sacrifice. Failing to get me to put my ass at his disposal, he swore that the girl’s sacrifice was matched by his own: it was the first time he had ever slept with a woman.

Writer Philippa Goslett supposes:

It’s clear something happened, no question… When you look at the letters it’s clear something more was going on there… It began as a friendship, became more intimate and moved to a physical level but Dalí found it difficult and couldn’t carry on. He said they tried to have sex but it hurt, so they couldn’t consummate the relationship.

Federico García Lorca Biography from Poets.org

3894e1b1-2a2c-472a-994b-9dfe63a86ca9Federico García Lorca is possibly the most important Spanish poet and dramatist of the twentieth century. García Lorca was born June 5, 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a small town a few miles from Granada. His father owned a farm in the fertile vega surrounding Granada and a comfortable mansion in the heart of the city. His mother, whom Lorca idolized, was a gifted pianist. After graduating from secondary school García Lorca attended Sacred Heart University where he took up law along with regular coursework. His first book, Impresiones y Viajes (1919) was inspired by a trip to Castile with his art class in 1917.
In 1919, García Lorca traveled to Madrid, where he remained for the next fifteen years. Giving up university, he devoted himself entirely to his art. He organized theatrical performances, read his poems in public, and collected old folksongs. During this period García Lorca wrote El Maleficio de la mariposa (1920), a play which caused a great scandal when it was produced. He also wrote Libro de poemas (1921), a compilation of poems based on Spanish folklore. Much of García Lorca’s work was infused with popular themes such as Flamenco and Gypsy culture. In 1922, García Lorca organized the first “Cante Jondo” festival in which Spain’s most famous “deep song” singers and guitarists participated. The deep song form permeated his poems of the early 1920s. During this period, García Lorca became part of a group of artists known as Generación del 27, which included Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, who exposed the young poet to surrealism. In 1928, his book of verse, Romancero Gitano (“The Gypsy Ballads”), brought García Lorca far-reaching fame; it was reprinted seven times during his lifetime.
1928In 1929, García Lorca came to New York. The poet’s favorite neighborhood was Harlem; he loved African-American spirituals, which reminded him of Spain’s “deep songs.” In 1930, García Lorca returned to Spain after the proclamation of the Spanish republic and participated in the Second Ordinary Congress of the Federal Union of Hispanic Students in November of 1931. The congress decided to build a “Barraca” in central Madrid in which to produce important plays for the public. “La Barraca,” the traveling theater company that resulted, toured many Spanish towns, villages, and cities performing Spanish classics on public squares. Some of García Lorca’s own plays, including his three great tragedies Bodas de sangre (1933), Yerma (1934), and La Casa de Bernarda Alba (1936), were also produced by the company.
In 1936, García Lorca was staying at Callejones de García, his country home, at the outbreak of the Civil War. He was arrested by Franquist soldiers, and on the 17th or 18th of August, after a few days in jail, soldiers took García Lorca to “visit” his brother-in-law, Manuel Fernandez Montesinos, the Socialist ex-mayor of Granada whom the soldiers had murdered and dragged through the streets. When they arrived at the cemetery, the soldiers forced García Lorca from the car. They struck him with the butts of their rifles and riddled his body with bullets. His books were burned in Granada’s Plaza del Carmen and were soon banned from Franco’s Spain. To this day, no one knows where the body of Federico García Lorca rests.

Selected Sources:

  1. Smith, David (October 28, 2007). “Were Spain’s two artistic legends secret gay lovers?”. The Guardian (London). Retrieved May 11, 2010.
  2. Bosquet, Alain, Conversations with Dalí, 1969. p. 19–20. (PDF format)
  3. “Federico García Lorca.” Poets.org – Poetry, Poems, Bios & More. Web. 22 Apr. 2011.

Leave a comment | posted in Gay Icon, History, Movie Review

April 19, 2011

Si Mis Manos Pudieran Deshojar

By Joe

Si Mis Manos Pudieran Deshojar by Federico García Lorca
— With English Translation

tumblr_lhlh2fp1Ua1qe5yzqo1_1280Yo pronuncio tu nombre
En las noches oscuras
Cuando vienen los astros
A beber en la luna
Y duermen los ramajes
De las frondas ocultas.
Y yo me siento hueco
De pasión y de música.
Loco reloj que canta
Muertas horas antiguas.

Yo pronuncio tu nombre,
En esta noche oscura,
Y tu nombre me suena
Más lejano que nunca.
Más lejano que todas las estrellas
Y más doliente que la mansa lluvia.

tumblr_lj1ejbORua1qdcsbjo1_400¿Te querré como entonces
Alguna vez? ¿Qué culpa
Tiene mi corazón?
Si la niebla se esfuma
¿Qué otra pasión me espera?
¿Será tranquila y pura?
¡¡Si mis dedos pudieran
Deshojar a la luna!!

————-

If My Hands Could Defoliate

I pronounce your name
on dark nights,
when the stars come
to drink on the moon
and sleep in tufts
of hidden fronds.
And I feel myself hollow
of passion and music.
Crazy clock that sings
dead ancient hours.

zzzzzzzzzSimonVroemena

I pronounce your name,
in this dark night,
and your name sounds
more distant than ever.
More distant that all stars
and more doleful than a calm rain.

Will I love you like then
ever again? What blame
has my heart?
When the mist dissipates,
what other passion may I expect?
Will it be calm and pure?
If only my fingers could
defoliate the moon!






Federico García Lorca

Many recognized his homosexuality from the start, but for decades Spain’s literary establishment, and even his own family, refused to acknowledge that the country’s best loved poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, was gay. His biographer, Ian Gibson, has conclusive evidence that Lorca’s poetic achievements sprang from his lifelong frustration at concealing his homosexuality.

lorcaIn Lorca y el mundo gay (Lorca and the Gay World), published in Spanish on Monday, Gibson describes how the poet’s works were censored to conceal his sexuality. It was not until the late 1980s that Lorca’s sexual identity became grudgingly acknowledged, in the face of denials and evasions. Gibson blames the decades of silence on a deep-seated Spanish homophobia. “Spain couldn’t accept that the greatest Spanish poet of all time was homosexual. Homophobia existed on both sides in the civil war and afterwards; it was a national problem. Now Spain permits same-sex marriage that taboo must be broken.”

Some academics who recognized the truth “suggested the poet’s homosexuality was alien to his poetic creativity”, Gibson writes of the man he’s studied for 40 years. Scholars colluded in the cover-up for fear of losing access to the poet’s archives, or antagonizing the family, he says. “All his poetry turns around frustrated love. His tormented characters who can’t live the life they want are precisely the metaphor for his sorrow. He was a genius who turned his suffering into art.”

After Lorca was assassinated by death squads in August 1936, at the start of Spain’s civil war, his brother Francisco and sister Isabel made every effort to expunge any trace of homosexuality from his life and work, Gibson claims.

A family spokeswoman, Laura Garcia Lorca, says they never talked of her uncle’s homosexuality when her father was alive. “We didn’t want his murder to be considered a sexual crime but to stress it was a political crime. It was difficult for my father to accept the homosexuality of his brother. However my Aunt Isabel [who died in 2002] spoke openly in her later years about homosexuality, and came to accept it as something natural. I imagine my father spoke of it among friends, but never publicly,” she said recently.

As late as 1987, a long introduction to a standard textbook of Lorca poems, The Poet in New York, contained not a word about his sexuality. But that US trip in 1929, which produced an explosion of anguished creativity, was the result of a failed love affair with the sculptor Emilio Aladrén, Gibson reveals. The beautiful sculptor abandoned the poet to marry an English woman, Elizabeth Dove, which plunged Lorca into a deep depression.

Poems written shortly before his death were finally published in the mid-1980s. But the title, Sonnets of a Dark Love (to read this sonnet, click “Read more” below), was softened to Love Sonnets, even though the verses clearly referred to a man: “You will never understand that I love you/ because you sleep in me and are asleep./I hide you, weeping, persecuted/ by a voice of penetrating steel.” The masculinity is clear in Spanish, in which nouns have gender.

Gibson says he went back to the beginning and re-read all of Lorca’s earliest poems for this latest book. “I discovered an anguished, tortured – gay – love … Those who deny his homosexuality must now shut up, or at least question their prejudices. It’s a relief after so many decades of obfuscation and silence, to reveal the truth.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/news/lorca-was-censored-to-hide-his-sexuality-biographer-reveals-1644906.html

Sonnet of Dark Love

tumblr_lj6slwV4sg1qgucp7o1_400Oh secret voice and song of a dark love!
Oh lowing without lambs! Oh hidden wound!
Oh needle of bile, cankered camellia!
Oh storm without a sea, town without walls!
Oh nights of iron darkness that descend
on mountains of mourning, proud peaks of grief!
Oh hound in the heart, the heart’s forbidden cry,
song ripening in silence without end!
Fly from my throat, you voice of burning ice,
yet don’t abandon me here in the wild
where flesh and sky mate without bearing fruit.
Don’t haunt the heavy ivory of my skull–
take pity and strip off this strangling shroud,
I who am love, I who am nature’s child!

8 Comments | posted in Gay Icon, History, Nudity, Poetry

April 17, 2011

The Gay Caveman Debate

By Joe

On Thursday, April 14, 2011, I posed Archaeologists Find “Gay” Caveman. Vilges Suola commented that “There’s no reason to assume he was homosexual, transsexual, bisexual or anything else. He wasn’t even a caveman!” This led me to do some further research. A chorus of paleoanthropologists, archaeologists and other bone experts have carefully dissected media reports about the dig, which began to increase after first appearing in British and Czech newspapers. I will admit that as a professional historian and teacher, I rarely choose to teach about prehistoric man, and I have a good reason for doing so. For me, there are prehistoric humans (those before written history), protohistoric humans (those during the beginnings of a written language and thus history), and historic humans (those who have a written history). Protohistoric man and historic man are in the realm of the historian, and prehistoric man is in the realm of anthropology. Though I do teach about prehistoric man, I make sure that my students understand the difference and why I usually start with the development of civilizations (that is those with a written record and those who built towns—though the birth of cities does not always follow with a written language, it often does due to the bureaucratic records needed for feeding and administrating a city). My research led me to several questions about the “gay” caveman: Was he a caveman? How do you classify a man of the Corded Ware culture? Was he even a man? What can we deduce about his gender identity or sexual orientation? Are these questions even important? I plan to answer these questions in this post.

The “man” found in the Czech Republic is a prehistoric man. The Corded Ware culture from which he originated may have had a proto-Germanic language, but no written records survive, and it is doubtful that humankind during this period and in that region had a written language (Egyptians, Mesopotamians, Harrapan, and Yellow River Civilizations had written languages and rich urban civilizations). Central Europe was not urbanized during this period. The Corded Ware culture, however, did not live in caves, and it is an incorrect generalization that prehistoric men are cavemen. Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) humans were cavemen, though the term is rarely used by professionals, and the Corded Ware culture was a Neolithic (New Stone Age) culture or Chalcolithic (Copper Age) culture, thus not a caveman, though he is prehistoric.

Second, is this skeleton even the skeleton of a man? I tend to take the archaeologists who found the skeleton at their word, since they have examined the skeletal remains and determined it to be a man. Until concrete evidence is found to the contrary, then I will believe that it is a male skeleton. Rosemary Joyce has a fascinating discussion on her blog about the problems of determining the sex of a skeleton. It is quite complicated and more in the purview of the archeologists and anthropologists than the historian. However, though Joyce makes an argument that they may have decided the sex too early, she gives little evidence that they were incorrect. Press TV, an Iranian international news network, broadcasting in English, sent a reporter to the Czech Republic and interviewed Kamila Remisova Vesinova, of the Czech Archeological Society. She stated:

The grave in Terronska Street in Prague 6 is interred on its left side with the head facing the West. An oval, egg-shaped container usually associated with female burials was also found at the feet of the skeleton…. We found one very specific grave of a man lying in the position of a woman, without gender specific grave goods, neither jewelry or weapons. So we think based on data that it could be a member of a so-called third gender, which were people either with different sexual orientation or transsexuals or just people who identified themselves differently from the rest of the society.…None of the objects that usually accompany male burials, such as weapons, stone battle axes and flint knives, were found in the grave….From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake. … What we see here doesn’t add up to traditional Corded Ware cultural norms.

Another member of the archaeological team, Katerina Semradova, said that colleagues had uncovered an earlier case dating from the Mesolithic period where a female warrior was buried as a man. She added that Siberian shamans were also buried in this way but with richer funeral accessories appropriate to their elevated position in society. (We should also remember that third gender individuals were sometimes seen as magical or spiritual beings because of their ability to bridge the gap between the masculine and feminine worlds.) This grave did not include any richer funeral accessories. In fact, it seems to only have been buried with the oval, egg-shaped container mentioned above. So this is what we seem to be able to gleam from these reports: 1) the skeleton seems to be that of a man, and 2) the body was buried in a female manner with female accoutrements.

Third, what can we know about his gender identity or sexual orientation? The Czech archeological team classified the body as that of a third gender. Considering that gay, bisexual, homosexual, and transgender are all modern terms, what then is a third gender? Historians find it hard to classify pre-modern men and women by a specific gender identity or sexual orientation. Gender can generally be determined by secondary sexual characteristics; however, skeletons, obviously, don’t have a penis, vagina, or breasts. We must look at other determining factors, such as the ones mentioned above. What is a third gender? Will Roscoe gave a good overview of the Third Sex debate, in a paper that was presented at the conference “Lesbian and Gay History: Defining a Field” at the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, City University of New York, October 7, 1995. I won’t go into detail about his theories here, but you can read this fascinating piece by clicking on the link above. The terms third gender and third sex describe individuals who are categorized (by their will or by social consensus) as neither male nor female, as well as the social category present in those societies who recognize three or more genders. The term “third” is usually understood to mean “other.” Transgender is defined as when gender identity doesn’t match physical or genetic sex. Third gender is a broader term that covers a wide range of gender identities in a number of cultures, some of whom reject the male-female binary altogether. The term has been used to describe Hijras of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan who have gained legal identity, Fa’afafine of Polynesia, and Sworn virgins of the Balkans, among others, and is also used by many of such groups and individuals to describe themselves. Like the Hijra, the third gender is in many cultures made up of biological males who take on a feminine gender or sexual role. In cultures that have not undergone heterosexualization, they are usually seen as acceptable sexual partners for the “masculine” males as long as these latter always maintain the “active” role. The fact is that many cultures have recognized a alternative gender identification. There were males, females, and others. These others, or the third sex, could be hermaphrodites (those born with male and female secondary sexual characteristics), those who chose to live a life of the other sex, eunuchs, or those who were born with homosexual or bisexual orientation. We tend to think in the form of the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions and prejudices of the world; however, many prehistoric cultures elevated women to a higher status than the Judeo-Christian-Islamic traditions. The male dominated masculine world often arrived with the invasion of Indo-Europeans (though not always) and with the rise of empires, see The Closet Professor Theorizes: Origins of Homophobia. Women were seen as life givers; many prehistoric deities were women, often with large breasts and protruding pregnant bellies. In the quest for male dominance and procreation, we often overlook the seeming normality in the ancient world of those who were of a different orientation of sexual identity. In small nomadic or semi-nomadic cultures, human populations needed to be small for mobility, thus there was not the overwhelming drive to have many children to increase the population and to build an army for defense of conquest. Therefore, there may not have been the prejudice against non-procreating third sex individuals, whether they were homosexual, transsexual, eunuch, sterile, asexual, or hermaphrodite. Therefore, since we cannot ask this skeleton his sexual orientation or gender identity, we can conclude that if the skeleton is male, then he is of the third gender, but that is all we can conclude.

Does any of this even matter? The answer for me is a resounding yes. If the skeleton is a man and was buried in a feminine manner then it will tell us more about gender identity in the ancient world. Third gender history is an emerging field of study and one that I find fascinating. Pre-twentieth century GLBT history is difficult enough because of the problems associated with identifying the sexual orientation of a historic individual. We really do not understand fully the notions of sexual identification and it needs to be studied further. We have a lot of scholars who make quick assessments, or even ahistorical, assessments about homosexuals in history. As we (the LGBT community) discover our place in this world, it helps to understand the positions those that came before us.

For Suggested Readings, click “Read more.”

Further Reading:

4 Comments | posted in History, Theory

April 14, 2011

Archaeologists Find “Gay” Caveman

By Joe

Czech_gay_caveman_flag.jpg.scaled500

The male body – said to date back to between 2900-2500BC – was discovered buried in a way normally reserved only for women of the Corded Ware culture in the Copper Age.

The skeleton was found in a Prague suburb in the Czech Republic with its head pointing eastwards and surrounded by domestic jugs, rituals only previously seen in female graves.

“From history and ethnology, we know that people from this period took funeral rites very seriously so it is highly unlikely that this positioning was a mistake,” said lead archaeologist Kamila Remisova Vesinova.

“Far more likely is that he was a man with a different sexual orientation, homosexual or transsexual,” she added.

Archaeologists-Discover-First-Ever-Gay-caveman-01

According to Corded Ware culture which began in the late Stone Age and culminated in the Bronze Age, men were traditionally buried lying on their right side with their heads pointing towards the west, and women on their left sides with their heads pointing towards the east. Both sexes would be put into a crouching position.

The men would be buried alongside weapons, hammers and flint knives as well as several portions of food and drink to accompany them to the other side.

Women would be buried with necklaces made from teeth, pets, and copper earrings, as well as jugs and an egg-shaped pot placed near the feet.

“What we see here doesn’t add up to traditional Corded Ware cultural norms. The grave in Terronska Street in Prague 6 is interred on its left side with the head facing the West. An oval, egg-shaped container usually associated with female burials was also found at the feet of the skeleton. None of the objects that usually accompany male burials such as weapons, stone battle axes and flint knives were found in the grave.

Cave-art_1866529c

“We believe this is one of the earliest cases of what could be described as a ‘transsexual’ or ‘third gender grave’ in the Czech Republic,” archaeologist Katerina Semradova told a press conference on Tuesday.

She said that archeologists had uncovered an earlier case dating from the Mesolithic period where a female warrior was buried as a man.

She added that Siberian shamans, or latter-day witch doctors, were also buried in this way but with richer funeral accessories to appropriate to their elevated position in society.

“But this later discovery was neither of those, leading us to believe the man was probably homosexual or transsexual,” Semeradova said.

The Corded Ware culture takes its name from the frequent use of decorative cord impressions found its pots and covered much of North, Central and Eastern Europe.

It is also known as a single-grave and battle-axe culture due to separate burials and the habit of being buried with stone axes.

alg_gay_cave_man

7 Comments | posted in History

March 29, 2011

The Spring

By Joe

by Thomas Carew (1640)
Now that the winter’s gone, the earth hath lost
Her snow-white robes; and now no more the frost
tumblr_lislksLSiq1qfhvvko1_1280Candies the grass, or casts an icy cream
Upon the silver lake or crystal stream:
But the warm sun thaws the benumbed earth,
And makes it tender; gives a sacred birth
To the dead swallow; wakes in hollow tree
The drowsy cuckoo and the humble-bee.
Now do a choir of chirping minstrels bring,
In triumph to the world, the youthful spring:
The valleys, hills, and woods in rich array
Welcome the coming of the long’d-for May.
Now all things smile: only my love doth lower,
Nor hath the scalding noon-day sun the powertumblr_lhz6hgwRAS1qgkmajo1_500
To melt that marble ice, which still doth hold
Her heart congeal’d, and makes her pity cold.
The ox, which lately did for shelter fly
Into the stall, doth now securely lie
In open fields; and love no more is made
By the fire-side, but in the cooler shade
Amyntas now doth with his Chloris sleep
Under a sycamore, and all things keep
Time with the season: only she doth carry
June in her eyes, in her heart January.

Thomas Carew (1594?-1640)
scroll

        Thomas Carew (pronounced Carey) was born, possibly at West Wickham, Kent, in either 1594 or 1595. His father, lawyer Matthew Carew, moved the family to London about 1598. Nothing is known of Carew’s education before he matriculated at Merton College, Oxford, in 1608. Graduating B. A. in 1610/11, he was incorporated B. A. of Cambridge in 1612, after which he was admitted to the Middle Temple. From 1613 to 1616 Carew served as secretary to Sir Dudley Carleton on embassies to Italy and the Netherlands. After being fired for making insulting remarks about Carleton and his wife, Carew returned to England for a futile search for employment. In 1619, his father having died the previous year, Carew joined an embassy to Paris headed by Sir Edward Herbert (later Lord Herbert of Chirbury). Possibly, he met there the Italian poet Giambattista Marino.
        In 1622, Carew’s first poem was published: verses prefixed to Thomas May’s comedy The Heir. In the early 1620s Carew associated with Ben Jonson and his circle, and also frequented the court. In 1630 Carew was made a gentleman of Charles I’s Privy Chamber Extraordinary. He was named Sewer in Ordinary to the King (that is, an official in charge of the royal dining arrangements). It is said he was “high in favour with that king, who had a high opinion of his wit and abilities.”1
        Carew had a reputation for mischief that stayed with him all of his adult life. This reputation did nothing to damage his career as a poet, soldier, and courtier. His society verses, such as “A Divine Mistress” and “Disdain Returned,” were prized for their wit. In truth, he was a conscientious poetic craftsman. Though he did not produce a large body of work, he took extraordinary care in shaping each piece. Carew’s masque Coelum Britannicum, performed before the king in 1634, though full of jokes and allusions, draws upon an important work by the sixteenth century Italian philosopher Giordano Bruno.2
        Much of Carew’s poetry was sexually explicit far beyond the norms of his age, and he was a reputed libertine. Yet he translated nine of the Psalms and wrote one of the finest elegies of the period: “An Elegy on the Death of the Dean of St. Paul’s Dr. John Donne.” It is a solemn tribute to Donne’s contribution to English poetry and the English Language. Perhaps the most interesting of Carew’s achievements is his verse criticism of his contemporaries. Formal criticism was in its infancy during the early seventeenth century. Carew’s commendatory, complimentary, and elegiac poems provide some of the best evidence concerning the literary values of the age.2
        “At the end of his life, Carew attempted to make amends to the Church, summoning a prominent vicar to his deathbed. Owing to his profligate life, however, he was repulsed.”3 Carew died on March 23, 1640 and was buried in Saint Dunstan’s-in-the-West, Westminster. His Poems were published the same year, to be followed by the second edition “revised and enlarged” in 1642.

  1. The Dictionary of National Biography.
    London: Oxford University Press, 1917 ff. Volume III. 972.
  2. The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 6th Ed. Vol. 1.
    New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1993. 1696.
  3. Crofts, Thomas, ed. The Cavalier Poets: An Anthology.
    New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1995. 32.

Leave a comment | posted in History, Nudity, Poetry

March 26, 2011

Tennessee Williams: Born March 26, 1911

By Joe

463px-tennessee-williams-with-cake-nywtsOne hundred years ago today, Edwina and Cornelius Williams gave birth to Thomas Lanier Williams III in Columbus, Mississippi.  Tom Williams grew up to become the greatest American playwright of the 20th century and is known to us today as Tennessee Williams.  Williams is my personal favorite playwright.  His plays, A Streetcar Named Desire, Suddenly, Last Summer, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Glass Menagerie, and his novel, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone have inspired countless productions, numerous movies, and a host of enjoyment for millions.  The richness of his stories, though set in a time before my birth, are timeless and never lose their appeal.

Tennessee was close to his sister Rose, who was a slim and beautiful woman with a host of mental illnesses from a young age, including schizophrenia, for which she was later institutionalized and spent most of her adult life in mental hospitals. After various unsuccessful attempts at therapy, her parents eventually allowed a prefrontal lobotomy in an effort to treat her. The operation, performed in 1943, in Washington, D.C., went badly, and Rose remained incapacitated for the rest of her life. Rose’s failed lobotomy was a hard blow to Tennessee, who never forgave his parents for allowing the operation. It may have been one of the factors that drove him to alcoholism.

20081023_080741_ae24menagerie_300Characters in his plays are often seen to be direct representations of his family members. Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie is understood to be modeled on Rose. Some biographers say that the character of Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire is based on her as well. The motif of lobotomy also arises in Suddenly Last Summer. Amanda Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie can easily be seen to represent his mother. Many of his characters are autobiographical, including Tom Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie and Sebastian in Suddenly Last Summer.

In his memoirs, the playwright claims he became sexually active as a teenager; his biographer Lyle Leverich maintained this actually occurred later, in his late 20s. His first sexual affair with a man was at Provincetown, Massachusetts with a dancer named Kip Kiernan. He carried a photo of Kip in his wallet for many years. Having struggled with his sexuality throughout his youth, he came out as a gay man in private. When Kip left him for a woman and marriage, Williams was devastated. Williams was outed as gay by Louis Kronenberger in Time magazine in the 1950s.

990528.garden.pbAfter the success of The Glass Menagerie, Thomas Lanier Williams, later known as Tennessee, spent time in Mexico in late 1945. “I feel I was born in Mexico in another life,” he wrote in a letter from Mexico City. Over the years, other writers—from Katherine Anne Porter to Williams’ mentor, Hart Crane— had expressed the same sentiment. But luck was with Williams as he crossed la frontera at Piedras Negras/Eagle Pass: He met Pancho Rodriguez, a young Mexican American. The tale of that meeting would later be embellished—with Williams’ car breaking down and a border guard’s son helping to rescue a manuscript that border guards had confiscated.  The rising 34-year-old playwright was immediately smitten with the 24-year-old Pancho—the border guard’s son—and invited him to New Orleans as his live-in muse. The rest, as they say, is history. But the chronicle of their relationship was forgotten and, to a large extent, whitewashed from Williams’ life story.

frank_merloHis physical and emotional relationship with his secretary, Frank Merlo, lasted from 1947 until Merlo’s death from cancer in 1961, and provided the stability during which Williams produced his most enduring works. Merlo was a balance to many of Williams’s depressions, especially the fear that like his sister, Rose, he would become insane. The death of his lover drove Williams into a deep decade-long depression.

Conflicted over his own sexuality, Tennessee Williams wrote directly about homosexuality only in his short stories, his poetry, and his late plays. Williams’s gayness was an open secret he neither publicly confirmed nor denied until the post-Stonewall era when gay critics took him to task for not coming out, which he did in a series of public utterances, his Memoirs (1975), self-portraits in some of the later plays, and the novel, Moise and the World of Reason (1975), all of which document, often pathetically, Williams’s sense of himself as a gay man.

tennessee_williams-by-lessignetsdotcomThere are several volumes of witty, confessional letters to friends Donald Windham and Maria St. Just and a raft of cynical, exploitative kiss-and-tell books by men who claimed to know Williams well in his later, declining years. However, anyone who had read his stories and poems, in which Williams could be more candid than he could be in works written for a Broadway audience, had ample evidence of his homosexuality.

Tennessee Williams’s work poses fascinating problems for the gay reader. At his best, Williams wrote some of the greatest American plays, but though homosexuals are sometimes mentioned, they are dead, closeted safely in the exposition but never appearing on stage.  In his post-Stonewall plays, in which openly homosexual characters appear, they serve only to dramatize Williams’s negative feelings about his own homosexuality. In the 1940s and 1950s, Williams presented in his finest stories poetic renderings of homosexual desire, but homoeroticism was always linked to death. Only in his lyric poetry does one find positive expression of homoerotic desire.

bhon5lThese contradictions are not presented to damn Williams for not having a contemporary gay sensibility but to say that his attitude toward his own homosexuality reflected the era in which he lived. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the McCarthy era, during which Williams wrote his best work, homosexuality branded one a traitor as well as a “degenerate.”

Williams’s best work was an expression of his homosexuality combined with the intense neuroses that fueled his imagination and crippled his life. Gay critics have debated in recent years whether Williams’s work is marked by “internalized homophobia” (Clum) or whether he is a subversive artist whose work can be best interpreted through the lens of leftist French theorists like Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (Savran).
David Bergman sees Williams’s characteristic linking of homosexuality and cannibalism as both religious (the homosexual as martyr) and Freudian (homosexuality as accommodation to and rebellion against the father figure), as well as part of a central American gay literary tradition that has its roots in the work of Herman Melville.

The diverse but complementary work of these critics can be read as necessary counters to the heteTennessee Williamsrosexist critics of the past who either ignored Williams’s homosexuality altogether or saw it as the root of his personal and artistic failings.
Williams died on February 25, 1983 at the age of 71. Reports at the time indicated he choked on an eyedrop bottle cap in his room at the Hotel Elysee in New York. The reports said he would routinely place the cap in his mouth, lean back, and place his eyedrops in each eye. The police report, however, suggested his use of drugs and alcohol contributed to his death. Prescription drugs, including barbiturates, were found in the room, and Williams’ gag response may have been diminished by the effects of drugs and alcohol.

Suggested Further Readings:

For a more intimate look at Williams, click “More” below.
pajama
Here’s a rare find. Original PAJAMA (Paul Cadmus, Jared French, Margaret French) vintage gelatin silver print by Jared French (1905-1987) from the collection of Paul Cadmus.

A rare image of a nude Tennessee Williams (lower right) and Donald Windham to (upper left) dated 1943.

2 Comments | posted in Gay Icon, History

March 24, 2011

F. Holland Day: 1864-1933

By Joe

day-youthstoneThe extremely controversial F. Holland Day is all but forgotten today as his fin de siécle images of young nude men—like the one pictured here— were eclipsed by rivals such as Alfred Steigltiz and other moderns. An American, he was the first in the U.S.A. to advocate that photography should be considered a fine art.
Day spent much time among poor immigrant children in Boston, tutoring them in reading and mentoring them. One in particular, the 13-year-old Lebanese immigrant Kahlil Gibran, went on to fame as the author of The Prophet.
day (1)Fred Holland Day was a wealthy eccentric and philanthropist from Massachusetts. As partner in the publishing firm Copeland and Day, which he founded in 1884, Day indulged his passion for English literature, publishing exquisite small-edition, hand-bound volumes by the likes of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Day’s friend Oscar Wilde. Although Copeland and Day published ninety-eight books and periodicals, the firm was never financially successful.
Day began to photograph in 1886; and he wrote extensively about photography’s position as a fine art and organized international photography exhibitions to further his claim. He asked: “And if it chance that [a] picture is beautiful, by what name shall we call it? Shall we say that it is not a work of art, because our vocabulary calls it a photograph?”
fhdnudeFrederick Holland Day’s photographs of the male body concentrated on mythological and religious subject matter. In these photographs he tried to reveal a transcendence of spirit through an aesthetic vision of androgynous physical perfection. He reveled in the sensuous hedonistic beauty of what he saw as the perfection of the youthful male body. In the photograph “St. Sebastian,” for example, the young male body is presented for our gaze in the combined ecstasy and agony of suffering. In his mythological photographs Holland Day used the idealism of Ancient Greece as the basis for his directed and staged images. These are not the bodies of muscular men but of youthful boys (ephebes) in their adolescence; they seem to have an ambiguous sexuality. F.-Holland-Day5The models genitalia are rarely shown and when they are, the penis is usually hidden in dark shadow, imbuing the photographs with a sexual mystery. The images are suffused with an erotic beauty of the male body never seen before, a photographic reflection of a seductive utopian beauty seen through the desiring eye of a homosexual photographer.
His style was Pictorialist, and he favored platinum prints, which are distinguished by their fine detail and ability to render a full range of soft tones. He lost interest in photography when a shortage of platinum during World War I made printing prohibitively expensive and eventually impossible. He died twenty years later, in relative obscurity.
Day

3 Comments | posted in Art, Gay Icon, History, Nudity

March 18, 2011

David Hockney’s "Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from C P Cavafy"

By Joe

Two Young Men, 23 to 24 Years Old
Bild 047He’d been sitting in the café since ten-thirty
expecting him to turn up any minute.
Midnight went by, and he was still waiting for him.
It was now after one-thirty, and the café was almost deserted.
He’d grown tired of reading newspapers
mechanically. Of his three lonely shillings
only one was left: waiting that long,
he’d spent the others on coffees and brandy.
He’d smoked all his cigarettes.
So much waiting had worn him out. Because
alone like that for so many hours,
he’d also begun to have disturbing thoughts
about the immoral life he was living.
But when he saw his friend come in—
weariness, boredom, thoughts vanished at once.
His friend brought unexpected news.
He’d won sixty pounds playing cards.
Their good looks, their exquisite youthfulness,
the sensitive love they shared
were refreshed, livened, invigorated
by the sixty pounds from the card table.
Now all joy and vitality, feeling and charm,
they went—not to the homes of their respectable families
(where they were no longer wanted anyway)—
they went to a familiar and very special
house of debauchery, and they asked for a bedroom
and expensive drinks, and they drank again.
And when the expensive drinks were finished
and it was close to four in the morning,
happy, they gave themselves to love.

Following the Recipe of Ancient Greco-Syrian Magicians
Bild 051Said an aesthete: “What distillation from magic herbs
can I find—what distillation, following the recipe
of ancient Greco-Syrian magicians—
that will bring back to me for one day (if its power
doesn’t last longer) or even for a few hours,
my twenty-third year,
bring back to me my friend of twenty-two,
his beauty, his love.
What distillation, following the recipe
of ancient Greco-Syrian magicians, can be found
to bring back also—as part of this return of things past—
even the little room we shared.”

In an Old Book
Bild 052Forgotten between the leaves of an old book—
almost a hundred years old—
I found an unsigned watercolor.
It must have been the work of a powerful artist.
Its title: “Representation of Love.”
“…love of extreme sensualists” would have been more to the point.
Because it became clear as you looked at the work
(it was easy to see what the artist had in mind)
that the young man in the painting
was not designated for those
who love in ways that are more or less healthy,
inside the bounds of what is clearly permissible—
with his deep chestnut eyes,
the rare beauty of his face,
the beauty of anomalous charm,
with those ideal lips that bring
sensual delight to the body loved,
those ideal limbs shaped for beds
that common morality calls shameless.

In the Boring Village
DavidHockney_InTheDullVillage_LGIn the boring village where he works—
clerk in a textile shop, very young—
and where he’s waiting out the two or three months ahead,
another two or three months until business falls off
so he can leave for the city and plunge headlong
into its action, its entertainment;
in the boring village where he’s waiting out the time—
he goes to bed tonight full of sexual longing,
all his youth on fire with the body’s passion,
his lovely youth given over to a fine intensity.
And in his sleep pleasure comes to him;
in his sleep he sees and has the figure, the flesh he longed for…

Their Beginning
hockn_beginningTheir illicit pleasure has been fulfilled.
They get up and dress quickly, without a word.
They come out of the house separately, furtively;
and as they move along the street a bit unsettled,
it seems they sense that something about them betrays
what kind of bed they’ve just been lying on.
But what profit for the life of the artist:
tomorrow, the day after, or years later, he’ll give voice
to the strong lines that had their beginning here.

One Night
P1188The room was cheap and sordid,
hidden above the suspect taverna.
From the window you could see the alley,
dirty and narrow. From below
came the voices of workmen
playing cards, enjoying themselves.
And there on that common, humble bed
I had love’s body, had those intoxicating lips,
red and sensual,
red lips of such intoxication
that now as I write, after so many years,
in my lonely house, I’m drunk with passion again.

In Despair
P1189He lost him completely. And he now tries to find
his lips in the lips of each new lover,
he tries in the union with each new lover
to convince himself that it’s the same young man,
that it’s to him he gives himself.
He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
He wanted, his lover said, to save himself
from the tainted, unhealthy form of sexual pleasure,
the tainted, shameful form of sexual pleasure.
There was still time, he said, to save himself.
He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
Through fantasy, through hallucination,
he tries to find his lips in the lips of other young men,
he longs to feel his kind of love once more.

David Hockney has enjoyed international fame ever since the early 1960s. He began his artistic training in 1953 to 1957 at the Bradford College of Art and continued studying at the Royal College of Art in London from 1959 to 1962. He exhibited his first works in 1960 and participated in the exhibition of the ‘London Group 1960’ in 1960 and was also presented for the first time with the ‘Young Contemporaries’ at the R.B.A. Galleries in London. He was awarded the Royal College Drawing Prize in the year he graduated. Hockney began working on his first engraved cycle ‘A Rake’s Progress’ as early as in 1961 – it was published in 1963. Hockney traveled to New York, Berlin and Egypt after having finished his studies, in order to find ideas for his illustrations. His friend, Henry Geldzahler, the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, encouraged him to move to Los Angeles in 1964. Hockney was offered a teaching post at the University of Iowa in the summer of the same year. His first one-man exhibition in the USA was successfully opened in the same year at the Alan Gallery in New York. He had other teaching posts until 1967 at the University of Colorado in Boulder, in Los Angeles and in Berkeley.
Hockney came across the Greek poet Konstantinos Kavafis, also called Cafavy, as early as in his studies. He was fascinated by Cafavy’s clear and unpretentious way of writing about homosexuality. Thus the idea for a cycle of etchings was born, which was, however, not solely due to his fascination for the Greek poet, but also because of his basic desire to create literature etchings. The project was not put into practice before 1966, as the translation of the poems which was in existence then could not be used for legal reasons. This is why Hockney decided to entrust his friend Stephen Spender, an English poet, and his colleague Nikos Stangos with a new translation of the poems. The project was completed in just 6 months. In general, the works of the cycle were not intended to be exact illustrations of the poem, but rather visual interpretations of Cafy’s poetry.
Hockney accepted a post as a guest professor at the Kunsthochschule in Hamburg in 1969. His international fame increased with his invitations to exhibit at the documenta 4 and 6 in Kassel in 1968 and 1977. He made numerous stage stets for ballets and operas by Mozart, Strawinsky, Wagner and Strauss from the mid 1970s to the 1990s. In 1982 Hockney began making Polaroid collages in a Cubist manner. He also began making color-copy prints, abstract computer graphics and fax drawings at the end of the 1980s. Hockney is often associated with Pop-Art, but he refuses to accept this labeling of his art.
Sources:

I only used seven of the fourteen poems featured in Hockney’s work, but these were the seven I found most intriguing. Each of the above poems were translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard.  In Hockey’s book, they were translated by Stephen Spender and Nikos Stangos.

Leave a comment | posted in Art, History, Poetry