A horrifying prospect

As I am preparing for my parents' upcoming visit (after our actual Christmas, which will be spent elsewhere), I keep remembering this exchange I had with my mother when I was six or seven.

Me: "Why are you cleaning more than usual? Don't you want Tutu and Grandad to get a picture of how we normally live?"

My mother, RIGHTFULLY AGHAST: "Honey. No. No!!"

Poor Mom.

( Whisperspace )

Lydia Davis on historical nuance

But to take up another part of your answer, the history of Mussolini’s reception in the U.K. and particularly in Scotland, it seems to me vital to keep nuancing, and when necessary denying, our oversimplified conceptions of historical events and periods. We do tend to reduce figures as immensely important as Winston Churchill almost to caricatures, rather than seeing them clearly as fallible individuals acting with great vision at certain times and quite wrongheadedly at others. What is so vital about reimagining all this in fictional terms, as you have done in The Emperor of Ice-Cream, is that only through fiction can we more completely reenter a historical period, with full empathy, rather than with merely intellectual appreciation.

—Lydia Davis, in a Conversation with Dann Gunn about Samuel Beckett, translation and transliteration, historicity in fiction, and much more (emphasis added).

This pursuit of empathic nuance is something I think about a lot while writing, both from a historical-fiction perspective as Gunn and Davis are discussing, and also from a more general perspective that considers the way personal, embodied individuality intersects with–or creates uncomfortable friction with–political stances; the way individual people are almost always conflicted, fallible and self-contradictory. It’s something I think is very, very tempting to oversimplify, in both fiction-writing and activist circles, as one searches for heroes, villains, or characters who are wholly sympathetic or unsympathetic.

Xenophobia in the leadup to WWI

"In Britain, too, intellectuals, writers, and artists of all kinds were banding together into a new defensive order. The irony is, that until that point, inclusion in the British cultural elite had demanded a demonstrable familiarity with the German greats: Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, Wagner, and the rest. Samuel Hines:

In the prom concerts, for example, before the War, Mondays were always all Wagner concerts. But in August of 1914 the prom programs were all revised and German music was replaced by English and French music. Wagner concerts were quietly dropped. Patriots may have been pleased, but nobody came to the concerts.

"The Times, October 1:

“A boycott of alien musicians: proposal to employ British artists only”

"German musicians and conductors with German names were banned. The conductor of the Torquay Symphony, whose name was Basil Hindenberg, changed his name in 1915 to Basil Cameron. This conductor had been born Basil Cameron, but in order to get a conducting job in England before the War he’d had to become Hindenberg."

—BBC Radio “Words for Battle”: Francine Stock begins her exploration of the culture of the Great War in 1914 with the mobilization of the word.

On the market for lesbian pulps

Lesbian pulps formed their own distinctive category within the wider medium, but the genre is not easy to define, nor are its borders obvious. For one, because sales figures are not readily available, it is impossible to pinpoint readership. This imprecision complicates the usual division made between the “lesbian-friendly” subgenre—around a dozen titles, subject to scholarly attention and frequent reprints by feminist presses—within the tawdry horde, written, it is claimed, “for men and by men” to fulfill straight men’s fantasies. For instance, Vin Packer’s (Marijane Meaker) 1952 effort for Fawcett Gold Medal, Spring Fire[,] is beloved in lesbian circles for its generally insightful and sympathetic portrayal of the vaguely butch-femme sorority romance between Mitch and Leda. Far from negotiating a secret path of veiled rebellion through what is commonly seen as a misogynistic and voyeuristic genre, though, Meaker’s book was an acknowledged superstar; apparently selling over one million copies, it—along with the 1950 bestseller, Women’s Barracks—kick-started Fawcett’s immediate foray into the genre. In short, it was not simply closeted lesbians in New Jersey purchasing the novels.

—Anastasia Jones, “Lesbian Pulp Novels, 1935-1965”

The whole blog post is interesting, but the bolded point in particular is something I haven’t really thought about before: that lesbian pulps written by lesbians were overall a minority within the genre, yet not necessarily a struggling or sidelined minority, even among the public at large (i.e. not just among queer readers or socially conscious readers). I find it vaguely encouraging that books about lesbians by actual lesbians–in a market that was essentially gender- and sexuality-blind, since female authors often wrote under male pen names and vice versa–were at least as popular if not more so than books about lesbians by men.

I stand by this 100%

I’m pretty much always looking to dress like a slutty lesbian version of my own grandmother.

—Me in January 2015, apparently

Love does not / make me gentle or kind

Up against another human being one’s own procedures take on definition.

———

Geryon was amazed at himself. He saw Herakles just about every day now.
The instant of nature
forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life
leaving behind just ghosts
rustling like an old map. He had nothing to say to anyone. He felt loose and shiny.
He burned in the presence of his mother.
I hardly know you anymore, she said leaning against the doorway of his room.
It had rained suddenly at suppertime,
now sunset was startling drops at the window. Stale peace of old bedtimes
filled the room. Love does not
make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other
from opposite shores of the light.
He was filling his pockets with money, keys, film. She tapped a cigarette
on the back of her hand.
I put some clean T-shirts in your top drawer this afternoon, she said.
Her voice drew a circle
around all the years he had spent in this room. Geryon glanced down.
This one is clean, he said,
it’s supposed to look this way. The T-shirt was ripped here and there.
GOD LOVES LOLA in red letters.
Glad she can’t see the back, he thought as he shrugged on his jacket and stuck
the camera in the pocket.
What time will you be home? she said. Not too late, he answered.
A pure bold longing to be gone filled him.
So Geryon what do you like about this guy Herakles can you tell me?
Can I tell you, thought Geryon.
Thousand things he could tell flowed over his mind. Herakles knows a lot
about art. We have good discussions.
She was looking not at him but past him as she stored the unlit cigarette
in her front shirt pocket.
“How does distance look?” is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless
within to the edge
of what can be loved. It depends on light. Light that for you? he said pulling
a book of matches
out of his jeans as he came toward her. No thanks dear. She was turning away.
I really should quit.

—Anne Carson, from Autobiography of Red, “IX. Space and Time”

Once having set up her idols

Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there. It was inevitable that she should accept any inconsistency and cruelty from her deity as all good worshippers do from theirs. All gods who receive homage are cruel. All gods dispense suffering without reason. Otherwise they would not be worshipped. Through indiscriminate suffering men know fear and fear is the most divine emotion. It is the stones for altars and the beginning of wisdom. Half gods are worshipped in wine and flowers. Real gods require blood.

—Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Let us pretend

Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is dispatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next.

—Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Suicides are always judged

For a suicidal person like Anne Sexton to have survived to the age of forty-five, seems to me an achievement, a triumph. Virginia Woolf, living to the age of fifty-nine, is even more extraordinary. Suicides are always judged as if they were admissions of defeat, but one can take the viewpoint that their having lived as long as they did is an accomplishment of a kind. Knowing herself suicidal as a very young girl, Virginia Woolf resisted—made heroic attempts to attach herself to the exterior world—as did Anne Sexton—as do we all. Why not concentrate on the successes, the small and large joys of these lives, the genuine artistic accomplishments? After all, anyone and everyone dies; the exact way can’t be very important.

—Joyce Carol Oates, from a journal entry

Yeah, this, for sure. There’s also the phenomenon whereby a life that ended in suicide (at whatever age) is portrayed in retrospect as nothing but angst and grief. Not only is the suicide viewed as an admission of defeat, but the whole life is collapsed into a cautionary tale seen through the filter of that defeatedness, and anything that doesn’t fit that model–any sense of humor, agency or times of stability or happiness the person may have had–are erased from their portrait.

In the case of Woolf specifically, I think we also need to consider the historical moment in which she–a self-described Sapphist with recurring bouts of mental illness, married to a Jewish man–chose to die. In March 1941 England was fresh from the sustained bombing raids of the three-month Battle of Britain, and the US was still nine months from joining the war. Hitler had planned to invade Britain in October 1940 and then pushed back the date until Spring 1941, and in March the threat of invasion still loomed. Woolf’s entire family and social circle would have been targeted for death camps on multiple counts, had such an invasion succeeded. And the city of London, one of the great loves of her life, was still in the midst of being ravaged by the Blitz. Despite how Woolf’s life and death have been cast in retrospect, one hardly needs to be “delicate” or “fragile” to succumb to fear or grief at such a moment–or to attempt, however desperately, to regain some fragment of agency in the face of such grim dangers.

My library

My library is an archive of longings.

—Susan Sontag, from As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980

Lord, when shall we be done changing?

This is a long letter, but you are not at all bound to answer it. Possibly, if you do answer it, and direct it to Herman Melville, you will missend it – for the very fingers that now guide this pen are not precisely the same that just took it up and put it on this paper. Lord, when shall we be done changing? Ah! it’s a long stage, and no inn in sight, and night coming, and the body cold. But with you for a passenger, I am content and can be happy. I shall leave the world, I feel, with more satisfaction for having come to know you. Knowing you persuades me more than the Bible of our immortality.

—Herman Melville to Nathaniel Hawthorne, November 17 (?), 1851

On Stracheyan passions

There is one criticism of my biography made by Leonard Woolf that I still don’t accept. ‘I do not think that he [Lytton] had any very strong passions or emotions,’ he wrote, ’… he was hardly ever completely serious when he had a pen in his hand, writing the tragedy or comedy of his perpetual love affairs to Maynard Keynes, James [Strachey], or me…’ […]

[But] In Lytton Strachey’s life, comedy and tragedy were not separated, nor does his sense of humour imply a lack of seriousness—indeed quite the contrary. Homosexuality was 'irrelevant’ to Leonard Woolf and, to my mind, he underrated its significance in releasing Strachey from lonely confinement in his own body. He also underrated the intensity and precariousness of Strachey’s passions during the long shadowy period of history that followed Wilde’s imprisonment.

—Michael Holroyd in dialogue with Leonard Woolf in the preface to Lytton Strachey: The New Biography

Holroyd’s careful attention to the ways in which humour and seriousness coexisted (and even intensified each other) in Strachey’s life is one of the things I really prize about this biography, and about Lytton as a character. Unpacking this question of how intensely he felt things, and the exact nature of the things that he intensely felt, is both tricky and fascinating given that his self-presentation was habitually both extremely hyperbolic and also in some ways oddly understated.

Me being me I tend to read a lot of this as a mechanism for covering a fundamental mismatch between innate character, self image, and available social categories—he was, for example, obsessed with love affairs, obsessed with the idea of being in sexual-romantic love; I can’t read his letters and come away in any doubt that he had genuine passion around the activity “having love affairs.” But a lot of the time, that genuine passion actually manifests more in his relationships with people other than the supposed love object. The love affair is still generating the passionate response, but sometimes it’s as if the passionate response is sort of… displaced, and experienced more in his interactions with people he thinks of as friends or rivals (though in point of fact he was often also sleeping with them, at least sporadically). I can see how that would read as cold or dispassionate, but I don’t think it was; I think it was more just a non-standard triangulation of love and desire and passionate interpersonal connection. And I suspect that some, at least, of the hyperbole in his manner was a mechanism that sort of… disguised the non-standard boundaries and manifestations of his passionate attachments.

In which Michael Holroyd tries to accept a drink

A number of people had disliked Lytton Strachey—Harold Nicholson for instance. I went to see him in his rooms at the Albany one evening. He was sitting in a chair when I entered, open-eyed and apparently examining me critically. He said nothing. I stood before him shuffling my feet, shifting my weight from one side to another, murmuring something about the uncontroversial weather. He continued to glare. Suddenly a sort of convulsion ran through him, and he blinked. ‘I’m afraid I’ve been asleep,’ he said. 'Would you like a drink?’ I said that I would. But the question was apparently to satisfy his curiosity rather than my thirst. We began to talk. Lytton, he told me, resembled a bearded and bitchy old woman, rude rather than witty in society, injecting with his unnaturally treble voice jets of stinging poison into otherwise convivial gatherings. After about a quarter of an hour he looked across at his own large empty glass, which stood on a table between us, and and asked: 'Another drink?’ Hesitantly I agreed. But once again he made no move, and since I could see no sign of a drink in the room, we went on talking. Ten minutes later his gaze again fell on the glass, this time with incredulity. 'Do you want another drink?’ His tone was so sharp I felt it prudent to refuse.

Next day I told this story to Duncan Grant. Without a word, he leapt up and poured me a strong gin and tonic. It was half past ten in the morning.

—Michael Holroyd, from the double preface to Lytton Strachey: The New Biography, on conducting research for the first volume of his book, in 1963 or 1964.

OH DUNCAN, basically, is my takeaway here.

Exchanging handwritten poems was a common practice

Exchanging handwritten poems was a common practice among respectable young women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The tradition began in part as an adaptation to the social stigma against published women authors. Women exchanged handwritten poems and copied friends’ compositions into their own commonplace books, so they could circulate their writings without offending propriety by having their writings appear in print. Friends valued these handwritten gifts for material and emotional reasons. […] Most of all, poems had value as gifts because they signaled emotional intimacy and trust between the giver and the getter. Poems symbolized a connection that ran deeper than superficial pleasantries.

Even copying out the work of a famous author for a friend was a sign of emotional intimacy. Choosing just the right lines required familiarity, a knowledge of poetry, and good taste. Writing personalized verses required something more—creativity, of course, but also the willingness to pin your heart on your sleeve. Fashionable ladies of the time might have breezily composed poems for each other without much effort. But the daughters of ordinary families in Massachusetts assigned a great deal of importance to the task. They wrote poems to amuse each other, but also to convey true sentiments and to establish lasting intimacies. To make the task easier, most aspiring poets chose to write in an established genre like the acrostic, where the first letter of each line spelled out a name. More confident poets wrote rebuses, or poems that contained secret messages to be decoded.

—Rachel Hope Cleves, Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

Sound familiar, fandom?

The closet as open secret in rural early America

Although it is often assumed that the “closet” is an opaque space, meaning that people who are in the closet keep others in total ignorance about their sexuality, often the closet is really an open secret. The ignorance that defines the closet is as likely to be a carefully constructed edifice as it is to be a total absence of knowledge. The closet depends on people strategically choosing to remain ignorant of inconvenient facts. In this light, Charity [Bryant] and Sylvia [Drake]’s acceptance within their [early 19th-century Vermont] town should be understood as the result of their success in persuading others to choose ignorance by not asking questions about their sexuality. No matter what the answer, the very act of being questioned would have damaged the women’s respectability.

The open closet is an especially critical strategy in small towns, where every person serves a role, and which would cease to function if all moral transgressors were ostracized. Small communities can maintain the fiction of ignorance in order to preserve social arrangements that work for the general benefit. Queer history has often focused on the modern city as the most potent site of gay liberation, since its anonymity and living arrangements for single people permitted same-sex-desiring men and women to form innovative communities. More recognition needs to be given to the distinctive opportunities that rural towns allowed for the expression of same-sex sexuality. For early American women in particular, the rural landscape rather than the city served as a critical milieu for establishing same-sex unions. Women of Charity and Sylvia’s [post-Revolutionary] generation spoke far more often of their desire to retire together to a little cottage in the countryside, than of their urge to move together to the city.

—Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

I would add that Cleves goes on to detail the ways in which becoming essential to the life of a small town also involved/involves a lot of sacrifice: basically Charity and Sylvia devoted their entire lives to pious public-spiritedness in exchange for a communal respect that never provided security equal to that of the most tenuous legal marriage. Nevertheless, I think these are interesting points.

And the construct of the open closet is a useful one even in more urban contexts—you get it, for example, when more Bohemian subsets of society within which people could be totally uncloseted (e.g. a Bloomsbury or a Silver Screen Hollywood) intersected with more mainstream culture where such things might be known or suspected but were not, by mutual consent, openly acknowledged.

Forgiveness for fornication in post-Revolutionary New England

Although women’s sexual behavior was carefully scrutinized in the honor culture [of late 18th- and early 19th-century New England], being the subject of sexual gossip did not necessarily leave a permanent disability. Women could regain their social standing with proper application. The records of the church Charity [Bryant] attended as a young woman are filled with evidence of premarital pregnancies. When parents who had conceived a child before marriage wanted their child to be baptized they first had to make a formal apology for fornication. This might appear to be evidence of a harsh social stigma, but it is really the opposite. The pattern of confession-baptism was so routine the the church records used the same stylized language to record the process each time. It is just what people did. They courted, had sex, got pregnant, got married, had children, confessed, and had their children baptized, in that order. […]

There was more trouble when girl became pregnant and the father did not marry her. But, again, there were routines for dealing with this common situation. The county courts routinely handled ‘prosecutions’ for fornication that were really glorified legal proceedings to secure child support. An unmarried mother would appear before the court, confess herself guilty of fornication, name the father, and the court would assign financial obligations to him. Sometimes the mothers were fined small amounts, but the proceedings were less about punishment than arranging matters to prevent an infant from becoming financially dependent on the town.

—Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

An interesting correction to the notion that pre- or extra-marital pregnancy and childbearing are a modern innovation that signals the unraveling of America’s moral fiber.

Evidence of lesbian ‘bosom sex’ practices

Evidence of lesbian ‘bosom sex’ practices in the early nineteenth century have been preserved in the rare correspondence of two African-American female lovers, schoolteacher Rebecca Primus and domestic servant Addie Brown. Separated by work, Brown wrote to Primus informing her that at the boarding school where Brown worked in service, several women sought to share her bed at night and fondle her breasts. Brown placated Primus that 'I shall try to keep your f[avored] one always for you,’ but added 'should in my excitement forget you will pardon me I know.’ When Primus apparently did not forgive her this excitement, but expressed jealousy over the thought of other women touching Brown’s breasts, Brown backtracked. In her next letter Brown promised that when she slept with another woman 'I can’t say that I injoyed it very much,’ and she denied recollecting what she had meant by the word 'excitement’ in her previous letter. The exchange paints a vivid picture of a self-consciously sexual culture of breast play among women educators and school workers in the antebellum era.

—Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

Still laughing over "and she denied recollecting what she had meant by the word 'excitement’ in her previous letter."

Brutality is often the other side of sentimentality

Nowhere did DiMaggio seem so gallant, or so tragic, as in the aftermath of Marilyn Monroe’s death, when he stepped in to take care of the details of the funeral, seeing that it was conducted in dignified privacy and arranging that fresh roses be sent to her crypt every two weeks ‘forever.’ At the time, I remarked on the impressiveness of this to Saul Bellow who knew Arthur Miller, who was Monroe’s husband after her divorce from DiMaggio. According to Bellow, Miller had said DiMaggio used to beat her up fairly regularly. 'You know,’ he added, 'brutality is often the other side of sentimentality.’

—Joseph Epstein, Masters of the Games: Essays and Stories on Sport

Sadly Epstein goes on to make excuses for DiMaggio’s abuse of Monroe (he only hit her occasionally! she said he did it “with reason”!), so I wouldn’t recommend this essay overall. But that last remark of Bellow’s really hit home for me. It is, isn’t it, the same kind of privileging of one’s own sentiment over other things or other people–I’m in love with her so I’ll make her (and everyone around me) feel it too; I’m angry with her so I’ll make her hurt too–that lies behind the grand gesture and the lashing-out. Things that smack of grand gestures almost always make me uncomfortable unless they’re very specific to, and in context of, the boundaries of a particular relationship, but I never really articulated why that was until now. There’s a certain entitlement about them–a certain claiming–that often sets off alarm bells for me.

Il y a des jours où la solitude

il y a des jours où la solitude, pour un être de mon âge, est un vin grisant qui vous saoule de liberté, et d’autres jours où c’est un tonique amer, et d’autres jours où c’est un poison qui vous jette la tête aux murs.

—Colette, La vagabonde

Female husbands in early America

The term ‘female husband’ first appeared in a late seventeenth-century humorous ballad about a hermaphrodite, raised as a woman, who impregnated a woman and then married her. The character of the female husband was popularized a century later in British novelist Henry Fielding’s true-crime pamphlet The Female Husband (1746), which related the picaresque adventures of female-bodied George/Mary Hamilton, who dressed as a man and married several women before his true identity was revealed. Fielding’s work launched a century of humorous writings about female-bodied cross-dressers who married women.

Female husbands were not merely figments of the imagination, dreamed up by satirists and pornographers. The term described a real, if incongruous, variety of gender and sexual expression familiar in North America as well as Great Britain. American newspapers in the late 1700s and early 1800s carried so many stories of female husbands that they became repetitious. In 1829 a Maine newspaper published a humorous anecdote in which a woman who sought a summons against her husband was asked by the judge, 'What, another female husband?’ Actually, she reassured the judge, her husband was just a bigamist. In general, the stories about female husbands, though sensational, did not treat their subjects as villains. The female husband’s escapades were disreputable but impressive. She personified admirable masculine qualities including mastery, courage, and initiative.

Charity [Bryant] shared these personality characteristics with the archetypal female husband, which made her appear appropriate to head the household. William Cullen Bryant wrote that his aunt was 'more enterprising and spirited in her temper’ than her companion, and thus naturally 'represent[ed] the male head of the family.’ [Neighbor] Hiram Hurlburt remembered how the first time that he entered the women’s shop, as a boy, Charity had pointed a finger at him and commanded, 'you will wait.’ She then put Hiram in his place by naming his family lineage, before permitting him to approach the cutting table. Charity’s demonstration of mastery led Hiram to conclude that it was 'perfectly proper’ for her to be 'the man.’ Since her youth, Charity had expressed a superior temperament that led her family to teasingly address her as 'your ladyship.’ After the move to Vermont, her domineering personality enabled her to transition from a lady to a female husband.

—Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

Well. This single passage manages to evoke pretty much the whole spectrum of my varied and incredibly tangled feelings about (a) the understandable but not exactly solidarity-building historical strategy of getting around male supremacy by assuming the overbearing and entitled attitudes typically associated with men, and thereby convincing male gatekeepers that you must be for real because you’re good at making other people feel inferior; and (b) the extent to which historical women expressing (traits generally associated with) masculinity could of course be doing so as an outgrowth of their own embodied/ensouled realities and self-concepts, an incredibly courageous and resourceful act—not to say that a woman going the (a) route wouldn’t also have to be pretty damn courageous and resourceful in her own right, however much her survival strategy also tended to participate in & reinforce the equation of “proper person in charge” with “being the man,” and thereby to throw more (quote-unquote) feminine women under the bus. Or the horse-cart, as the case may be.

(As an aside: these gender roles weren’t just in the eyes of the beholders; Charity and Sylvia were both pretty clear, if euphemistic, about identifying with the roles of husband and wife respectively, and split their worldly versus domestic spheres accordingly. Merchants settled debts with Charity, Sylvia was responsible for all the cooking and housework, Charity rode into town to dine with friends while Sylvia stayed home and did the Spring cleaning, the words they used for one another reflected the difference, etc. Which makes them, in one way, very predictable—this was the standard relationship model for two people in housekeeping together—and in another way interesting vis-à-vis later 20th century developments like butch/femme.)

Anyway! Picaresque adventures of 18th-century female husbands. Interesting stuff!

The treacherous clam that lurks within

Rejecting her sinful past could not preserve her from the danger of backsliding in the future, however. [Her companion] Sylvia [Drake]’s presence beside her every evening in bed over the next forty years presented temptations that were too powerful to overcome. Like many sinners who had been reborn, Charity [Bryant] struggled with her besetting sins for the rest of her days. In the final decade of her life, Charity wrote Sylvia a poem that described her private challenge. A person, she wrote, must fight:

… the secret cherished sin
The poison serpent’s tooth
The treacherous clam that lurks within
Destroying age + youth.

[…] The secret sin, in the language of the time, was a common euphemism for masturbation. Martin Luther himself had once called masturbation the secret sin. In the early nineteenth century, this corrupt practice or secret vice because an obsession within the American medical establishment. Leading doctors argued that masturbation was the primary cause of disease among American youth, leading to consumption, blindness, insanity, and even death. Notably, a close reading of anti-masturbation texts reveals that what early nineteenth-century doctors called masturbation among girls, we might call lesbian sex today. The secret vice, according to the authorities, was a sin that girls taught to each other and frequently practiced together for maximum titillation.

—Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

This is legitimately fascinating, and for my money this chapter dealing with Charity and Sylvia’s combination of Puritanical sexual guilt—they both accused themselves of sinfulness outside the common run of things—and genuine happy tenderness and sensuality toward one another, is one of the best and meatiest so far in this book…

… but I have to admit that I pretty much copied out this passage for the phrase the treacherous clam that lurks within I MEAN COME ON

FDR and the queers of the US Navy, Rhode Island

The [gang of] inverts [within the US Navy in 1919 Newport, Rhode Island] grouped themselves together as “queers” on the basis of their effeminate gender behavior, and they all played roles culturally defined as feminine in sexual contacts [sic]. But they distinguished among themselves on the basis of the “feminine” sexual behavior they preferred, categorizing themselves as “fairies” (also called cocksuckers), “pogues” (men who liked to be “browned,” or anally penetrated), and “two-way artists” (who enjoyed both). The ubiquity of these distinctions and their importance to personal self-identification cannot be overemphasized. Witnesses at the naval inquiries explicitly drew the distinctions as a matter of course and incorporated them into their descriptions of the gay subculture. One “pogue” who cooperated with the investigation, for instance, used such categories to label his friends in the gang with no prompting from the court: “Hughes said he was a pogue; Richard said he was a cocksucker; Fred Hoage said he was a two-way artist…” While there were some men about whom he “had to draw my own conclusions; they never said directly what they was or wasn’t,” his remarks make it clear he was sure they fit into one category or another.

A second group of sailors who engaged in homosexual relations and participated in the group life of the gang occupied a more ambiguous sexual category because they, unlike the queers, conformed to masculine gender norms. Some of them were heterosexually married. None of them behaved effeminately or took the “woman’s part” in sexual relations, they took no feminine nicknames, and they did not label themselves–nor were they labelled by others–as queer. Instead, gang members, who reproduced the highly gendered sexual relations of their culture, described the second group of men as playing the “husbands” to the “ladies” of the “inverted set.” Some husbands entered into steady, loving relationships with individual men known as queer; witnesses spoke of couples who took trips together and maintained monogamous relationships. […]

[T]he gang … helped men depart from the social roles ascribed to them as biological males by th[e] larger culture. Many of the “queers” interrogated by the navy recalled having felt effeminate or otherwise “different” most of their lives. But it was the existence of sexual subcultures–of which the gang was one–that provided them a means of structuring their vague feelings of sexual and gender difference into distinctive personal identities. Such groups facilitated people’s exploration and organization of their homosexuality by offering them support in the face of social opprobrium and providing them with guidelines for how to organize their feelings of difference into a particular social form of homosexuality, a coherent identity and way of life. The gang offered men a means of assuming social roles which they perceived to be more congruent with their inner natures than those prescribed by the dominant culture, and sometimes gave them remarkable strength to publicly defy social convention.

At the same time, the weight of social disapprobation led people within the gang to insist on a form of solidarity which required conformity to its own standards. To be accepted by the gang, for instance, one had to assume the role of pogue, fairy, two-way artist, or husband, and present oneself publicly in a manner consistent with that labelling. But some men appear to have maintained a critical perspective on the significance of the role for their personal identities. Even while assuming one role for the purpose of interaction with the gang, at least some continued to explore their sexual interests when the full range of those interests was not expressed in the norms of that role. Frederick Hoage, for instance, was known as a “brilliant woman” and a “French artist” (or “fairy”), but he was also reported surreptitiously to have tried to “brown” another member of the gang–behavior inappropriate to a “queer” as defined by the gang.

Gang members, who believed they could identify men as pogues or fairies even if the men themselves had not yet recognized their true natures, sometimes intervened to accelerate the process of self-discovery. The gang scrutinized newly arrived recruits at the Y.M.C.A. for likely sexual partners and “queers,” and at least one case is recorded of their approaching an effeminate but “straight”-identified man named Rogers in order to bring him out as a pogue. While he recalled always having been somewhat effeminate, after he joined the gang Rogers began using makeup “because the others did,” assumed the name “Kitty Gordon,” and developed a steady relationship with another man (his “husband”). What is striking to the contemporary reader is not only that gang members were so confident of their ability to detect Rogers’s homosexual interests that they were willing to intervene in the normal pattern of his life, but that they believed they could identify him so precisely as a “latent” (not their word) pogue.

—George Chauncey, Jr, “Christian Brotherhood or Sexual Perversion?: Homosexual Identities and the Construction of the Sexual Boundaries in the World War I Era” (from Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past). Bolding mine.

I was reminded the other day of the amazing 1919 US Navy sting operation in Newport, Rhode Island, in which then-secretary of the navy FDR, dismayed at his branch’s growing reputation as a bastion of male-on-male perversion, decided that the best way to clean things up and convince the US people of the eminent respectability of their armed forces was by recruiting a bunch of straight-identified servicemen to volunteer to go have sex with their fellow (queer-identified) sailors, and then testify in court about all the dirty details of what had happened.

What. Could possibly. Go wrong.

Putting aside how this whole boondoggle is one of my favorite episodes in the whole of US history, and that I kind of want to write a novel set during it, I find many of Chauncey’s points above independently fascinating. The bolded bit plays to my perpetual Achilles’ heel: the places where (sub)cultural identity categories, however useful they might be, break down. But Chauncey also points out how legitimately self-evident their own identity categories seemed to the Newport queers—and how socially useful they proved. Note, too, the early date of using the word “queer” as an apparently value-neutral term of self-identification. And what ISN’T fascinating about that last story, wherein Rogers the latent pogue is outed—apparently wildly successfully—and started on a new path by a group of total strangers?? How would Rogers’s life have gone differently, one wonders, if the gang had left him alone?

Life is walking tiptoe over landmines

Life is walking tiptoe over landmines. We never know what’s coming and, if you want my opinion, we don’t have a good grip on what’s behind us either. But we sure as hell can spin a story about it and break our brains trying to get it right.

—Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (narrator Harriet Burden)

My mother believed and I believe

My mother believed and I believe in really looking hard at things because, after a while, what you see isn’t at all what you thought you were seeing just a short time before. Looking at any person or object carefully means that it will become increasingly strange, and you will see more and more.

—Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (narrator Maisie Lord)

What is the memory of love?

I remember the afternoon I stroked your curls over and over when we were first in love. I remember lying with you in bed and feeling your fingers in my hair as you petted me for minutes on end and how lovely it felt, and I remember the daylight in the room, and I remember our love. What is the memory of love? Do we actually recall the feeling? No. We know it was there, but the manic desire isn’t there in the memory. What do we recollect exactly? The sensations are not reproduced. And yet, an emotional tone or color is evoked, something weightless or heavy, pleasant or unpleasant, and I can summon it. I remember lying in bed with Felix. But is it one time or is it many times merged together from the early days of our clutching love, when I ached for his touch? I know I held his head sometimes when we fucked. I know I put my lips to his ear afterward and whispered words long forgotten, probably stupid words. But do I really remember a single time, the once only? Yes, the Regina in Paris, with the uncomfortable beds we had to push together. Five stars and those beds. I think I remember the line of light between the heavy curtains as I sat on top of him, banging him. Long ago.

I remember coldness, too, his back to me. The distance between us, his eyes dead to me. I remember this: at a dinner. Where was it? The caustic joke about marriage, not ours, of course, but the institution in general. What were his words? I can’t remember. I recall I started, looked at him. In my mind I see a plate with a gold rim. He turned his head. Now it returns with the memory, pain, perhaps not as acute, but pain arrives with a recollection so vague it has almost disappeared—there was a joke, a plate, a look, and a cutting pain. Is pain more durable than joy, in memory?

—Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (narrator Harriet Burden)

We live inside our categories, Maisie

We live inside our categories, Maisie, and we believe in them, but they often get scrambled. The scrambling is what interests me. The mess.

—Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (narrator Maisie Lord, speaker Harriet Burden)

They live in us from the start

It should not be forgotten that Harry had been rewriting her own life in psychoanalysis for years, that what she called a slowly developing “revisionist text” of her life had begun to replace an earlier “mythical” one. People and events had taken on new significance for her. Her memories had changed. Harry had not recovered any dubious memories from her childhood, but on February 19, 2003, only a month before Beneath was shown, she told me that when she looked back on her life, vast stretches of it had vanished. With a little prompting, she could easily fill in those blanks with fictions. Weren’t most memories a form of fiction anyway? She remembered what I had forgotten, and I remembered what she had forgotten, and when we remembered the same story, didn’t we remember it differently? But neither of us was prevaricating. The scenes of the past were continually being shifted and reshuffled and seen again from the vantage point of the present, that’s all, and the changes take place without our awareness. Harry had reinterpreted any number of memories. Her whole life looked different.

And, Harry asked, where does it begin? The thoughts, words, joys, and fears of other people enter us and become ours. They live in us from the start.

—Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (narrator Rachel Briefman, best friend of Harriet Burden)

Death in fiction, queer and straight

This is hard for me to write. These words come hard to me; each one begins as a stone in my mouth. Harry’s pain arrived in bolts that made her limbs stiffen. We turned up the drip. She whimpered as she lay stiffly flat on her back, and she allowed me to stroke her head, her neck, and her shoulders. I’ll be good, she whispered. I promise to be good, Bruno. Don’t leave me. I’m afraid. I told her I wouldn’t leave her, and I didn’t. She left me. Her last word was no. She said it several times, and before she died, she rattled. The noise came from deep in her lungs, shuddering, dry, and loud, and we watched. Harry died at three o'clock in the afternoon on April 18, 2004, with the window wide open in the room so the spring air and sunlight could reach her face.

Damn you, Harry. Damn you, for leaving me too soon.

—Siri Hustvedt, The Blazing World (narrator Bruno Kleinfeld)

Here’s something that was eating at me a bit last night as I was sobbing through the last 40 pages or so of The Blazing World: while I’m as cranky as the next person about the prevalence of the ~Tragic Queer~ plotline and its (ab)use by lazy storytellers to generate cheap pathos, the problem with indiscriminately criticizing narratives where the queer person dies and advocating for “Happy queers! Happy queers all the time!” is that, you know, there are plenty of straight narratives that grapple with death, as well. It kind of tends to be a perpetual theme because of that whole issue where we’re all going to die one day and before we do we’re probably going to lose lots of people we love; and it’s down to us to somehow come to terms with that. Or not—there’s no guarantee that we will achieve that peace; as Harry Burden demonstrates above, our last words, however horrific this might seem, can be I’m not finished, I’ll be good, no, no, no. But to claim it’s not a valid subject for queer art, to say that we as queer folks shouldn’t try to take this issue on because a bunch of straight people over the years have used us as token symbols of tragedy to make a quick buck and turn a quick tear, is to deprive ourselves of one of the Big Tough Issues that writers and artists have been dueling with from time immemorial. Not to mention, to look down one’s nose at queer art that grapples with death is to deny the subset of artists who happen to be queer, the outlet for trying to process real-life brushes with death of a loved one.

So, like: big-budget motion picture featuring a single queer character who dies three-quarters of the way through in order to further the emotional arc of one of the straight folks? I am totally on board that that is shabby. Narrative or adapted narrative originally created by a queer person, dealing comprehensively with the subject of death in order to process loss or come to terms with the inevitability of mortality in this world? Probably not something worthy of snarky dismissal. Especially considering the plethora of incredibly thoughtful, affecting, brutally honest and uncompromising straight narratives that grapple with this exact same theme.

"Mannish" women in post-Revolutionary New England

Although social sanction [around romantic friendships between unmarried women] made it easy for her to enter into intense friendships with the women she met while teaching, something about Charity troubled onlookers as those intimacies developed. Within months of her arrival in each town where she taught, Charity became the subject of vicious gossip.

The rumors about Charity likely concerned her sexual propriety. [… They] appear to have been tied to Charity’s masculine demeanor and her relationships with other women Far from a coquette, Charity dressed with a notable lack of adornment and avoided superficial chatter. Her appearance struck some who knew her as mannish. She did not wear her hair short or have her garments tailored like a man’s, as the independently wealthy Anne Lister did. Charity strove to preserve the feminine respectability that secured her teaching positions, but she still managed to convey a certain masculinity. [Her friend] Lydia commented more than once on Charity’s resemblance to her brother Peter both in “countenance” and “motions.”

Eighteenth-century culture regarded masculine women with deep suspicion. Social critics often attacked outspoken women as mannish in order to silence them. English satirists depicted American “daughters of liberty” during the Revolutionary era as mannish-looking. […] Underlying this hostility was the strong association between female masculinity and lesbianism, although eighteenth-century writers would not have used this term. Instead they might refer to sex between women as “tribadism,” another classically derived term, directed against mannish women, who supposedly used their oversized clitorises to rub against, or even penetrate other women. A woman who cultivated her masculine charms could be seen as hoping to attract a female lover. […]

Charity’s emerging identity as a single woman tipped the scales against her. Like mannish women, spinsters were objects of derision in eighteenth-century America, especially in family-oriented New England. As Charity advanced through her early twenties without entering into courtships with men, her single status became more notable. Again, she stood at the vanguard of a tremendous shift in American culture. During the colonial period, no more than 2 or 3 percent of women remained unmarried for life, but after the Revolution an increasing number of women, like Charity, began to choose singlehood in order to preserve their autonomy. As rates of female singlehood surpassed 10 percent in the antebellum era, new suspicions about spinsters emerged, including a recognition of their affinity to lesbians.

—Rachel Hope Cleves, Charity & Sylvia: A Same-sex Marriage in Early America

Excuse the long quote, but I find a LOT of this to be of interest and/or good reminders about late 18th and early 19th conceptions of female/female romanticism and eroticism, to wit:

• Lady/lady romantic love and “carnal encounters” were, contrary to a lot of received modern notions, an acknowledged possibility at this time—one which ministers and other authority figures warned against, and which became a source of anxiety and vicious gossip when it was suspected (and which was also used as a weapon against non-conforming women of all descriptions).



• While the obsession with romantic friendships within the culture of sensibility did provide a context for the expression of same-sex attraction, romantic friendships were only viewed as socially acceptable as long as they were seen as instrumental to, rather than interfering with, marriage prospects (see the increasing suspicion directed at Charity the older she got while remaining unmarried and unreceptive to courting).



• Perceived “mannishness,” even in the absence of obvious outward signifiers, could cast a suspicious light on behavior that might, on its own, be viewed as socially acceptable.



• Those statistics on the shift in numbers of women choosing to remain unmarried after the American Revolution are fascinating!

(Note from 2018: FYI for my queer history peeps, there's a TON more in the Charity & Sylvia tag on my journal, including an overall rec of the book if you're interested.)

On Rachel Hope Cleves's Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America

Well! I just finished Rachel Hope Cleves’s Charity & Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America: an in-the-weeds, everyperson history of two regular New England women in a small town in post-Revolutionary Vermont, who entered into a marriage with one another and remained committed (and respected/acknowledged by their townspeople, including being close friends with a series of ministers) for over forty years, until they were separated by death. For those just joining me, particularly insightful or intriguing passages are blogged over here. Despite some occasional clunkiness in the writing I’d definitely recommend it to folks who are interested in queer female history, especially since there’s so little acknowledgment that 19th-century American women ever conceptualized their relationships as erotic, however romantic they might undeniably be.

Cleves’s biggest strengths, I think, are:

(1) Contextualizing Charity and Sylvia’s actions, relationship and correspondence within a historical framework (she does a lot of close-reading of Biblical references in their poems and letters that would otherwise have been totally inaccessible to me, and she makes nuanced arguments about the women’s delicate relationship with the townspeople, and their establishment of respectable reputations), and

(2) Grappling with, rather than collapsing or simplifying, the womens’ own conflicted relationship with their sexualities and spiritualities. Both Charity and Sylvia wrote a lot, and in relatively blatant sexualized terms, about what terrible sinners they were, and how their sins brought poor health on them and those they loved; they suffered substantial guilt about their union yet stayed together, committed to one another. Cleves doesn’t shy away from this; doesn’t paint Sylvia and Charity as anachronistically “liberated” modern-day women. But she also brings in an important counterpoint:

While the women’s religious writings capture their feelings of sexual guilt, their lifetime of bed-sharing suggests the positive attachment they felt toward physical intimacy. The history of same-sex sexuality has been overdetermined by the selective evidence available for its study. Reliant on religious doctrines, court records, and psychological theories, the history of same-sex sexuality is often framed around the poles of oppression and resistance. the missing evidence of pleasure must be supplied by the imagination. Enjoyment of each other was the daily glue that bound Charity and Sylvia despite their intermittent episodes of self-recrimination.

I think this chapter (”Wild Affections”), and the one dealing with religion (”Stand Fast in One Spirit”) were particularly good and nuanced in their analysis. In between them, “Miss Bryant Was the Man” was also extremely thought-provoking vis-à-vis gender roles and gender expression in very early America.

The book suffers a bit from “every chapter was originally presented independently as a paper at a separate conference” syndrome, and for a reader starting out receptive to Cleves’s overarching thesis—that both the women involved in the relationship and their community recognized Sylvia and Charity’s bond as a marriage, effectively proving that same-sex marriage of a sort existed in the US since its very earliest generations and is not therefore a brand-spankin’-new innovation as its detractors would claim—her points can sometimes seem a bit belabored. I’m sure there are plenty of folks who need convincing, though, and I certainly appreciate the existence of books that do that work. All in all a fascinating history, and one that fills a niche sorely in need of further exploration.