Hidden History: Reading Roundup #1

Hidden History is my new Monday afternoon column for The New Gay. Each week, I’ll cover a different nook or cranny in the gay and lesbian past.

Partway through writing my Hidden History column this week about gay Howard University professor Alain Locke and his influence on the Harlem Renaissance, I realized that I wasn’t doing the depth and complexity of the subject justice. I love writing these posts, but this is also the first time I’ve tried to write a weekly column. The pace is a bit much for me some weeks, and Mr. Locke will have to wait until next Monday.

What, I asked myself, could I use to fill in? I didn’t have time to begin research on a different topic, but I did want something history-related. A few readers have mentioned to me that they have liked the book recommendations with which I’m constantly burdening the comments sections on TNG. And I do read a lot of history books.

A ray of divine light came down and struck me. (Okay, maybe not divine, considering the book on hustlers I’m about to talk to you about.) What about a reading roundup, where I can talk about some of the gay books I’ve recently been reading and how they relate to our collective history?

And hence, the reading roundup is born. If anyone likes it, I’ll keep it as an occasional Hidden History special feature. All of the books are in print; if you’re intrigued by any of them, they are not hard to find.

So without further ado, you can click below the fold for brief discussions of a classic gay novel, a language poet’s book of essays, a wonderfully gossipy bio-history of mid-century gay liberation, and yes, the aforementioned history of hustling.

Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man (1964)

Ranked #33 on The Publishing Triangle’s list of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels, A Single Man could easily be higher. The plot is the simplest possible: a day in the life of George, a middle-aged, gay, college professor living in Los Angeles in the 1960s. From that slender framework, Isherwood crafts a series of extraordinarily observed scenes. Never in my reading experience have the slight details of daily life and thought received such careful attention. By setting up George’s life in the first few pages as boringly normal, Isherwood increases the power of every event that follows. Nothing out of the ordinary happens, but all these ordinary events are infused with beauty and melancholy. And in George’s angry revenge fantasies against oppressive homophobes, Isherwood sees the building rage in gay life that would lead to the increased visibility of the gay liberation movement at decade’s end.

A Single Man is going to be discussed by a local book club, Bookmen DC, on Wednesday, October 1st. Click the link to their website for more information about time/place.

Aaron Shurin, King of Shadows (2008)

Shurin is a respected West Coast language poet. His first published book, The Night Sun, came out from gay liberationist publishing company Gay Sunshine in 1976, and over thirty years later, he has released what I believe is his first book of essays. The poetic essays in King of Shadows cover a lot of territory, but the longest essays and the centerpieces of the book address Shurin’s development as a gay man. “King of Shadows” movingly recounts his participation in a high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, screwing up the courage to don ballet shoes in his role as Puck. “In the Bars of Heaven and Hell” does more in a few pages to show the paranoia of living as a gay man in the 1960s than any three more-traditional histories put together; its uplifting ending is earned.

James Sears, Behind the Mask of the Mattachine (2006)

If you’re going to read a history of the early days of gay organizing, though, you can't do much better than Behind the Mask of the Mattachine. At well over 500 pages, this is a sprawling epic of research into the earliest major and public gay rights group, The Mattachine Society. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), there’s so much gossip, in-fighting, back-biting, and general shitty behavior on the part of Mattachine participants that Sears’ retelling never becomes boring for a second. Sears, who has written multiple books about the history of gays and lesbians in the South, has here written a loose biography of Hal Call, the tremendously controversial organizer who wrested control of Mattachine from its early founders and proceeded to both take the group to new heights and drive it into the ground. Call is roundly despised in a number of other histories of the period, so Sears’ book is a welcome corrective: Call was an asshole, but a driven and productive one. Behind the Mask of the Mattachinealso illuminates how the arguments about homosexuality we’re having today are the same damned ones they were having 50 years ago. In that sense, it’s depressing as hell, but fascinating.

Mack Friedman, Strapped for Cash: A History of American Hustler Culture (2003)
Speaking of fascinating, this book comes out of left field. The silly and slightly misleading title and Alyson Books’ marketing campaign made Strapped for Cash sound like a sleazy romp. Instead, it’s a deeply researched and exhaustively footnoted history that is also a sleazy romp. I heard Friedman talk about this book at D.C.’s Goethe Institute shortly after it was released, and he obviously knows of what he speaks. He has done outreach work with gay and transgendered hustler populations, so he brings street knowledge along with his academic chops. Going as far back as early colonists trading sex to mercenary sailors in exchange for provisions in the early 1600s, Friedman shows the development of increasingly complex male hustler communities in major American cities. This is a brilliant and suggestive book on a topic that has received nowhere near enough research. Hidden history, indeed.

And yes, it is heavily illustrated.

For Hidden History, I’ll write more about pornographers and poets, furies and faggots, books and bootleggers, singers and scandals. If you’ve got suggestions about people, places, and ideas I should cover, particularly if they have a D.C. connection, shoot me an e-mail: philip@thenewgay.net.

Next week: D.C.’s very own Alain Locke and the Harlem Renaissance – I promise!