Saturday, November 30, 2024

A Queer Touch Across Time


Edward Carpenter and his lover George Merrill, ca. 1900


I've spent much of my life cruising the past--sifting through the ambiguous evidence that our kind was here long before any of us now living. Gaydar isn't just about what you pick up from the guy who's waiting next to you at the bus stop. It's about the diary that turns up in the personal effects of an uncle who lived decades earlier in Washington DC. The box of photographs from a small town in New Brunswick that a local man took of his lover in the 1920s. The unsent letter that somehow survived when the rest of the writer's correspondence was burnt.


As gay and bi men, we're used to looking for the evidence of one another's existence in subtle hints at the edge of things. Our greater visibility over the last generation or two hasn't really changed that. If we enjoy middle-class privilege in a tolerant bubble, we can more easily imagine that we don't still live our lives in the margins. But take your gay visibility 50 miles into the hinterlands, and find out whether you still feel safe. Take it to the Florida panhandle, or to the middle of Kansas. Or closer to home, to the wrong neighbourhood in your own city;  into the wrong bar; into the sanctuary of the wrong church. Try being an out man of colour in many communities of origin. And nearly anywhere, especially now, try being visibly trans.


So much has changed over the last fifty years; yet in some ways, in some places, very little. The freedoms we've won are now once again at risk, as the forces of Christian nationalism and social reaction stand ready to be unleashed by the deceptive charlatan who will be sworn in as President of the United States in less than two months.


On that upbeat note: generation after generation, we've survived and found each other--and found our ancestors-of-choice--by being, necessarily, amateur archivists, scanning for the traces that tell us, as gay photographer Robert Giard put it in his preface to Particular Voices, "These people were here; like me, they lived and breathed." Those we encounter in such traces reply, "We were here; we existed. This is how we were." 





The phrase "queer touch across time" belongs to literary scholar and queer theorist Carolyn Dinshaw. I've been thinking about her formulation a lot this week. In connection with a diary like the one I mentioned above, published as Jeb and Dash: A Diary of Gay Life 1918-1945, edited by Ina Russell





In connection with the cache of photos that inspired the volume Len and Cub: A Queer History, by Meredith Batt and Dusty Green.





In connection especially with a wonderful two-part BBC television presentation from 2017, but which I only watched this week, Man in an Orange Shirt, whose plot is too complex to summarize here, but which turns entirely on the way that the material traces of an obscured past become the means of reconciliation, healing, and liberation for its characters. 





We have a right to a past we can live with--a past that makes sense of our present. We have a right to search out the queer ancestors who impart to our own lives the richness and depth that comes of knowing we have a history. And we must claim it for ourselves, cobbling it together from the fragments that survive, and energized by our desire.


Saturday, November 16, 2024

The Gay Faith of Anthony Oliveira, Once More

The fabulous author of Dayspring, as interviewed by Anthony Milton in Toronto Life:

You've written a gay love story about Christ and other biblical figures. Some people may get riled up about that. 

It's funny to imagine people being mad about any deptiction of a Christ who is loving. If there's anything worth saving about Christianity--and maybe there isn't--it's the idea that God was once a human being, and therefore there's nothing about us that is unworthy of love....

I want people to read this and say, "This is the Christ that I knew existed but that everyone has been hiding from me."

Sunday, November 10, 2024

The Queerest Book in the Bible

She's the foreign widow of a man who died, along with all the other men his family, as an economic refugee from his own country to hers. Only her mother-in-law, also widowed, is left. Once the famine back home is over, the mother-in-law will take her chances on returning to the town of her birth, hoping not to starve in destitution.  

But there's nothing left for the two women who married the deceased sons. One of the daughters-in-law does what's most likely to assure her own survival: she returns to her own family. But the other daughter-in-law refuses to leave the side of the older woman.

"Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people," says Ruth to her mother-in-law Naomi.


She braves the hostility of a country that has nothing but contempt for the place from which she comes. They arrive in Bethlehem and start scavenging for food. A wealthy landowner connected to Naomi by blood sees Ruth at the Iron Age equivalent of the food bank and turns out to be a decent mensch. Naomi and Ruth together hatch a plan that involves his seduction. (Yes, his seduction--I'm not going further into it now.) He marries Ruth, and she births a son.


Who turns out, the last verses of the book of Ruth tell us, to be the grandfather of King David. King David, the anointed of the Lord. King David, the offspring of a mixed bloodline: his great-grandmother an undesirable resident alien. King David, the ancestor of another well-known guy, who by ordinary appearances was the out-of-wedlock son of a pregnant teenager, who likewise was married by another decent mensch. 


Christian nationalists: put that on your plate and eat it. Steven Miller, to the head of the line, please.


But the story isn't just about welcoming the stranger--an impulse that was voted down by the American public this last Tuesday. It's also about the chosen bond between two women, which is stronger than any other in the story. When Ruth bears her son, the women of Bethlehem declare that "a son has been born to Naomi." Boaz is a sweet guy, but he's basically the donor dad in a queer family of choice.


Christian nationalists: put that on your plate too. Ron DeSantis, to the head of the line, please.


Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Saturday, November 2, 2024

The Handmaid's Tale, Coming Soon To You

This morning, the Editorial Board of the New York Times posted the following to the paper's webpage. 

"You already know Donald Trump. He is unfit to lead. Watch him. Listen to those who know him best. He tried to subvert an election and remains a threat to democracy. He helped overturn Roe, with terrible consequences. Mr. Trump's corruption and lawlessness go beyond elections: it's his whole ethos. He lies without limit. If he's re-elected, the G.O.P. won't restrain him. 

"Mr. Trump will use the government to go after opponents, He will pursue a cruel policy of mass deportations. He will wreak havoc on the poor, the middle class and employers. Another Trump term will damage the climate, shatter alliances and strengthen autocrats. Americans should demand better. Vote."

What needs to be added here, on a blog about queer men's journey toward a freer, fuller life: he will empower every right-wing Christian nationalist who praises him as God's Anointed. What he did to women's control of their own bodies by appointing three right-wing hacks to the Supreme Court, he will do as well to sexual and erotic freedom, with vindictive heartlessness. 

So once again: for your own sake, for freedom's sake, for all our sakes. VOTE.


The Golden Calf, courtesy of the progressive Christian group Faithful America