The Letters of Thom Gunn

Whatever possessed me to read more than 600 pages of letters penned by a poet?  I rarely even glance at the poetry The New Yorker publishes every week.

Well, to start with I definitely would have cruised Thom Gunn if I'd seen him standing under that truck route sign and he wrote poems about AIDS, notably "The Man With Night Sweats," which I do recall permeating my philistine consciousness favorably at some point in the 1990s, because it seemed tragically straightforward and resonant.  The contours of his life also intrigued me:  born in England, educated at Cambridge, expatriated to California, lived in Haight Ashbury during the period when San Francisco became the gay Mecca AND remained HIV negative.

There also was the fact that he was a generation older, and I've always been intrigued by writers--Philip Roth especially comes to mind--whose work can function as a guidepost about what lies ahead.

The news isn't good.

Well, how about this for resolutions?  No more speed after the age of 70, no more alcohol after 75, no more sex after 80 (probably not much more available at that age anyway), and die at 85, the last years being full of really good meals and lots of jokes. (February 17, 1997)

In reality, Gunn only made it to age 74.  He overdosed on a recreational drug cocktail, including crystal meth, not long after he and his speed freak "boyfriend," three decades his junior, broke up.  His family of friends, including Mike Kitay whom he identified as life partner, all hated the guy.  Several of them lived together with Gunn and Kitay (who had separate bedrooms) in an unconventional arrangement that reminded me of a share house in the Pines, so it must have been awful for them to witness the behavior of their aimless friend.

I got bored with the gym; and I start drinking cheap wine in the afternoon. (But somehow, I’m not really a lush, probably because it is such BAD wine.  My wants are very few:  drink, drugs, a mad biker with an imaginative cock and an infinitely hungry hole, a loving family, and a fairly warm climate.  Very Horatian.

Throughout, Gunn is completely forthright about his fondness for both drugs (he makes a pretty strong case for acid enhancing his verbal imagery) and sex, although the fact he supported the speed freak suggests that something more than gerontophilia--a life preserver in Gunn's later years--was at play.  His relative fame no doubt worked in his favor, too, even if "hunky poet" seems like an oxymoron. 

It's difficult not to connect Gunn's insatiable hunger for intoxication to the trauma he and his brother Ander, a beloved, lifelong correspondent, suffered as teen agers when their mother killed herself.  Shortly before his death, Gunn published "The Gas Poker," which refers to the tool she used.  It's no wonder he, who dishes constantly in these letters about poets living and dead, rarely has a negative word to say about Ted Hughes, similarly abandoned as a result of Sylvia Plath's suicide by the same means, even though the fellow Brit achieved greater rewnown.

Shop talk and the rhythms of an academic year characterize many of the letters; included among the correspondents are August Kleinzahler, a neighbor, and Clive Wilmer, two of the men who put the book together (along with Gunn biographer Michael Nott), which clearly was an act of love and deep respect.  For a man who endured more than his share of tragedy, he remains surprisingly upbeat, even comic when writing to his many friends, relatives and colleagues.

Susan Sontag has to KISS me—why? . . . I hate kissing people when I’m not horny.  I think it’s an irritating habit of elderly New Yorkers, much preferring a Prussian-type handshake myself, or even a stoned and nonchalant wave of the hand.  Hi there, stud, I’d sooner say to SS. (October 4, 1996)

That said, I much preferred his "pen pal" missives to gay men like New Yorker Billy Lux in which we discover that Gunn and Janis Joplin shared the same tattooist, although he got his body (right forearm) inked six years earlier than she.  Gunn's love for novels, both classic and contemporary, and pop culture, particularly his sympatico musical taste, surprised and kept me reading longer than I might have otherwise.  He sounds like a good hang.

AIDS first rears its ugly head in May 1983, when Gunn was 53.  Although he loses many close friends, he also develops a surprising perspective, perhaps due to his age.

“But I do think we—our generation on, that is—have had it unnaturally easy for most of our lives.  ALWAYS people have experienced lots of death near at hand until the discovery of antibiotics in WWII—my parents had school friends die, one of my mother’s sisters died of TB while young, both my grandmothers died before I was born.  But WE knew hardly anyone dying—if they died, it was of old age or through accident—so we forgot that if we were born to seek out happiness we were also born subject to disease.  I’m getting sententious, aren't  I?  But it has taken AIDS to remind us of what ever previous generation was familiar with, and to be aware that if we personally live to an advanced age, we shall be out there alone and in the cold.” (September 26, 1994)

Both the literary and academic domains must have been fairly forgiving of homosexuality even in Gunn's youth.  But he defended himself like a warrior when his preferred tribe--leather men--came under attack from Gregory Woods, a fellow poet. 

 

What I quarrel with chiefly is the way you have read my (sexual and some other) poetry as pretty well exclusively sadomasochistic in content or implied content.  To do so you can argue from only two poems:  one, "The Beaters," an early and bombastic poem in which I was rather childishly trying to shock, and two, "The Menace" . . . What I was trying to do in this second poem was to release leather bars from the rather crude assumptions made about them by straight people, newspapers and gays who either have never been in one or have only gone to one to find in it what they expect . . . 

However, you do at least, so far, have the justification that these two poems are about the subjects you say they are about.  The connection between yr (sic) examination of them and the rest of your argument seems to be found in the following remark: 'In the semiotics of cruising, black leather signals a greater or less interest in sadomasochism'. Having said this, you on to find sadomasochism in every poem in which a soldier or a motorcyclist figures.  Surely you must know how questionable your generalisation actually is; but even if it were true, the semiotics of cruising is not the same as the semiotics of poetry--at least I hope they aren't.  I have in fact said something in my prose about possible significance of the soldiers and bikers in my work, and I am really made sad to think of their being seen one and all as sexual sadists. (It might help you to remember that the movie 'The Wild One' came out at the same time as I wrote 'On the Move': I wonder if you are prepared to take this as being a sadomasochistic film?)

Having established your generalisation, you then go on to take poems that are not sexual in content or implication and interpret them as sexual poems, and to take sexual poems and interpret them as sadomasochistic poems.  Many of your readings completely astonish me: e.g. snow in one poem and distant smoke in another become semen for you; you see the Unsettled Motorcyclist making an 'anal' descent into the earth; and the poor wolf-boy becomes a 'catamite' at the end of his poem, the blood on his paws becoming the blood from where he has scratched his lover's body (ugh).  Come on now:  he drops on four feet because he has turned into a wolf, and his paws (only the back ones, I guess) are bleeding because he has been running barefoot through the stubble (the wound he receives in the one life carries through into the other). He has no lover in the poem; it wd (sic) be a much happier poem if he had.  But to understand this poem--or, I wd (sic) say, most poetry--you must possess a firm trust in the literal meaning of language.  If you can grasp the the literal situation, then my hope is that you might be able to apply it to other similar situations--even though they are not in the poem and the application is your work and not the author's.  Thus, the wolf-boy's situation fully grasped might be seen to apply to that of anyone else leading a double life--maybe sexually divided, or divided in other ways. (October 2, 1982)

What makes this rebuttal even more fascinating is the fact that Woods himself is a friend of Dorothy, who began chairing the Gay and Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University 16 years later!  Gunn's insistence that "you must possess a firm trust in the literal meaning of language" to understand poetry exposes what I always found to be most frustrating aspect of my college education:  hearing a professor's fanciful interpretation of art, literature or music and wondering WTF?!?  Where did that come from?

To be fair, Gunn's occasionally alienating fearlessness--"The Beater" above alludes to a dandy's "swastika-draped bed" and he included a series of poems written from the perspective of Jeffrey Dahmer in Boss Cupid, his final collection--isn't for the fainthearted but it's also the mindset that enabled him to tackle AIDS in way that particularized both its horror and the simple humanity of its victims.  

While the end of Gunn's life seems profoundly sad--retirement from writing and teaching clearly didn't suit him--his zest for life remained constant as did his crush on Keanu Reeves.  After celebrating his 64th birthday with a five-way he wrote: 

Age is apparently exactly like youth.  How reassuring.  (September 3, 1993)

As someone about to turn 72, I'm less sanguine, although I do recognize the legitimacy of his observation: we remain who we always have been.  

 

Romantic Comedy (5+*)

 

It's as if Curtis Sittenfeld, one of my favorite contemporary authors, had plumbed the shallows of my mind to articulate exactly what I always had fantasized about in life but have never come close to achieving.

First. a dream job:  Sally Mintz, a career gal from the Midwest, writes for "The Night Owl," a weekly, late-night sketch comedy show with musical guests known by its acronym (TNO), just like its "live from New York" inspiration.  

Hearing the famous line never failed to release something in me, some ecstasy that was like lifting the tab on a soda can, or maybe like having an orgasm, or maybe like knowing I’d have an orgasm in the near future—some excitement and anticipation and nervousness and delight. The essential thing I’d failed to understand about TNO before working there was that, even though there were flubbed lines and late camera cuts and sketches that bombed, the live part wasn’t the show’s weakness; it was its strength. And really, so was the way all the preparation had to be crammed into a week. These were the things that made us inventive and wildly ambitious, that gave the show its unpredictability and intensity and magic.

Sally's ideas for internet dog searches are as amusing as anything I've ever seen on SNL but her humor, like her spiky personality, more typically has an edge.  When Noah Webster, a hunky singer/songwriter does double-duty as host and musical guest, Sally pitches a skit idea asking how come ordinary guys (i.e. not especially attractive) often manage to snare gorgeous female celebrities while the reverse almost never happens.  Turns out she's on a roll:  not only does the Lorne Michaels stand-in approve of the pitch, he chooses two of Sally's other ideas for the same show, too, a personal best, even though a last-minute complication forces the cancellation of "The Danny Horst Rule," named for her about-to-be-unlucky-in-love office mate.  My one brief bid at writing acclaim occurred in high school, during an enriched English class when Mr. LaGrone had been given us the highly unusual assignment of producing a satire on 1970 American life for the general assembly.  When I declared "Mom ran off with Colonel Sanders because he likes big breasts," it got the biggest laugh in spite of my shy delivery.

Second, insecurity:  During their very intense work week, Sally falls head-over-heels for Noah even though she so disdained "Making Love in July," his earliest, biggest hit that she's never paid much attention to his other work.  A divorced Indigo Girls-girl, she relies on a friend with benefits who sends her unsolicited dick pics to satisfy her physical needs. Unlike her male colleagues, Sally finds porn "narratively unsatisfying;" her week-long professional relationship with Noah is anything but. Sittenfeld steeps it in well-researched detail with a flair for eroticism that transcends mere heterosexual attraction.  But Sally constantly second-guesses her own appeal (she had me with a hamster tattoo anecdote), and ends up sabotaging a potential kiss at an after party with a snarky remark about Noah's reputed fondness for models. 

Third, being chosen:  If not for the pandemic, Sally no doubt would always remember Noah as the "one who got away."  But after a nasty bout with covid, he e-mails her out of the blue, initiating an intense correspondence/courtship from across the country.  

Obviously, endlessly emailing someone before meeting is a waste of time, but I do still wonder whether a person’s writing self is their realest self, their fakest self, or just a different self than their in-the-world self? Or maybe emailing with someone a lot before meeting is ill-advised not because the other person is real or fake but because there inevitably will be a discrepancy between your idea of them and the reality. 

If only I'd read that last sentence in 1996, when "Kill Barbie" and I met through Firefly, an internet community that brought people together based on their taste in music.  We bonded over the Pet Shop Boys and exchanged confessional e-mails at a rapid clip for a couple of months before business travel to south Florida gave us a chance to meet in person.  The venue he selected in South Beach was so dark and gloomy that it took no more than a glance at him sitting hunched over,  bearded at the bar, nursing a drink, to become a ghost (like I said earlier, shallow depths).  

Sittenfeld offers pretty persuasive evidence that a person's writing self actually is their best self.  Both Sally and Noah recall enough about each other that they have a jumping off point from which to build a virtual relationship that can survive the revelation of their vulnerabilities and mistakes  in a way that would be much more difficult face-to-face, or at least for two actual people not so talented as Sittenfeld in expressing themselves.  It's my favorite part of the book, a very meta expression of romance that could never work in a film or television adaptation because it's all happening in the characters' minds, with date and time stamps providing the only indication of the outside world.

Finally, a happy ending.  If the "IRL" final section is less convincing, it's not because Sittenfeld isn't hitting all the right notes in her set-up.  She again makes believable use of the pandemic, if one far removed from the experience of most people; in fact, she pretty much anticipates this reader's minor objections when Noah unexpectedly serenades Sally in front of the neighbors next door to her childhood home, the kind of "grand gesture" that romantic comedies employ and one the reunited couple have recently dissected in person:

I once heard a smart person point out that it’s hard to determine where the dividing line is between cheesiness and acceptable emotional extravagance.

He grinned again. “I didn’t tell you at the time, but I know exactly where the line is. When it’s happening to other people, it’s cheesy. When it’s happening to you, it’s wonderful.

Maybe I should have been reading Harlequin romances all along.  Or maybe not.  The crash that followed the exhilarating high of finishing Romantic Comedy felt almost like the enervating end of an actual fling.  Or, to paraphrase the TNO heel who nearly scarred Sally for life  by rebuffing her affection, I've confused reading Sittenfeld's convincing novel with experiencing real love.

Triple Header @ the Met

Two major exhibits and a bright new wing welcomed me back to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the first time since December; unfortunately, summer heat closed the Roof Garden which will not see another new commission until 2030.  Unless I return before the end of October, the extraordinary sculpture of Petrit Halilaj will at least have offered a memorable final visit.

Sargent & Paris

I'm glad I saw this show after a recent episode of The Gilded Age--one of my favorite television series--aired.  John Singer Sargent has been commissioned to paint the daughter of a social climbing matron who's about to be married off to an English duke in need of an American fortune--new, of course--to maintain his 16th century manor house.  Their engagement is announced at the artist's unveiling of the portrait with Mrs. Astor and the rest of the Four Hundred in attendance.

Self-Portrait (1886)

Although Glady's portrait isn't as spare as Sargent's most famous--which would have been even more spare if its initial, scandalous reception hadn't resulted in the artist adding shoulder straps to his arriviste subject's dress--the prop does the job and provides an extraordinarily satisfying dramatic moment, akin to seeing Madame X luring Met visitors through several galleries like a siren.  Bravo to the exhibition designers!

"Madame X (Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau)" (1883-84)

Sargent first made his mark at the Paris Salon of 1880 with this portrait of a woman in Morocco exotically perfuming herself with incense.  Critics and patrons alike fell for his white-on-white color palette.

"Smoke of Ambergris" (partial, 1880)

I'm more partial to his use of red.  The artist made waves depicting this French gynecologist attired in a dressing gown instead of the formal dress usually worn in male portraits.

"Dr. Pozzi at Home" (1881)

Sargent's talent and enormous canvases exposes the puny, simpering inadequacy of selfies in capturing a woman's allure.  He exhibited this painting at a Parisian gentleman's club to attract clients, a strategy that quickly paid dividends with husbands looking to please their wives.

"La Vicomtesse de Poilloue de Saint-Périer (Marie Jeanne de Kergolay)" (1883)

Call me a nitpicker, but Sargent was more skilled in capturing a woman's face than her hands.

"Madame Ramón Subercaseaux (Amalia Errázuriz y Urmeneta)" (1880)

The French government purchased this vibrant portrait of a flamenco dancer for its museum of contemporary art.  Sargent already had made a name for himself by the age of 36.

"La Carmencita (Carmen Dauset Moreno)" (ca 1890)

The Met remains discreet about Sargent's sexual orientation, identifying this Welsh hunk as a "lifelong friend" whose "surviving correspondence reveals a deep intimacy."  Read The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World by Paul Fisher for more salacious details about his same-sex attraction.

Albert de Belleroche (1883)

The Met encourages visitors to express their own creativity at the end of the exhibit.  The quality of the pencil sketching was surprisingly good says the man who barely can draw stick figures.

Superfine: Tailoring Black Style

I'm embarrassed to admit when I first learned that the Costume Institute was devoting a show to Black "dandies," a term I mostly associated with Edwardian England, I pictured over-the-top pimp finery.  Instead, the museum celebrates Black men dressing well as a triumph over adversity and stereotype. 

Nearly two and a half centuries separate these depictions of how other people see dandies and how they see themselves.  In this racist caricature, a British artist lampoons the stylish "pretensions" on display 

"The D- of [ l-playing at foils with her favorite lap dog Mungo
after expending near £10000 to make him a -*"
by William Austin (1773)

. . . while in this almost surrealistic photo, an African artist exults in his sartorial knowledge and splendor.

"Sartorial Anarchy #5" by Iké Udé (2012)

This beloved New Orleans gentleman, celebrating his 76th birthday, played bass drums and kazoo in the Treme Brass Band.  By pinning dollar bills to his jacket, Lionel Batiste amplified his good fortune and literally made himself look "money."

"Uncle Lionel's Birthday" by Andy Levin (2007)

Similarly, a French designer commented on the absence of Black American wealth in a collection called "Land of the Free" which debuted not long after the murder of George Floyd.

Jacket by Emeric Tchatchoua
(Autumn/Winter 2019-20, 3.PARADIS)

Mannequins wearing clothes mostly designed during the new millennium appear throughout the exhibit in various contexts.  

Although well chosen and beautifully displayed, the outfits sometimes seemed a little superficial in comparison to the more historical items also on view.

Ensembles by Kerby Jean-Raymond (Spring/Summer 2020, Pyer Moss) &
Edvin Thompson (Spring/Summer 2025, Theophilo)

Ensembles by Skepta (Spring/Summer 2025, MAINS) & Polo (2019, "Morehouse College")

Once again, I was struck by the fierce LGBTQ dignity that Diane Arbus memorializes in her work.  Eight years after she photographed this particular "lady," the aptly named Stormé de Larverie would participate in Stonewall.  Although she pointedly didn't care about her pronouns, she did insist that the landmark event be identified as a "rebellion" rather than riots.

"Miss Stormé de Larverie, The Lady Who Appears to be a Gentleman, New York City" (1961)

W.E.B. DuBois, an organizer of The Exhibition of American Negroes at the 1900 Worlds Fair in Paris. put his best foot forward when posing for an unknown photographer.  The exhibition compiled photos, statistical graphs, bibliographies and patents to showcase how much progress Blacks had made since Emancipation. 

Here's what Frederick Douglass had to say about this elegant timepiece from 1846:  "The possession of a watch in my young days was among the remote possibilities. I did not own myself."

Minstrel shows with white men performing in blackface during the 19th century initially acclimated Americans to seeing "Blacks" in formal dress, but 20th century entertainment--including vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood--finally provided them with a wider platform to express their well-attired talent, sometimes subversively.  "Cakewalk" dances like these recorded in 1903 were once a coded way for slaves to make fun of their highfalutin' owners.

Harlem's emergence as the cultural capital of Black America provided its residents a relatively safe space to develop their own highly developed, idiosyncratic style, including the zoot suit, a fashion trend soon imitated worldwide.

"Harlem Dandy (African American man [head & shoulders] wearing a hat with tilted brim)
by Miguel Covarrubias (ca 1930)

"Zoot Suit" by Charles Henry Alston (ca 1940)

This dance routine featuring the Four Step Brothers and Harold Nicholas from Carolina Blues (1944) puts a Hollywood spin on Harlem dandyism.  

The suit worn by Nicholas nods to Lucius Beebe, truly a Harlem Renaissance man, who sported something similar when he posed for the cover of Life magazine five years earlier. His new look had sounded the death knell for the zoot suit in the Black community.

Needless to say, my family didn't subscribe to Ebony or Jet when I was a teenager.  

But Time, Life and Look all included images of the Black Panthers who raised my consciousness about fashion as much as racial inequality.  Revolution never looked so good.

Just a few years later, athletes like Walt Frazier became Black male fashion plates. When he endorsed an athletic shoe--the first professional basketball player to do so--Puma named it "Clyde" (seen below along with one of his wide brim hats) because of Frazier's fondness for the gangster look he appropriated from Bonnie & Clyde. 

In "Looking for Langston" (1989), an absolutely fascinating meditation on Black queerness, Isaac Julien imagines a venue full of tuxedo clad men and women, including Langston Hughes, disguising their sexuality in conformity, another form of passing.

.

A stack of monogrammed Louis Vuitton luggage owned by André Leon Talley near the end of the exhibit also subtly acknowledges queerness, this time flamboyant, in the fashion world. It's hard not to wonder what ALT would have made of "Superfine" which, as far as I can recall, didn't include any caftans.

Arts of Africa, Ancient America & Oceania

I suppose a cynic might attribute the construction of a new wing to showcase what was once called "primitive" art as a strategy to shift attention away from its provenance.  Then again, if that were the case, why would the Met name it after Michael C. Rockefeller, whose adventurous acquisition of wood carvings by the Asmat tribe in Dutch New Guinea (now Indonesia) may have led to his mysterious disappearance at the age of 23?  His body was never recovered, and some say he was eaten by cannibals after his canoe overturned and he swam three miles to shore, not exactly the end you'd expect for the great-grandson of the man who founded Standard Oil.  The case could be made that Rockefeller paid for the Oceanic collection with his life, leaving behind a more significant legacy than young male members of the Getty and Kennedy dynasties who also suffered grisly fates. 

West Papuan Spirit Canoe (partial, 20th Century)

West Papuan Paddles (Early to mid-20th Century)

Sunlight illuminates these imposing slit gongs from Vanautu, no more than a century old.

No worries about the provenance of this ceremonial house ceiling from Papua New Guinea: The Met commissioned it in 1970 from artists in Mariwai, a village home to two different clans.  

Nearly 200 painted palm leaf stems allude to the villagers' dual clan heritage and their environment, including flying foxes, natural spirits, and the play of light on water in Oceania, which encompasses thousands of Pacific islands, Australia and New Zealand among them.

Contemporary art from Oceania also is exhibited, including colorful variations of bark paintings similar to those that I saw at a gallery show last year. 

Baratjala Series by Nonggirrnga Marawili (partial, Australia, 2022-23)

Exhausted, I didn't spend as much time in the African or Central American galleries.

Initiation Headdress (Democratic Republic of the Congo, Late 19th-first quarter of 20th Century)

Throne of Njouteu (partial, Cameroon, Late 19th-Early 20th Century)

"Tabaski III" by Iba Ndiaye (1970)

The objects from Central and South America are significantly older than those found in the African and Oceanian collections, perhaps because stone is a much more durable medium. Nevertheless, displaying them in such close, thematic proximity seems forced.  They deserve more distinct treatment, like they get at the incomparable Volcanica in Mexico City.

Seated Elder (Columbia or Ecuador, 200BC-300AD)

Feathered Tunic (Peru, 1450-1625)

James (4*)

 

It's about time!  With James, Percival Everett has reclaimed Jim, one of American literatures most iconic characters.  He no longer plays second fiddle to Huck Finn; more significantly he doesn't sound anything like Mark Twain's original character because in Everett's conceit, "slave talk" is something that black people employ only when communicating in front of white people, as a means of survival and concealment.

I must admit that Jim's use of the phrase "proleptic irony" (dictionary, please) early in the book stretched the bounds of credulity but it also slyly contemporizes the tale and reveals Everett's deep love of language and writing for people who, like me, are reading him for the first time.  I wasn't familiar with his work until two years ago, when American Fiction, the Oscar-nominated movie based on his novel Erasure, was released shortly before he won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for James, his 24th novel.  New fans might even congratulate themselves on finding a little proleptic irony in this passage, considering the mid-list confinement its under-appreciated author endured for decades:

Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the ends of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all. 

In a New Yorker podcast, Everett said he re-read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn 15 times so that he could internalize Twain's novel which has been a near constant--and often controversial--presence on middle and high school reading lists since the 1950s.  His diligence pays off, but to say much more about James's plot, equally adventurous and peopled with familiar characters sometimes to its detriment (the shenanigans of the Duke and the Dauphin still bore), would definitely enter spoiler territory.  Suffice it to say that the revelation explaining Jim's lifesaving behavior at the conclusion of Everett's novel rings more true than what Huck does at the end of Twain's.  

It also exposes the absurdity of a critical take on the original novel which was still in vogue when I first read and thought it overrated.  But "Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!," a 1948 essay did pique my interest at the time.  Leslie Fiedler posits that the relationship between Huck and Jim--as well as that, more explicitly, of Ishmael and Queequeg in Melville's Moby Dick--is homoerotic and that their respective raft and ship are a kind of Eden where the characters must go to escape the violence characteristic of 19th century America. Hmmmm.  Theories like that are what made me decide graduate school would be worse than Hell.

Everett has finally freed James from the shackles of white imagination, imbuing him with the intelligence, dignity and agency that American violence always had denied him.  At least Fiedler got that part right.

Prince Faggot (5+*)

Fag Puddle with Crown and Wire by Salman Toor (2022)

Don't you love it when edgy theater blows your mind? And not just because of some sexual staging truly worth whatever bite an intimacy coordinator's salary took out of the limited budget of an off-Broadway play: Prince Faggot breaks the fourth wall with greater resonance than I've ever felt previously.

This "gay fantasia" for the New Millennium ranks right up there with A Strange Loop and Slave Play.  It grabbed me by the throat from the get-go when an extraordinarily charismatic actor (Mirhir Kumar) projects a photo of himself as a child whom he identifies as incontrovertibly queer prior to having any awareness of what that actually means. Several of the other performers (who are identified only by number in the Playbill, and not just because most of them play multiple roles announced by the cast early on) follow suit before Canadian-born playwright Jordan Tannahill provocatively shows his hand with a projection of Prince George that appeared in Vogue, People and other publications.  

Photo by Samir Hussein (2017)

I don't recall seeing the photo but according to the BBC, it caused a ruckus after the UK-based PinkNews reported that it had turned the prince into a "gay icon," the day before his 4th birthday.  Still, encountering it at Playwrights Horizon/Soho Rep eight years later immediately recalled a memorable response uttered by Mary Louise Parker in Longtime Companion when someone claims that her neighbor, a soap opera actor, is straight: " Well, he lives with another guy and they both have great bodies. You tell me."

Tannahill does, brilliantly, but we are way beyond closets in Prince Faggot.  In the scene that follows, set in the near future, Prince George informs his parents that he'll be bringing his brown boyfriend home from Oxford for the weekend.  Dev, played by Kumar, tries to make a good impression by giving the nonplussed Kate and William a first edition of The Waves as a house gift, a gesture soon interrupted by the emergency dispatch of the hilarious palace flack who reports that a picture of the couple holding hands has surfaced on the internet that very morning.  The Firm swings into action and Dev suddenly discovers he's in over his head, although George remains blasé.  He never has known anything different, given Fleet Street's longstanding obsession with the royal family.

We quickly discover what the men are "into" in a scene that literally throws back the curtain on gay sex, the first of several as necessary as they are explicit for juxtaposing the gulf between public and private behavior, one that has narrowed considerably in the age of camera phones.  Much later, an indiscreet George, fearlessly embodied by John McCrea, whines to Charlotte, the Princess of Wales, that he's the only gay man who's ever been forced to discuss chem sex with his grandfather, in this case the ancient but still breathing King Charles III.  It's followed by a drug-induced hallucination in which a quartet of former English kings and queens remind George that you can indulge your appetites so long as they're cloaked in the hypocrisy of marrying a "nice" white gay man whom you don't necessarily love.  History intervenes more soberly with the mind of Dev, a versatile queer theorist of sorts, who confesses he could never "bottom" for George because it would betray the millions of south Asians who were fucked by colonial Britain for centuries. 

Go for bitchy, brilliant comedy, but stay for Prince Faggot''s nuanced exploration of how our age and station in life influence the expression of out identities in bed and out. Obviously, this can have awful consequences as we have just seen for nearly two thrilling hours, but Tannahill gives incandescent N'Yomi Allure Stewart, who plays Charlotte ever-so-quietly, the final word. It's absolutely TRANScendent, although that's not to take anything away from the equally moving break-the fourth-wall speeches delivered by Rachel Crowl, K. Todd Freeman and David Greenspan. 

I sailed out of the theater pitying the prince and embracing my inner queen who had absolutely no idea what awaited him off the hobby horse. 

1957

Just In Time (4*)

I have the same problem with Just In Time as I do with the CD of Bobby Darin's greatest hits that I bought during one of my early summers in the Pines:  there are only a few songs I really want to hear, including "Mack The Knife," one of the first 45 rpm singles that my parents bought me after the Bronx crooner sang it on the hair-tousling Ed Sullivan Show in 1959, when I was five.  The recording falls early enough in Darin's career that it's performed before intermission, as is "Beyond The Sea," my other listen-on-repeat, then a fairly new innovation.

That said, nearly everything else about the production, rises to the occasion of Jonathan Groff's finger-snapping, hip shaking, time-stopping inhabitation (think Hugh Jackman in The Boy From Oz, a superior show), minus what likely was Darin's toxic masculinity.  Not that there's anything wrong with that in this flashback context:  you might be a little toxic yourself if you were told you'd be dead at 16, the match that lights the nonpareil nightclub performer's relentless, all-consuming drive to conquer show business in nearly all its forms.  I'd forgotten that Darin had been nominated for an Oscar in Captain Newman, MD, a 1963 movie I plan to watch again on You Tube.

The Circle in the Square has been believably transformed into the Copacabana, the venue where Darin belatedly found his happy place before finally kicking the bucket at age 37, successfully recovering from a brief foray into attempted folk music relevance which does yield the oh-so-poignant "If I Were A Carpenter," sung to ex-wife Sandra Dee (!); Alex Timbers' reliably imaginative staging makes full use of theater-in-the-round and cleverly overcomes many of the jukebox musical's hoariest cliches, especially during "Splish Splash," where Groff once again proves he can do anything, including look smokin' hot in a Speedo; the kaleidoscopically colorful Fifties and Sixties costumes; and the supporting performances--including the Sirens, whose fluid, if often soaked, choreography appears to have been inspired by the original production of Dreamgirls--all have the ring of backstage truth.

And during the book's slower "and then" moments, especially in the first act, I had plenty of time to fantasize about the uses I could make of my "Mack The Knife" single. Should I wait outside and ask Groff to autograph it?  Or, since I'm in the de-accessioning stage of my life anyway, should I mail with a handwritten note informing him that our brief bicycle encounter last spring on Fifth Avenue tops the list of my lifetime celebrity encounters?

Yep, I'm a major Groff stan (you would be, too, if you re-watched HBO's incomparable Looking as recently as I have and paid top dollar to see Merrily We Roll Along),  even more obsessed than my mother was with Darin.  And, believe it or not, it being able to confirm my memory that she caught his performance at the Greek Theater in Los Angeles in August 1960 after we visited Disneyland would give me almost as much joy.

Quechee Kids Bash Alligator. Mercilessly!

Thom and I found a stowaway from Alligator Alcatraz in Delia's trunk en route to Quechee to celebrate Independence Day.

 

Actually, that's fake news.  My stepmother had it custom-made in Juarez after I casually mentioned how cool a piñata that looked like the Lacoste logo (which the French company identifies as a crocodile) would be.  In just a day, a couple of Vermont thunderstorms washed away four decades of dust it had accumulated lying-in-wait on top of a pair of bookcases at 47 Pianos.

Thom and I arrived the night before Magda, Joe and D-Kids.  Without paying much attention to the weather forecast, we went on a walking tour of Quechee first-thing Thursday morning.  Ya gotta love a small-town library.

The Quechee Church is open to all Christian denominations.

For a state as white as Vermont, it takes Black history pretty seriously.

Adirondack chairs could be glimpsed across the Ottauquechee River.  

One of Vermont's hundred covered bridges crosses it. 

Look what happened when the river rose eleven feet during Hurricane Irene. A sudden thunderstorm forced Thom and I to take refuge in the basement of a Simon Pearce glassblowing factory, powered by the rapids outside. Quechee's hot air balloon festival had taken place two weeks earlier.

Employees craft expensive glassware sold in the show room upstairs.  When Joe rescued us, he self-purchased his birthday and Father's Day gift from Magda: a pair of whiskey glasses for $90 each.  It was news to her!

Wooden blowpipes and other tools comprise a striking, three-dimensional collage hanging in the visitor's area.

In addition to the showroom, there's a classy bar and restaurant upstairs.  Neither were open so early in the day.

After high winds and thunderstorms closed the pool at the Quechee Club, we dined at a pizzeria in Bridgewater which also included an arcade.  Della and Dagny proved to be equally adept at shaking down cash contributions and scooping up rubber duckies.

They even spent a little of their allowances unsuccessfully trying to win plush toys.

Meanwhile, Thom and Desi continues an unexpected bromance that had started at the pool.

On a Friday morning hike, Della demanded to know where the dinosaur tracks were.

A seesaw hidden in the woods and a pretty fast merry-go-road at Lake Pinneo later that afternoon enabled the D-Kids to burn off some energy.  Magda and Joe subscribe to what I call the shark school of parenting: keep them moving at all times.

Dagny's fashion sense definitely doesn't include camouflage.  

Desi, like Thom, can nap anywhere.  

It turned out the still sodden piñata lacked a plug so it remained forever-unfilled with candy. That absence didn't diminish the D-Girls's bloodlust.  Joe, Magda and I got several whacks in as well. Newspapers inside were dated 1987, a year after Magda was born which raises the question: why didn't I give it to her or Zoltan when they were young children? Because it was a crucial element of my apartment's decor which Audrey once accurately described as "late-college."  The de-accessioning era continues, here literally in full swing!

Thom presented the kids their new outfits afterward.  Too bad Dagny didn't embrace the Parisian look. It really suits her.

I brought the D-Girls personalized key chains in Williamsburg when my friends from Colorado visited the week before. They include tiny states of Vermont (Massachusetts was out of stock) and peace signs as well as unicorns, the first letters of their names, lips and an eye.

All the D-Kids got a ride in Delia.  Dagny and Della quickly mastered turning up the music volume to accelerate the car, and Desi looked truly awestruck when Thom put the top up. Just call us the fun uncles.

I had to fend off an attack from a piñata basher before our departure Saturday morning. Fortunately, the inflatable Pittsburgh Pirates bat couldn't do much damage.  Wherever did I pick that up?  From the secret drawer, of course!  Soon to become the portable secret drawer since it's unlikely the D-Kids will ever visit 47 Pianos.

On our way back to New York, we stopped for a terrific seafood lunch in Niantic with Randy.  

What an enjoyable four days!  Thanks again, Magda & Joe.

More Vermont:

DKE In Quechee (2024)

Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park (2024)

Vermont Quilting Bee (2024)

Billings Farm & Museum (2024)

Lake Champlain Ferry (2021)

Unpronounceable (2021)

Lamoille Valley Rail Trail (2021)

TW Wood Gallery (2021)

The Flavor Graveyard (2021)

188 Floors (2021)

Shiny Domes and Sugar Houses (2021)

Green Mount Cemetery (2021)

Burlington Walkabout (2021)

Another Pride Surprise (2021)

Vermont Coffee Company (2021)

Smuggler's Notch (2021)

The Other Woodstock (2021)