A note on The Young and Evil (Obelisk Press, 1933) by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler

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In THE YOUNG AND EVIL, Julien (Charles Henri Ford and Karel (Parker Tyler) are fleeing a homophobic attack by a gang of sailors when they run into the police and get arrested. I start with that because the novel seems so modern. Neither has a problem with their sexuality; each is looking for love or at least a good time; they all too briefly think they may have found it in each other but remain friends. It’s set in Greenwich Village bohemia of the early Thirties, during Prohibition. Julien and Karel drink too much, have parties, take a lot of drugs, go up to Harlem for drag balls, get involved with married men, sometimes trade sex for rent money….or a fur coat, and sometimes even with a woman. Mostly, they fall in love with the wrong people. They don’t suffer psychologically because they’re different. They like being different: they want to be poets. But mamma mia! The world they live in! They’re constantly being robbed, thrown out, beaten up, arrested. Their sexuality is a problem for the world, and that is what creates problems for them, which they mainly shrug off because, l’important c’est d’aimer and to create art. It’s a very uneven book, with some chapters written in a surrealist, stream of consciousness style, others in a more linear narrative. Part of the pleasure of reading is that it is a roman-à-cléf and it’s fun to try and figure out who is who. The book was published in 1933 by the Obelisk Press in Paris and considered so scandalous it wasn’t allowed to become a scandal. 500 copies were seized and burnt at port in the UK; shipments to the US were intercepted and turned back. It’s not a great novel, but it’s a great document of a particular structure of feeling. It was compared to Fitzgerald’s THE FAR SIDE OF PARADISE; and I suspect young queers might recognise more aspects of their conditions and experience in this almost hundred-years-old book than they’d like to . I love the title of the Italian translation: POVERI PERVERSI.

PS

Tyler wrote Screening the Sexes, an early study of homosexuality onscreen. He is a key American film critic who should be studied alongside Manny Farber, Otis Ferguson, and Agee… he was their contemporary…Kael came a bit later… but isn’t, or at least until recently. Adrian Garvey reminds me that Gore Vidal named his film critic Parker Tyler in Myra Breckinridge — Vidal claimed to have resuscitated Tyler’s career as Albee had done for Virginia Woolf — and of this below:

In The Rhapsodes, David Bordwell ranks Tyler, alongside Ferguson, Agee and Farber as the most significant American film critics of the 1940s….’largely ignored  by official culture, they came to a wider recognition decades later, after film criticism emerged as a legitimate area of arts journalism’. (p.3, Kindle edition) but he acknowledges that ‘Tyler is still an obscure figure compared with his contemporaries. James Agee and Manny Farber are celebrated as great critics…and Otis Ferguson occasionally attracts some minor tributes. I’ve been surprised how many people have told me they were unaware of Tyler’s work. (p. 112).

…and Andrew Sarris wrote the foreword to Screening the Sexes, partly to make up for what was, in his own words, ‘a cruel review with more than a tinge of hip homophobia — of Tyler’s MAGIC AND MYTH OF THE MOVIES –to the introduction to the 93 Da Capo Press edition of Screening The Sexes, where he writes of Tyler’s film criticism, ‘He was neither a witty, warm humanist like James Agee nor a brilliantly iconoclastic pop maverick like Manny Farber. Whatever humour emerged in his writing was not derived from his florid, pedantic style, but from a genuinely subversive psychosexual penetration of even the most banal cinematic texts. Only Parker Tyler ever noticed that Red Skeleton was more gracefuland had better legs than the starlets among whom he cavorted in Bathing Beauty. Only Parker Tyler was discerning enough to figure out the homosexual subtext of the extraordinary verntriloquist sequence in Dead of Night with Michael Redgrave in one of the great performances of his career, pp. x-xi)

Ford was lover of Pavel Tchelitchew until his death in 58, the editor of the leading  Surrealist magazine of the day in America, View, and brother of Ruth Ford, part of Welles’ Mercury Theatre, who married Zachary Scott, the oily gigolo in Mildred Pierce.

José Arroyo

A note on A Farewell To Arms (Frank Borzage, 1932)

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I had seen A FAREWELL TO ARMS ages ago on TV and didn’t think much of it in spite of being a great admirer of Borzage. Seeing it again at the BFI yesterday on a big screen in a restored print was a revelation. Charles Lang’s cinematography glistens, and every glistening is meaningful, the lights and shadows over the bombings, the sadness of the rain, the way the tear on Gary Cooper’s face shine at the end helping to evoke his love and hopelessness. It is absolutely gorgeous. There are so many elements that dazzle: the camera taking on Gary Cooper’s point of view on the stretcher, so we see those grand Italian ceilings as he is most in pain; the way the camera becomes Gary Cooper’s mouth as Helen Hayes goes to kiss him. It’s full of subtle imagery purposefully deployed, some of it religious (the crucifixes amongst the battlefield) some of it sexual (the satin shoe). There’s one shot where a man with a totally bandaged head, looking outside the window as the city is being bombed where his knees buckle that becomes a metaphor, one created using a series of elements from the avant-garde of many arts, including here dance, that I found extraordinary. And the last scene, Helen Hayes’ death played almost entirely on Gary Cooper’s face, and then when he swoops her in his arms and the bedsheets make a bridal train. There’s a combination of all powerful belief in love and in God, that makes for a romantically transcendent ending. There’s a million things more to say on this film of course; but I wouldn’t have been able to see or think about any of them without being able to see this screening. I’m only sorry the BFI was not able to get a greater audience. There were only a handful of people in the large NFT1. Mubi is showing the restored original alongside the remake with Rock Hudson and Jennifer Jones.

 

José Arroyo

The Young and the Evil: Queer Modernism in New York, 1930-1955, edited by Jarrett Earnest, David Zwirner Books, 2020

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Aside from Allan Ellenzweig’s marvellous new biography of George Platt Lynes, my greatest find so far has been THE YOUNG AND THE EVIL, not the notorious novel by Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, but the catalogue of an exhibition curated by Jarret Earnest that set out to map a milieu, to some extent covered in biography, but largely absent from standard accounts of American modernism and which the exhibition labelled as ‘Queer Modernism in New York 1930-1950’. The show illustrates the ‘gravitational forces of emotional, intellectual, artistic and sexual attraction formed by the group’. It was sparked by death.

George Platt Lynes and Monroe Wheeler, photo by George Platt Lynes

An archeology of how some of the materials landed in the exhibition itself speaks a queer history. When Joseph Scott and Vincent Cianni went through the contents of the estate of their deceased friend, Antole Pohorilenko, they discovered a series of boxes marked ‘MW/ GPL PRIVATE’ and ‘INTIMACIES’. Pohorilenko had been the last lover of Monroe Wheeler who had himself inherited from Glenway Westcott. This plus additions from the heirs of Platt Lynes and Lincoln Kirstein form the basis of the exhibition, and what a find it is: erotic reveries of practically every sex act a homosexual can think of, alone and in groups, rendered explicitly but aimed for private consumption, and in a few cases drawn specifically for Kinsey, presumably it took them a while to suss out that Kinsey already knew more than he let on, and from personal experience. The images are by some major twentieth century artists (Cadmus, Jared French, Pavel Tchelitchew) and includes also explicit photographs, famously an early selfie of Platt Lynes giving Monroe Wheeler a blow job). The drawings are characterised by a longing and desire but also a dreaminess, a personal and idealised fantasy of sexual want, direct and unashamed; some romantically rendered; some evoking a roughness, clearly desired; some longing for the particular other; some for the anonymous group. They simultaneously speak an individual, an era, and a personal instance of a structure of feeling: They are marvellous.

George Platt Lynes giving Monroe Wheelr a blow job

 

Apart from Jarret Earnest’s excellent introductory essay, the book also includes, and interview with Jason Yow, Leonard Kirstein’s long-time lover and heir, an explanatory linking of the novel of THE YOUNG AND EVIL to the exhibition, and a superb essay on the paintings Paul Cadmus and Jared French both did of the HERRIN MASSACRE OF 1922 where striking miners laid a siege to the mine, fired on strike-breakers and ended up brutally massacring some of the scabs, Kenneth E. Silver’s essay situating the paintings not only in the labour struggles of the early 20th century but also of the anti-gay ‘clean-ups’ of New York City in the lead-up to the 1939 World’s Fair, and how the paintings lend themselves easily to readings of murderous homophobia, and the significance of that possible anti-labour reading combined with that murderous homophobia.

by Cadmus
by French

A wonderful book that offers information, sparks thought, and stimulates the senses.

The Lion Boy by Pavel Tchetlichew. It was owned by Glenway Westcott for many years and hung over his bed.

Drawings by Cadmus, French, Tchelitchew

One of six gouaches Tchelitchew drew to illustrate the original novel

José Arroyo

Young Royals, Netlix.

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Edvin Ryding and Omar Rudberg in Young Royals–

 

Following on the HEARTSTOPPER trail, I moved to YOUNG ROYALS, a Swedish teen series about the younger son of the royal family who’s such a party boy he gets sent to boarding school, where he promptly falls in love with the only mixed-race scholarship boy in the place, a situation made more difficult when the Prince’s older and much-loved brother gets killed in a car crash and he becomes heir to the throne, his love now denied him for reasons of state as well as everything else. How to overcome this? It’s all very teen: intense feeling, lots of attempts to hold hands, finding secret places to kiss, sneaking into bedrooms. The camera’s look on the boys is more eroticised than HEARSTOPPER – it’s aimed at a slightly older audience — though still relatively tame, the emphasis more on the heart than the groin — but drugs and alcohol now figure in a way they didn’t in HEARTSTOPPER. It’s a boarding school setting and fans of the genre will find all the familiar tropes here: the alliances, groupings, performances, initiations. It is also a fairy tale which follows the tropes closely; the prince is lonely and isolated and finds his other half amongst the people, though as is usual, this particular person, whilst he ends up not being royal himself, is marked as special because he looks divine and sings like an angel. Interestingly, the poor boy chosen by royalty here, and despite his rough background, is pictured as femmy, keeping with the trope that it’s always a girl who is raised up socially by the princely alliance (I can’t think of an instance in traditional fairy tales where it’s the other way around). The series has a great focus on the girls in the boarding school; dressing up, putting make-up on, their conflicts with their mothers, their mutual support. So a fairy tale about young gay boys aimed primarily at teenage girls. I enjoyed it but did giggle when I chanced upon a review praising it for its realism.

José Arroyo

Naked Men Too: Liberating the Male Nude 1050-2000 by David Leddick

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Yes, there was a sequel to the male nude an it has a similar structure: A banal Quentin Crisp introduction; chapters in relation to period (from 1950-2000), a contemporary update on the picture’s subjects, here often unnecessary as those pictured are often very famous indeed (Yves St Laurent), movie stars (Charlton Heston, Burt Lancaster, Joe Dallesandro, Rupert Everett, Maxwell Caulfield) or later on in the book, porn stars (Jeff Stryker, Ryan Idol, Aiden Shaw. Casey Donovan, Peter Berlin) The racial representation in this is better. But the book feels partial and idiosyncratic; what Leddick likes and could get rather than what was significant or influential: still some Platt Lynes from the 50s (he died in ’55. I only have the 2020 Kindle reprint of INTIMATE STRANGERS which shockingly doesn’t refer to an original publication date –or I can’t find it — but clearly that research fed these coffee table books), a bit of Bob Mizer but less of that whole 1950s Physique Pictorial genre than is warranted, no Tom of Finland, no Bruce Weber, no Herb Ritts. And why is Helmut Newton in this collection? We do see Mapplethorpe pictured and there are some striking Pierre and Gilles photographs and a lot of gorgeous Tom Bianchi photos but it doesn’t cohere as a work of history or analysis. It all gets more explicit, sleazier, and even less satisfying as it progresses, and this in spite of the beauty of particular images. It did introduce me to new photographers and it did win a the Lambda Award and it was a long time ago. But I wouldn’t buy it again.

 

Rupert Everett by Greg Gorman
Aiden Shaw by Pierre et Gilles
Peter Hinwood by Helmut Newton

José Arroyo

Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes, 1935-1940 by David Leddick

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Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes, 1935-1940

Naked Men: Pioneering Male Nudes, 1935-1940 is a book full of beautiful images, overly focussed on George Platt Lynes and his circle, with merely a nod to the other arts (except those practiced by that circle) and to European art production (much less the rest of the world): a Voinquel photo here ; a Duncan Grant painting there …the rest is American, mostly Platt Lynes. The pictures are gorgeous, and some of them are of very famous people (Tennesse Williams, Yul Brynner). And there’s a great central idea behind the book; to search for the subjects of the pictures, find out what they are doing, and juxtapose photographs of them in the present with those of them in their youth (and which some of them had forgotten they’d posed for as many of the photos were only circulated privately).
I used to read Quentin Crisp avidly when he was writing for the gay monthlies in the 80s; but his introduction here seems posy, mannered, thin (and he was that but also much more than that). He talks of his own past posing nude and makes a common distinction between naked and nude; how nude was in the service of art and naked would have frightened the horses and resulted in jail time. Okey Dokey.
The book would have been better titled as Pioneering Male Nudes in the USA or some such. It’s organisation is meant to exude comprehensiveness: The Depression Years, 1935-1940; The War-Years; The Post-War Years, 1945-1950 but there are major photographers missing (Carl Van Vechten) and there is not a single photograph of a black man in the whole book. The work exudes US cultural imperialism in its choices and racism in its absences, and it’s not just because all of these nudes depict a particular Aryan ideal (even in the rare instance when the subjects are Latino).

José Arroyo

A note on George Platt Lynes and Heartstoppers

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Don’t mess with a queen: ‘George Platt Lynes was the true pariah amongst (Lincoln Kirstein’s) classmates’, who seem uniformly to have regarded him as a foppish freak, a sneering little bitch who fancies he is too pretty to look at and saunters in like Fifi D’Orsay. The turning point came when Lynes, endlessly bullied, teased and in utter desperation, ‘whipped out his knife and melodramatically stabbed another student,’ who fortunately survived.
From Martin Duberman’s THE WORLD OF LINCOLN KIRSTEIN
My mind keeps drifting back to poor George Platt Lynes – a rare instance of poor being used in conjunction with his name – so bullied for being visibly femmy , and so powerless and enraged by it, he’s finally driven to stabbing the oppressor; a trauma and rage I’ve never seen in the glamorous, controlled and desirous images of male perfection he produced. Also, I was watching HEARTSTOPPER, the new gay teen romance on Netflix, and noting how things had changed and not changed; bullying and violence are still what the young teens in the drama face, even in a context where some of them are now out and at ease, and their potential to touch is animated by electricity, and their kiss by floaitng butterflies: continuities and breaks. I found it very sweet and touching though I did wonder if I’d have found it more twee had the protagonists been heterosexual.
José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 353 – The Northman

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Writer-director Robert Eggers, who previously wowed us with The Lighthouse, returns in style with a brutal, bloody Viking epic, based on Amleth, the figure in Scandinavian legend that inspired Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It’s the first of his films to see a wide, mainstream release and large-scale ad campaign to match, and it’s perhaps for that reason that it is in some sense less demanding that its audience put the work in to understand and interpret it – although there remains plenty of room for that, and it’s in a different league to the blockbusters with which it’s competing. It’s a film to put down what you’re doing right now and see at the cinema – it’s vicious, atmospheric, and beautifully shot, and you won’t regret seeing it where it’s meant to be seen.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 352 – Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Upon revisiting our podcast on the previous entry in the Harry Potter-adjacent Fantastic Beasts series, The Crimes of Grindelwald, we find that we could virtually have copied and pasted its content for our discussion of The Secrets of Dumbledore. It’s again less than the sum of its parts, a fantasy adventure with some charms, several good performances, but incoherent storytelling, and too little that convinces us to get invested in the characters’ lives and the fate of the world they seek to save.

The film begins with a powerful avowal of love between Jude Law (Dumblemore) and Mads Mikkelson (Grindewald), linking their lives together eternally and preventing one from acting against the other. It goes downhill fast. Famous as the film where Johnny Depp got replaced. Ezra Miller makes an impression.

A note on Douglas Stuart’s Young Mungo

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UK Edition
US Edition

 

Young Mungo is a beautiful book; a page-turner in which poverty, violence and addiction all intermingle and are buoyed up but never quite excused by love. It has a dual structure in which a forbidding fishing trip designed to make a man out of Mungo is set in the present; and chapters alternate with the other narrative, Mungo’s relationship with his family and his growing feelings for Jamie, the boy who lives across the way, forbidden by the violent homophobia of Jamie’s father and Mungo’s brother, and also along sectarian lines: Jamie’s a Catholic. The book is a rich evocation of time (the early 1990s) and of place – those who’ve only been to brief visits to Glasgow might discover a different one – of a sub-prole, geographically located language usage that feels both rough and lyrical.
Douglas Stuart has written of how one has to become middle-class to write about working class experience, interesting in its implication that something gets lost along the way, or that memory and perception might be tainted by that transition. And perhaps that’s so; but it doesn’t feel that way when reading Young Mungo. The characters in this novel are aware of the fear, disgust, and aggression their poverty sometimes incites in those more fortunate, and there’s a homology in this with the question of sexuality. The limitations (geographical, educational, material) their poverty imposes is also known to them.
Family is coercive in this novel. People love, but only if you conform; and they’ll beat you, endanger your life, kick you out, until you do. The masculinity in this novel is certainly toxic, beautifully narrated, with an eye to suspense, a certain tension between what is said and what is done, and the odd turn of phrase you want to savour. One of the elements that contributes to the exquisite sadness of the novel is that Mungo and Jamie are 15-16, on the cusp but not quite adults, one forbidden by law to go off on his own, the state thus condoning the violence he is daily subject to; teens on the cusp of change. But it is a transformation they fear they might not live to experience. A fantastic book. I’ve been thinking about it non-stop.
Also note the interesting difference between the UK and US editions:

 

José Arroyo

David Leddick’s INTIMATE COMPANIONS: A TRIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES, PAUL CADMUS, LINCOLN KIRSTEIN AND THEIR CIRCLE

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Continuing with my reading of the Platt Lynes Circle, David Leddick’s INTIMATE COMPANIONS: A TRIOGRAPHY OF GEORGE PLATT LYNES, PAUL CADMUS, LINCOLN KIRSTEIN AND THEIR CIRCLE, is a comparatively lighter work, very readable, with a wider scope. I wish I’d read it first. I learned more about the painters in the circle — Paul Cadmus, Pavel Tchelitchev, Jared French, George Tooker — and their inter-personal, sexual and professional relationships. It well illustrates what Gregory Woods in his great book has conceptualised as the or at least a ‘hominterm’, an international network of lesbians and gays that could be seen as a creative force and/ or as a ‘sinister conspiracy against the moral and material interests of the state’.

This particular grouping can certainly be seen as both; all of them ‘discrete’ to greater or lesser degrees; all of them out to their immediate circle and beyond. Working in art, major institutions such as MOMA, or indeed, like with Kirstein, helping to create the American Ballet Theatre but also discretely working for representation and inclusion; Monroe Wheeler through his influence on  what MOMA programmed or published; Glenway Westcott through his work with Kinsey; Kirstein through his financial and institutional patronage of painting and ballet; Platt Lynes through his private nudes, circulated underground; Cadmus needed only his painting, where homosexuality seems ever present.

The book is divided into chapters, covering mainly the trio at various stages of their life, but also others who were important to at least one of the trio: Fidelma Cadmus Kirstein (Cadmus’ sister; Kirstein’s wife), Katherine Anne Porter, Jared French etc. My only reservation is that the book is interspersed with first-hand observations, an eye-witness account, of either the people or events such as parties and funerals. In the end it’s revealed that it’s by a certain ‘Sandusky’. But who is this Sandusky? It’s never as clear as it should be whether this is fiction or an eyewitness who wishes to remain anonymous. If it’s a real person it adds insight; if it’s fiction….well it’s interesting but speculative and potentially undermines aspects of the book. I wish this element had been better handled. It brings to mind a niggle with the title: the tension between ‘a triography’ and ‘their circle’. Why not just eliminate triography? Any biographic work would have to deal with ‘their circle’: INTIMATE COMPANIONS: GEORGE PLATT LYNES, PAUL CADMUS, LINCOLN KIRSTEIN AND THEIR CIRCLE.

I’m grateful to Leddick for enhancing my appreciation of Cadmus’ very beautiful drawings more traditional than his paintings, in a ‘classic’ style that reminds one vaguely of Da Vinci; more lifelike. The paintings I also love. But along with the social commentary, they also remind me of more greatly textured 30s cartoons; the drawings are both representational and also idealised, and in a sexual way. Democratic too. How many people have pictured factory workers like this below:

With all the superb visual materials in circulation, someone could make a great documentary on this. It certainly skewers contemporary notions of the rigidity and fixity of sexual identities between Wilde and Stonewall. This particular circle dances all over the Kinsey scale.

Platt Lynes in flapper drag in the 1920s
Kistein by Cadmus

José Arroyo

A thought on Glenway Wescott after reading Jerry Rosco’s ‘Glenway Wescott Personally’.

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Now well and truly down a rabbit hole prompted by Allen Ellenzweig’s GEORGE PLATT LYNES. I’ve just finished Jerry Rosco’s book on Glenway Wescott, the often odd-man-out in the Lynes-Wheeler-Wescott trio.  It’s a rich book, benefitting from hours of reminiscences Westcott recorded towards the end of his life, almost a lifetime of diaries, and a well-documented life. Wescott, only vaguely known to me until now, was famous before Hemingway (and the cruel butt of his homophobia. He is ostensibly the model for Robert Prentiss in THE SUN ALSO RISES, of which, according to Wiki, after meeting Prentiss, Jack Barnes, the narrator, says, ‘I just thought perhaps I was going to throw up’); wrote two best-sellers (THE GRANDMOTHERS, 1927; APARTMENT IN ATHENS, 1945) and received quite extraordinary critical praise for THE PILGRIM HAWK, including a two-part appreciation from Susan Sontag in The New Yorker in 2001, where she deemed it, ‘among the treasures of twentieth-century American literature’.

Monroe Wheeler, Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes by Paul Cadmus.

His life is an illustration of a particularly American kind of re-invention. The son of Wisconsin farmers, himself farmed out to relatives when the family didn’t have enough to eat, who went on to become a celebrity, peer of Hemingway and Fitzgerald in Paris, then firmly entrench himself in the upper classes without himself having a penny to his name or indeed working on anything but his writing. He brings to mind Truman Capote but without the dizziness of that particular kind of success, the self-destructiveness, a better internalisation of Carnegie’s How to Make Friends and Influence People, and an innate niceness and cheer. In ‘The Loves of the Falcon’a lovely essay on his work in the New York Review of Books, Edmund White writes: ‘He was a confidant who also confided in others (intimacy is not always a two-way street, which egotistical friends don’t notice at first but come to resent in the long run)’

Glenway Wescott, George Platt Lynes, Monroe Wheeler, by Jared French

In many ways he is the ideal clubman. Had he not been queer and a writer, he might have made an excellent Elk or Rotary. As he dined with Pauline Rothchild, he also contributed greatly to the Kinsey Institute, not just by being a subject or through donations but by actually working towards the organisation of the archive. He directed many of the writers’ associations of the day; and amongst other ‘contributions to literature’ that don’t have to do strictly with writing, he and Christopher Isherwood arranged for the publication of E.M. Forster’s Maurice.

Wescott with Kinsey

What interested me most in the book and in his life, what interests me most about biography, is the insight it offers to how people live, the choices they make, how they manage their life. Wescott’s circumstances were inherently difficult, though nothing in this book makes it seems so: people were queer and they dealt with it. On the edges of the book, however, one deduces other stories; handsome, gifted people who intersected with these lives and didn’t manage so well; drugs, alcohol, despair, oppression, suicide, all having an effect that Wescott’s cheery disposition  and strong support network circumvented, though they do appear here. As well as being nice to others, Wescott was very honest with himself, particularly in relation to questions of sex…and of love. He was never confused as to which was which and when they coincided; and he was a very loving person, maybe a reason why he was able to maintain such a rich network of relationships right to the end.

The Lion Boy, by Thcheltchew, a painting Wescott hung above his bed for most of his life.

The book, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, might have been improved by sharpening the narrative and eliminating ‘doings’ that don’t much enhance our understanding of the man – the post sixties chapters suffer from too much listing of events and activities . I woud have liked more on psychology. Perhaps what surprised me more in the book was that someone so clearly good looking though of himself as physically unattractive, and this despite being regularly in sexual demand through much of his life. I would have liked to have understood this better — Edmund’s White’s explanation that he thought he had a small penis and that a youthful illness resulted in the removal of a testicle are surely a contributing factor but don’t quite fully convince: it’s undoubtedly true Westcott felt this, but why, when, for how long, did this often intermingle with a knowledge of his own sexual pull; how did he he rationalise this with the constant stream of long relationships with much younger lovers as well as with Wheeler throughout and right to the end of his life? I would have liked a fuller account of this.

The book leaves one uncertain of Wescott’s place in 20th Century American Letters but convinced that he is a major figure in a history of twentieth century queer cultures in the West.

José Arroyo

Some thoughts arising from reading Allen Ellenzweig’s GEORGE PLATT LYNES

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This is really a collection of facebook posts spurred on by reading Allen Ellenzweig’s George Platt Lynes, which I think might be of interest to others (and which I’d like to keep in one place)

Dan Callaghan’s excellent review reminded me I had the book in hand and I’ve been immersed in it ever since. A monumental work for those interested in 20th century American art and culture. The ménage à trois between Monroe Wheeler, Glenway Westcott and George Platt Lynes, which lasted for two decades and which ended partly because rumour threatened Wheeler’s job at MOMA, is an endless source of fascination. The honesty and clarity of feeling; the love, longing, and desire so freely expressed in the letters is very moving.

Last year’s obsession meets the current one: Burt Lancaster by George Platt Lynes:

I read David Leddick’s Intimate Companions alongside Ellezweig’s biography and found this on Platt Lynes declining years: ‘He continued to give great all-boy parties (liquor was frequently paid for by François Reichenbach, a rich rather fey Frenchman, nephew of Jaques Guérin, a quite talented documentary movie maker and heir to a French fragrance fortune; François was quite possibly the only unattractive person George tolerated’. Guérin had been the lover of Glenway Westcott, part of Platt Lynes’ ménage with Monroe Wheeler. Reichenbach is to me a most attractive and an important if still relatively under-appreciated figure in queer culture, whose work was recently highlighted by the Cinémathèque Française and the subject of several podcasts John Mercer and I did in the last year, of which a trailer below:

The above and this were filmed at this period in the early 50s, when he was ostensibly supplying the liquor for Platt Lynes’ parties:

The full film , discovered by Thomas Waugh at the Kinsey Institute, can be seen below:

Below, E.M Forster and his lover, Bob Buckingham, photographed by George Platt Lynes. Buckingham was a married policeman; and Foster lived out his last days in the Coventry home of the official couple. Another trio; another way people had to invent lives outside the mould and make the best of it:

I’ve now finished reading Allan Ellenzweig monumental work on George Platt Lynes, which I can’t recommend enough. The last connection to surprise me was that of Platt Lynes with Samuel Steward. I suppose it shouldn’t have. Steward had written novels and was also a friend of Gertrude Stein. But I hadn’t realised the extent of their correspondence, that both were close to Kinsey and contributed greatly to the archive, Steward even allowing himself to be filmed in an SM scenario getting beaten. Steward is at least as fascinating a figure as Platt Lynes, a novelist and professor of literature who left it all to become a tattoo artist in California and the writer of romantic porn under the name of Phil Andros (amongst other pseudonyms). Steward was himself the subject of a superb biography by Justin Spring (see below):

There’s a wonderful review of the Justin Spring biography by Geoff Nicholson that begins:

‘On July 24, 1926, Samuel Steward, one day past his seventeenth birthday, got word that Rudolph Valentino had just checked in to the best hotel in Columbus, Ohio. Grabbing his autograph book, he made his way to the hotel and knocked on Valentino’s door. The actor appeared, wearing only a towel, and after signing his autograph asked whether there was anything else the boy wanted. “Yes,” said Steward, “I’d like to have you.”
The Latin lover obliged. Steward performed oral sex on him and at some point procured a lock of Valentino’s pubic hair—a souvenir that Steward kept in a monstrance at his bedside for the rest of his life. He also entered the encounter in his “Stud File,” a card catalogue recording details of his sexual partners, eventually a few thousand over the course of his lifetime.’
Ken Monteith informs me that Steward wrote his own account of moving away from academia into tattoing and gay porn here:
So these links keep cropping up and revealing a whole now not so hidden culture.
José Arroyo

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 351 – Morbius

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Sony’s Spider-Man Universe has given us a charming Venom origin story, a rather less charming Venom sequel, and now another film about a well-intentioned man inadvertently possessed by something that demands he feed on humans. In Morbius, Jared Leto’s brilliant scientist finds a cure for the blood disease that has tormented him and his best friend throughout their lives – except that it comes with a side of vampirism.

In short, Morbius is not a success. José describes it as what people who claim to hate Marvel, which has produced some very good films, truly do hate. It’s as blunt, CGI-laden and uninvolving as that kind of criticism implies. Mike tries to be fair to it – the hallway bit isn’t too bad – and we agree that there’s one actor to like in it, although we disagree on which one that is. José accuses the film of failing to appreciate that one thing a star should deliver in this type of work is physical appeal; Mike accuses José of shallowness.

But as fun as it is to tease José, Morbius is not a fun film to have to sit through in order to get to do that. One to avoid.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Martin Suter Mysteries

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I’ve been trying read more contemporary European fiction and stumbled across the work of Martin Suter, which I’ve enjoyed so I’ve now read three: THE LAST WEYNFELDLT is about the sexual re-awakening of middle-aged bourgeois as he gets caught up in an art forgery scam; MONTECRISTO is about a video journalist and wannabe filmmaker who in the wake of Lehman Brothers discovers a bank cover-up that could threaten the entire Swiss banking system; and THE CHEF is about a Tamil dishwasher who sets up an erotic dinner business with a friend and uncovers another banking scam amongst the upper classes. The books are light, elegant mysteries, dealing with the stocks, bonds, food and art of the upper classes; all are set in Zurich, with a nice feel for detail and what seems like insider’s knowledge. It’s crime solving á la Sunday Times Supplement, well-written, elegant, addressed to the middle-classes though not unaware of the rest of the world and really quite enjoyable if you’re not looking for anything too demanding.

 

José Arroyo

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 350 – Deep Water

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Director Adrian Lyne, who made the Eighties his erotic, thrilling playground with Flashdance, 9½ Weeks and Fatal Attraction, returns with the erotic thriller Deep Water, his first film in twenty years. Repeatedly delayed and eventually denied a cinema release due to COVID, it’s available on Hulu in the US and Amazon Prime everywhere else, and is easy to recommend – until the last act kicks in.

José contends that Ben Affleck has never been better as the quietly but increasingly jealous husband of a wife who publicly and aggressively displays her unfaithfulness to him – as whom Ana de Armas gives a star-making performance. We discuss their interplay and how it grounds the film, as well as the use of setting and lighting – that dank, grimy shed in which he spends time with his snails, buried within the vision of his perfect mansion, is a wonderfully expressive metaphor for Affleck’s character. We put the film’s mixed reviews down to its abysmal ending, which Mike finds it hard to ignore, but don’t let them put you off enjoying this otherwise fabulously entertaining, extremely watchable thriller.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Love Meetings (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1964)

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Pasolini’s Love Meetings is on MUBI at the moment and I highly recommend. What do Italians think about sex, love, marriage, prostitution, homosexuality, divorce, etc. in 1964? Pasolini goes all over the country and asks them. He covers north and south; city and country, peasants and proles; people in the big cities — Milan, Rome, Palermo; the middle classes; men and women. There’s an attempt at representativeness which he acknowledges is not comprehensive. Those pictured have clearly been given a say on their representation as one occasionally gets a ‘self-censored’ notice as they speak. There’s a bit of voice-over narration, but most of the film is given over to hearing what people have to say, including the prostitutes; so the film never suffers from ‘Voice-of-God’ certitude; and half-way through Pasolini interrogates the veracity of what he’s been presenting: it’s clear many people are not telling the truth, and for various reasons; also all the speakers have been self-selected, what about those who were silent or didn’t get a chance to speak, he asks Alberto Moravia?

Love Meetings is an imaginative and ethical film; one sees the filmmakers grappling with so many of the concerns that would become central to documentary for the next twenty years, including the filmmaker putting himself in the picture, questioning how to represent and whether the representation is truthful, and giving those a represented a say in their representation. Plus it’s all such fun. The analysis is Marxist; the tone humorous, respectful, inclusive. A film that seeks knowledge and radiates intelligence and empathy.

 

José Arroyo

José Arroyo in Conversation with Andrew Moor on Derek Jarman ‘Protest!’ at Manchester Art Gallery

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A conversation with Dr. Andrew Moor on Derek Jarman, arising from the Derek Jarman Protest! exhibition at Manchester Art Gallery, on Jarman’s significance in British Culture, his legacy as a multimedia artist and his contributions to art, protest cultures, queer cultures and tourism.

In the podcast we discuss his films throughout — the exhibition has been accompanied by a full retrospective at HOME in Manchester — and make reference to the following aspects of his art work that the exhibition touches on:

Juvenalia:

Jouissance:

Black Paintings: Before and During Caravaggio

Drag:

 

Scrapbooks:

 

Protest Art:

Protest Practice

Pedagogy:

José Arroyo

 

 

 

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 349 – The Worst Person in the World

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

A Palme d’Or-nominated millennial comic drama from Norway, whose lead, Renate Reinsve, won Best Actress at Cannes last year, The Worst Person in the World explores universal themes of how to find a direction in life, our expectations of our own lives and others’, falling in and out of love, and how to handle the twists that life throws our way. But it speaks to José and Mike differently.

To the older of us, it’s a great film, one that articulates its themes with complexity and develops its characters expressively. To the younger – a millennial, to whom it should speak more directly – it’s a film that’s difficult to connect to, that occupies an emotional register to which he doesn’t relate. We discuss that register, the ways in which the characters behave and respond to one another, the use of chapters to structure the story and narration to tell some of it, and the imagination and life of certain scenes. Many of The Worst Person in the World‘s qualities are obvious, but we don’t agree on its greatness. As they say in Norway, c’est la vie.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.

Eavesdropping at the Movies: 348 – X (2022)

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Listen on the players above, Apple Podcasts, Audible, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.

Referential and reverential of classic slashers from decades past, Ti West’s X is likely just the sort of thing the dedicated horror fan wants to see – but to Mike, it’s a pretty unsophisticated and tedious imitation of much better films, and to José, it’s unpleasant, racist, sexist, and ageist. But on the plus side, no film has made him – a man who is decidedly not delighted by being frightened – jump and yell with the kind of regularity and energy that X inspired, which really livened things up for Mike. Unfortunately for you, José won’t be watching it a second time, and if you can’t drag him along, it’s not worth it.

With José Arroyo of First Impressions and Michael Glass of Writing About Film.