Common Sense	Common Sense Archive

The brackets of today's meditation are two new books. They are: Thomas Eakins: The Absolute Male and Richard Goldstein's The Attack Queers: Liberal Society and The Gay Right. This Eakins title collects his photographic work of male subjects some of which he later turned into paintings. Eakins really is good. There's the photos of Billy Duckett, Walt Whitman's last beau. (I recommend Charley Shively's book Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados for information on the long list of WW boyfriends, including Duckett who was probably around age 15 when he took up with Walt, and a few years older when appearing in the buff in front of Eakins's camera.) How the bodies have changed since Duckett's youth! Flash forward to The Attack Queers, a bright essay on a certain handful of contemporary personalities and their intellectual faults and failings, and I had to think: how did we get from there-- the masculinism of Eakins to the macho masculinism of the Attack Queers, at least in Goldstein's take.

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What causes change? Not many days ago, over 100,000 people participated in the Gay Pride Parade in Boston, my town. One hundred thousand people! That's like Youngstown, Ohio, maybe Canton, maybe even Akron coming out for The Parade! 35 years ago, such a social happening was unthinkable. What happened? We have now an entire generation that has grown up in a culture wherein the annual Gay Parade is an established fact. What does that mean?

I begin to feel like Billy Pilgrim in Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse Five, time traveling hither and fro. I walk down the street and see faces that belong to friends I know are long dead. I expect things to cost the same as they did in 1965. I plan to go out to places long gone. It's hard to occupy two time zones simultaneously-- you hear the same conversations at different times in each ear. Now and then.

I remember the early years of gay activism. The topics which were Top Stories then were: Gays In The Military, Gay Partnership/Marriage, Job Discrimination. Despite some changes, these remain in place-- stories from those societal sectors where Nothing Changes.

Now and Then. "I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness [] who lost their loverboys to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the heterosexual dollar the one eyed shrew that winks out of the womb and the one eyed shrew that does nothing but sit on her ass and snip the intellectual golden threads of the craftman's loom" Odd that none of The Attack Queers has the moxie of Allen Ginsberg, and Allen did see the best minds of his generation get wiped out by name the perpetrator: mass culture, institutional persecution, identity non-congruence. In my cohort, suicide remains epidemic.

I have been told from a very early age that when I get going-- wound up, on a tear, talking a blue streak-- most folks can't understand what I'm talking about, can't make the leaps, and, you know, that's frustrating. Looking back on my life in this land, I must acknowledge that I have reciprocated: why would people go to football games, listen to sermons, respond to advertising, heed the screaming?

Allen's "Howl" queens weren't just misunderstood, which is volitional, they were not heard at all, just noise to their auditors. That's a recipe for insanity. And, of course, once the best are gone, what's left? The Attack Queers? No, they come later in the story.

Most people think the past was worse than now in all regards. And, in most regards-- medicine, civil rights, hygiene-- they are right. But when it comes to what is now called the Quality of Life issues-- the amenities, having the hardware store around the corner, ten-cent coffee joints, easy, uncomplicated homo-sex, a world without therapeutic jargon ("healing," "closure," "anger stanching," etc.)-- perhaps old days were better.

Certainly, the punitive and administrative functions of police, prisons, the noise of popular culture, the sneer of the ugly have all gotten worse and more intrusive in recent years-- the sheer volume of the oppressors is so much worse. And none of the shits seem to get killed-- I'm not suggesting the Dutch candidate Pim Fortuyn (not his real name) deserved to be killed, in fact the opposite; he seemed to have a affection for his sex with men when he was a lad, and recommended it, as well as a taste for Maggie Thatcher handbags-- every faggot has a flaw. I predict: we will never know who killed Pim, just as we have never learned who assassinated the Swedish Prime Minister from the 70s, Olaf Palme. Then and now.

I look into my crystal ball. I see Connie Francis, hear the voice of Adlai Stevenson, see the clothes of Rudi Gernreich. It's sad that the central contradiction is that in the 1970s, with all the advances of the gay movement, we also had the creeping-crawling of the right-wing reaction, moving, oddly, in tandem with our successes, giving us the Attack Queers, in this cycle. The more things change the more the prices change!

Author Profile:  Mitzel
	Mitzel was a founding member of the Fag Rag collective, and has been a Guide columnist since 1986. He manages Calamus Books near Boston's South Station.
	Email:	mitzel@calamusbooks.com
	Website:	calamusbooks.com