Stonewall Triptych

The Guardian had a story a month ago about a photograph of a man eating chicken out of a pot on the steps of the New York Public Library. The man eating the chicken told the photographer that he could take his picture if the photographer would “help [him] deliver a message.”  Here is the man’s message [from the Guardian story, originally published on Facebook]: 

“I work at this library. And before that, I was coming here for twenty years. It’s my favorite place in the world. As many people know, the main reading room of this library is supported by seven floors of books, which contain one of the greatest research collections in the world. Recently, the library administration has decided to rip out this collection, send the books to New Jersey, and use the space for a lending library. As part of the consolidation, they are going to close down the Mid-Manhattan Library Branch as well as the Science, Industry, and Business Library. When everything is finished, one of the greatest research libraries in the world will become a glorified internet cafe. Now read that back to me.” 

This photo and message were originally posted to Facebook to a page called “Humans of New York.” It went viral and has been attracting internet attention since it was first posted. Check out the Facebook entry and the Guardian story and follow the links to his picture. Read the comments. There are thousands on the Facebook page. 

The comments, like the NYPL administration, reduce the “problem” to a conflict between print books and ebooks. Either we have and read print books in libraries or we move to ebooks and get our books on computers and tablets. And the reason we would move to ebooks is everything else is going digital, so libraries must go digital too. The thousands of people who are writing comments on the Facebook page all see the man in the photo eating chicken as a young, sexy fighter for our literate past as embodied in our great research libraries. The impassioned responses to this post seem driven both by the sexiness of the man in the photo and by the danger our literate culture is in.

I live in a city with at least two research libraries—the Boston Public Library and the libraries at Harvard. I give a little bit of money to the BPL every year, and I expect it and Harvard will continue all of the rest of my life and for generations into the future. I wrote most of my last two novels, Race Point Light and Adam in the Morning, in the Bates Hall, in the BPL (when I wasn’t at Espresso Royale on Gainsborough). We should maintain these research libraries and when possible wire them for access to the internet and for access to the Digital Public Library of America for research and for work. The future belongs to both print books and ebooks. There is room for both and need for both, and our culture needs to take full advantage of both. Only a luddite would think that the coming of the digital age means that our research collections should be sent to New Jersey. 

I was a kid twelve or thirteen in the seventh grade, and I had fallen in love with another boy a year older than I. That is, I had developed an intense lust for him. I couldn’t see him but once a day, when he walked past me on his way to his classroom. We didn’t have classes together, and we didn’t share any of the same activities, and I didn’t know how to introduce myself to him. This was in 1951, in the conservative, religious, American South. 

When I began to be attracted to men, one of the bad things was that you couldn’t see men except the live ones at school or on the bus or at the beach or somewhere. You couldn’t get more than a glimpse of them—they’d be walking past you, or you’d be walking past them. You couldn’t just stop and stare at this boy or man you thought was totally nice looking and who you might want to stare at for the next eight or ten hours or days.

What we needed was pictures. At least once a week, my father went to a news stand on Main Street in Columbia, South Carolina, and often I was with him. While he was on one side of the storefront looking for the magazines he was going to buy—he bought Time, and Newsweek, and US News & World Report every week—I was on the other side. I discovered magazines that had pictures of men. The first one I ever saw, I think, was called Physique Pictorial. It was small enough to hold in one hand and had forty or so pages, and mostly it was pictures or drawings of guys who were wearing nothing except brief tight bathing suits or loin cloths. Sometimes it was a group of young men around a swimming pool, or something Greek, or a Roman gladiator or wrestler, other times it was a drawing of an Aztec god, and other men were bowing down to him.

I went back alone to that news stand and bought one of these magazines.  The man at the cash register recognized me from my being there with my father, and he noticed what I was buying. He let me know he recognized me, but he sold it to me anyway. 

These little magazines solved one of the problems of growing up in a southern, conservative, religious town. Many of the subjects of the pictures looked like the boy in my junior high school—athletic, blond, hair slicked back in duck tails. Later, I discovered the artists I liked. George Quaintance was one. Right after I discovered him, I discovered Tom of Finland.

I was devoted to Tom of Finland and his underground, erotic art. His men were big, muscular, impossibly good looking, and they had big dicks. Humongous dicks. At first his men were lumber jacks, later they were big leathermen. They followed contemporary styles. Then, styles followed his men. When I first went to the Ramrod, in Boston, the dominant style of the other men had been lifted directly from Tom of Finland’s drawings—black leather chaps over jeans, construction boots, leather arm bands, and muscles. There are many styles in the gay community. Tom defined mine. 

Then Tom of Finland began to come out into the daylight. Museums held exhibitions. Books between hardcovers—far too big and massive to hold in one hand—were published.  

Now, today, Huffington Post announces that Finland is putting Tom of Finland on a postage stamp. And here. A postage stamp. The graphic on the stamp—from Tom of Finland’s own art—is, as Itella Posti says, “a confident and proud homoeroticism.” This, and the Harvey Milk stamp too. We move forward on all fronts at once.

OK, the marriage cases are beginning to reach the appeals courts. In the most important case since the Supreme Court decided United States v. Windsor last summer, the US Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit was the scene yesterday for a hearing of Kitchens v. Herbert. This case was tried in Utah and resulted in federal district judge Richard Shelby declaring that the Utah marriage bans violated both the equal protection and the due process guarantees of the Constitution. Look up Richard Shelby on Kitchens v. Herbert. The state of Utah appealed that judgment to the Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, and that is where we were yesterday. Now we wait for the decision. 

If the 10th Circuit agrees with Judge Shelby, then it appears that all marriage bans in the entire 10th Circuit will be struck down—that is, in Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, and the northern, eastern, and western districts of Oklahoma. But there is more to this than that. Ari Ezra Waldman  writes about the importance of this case:

Ari says this has a good chance of being the case that makes it all the way to the Supreme Court.  So Ari says the questions are: Will the court issue as broad a ruling as Judge Shelby's, or limit it in some way? What does the court say about the level of scrutiny in antigay discrimination cases? and What role will the political backgrounds of the judges play in their decision-making (two Republicans and one Democrat)?  

Lisa Keen writes on background, and, in the aftermath, the Washington Post, and the Denver Post. See Andy Towle here, and more Andy Towle and a full audio recording here.

It's worth spending the time listening to the full audio in the last link. As soon as a full transcript is available, I'll tell you where it can be found. What is happening now, as we move through these cases around the country, is akin to periods during the Civil Rights movement when the issues were fought out one at a time. Decades from now, when our grandchildren look back on this history, those of us here now will remember, "Ah, yeah. That was an intense time. After the Supreme Court ruled in Windsor but before  people agreed as to what Windsor meant, and we had to fight it out state by state. I remember when our right to marry nationally first got to the appellate court—10, I think it was—and we had to wait for their decision..." What we're hearing now in the media is a kind of play-by-play as we listen to the principals fight it out. (There's no video in federal court cases.)

As I read Ari, it appears that he is confident that the 10th Circuit, when it announces its decision, will agree with Judge Shelby—and with all the other federal judges who have, unanimously, agreed on the meaning of Windsor. I think, now, that it is late, at this point, to reverse the flow of this history. 

The only person who can tell what sexuality a person is, is the person involved. Everybody else is clueless. 

I was searching for something yesterday on the web when I stumbled on an interview with Kirstie Alley, from a couple of years ago. She was talking about John Travolta and responding to the rumors about his being gay. She said he’s not gay. She is quoted saying he is “the great love of my life.” And then she is quoted saying, “I know John. With all my heart and soul, he’s not gay.” Alley is talking about things she knows nothing about. She doesn't know John. Nobody can, but John.

Apparently she had sex with Travolta, and she thinks that gives her authority to speak of his sexuality. It doesn’t. Some men can’t operate outside their sexuality. Others—many others—can. It works like this: A man knows what his default sexuality is, he likes men, but society brings pressure to bear on him not to like men, which the man gives in to. Or having a relationship with a woman gives the man something he doesn’t get otherwise. Or it may be that the man falls in love with her, and he enters into a relationship with her. No one knows what it is but the man involved. 

During the whole of the life the man spends with this woman, no one sees evidence of the man’s default sexuality. It may be that he will die in this state, or it may be that at some point he will announce that he is leaving his relationship and is prepared to explore sex with men.  All of this is so deeply private—it’s happening in a place so far removed from any other person’s perception—that none of the rest of us can say anything about the process. We can’t tell what’s happening in another man’s brain or heart.

A man I am distantly related to was trying to get his head around parts of my life and having difficulties. He said, worried look on his face, “Well, all those years you were in a marriage, you must have been—” and here he paused, searching for a word, “—at least bisexual.” He wanted me to say yes, in which case I could be inserted into a familiar pattern, and he could stop thinking about these difficult matters. 

But I said, “No. Never during all those years did I stop being gay, and never did I develop a feeling for women. I was never anything more than a gay man.” What I tried to go on and explain to him was that gay was more complicated than our culture would have it. And some can be profoundly gay and completely gay and yet at the same time can function for a time as something else. It’s not that I “functioned” for eighteen years as something else. It’s that I did what I had to do for tonight. And then I did it again tomorrow night. I did this for myself and also because I cared about her. But afterward I went back to being Dwight Cathcart, queer the rest of the time even though no one knew about it. Most of the things in life that are worth having are the result of tradeoffs. You give up something important in order to get something more important. I loved her, and, for a number of years I gave up my own sexuality in order to live with her. And to have my children. At that time, that was the way it was done.