Recently read 'Love in a Dark Time', Colm Toibin's collection of essays on Gay and lesbian writers.
I've also just seen the HBO documentary on Vito Russo.
Vito Russo, 7/11/46 - 11/7/90 was one of the leaders of the gay rights movement of the 1960s until his death from aids in 1990. He was one of the founders of the Gay Activist Alliance, Act-up, and GLAAD. He is most remembered as the author of 'The Celluloid Closet'; which is about the depiction of gays in cinema. He loved movies and hated the stereotypical depiction of gays in movies. He worked for years on the book and it was years before he found a publisher. Part of the book was written in Lily Tomlin's unfinished, unheated home. She was a friend and is the narrator of the film of 'The Celluloid Closet'.
It interests me it's all a part of me, my history, and my interests: books and movies.
Toibin [he is an out Irish catholic gay writer]
'studies how a changing world impacted on the lives of people who, on the whole, kept their homosexuality hidden, and reveals that the laws of desire changed everything for them, both in their private lives and in the spirit of their work.' [from the back cover]
He writes about Henry James' story 'The Beast in the Jungle':
"It is, ostensibly, about a man who realizes his failure to love has been a disaster; but it is also, for readers familiar with Edel's or Kaplan's biographies of James, and readers willing to find clues in the text itself, about a gay man whose sexuality has left him frozen in the world.' Life experienced from the outside, not from within. Books and movies?
On his essay on Oscar Wilde he explores the inexplicable attachment of Wilde to Bosie.
"In most societies, most gay people go through adolescence believing that the fulfillment of physical desire would not be matched by emotional attachment. For straight people, the eventual matching of the two is part of the deal, a happy aspect of normality. But if this occurs for gay people, it is capable of taking on an extraordinarily powerful emotional force, and the resulting attachment, even if the physical part fizzles out, or even if the relationship makes no sense to the outside world, is likely to be fierce and enduring."
Vito Russo states that he never felt his homosexuality was wrong. It's sex. It's natural. The documentary shows how close and deeply loving his relationship with his mother was. He brought all his gay and lesbian friends and his lovers to his family's home to meet her.
The documentary makes no mention of what books Vito read but we know the movies he saw and loved. And now I know the books Colm Toibin has read and the people he has studied: Henry James, Walt Whitman, Roger Casement, Thomas Mann, Francis Bacon, Elizabeth Bishop, James Baldwin, Thom Gunn, Pedro Almodovar, Mark Doty, F. O. Matthiessen, and many others.
Colm Toibin's last piece is titled 'Goodbye to Catholic Ireland'. He quotes from 'The Irish Mother' by Inglis on how the Irish mother gained power:
"The way for the mother to obtain the priest's blessing and approval was to bring up her children within the limits that he [ the priest] had lain down. In doing so she was able to call upon him as an ally in her attempts to limit what her husband and children did and said."
That took hold in mid-nineteenth century Ireland. Today:
" On one Monday in November 1994, the three leading stories on RTE television were the political repercussions following the Brendan Smyth [ the priest who abused a large number of young people] case, the collapse and death of the Dublin priest in a homosexual sauna club [ as chance would have it, there were two other priests on the premises to give him the last rites] and the conviction of a Galway priest for a sexual assault on a young man."
At one time only five groups were ranked below gays by the Irish and 22.5% of the Irish believed people with aids should be deported. As of April this year civil partnerships are legal for same sex couples.
Books and movies and, Toibin adds, the daily news are forces for change. Vito would add: sometimes Mothers.
