The other night, CAConrad, David Buuck and Eileen Myles read at Artists’ Television Access in San Francisco for Small Press Traffic. The reading was sold out and a few dozen people were turned away. After the reading Eileen and Conrad read to some of those who couldn’t get in at Mission Laundromat. This is an excerpt from Eileen’s reading. Check out Conrad’s reading, too.
Video credit: Andrew Kenower
A flyer created by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore for an Occupy-inspired demonstration against the corporate, tourist-fueled Santa Fe art world. Unfortunately, the Fart Walk never happpened, but still, we have this inspiring artwork.
It’s difficult to choose a favorite line from Guy Hocquenghem’s The Screwball Asses, but I do like this one a lot:
“In my dream, gays can be queens without running backwards towards big dicks.”
Swarm
Camille Roy
Black Star Series
1998
Swarm includes two novellas by Camille Roy, The Faggot and Perils. Both are lesbian coming out stories, however, thankfully, not in any sort of conventional manner.
In The Faggot, Camille spends the summer with family friends at run-down motel in Aspen, Colorado. Shane calls her “faggot” for reasons unexplainable to Camille. Perhaps he can sense something different about her but cannot name it, probably because that something is about female sexuality. Camille finds the perfect word though—dyke, of course—after having sex in the attic of Pussy’s Victorian mansion with a rash-prone girl on a mysteriously-stained mattress. Pussy and her friend, the poet, Mina Loy act as dyke mentors with Pussy providing the house and Loy offering the possibilities of language. Roy’s writing is poetic, too, with a mysterious and earthy tone that explains nothing so that the story lingers on.
Perils is more perplexing, with a theme of academia and physics. There’s a ghost, too, and series of crappy part-time jobs. Camille is kicked out of college, she’s failing, but it’s okay because what she really needs is to explore her sexuality, okay? She finds a sort-of mentor in Professor Wittig who seems to offer Camille a fulfilling return to the world of physics, even though the professor doesn’t believe women can make it as physicists. It isn’t until the end when Camille has a star-struck moment of connection with a girl at her part-time sex parlor receptionist job that she is finally found. The art of queer failure in full bloom!
Franny, the Queen of Provincetown
John Preston
Aresenal Pulp Press
Originally published in 1983, this is a reissue by Arsenal Pulp Press published in 2005 that includes an introduction by Michael Lowenthal, the previously unpublished sequel, and several previously published articles about the author.
In Franny, the Queen of Provincetown, John Preston turns the most disdained figure of the gay male world, the queen, into a tough-as-nails sage and savior of the boys of Provincetown in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. A full-time queen, and an unattractive one at that, Franny is an unlikely hero for a book, and definitely for a book written by Preston who was previously known for leatherman erotic fiction.
The story is told through a series of monologues by Franny, her best friend Isadora, and the many gay men that Franny “saves” from the effects of societal homophobia, and the resulting perils of gay life. The catalyst for Franny to become something other than just another queen is the loss of a beloved friend to suicide who had been, of course, rejected by his family and never recovered from the isolation of being queer. Franny could not save him, so from then on she becomes a mother figure to the men who flock to Provincetown. She offers advice and inspiration, and sometimes stern condemnations of the self destructive behavior she sees in “her boys.” While some of the scenarios do seem contrived, and Franny as the always all-knowing mother is a bit too repetitive, the validation of the queen helps to accessorize the sometimes bland writing.
A short, simple novel, Franny, the Queen of Provincetown is nonetheless a unique contribution to much of the status-quo fiction that passes as queer. It has a very specific point—this disdain of queens in the gay world is a form of internalized homophobia. Interestingly, in a 1999 interview with John Preston, published in this edition, he indicates that Samuel Steward is one of his writing “role models,” but it would seem that Preston’s book is written in reaction to the kind of writing that Steward and others of his ilk offered gay readers which perpetuated the idolization of masculinity.
The fabulous Leche by R. Zamora Linmark has made it onto two Best Books of 2011 lists:
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/best-books/2011/fiction#list
http://www.lambdaliterary.org/features/12/25/best-books-2011-authors-choice/
Don’t miss my review of this book in the upcoming issue of Make/Shift magazine!
Another quirky find from our queer literary past, Size Queen and other poems, written by Dennis Kelly, seems to have so much potential, but sadly, the writing, at least, is flaccid. The cover really pulls you in with the illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley dating from 1896, but the writing, oh no, the writing! “Shock of shocks! First day in the showers at Rimjob Junior High! A day she’d never forget! Dickmeat city!” Seriously? But then there are the several zine-like photo collages interspersed throughout the book. They aren’t particularly well done either, but exciting nonetheless for the DIY, low-budget, down-at-the-heels, gay publishing aesthetic of the 1970s and early 80s. This poetic masterpiece was published by Gay Sunshine Press in 1981, and, of course, I found it at The Magazine in San Francisco.
Published in 1972, The Gay Insider USA must be the rarest of rare, strangest of strange, gay guides ever to be published. Written by John Francis Hunter, aka John Paul Hudson, activist, actor, journalist and sex-positive ramblin’ man, all of which the reader knows because half the book is about him, his opinions on the gay movement (which was already failing then), and his critiques of gay representation in literature and film. All that, and I got it for a $1 at The Magazine: http://themagazinesf.com/THE_MAGAZINE/Welcome.html
The first sentence, just for fun: “This book is an eclectic guide to where the male homosexuals can find love, companionship, truth, beauty, sex, God, Liberation, good gay food, a crash pad, tools of torture, VD treatment, therapy, group therapy, tonsorial attention to poodles, codpieces, poppers, danger, a fix—or all of these—anywhere in Gay America.”
