Tag: GLBT literature

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Favorite Literary Character by Gillian

This one took up a chunk of thinking time. With little trouble I can come up with many literary characters I love for many different reasons: I empathize with them, they make me laugh, they express themselves brilliantly, they make me cry. So first of all it depends whether the actual topic is a favorite character, as in one of many, or my favorite, as in one and only. I decided on the latter, which of course makes it a much more challenging pick. I next tried to get a clearer vision than my own as to the exact meaning of “literature,” but found that most definitions seem as loose, fluid, and confused as mine and so concluded it means just about anything that anyone has written, ever, about anything.

My eventual choice I find to be more than a little embarrassing. In fact coming out with it is a bit like coming out of the closet; a bit scary, unsure of acceptance. Fears of rejection or ridicule abound. I fear you expect more of me. You perhaps are awaiting the introduction of some obscure character from some equally obscure piece of writing which has rarely crossed The Pond, and in those rare cases only to lodge itself in still more obscure ivory towers of Academe. Or maybe someone extremely funny, created by Kingsley Amis or Hilaire Belloc. Or some delightful female creation out of Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf. Or someone in one of those gritty novels by Ruark or Hemingway. Or a real person writing with true courage, such as Anne Frank and Paul Monette, or authors out to change the world like Rachel Carson or Mary Pipher, who wrote a book actually titled, Writing to Change the World.

The choices are endless, and all good. But I rejected them all.

One of the problems is that my very favorite changes all the time. I read a new book and one of the characters in it becomes my favorite, but pretty soon another from yet another new book replaces him or her. My one and only very favorite, then, has to be one who has stuck with me; every time I encounter that character, it is still my favorite. If I simply remember it, it is my favorite. And I could only, then, looking at it like that, think of one. I have loved this character since my childhood, and have never lost that love. Even movie and TV portrayals have not diminished it.

And, yes, dammit, it is like coming out. So I’m not ashamed, I’m not embarrassed, I can love whoever I want, and I will not apologize for my love, nor will I deny it. I shout it from the rooftops for all the world to hear —–

MY FAVORITE LITERARY CHARACTER IS ……. WINNIE the POOH!!!

OK, OK, I’m sure it’s really my inner child that loves him, and why not? One of the many Pooh books, and I don’t know which, is the first book I remember having read to me. I cuddled on my mother’s knee and jabbed a finger and squealed at the delightful illustrations and headed off with my buddy Pooh for adventures in Hundred Acre Wood, though I’m sure I had no idea what a hundred acres would be like. (Come to that, I still don’t!) That particular book was just wonderfully illustrated, and I’m sure that’s why my inner kid fell in love with Pooh Bear.

I mean, what’s not to love in an androgynous, vaguely ursine creature of indeterminate age, whose height of ambition is to suck down the very last drop of honey in the pot and then go to sleep, and whose closest approach to an expletive is, “Oh bother!”

Pooh portrays the the very height of non-ambition, and his tiny bear-brain is certainly not very active. He trails along with his wonderfully entertaining friends, seeking a spot to nap or consume more honey or both. And his friends are all such exquisite characters, each depicted so that the reader inevitably reacts with, oh I know someone just like that! Take Tigger, for instance. He bounds and bounces and is never still for a moment. He overflows with zest and zeal, bouncing off this way and that, never thinking first, and bouncing into endless troubles. He bounces right through the ice on the lake and Pooh et al have to go to the rescue; likewise when he bounces right up into a big tree or into a raging river. His friends are tired of always having to rescue him and wish he would occasionally take time out for a little thought before taking his next big bounce. But when, in one book, Tigger loses his bounce, he just isn’t the same old Tigger they know and love, and they are all delighted when his bounce eventually returns. Now don’t we all know someone like that?

There’s Mrs. Roo, mother of Kanga. She’s the quintessential mother everyone wants for their own. Soft-spoken, never issuing a reprimand stronger than, “Oh dear!” she is always on hand with milk and fresh-baked cookies, and of course toast and honey, or just honey, for Pooh.

Then there’s Eeyore, most definitely a glass-half-empty kinda donkey. He trails dejectedly at the back of the pack and rarely intones anything more significant then, “Oh well, it doesn’t matter anyway.”

In my childhood book, the wonderful illustrations brought these and many more characters to life in a time preceding mass animation. Pooh was illustrated dozing at the bottom of page four, waking up on page five, ambling along the bottom of pages six through ten, then, having caught up with the narrative, dozing at the bottom of page eleven. Later, on page fourteen, he was depicted climbing a ladder to the top of the page fifteen where he appeared again in the story, sucked another pot of honey dry, and promptly fell asleep on line two. Meanwhile, Tigger had bounced off to page twenty, way ahead of the story, and bounded up above the top line and back down below the bottom, up and down across the page while he impatiently waited for the others to catch up with him.

I don’t know how many 21st century children read Winnie the Pooh. Maybe they play computer games or enter chat rooms instead. If so, I think they miss out on something warm and wonderful. Winnie the Pooh and his assorted anthropomorphic friends make me smile even now, and provide me with that deep warm glow inside that isn’t always easy to acquire in adulthood. I still read the books, occasionally, and still delight in them, although I do try not to jab my finger at the illustrations and squeal with joy as I once did. I also watch the animated versions of Milne’s stories on TV, because by some miracle, to me at least, they have not ruined but rather enhanced my own version of the characters. Pooh Bear has filled me with warm fuzzies for seventy years. How can he not qualify as my favorite literary character?

April 19, 2014

About the Author

I was born and raised in England. After graduation from college there, I moved to the U.S. and, having discovered Colorado, never left. I have lived in the Denver-Boulder area since 1965, working for 30 years at IBM. I married, raised four stepchildren, then got divorced after finally, in my forties, accepting myself as a lesbian. I have now been with my wonderful partner Betsy for 25 years.

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My Favorite Literary Character by Ray S

A footnote to our
storytelling: Don’t forget Peter Rabbit, Peanuts’ Charlie Brown, or Alice. “It
is an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San
Francisco.” Oscar Wilde.
Seven a.m. and
it’s my Monday morning challenge. No, not that—my muse and I have been fooling
around since last Monday with today’s subject and it’s been difficult to boil
down the vast numbers of characters, if you count the fictionally named heroes of
gay porn. But that’s a matter that does not qualify for the highly intellectual
subject matter for today.
As a child having
a reading difficulty, my character inventory was limited to the delightful
poems of Mr. Stevenson and his “A Child’s Garden of Verses”. What fond memories I
have of “The Land of Counterpane.”
When I was sick and lay a-bed,
I had two pillows at my head,
And all my toys beside me lay,
To keep me happy all the day.
And sometimes for an hour or so
I watched my leaden soldiers go,
With different uniforms and drills,
Among the bed-clothes, through the hills;
And sometimes sent my ships in fleets
All up and down among the sheets;
Or brought my trees and houses out,
And planted cities all about.
I was the giant great and still
That sits upon the pillow-hill,
And sees before him, dale and plain,
The pleasant land of counterpane.
Oh, and yes from a
more recent time when I used to read to my kids the adventures of Maurice
Sendak’s “Nutshell Library,” “Alligators All Around,” and “The Moral of Pierre
is: CARE” and many more.
My literary life
didn’t include Oscar or Gore, but with the advent of my SAGE time of life I
have discovered and learned to love a truly fabulous cast of characters through
the offices of the genius of my hero Armistead Maupin. I shall never forget the
tale of the long journey from the Blue Moon in Winnemucca, Nevada to the house
of Barberry Lane. That’s how I met my most favorite literary character—and
first acquaintance with the “T” in GLBT, the Queen of 28 Barberry Lane, Mrs.
Anna Madrigal. She is a role model for everyone—no matter which way you swing!

© 10 March 2014, Denver


About the Author 



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Details by Colin Dale

The setting of houses, cafés, the neighborhood
that I’ve seen and walked through years on end:

I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,
with so many incidents, so many details.

And, for me, the whole of you is transformed into feeling.
     
      Lady Luck.  Serendipity.  Fluke.  Whatever you want to call it, when I found my idea for today’s story it was a remarkable moment.  And thank god I sat down to look for something a few days ago and didn’t do what I usually do and wait until Monday morning.  Looking for an idea, I checked my Bartlett’s, but was unprepared for the coincidence–the GLBT coincidence–I’d find.
     
      Under details, Bartlett’s had only two citations: the first, God is in the details, by Anonymous, and the 5-line poem with its: I created you while I was happy, while I was sad,/with so many incidents, so many details.
     
      The poet is gay icon Constantine Cavafy, known today in GLBT circles for his homoerotic poetry.  To be fair, though, only a portion of Cavafy’s work is homoerotic.   Virtually unpublished in his lifetime, Cavafy is today regarded as one of the great European poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
     
      Constantine Cavafy died in 1933 at the age of 70.   Born to Greek parents in the Egyptian port-city of Alexandria, Cavafy lived the entirety of his life closeted.  His poetry was introduced to the English-speaking world by his friend and then equally closeted writer E.M. Forster.  Forster, though, who died in 1970 at 91, managed in his last years to emerge some from the closet.  Cavafy, dying 1933, wasn’t so lucky.
     
      A prolific writer, Cavafy drew heavily from classical history, Greek and Hellenistic.  History, and Cavafy’s home Alexandria with its own rich history, serve as metaphor for the whole of the human experience.
     
      First this–to make today seem a little less like a grad seminar in poetry:
     
It’s not a trick, your senses all deceiving,
A fitful dream, the morning will exhaust –
Say goodbye to Alexandra leaving.
Then say goodbye to Alexandra lost.
     
      This is not Cavafy.  This is another of my heroes: Leonard Cohen.  Cohen transformed Cavafy’s poem, The God Abandons Antony, into a somewhat autobiographical love song, changing Alexandria to Alexandra.  In the Cavafy poem …
       
      Anthony is Marc Antony, Cleopatra’s lover. The story goes when Alexandria was besieged, the night before the city fell, Antony dreamed he heard an invisible troupe leaving the city.  He awoke the next morning to find that his soldiers had in fact deserted him–which Antony took to mean even the god Dionysus, his protector, had abandoned him.  The poem has many layers of meaning beyond the historical.   Most say it’s about facing up to great loss: lost loves, lost dreams, lost opportunities–ultimately, of course, life itself.

When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with cowardly pleas and protests;
listen–as a last pleasure–to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
     
      I’d wondered whether a poetry sampler was appropriate stuff for Storytellers.  It’s hardly run-of-the-mill memoir (“Then in 1988 this happened to me … “), but as a taste of some of the poetry I like, it qualifies, I think, as memoir-light.
     
      But, you’re thinking, what about those homoerotic poems?  I’ll give you a sample of two of Cavafy’s shorter homoerotic poems.    Now, neither one is going to make you go, Oh my God how could someone write that? –but consider when these were written.  Cavafy’s homoerotic poems, mild as they may seem to us today, do evoke the stifling repression that made emotional cripples of men like Cavafy and Forster.

He lost him completely. And he now tries to find
his lips in the lips of each new lover,
he tries in the union with each new lover
to convince himself that it’s the same young man,
that it’s to him he gives himself.

He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
He wanted, his lover said, to save himself
from the tainted, unhealthy form of sexual pleasure,
the tainted, shameful form of sexual pleasure.
There was still time, he said, to save himself.

He lost him completely, as though he never existed.
Through fantasy, through hallucination,
he tries to find his lips in the lips of other young men,
he longs to feel his kind of love once more.

      Tame, no, by what we’re used to?  But the works of kindred spirits like those of Constantine Cavafy and E.M. Forster–written only a few generations ago–remind us of how much we’ve to be thankful for today.
     
      That last poem is called In Despair.  This:
     
At the Next Table

He must be barely twenty-two years old—
yet I’m certain that almost that many years ago
I enjoyed the very same body.

It isn’t erotic fever at all.
And I’ve been in the casino for a few minutes only,
so I haven’t had time to drink a great deal.
I enjoyed that very same body.

And if I don’t remember where, this one lapse of memory
doesn’t mean a thing.

There, now that he’s sitting down at the next table,
I recognize every motion he makes—and under his clothes
I see again those beloved naked limbs.
     
      I’ll end with a cut of one of Cavafy’s best-known poems Ithaka.  You can find a YouTube video of Sean Connery reading Ithaka.  “Since Homer’s Odyssey . . . [and I shoplifted this from a Cavafy website] . . . Since Homer’s Odyssey, the island, Ithaca, symbolizes the destination of a long journey, the supreme aim that every man tries to fulfill all his life long . . . “
     
As you set out for Ithaka
hope that your journey is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare sensation
touches your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians and Cyclops,
wild Poseidon-you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so that you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaca gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would have not set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

About the Author

Colin Dale couldn’t be happier to be involved again at the Center. Nearly three decades ago, Colin was both a volunteer and board member with the old Gay and Lesbian Community Center. Then and since he has been an actor and director in Colorado regional theatre. Old enough to report his many stage roles as “countless,” Colin lists among his favorite Sir Bonington in The Doctor’s Dilemma at Germinal Stage, George in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Colonel Kincaid in The Oldest Living Graduate, both at RiverTree Theatre, Ralph Nickleby in The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby with Compass Theatre, and most recently, Grandfather in Ragtime at the Arvada Center. For the past 17 years, Colin worked as an actor and administrator with Boulder’s Colorado Shakespeare Festival. Largely retired from acting, Colin has shifted his creative energies to writing–plays, travel, and memoir.

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Buddies by Phillip Hoyle

     Last week I visited my family, the one related to my long-standing marriage with my ex-wife, the one that produced two interesting children, the one that has graced me with ten grandchildren. That family has extensions: my family of origin with four sisters and their husbands and, for three of them, children; my ex-wife’s family of origin with three siblings and their families; an informally adopted child and his wife and children. My week seemed both long and short, long in that I was away from my Denver family of Jim and his mother, a group of close friends, and other important relationships with storytellers, writers, artists, and neighbors. But my stay was also short in that the whirlwind of Mid-Missouri card playing, discussions of writing and art, politics and theology, observations of life at my son’s new farm, graduations, parties, trips to coffee shops, supporting my daughter when she heard her partner had been arrested at the Mexico-USA border, grandkids going to new jobs, two little girls who still drive me crazy, and themes related to my nine years of residence there when I served on the staff of a local church made the time fly by like a Kansas storm. At the end of the week I was tired. Upon returning to Denver I was united with my urban family of gay friends that sometimes reminds me of one of my favorite books, Ethan Mordden’s Buddies.

     Philosophy and science work hard at defining concepts and terms. The words of sexuality get such treatment and with them an assignment into moral categories, behavioral norms, psychological perspectives, and the like. The author of Buddies (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1982) seems also to have been on a search for definitions, particularly of gay and straight. In telling his stories, Mordden played with the feelings and sensibilities of readers. Bud, the writer-protagonist of the book plays similarly with the feelings and sensibilities of quite a few of the other characters, some of whom argue with him about the meanings. Mordden’s meanings arose from the emerging gay life of Stonewall and post-Stonewall Manhattan and proposed a new kind of relationship characterized by sexual freedom but not without norms.

     When back in the 1980s I stood in a mid-Missouri bookstore reading the novel during several consecutive noon-hour stops there, I was most taken by the chapter “Hardhats” in which Mordden tells a story of ironworkers, a tale that provides a glance at their social profile, extremely macho lives, blended in with an instance of homosexuality or bisexuality. (Mordden didn’t like bi-sexual, didn’t believe in it.) But his language of friendship paired with the need for a sexual component made great sense to me. The picture Mordden provided of homosexuality among the most macho of all macho construction workers surprised me with a world that contrasted with that of artists found in most of the gay narratives I’d read up to that time. The privacy of the ironworkers’ gay experience—or the closeted character rarely uttered—engaged me. I liked other Mordden characters as well; the ironworker who was friend to the homosexual worker but didn’t have sex with him or even realize he was homosexual, the school-teacher gay, and the hooker gay young man who had little interest in work, and a 20s something kept man with great and odd creativity. Mostly, though, I liked this plain ironworker who drank too much but who, on occasion, could express his love through sex and sexual words. He seemed a homosexual who didn’t make a career of his sexuality. I may have liked his story so much because I experienced a similar yet contrasting closeted experience. I sought a discrete homosexual relationship that wouldn’t destroy the rest of my life. Standing there reading the new book, I saw that novel-writing gay critic Mordden understood and valued that kind of life. He also showed how it wasn’t gay in the Stonewall sense of gay—an existence with the social demand for recognition, tolerance, acceptance, and civil rights for homosexual persons. 

     Still, Mordden urged closeted folk out of the closet even while he accepted that homosexual ironworkers could never be openly gay. Their understanding of faggot was different. They separated men from fagots by their build, muscles, costume, etc., but they couldn’t fit in with the 80s macho gay crowd. Mordden concluded that their distinction was ultimately cultural, not sexual.

     Buddies examines family of origin with siblings and parents, theatre (especially the American musical), social class, language, defining ethos of work, writer/storyteller, friendship, romance, families of choice (although I don’t think he uses that jargon), personal perspective, and more. This work reminds me a lot of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales although Buddies does have a bit more discernable plot. If Bud is the protagonist, he really has no evil antagonist. His quest is observation and storytelling for the purpose of definition. His friends and subjects are his only antagonists in that they resist his categories and argue with him over his whole project. This gay family gathers around Bud and his long-time friend Denis Savage who live in the same building. Stories occur in their apartments, in others around the city, on streets, in bars, and often on Fire Island. 

     I have my gay family, too. I don’t care so much about definition since I’m not trying to define Gay life in Denver, but like Bud, I too make some of my friends nervous. Will they end up as characters in one of my stories? They sometimes wonder. And yes, they will be in stories even if effectively camouflaged. But this family is more for me, also including folk I know from an annual retreat, massage friends, and clients. 

     So yesterday I attended a birthday party held at the Denver Wrangler Sunday beer bust. There I was surrounded by that solidarity (at least many guys had solid physiques), and I was there with my family of the five guys I’m most often with and saw others I knew who are related to the annual retreat I attend. I laughed, hugged, and felt comfortable with this nutty, sometimes nelly, crowd of like-minded, like-inclined gays. I felt at home and knew my feelings connected with Mordden’s as I stood there with my Buddies.

About the Author

Phillip Hoyle lives in Denver and spends his time writing, painting, giving massages, and socializing. His massage practice funds his other activities that keep him busy with groups of writers and artists, and folk with pains. Following thirty-two years in church work, he now focuses on creating beauty and ministering to the clients in his practice. He volunteers at The Center leading “Telling Your Story.”