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 



Long Ago and Far Away by Gillian

Long ago and far away, I lived in paradise. It was quiet and peaceful, a land of green farm-studded hills comprised of green sheep-studded fields. No-one locked their doors. There were few cars. A tiny tinny church bell rang one monotonous note every Sunday morning. No peels from bell ringers here, just one old farmer pulling on an old frayed rope, and we all answered it’s call; not from religious zeal but because we wanted to chat with our neighbors, who lived many stones’ throw away.

What a wonderful life!

What claptrap!

Nostalgia, it has been said, is the longing for a place and time you couldn’t wait to get away from. I do have wonderful memories, real or imagined, of that past life, but I do not want to return to it. It did not encompass the GLBT world I am now able to inhabit. I was condemned to act a part on reality’s stage rather than live my real life. I couldn’t be who I really was. I couldn’t even know who I really was.

In High School English class, two of the works we studied were Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest, and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s In Memoriam. These days we all know about old Oscar and the troubles he got himself into, but all that study of his wonderful writing never once led us to any discussion of his personal life. My elderly Welsh teacher would not have had a clue how to deal with any of that; nor would she have wanted to. Oscar himself had been well out of the closet, but we had booted him back in and slammed the door.

Tennyson is not as well known today as Wilde. His writing has never been interpreted on stage or screen, though In Memoriam has given us that familiar sentiment that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

As with Wilde, we spent endless school hours analyzing and dissecting the writing; the four line ABBA stanzas of iambic tetrameter. But never the man. Nothing was up for discussion on the fact that Tennyson spent seventeen years of his life writing this poem of love for, and in grief over the death of, another man. In doing that, he certainly came well out of his closet, but again society had shoved him back in.

I sometimes fear that all these English Lit. studies gave me was the ability to trot out endless quotations to fit just about any given situation, and wonder why memorizing everything was such a large part of our education. But in fact these lessons gave me much more; the very special gift of a love of literature.

Tennyson still brings tears to my eyes, and when I return to In Memoriam I find he speaks to me so clearly after all these years, and perhaps even more clearly to the lost soul I was then, in that closeted world where I studied his words.

So runs my dream, but what am I?

An infant crying in the night

An infant crying for the light

And with no language but a cry.

How better to describe me, in that cold dark closet, long ago and far away?

The past is another country, and, in the way of other countries, a great place to visit, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

© September 2013 

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.