Hello! After a hiatus from posting regularly (during which I met—unsuccessfully—with the emissary of a billionaire dangling potential funding for my research on how Michael Denneny took his teachers Hannah Arendt and Harold Rosenberg as inspirations for gay politics and culture, and, I was dreaming big, for a new journal for gay men taking up something of that intellectual project… I of course fumbled that bag—other billionaires and emissaries please note my availability) I’ll be back to posting I think more or less weekly for the foreseeable future.
For the next couple of months, I’ll probably be mostly sharing things I found in the archives in New York and Chicago as I’ve been working on gay history/literature stuff. This may all be of rather little interest to straight people… as I suppose my winter critiques of Robert Gluck, John Ashberry, Garth Greenwell, etc. on the stakes of gay literature must have been! I don’t know what y’all like.
But I admit—and here’s perhaps where I lost my billionaire, whose delegate said my dreams “sound too much like identity politics”—that I am mostly thinking about gay stuff these days. If I have to justify that interest in ‘more general’ terms (which, ew, why—I am neither the census nor the voice of WorldSpirit), I think I’ve thought my earlier critiques and complaints about woke-ish notions of identity, and of liberalism, to a point of boredom. Now I want to see what, contrawise, I can get out of really thinking through what I love about (and fear for the cultural/political future for) one of my ‘identities,’ on the hunch that, as I’ve been saying here, a non-retarded politics of identity might be what saves us. Plus I have some fun pics!
So, ok, what follows are some book covers from things published by Felice Picano’s small gay presses in the 70s and 80s. If you don’t know Felice Picano, he (still alive!) is a terrible and prolific gay writer, responsible for some of the most wooden gay fiction of the golden age of ‘gaylit’, from the proto-Cruising leather thriller The Lure to what his colleague Edmund White lyingly blurbed as “our Gone with the Wind,” Like People in History (I guess it’s like Gone with the Wind if the Yankee Army burning Atlanta were played by AIDS devastating gay New York—and if you read my essay last year on Florida gay playwright Cal Yeomans and his friend Ernest Mickler, you know I’m not the only one to make the comparison). While no one can make it through even one paragraph of his without physical discomfort, Picano, if not a writer, was a great publisher, putting out everything from edgy avant-garde stuff like Gluck and Dennis Cooper to shits-and-giggles stuff like The Butch Manual. And the cover art, well, it has to be seen…
First, the man himself (I think a lot of Picano’s misplaced confidence in his literary abilities and more correctly placed confidence in his editorial choices must have come from having been a handsome guy in the 70s, the height both of gay male promiscuity and our national interest in Italian-Americans):
and now the works!
regular readers will know I’m no fan of Gluck but who can resist the uh modernity of this cover!
apologies for the blur but my rice-queen fingers were shaking in disappointment!
‘real men don’t eat quiche’ just didn’t do it for homos, I guess (I’d love to own a copy but they’re incredibly expensive—benefactors, investors, paypigs, contact me!!!)
the back promises a ‘dazzling satire’ about a ‘well-endowed and eager-to-learn farmboy’ who moves to New York
This rather AIDSy-looking number, by the author of The Faggots and their Friends between Revolutions begins “The sky was a new shade of green that day… I had never seen that exact color before,” and its back cover assures you that “[E]verywhere is the heat, the torpid air and the unmistakably itching rash of sex.” So lotion up.
What better sell than half of Harvey Fierstein’s face?
Finally, I actually own a copy of this 1980 book, which is like if Rupi Kaur were a gay man. Some highlights:
he wears his
boots two sizes
too big
i’ve never
asked him why
[the I is lower-case! Sensitive!]
***
he’s thin for a
wrestler
sometimes it
takes all my strength
to be pinned
***
he is not
without
his faults
i have savoured every one