Gaudy Yesterdays at the Gizmo Lounge

A gentleman whom I won’t name had a column in the Birmingham gay paper from 1995 to 1997, and then self-published his collected works. A number of them are interesting reflections on local gay authors (such as Eugene Walter, a Mobile sissy who in the mid-century was part of the Paris Review and Botteghe Oscure crews [unfortunately I don’t personally care for his fiction, poetry etc but if you’re into that sort of fey-American-abroad last-droppings-of-queer-modernism thing—Paul Bowles, Parker Tyler, Charles Henri Ford, Arthur Chester etc etc—then you might as well read his memoirs Milking the Moon]) and authors whom he asserted to be gay (like the gay who wrote the novel The Bad Seed, the movie version of which scared the beejeezus out of child me). There are also memories of Birmingham’s gay life:

A color version of this piece is on the local art museum’s website… it’s uh something. Thankfully for the reputation of gay men as aesthetes, Robin Richeson is a woman.

But the columnist had other reasons for writing.

That’s good advice from Mom, by the way, you whores. I met my partner in a poetry seminar, because, famously, I’m a good boy. He does not read my work.

It’s hard to picture the column working as intended, because the columnist—and this is why I’m not naming him—was a bit of an over-sharer (and this is coming from me).

Well, it’s tough to get back out there, as that show with Neil Patrick Harris nobody watched tried to prove (or so I assume, having not watched it either). But there’s more…

Grim! One isn’t supposed to blame the survivors of such situations, of course, but I learned last year that a colleague of mine whose partner killed himself then dated another guy who also killed himself, and as Oscar Wilde says, it starts to look like carelessness. I want to know your exes are alive.