Mr. Strong

“Mr. Strong may be a bit too strong for his own good. But if you need a helping hand–he’s your man!”

Looks a bit more like “Little Miss Trouble” to me.
Photos: Model, Scott Stone at www.englishlads.com

Voyage

Have you sunk into so deep a stupor that you’re happy only in your unhappiness? If that’s the case, let us fly to countries that are counterfeits of Death.

CHARLES BAUDELAIRE

Photo: Still from the 1969 Claude Jutra film, WOW [click on image to view film]

FTL

The Photograph

 

Looking at the photograph of a chum of his,

at his beautiful youthful face

(lost forever more;—the photograph

was dated ‘Ninety-two),

the sadness of what passes came upon him.

But he draws comfort from the fact that as least

he didn’t let—they didn’t let any foolish shame

 get in the way of their love, or make it ugly.

To the “degenerates,” “obscene” of the imbeciles

their sensual sensibility paid no heed.

 

C.P. CAVAFY, from The Unfinished Poems, the first english translation, with introduction and commentary, by Daniel Mendelsohn. New York : Knopf, 2009.

Uncommon

Immured in youth and beauty.

 

Times have changed, and changed radically, but each one of us is still trying to find the same old things: sex, love, and self-respect.

     Sex, love, and self-respect are hard enough to balance in life, period, without having to do it as a person whose biological identity seems at variance with his sexual one. How to integrate our homosexuality with the rest of our selves, our lives—our family, our society, our upbringing—was a problem a minority, not a majority of the gay men I knew were able to solve before the plague. Most of us just kept everything in compartments. Most of us led double, triple, quadruple lives, changing costumes as actors do, masking our intelligence, emphasizing our bodies, feeling our fate depended on the shape of our mustache, the size of our dick. But you can juggle the apples of discord only so long. When desire begins to burn off, like morning haze, it leaves the rest of our personalities more visible. “I’ve read all of Proust and Henry James, I just got a promotion at the bank to systems manager,” a friend wrote me in 1977. “So what am I doing at four A.M. in Sheridan Square, hailing a cab with shit on my dick?” Having the time of your life, I would have answered had we both been twenty-one. But we were not, and that was part of the problem: What youth and lust camouflage, age and abstinence bring into relief—the contradictions of being gay.

     … much like Life. Moments of exquisite boredom… are followed by breathless revelation—

     “I was a problem,” said Oscar Wilde, “for which there was no solution.”

 

ANDREW HOLLERAN, from Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and its Aftermath. New York : De Capo Press, 2008.

Sutherland & Malone. Lark. An [unnamed?] aging gay professor. Four characters forever etched in memory from three extraordinary novels that could only have been written by Andrew Holleran. The seventies gay romantic classic on the days of dark disco Dancer from the Dance, the much maligned (for its brutally bleak, unsparing honesty) The Beauty of Men, and his most recent slender masterpiece, Grief. His short stories, In September the Light Changes, a collection also to be relished. These Chronicles first appeared in the NY Native, then collected in the (out-of-print) book Ground Zero, now thankfully reissued and expanded upon. 

Five Favourite Revolutionaries: Andrew Holleran

“It’s all about dick.”

(Happy Father’s Day, dads.)

2 x Cavafy

 

It Must Have Been the Spirits

It must have been the spirits that I drank last night,
it must have been that I was drowsing, I’d been tired all day long.

The black wooden column vanished before me,
with the ancient head; and the dining- room door,
and the armchair, the red one; and the little settee.
In their place came a street in Marseille.
And freed now, unabashed, my soul
appeared there once again and moved about,
with the form of a sensitive, pleasure-bent youth-
the dissolute youth: that too must be said.

It must have been the spirits that I drank last night,
it must have been that I was drowsing, I’d been tired all day long.

My soul was released; the poor thing, it’s
always constrained by the weight of the years.

My soul was released and it showed me
a sympathique street in Marseille,
with the form of the happy, dissolute youth
who never felt ashamed, not he, certainly.

 

Birth of a Poem

One night when the beautiful light of the moon
poured into my room . . . imagination, taking
something from life: some very scanty thing-
a distant scene, a distant pleasure-
brought a vision all its own of flesh,
a vision all its own to a sensual bed . . .

 

C. P. CAVAFY, The Unfinished Poems, trans. Daniel Mendelsohn  New York : Knopf, 2009.

Body, Remember . . .

Not a fighter.

 

Sweet to the senses and instructive to the mind — which is, Horace wrote,

how poetry should be.

May I?

Blue fish