This Gaudy Gilded Stage

PJ and I are back from New York. All I can say is, so that’s what everbody’s been talking about all these years! Like just about everyone else, I too love New York! I’ll have several posts about our trip in the coming days, but I thought that I would start with an overview of my thoughts about visiting Manhattan for the first time.

I’ve taught about New York for years now. The texts in my GLBT lit course often revolve around New York as one of the most important havens for gay people throughout the twentieth century. It’s a shame that it’s taken me so long to get there. I’m definitely provincial, the son of working class, conservative parents who never really instilled within me a desire to travel to places like New York or Paris or wherever. One of the things that I like about being with PJ is his urging that we travel and see places. I’ve tended to be a homebody, but I think I’m increasingly gung-ho about going to major cities and experiencing more of the world. In the past decade, I’ve come to love London, Madrid, Washington DC, and San Francisco. I know I’ll never be a New Yorker, and I realize that one trip to the city is only a small taste of what it has to offer. But New York is now on the list of cities I love. It was everything everyone said it would be: wonderful, vibrant, commercial, tawdry, busy, noisy, expensive, and fabulous.

We had three full days in the city. Our hotel was about two blocks from Times Square, so we saw the theater district every day. We saw many of the usual tourist sites: Rockefeller Center and the Christmas Tree, Radio City Music Hall (though we didn’t go in or see the Rockettes), the Empire State Building, Macy’s Christmas window displays, the U.N., St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Grand Central Station, the World Trade Center site, and Battery Park.

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PJ and I are off to New York today. We’ll be there until Friday. This is my first trip to the Big Apple, so I’m both looking forward to it and feeling nervous about it — new things and places always make me nervous.

I’ll be taking a break from blogging until the weekend. I hope to have a lot to post about when I get back!

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PJ and I got back from Philadelphia yesterday evening. Since he was busy at his conference most of the time we were there, my goal was to check out a few museums and other attractions around the city.

This was the fourth time I’ve visited Philadelphia since 2000. My first visit was to present a paper at the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. The conference organizers emphasized how many eighteenth-century-related sites there are to see in Philly, but I didn’t actually see many of them while I was at that conference. In 2003, PJ and I went to Philly for vacation. We spent most of that trip seeing Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell, Benjamin Franklin sites, and the Philadelphia Art Museum. In 2004, we went back for a meeting of the North American Conference for British Studies. We were there with a couple of friends, so we spent most of our time on that trip hanging out with them.

So, I wanted to take the opportunity to see more of the eighteenth-century sites and to learn more about eighteenth-century Philadelphia on this trip. I didn’t get to see everything I wanted — I had a habit of showing up when things were closed or when a long line of school children had just lined up at the door. But I go a little taste of eighteenth-century Philadelphia, and I know what I want to see when I go back.

One of my first stops was the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, which has a very good, if small, museum. I especially enjoyed seeing works by members of the Peale family. Charles Willson Peale (1741-1827) and his brother James Peale (1749-1831) were painters. Charles Willson Peale studied under British painter Benjamin West and then taught his brother and several of his children to paint. These children included Raphaelle Peale, Rembrandt Peale, Rubens Peale, Titian Peale, and Angelica Kauffman Peale. His portrait of Benjamin Franklin in 1785 (right) is just one of his famous portraits, a genre in which he excelled. This painting is on display at the PAFA. Rembrandt Peale become one of the most important American painters of the early nineteenth century.

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