ASECS: A Review Friday, Apr 6 2007 

academia and research thisgaudygildedstage 9:15 pm

Two weeks ago I was in Atlanta for the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. I presented a paper on the first day of the conference and chaired a session that I had put together on the last day. On the whole, I think it was a very good conference, professionally much better than GEMCS in February (though GEMCS was more fun).

My paper, which was entitled “Turks and the Exclusion Crisis: Revising Representation, Partisanship, and Political Culture in Aphra Behn’s The False Count,” analyzed Behn’s depictions of “Turks” in her 1681 comedy. (They’re not actually Turks; they’re Spanish men in disguise.) I think it went pretty well. In general, the most useful part of going to a conference is just that it forces you to write the paper, to get your thoughts down. I like it well enough to spend some more time on it and see if it goes anywhere. I received some very positive response from people who heard the paper. For a day or two, I kept running into people who had been in the audience and who continued to say good things about it. So that was nice.

I thought the most interesting paper on the panel (besides mine, of course) was Chris Gabbard’s “‘The wit may be somewhat trimmed’: Mental Disability in Thomas Willis’s The Soul of Brutes.” This paper demonstrated that at least one writer, Willis, offered an alternative vision of people with mental disabilities than that posed by Locke in the late seventeenth century. It was a fascinating paper and subject.

I heard a few other good papers. (I went to about 6 or 7 panels total over the course of the conference, which I’m pretty sure is a record for me. Usually, I just go sightseeing and drink too much.) I enjoyed Patricia Chapman’s “Laureate and Whore Debate Dramatic Theory: Shadwell, Behn, and the Poet’s Purpose.” Chapman compared these two playwrights’ theories of drama to (kind of) show that Behn’s was better (at least that’s what I got out of it, though I am admittedly reducing her argument to something she didn’t really intend).

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Teaching Faggots by Larry Kramer Wednesday, Apr 4 2007 

academia and books and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 5:56 pm

Today I taught excerpts from Larry Kramer’s 1978 novel Faggots in my Lesbian & Gay Lit course. For the past couple of years I have taught the entire novel in the class, but this time I decided to teach only a small section — mostly the first 30 pages or so — in order to make room for Kramer’s 1985 play The Normal Heart and Wayne Hoffman’s 2006 novel Hard. I’m looking forward to teaching those works for the first time, but I definitely wish I had been able to keep all of Faggots on the reading list.

Faggots Faggots follows its “hero,” Fred Lemish, as he maneuvers his way through the gay scene of 1970s New York City. The novel is extremely graphic and includes detailed descriptions of felching, anal sex, water sports, rimming, douching, oral sex, incest, group sex, S/M, and fisting. Ultimately, Kramer’s point in this novel is to critique the endless and often anonymous sexual encounters of many gay men in the 70s, arguing that this lifestyle is destroying their chances of living more normal, fulfilling, and loving lives.

Not surprisingly, Kramer took a lot of heat for this critique. Here’s what one reviewer writes about the novel:

Kramer has attempted to write a comic sex novel; his model, it is clear, is Portnoy to Holleran’s Gatsby. However, combining intense, John Rechy-type sexual explicitness with broad, crack-timed humor requires the technique of an expert writer, and Kramer is anything but. So his jokes stiff, and his porn goes limp. In fact, he does almost everything wrong. He creates too many characters and gives them farcical names like Randy Dildough and Yootha Truth, so you don’t take them seriously; but then he keeps bringing them back and asking you to care about them when you can’t even remember who they are. He delivers his wit and wisdom in subtle, clever statements like this: “Of the 2,639,857 faggots in the New York City area, 2,639,857 think primarily with their cocks.” He rushes his characters from orgy to orgy with increasingly unfunny running gags in a way that suggests what might happen if Rechy’s The Sexual Outlaw were made into a sitcom by Terrence (The Ritz) McNally.

I don’t really agree with this writer. While its true that Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance is a much more lyrical book, Faggots makes a much more pointed critique. It’s much more like eighteenth-century satire — think Jonathan Swift — than Dancer is. If we read it from this point of view, I think it has a lot to say to us about a certain portion of 1970s gay male NYC culture as well as about our own attitudes to that past and what’s happened since.

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Half Nelson: A Review Tuesday, Apr 3 2007 

movies thisgaudygildedstage 6:05 pm

This past weekend PJ and I finally saw Half Nelson, starring Ryan Gosling as an inner-city junior high school teacher with a bit of a drug habit. If I had the time and inclination, I would go back and revise my list of my favorite films of 2006, because this movie is now one of them. Gosling is mesmerizing, and the film is generally excellent.

The film is about Gosling’s character, Dan, and his struggle to make a difference in his students’ lives. As he says at one point, if he can just change one of their lives for the better, his job will be worth it. He soon singles out one particular student, Drey, played by Shareeka Epps. She’s clearly special, and she’s very much at risk: her single mom works long hours as an EMT to make ends meet, her brother is serving time for a drug conviction, and her brother’s former “employer” is trying to get her to start selling in her brother’s place.

One of the major obstacles standing in his way, of course, is his addiction. I like that the film depicts Dan as someone who is out of control, suffers consequences for his actions, and yet still manages to show up most days to teach his classes and coach the junior high girls basketball team. He’s a functioning addict who hangs perilously close to total destruction. In a lesser film, Dan would totter over the edge, but this film has other interests. It’s not a study in how drugs are bad. They are, and the film lets us see this, but the point lies elsewhere.

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Gay Sex in the 70s: A Review Monday, Apr 2 2007 

movies and queer culture and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 5:08 pm

Today in class I showed the documentary Gay Sex in the 70s. It’s a great, if pretty graphic, documentary about gay male sex in New York City in the 1970s. It combines images from the 1970s — private photos, clips from films (porn and non-porn), etc — and interviews with men (and one woman) who lived through the gay 70s NYC scene. Here’s a clip/trailer:

I really like this documentary. What I love most about it is its putting a face to the 70s. While I lived through them, I was a just a babe then, and none of my students were even born in that decade, so we need a human face, a mediator, to explain what it was like to be there. A short film that I sometimes show my class is about a gay guy in the 90s who is magically transported back to the 70s every time he puts on a pair of shoes handed down to him from a friend (his uncle?) who died of AIDS. These shoes allow him to come out of his shell and “get to know” the guy he has a crush on. For me, this short gets to my generation’s complex feelings about the 70s. Some of us are jealous of the “free love” and liberation of that time period, but we’re also conflicted about it since we know what comes afterwards. “We” yearn for the sense of community that this period aspired to, but we also know that this community was ultimately forged through great suffering and death.

Gay Sex in the 70s captures the joy and brotherhood of the gay community in the 70s as well as the coming pain and death of the 80s. It shows us the idealism, the naiveté, and the downsides of this culture. And I like that it sets my class up for reading Larry Kramer’s Faggots, one of my favorite books to teach.

Gay Sex in the 70sEvery time I see this documentary, I’m also reminded just how sexy the 70s were! To the left is a picture from the documentary’s press packet. The 70s look is just hot.The short shorts. The tight bodies that aren’t overly worked out at the gym, but rather have a more natural muscularity. The jeans. The mustaches. Crew socks. Shaggy hair. Maybe I just have some sort of irrational affection for the 70s look left over from my budding gay childhood or something, but I definitely think it’s THE hottest look. This documentary is, of course, full of images of 70s men — what’s not to love?!

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Playing it Straight Sunday, Apr 1 2007 

television thisgaudygildedstage 5:08 pm

PJ and I have been watching a marathon of Fox’s Playing it Straight on t.v. today. This reality series puts a young woman named Jackie on a ranch with 14 men. She initially thinks it’s a straight up (pun intended) dating show like The Bachelor (this year’s bachelor is totally HOT, but I won’t watch that show regardless), but she soon learns that some of the men are gay. If she ends up with a gay guy at the end of the series, he gets $1 million; if she selects a straight guy, they split the million.

These kinds of reality shows (Gay, Straight, or Taken is another one) really anger me. While many of the gay contestants who are on these shows claim that they’re doing it to prove that gay people are everywhere and you can’t always tell who’s gay and who’s straight, it’s nevertheless bad for gay people, in my opinion.

First, it’s the gay men who are depicted as playing the game just to get the money. We’re the greedy ones. Of course the straight men are also playing for money, but they’re consistently discussed as in it for the potential relationship and not just the cash. (PJ just told me that one of the straight men just confessed that he’s in it for the cash, but I still don’t think that’s how the show depicts the straight men overall.)

Furthermore, it’s the gay men playing straight that are the liars and deceivers; they’re the ones who have to apologize when they’re kicked off for hurting the woman by lying to her, for just wanting the cash.

And finally, it really bugs me that these shows force gay men back into the closet, even if just temporarily. The guy who got kicked off the episode of Playing it Straight that was just on had a departure confessional in which he explains that he’s glad he got kicked off because he didn’t like lying to Jackie’s face and he has a boyfriend with whom he’s in love. It bothers me that these shows force the gay men to deny their partners/boyfriends just like society at large has forced these denials for so long. At least pick single gay men to be on the dating reality show. (One of the gay guys just made the comparison to being in the closet and how uncomfortable he was going back in for the show. But just because the contestants see my complaints too doesn’t mean that the complaints aren’t legitimate.)

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Hottie of the Month: Burke Thursday, Mar 29 2007 

academia and research and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century 'hotties' thisgaudygildedstage 4:18 pm

Edmund BurkeMy hottie of the month for March is Edmund Burke, the eighteenth-century politician, orator, political theorist, and philosopher. Burke is, perhaps, most famous for writing his Reflections on the Revolution in France, a work I had to read as an undergraduate history major. He is considered one of the fathers of conservatism, a political philosophy he embraced in response to the terrors of the French Revolution and its potential threat to England.

Because of his conservative leanings, I’ve never been particularly interested in him or his writings. Every now and then, I’ve tried to read a few selections from my anthology of Burke’s speeches and writings, but I’ve never been able to make it very far. So, I’m rather surprised to find myself suddenly interested in him and in late eighteenth-century English conservatism more generally.

This interest arose as I was working on my paper for GEMCS this past February. One reference led to another, which led to another, and before I knew it I was rereading parts of Reflections. While working on that paper, I picked up Frans de Bruyn’s “Anti-Semitism, Millenarianism, and Radical Dissent in Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France,” published in Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2001. This excellent and interesting article looks at passages in Reflections in which Burke seems to embrace anti-Semitic rhetoric and attempts to explain the historical context for these passages and how they work rhetorically within Burke’s larger political argument. It’s a very informative essay that led me to another essay on conservatism in the period, which led me to start thinking about various other issues related to my current project.

I doubt that I’ll be teaching Burke any time soon. In fact, I’ve never been assigned him in a literature course (it was a history class that I read Reflections in). And he’s certainly not a major figure in my current project. But I am interested in using him and his writing to illustrate a couple of points about anti-Semitism at the end of the eighteenth century and about conservatism in general. In other words, he’s become quite useful to my project, even if he’s not a major figure in it.

So, I suddenly find myself interested in a political movement, conservatism, and a socio-political circle, one that includes Burke and Richard Cumberland, neither of which I ever thought I’d be writing about. For this reason, and certainly not because of his portrait above, I am celebrating Burke as March’s hottie of the month.

 

The Cockettes: A Review Wednesday, Mar 28 2007 

movies and queer culture and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 6:07 pm

Since enough copies of Stone Butch Blues haven’t come in yet at the local bookstores, I had to rearrange our reading in the Lesbian & Gay Lit class for the first few weeks. Since I didn’t think I could spring a reading on them at the last minute (more or less), today we watched the documentary on The Cockettes rather than read a text.

The documentary recounts the rise and demise of the Cockettes, a hippie/acid freak/queer theatrical troupe from the late 1960s and early 1970s in San Francisco. I didn’t show it in class last year, but I did show it a couple of times before that. What I like about it in relation to my class is its illustration that the Stonewall Riots, while incredibly important in queer history, were not in fact the only show in town in the late ’60s.

Hibiscus The Cockettes were led, at least for a time, by Hibiscus, shown here. They were known for their outrageous form of drag — outrageous in part because of their combination of male facial hair (in some cases), feminine clothing, and (arguably) excessive glitter. As one member of the group explains, whatever someone was doing the others would call for more. If you had one shirt on, why not five more? If you had some glitter, why not a lot of glitter. In many ways, this summarizes the whole Cockette lifestyle.

It’s a great documentary. It follows a relatively predictable narrative: formation of the group, the group’s zenith, its demise, and the aftermath. It intersplices interviews with the surviving members with images and footage from the group’s performances. It also focuses on a lot more than just sex or drugs. We see parts of some of the performances. The movie also explains who people in the late 1960s were able to survive in communes (welfare, in most cases). And it shows the effects of Ronald Reagan’s cutting of state programs that many artists used to subsist.

Whenever I watch it, I start to regret that this sort of queer community and action doesn’t seem possible today. While some aspects of the era’s culture are probably not quite as attractive today (promiscuous, unsafe sex and hard drug use, for example), one (I) can’t help but be a little jealous of the love, the excitement, and the energy created by this family/community. I suppose I see Shortbus as the fictional heir to this kind of queer community, one that includes everybody — gays, straights, transpeople, bisexuals, and anybody else that wants to come along.

And maybe someday I’ll be brave enough to dress as a Cockette for Halloween or something! It will be a pale imitation, but perhaps a liberating one nevertheless. In the meantime, I highly recommend The Cockettes. It’s a very entertaining documentary.

 

Teaching in a Sauna Tuesday, Mar 27 2007 

academia and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 9:11 am

My classes started yesterday. Based on first impressions, I think it’s going to be a good quarter. The HTC students might be a little quiet, but the GLBTers will make up for that I’m sure. The GLBT lit class has a lot of students that I already know, either from past classes or from Open Doors. (I also already know half of the HTC students.) It’s always nice (and somewhat affirming) to have repeaters. Ellis Hall

But the main thing that sticks out in my mind about my classes yesterday was the unbearable heat in Ellis Hall. (I’m not quite sure why, but I love this picture of Ellis.) We’re in the transition period between winter and spring, and the thermostat is not quite set for the warmer weather.

Because the building is so hot inside, most of the windows are open, but then the sounds from outside — like lawn mowers during my HTC class — make it difficult to hear in class. There’s a lot to love about Ellis Hall, but the semi-annual temperature problem is not one of them.

Due to the heat, I ended up letting both of my classes go early. I was going to give my HTC class a PowerPoint presentation about eighteenth-century English society and I was going to show my GLBT class a documentary about Stonewall and its aftermath. but it was just too hot to make them (or me) sit there another minute. Sweat was pouring down my back, and I felt like my clothes were sticking to the furniture every time I stood up. I’ve put the PowerPoint presentation on Blackboard, so the HTCers can just look at it there sometime, if they want. I can show the video at a later date — either tomorrow or next week.

Tomorrow will be the first real class for the GLBT class. I’m looking forward to seeing what they make of Stone Butch Blues.  It’s an amazing book. The HTC class doesn’t meet again until Thursday. We’ll be watching Stage Beauty in there. I really like this movie, but I also object to some of its misrepresentations of the period. I just hope Ellis is cooler tomorrow and Thursday!

So, the quarter is off and running. One down, 39 days to go!

 

Back in Athens and Ready to Go Sunday, Mar 25 2007 

academia and teaching thisgaudygildedstage 8:00 pm

I got back from Georgia a few hours ago. On the whole, being at the conference (ASECS) was really good, and I definitely enjoyed hanging out a bit in Atlanta. My paper went really well on Thursday, which pretty much meant that anything else fun or good was icing on the cake. The panel I put together and chaired also seemed to go well. I’ll try to give my review of the conference sometime this week. I’ll also post about the museum I visited.

But what’s really on my mind is the fact that my sabbatical is completely over starting tomorrow at 1 pm, when I start teaching again! While in Atlanta, I have to admit, I really disliked the idea of going back into the classroom. Don’t get me wrong: I love teaching, and I love many of my students (I love my students, but I don’t love my students). But having the past several months to spend almost unlimited time reading and thinking and writing has been really enjoyable. It wasn’t quite like being on vacation — since I did work a lot.

But now that I’m back in Athens and doing a little prep work for tomorrow — I figure I’ll give my tutorial students a little background about the period, and we’re going to watch a 54-minute documentary about Stonewall and its aftermath in my Lesbian & Gay Lit class — I’m actually feeling a little excited about teaching again.

I’ve long felt that a great deal of my sense of self-worth comes from my teaching. I’m not the best teacher around or anything, but teaching is very invigorating. I love talking with my students about the writers, texts, and issues I love. I love introducing them to my favorite books and authors and hearing what they think about them. I enjoy teaching, and I’m fairly good at it. When my research has been slow or non-existent, I’ve always been able to fall back on my teaching for a sense of accomplishment. It’s going to be interesting to see how I feel about it now that it’s going to interrupt my on-going (and definitely not non-existent) research.

This quarter I’m teaching the eighteenth-century tutorial, which I hope will be a lot of fun. It’s my first time, so I’m anxiously excited to see how it goes. I’m also teaching my GLBT Lit class, which is probably my favorite course to teach each year. Not the least of my excitement comes from knowing that my current crop of favorite former students (most of which have had this class) are graduating — hopefully this quarter will bring me a new set of Brodie “girls.”

I’ve already been so busy in recent weeks that I’ve not had time to blog, so I’m a little worried about whether I’m really going to be able to keep it going, but I hope so. Starting tomorrow, I’m sure I’ll have lots to blog about. So, cheers to the start of a new quarter!

 

Off to Atlanta Wednesday, Mar 21 2007 

academia and travel thisgaudygildedstage 8:44 am

I had hoped to post at least once before heading off to Atlanta for the meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies. Unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to. When I went to GEMCS last month, I managed to pre-write several posts; no such luck this time.

I present my paper first thing tomorrow morning, so it will be over quickly. I’m chairing a session on Saturday. In between, I hope to hear some interesting papers and see some sights in Atlanta, including the High Museum of Art and maybe the aquarium or the Carter Presidential Library. (PJ and I try to see presidential libraries whenever we get a chance, but it won’t feel right seeing one without him.)

When I get back, I hope to have lots to blog about. I also want to write a few short reviews of movies I’ve seen recently — I think there are four in my mental queue waiting to be reviewed — and, of course, reveal the hottie of the month. And I start teaching again on Monday. I hope I remember how!

 

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