What good book have you read lately? (New or old)

[Sara B]

That’s beautiful.

[ingmarnicebbmt]

Thanks for the Rilke poem!

Any idea what the German (original) title is? I'd like to look it up.

[Lyle (Mooska)]

Thanks for sharing that!

[rmperalta]

Thanks for the Rilke poem!

Any idea what the German (original) title is? I'd like to look it up.

Here's a link I found with the poem in German + English.

https://poems.com/poem/you-who-never-arrived/

[Lyle (Mooska)]

--Scrimmage for War

This is a non-fiction book by Bill McWilliams. In late November 1941, two football teams, Oregon's Willamette University and California's San Jose State, along with the coaches and some assorted other people, boarded the Matson Luxury Ocean Liner, the Lurline, in San Francisco and headed to Hawaii where the teams were each to play two games. One team was to play Hawaii University's Rainbow Warriors, the other a charity game and the third game to be between each other. This was part of a tradition that had been going on for twenty years prior with various teams from the mainland visiting Hawaii for a set of games each fall. Or course, what no one knew this year was what was to come on Sunday, December 7th, the day after the first game was played.

After learning so much about WWII in my grade school years of history classes and beyond, I've always been interested in the more personal stories of people caught up in things beyond their control. What it might have been like to be caught up in an unexpected maelstrom from those on the homefront to those in harm's way.

As such, I've always been particularly drawn to Hawaii because most of the attention in mainstream films, documentaries and books has always been about the Pearl Harbor attack itself and the military aspects of it, and not so much on the civilian population and their stories.

This book takes a look at the few dozen 18-21 year olds who were in Hawaii for a once in a lifetime experience, expected to be joyous and happy, and how that went. One of these guys was looking forward to spending his birthday in Hawaii and his birthday was December 7th.

It starts with their journey on the Lurline, arriving in Hawaii, and leading up to and including the first game that was played on December 6th and then the next day, starting in relaxation and comfort and turning to the odd realization of "something" going on and then the fear, terror, confusion and such the rest of the day and then being recruited by local law enforcement and civilian entities to help with tihngs like patrolling streets, searching out possible enemy spies, cleaning up flack and debris and innumerable other things. And then wondering how they were all to get back home and then being taken back on an overcrowded ship, tending to severely burned sailors who were being transferred to the mainland and needed constant attention all the while in a convoy with 4 other ships patrolling and on the lookout for Japanese subs who had been targeting ships up and down the western U.S. coast. And then finally arriving in San Francisco harbor, on Christmas Day no less, and no one knew they were coming.

A few of the players from the San Jose State team did not come back on that boat. In the days following the attack, a large squad of boys from San Jose were asked to join the Honolulu police department to help patrol streets and other sites the days after the attack. They also participated in search and rescue operations and a few were even involved with officers looking for sympathizers to the Japanese and take them in for questioning. When it was known they had secured transportation back to the U.S., the Honolulu Police asked them if they would consider staying with them and become part of their department at $169 a week. Seven of those guys could not resist that offer.  One had been working a job for 35 cents an hour back home. $169 was equivalent to over 480 hours to him and he'd get that working for one week! One of those seven made his home in Hawaii from then on.

It's all very fascinating. The above is 1/3 of the book and the best part.

After the return to the U.S., the story then seems to veer off into tangents both interesting and dull. It details what happened to each of the ships that were involved in their return trip to California. Later on it details many of the people who were on those teams, most of them entered the war and participated in various campaigns all around the world. It concentrates on some of the original football players who experienced the most things during the war, and also because there's the most information and such about them. There's a whole 50 pages of the book about a few of the guys who were involved in a B-17 bomber group, based in Italy and their whole war exploits. Now, I am also a fan of the stories of the 8th Bomb Group based in Britain and their stories, so this reading wasn't unpleasant, but it also was very far afield from the premise of this particular book.

This book isn't an old book, it was recently published, maybe 2019. I got my money's worth out of it!

[Lyle (Mooska)]

There have been a lot of movies about WWII and each particular well known military battle or event and almost all of them have seminal movies about them that are considered standard viewing if one wants to know about them. D-Day has three great ones, The Longest Day and Battleground and Saving Private Ryan, for example. But I don't think the Pearl Harbor attack has a standard great film. Tora! Tora! Tora! is well-known, but that long film is really pretty boring. And it's very antiseptic, meaning the pain and shock of that day is toned down so much that it never seems like anyone got hurt. During the attack, there are also some comical scenes, scenes that actually happened, but they're played for laughs instead of surprise shock or terror. Almost like they want to tell you what happened, but not offend anybody. Then, of course, there's Pearl Harbor, which Michael Bay turned into something resembling a video game, instead of a movie. (And that was 20 years ago now!) Back then I'd ask people "When you think of Pearl Harbor, what is it that comes to mind to you?" (Think what comes to your mind yourself now before you read my next sentence.) Nearly everyone I asked would mention the sailors in Hawaii and how they were caught by surprise that day. So, who are all the main lead characters in the movie? Army Air Corp pilots.

[CellarDweller115]

Can a Novel Capture the Tensions of Recent Queer History?

By Jake Nevins - July 15, 2021


My last pre-pandemic outing to a Broadway show, in the fall of 2019, was to see Matthew Lopez’s play The Inheritance, a seven-hour spectacle that in its size and scope courted comparison to Angels in America. It was a polarizing play, one of those cultural events by which the queer men in my life felt either “seen” or misrepresented, so imposing was the show’s will to diagnose the particular pleasures and pathologies that constitute what might be called contemporary gay culture—at least as it exists among the dozen or so mostly white, New York City–based men who make up the play’s dramatis personae.

Ultimately The Inheritance, loosely adapted from E.M. Forster’s Howards End, was an exercise in anthropology as much as dramaturgy. At each intermission (six in all), we in the audience discussed its themes: sex, AIDs, friendship, literature, history, and traumas (individual and collective, fresh and inherited). The show was by turns thrilling and enervating, with aims so explicitly representational that the conversations in the audience took on a strange meta quality, much like the intergenerational back-and-forth among the show’s characters. Sitting to my right was a gay man of observable means who was gratified, he told me, that my generation would get the chance to vote for a gay president. He’d come straight to the theater, he added, from a fundraiser, which he himself had hosted, for then–Democratic primary candidate Pete Buttigieg.

I was reminded of the exchange while reading the debut novel Let’s Get Back to the Party, by author Zak Salih, which investigates the supposed ideological discord among contemporary gay men with a similarly broad sweep. Set shortly after the 2015 Supreme Court decision affirming the right of same-sex couples to marry and before the slaughter, the following year, of 49 people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, the book begins at a gay wedding, at which Sebastian, the first of our two narrators, arrives “dressed for a funeral.” There he’ll run into Oscar, the second narrator and Sebastian’s functional foil, for whom marriage equality is a kind of symbolic death, the arc of gay history bending inexorably toward assimilation. The pair are childhood friends, estranged by time, distance, and a clumsy tryst back in college; their chance encounter at the wedding sets the book’s dual narrative in motion. Throughout the work, the point of view alternates between the two of them, illuminating what Salih takes to be some kind of chasmic divide among today’s gay men.

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/back-to-party-zak-salih-review/

[tfferg]

Intersting. Thanks,Chuck.

[tfferg]

Black queer New York writer Robert Jones, Jr's intriguing 2021 first novel, The Prophets, is a hopeful story about the power of love. Reading historic American slave literature, he was struck by the absence of any references to love between Black queer figures in that era.

Samuel and Isaiah are enslaved young men on Empty, a cotton plantation in antebellum Mississippi who are set to work in the barn as boys tending to the animals. They fall deeply and tenderly in love and the barn is their intimate refuge. In an interview, the author envisages them as "a sort of pioneering, trailblazing duo in which ... imagination is expanded so that when we think Black, we don't just think cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied men. We see the full breadth of Blackness, which encompasses so much and is so expansive."

So the novel was developed over 14 years writing to feature the perspectives of many other enslaved men and women, and the enslaving family and their white employees and the voices of the African ancestors who speak to the author in his dreams, to the other characters and to the reader.

Robert Jones knew he was queer from the age of 4. He does not accept the view of many in America that queerness among Black people is purely the result of past trauma. He learned through reading and from people on his blog, Son of Baldwin, that there were queer people in pre-colonial African societies. In the novel, he explores through chapters set in a precolonial kingdom when Europeans arrive how the European project in Africa, through missionaries and the slave trade stripped Black people of their spiritual and cultural heritage and practices, their names and lineages. His Kosongo characters Kosii and Elewa figure as precursors of Samuel and Isaiah.

Samuel and Isaiah have no problems with the other enslaved people on the plantation until an older enslaved man, Amos persuades the owner, Paul, to teach him Christian doctrine and allow him to preach to the others on Sundays.

In order to maintain the supply of slave labour, enslaved workers are required to procreate and Paul also rapes enslaved women. He does not acknowledge the resulting children as family members. However,  the "young bucks" Samuel and Isaiah cannot or will not perform. Fearing the consequences for the other enslaved people and his desire to be allowed to marry and protect Esse who has a baby Solomon born of rape by Paul, Amos betrays Samuel and Isaiah.

Robert Jones sees James Baldwin and Toni Morrison as his godparents. The novel has many lyrical passages influenced by Gospel music, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson and Sade.

[Lyle (Mooska)]

Black queer New York writer Robert Jones, Jr's intriguing 2021 first novel, The Prophets, is a hopeful story about the power of love. Reading historic American slave literature, he was struck by the absence of any references to love between Black queer figures in that era.

Nice to have someone review a book and call it a hopeful story. We need more of that, for sure.

I'm not sure why he was "struck by the absence of any references to love between Black queer figures in that era" though. I'd have been astounded to find any such references regardless of race or class.

[Lyle (Mooska)]

The short-story was embedded in one of the article's links -> https://www.thecommononline.org/the-history-of-sound/

I thoroughly enjoy and have searched for WWI/WWII stories. We know gay men served - there's just very little ever been saved or written about those elements or times.   The best examples which come to mind of recent are:  "Man in an Orange Shirt" and of course one of my all time favorite novels, "Wingmen" - which I believe could be made into a good solid film like BBM with the right script and producers. 
Stay safe, stay alive.  Peace. V.

Vincent, first, just wondering if you know that Man in an Orange Shirt was written by a novelist, but it was written for television? I knew it was a two-part television film, but the way they advertised it made it seem like it was from a novel. Just wondering.

Wingmen, by Ensan Case, was brought to my attention when I first read the gay history book Coming Out Under Fire by Allan Berube. In a chapter titled The Legacy of the War he writes about authors who started to write about their WWII experiences, both gay men and lesbians, and straight men who'd witnessed or come in contact with the subject.

He has an interesting note about John Steinbeck, from his 1958 book Once There Was a War, which was a collection of articles he wrote while he was a special war correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune. Steinbeck acknowledged that "he and his colleagues had known about 'sex deviation" in the armed forces, but this was among the 'many things not mentioned' in their reports. They had felt a duty to 'protect the armed services from criticism' and to protect the home front 'from the whole account of what war was like'. Steinbeck believed that such protection had left the civilian public unprepared for the shock of reading fiction by ex-soldiers about the gritty realities of World War II."

FYI: If you're interested...
In his text and detailed notes, Berube lists some works of gay fiction detailing soldiers war time experiences. I've read some of those listed, like Wingmen, and some of it is surprisingly open, but there is also a lot of it that's written in the same coded language that gay men of the time learned to live with and navigate so that others weren't attuned to. This can frustrate a modern reader unfamiliar with those times who feels more like the Harry Hamlin character when he says to Michael Ontkean in Making Love, "Why don't you just say it?" But if one has an understanding of those times and why things were coded, it can be unusually enlightening.

So I'll list some of the writings dealing with the subject that Berube has mentioned or listed in the book:

Novels: (homosexuality the main theme)
The Invisible Glass by Loren Wahl (1950)
Quatrefoil by James Barr (1950)
The Brick Foxhole by Richard Brooks (1945)
Women's Barracks by Tereska Torrès, paperback (1950)
Ship's Company by Lonnie Coleman (1955)
Hold Tight by Christopher Bram (1988)

Short Stories: (main theme)
The Prisoners by C. Hall Thompson (1945)
Show Me the Way to Go Home by Donald Vining (1945)
(Notes say the above two stories are in Cross Section 1945 (New York: Book Find Club, 1945)
Queer Island by Jock Ember (1954) In American Aphrodite 4, No. 14
Rhymes of a PFC by Lincoln Kirstein (New York: New Directions, 1964) - includes several narrative poems about gay American soldiers in WWII

Novels that introduce characters who were explicitly portrayed as homosexual officers and enlisted men,
but usually as villains or victims:
Tales of the South Pacific by James Michener (1947)
The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947)
Stranger in the Land by Ward Thomas (1949)
From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951)
The Captain by Russell Thacher (1951)
The Deep Six by Martin Dibner (1953)

Non-war novels that had characters who had gay experiences during WWII:
The Fall of Valor by Charles Jackson (1946)
The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal (1948)
The World in the Evening by Christopher Isherwood (1952)
Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (1959)

Berube also notes these two on postwar gay and lesbian fiction:
Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America by Roger Austen (Indianapolis/New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1977)
Sex Variant Women in Literature, 2d ed. by Jeannette Foster (Baltimore: Diana Press, 1975)

After writing about the subject, Berube makes this observation that you also did Vincent:
"By contrast, few gay characters had populated American war fiction after World War I."

[Lyle (Mooska)]

NOTES:
On some things mentioned in the above post.


--Quatrefoil by James Barr (1950)
I read this novel and found it quite a nice read. I remember in the preface of a revised edition it was mentioned that the main character was based on a fraternity brother whom the author had an affair with in college. I distinctly remember a passage in the introduction where the author talks about how some men deal with the sexuality they're dealt.

     "Phillip and I were fraternity brothers at our university before the war. We were both quietly, very discreetly,
      homosexual...but with one great difference. When dear Oscar's Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name smiled
      on Phillip, it turned him to stone. I, on the other hand, went prancing out to meet it."


--The Brick Foxhole by Richard Brooks (1945)
Richard Brooks became a film director (In Cold Blood for example.) He wrote this novel from his own war experiences and it deals with some soldiers whose bad-tempered dispositions and homophobia cause them to murder a gay man. It's a pretty brutal read in the sense the characters have been through harsh experiences. A police detective tries to uncover the whodunit. This book was made into the Best Picture nominated film Crossfire from 1947. Considered a seminal film noir. However, they changed the murder victim's homosexual orientation to that of being Jewish, so that the motivation was anti-semitism, not homophobia. So this might be or could be ripe for a remake?

--Hold Tight by Christopher Bram (1988)
I read this book, but I have no recollection of anything about it for some reason. I went to refresh my memory thinking it must still be in my bookcases somewhere, but I didn't find it. Which makes me wonder, did I read it? My recollection is that the story of the two men who fall for each other is interracial. If that's not correct, I really don't think I read it.

--Show Me the Way to Go Home by Donald Vining (1945)
I did not read this short story, but Donald Vining is the pseudonym for a gay man who kept a diary (diaries) his whole life, day by day, and in the late 70's the first of six (I believe) volumes of his diaries were published and available to buy.
--A Gay Diary 1933-1946 by Donald Vining (1945)
I first read this one and the chronicle of this gay man's life and loves etc. is fascinating. Not that it's sensational by most any means, but that it existed in a time where such things were hidden. He grows up in or around New York City and during World War II he goes to California and spends a couple years in Los Angeles/Hollywood. I found this all so interesting. For reasons I don't recall, he was not suitable for military service for some reason, but it wasn't because he was gay.
He volunteered in New York City at the Stage Door Canteen and when he was in L.A. he volunteered at the Hollywood Canteen. He was very much interested in theatre and pursuing a literary career. While in L.A. he had a job at Paramount Studios as a janitor. He liked to go downtown to Pershing Square across from the Biltmore Hotel and pick up servicemen whom he brought back to his one room apartment for many dalliances. From New York he knew an actress named Jeff (yes) Donnell who was in Hollywood and did several films. One I recall is In a Lonely Place with Humphrey Bogart.   
     Anyway, he talks about his daily life surrounded by the Hollywood and LOs Angeles of the war years and it's very personal and compelling. I happened to see online several years ago a note from a woman who was writing a book about the Hollywood Canteen and she wanted to interview anyone who had actually spent time there in any capacity. I sent her an email telling her that I hadn't, but I recommended Donald Vining's DIary to her and quoted some of the paragraphs he wrote about his work at the canteen. She was especially interested because he had also compared the Hollywood Canteen to the Stage Door Canteen in NYC. She wrote me later on saying she'd gone to the place where Vining's diaries were kept to research things because they were unedited there. Her book came out about 5 years, maybe more, after that and in it she recounts Vining and another volunteer discussing one night about Van Johnson being gay. The name of the book she wrote is: "Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen" by Sherrie Tucker.

--From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951)
This book is about the difficult life of soldiers in pre-wartime Hawaii and the book is very difficult to read if you're not in the mood for that. People know the movie. The book does detail some homosexual incidents, such as sailors who'd let gay men take them out to dinner because they'd pay for it and often would roll, or rob, the gay men afterwards outside, which led the gay guys to let someone in the restaurants hold their wallets while they were in there to avoid these things. In 2009, James Jones' daughter Kaylie revealed "a major gay sex story line was cut from James Jones's 1951 novel and he was told by his publisher Scribner to eliminate both expletives and that story line." In 2011 there was supposedly a digital edition of the book that restored those things.

--The City and the Pillar by Gore Vidal (1948)
If you like Vidal, you'll appreciate this novel. He was warned against writing it and having it published because of the content. Indeed, people were shocked and more. I guess there is a revised edition that Vidal supervised and added things in originally cut out.

--Advise and Consent by Allen Drury (1959)
I did not read this book, but did see the film, which has a plot about a man running for high political office that is discovered to be gay, or have had a same sex dalliance in the past and so is disqualified. I'm sure the book had more to say about it than the movie did.

--Ship's Company by Lonnie Coleman (1955)
This is a book of short stories, all by Coleman. The thing that ties them together is that they are all about life on a troop transport ship, The USS Nellie Crocker, in World War II. Coleman, himself, served on such a ship. Two of the stories are gay themed, "The Theban Warriors" and "Bird of Paradise." Bird is a gay romance on board. Theban Warriors is a hoot. It's about this sailor who is transferred to the ship. He's a big giant brute and a boxer and as nelly as the name of the ship. A guy on the ship narrates the story and he begins describing the night this sailor (Montgomery) arrived on the ship. Montgomery asks where the bunks are and after he's told Montgomery replies, "Thank you. Now, would you be a dear and help me with my bag? Your mother's all tired out. Such a time I had finding this ship, I thought I'd never." When I first read this I was so surprised to find something like this in a book of a WWII ship's sea stories and wondered what average Joe's who read it when it came out must've thought.

There's another book by this author titled The Golden Vanity (1962) and it's listed in Gay studies lists of novels, but it's not one I'm familiar with. The listings describe it as "A Mister Roberts or Caine Mutiny story of two men fighting for command of a Navy cargo vessel during WWII." ? Or are they fighting for command of each other?

[gattaca]

^^^ Holy smokes!  Gave me some homework reading... Thanks I'll digest and get back! 

[Lyle (Mooska)]

--A Gay Diary 1933-1946 by Donald Vining (1945)

Later yesterday I looked up on Amazon to see if this was still in print. At least on Amazon, if any are listed at all they are third party sellers. There is a listing for 4 of the books.



I think there was a 5th one as well, but not sure. (Looked it up, yes there was, covered 1975-1982.)

I noticed the second volume (the red one) on my shelf and looked that up. A third party seller on Amazon is selling it for $974.83! And that doesn't even include shipping!  Yikes! Who would pay that much?

The first volume in the photo was also printed in a smaller paperback version.



Apparently these, in my opinion, valuable books are now very rare and are being sold for pretty outrageous prices.

[Jeff Wrangler]

Apparently these, in my opinion, valuable books are now very rare and are being sold for pretty outrageous prices.
I noticed the second volume (the red one) on my shelf and looked that up. A third party seller on Amazon is selling it for $974.83! And that doesn't even include shipping!  Yikes! Who would pay that much?

(It's not just books. Recently someone was trying to sell the DVD set of the sixth season of Wagon Train on eBay for nearly $500. That can't be that rare!)