Reviews for The gay question

The average rating for The gay question based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-04-08 00:00:00 Jimmy Bell Jr Don’t tell Maria Von Trapp and all those Viennese kids but Walt Whitman “said goodbye with ‘so long,’ an idiom he associated with sailors and prostitutes.” An early white anthropologist on ‘berdache’ in Native American cultures: “There is a side to the lives of these men which must remain untold. They never marry women, and it is understood that they seldom have any relations with them.” .... dot dot dot ... I love the berdache and want to read more! “The Lakota Sioux chief, Crazy Horse, is said to have one to two winkte in addition to female wives.” and “Men took on berdache status in a number of ways. Sometimes they acquired the attributes of ‘two-spirit’ people as a result of dreams. In some tribes, male children who seemed to prefer female pursuits would be tested to see if they should take the berdache role. Among the Mohave of the American Southwest, such a boy (usually of age ten) would be surrounded by members of the tribe, and a singer, hidden from sight, would perform particular songs. If the boy began to dance like a woman (meaning with great intensity), he assumed ‘two-spirit’ status. … Among the Papago Indians of Arizona, as late as the 1930s, such a test involved building a small brush enclosure in which members of the tribe placed a man’s bow and arrows and a woman’s basket. A boy who displayed berdache inclinations was brought to the enclosure … Once he was inside, the adults set fire to the enclosure. They watched what the child took with him as he fled: if he took the woman’s basket he would become a berdache.” Fascinating, huh? And so … like… I don’t mean to be flippant … but they sound like concepts for TV shows, don’t they? “America’s Got Queer Eye Judging Your Gay Dancing” or something. Anyway, lots of Europeans hated the berdache. Nuno de Guzman – a nasty piece of work – recalled “'a man in the habit of a woman, which confessed that from a child he had gotten his living by that filthiness, which I caused him to be burned.'” Vasco Nunez be Balboa had 40 “sodomites” eaten by his dogs … “'a fine action of an honourable and Catholic Spaniard,' as one chronicler described it.” “By the 1820s another missionary … was able to report that while Joyas [berdache in California] were once very numerous, 'at the present time this horrible custom is entirely unknown among them.'” “Indian Boarding Schools were a focus for the assimilation of Indians into white culture.” One young person was taken to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania and “Since he was dessed as a girl, he was assumed to be female and placed in a girl’s dormitory; the other Navajo students protected him. However, during a lice infestation in which all the girls were scrubbed, it was discovered that this student was actually a male. He was removed from school and never seen again.” A Lakota Sioux medicine man said “'They began to look down on the winkte and lose respect. The missionaries and the government agents said winktes were no good, and tried to get them to change their ways. Some did, and put on men’s clothing. But others, rather than change, went out and hanged themselves. I remember the sad stories that were told about this.'” “Mrs Nash was the company laundress of General Armstrong Custer’s Seventh US Cavalry. She remained with the regiment from 1868 to 1878, married to one soldier after the next. In the summer of 1878, Mrs Nash died … while the corporal she was living with was off fighting Indians. The ladies of the garrison prepared her body for burial, and it was then that they made an astonishing discovery: Mrs Nash was actually a man. (She had always been heavily veiled when she appeared in public.) When her corporal-lover returned home, he was ridiculed unceasingly by his fellow-soldiers. He shot himself to death.” Sad, huh? And “shot himself to death” sounds like he had to shoot more than once, don’t you think? God, what a nightmare. When they arrested Oscar Wilde, Bosie fled to Paris and “Some 600 people made the Channel crossing from Dover to Calais on a night when typically only 60 would have done so … 'Never was Paris so crowded with members of the English governing classes … It was even said that a celebrated English actor took a return ticket … just to be in the fashion.'” J.R. Ackerley was encouraging E.M. Forster to be more open about his homosexuality, like André Gide. “But Gide hasn’t got a mother!” was the reply. The Sunday Express on The Well of Loneliness…. “'I would rather give a healthy boy or healthy girl a phial of prussic acid than this novel. Poison kills the body, but moral poison kills the soul.'” So dramatic! It reminds me of the Lucille Bluth quote about gays, “Everything they do is so dramatic and flamboyant. It makes me want to set myself on fire.” Radclyffe Hall: “By the late 1930s, she and Una were living in Florence, singing Mussolini’s praises, and blaming the Jews for Europe’s problems.” Yikes! Step away from the rightists, gays. Always. You knew Tchaikovsky was gay … but did you know Tchaikovsky’s brother was gay? And called “Modest”? And did you know Vladimir Nabokov was mean about his gay brothers? One of them was “a harmless, indolent, pathetic person who spent his life vaguely shuttling between the Quartier Latin and a castle in Austria.” Bit catty, Vladimir. Maxim Gorky: “In the fascist countries, homosexuality, which ruins youth, flourishes without punishment; in the country where the proletariat has audaciously achieved social power, homosexuality has been declared a social crime and is heavily punished. There is already a slogan in Germany, ‘Eradicate the homosexual and fascism will disappear.’” Eyeroll. “There is no doubt, however, that men who were put in camps for being homosexual were not able to take advantage of the financial restitution which the West German government offered to Jews, political prisoners, and other groups that had survived the camps.” Ugh. “World War II marked the first time in which the US military screened for homosexuality, asking young men, ‘Do you like girls?’ … Suddenly those attracted to members of the same sex had an identity, at least in the eyes of the military.” In January 1957: “'It is not within the province of the [American Civil Liberties Union] to evaluate the social validity of the laws aimed at the suppression or elimination of homosexuals,'” Yeah cheers thanks a lot ACLU. Monty hated gays! In the decriminalisation debates that set the age of consent at 21 in 1967, he argued that it should be 80! “It wasn’t until 13 years and innumerable parliamentary debates later that, in 1980, law reform was extended to Scotland.” It came into force on 1 February 1981, with the age of consent at 21. Jack Kerouac: “Not too many good vibrations in Tangier … Mostly fags abound in this sinister international hive of queens.” Later, William S. Burroughs wrote that “Tangier is finished. The Arab dogs are upon us. Many a queen has been dragged shrieking from the Parade, the Socco Chico, and lodged in the local box where sixty sons of Sodom now languish … the boys, many beaten to a pulp, have spelled a list of hundreds.” Time Magazine on Other Voices, Other Rooms: “'the distasteful trappings of its homosexual theme overhang it like Spanish moss.'” Which is quite a gay way of being mean about gays, no? "distasteful trappings ... overhang it like Spanish moss"? Tennessee Williams: “'When your candle burns low, you’ve got to believe that the last light shows you something besides the progress of darkness.'” James Baldwin: “I wish I had heard him more clearly: an oblique confession is always a plea. But I was to hurt a great many people by being unable to imagine that anyone could possibly be in love with an ugly boy like me…” and “Best advice I ever got was an old friend of mine, a black friend, who said you have to go the way your blood beats. If you don’t live the only life you have, you won’t live some other life, you won’t live any life at all.” Pat Bond: “Yeah, there was a lot of pressure to look butch … So I would affect how I stood, and you learned to walk like a man with a grim look on your face – that suggested maleness, somehow, being grim.” When a Miami gay bar gets busted: “'Damn, not only is my life ruined, but the whole evening is spoiled.'” “'No longer is the claim made that gay people can fit into American society, that they are as decent, as patriotic, as clean-living as anyone else. Rather, it is argued, it is American society itself that needs to change.'” “'We are no longer willing to be the token lesbians in the women’s liberation movement nor are we willing to be the token women in the Gay Liberation Front.'” “'What is a lesbian? A lesbian is the rage of all women condensed to the point of explosion…'” Lesbianism… “'offers escape from the silly, stupid, harmful games than men and women play, having the nerve to call them “relationships.”'” Thatcher in October 1987: “'Children who need to be taught to respect traditional values are being taught that they have an inalienable right to be gay,'” On Section 28: “Once again, attempts to repress homosexuality had wound up only giving it more visibility, ‘promoting’ it more strongly than the ‘loony left’ councils ever had.” Simon Nkoli: “When more than 70 people showed up at the first meeting, Nkoli was stunned. ‘I believed I was the only black gay in South Africa,’ he said.” “'These guys who operate multimillion-dollar aircraft and tanks are afraid someone’s going to hit on them. Maybe they’ll understand how women feel all the time.'” Navratilova: “'I’ve been in the twilight of my career longer than most people have had careers,'” 9/11: “There were at least 22 known surviving same-sex partners of the terror attacks, and some Christian Right leaders opposed the use of federal funds to assist them. Public and private relief agencies, said the Rev Lou Sheldon … ‘should be giving first priority to those widows who were at home with their babies and those widowers who lost their wives. Assistance should be given on the basis and priority of one man and one woman in a marital relationship.’”

Review # 2 was written on 2012-11-22 00:00:00 D V This was very similar to the LGB class I took at my school. The information covers from 1869, starting with Walt Whitman, to about 1995 with Clinton being the president. It would be interesting to see an updated version covering the past two decades. This is an essential book to read for LGBT history though it focuses mostly on Lesbians and Gays, there are a few pieces on Transgender people and some notable bisexuals are mentioned as well. It is also notable that there is some global prespective too, it is not just about the U.S. and Western Europe (though that is the main focus) but there are entries about Soviet and post-soviet Russia, China, Japan, South Africa, Cuba, and Argentina.