Second in a series of guest posts is today’s from Tom Cardamone, to remind (or instruct) us that the language of gay love has been a fictive lingua franca for a long time now, and that the past is present and immediate in its pages today.

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I received an astounding education, editing The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered. Every week I was a ghostly librarian, haunting moonlit shelves, reassembling attic histories, tracing overgrown paths of desire. I’d assembled this anthology with the theory that gay literature was doubly impacted by AIDS, that not only were voices lost, but memories expunged. Reaching out to every writer I knew or admired, and in turn asking them to recommend a colleague, I waited to see what titles they wanted to write about. The guidelines were simple: they had to have a personal connection to the book, it had to be gay fiction and out of print. I worried the books would be too similar and then the emails came and a literary cornucopia opened up: novels representing nearly every decade of the 20^th Century were proposed: a mystery, a Vietnam War epistolary novel, an intense study of a Times Square hustler, books that took place in New Orleans, Spain, England, Canada, Australia, Greece, Italy, devastating books on AIDS, beautiful tone poems on young love.

I was overcome. I also started to gain a more nuanced perspective on the rise of gay literature and have only recently begun to consider an interesting catalyst: Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, published in 1948, introduced sexuality to the American media and the media exponentially expounded on the topic. The results? What was masked or symbolic in art became frank in fiction, and for most of early queer writing was delivered in the form of pulp paperbacks. As awareness increased and the closet door came off the hinges, mainstream fiction and serious, respectful small presses took up the cause. But the fiction that gets all the attention typically alludes to the immediate: coming out stories, AIDS, marriage, adoption, bashing – regurgitated headlines, but what about the past of the past? As Kinsey codified behavior and a new civil rights issue was unknowingly born (needy, parentally shunned but embraced by stylish aunts in Manhattan) novelists began giving voice to our cousins populating all places before: ancient Greece, Victorian England, and most recently 19^th Century Brussels in Under the Poppy and Paul Russell’s The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabakov, which takes place in equal parts Russia, France and Germany.

Mary Renault’s heroic, historic, eminently well-researched and well-wrought Alexander novels deserve prominence of place when discussing this development –I’m not going to go on record to say that she was the first novelist to explore queer lives in the context of earlier times, but her oeuvre is so consistent, so fully established, that she can easily be identified as a significant force. The Alexander trilogy was launched in 1969 with Fire From Heaven. However, her 1956 novel, The Last of the Wine, featured a life-long gay love affair in ancient Athens. (Both characters are students of Socrates. Plato and Aristotle figure in Renault’s other work). While the explosion of pulp in the fifties and sixties featured mostly contemporary settings and characters, all were shaded with the psychological struggle of stigma and the identity of the diseased. Renault’s novels were unique in her time not only because they posited robust, past queer lives, but because the lives lived were natural – though quite different from modern definitions of homosexuality, to be sure, but a continuity was established, with love the defining characteristic. Here struggle was deliberately written with a human pen rather than scratched with deviant ink. Suddenly, gay men and women could look backward as well as forward.

Before I discovered Renault, I had the fortuitous luxury to read Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian first. Reading Yourcenar before Renault is like following the advice that one should live in San Francisco before living in New York. Published in 1951, the novel is a long diary-like letter from the Roman Emperor Hadrian to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, with deep and moving passages about his young lover, Antinous. Memoirs of Hadrian is closer to the primal Greek literature that Renault’s work is expertly drawn from. New York is great for ambition; San Francisco is good for the soul.

Christopher Bram’s The Notorious Dr. August: His Real Life and Crimes tackles slavery, mysticism, family, and Coney Island in late 19^th – early 20^th Century America (with a gothic side trip to Constantinople). It’s been awhile since I’ve read this book – and it’s on my very short Must Re-Read List. Known for The Father of Frankenstein – made into the Academy Award winning film Gods and Monsters, Bram has worked within an historical context before. His novel Hold Tight runs through the alleyways and gay brothels of New York City during World War Two, and offers a noirish read on a twilight experience yet named (and if memory serves was a more literate take on pulp minus the then contemporary stain of guilt). Before he found his eon-spanning legs, Gore Vidal wrote of gay post-War New York in The City and the Pillar. He’s just so arch and, when it comes to all things queer, contrary, that this early novel gets a mention here mostly because I just read it – it was written current to the time within which it takes place. In his delightfully foggy literary memoir, Palimpsest, Gore recalls spying Kinsey stationed by the balcony of a Times Square gay bar, observing the tidal crush of servicemen. The sea change was in effect: the definition of gay began its move from behavior to personhood. And people have culture, history, and what had been forgotten, burned, shunned, murdered and destroyed, gives artists the ash with which to paint anew.

More titles abound, new and old. Edward Lucie-Smith’s The Dark Pageant, (1977) is a highly literary take on the depraved child murderer (and Joan of Arc colleague) Gille de Rais. I have a voluptuous hardback of Edward, Edward by Lolah Burford, from 1973. A boy’s incestuous relationship with his father in 19^th Century London and Europe -it’s just so massive I haven’t dared read it yet (Even the subtitle is exhausting: A Part of His Story and of History, 1795-1816, Set Out in Three Parts In this Form of a New Picaresque Romance That Is Also A Study In Grace). However, I’ve only just started surveying queer historical fiction, much less how these titles relate to one another thematically – the interest was sparked having interviewed Kathe Koja in a recent issue of Icarus: The Magazine of Gay Speculative Fiction, and then the happy coincidence of finding us both judges for a literary award for which The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabakov was nominated.

Reading Under the Poppy and Unreal Life over the last two respective Decembers, I stepped out of the present and into the midnight snow of imagined lives. The characters that occupy the brothel in Under the Poppy do so with passion made more urgent by the realities of love and war, while the nearly forgotten young brother of Vladimir Nabakov emerges from the smoke of World War Two to finally claim his own voice with a noble stutter. Both titles are two of the most immediate books I’ve read in recent years, and both in their own ways were reminiscent of the time I spent with Memoirs of Hadrian: these authors construct new truths. The past is not re-imagined to wring out one more drop of sympathy for gay rights, or to shame the suppressors of queer heritage. It’s much more elemental than that: a human need to sing forgotten songs and call forth spring.

Tom Cardamone is the editor of The Lost Library: Gay Fiction Rediscovered, and author of the erotic fantasy novel, The Werewolves of Central Park. His short story collection, Pumpkin Teeth, was nominated for a Black Quill Award and was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, some of which can be read on his website: www.pumpkinteeth.net.        

Megan Harris is a puppeteer and puppet creator. Marco is her creation, via the text of Under the Poppy. These are Meg’s photos as Marco took shape in her hands, on her worktable, moving through her vision and skill into tangible life.

Marco is very soon to undergo a further, more emotionally drastic transformation – puppets change, of course, like people, when the forces are strong enough.

Meeting and working with Meg has been one of the greatest pleasures for me, in this project full of pleasures. Les mecs and Istvan would surely approve of her methods, as well as her ruthless, subtle, humorous artist’s eye.

This is seriously a match made in puppet heaven: the louche and passionate partisans of the Poppy, actors both live and constructed, disporting in the gorgeous confines of the Danto Lecture Hall at the Detroit Institute of Arts, as part of the Friday Night Live! series. Is it a coincidence that the doors of this hall open upon some of the players of the world-renown Paul McPharlin Collection? Or is it a wink from the spirit of artful play?

We’re thrilled to be invited to appear in such a gorgeous venue, thanks to Larry Baranski, puppet partisan extraordinaire! Save the date – 2/17/12, 8 PM, and come prepared to enjoy a performance, an experience, of the pleasures of the Poppy, offered by a troupe of players out of dark Victoriana, whose only aim is to give you, dear gentlemen and ladies, everything that you deserve.

As the journey of the old year winds to a close, we wish to thank all of our devoted friends of floozies for keeping company with us upon the road. As 2012 begins, we’ll make our way to a surprising and august venue, before arriving at our ultimate destination of the brothel, the war, and truest love . . . concurrent, we hope, with the arrival of the Poppy’s sequel, The Mercury Waltz, from the literary hands of Small Beer Press.

Until then, we invite you to keep your knickers dry and your strings supple, and thank you again for your support of our immersive events and passionate productions. And we remind you as well that the Poppy is a uniquely desirous environment, and that, as in love, we all have a role there to play, in mask or top hat, with wink or wriggle or dream.

Wonderful to see Detroit’s PuppetART get a loving shout-out here. It’s one of the highlights, along with the McPharlin Collection at the Detroit Institute of Arts, not to be missed by the visiting devotee of puppetry.

From the start, we’ve been dedicated to Detroit as our Under the Poppy venue.  Our narrative events have traveled from Hart Plaza to the Russell Industrial Center to District VII Detroit, with our next appearance in February 2012 to take place in the heart of the city’s cultural center. Watch this space for that announcement . . .

And in national culture, puppets are seen to be having a moment – but of course, the moment is always theirs.

Here Under the Poppy, we love stories, for stories are purest theatre. And what better way to inaugurate a new series of guest posts than with one from artist Clive Hicks-Jenkins, a puppet story, three acts of mystery.
Haunted by Puppets. [Photo of CH-J courtesy CH-J.]

I have a mystery in my life… a ghost story if you like… that is ongoing. It has un-spooled in episodes of hallucinatory clarity across the years, but awaits… or more precisely I await… a denouement! It started with a prologue that to date has been followed by two acts. Now a two-act drama is always unsatisfactory, so of course there must be a third, though in this case decades have elapsed since the second. Three, why is the magic number always three? When I paint a still-life there must always be three objects in it. Two unnerve me. Though the present interval in this ‘drama’ has now been going on for nearly forty years, I knew with complete certainty once the curtain had come down on the first act, that the story would not, could not be complete, until the end of a third.

Prologue
When I was a boy of six living in South Wales, I made my first glove-puppet. It was a green-faced witch… echoes of Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West there… and had a head modelled from papier mâché. I made a steeple-hat for her from a page torn out of one of my mother’s magazines. The paper had a full-page advertisement on one side in which most of the background was black. I cut and scrolled it into a cone and taped on a wide brim snipped from the same sheet. It was black all over, but the under-brim and the inside of the hat were covered in print. Interesting that I left it like that, that at some level I made the aesthetic choice there should be a cache of cut-off sentences hidden in the crown and barely visible in the shadows under the brim. I’ve always loved stories, poetry, text. Maybe I thought the oddity of a hat lined with words was apt for a witch versed in spells.

I was mightily pleased with my puppet creation, but at some point she went missing, as things made by children so often do, or did back then, when there was less sentiment about the fledgling skills of the very young. Parents weary of clutter threw juvenilia away. My mother threw away plenty, so it would come as no surprise were I to find that the green-faced witch had been discarded by her when she’d thought I’d outgrown it. The truth is I’ll never know what happened to the puppet. It just disappeared, and I’m not entirely sure I even noticed at the time.

Act 1
Some years have passed. I’ve forgotten about the witch. I’m perhaps nine or ten and I’m walking along the street where we live. I’m on the opposite side of the road from where our house is. The weight of my school satchel is against my hip, but I’m heading away from the direction of school and home, though why I’d be doing that I can’t imagine and don’t recall. I’m passing sombre red brick terraced houses with narrow strips in front of them hemmed by walls of varying heights, some low but some as high as my shoulder. Few plants in these ‘front gardens’. Most are paved and used as spaces to park bicycles. Ahead of me I see something small, dark and conical perched on the top of one of the higher walls. My step slows as I draw level. l look up and down the street to scout whether anyone is about, stare at the blank front window beyond the wall to see whether anyone is looking out. This isn’t a house where anyone known to me lives, so I must be careful about picking up anything that may have been put out on the wall for a purpose. I reach out my hand to the witch’s hat, still pristine as the day it was made years before. I turn the brim toward me to see what I know will be inside, the odd, disjointed, random text I’d memorised, my witch’s words of magic. I place the steeple-hat back on the wall and walk away. I don’t look back, even though I dearly want to. Nothing will ever be quite the same again for me, because now I know there are mysteries, and this one is mine and will always be with me.

Act 2
I’m in my twenties, a choreographer living and working in London. I’m rehearsing dancers in a dingy hall at the Elephant & Castle. Things are not going too well and I slip away in my lunch-break to walk the empty, shabby back streets while I try to think my way through the problems. It’s chill and I’m wearing a dancer’s flimsy rehearsal clothes, regretting already that I didn’t grab a coat on my way out. I’m striding with my head down, preoccupied, arms folded against the wind. The gutter is full of rubbish blowing about. Something there catches my eye, nails me to the spot, peels back time and makes the hair at my nape stand on end.

When I return to rehearsals I’m twenty minutes late, and the dancers, so recalcitrant and ill-tempered that morning, have become worried and concerned because I am known to be never late. I carry on where we left off, working now at speed and with renewed focus to shape the choreography to the music. Everyone is exhilarated, relieved, smiling. But roiling around in my head are the remembered words of magic I’d read while hunkered at the pavement edge, having prised apart the fragile, crushed-though-familiar paper steeple-hat to find them hidden within.

Speak Its Name is the place to find gay historical fiction: robust reviews, writers whose work may be new to you, bylines you already follow. And right now SIN’s in the thick of the annual Advent Calendar, and today’s post is mine, “The Joy of No.”

Halfway through the season, my favorite post so far is Donald L. Hardy’s rumination on historical accuracy: thoughtful, useful, and worth putting into practice.

And the Advent Calendar is so much like a little theatre, isn’t it? Open the door, release the day’s story. What will tomorrow’s be?

. . .  you remember. If not, we shall hope to see you in the new year to come, in your finery, with your curiosity, ready to glance around corners and be delighted in the dark. [Jordan Whalen photo courtesy Diane Cheklich.]

The Dream of the Moving Statue: the dream of the artist, the word-made-flesh of the puppeteer: here is that uncanny life, that endless fascination.  A must-read here at the Poppy.