Shadow puppetry is one of the aspects of desire and control that we intend to explore in “Puppets and Passion” at the DIA. Bring your shadow.

[Photo of Brooklyn Dimitrie and Vanessa Hentschel courtesy Diane Cheklich.]

Here we see a mask, created by the talented Megan Harris (who has created all the masks for our upcoming “Puppets and Passion” show), sitting quiescent on a very old head form.

The mask, too, looks quiescent; but don’t be fooled, already we’ve seen it deployed in rehearsal, and the eyes behind it, and what it cloaks is a desire not easily expressed. If you find yourself at the “P&P” show, you’ll see it, too.

And it will see you.

The Under the Poppy crowd will, of course, be present for this showing, so if you’re sitting in our aisle, please do say hello.

* * * * *

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.        

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?