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.        

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.

While “Between the Sheets” is, like, totally misleading, this one needs to go into heavy rotation at the Poppy.

Spending the day considering amazements like this – and this - and on the way to discuss puppets-in-the-making (with the maker!)  . . . We do have our fun here, Under the Poppy, though the peacock feather fan is getting a little damp from the heat.

Also during the weekend,  a concerned citizen of our acquaintance asked if the performance/environment/evening was going to be “surprising” (having read novels of mine, I think, in the past).  Well, depends on what surprises you, and how much you like that.  I would say yes, lots, and gorgeously, if everything goes right.

All real art comes with a touch – or more than a touch – of real danger, the certainty that something painful, human, final is on the line. Without dark chance, there is no chance of loss: or of joy. What could be more tedious than  a story in which all hazards are small and surmountable, the road’s a straight line, and everyone ends up with exactly what they thought they wanted in the first place?  That’s a 22-minute sitcom, and if life is a sitcom, shoot me now. Fortunately art is not a sitcom. . . . Playing with fire is playing for real.

The folk at the Poppy understand that sex, or more accurately desire, which is the engine that drives sex – without desire, sex is silent meat – is purely combustible: “the utter, utter verge,” as the knowledgeable Guillame likes to say.

Working with fire is also playing with something dangerously real. And don’t we love that.

A larger version can be found here. Meanwhile, just bask in that wheel, those upthrust legs, that spangled darkness.  This is theatre; this is why it’s so really very terribly fun to do and go see and dream about; write about. The denizens Under the Poppy would and do thoroughly approve.

Yes, it’s a delightful Scissor Sisters song (mildly NSFW; there’s a definitely NSFW version out there  that’s worth finding), and it’s also the engine that drives the sex and power equation, that in turn turns the wheels of the brothel in Under the Poppy.  Reading about the trickster god Mercury, as I am and have been doing, leads to the conceptual facts (via Lewis Hyde’s great Trickster Makes This World) that “appetite drive[s] their wanderings . . . their shamelessness and their great attraction to dirt . . . ‘The texts remind us again and again that “Mercurius is found in the dung-heaps.”‘” Which is say that some of the attractive power of sexuality comes from that sense of the crossing of boundaries, of play where, yes, it might get a little dirty, or even more than a little, and it might all happen in the dark.

Which is to agree with the woman who thought she would like to support our stage show but was then offended by the beginnings of the novel, the first chapter in fact, which really is a bellwether chapter: it’s the door under the exit sign, if you are at all inclined to use it; it’s meant to tell the reader that this is a place where things happen that (as Lucy says later) will happen nowhere else. It is that liminal, sexual place of shadows and shadow-play, where one thing seems to be another, and desire is the order of the day.

Louise Bak knows that zone: she interviewed me on Toronto’s CUIT – FM’s “Sex City”, and we talked about the excellent lawlessness of puppets as avatars of desire, specifically Pan Loudermilk; for those who have asked, his avatar, is, yes, the puppet one sees onstage in the Poppy‘s book trailer. Also worth noting that, in the world of mythology, Pan is one of the sons of Mercury, which makes perfect sense for that small, smiling gentleman; I didn’t know this when the name came to me, but I didn’t have to, after all.

… are a varied lot, and their calling card is a kind of glamour, a beautiful dark smile that knows that all is just in play, isn’t it? Like poetry. Like sex. The puppet is the creation most likely to escape its creator, but that too is all in fun.  Isn’t it?

“With base outlandish cullions at his heels,/Whose proud fantastic liveries make such show/As if that Proteus, god of shapes, appeared.”   – Marlowe’s EDWARD II

Everything here just now is theatre: reading A.L. Rowse on the incomparable Christopher Marlowe, squinting at the military precision of the Marc Jacobs show (while thinking of our own Poppy costumes: the trailing edge of torn lace, brothel creepers, make-up around the eye like a self-inflicted bruise), pondering the duties of a “People’s Opera” supernumerary, and feeling pleased and proud to read this about Under the Poppy: “Also, the novel is breathtaking when it portrays the theater—it really conveys the depth and flash of the performances in a way that I haven’t seen before in text.” And all is summed up by Jonathan Raban writing of his first childhood experience at the theatre: “I remembered going to Chu-Chin-Chow in Southport when I was 7: no trees that I’d ever seen before had been as intricately green as those painted cardboard flats, no sea so vividly, enticingly watery, no room so solidly inhabitable.  I had sat with my grandmother in the back of the theater, aching to be admitted to that enchanted social world of costume, rouge and cardboard, because it was immeasurably more real than the grindingly artificial place that my family and I lived in outside.” Amen.  As Michael Blumlein, a writer I much admire, wrote: “There is no thing that does not change. There is no fact, there is only fiction.”