The Gay & Lesbian Review

ironies abound: Warhol was shot by a fanatical fan, as was

Lennon, fatally. Two other of John’s famous friends, Gianni Ver-

sace and Princess Diana, met with sudden, violent ends.

Celebrity, for John, is a potential death sentence.

This familiar motif in Elton John’s canon is clinched by

“Oscar Wilde Gets Out,” the album’s second track. Over the years

John has created a veritable pantheon of characters: Daniel, Ben-

nie, Levon, Lady Samantha, Captain Fantastic. Of course, these

personae are really projections of the musician himself. Wilde is

another mirror, another bisexual Brit who didn’t just get out but

came out. Lest we forget, Wilde also wrote children’s stories, just

as John did for Disney after rehab. In his homage to another fallen

star, John traces the life of Wilde as an ex-con, a “golden boy in

velveteen” landing in New York and “knowing how love makes

fools of us all.” The song is entirely retrospective: “The past is so

seductive,” Sir Elton sings, “long before the lords and law/

Branded Oscar Wilde a sinner.” The album is full of such back-

ward glances and it brims with self-assurance and sagacity.

Celibacies:

American Modernism and Sexual Life

by Benjamin Kahan

Duke University Press. 232 pages, $23.95

Most of us have negative associations with

the word celibacy. Catholics think of priests,

whose vows of celibacy have been tarnished

by the pedophilia scandal. Growing up, we all

encountered “old maids” or “bachelor un-

cles,” who were presumed celibate and pitied

by adults. For gays and lesbians, celibacy im-

plies the closet, historically the place where

those unable to accept their sexual nature

lived lives of lonely isolation. This scholarly

but accessible study turns our notions of

celibacy on their heads. Kahan demonstrates

that, starting in the U.S. in the 1840’s,

celibacy became a source of power, especially

for women, to reform public life. By the early

20th century, celibacy provided a way for

people to subvert repressive social, economic,

racial, and political systems. Before women’s

and gay liberation made celibacy unfashion-

able, it had acquired, in the hands of a figure

like Andy Warhol, the status of a sexual iden-

tity. Warhol’s famous Factory was an instance

of “secular group celibacy.” What celibacy

decidedly is not, Kahan insists, is synony-

mous with repression or closeted homosexu-

ality. Kahan approaches his subject by

analyzing the work of writers—Henry James,

Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden—and a curious

figure from the Harlem Renaissance, Father

Divine, whose followers, black and white,

lived in cooperative households where

celibacy was practiced. The book’s power de-

rives from Kahan’s skill in making us recon-

ceive sexual categories, particularly celibacy,

which he argues convincingly is a positive

way of choosing how to be in the world.

ANIEL

A. B

URR

Growing Up Golem

by Donna Minkowitz

Magnus Books. 216 pages, $19.99

Donna Minkowitz, lesbian activist and inves-

tigative journalist, started writing for the

Vil-

lage Voice

back in the 1980’s, right after

graduating from Yale. For thirteen years or so,

she wrote about “sexual abuse, rape, baby-

and wife-beating ... but mostly about being

queer.” While she was growing up, her family

lived on the fringes of poverty, moving every

year. Her brilliant mother had a doctorate in

philosophy but never rose above adjunct level;

her father bounced from one low-paying, me-

nial job to another. Of their three children, it

was Donna who, as a child, was beaten by her

father. As an adult, she wondered if he got

sexual satisfaction from hitting her. But all

three girls

—

especially Donna—were on the

receiving end of their mother’s seductive ways

of talking and acting. Minkowitz goes into de-

tail about the (verbal) sexual boundaries that

her mother exceeded. It is no wonder that she

wrote “I wasn’t a real person” but instead a

golem

—“an artificial creature created by

magic, often to serve its creator” (as defined

by the Jewish Virtual Library). Descended

from Eastern European Jewish mystics and

feeling close to her roots, Minkowitz under-

standably chose this being to identify with.

Stricken in her mid-thirties with a disabling

case of repetitive stress injury, she was

reduced to dictating into primitive voice

recognition software, then making multiple

corrections. Everything that involved her arms

and hands, from taking a book off the shelf to

having sex, caused agonies of pain. Surmount-

ing this impediment, Minkowitz is an engag-

ing and amusing storyteller. She’s at her comic

best when describing her girlfriends and the

“lesbian therapy Mafia” in which she found

herself entangled. While the

golem

trope occa-

sionally wears a little thin, this is a thoughtful

memoir by one of our community’s stalwarts.

ARTHA

E. S

TONE

With: New Gay Fiction

Edited by Jameson Currier

Chelsea Stations Editions. 278 pages, $20.

The characters in this anthology of short sto-

ries by gay authors run the gamut from hus-

bands and fathers to tricks, hustlers, and

boyfriends. As with most anthologies, this

one is a mixed bag. There are stories set in

New Orleans, San Francisco, and New York,

and there’s even a piece of historical fiction

set during the Civil War. David Bergman’s “A

Sentimental Education” is a nicely terse, con-

temporary riff on Flaubert’s novel of the same

name. Similarly, “The Beautiful Boy,” by

Shaun Levin, is a kind of gloss on Andrew

Holleran’s

Dancer From the Dance

, nicely

B R

controlled and lyrical throughout. David

Pratt’s “What is Real” cleverly uses a series

of antithetical statements to make a heartfelt

point about the illusions that come into play

when the narrator is picked up by another

man along a roadside one day: “He did not

say, ‘How far did you walk?’ I did not say,

‘Five miles, at least.’ ... I did not feel bathed

in grace for the first time in my twenty years,

nor did I feel at last welcomed into a warm,

bright room outside of which I’d long

waited.” Most of the stories in

With

are writ-

ten well; some are overly earnest; and one,

“Follow Me Through,” seems morally inde-

fensible (a man kidnaps a child to compensate

for the loss of his lover to AIDS).

ALE

OYER

Fault Tree

by Kathryn L. Pringle

Omnidawn. 80 pages, $15.95

Selected by renowned poet C.D. Wright for

Omnidawn’s First/Second Book Prize,

Kathryn L. Pringle’s second poetry collection,

Fault Tree

, begins with epigraphs about Ein-

stein’s theories and Boolean logic. However,

it quickly becomes clear that no physical or

emotional reality is certain or stable in the

world of these poems. How does one live in

an exploded moment?

Fault Tree

answers this

question in fragments that somehow cohere.

The cohesion is partly effected by the ghost of

a narrative: A soldier at war is harmed and

does harm. A distressed soul takes medica-

tions. Some comfort is found in bed. Some

panic begins in a Chinese restaurant. But if

narration depends on time, this story is out of

time; moreover, the narrator is dead. The soli-

tary voice that remains conveys an authority,

poise, and wit that make sense out of insan-

ity—a confounding soldier-maniac’s voice

that is ironically strong, centered, and charm-

ing. The tone grounds a work of mind-blown

world devastation. Everything is obliterated

and isolated: “all is war / we haven’t not had

one.” I recommend reading this memorable

and strangely moving book-length poem

from beginning to end. Dipping into it could

be disorienting, especially if you’re not accus-

tomed to conceptual poetry, a genre in which

Pringle is clearly a rising star.

ARY

ERIAM

March–April 2014

Elton

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