The Gay & Lesbian Review

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Update: Cherry Grove Theater Lives!
To the Editor:
My essay “America’s First Gay Town”
introduced a historic Cherry Grove, New
York, to your readers in the Nov.-Dec.
issue. The essay concluded with a refer-
ence to the listing of Cherry Grove’s
“Community House and Theater” on the
National Register of Historic Places by
the U.S. Department of the Interior on
June 4, 2013.
On December 11, 2013, Governor
Mario Cuomo announced New York
State’s “Regional Economic Development
Council Awards,” which included the
Cherry Grove Community Association,
Inc. community house as a recipient of a
$335,000 matching grant. The award to
restore the building will be administered
by the NYS Parks, Recreation and His-
toric Preservation Office.
Receiving this award completes a “Cin-
derella” story of sorts. The association,
prompted by a question from its legal
counsel—“Are you historic?”—embarked
on a twelve-month project. It was advised
to lobby state and federal elected officials
and to research and apply for historic
recognition. The goal: to raise awareness
of Cherry Grove’s importance in the pre-
Stonewall era to GLBT people and to the
nation’s history, and to become eligible
for government grant assistance to pre-
serve its community house. Cherry
Grove’s profile was elevated from that of
a locally known GLBT resort to a nation-
ally-recognized GLBT historic site in the
National Parks System’s Fire Island
National Seashore.
I want to thank GLR for its coverage.
Your magazine’s cover, masthead and
essay were forwarded to panelists in Al-
bany, New York, to coincide with the
grant application review period. GLR’s
standing as a journal with a “worldwide”
readership provided more evidence of
Cherry Grove’s historic significance be-
yond its regional GLBT audience. GLR
contributed greatly to an unimagined
“happy ending” to the present-day
Cherry Grove story.
Carl Luss, New York City
MyTense Moment with May Sarton
To the Editor:
Reading Dolores Klaich’s generous, as-
tute tribute to May Sarton and Sarton’s
rude response [Nov.-Dec. 2013] reminded
me of my own awkward encounter with
Ms. Sarton. She had come to the Bay Area
for poetry readings. The three I attended
were jam-packed, a sea of white-haired
women.
I went early to the first, at San Fran-
cisco State, and there outside the audito-
rium was Sarton, by herself. I introduced
myself and said that I would soon read a
paper about her on a Modern Language
Association panel titled “Non-declared
Lesbian Writers.” “But,” she said indig-
nantly, “I’m a declared lesbian writer.”
Oops. She must have been thinking of her
1965 novel Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mer-
maids Singing, but I knew from reading
the reviews that her coming out was so
muted that it escaped reviewers’ notice.
Ten years after the poetry readings at
which Sarton was such a star, she was
back in San Francisco. I was able to inter-
view her at the home of her gay male
friends in Noe Valley. She seemed to be
very interested in the gay movement and
to see herself as part of it.
After Sarton died, a woman knocked on
the door of Doris Grumbach in her coastal
village of Maine. “You,” declared the visi-
tor emphatically, “are the new May Sar-
ton.” Grumbach was aghast.
Margaret Criukshank, Corea, ME
What Robert Craft Was to Stravinsky
To the Editor:
In his vulgar speculation about the
sources of Robert Craft’s income [in a re-
view of Craft’s book, Stravinsky: Discov-
eries and Memories in the Jan.-Feb.
issue], Alfred Corn seems to have forgot-
ten that Mr. Craft was, throughout his
more than twenty years as a virtual mem-
ber of the Stravinsky household, a busy
conductor whose pioneering concerts and
recordings of modern music (eight vol-
umes of Schoenberg, the complete music
of Webern) and older music (Gesualdo,
Monteverdi, Schütz, Bach, Mozart) intro-
duced many Americans (including
Stravinsky) to rarely performed music
that they might not have discovered
otherwise.
This is in addition to his contributions
to literature as the co-author of Conversa-
tions with Igor Stravinsky (1959) and five
subsequent books of “conversations” on
which Craft and Stravinsky collaborated
up to the time of the composer’s death in
1971.
In his years with the Stravinskys, Craft
also prepared the orchestras for the mae-
stro’s concerts and recordings and shared
conducting duties with Stravinsky, espe-
cially during the composer’s last years.
But for Craft’s influence, Stravinsky al-
most certainly would not have written the
masterpieces of his later years—In Memo-
riam Dylan Thomas, Agon, Anticum
Sacrum, Threni, or Abraham and Isaac. If
Craft benefited from the association with
Stravinsky, the benefit was mutual.
Correspondence
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