Learning more about Oscar: #LGBTQ #amreading #intersectional

I am posting a review of Wilde Nights & Robber Barons, The Story of Maurice Schwabe (The Man Behind Oscar Wilde’s Downfall, who with a Band of False Aristocrats Swindled the World) written by Laura Lee (2022; Elsewhere Press).

The review that I recorded for Book Tube is below and the written review is below that.

Oscar Wilde was not the first one. Of course, I knew that rationally. But this was also the first thought that popped into my head after finishing the book Wilde Nights & Robber Barons, The Story of Maurice Schwabe (The Man Behind Oscar Wilde’s Downfall, who with a Band of False Aristocrats Swindled the World) by Laura Lee (2022; Elsewhere Press).

No stranger to the world of Oscar Wilde, Lee is the author of the 2017 nonfiction book titled Oscar’s Ghost, The Battle for Oscar Wilde’s Legacy from Amberly Publishing in England.

Her new book interested me because it tells the story behind the story of how Oscar Wilde became the gay icon that he is – including the impetus and name of the infamous and historically important Oscar Wilde Bookshop in New York City which closed its doors in 2009.

Wilde was born in 1854 in Dublin, Ireland; went to college in England; married a woman as custom dictated; became a well-known writer; discovered he was gay, fell hopelessly in love with a younger man named Lord Alfred Douglas; and went to jail for that love in 1895. He was then released from jail in 1897 and in 1900 died penniless.

Wilde is the author of numerous and often satirical writings including his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his plays including his most popular, The Importance of Being Earnest.

In Wilde Nights & Robber Barons, Lee used her research and writing to bring to light the story behind Oscar Wilde. He came to be known because of his writings, and he came to ruin because he was being blackmailed for his homosexuality along with other gay men in a certain class in what was commonly called “polite society.”

Maurice Schwabe, key to the international circle of card sharks and blackmailers, just happened to have been lovers with Lord Alfred Douglas, the man who was known for his long-term love affair with Oscar Wilde. Douglas, also known as Bosie, was with Schwabe before he was with Oscar Wilde, making me think that jealousy and revenge were likely motives in the blackmailing along with financial gain.

In doing her research and presenting the facts, Lee gives the reader some interesting insight into Wilde’s important role in the early gay rights movement:  “Oscar was starting to be known as someone a young man in a certain kind of trouble could call on for help. In September 1893, Bosie had written to Charles Kains-Jackson, the editor of The Artist and the Journal of Home Culture, which was a showcase for homoerotic verse. He talked about Oscar’s role in advancing the “new culture,” a society that was accepting of same-sex love, an early form of the gay rights movement. ‘Perhaps nobody knows as I do what [Oscar] has done for the ‘new culture,’ the people he has pulled out of the fire and ‘seen through’ things not only with money, but by sticking to them when other people wouldn’t speak to them…’ In the years leading up to his trial for gross indecency, Wilde spent a fair amount of time negotiating with blackmailers, and only a small portion of this involved letters of his own.”

In reading Wilde Nights & Robber Barons, The Story of Maurice Schwabe (The Man Behind Oscar Wilde’s Downfall, who with a Band of False Aristocrats Swindled the World) by Laura Lee (2022; Elsewhere Press), I learned more about Oscar Wilde than I knew before.

This is Janet Mason reviewing for Book Tube.

For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:

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Pride and Remembering Harvey Milk — #Pride #amreading #LGBTQ

In honor of Pride month, I’m re-posting this review of a book about the gay pioneer Harvey Milk written by Lillian Federman. It’s important to remember our heroes, especially in these trying times. Harvey Milk, who was assassinated in the prime of his live, would have been 90 this year. (His birthday was in the end of May.)

Below is my review of Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Federman published by Yale University Press. You can view the video on Book Tube or read the review below that.

His death changed a lot of lives — including mine, including yours.  –Janet Mason booktube

When I first listened to the audiobook of Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Faderman published by Yale University Press in 2018, I thought I knew about Harvey Milk and would just be getting a refresher, something I could pass along.  Harvey Milk is the gay leader who was assassinated in 1978 when he was 48. Having held a seat on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for nearly a year, he was the first openly gay man to hold elected office in the United States.  He was dubbed the Mayor of Castro Street — the gay neighborhood in San Francisco where Milk eventually moved and made his home. As is described in the epilogue of the book, Milk was larger in death than he was in life.   His murder — along with the then San Francisco Mayor George Moscone — galvanized the LGBT community across the nation and the world. The anger that erupted after his murderer received a less than two-year sentence was too long-suppressed gay anger and it could not be denied.   His death changed a lot of lives — including mine, including yours.   The new information that I found in this book was in the details of his complex background and in the Jewish identity of this man who was raised in Long Island New York, a place that was rife with anti-Semitism during the holocaust when he and his family would listen to the news on the radio, fearful that the Holocaust could spread to America.   The book, which is part of Yale University’s Jewish Lives series, points out that Harvey Milk was informed by Tikkun olam —  the Jewish philosophy of repairing the world.  After he came out and was radicalized in San Francisco, he was always concerned about the disenfranchised and rose to elected office by building coalitions.   He was, in many ways, ahead of his time in understanding the power of uniting — or what is now called intersectionality.   He was accused by the (largely unsuccessful) gay establishment of the time as muddying the waters by focusing on the rights of all oppressed groups and not only on gay rights. But Harvey persisted. And he succeeded in furthering gay rights only as someone who was not concerned with “fitting in” and upending the status quo could.   When I read Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death by Lillian Faderman published by Yale University Press, I knew I was reading about an important part of LGBTQ history but I didn’t know how important it was until the last page was turned.     This is Janet Mason with reviews on You Tube and Spotify

For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:

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“No One Knows I’m a Lesbian” — The New Town Librarian in review: #BookTube #amreading #LGBTQ

Th text of this review that is on Book Tube is below.

Reading Kathy Anderson’s novel, The New Town Librarian from NineStar Press reminded me of what I love about reading which seems crazy since I read all the time but it did, the sight, the smell of books on shelves, the fact that books help people connect with themselves and others and that not only do people write books but that there are people in books and people all around them.

I found myself rooting for the lead in The New Town Librarian. I wanted her to do well in her new job, get the girl (her favorite shirt reads “No One Knows I’m a Lesbian”), and most of all for her to be happy. Being happy is a goal that the protagonist mentions –she would be the first woman in her family history to be happy. She describes herself as having descended from a bunch of “sad sacks.”

The novel is set in a small town in New Jersey near the mysterious bogs of the Pine Barrens and is full of local lore including rumrunners and the Jersey Devil.

The question that is asked in various ways throughout the novel, is whether the new librarian who is so different in many ways – queer in both the old and new meanings and from a City where there are more people like her who are different – can make her home in this small town where she now lives and if there is enough there for her.

As I turned the pages and accompanied the protagonist on her journey, I found myself laughing and crying with the characters that now filled her life – in particular, her landlady (a force of nature), her husband (a man who conjures the word “good”) and a foster teen who shows up at the library and makes it his home.

The book held me to the end – and I was sorry to see it go – as I wondered if the universe would spin its magic and make our hero happy.

As I read Kathy Anderson’s novel, The New Town Librarian from NineStar Press (published in 2023), I was brought back in touch with a part of myself that I didn’t realize was missing.

This is Janet Mason with reviews for Book Tube and Spotify.

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The book “I needed” — a worldwide perspective on Loving Artemis: #hope #equality #LGBTQ #amreading

One of the things that is wonderful about being an author is that I hear from people all over the world that the worlds that once lived in head are meaningful. Of course, this is often influenced by events that have actually happened as is the case with Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love and marriage published by Thorned Heart Press.

I was really touched by this review from Kira who is associated with The Sapphic Book Club.

Loving Artemis wasn’t exactly what I expected – but I think it was what I needed. The book is divided into three main sections; one in roughly modern day, one from Art’s perspective about her life growing up, and the last from Grace’s perspective in high school. While it wasn’t until the last section that I really understood how they all tied together, I found that the focus on each character individually created a more balanced narrative about queer youth and the lasting impact of early relationships.

Art, short for Artemis, wants to become a person of her own design, rather than the housewife that her family (and society) believe lies in her future. Grace, on the other hand, begins discovering who she is through a variety of factors- a disastrous trip with a friend, a school project, and a chance encounter with Art. Although these two are only together for a short period of their lives, they both end up living through a particularly eventful period in the American gay liberation movement.

Throughout the book, academia and academic pursuits offer a window into the changing world, even as Art and Grace are caught up in the trials of their own lives. Passing references to Stonewall, Loving v. Virginia and Obergefell v. Hodges, Defense of Marriage Act, and other monumental events are discovered in classes and headlines, providing a contextual backdrop that is just as compelling, if not more so, than the protagonists journeys.

Everything and everyone- Art, Grace, their lives, and the movement for equality- come together at the beginning and end of the book at New York Pride. In the midst of a celebration and memorial of their struggles, resolution abounds. As much as I know that we are not, and likely will never be, finished with the fight for equality, Loving Artemis ends in a way that makes me believe that will be possible, if only for a short while.

To read my post first published by The Sapphic Book Club, click here.

For more information on my most recent novel Loving Artemis, an endearing tale of revolution, love, and marriage, click here:

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The Unicorn, The Mystery in review — #FaithfullyLGBT #amreading

I’m very glad to be able to repost this review by Trudie Barreras of The Unicorn, The Mystery. Special thanks to Kittredge Cherry. Click here to learn more about the QSpirit newsletter.

“The Unicorn: The Mystery” by Janet Mason is yet another book brought to my attention by author Kittredge Cherry and her extremely important QSpirit ministry that deals with the interface between sexuality and spirituality. Mason’s fascinating novel uses a room in a museum containing seven tapestries featuring a Unicorn as the impetus for an intricate meditation on the conflict between mythological spirituality and the rigid dogmatism of a Christianity totally submerged in fear of heresy.

The two narrator-protagonists are the Unicorn and a Monk. The setting is an Abbey somewhere in France which includes an attached convent of female religious. The Monk, a young mystic who none-the-less has earthly ambitions of achieving power and prestige by becoming a priest, has been steeped in “pagan mythology” by stories his mother has told him. As the story opens, he sees the Unicorn basking in the sunlight and falls in love, both spiritually and erotically. The trouble begins when he naively describes his experience to his priest-teacher, and sets in motion a chain of events leading to the hunting of the Unicorn, all of which are depicted in the tapestries upon which the Unicorn reflects while relating the story.

For information on my upcoming novel Loving Artemis (August 16, 2022; Thorned Heart Press) click here

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

To learn more about my latest published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT

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Carson McCullers in review — #BookTube #LGBTQ #amreading

There’s something reassuring about reading a well-done, good old fashioned lesbian book. I felt that way when I read My Autobiography of Carson McCullers a memoir by Jenn Shapland, published by Tin House in 2020. That the book was a finalist for The National Book Award is evidence of how far things have progressed.

I’ve long been a fan of the writer Carson McCullers and have always thought of her as a lesbian but alas–as Shapland writes–the world begs to differ.  In My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Jenn Shapland takes on the homophobia of the literary establishment–much to this reader’s delight.

She also quotes many lesbian authors of previous generations in the text, including the estimable, late, Audre Lorde. Of course, there is much self interest in how much I loved reading the book. It means that the previous generations of lesbian writers did something right as we fought to be heard in the world and it also means that our words have not been forgotten.

In My Autobiography of Carson McCullers, Shapland searches for clues to her own queer identity as she researches the life, letters, and therapy transcripts of Carson McCullers. In particular, she discusses her own life when she felt she had to stay in the closet and the closet that McCullers lived in or was put in. Shapland explains how unhealthy that is.

Carson McCullers was born in 1917 in Columbus, Georgia and was a well-known novelist, short story writer, playwright, and essayist.  She was friends with prominent artists at the time including Tennessee Williams. As Shapland points out in the book, McCullers was well-known during her lifetime and still is an important American author.

Carson McCullers’s writings include The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, The Member of the Wedding, and The Ballad of the Sad Cafe. Carson was sickly and died young in her fiftieth year.

She is known for her characters who include “misfits and outsiders” meaning that she wrote about race, people with disabilities, and, in the parlance of the time, homosexuals. As Shapland writes, McCullers would have hated the turn that America took (in its choice of a “President”) in 2016.

After the Presidential election of 2016, Shapland explores her feelings by writing: “…I felt cut open and kept recalling a passage from Member of the Wedding when the news of the war and the world’s instability hits Frankie for the first time.

 ‘Frankie stood looking up and down at the four walls of the room. She thought of the world, and it was fast and loose and turning, faster and looser and bigger than it had been before…Finally she stopped looking around the four kitchen walls and said to Berenice: ‘I feel just exactly like somebody has peeled all the skin off me.’”

Ultimately, Shapland writes about love–how beautiful it is and how necessary it is not to stifle or closet it.

In reading My Autobiography of Carson McCullers a memoir by Jenn Shapland, published by Tin House, I learned more about Carson McCullers than I knew before. Just as importantly, the book is a damn good memoir and an inspiring read.

This is Janet Mason reviewing for Book Tube.

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

To learn more about my latest published novel — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT

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Memoir — the art of reading it #amreading #LGBTQ #difference #BookTube

There’s something about losing myself in a good memoir that I find hugely appealing.  The book that I found this time was titled “I Did It My Ways,” by D’yan Forest with Stephen Clarke.

D’yan describes herself as an 86-year-old standup comedian, who was previously a singer and an American in Paris who lived a scandalous life that was a far cry from the conventional expectations of her Jewish family in Boston in the United States. She was born in 1934.

As a writer, I have spent so much of my time under a rock that I have not even heard of D’yan Forest.

Still, desperate to get away from my own life—at least temporarily—I began turning the pages. Memoir as a form draws me in because I am interested in learning how people construct their lives and live on their own terms especially against the backdrop of conventionality.

It’s possible that conventional people don’t write memoirs—or maybe it is that I have never been interested in reading such a memoir. By definition, a memoirist has to have a story to tell. And if the story is just like everyone else’s, then why bother?

“I Did It My Ways” is an interesting story of a woman who lived – and continues to live – an unconventional life. It held my interest. And I may have a very different unconventional life myself, but there at the heart of the memoir is a story that dovetails with my own.

D’yan Forest had to struggle to find herself and she has always dealt with the feeling of difference. I have long struggled with feeling different also. In my case, and D’yan’s, over the years, this has lessened. As D’yan writes, maybe she just didn’t care anymore.

When she was growing up, the United States was rife with antisemitism and many of her ancestors in Europe had lived in Latvia and were killed in the Nazi-run concentration camps.

Later in life, she becomes obsessed with going to visit the concentration camps in Europe. As she writes: “My never-ending fight to avoid getting judged for who my ancestors were, made me even more determined to go to Europe and face the truth about what real hatred can do.”

Of her trip to Leningrad, she writes, “It was a hard lesson. Silence, I realized, can kill almost as much as violence. When we keep our eyes and mouths shut in the face of prejudice, we’re collaborating in that prejudice.”

Her issue of not fitting in began in childhood when she was a self-described tomboy. But she wanted to fit in and that meant dating boys. But fortunately, the boys didn’t go for it, so D’yan ended up going to college.

She attended college in New England at a time when sororities didn’t let Jews in. Wanting to fit in somewhere, D’yan ended up joining a Presbyterian choir. Her mother told her that was fine but to hum whenever they mentioned Jesus.

In college, D’yan studied French and spent a year abroad in France which ended up changing her life. She experienced less antisemitism in France and observed that the kids there who she encountered didn’t ask her who her grandparents were or what religion she was. Throughout her life, D’yan observed that she felt freer to be herself in Paris.

D’yan spent her life as bisexual which probably made it easier to bend to her parents’ demands of conventionality and she did marry a man which lasted a relatively short time.

 D’yan went back to Paris after the marriage ended and pursued an active sex life with both men and women. She became a singer in Paris and later in life reinvented herself as a standup comic.

I found “I Did It My Ways: a memoir by D’yan Forest with Stephen Clarke” to be an inspiring page turner of a good read.

This is Janet Mason with reviews for BookTube.

To learn more about my most recently published novel (available online & everywhere books are sold and lent such as your local library) — The Unicorn, The Mystery, click here:

The Unicorn, The Mystery now available from Adelaide Books — #amreading #FaithfullyLGBT

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Beautiful Aliens — #LGBTQ #amreading #pioneers

This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

(TWO is the first international LGBTQ radio news magazine.)

 

Beautiful Aliens

A Steve Abbott Reader

Edited by Jamie Townsend

“Will We Survive the Eighties” is the hypothetical question that titles an essay written by Steve Abbott, a gay man and a leading figure in the 1980s avant-garde literary community based in San Francisco.

In 1992, when attending Naropa University’s creative writing program. I was scheduled to have a one on one critique session with Steve Abbott – but he wasn’t there. He had attended the program and had given a reading and a workshop but had to leave early because he was sick with full blown AIDS.

Nearly three decades later, in 2019, Beautiful Aliens, A Steve Abbott Reader edited by Jamie Townsend was published by Nightboat Books in New York.

Abbott survived the 1980s but just barely. He died in 1992 when he was forty-eight.

Abbott was many things – a poet, critic, novelist, and poetic cartoonist – but as his daughter Alysia Abbott (the author of Fairyland, a memoir about her relationship with her father), writes in the afterward of Beautiful Aliens:

“…his work was about building community. It was about hand-illustrating posters for the readings he organized…..It was about going out and engaging young men and women in classrooms but also in the cafes, bars, and bookstores around San Francisco, sharing his vast knowledge and encouraging them to add their voices to queer culture, in whatever way they could, even if that culture wasn’t getting mainstream attention. He knew how important it was to support voices on the edge, writers that were pushing boundaries and weren’t interested in keeping their readers comfortable.”

I found Beautiful Aliens, a selection of Abbott’s writings, mesmerizing.  For one thing, there were so many overlapping areas that we had in common – queer writing conferences that were important to me, and favorite poets and writers such as the lesbian icon Judy Grahn.

I also found that Abbott was a writer who, in so many ways, was ahead of his time, and still has much to tell us.  In his prescient essay “Will We Survive the Eighties,” Abbott writes:

“It is clear that what we are doing now … is killing us all. And as we project these attitudes onto other species and towards the Earth’s ecological system, we are jeopardizing our very planet. I would argue that we can no longer afford to see anything – not even ‘gay liberation’ or our survival — as a separate issue needing a separate cultural or a political or a spiritual agenda.

This does not mean I intend to renounce my sexual orientation, far from it. Even in times of sadness or loneliness, it remains my greatest source of strength and joy.”

 

I found Beautiful Aliens, A Steve Abbott Reader edited by Jamie Townsend, published by Nightboat Books in New York to be that rare thing – a voice from the past that addresses the present.

 

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

 

 

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Living True reviews THEY — #amreading #LGBTQ down under

“Tamar leads us through their world with intelligence and humour, bringing the old tales to life and making them accessible to the contemporary reader; infusing them with a modern subtext to give them relevance in today’s world. Unconventional families, shattered typecasts, twisted myths and all presented with a tongue in cheek subtlety and wit. Mason has managed to take a complex and rather alien historical setting, merge it with up to the minute social mores and produce an amusing read.”

amazon link https://amzn.to/2UgefCb

–Living True, LOTL (an Australian-based media development and events company with offices in Sydney and New York City)

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Two books from Other Press airing internationally this week: Can love conquer all? — #amreading #lgbtq

Note: This piece is airing worldwide this week on This Way Out (TWO), the syndicated LGBT radio show.  Click here to listen to the entire show.

As a lesbian writer, I am continually confronted with the fact that we are many things – at the heart LGBTQ but perhaps not in everything we do.  I’ve come to the conclusion that LGBTQ status shouldn’t matter even when it does.

Recently, I was reminded of this dilemma in the reading of two books from Other Press about men who happen to be gay in the Middle East. Both books are well-written and delightfully complex. Both also represent stories within a story. 

In The Parting Gift (Other Press 2018), a novel by Evan Fallenberg, we meet an unnamed narrator who tells us the story by writing a letter to his former lover Adam who he knew in a university in the states when the narrator left abruptly for Israel where he fell in love with a for a time lived with an alpha male who was previously heterosexual – and who in fact, as the narrator tells us, may not have an orientation other than being macho and selfish.

The story line, like the sexuality of the two male beloveds, is fluid. “This story, like most stories, could begin in a number of different places,” writes Fallenberg.  His narrator explains that he chose to go to go to Israel “because if you’re a Jew you can get off the plane in Tel Aviv, tell them you want to be a citizen, and you get processed right there at the airport.  Full rights and benefits – housing, education, medical.”

Once in Israel he meets and falls in love and lust with a spice-dealer who is close to his ex-wife and his children. The gay narrator becomes totally ensnared in the relationship and once things quickly begin to go bad, he is forced to examine entitlement – first that of his lover but then also the entitlement that he himself grew up with even as he acknowledges that he is now on the receiving end of entitlement.  It is being used against him. The narrator explains to Adam (and to the reader) that he didn’t leave abruptly because, “I had no friends, no real prospects. I was suddenly a 1950s housewife, trapped and helpless.”

The Diamond Setter, a novel by Moshe Saka (Other Press 2017) which was translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen is a sprawling novel that traces the role of a blue diamond — a cursed but inanimate object with a storied past — in connecting people and communities.

A main character — Fareed a young Arab man from Syria who crosses the border and sneaks into Israel with the destination of Yafa – is gay. Fareed (who is carrying the diamond) finds himself in a community that evokes his past.

In addition to being culturally significant, or perhaps as a result, the novel has love at its core. It begins with a few paragraphs that contain the passage that this a story “from back in the days when the Middle East was steeped not only in blood but also in love.”

When Fareed is amazed at the acceptance of gays in Israel, one of his new friends in Yafa warns that,

“Most gay Palestinians in Israel are closeted. It’s a very conservative society. Even our leaders, the ones in the Knesset, say things like, ‘Arab society is not yet mature enough to contend with this issue.’ What is it mature enough for it to deal with then? … What’s for sure is that the Shami Bar, here in Yafa, is an oasis.  It doesn’t represent anything going on in this country, certainly not the discrimination and racism against Arabs.”

Perhaps the novel can be summed up by what Sakal writes in the Afterword:  “Anyone who lived in Palestine before the State of Israel was established in 1948 had tales of brave relationships that survived even the bloodiest of times, love affairs and friendships between Jews and Arabs … “

As complex as The Diamond Setter is, it can leave the reader with the feeling that with love, anything is possible.

 

To learn more about my novel THEY, a biblical tale of secret genders (just published by Adelaide Books New York/Lisbon), click here.

 

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