Bernard Perlin

door Fleur Pierets | jul 3, 2017 | Art, Books, History

Bernard Perlin

Text JF. Pierets Artwork Bernard Perlin

Bernard Perlin (1918-2014) was an extraordinary figure in twentieth century American art and gay cultural history. An acclaimed artist and sexual renegade who reveled in pushing social, political, and artistic boundaries, his work regularly appeared in popular magazines in the 1940s, ‘50s, and ‘60s; was collected by Rockefellers, Whitneys, Astors, and Andy Warhol; and was acquired by major museums, including the Smithsonian, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Tate. In One-Man Show, Michael Schreiber chronicles the storied life, illustrious friends and lovers, and astounding adventures of Bernard Perlin through no-holds-barred interviews with the artist, candid excerpts from Perlin’s unpublished memoirs, never-before-seen photos, and an extensive selection of Bernard Perlin’s incredible public and private art. One-Man Show: The Life and Art of Bernard Perlin has been named a 2017 Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association, and is a Lambda Literary Award Finalist.

What triggered you to write this book?
I discovered Bernard and his amazing artwork through my great interest in the illustrious gay social and artistic circle that surrounded the legendary photographer George Platt Lynes in the 1930s through 1950s. Bernard was an intimate member of this great New York gay “cabal,” as he called it, whose members and visitors included such artists and literary such figures as Somerset Maugham, and Christopher Isherwood. Bernard Perlin was the last living member of this remarkable company, then in his early nineties, and so I wrote him. He responded with a friendly phone call that led to another and another and ultimately to an invitation to his home in Connecticut. And so began our close friendship and the unexpected journey towards this book.

Was it important to write this book, aside from your personal connection with Perlin?
First and foremost, I felt a great sense of commitment to getting Bernard Perlin’s extraordinary artwork seen again. But as I began to learn more about his equally extraordinary life, I knew the incredibly compelling story of this unsung gay artist-hero had to be told somehow, and as much as possible in his own colorful, unfiltered way.

As an art connoisseur, what attracts you to his work?
Bernard was a beguiling storyteller – not only in conversation, but also in his art. Every Perlin painting tells a unique story. I’m particularly drawn to his work that can be classified as “magic realism,” in which he interjected unexpected or magical elements into his examination of “real” situations or objects or figures. I always find his perspective an interesting one to consider. In terms of subject matter, I really love Bernard’s “Night Pictures,” a series of paintings depicting the swinging “cocktail culture” of 1950s New York City jazz clubs, street dances, and underground gay bars. The latter were very daring works for him to publicly show when he did, but for Bernard they were just further efforts to depict the full “normal” range of people seeking connection with one another.

He was openly gay in the 1930’s. How did that work out?
While he was very conscious of his sexuality and embraced it from a very young age, it wasn’t really until he went to art school in 1935 in New York that he found a thriving underground gay culture that welcomed him and he easily fit into. He was 16 years old at the time. From that point on, Bernard chose to also live his life “above ground” as a fearlessly openly gay man – doing so during a fearfully closed period in our recent history. It’s remarkable now to consider some of the real risks he faced, sometimes head on. He walked past a sign reading “no Jews allowed” into a department store in Nazi-occupied Danzig in 1938, bought a pair of Hitler Youth shorts, and then boldly walked around in them, as not only a young gay man, but a Jew. Equally remarkable was his attitude about being arrested in a Parisian bathhouse in 1951. In spite of being thrown into a large cage in the middle of a medieval courtroom, and tried in a language he didn’t understand while onlookers jeered, then being jailed without knowing how long he’d be held, Bernard just took it in his stride and thought it all a “great adventure.” He was similarly arrested in Florida and Virginia for “behavior against public decency,” posted bail, then skipped town and carried on undeterred with his cruising and bathhouse escapades. But certainly the most poignant story he shared with me was about his not wanting to fight in World War II, so he had to go to a psychiatrist, be declared a “mental degenerate” as a homosexual, and then present himself as such in front of the draft board. When we talked about this, Bernard confessed that he had long carried a sense of shame over what he perceived to be his cowardice about not going to war, when in fact it was an incredibly brave act to have publicly declared himself a homosexual in 1941. And of course, he then went on to fight the war anyway, but with his paintbrush, producing many now iconic images of World War II as a propaganda artist for the U.S. government and as a war-artist correspondent for Life magazine.

Did you ask him about the most significant changes between being gay in the 1930’s and now?
I did. It was very enlightening for me to learn that he had been able to so freely express his sexuality when he did – although it should also be considered where he did – in 1930s New York, which was somewhat less permissive than it had been during the 1920s, but yet allowed gay bars and gathering places to exist, as long as the police were paid off. Of course outside of New York, such open expression carried tremendous risk. As he explained it: “one was open but with a great sense of consciousness about it.” In the last couple of years of his life, he was delighted by the changes that were then accelerating for gay acceptance. The act of marrying his partner of 60 years was a tremendously important one for him. And they did it solely as a political statement, to add their number to the statistics. Although he had never been conflicted about being gay, Bernard certainly celebrated the fact that society was becoming less conflicted. Or so he hoped.

‘Of course historically up to this point there has been limited gay imagery in mainstream art because it has not been a socially accepted expression. But I’m ever hopeful that that is changing.’

You write about Perlin as a gay artist and you launched the book at a gay publishing company. Why is it important to accentuate this?
The actual artwork should be left to the interpretation of the viewer, of course. We all see the world uniquely through the lens of our own experience and identity. For that reason, Bernard didn’t like having his work linked to a particular style, nor did he subscribe to any particular school of art. He wanted viewers to interpret his work in their own way, free of any pre-established definitions, but yet at the end, he did want them to know it was the work of a gay artist. That the great variety of human experience that he had depicted in his work – that a great variety of people had emotionally and intellectually responded to over seven decades – had all been recorded by a fellow human being who just happened to be gay. By a “variant” himself. It was an identity that he felt very proud of and committed to championing – to “normalizing” in a way, although there truly is no such thing as “normal.” He just hoped his viewers would allow and consider it, in the hopes it might expand their perception not only of his art, but also of our shared humanity.

Does this have something to do with awareness? Showing that artists, movie stars, etc. can also be gay?
Sure, as you bring the gay experience into the fold of the bigger human experience, it does “normalize” it. Just as I feel it’s important to consider whatever particular identity an artist embraces – whether that relates to their gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, etc. – in the hope it will challenge and expand a viewer’s perspective on their art, but will also influence how that viewer then sees the real world and lives happening around them. Ultimately, we are all human at the end of the day. Isn’t it wonderful that we can see things so differently? In fact, it’s important that we do. Considering that informs all of us about the wonderful variety of the human experience. And toward that end, Bernard found it very important to raise his hand and be amongst the counted as gay artists.

Why do you think there is so little gay imagery in art history?
That’s an interesting topic that Bernard and I actually spoke a lot about. A picture of two men or two women kissing isn’t actually a classical theme in art – “yet,” as Bernard would point out. Of course historically up to this point there has been limited gay imagery in mainstream art because it has not been a socially accepted expression. But I’m ever hopeful that that is changing. Bernard was in the vanguard of artists who were boldly depicting gay themes in their work several generations ago, and happily that mantle has been taken up in recent decades by more and more younger artists. It’s just a matter now of getting more of their work on the walls of mainstream museums to make that “yet” a reality.

Is that also something you aim for with your book?
Absolutely. It’s empowering to have known this man who was at the vanguard of promoting that acceptance just by living his life openly and fully and refusing to compromise. I was so blessed to have learned from a fellow human being who had the ability and the courage to embrace and to dominate his life – a man who was fully occupied with living, loving, and leaving nothing unexplored that interested him. He found both in his life and his art what is at the heart of the fulfilled human experience: and that is, to live one’s life fully in one’s own way – authentically, and without apology. And so that is what is at the heart of this book, and why I felt Bernard’s story was an important one to share – not to provide an exact blueprint of how one should live one’s life, but to open a door to possibilities, and permission.

www.bernardperlin.com
www.discover.brunogmuender.com/one-man-show-bernard-perlin

© Bernard Perlin / 1957 - B-29 Mechanics

© Bernard Perlin / 1955 - The Children Waiting

© Bernard Perlin / 1944 - Patrol Disembarks

This article is featured in Et Alors? Magazine 20.

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Annelies Verbeke

door Fleur Pierets | jun 17, 2017 | Books

Annelies Verbeke

Text & photos JF. Pierets

The press called your latest book, Thirty Days, socially relevant. Is it?
That’s a tough one because I don’t like to be put into a box. For me, Thirty Days is just a continuation of everything I’ve written before. I’m working on an oeuvre, which I started in 2003, and hopefully will be able to build up till the end of my days. So for me it’s a clear evolution with its own variations and perspectives, yet they all existed deep inside of me. It did bother me a bit that the book got a very defined market. “What type of book is it?”, “how should we label it?”, are fundamental questions in the literary world nowadays. They say Thirty Days is about the refugee problem, yet that doesn’t quite cover its content. For me it’s about being a good person in a world that doesn’t promote goodness. That’s the essential theme. I always write about what comes my way and the topic of racism and refugees came into view. That’s why I write about them, not because I necessarily needed to write a social critique.

You once said that as a writer you have to write good books, not criticize.
I used to say that as a writer you don’t have to think in terms of social obligation but my opinion on that has changed a bit over the years. Nowadays it doesn’t bother me anymore to use social media or my column in the paper to promote what’s dear to me. For example, foreign writers that nobody’s heard of. We get so little input about European literature that I’m always on a quest to bring suppressed genres and languages to the surface. Did you know that 80% of the books in our Dutch language area are translated from English – a language that almost everybody can read? And only 3% of the books in the American market are translated from other languages? All languages? Just to give you an idea of its dominance in the field and that we are not always aware of how much we are controlled in the choices that we make.

What makes you sit down and write every time?
I think I have to call it an urge. From a young age I was very certain that I would become a writer. The first literary prize I ever received was from a Dutch foundation called ‘Roeping’ (Dutch for Vocation. Ref.), a very Christian word yet I think it kind of fits. I do believe that there is something like a calling. I think that certain jobs like being a teacher or a nurse can only be managed if you have that kind of calling, which is the same for writers. Luckily I got the confirmation that it was the right thing to do.

Did you need that confirmation in order to keep going?
I think that I needed some kind of permission, yes. And of course you have to be a megalomaniac in order to be a writer because let’s be honest, who needs another one?

How do you feel after you’ve finished a book?
After every book there’s the need for time until something else comes bubbling up. I’m always empty when I’ve finished another novel, which is pretty freaky because you never know if it will come back.

Currently you’re writing short stories again.
Yes. And I love it. Each of my short story collections have only one theme, which makes me feel free and happy, and able to look at that one theme from 15 different angles. Whereas in a novel I have to follow the path that I have chosen, be more consequent in a certain train of thought for about a year and a half or two years. A novel asks for a larger consistency whereas a short story is much more playful and offers me another approach. Let’s say it makes me happier.

You’ve been a published author for over 13 years now. Do you still love what you are doing?
When you’re a writer, there’s a constant repetition of events. You finish a book, it gets published, you have to defend it, talk about it, and then you have to start all over again. For the first time it started to feel like a prison after I finished Thirty Days. Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful and there is still nothing more liberating than the feeling I have after a great day of writing. There is nothing in the professional field that can replace that. So obviously I’m not going to quit. Yet all of a sudden I saw a glimpse of the dark side. What kind of fate gives you the highest freedom and equally keeps you in prison? I’ll probably get over it, but you need a lot of energy to keep up with the ever-repeating chain of events and I kind of lacked that amount of verve. I was exhausted when I finished that book, but unfortunately that’s the precise moment when the whole circus is about to begin. When I think of myself being in my 70’s or 80’s, I don’t know if I will still have the energy to go through all that again. Sometimes I would like to find something in which I can disappear. At least for a few years. An obvious question now would be; ‘why don’t you just write and not get published?’ But the duality of it all is that a book is not finished before it’s been read. I keep on traversing between a huge gratitude and oppression. Maybe it’s just because I recently became 40. However great my life is, there are still moments when I think ‘is this it?’

Can you imagine doing something else?
I do have those romantic and foolish fantasies about being a hairdresser or a masseuse. Sometimes I would love to have a profession where I can touch people – in a non-erotic manner. That fantasy keeps coming back.

That sounds like an eagerness to please.
I don’t know, maybe I should call it ‘relating’ instead of ‘pleasing’. People wouldn’t even have to thank me for a job well done; it’s really about making them happy

What keeps your mind flexible?
I know it sounds contradictory, but I’ve set out a few rules in order to keep a flexible mind. Every year I want to read 52 novels. There has to be at least one book from every continent – with the exception of Antarctica and Arctica because there’s not much writing going on there – and spread over three centuries at least. It probably sounds more epic than it actually is because it’s quite doable. It allows me to read the writers that you do not stumble upon easily.

‘A female critic once accused me that I was afraid of being a woman. I found that pretty surreal. You might read something neutral in my work, yet that’s who I am. I don’t have to pretend, do I?’

Are there certain things that have determined your growth?
Notwithstanding certain life events that mess you up, I think that the older you get, the more life experience you gain and the more you read, the more you grow. I’m lucky to be able to pour the sad things from my life into literature. Which is often a salvation. Being able to transform your pain into something creative is a huge victory. And that’s a gift. Imagine being a bookkeeper, or a shop owner, how do they handle that?

What do you like to write about most?
If I would have to point out a common theme running through my little oeuvre, it’s ‘what is reality?’, which most of the time is based upon assumptions. In the beginning of my career a lot of reviews spoke about my fascination for madness. Yet I’m not necessarily interested in madness, but I am intrigued by what someone with a psychoses experiences as reality. Even better, you don’t have to go as far as having a neurosis to see that every one of us has another reality. It’s both interesting, funny and tragic how hard people are trying to fit into that. The absurd is omnipresent. Just think about war, or placing a gnome figurine in your garden, just because your neighbors are doing it. There are so many delusions wherein people are finding themselves or basing their identity on. It’s very innocent when it’s about gnomes, but it can also escalate into resistance towards refugees. If you agree that a certain branche of our population doesn’t have any human rights, just because your neighbor is thinking the same thing. Absurdity dwells in the constant threat of chaos. On the one hand you have the efforts to keep it all on the right track and on the other there’s pure escalation. That’s where absurdism comes from. And it’s constantly around us.

Is that what you are doing as a writer? Creating a new reality?
That’s exactly how it feels, but it’s more like filling something in instead of creating. Céline once said that the stories that we write are the invisible castles above our heads which we have to reconstruct on paper, stone by stone. I still find that a great image. When I’m writing I can always feel when it’s good and when it’s not. And not only when it comes to style, rhythm or grammar, but also if it’s right for the story. Which is weird, because this possibly implies that the story is already there. That there’s an ideal, which you merely mirror.

Is it self-portraiture?
I consider myself a parade of people where one takes the lead until the next one takes over. In my novels my narrators were the ones leading in a certain period of time whereas in my short stories, I’m looking at who else is in that parade.

What is literature about?
It’s about insight and all kinds of thoughts and feelings. You have to confront the things that happen to you. It’s an introspection without you being behind the wheels. For me it’s also very double; part of me is writing freely while the other part is controlling the quality of what I write as a reader. And I can tell you it’s not a reader who is easy to please. But then it gets read and criticized and that’s even worse because it’s always colored by someone’s prejudice. I don’t care about someone saying or writing that they don’t like the book for reasons of taste, but I do care if someone offers criticism coming from resentment, or if someone is holding a grudge or just doesn’t like female writers. That said, fortunately there are many literary critiques in which I’m completely understood, which offers a sense of ease.

Let’s talk about the female writers.
I have a lot to say about female writers. When I made my first appearance as a 27-year-old writer I had more of the aura of a rabbit in headlights than of someone with an impressive personality. I can give numerous examples of how I’ve been patronized or intellectually underrated. In the beginning of my career people actually asked me what it was like to be a woman while my male colleagues were never asked that question. But I’m not only talking about men, because for me, feminism is not the opposite of men being against women. Some women are also biased and judgmental about women. And what I definitely cannot stand is being treated that way by people whom I find less intelligent than I am.

Anyhow, I do think people read very judgmentally. People start off with tons of assumptions that they then actually read in the book. I know it’s impossible, but sometimes I wish that things like awards would happen anonymously. A lot of women are still not nominated so I wonder if this would make a difference. A female critic once accused me that I was afraid of being a woman. I found that pretty surreal. You might read something neutral in my work, yet that’s who I am. I don’t have to pretend, do I? The same for men. When a book is from a neutral position, I often find it more interesting – this compared to some Hemingway-ish kind of writing because how many times can one go fishing and hunting? Let’s say there’s still a lot to do on the gender front.

www.anneliesverbeke.com

This article is featured in Et Alors? Magazine 19.

Read the complete issue here.

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Et Alors? magazine. A global celebration of diversity.

Greg McGoon

door Fleur Pierets | mei 21, 2016 | Books

Greg McGoon

Text JF. Pierets Photos Courtesy of Greg McGoon

Author and theatre performer Greg McGoon challenges the norm of children’s literature. By choosing a transgender princess as main character of the fairytale The Royal Heart and teaching self-acceptance in The Tanglelows, McGoon tries to establish a healthy open-minded relationship between parent and child. A conversation about imagination, gay characters and overcoming obstacles.

You studied psychology and political science. How does one become an author of children’s books with this background?
There’s a theatre program in my hometown and that’s where I fell in love with both theatre and working with children. This background basically evolved into writing for – and learning to connect with – kids through theatre, an art form not only about acting but something that also strengthens your social skills and your engagement. I think dealing with kids, theatre and art, while keeping the psychology I studied in my mind, naturally developed into writing down stories. It just happened as I was trying to process my own growth and understanding of the people around me. I realized that my words would have a broader reach if I found ways to adapt them to reach out to children.

Your imagination immediately takes off running in your first book, Out Of The Box. A story about the limitless places our creativity can take us to.
I kind of wrote Out Of The Box for myself, when I was developing a project with children on creative arts. Rather than write some angsty melodrama of my own life, I wanted to rediscover the creativity and imagination that I felt I had lost long ago. I wanted to find some solutions to my own struggles and challenges in a more universal, but also playful way. This book is not only about the simplicity of children playing with a cardboard box. It’s about maintaining and owning your imagination in order to make honest connections with others, even though that can prove challenging. It was my response to the concept of imagination and allowing that magic out of the box once again.

It sounds like your personal pursuit became a tool to help others.
I did. I thought I’d rather live with the possible pain of expressing my feelings, than live with the pain of denial. My personal life story became so dark and I got so tired of living in that darkness, tired of denying things, that I had to take ownership of myself and of my self worth. Writing these children’s books and trying to work past this fear of speaking about your feelings was very important. Because once you’re an adult, it gets a lot harder to start opening up all of a sudden. But when you’re a child you get into that habit of not only talking about your feelings, but also learning how to do so. There are so many ways to express yourself, but some ways are more healthy and effective than others. If children start recognizing that and start being comfortable, it will help society as a whole.

Your second book, The Royal Heart, is a fairytale. The first fairytale ever with a transgender princess.
Like many kids I had a childhood fascination for Disney and the exploration of the origin stories. What fascinates me in fairytales is not just the lesson they can teach, but how they’ve been shared over time and what has been changed due to the time that they were written. They are evolving and are adapting to society’s influence in a lot of ways. Children are connecting and relating to that. When I grew up, all I was seeing and reading were all these beautiful men and women falling in love with each other. I could connect with the essence of the story, I could connect with the love, but the visibility of it was limiting. Fairytales are magical, grand and beautiful, so why should people be excluded from that?

Why use the transgender theme?
It just so happened that the idea of a transgender character fitted the essence of what I was trying to convey. Transformation is a common theme in fairytales; Ariel’s goes from fins to legs, the frog becomes a prince, a princess becomes a swan, and so on, and most of those transformations are due to an external force. I never intended the book to be about being transgender, because that’s not something I personally experienced, but it’s about the love for everyone around me. The acceptance of that as being a part of life. If somebody comes to me and says “this is who I truly am”, there’s no part in me that would ever ask “why?” That’s not a question that comes into my mind, I’d rather say “thank you for sharing.” A lot of people are still stuck on the “why?” Why are you a woman, why are you a man, why are you gay? However, there is no “why” to begin with. It’s a reality that needs no explanation. It’s just about love.

‘The book can be a message for parents to show their children that this character worked up the courage to express their true self. That no matter what that is, their child can feel that way too.’

Did you intentionally use a medieval setting to make it more timeless?
Yes, I wanted it to look like it’s been around for many years because transgenderism is not new. And history has a way of denying the voice and the human experience when it is not understood. The book is very minimal, yet I was very careful in choosing the words to take it a little bit further then just about gender. For me it’s also about taking on the responsibility of self and becoming a leader. I want people to look at it and wonder if hundreds of years ago there actually was a prince who could never fully realize himself. We’re talking about a whole spectrum of human life that has always been around. It’s not that all of a sudden people are being born who identify in a different way. It’s just that those voices are finally starting to be heard. We get so caught up with this idea of male-female that we lose sight of just living life. And there are so many ways to live life that I don’t think it has to be dictated how that should be. Let’s just try and live together instead of trying to impede on other people’s lifestyles. We don’t have to hold hands and get along, but we do need not to abuse each other. And that’s what The Royal Heart talks about; it’s about celebrating life.

A true idealist?
I don’t know how I became such an idealist all of a sudden since my mantra through my mid-twenties was “I’m gonna die alone!” I was this melodramatic person until I finally realized I was only going to die alone if I forced that upon myself. I had to believe that there was more to it, and since I can’t be the only one in the world with those feelings I started sharing my stories and my writing. Because why can’t the LGBT community have those unrealistic, magical, love at first sight, fairytale stories, if everybody else does?

I’ve said you’re working on a book about a gay prince. Are you looking for a fairytale character you can relate to?
Well, I still want to write this epic adventure I was looking for when I was a kid. Having stories that represent LGBT characters is adding to the positive visibility that hasn’t been around for children. You can only have so much fun looking at blog posts of genderbending Disney characters. We’ve all seen those, and it’s great, but where are our characters? I’m not trying to be groundbreaking or evolutionary, I just want to have a character that happens to love men.

How would you convince a parent to buy an LGBT themed book for their child?
Having an LGBT character doesn’t necessarily make a book LGBT themed. The Royal Heart is not LGBT themed, nor is the story of the prince I’m developing. The main theme is love. To establish a healthy relationship between parent and child, you have to be open to each other. The book can be a message for parents to show their children that this character worked up the courage to express their true self. That no matter what that is, their child can feel that way too. They can come to them, no matter what they have to say, and that they are going to be ok with it. So it’s an invitation to children to know that if their parents share this story, that they have their full support of their full existence.

You recently released your third children’s book, Traveling the Twisting Troubling Tanglelows’ Trail. What’s it about?
It’s a rhyming, poetic story that deals with creatures that live inside your mind and tangle everything up, making you feel that you are worthless. In this book I’m saying that life is full of challenges, and that you’re might feel useless, but you have the ability to start untangling that. With this book I hope to introduce some practical applications to an abstract thought. Children need to understand that feeling unhappy is sometimes part of the beauty of life. And while bad things can happen, good things can happen also. The characters are saying that pain exists, but that joy can be found. You’re going to face obstacles, but you’re only going to be able to overcome them once you start to realize that you have the strength to do so.

www.gregmcgoon.com

This article is featured in Et Alors? Magazine 18.

Read the complete issue here.

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Et Alors? magazine. A global celebration of diversity.

Gay in America

door Fleur Pierets | mrt 25, 2014 | Portrait Series

Gay in America

Text JF. Pierets Photos Scott Pasfield

Scott Pasfield celebrates diversity in this first-ever photographic survey of gay men in America. Stereotypes are laid to rest and an intimate, honest picture of contemporary gay life is revealed through stunning personal portraits and narratives of 140 gay men in all 50 states. Joyful and somber, reflective and celebratory. A rare and honest book.

Name Michael & Allen
Location Delta Junction, Alaska

My partner and I have been in Alaska for ten years. We own an eighty-acre ex-dairy farm that we are trying to resurrect. Since 2006, we’ve been building a large (some would say huge) two-story house right in the middle of it. We’re finally getting siding on this month! We’ve begun collecting milk cows; two are currently being milked, and two heifers were born this year. We’re also raising hogs and one of our sows had her second litter two weeks ago. The goats kept eating my garden, so I insisted they had to go. The farm looks out on the glorious Alaska Range, as well as the White Mountains and the Granites. Living here brings us closer to our dream of self-sufficiency. I work as an environmental specialist for the Army. I am also chief of the Delta Junction Rescue Squad, an unpaid volunteer position that takes up many hours. Allen works for the state during the summer as a park ranger and is the true farmer between the two of us. We’re two Southerners who moved here for my job. We were curious how such a small town would greet us, and discovered that everyone knew pretty much everything before we even got here. Small towns have no secrets – even if you want to keep them, which we did not. There was a week of polite but curious gossip and questions, and then nothing. Our lives as gay men here have been completely uneventful. In fact, it’s more like the movie Big Eden, where good-hearted, loving people have pushed us to share our lives with them in a way that completely surprised and overwhelmed me. For this reason alone, we are home.

Name Jakoury
Location Chester, Virginia

I live in what I would call a “retirement” town. There are lots of elderly people, everyone here is pretty conservative, and there are very few activities for people to do. When I entered high school I had just moved here from Atlanta, and it was an extreme change of pace for me. Everyone was quiet and tightly compacted into the stereotype of what was acceptable. I always knew I was gay, and in Atlanta I was slowly beginning to show it. I told my mother before we moved away and she was fine with it, but I was afraid to tell my father. He was a military man straight out of the country; I doubt he had ever come into contact with a sexual minority, let alone spend time with one. When we moved, we left my mother behind. They weren’t quite divorced and they weren’t quite together. I guess they assumed that moving away from each other would help them realize what they really wanted. When we got to Virginia I was excited about the fresh start; I could just come into school gay, no need for a back-story, no need to make friends, I could just be myself. I quickly found that being out of the closet wasn’t going to go over easy. Everyone in town was a carbon copy of each other. All the kids wore the same clothes and looked exactly the same. I forced myself to fit in, even carrying on relationships with girls from time to time. I was upset I had to act this way, to put up a front. During a visit to my mother, I told her how unhappy I was. She explained to me that if the people at my school couldn’t accept me as gay then they really weren’t my friends at all, and that I wouldn’t know those people ten years from now. She said I shouldn’t be something I’m not just to impress people. On the way back to Virginia I decided I would be an out gay male, probably the first my town had ever seen. It was a long ride back, and I told my father everything. At first he was uneasy, but he told me he was going to love me regardless. When I returned I cut my hair into a mohawk, got rid of all my masculine, loose-fitting clothes, and became more fashion-forward. I was on a high; I loved being myself. Unfortunately, other people didn’t. I was ridiculed, mocked, bullied, and harassed. People called me a faggot, wrote “fudgepacker” on my locker, and even threw things at me. Every night I would cry. I was so miserable. I got into fights and was beat up a few times. Someone vandalized my house, writing “faggot” across my front door. My father had enough. He put me in boxing classes and told me to stop being so passive. I spent the whole summer learning to defend myself. On the first day of tenth grade I got in a fight and made an example of the kid. If anyone insulted me I would curse them out so bad that they’d never want to utter another word to me. I became a bit of a bad-ass, but I was happy because people stopped bullying me and started looking up to me. More and more, boys started coming out of the closet, and became examples of how happy gay teens could be. I started a small gay student association at my school and became actively involved in a youth group for teenagers in the city. I’m not worried about fitting in anymore.

Name Jacques & Abi
Location Sacramento, California

I live in Sacramento with Abi, my partner of more than thirty years. We recently married in front of twenty of our closest friends. Abi is very fond of telling me how he first observed me, long before we actually met, paddling my kayak upstream on the American River, which flows through the community where we currently reside. We have lived together since we met on the disco dance floor in 1976, where we were both inventing our own moves and steps. Abi moved to Sacramento from Detroit in 1973, and enjoys a semi-retirement as an antiques dealer. He collects antique miniatures and dollhouses and has an intense passion for finding and arranging furnishings for our home, which is dramatically filled with our shared interests. My hobby is riding and restoring antique bicycles. Using a bicycle built in 1886, I have set a two-hundred-mile distance and time record in Europe, and a one-hundred-mile distance and time record in Australia. When I can pull him away, Abi and I enjoy traveling together to warm, exotic places.

Name Brian
Location Austin, Texas

I’m a bit of a maverick, a roamer, and a wanderer. The most stable time in my life was my childhood. Growing up in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the small California town of Twain Harte, I spent all my time playing in the forest. We had miles and miles of woodland around us. As an adolescent I resented where I lived—it was too remote, too far from my friends. Now, as an adult, I envy those who are able to live and thrive there. I left home at eighteen and spent a few months in southern Oregon before returning to California to attend college, where I came out. After I graduated, I moved to San Diego, and learned all about computers and corporate life. I was young and eager to conquer the world, but after five years of living the gay lifestyle I longed to be back in the country. I found that just because I was gay didn’t mean that I had to conform to the city culture of gay life. San Diego had become too big for me and was not fulfilling on a spiritual level. I met a couple while on vacation who were moving to Austin and they suggested I take a look as a possible place to live. Texas was hot, but there were rolling hills and the people were friendly. I was living on four acres outside of Austin with a couple of friends, enjoying both the country and the many comforts that come with city life. Ultimately we lost the ranch to foreclosure, but I was able to turn what some saw as a tragedy into a dream come true. A few weeks before losing the house I bought a fifth wheel RV. I moved myself, my three dogs, and my cat into my escape pod. It has been two years since I made that move, and I have never been happier. I am now free to roam the country, taking my family and my home with me where ever I go. Native Americans had the right idea keeping their lives so mobile. There is nothing more liberating than coming home one day, hitching up the house, and moving on to another town miles away. The scene outside my windows changes regularly and I love the mobility. There truly is a different way of life for each of us, and I have found mine.

Name Trace
Location Orlando, Florida

I’m from the Deep South. I always knew I was gay. It was never a big issue for me. It didn’t affect the way I thought about myself or make me feel like any less of a man than the other guys at my school or the friends I grew up with. It never occurred to me that I had some need or desire to come out. Over time my family and friends realized I was gay, but there was no need to talk about that, any more than who my brother was dating, or the private lives of other family members. If someone feels the need to ask me directly about my sexual preference, I have a few responses. If you’re an important person in my life, I’ll say yes of course I’m gay. If I’m asked in connection to a civil rights issue, I’m happy to stand up and be counted as gay and fight for our rights, as I do for all civil liberties. If you’re a relative stranger and are prying, I take the Southerner’s approach by politely saying that it’s my personal business and has nothing to do with you.

Scott, what triggered you to make this book?
I wanted to make a book that I wished existed when I was a kid. To show that as a gay man, you can go anywhere and do anything.

When I think about being gay in America, I think of only a few progressive countries. What did you experience?
I think the gay world in America is certainly as diverse and varied as the straight world is. Slowly we are assimilating into mainstream culture and healing from all the discrimination that has been thrown our way. How that compares to the rest of the world, including other progressive countries, is still something I would like to investigate.

You chose to put all stereotypes aside. Why did you make that choice?
I tried to vary the men and stories as much as possible when selecting who to include. I felt it was important to do so, to be true to all types of gay men. Often only the a-listers get all the attention.

Why only men?
I chose to do this for many reasons, including healing from my own past. I saw it as a way to learn from other men who had gone through similar things. They opened up to me and felt comfortable doing so because I was one of them.

You travelled 54,000 miles across fifty states over a three-year span. You listened to stories and documented the lives of 140 gay men. What’s the most beautiful story you heard?
That is a tough one. Many of these men had such wonderful stories. I love Stephens’ in Miami who talks about coming out to his parents at a young age. They dragged him off to a psychiatrist who ended up telling the parents that they were the ones who needed therapy. Such a simple and wonderful tale, if only all of our parents were told so.

Can you tell me your own story? Coming out?
I write a little about my coming out in the book’s introduction. My father was a born again and on his third marriage when I told him. His belief was that I was doomed to go to hell and I should pray to change. Religion is the root of so much hatred and making this book certainly allowed me to see that I was not alone.

Where did you find your models and how did you contact them?
I put ads out on social media and dating sites, looking for guys who might be interested. It was very easy to sort out those men that truly wanted to take part in this. They had to believe in me and my mission and had to send me their ‘story’ before I would commit to photographing them.

What would you like to achieve with these pictures? What do you want the spectator to see?
I want to help educate those that struggle with their own sexuality and perhaps those that struggle with accepting gay men, perhaps even their own family members. We are all God’s children, all created equally. We all face the same issues.

The pictures are accompanied by essays. Do you find it important for people to know the story behind the models?
Absolutely. To hear their own words adds incredible depth to the portraits. The stories are as important as the photos.

You featured 50 states. Was it important to cover the entire country?
It was a goal I set for myself from the beginning and one of the parameters of the project. To look at the life of gay men in every state. I felt it was socially important to view the country as a whole.

As an artist, are you most narrator or photographer?
I have always been more of a photographer than a narrator, but that is changing in time. This project has made me realize how important storytelling is to my job as a photographer.

Why is such a project important for you personally?
To make a difference is something we all aspire to do. I saw this project as a chance to do just that.

Future plans?
My partner and I renovated and opened an Inn and restaurant in Vermont last year and have been having fun getting it up and running. Getting out of the city and challenging ourselves with something new has been a wonderful change of pace. Yet my heart still longs for more photo projects like Gay in America. I’m heading to Los Angeles soon for more work and am looking forward to what that will bring. It’s all about balance.

www.scottpasfield.com
www.theinn.us

This article is featured in Et Alors? Magazine 9.

Read the complete issue here.

Femme Space

“If you don’t see femmes as queers, it’s because you choose to not see us. You are invested in our erasure. We are here. We have always been here.” A strong quote, coming from Dulce Garcia, AKA Fierce Femme, one of the participants in Femme…..

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Unveiled

Belle Ancell is a queer community photographer living in Canada. Amongst her series there is “Unveiled”, portraits of the Vancouver Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. In-depth photographs and representations of people who are, just like…..

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Chubby Vogue Divas

Chubby Vogue Divas is an ongoing photography project by artist and activist Charmain Carrol. Her being an activist started in the 90s when black lesbians went through a phase where their parents were not accepting their children’s sexual orientation…..

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Boystory

Danish-born Arrevad spent five years documenting the international, subterranean world of male performers, burlesque, go-go dancers, cabaret singers and porn stars. The journey would take him to New York, Berlin, Paris,…..

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Reassign

Born in Chile, raised in Europe, and with an advanced training in photography, Claudia González has spent the last 2 years working on her project called Reassign. In order to make this series, Gonzàlez joined forces with Mariela Castro’s sexuality…..

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Meg Allen

In her series ‘Butch’, photographer Meg Allen shows a variety of women who fall under the category of more masculine than feminine. Over the years people have been given different names to lesbians, and being butch is yet another flavor…..

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Kanithea Powell

‘Well, these aren’t your typical flannel, mullet, boot wearing butches. This new art book pushes the Butch-definition beyond its seams. Packed with fashion forward pictures that are vivid, dramatic and provocative. These gender-bending bois will……

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Gay in America

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Furries

From 2003 until 2008, Charlotte Lybeer photographed gated communities and actual “theme parks” in the US, South Africa, Europe, China and the Arab Emirates. ‘The success of these ‘enclaves’ proves that in a society without boundaries, we still…..

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Sworn Virgins

Northern Albanian women, faced with a culture that subjugates females, live and dress as men in order to provide for their families. These sworn virgins took a vow of chastity, wear male clothing and live as men in the patriarchal northern…..

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Masked Superstars

For thirty years photographer Lourdes Grobet has penetrated the world of one of the most popular sports and deep-seated traditions in Mexico: Lucha Libre-wrestling. She documented the lives of the fighters inside and outside of the ring. Lucha Libre…..

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Bears

Heavily set, rugged and fiercely hyper-masculine, these are males who convey strength, identity and are an ever-growing subculture of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (lgbt) population. Welcome to the “bear” community. Evolving in the…..

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The Tokyo Hotel Story

Photographer Nathalie Daoust first broke onto the scene in 1997 while photographing the themed rooms of the Carlton Arms Hotel in New York. This project, her first solo exhibition, was published into a book, New York Hotel Story. Since then…..

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Et Alors? magazine. A global celebration of diversity.

Jonathan Kemp

door Fleur Pierets | mrt 25, 2013 | Books

Jonathan Kemp

Text JF. Pierets Photos Rudy Thewis

In London Triptych you tell three stories. There’s the rent boy Jack Rose in the London of the 1890s, of the 1950’s with painter Colin Read and male escort David, living in the London of the 1990s. The three stories explore the subculture and underworld of male prostitution. You seem to know quite a lot about the subject matter?
I did a lot of research in one way or another, and I was very interested in giving a voice to the voiceless. Male prostitution is a minority within the society of prostitution. Most of the historical focus has always been on female prostitution so they’re like a minority within a minority. As a writer you’re always trying to find a perspective that has not been tackled before and this seemed like a really interesting angle.

London Triptych started out as a short story called ‘Pornocracy’, which told the tale of Jack Rose, one of the boys who testified against Oscar Wilde in 1895. Is Jack historically correct?
Jack starts to work as a telegram boy and then he got involved in prostitution through this man called Alfred Taylor. Taylor really existed and supplied boys to Wilde so there are elements of truth from what I had gathered on research. If it weren’t for the fact that Wilde had been arrested and in prison, it would be even harder to find material on the subject matter. Ironically, given the negative outcome for Wilde, that kind of stamped it in the history books in a way that it wouldn’t have been otherwise. The transcripts of the trial have been very useful. Jack himself is an invention. He’s a mixture of a lot of different boys Wilde played with – he called them Panthers. Their danger appealed to him, their lack of gentility. He was a well-educated, upper middle class man so he liked their roughness, this spontaneity that he didn’t find in his immediate circle.

You seem like a big Wilde fan.
I have loved Oscar Wilde ever since I was a teenager. As I got older and came out myself, I got more interested in gay history. Wilde almost became this figurehead. The idea that he established in many ways, the parameters, the identity that was to go on in the 20th century. The concept that he is almost the prototype of the modern homosexual. He gives it a shape, a voice and a way of being. That was always fascinating to me. I often think the work is overshadowed by his life but I find him an incredible wordsmith. The poetry and ideas in his books have always appealed to me.

Your love of Wilde, the fact that London Triptych is populated by rent boys, models, aristocrats, artists and gangsters,… are you a little nostalgic?
I must say that Jack became my favorite character, that was my favorite piece to write, What appealed to Wilde in these boys is what appealed to me when I got under Jack’s skin. There must have been many Jacks in London at that time and the more I read about queer history, the more I became interested in trying to represent that minority voice.

The minority voice stays but times are changing.
Jack could go to prison for what he was doing, but David, the male escort in the 1990s, is free because of the change in the law in 1967. It’s sort of a history of gay liberation and the humanitarian progress during the century.

The book is filled with sex but it remains sexy instead of becoming a dirty story. It’s a thin line between what your write and pornography.
I’m fascinated by the way that language expresses human experience. Pornography is the most straight forward way sex can be represented. It has a very specific aim and that is to turn you on. There’s nothing wrong with that but it felt a bit limiting to me. I’ve always been attracted to writers like Jean Genet, who wrote about sex in a much more poetic way. For me it was essential to the book that sex had to appear but not in a sort of bashful way. The most interesting thing is often ‘what goes where and who does what to whom’, so I wanted to find much more different metaphors and to describe the emotions rather than the mechanics.

When I read the book if felt like all 3 characters were imprisoned. Because of love. Is that so or is it just my imagination?
As much as sex was an important aspect, love was also. When it became clear to me that this was going to be a novel about prostitution, I wanted to write three love stories. Love coming from the least likely places for example. They are very tragic love stories and I wanted to overturn the cliché of the hard-bitten prostitute who is incapable of love. So love and that trajectory of love is very important.

You ran a theatre company in the 90’s. Why did you switch from that to writing novels?
Writing theater plays was actually a diversion from writing prose. I have always written novels. The first one I wrote was when I was about 17. But I didn’t really pursue it very hard. Every writer gets rejected by publishers but when I got the letters I gave up quite quickly, thinking it was no good. At that time I was living with an actor who wanted to do his own plays so I thought ‘how hard can it be?’ We started of with monologues, it was a one-man show, and after a while I added more characters and got more confident with each play we did. When the company disbanded because there wasn’t enough money in theatre – even less than in books – I went back to writing prose. So London Triptych was the first novel I wrote after the excursion into the theatre.

Your second book is called Twentysix. It’s not a novel nor is it a collection of short stories. I wrote down: ‘Poems about sexual encounters between men. One of every letter of the alphabet’. It’s completely different from London Triptych
It is, but I think it picks up on some of the themes of London Triptych. When I was writing about London and its sexuality, I was trying to gain some originality or poetry in the descriptions. I wrote Twentysix almost immediately after the novel was finished. At first I just wrote down these short episodes, these short encounters. I was exploring language and post structuralism, reading Derrida, Bataille, and wanted to experiment. Midway through the book I considered what to do because I could go on writing about these sexual encounters and publish this huge volume, so I had to put a limit to that. 26 seemed like a slim manageable number.

I read on the net that you once said; ‘I think sometimes being gay has led me to broader horizons than it otherwise would be.’
I think straight comes with a script. You are aware of the life trajectory you’re expected to follow. The model you’re expected to conform to. You’re going to get married, have children, a mortgage. I’m not saying that all people do – and I know straight people who forge a different path – but I think that, when you don’t have that script at hand, you create new possibilities. You kind of invent a way of being. And there is a sort of courage that comes from having to live outside that mainstream model. There’s a security in that model that is not available to you.

‘There is a sort of courage that comes from having to live outside the mainstream model.’

It’s a different way of being in the world. You have to be more original in the things you are going to be or going to do. Just that slightly greater edge of invention.In London Triptych, David describes playing a game when he was a child, standing on a train track, with all his friends. The game was called ‘chicken’ and was about who could stand there the longest. David always won. This unanticipated courage, that was me. I knew from the beginning that staying where I grew up would kill me. Spiritually.

Being gay is as much about character as having a sexual drive?
Whether moving to London had to do with my sexuality, I don’t know, maybe that was a force of character that made me invent and explore. I do think it had to do with the sexual exploration and with courage, I find it hard to separate the two.

Some gay writers don’t want to be referred to as being ‘a gay writer’. Because they are also a white writer, a male or female writer, an American writer,… Yet you don’t mind being in that category.
I don’t. You can call me a black writer if you want to. I can understand why people are against it but then I think; ‘you are gay and you write, so why not’. I feel that it can work negatively because maybe straight readers wouldn’t go for a gay book. While gay readers will rush to it, but nevertheless will also read lots of straight books. So I understand why that label can feel restricted but I don’t mind. I love to write for gay people. It matters to represent these lives in books. People identify with what they read so why not write for gays. I can imagine that some straight people might find a book like Twentysix quite alien but then again, parts of their lives are alien to me. I’m not trying to write for everyone, I’m trying to write for people who can find something in my work. If a straight reader has an open mind, well go ahead. When I came out, exploring my own sexuality, I discovered there was a whole history of gay men writing. That was great! To know that now, after centuries, you have bookshops filled with gay writers is just fantastic. Its history is very short compared with the history of literature, but to discover people like Genet, Vidal or Capote who were exploring and experimenting was a revelation. By putting a label on it, it allows gay readers to find those books. Because if you are confronted with this huge mountain of literature as a gay man or a gay woman, you are going to want to find the books that speak to you because we are all looking for books that give us alternatives. The alternative to see the world from a different consciousness. So I think if you are looking for gay books and there is a big sign where to look, I don’t mind. I find it very useful. It saves you a lot of time. It’s all about things you want to share.

You are not afraid to exclude readers?
Those kind of closed minds are not the kind of people you want to speak to anyway. I can’t say that I’m never going to read a book by a straight person because they have nothing to say to me. Then you will be missing out so much of the things I’ve read and enjoyed.

You are working on a third book.
Yes, and it’s almost finished. My first two books are very related because I was fascinated about sex and language. My new novel is something completely different. The main character in All There Is + All There Is Not, is a 65 year old woman who lives on a narrowboat in North West London. One day she’s out shopping and she sees the spitting image of her first husband who died 40 years previously. She thinks she’s going mad. She keeps on seeing him and it turns out that he’s not a ghost, not a figment of her imagination but a gay man with a striking resemblance, like people often do. He becomes a portal to her. And like Alice she’s tumbling through a portal to an entirely different life and culture.

Sounds great! Looking forward already.

And last but not least. What’s your most flamboyant future dream?
I would love London Triptych to be made into a TV series. A British 3-part TV drama.

And if you were asked to play one of the characters? Who would you choose?
Oscar, of course.

www.myriadeditions.com/jonathankemp
www.birkbeck.academia.edu/jonathankemp