I could swear we reviewed this lovely book, but I can’t, for the life of me, find the review anywhere in the archives. Nonetheless, on what will be a hot and sweaty Gay Pride weekend, here’s a lovely slide show that is drawn from the book Affectionate Men: A Photographic History of a Century of Male Couples, 1850-1950 as well as another, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together 1840-1918.
There’s a very nice song, Secretly, that accompanies it, by Jimmie Rodgers. Enjoy.
I’m excited about this new documentary, Chris & Don: A Love Story that is opening here in New York (and I’m guessing in Los Angeles, for the time being.)
White Crane had a marvelous interview with Don Bachardy not too long ago. And I have the delightful experience of sitting for a series of portraits of myself by Don Bachardy (seen at the right.)
What a marvelous film…more love story than documentary. Charming, moving, fascinating. Every Gay person should see this beautiful story of two loving men who were out when out was truly a courageous act, even in Hollywood. Narrated by actor Michael York, this is just a terrific piece.
I think one of the most moving stories the film relates is how, in the last months of Isherwood’s life, as he was dying from prostate cancer, Bachardy diligently, devotedly painted portrait after portrait of his dying lover. Recorded in the breathtaking, beautiful (and rare) book, Last Drawings of Christopher Isherwood (with an appreciation by none other than Stephen Spender), their mutual devotion to his lover was turned into art.
I loved every minute of the Lammy’s evening of awards. Congratulations to the Lammys, which have moved to Los Angeles (along with Charles Flowers, the real loss for New York). Twenty years is no small accomplishment. May you continue forever.
Alas, White Crane’s ALL: A James Broughton Reader was, inexplicably, not a finalist for the LGBT Arts and Culture category. I have to admit…all sour grapes aside…I don’t understand how this important collection of one of the leading voices of queer writing and film could be so blatantly ignored. Winning would have been gravy. But it should have been a finalist. There…I got that off my chest.
Friend, Kitt Cherry, was nominated for her boook Art That Dares was one of five books chosen in the LGBT Arts and Culture category. Unfortunately it didn’t win, but congratulations Kitt. You do wonderful work and we’re proud to feature your work in White Crane. [2008 Lammy winners]
It was a wonderful evening. It was a delight to be in an auditorium with all the hardworking GLBT authors. I think the Lambda Literary Foundation needs to rethink the process and break down and let the winners know they’ve won. Too many of them opted not to fly cross country (when flying is nothing short of a penance!) only to find out that they hadn’t won. Personally I think we owe it to our own institutions to support them, whether we’re winners or not (or…ahem…finalists!) But practical is practical and if the Lammys really want to be the important award they are, it sort of undercuts that end when the winners aren’t present to receive their beautiful crystal book award. And there’s far too much attention to the big publishers…[and they wonder why Gay publishers are folding left and right?]
I’m not quite sure what our sisters made of all the “penis humor” which was…shall we say…somewhat flaccid? But equal time for bad Lesbian humor was well-represented by a Lesbian comic troupe called "The Gay Mafia" performed a Lesbian science fiction scene that was, at best, sort of obligatory. And why is it that Lesbians get to make penis jokes and if Gay men said anything about women’s genitalia we would lose ours? Let it be duly noted: Lesbians can be as embarrassingly bad as Gay men.
For the most part, this is a graying (if eminent) crowd. Youth was represented, but there was, overall, a nice balance of age. The President of the LLF has been handed off (in another series of penis allusions with a "baton") from the eminent and splendid Terry Decrescenzo to best-selling author (and son of newly-minted Christian, Anne Rice) Christopher Rice in a clear play for the Los Angeles celebrity and youth crowd. I get it. Lambda needs to do this. The whole publishing world needs to get connected with the short-attention span crowd. At least he’s out-Gay. For the Los Angeles Gay scene, this is not always a given (see "Hilton, Paris/Gay Pride 2005").
There was a moving (if somewhat overlong) "In Memoriam" slide show, that had all the authors who had died in the past 20 years — 1988 to 2008, since it was the 20th anniversary of the Lammys. Tears and fond sighs were the order of the day as all our literary heroines’ and heroes’ faces looked out at us from the silver screen. Even Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who wrote "Scum Manifesto" and who shot Andy Warhol, was up there. The obligatory applause response sort of faded away long before the slide show was over. Maybe some of the authors in the slide show were not well-known to everyone in the audience. But my suspicion was more along the lines that the reaction was “Why are we doing this?” Is it really necessary to parade this dirge-like presentation? I’m all for acknowledgment of our elders and our ancestors, to be sure…but it seems to me it might have been a little more celebratory in tone as opposed to the somber tone it took.
Mystery pioneer Katherine V. Forrest presented a Pioneer award to Ann Bannon, 
who wrote the Lesbian Beebo Brinker novels in the 1950s, which has recently been staged by our friend Linda Chapman (The Beebo Brinker Chronicles), and whom every Lesbian of a certain age has read and revered. Her character Beebo Brinker is nothing short of legend. Forrest attested, as she struggled not to cry, she that Ann Bannon’s books had saved her life. This is what all this publishing is all about. And we must never forget that. Every day, somewhere, there is some Gay kid looking to find some reflection of himself or herself in the world. Like most people, the only place I ever found it was in the dictionary. Ann Bannon is a lovely woman, whose warm smile lit up the room. Her books saved lives. I had the pleasure of meeting her in New York when The Beebo Brinker Chronicles opened and she couldn’t have been more delightful then, and more deserving of this acknowledgment now. Congratulations to Ms. Bannon.
Finally, the other Pioneer awards went to our dear friends Malcolm Boyd, who is 
going to be 85 years young this very weekend, and his lion-hearted partner, Mark Thompson, both White Crane authors and contributors. They’re both grand old gay men of letters. White Crane has published the essential Malcolm Boyd reader in recognition of his 85th year, A Prophet in His Own Land: A Malcolm Boyd Reader.
In all…a lovely event. On a personal note, Mark and Malcolm hosted me in their beautiful home for a very smart (in every sense of the word!) cocktail party with the literati of Los Angeles in attendance. I must admit it was a real honor to have such an illustrious and accomplished crowd assembled…to say nothing of it being in my honor (and Malcolm’s, too). To return to the City of Angels after 25 years and receive such a welcome was gratifying, humbling and sweet. Thank you M & M!
I’ve been on the road, as I mentioned, attending the Lammys, visiting the ONE Archives and now back in New York City for the Cockettes celebration of the donation of the Martin Worman Archives to the NY Public Library. Whew!
But no…I have not forgotten the one event I was UNABLE to attend personally: The dedication of the Harvey Milk Memorial bust at San Francisco City Hall on May 22. We had two intrepid reporters in attendance on our behalf, Andrew Ramer and Lee Mentley (two more intrepid people I dare say don’t exist!) I will try to relate their reportage here. Andrew wrote about 5,000+ words about it. Lee and I spoke about it at the Cockette’s performance in in New York at the Theater for the New City on Monday. Let’s start with that.
Lee was almost at a loss for words about the event, he said. But the thing that struck him most deeply was the effect it had on the young people who were in attendance. "For most of these kids, they didn’t really have a clue. Who the heck is Harvey Milk? They weren’t even born yet! But by the time the event was over, you could see a real change in their eyes. They were crying, some of them. They had a whole new sense of themselves, their history, the place in which they were standing even."
History has a way of doing that. Huh? Our children need their roots, their history, just like everyone else.
Andrew’s moving account of the proceedings, in his own words, is not meant to be a full account of the day. We don’t usually post such long pieces on the blog. But this is worth the time and space. In case you don’t make it all the way to the end of this moving piece, please give an extra bit of thanks to Rink, who graciously gave us permission to use his wonderful photos to illustrate this post, this story, this historic event…:
You may remember the biblical story of the patriarch Jacob, who dreamed about angels going up and down a ladder or stairway to heaven. Connecting matter and spirit was to me the theme of the ceremony, which took place at the foot of the great staircase in the Rotunda of San Francisco City Hall, a stately Beaux Arts edifice built after the destruction of its equally ornate predecessor in the 1906 earthquake.
Before walking over to City Hall, I had dinner with my very good friend Andréa Guerra, a photographer and artist who’s done a series of watercolors and collages of Jacob’s ladder. We were eating at Red Jade on Church Street, our favorite Chinese restaurant. Two men were sitting at the table behind her, both longhaired and bearded, about my age or a bit older, wearing not quite matching green shirts and kilts. I wondered if they were dressed up because they too were going to the ceremony. We got to City Hall at around six, mounted the front stairs with others, slowly passed through the security line, and made our way into the Rotunda, after being handed a program guide, brochure, and postcard for the event. I noticed with pleasure the White Crane logo on the back of the program guide. Was my behavior petty and tribal? Yes, but it isn’t every day that I attend a memorial celebration for a fellow Gay Jew, and I was proud to be there on behalf of White Crane, who supported the project and were cosponsors of the ceremony.
A very large rainbow flag hung over the entrance to the Rotunda, pulled to one side, making the vast formal space look rather like an Edwardian drawing room on acid. As we entered the Rotunda, Andréa pulled out one of her two digital cameras, I pulled out my little spiral notebook and clear plastic fountain pen, and we began to move through the crowd. Six or seven rows of folding chairs were set up in a semi-circle at the base of the monumental stairs leading up to the chamber of the Board of Supervisors. Two very large screens up on the mezzanine, on either side of the stairs, were showing photos of Harvey. Panning the room I saw the two men in green, one’s nose ring catching the light. To the right of the Rotunda, in the North Light Court, an even larger screen flashed the White Crane logo. 
I sat down in one of the empty chairs arranged in rows in front of the screen to watch the rest of the black-and-white pictures of Harvey and see all the sponsors’ logos when they came up again.
What a different era those pictures revealed. Men in tee shirts and jeans, slim, no gym bodies that I could detect, young and hopeful in that wonderful time after Stonewall and before AIDS, when it seemed that everything good was coming our way. Pictures of Harvey at different times in his life, laughing, smiling, marching, in one of Robert Lentz’s icons, on a postage stamp, and my favorite – Harvey as a little boy with very big ears sitting on top of a horse. Those ears were tuned, it seemed to me, to the very pulse of the world around him. Sad and strange that this would have been his 78th birthday. Several times my eyes welled up with tears, not just from the pictures of his coffin lying in the same Rotunda, of candles, shattered glass, but also from looking at him smiling. Smile iconic, and now duplicated in the bust of him to be dedicated later. His smile reaching out and embracing, just as much as his ears were transceivers taking in. I believe in the immortality of the soul. I do not believe in predestination. I do believe that all souls choose to come here. But we queers have so few heroes, and for him to have been gunned down in his prime, in what has sometimes felt to me our prime. Oy!
The people in those pictures were very different too from most of the people in the room, although some of them were probably the same people. Formal wear, jackets and ties had replaced tee shirts and jeans, although there were a few people dressed that way and Harvey’s jackets and ties were part of his official life as a city politician. Wandering through the crowd I saw almost no leather, some drag, including Jack Davis, local artist and Radical Faerie, in a wedding gown and veil whose whiteness matched his beard. The feeling in the crowed space was festive. And yet here and there I saw a face that carried pain, and I wondered – Is that a friend of Harvey’s, someone for whom this birthday party is also a night of deep loss and continuing grief?
Servers wandered through the crowd carrying small white plates of finger food that I was too nervous to eat. What was I supposed to be doing? I told White Crane co-editor Bo Young that I would go, and write about the evening for the White Crane blog. But I don’t go online very often and have only seen one blog ever, my friend Patanjali’s cooking blog, yet there I was with a small spiral notebook and fountain pen. As I moved through the room I kept distracting myself from the task at hand by this thought – In a state where same-sex marriage has been recently declared kosher, is my husband, as yet unmet, about to cross my path? (He didn’t.)
Andréa and I wandered back and forth from the Light Court to the Rotunda, she taking pictures and me making notes. I rather liked the twisty rainbow-colored balloons that were hanging from archways around the Rotunda. To me they resembled gigantic octopuses, tentacles reaching out and making connections. In the Light Court there were similar creations on top of columns of balloons, which Jeff, an old friend from the Gay Spirit Visions Conference, pointed out to me were not the sea creatures on sticks they appeared to me but balloon palm trees. Even though palm trees are not native to this area they have been planted all over the city, a city in which so many of us come from stock that is native to other regions.
In the midst of jackets and ties a Sister of Perpetual Indulgence wandered through the crowd. John Burnside, life-partner of Harry Hay, was seated in the Rotunda in elegant black, a bright red flower on top of his hat. I ran into friends from my synagogue, including one who had been a friend of Harvey’s, who told me a few stories about him. She wasn’t out yet the first time they met and she went up to him and said, “If you were straight I’d go out with you.” She also shared these words of his, as we stood at the base of the monumental staircase leading up to his not yet unveiled bust: “Those stairs belong to us like they belong to all people.”
So much has changed since Harvey Milk said those words. We know that those stairs are everyone’s, at least here in San Francisco. We live our lives because people like Harvey had the courage to come out and act on our behalf, I thought, as I moved back to the Light Court, stopping to look at the technology that made the evening possible. Two laptops on a table at the side of the stairs seemed to be running the slideshow. A CD player was giving us music. All together there were 8 monitors and wired devices that I cannot name or identify, that did not exist when Harvey was alive. I wondered what he would have thought of them, and imagined that he might have envied the increased capacity for communication they would have allowed him.
The ceremony began around 7 when MCs writer Jewelle Gomez and local activist Cecilia Chung introduced Mayor Newsom. A long line of politicians joined him at the bottom of the stairs, all men in suits till Carole Migden joined them. Later I found out that the mayor was scheduled to speak first and the other politicians weren’t supposed to come up till after a group of Harvey’s friends had come down the stairs and spoken to the gathering. Our cute straight raspy-voiced mayor, who has demonstrated his ability to be our ally, spoke about Harvey and his legacy. He and the other politicians, including Tom Ammiano and Mark Leno, reminded us that we all stand of the shoulders of other people, that our struggle is linked to that of other people, and spoke about Gus Van Sant’s film about Harvey that will be out soon, starring Sean Penn. The screenwriter was in the audience, I believe. Carole Migden said this of Harvey: “He was a warrior. He wasn’t mainstream.” Jose Cisneros moved me when he said, “We’re in Harvey Milk’s house. That bust at the top of the stairs won’t let anyone forget that.” And Gerardo Sandoval told us about Harvey’s having been an inspiration to him and other Mexican-Americans, another reminder that our work is not isolated, that having friends and allies, and being friends and allies, is part of our spiritual and political work.
For me, and I think for others in the hall, the dedication really began when the politicians stopped speaking and Connie Champagne, local performer and songwriter, sang “Over the Rainbow.” Yes, it’s a cliché, weighed down by allusions, and yet it still called out to me. Standing in the crowd I felt elation and sorrow wash through my chest. I couldn’t have imagined anything like this happening when I came out in 1973, way across the bay in Berkeley – the dedication of a memorial to the first openly Gay person erected in a seat of government anywhere in this country.
Tears welled up as a group of Harvey’s friends came down the stairs. Anne Kronenberg spoke as their representative. She’d worked as an aide for Harvey and told us that the city used to literally roll a red carpet down those long stairs to the front doors of the building for visiting dignitaries, and Harvey loved to prance up and down those stairs, pretending he was one of those dignitaries. Tears followed by laughter, imagining him doing that.
Two performers sang a song written for the occasion, “Give Them Hope,” inspired by and with words taken from Milk’s speech of the same name. (The sound system wasn’t quite adequate and I missed several parts of the evening, including most of a recording played later, in which Harvey repeated some of the talk and in which he discussed his fears of being killed, and what he wanted to be done if that happened.)
I want to mention the Bob Ross Foundation, major sponsors of the memorial, and the team of artists who created it, Eugene Daub, Rob Firmin, and Jonah Hendrickson. And I have to mention the wonderful pairing of the co-chairs of the Memorial Committee, Joey Cain and Dan Nicoletta, who worked for Harvey and whose photo inspired the bust of him. Dan wore an elegant jacket and tie whose formality held one end of the spectrum, while Joey wore a black hat over his flowing hair, a bright red shirt with black polka dots, a light-colored bow tie, and multicolored pants that stood out in the crowded dun-colored space. Cain told a moving story about one of the people involved in the project. Charlotte Coleman owned a number of lesbian and Gay bars in the 1960s and 70s. Right after Harvey’s death she started a fund for some sort of memorial, but forgot about it during the AIDS crisis and only remembered it after reading about the project in one of the local Gay papers. When she tried to track down the money she discovered that the state had seized the account as being unclaimed. After doing all the work necessary to reclaim it, Ms. Coleman had $5000 to contribute, an inspiration to those of us who move slowly and doubt the results of our well-intended deeds.
I was also moved by the words of Harvey’s nephew Stuart Milk, who spoke of belonging to both of Harvey’s families, his LGBT family and his birth family, and who bore to my eyes a strong physical resemblance to Harvey. A teenager when his uncle was assassinated, he told us that he came out to Harvey at his grandfather’s funeral and recalled his uncle’s advice to accept himself, something that many of us still struggle to do. The mayor presented a plaque to him declaring May 22 Harvey Milk Day, or at least I think that’s what he said. Again, the sound quality wasn’t very good.
The San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus sang next, looking dashing in their tuxedoes, followed by a procession of diverse community members, who also came down those long marble stairs. The event concluded with the descent of a group of nine young people ranging in age from ten to eighteen, representing different youth groups in the city. Several were from the Gay Straight Alliance Network, one was from Larkin Street Youth Services, and a ten-year-old attends the Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy. After coming down the stairs, to the applause of those of us assembled, the representatives of our queer future marched back up to the landing in front of the chamber of the Board of Supervisors. I watched from below on those two huge video screens as a fanfare played and they slowly struggled to pull off the long blue fabric that covered the statue. It was so like an unveiling at a Jewish cemetery, which usually takes place a year after someone’s death, when a gravestone is ritually uncovered. So heartbreaking and yet so necessary a part of the process of grief, loss, and also gratitude, however long delayed the ceremony turns out to be.
The fabric reminded me of the blue stripes on a tallis, a Jewish prayer shawl, flowing like water in the hands of those nine young people. Filled with sorrow and joy I turned in the opposite direction and read on the high Rotunda wall these words engraved into the stone, written in the archaic style I remember from my childhood, that would have been familiar to Harvey too, in Roman letters where U and V are the same:
SAN FRANCISCO
O GLORIOVS CITY OF OVR
HEARTS THAT HAST BEEN
TRIED AND NOT FOVND
WANTING GO THOV WITH
LIKE SPIRITS TO MAKE
THE FUTVRE THINE
Surely those words were meant to be a reminder of the catastrophic quake of 1906 and its rebuilding afterwards, but I read them as a testament to the murder of Milk and Mayor George Moscone on November 27, 1978, and then the beginning of the AIDS nightmare that started three years later. San Francisco has been a model to the rest of the world, and that night I felt the energy of this city’s genius pulsing in that vast domed space where not so many years ago nearly 4000 same-sex couples were wed, and where, hopefully beginning this June, such marriages will be performed again. To make the future ours.
After the unveiling, was I the only one who choked on words as we all stood and sang Happy Birthday to Harvey? I doubt it. Although I never met him, his life touched mine in a profound way, and I knew that I was standing there, pen and red-covered pad in hand, because of all the ways in which that Gay Jewish man’s life work made my own life and work possible.
Andréa and I joined the throng gathered at the foot of the stairs, slowly ascending them to view the newly unveiled statue. Those stairs – there are many of them. Eight from the floor of the Rotunda to the first landing. Twenty-eight more to the second landing. Then six more steps till we arrived at the landing where the memorial stood, beside a supporting column to the right of the entrance to the Board of Supervisors’ chamber.
The statue. A bust of Harvey that seems a tad larger than life. The bust, perhaps a tad higher than Harvey was tall, smiling, tie blowing in the wind, shirt lapels not as long and pointy as in Dan Nicoletta’s photograph. People were going up to the statue, standing beside it, throwing their arms around it, laughing, smiling, as several photographers took pictures of them. The Milk Memorial is the 13th such statue in the building, designed to fit into the elegant Beaux Arts structure. Almost all of the other statutes are of former mayors, an engineer, a major general. But I somehow doubt that people were throwing their arms around their statues when they were dedicated, as almost everyone was doing with Harvey’s. As if the statue were Harvey himself, his warmth even all these years later, his warmth and sincerity, inviting a familiarity that may also come from his Gayness, Gay in both senses of the world. It didn’t look as if people were hugging a monument, but rather that they were embracing one of us, a friend.
Wandering out into the cold night I continued to feel warm inside, sad inside, grateful, moved that I had been there, and torn apart by the violence of this world and the struggle we go through to make it a better place. When I got home I took off my black jeans, gray shirt, blue and black checked jacket with a blue and white rhinestone flower pin on its lapel, given to me by White Crane co-editor Dan Vera. I got into my chilly bed, sad and energized by the evening, beginning to assemble these words beneath my bald pate.
Co-chair Joey Cain was kind enough to speak with me by phone the next morning. He told he that the 
reason he got involved was: “I never agreed with Harvey when he was alive. I was an advocate of overthrowing the system, not joining it. Harvey and I had very vocal arguments on Castro Street. But over time I realized that we have to do all of it, including change the system.” He went on to say that, “For me our work was about the queer community being recognized in a governmental building. Equal to going into the Library of Congress and seeing Walt Whitman’s name on the ceiling, I want Harvey in San Francisco City Hall for people 100 years from now, this Gay person who was important. More than for Harvey, I did it for the people.” His words echoed Harvey’s words, now preserved in stone.
Joey told me that the artists envisioned a contemplative monument that would be a source of pilgrimage in the city, and he too spoke of the importance of the stairs, to Harvey and to the evening. They planned the ceremony so that all the participants would come down those stairs and go up them, up to the mezzanine where Harvey’s bust was to be unveiled. He reminded me that the event took place fifty yards from where Harvey was shot, and told me another anecdote, that Harvey used to say, “When Gay people go to City Hall, don’t take the elevator, take the steps, so that everyone knows we’re there.”
The next morning I walked my Gay self back to City Hall. I wanted to be in that space by daylight and see the memorial without all the crowds. There was no evidence that anything had gone on the night before. No rainbow palms, no rainbow flag. The crowds were gone but the Rotunda wasn’t empty. I’d forgotten that the small circular space at the top of the stairs is the site of numerous weddings. I slowly mounted the stairs and got the top as a wedding was in progress. I watched the next wedding from beginning to end, and stayed to watch one more, with other couples lined up below waiting their turn. Of course, as it isn’t June yet, and I’m still not convinced that the Supreme Court’s decision will become a reality, all of the couples marrying were straight. Some wore formal garb, some casual, all said their vows beneath the frozen gave and frozen smile of a Gay man who none of them seemed to notice. Nor did the black-robed woman who stood facing Harvey, who in less than five minutes was binding those couples together according to the laws of the state of California.
Slinking along the side of the landing, not wanting to intrude, I took time to look at the monument as I hadn’t done the night before, when I didn’t want to linger and be photographed. In the filtered light of day the stone pedestal, of mottled chocolate marble, was glowing soft and warm. I’d read that the designers were not originally in favor of the site but came around to it and grew to appreciate its rightness. I stood for a while staring up into Harvey Milk’s eyes, a bit higher than my own. Who was this man, I wondered, whose kind face reminded me of my Uncle Manny, a Queens New York dentist I adored as a child? Would Harvey and I have liked each other? Seen eye to eye in life, two Gay Jewish men from adjacent generations, both of us from Long Island? I’ll never know. But in our different ways the two of us stood there while a wedding went on behind me, as I read the words on the memorial and copied them in my little pad.
MAY 22, 1933
NOVEMBER 27, 1978
JANUARY 9 – NOVEMBER 27, 1978
TO CONTINUE.
BECAUSE MY ELECTION GAVE
YOUNG PEOPLE OUT THERE HOPE.
YOU GOTTA GIVE ‘EM HOPE.
HOPE SPEECH 1978
GIFT OF THE BOB ROSS FOUNDATION
AND DONORS FROM AROUND THE WORLD
So sad, so strange. A strong vital face staring at me. So absent, the man. So present and enduring his tribute in metal and stone, till the next great quake rumbles beneath us.
The early thirty-something photographer for one of the weddings came up to the statue and with a chuckle asked the older gentleman who came with him, “Who was that? The inventor of powdered milk?” The gentleman looked at me and stumbled to explain. I took over, telling him about the ceremony the night before, about how Harvey was assassinated not fifty yards from where we were standing. Did what I was saying register? I don’t think so. He was there on other business and returned to it. And I turned back to the memorial.
Beneath the bust are three bas-reliefs that give voice to some of what the bust itself doesn’t say. On the left-hand side, taken from another photograph, we see Harvey in tee shirt, left fist raised, a lei around his neck, balloons behind him, (were they rainbow colored?) sitting on top of a car. The words on this relief read, “Gay Freedom Day.” On the right, also from a photograph, we see Harvey in uniform beneath these words, “US Naval Officer 1955.” But it’s the relief in front that will tell visitors a bit more about the man and his place in our community. “Candlelight March November 27, 1978.” Ten people move across the relief from right to left, all carrying candles. A woman alone, a man alone, then two women with their arms around each other, two men holding hands, another woman alone, another man, and then what looks like a mother and her child bringing up the end of the march. These are not the words I would have put on a monument. Mine would have read, “Gay Jewish Supervisor.” My memorial would not have been stone but something luminous, perhaps a tall glass pillar with an image of Supervisor Milk on it, wearing a pink triangle arm band. Instead I stood before a subtle and beautiful monument that fits into the building with more natural elegance than any of the others I could find, and I went to visit all of them.
Directly across the Rotunda, on the far side of the mezzanine, beneath a row of flags, I saw Mayor Newsom smiling and laughing with what looked like a visiting family as cameras flashed. Was he thinking about the preceding night? Was he looking at the children in the family and wondering if any of them were queer, as I was? Did he walk them all around the mezzanine to see Harvey’s memorial? And did he tell them about the amazing birthday party for a dead man he’d attended the night before? I hope so.
On Saturday afternoon I caught up with Dan Nicoletta, the other co-chair of the memorial, who like Joey Cain was kind enough to answer my questions by phone. I wanted to know where and when he’d taken the picture of Harvey that was used to create the bust of him. He told me that he’d taken it in front of Harvey’s camera store, circa 1977. When I commented on his elegant outfit he said, “I knew I would have some competition in the fashion department so I chose something smart but subtle.”
I wondered how the evening was for him, if beneath the joy there was sorrow. His answer: “Maybe it hasn’t hit me yet. I felt very even that night. Welled up at times but did not experience highs and lows. I was very happy with evening and complete with the project.” Then, being not just an elegant dresser but also my Great Aunt Mina’s idea of a perfect gentleman, he offered his thanks to White Crane for showing up and participating in the project. Another lovely tribal moment of pleasure.
I was curious what it was like for him as an artist to see his two-dimensional image of a living three-dimensional friend turned back into three bronze dimensions. At first he talked about the photo itself. “There’s elan in that moment, tie blowing in the wind. Time frozen. Harvey’s smile.” He told me that sculptors usually avoid open-mouthed smiles in bronze because they’re hard to do, but the team wanted to show Harvey’s smile. When I asked Dan what it was like for him to see a bust crafted from his own work he added, “It was really such a great honor metaphysically and physically. The sort of honor every artist longs for. A very high coolness factor.” Reminding him of White Crane’s mission to be a voice for Gay wisdom and culture, I asked him for a comment. He echoed Joey Cain’s words: “The one thing we hoped for as a committee is that the memorial becomes a place of pilgrimage, not just to Harvey Milk’s legacy but to the LGBT movement. A visiting spot for everyone coming to this city, to give them a sense of awe at the political process and their ability to participate in it. That’s what Harvey wanted and that was the goal of our work.”
Dan also told me that creating the memorial was an incredible exercise in community building, and all of that can be felt when you stand facing it. “Harvey’s reputation has ebbed and flowed over the years,” he said, and when the project was initiated in 2004 there was a low ebb of interest in his memory. That year there were 15 people at the candlelight march, 14 of them elected officials, and the group was fag based crossing Castro Street. But, he added, “Stalwart people were determined to do it, and we did.” 
75 inches high, weighing more than 200 pounds, of bronze and marble, at the top of all those stairs, a smiling man stares out into the vast Rotunda. I believe in the immortality of the soul. I don’t know, in a vast multi-dimensional universe, if Harvey was at the ceremony. Who can say what other adventures the dead are engaged in, what other things they have to explore, what other places? But when/if same-sex couples gather again on that landing at the top of the stairs, I hope that they will remember to thank Supervisor Harvey Milk for the work he did to pave the way toward their marriage being legal.
Carole Migden reminded us that, “We won the right to marry. Not that Harvey ever would.” Or, would he have changed his mind if he had lived longer? Would he have been involved in getting same-sex marriages legalized sooner? And one day, in the midst of his active life, would he have met a man so compellingly right that eventually he would have gotten down on one knee to do something old fashioned? Would they have had invitations printed up, and would Harvey have walked up those cold marble stairs, perhaps as the governor of the state of California or the president of the United States, his hand warm in the hand of another man? And when they stood before a judge, in the city Harvey called Home, in the presence of family and friends, when he said, “I do” and had those sweet words echoed back to him – would a fellow Gay Jew with a pad and fountain pen have been standing in the corner, watching, making notes, thinking about Jacob’s ladder and how these two had just ascended it together, embodied angels? This fantasy of mine is what murder robbed him of, robbed us all of, the rest of his story, however he would have lived it out. And this is what we must do in his absence, not just make pilgrimage to the shrine, but make of our lives… Oh, you know this. Enough. Go and do.
Oh no they’re not…they’re just breathing hard!
A COCKETTE SYMPOSIUM
Thursday, June 5. 7:30 – 9 p.m.
LGBT Center, 208 West 13th Street, Kaplan Assembly, First Floor
Admission: FREE, no reservations required.
Join the largest New York gathering of Cockettes since their theatrical catastrophe at the Anderson Theater in 1971. In 1968 this psychedelic-fueled gender bending troupe of men, women, children, Gay, straight and in-between became legendary for their performances at San Francisco’s Palace Theater. At the cultural forefront of Gay Liberation, these bearded hippie drag queens showed generations to come the creative potential within us all. Moderated by Steven Watson, chronicler of the American avant-garde and author of Factory Made, The Beat Generation and The Harlem Renaissance, and hosted by John Waters’ superstar Mink Stole and HRH Lee Mentley of the Hula Palace, the evening promises to be historic. Cockettes scheduled to appear include Scrumbly, Sweet Pam, Rumi, Fayette, Harlow, Jet, Tahara, Sebastian, Toots Taraval, Jim Campbell and Dolores DeLuce.
Contact: Robert Croonquist at rcroon@nyc.rr.com
ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
A Cockette Symposium is one of a series of events in New York the first week in June will bring a dozen of the original Cockettes together on the East Coast for the first time since 1971 to mark the donation of the Martin Worman Cockettes / Gay Theater Archives to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theater Division at Lincoln Center.
The other events include:
The Northeast Radical Faeries and the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence Present
AN EXTRAVAGANZA TO BENEFIT FAERIE CAMP DESTINY
Monday, June 2. Bazaar, Refreshments and Films from 6:30 to 8 p.m. Performances at 8 p.m.
At Theater for the New City, 155 First Avenue at 10th Street.
Admission, $30. Bake Sale and Bar, Faerie Wares and Services—Priceless
For tickets go to: http://www.faeriecampdestiny.org
For further info contact: Jeff Huyett, NYDayZee@aol.com , 646 263 9137
Rumi Missabu of the Cockettes & the Camaraderie Art Salon present:
A COCKTAIL OF GLAMOR AND ANARCHY
Wednesday, June 4. 8 p.m. with a possible second show at 10 p.m.
At Monkeytown, 58 North 3rd Street between Wythe & Kent, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Bedford subway stop.
Admission FREE with two drink minimum. Dinner reservations encouraged, 718 384-1369
Further info at: mailto:camaraderieartsalon@yahoo.com
The Cockettes
The Cockettes emerged from the communal movement in San Francisco in the late 1960’s. Founded by Hibiscus and other members of beat writer and publisher Irving Rosenthal’s Kaliflower commune, the Kitchen Sluts, as they were first known, would entertain as they delivered food and newsletters from Rosenthal’s Free Press to an intercommunal food network of over 300 households. Known for their outrageous bearded drag, sequins, glitter and camp, the queerly androgynous troupe made street theater and performance history on the stage of the Palace Theater at the Nocturnal Dream Shows, midnight showings of camp film classics. Word of their shows spread by word of mouth and through San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen. The Cockettes were officially discovered by Rex Reed, Truman Capote and Joanna Carson and were whisked off to New York where they were feted by Vogue editor Diana Vreeland and held court at Max’s Kansas City. Their cockeyed optimism was welcomed by many but at odds with the irony and cool of New York during the Warhol era. Those who flocked to see their premiere at the Anderson Theater included Anthony Perkins, Allen Ginsberg and John Lennon. As Sylvia Miles said, “Everybody who was anybody was there.” And they were not amused; the evening was a catastrophe. Angela Lansbury is said to have risen from her seat midway through Act One and exclaimed, “Get me the fuck out of here,” and Gore Vidal quoted Arthur Laurents’ Gypsy, “Having no talent is not enough.” After the glitter settled, the Cockettes returned to San Francisco where they created their most successful shows. Cockettes who became famous in their own right include disco diva Sylvester, Café Society pianist Peter Mintun and Cockette guest star Divine.
The Martin Worman / Cockettes / Gay Theater Archives
Martin Worman was a playwright, director, actor and lyricist during the height of the Gay Liberation movement in the 1960’s through his death of AIDS in 1993. A Vietnam Era veteran from Paterson, New Jersey, Worman left Fort Dix for a life in the theater in San Francisco where he was a member of the legendary troupe known as the Cockettes. He wrote book and lyrics for several of their most renowned shows including Hot Greeks and Vice Palace which featured John Waters’ superstars Divine and Mink Stole. He was known as “The Cockette Who Can Read” because of his multiple academic degrees, a secret he carefully guarded from the street-based, anti-professional ethos of the time.
Worman continued his musical collaboration with Cockette Richard “Scrumbly” Koldewyn, writing musical revues and plays, most notably the 1972 musical Rickets: A Day in the Life of the Counterculture. Influenced by the theater of Bertolt Brecht, Worman viewed himself as a cultural worker and saw theater as a weapon in the struggle for Gay Liberation. In 1975 he co-founded the San Francisco-based Gay Men’s Theater Collective whose award-winning play Crimes Against Nature was brought to New York. There Worman assisted Robert Wilson and Jack O’Brien, directed Lola Pashalinski in her Obie winning performance of Steven Holt’s Cold, Lazy and Elaine and adapted Sherwood Anderson’s The Man Who Became a Woman for Steven Keats at Theater for the New City. At his death he was Associate Professor of Theater at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where he adapted Meridel LeSeuer’s Midwest populist writings to the theater. The 90 hours of interviews he conducted with Cockettes in 1987 during the height of the AIDS epidemic include a deathbed interview with disco diva Sylvester. His unfinished dissertation at NYU on the history of the Cockettes became the basis for David Weissman and Bill Weber’s acclaimed documentary The Cockettes.
Worman created extensive archives of his work in the theater, including 600 pages of Cockette interviews transcribed by his partner Robert Croonquist who safe-guarded the archives and is now donating them to the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Billy Rose Theater Division at Lincoln Center.
For other reasons altogether, I was in search of the source of the quote:
"never underestimate the potency of cheap music."
Now…a quip of that nature can only have come from a limited handful of sources…I was initially guessing Oscar Wilde…Mark Twain probably said something similar. But no. It was our dear, dear Noël Coward, of course, putting the words in the mouth of his beloved Gertrude Lawrence as she played "Amanda Prynne" in Private Lives (a role he wrote specifically for her, with him playing opposite as "Elyot Chase".)
And so…apropos of nothing other than my own recent reading of The Letters of Noel Coward (a delectable read of the first order)… and, of course, it’s Friday and it’s been a long week…here, ladies and gentemen is the estimable Sir Noël Coward potently–and inimitably–singing one of his own, most famous, but hardly cheap, songs.
Enjoy:
White Crane is collected in numerous libraries and scholarly collections in the U.S.
We’re proud to announce that we are now in the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison.
Many interesting things come over our transom…this from the esteemed John J. McNeill, on the arrival of Joseph "God’s Rottweiller" Ratzinger (wasn’t this guy on Cheers?) on our shores (traveling under his nom de power "Pope Benedict XVI"):
Toward a Theology of Fallibility
When Pope Benedict comes to Ground Zero in New York City he will be greeted by
a giant banner with a painting of Michael Judge, the Gay Franciscan priest, whose life is recorded in the documentary, Saint of 9/11. That banner signifies the ambiguous state of many Gay, Lesbian, bisexual and transgendered Catholics toward the Pope. We share the respect and love of the Catholic community for the Vicar of Christ and wish him well. At the same time we are profoundly aware of how wrong he is in his understanding and judgment on Gayness as “intrinsic disorder”. We are deeply conscious that we cannot accept and live out his teaching on homosexuality without destroying our mental and spiritual health. What is bad psychology has to be bad theology. We find ourselves in the same position as children of a homophobic parent, who, while still loving their parent, must separate off and take distance from that parent’s homophobia, if they are to live happy and healthy lives.
We Roman Catholic Gays have found it necessary to undergo the same maturing process in our spiritual lives that Jesus asked his disciples to undergo at the last supper. “I shall ask the Father and he will send you another Paraclete to be with you forever, the Spirit of truth.” (John 14: 16-17) Jesus stressed the point that it was necessary that he should go away in order for the Spirit to come. “Yet you are sad at heart because I have told you this. Still, I am telling you the truth; it is for your own good that I am going, because unless I go, the Advocate will not come to you; but if I go. I will send him to you….However, when the Spirit of truth comes, he will lead you to the complete truth.” (John 16: 6-13)
Why could the Spirit of Truth only come after Jesus’ death? Because as long as Jesus remained alive and present, his disciples had their center of authority outside themselves and were not totally responsible for their actions. They were striving to meet the expectations of a provident leader. They had not yet become fully creative and responsible adults. But after Jesus’ death, his Spirit became what Paul saw as the source of the “Glorious Freedom of the Children of God”. “The proof that you are sons and daughters is that God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts: the Spirit that cries, ‘Abba’, Father; and it is this that makes you a son or daughter, you are not a slave anymore’. Pagans were not free but slaves in relation to their gods because they related to their gods in a spirit of fear. John tells us “Perfect love cast out all fear. It is equally true that perfect fear casts out all love.” Christians are free because their God is a God of love who had adopted them into his family. “All who are guided by the Spirit of God are sons or daughters of God, for what you have received was not the spirit of slavery, to bring you back into fear, you have received the Spirit of adoption, enabling us to cry out Abba, Father.” (Rom. 8:14-17)
With the death of Jesus and the coming of the Holy Spirit, the apostles received a challenge as well as an opportunity to mature. As Paul expressed it, “…until we all reach unity in faith and knowledge of the Son of God and form the perfect human, fully mature with the fullness of Christ himself.” (Eph. 4:13). The apostles had to give up the security of a provident leader; they had to begin to find out what God wanted from them from within themselves and their own experience.
In like manner, in our spiritual life, we Roman Catholic Gay people must pass from a passive, dependent role to an active, creative one. For our survival we have a special need to become mature, self-motivated, autonomous people, no longer dependent on outside homophobic sources for a sense of our identity and well-being. We must not let our enemies outside ourselves define us; we must let the Spirit of love that dwells within our hearts define us. As the Catholic philosopher Maurice Blondel expressed it: “Our God dwells within us and the only way we can become one with that God is to become one with our authentic self”.
It is this understanding of the role of the indwelling Holy Spirit that gives me great consolation during these times when the Catholic Church reacts to its Gay members in ignorance and even downright hostility. We Gays should be grateful to God for creating a humanly fallible Church. We are intensely aware that if our parents had been infallible we could never have matured and become autonomous and responsible adults. God blessed us with finite and fallible parents. It was precisely when and where our parents proved fallible that we were challenged to take distance from their authority, make our own choices and be fully responsible for them.
In a similar way, as Gay Roman Catholics we are dependent on the human fallibility of religious authorities in order to develop an adult freedom of conscience. I believe that we are witnessing the coming into being of what I call the Church of the Indwelling of the Holy Spirit. After forty years of ministry with Lesbian and Gay persons, as both priest and psychotherapist, I am convinced that a unique spirituality, special and vibrant, is springing up in the Christian Gay community. It is spirituality totally compatible with a life of Gay sexual love and intimacy. As scripture says “the stone which the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. (Mark 12:18) Gays are leading the way to form a spiritual community based on the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The Spirit’s special presence in the Gay Christian community and the unique graces which are enabling Lesbians and Gays to build a mature, autonomous spiritual life are not just gifts meant for the Gay Christian community alone. When God pours out special blessings on one segment of the community, those blessings are meant to flow out and be shared by the human community at large.
The Church of the Holy Spirit will be a Church in which all are equal, no hierarchy, no clergy as a separate caste, no domination of men over women. Leadership in the Church of the Holy Spirit will be based on careful listening to what the Holy Spirit is saying through the people of God. A recent event makes me believe that God is working overtime to bring about the transformation of the Catholic Church into the Church of the Holy Spirit. President Lech Kaczynski of Poland in a March 17 televised speech to the nation, echoing the Vatican position, warned that the adoption of the European Lisbon Treaty would compel Poland to recognize same-sex marriages, which he linked to the end of “moral order”. To make his point the president used footage of the 2003 wedding of Brendan Fay and Tom Moulton in Canada. As a result of that speech a media frenzy moved Brendan and Tom out of obscurity and they became world famous. Brendan and Tom are devout Gay Roman Catholics who see their marriage as a sacred bond blessed by God. The Holy Spirit is ultimately in charge of the Church and will transform it so that it becomes one with the realm of God. We who are Gay and Catholic pray daily that the hierarchy will hear what the Spirit is saying through the people of God and cooperate with the Spirit’s transformation of the Church.
John J. McNeill John J. McNeill, author of The Church and The Homosexual, Taking A Chance on God, Freedom, Glorious Freedom, and Both Feet Planted Firmly in Midair. The Reverend McNeill can be reached at jjmcneill@aol.com
Not to brag or anything…but we were a busy Institute this weekend.
This weekend was also the fourth Gay Men’s Leadership Academy, a sponsored program of White Crane Institute.
We alternate the academies between the west coast and the east coast to make attendance and subsequent networking easier. And, you know…we get bored easily.
East coast academies are held at Easton Mountain and the west coast academies are held in Guerneville at the Wildwood Retreat Center. Both beautiful facilities. Add handsome men, cute young guys and a multitude of bright minds…and you’re talking AWE & WONDER!
We invite you to visit the GMHLA blog set up by the Academy alums. And even more importantly, consider attending. We’re moving Gay Men’s Health into the 21st Century.
From our friend Jeffery Beam…
Jonathan Williams, 79, Avant-garde Poet, Publisher, and Photographer
By Jeffery Beam
Poet, publisher, and photographer Jonathan Chamberlain Williams, founder of The Jargon Society press, one of the most renowned small presses of the last half of the twentieth century, and champion and publisher of some of the most important mid and late century poets in the United States and England, died on March 16, 2008 in Highlands, North Carolina. The cause is not known at this time. Williams, 79, began his avant-garde press while a student at the Chicago Institute of Design, naming it "Jargon" not only for its meaning of personal idiom, but after the French spring pear, "jargonelle" and the French "jargon," meaning the twittering of birds.
The only child of the late Thomas Benjamin and Georgette (Chamberlain) Williams, Williams was born on March 8, 1929 in Asheville, North Carolina, grew up in the District of Columbia and spent summers at the family’s North Carolina mountain home. His father, who designed office systems for government contracts in Washington, grew up in Hendersonville, North Carolina; his mother, a gifted decorator, was the daughter of a successful banker in Atlanta, growing up there and on the ancestral farm near Cartersville, Georgia.
Williams’ interests and talents, revealed him as a Renaissance man – publisher; poet and satirist; book designer; editor; photographer; legendary correspondent; literary, art, and photography critic and collector; early collector and proselytizer of visionary folk art; cultural anthropologist; curmudgeon; happy gardener; resolute walker; and keen and adroit raconteur and gourmand. Williams’ refined decorum and speech, and sartorial style, contrasted sharply, yet pleasingly, with his delight in the bawdy, his incisive humor, and his confidently experimental and inventive poems and prose. His interests, in his own words, raised, "the common to grace," while paying "close attention to the earthy." At the forefront of the avant-garde, and yet possessing a deep appreciation of the traditional, Williams celebrated, rescued, and preserved, as he described it, "more and more away from the High Art of the city" settling "for what I could unearth and respect in the tall grass."
Despite numerous awards and honorary degrees including a Guggenheim, numerous National Endowment Fellowships, and a Longview Foundation Grant, Williams was never sufficiently acknowledged for his achievements as a poet or prose stylist by the writing establishment, nor for his press’s generosity toward artists from all walks of life. His southern Appalachian origins created in him a deep sympathy for the underdog, for society’s throwaways, and for the unbridled creativity of the outsider. He unapologetically celebrated his gay identity long before it was fashionable. By the Reagan years he began to object even more vigorously to the failure of American democracy and education. Williams’ concerns about threats to the natural world; the loss of a humane and well-mannered society; and his distaste for hypocrisy in government, religion and the arts; made for vivid poetry, prose, and conversation, and informed his choices as a publisher. Known for his irascibility and opinions, he once stated (quoting Henry Miller paraphrasing Celine), "one of the things Jargon is devoted to is an attack on urban culture. We piss on it all from a considerable height."
Nevertheless, acclaim came despite the poetry world’s general indifference. Buckminster Fuller once called Williams "our Johnny Appleseed," Guy Davenport described him as a "kind of polytechnic institute," while Hugh Kenner hailed Jargon as "the Custodian of Snowflakes" and Williams as "the truffle-hound of American poetry." Williams held a number of poet-in-residencies early in his career. The Maryland Institute College of the Arts honored him in 1969 with a Doctor of Humane Letters, and in 1974 he received the "Honorable Order of Kentucky Colonels" for services to the arts in Kentucky. Publishers Weekly awarded the press its Carey-Thomas Citation for creative small-press publishing in 1977; in the same year Williams received the North Carolina Award in Fine Arts. Williams joined a handful of other poets to read at the Carter Administration’s White House Poetry Day event in 1980. In 1998 Williams was inducted into the North Carolina Literary Hall of Fame. Distinguished Houghton Mifflin Editor Peter Davison stated in 1990, "a sensible society would set up a permanent outsize subsidy for…Williams and let him go to whatever his hand fell upon…Jargon is still searching out astonishments; it is one of the irreplaceable American small-press institutions."
Williams began his education at Washington’s Cathedral School at St. Albans, entering Princeton in 1947 where he soon found the academic track stifling. He wrote in a 1984 self-interview, "I clearly did not want to become a Byzantinist in the basement of The Morgan Library; or an art critic for The New Yorker; nor did I want to live in the world of competitive business." Escape, much to his parents’ dismay, was inevitable and leaving Princeton in his sophomore year he studied painting at the Washington’s Phillips Gallery with Karl Knaths, later joining Bill Hayter’s Atelier 17 in Greenwich Village to study etching, engraving, and printmaking.
Williams’ interest in photography and bookmaking led him eventually to the Chicago Institute of Design. Here, again, Jonathan found the commercial focus too confining, and his interest in photography deepened. Photographer Harry Callahan, a professor at the school, unable to allow a lower-classman into his seminars, suggested that Williams go to Black Mountain College in the summer of 1951 to study with him and Aaron Siskind. Before leaving for Black Mountain, Williams set off for California to meet with Kenneth Rexroth, Henry Miller, and Kenneth Patchen, all with whom he had been corresponding. Their enthusiasms for the enhancement of words through visual dimensions, and Black Mountain’s principles of learning by doing and the tactile importance of art, were to play an important role in the development of Williams’ aesthetic principles as a poet, photographer, publisher, collector, and critic.
Jargon and Williams came to life at Black Mountain where Williams, under the tutelage of rector poet Charles Olson, began writing more of his own poetry. Olson hired his talented student to be the college publisher. Ultimately Jargon, along with New Directions, Grove, and City Lights became one of the four most famous small presses of a burgeoning 1960s movement that continues not only on the printed page, but today, even on the Internet. Jargon’s books, in particular, became collectibles, setting the standard for the small press, and were widely praised for their meticulous beauty and refined craft, and for Williams’ ability to discover new and important talent. In the late 1950s, the 1960s and 1970s Williams was known for filling his Volkswagen Beetle with books and traversing the country, selling books out of the back seat, giving readings, and spreading the word about the many writers and artists he had come to know.
Writers and artists, nurtured by Jargon, number in the hundreds. Many of their careers began or blossomed under Williams’ and Jargon’s patronship, including American authors James Broughton, Robert Creeley, Guy Davenport, Robert Duncan, Russell Edson, Buckminster Fuller, Ronald Johnson, Denise Levertov, Mina Loy, Paul Metcalf, Lorine Niedecker, Charles Olson, Joel Oppenheimer, and Louis Zukofsky; photographers Lyle Bongé, Elizabeth Matheson, John Menapace, Mark Steinmetz, and Doris Ullman; British poets Basil Bunting, Thomas A. Clark, Simon Cutts, and Ian Hamilton Finlay; and bookmakers Jonathan Greene, Doyle Moore, and Keith Smith. Some of the artists and photographers who contributed visually to Jargon designs include Harry Callahan, John Furnival, David Hockney, R. B. Kitaj, James McGarrell, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Guy Mendes, Robert Rauschenberg, and Art Sinsabaugh. Thornton Dial, St. EOM, Georgia Blizzard, Howard Finster, Annie Hooper, and James Harold Jennings, are just a few of the visionary folk artists whom Williams began to champion in the 1980s, and whose work is represented in his outstanding personal collection of outsider art, in his essays about visionary art, and his yet unpublished monograph Walks to the Paradise Garden. One Jargon title, Ernie Matthew Mickler’s White Trash Cooking, took America by storm appearing on the New York Times bestseller list, with major interviews and reviews in the national media, standing alone as the book which temporarily made Jargon a household name.
The Jargon Society archives, containing personal papers as well as press materials, rest at the Poetry/Rare Books Collection‒SUNY at Buffalo. Williams’ correspondents were legion. In his letters, no less than in his poetry and essays, Williams—who was known to write under various noms de plume such as Lord Stodge, Big Enis, Colonel Williams, and Lord Nose—held court, preaching the art gospel with his usual flair. He was fond of quoting Robert Duncan, "Responsibility is to keep the ability to respond." Yale University recently purchased Williams’ personal photographic archive, including his uncommon portraits of poets, painters, writers, and artists – major works documenting Black Mountain College and Williams’ peripatetic wanderings across America and Europe. His letters, negatives, and photographic prints alone will provide bountiful insight into 20th century culture, history, sensibility, and community.
Williams’ over one hundred works, published by many of the most important small presses in this country and Britain, exemplified his playful blend of polish and earthiness, and revealed his massive and impressive circle of friends. Williams seems to have known practically everyone of consequence in early and mid-twentieth century American alternative arts. An Ear In Bartram’s Tree (1969, University of North Carolina) and Blues & Roots/Rue & Bluets (1971, Grossman; 1985, Duke University) demonstrate his sensitivity to the nuances of language and the simple charms of Appalachian and White Trash culture. Quote, Unquote (1989, Ten Speed Press) was one of many editions of Williams’ astonishing accumulations of revelatory quotations discovered in his wide reading. A Palpable Elysium: Portraits of Genius and Solitude (2002, David Godine) offers a select view of Williams’ photographs of unique people and places accompanied by pithy, revealing mini-essays. The Magpie’s Bagpipe (1982, North Point) and Blackbird Dust (2000, Turtle Point) collect spicy essays on artists and culture. Jubilant Thicket: New and Selected Poems (2005, Copper Canyon) contains a selection of over 1000 of Williams’ poems.
Williams and his partner of forty years, Poet Thomas Meyer, lived since the early 1970s in a seventeenth century shepherd’s cottage in the English Cumbrian hills in the summer and at the Scaly Mountain home near Highlands in the winter. For the past decade they have resided mostly at Skywinding Farm, in Scaly. Williams is survived by Meyer, their beloved ginger-cat H-B, and numerous devoted friends and supporters. In the Appalachian poem "Epitaphs for Two Neighbors in Macon County No Poet Could Forget" Williams captures Uncle Iv Owens. It seems a fitting epitaph, too, for this remarkable man of American letters, Jonathan Williams:
he done
what he could
when he got round
to it
