Mayra Lazara Dole's Blog - Posts Tagged "hemingway"
In Boston I cut the hair of a 23 year-old bookish Harvard grad with twenty-seven polydactyl cats. On that dark chilly morning she invited me to her Sunday book club potlucks.
Yesterday, I received an email from her and remembered how I stepped into her house with a big pot of frijoles negros under one arm and my Senegalese Djimbe drum in the other. She walked me through a living room decorated with black velvet curtains, couches and arm chairs. Thumping rock music played in the background while she introduced me to folks sipping mojitos —I skipped the alcohol. On the way outdoors, I noticed walls adorned with Hemingway photographs and pictures of his infamous six-toed cats and wondered why she was so enamored of the author.
Outside, we sat on logs and huddled in a circle by a small fire pit.
I sat among two disheveled lit geeks (a guy and a girl), a Republican Nazi with a long beard (no one knew he was Nazi until he spoke of his passion for Hitler and was thrown out of the house), a punk rocker poet/English-teacher-to-be with a Mohawk and tattoos, a preppy female Art History student, an attractive crossed-eyed female English Lit student, an ultra conservative-looking guy with the heart of a hippie who read one historical novel per day, and a gorgeous Jewish girl with fiery long curls and freckles attending BU of which she lovingly called: “Be Jew.”
I was the only Latina and felt a bit insecure and jittery about flexing my intellectual muscles within a group of literary geniuses. I sensed that because of lovely media stereotypes, and lack of authentic Latinos in YA lit, they might have considered me intellectually inept/inferior. Also, regardless of how much I adored literature, my having been a hairstylist/drummer/dancer might have added to the Latina stereotype. I had to give it my all so I could represent and be respected.
That week I read The Sun Also Rises twice, memorized lines verbatim and equipped myself with Hemmingway quotes and anecdotes. The book discussion was engaging and lively and to my surprise I didn’t feel insecure about speaking with what they considered, “a slight Spanish accent.”
During the discussion I threw in facts about Hemmingway, such as that in Cuba he invited a bunch of boys to play ball every day with his son (Hemingway was the pitcher). One of the kids, René Villarreal, grew up and became his (and his wife’s) houseboy and butler at seventeen until age 32. Although I was born a rebel, and am more interested in asking questions than finding answers or believing in a set truth, I didn’t mean to insinuate that Hemingway was gay when I asked, “Could having fallen in love with René, the man (or any other man), and his inability to express his desire, or do anything about it, have led Hemmingway to commit suicide?”
The group's passion for Hemingway’s writing was that of enthusiasts and scholars of his work. They believed Hemmingway was a macho man who attempted suicide after receiving ECT treatments which made him lose bits of his memory and hence ability to write as well as he used to. I knew about ECT because a great deal of ancient LGBT's endured them. The treatments are SUPPOSED to help with depression, mania, guilt and compulsive thoughts and behaviors that can’t be stopped thus the main reasons gays were subjected to it.
Ending your life with a shotgun blast to the head is an extreme act of violence towards self and it seems to reek of self loathing behavior.
It seemed that scholarly and medical opinion had never been attentive to the view that Hemmingway might have lived a guilt-ridden life because he was a repressed and oppressed homo. I might be 100 percent wrong, but back in the day when I read his books and researched him, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was a suffering closeted gay.
Hemmingway once said, “All things truly wicked start from innocence.” He stated, “About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after” and “Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”
In all fairness to Hemingway, I think his suicidal tendency (to put it mildly) was also genetic since his father, siblings, and granddaughter committed suicide too.
In order to prove that Hemmingway was a straight man, the group discussed an affair he’d allegedly had with the married Jane Manson. That cracked me up. I’m always amazed how quickly het folks dismiss someone’s homoness simply because they had an affair with a person of the opposite sex. I asked if they’d never heard of the rumors about Papa and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald’s wife said her husband and Hemmingway behaved like “lovers.”)
In A Moveable Feast, Hemmingway has a conversation with Gertrude Stein about homosexuality. He seems to accept lesbians but not gay men. Gertrude let him know, “You know nothing about this, Hemingway. You’ve met known criminals and sick people and vicious people. The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy."
Honestly, I think SHE knew nothing about male homosexuality.
Hemingway was obsessed with masculinity and had male gay characters in some of his work, such as:
The Mother of the Queen (about a homo bullfighter).
Across the River and into the Times (has a male homo artist).
I went on to speak about Hemingway's love for Havana’s Barrio Chino (Cuba's Chinatown) and explained how Cuba sold Hemingway to tourists as part of Cuba’s ’50’s image even though they reject the Corporate Capitalist era. http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/justice/ Everything Hemmingway in Cuba has been franchised. I never thought I could become so inspired by Hemingway, but having been surrounded by his fans made all the difference.
Gregory Hemingway, the author’s s transsexual son, a former doctor who went by Gloria Hemingway after a sex change operation, died in jail at 69. He seemed drunk and “charged with indecent exposure and resisting arrest without violence after a park ranger reported a pedestrian with no clothes on” (the officer said she was shoeless and had a dress and heels in her hands).
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conwa...
These days, the Hemmingway's wouldn't be in turmoil for being LGBTQ. Lady Gaga is rumored to be a hermaphrodite and no one gives a flying porcupine: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/200...
If you’re the type of traveler that plans a trip around visiting old authors’ homes, be sure to make a stop at Hemingway’s Key West Home, also known as the “gay capital” of Florida. (I’m just saying…).
Tidbit:
At 28, Hemingway wrote, MEN WITHOUT WOMEN
Yesterday, I received an email from her and remembered how I stepped into her house with a big pot of frijoles negros under one arm and my Senegalese Djimbe drum in the other. She walked me through a living room decorated with black velvet curtains, couches and arm chairs. Thumping rock music played in the background while she introduced me to folks sipping mojitos —I skipped the alcohol. On the way outdoors, I noticed walls adorned with Hemingway photographs and pictures of his infamous six-toed cats and wondered why she was so enamored of the author.
Outside, we sat on logs and huddled in a circle by a small fire pit.
I sat among two disheveled lit geeks (a guy and a girl), a Republican Nazi with a long beard (no one knew he was Nazi until he spoke of his passion for Hitler and was thrown out of the house), a punk rocker poet/English-teacher-to-be with a Mohawk and tattoos, a preppy female Art History student, an attractive crossed-eyed female English Lit student, an ultra conservative-looking guy with the heart of a hippie who read one historical novel per day, and a gorgeous Jewish girl with fiery long curls and freckles attending BU of which she lovingly called: “Be Jew.”
I was the only Latina and felt a bit insecure and jittery about flexing my intellectual muscles within a group of literary geniuses. I sensed that because of lovely media stereotypes, and lack of authentic Latinos in YA lit, they might have considered me intellectually inept/inferior. Also, regardless of how much I adored literature, my having been a hairstylist/drummer/dancer might have added to the Latina stereotype. I had to give it my all so I could represent and be respected.
That week I read The Sun Also Rises twice, memorized lines verbatim and equipped myself with Hemmingway quotes and anecdotes. The book discussion was engaging and lively and to my surprise I didn’t feel insecure about speaking with what they considered, “a slight Spanish accent.”
During the discussion I threw in facts about Hemmingway, such as that in Cuba he invited a bunch of boys to play ball every day with his son (Hemingway was the pitcher). One of the kids, René Villarreal, grew up and became his (and his wife’s) houseboy and butler at seventeen until age 32. Although I was born a rebel, and am more interested in asking questions than finding answers or believing in a set truth, I didn’t mean to insinuate that Hemingway was gay when I asked, “Could having fallen in love with René, the man (or any other man), and his inability to express his desire, or do anything about it, have led Hemmingway to commit suicide?”
The group's passion for Hemingway’s writing was that of enthusiasts and scholars of his work. They believed Hemmingway was a macho man who attempted suicide after receiving ECT treatments which made him lose bits of his memory and hence ability to write as well as he used to. I knew about ECT because a great deal of ancient LGBT's endured them. The treatments are SUPPOSED to help with depression, mania, guilt and compulsive thoughts and behaviors that can’t be stopped thus the main reasons gays were subjected to it.
Ending your life with a shotgun blast to the head is an extreme act of violence towards self and it seems to reek of self loathing behavior.
It seemed that scholarly and medical opinion had never been attentive to the view that Hemmingway might have lived a guilt-ridden life because he was a repressed and oppressed homo. I might be 100 percent wrong, but back in the day when I read his books and researched him, I couldn’t help but wonder if he was a suffering closeted gay.
Hemmingway once said, “All things truly wicked start from innocence.” He stated, “About morals, I know only that what is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after” and “Decadence is a difficult word to use since it has become little more than a term of abuse applied by critics to anything they do not yet understand or which seems to differ from their moral concepts.”
In all fairness to Hemingway, I think his suicidal tendency (to put it mildly) was also genetic since his father, siblings, and granddaughter committed suicide too.
In order to prove that Hemmingway was a straight man, the group discussed an affair he’d allegedly had with the married Jane Manson. That cracked me up. I’m always amazed how quickly het folks dismiss someone’s homoness simply because they had an affair with a person of the opposite sex. I asked if they’d never heard of the rumors about Papa and F. Scott Fitzgerald. (Fitzgerald’s wife said her husband and Hemmingway behaved like “lovers.”)
In A Moveable Feast, Hemmingway has a conversation with Gertrude Stein about homosexuality. He seems to accept lesbians but not gay men. Gertrude let him know, “You know nothing about this, Hemingway. You’ve met known criminals and sick people and vicious people. The main thing is that the act male homosexuals commit is ugly and repugnant and afterwards they are disgusted with themselves. They drink and take drugs, to palliate this, but they are disgusted with the act and they are always changing partners and cannot be really happy."
Honestly, I think SHE knew nothing about male homosexuality.
Hemingway was obsessed with masculinity and had male gay characters in some of his work, such as:
The Mother of the Queen (about a homo bullfighter).
Across the River and into the Times (has a male homo artist).
I went on to speak about Hemingway's love for Havana’s Barrio Chino (Cuba's Chinatown) and explained how Cuba sold Hemingway to tourists as part of Cuba’s ’50’s image even though they reject the Corporate Capitalist era. http://www.hemingwaysociety.org/justice/ Everything Hemmingway in Cuba has been franchised. I never thought I could become so inspired by Hemingway, but having been surrounded by his fans made all the difference.
Gregory Hemingway, the author’s s transsexual son, a former doctor who went by Gloria Hemingway after a sex change operation, died in jail at 69. He seemed drunk and “charged with indecent exposure and resisting arrest without violence after a park ranger reported a pedestrian with no clothes on” (the officer said she was shoeless and had a dress and heels in her hands).
http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conwa...
These days, the Hemmingway's wouldn't be in turmoil for being LGBTQ. Lady Gaga is rumored to be a hermaphrodite and no one gives a flying porcupine: http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/200...
If you’re the type of traveler that plans a trip around visiting old authors’ homes, be sure to make a stop at Hemingway’s Key West Home, also known as the “gay capital” of Florida. (I’m just saying…).
Tidbit:
At 28, Hemingway wrote, MEN WITHOUT WOMEN
