Christopher Matthew Hennessy's Blog, page 16
March 2, 2011
"God Hates Fags?" Nope. God Loves Poetry.
With this breaking news — Supreme Court upholds Westboro Baptist Church's right to stage anti-gay protests at funerals of U.S. troops. — I figured it might be good to remind you of God Loves Poetry, a site where poets use erasure of the Westboro materials to create new poems.
A Caption, My Caption (vote for me?)
Wanna vote for me (or just vote) in this fun caption contest?!
It's over at the great blog Avoiding the Muse, one of my favs. Happy to be in the "Death Match" competition open only to winners and finalists. See what I came up with and vote! And if you're so inclined post on your Facebook page:
http://avoidmuse.blogspot.com/2011/03...
March 1, 2011
February 26, 2011
'As if most homosexual literature were a game' (1971)
Reading log: 2/26/2011
"Queer Books," by John Murphy, 1971, found in Out of the Closets: Voice of Gay Liberation.
"It is as if most homosexual literature were a game, with elaborate rules, masks, costumes, hiding places. But the game is very old; we all know all the parts; the identity behind the masks is painfully clear. Everyone is tired of the old game; it would be very painful to acknowledge that it all was a game, that there is nothing special going on anymore. It will probably hurt to live realiastically, yet that is what we must do."
February 19, 2011
A call for work for "underrepresented minority authors"
First, let me just say how lame I am for not posting regularly lately. I am going to try my best to get back to posting much more soon.
Second, I got an email from a new journal seeking work from "underrepresented minority authors." See details below.
Saltwater Quarterly is a new literary journal devoted to publishing works by underrepresented minority authors. We are looking for work that:
* Shines a light on underrepresented communities;
* Exemplifies craft and technique and uses both successfully;
* Subverts or revises traditional forms to illustrate the experience of underrepresented communities;
* Surprises and moves the reader.
We believe that developing the confidence to write is critical and that every act of writing that combats the oppressive messaging of mainstream media is a revolutionary act. Please submit only your best work.
* Fiction should be no longer than 1,000 words.
* Creative nonfiction should be no longer than 1,000 words.
* Poetry of any form and style is welcomed. We are especially open to poetry that experiments with traditional form in new and exciting ways. Please send no more than three poems at a time.
We are also interested in submissions of artwork for future covers and issues. Please send us no more than three images of jellyfish, created by you in any medium you've chosen, that exemplify the minority experience. We leave it up to you to decide what that looks like.
editor@saltwaterquarterly.org and http://www.facebook.com/l/e8b7725Vaqahi2Zt5CcIfH6RNuw/www.saltwaterquarterly.org
February 18, 2011
What the gay (artist) sees from the closet
Reading log: 2/18/11
"The homosexual had to discover that one's native language was not one's own. It could not be trusted as an instrument of desire or assertion or self-definition.
"What an interesting discovery. What terror and what richness. One had to understand instinctively the often treacherous meaning behind the culture's simplest norms and pervasive rituals. One had to rely on interpretation and tone; for gay people, inflection was required. The translation of the felt language of love and custom was something homosexuals understood by doing without. The possibility that it was all lies, as it felt to him, enters early into the gay soul." (86)
"The culture gets from its closeted gays a powerful perception of its most intimate and most important matters since its politics and its literature are so often public ways of talking about its private concerns. And what the gay sees from the closet, the culture can use for free because the closet keeps the gay from owning his own insight, from creating the character who says I know that because of who I am, from making the pronoun in the song same-sex. It is free labor. The universality of so much closet-seeing reminds us of how specific a human experience the universal inevitably is." (93)
– from Making History Matter, Robert Dawidoff
February 15, 2011
Spreading news
Eric Norris, a poet who comments here quite a bit and has his own blog, sends word he's got his first book out, and wait till you hear about it. It sounds weirdly enchanting and thought-provoking. He calls it his 'queer little chapbook.' Check out this description and click to learn how to purchase:
February 11, 2011
February 9, 2011
Our 'secret, molten camaraderie'?
Reading log: 2/9/11
Michael Sherry, in his book Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy, sets up an interesting dichotomy via these two quotes:
In response to New York's New Museum's 1987 forum "Is There a Gay Sensibility and Does It Have an Impact on Our Culture" — "No, there is no such thing as a gay sensibility and yes, it had an enormous impact on our culture." Journalist Jeff Weinstein
Edmund White: "[At least] we can discuss gay taste of any give period" and "detect…a resemblance among many gay works of art made at a particular moment—a resemblance partially intended and partially drawn without design from a shared experience of anger or alienation of secret, molten camaraderie."
February 7, 2011
The Gay Body in Space
Reading log: 2/7/2011
[Anti-gay] Dr. Charles Socarides, February 1967, at a Defense Department hearing concerning a gay employee: "[The homosexual] is frightened of his own body….He does not know the boundary of his own body…. He does not know where his body ends and space begins… He will believe that parts of his body are missing."
Regarding the National Institute of Mental Health's Final report of Task Force on Homosexuality, chaired by Evelyn Hooker, Sept. 1967:
"Human sexuality, it noted, extended across a continuum of behavior, homosexuality was not a unitary phenomenon, a homosexual personality did not exist, gay women and men came from all walks of life, and as many as 4 million Americans were primarily homosexual."
– from Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities, John D'Emilio
