I’m excited to announce that my essay has been published in the book Approaches to Kurban Said’s Ali and Nino: Love, Identity and Cultural Conflict. I worked as an editorial assistant on this collection as well. Here’s a brief snippet of my article:
My review of George Hodgman’s memoir Bettyville has been published in the journal Western American Literature. Here is an excerpt:
In Bettyville, New York book editor George Hodgman returns to his native, rural northern Missouri home to care for his elderly mother. In the process, he crafts a Proustian remembrance of growing up gay in a small town amid the cultural revolutions of the sixties and seventies that at once seemed as distant as Fire Island in New York and as near as the campus of the University of Missouri.
The actual geographical location of Bettyville is Paris, Missouri, a town that like thousands of other small American towns finds itself slowly disappearing from the map as it struggles to transition into the twenty-first century. What separates Hodgman’s account from many other queer coming-of-age narratives of small-town life is his genuine affection for Paris despite the decades-old wounds he still nurses. Hodgman offers both a personal and sociological elegy for his hometown. Mourning Paris’s vanishing main street, he writes, “Wal-Mart, the store that wiped out the merchants, shuttered everything, has never offered a lonely widow a turkey dinner, a day of fellowship among friends, or hope” (217). He feels most at home where he never fit in and shows true affection and empathy for townspeople who were taught by their religion and their government to hate him.
(Full Article Available in Western American Literature via Project Muse)
This past weekend, I was a guest on Daniel Crocker’s podcast Sanesplaining, a show dedicated to exploring topics related to mental health in current events and culture. I was invited to discuss the classic Sci Fi show The Twilight Zone and how it commented on cultural understandings of mental health in its era. My section begins around the 26 minute mark.
Mayday Magazine’s special LGBTQ edition is now available, featuring poetry, fiction, and commentary selected by myself and poet Amy King. The following is an excerpt from our co-authored introduction, “LGBT Writing and the 21st century along with a link to the entire article and issue:
On Sunday, June 12th, 2016, the most fatal mass shooting in American history took the lives of 49 LGBT people and allies. Up to this point, there had been a culturally pervasive sense that the upward trajectory in the cause of LGBT rights meant that LGBT people were becoming less susceptible to bigotry and violence as signaled by the passing of legislation on marriage equality. This sense of tolerance led many to believe that LGBT culture was becoming obsolete. The thought was that becoming accepted into the mainstream meant that an alternative culture of LGBT outcasts was no longer necessary. This viewpoint sees LGBT culture as an ersatz imitation of a community pieced together out of the remnants of society. Now welcomed into society, it was time for LGBT people to cast aside the juvenalia of the queer world: the sexual exploration, the gender ambiguity, and the political dissidence, and embrace the politics of respectability. We’re here, We’re queer had its moment when we had to burst from the closet and fight for our lives during the AIDS epidemic and the rise of the Moral Majority, but just like the feminists and people of color have been told earlier, the passing of a few laws and the corporate adoption of some diversity initiatives meant that the goal of acceptance has been accomplished and it was time to pack up and step down.
What the viewpoint above does not understand is that while fighting for civil rights has always been a priority of LGBT culture, it has never been its end point. LGBT cultures have always been about living and thinking queerly. A queer culture is a non-normative culture; it resists and challenges assumptions and fixedness. Queer culture is in a constant state of flux; it evolves without a predetermined destination. Historically, queer writers have used their marginalized positions in society as an opportunity to critique normative culture from the outside and to investigate and cherish the repressed and devalued parts of human existence. As long as there is a norm, there will be a queer, and thus there will always be a space in the margins in which a universe of experience will be discovered. (full article available at Mayday Magazine)
(Poet, Frank O’Hara)
……..Christopher Hennessy’s Homosexuality is a Poem, is a part-theoretical, part-historical examination of the relationship between post-war poetry and gay identity. Focusing on the work of poets such as Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer, John Wieners, and the poets of the early Gay Liberation Movement, Hennessy contends that the lyrical form allowed gay writers the ability to theorize and imagine gay identity and desire in innovative ways. As they invented new forms of poetic expression that challenged lyrical conventions, they in turn used poetry to object to society’s marginalization and persecution of homosexuality in the 50s and 60s. This poetry, in turn, helped to imagine queer community and politicize gay desire in ways that inspired and vocalized gay politics in the pre- and post-Stonewall eras.
………In his first chapter, Hennessy lays out the structure of his investigation into how post-war gay poets reinvented the lyrical form to fit the queer experience of same-sex desire, the politics of sexual liberation, and gay identity. He identifies these as the principal aims of his study: “making sexuality central instead of peripheral” to the study of a gay poet’s corpus, understanding “postwar lyric as a form still influenced by the long shadow of The New Criticism” via its impact on minoritized gay poets, showing “how the lyric functions differently for the gay poet,” and beginning “new critical conversations” about gay poets in ways that “include taking seriously these eroto-poetics” and conceiving of their creators “as lyric theorists.” (pp.8-9) Hennessy’s approach toward analyzing the work of these pioneering poets is as much a historical project as it is a work of literary criticism. His readings of Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer, and John Wieners stress the oppressive environment of the post-war social climate before the modern gay rights movement as a contributing factor to how they used poetry to theorize and narrate gay experience. Hennessy contends that “the experience of gay male desire, before it had emerged fully as a political and social identity, was a textual experience, a discursive identity rather than a set of acts. But perhaps more importantly it was a question, not an answer, the way in which the best of poems function.” (p.17) Poetry did not merely describe gay male desire; it helped men who felt such desire invent and define themselves.
(Full Article Available via Dissertation Reviews)
My latest article, “Sensing America: Yoko Tawada’s Synesthetic Meditation on Linguistic Spaces in Foreign Tongues” is now available in the book German Women Writers and the Spatial Turn: New Perspectives, edited by Carola Daffner and Beth Muellner. Below is a description of the collection.
The collection is available via Amazon and portions can be accessed on Google Books. Below is the introduction to my article, written by Beth Muellner.
My new article “Crafting Hermaphroditism: Gale Wilhelm’s Lesbian Modernism inWe Too Are Drifting” has been published in the Summer 2014 edition of College Literature. Below are an abstract for the article and a link to Project Muse where the full article can be accessed through most college library subscriptions.
Abstract:
This article argues for a renewed interest in forgotten modernist lesbian author Gale Wilhelm through an examination of her 1935 novel We Too Are Drifting. Aimed at a wide readership, Wilhelm’s novel differs from the work of high-modernist lesbians like Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes with its middlebrow sensibilities. Furthermore, it presents the hermaphrodite as a new metaphor for conceptualizing lesbian identity in contrast to the dominant model of the invert espoused by Radclyffe Hall’s famous The Well of Loneliness. Without engaging in explicit politics, entering into clinical considerations of sexual psychology, or including gratuitously titillating scenes that the public had come to expect with the subject of lesbianism, Wilhelm’s revolutionary gesture needs to be gauged differently: it assumes the lesbian’s right to define her own existence as the a priori condition for writing about lesbian love by focusing on how lesbian artists use visual media to express their identities and desires.
(Full Article Available at Project Muse)
One of the most alarmingly overlooked issues facing lgbt politics is the impact of social and economic class divisions within the lgbt community. Today, as lgbt organizations increasingly promote the image of the upper middle class professional as the face of its campaign for rights, it is more important than ever that we understand the role social and economic class plays in the queer world as issues such as gentrification, homeless youth, and affordable healthcare affect the more vulnerable members of the community. Didier Eribon’s Returning to Reims presents a fresh insight into examining social class as an integral part of gay identity. Part personal memoir, part philosophical treatise on the relationship between sexual identity and social class status, Eribon’s book is both a delicately told tale of a young Frenchman crafting a gay self in the working class world and a stunning analysis of how acculturation into a social class identity affects sexual identity and vice versa.
(Full Review Available at Lambda Literary Review)
As It Ought To Be Announces Chase Dimock as New Managing Editor
I am excited to announce that I will be serving as the Managing Editor of As It Ought To Be. My friend Okla Elliott co-founded this publication and managed it for years before his unexpected passing last spring. I want to keep Okla’s legacy alive by continuing to publish creative pieces and progressive works of social and political commentary. I hope that my friends and colleagues will help me in this endeavor by submitting their work for consideration (contact inquiries.asitoughttobe@gmail.com)and spreading the word about As It Ought To Be’s relaunch.
The full formal announcement can be read at As It Ought To Be.