AN HONEST LIVING: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries, or "needs must when the devil drives"

AN HONEST LIVING: A Memoir of Peculiar Itineraries
STEVEN SALAITA
Fordham University Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$18.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.9* of five

The Publisher Says: An exiled professor’s journey from inside and beyond academe

In the summer of 2014, Steven Salaita was fired from a tenured position in American Indian Studies at the University of Illinois for his unwavering stance on Palestinian human rights and other political controversies. A year later, he landed a job in Lebanon, but that too, ended badly. With no other recourse, Salaita found himself trading his successful academic career to an hourly salaried job. Told primarily from behind the wheel of a school bus–a vantage point from which Salaita explores social anxiety, suburban architecture, political alienation, racial oppression, working-class solidarity, professional malfeasance, and the joy of chauffeuring children to and from school–An Honest Living describes the author’s decade of turbulent post-professorial life and his recent return to the lectern.

Steven Salaita was practically born to a life in academia. His father taught physics at an HBCU in southern West Virginia and his earliest memories are of life on campus and the cinder walls of the classroom. It was no surprise that he ended up in the classroom straight after graduate school. Yet three of his university jobs–Virginia Tech, the University of Illinois, and the American University of Beirut {AUB}–ended in public controversy. Shaken by his sudden notoriety and false claims of antisemitism, Salaita found himself driving a school bus to make ends meet. While some considered this just punishment for his anti-Zionist beliefs, Steven found that driving a bus provided him with not just a means to pay the bills but a path toward freedom of thought.

Now ten years later, with a job at American University at Cairo, Salaita reconciles his past with his future. His restlessness has found a home, yet his return to academe is met with the same condition of fugitivity from whence he was an occasion for defiance, not conciliation. An Honest Living presents an intimate personal narrative of the author’s decade of professional joys and travails.

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My Review: I have experienced being in the crosshairs of the True Believers. It was not as awful for me, old retiree and disabled, as it was for able-bodied new dad and advanced-degree having Steve. My career is an avocation, not a livelihood; I read books and write about them whether or not anyone pats attention to me. I do not do this for money so I am more insulated from that harm, which made me feel the nervousness of Author Steve's situation more sharply. If I'm this tense when piled on, dismissed in demeaning terms, then blocked by people I'd assumed were not judgmental, how must someone with a job he likes and wants to keep doing as well as a family to support feel?!

One thing is for sure, he felt the need to get a paycheck very quickly. Leaving a professorship for a seat at the front of a schoolbus was not the comedown I think his enemies within academia thought it would be. It certainly makes me understand Mao's cultural revolution more clearly...tell an academic he's now a "menial worker" and watch him wither like a salted slug. Not Author Steve. He did the "menial" job, thought about what principles and ethics are for, and came out of the situation with very cute anecdotes about his kid passengers, and a damn good job in Cairo working for the American University in Cairo. (I read a lot of their press's books.) I'm very glad for that because I think Author Steve belongs in the driver's seat of young peoples' education, always has but even moreso after his recent experiences. He can now speak with authority about the hypocrisy and the shabbiness of the Establishment's vaunted belief in the free exchange of ideas and the protection of the right to free speech within their institutions.

It's worthwhile to read a memoir by someone who's been victimized for standing up for his principles. It's fun to read the wry reflections of a man who's never lost his principles under pressure. It's deeply instructive to take the tour of modern cancel culture with one of the canceled. A book doing all of these things is a must-read in my never-remotely-humble opinion.

QUEER AS CAMP: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality, preaching to the choir...but charismatically

QUEER AS CAMP: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality
KENNETH B. KIDD (ed.) & DERRITT MASON (ed.)
Fordham University Press
$33.00 trade paper, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: To camp means to occupy a place and/or time provisionally or under special circumstances. To camp can also mean to queer. And for many children and young adults, summer camp is a formative experience mixed with homosocial structure and homoerotic longing. In Queer as Camp, editors Kenneth B. Kidd and Derritt Mason curate a collection of essays and critical memoirs exploring the intersections of "queer" and "camp," focusing especially on camp as an alternative and potentially nonnormative place and/or time.

Exploring questions of identity, desire, and social formation, Queer as Camp delves into the diverse and queer-enabling dimensions of particular camp/sites, from traditional iterations of camp to camp-like ventures, literary and filmic texts about camp across a range of genres (fantasy, horror, realistic fiction, graphic novels), as well as the notorious appropriation of Indigenous life and the consequences of "playing Indian."

These accessible, engaging essays examine, variously, camp as a queer place and/or the experiences of queers at camp, including Vermont's Indian Brook, a single-sex girls' camp that has struggled with the inclusion of nonbinary and transgender campers and staff; the role of Jewish summer camp as a complicated site of sexuality, social bonding, and citizen-making as well as a potentially if not routinely queer-affirming place. They also attend to cinematic and literary representations of camp, such as the Eisner award-winning comic series Lumberjanes, which revitalizes and revises the century-old Girl Scout story; Disney's Paul Bunyan, a short film that plays up male homosociality and cross-species bonding while inviting queer identification in the process; Sleepaway Camp, a horror film that exposes and deconstructs anxieties about the gendered body; and Wes Anderson's critically acclaimed Moonrise Kingdom, which evokes dreams of escape, transformation, and other ways of being in the world.

Highly interdisciplinary in scope, Queer as Camp reflects on camp and Camp with candor, insight, and often humor.

Contributors: Kyle Eveleth, D. Gilson, Charlie Hailey, Ana M. Jimenez-Moreno, Kathryn R. Kent, Mark Lipton, Kerry Mallan, Chris McGee, Roderick McGillis, Tammy Mielke, Alexis Mitchell, Flavia Musinsky, Daniel Mallory Ortberg, Annebella Pollen, Andrew J. Trevarrow, Paul Venzo, Joshua Whitehead

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My Review: Camp. One set of four letters, widely divergent meanings to different groups. Don't think these essays, from the queer-studies, and mostly queer, people listed above are in any way insensible of this dichotomy. It gets played with a lot.

One note I'll give you before you even think about reading the collection: Read Sontag's Notes on Camp before you get into these weeds. Everyone herein reproduced has, says so, and/or refers to that work. Besides it's well worth reading just because.

Academocs are famous for writing at each other, Essays and articles in their specialist subjects used a shared vocabulary that most of us do not share. That's certainly true of this collection's contents. Yet I've given it four stars. That's all down to the fact that the essayists have all tied their thoughts either to pop-cultural texts like Mielke and Trevarrow's engrossing"Camping with Walt Disney’s Paul Bunyan: An Essay Short" and Kyle Eveleth's "Striking Camp: Empowerment and Re-Presentation in Lumberjanes", which might be my favorite essay in the whole thing; or to experiences of going to summer camp that I could relate to, like D. Gilson's "Notes on Church Camp" which was a tough read for me.

What I got from this assemblage of academic thought about youthful queerness was the striking, clarifying bolt of insight that I was supposed to feel the exclusion and rejection of camp. It was meant to, designed to, cause this Otherness I knew I had to be thrown (verb not chosen lightly) into high relief. I was *intended* to feel the hostility of my peers so I would buckle down and try to be like them.

Fat chance.

The other reason for a boy like me to go to camp, to be a camper, was to show to the other boys that I was fair game. As long as I failed at their tasks, it was okay to be cruel...it was expected. "Letting the kids sort themselves out" was the way the appalling cruelty of ut was sold to parents.

That has never been clearer than after reading these stories of queer camping experiences. I don't know who among the readers of my blog will most likely want to spend the high price of the collection; I hope that, for anyone interested in the subject, their local library will step in and add this to the extant sociology texts, or if you live in an enlightened place, their queer studies collection.

STROKE BOOK: The Diary of a Blindspot, trade paper edition of a book that speaks to me differently now

STROKE BOOK: The Diary of a Blindspot
JONATHAN ALEXANDER
Fordham University Press
$15.95 trade paper, available Tuesday

THE TRADE PAPER EDITION PUBLISHES ON THE 7TH, SO I'M REVISITING MY RECOMMENDATION OF THIS BOOK.

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: An archive of personal trauma that addresses how a culture still toxic to queer people can reshape a body

In the summer of 2019, Jonathan Alexander had a minor stroke, what his doctors called an "eye stroke." A small bit of cholesterol came loose from a vein in his neck and instead of shooting into his brain and causing damage, it lodged itself in a branch artery of his retina, resulting in a permanent blindspot in his right eye. In Stroke Book, Alexander recounts both the immediate aftermath of his health crisis, which marked deeper health concerns, as well as his experiences as a queer person subject to medical intervention.

A pressure that the queer ill contend with is feeling at fault for their condition, of having somehow chosen illness as punishment for their queerness, however subconsciously. Queer people often experience psychic and somatic pressures that not only decrease their overall quality of life but can also lead to shorter lifespans. Emerging out of a medical emergency and a need to think and feel that crisis through the author's sexuality, changing sense of dis/ability, and experience of time, Stroke Book invites readers on a personal journey of facing a health crisis while trying to understand how one's sexual identity affects and is affected by that crisis. Pieceing and stitching together his experience in a queered diary form, Alexander's lyrical prose documents his ongoing, unfolding experience in the aftermath of the stroke. Through the fracturing of his text, which almost mirrors his fractured sight post-stroke, the author grapples with his shifted experience of time, weaving in and out, while he tracks the aftermath of what he comes to call his "incident" and meditates on how a history of homophobic encounters can manifest in embodied forms.

The book situates itself within a larger queer tradition of writing—first, about the body, then about the body unbecoming, and then, yet further, about the body ongoing, even in the shadow of death. Stroke Book also documents the complexities of critique and imagination while holding open a space for dreaming, pleasure, intimacy, and the unexpected.

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My Review: I reviewed the hardcover edition of this book in June, 2022. In January, 2023, I had three strokes. As Fordham University Press is releasing this trade paper edition Tuesday next, it seemed like a good time to revisit the read, and to tart up my review. In the year-plus since my own strokes, I have had a lot of time to think over what happened to me, how it happened, and what I have lost as well as gained from the terrifying bodily othering of one's brain being altered physically.

Here is my 2022 review:

Author Alexander does a lot of thinking. It is all in his prose.

I found myself thinking beyond {others}'s formal approach to the even more particularly queer nature of how I understood my stroke, of how I had been invited by a homophobic culture to think and feel about my body. A pressure that the queer ill contend with is feeling at fault for their condition, of having somehow chosen illness as punishment for their queerness, however subconsciously.

His world includes a husband, Mack, and a bunch of doctors who see him at need. So yes...he's white male privilege on legs. He's loved, employed, and creatively gifted (even works with my dote Michelle Latiolais!); he's able to get a publishing deal, so he's well connected.

None of that matters to cholesterol hanging onto the walls of this one artery, though, and when it takes off and lands in a new place that leaves him partially blind (and him with amblyopia already! PLUS it's his dominant eye that has the stroke!) He lands in that weird place called "chronic illness." And he'll never leave it. As a Queer man, that's a bad, grim journey...so many, many side-paths and so many losses and so much rage against the medical establishment that excuses its homophobia as "concern for patient privacy". But mostly, the fact is, this is a new resident in a community he's circled for decades, since AIDS through some "calculus of divine justice" has been seen as guilty without trial or concern for truth of Deserving It. Whatever bad thing "It" is, the gay men of the world Deserve It.

Not true; never was true; but there it is, like a rock in your panna cotta. Author Alexander asks, as he copes with his new situation as well as his mother's decline into old age, "is this what aging is like?" And answers himself, "Too soon. Always too soon." Amen, Soul Sibling. A-bloody-men!

***

So what would I add, what would I change, now that it has happened to me?

Really, not a whole lot of anything. I'll say that my recovery from three strokes has felt miraculous at times. I can't recall ever feeling as though I would need to adjust my quality-of-life expectations downward because of the strokes and their effects. My pre-existing issues have not worsened due to the strokes; if I have less and less energy, well, I'm not growing younger am I?

In short, I feel so very fortunate. I think the author realizes he was as well, though honestly he doesn't really make much of a meal about how he has changed, so I felt very much in tune with him and his attitude. Join him on a meditative journey through the changes that aging and its occasional curveball events will ring on your life.

GLOBAL QUEENS: An Urban Mosaic, nostalgia for the ex-New Yorker or inspiration for the aspiring New Yorker

GLOBAL QUEENS: An Urban Mosaic
JOSEPH HEATHCOTT
Empire State Editions/Fordham University Press
$34.95 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: A vibrant exploration of the everyday life of one of the most diverse places in the world: Queens, New York.

Remade by decades of immigration, Queens, New York, has emerged as an emblematic space of social mixing and encounters across multiple lines of difference. With its expansive subdivisions, tangled highways, and centerless form, it is also New York’s most enigmatic borough. It can feel alternately like a big city, a tight-knit village, a featureless industrial zone, or a sprawling suburban community. Through more than 200 contemporary photographs, Joseph Heathcott captures this multifaceted borough and one of the most diverse places in the United States.

Drawn from more than a decade of roaming around Queens and snapping photos, Heathcott conveys the juxtaposition of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the mundane and the surprising, and the staggering social diversity that best characterizes Queens. At the heart of the story are two separate but entwined histories: the rapid expansion of the borough’s built environment through the twentieth century, and the millions of people who have traveled from near and far to call Queens home. Newcomers have had to confront discrimination, white racial hostility, legal challenges, and language barriers. They have had to struggle to find adequate housing, places to worship, and jobs that pay enough to survive. And they have done all of this in the borough’s jumbled collection of neighborhoods, housing types, civic and religious institutions, factories and warehouses, commercial streets, and strip malls.

Heathcott makes primary use of documentary photography to bring these social and spatial realities of everyday life into relief. He also draws on demographic data, archival sources, planning documents, news stories, and reports. The result is a visual meditation on Queens that provides clues about an urban future where notions of citizenship and belonging are negotiated across multiple lines of difference, but where a sense of ”getting along”—however roughly textured and unfinished—has taken hold in the everyday life of the streets.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: The city I've lived in, or longed to return to, since the 1980s is always entered via the Borough of Queens: Both airports are there, and we're not going to count Newark as it is its own major city and port of entry for all of New Jersey's international flyers. It's the biggest borough, it's got the most oceanfront exposure, it's always been a huge part of the immigrant experience of New York City for many, possibly most, ethnic minorities getting a foothold in the Land of Opportunity.

The side of New York City that most who visit, and many who live in, it just don't think about...lots of natural areas still exist that aren't carefully manicured parks.

To those who live here in the city, or as I do now, mere meters from Queens (Nassau County WAS Queens until it seceded in 1901 for depressingly racist reasons), think of it as the borough of homes:

...I think gemütlich is a great word, and one that pretty much *is* Queens.

The place is an educational hub, having numerous university campuses, and a separate public library system that serves a tremendously large (2.4 million people) and diverse population:

...as well as being very close and convenient to the employment and entertainment hub that is Manhattan:

...so it's no wonder so very many people who come here end up in the already-established immigrant communities, and the comparatively affordable housing, that this global city offers.

One of the unappealing human characteristics is the need to Other people with slighting nicknames. A common one, from the Manhattan of my youth, was to call the people who came to our home patch (as we saw it) "Bridge and Tunnel Kids" regardless of their age. The bridges and tunnels referenced here are part of the astoundingly efficient and well-designed transportation infrastructure of the borough. It's all a lot prettier than you've been led to believe, too:

...and works a lot better than many cities with much smaller populations can manage. After all, the bridges and tunnels don't just bring the millions of Queens residents to and from different destinations...they serve millions from Long Island, millions from Brooklyn, a million-plus from Manhattan, and a few hundred thousand from Staten Island.

New York City is a place so many aspire to live, for so many reasons; a gift to one of them that you know wouldn't come amiss. The sad soul who left, but would like to come home, is also an apt recipient. The stories about Queens, the social history aspects of the book, also make it a good gift idea for your scholarly pal who talks a lot about how we live in these weird constructs called "cities" without thinking about how they work. Not for nothing did this book win The David R. Coffin Publication Grant.

Beautiful and educational, informative and entertaining...a great package.

A SCARLET PANSY, 84-year-old call for tolerance by emulation

A SCARLET PANSY
ROBERT SCULLY
Fordham University Press
$19.95 paper, available now

Rating: 4 quizzical stars of five

The Publisher Says: First published in 1932, A Scarlet Pansy is an extraordinarily vivid and richly textured depiction of American queer life in the early twentieth century, tracing the coming of age of androgynous Fay Etrange.

Born in small-town Pennsylvania and struggling with her difference, Fay eventually accepts her gender and sexual nonconformity and immerses herself in the fairy subculture of New York City.

A self-proclaimed "oncer" - never tricking with same man twice - she immerses herself in the nightclubs, theatres, and street life of the city, cavorting with kindred spirits including female impersonators, streetwalkers, and hustlers as well as other fairies and connoisseurs of rough trade.

While reveling in these exploits she becomes a successful banker and later attends medical school, where she receives training in obstetrics. There she also develops her life's ambition to find a cure for gonorrhea, a disease supposedly "fastened on mankind as a penalty for enjoying love."

A Scarlet Pansy stands apart from similar fiction of its time -- as well as the ensuing decades -- by celebrating rather than pathologizing its effeminate and sexually adventurous protagonist. In this edition, republished for the first time in its original unexpurgated form, Robert J. Corber examines the way in which it flew in the face of other literature of the time in its treatment of gender expression and same-sex desire. He places the novel squarely within its social and cultural context of a century ago while taking into account the book's checkered publication history as well as the question of the novel's unknown author.

Much more than cultural artifact, A Scarlet Pansy remains a uniquely delightful and penetrating work of literature, resonating as much with present-day culture as it is illuminating of our understanding of queer history, and challenging our notions of what makes a man a woman, and vice versa.

THE PUBLISHER APPROVED MY NETGALLEY REQUEST IN EXCHANGE FOR AN HONEST REVIEW Thank you to the press and to NetGalley!

My Review: I am gobsmacked by several facts about this book: That it was *published* in 1932! and that it remains pretty much unique in literature as being told, unapologetically, from the PoV of a real flamer, a pansy, a nancy-boy...that is to say, an effeminate man. So much emphasis...so very, very much emphasis!...is placed in today's mainstreamed gay world on "passing" or being a "straight-acting" gay man! Our leaders are preaching tolerance, acceptance, inclusion, and the rank-and-file put up sex ads for "straight-acting" sex objects. What in the world does this convey except internalized homophobia? Is mainstreaming to blame for this? No. But believe you me, the disappearance of the gay ghetto, or at least its depopulation, is down to the mainstreaming efforts of the past 30 years. That makes the world a little bit *ironically quirked eyebrow* less safe for the effeminate men and the butch women in our community.

Fay Etrange would be no more welcome in a public panel on Gay Issues now than she would have been in a medical school lecture hall in the 19th century. Very much a queen, her passage through the world as presented by "Robert Scully" was a busy one, bestowing royal favors on a grateful American manhood:

This first meeting with a strange man was almost prophetic. For the rest of her life she was to meet his kind, wherever and whenever she travelled--always seeking her and the favors she could bestow.

This set-up makes sense to me, since I've never lacked for the company of "regular guys" in my own transit of gay life. It's been my design, willingly subscribed to by the parties of the second part, to educate and inform the unimaginative males of the USA of their other options. Sometimes the teachings took, sometimes not so much. But in all the attendant mishegas, I did my dead-level best not to make assumptions but let the situation teach me as much as it did him. Fay is the most unusual kind of character in non-romantic gay fiction, in that she practices this behavior as well. In a strange way it was a relief to me to have the intimate details of Fay's affairs left to the imagination. It's not that I'm squeamish, perish forbid!, but the fact that Fay isn't in first-person narration would make any detailed description of the various acts and positions feel peculiarly and unpleasantly prurient.

Fay arrives at this sort of thinking by attending to her own inner moral compass, and educating herself broadly though never at the expense of delving deeply into topics that fascinate her:

Electing to take religion as one of her college courses, she had obtained a wide knowledge of the teachings of the East. Practically all began with assumptions of infallibility, which, though unproven, the disciples then proceeded to teach as basic facts. Their leader, she found, ignored the selfish reasons which led them on and caused them to set aside reason and endeavor to inculcate blind faith. She had no faith. She could see no reason to have faith. She was happier without it. Nothing was explained ultimately; why accept puny, childish explanations?

Soul sister! I know from several deep conversations with my gay uncle, a sailor as it happens, that people aren't products of their times and stations unless they choose to be. Even in what we view as unenlightened, hag-ridden by gawd, times there were mental and even social non-conformists. The past is made up of once-living people; history is indeed (sometimes lamentably completely) his story; we're really not unique in our deepest selves as we're all human. This is always a welcome reminder for me, find it where I may.

Of course it's one thing to remember that people been people forever, that our own "unique" needs and desires are only unique in our limited experience:

The avenue seemed full of gay people these days, persons as happy as she. At intervals were stationed the mounted traffic police. Their splendid figures, their neat, well-fitting uniforms, their highly polished puttees protecting perfectly formed legs, the thigh outlined by pressure against the horse's side, all combined to make a picture which she found irresistibly appealing. She found herself looking for the mounted police. She formed preferences for one or the other. She thought of the Aztecs with their idea that men astride of horses were some kind of god,and she smiled to think that her poetic sense was interpreting these horsemen in the same light. She liked especially to view the officers from the back, the torso, the carriage, the outline of the leg all accentuated.

...hmmm? What was that? Oh sorry, I went to mental Bermuda for a moment there. Yes, well, do you need any further evidence that we're all sisters under the skin? Some details tweaked, or twerked, and this statement of admiring desire fits in the mind of any one of us bald bonobos. The slightly namby-pamby modern mantra "love is love" is a short and punchy reminder that we're all sexual creatures. Desire, love, need, any and all of these things, are organizing principles in our own little lives, and we're well advised to protect others in their exercise of them if we wish to be protected in our turn. I think this statement would be whole-heartedly seconded by Fay Letrange, and the pseudonymous "Robert Scully" who created her.

With this realization comes a further revelation of the commonality of human experience, that of the honest and fearless and searching moral inventory. Know yourself as you really are, not as you and others would like you to be (or insist that you are):

"Perhaps it's natural to them; what is natural to them may not be natural to another. Imagine them married. What would their offspring be? Probably even more erratic. Perhaps they are fulfilling their destiny by not marrying. Did you ever consider that? I often think that people who do not wish to have children should not be criticized, for brobably there is some basic instinct which prompts them not to be parents. Perhaps they are really not fit to be parents."

Amen! That this conversation was put into the mouth of a person created by a Victorian writer, and set in the very earliest years of the twentieth century, was a small shock of surprised recognition to me. I've always kicked hard against the Cult of the Mother, the ascription to all females, ladies, womyn, uterus-havers of an innate and all-powerful desire to give birth to and nurture young. I applaud those with the self-knowledge to say "no, thanks" and the strength to stick to it. It isn't easy to swim against the tide, which makes most of us leery of doing it. How much more difficult, we think, it must have been for those poor benighted children who came before us! Stuff and nonsense. Reading this transgressive book from the past is listening to a voice shouting reason and reasonability. That it feels as transgressive today as it would have 84 years ago is more a statement of human nature's irreducible commonness throughout history: Bow to the Vox Populi, speak only the Norma Loquendi, or be marked out as Strange. But don't kid yourself that it was harder, easier, whatever then or now.

"You are sure you mean bliss?"

"Yes, an island or some place where we could all live or go to easily whenever we pleased and do all the things we wish to do without thought of the narrow-mindedness of others."

"You are asking too much. Oh, for the Isle of Crete! You are wishing a return to the good old Pagai times when all honor was paid even to prostitutes."

"No, not asking too much, just asking for a natural morality, a thing which varies with each bird, beast, and human and for which due allowance is not made in lawmaking."

We all long for Paradise. Some are willing to allow others into it with them. I like those of the latter opinion the best of all.

It seems as if the world considers a climate of tolerance to be asking too much these days as well as in those days. I don't need to give examples of events springing from the external pressure imposed by intolerance, or of the personal price paid by those subjected to it. I'm equally sure I don't need to give examples of those expressing their internal conflicts by mismatched rhetoric and inner monologue. I think this passage pretty much sums up the disconnect:

The professor would describe all sorts of aberrant types, their prominent, wild eyes, their too thick or too narrow chests or hips and their too thin or too heavy leg muscles; he would illustrate the swagger of the feminine type and the mincing short-stepped swaying gait of the masculine, the fluttering, so called; he would tell of their nocturnal amusements and occupations, and when he had finished he had so enthused his entire class that they were ready to go down town and start a laboratory course at once.

Heteronormative locker-room raillery, complete with ill-willed imitation, as medical school education. Charming. The response of the students isn't unusual, which is in and of itself unusual. Things really have changed little if this passage still speaks to the ordinary experience of the different. But then again, compared to fifty years ago, the intolerance of such a scenario is worth remarking on because it isn't simply the "oh well" resignation of the narrator but his sharp-eyed attention to the eagerness of the audience to go find some action for themselves that's a ray of hope. Soon dashed, of course, as is the way of things in an imperfect world:

"Have a sense of humor. Remember, Gawd must have his little jokes on the human species."

"I feel bitter, bitter against the half-men who make our laws. Come on, let's legislate against the tides too."

"Be practical," suggested Miss Bull-Mawgan. "The only recourse is to see that every ecclesiastical student is properly seduced, and thus liberalized. The pulpit, after all, makes the laws in this country."

I'm happy that I live in a state where marriage equality is law. I am sad to live in a world where that equality of access to the law's protections, duties, and rights is so controversial that such a protection is necessary. I can barely imagine what the gay men of 100 years ago would think of such a protection! Impossible dream! And now that it's a given in some places I wonder how it was ever not. The scary monsters are out in the open, and whaddaya know! They're the neighbors.

Not everyone is comfortable with that. The neighbors are supposed to be much like us, after all, that's why we elect to live in certain places and not others. I can see that. After all, not everyone can hold up their end in the stereotypically gay witty, dirty badinage:

"Aunty Beach-Bütsch, control yourself! I shall lend him out to friends and near relations. We are coming back in two years."

"And I shall have drunk myself to death by that time," wailed old Aunty Beach-Bütsch. "But Mason, we shall be friends to the end."

Another opportunity for Miss Savoy. "Which end? I didn't know you loved Mason so much, Aunty Beach-Bütsch!"

"Love him? I love every inch of him, from the ends of his hairs to the tips of his toenails. Why I love his very guts!"

"That's a very vulgar but adequate description of the depths of your passion, Aunty Beach-Bütsch!"

Need I mention that the female monikers are hung on males? Mason, on the other hand, is a man, and a newly married one, being bartered off by his blushing bride Marjorie, née Dike, as she is known from that moment on. It sounds like ordinary conversation to me, but the people I tried it out on were flustered and taken aback. No wonder straight people fear the gays buying the house next door! They speak Camp, and there's nothing scarier than having the neighbors speak a different language from yours, right?

But in the end, we all succumb to a common malady, that of falling in love. She's been a "oncer," a one-fuck-and-bye bye gal, since her earliest years. But that changes because the pressures of going to war, being under fire, trying to do her duty as a doctor in service of men shattered by modern munitions. It's grueling work, most often sad in its outcomes; watching a generation of men vanish before her eyes makes Fay susceptible to a sentimental attachment that she would have rejected only a short time before. Her medical studies having taken her to Berlin, her first true love is a German officer; after his tragic death in her arms, Fay falls head over heels for a soldier boy on his way to the front in France's trenches.

His body was sweet and clean smelling. As she finished [massaging his dislocated shoulder], Fay bent and gently kissed him on the neck, that part where the skin is so soft abd sensitive, midway between the angle of the jaw and the hair line at the back of the neck. He opened his eyes, startled, then smiled as he murmured, "Oh! It's you. That's all right." He folded his arms about her, bringing her head close to his, then like a contented child sank into a deep sleep. His clean body odor gave her keenest delight. She hesitated to attempt to alter their relationship, and possibly lose him entirely. He had accepted her as a pal, that she would be.

Some variation on this sentiment is familiar to everyone who is an adult. It's amazing to me that anyone could grudge this simple rapture to another soul. Because that's what homophobia is, denial of the commonality of the experience of love, loving, cherishing someone for their inner being while reveling in the sensory pleasures of their outer being. How is that a good thing in anyone's mind? Shouldn't we all be promoting anything, anything at all, that can stitch us tighter into the social contract of being alive and a player in the world's arena?

Here's an eighty-four-year-old reminder that this should indeed be our goal. How amazing to find such validation for a "modern" world-view here. It's also a bit sad to need this reminder in the twenty-first century. We are all as Heaven made us, the Confucian quip goes. Let's aspire to be that commonsensical in our dealings with the Others who make up our entire world.