poems from the Morning Star

ISBN 978-1-90582-42-1

Edited by John Rety

John Rety (Rety Janos) who chose these poems was a Hungarian Jewish anarchist who survived Auschwitz (1944-45) because as a healthy youth he was sent to a labour battalion.  He escaped from the camp and trekked westwards to what became the British Zone in western Germany.  From that time until Hungary joined the EU he rejoiced in his ‘Stateless Person’ papers.  He recounted this in delightful article in Peace News.  Faced with having to choose a State he decided on the UK.  He had, after all, lived for more than six decades in England.  He ran poetry ‘sessions’ in the Quaker meeting house on Torriano Avenue, north London, (within shouting distance of Holloway and Pentonville prisons).  Morning Star, a Communist journal, – now decidedly non-sectarian – offered Rety another platform.

So what are the poems like?  Mostly excellent, and in all styles from offerings by Johannes Kerkoven his ‘visual [it used to be called 'concrete'] poetry’ includes Scrabble and Out of Work which is sardonically funny.  The oldest is Robert Burns’s Auld Lyne Sang there are a fair number of translations (Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo appear) some are ‘political’, and none the worse for that.  A fair number are by ‘displaced persons’ / political exiles like Rety Janos. One offering, Jennifer Johnson’s Disconnection and Reconnection is about surviving the bombing of London Underground (specifically the Edgware Road station attack. in 2007).

It would be nonsensical to pick out a ‘best’ poem, or even a favourite the stuff is too good for that, and Rety was not in the business of pushing a particular ‘line’.  I (and it is emphatically a persona ‘ting’) was struck by Jeremy Kingston’s three poems.  The Taste of His Hair (p 69) is the only poem about sexual love – and is addressed to another man.  Paying for the Games is a (slightly) tiresome attack on the ‘trimming’ of other budgets to finance the Paralympic and Olympic Games.  How does Jeremy know that Shakespeare and Goethe weren’t sports fanatics?  The latter was a tennis player – I think?  We have, of course, been promised an ‘Olympic legacy’ – the ‘legacy’ will probably be a huge debt.  The Olympics really ought to be permanently centred on Athens, where they started.

Jeremy Kingston’s Being Pius is a wonderful piece of writing.  The sort of concentrated venom and hatred is startling – and very unusual, even ‘out of place’  – in the genteel purlieus of Anglo (even ‘Anglosphere’) poetry.  Here it is in full:

Observe Pope Pius, scraping Jews

like shitballs off his neat white shoes;

the gold for his pince-nez he took

from a girl’s jaw in Ravensbruck;

but now his pale eyes brim with pity

for the art-works in the Eternal City;

daily he offers prayers for them

at a statue of the B. V. M.

carved in white wood from Bethlehem.

Mary’s a Jewess he’ll accept,

he weeps remembering how she wept

to watch her son die on a tree

more slowly than with Zyklon-B.

We are naïve to be surprised

Pope John Paul wished him canonized.

— Deep in the Pit Pope Pius flits.

Now John Paul joins him there and sits

smirking with the hypocrites.

This was published on 24 October 2007.  It a fine example of Anglo self-satisfaction — and self-delusion.  Pius was personally involved in saving scores of thousands of Jewish people.  The Catholic Church in the Nazi Realm was under suspicion.  The encyclical Mitt brennender Sorge published under the name of Pope Pius XI, but written by Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli (Pius XII from 1938) based on a draft by Cardinal Faulhaber, Archbishop of Munich did not help matters.  It had been ‘brewing’ for several years and published on March 10, 1937 – but dated March 14.

The Encyclical was written in German, was printed secretly in Germany, and circulated secretly to every Catholic church in the Nazi Realm, and thereby read publicly at every Mass on March 14, 1937, – Passion Sunday.  Some historians seem surprised that the Vatican did such a thing.  The consequences did not help Catholics in Germany, workers and masters who had printed the Encyclical lost their livelihoods.  Hundreds of priests, nuns, and other ‘religious’ were imprisoned and show trials mainly for alleged sexual offences took place.  Catholic groups that survived when Communist organisations had been dissolved were broken up.  Catholic politicians were put in concentration camps.   It’s possible to pick holes in the text – it did not specifically denounce Hitler or his Party by name – but at one point he and it are described as ‘monstrous’.

One looks forward to an Anglo poet wondering in print why (just as an example), the RAF and USAF never bombed Auschwitz.  They turned every German city and nearly every town into dustbowls, including Königsburg (now Kaliningrad) the capital of East Prussia hundreds of miles to the north east of Auschwitz.  They had the Nazi Realm’s air space at their mercy from at the latest mid-1944.  Not one bomb was dropped on a concentration or an extermination camp.  Was the fact that hatred and contempt for Jews was respectable in the US and UK a factor in this matter?

Seán McGouran

What I can report on is a beautifully delivered, well-rounded concert that would satisfy the most ‘picky’ audience round the corner in any of the South Bank venues. (Except that St John’s has a lovely acoustic, like the Ulster Hall’s, and unlike the RFH (Royal Festival Hall)). It may be a matter of my hairy lugs playing tricks but the RFH’s acoustic has always sounded cotton-wooly to me. We got the Mendelssohn No. 3 – the Scottish Symphony. My subconscious kept wondering why it wasn’t the Italian. (I’ve been in a state of confusion since the age of six, being a sexagenarian has little to do with the matter).

Next came a Beethoven Romance for fiddle and orchestra (in F) the soloist was Ed Price. He is the Leaders’ ‘sub’, when she is not available. There was a handout complete with mug shot of Master Price. He got an Associated Board Performance Diploma in 2005. It was clearly well deserved. It was a strikingly elegant performance —though Beethoven is not really supposed to do ‘elegant’. I must admit that I have always thought that Beethoven’s Violin Concerto has a fairly high GEF (glazed eye factor), but I’d really like Ed Price and the LGSO, to tackle it at some point. Ed Price is a Silly Servant in the Dept of Works and Pomps (um… Pensions) and is an “”official geek”". Surely the proper technical term is ‘nerd’?

The concert ended with a beautiful performance of the Brahms third symphony. His ‘pastoral’ – it was a most elegant and – genial, is the only word, performance.

Nights Beneath The Nation

Denis Kehoe

Serpent’s Tail

ISBN 9 781846 686795

This is a novel about ‘Daniel Ryan’, who is in his late sixties, written by Denis Kehoe, who is in his early twenties.  The blurb on the cover of this edition quotes a review by David Norris.  He says, among other things, that it is a “a feat of creative memory”.  The ‘memory’ is what disturbs me, rather than the ‘creative’.  Daniel Ryan is from a hick town in south west Ireland.  The people who live there are boring and lead dull straitened lives.  The Spanish Civil war erupts into the narrative at one point.  A “red faced” priest denounces the Spanish Republic and urges support for a man called Franco.  Daniel’s father, who fought in the War of Independence (but appears never to discuss the matter), for no clear reason wants to go and fight against Franco.

Franco (not particularly prominent at the start of the military rebellion) and the Falange (which he gutted of its radical politics) were not nice, but there are problems with this cliché.  The pro-Franco Irish Christian Front was a mass movement, and the Connolly Column (whose personnel included an Irish Christian Brother) was small.  The Spanish Republic might have become the ‘last great cause’ in the Irish Republic relatively recently, but contemporary Christians had a right to be affronted by the behaviour of some of the Republic’s supporters.  They burned down churches, monasteries, and nunneries, and killed priests, nuns and other ‘religious’, in their thousands.  They alienated the peasants who would have supported the Republic if it had simply redistributed the land.

Some other matter does not ring true.  Daniel’s father is a barber by trade, young Daniel helping out on busy days.  The men talk dreary ‘culchie’ talk of the sort one would hear in any market town.

Really?

Was this the only town ‘Éire’ that did not have clashes (especially one would have thought on market-day) between the Blueshirts and the IRA?

Did nobody discuss Fianna Fáil’s policies, like redistribution of the land into thirty acre parcels, the introduction of Búnreacht Éireann (De Valera’s Constitution – ‘bunreacht’ implies ‘fundamental law’)?  Did the ‘Economic War’ between Éire and the UK pass these agricultural producers by?  Was nobody in this (cough) bog-standard Irish town interested in ‘the Missions’, that gigantic enterprise which absorbed the energies of millions of Irish Catholic women and men over generations?

On a mundane level was it only town in the ‘Free State’ not wangling for a sugar factory?

There are other un-truisms.  Már shampla, WW2 was ‘the Emergency’.  A trip to the National Library and a squint at war time newspapers (they were the size of restaurant menus) would demonstrate this to be drivel.  So, too, would a scan of Parliamentary Reports.  Debates, in the Dáil and the Seanad, about – nearly everything – contained references to ‘the war’.  ‘Emergency’ regulations were introduced.  Technically, some were not lifted until 1973.  That would certainly have been made the occasion to belittle ‘Ireland’, if the pretence about the war had not proved more useful.

A fib bruited about over decades is still a fib.

In 1950 Daniel goes to Dublin as a civil servant, (Department unspecified), it too, is full of dreary people.  He joins the Dramatic Society.  It is going to put on Easter Parade.  That seems a bit unlikely.  A recent (1948) musical Easter Parade would have needed singing actors, dancers, dance directors, a choreographer, musicians, a full orchestra, music directors and a conductor.  Possibly another music director would be needed for the chorus.  The composer, Richard Rogers’s contribution is pretty lavish.  This is apart from an over-all producer / director, and money for royalties.

Most amateur drama societies in Ireland were, (and are), quite ambitious.  A number of projects, Belfast’s Lyric Theatre and Circle Theatre (the latter burned to the ground in 1970) arose out of purely amateur endeavours.  The denizens of Donaghmore in deepest culchie-land (Tyrone) built themselves a theatre – because they wanted one.  The Stephens Boyd and Rea, Liam Neeson, and many others, were graduates of this amateur endeavour.  A Civil Service Department DramSoc would probably have had something substantial in mind.

Daniel mentions (p 163) “political plays from England” — in 1950?  English theatre had been plunged into verse drama, stretching the word ‘drama’ a rather long way, for some years by 1950.  It was apolitical (meaning reactionary-to-conservative).  ‘England’ here may stand for the whole of Great Britain.  Wales produced political plays — in Welsh.  Scotland produced some too, mostly written by Paul Vincent Carroll, a native of Dundalk.  John Whiting wrote fairly ‘political’ (prose) plays, he was, and still is, unpersonned.  (The UK’s establishment makes the erstwhile USSR’s look like the rank amateurs they were, at this game).

Daniel joins a ‘real’ AmDram Soc.  It is putting on Lorca’s Blood Wedding.  (Purely as ‘theatre’ is Blood Wedding all that superior to Easter Parade?  I only ask…).  The group is run by ‘Bohemian’ types, one is a Gay man who fought in Spain.  He is famous in Dublin, (‘Ireland’ being put in its culchie, uncultured, box), for being Gay and a former International Brigader.

Both of which seem somewhat unlikely.

Also involved in this, let’s be serious, rather precious venture is Anthony.  He is a perfect example of an ‘Ascendancy’ left-over.  He’s not.  He is from a wealthy Catholic background.  He hates his parents and will repudiate his family.  Just as soon as he gets his (expensive) degree, from Trinity [College, Dublin - TCD].  Why would his backward mere Irish parents allow him to attend TCD?  It wasn’t much ‘cop’ as a tertiary college at that time.  A Fianna Fáil government saved it from closing down.  It gave Trinity a huge grant and sent in the building restorers to save and preserve the fabric of the place.  (The ‘Inter-Party’ Government of the late 1940s engaged in straightforward, (tight-fisted), sectarianism in regard to TCD.)

Anthony’s parents send him to see a psychiatrist because of his homosexuality.  This is deemed to be reactionary and unenlightened.  (In the UK and the US in 1950, he would have been given electric shock ‘treatment’, put in baths of ‘dry ice’, or possibly subjected to lobotomy.   The latter involves flipping the scull-cap off the head, exposing the brain – then flicking a scalpel through the frontal lobes.  These – essentially magical – practices allegedly ‘cured’ the ‘defect’. They often reduced the ‘patient’ to a ‘vegetative’ state – or induced forms of epilepsy.

Were psychiatrists’ particularly prominent in post-WW2 Ireland?  Would not these sad benighted people (his parents) be more inclined to send him to a priest?  Possibly even a priest-psychiatrist.  Though possibly not a Freudian, the Pope (Pius XII)’s denunciation of the ‘pan-sexual’ implications of Freudianism used to be brought forward as evidence of the reactionary nature of Popery.  Then feminists began to say much the same thing…

Daniel becomes starry-eyed about Anthony.  Among other things he can “speak three European languages” whereas Daniel can only speak English and Irish (two European languages, surely?).  Anthony eventually commits suicide in a manner that would satisfy the most demanding drama-queen.  This is made the platform for another attack on Irish mores of the time.  A big fuss is made of the suicide and of the homosexual nature their relationship.  But surely that sort of gross publicity was characteristic of the British press?

When the British stopped sending people to prison for attempting to commit suicide, they took to sneering at Irish attitudes to suicide.  Irish courts and coroners tended to imply that, (to British journalists’ at least) grossly obvious suicides were accidents.  This was due to ingrained stupidity and the (RC) Church’s inculcation of horror at self-murder.  That such verdicts forced insurance firms to shell out money to the deceased’s relatives never struck them.  There was also a tendency, in Ireland, to discretion about such matters.  Ripping open still-throbbing psychological wounds was a Fleet Street speciality.  The police connived at this sort of ‘cover up’.  Daniel, (despite the trauma he has suffered), is put on the boat to America by his loving, but uncomprehending parents.  They (being culchie chumps) had presumably never encountered the names and reputations of Roger Casement or Oscar Wilde.

Daniel rails about Ireland being backward and, in a vague way, not left wing.  In New York City he becomes a wealthy businessman.  Presumably he jettisoned his implied political principles in mid-Atlantic.  (Leftist nice guys don’t make fortunes in New York City).  He returns to Ireland half a century on – and is still annoyed by the place, largely for the same reasons.  The place is still backward.  (The usual expatriate’s reason is that too much has changed — Ireland, and in particular Dublin changed drastically – spectacularly – between 1950 and 2000 – and not necessarily for the better).  He strikes up a relationship with ‘Gerard’  (Denis Kehoe?  Is there a touch of the roman-á-clef about this artistic endeavour?).  Gerard is compiling a history of queer Ireland.  (Or maybe just Dublin.  After all, a queer history of Ballymena or Ballydehob is simply unimaginable).  A lot of the action of the book involves Daniel and Gerard’s – ‘testy’ is the only word – relationship.

This book, you might gather from the above critique is rubbish — it isn’t — it is very well written and is a lively read.  So long as the reader bears in mind that the ‘Ireland’ presented here is as fanciful as the one presented in John Ford’s film The Quiet Man.

Director: Parvez Sharma

USA 2007

I queued for hours for ‘return’ tickets prior to the Sunday 30.03.08 showing of this film.  I am heartily glad I did.  Purely as film A Jihad for Love is not specially outstanding.  We’ve all seen television documentaries just as well photographed.  Heads talked (to camera).  It was their talking to the camera (and what they were talking about) that was crucial.  It was the interface, and tensions, between their Islamic faith and their homosexuality.

Some people handle this, and are forced to handle it, (due to social forces pressing on them), by applied hypocrisy.  They use the ‘inertia principle’: ‘If you don’t ask, I won’t tell’.  There are a number of people who were not prepared to do this, including an effeminate Indian Gay man and an up-front Turkish woman.  She is seen taking the woman with whom she is currently living to see her mother in the provincial town she grew up in.  (The mother is not in the least phased by this, and is very – well – motherly).

The Indian man, a ‘relapsed’ Muslim has cleaned up his act and dresses ‘normally’ and has dumped the slap and jewellery, but has not stopped being sexually active.  Another man, in Pakistan talks with an Imam who simply lays down the law on homosexuality.  It’s the ultimate ‘No, No’.  Quite what the poor soul who happens to be Gay is to do about it is not really dealt with.  There is a vague suggestion that marriage may not quite ‘cure’ him (and others).  But it will occupy his (and their) time to such an extent that they won’t have time for homosexuality.

The main figure in this film is Muhsin Hendricks.  He is a third generation Imam, and a Hafiz (a person who has committed the whole of the Quran to memory).  He is a divorcé, with three loving children, all girls.  He is an out, and campaigning, Gay man.  We hear some wonderful bigoted remarks about him taken from a phone-in radio programme.  One mad bigot ties himself in a knot – suggesting he “should have his anus cut off…”!  Don’t you just love the way the decencies were respected there?  He did say ‘anus’ and nothing as vulgar as ‘arse’.  Muhsin ignores this drivel.  He works for and gets a workshop with the very orthodox Islamic Social Welfare Council of Cape Town.

They are a pretty tough audience, but there is some genuine discourse.  Muhsin himself muses on the same question that exercises the minds of Christians and Jews. Is God / Allah love – does she / he / it forgive all?   Or is Allah / God the vengeful ogre of the religious ‘fundamentalists’, (their self-description).  He visits Mecca (an ‘Umrah’ – it is outside of the ‘Hajj’ period) and decides that Mohamed’s God is in favour of all-embracing love.  This is a very interesting film, especially in some ways, for a person like myself – I am not a ‘believer’ – not a ‘God-botherer’ nor God haunted.

Homo Jihad

Timothy Graves

Paradise Press

ISBN 978-1-904585-15-2

Timothy Graves studied Drama and English, his central character David Underwood studied English and Drama and teaches in a London primary school.  Mr Underwood does not come across as a particularly pleasant individual.  (It is clearly something of a roman-á-clef.  To preserve to the editor’s peace of mind, the rest of this review will be carefully worded).  Underwood, like Timothy Graves, lives and works in east London, specifically Bethnal Green (there is a reference to “the ‘Respect’ party” – note the suitably slighting single quotes around the name).  He gives every indication that he has not met any of the large, local (mainly Bengali-origin) Muslim community, in a social situation.

He has encountered at least one Muslim in his adventures in London’s sweaty, drug-laden Gay discos.  He admits to himself at one point that he absorbs industrial quantities of (apparently, industrial solvent).  This is a diverting aspect of this novel, Timothy Graves, one suspects, sat down to write a book denouncing Islam – and realised that his own life was not all that wonderful.  It consists of doing his minimal duty as a primary school teacher (the school being full of ‘third world’ – mostly Muslim – kids) and getting off his tits in discos most weekends.  He appears not to have much of a social life outside of that, not even encountering his neighbours in laundrettes or supermarkets.  (I recall the look of distaste on a young Muslim man’s face having to handle pork – even when wrapped in plastic – it was the ‘Co’ [-op, for the uncultured] on Mile End Road).  Maybe he doesn’t like plebes of any description. (Non-English people don’t really ‘get’ the ‘Anglo’ obsession with class).

One Muslim he does encounter is ‘Ahmed’ a suitably classy Arab, he recounts a journey to north London to find Ahmed, it’s unnecessarily complicated.  He travels from Bethnal Green to Crouch End or Muswell Hill.  One complication is that Ahmed is, of course, about to be forced into an arranged marriage (that the woman involved is in the same boat as him doesn’t strike either man, or the author).  There are hopes that his smooth, civilised, ‘westernised’ parents might relent and let him become a partner of a drug-ridden lower middle class Brit.  (They don’t – and Ahmed has to escape back to that well-known oxymoron ‘Western civilisation’.)

David has had a relationship with an Israeli, who survived a Palestinian ‘human-bomb’ attack.  This is presented as the sort of anti-human thing a Muslim might be expected to do.  Though some such people have been of Christian origin.  He travels to Israel to visit his lover.  He discovers why Palestinians might be inclined to engage in (essentially, counter-attacking) the Israelis.   They are forced to live in vile conditions.  Ahmed appears in Jerusalem.  He has dual citizenship with his Emirate and Egypt.  The Israeli passport authorities are decidedly un-welcoming.  What they would have done if he told them he was going to meet a Gay lover from England is left unsaid.

The above may seem a bit offhand, even hostile, but I enjoyed reading this.  There is certainly plenty of action and the characters develop over the period of the narrative.  Timothy Graves is, one hopes, hard at work on another narrative

Paradise Press is I’ve been told, designed for first time authors.  I’ve also been told TG forked-out three hundred quid (£300!) to a sub-editor.  He should bring whoever it was to the Small Claims Court.  On page 188 – chosen randomly – there is a mention of a ‘bloc’ of flats, with ‘rizzlas’ lying about the stair well.  There are other – infelicities – but this is a vigorous, readable narrative.  You will almost certainly  – ‘enjoy’ is hardly the word – be moved, reading it.

Seán McGouran

Producer: Stephen Walker

A Very Victorian Sex Scandal, (BBC Radio Ulster) was about the life and times of one Edward Samuel Wesley de Cobain.  Jeff Dudgeon who contributed to the programme is not a fan, describing him as “criminal and unpleasant”.  He (de Cobain!) forced his ‘affections’ on telegram and other delivery boys, who were the objects of complaints if they were not compliant.  De Cobain, (born 1840), was of decidedly plebeian origin, but became a figure of great consequence in Belfast, due to his vigour, intelligence and application.  By the 1870s / early ’80s he was the Grand Master of the Orange Order in Belfast (at that point a distinctly raffish organisation — the Home Rule Bills drove the bourgeoisie into the Order).  He was ‘Chief Cashier’ of Belfast – what the office consisted of was not clarified.

Belfast was, as Brian Walker claimed, stitched-up by the Conservatives.  (The Liberals had to spend a huge sum on a prolonged court case to get their ‘shout’*).  De Cobain broke the monopoly of the élite – the Harland’s, the Wolff’s and the Corry’s – by becoming the Conservative MP for the new seat of East Belfast in 1885.  Nicola Morris, an English QUB (the Queen’s University, Belfast) academic said the élite had used De Cobain.  But he represented a very independent-minded Protestant working class constituency (in the sense of ‘cohort’ or body of opinion).  While in Parliament he annoyed Belfast’s bourgeois élite by aggressively arguing for greater rights for workers’.  He was aggressive in other ways, engaging in fistfights on the floor of the House of Commons, presumably with Irish Nationalists.

(This was the Parliament of the First Home Rule Bill, and of a consequent element of chaos in politics, the (socially radical) Liberal Unionists split from the Gladstonian Party and joined the Conservatives in defending the Union.)  De Cobain authored a pamphlet attacking The Papist Constabulary (the RIC – Royal Irish Constabulary) as “Morley’s Murderers” — the reference being to the bloody Belfast ‘riots’ of 1886 — which were more in the way of being anti-Catholic (certainly anti-Home Rule) pogroms.  Morley was Gladstone’s Chief Secretary for Ireland (a Cabinet post).  De Cobain thereby added the RIC (Royal Ulster Constabulary) to his – long – list of enemies.

A rogue's hideout?

A warrant for de Cobain’s arrest signed by Belfast’s RIC Head Constable, Edward Hussey, was served by RIC Sergeant David Farrell, in Goole, Yorkshire, on April 4th, 1891.  De Cobain left for London, Bloomsbury to be exact.  As the warrant had not been served another on was issued, on April 8th, from Dublin Castle (the legal systems had not been integrated after the Act of Union, a Court of Justice oversaw ‘Irish law’).  On April 12th ESW returned to Belfast.  He then fled to mainland Europe, first to Bilbaõ, where he annoyed the locals by engaging in street preaching, then to Boulogne (where Home Rule MPs may, simultaneously, have been engaged in discussions with Charles Stewart Parnell, — who had his own troubles with the English Nonconformist conscience.

The Home Rule MPs, according to Guardian journalist David McKie), objected to the demand (by the Pall Mall Gazette, a very influential publication at the time) that de Cobain be expelled from the Commons.  There was a suspicion that this whole sandal was the result of a young man in Belfast blackmailing de Cobain.  (And probably the further suspicion that the Belfast Conservative élite were trying to humiliate a vigorous representative of the Belfast Protestant working class.  Some Home Rule MPs (Michael Davitt, for example) were strongly labour-leaning, others just wanted to break up the northern Unionist consensus.)

By April 1892 de Cobain was in New York.  He supported himself by street preaching.  In Brooklyn apparently, (this programme was very site-specific), he claimed “the Lord had no plans” for him to meet his accusers.  He appears not to have repudiated the accusations.

William the Third

Meanwhile he was expelled from the Orange Order (it had become very ‘respectable’ post the 1886 and 1893 Home Rules Bills).  The Conservatives in Belfast rushed to replace him in Belfast, East with the eminently respectable Wilhelm Wolff, the ‘shipbuilder’.  He may have encountered a rivet — once.

De Cobain returned to Ireland, to his home Hampton House on the Ormeau Road, he was arrested for Gross Indecency with five men.  He claimed he was the victim of blackmail – in the wake of the Oscar Wilde affair his accusation held water – but there had been questions about his sexual tastes prior to that and the ‘Cleveland Street scandal’.  He had, allegedly, been client of that boy-brothel.  He, also allegedly, only did it with good Protestant boys, using his physical and social power to overcome any objections on their part.  One boy’s description of his (rape, in effect) convinced the jury, along with other, more circumstantial, evidence.  De Cobain was given 12 months hard labour, making history by being the first person to be convicted under the Labouchére Amendment.  He died some years later, unforgiven by Belfast’s Conservatives.  This was an interesting disinterment of Belfast and Ireland’s homosexual prehistory.  A contributor to the programme was Dr Éamonn Phoenix, who put de Cobain’s career in perspective.  I am by no means convinced he was the object of unsullied justice.

Seán McGouran

Further reading links:

1. Labouchére Amendment – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labouchere_Amendment
2. Orange Order – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_Order
3. Oscar Wilde – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oscar_Wilde
4. The Papist Constabulary – http://tiny.cc/3o5zdw

G•A•A•Y

Jarlath Gregory

Sitric Books

ISBN1-903305-15-20

a son called gabriel

Damian McNicholl

Legend Press

ISBN 9 781906 558079

These two books, published 2005 (G•A•A•Y), and 2008 (a son called gabriel), date from the days when (presumably snooty / numpty editors from the more salubrious bits of Dublin or London) told potential authors that the GAA was simply everything that was wrong with ‘Eye-land’. Then Dónal Óg Cusack came out and the hairy yahoos of the GAA (Gaelic Athletic Association) greeted this with a subdued ‘good on you, mate’. Oops! ‘…new balls, please’.

Of the two books G•A•A•Y is the livelier and somewhat better written. The central character is Anto Broderick, whose means of making a living – he works in a call centre – and of disporting himself when not working, (he is big on competitive disco dancing), are explained. Anto is a child of the Celtic Tiger (since publication of G•A•A•Y subject of serious mange) and calls his twitter account Capitalist Kid. The only ‘political’ element in the book is a sneering reference to badly dressed ‘Lefties’ (they actually seems to be Greens) whinging about… something.

In so far as there is a story (he lusts after his sister’s boyfriend – but really gets nowhere) it is about Anto (not quite) growing up. It is written in a very lively mode, but not, thank the Abstract Entity in working class ‘Dublinese’ (Trainspotting is a probably a great read, I gave up two pages in… plebeian Edinburgh (actually Leith) patois defeating me). There are (very small) elements Jarlath Gregory ought to have reconsidered, possibly the standard-issue ‘fag-hag’, and certainly the lesbophobic reporting if an incident concerning his GAA-mad mother. Anyone with even a passing acquaintance with the GAA (represented in every parish on the island of Ireland) must have realised it is a very ‘broad church’. Sectarian abuse of Protestant players in the North was very quickly nipped in the bud. (A big problem for those witch-hunting ‘anti-gay’ sport is that soccer is the worst offender, and English soccer is outstandingly homophobic.)

Nobody would accuse Jarlath Gregory of being particularly subtle, neither is Damian McNichol, but at one point in his narrative his character Gabriel realises that his (you guessed it — GAA mad) father is inarticulate rather than disapproving. But on the whole this is a rather lumpily-written book. His mother, at one point denounces homosexuality as an ‘abomination’ (one can only assume that said numpties in his London-based publishers told him that’s how people in the Ulster countryside described such things. Ulster country – and urban – mothers might avert their eyes from early-adolescent fumblings. Hysteria about such things was the remit of the middle classes. There is other use of language that struck me as over-blown, partly as if the author thought people ought to use the sort of language appropriate to an Important Theme.

Gabriel is a bookish boy in a fairly sporty family ('sporty' and 'bookish' are still antinomies for Anglo publishers.

The story is pretty straightforward, Gabriel is a bookish boy in a fairly sporty family (‘sporty’ and ‘bookish’ are still antinomies for Anglo publishers. Despite the fact that most – male – English authors seem to be sports- (in particular soccer-mad)). He gets to a grammar school and does – by and large – well academically. He has problems with bullies and, of course, encounters a priest who gives him a blow-job. Then, because Gabriel ‘touts’ on him, is sent to be ‘cured’ somewhere in England. Quite why he isn’t sent to the US or ‘the South’ is not explained. Gabriel seems to be somewhat snobbish. He decides to go to university in England (this may be ‘Ulster-speak’ for Great Britain – even when Plaid Cymru and the SNP are flying high – we tend to overlook the bits stuck on the end of ‘England’), and not a local or a ‘Southern’ one.

It’s difficult to understand why Gabriel decides on do this – he has a kind-of relationship with an upper middle class Protestant girl – maybe he hopes he’ll be ‘cured’ by having heterosex with her. He might look forward to becoming a ‘plastic Paddy’, minus giveaway accent and with an Oxbridge degree. (The sort of person most English people can spot at half a kilometre’s distance.) He might simply take the same attitude as most British students. In the days between the ending of National Service and the re-introduction of fees, they attempted to get as far away from their parents as possible. (Male) students in Northern Ireland take their washing home at the weekend.

This is a pleasing book and generally well written, (but the climax of the tale is melodramatic and not really believable). I don’t want to give a bad impression of it, but some elements in this novel simply do not ring true. A working class boy (culchie or town-bred) would not have Gabriella’s attitude to his own sexuality. That is not to say that he would not have guilt problems – but this is set in the 1970s, for Heaven’s sake. Gabriel (‘in real life’) would have phoned Cara-Friend’s telephone service for advice about what was available in the university and environs, he was intending to depart to.

Read the book and make up your own mind. You won’t feel that you’ve wasted your time – and may feel that I have been unfair to it. Contact us and tell us your own attitude to this — and everything else we deal with.

Seán McGouran

Joy Melville

Haus Publishing

ISBN9781-90591-91-0

Diaghilev and Friends

I wondered about the price (£20) of this lavishly produced book. Then noticed it was Printed in China. Another cohort of Western workers to be made redundant! The book has 290 thick, glossy pages. There are 29 full colour reproductions of portraits and costume and set designs and 59 black and white drawings, ‘snaps’ and portraits of Diaghilev and various friends (and enemies). The fly cover has on the back a ‘colourised’ photo-portrait of Sergei Pavlovitch (looking very pink -faced — he was noticeably pale). The front of the fly-cover (and page 40) bears a portrait (by Serov) of Diaghilev in a peasant shirt. And a vaguely ‘camp’ pose.

Joy Melville insists that he did not like camp or effeminate men. She writes (page 33) “[h]omosexuality was not encouraged within the Ballets Russes… Diaghilev’s own homosexuality and his love affair with Nijinsky left its stamp on ballet and created a lasting question about male dancers, whose public image has for years been unfairly regarded as homosexual.” Why “unfairly”? She gives, in ‘Gentlemen’s Mischief’, a history of (male) homosexuality in Russia. The first anti-Gay laws, introduced in the early eighteenth century, were a bow to western Europe’s ‘modernity’, Russia rushed to ‘keep up’. The suicides of Gogol and Tchaikovsky are noted. So are the laws and bourgeois social views of ‘the West’, England, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the US, (states in which the Ballets Russes tarried for lengthy periods) Argentina and Brazil could be added to the list.

Diaghilev took an interest in peasant art – but wasn’t especially sentimental about ‘Holy Russia’. His first act as an ‘impresario’ was organising a great exhibition of paintings from western Europe. Russia having, still, something of a ‘cultural cringe’. (Belfast gets a mention in this context in relation to one of the exhibitors, John Lavery). Sergei Pavlovitch’s great success was an exhibition of Russian art. He bustled through great – and not so great – houses throughout Russia to find this material. The Tsar, Nicholas II, supplied money for some of Diaghilev’s enterprises. He, Nicholas, may not have been quite the dunderhead he has been pictured as, by the Bolsheviks — and the Brits. He may have grasped the ‘soft power’ implications of Russia being seen as a cultural powerhouse.

Diaghilev first brought this material to Paris, then an opera company, which had an important effect. But he decided in 1908, to put all his efforts into a ballet company, prior to this he hadn’t been particularly ballet-conscious. The Ballets Russes focused all of his previous work. He used untried composers (like Stravinsky and Prokoviev) and the painters he had cultivated in Russia. He also found a choreographer, Fokine, whose talent was on a level with Stravinsky’s.

Diaghilev and Friends

The history of the company is, for the uninitiated well told, but a bit unsatisfying for those with some knowledge of this unique phenomenon. The sexual politics of Diaghilev’s love life is touched on. Nijinsky has been pictured recently as less of a Holy Innocent than previously thought. Nijinsky produced some remarkable ballets. The Rite of Spring‘s choreography caused as much outrage as Stravinsky’s score (Stravinsky tended to talk-down Nijinsky’s contribution to that famous event). Nijinsky married his Hungarian ‘fan’ Romola de Pulszky in Buenos Aires. Diaghilev was outraged (he was in mourning to an extent) and cast him into the exterior darkness. (This has been disputed in other texts.)

He later gave Nijinsky the job of managing the Ballets Russes on a tour of the USA. Vaslav Fomitch was not up to running the company in Sergei Pavlovitch’s absence. Nijinsky was already suffering the mental incapacity which led to his being institutionalised for three decades. (There were other problems like Nijinsky’s house arrest in Hungary as an ‘enemy alien’. Diaghilev mobilised several Presidents and the Pope to ‘spring’ Vaslav Fomitch). Diaghilev’s later choreographers / lovers Massine and Lifar were, to an extent, using him.

This shouldn’t be over-egged they were both in their teens when he decided to become their patron. Massine is described as being “overworked” by an English patron of the Ballets Russes. Both had successful professional lives after Diaghilev. Anton Dolin (Patrick Healey-Kay) had an affair with Serge Pavlovitch. He later formed what is now the English National Ballet. George Balanchine (culturally probably entirely Russian, but ethnically Georgian — he had a composer-brother) didn’t have sexual relations with him. Nor did Nijinsky’s sister Bronislava Nijinska. (Massine sneered about Diaghilev being sexually rather easily pleased.)

This emphasis on the sexual aspect may read rather oddly – but this is a Gay publication – and it is rather important. Diaghilev was one of the first public figures, anywhere, to take the attitude that the public had to lump his homosexuality or leave it. The long-term effect of that was liberationist. The short-term effect in ‘Anglo-Saxondom” was that real masculine males (people whose sexuality is often quite fragile) did not take up ballet. A fair number of up-front, talented queers did. There was no great artistic loss. Despite nervousness on the part of some commentators, including, it seems Ms Melville, author of a number of biographies of strong women.

Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes became somewhat less ‘Russes’ after the 1917 Revolution. He became, for a time, avant grade for the sake of being avant garde. But much of this material has stood the test of time. The choreographers are noted above (and some produced useful work for decades after Sergei Pavlovitch’s death. Some founded or restored great companies, the New York City Ballet, the (British) Royal Ballet, the ballet of the Paris Opéra, and their many spins-off. The artists included Picasso, de Chirico, Léger, Dalí, the composers Satie, Poulenc, Constant Lambert and many others. There were still plenty of Russians, in the background, as well as up front, on stage, or providing the music or ideas for the ballets.

The text is very well written and provides all the information a reader would need (possibly a chronology of Sergei Pavlovitch’s work could be added). A small (not to say tiny) irritant is Joy Melville’s shoving bits of general information into the text for ‘context’ presumably. Some of it is misleading, on page 174 it is claimed “the IRA was founded” in 1919. The Irish Republican Army (which fought the War of Independence) was founded on April 28th 1916. Ms Melville writes (of the IRA) it was formed “in Ireland”. The Fenians in America formed an Irish Republican Army after the Civil War. It staged a – credible – invasion of Canada. Belfast’s second mention is on this page “there were shipbuilding strikes in Belfast an on the Clyde”. It was a huge strike, spearheaded by Belfast, and included London, involving railway workers and miners. The Orange-Unionist authorities broke the strike using sectarian violence. There was no ‘Red Lagan’ to go with Red Clydeside.

Áine ni Phól

* In Gay’s The Word

Belgium 2011

Director: Bavo Defurne

Bavo Defurne has made a large number of short films, which you might have seen on the UK’s Channel 4 (when it was edgy and non-commercial), or on Peccadillo Pictures DVDs.  He is an unambiguously queer film maker. This, his first feature length (96 minutes) film is dedicated to ‘all the kid who were not allowed to audition for a part in it’.  He’s that ‘notorious’.  Pity for the kids, this is a (genuinely) heart-warming movie.  It is about young PIM (played as a youth by Jelly Florizoone – as a small boy by Ben Van den Heuvel, though there’s not much, really, about the three main characters as children).  Pim is a fairly lonely kid and lives in something of a fantasy-life.  His single mother, Yvette (Eva van der Gucht) travels a lot plying her trade as an accordian player.

Jelle Florizoone is very good at conveying teenage passive-aggression often directed at Yvette’s sometimes slightly sleazy male ‘friends’.  He likes to one of them, the smoothly handsome (and somewhat sexually ambiguous) Zoltan.  He is taken in as a boarder in the spare room.  Post-war housing in Belgium was not imaginative.  The estate Pim and Yvette live in is made up of brick-built cubes.  The shower is a vertical coffin in the kitchen-dining area.  It creates a situation were flesh can be, relatively legitimately, exposed.  Zoltan realises that Pim is taken with him and exposes quite lot of his.  Bavo Dafurne let’s us see generous amounts of Pim’s own rather lovely flesh.  Pim realises that Zoltan is not using the room he rents and jealously barges into Yvette’s room while they are in flagrante.  This, the passive-aggression, and the fact that Pim has reached 17, leads to Yvette abandoning the house, and him.

He appears to enter into possession of it.   Pim moves in with neighbours – his actual family – it is another single mother.  The children are Gino and Sabrina, they are dark hared and rather swarthy, they are shown a photograph of their father (Alfredo) when their mother Simone (Patricia Goemaere) is on her death bed.  She also links Gino and Pim’s hands (Bavo Defurne, at a question and answer session in the BFI said he did not quite know why he allowed this – it just felt right).  Pim is in love (certainly in lust) with the slightly older Gino, who ‘bequeaths’ him his bicycle when he – Gino – gets a motorbike.  Gino, and especially Pim, enjoy rides on the motorbike, and sex session in a tent on the dunes.  Sabrina is in love with Pim, and welcomed him into their house with glasses of orange juice lovingly offered.  She sneaks into his room and discovers drawings of Gino, naked, and from then on bangs down glasses of water when he visits.  But their relationship when Pim moves in is that of sister and brother.  She is quite sympathetic, to Pim, when Gino decides he is grown up and therefore heterosexual.  He has found a girlfriend in France.  (Yvette went to France too, it appears to be something of a Tir na nÓg in this slightly run-down bit of Flanders).

The film title refers to one of those all-purpose buildings found in seaside resorts.  It appears to be mainly a boozer.  Pim goes there a lot, partly because Yvette performs there.  He is something of a pet and is given (soft) drinks on the house.  The dirt track leading to it plays a significant rôle in the film.  It connects everything up, the sea, the dunes, the big white building and Pim’s growing from boy to young manhood.  The last scene is Pim undressing and walking into the sea – it is celebratory – not yet another queer-boy suicide.

Jelle Florizoone, interviewed by Brian Robinson (main organiser of the BFI (British Film Institute)’s London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival) said he found being naked a bit embarrassing.  Very few of his audience, queer, non-queer, female or male were remotely embarrassed.  He “was” as he emphasised a dancer.  He now plays in a successful television series and wears a red leather suit (it’s not very flattering).  The ordinary suit he wore at this session was much more interesting.  He has a lovely slender body.  Eva van der Gucht (Yvette) answered questions – she is not remotely blowsy like Yvette – and is currently playing Desdemona in a touring production of Othello.

See this movie if you can, it looks lovely, even the housing cubes can look interesting.  The cast, including the younger members, play like a repertory company.  And it is genuinely a ‘feel good’ film – damn the matter with that…

Seán McGouran

USA 2011

Director: Jeffrey Schwartz

This feature (93 minute) length film is a pleasing celebration of Vito Russo’s life.  As such it is entirely legitimate (and I am glad I have seen it), but one wonders if anybody under the age of, say, forty would be any the wiser about Vito Russo having watched it.  It is not light on facts and figures, but they are not really put into a context that the ‘innocent viewer, particularly a non-American viewer, would readily grasp.

Vito Russo was the product of a large, loving – even of the queer sheep of the family  – New York Italian family.  His one problem with his family is that it moved to New Jersey.  He was discovering queer sex – and cinema – in the City.  He needed to live there to satiate these two great appetites in his life.  He went to university in NYC (the film-makers don’t bother to tell us which one, nor what precisely he studied).  He worked for MOMA (the Museum of Modern Art, in NYC, needless to say).  His life-defining work, the Celluloid Closet was, oddly enough, suggested by a (straight) senior in the department of film in MOMA.

It was ‘life-defining’ because nobody had thought of examining the portrayal of queer people in cinema prior to his effort.  And because Vito Russo was jut the person to do such a thing.  He gave many lectures on this theme in most parts of the US, and abroad – he visited the UK once.  And expanded the book a number of times (it does not really deal with non-American, or Anglophone, movies, but did include early US television).

Russo became something of a political animal.  He witnessed the start of the Stonewall Riots (he shimmied up a tree for a good view).  But only joined the GAA (Gay Activists’ Alliance) in January 1970, after the suicide of an Argentinean friend.  He was to be deported back to his, at that time deeply homophobic homeland.  While involved with the GAA he helped in the ‘squatting’ of a former fire station (‘Fire House’ in American).  He, of course, put on a series of movies.  The ‘stills’ showing these events are somewhat at variance with the narrative, as the audiences seem to have been overwhelmingly male.  He helped organise Pride in New York for several years.  But in 1973 a huge row erupted on the platform with women and drag queens slanging-off each other publicly, and quite mercilessly.

Russo brought on Bette Midler to calm things down, but was deeply disillusioned.  He took something of a (campaigning) sabbatical until the AIDS crisis arose a decade later.  His lover died of the plague and he was diagnosed with ‘full-blown’ (as it used to be described) AIDS.  He recommenced campaigning with gusto, despite becoming physically weaker practically day on day, using the experience gained in the 1970s.  He accused the Reagan Administration of ‘genocide’.  The accusation was not absurd.  The Administration cut the Health budget, despite many medical professionals agreeing with the ACT-UP campaign’s aims.  The White House was deeply homophobic, despite (maybe because of, the fact that Reagan was a former movie-actor).

There is more about Russ’s campaigning in the film, but he was a nice, furry, happy Italian Gay man.  He enjoyed life, even while fighting AIDS (and the US authorities), and has left a useful legacy in the intellectual sphere with his pioneering work on cinema.  He has left a useful legacy in his campaigning work – it will inspire generations to come.   It’s just a pity this is a rather pedestrian piece of work.

Seán McGouran