Had I the heavens’ embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet.
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.
Text: He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven
W.B. Yeats, 1865-1939
Image: Unknown
Tagged: gay, vintage male affection, vintage photo, Yeats
You can give without loving, but you can never love without giving. The great acts of love are done by those who are habitually performing small acts of kindness. We pardon to the extent that we love. Love is knowing that even when you are alone, you will never be lonely again. And great happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved. Loved for ourselves. And even loved in spite of ourselves.
Text: Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862)
Image: Unknown, 20th century, via bobster855/Flickr
Tagged: gay, Les Miserables, Victor Hugo, vintage male affection
The recent death of Ted Kennedy prompted me to pick up some of the Kennedy books I have lying around the house and I have just re-read a book about JFK that shook my world a couple of years ago. It illuminates a story about a beloved president that was never told prior to this book being published. It’s been hidden from history, or at least overlooked by every biography ever written about JFK.
John F. Kennedy is one of the most studied and written-about presidents of the 20th century. Aside from the remaining mysteries surrounding his assassination, there is little that is unknown about the life of the thirty-fifth president of the United States. Or so we thought.
In Jack and Lem, published by Avalon, writer David Pitts sets about uncovering the story of Jack Kennedy and his closest and dearest friend in the world for 30 years, Lem Billings — a gay man.
Jack and Lem met while at prep school in the 1930s and from that point on were inseparable until the day Jack Kennedy was killed. Pitts worked for two years to persuade Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to grant him research access to documents that have been locked away for decades, including letters between the two friends, recorded phone calls, and even an 800+ page transcription of an oral history that Lem Billings gave after the death of the president. Pitts also combed through hundreds of photographs never seen by the public, many of which he was allowed to publish in the book, and interviewed anyone and everyone he could who knew Jack and Lem so he could tell, as accurately as possible, the story of a president and his gay best friend.
This well-told account paints a tender, moving portrait of what the author calls “an extraordinary friendship,” the details of which enchant and move the reader. Anecdotes about Lem having his own room in the White House, how Jackie Kennedy dealt with having a third person in her marriage, and other bits of lost history aren’t taught in any school text books, but they are told in this book — for the first time.
I interviewed David Pitts about Jack and Lem when this book came out. It’s important to me that this story not be forgotten and now, as we say goodbye to to Ted Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy and regard the legacy of Camelot, this seems like a good time to share it again.
Kenneth Hill: How would you characterize the friendship between JFK and Lem Billings?
David Pitts: The way I would characterize it is that is was a very close, deep, friendship across sexual orientation lines.
KH: How did you first learn about it?
DP: I first learned about the friendship from reading JFK books. I am such a Kennedy fan that I read most of the new JFK books that came out over the years. Lem was mentioned in some, but there was always very little information about him — usually one or two pages — and I just became curious about, well, who exactly is this guy? And that’s how this book that I wrote came about.
KH: How did you find out who he was?
DP: The first thing I did was to look at all the books again to see what had been said about him, which, as I said, was very little. Then I then compiled a list of people to call, people to interview that I thought might know more. I also set about trying to track down documents in various institutions — most notably the John F. Kennedy Library and the Massachusetts Historical Society. And on the latter, I hit a big brick wall early on in the project, which is why it took so long. Most of the documents, including, very significantly, an 815-page oral history done by Lem, were closed to writers and authors. Many of the quotes of Lem in the book are from that document. And it was closed at the Kennedy Library and required the permission of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to access it, and he didn’t give it to me for a long, long time.
KH: How long?
DP: I would say about two years. Two years into the project before Bobby, I guess, got tired of me pestering him.
KH: Why do you think there was resistance?
DP: I don’t know. I’ve been asked that quite a few times — usually I’m asked why he in fact GAVE me the documents — but I really don’t know. I can’t answer that. He didn’t agree to an interview, I wanted an interview, as well, but he did give me the documents which in a sense were more valuable. But when he decided to give me the materials, he gave me everything without restriction, including the ability to copy them as well as quote from them.
KH: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and Lem were close when Bobby was a young man, right?
DP: Yes, that’s how Bobby ended up with control to most of the materials. Lem knew Bobby from when he was very young, of course, Lem being an intimate of the Kennedys, and when Lem died in 1981 his belongings passed into the possession of Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. Some of his things went into the possession of his neice, Sally Carpenter.
KH: Lem was a friend of the Kennedy family during the time that JFK was alive, and also after he was assassinated. Did you have any sense that this was a story that they didn’t necessarily want to have told?
DP: No, I can’t really say that. I mean, none of them agreed to an interview, although Eunice Kennedy Shriver who knew Lem very well came very close and then she became ill. So if I was to guess, and this is purely a guess, I think Bobby Kennedy and the other Kennedys knew this story was going to come out sooner or later. They probably checked me out — I’m sure they did — and were more willing to trust someone with a liberal political bent than some conservative writer who might try to use it in a sensational way. That would be my guess.
I did talk to a friend of Bobby Kennedy when I was trying to get these materials and when I was trying to talk to Bobby, by the name of Blake Fleetwood, who’s a blogger himself on the Huffington Post. He also knew Lem. He told me that the Kennedys have been burned so many times now in these conservative times by writers, they just are very very suspicious of writers, period. It’s not about this story in particular, it’s about any story. And so I think if you take him at his word, part of the reason must be just suspicion of journalists these days.
KH: You said that this was the story of a friendship that crossed sexual orientation lines, which I think is really an interesting element of it, but talk a little bit about the depth of this friendship. The fact that it started when they were very young and, from what I read in the book, they were basically inseparable for the rest of their lives except when circumstances had them in distant cities. Read More
Tagged: biography, David Pitts, Edward Kennedy, Eunice Kennedy, gay, Jack and Lem, Jackie Kennedy, John F. Kennedy
Love is enough: though the World be a-waning,
And the woods have no voice but the voice of complaining,
Though the sky be too dark for dim eyes to discover
The gold-cups and daisies fair blooming thereunder,
Though the hills be held shadows, and the sea a dark wonder,
And this day draw a veil over all deeds pass’d over,
Yet their hands shall not tremble, their feet shall not falter;
The void shall not weary, the fear shall not alter
These lips and these eyes of the loved and the lover.
Text: Love Is Enough, William Morris (1824-1896)
Image: Unknown, early 20th century, via Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy/Flickr
Tagged: gay, vintage male affection, William Morris
You and I have so much love
That it burns like a fire,
In which we bake a lump of clay
Moulded into a figure of you
And a figure of me.
Then we take both of them,
And break them into pieces,
And mix the pieces with water,
And mould again a figure of you,
And a figure of me.
I am in your clay.
You are in my clay.
In life we share a single quilt,
In death we will share one bed.
Text: Married Love, Kuan Tao-sheng (1263-1319)
Image: Unknown, late 19th c., via Varones/Flickr
Tagged: Kuan Tao-sheng, Married Love, poem, vintage male affection
Woolf & Wilde has spun off into two separate blogs. Kenneth Hill is now the sole editor of Woolf & Wilde, while Dom Agius and Predrag Pajdic have launched The Pandorian.
Tagged: Dom Agius, Kenneth Hill
Many people have a list of books they read every year: Jane Austen’s Emma, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. Classics. Sometimes, if a reader is lucky, a contemporary work will earn a place on the list. Mother of Sorrows by Richard McCann is such a book.
Published in 2005 to critical acclaim, Mother of Sorrows is a work of ten stories that weave together spare snapshots from the life of a gay man, touching on themes of family expectations and forgiveness, growing up in suburbia, sexual oppression and acceptance, being a sissy and what happens to boys who have to hide their true nature.
These are tales of American life, inhabited by a mother who’s more than a wee dramatic and overly involved, a father who is distant, and a brother who packs a wallop of a surprise (well, several) — all told by a narrator who wants desperately to make the pieces of his life make sense, but isn’t sure how. It’s a coming out story of sorts wrapped up in one hell of a family drama, fed to you in ten perfect bits that, while not linear, accumulate into something whole and very beautiful.
The book opens with a scene that establishes the centrality of the mother in the narrator’s life. She’s a woman whose glamour captivates this young man, unleashing, or perhaps shaping, a path that will find him challenged by his own masculinity, femininity, desires, dreams, sorrow.
“Sit with me, son,” my mother said. “Let’s pretend we’re sitting this dance out.”
She told me I was her best friend. She said I had the heart to understand her. She was forty-six. I was nine.
Then, the complexity of the relationship starts to come through:
Because beauty’s source was longing, it was infused with romantic sorrow; because beauty was defined as “feminine” and therefore “other,” it became hopelessly confused with my mother: Mother, who quickly sorted through new batches of photographs, throwing unflattering shots of herself directly into the fire before they could be seen. Mother, who dramatized herself, telling us and our playmates, “My name is Maria Dolores; in Spanish that means ‘Mother of Sorrows.'” Mother, who had once wished to be a writer and who said, looking up briefly from whatever she was reading, “Books are my best friends.” Mother, who read aloud from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night with a voice so grave I could not tell the difference between them. Mother who lifted cut glass vases and antique clocks from her obsessively dusted curio shelves to ask, “If this could talk, what story would it tell?”
Author Richard McCann wrote Mother of Sorrows over a span of 18 years. The book blurs the line between fiction and memoir, but it’s McCann’s background as a poet that informs his writing style which is marked by a meticulous ability to say a great deal using language that has been distilled so finely as to inspire awe. At the end of each short chapter, the reader is left wondering how McCann could convey things that are so huge using so few words.
McCann’s literary mastery and astute observations are what call readers back to this book to read and read again.
Tagged: Mother of Sorrows, Richard McCann
When he whom I love travels with me, or sits a long while holding me by the hand,
When the subtle air, the impalpable, the sense that words and reason hold not, surround us
and
pervade us,
Then I am charged with untold and untellable wisdom—I am silent—I require
nothing
further,
I cannot answer the question of appearances, or that of identity beyond the grave;
But I walk or sit indifferent—I am satisfied,
He ahold of my hand has completely satisfied me.
Text: Walt Whitman, Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances, excerpt
Image: Unknown, via Miss Magnolia Thunderpussy/Ipernity
Tagged: vintage male affection, Walt Whitman
People around here don’t generally fancy men like me. They have a hard time understanding my attire, and I suppose it’s usual for folks not to know what to make of someone male who prefers a wardrobe normally assigned to the fairer sex. I always saw myself as fairer. I still do.
When I was five years old, I started to dress-up. My cousin Vivienne lived on the next ranch over and she was born in 1875, a year earlier than me. Her dresses were mostly cotton, simple patterns and almost all made by my Aunt Elsie, my father’s youngest sister. Vivienne let me try them on whenever I wanted, which was as often as I could. About once a year while we were growing up, she’d make me a present of one of her dresses that I could keep.
As early as then, I knew that’s what suited me. My folks about drove themselves hoarse telling me I was a boy and should dress like one, but I couldn’t wear boys’ clothes. My poor mother hollered fits trying to dress me properly, like a boy, that is, but I’d rip the trousers off. At that age, I’d sooner run around naked than wear boys’ trousers.
I kept on with the dresses. My father whipped me with a cane when I’d show up for supper in one of my cousin’s outfits, but I didn’t know any other way to be. I truly didn’t. My folks tried to get my aunt and uncle to punish Vivienne, too, but they said it wasn’t any of their concern.
By the time I was 13 or so, Mother and Father succumbed. It was gradual. They let up slowly, then quit it all, just let me be. I don’t know why exactly. I wasn’t mean or ornery about any of it, really. I was just natural, and maybe that’s what did it. Anyone who knew me could see that asking me to wear trousers would be the same as asking rain to fall up instead of down.
When I was 16, I started making my own clothes. My mother would help me pin the hems. I got to be quite a good dress maker, and two or three of the ranch wives asked my mother if I wouldn’t make something for them. I was good with ribbon. That’s how I met up with Will Weston. Read More
Tagged: crossdressing, gay, imagined history, vintage male affection, wax cylinder
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There was only ever one reason I agreed to go out with Lillian, which was so that I could go out with Christopher. On double dates, you see. A cruel thing to do to her, yes, but Chris stopped “us”– him and I being together, I mean. I couldn’t bear it. I can’t bear it. He’s my life. I have to have him near.
After his mother and father saw us asleep on his bed the morning they came home early from vacation, things have never been the same. Neither of us heard his parents coming in. When they opened his door, we were wearing nothing but an air of perfect contentment, no bed sheets covering us or anything because it had been very warm that August night. Wrapped in each other’s arms, our four hairy legs intertwined like some kind of slip-knot, we were found out. Chris unravelled. It undid him.
His father told him he’d never have a career, and his mother cried for two days. Christopher said we’d drunk too much and it wasn’t what it looked like. They believed him, because they needed to.
He won’t be alone with me ever since then. It all just stopped. His passion and affection toward me — the intimacy we’ve had and hidden by necessity for 17 months — have been smothered by convention. Now he and Betty Ash are an item, and I’m his past.
I’d do anything just to be in his presence, still, ergo the charade of dating Lillian. If I believed in God, I’d ask him to forgive me for this. For now, I am playing along. I swallow the sight of Chris holding Betty when they dance; a little piece of me dies, accompanied by an orchestra. But at least this way, being on a silly double date with a sweet girl who’s like a sister to me, I can still touch his skin, even if it means reaching across the table for my glass and brushing his hand as if by accident.
Just that little bit of electricity is what keeps me going, really.
Christopher is too afraid to be with me, I am too afraid to be without him, and so here we are.
Text: Kenneth Hill
Music: K.C. Blues, Charlie Parker
Image: Unknown
Tagged: gay, vintage male affection
