Glory and loveliness have passed away

Along with finding out the death of Clement Freud, I heard yesterday that the queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick had died, and felt incredibly sad. Freely admitting that as a married woman who enjoyed "vanilla sex", and that she was basically a fag hag of tremendous proportions, she introduced the world to the concept of triangular desire, without which fitcrit would be nothing. In Between Men, Sedgwick demonstrates that in the nineteenth-century novel, desire between men is often played out through a competitive desire for a third woman. It's a great concept, because you can apply it to any pair of straight up straighties and imagine them in all sorts of positions of panting, barely suppressed eroticism.

She also had a really cool aesthetic, which I adored.
As an appropriate tribute to the inventor of the concept of the homosocial, I thought I would put quote one of my favourite passages from Shelley's Adonais, in which he mourns the death of the beautiful Keats:

He is a portion of the loveliness
Which once he made lovely; he doth bear
His part, while the one Spirit's plastic stress
Sweeps through the dull dense world, compelling there
All new successions to the forms they wear;
Torturing th'unwilling dross that checks its flight
To its own likeness, as each may bear;
And bursting in its beauty and its might
From trees and beasts and men into the Heaven's light.

Big Bro; Daniel Defoe; Fo' Sho'

Courtesy of my friend Rachel, a comparison between the life and death of Big Brother's Jade Goody and that of Moll Flanders, of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders. Compelling, superlunary, and brilliant.

(Mervyn Peake's illustrated cover for Moll Flanders)

"Life in the Goody/post-Goody world is an exemplification of Defoe's ideas regarding tireless and impossible reinvention of character, especially in the public eye, against all kinds of shilpa-related-adversity, it's what Jade achieved. She is basically the savior of the facebook generation, Big Brother has given his only daughter for us, that we may follow her example. She is a quasi Christ-like figure who was condemned (the shilpa front pages are like the trial, the carrying of the cross, her crown of thorns) and died in order to show us that all forms of media exposure are legitimate, and by following her example we will come to learn that only life documented and performed is authentic, legitimate existence.
What Jade did on a macro-level (in the eye of the media) we must do in our own lives, by following Jade's example we will find happiness, only through complete eradication of autonomy, depth, privacy can we truly be living life in the way that the (face)Book of Goody advises. We can only aspire to her frontpage exposed greatness, where her death/marriage etc etc was on the front page we can tag ours on facebook."

This suggestive and illuminating comparison between Goody and Christ puts one in mind of Pontius Pilate's offer to the public. Was the vote for Barabas or Jesus the world's first example of a (rigged) reality eviction? Answers on a postcard; in Aramaic.

My latest GILF is Frederico García Lorca. No doubt I have something of a penchant for dark and brooding poets, with Romantic deaths and a taste for bow ties. I also find the Sonnets of Dark Love unbelievably sexy. In the intense 'Night of Sleepless Love', Lorca addresses his lover, the young student Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, in a very dark version of an aubade. (Dark here is usually taken to mean 'homosexual' but Lorca plays with the image of light beautifully; a lovely queering of Othello/Romeo and Juliet?)

Dawn married us on the bed,
our mouths to the unfrozen spout
of unstaunched blood.

The sun came through the shuttered balcony
and the coral of life opened its branches
over my shrouded heart.

Frozen spout, indeed. Anyway, of course I am not (solely) interested in the high-brow. Pop-culture slut-bag as I am, I am really only able to understand the gilfitude of Lorca through the medium of film. Tickets for the new biopic Little Ashes went on sale today, and the film charts the love affair between Lorca and Salvador Dalí, with a little bit of Luis Buñuel thrown in for good measure.

Dali and Lorca

The film stars Robert Pattinson (of Twilight fame) as Dalí, and Matthew McNulty as Lorca. McNulty is no stranger to the biopic, having starred as a rather Frankestein-ish Ian Curtis in Control, nor is his tongue a stranger to the face of Sugar Rush's Olivia Hallinan, whom he macked on in Lark-Rise to Candleford. Anyway, now I guess he'll be shoving his tongue in the Diggory.I am always suspicious that these queerifiying movies are going to cop out instead of copping off, and there was latitude for them to do that. Dalí repeatedly claimed that, although Lorca 'was madly in love with me' and 'tried to screw me twice', it hurt too much and 'nothing came of it'. To me, this doesn't really ring true. Firstly, I don't understand why Lorca would try to put the ostensibly-straight Dalí in the passive role (although I can't wait for Pattinson to act that one out). And secondly, in a typically contradictory mood he suggests that they did indeed do it: fast and nasty. Dalí felt flattered by Lorca's attentions and 'deep down I felt that he was a great poet and that I owe him a tiny bit of the Divine Dali's asshole.' Deep down, indeed.

Happily, it sounds as though the film is really running with it, and Cedric Diggory in the GQ interview says that he shot an 'extremely hard-core sex scene' with Javier Beltran, and there's some synchronised fucking between the leads in a beautiful E. M Forster/Swimming Pool Library bathing scene. Plus, Pattinson revealed that in one bit, Lorca, frustrated by not being able to fuck Dalí sleeps with a mutual female friend while Salvador just wanks tearfully in a corner. I know I say this in every fit crit, but triangular desire MUCH?

Thus, in conclusion, Little Ashes sounds like a riot. But my god, this is a booger trailer if ever I saw one. They make Dalí look like Mo Mowlam. I'll probably still see it anyway. But first I have Brideshead to catch up on. Adíos.

Dorian Gay, or, A Mid-Bummers Dyke's Cream

In other Dorian Gray related news, I fear mine and Caro's hopes that the new film version of Wilde's novel starring Colin Firth and Prince Caspian would be tremblingly homoerotic are to be quashed and thwarted. In a convenient example of triangular desire, it seems the introduction of the character of "Emily Wooton" will serve as both a validation of Lord Henry's frankly dubious heterosexual credentials, and a potential love interest for Gray, and thus provide a cathexis for Wooton and Gray's less Hollywood friendly mutual-facexploration.

AND YET, the choice of Ben Chaplin to play the pro-active aesthete Basil Hallward (and seen here with Billy Crudup in Stage Beauty) is surely some sort of subtle sign? They say a nod is a good as a twink, but I like my nineteenth-century gothic queers to be hot, hard and flaming. I'm writing to gay santa as we speak.

An American stimulus package

For all its faults, Broadway must be given praise for consistently aiming below the belt. Recently I've been putting in hours of research, posting searching questions on messageboards -- "What is the plot of Cute Boys in their Underpants Fight the Evil Trolls?" "Not 100% shure... U SUK DIKKK" -- and generally parking my nosey into the world of gay theatre. (To quote Margaret Cho, it smells like balls in pantyhose.) Firstly, there's James Edwin Parker's 2 Boys in a Bed on a Cold Winter's Night. It's a kind of Cute Boys in Their Underpants but without the underpants and the crippling shyness:

Other intruiging productions include Blowing Whistles and the slightly unappealing but nevertheless glorious Slap and Tickle. But I wonder: are we breaking glass ceilings, or just the fourth wall? With a penis? The New York Times wrote interestingly on this topic in 2005, so as fit crit goes it's practically vintage. Their entire article is but a shameless excuse to show things like the hilariously named Keith Nobbs dressed like this:

Although the Times piece makes some interesting comments about the introduction of the penis to the theatre coinciding with the emergence of gay men from the closet, it failed to question whether this is indeed a positive move. The idea that gay men are only valid if they are entertaining and pecc'd out to the nines -- and indeed judge one another by this standard -- is outdated and potentially harmful. Take Matthew Bourne, the influential choreographer, who has had a lot of success with productions like the incredible, all-male version of Swan Lake and the Play Without Words. However the line between an admiration of beauty and a less artistically credible exploitation is much less defined as it is with female ballet dancers, and I think this is a problem. Bourne's adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray for Sadler's Wells will shortly be returning to the stage:

And I think it'll be interesting to see how Dorian Gray handles this potentially problematic fetishizing of the body -- since this is of course something which the novel explores -- or whether it will itself becomes victim to the narcissism and objectification of art which Wilde critiques. The critic in me fears the latter. The bonertronic in me just doesn't care.

Comparisons are odorous

If you ever want to find an attractive poet -- and believe me I've tried -- you could do a lot worse than Ezra Pound. I am voting him my number one GILF, or gratuituous literary fittie (the 'I' is for eye-candy):

I've recently become interested in early photographic portraits, and the way that posing evolves from stillness to capturing motion, and therefore from intense formality to an intense privacy. Here for example the three-quarter profile is interesting-- head slightly tipped downwards, with an almost blossoming smile. Caught in his shirt-sleeves, this is clearly a private picture and not a public portrait -- and even the pose seems to demonstrate the modernist opposition to everything conservative, suburban and Victorian. It also gives we fitcritics a boner.

In his capacity as (m)advisor to T.S. Eliot and W. B. Yeats, he demonstrated an incredible ear, and even better hair:

It is interesting to imagine how Pound would have styled himself with today's sartorial accoutrements. One can only guess what the invention of hairspray and the tortuous manlegging would have done to the poor dear - perhaps the noxious fumes and loss of circulation to the vitals would have only exacerbated his rampant anti-semitism and splendid unreason. Witty and sesquipedelian to the point of incomprehensibility, I would therefore propose for my odious comparison this little chappy, the Ezra Pound of booky wooks:


Take heart, Russell: even the best of us make mistakes on the radio.

Lezz Be 'Avin You

Channel 4, you tease. Having cruelly cancelled the much-loved seminal teen lezzer drama Sugar Rush, they leave us no choice but to turn to the (somewhat disappointing) third series of Skins for our barely-legal fitty needs.


That said, they've pulled off a blinder in the blossoming romance between unsure sapphist Emily and her objet de désir Naomi. Skins never knowingly underdoing the angzzt, we're not quite sure why they didn't go the whole hog and have Emily fancy her equally cutely coiffed twin sister. Sure, it'd infer all manner of outdated queer theory on the lesbian urge to merge, but think of the drama.


What we've got, however, ain't half bad. A gorgeously shot woodland love scene nicely referencing modern epic lezzorama My Summer of Love, followed by a lewdicrously symbolic confessional via Emily's cat flap: the pussy-centred counterpart to Pyramus and Thisbe's hetero hole in the wall. Amazing. Channel 4, we salute you.