May 30, 2003

GAY PEOPLE'S CHRONICLE 11

eveningsout

Once again, truth is stranger than fiction

by Anthony Glassman

The Scottish have an interesting saying, "There's nought so quair as fowk."

Translated into normal, non-brogued English, it comes out something like, "There's nothing as queer as folk," which gave the world one good British television series and a weekly dose of good, old-fashioned American soft-core pornography.

What the saying means, though, is far more cogent than either of the two series it spawned. It means that people are strange, a fact borne out in three fascinating tomes from Harrington Park Press.

Sex Terror: Erotic Misadventures in Pop Culture by Mark Simpson, for instance, sounds like it might be a little naughty, a bit risqué, perhaps. It is.

Simpson, described alternately as "Joe Don Baker channeling Truman Capote" and "a skinhead Oscar Wilde," collects various columns he has written, interviews he has conducted and reviews he has penned in one volume lacking nothing but scandalous photographs.

Anyone who can interview Bruce La

Bruce, an underground Canadian filmmaker who went from dark little comedies to hardcore pornography, and in the same book have a humorous essay on trying to find a date by calling America's Most Wanted, deserves a second look. Whether that look is approving or not would probably depend on just how strange the reader is.

As far as political correctness goes, if PC means more to you than "personal computer," stay far away from this book. Simpson's a bad boy, and more than willing to get spanked for it.

A little more serious is Tim Bergling's look at Sissyphobia: Gay Men and Effeminate Behavior.

"To be homosexual is to like the ideal of sex," costume designer Jaye Davidson, star of The Crying Game, is quoted in the first chapter of the book. "Homosexual men love very masculine men, and I am not a masculine person."

That statement, and the debate over its veracity, lie at the heart of this book.

Anyone who has read a "Men seeking men" personal advertisement has seen the godawful phrase "No fats or fems." The

question is, why no fems?

Bergling interviewed hundreds of men, speaking to them in person, over the phone and via e-mail, to discover what the gay community really thinks about effeminacy, whether there really is an antipathy to the girly-boys in the audience and, if so, why.

The book could have been done as a deep and very serious study. Thankfully for Bergling's commission check, he took the low road and kept it lighter and more anecdotal than a major university study would have produced. What did he find? That some men really dislike stereotypically swishy guys, while others find them attractive, and still others like them as friends but not as lovers.

It is the journey, the various perspectives collected in the book, that make it interesting. They give one pause to think about one's own feelings towards the softer side of the "third sex." Do effeminate gay men perpetuate negative stereotypes? Do gay men put on artificially effeminate mannerisms, or are the more sissy guys just born that way? Bergling touches on it all.

Finally, Marc E. Vargo's Scandal: Infamous Gay Controversies of the Twentieth Century provides a fascinating look at some of the darker chapters of modern gay history. The book's cover would seem more fitting for a "gay boy tries to find love in West Hollywood" novel, but Vargo probably had little to do with the design.

The contents between the covers are his domain, and he rules it well. Vargo's exhaustive research and accessible writing style have combined to create as close to a "must-have" book as is possible without including lots of really naughty pictures. For a gay man, a

Mapplethorpe book might be more important to have on a bookshelf, but this tome is far more intriguing and informative.

Despite being an American, which traditionally implies a more limited worldview, Vargo looks at scandals internationally, many of which will be, if one can excuse the term, foreign to readers in this country.

The first scandal, for instance, regards the British civil servant, Irish patriot and all-around gay guy Sir Roger Casement, who seemed to have a taste for young, dark-skinned men. His official diaries provide an account of his work on behalf of the English government for disadvantaged people across the dwindling Empire, but his "black diaries," as they were called, illustrated his more erotic exploits, and were used as evidence in a treason trial. Casement's supporters insisted the diaries were forgeries, and the debate over their veracity has raged on to this very day.

Vargo looks at the scandalous events and people across the world, including the Burgess and MacLean espionage scandal that rocked Britain and gave Rupert Everett one of his best roles, the film Another Country. He examines the furor over Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, filmmaker Pier Paulo Pasolini's gruesome death, a gay scandal that almost toppled Kaiser Wilhelm's government, Reinaldo Arenas' activities before night fell and Simon Nkoli's attempts to make South Africa a free and equal country.

While all three books are worthy of plaudits, Scandal is probably the best. Of course, priced between $15 and $20 each in paperback, there's really no reason to choose between the three. Buy all of them and gain some insight into why, as the Doors so aptly put it, people are strange.

Ono, you'll tear the sheets!

Jack Waters and Peter Cramer, two openly gay performance artists, will be in Cleveland on Friday and Saturday, May 30 and 31, as part of the Welcome to the Avant-Garde performing arts festival.

Cramer and Waters, who have been a couple for 22 years, are reviving the spirit and method of John Lennon and Yoko Ono's Montreal bed-ins protesting the Vietnam War to make a statement about the war against Iraq and other militant posturing by the Unites States. "War is Ovah, If You Want It, or Give Peace a Break" will have the couple lying in bed in the Cleveland Public Theatre's lobby to assert, in the words of John Lennon, "For reasons known only to themselves, people do print what I say. And I'm saying peace. We're not pointing a finger at anybody. There are no good guys and bad guys. The struggle is in the mind."

Welcome to the Avant-Garde runs through June 8 with performances at various yenues throughout Cleveland. For a full listing, log onto www.performance-art.org.

---Anthony Glassman

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