Table Of ContentGay
Travels
A Literary Companion
EDITED BY
Lucy Jane Bledsoe
WHEREABOUTS PRESS SAN FRANCISCO
Copyright© 1998 by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Preface© 1998 by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
Foreword© 1998 by Felice Picano
Permissions continued on page 242..
For materials cited within Paul Monette's essay: Excerpt from "The Deer Lay
Down Their Bones" from Seleaed Poems by Robinson Jeffers. © 1954 Robinson
Jeffers. Reprinted by permission of Random House, Inc. Excerpt from "Ithaka"
by C.P. Cavafy from Colleaed Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip
Sherrard, reprinted by permission of Princeton University Press.© 1992. Edmund
Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Excerpt from Ford Madox Ford's Provence reprinted
by permission of Ecco Press and by Theodora Zavin Agency on behalf of Janice
Biala. © 1962 Janice Biala. Excerpt from Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken"
from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem. © 1944
Robert Frost, Copyright 16 © 1969 Henry Holt and Company, Inc., © 1997 by
Edward Connery Lathem. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and
Company. Excerpt from Noel Coward's Private Lives is reprinted by permission
of Michael lmison Playwrights on behalf of the Estate of Noel Coward. Excerpt
from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Moriturus" from Collected Poems, published by
HarperCollins, reprinted by permission of Elizabeth Barnett. © 1928, 1955 Edna
St. Vincent Millay and Norma Millay Ellis. All rights reserved.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published in the United States by Whereabouts Press
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Manufactured in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gay travels : a literary companion I edited by Lucy Jane Bledsoe.
p. em.
ISBN 1-883513-06-5
1. Gay men-Travel-Literary collections.
2.. Americans-Travel-Literary collections.
3· Voyages and travels-Literary collections.
4· American prose literature-2oth century.
5· Gay men's writings, American.
I. Bledsoe, Lucy Jane
PS647-G39G39 1998
810.8'0355-dc2.1 98-19303
CIP
10987654321
Contents
Felice Picano Foreword V1l
Lucy Jane Bledsoe Preface xi
SPAIN Brian Bouldrey Pilgrim's Regress 1
BEIJING Philip Gambone Invading Their Space 15
OLYMPIA Darieck Scott Ride of the Centaurs 27
TANGIER Joe Orton Tangier Diary 45
CALIFORNIA Rondo Mieczkowski Bodies in Motion 50
INDIA Adam Klein A Desert Shade 6o
ISRAEL Hanns Ebensten First Night in the
Promised Land 84
BERLIN Edmund White Shopping 92
AND BEYOND
CENTRAL AFRICA Cary Alan Johnson Obi's Story 96
MEXICO CITY Andrew Holleran Sleepless in Mexico 119
SACRAMENTO Michael Nava Journey to 1971 130
TOBAGO AchimNowak Jungle Fever 138
RUSSIA David Tuller Broken Romance 149
BARCELONA Erasmo Guerra La Plafa Reial 165
INDIANA Michael Lowenthal Sand Niggers and a
Tallboy Bud 178
PARIS James Baldwin Equal in Paris 187
CAPRI Paul Monette A One-Way Fare 206
AND BEYOND
Contributors 239
Foreword
A character in an Oscar Wilde comedy remarks that having her
diary by her side while traveling is a great comfort because she
is therefore always assured of having something scandalous to
read on the train.
Wilde being droll was Wilde at his most authentic. In addi
tion, he appears to have augured an impending century of
homosexual writers who would go on to keep diaries, pen travel
books, write memoirs, and somehow commix them all, creating
a new form: not unequivocally fact, not demonstrably fiction,
yet with the advantages and usefulness of both, and with a bit
extra, that immeasurably attractive property that subatomic
physicists have come to refer to as "charm."
I think immediately of that most disreputable volume of
revelations, The Diaries ofR oger Casement, by an Irish diplomat
who traveled extensively, had gay sex several times daily, and
kept detailed notes of each encounter, including exact penis size
and the precise amount of semen discharged. By some unfore
seen algebra indicative of what would often later recur, Case
ment's sex-and his writing about it-improved the more dis
tant from home he traveled. And while those scalding diaries
would end up destroying Casement once they were used as evi
dence at his trial for treason, it is difficult for us to read them
without marveling at his sexual appetite, his daring at initiating
encounters in any language-and his long run of luck!
Far more sexually circumspect-and successful, once his
works reached publication-was Norman Douglas, lover for
Vlll FELICE PICANO
decades to the husband of the American heiress and lesbian
painter Romaine Brooks. Douglas's pre-World War I books
about southern Italy-Siren Land, Old Calabria, Fountains in the
Sun, et al.-seamlessly integrate history, landscape, and portrai
ture. And what portraits he paints! Each Italian boy, youth, and
young man glitters and glows and glowers in Douglas's supple
prose, attracting new travelers to Reggio and Anacapri, Messina
and Taormina, decades after he and those lads are long gone.
Almost simultaneously and in the very same locales, Baron von
Gloeden was photographing Sicilian and Sardinian boys, scant
ily clad in his own renditions of chitons and togas avec laurel
wreaths, as he went about creating his own unique, pseudo
Greco-Roman visual travel diary. Apparently these were the
same photos Henry James grumbled were being handed around
by Hugh Walpole and the younger gay set in Westminster
Cathedral to enliven Poet Laureate Robert Browning's otherwise
cheerless memorial service. The Miss Manners in James thought
this inappropriate behavior, although given Browning's broad
love of all things Italian, many might differ.
Appropriateness becomes a most debatable issue not twenty
years later in what is one of my desert island books, J. R.
Ackerly's Hindoo Holiday. The opening says it all: "He wanted
someone to love him-His Highness, I mean: that was his real
need, I think." And so he hired Ackerly as an English tutor and
dragged him across the world to a small kingdom in the heart of
colonial India, a true "fairy" realm, in that the maharajah who
summoned Ackerly was openly gay and surrounded himself
with gay boys and men. "The Greeks are born again in Chhrok
rapur:' the maharajah assured Ackerly, as, melancholically and
mock-tragically, he pursued a life of gay romance-to his even
tual disillusionment and to our endless delight, thanks to
Ackerly's book.
Since the 1930s the flood sluices have flown open, and today
Foreword IX
one can find travel writing by good homosexual writers (albeit
mostly closeted) on every library shelf. E. M. Forster and
Somerset Maugham spring to mind most prominently, al
though later another closeted Brit, Bruce Chatwin, made a sub
stantial run at their eminence. But if I had to choose my own
circa-Stonewall favorites, rather than anything by Chatwin, I
would opt for Truman Capote's delicious, malicious The Muses
Are Heard, an account of a U.S. State Department-sponsored
African-American touring company that brought Gershwin's
opera Porgy and Bess to mystified audiences across the Soviet
Union; and Tobias Schneebaum's amazing ethnography Keep
the River on the Right, an account of his year living in the males
only long hut of a group of New Guinea cannibals, sleeping and
having sex with them, hunting alongside them, and even joining
to war against their enemies.
What sets this book apart, what makes it so absorbing, is that
every author here is an openly gay man writing from that per
spective. Only the pieces by James Baldwin and Joe Orton pre
date that defining moment in gay history, the Stonewall Riot. Of
the other authors, a handful are from the founding generation
of overtly gay writers, others are just becoming established, and
still others are up-and-coming writers. As a result we are able to
read about places and people, adventures and misadventures, as
if we were there ourselves. No need to ask, "What if I were there
with my lover?" or "Will I be looked down on if alone? Out of
place? Culturally shocked?" These men will tell you.
This volume makes no attempt to rival those gay travel
guides that already exist. It is something different, far more in
triguing: a collection of stories that aim at being what Herman
Melville deemed "an inside narrative." That is, what being a gay
man in a foreign land really feels like, smells like, tastes like, and
hurts like. The voices here might be likened to those of friends
X FELICE PICANO
sitting around a dinner table the night before your journey who
provide you with insights and warnings that only later do you
discover add infinitely to your excursion.
But it is the book's diversity that is its greatest asset. As one
delves further and deeper into the unexplored-whether in
travel or in life-the very best companion may end up being the
one who is the most multifaceted.
Felice Picano
JANUARY 1998
Preface
For me, literature and travel are inextricably linked. Opening a
book is much like entering a new country. I read for the same
reasons that I travel: to pry open my limited world view. Of
course it is possible to read only those books that reflect one's
own ideas and lifestyle, to travel in a manner that bolsters one's
concept of oneself and one's place in the world. But a true trav
eler, like a true reader, enjoys stretching his or her limits, cross
ing borders, even scary ones.
Because border-crossings are about change, new territory,
and anticipation, they make great stories. And because gay peo
ple have special expertise in crossing borders, we have access to
a special kind of travel story. All gay men and lesbians who come
out cross a border of sexuality, which for many of us contributes
to our feeling like outsiders (often gladly) within the dominant
culture. With varying degrees of success, we learn to cope. This
outsider status at home can have a profound effect on our ex
periences traveling in other countries, or even within this coun
try. It is possible, though certainly not always the case, that our
experience of difference increases our sensitivity to difference
abroad, allowing us to look more deeply into the place we are
visiting, to see beyond cultural constructs-particularly our
own. Our strategies for negotiating as queer people in a straight
world, strategies that work in some parts of the United States,
may not work abroad or in other parts of this country. Yet for
the lover of travel, these are exactly the reasons we do it: to place
ourselves in contexts that challenge our assumptions, help us to
Xll LUCY JANE BLEDSOE
see more clearly our individual and cultural characteristics. For
the gay traveler, this opportunity is multidimensional. The es
says in this book reveal the adventures of seventeen gay men as
they discover more about themselves and others through travel.
Twenty years ago, a trip to northern Africa presented me with an
experience of gender separatism unrivaled by anything in the
United States of any decade, including that one-the 1970s. I
traveled with my girlfriend to Tangier where she was making a
film. One night, the mixed-gender film crew was invited to a
private party in a Moroccan home. We dressed as appropriately
as we knew how, meaning that, in spite of the heat, I covered
everything but my face. The moment we arrived, my girlfriend
and I were whisked upstairs to the awaiting women's party, but
on the way I peeked into the westernized living room where the
Moroccan men stood stiffly, holding what looked like bourbon
on the rocks, in gray business suits and conservative ties.
Upstairs was another story. The women were traditionally
decked in layers of brightly colored cloth laced with glittering
gold lame threads. They delighted in teaching us how to eat
properly and in forcing us to eat much more than we wanted.
Then the real party began. Someone put on a record and the
oldest, fattest woman began dancing slowly, removing first her
dfina, a shimmering, transparent outer layer, and then even her
kaftan, revealing a great expanse of simultaneously undulating
and jiggling flesh. Our yips, clapping, and raucous laughter
drifted down the stairway to the men's party below, which, we
later learned from our male American cohorts, consisted of
endless discussion about the newest technology, no food, and
definitely no belly-dancing.
This perfect travel experience illuminated both the Moroc
can culture and my own. The Arabic approach to separatism, al
though brutally exclusive in many ways, allowed women a wild
