The Stonewall Reader (ed. New York Public Library, 2019)

I'm not really sure why, but one of the common traits that seem to exist among the friends I've made in my adult life is that a majority seem to exist somewhere on the queer spectrum.  Sure, part of that might be because I identify as asexual, which is the eighth letter in the common alphabet soup of inclusive lettering and is frustratingly-often understood as meaning 'ally' or something similarly missing-the-point, but I wasn't even aware of that as a term before 2017 or so.

I know there's a lot of question of the value of labels, whether they're forcing people into boxes, but when you don't have a word to describe how you feel and suddenly learn that there is a box you fit into, it's remarkably freeing, interestingly enough.  It's knowing 'I'm not alone!' that makes all the difference, really.  And even if it's not something that carries any real stigma, comparatively, it does complicate things; I'm not aromantic, I definitely want a life partner at some point, but... sexual desire isn't really part of it, and I haven't the slightest clue how I would even bring up the subject with a prospective partner.

Darn neurodiverse brain.

Anyways, getting back to the topic on hand.  I've had a lot of queer friends over the years, and tend toward being very much in favor of acceptance and normalization and... other words that mean 'bigotry bad' and such.  I'm a millennial, I grew up in a time where queer topics just weren't as taboo as they might have been in the past (Ellen's 'coming out' episode ran when I was in seventh grade, and Will & Grace was on the air during my time in high school), I knew people who were out of the closet by the time I graduated, and my sophomore year in college included someone coming out as the first of many trans* friends I've had over the years.

Even with all that, though, largely because of the media landscape when I came of age, I never really had a solid understanding of just what the struggle for civil rights looked like for queer communities.  You always learn about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. when you're in school, and maybe you learn about Cesar Chavez, but that's about it, when it comes to mid-twentieth-century civil rights.  Even with the college history classes I've taken, I never really got a good understanding of exactly what the Stonewall uprising was.  Thanks to the New York Public Library, that particular blank space in my knowledge of history has been filled, at least a bit.

The Stonewall Reader, published in honor of the 50th anniversary of the uprising, was very much an eye-opening read for me.  It's separated into three sections, and each provides a number of voices to give a feel for what the general feel of the era was like, in a way that is sort of a cross between an anthology and an oral history.  The first section of the book, "Before Stonewall", is designed to give an idea of what the state of queer rights was like in the 1960s, followed by "During Stonewall" that gives accounts by people who were actually there during the uprising, and "After Stonewall" to go over the civil rights movement that arose in the aftermath, and the changes in the culture through the last decades of the 20th century.

There's a distinct lack of voices on display here for gay white men, but that's somewhat by design; there's a definite intention on display here toward amplifying marginalized voices, so that there ends up being a focus on non-white writers and interviewees, but also a noticeable emphasis on trans* voices.  This was particularly surprising to me; sure, I had always understood Stonewall to have been about the police cracking down on a gay bar, but I had no idea of the specific nature of that gay bar, that it was the only one that would really let the drag queens and transvestites in, that the police crackdowns would go differently for pre- and post-op transsexuals...  And the number of accounts that include a mention of a chorus line stretching across the street and singing and doing Rockette-style dancing in front of a phalanx of riot police?  Amazing.

What is rather less amazing, however, is the way that everything kind of changed in the aftermath.  It's easy to look at the news right now and see how trans* rights haven't kept pace with the rest of the queer alphabet soup, and it's kind of obvious why, when you see how they were treated by the movements as a whole.  Several of the interviewees in the "After Stonewall" section are downright bitter about how, after being such a fundamental part of that initial bout of civil disobedience, the trans* community was just kind of pushed aside, always stuck on the sidelines and getting strung along without nearly as much effort put into their rights.  It's honestly infuriating to me.

I'm glad I took the time to read this.  It's one of those important parts of American history that I had somehow never really heard about, and given its relative importance, it feels like it should be better-understood, better taught.  Good on Penguin for publishing this, and amplifying the voices within.

The Naked Civil Servant (Quentin Crisp, 1968)

I really don't read as many autobiographies as I probably ought to.  There's a lot to be said for being able to get a look at someone's life through their own eyes, especially when they're a person who has a vastly different lifestyle to your own.  Add in a remarkably self-deprecating sense of narration, and it's difficult to say that The Naked Civil Servant, Quentin Crisp's autobiography (actually the first of three), isn't worth spending the time to read.

Prior to this, I didn't actually have an idea of who Crisp was.  I'm in the middle of doing the local library's 'Own Voices' challenge, where they want participants to read literature coming from various marginalized communities, and one of the categories was LGBTQ+.  I was reasonably certain at the time that my shelf didn't actually contain any queer literature, so I did a quick search to see what options exist in Penguin Classics, and this one stood out, largely because the description mentioned the author's dry wit.  I'm always down for a bit of dry wit.

Yeah, I've been focusing almost exclusively on Penguin Classics lately.  It's a good way to curate a selection of literature, even if it's taken until comparatively recently for them to start getting a decent selection of non-European literature.  I'm trying to reflect that at least somewhat on my shelf when I buy online rather than getting what I can find at thrift stores/used book stores, but it's slow going.  It does give me a good, inexpensive way to fill the gaps in what I've read, with solid translations and (usually) plenty of context notes, though I wound up reading this book with my phone at my side so I could look up names and unusual terms when necessary, as there weren't any notes whatsoever in this one.

Anyways.  This covers about the first 50 years of Crisp's life, starting with his realization that he was "different" and the difficulties in dealing with that, quickly moving into his decision to lean into his effeminacy, a decidedly problematic choice to make in 1930s Britain, particularly when homosexuality was very much against the law in that country.  He goes over his difficulty in maintaining employment, his struggles with keeping financially afloat during the first half of his life, and his general view that, well... everything that wasn't himself was pretty hard to maintain interest in.

I don't really get the sense that Crisp was a particularly likeable person to get close to.  There's a general tone to the work where he's sort of leaning into this; he's rather open about how he was almost confrontational about his camp aesthetic, and being out in the open with it rather than keeping it to the underground clubs that most gay men of the era limited their expression to, but it's very much camp; he outright states that he only actually dressed in drag once, and doesn't seem to have enjoyed the experience.

Crisp spends much of the book going through various art/design-related jobs, doing book covers and logotypes for films and the like; he outright states at several points that a large part of why he perhaps struggled to keep these jobs was the combination of 'no formal training', 'rushes to get it done quickly', and 'never learned how to be detail-focused'.  He has a general dislike of art and, in fact, all culture; the brief period he talks about in which he was going to movies on a regular basis is explicitly described as not having included anything with English-language audio, but also he actively refused to go to anything alone, preferring to have a companion, as if the idea of being alone in attending a film was somehow anathema.

During the Second World War, Crisp was actually quite willing to go, but received a discharge when he reported, due to "sexual perversion," so that he instead remained in London.  This resulted, however, in his first encounters with Americans, and particular with the many gay servicemen who passed through Britain when on leave, especially sailors.  This actually surprised me, in large part because of the numbers of servicemen involved; given the U.S. Military's rules at the time, congregating as groups could easily have resulted in mass delivery of blue discharges, which could have been seen as an easy way off the frontlines, but just as easily caused a lot of problems upon returning home, given that such discharges were treated as 'dishonorable' in many cases.  And yet, here are large groups of sailors aiming to sleep with Crisp, even if he was much more interested in just talking.

It's clear, in fact, that he's very interested in talking about himself.  He states as much, it's true, but we're talking about someone who wrote three autobiographies, had a successful one-man stage show, and had a healthy career as a raconteur in his later life, after this particular book's timeline ends.  The beginnings of that career are visible as he has his first few times speaking, as it were, during the period covered (though rather than public speaking as one might expect, they were instances of speaking at a mental institution).  He's quite open that he's not sure what anyone expected out of him in that case, especially as he told them up front that he wasn't much good at talking about any other topic.

The book's title comes from his primary employment during the second half of the book, working as a (mostly) nude model for various figure-drawing classes at local universities, a job which eventually came to feel less as exhibitionism and much more as a sort of government job.  He acknowledges the difficulties involved early on, the physical demands necessary for maintaining a pose for hours, and that his flamboyant style made the students actually dislike him because he tended to make exaggerated poses that were anything but 'usual' for the classes.

The overall feeling that one gets from reading Crisp's autobiography is that he didn't much care what anyone else thought of him, really; his more public later life included a number of controversies when he made comments that seemed either tone-deaf or actually anti-gay, and refused to retract them.  That would largely seem to be material in the other two autobiographies, which cover his life after this book was made into a film starring John Hurt, his relocation to New York, and the end of his life (the third autobiography having been published posthumously and actively worked on during the last year of his life).  That he lived to almost 91 may be surprising after the way this book ends, however; he gripes openly about the state of elder care, that nobody should be forced (or even allowed) to live past 60, and that there ought to be a Nineteen Eighty-Four-style "Ministry of Heaven" which would enforce this.

I'm definitely left with a good idea of why Crisp seems to have been a divisive figure, at the very least; his sardonic writing style at least kept me interested in seeing where his life went, and I could definitely see myself reading the other two autobiographies at some point, but for the moment, I think I'm more interested in just moving on to my next book.