Tag: Leibestrasse

I Wanna Be Free

Saturday morning and here we are, looking forward to another good day at the Lost Apartment, huzzah! Sparky got me up for food at six thirty, but joined me when I returned to bed (after licking his bowls clean) and cuddled with me another hour or so. He really is a dear, even if he turns into a vicious apex predator terror every once in a while. I’ve not seen any bugs or vermin in the house since we acquired him and brought him home either, so I can deal with the vicious apex predator terror for the short while that mood lasts.

I was thinking yesterday as I cleaned up around the kitchen and waited for Paul to get up (I never wake him up unless I know he has to be somewhere), and as a marvelous thunderstorm moved in, that my Substack hasn’t grown much but I also am not actively trying to grow it, to be honest. It’s free, just like the blog, but what I really want to do with the Substack is make it more essays about stuff that no one will ever ask me to write (or not for pay, at any rate), and leave the more personal stuff here and here only. That way, if you just want essays about queer life, history, culture, books, movies and television shows etc. you can subscribe to the Substack and skip the every day here. If you can’t get enough of me, you can do both or you can just stay here. I may eventually get to the point where those essays no longer get posted here…but that will have to wait until the subscribers make complete separation of self worthwhile. I was also thinking yesterday as the sky darkened and the winds picked up, that all of this new free time I am enjoying so much can also be used for productivity–if I can get back to the point where I’m writing 500-5000 words per day again, then this extra time can be utilized for marketing and teaching myself how to work my website and get it all finished and updated. I also am going to start learning how to do more promotion and format ebooks, too, so I can eventually get to the point where I can do my own ebooks. It would be cool to put up a short story or a novella here and there whenever I feel like it, for free–yes, I know my work has value and worth, but every so often it would be fun to gift readers who like my writing with something free every once and a while, you know, as a thank you for sticking with me all these lengthy years.

I also wrote for a whole yesterday, which felt great. I got about a thousand or so words done, which felt great, and I was most pleased with myself for doing so. I also came up with an idea for yet another book that sounds rather interesting and might be fun to explore thematically; I certainly wrote down a shit ton of notes and ideas and riffs in my journal last night, and I have to say I am really enjoying my journal these days. I also managed to get my review essay of Liebestraße finished yesterday, which felt great, and I hope to get some more of those done over the course of the weekend. Yesterday was, overall, a very good day that I got through without much irritation or aggravation, so I will take that. I do have more errands to run today–we ended up skipping Costco, so we have to do that today–and I hope to have some time to read and write later on after I finish everything.

Today is also our anniversary; twenty-nine years today we’ve been together. Almost thirty years, and almost half of my life. We’re going to watch some movies tonight, and we’re going to have a nice little dinner here at home to celebrate. Next year will be thirty years, and in ten days we’ll have lived here in New Orleans twenty-eight years, too. New Orleans was the key to all of my dreams coming true. I wish I would have been less anxious and more confident when I was a teenager, and if I knew then what I know now, I would have gone to college at LSU and moved to New Orleans after graduation, and maybe gotten a master’s in creative writing at the University of New Orleans. My life would be completely different now–I probably would have left New Orleans at some point rather than staying here my entire life, but there’s no use in speculating over that sort of thing–especially since I am settled and extremely happy.

We finished the seasons of The Acolyte and The Boys (which is coming hard for MAGA and I am so here for it; the season finale especially was rather pointed) last night and also watched this week’s The Serpent Queen, which is very well done, but most of the drama for the rest of her life now was political; and I don’t know how the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre is going to play out in the show. There are already inaccuracies in the speeded up timeline; Princess Elisabeth was long married to the King of Spain by the time Charles IX was old enough to be depicted as an adult. I try not to get heavily involved in complaining about inaccuracies in historical shows–they are always rotten with them, but I love watching historicals far too much to stop watching them now because they twist history to fit their storytelling purposes…and this is a period of history I am very interested in. Thank you, cable channels, for committing to doing shows set in historical times I love (like Mary and George). I know there’s a television series based on The Three Musketeers, but it’s very hard for me to watch any adaptation of that after loving the 1970s film versions with (sigh) Michael York (who is an incredibly nice man).

There was a lot of open homosexuality at the royal courts of England and France during this time period, even more so in France rather than England. I’ve always wanted to write about Louis XIV’s brother, Monsieur le duc d’Orléans, who often donned women’s clothing to attend court functions and had a long time lover the Chevalier de Lorraine1 (both were depicted beautifully in the series Versailles, which I also loved). Maybe when I’ve retired I can delve into writing more historicals. I also have an idea for a short story that is a historical; another Sherlock story from 1916, which I am hoping to get started this weekend as well. This morning I am going to do some clean-up around the kitchen before doing some writing and cleaning myself up to go run my errands. I also really still want to write my book about the women in power of the 16th century, too. I suppose it could be called The Monstrous Regiment of Women, but I suppose it could also be called When Women Ruled the World.

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines for now. Have a lovely Saturday, Constant Reader, and I’ll check in with you again later.

  1. The Chevalier started a society of homosexuals at the court of Louis XIV, which I would also like to research some more. ↩︎

We Found Love

I’ve always1 been interested in Weimar Germany, and Berlin during that period particularly. My interest grew, obviously, as it became more and more aware of how tolerant and progressive the period was; one of the first periods of true freedom for queer people in history. I’m sure there was still homophobia, but the culture and intelligentsia of the period were more interested in examining and studying queerness than eradicating it. This was part of what the Nazis sneeringly referred to as “decadence2” and opposed; everything began changing (for the worst) after 1933.

Sometimes I wonder if the more time passes after the fall of Berlin in 1945 and new generations come along that are farther away from the horrors of the second World War also make it seem less real and more history? It was very recent history when I was a child. My paternal grandfather served in the Pacific theater in the south Pacific, people on the street where we lived in Chicago when I was a kid was chock full of veterans and war refugees, people who lived through the war in Europe. A friend’s father had numbers tattooed on his forearm, and wasn’t Jewish, just an ethnic undesirable. We watched documentaries about the war and the camps as far back as I can remember. There was also an amazing PBS documentary that aired all the time–it was a series, The World at War. War fiction and non-fiction were still being published, still new, and still horrifying. I was a teenager when I read Herman Wouk’s definitive war novels, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, which became mini-series in the 1980s and I still think should be required reading for US History classes. (Granted, the two books are about three thousand pages long in total; it would take most students the entire class year to read them both, but putting a human face on the war by showing it through the eyes of people who were living through it has always been the best way, in my opinion, to teach history; by putting the students into the place and minds of the people who did experience it.) Anyway, clearly the history of the period isn’t taught correctly in this country else we wouldn’t be facing the rise of fascism here not even a hundred years after defeating it so thoroughly in the 1940s3.

Liebestrasse4 was suggested to me by Kindle Unlimited after I read Sins of the Black Flamingo, and I’m always up for a compelling queer story. My German isn’t good anymore, but I could read the title of this as “Love Street,” and given the nervous way the two embracing men are looking around, I gathered it was a Weimar Republic story.5

How could I pass that up?

And it didn’t disappoint.

It is, as always, both heartening and disheartening to see how open and inclusive Berlin was in those years leading up to 1933; how queer people could be open and live their best lives. Sure, there was oppression–there always has been and probably always will be–but it was easily skirted and just part of the risk expressing yourself has always held for queer people (I was explaining to a co-worker the other day how freeing going out to gay bars used to be for all of us, an escape from the stifling heterosexual world we are all trapped in, all the while knowing a police raid could, at any moment, possibly destroy your entire life.)

Leibenstrasse has no happy endings. Queer lives didn’t have them back then as a general rule, and those who managed it somehow didn’t broadcast it, either–because that would have ruined the happy ending. The main character is a deeply closeted American businessman, one of those alpha sharks we are always taught to respect, admire, and aspire to be–but he’s single, dodging all attempts to avoid being set up with women and dates, parrying all commentary about his private life–and finally decides to take an opportunity to go to Berlin to look for business opportunities for his company as well as to establish the company in Berlin. He does this not only to escape the stifling world he is living in, but also because he’s heard about the freedoms in Berlin, and that is very appealing to him. The story is cast several years after the war, with him returning to Berlin again, and remembering that lost time, and falling in love with an anti-Nazi gay activist and becoming a part of his circle. He gets arrested, and fired, from his company, and decides to go back home to escape the coming Nazi storm. He wants his love to come with him, but he wants to stay in Germany and keep fighting the Nazis…and they lost touch. Is his love still alive? DId he make it through the Nazis and the war?

Or did he die in one of the camps?

It’s a very heavy subject, and it is also one I would love to see more fiction and non-fiction about; how do you handle the guilt for fleeing and leaving your great love behind to potentially die horribly? What does that say about you?

This was an excellent read, and the art is also fantastic. Highly recommended.

  1. Always is an interesting word choice; obviously I didn’t come out of the womb with an interest in Germany between the wars. But as I grew up and became more and more aware of the period, the higher my interest. ↩︎
  2. Decadence, sin, sodomy: it’s all the same thing, so you see why it’s irritating when modern American fascists lie about the Nazis to fool people into thinking they don’t, you know, share beliefs and values with the most disgusting and horrific political ideology of all time. ↩︎
  3. Or maybe not. There’s always been a pro-fascist element in this country–look up “America First 1940” and see what comes up. They were pushing for us not to enter the war at all, or if we did, our natural ally was Hitler against the Soviet Union because communism. ↩︎
  4. In actual German, it would be spelled with a scharfes s, but I don’t know how to make that symbol on here…ß! There it is! ↩︎
  5. I recently bought a copy of Stephen Spender’s novel of the time, The Temple, and intend to reread Isherwood’s Berlin Stories and Christopher and His Kind. ↩︎