Tag: The Temple

Count Me In

Work at home Friday! I have to go have blood work done at noon, so I am going to do my errands then–get the mail, hit the grocery store, wash and clean out the car–before coming back home to finish my work-at-home duties for the day. It shouldn’t take long, methinks; Wednesday night I managed to do my errands and make groceries in under an hour after I got off work. I left the office that night just after five, and figured it would take me about two hours to do everything and get home. I walked into the apartment at six, which was pretty impressive efficiency. Well, I was impressed.

I was tired yesterday when I got off work, but had committed to the party so when I left the office, dragging and really just wanting to hang out in my chair with Sparky, I forced myself to get up and go get cleaned up and ready. I always dread these things, always, but inevitably always have a good time once I actually am there. I hate getting ready and getting there, in all honesty. I did some chores before I left the apartment, and Sparky got some sleepy time in my lap before I got ready. But sadly I was dragging a bit, and knew I wouldn’t last long once I got to the party. I haven’t left the house at night in the car to go anywhere in a very long time, and I did go to the Marigny the way I always used to (side note: while I often regret and miss our old office on Frenchmen Street, taking the way I always used to go to work made me very glad I no longer work on Frenchmen and have to deal with negotiating the CBD and the Quarter every evening to come home)–yeesh, what a horror it was driving–so much so that when I came home I went to Claiborne and got ont the highway. The party itself was really nice–the house, which used to be a Satanic temple, I think, was also very interesting. John Cameron Mitchell’s residence is the very top floor, and I am actually kind of curious about the house now, which is called the Temple1. (side note: I can’ believe how much the Marigny has changed in the years since we moved to the Elysian Fields office, but it’s been a very long time since I have driven to the other side of Elysian Fields and gone into the Marigny.) I saw some people I wanted to see, got to see the house, and of course didn’t take any pictures. I stayed for an hour, which is an accomplishment. The live music was amazing, and the food was terrific. I was driving so I didn’t have anything to drink, and came home to change into something comfortable and to relax (and watch The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City) before going to bed. I slept later this morning than I usually do, too, but feel pretty good and will be ready to dive into the work-at-home spice mines relatively soon. The apartment is also a terrible mess; the stacks of dirty dishes here in the kitchen, not to mention the general disarray of the entire apartment, needs to be worked on today.

I never did make a to-do list, either–which means I need to make one today, one for the weekend and one through Thanksgiving (Paul is leaving on Tuesday), and start crossing things off. I want to get more writing done this weekend–I want to finish that short story and start editing Scotty, maybe even finish another essay and perhaps even dive into some other writing, too. I also know it’s an ambitious plan for the weekend and I may just decide meh, let me vegetate in my easy chair with Sparky and blow off a day, as I so often do. That’s also fine, too.

More lighter fluid keeps getting squirted on the dumpster fire that is the country/world now, and I am veering between optimism and pessimism about the future–I often descend into gallows humor, as is my wont–as a method of dealing with the existential nightmare we are being unwillingly dragged into. I’m not sure what it says about me that I always deal with these sorts of things by laughing at them, even when they truly aren’t funny; but that’s what happens when you grow up gay in a homophobic society. Legacy media continues to swirl around the toilet bowl, capitulating in advance as their ratings and subscription rates continue to fall deservedly. Their corporate masters decided that it was better for their ratings to be Leaders of the Opposition to get those monster ratings they had during the first term again, so they betrayed their viewers by doing everything they could to throw the election to the Right, rubbing their monstrous little hands with glee while they watched their potential ratings and advertising revenue shoot up again. We’re the Resistance and we’re here for you! Alas, they severely overestimated their importance and the ignorance of their viewers/readers. We saw them betray us, again and again, playing a long game that wasn’t actually a game for many of their audience. When they shivved Biden this past summer, starting with that faux-liberal piece of shit George Clooney (who lives in fucking Italy) in his “I’m so much smarter than anyone else with progressive credentials” arrogance writing that disgusting editorial in the New Yuck Times and has been completely invisible since he accepted his thirty pieces of silver. (I laugh every time Apple TV tries to push his latest film on me. No thanks, never thought he was very talented or handsome, and still think he did his best work on The Facts of Life and Roseanne.) But Paul and I have our exit plan if it comes to that. I know, man plans and God laughs, but it makes me feel better.

I cannot believe the fall/winter holidays are upon us already. Madness! But it has been a year, hasn’t it? Heavy heaving sigh. I should go fold those clothes, so on that note, I am going to bring this to a close and get some more coffee, too. Have a lovely Friday, Constant Reader, and who knows if I’ll be back again before tomorrow morning? It’s a mystery!

  1. There are so many cool and interesting places in New Orleans! I’ve lived her for almost thirty years now and still find new to me cool spots all the time. ↩︎

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. ↩︎

The Streak

Good morning, Sunday, how are you all doing? I’m feeling pretty good. Yesterday was a pretty good day. I took four boxes of books to the library sale and was thus able to pretty much finish the overall of the living room. I also worked on the filing, finished the laundry room, and got the kitchen back under control. I do have to spend some time this morning working on the work space here, but I feel like I have the apartment back for the first time in years. I feel very accomplished, not going to lie. There’s still more to do, but at least it doesn’t look like the abode of a hoarder who hasn’t seen the floor in years anymore. There’s still another book purge to come, of course, and there’s the boxes on top of the cabinets that need to be removed as well. I think most of it is paper, too; I don’t think I have that many copies of my own books still in boxes anymore–but I’ve also kind of decided that I can dispose of the vanity book case soon, too. If I can clear out enough other spaces, I can box up my books, carefully archiving and labeling them, and store them in places where I have books that can be donated; and then I can pick up all the stacks of books off the floor and store them in bookcases.

I’m feeling very ambitious about the apartment this year, can you tell? And it was marvelous to come downstairs to an uncluttered and more spacious living room this morning. There are just a few more bits and pieces to get done today down here–things to put away and so forth–and then I can vacuum the entire downstairs! HUZZAH!

I slept late again this morning, much to Sparky’s dismay, but now I am up and my coffee is tasting magnificent this morning. I do have to make a grocery run today, which means organizing the fridge and so forth this morning, too, so I know what we need as well as make room for it. I am resisting the temptation to stock up the freezer–part of being prepared for hurricane season, empty your freezer and don’t fill it with anything other than things you’ll use right away; there’s nothing more frustrating and maddening than throwing away a lot of food after a power outage in the summer–which isn’t easy because yet another mental issue for me is food anxiety; I am always afraid we won’t have food in the house and I won’t have money to buy more (I think Mom was the same way, which is why there was always so much food in her house). I’ve always been this way; living paycheck to paycheck when you don’t make a lot of money can be very scarring for the rest of your life. Maybe some day I’ll get over it, but at least I recognize that it’s an actual thing now and can resist it.

Also, no need to stock up on anything fresh, as everything spoils quickly here in the heat, too. It’s amazing how quickly bananas will ripen here in the tropics, you know.

I am hoping to get some writing done today, too. Tomorrow I am going to get the mail and go to the gym on the way home from the office, and hopefully that will start a real streak of me going to the gym. My arm actually looks better than it did, which is yet another reason I really need to get into the three times per week habit again, even if I’m not doing heavy weights just the exercise itself will help my metabolism. I am getting closer to two hundred pounds and my goal weight (I remember back in the aughts when that was my goal weight to build up to; now it’s a weight loss goal. Sigh. The ironies involved with being gay never end until you’re in the grave.

I read a comic book yesterday; it was a Comixology original and it was quite good. Liebestrasse was the name of it, and it’s main character is a very closeted gay businessman returning to Germany in 1952 and remembering the Weimar times there, when he moved there for work and lived openly as gay and fell in love…as the Nazis were rising. I may give the comic its own entry, but then again I may not. Gays in Weimar Berlin always interest me (especially these days, as the similarities between now and then are even more sharply drawn), but the stories never end happily–how can they–and it’s all really just another version of Goodbye to Berlin, which is a seminal work in queer canon, methinks. I also got a copy of Stephen Spender’s novel of the time (he, Isherwood, and Auden were all friends in Wiemar Berlin) The Temple, which I am also looking forward to reading at some point if I can ever get all my reading caught up (it’s never going to happen, and I really need to stop deluding myself that it will). I’ve always been interested in that time, once I learned about the queer freedoms, and I started clocking the similarities in the 1990s…even coming up with a book idea about the fall of democracy in the United States, when dissidents, queers, and racialized people were imprisoned in “relocation centers.”

Of course, I’ve been saying this for years and no one has ever listened…and here we are.

Chilling thoughts for a Sunday morning, am I right?

And on that note, I am heading into the spice mines. Have a lovely Sunday, Constant Reader, and I may be back later; stranger things have happened, after all, and continue to happen.

I really wish I had discovered rugby players years ago. I actually would have loved to have played, too.