Fritz Peters near Utica, 1950

"What are we thinking about when we drive so fast over some of the most lovely countryside to be found anywhere?" he asked himself.  "Where are we all going?"

While researching what was to become his third novel, The Descent, Fritz Peters visited with friends in Clinton, near Utica, New York. His novel of America's roads and highways, whose final cataclysmic scene takes place in New Mexico, started its life with Peters observing and interviewing travelers along Route 20 in New York. Richard H. Costa composed a portrait of the author with accompanying photos by Dante O. Tranquille for the December 10, 1950 Sunday edition of The Utica Observer-Dispatch. The original photo negatives used in the story and two candid shots of the subject and the author are now part of a private collection.

Costa was a columnist-reporter for The Utica Observer-Dispatch in the 1950s, taught at Utica College in the 1960s and was later a professor of English at Texas A&M University.

Tranquille was a central New York photographer who also worked for many years as the staff photographer for The Utica Observer-Dispatch. Two of his photos were selected for 1949's The Exact Instant, a show of the 100 best news photographs of the century at The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Fritz Peters uses a wire recorder to make notes
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0008]

Fritz Peters in the kitchen
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0009]

Fritz Peters with American, English and paperback editions of his first novel,
The World Next Door
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0010]

Fritz Peters leaving cabin 5 to begin research
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0004]

Fritz Peters leaving cabin 5 to
begin research (detail)
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0004a]

Fritz Peters along Route 20, NY
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0003]

Fritz Peters along Route 20, NY (detail)
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0003a]

Fritz Peters along Route 20, NY
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0001]

Fritz Peters along Route 20, NY (detail)
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0001a]

Fritz Peters along Route 20, NY
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0002]

Fritz Peters along Route 20, NY (detail)
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0002a]

Fritz Peters interviews Mrs. James Erskine, proprietor of the
Madison Motor Court, NY
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0005]

Fritz Peters interviews Mrs. James
Erskine, proprietor of the Madison
Motor Court, NY (detail)
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0005a]

Fritz Peters correcting galley proofs of his second novel, Finistère
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0007]

Fritz Peters at the piano
November 27, 1950  [cat 3119-0006]

Fritz Peters and Richard Hauer Costa discuss The World Next Door
December 5, 1950  [cat 3899-0001]

Fritz Peters reads Richard Hauer Costa's notebook
December 5, 1950  [cat 3899-0002]

These images originally appeared in Gallery 2 on FritzPeters.info, December 21, 2006. 

Meditation N.33 by Alexej von Jawlensky

Meditation N.33 (1935)

Alexej von Jawlensky (1864-1941)

Oil on paper mounted on cardboard

20.5 x 13.5 cm

Im Obersteg Collection at the Kunstmuseum Basel

"My art in the last period has all been in small format, but my paintings have become even deeper and more spiritual, speaking truly through colour. Feeling that because of my illness I would not be able to paint very much longer, I worked like a man obsessed on these little 'Meditations . And now I leave these small but, to me, important works to the future and to people who love art."

Alexej von Jawlensky 

JD by Mark Merlis

Madison : Terrace Books, 2015

Jonathan Ascher was a radical writer from the 1960s, who over the years has been largely forgotten. When Philip Marks inquires about access to Ascher's papers, it sets his widow Martha on a journey of discovery where she finds the husband she hardly knew.

Having simply sent all of her husbands papers to an archive after his death, she had no idea what might be found there. Combining large excerpts from Jonathan's journals from the 60s and 70s with Martha's present-day reactions, Merlis weaves a complex family drama in which she discovers her husband's bisexuality and realizes that she really knew nothing of his relationship with their son.

The novel is set in the 1960s literary scene of New York. In an interview with Lambda Literary, Merlis acknowledges that he has used actual writers from the time as jumping off points for some of the characters of the novel, but is quick to point out that they are literally that - jumping off points, not biographical sketches of the actual people. The source for Jonathan Ascher is Paul Goodman. Gore Vidal was immediately obvious in the character of Edgar Villard - no doubt a nod to Edgar Box, Vidal's 1950s literary pseudonym used during his exile for having published The City and Pillar.

While some will find parts of the story shocking, those who have read Paul Goodman's Parent's Day (1951) will see that both Goodman's life AND writing influenced this story.

Male Bather with Fish by Kelly Fearing

Male Bather with Fish (1950)

Kelly Fearing (American, 1918-2011)

Oil on canvas

45.1 x 29.8 cm

Interior Figure (Egg Shell Chairs) by William Theophilus Brown

Interior Figure (Egg Shell Chairs) (1976)

William Theophilus Brown, (American, 1919-2012)

Acrylic on canvas

48 x 60 in

Different From the Others (1919)

Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others), 1919
Silent Film Directed by Richard Oswald

Anders als die Andern (Different from the Others) is a gay film from the silent era directed by Richard Oswald and starring Conrad Veidt. Based on the 1903 novel of the same name by Hermann Breuer (published pseudonymously under the name Bill Forster), it tells the story of Paul Körner, a concert violinist, who falls in love with his male student and falls victim to blackmail. Kurt Sivers, the student, upon realizing Körner's feelings flees.

Although the film includes the basic story of the novel, its focus is more targeted on the harmful effects of Paragraph 175 on homosexuals in Germany as well as the evils of blackmail (often leading to suicide). Noted sexologist, Magnus Hirschfeld, plays himself in the film and explains both homosexuality and the unjust law.

In 1920, a year after Anders all die Andern was completed, public outcry about the content of films being produced at the time led to the reintroduction of censorship in Germany. It was officially banned and all but one incomplete copy of the film, now held in a film archive in Russia, were destroyed by the Nazis. It is a combination of film and still photographs from the production with extensive intertitling explaining the action in the missing portions. 

Hermann Breuer's novel has been reissued in German as recently as 2009, but unfortunately does not appear to have ever been translated into English.


 

Goldie by Kennilworth Bruce

New York : William Goodwin, 1933

Of the gay novels of the 1930s, Goldie is the most elusive. Held by less than a handful of libraries (in special collections departments), one assumes that there are no more than an equal number being held by independent collectors. Some kind soul posted the image I include here on LibraryThing.

Synopses of this rare novel appear in three publications. Roger Austen's is the first and most complete in his Playing the Game: The Homosexual Novel in America (1977). James Levin's The Gay Novel in America (1991) and John Laughery's The Other Side of Silence: Men's Lives and Gay Identities: A Twentieth-Century History (1998) both rely on Austen (as I will).

A young man from the midwest, Paul Kameron, is an ace pilot with the Royal Flying Corps during World War I. Bailing out over Germany, he is 'brought out' while being held in a POW camp. After the war, he returns to New York with his lover, a furrier he met in Europe. Paul grows more comfortable with having entered 'Limbo' (his term for 'the gay life') when he discovers there are "more than four million others in the United States who dwelt in that twilight realm of sex."

Paul transforms into Goldie when he begins dying his hair. After his lover catches him with the shop janitor, he breaks it off and Goldie is left to hustle on Broadway. He later has an affair with a gangster and starts working in a gay restaurant in the Village.

Goldie's friend, Jack Shaw, has the idea to form a gay liberation club. Its first meeting takes place in the restaurant and draws six people, including Goldie. In drafting their resolution, they aim to abolish the laws in the State of New York that make 'inversion' a crime. They cite both France and Italy having both eliminated similar laws over 100 years ago. Thus, The Twilight League was born. And just as quickly it met its demise due to its members each having plans to exploit the League in different ways, up to and including running a connections service where "wolves could obtain fairies."

Laughery, in The Other Side of Silence, ends his synopsis of Goldie by asking the question "... in 1933 who knew any homosexuals who thought they had civil rights to agitate for?" George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (1994) offers a place to start answering this question.

FROM TOP TO BOTTOM: Magnus
Hirschfeld, Henry Gerber

It is accepted that the mass mobilization of American men during WWII and their exposure to more progressive attitudes about sexuality in Europe led gay men after the war to see new possibilities for their own lives, especially as they settled in New York and San Fransisco. The evidence also suggests that service members during WWI, albeit fewer of them, were also exposed to a cultural and political climate for homosexuals in both Paris and Berlin which far surpassed what they could have imagined in small-town America or even New York.

Magnus Hirschfeld founded The Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitee (Scientific-Humanitarian Committee) in May 1897 to campaign for legal recognition of gay lesbian and transgender men and women and against their persecution (specifically Paragraph 175). It was the earliest gay rights group, but certainly not the only one in early 20th century Berlin. It continued its activities through 1933, when the Nazis destroyed The Institut for Sexualwissenschaft  (Institute for Sexual Sciences) which housed it's offices.

From 1920 to 1923, Henry Gerber had served with the Army of Occupation in Germany after WWI and had seen firsthand the openness of Berlin during this time and was upset about the way homosexuals were treated in the United States. In December 1924, now living in Chicago, Gerber founded The Society for Human Rights by filing a charter with the State of Illinois. Gerber chose to use the same name as was used by the german group he most closely identified with, Bund für Menschenrecht (The Society for Human Rights).

A police raid and subsequent arrests brought The Society for Human Rights abruptly to an end in the summer of 1925. Gerber's Society had concentrated  its efforts on the State of Illinois where they focused on reforming laws that criminalized homosexual acts. This sounds suspiciously similar to the goals of The Twilight League in the State of New York in Kenilworth Bruce's Goldie. After three costly trials for deviancy (all eventually dismissed), and the loss of his job with the post office, Gerber relocated to New York. One wonders if Kennilworth Bruce didn't borrow from Gerber's life when writing Goldie.

For more about Goldie and hustler culture, see George Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 (1994) and Mack Friedman's Strapped for Cash: A History of America's Hustler Culture (2003). For an excellent history of the gay rights movement in Berlin see, Robert Beachy's Gay Berlin: Birthplace of a Modern Identity (2014). For more about Henry Gerber and The Society for Human Rights, see Jonathan Ned Katz' Gay American History: Lesbians & Gay Men in the U.S.A., Revised Edition (1992).


Bibliographies & Ratings: Mattachine Review (P); Young (490,*) Note that the Mattachine Review rating of P is not defined in the legend but may be a typo for O, which means it was not examined but is believed to have pertinent content. Garde specifically excludes works that could not be examined.