It's Always More Complicated

Now I want somebody to write the actual history (now that Virago has been done, and the history of Silver Moon bookshop, is anyone doing Pandora Press or Sisterwrite on Upper Street?), given that websites can vanish, but this is good to be going on with: The Women’s Press (1977-2003): and to this global online, ongoing ARCHIVE. The Women's Press were perhaps rather more demotic in their selection of materials than Virago and had strong sff and crime lines, I am sure I am not the only one who still has their distinctive black and white striped spines adorning my shelves.

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While as long-time flaneuse of Fitzrovia I am saddened by what appears to be the demise of Pollock's Toy Museum at that historic location, though it seems to still be flourishing in Leadenhall Market, and, of all places, Croydon, Persephone Books are apparently moving in to those premises - having moved out of the metropls to Bath some years ago.

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Gay Print Culture: A History of Gay Magazines in Mexico, Canada, and the United States:

I became interested in the history of gay periodicals in 2015, as an M.A. student at the University of Toronto. My readings and coursework at that time focused mostly on the histories of gender, sexuality, and LGBTQ+ activism, and they sparked my curiosity about the role of print media in the formation of gay identities and communities.

Today we went and had an Art Experience.

Ever since I saw there was going to be an exhibition of Ithell Colquhoun at Tate Britain I had the intention of going to it but somehow we never got round to it until this final week (and I still have not read the book on her I have).

But at least I did get to it.

'engagement with the surrealist movement... fascination with the intertwining realms of art, sexual identity, ecology and occultism'.

Mix them up, shake and stir. She left the Official Surrealists because they made an edict that you were apparently not allowed to belong to other organisations if you were a True Surrealist and she was not about to quit her various occultist movements -

- of which there were several and one wonders a bit whether they were at all contradictory....

- but her work remained pretty surreal and involving unconscious picture-making and various methods that brought random patterns into the mix.

There was a v early work from her time at the Slade which was Judith and Holofernes, and one wonders how many women artists since Gentileschi have been moved to depict that, eh.

The ticket also admitted to the Edward Burra exhibition - I found it a tad odd that while the labelling on Colquhoun's work mentions eroticism and her involvement with women this element was not mentioned re Burra in spite of the saucy Marseilles sailors, doing designs for ballet, etc, which rather had my period gaydar pinging.

We had vaguely thought of doing the Lee Miller photography as well, but the previous were already quite enough and that has only just started.

We did flaneuse a bit about the galleries generally and spotted a portrait of Emma Hart (later Hamilton) as Circe: nothing like that hideous reconstruction recently posited, hmmmm?

Meet generation stay-at-home: ‘You don’t need to pay to go clubbing: you can sit at home and watch it on your phone’ This is so many generations down the line from when I was a young thing - it wasn't even so much about clubbing when I was a student, because (and this may be down to having been at an on-the fringes of the conurbations campus uni) there were various events involving live bands or the precursors of disco actually on the premises.

Sort of resonated with something I spotted on social media where somebody had screenshotted somebody going 'how did people get together before mobile phones?' and I was very tempted to go 'Eeeeee, we'd go down to the monkey-walk':

[I]t consisted of a parade of unattached young men and women walking along from the clock on the Co-op buildings on Belvoir Road to the clock on Lashmore’s shop on High Street*. Young men would be on one side of the street and young women on the other. They would parade back and forth ‘eyeing up the talent’ as one participent put it. ‘Liaisons’ would occur and often couples would be ejected from shop doorways by the local bobby on his beat.

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From my very first downward dog, I was hooked. But training as a yoga teacher led me to a miserable world of false promises, exploitation and near-total burnout. Could I find my way back to the mat? Some of this rather reminded me of my brief period of fairly peripheral involvement with the 'growth' or 'human potential' movement around the late 70s, where people did seem to get sucked into the cult, or rather, different manifestations thereof that were around at the time, presumably according to individual personality:

It was wildly chaotic but there was a strange kind of method to it. Something like breaking us down to build us up. We’d spend a weekend each month in her studio, then return to our lives wide-eyed and changed.

And, talking of cults, Italian researchers say that joining the mafia is like entering a cult in which members must leave behind their own identity:

Everything changes, Lo Verso said, when something disrupts the mobsters’ lives. “As long as they are integrated into the mafia family, the bosses do not show any kind of psychological suffering,” he said. “Their own ‘self’ is suppressed because they identify totally with the mafia and their thoughts conform to those of the clan. However, things change when there is a break, a detachment from the mafia, for example, when an arrested mafioso decides to collaborate with the authorities.

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This is just me being irked, niggled and narky: maybe that is just having been part of a niche community of historians which has been WELL AWARE of these figures since the 1970s or so, has this guy ever heard of Jeff Weeks or Sheila Rowbotham(or is he just Failing to Cite)? Beyond Oscar Wilde: the unsung literary heroes of the early gay rights movement. Grump. Unsung by whom? Mutter fume.

I don't think I'm a member of the Outer Alliance

for queer speculative fiction and those who create, publish and support it, whatever their sexual orientation and gender identity.

It's something I'm generally in favour of, and about which I sometimes think back to the dear dead days of the 70s and early 80s when there was actually quite a lot of queerness or at least not doing of conventional straightness in sff, or at least the sff I was reading and wonder why this appears to be off the map, pretty much...

There does seem to be a suggestion that one should post, or post a link, to some specfic of one's own of a queer nature.

Unfortunately I don't really have anything - there was my unfinished Mitfordverse fic about Jassy Radlett Coon as lesbian Hollywood scriptwriter, Communist, union activist, etc. (Backstory I made up was that when she married Gary Coon it eventually transpired that he swung both ways, and so, she discovered, did she, and when the story I was trying to write began, she was more or less living with a costume designer while Gary was away on location most of the time, an amicable arrangement all round.) Not exactly sff, though.