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of the most interesting and also most poignant manuscripts in the
Paul Monette papers is the first draft of Borrowed Time: An AIDS
Memoir. The typescript is sure of itself, yet there are extensive
holograph corrections enabling the study of Monette's writing process.
The complete first draft is shown in the left case on the north wall
of this room. Shown here are two pages about Greece, particularly
the effect Delphi had on him and his lover, Roger Horwitz. They visited
Greece in 1984 after Horwitz was diagnosed with AIDS. The typescript
leaf begins: "I don't know how not to gush about it., but the moment
I set foot in Greece I was home free." Monette made corrections on
the typescript and then was inspired to make his good text even better.
He adds in holograph, on an inserted sheet of lined yellow paper,
an entire section beginning: "Impossible to measure the symbolic weight
of the place to a gay man.." On that same leaf is the haunting phrase:
"It was the last full blast of sunlight in our lives" denoting the
loss suffered since Horwitz's illness.
Monette didn't define this meaning for gay men that is "impossible to measure." He is assuming that readers will find from their general education something about Greece and homosexuality with which to identify. The meaning he alludes to was the result of a long process common to western education, a process which can be traced through the entire history of printing. Works to study this meaning are shown here in fine printing, gay studies, gay popular literature, and lesbian feminist items and publications.
The reclaiming of a Greek philosophy of homosexuality began in the
Renaissance and was disseminated in books printed even in the first
century of printing. Marsilio Ficino translated Plato from Greek into
Latin. Ficino also did commentary on Plato's works and from The
Symposium and other dialogs developed the idea of "Platonic love."
Platonic love has come to indicate a chaste love, but Ficino's philosophy
included the physical. Ficino's view of platonic love, a deep spiritual
as well as physical bond between men with a shared thirst for beauty
and knowledge, is complex. He saw human beings as inherently both
sexual and spiritual. His thought influenced Michelangelo in his sonnets
and numerous other creative giants.
Ficino's formulation of platonic love exercised an important influence on artists in his own time and beyond, including Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. His influence can also be seen in the homoeroticism in Michelangelo's and Shakespeare's sonnets as well as in the works of Edmund Spenser, Pierre Ronsard, and Maurice Scève.
When homosexual relations and the "pagan" Greeks were denied by the church and governments through the ages, this concept was turned into courtly love. Centuries after the Renaissance, German scholars and the inventor of art history, Johann Joachim Winckelmann, looked back to Greece and began a new appropriation of Greek homosexuality, in attitudes toward male beauty found in Greek sculpture, for example.
In literature, Byron and then the Victorian English also privileged the Greeks. This came primarily through professors at Oxford and the great translator Benjamin Jowett urging the study of the Greek classics, with the Greek language and its literature displacing Latin. The "gay" came through the writers and theorists Walter Pater and J.A. (John Addington) Symonds, who wrote the first "gay study" in English, A Problem in Greek Ethics. UCLA's copy is the copy Symonds has corrected in his own hand to be published as an appendix to a work by Havelock Ellis. Symonds's note indicates it was written in 1874 [in other places he states 1973] and printed in Edinburgh in 1883. The flyleaf has the signature of Ell penciled "H Ellis." A copy of [this book] was circulated to Henry James by Edmund Gosse. When Symonds died, his heirs refused publication in Ellis's work. Symonds gives details the story of Achilles and Patroclus that Monette too up his and Roger Horwitz's battling AIDS. Symonds: "Thus the tale of Achilles and Patroculus sanctioned among the Greeks a form of masculine love.we are justified in describing as heroic, and in regarding as one of the highest products of their emotional life." The book is open to pages reading:
The man who loves the one love is a friend of God, a friend of law, fulfilled of modesty, and free of speech. He dares to court his friend in
daylight and rejoices in his love. He wrestles with him in the playground,
and runs with him in the race, goes afield with him to the hunt, and in battle fights for glory at his side. In his misfortune he suffers, and at his death he dies with him.
Further notes on the page refer to writings by Sir Richard Burton, who wrote about homosexual activities throughout the world.
Monette may or may not have known the work by Symonds, reprinted later,
but these theories had by his time become even part of popular erotic
literature and culture so that articles about the Greeks appeared
in what were called "physique" magazines in the 1950s and 1960s when
Monette bought these. Shown here are copies of Grecian Guild Pictorial,
a physique magazine which more than the others of its genre used the
Greek "cover" to promote a physical appreciation of the male body.
This 1960s paperback translates Robert LaFlaceliere's work . While the front seems innocuous enough, the rear cover shows it was meant to be sold as titillating erotica, and gay erotica, at that.
To a lesser extent, lesbians appropriated Greek same sex culture as
well, particularly from the writings of the poet from Lesbos, Sappho,
also mentioned on the back cover of the 1960s work. At the beginning
of the twentieth century, women in Paris termed themselves Sapphics,
particularly the Englishwoman Pauline Tarn who took the name Renée
Vivien, a translator of Sappho, and her lover, Natalie Barney. In
the 1970s, lesbians recovered Sappho and these French women's use
of Sappho. UCLA has one of the world's most extensive collections
of Gertrude Stein and her circle and that of Natalie Barney and others
in Paris. Vivien anonymously translated the fragments of Sappho into
modern French for the first time in her Sapho (1909). She
rewrote Sappho's life, starting with the reclamation of the uncorrupted
form of her name, "Psappha." Teachers such as Arlene Raven and Terry
Wolverton at the Los Angeles Woman's Building used their works in
their classes. This flyer and class syllabus from the Terry Wolverton
papers here at UCLA shows .. . Others used Sappho for 1970s lesbian
feminist purposes, as shown in Sappho Was a Right On Woman
(1973; second printing, 1974).
Monette used Greek imagery to show desire for another male: "when
he passed in the car a Greek statue with its shirt off." He used the
imagery to show that gay men during AIDS were not weak and could indeed
fight the necessary battles against the disease itself and against
the social and political forces that were denying full recognition
and treatment of the devastation. This imagery is shown here in the
exhibit when discussing his poems published in Love Alone: 18
Elegies for Rog. In that work he refers to himself and Roger
Horwitz as "warriors together," as were Achilles and Patroclus. In
Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir, which told the story of Horwitz's
disease and death in prose, Monette indicated this Greek thought "impossible
to measure" and the healing spirit he found in Delphi: "I felt as
if my body and soul were wedded."
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J.A.
Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics
Tomorrow's Man
Male nude with Greek column
Cover
of Sappho Was a Right On Woman
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