Censorship – THE QUALITY OF MERCY

2020-02-212022-01-21 by David Hughes

Symonds, Whitman, Rossetti and Rake

Before Christmas I checked out a book from my little public library branch: Naomi Wolf’s Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love. I had a lot of other things to read and left it for last, not knowing what it contained, vaguely recognizing the author’s name. Turning to it, I recognized Wolf’s photo. If nothing else, readers might remember her defense of Julian Assange when he was accused of sex crimes in Sweden. I thought the book would be a history of censorship, but it’s more comprehensive. By introducing and then returning often to her cast of characters, Wolf creates an intimate narrative against the mise en scène of her historical sweep and sociopolitical stance. Continue reading “Symonds, Whitman, Rossetti and Rake”

2019-08-022022-01-21 by David Hughes

The Summer of Our Discontent

The same edition of Gay & Lesbian Review that I touched on last time—its Stonewall Special—contains an essay by author and publisher John Lauritsen: “The Rise and Fall of the GLF.”¹ I reread the piece last month.

Shortly after Stonewall in the summer of ’69 Lauritsen attended a meeting of gay people who were debating whether to align with the antiwar movement, with which John had been involved since 1965. He and the other radicals at the meeting carried the day and so the group eventually was dubbed Gay Liberation Front, a nod to the National Liberation Front—aka Viet Cong—of Vietnam. This is an example of the overlap I always saw as perfectly natural. As a kid I organized against the war in high school and and also wrote a book report on James Baldwin’s Another Country.² Others might have preferred cubbyholes over connections. Continue reading “The Summer of Our Discontent”

2019-03-192022-01-21 by David Hughes

Marx and Eno

An instance of years-ago seeming yester-day. My recently departed comrade, Lowell May, in a fortunate instance of synchronicity, on September 12, 2011 forwarded a snippet of Karl Marx just two months after musician Brian Eno had issued his collaboration with poet Rick Holland, Drums Between the Bells (and six days before Occupy Wall Street). What Lowell sent was a blog post of the same date by one N Pepperell, lecturer at an unnamed university in Melbourne, who felt the quotation from Marx “is on point for the sorts of reading strategies I apply to his style in Capital.” The language of this relatively obscure open letter, published twenty-four years before Capital, when Marx was 23, abstractly mirrors that of Holland’s words atop Eno’s soundtrack. Continue reading “Marx and Eno”

2014-09-152022-01-21 by David Hughes

Profile: Wallace de Ortega Maxey, Mattachine Foundation Member, Free Speech Champion

Wallace de Ortega Maxey was a founding member of the Mattachine Foundation, which was the public face of the clandestine Mattachine Society. In that capacity, Maxey is best known as having hosted the Mattachine’s constitutional conventions, in the spring of 1953, at Los Angeles’ First Universalist Church where he was pastor. Later, Maxey became a champion of free speech, to the point of being a defendant in a significant obscenity case.

I composed two versions of the profile of Maxey.

A relatively brief overview of Maxey’s life focusing on his work with the Mattachine and anti-censorship efforts, posted on The Tangent Group
A longer profile of Maxey from an ecclesial perspective for The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Religious Archives Network / Pacific School of Religion