Mark Adnum

Editor

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Yukio Mishima met with the younger members of his private milita the Tatenokai at Tokyo’s Misty Sauna Baths in the late 1960s, as he was preparing for his ritual suicide in 1970. That’s him in the top left photo (top, slightly right of centre). David Bowie was also a fan, painting a large expressionist portrait of Mishima and hanging it on the wall of his Berlin apartment (pictured). The celebrated Japanese artist (a novelist, playwright, actor, flaneur par excellence) may have celebrated his 90th birthday today, 14 January 2015. My profile at the Huffington Post today looks at his swashbuckling adventures as a globetrotting dandy, a most marvelous identity he enjoyed during the height of his fame. 

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Hanoi is just stupendous.

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I really loved my week in Boracay. More pics at my Instagram.

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All games have morals; and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures, as no other activity can hope to do, the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb, a snake is waiting just around the corner; and that for every snake, a ladder will compensate. But it’s more than that; no mere carrot-and-stick affair; because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things, the duality of up against down, good against evil; the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuosities of the serpent; in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see, metaphorically, all conceivable oppositions, Alpha against Omega, father against mother; here is the war of Mary and Musa, and the polarities of knees and nose … but I found, very early in my life, that the game lacked one crucial dimension, that of ambiguity — because, as events are about to show, it is also possible to slither down a ladder and climb to triumph on the venom of a snake. — Salman Rushdie, Midnight’s Children.

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Weekend in Yogyakarta.

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1,112 and Counting: Larry Kramer by the numbers

Long before he became, as Gabriel Rotello named him, “the gay community’s AIDS prophet”, Larry Kramer was a script editor at Columbia Studios' London offices. He wrote the dialogue for Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush, then bought the movie rights of DH Lawrence's Women In Love, wrote the screenplay and co-produced the film adaptation directed by Ken Russell, which won Glenda Jackson -- who Kramer insist be cast in the lead female role --  the 1970 Best Actress Oscar (Kramer was nominated for his screenplay, but lost to Ring Lardner Jr. for MASH). 

When his treatment for an adaptation of Yukio Mishima’s Forbidden Colours was not optioned by Columbia, Kramer moved to New York and in 1972 his first play, Sissies Scrapbook, ran for eight performances in a shared space above a YMCA. Faggots, his only novel, was published in 1978 and between 1981 and 1983 he wrote a series of articles for the New York Native reporting the early emergences of what came to be called AIDS. In 1982 he helped found Gay Men’s Health Crisis (GMHC) but resigned from the board of that organisation soon after. In 1985, he wrote his most well-known work, the play The Normal Heart. In 1987 he co-founded AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power (ACT-UP) in 1987 and in 1989 Reports from the holocaust: the making of an AIDS activist, an anthology of his Native articles that included a lengthy new essay, was published. Throughout the 1990s Kramer was a regular columnist for The Advocate, and in 2004 that magazine published his response to the death of Ronald Reagan, Adolf Reagan. In 2005 The Tragedy of Today’s Gays, originally delivered as a speech at a “Gay Pride” event the previous year, was published as a short book, with an introduction by Naomi Wolf.

The body of work about Kramer includes We Must Love One Another or Die: the Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, an essay collection published in 1997, and the play The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me written by David Drake and first performed in 1994. A film adaptation of The Night Larry Kramer Kissed Me was released in 2004, and Kramer has appeared in numerous documentaries including Larry Kramer (1993), Gay Sex in the 70s (2005) and Sex Positive (2008).

Apart from David Bergman, who notes that Kramer’s later attacks on senior bureaucratic figures was a theme “first announced in [Kramer’s] screenplay for Women In Love”[1], most discussions of Kramer’s earliest work begin engagement with Kramer from the publication of Faggots onward. Sissies Scrapbook was reworked and retitled as Four Friends but it ran for less than a week when staged in 1975; it is unpublished and is rarely clipped into even the most retrospective appraisals of Kramer and his work. 

David Willinger, for example, says that Kramer’s “real” work began after 1981, that Sissies Scrapbook/Four Friends saw the playwright “throwing up” unready ideas and that it “was the AIDS crisis which ultimately catalysed him … back to playwriting”[2]. For Michael Paller, Sissies Scrapbook/Four Friends was too late to be a part of the vibrant period of underground gay playwriting centred on New York’s Caffe Cino in the late-1950s and early 1960s (“Larry Kramer was not part of this world”, notes Paller) and was too early for the mid-1980s “AIDS-theatre” marked by William M. Hoffmann’s As Is and, of course, Kramer’s The Normal Heart[3].  In their essays about Larry Kramer and gay theatre in the “Voices, Audiences and the Theater” section of the 1997 essay collection, We Must Love One Another Or Die: The Life And Legacy of Larry Kramer, Tony Kushner, John M. Clum and Gail Merrifield Papp do not reference Sissies Scrapbook/Four Friends at all. 

Patrick Merla provides a comprehensive overview of Kramer’s early writing career in his biographic essay of Kramer in We Must Love One Another Or Die, describing Sissies Scrapbook as 

the story of three straight men and one gay man who have been best friends since their days at Yale. All four are emotional cripples; one of them becomes physically crippled in the second act. Kramer describes the play as being about “cowardice and the inability of some men to grow up, leave the emotional bondage of male collegiate camaraderie, and assume adult responsibilities.” 

Like Kramer, Mishima segued from writer to political dissident, forming the right wing nationalist group Tatenokai in the late 1960s which met privately in locations like the Misty Sauna Baths in Tokyo and eventually attempted a coup to restore the Japanese Emperor to power[4]. Essay titles like “Volunteers needed for civil disobedience”, “Equal to Murderers”, “We Can Be Together” and “Oh My People” can be imagined as polemic writings crafted by Mishima, but they are titles of essays written by Kramer. The widely speculated sexual rites of the Tatenkai, denied by Mishima’s widow but asserted by Japanese novelist Jiro Fukushima among others, were dramatised in the 1983 film Forbidden Colours, which showed members of the Tatenkai routinely enjoying nightly group sex under the instructive eye of a dramatised incarnation of Mishima and bottomless tubs of Nivea Crème placed handily throughout the washitsu. A similar scene, surely, to the dreamlike moments in Faggots such as:

While watching one of the members fucking himself by sitting on a stationary twelve-inch rubber dildo while being bound hand and foot, the dildo impaled to a cross, the cross mounted on a stage, and the fellow also sucking the cock of a gentleman clad entirely in chain mail, except of course for his genitals, which were exposed, and enormous, and holding in his hand while mouth-fucking the impaled acolyte, not one but two hissing rattlesnakes, reputed to have been defanged but dripping something from their mouths nevertheless, all of this witnessed by forty-nine other members, each donged with grease, each jerking off either himself or a fellow clubber, in some sort of cockamamie version of the daisy chain.[5] 

The title of Forbidden Colours could be a title for an appraisal of Kramer’s writings, specifically, their relentlessly colourless, black-and-white stylings. The newsprint pages of the New York Native were black-and-white, and Kramer’s articles in that publication presented all-or-nothing ultimatums (“unless we fight for our lives, we shall die”) with tick-tock titles such as “1,112 and Counting”, “Where Are We Now?” and “2,339 and Counting”. The Normal Heart explores binary tensions (“You and your straight world are our enemy”) and inflexible ultimatums (“tell gay men to stop having sex!”) inside a set made up of “whitewashed” walls covered with facts and figures related to AIDS written in “black, simple lettering”. Zebra crossings, like the invisible ones that allow Kramer calm passage through the discursive traffic that whizzes between his oft-contradictory convictions (the publication of “Adolf Reagan in 2004 and its assertion of an external “murderer” of gay men was followed, three months later, by the publication of The Tragedy of Today’s Gays, which asserted that gay men were “murdering” each other through “fratricidal” unsafe sex practices) are usually black-and-white[6]. Black-and-white too is the “love him or hate him” responses of Kramer’s peers and contemporaries: for Michelangelo Signorile, Kramer is an “inspiration” and a “mentor” but Andrew Sullivan has described Kramer as a “wise child”[7]. Dialogue in Kramer’s writings tends to the metronomic: “all we do is live in our Ghetto and dance and drug and fuck”, spoken by Fred Lemish, the main character from Faggots, “party, party; fuck, fuck” from The Normal Heart. His prose is saturated with numbers, ostensibly deployed to provide his narrators with an insider’s authenticity, such as the opening sequence of Faggots:

There are 2,556,596 faggots in the New York City area.

The largest number, 983,919, live in Manhattan. 186,991 live in Queens, or just across the river. 181,236 live in Brooklyn and 180,009 live in the Bronx. 2,469 live on Staten Island, substantiating that old theory that faggots don’t like to travel or don’t like to live on small islands, depending on which old theory you’ve heard and/or want substantiated.

Westchester and Duchess Counties, together with that part of New Jersey which is really  suburban New York, hold approximately 279,852, though this figure may be a bit low. 

Long Island, or that which is beyond Queens, at last count numbered 211,910. (This goes all the way to Montauk, remember.)

Suburban Connecticut (not primarily of concern here, nor for that matter are suburban New Jersey or suburban New York – but you might as well have the advantage of all the statistics, since they were exhaustively collected), which includes the heavily infested Danbury triangle area, has 211,910 also, which makes it a sister statistic to Long Island, which is as it should be since the two share a common Sound.

In Borrowed Time, Paul Monette writes that “no one knows where to start with AIDS”[8] but Kramer certainly seemed to feel the epidemic was measurable, such as the notes on the original New York production of The Normal Heart, which recount that:

Everywhere possible, on this set and upon the theatre walls too, facts and figures and names were painted, in black, simple lettering.

Here are some of the things we painted on our walls:

1. Principal place was given to the latest total number of AIDS cases nationally – AND COUNTING. (For example on 1 August 1985, the figure read 12,062). As the Centers for Disease Control revise all figures regularly, so did we, crossing out old numbers and placing the new figure just beneath it.

2. This was also done for states and major cities.

3. EPIDEMIC OFFICIALLY DECLARED JUNE 5, 1981.

4. MAYOR KOCH: $75,000 – MAYOR FEINSTEIN: $16,000,000. (For public education and community services.)

5. ‘TWO MILLION AMERICANS ARE INFECTED – ALMOST Leyland TIMES THE OFFICIAL ESTIMATES’ – Dr Robert Gallo, London Observer, 7 April 1985.

6. The number of cases in children.

7. The number of cases in gays and the number of cases in straights, calculated by subtracting the gay and bisexual number from the total CDC figure.

8. The total number of articles on the epidemic written by the following newspapers during the first ten months of 1984:

            The San Francisco Chronicle               163

            The New York Times                          41

            The Los Angeles Times                       37       

            The Washington Post                         24

9. During the first nineteenth months of the epidemic, The New York Times wrote about it a total of seven times:

            1. July 3 1981, page 20 (41 cases reported by CDC)

            2. August 29, 1981, page 9 (107 cases)

            3. May 11, 1982, Section III, page 1 (335 cases)

            4. June 18, 1982, Section II, page 8 (approximately 430 cases)

            5. August 8, 1982, page 31 (505 cases)

6. January 6, 1983, Section II, page 17 (approximately 891 cases)

7. February 6, 1983, Magazine (The ‘Craig Claiborne’ article.) (958 cases)

10. During the three months of the Tylenol scare in 1982, The New York Times wrote about it a total of 54 times: October 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31, November 2, 5, 6, 9, 12, 17, 21, 22, 25, December 1, 2, 3, 4, 8, 10, 14, 15, 19, 25, 27, 28, 29, 30. Four of these articles appeared on the front page. Total number of cases: 7.  

The surfeit of numerics in Kramer’s writings seems uncanny in its ubiquity[9], even comic[10]. It reaches to character names (Ned Weeks), title inspirations (The Normal Heart is from Auden’s poem September 1, 1939, a date that is also relevant to the title of Reports from the holocaust) and title revisions (Sissies Scrapbook was upgraded to a tale about Four Friends). The final sentence of Reports from the holocaust is: “105,990 and counting … ”. 

Various forms of listing and counting bleed into appraisals of Kramer and his writings, too, such as Andrew Holleran’s anecdote about the imposing sight of an “entire wall of books” he encountered at Kramer’s apartment in 1971. “I didn’t ask if he’d read them all,” Holleran writes. “His apartment was like a bookstore”[11] (in The Normal Heart Felix asks Ned “That’s quite a library in there. You read all those books?”). Mark Merlis views Kramer and his writings as signposts of Time, with numbers marking Merlis’ introspective memories of his encounters with Kramer’s writings. “I came out the same year Faggots did,” Merlis writes, adding that “at twenty-eight, I was a Kinsey 5”[12]. Douglas Sadownick, too, notes that “Faggots came out in the year and city in which I came out: New York, 1978”[13]

John M. Clum has a less reverent take on the number of numbers in Kramer’s writings:

From the beginning of the AIDS epidemic in New York City, Kramer aspired to be Moses, bringing the Law from the mountain top to his gay people who  had been worshipping the false god Priapus. Lacking divinely written Law, he armed himself with statistics. Numbers and lists were his authority. His first major diatribe, “1,112 and Counting,” is filled with both.

Clum illustrates this point most effectively by quoting the following passage from “1,112 and Counting”:

There are now 1,112 cases of serious Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. When we first became worried, there were only 41. In only twenty-eight days, from January 13th to February 9th [1983], there were 164 cases – and 73 more dead. The total death tally is now 418. Twenty percent of all cases were registered this January alone. There have been 195 dead in New York City from among 526 victims. Of all serious AIDS cases, 473 percent are in the New York metropolitan area.

We grasped at the straws of possible cause: promiscuity, poppers, back rooms, the baths, rimming, fisting, anal intercourse, urine, semen, shit, saliva, blood, blacks, a single virus, a new virus, repeated exposure to a virus, amoebas carrying a virus, drugs, Haiti, voodoo, Flagyl, constant bouts of amebiasis, hepatitis A and B, syphilis, gonorrhoea. [14]

Clum suggests that:

the list presented [Kramer] as an expert in gay life. He was one of the gay men, but also the leader who knew the facts and would set the terms of the discourse. 

David Román and David Bergman add an interesting layer to Clum’s observation about Kramer’s writings and their suspiciously persistent collapse into argumentum ad numerum: that they may evidence some sort of extra- and inter-textual pathology. Román describes “the alarmist erotophobia of Larry Kramer”[15], and for Bergman, Kramer “fears [the] very uncontrollability” of gay sexual behaviour and the physical, psychic and emotional intimacies those behaviours can engender. For Bergman, Kramer’s writings indicate a “latent antipathy towards sex” and that Kramer may have used the facts and figures of AIDS “to mask his sexual discomfort”. Such responses to Kramer’s writings are not new. In response to “A Personal Appeal”, playwright Robert Chesley wrote (in a letter to the New York Native) that,

I think the concealed meaning in Kramer’s emotionalism is the triumph of guilt: that gay men deserve to die for their promiscuity. In his novel, Faggots, Kramer told us that sex is dirty and that we ought not to be doing what we’re doing. Read anything by Kramer closely. I think you’ll find that the subject is always: the wages of gay sin are death.[16]

According to the (online) Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions, “mish” is pejorative English slang for “missionary position”[17]. “Mish posish” describes proscribed, unimaginative sex that doesn’t push boundaries, “mish, mish mish – no imagination!” Fred Lemish: Fred the Mish. The kaleidoscopic decadence of Faggots is the gay sexual world as viewed through the black-and-white polarities of frigid Fred (Le)Mish’s voyeuristic eyes. Fred enters the gay sexual cultures that surround him, but he never really engages with them. Even when he physically participates, his participation is reluctant and tentative, his thoughts and feelings elsewhere, indeed anywhere but the “sex machines” he interacts with. In the middle of the threesome that opens Faggots, for example, Fred’s mind wanders. Though one man is urinating down Fred’s back, and instructing Fred to “fuck my friend and I’ll suck your come out of his asshole”, Fred’s concentration drifts to a recent conversation with a friend:

All I want is someone who reads books, loves his work, and me, too, of course, and who doesn’t take drugs, and isn’t on unemployment. And who reads and appreciates, preferably in the original Dostoevski [sic] and Proust, plus is a good cook and a faithful lover and kisses you a lot and is terrific in bed. 

In The Normal Heart Ned, also a Dostoevsky fan (“Dostoevsky is my favorite writer”, Ed says in Act One, Scene Four) says: “I don’t think much of promiscuity. More sex isn’t liberating. And having so much sex makes finding love impossible”.

When the ACT UP activists parodied in Zero Patience (1993) chant “Control is what we want and need” and "How much time do we have? None! Five! Four! Three! Two! One!", were they singing a kind of theme song for Larry Kramer’s writings? Certainly, mathematical order would make a good buttress against the experiences of the epidemic described by Tony Kushner (in the preface to David D. Feinberg’s Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of A Rampaging AIDS Clone) that:  

came along and ripped open reality, irreparably, irretrievably. All expectations have been violated, all guarantees of life-as-usual are declared null-and-void. Through the great gaping tear, through this wound, much pain, unaccountable losses, and insuperable grief have issued.[18]

Or was Kramer's listing of numbers part of his pragmatic search for a way out of the purgatory of the epidemic, best summed up the time he said,

I know many people look to me for answers. You want answers? We’re living in pigshit and its up to each one of us to figure out how to get out of it. 

[1] David Bergman , “The Rhetoric of AIDS,” in AIDS: The Literary Response ed. Emmanuel S. Nelson (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 177. All subsequent references to this essay are included within the text.

[2] David Willinger, “A Meaning for All Those Words: Sex, Politics, History and Larry Kramer,” in We Must Love One Another Or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, 80. All subsequent references to this essay are included within the text.

[3] Michael Paller, “Larry Kramer and Gay Theater,” in We Must Love One Another Or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, 229. All subsequent references to this essay are included within the text.

[4] Mishima committed suicide when the coup failed to arouse wider support.

[5] Kramer, L. Faggots, (New York : Warner Books, 1978), 276.

[6] L. Kramer, The Tragedy of Today’s Gays (New York: Penguin, 2005), 29. All subsequent references are included within the text.

[7] A feud between Signorile and Sullivan took place in 2001, after the former identified the latter as advertising for “raw” (unprotected) sex on gay dating websites, despite Sullivan having written consistently erogatorily on his popular blog for several years about gay sexual cultures including “raw” subcultures.

[8] P. Monette, Borrowed Time: An AIDS Memoir (Orlando: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988), 2. All subsequent references are included within the text.

[9] Space does not allow for a full catalogue of examples in this line from Kramer’s writings, such as this reflection on a diary entry from pg. 28-29 of Faggots, for example:

Dates leading to orgasm: 98 ...

Dates interesting enough to want to see again: 2.

Dates seen again: 23.

Refusals: 23.

Tubs attended how many times: 34.

Discos danced at how many nights: 47 (not counting Fire Island). ...

Who were Bat, Ivan, Tommy, Sam, Jelly, Beautiful Henry, Kelly Hurt (or Kelly hurt?), Joe Johns, Francois, Watson Datson, too many of the 23, not to mention the 87, were no unrecognizable and obviously equally as memorable as the how many - ? 100? 200? 50? 23? Orgasms he had probably forgotten to tally.

Or, these questions from “Gay “Power” Here”, published on the op-ed page of The  New York Times in December 1978, in response to the death of Harvey Milk:

Would our one million homosexuals march with lit candles? Will we join with San Francisco’s 100,000 homosexuals on July 4th, 1979, in the march on Washington that Harvey Milk was planning at his death? Where are our one million homosexuals?

In any case, presenting a list of Kramer’s lists to illustrate the contentiousness of Kramer’s use of lists seems like a somewhat contentious strategy.

[10] Here, I may have my lines crossed with a scene in Team America (dir. Parker, 2004) that lampoons the Broadway musical Rent, a musical  that featured several AIDS plotlines and HIV-positive characters. This sample lyric from “Everyone has AIDS”, the number performed in the Team America scene as a full-chorus showstopper from a musical called Lease exemplifies the parodic argumentum ad numerum register:

My father? AIDS! My sister? AIDS! My uncle and my cousin and her best friend? AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! The gays and the straights and the whites and the spades – everyone has AIDS!

[11] Andrew Holleran, “Larry and the Wall of Books,” in We Must Love One Another Or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, 119. All subsequent references to this essay are included within the text.

[12] Mark Merlis, “GPT: Time and Faggots,” in We Must Love One Another Or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, 134. All subsequent references to this essay are included within the text.

[13] Douglas Sadownick, “Faggot Psychology: Encountering the Gay Shadow and the Gay Soul Figure in Faggots,” in We Must Love One Another Or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, 142. All subsequent references to this essay are included within the text.

[14]John M. Clum, “Kramer vs. Kramer, Ben and Alexander,” in We Must Love One Another Or Die: The Life and Legacies of Larry Kramer, 202. All subsequent references to this essay are included within the text.

[15] D. Román, Acts of Intervention: Performance, Gay Culture, and AIDS (Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1998), 56. All subsequent references are included within the text.

[16] Larry Kramer, “The First Defense” in Reports from the holocaust, 16

[17] Definition of mish, accessed 7 Oct. 2011; available from http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/mish

[18] D. B. Feinberg, Queer and Loathing: Rants and Raves of a Raging AIDS Clone (New York: Penguin, 1994), ix. 

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Cowboy Oscar Wilde.

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Peter Allen and Liza Minnelli on their honeymoon in Florida, 1967.

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Joan Versus The Volcano

Joan Collins has made an invaluable contribution to my life and I am thankful for both her and the contribution. But I can't resist revisiting this magic moment from her interview with Playboy in 1984:

There’s a moral laxity around. Herpes and AIDS have come as the great plagues to teach us all a lesson. It was fine to have sexual freedom, but it was abused. Apparently the original AIDS sufferers were having 500 or 600 contact a year, and they are now inflicting it on heterosexuals. That’s bloody scary. It’s like the Roman Empire. Wasn’t everybody running around just covered with syphilis? And then it was destroyed by the volcano.

Enough has been said about this issue by people who are not knowledgeable. It should be left to doctors and politicians to discuss, not actors.

I met Joan once, at a book signing in Sydney and she glared at me for taking too many flash photographs of her. She remembered me when it came to my turn in the queue and signed my book, but slammed it shut as she gave it back to me to make it clear she thought I was a cunt.

The book:

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Quentin Crisp reviews The Hunger

THE HUNGER

United Kingdom, 1983 Director: Tony Scott Stars: Catherine Deneuve, David Bowie, Susan Sarandon

Available on DVD

Fifty years ago, if you had told any girl - any nice girl - that she looked sexy, she would have slapped your face. Life was pleasant then. There was a lot of flirtation and very little fornication or, if your interests lay elsewhere, there were a great many mysterious threats and very little murder. People lived largely in the mind and always seemed to have some adventure to which they could look forward.

Now all that has changed. Nay, everything has been reversed.

In the 1980s, fulfillment precedes desire. This nasty state of affairs is reflected in many of our contemporary movies or, possibly, it is caused by them.

Just such a film is The Hunger; it should have been called The Glut. It drips with blood and oozes sex.

Presumably even fifty cents put into the capable hands of Mr. E.P. Hutton in the time of the Pharaohs would yield a considerable yearly income by 1983. Apparently, you also become strong. When Mr. Bowie grows too old to walk or even crawl, his hostess is able with no obvious effort to carry him to the attic and place him in his coffin beside a few of his precursors. She looks like a tired housekeeper taking an extra blanket to one of the guest rooms. The disadvantages of vampirehood are that, while remaining prey to hideous appetites, you cease to feel any emotion and are incapable, except when slitting somebody’s throat, of making any swift movement. Miss Deneuve drifts about the house like an underwater swimmer. indeed, The Hunger is like a vehicle for an unhealthy Esther Williams, photographed not in her habitual bright blue swimming pool but in a badly kept canal.

The plot of The Hunger, if such there be, concerns a rich woman who spends her life giving strangely lethargic music lessons or bickering wanly with Mr. Bowie as though they were two touring actors filling in a Sunday afternoon in a provincial town. In flagrant defiance of the Trade Descriptions Act, she offers her victims everlasting life. They learn later that they have only been given three or four hundred years, at the end of which niggardly span they start to age at the rate of several years a day. When we first meet Mr. Bowie, this process of disintegration has already begun.

Meanwhile, in another part of town, Miss Sarandon is having a jolly time watching a small monkey turning into a skeleton. She is working on a cure for premature senility. Mr. Bowie hears of her research and pays a visit to the hospital where she is employed. here, we encounter the film’s only glimpse of reality. He sits all day in the waiting room growing older by the minute. No one comes to his aid. In the very next sequence, we are right back in our world of fantasy. Miss Sarandon calls on him without mentioning money. A likely story! She meets Miss Deneuve and they become lovers. how much time passes, it would be hard to guess, but one fine day there is an earthquake. The house rocks, the coffins in the attic burst open, and the living dead arise from their crumbling inertia to revenge themselves upon their hostess, who then also lapses into instant decay.

Why? How? What does it all mean?

I have demanded an explanation for these events from several people, including the kind gentleman who procured complimentary tickets for your editor and me at the 8th Street Playhouse (where incidentally the patrons are treated as though they were royalty). So far, no satisfactory exegesis has been forthcoming. In fairness to the film I ought perhaps to admit that I am by nature feebleminded and that toward the end of the picture, Mr. Steele’s attention was diverted from the screen by an unusual incident that occurred in the auditorium. A gentleman who had arrived conspicuously late and seated himself near to us left surreptitiously earlier, taking Mr. Steele’s briefcase with him. Your dauntless editor pursued the thief out of the theater into the lobby, and up the stairs to the gent’s. There, the culprit vanished, but the case was found on the floor of a locked cubicle. That you are at this moment reading your current issue of Christopher Street is due to a miracle. Nothing was stolen. Needless to say, the management was abjectly apologetic and called the police immediately. They arrived but arrested nobody.

Somewhat shaken by the film we had just witnessed and the disaster we had so narrowly escaped, Mr. Steel and I went to a charming cafe nearby to steady our nerves. There, he was kissed over by a delightful lady who knows more about the future than most people remember about the past. She was in a state of high excitement. She had just received from a customer, to whom sh had promised a  free glimpse of things to come, a check for a sum of money that would have ransomed a king. I menti0ned these events in order to make a comparison. Life is under no obligation to obey the laws of probability, but the movies are another matter.

However fantastic the premise upon which a movie is based, nothing excuses illogicality. A good picture is a series of gloriously foregone conclusions - a moral crossword puzzle. A scenarist has only two weapons with which to conquer his public .These are suspense and surprise. A truly great screenwriter uses both. He warns his  audience of impending danger, but when disaster strikes, he makes it worse than anyone could have foreseen, though no more than his villains deserve. This will one day be known as the Hitchcock principle. I cannot say that The Hunger obeys this precept.

This, however, does not mean that the movie is not worth seeing. The photography tricks - the aging processes - are a wonder to behold. The photography is excellent throughout, but its very consistency tend to make its subject matter like the Sahara desert - impressive but boring.

The two leading ladies quite rightly do not act. They present their glorious bodies to the cameras, drift about the screen like sleepwalkers, and glow. They are incandescent with moral decay. The acting is done by the music student of Mr. Bowie. The former brings to the bizarre story its few moments of innocent common sense. It is through her alone that we receive any idea of a bunch of weirdos living in secret isolation in the midst of the normal world. Mr. Bowie’s performance is even more remarkable. While seeming to doze in a hypnotic trance, he manages to make us aware that beneath his mask, he is sick, terrified, and consumed by an irreversible anguish. I confess that I was amazed by the high standard of his acting. I had thought of him as a pop star - a profession nothing can justify except the wages.

Finally, for outshining any other asset this film may have, is the charisma of its star. She is a very cool, up-market vampire, scorning to sleep in her coffin or wear joke-shop teeth. When I last saw her in Mr. Polanski’s Repulsion, she was a pretty French girl. Now, she is a sophisticated, superbly elegant American woman. The one thing that I would not wish on my worst enemy is eternal life, but if anything could compensate anyone for having this appalling burden laid upon him, it would be the delight of being bitten by Miss Deneuve.

The incomparable Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) shared a birthday with Jesus and was played by John Hurt in 1975’s The Naked Civil Servant, adapted from Crisp’s memoir of the same name.

Imperiously disparaging about everything from AIDS (”a fad”) to Princess Diana (”vulgar”), he wrote a classic series of film reviews for Christopher Street magazine, some of which are reprinted here. For more information, please visit Crisperanto, or purchase the anthology of Quentin Crisp film reviews, How To Go To The Movies, from which this review is excerpted.

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"You see, it may be true that artists adopt a flamboyant appearance, but it's also true that people who look funny get stuck with the arts." -- Quentin Crisp.

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I spent my first day in Myanmar (yesterday) in bed with fever, so today I went to the Swedagon Pagoda even though it was overcast.

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That period just after Stonewall when the men's bars exploded suddenly in number and in luxury -- the women's bars always remained much poorer compared to that -- I describe this moment when I had been used to going with my male gay friends into bars and I suddenly was no longer welcome. And this was a tragedy for me, it was like a break in my life, when male gay friends who had been my confederates in anguish and in questing, you know, for love and so on, all of a sudden I as a woman was persona non grata in the men's bars, and it was exactly the moment when the orgy rooms came into existence, and when there were only now these black or dark rooms with people rolling around with very poor sanitation there, okay? You began to have sex shows, and fist fucking was coming in, men in swings, that kind of thing. I was no longer welcome. That's how I remember it, very accurately. I suddenly had this sense of abandonment by my male friends who went off into this paradise garden of earthly delights.

And almost immediately, this was in the mid-Seventies, I remember reading this in the New York Native or something like that, and it reported -- now also, my friends started talking about having this -- trouble with amoebas, these parasites that would not go away. I started hearing about this from my friends. And then I saw this -- this is in the mid-70s -- this article that said a parasite had been identified in the intestines of gay men in New York that had never been identified in human medicine before. Only veterinary medicine was able to recognize it. It was an animal parasite. A chill went through me. This cannot have been more than six or seven years after Stonewall. I'm saying that the signs that something terrible was about to happen were already obvious within a few years after Stonewall. The idea that this came out of nowhere -- this is a piece of historical nonsense.

Camille Paglia, 1999.

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Quentin Crisp reviews Plenty (1985)

PLENTY USA, 1985 Dir: Fred Schepisi Stars: Meryl Streep, Charles Dance, Sting Available on DVD

... of what?

Presumably of worldy possessions, but the heroine is excruciatingly English. We, therefore, never see her extravagantly dressed. She is tastefully clad and seems to occupy elegant surroundings with ever-increasing disgust. Why she does this, I never fully understood. The symptoms of this woman's mental disorder are evident but her disease is never named.

The film begins with Miss Streep being parachuted into occupied France during World War II. There she has a smash-and-grab sexual encounter with a fellow spy. When she returns to England, she finds employment making television commercials. Why? She obviously doesn't need the money, because she leaves the job with no better excuse than her own impatience.

There is a sense in which mad people are more sane than the rest of us. They see things as they really are and cannot play that they are different -- cannot rearrange them in some easily digestible order. Are we supposed to regard the heroine of this movie as such a person -- as someone unable to return comfortably to smug peace after the life-and-death drama of Occupied France? Is the guilt of a life of ease too great for her to bear?

I would not express my bewilderment so brazenly if I had not watched this picture with Mr. Steele and, as an unexpected bonus, Mr. Patrick (at one time, the Lower East Side's resident dramatist), and been relieved to note that both these distinguished gentlemen were as dazed as I.

As I waited for Mr. Patrick to arrive outside the Murray Hill cinema, I saw in one of its showcases a pair of cuff links. These keep recurring in the film and are to Plenty what the word Rosebud is to Citizen Kane, but without the blinding impact. They were once presumably the property of the heroine's first lover and if this entire story is about a girl who never recovers from the effect of her first sexual experience, we have indeed been sold the mangiest of pups.

The press tells us that this film is an allegory of the fall of the British Empire. No wonder it is dreary!

We must not, however, totally condemn this picture. It is decorated with beautiful interiors; the dialogue, provided that we regard the heroine as mad, is always believable and the acting throughout is marvelously restrained.

There is also Miss Streep. She is a highly accomplished actress playing with complete conviction a variety of parts, but this very ability has its disadvantages. Her public never really gets to know her. Had she been born in happier days, she would have been a star. She would have been assured of a seven-year contract. During that time, unruffled by worldly considerations, she would, like an exotic fish, have swum down, down to the very center of her personality, where she would, forever after, have glowed with a phosphorescent light, changing only from time to time her hairstyle or her costume. We, in response, would have expected nothing from her but an occasional bland aphorism floating from buttered lips. In those days, we would have accepted without question the odd behavior displayed in Plenty; we would have known that she thought the world in which we live so happily was unworthy of her. After all, this was Miss Garbo's permanent posture. That era is past; the movie industry has been so badly shaken, but we cannot lay all the blame on the shoulders of the film moguls. Ultimately, they will always give us what we demand. It was audiences who so foolishly asked that women, both on the screen and in real life, should be as boring as people. As Mr. Shakespeare has told us, the fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves.

I must not, however, imply that the star system never made mistakes.

The incomparable Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) shared a birthday with Jesus and was played by John Hurt in 1975’s The Naked Civil Servant, adapted from Crisp’s memoir of the same name.

Imperiously disparaging about everything from AIDS (”a fad”) to Princess Diana (”vulgar”), he wrote a classic series of film reviews for Christopher Street magazine, some of which are reprinted here. For more information, please visit Crisperanto, or purchase the anthology of Quentin Crisp film reviews, How To Go To The Movies, from which this essay is excerpted.

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Correct: Robert Redford has you in his arms but the main concern right now is your nails.

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Perkins haunted eyes and gangling spire of a body mix 'American Gothic' with a quality of solemn thought, and one can believe that here is a rustic-neurotic sense of woe-begone duty. He could hold his own against Hollywood's 'hickory faces' -- Henry Fonda, Raymond Massey, Walter Huston -- though more weakly anxious, mischievous, wicked. Fonda's stare, reserved but penetrating, suggests a slow, reflective but deadly accurate, moral intelligence; Perkins' look is darker, weaker, unsurer, more modern.

Raymond Durgnat, A Long Hard Look at Psycho

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Olivier & Leigh and the dream of air travel.