Donald Trump’s Big Gay Government: On the town with the A-Gays of Washington, who have never been happier to be out, proud and Republican (The New York Times).
‘A Single Man,’ a Classic Gay Novel, Becomes a Ballet: Artists including the musician John Grant have collaborated to find feelings beyond the words of Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 book. Occasionally, they succeed (The New York Times).
From the class composite of the University of Miami School of Medicine, Class of 1964
A surprising detail appeared in the recent New York Times obituary of Patrick Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway’s last surviving son, who died at the age of 97. The article referred to his sibling this way:
Hemingway’s third child, Gloria Hemingway, was a physician who struggled with alcohol abuse. She wrote a memoir, “Papa” (1976), before undergoing transition surgery later in life. She died in 2001.
Back then, the Times emphasized Gregory Hemingway’s medical career and his battles with alcohol and emotional problems. It noted that he had been married four times, that he was arrested in Florida for indecent exposure and resisting arrest, and that he was found dead in a women’s detention center. The obituary added that, according to news reports, he often dressed as a woman, was known among some friends as Gloria, and had undergone a sex-change operation.
The contrast between the two obituaries is telling—and a little confusing. Gregory Hemingway’s complicated life, including its end, is recounted in detail in Paul Hendrickson’s excellent book Hemingway’s Boat (Vintage, 2012). I don’t remember reading that he had had a sex-change operation. Being away from my library, I asked ChatGPT:
Gregory (1931–2001), the youngest son of Ernest Hemingway, spent much of life struggling both with alcoholism and with gender identity. Later in life, Gregory began living at times as a woman under the name Gloria Hemingway, sometimes describing herself as a transsexual. She took gender-affirming hormones and, according to some accounts, pursued or at least considered surgery. Yet her identity remained complex and ambivalent: she alternated between living as a man and as a woman, never fitting neatly into a single narrative.
Posted inUncategorized|TaggedErnest Hemingway|Comments Off on From Gregory to Gloria: How DEI Shapes the Remembrance of a Hemingway
Constantine Cavafy: A New Biography (G. Jusdanis and P. Jeffreys, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2025) has been released recently. Its review in the TLS starts with:
Constantine Petrou Cavafy (1863–1933): a poet of obscure history and an eroticism so gentle, it seems odd to call it eroticism at all. A civil servant in the irrigation department of the city of Alexandria. A descendant of an aristocratic family that lost its way. A gay man in a cosmopolitan city away from the cultural centres of the world. The last surviving son of Constantinopolitan immigrants. A teenage refugee from the Anglo-Egyptian War. The most important Greek-language poet of the twentieth century. A major literary figure – an influence on writers around the world, and available in so many languages and editions that it is hard to keep up.
As an openly gay producer, Mr. Lovett was a rarity in the broadcast news world of the 1970s and ’80s. Working at CBS and ABC, he pursued news segments aimed at destigmatizing gay life in the United States and drawing attention to the AIDS crisis at a time when that subject was largely overlooked by mainstream news organizations.
This book of correspondence ends with an excerpt from Paul Valéry’s Notebook 24. In it, he noted down a conversation he had just had with André Gide, in 1925. Gide, who was fifty-six years old, confessed everything to him. “I had been ignorant of his life and his habits until quite recently, which shows how blind I was,” Valéry remarks, before continuing: “He then told me—that all the feeling he had ever had was for his wife. He had never mixed the slightest bit of intellect with his senses. Any intervention of the mind cooled him. But as for the senses—complete debauchery. He had tried everything and still continued. He insisted on that word.”
Here Gide laid out his so-called thesis of “uranism,” based on the separation and rupture between love and sexual need. Love is platonic; sexual need is of the flesh, devoid of feeling. He lies. He knows he is lying to himself. His affair with the young Marc Allégret in 1917 was both love and sex, sentimental and carnal. Discovered by his wife when the “couple” left for England, the idyll led to the destruction—in tears and by fire—of thousands of letters Gide had written to Madeleine, which he regarded as the best part of his work. Madeleine, the writer’s first cousin, virgin and martyr, then sank into sorrow. She could be seen, in Cuverville, advancing with the small, shuffling step of life’s defeated, distributing food to stray cats.
The brilliant mathematician and computer scientist, an alumnus of the École Polytechnique, died of cancer in Paris on July 21, 2025, at the age of 58. In 2007, he published a fascinating short book on the history of mathematics: The Metamorphoses of Calculation (Le Pommier):
Le Carnet du Monde
Posted inQueer Lives|TaggedGilles Dowek|Comments Off on Queer Lives: Gilles Dowek, 1966-2025
Despite the ridiculous name change (Painting His World) – to make it more “inclusive” according to the Chicago curator Gloria Groom, I enjoyed the Caillebotte exhibition at the Art Institute (Painting Men). The focus and commentary beside the works remain true to the original intent, and the catalogue is the same as the one printed when the show was first presented in Los Angeles:
All of Caillebotte’s greatest paintings are there, in a setting much less crowded than that of the Musée d’Orsay, which I visited in December:
The First Homosexuals: The Birth of a New Identity (1869–1939) at Wrightwood 659 is not as strong as its catalogue. The welcome is charming, though. Of course, the most impressive work from the late 19th century – L’Homme au bain (1884) – while referenced in the catalogue, is not on display, as it is at the Art Institute. The show does, however, offer the opportunity to discover Konstantin Somov (1869–1939), whose life spans the period under examination:
Although, according to Wikipedia, Jacques-Émile Blanche’s homosexuality was well known in Parisian society during his lifetime, I only became aware of it when I discovered his Self-Portrait with the Spanish Painter Rafael de Ochoa (1890), painted two years before his famous portrait of the 21-year-old Marcel Proust:
How ‘Gay’ Became an Identity in Art: Two groundbreaking exhibitions in Chicago explore the shift in portrayals of same-sex attraction. They are being staged at a fraught moment. (New York Times)
St Sebastian, Guido Reni, c. 1615, Musei di Strada Nuova, Genoa
D’où la possibilité qui t’est donnée de te constituer dans chaque musée que tu visites ton cabinet secret personnel, accessible à tous, mais où nul à part toi et quelques privilégiés ne sait qu’il est entré. Un savoir gai, William Marx, Minuit, 2018
Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Cabinet secret
