Review: Fighting Proud - Stephen Bourne

Oh, dear, that is quite a large pile of books I've read but not reviewed yet. I'm even going to miss LGBT+ History month by the time this one goes live and I read it in December...

Moving on anyhow, I picked up Fighting Proud, The untold story of the gay men who served in two World Wars in Norwich's wonderful The Book Hive as pre-Christmas present to myself after getting a full set of stamps on my loyalty card by buying books for other people. The title caught my interest and, unlike a lot of non-fiction I've read, Fighting Proud does exactly what it says on the tin - delivering in sparse, engaging prose, a compendium of information about the (primarily British) men who served in the Forces during the First and Second World Wars. While it does address famous figures like Wilfred Owen, Ivor Novello, Noël Coward and Alan Turing, Bourne fulfils the 'untold story' as much as possible by making the the focus the book on the ordinary gay serviceman, and an examination of the social mores surrounding homosexuality in the military at the time.

Honestly, it's a fascinating read. Using photographs, letters, personal writings and - where possible - interviews, Bourne creates a well structured, highly readable book that is informative, rigorous, compelling, and in places deeply moving. With a focus primarily on the Second World War - due to an acknowledge paucity of sources for the First - Fighting Proud finds gay stories from the Army, Navy and Airforce, as well as paying attention to the experiences of gay men on the Home Front, and in the both the state sanctioned and independent entertainment industries of the time.

 I loved it, and devoured it at a speed with which I usually struggle to read non-fiction books. Bourne portrays excellently the 'knife-edge' of homophobia, prejudice, with which men who had sex with men had to live in those periods, as well as the tacit (and occasionally open) recognition by comrades and officers that "these things happen." More importantly, it makes a very clear statement of the fact that 'we were always here', and that homosexual desire, love, and devotion, are not a new phenomenon in any part of society, or among any type of person - regardless of politics.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Fighting Proud is primarily concerned with the service record of those whose stories it tells - and I think if the book has a weakness it's the way it sits uneasily between being a queer history and a military history, and operating a little tentatively with its appeal to either discipline. There were a couple of moments where one felt oneself being bombarded with military accolades so that an archetypal straight reader would come to understand that Gay People Can Be Brave, Too. Also, from a personal perspective, I would have preferred more attention to be paid to the books subjects as men outside of their military service, but this is less a request for a different study than for more of this book - and it will certainly send me off to do some further reading, especially on Ian Gleed, of whom I had criminally not heard before this book.

My only other real criticism would be the ever-contentious issue of modern labels in queer historical context. Bourne is very careful in this project to rely upon his sources and not make any but relatively conservative statements about the orientation, or indeed gender, of his subjects. While a love letter between two men can generally be read fairly unambiguously*, examining possible transgender history in a time when not only transition, but even the language to describe it, was not accessible to most people is an intensely difficult undertaking. The line between drag and trans identity isn't clear or stable even now, and many closeted people use drag as an outlet before - or indeed, instead of - coming out**. As such, I feel perhaps a little more house room could have been given to possible trans interpretations of cross-dressing and gender non-conformity in certain cases, even if - in the absence of more solid evidence - Bourne was reluctant to commit himself to such a reading.

Similarly, Bourne generally divides his subjects in to those who were gay and those who had gay experiences when in all-male environs but were otherwise straight, but seldom does the word 'bisexual' make an appearance. While I appreciate that many of these men would disown that label heartily, as an historian who shows such sensitivity when regarding how homophobia and self-closeting problematise writing the history of gay men, it is a little disappointing that he does not address the effects of structural biphobia and the self-erasure and closeting that many bisexual men face even today.

However, Fighting Proud is still an immensely valuable book and one I will doubtless revisit. Well worth your dime.

 * despite what some historians insist...
** Not that I speak from experience or anything

Review: 'Blood, Bread and Roses', Judy Grahn

You know what I was saying about random library finds?

Well, my gods, I love this so much. I admit, a fraction of this enjoyment is because (shortly after picking up) I had a run in with my favourite local mansplainer who benignly asked what I was reading, and I had the pleasure of showing him the cover and watching the vague interest turn to an actual recoil.

Still this book is astonishing. Did you know I'd never heard of it before? Me, whose doorway to adulthood was Angela Carter, whose undergraduate adulation was spent on Carl Jung, James Frazer and Clarissa Pinkola Estés? No-one even thought to tell me this book was around?

And okay, yes, it is one of those sweeping, slightly too-universal acts of poetic anthropology which are a) academically a bit suspect, and b) not to everyone's taste. However, the value of such works is not solely in their content, or the viablity of their research. No. What they do is shatter open the closed doors in our minds, bring us face to face with the impossible, with the things that, bone-deep, we have always suspected to be true. Their worth is not measured in intellectual terms, but in spiritual and socieological ones. Their sweeping deconstruction may not be entirely accurate, but it reframes our mental narratives, makes us interrogate our understanding of our bodies, our spirituality, our world.

To her credit, Grahn recognises this. By her own lights, she is a poet, and the story she offers here - overwhelming and encyclopeadic as it might be - is never intended to be more than one voice among many. More importantly, it is a female voice, one rooted in the female body - specifically in the act of menstruation - an act and a body that has faced and faces so much discrimination, so much legislation, disgust and ostracisation worldwide. 

Grahn takes the balance of shame laid upon the female head, the female gaze, upon female blood and female decoration, and draws out its global import. Rather than shame and staining, menstrual blood becomes the original creator of human consciousness, the single thing whose expression and management keeps the world in order. She reframes it as the root of all science, all craft, all religion, language and clothing. It is the originator of diet and ritual. In her language, all blood is menstrual blood.

 Her methodology is engaging and pursuasive, hopping through academic disciplines to create a welter of evidence and arguement, drawing parallels and concordances across time periods and civilisations. She shows consciousness, humanity, society as a gift that was begun by women and passed - through actions she calls metaforms - into the hands of men, whose mimetic 'menstruations' can be traced through every hero's journey we have ever read. 

Naturally, a book so focused on periods is going to be pretty essentialist. Yet, even so, Grahn leaves the door open for queer theory. Civilisation could not begin and end at bodies which menstruate - the truths so learned must be commicated to those that do not. The narrative she constructs suggests that gendered behaviours not only can cross the line of bodies, but more specifically that they must. That, for society to function, men can and have simulate menstrual forms to access that same ritual power associated with the original menstruation. 

A more marked criticism is that Grahn's methodology and examples are not always entirely sound. She makes much of menstrual etymology, but her focus is almost entirely upon the English language. What is more, with my limited knowledge of etymology, I was able to spot a few mistakes - a more experienced scholar would doubtless notice more. Perhaps more seriously, her universal focus could be open to the criticism of approriation and misrepresentation of other cultures. Her repeated reference to the practices of the Dogon people made me uneasy, and although I am not an anthropologist, I am always wary of the constructions European scholars put upon the practices of other cultures.

That said, however, if recognised as a flawed work that exists as one voice among many, Blood, Bread and Roses should really take its place as a central text of mythic history. It should be spoken of in the same breath as Man and his Symbols, The Golden Bough and The White Goddess.

Essentially, I should have heard of it.

What I've Been Reading: London Under, I Will Repay, Daughter of Smoke and Bone.

"I don't want to be a day bird," said Plop, "day is NASTY."

Okay, reviews for the week 26/08/14 to 01/09/14.

I heard about Peter Ackroyd's London Under at about the time it first came out, and finally bowed to the pressure of being in a bookshop and wanting it a couple of months back. If you have a copy, read it. It is an absolute delight.

Lyrical and beguiling, it drags you deep down into the London clay, into the strange magic of the Underground, the silent sterility of the telegraph wires, the gradual sink of history into the mud. Ackroyd captures the depth and power of the places under the earth, the fear and the energy of a metropolis. London Under is a love-song to a London that is at once infernal and sacred. It bewitches. It makes you want to travel those secret, dim, waterlogged paths. It makes you want to use big words to describe them.

If I have one complaint, though, it is that it isn't that useful as an informative book. Ackroyd's prose is masterful, and you traverse themes in a giddy stream of facts, of mood, of place, but buggered if you can remember any of it afterwards. I was fascinated as I read, but like surfacing from a shamanic journey, I got to bring very little home with me. I was also a little disappointed that it didn't namecheck Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, but I shan't hold it against him.

Anyway, a reading book, rather than a reference one, but a must for all affecionados of the subterranean life.

For a total change of mood now, I will now talk about Baroness Orczy's I Will Repay, or as it is perhaps better known as 'Ooh, The Scarlet Pimpernel, did well, I should probably write a sequel'.

I think the sheer harshness of my judgement on this one is probably less the fault of the work itself, and more a result of the circumstances in which it has been read. I encountered The Scarlet Pimpernel at around twelve or thirteen, when my head was full of Richard E. Grant in the BBC adaptation. I read the novel in one sitting, leaning against a radiator in the school library. All later re-readings have been informed by the breakneck rapture which attended that first time. But - due to my school library's poor stocking habits, and my own pigheaded attitude towards reading series - I never actually got round to any of the later books.

Until now.

'Number of pages' is a sure sign of quality.

Visiting the lovely Chapel Books in Westleton (a brilliant shop, give them all your money), I laid my hands on this rather smashing omnibus. Yet while I attempted to recreate my original experience via the simultaneous consumption of many cups of tea and a dangerous quantity of chocolate, there appears to be no condiment sufficient to change the nature of this book. And this book's nature is a remarkably obvious romance strung on the bones of a somewhat transparent heist. Don't get me wrong; at twelve, I would have devoured it. At *ahem, cough, splutter, none of your business*, I am wide awake to its flaws. It is mushy, it is predictable and it is incredibly right-wing.

I'm not saying I didn't enjoy it, because it does still possess a certain charm. I just doubt that it's a book to which I doubt I will be returning.

Time for another total mood change - well I'm nothing if not eclectic - we have Daughter of Smoke and Bone, a book I bought at the same time, and on the same advice, as C. Robert Cargill's Shadows and Dreams. As such, I've been avoiding it. Actually, I'd been avoiding it anyway. It seemed too much of a piece with the teenage-girl-and-generic-mythic-creature YA romance trend which was dying off around the time I purchased it. It wasn't so much that I dislike that plot, rather - like the rest of us - I was fatigued by it and not really looking to read anything else in that vein.

Yet while the opening chapters did not fill me with confidence, the story soon started to stretch at the confines of that genre. It began to change into something other, something far more adult, something powerful, even something important. As I was drawn into the world Karou inherits, the world in which Akiva battles, the YA Romance padding fell away, and I was left with a brutal tale of war, of exploitation, of power and prejudice. Reading it was almost like an insight into an authorial mind, where the conception for a fraught love-story matured with the telling into something darker, sadder and more cynical.

Gods, though. I wish this were a YA book. It is so important that books like this are given to teenagers, books that strip back our learned moralities and make us question things.

I got caught up in it. By the time I was half-way through, I was trembling. It's a magical book, a heart-wrenching, harrowing book that builds towards perfect, exquisite conclusion, a blow laid hard against you at just the right moment to break your heart...

And then it trails off to a weak finale and the promise of a sequel. A sequel which I now have to read, a sequel which - apparently - isn't anything like as good.

 It should have stopped. It should have finished. That ending should have been perfect.

I bloody hate sequels.