Political Booknotes
Political Booknotes Queer in America Michelangelo Signorile Random House, $23 By Victor Zonana I first encountered Michelangelo Signorile in June of 1988, when he was head of the media committee...
...I have always assumed that he named me Calvin . . . because he believed, incorrectly, that it would be an appropriate name for someone at Yale...
...For instance, he emerged as an academic specialist in "North-South" issues at just the time when Americans were getting bored with the Third World...
...Instead, Trillin sounds glad for the chance to have gone to Yale, glad to have been "tapped" for one of the secret societies, glad now to serve on the Yale governing board...
...That way, he writes, "I could prove that I agreed they were freaks and distance myself from them...
...As ACT UP's message about Reagan administration neglect and pharmaceutical industry greed seeped into the national consciousness, I made a mental note to keep track of this fellow...
...Thanks...
...Life magazine, back when it was the center of America's pop consciousness, chose him as the subject for a photo-essay on American college students...
...58 The Washington Monthly/June 1993 Remembering Denny Calvin Trillin Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, $19 By James Fallows Calvin Trillin's latest book has received the sort of consistently favorable press that often makes me suspect that log-rolling is underway in New York...
...Deep down," Signorile tells the closeted, "you know you have no 'right' to be where you are, that you were shoved in your closet a long time ago...
...Trillin had, of course, known Hansen from those days—from the era when a man who thought he was gay typically grew up "not simply hearing his closest friends tell faggot jokes but maybe even telling a few faggot jokes himself for camouflage...
...I needn't have bothered...
...Part memoir, part social history, Signorile's book is must-reading for members of the chattering classes who are struggling to come to grips with the gay and lesbian struggle for equality...
...Political Booknotes Queer in America Michelangelo Signorile Random House, $23 By Victor Zonana I first encountered Michelangelo Signorile in June of 1988, when he was head of the media committee of ACT UP, and I was a reporter writing about AIDS for the Los Angeles Times...
...Write to S. Tallapragada at The Washington Monthly, 1611 Connecticut Ave...
...In one of the book's sincerest moments, he regrets how much harm he—and everybody of the generation—did with casual "homo" jokes, before they knew how many of their friends might be hurt...
...Those who encountered the same man in Washington, in the decade before his death, knew him as Roger D. Hansen, a sour-seeming, run-of-the-mill figure at a think tank...
...In this book, the richest material concerns three main subjects...
...Now is the time for all queers to come out and be counted," he declares...
...Brooklyn isn't the easiest place to grow up, especially if you're a homo," he writes wryly...
...Perhaps there was no one decisive reason but just a number of things all gone wrong...
...In a classic example of the pathology of the closet, Signorile himself would pummel kids who'd been labeled faggots by others...
...Trillin had known this friend as "Denny" Hansen, a sunny-seeming, handsome varsity athlete and natural scholar who charmed everyone he met...
...Trillin's tone is heartfelt rather than wisecracking...
...Even David Geffen—once denounced by Signorile as "the most horrifying kind of nightmare I've come to study in the grotesque mosaic of the media swirl" for producing an album by Guns N' Roses whose lyrics referred to "faggots" spreading a disease—has come out as a gay man and now devotes part of his fortune toward the struggle for gay rights...
...As an adult in New York, Trillin and his wife lived on one side of the generational divide, with plenty of openly gay friends...
...Perhaps it was simple bad luck and bad timing at several of his jobs...
...But he also has a lot to say about how Ivy League and prep-school snobbery has changed over the decades, and about the way early social snubs or victories shape people later in life...
...The closeted sub-cabinet officials of the Reagan and Bush administrations are giving way to the openly gay and lesbian professionals in the Clinton administration...
...perhaps, as another friend said at his funeral, he had been "depressed all of his life," even when seeming to be on top of the world...
...The way I see promise is that you have a knapsack, and all the time you're growing up they keep stuffing promise into the knapsack," a woman who knew Hansen in his later years told Trillin...
...But Queer in America is more than a voyeur's delight...
...James Fallows, a contributing editor o/The Washington Monthly, is the Washington editor of Tht Atlantic...
...if I meet someone who is easily identifiable as being from what was once called a St...
...Clippings from your local papers inspire many of the items in 'Tidbits and Outrages" and "Tilting at Windmills...
...I watched in astonishment as this street-smart kid from Brooklyn and his ragtag army of hypsters worked the media like pros, offering up everything from theatrical demonstrations for the television cameras to tightly reasoned position papers for the more serious minded...
...While the lawyering undoubtedly weakened the book, it will lead to titillating parlor games inside the Beltway and in Hollywood as readers attempt to ascertain the identities of "The Legislator" and "The Mogul," closeted men who allegedly sexually harassed same-sex employees...
...Just drop us a note telling us the work you're interested in, your experience, and the times you're available...
...It's better if you do it yourself...
...It's liberating and invigorating and empowering...
...Signorile has produced nothing less than a deconstruc-tion of the closet—an institution, he argues, that has outlived its usefulness...
...If you're capable of becoming president, they say, then to wind up anywhere else is somehow to have failed...
...Signorile attributes his survival skills to his working class father, who taught him to fight ethnic slurs like "wop" and "greaseball" with his fists...
...I became a queer basher to prove I wasn't a queer...
...Trillin therefore spares us the pussyfooting so familiar from people who say that A Book-of-the-Month and History Book Club selection OUTWITTING THE GESTAPO Lucie Aubrac Translated by Konrad Bieber with the assistance of Betsy Wing Introduction by Margaret Collins Weitz "A breathtaking account that feeds the soul as much as it satisfies the appetite for vicarious danger...
...In a year or two, he and most other public school graduates found themselves doing better than most of the preppies and got the feeling that, a lot of the rich Eastern people were at Yale because of some entitlement of family or class or money and that we were there because, in ways that were perhaps not immediately apparent, we somehow deserved to be...
...But as a child in Kansas City and as a student at Yale, Trillin had been on the other side of the divide, when "homosexuals" were exotic, theoretical creatures one did not encounter in daily life...
...The most moving part of the book concerns Signorile's own personal struggle to survive in a world that loathed his kind...
...The selection was partly happenstance, partly pure bigotry—the editors wanted to avoid a student who would seem "too Jewish"—but partly an indication of how completely Hansen seemed the all-American boy...
...Even now, nearly forty years later...
...By June of 1989, Signorile had once again burst onto the scene, this time as a columnist for Outweek, the gay and lesbian news magazine of the ACT UP generation...
...YOU CAN HELP The Washington Monthly depends on its readers...
...45.00 hardcover, $14.00 paperback At bookstores or order 1-800-822-6657 University of California Press ,., Berkeley Los Angeles New York London they "went to college outside Boston," so as to make you drag out of them that they went to Harvard...
...20009...
...And it's time...
...Shades of Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover...
...Booklist "[A] stirring tale of heroism, which concerns not only Resistance members, but ordinary citizens, notably women...
...This is a crisis...
...As timely as today's headlines, Queer in America is a landmark book, ranking with such other gay masterpieces as Larry Kramer's Reports from the Holocaust and Paul Monette's National Book Award-winning Becoming a Man...
...You have to unpack...
...Now comes Signorile's Queer in America...
...Trillin ends up confessing that he can't really explain how the first man turned into the second...
...Thus was born the furor over "outing...
...Deep down, you know why you must come out and why it is wrong for you not to...
...They do so by insisting on gay invisibility, a good example being the don't-ask, don't tell compromise being floated for gays in the military...
...For gay-identified men and women wearied by eight years of plague and centuries of homophobia—myself included—Signorile's diatribes were like weekly jolts of adrenaline...
...A second endlessly rich subject is the connection between schooling and social mobility in America...
...For every "promising" person who is crippled, as Hansen seems to have been, by the idea that moderate success equals failure, there are probably ten people who draw essential confidence from early assurances that they have something special—and a hundred people who are held back by having been told that they had no promise at all...
...The media, the political system, and the entertainment industry make up what he calls "The Trinity of the Closet...
...When Denny Hansen left Yale, he might have seemed the complete fulfillment of what it meant to be "promising...
...perhaps this was just too depressing for someone who had starred on Yale's swim team...
...For the first time, Signorile is able to circumvent the filter of the mainstream media and directly make his case for the abolition of the closet to a wider audience...
...Trillin has always seemed reluctant to draw big-picture conclusions in his writing, but his reporting is so careful and his descriptions so vivid and funny that the reader has plenty to work with when drawing conclusions of his own...
...Trillin's inability to solve this mystery (as if anyone could) does not matter, because the book's payoff comes through the observations and portrayals along the way...
...The vetting resulted in the removal of a handful of names, and more importantly, poignant details in cases such as Merv Griffin's...
...But the world is changing, and for the better...
...The idea of "deserving" to succeed brings us to Trillin's third main theme: what he considers the burden of "promise...
...For example, like every public school boy from the hinterland, he was initially shocked by how many things preppies knew and he didn't...
...His friends thought anything was possible for him, which in practical terms meant that they joked about what cabinet jobs they'd have in the Hansen administration...
...In this sense having "promise" is like having family money: it messes up some people, but on the whole is a plus...
...Trillin quotes a lot of Hansen's friends, especially Rhodes scholars, on how unfair and oppressive this "promise" can be...
...There exists in America what appears to be a brilliantly orchestrated, massive conspiracy to keep all homosexuals locked in the closet," he writes—and sympathetic straight people are some of the biggest enforcers...
...Grottlesex background, my gut expectation—kicking in fast enough to override my beliefs about judging people as individuals, slipping in well below the level of rational tMnking—is that he's probably a bit slow...
...Kirkus Reviews "An electifying view of the underground in action...
...Well, almost directly...
...N.W., Washington, D.C...
...Trillin presents his own position on the subject as being healthily uncomplicated...
...It takes only two or three hours to read but raises questions worth mulling for a long time...
...We just wanted to say something mean...
...One is the huge generational shift in perceptions of homosexuality...
...But he terrorized a small subset of gay people: public figures who remained locked in their closets...
...If you live in the Washington area, you may be able to help us in our office—with proofing or occasionally stuffing envelopes...
...In middle age, Hansen suffered constant pain from back and shoulder injuries...
...Publishers Weekly $25.00 Available at bookstores...
...Use it...
...Subtlety and nuance are not his strong suits, but Signorile is right on target in his denunciation of the closet and the forces that keep it closed...
...I realize you're oppressed, just like the rest of us (which is why you're hiding in the first place)," Signorile wrote in one of his more temperate moments...
...Perhaps Hansen was at war with the realization that he was homosexual, which did not fit his own idea of fifties-style perfection...
...It's much easier for you to break the chain of homophobia than it is for me...
...The book concludes with what Signorile calls "A Queer Manifesto," queer, of course, being the word gay men and lesbians have appropriated from their oppressors in order to remove its sting...
...This is not completely convincing...
...The one way in which the book fails is in giving a clear answer to the question with which it begins: Why, exactly, did the person Trillin had known in the fifties as a golden boy at Yale kill himself in 1991...
...After reading Remembering Denny, I'm convinced that the praise is genuine and well deserved...
...You are in enormous positions of power...
...You can help also help us by calling with tips for stories, giving friends subscriptions, or just making sure we're on the shelves of your local newsstands, libraries, and bookstores...
...Hansen's family had a history of mental illness...
...In all three power structures, closeted gay men and lesbians serve as enforcers, and beneficiaries, of the closet...
...But don't react to it by oppressing us...
...To my taste this is the best of Trillin's many books...
...Pretty soon, it's just too heavy to carry...
...Marshall B. Clinard, author of The Abuse of Corporate Power $25.00 hardcover Legislative Leviathan Party Government in the House by Gary W. Cox & Mathew D. McCubbins Here is an incisive new look at the inner workings of the House of Representatives in the post-World War II era, that also debunks prevailing arguments about the weakening of congressional parties...
...This book was subjected to the second-longest legal review in Random House history...
...Malcolm Forbes, Barry Diller, David Geffen, Liz Smith, Pete Williams, Jodie Foster—none was spared Signorile's upper-case invective as he transformed himself into a one-man battering ram determined to smash down the anachronistic relic known as the closet...
...When we called somebody a fairy, the implication was not that he actually engaged in homosexual acts...
...Our Memos of the Month come almost entirely from you...
...His own father, who grew up in a Russian-Jewish immigrant family, dreamed of modeling his son's life after Dink Stover at Yale...
...He was off to Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship...
...University of Nebraska Press • Lincoln, NE 68588-0520 • 800-755-1105 J. June 1993/The Washington Monthly 59 CAPITOL WORKS Prescription for Profit How Doctors Defraud Medicaid by Paul Jesilow, Henry N. Pontell, & Gilbert Geis "A sound, well written, and highly interesting examination of how Medicaid...has given far too many physicians an opportunity to 'mop up' fraudulently, for their own financial gain...
...Victor Zonana is a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and a founder of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association...
...Instead, he ticks off all the factors that might have played a part...
Vol. 25 • June 1993 • No. 6
