Cranky Lesbian

Look what the homosexuals have done to me!

Tag: Susan Sontag

A Date Which Will Live in Infamy

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On January 16, 2009

In Stories of Triumph and Inspiration

The woman who inspired a thousand drag queens (and one irritable teenage lesbian).

On this day in history three of the great American women of the last hundred years were born: Ethel Merman, Susan Sontag, and yours truly. No need to send me a present, I don’t want anything and hate having to feign enthusiasm when opening gifts anyway. But if you want to bake me a cake, that’s fine, just wash your hands first. And no chocolate cake, please. No ice cream cake, either, because there’s just no reason for that. Oh, and no cheesecake. Cheesecake is fine if you’re on The Golden Girls, but until I’m in my sixties and have my own lanai, I’m staying away from it.

On second thought, let’s nix the cake idea altogether. Cake is overrated, in addition to being the name of a so-so band. The only thing it really has going for it, at least in my book, is its importance to the immortal Hole lyric “I want to be the girl with the most cake.” So let’s let Courtney have her cake, and we can have cookies and toast my parents for not aborting me or putting me up for adoption. That was very generous of them and something I’ll take into consideration when the time comes to choose their nursing home.

In honor of Ethel Merman’s birthday — she’d have turned 101 today — here’s a clip of her singing “There’s No Business Like Show Business,” from the film of the same name. When I was a kid I used to torture my dad by watching it every time it was on AMC, and in retrospect I probably owe him an apology for that. It’s a horrible movie, and 55 years later it’s still impossible to imagine why anyone ever thought it was a good idea to cast Mitzi Gaynor in anything, but I was fascinated by Ethel — and by Marilyn Monroe’s “Heat Wave” performance. Two early signs that I was a lesbian, but it would take a little while longer for me to realize that.

More on Sontag’s Diaries

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On November 16, 2008

In Uncategorized

The first volume of Susan Sontag’s diaries (edited by her son, David Rieff) will be published in the U.S. by Farrar, Straus and Giroux next month. In England they’ll have to wait until January, but today’s Independent quotes a couple of passages dealing with Sontag’s sexuality, including this one that she wrote at the age of 15: “I am very young, and perhaps the most disturbing aspects of my ambitions will be outgrown … so now I feel I have lesbian tendencies (how reluctantly I write this).”

She sounded less reluctant a year later, when she wrote about having sex with another woman, but if the Times excerpts are any indication, Sontag continued to have a complicated relationship with her sexuality for many years to come. In December of 1959, at the age of 26, she wrote:

My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me.

It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license.

I am just becoming aware of how guilty I feel being queer. With H., I thought it didn’t bother me, but I was lying to myself. I let other people (e.g. Annette [Michelson, film scholar]) believe that it was H. who was my vice, and that apart from her I wouldn’t be queer or at least not mainly so.

. . .

Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable.

Saturday Morning Short Cuts

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On February 2, 2008

In Uncategorized

McGillis in The Monkey’s Mask: “Don’t ever interrupt me when I’m watching football.”

The 17th Annual Kelly McGillis Classic International Women’s/Girls’ Flag Football Championship begins this weekend in Key West, Florida. You can read more by visiting the tournament’s official website, which informs us that not only does McGillis — whose guest arc on The L Word begins later this month — enjoy playing football herself, but one of the teams in this year’s competition is called the Diesel Daisies.

I was going to suggest that McGillis Classic scheduling might be to blame for the Spice Girls cutting their reunion tour short (you know how Mel C. is about her sports), but it turns out they’re not wrapping things up until February 26th.

Sontag at home in 1988, in an image from Leibovitz’s A Photographer’s Life

In her review of David Rieff’s Swimming in a Sea of Death, a memoir of his mother Susan Sontag’s battle with cancer, Katie Roiphe quotes Rieff as writing that Sontag was “humiliated posthumously” by lover Annie Leibovitz’s “carnival images of celebrity death.” The personal photographs first caused a stir upon their publication in the Leibovitz collection A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005 in 2006. Promotion for the book marked the first time Leibovitz spoke publicly about her lengthy relationship with Sontag.

Later this year, Rieff will oversee the publication of journals and notebooks his mother kept between 1947 and 1964. Previously published excerpts contain Sontag’s reflections on lesbian relationships with Harriet Sohmers and Maria Irene Fornes and comments like, “My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me. It doesn’t justify my homosexuality. But it would give me — I feel — a license.” Sontag also wrote: “Being queer makes me feel more vulnerable.”

Other news and suggested reading:

Yesterday an appeals court ruled that Dr. Sneha Anne Philip died at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Philip’s disappearance was the subject of a 2006 New York magazine article that revealed a police probe into her personal life turned up stories of hidden alcohol abuse and bisexual affairs, which her family denied.

JFLAG, the Jamaica Forum for Lesbians All-Sexuals and Gays, has made a plea for government action in the wake of a mob attack on gay men in Mandeville. Their statement reads in part, “We are cultivating an uncivil society which seems to be itching for a reason to resort to mob violence as a redress for real or perceived grievances. When those with whom we entrust the responsibility of leadership fail to act decisively, they betray all Jamaicans.”

Where are gays in space? And Jodie Foster in Contact doesn’t count. We’re not talking about gays in front of bluescreens.

Newsday journalist Saul Friedman has written a nice piece about SAGE-LI, a new Long Island organization devoted to helping elderly GLBT individuals.

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