Mirror, mirror | Simon Callow on The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Category: {gay}
Gay
An apology for Alan Turing
Sometimes petitions work. A few weeks ago one such was launched by computer scientist John Graham-Cumming on the UK government website requesting a public apology for the terrible treatment accorded mathematician and wartime codebreaker Alan Turing in 1952. Turing was prosecuted after admitting a gay affair to police investigating another matter and given the choice of imprisonment or parole with chemical castration; in order to carry on working he took the latter choice but subsequent depression led to his suicide. The law used was the same which sent Oscar Wilde to prison in 1895, and Turing’s case was probably the worst treatment of a notable figure on the basis of sexuality since Wilde. During the Second World War Turing had saved countless lives by helping crack the Enigma code, and his early computer research led to the development of machines like the one on which you’re reading these words. In 1999 TIME Magazine put him in a list of the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century.
Turing has always felt like a local hero to me even though he only lived in Manchester for a few years. The house where he died isn’t far from where I live, and he has a memorial statue (above) in Sackville Park in the city centre, midway between the gay village and the Institute of Science and Technology where he worked. The petition gained a lot of support—30,805 signatures—including endorsement from high-profile figures such as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry. I signed it although I was sceptical it would lead to anything; this government doesn’t have much of a record for paying attention to the wishes of its citizens. So colour me surprised now that PM Gordon Brown has issued an apology:
Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can’t put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.
I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue. (More.)
I take a consistently dim view of the present administration when it comes to its diminishing of our civil liberties and its involvement in other people’s wars. But when it comes to gay issues, Blair and Brown have been the best Prime Ministers since 1967, when another Labour government overturned the law which killed Wilde and Turing. The best, bar none. This announcement is another plus in that direction.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Stonewall forty years on
• Over the rainbow
• Forty years of freedom after centuries of injustice
Bondage Machine
Photography by Steven Klein, styling by Nicola Formichetti.
Not a Tom Waits album, Bondage Machine is the title of a feature in Vogue Hommes Japan which plays with bondage and fetish imagery to striking effect. What’s not to love about a huge skeletal necklace and leather underwear? Fetish gear is the aesthetic dimension of erotica and it’s always nice to see new manifestations of the form even when, as in this case, it’s largely about fashion designers flirting with the edge of acceptability.
Via the essential Homotography.
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Bad Boy
The art of George Barbier, 1882–1932
Les Chansons de Bilitis (1922).
I’ve posted examples of George Barbier’s Art Deco drawings before but online examples of his work outside the world of fashion illustration have been difficult to find. The Bunka Women’s University Library corrects that with a collection of high-quality scans which include a book about the artist, George Barbier, Étude Critique (1929) by Jean?Louis Vaudoyer. There’s also his adaptation of the Sapphic classic by Pierre Loüys, Les Chansons de Bilitis, from 1922. The drawings there lack the customary ardour of other adaptations but they’re marvellously elegant nonetheless, with some beautiful page designs.
Note: these books can’t be linked to individually, you need to follow the links from “Art Deco illustrated books” in their site menu.
Nijinsky (1913).
Poèmes en Prose (1928).
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The illustrators archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• The Decorative Age
• Images of Nijinsky
Antonin Mercié’s David
David (c.1872).
I’d marked out this statue as a suitable addition to the burgeoning men with swords archive some time ago but it took the discovery of a piece of writing to prompt this post. Antonin Mercié’s statue of David resides today in the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, but I managed to miss it on my visit there. Judging by the photos it’s situated at the end of the main hall near Rodin’s enormous Gates of Hell, and it was the Rodin which claimed my attention that day. It’s also the case that the D’Orsay hall (formerly a railway station) is such a cavernous space that free-standing works such as this lose their impact, they’d look far better in smaller rooms.
At the late 1870s, Antonin Mercié incarnated the young generation of French sculptors who, without breaking away from the traditional canons, wanted to make their figures more vibrant. He sought to combine the skilled composition and lively modelling seen in the great models of the Florentine Renaissance: hence the sweeping curves of the arm extended by the movement of the sword, the bent knee, and the graceful movement of this David. A spectator walking round it can appreciate the way the planes gradually modulate the space. Mercié carved himself an original path between modern classicism and explicit realism. (More.)
You tend to find with many nude sculptures of the 19th century that the original is the naked one while the copies have gained additional items of clothing. This is the case with Mercié’s David whose replicas like the one above from the University of Copenhagen has a wrap around his waist. It’s the nude condition of the Paris statue that lends a frisson to a piece of writing by French author Patrick Drevet which may be fiction or may be reportage. An Angel at Orsay describes an elaborate game of homoerotic voyeurism as the narrator wanders through the museum and stops by Mercié’s David when he spots a student boy sketching the statue. Drevet’s piece is a sustained reverie inspired by his act of studying the student who studies the statue in turn and then becomes engaged by another student boy, the latter deliberately placing himself on view gazing at the statue and hoping (so the narrator surmises) to be sketched himself. A meagre précis like this fails to do Drevet’s piece any justice, it really needs to be read in its entirety. I found it in the Penguin Book of International Gay Writing (1995), and it may well be available in a collection of the author’s work. It’s certainly enough to make me want to read more of Drevet’s writing.
Elsewhere on { feuilleton }
• The men with swords archive
Previously on { feuilleton }
• Behold the (naked) man