Inspirations: A Yaddo Gay Pride Event Celebrating our LGBT Writers
Guest Post by Rob Michael Blake
Photo by Nicole Alexander Photography
There was a heady buzz on Tuesday, June 12, in room 310 at the Center. The audience chatter could have been that of a much anticipated new book at a launch party. Writers and filmmakers updated their peers about their current work or past work, or a new collaboration. This was the audience for Second Tuesday, the Center’s longest-running cultural program. Second Tuesday has been running since 1985 and has hosted speakers who have garnered every major literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the Man Booker prize. It has historically played host to politicians, activists, and artists of all stripes with a focus on issues impactful to the LGBT community.
The featured program of the evening: Inspirations: A Yaddo Gay Pride Event Celebrating our LGBT Writers. Yaddo is a residential program for working artists. The program was moderated by Allan Gurganus and featured Chris Beam and Jorge Ignacio Cortinas. All three writers had working residencies at Yaddo. Mr. Gurganus is a member of Yaddo Corporation and has had working residencies there dating back to 1975. Yaddo is located in a 75-room estate on 400 acres in Saratoga Springs, New York. It has played host to some 6,000 notable artists, including such cultural icons as Truman Capote, Aaron Copeland, Patricia Highsmith and Carson McCullers. All three of the speakers shared their experiences at Yaddo, extolling its collegiality and singularly unique impact on nurturing gay and lesbian artists, who have in turn gone on to shape popular culture. Each writer read from his or her work.
Photo by Nicole Alexander Photography
First to speak, and moderating the program, was Allan Gurganus. A prolific author and essayist, he is perhaps best known for his 1989 debut novel, Oldest Confederate Widow Tells All. Mr. Gurganus spoke of his relationship with Yaddo which began in 1975 and its unlikely, and unexpected, role in a becoming a mecca for LGBT talent. In one anecdote, he described the campus reaction when a busload of gay men arrived from New York City in the 1970’s. One workshop participant noted their arrival in an exasperated announcement to the larger group. “There is a certain kind of over-enthusiastic tittering from one particular table in the room. It’s distracting.”
Mr. Gurganus introduced award-winning playwright Jorge Ignacio Cortinas, who read excerpts from two of his plays, including a scene from the upcoming Bird in Hand. Set in a Florida theme park, Bird in Hand features a young gay man in the process of coming out and his apparently straight best friend. The third character, a witness and commentator to the action, is a talking parrot.
Photo by Nicole Alexander Photography
The parrot was rescued from his owner, a paranoid shut-in who lived in a high-crime area. As a consequence, the bird’s speech consists only of police car sirens, gunshot sounds and CB radio law enforcement code for homicide. After the bird’s owner is accidentally killed when police mistakenly break into the wrong apartment (“it’s ironic,” remarks one of the human characters wryly,), the bird is sent off to the theme park. It is hidden from public view for speech retraining: a bird rehab of sorts.The parrot plays witness to the coming out of the gay man, his confession of his crush upon his best friend and a tentative first kiss between the two men. By turns sweet, sad, funny and unexpected, Mr. Cortinas artfully gave voice to all three of his characters.
Next to speak was prolific author, Chris Beam. Ms. Beam is an award-winning author of both fiction and non-fiction and is a professor in New York City. Her diverse subject matter covers the lives of transgender teens (I am J) and a memoir-style short novel, Mother Stranger which she read from that evening. Mother Stranger chronicles her life growing up with an abusive, mentally ill mother from whom she escaped at age 14. She spoke of her mother’s claim to always be holding five jobs. She could only remember one: a prostitute. Some twenty years after she left home, and after her mother’s death, she returned to her childhood home with her brother. Upon introducing themselves to the current owner of the house, the woman seemed shocked. “Yes, I bought this house from your mother. But, she told me her children were dead.”
Photo by Nicole Alexander Photography
One theme pervading Ms. Beams work was the process of healing. “One sign of trauma,” she remarked about her childhood, “is that it doesn’t have language at all.” Ms. Beam also read from a letter written to her 14 year-old self as an adult, a piece done in association with the Trevor Project. Of her time at Yaddo, she remarked, ”Yaddo lifts you from the interior torment, and that, in turn, lifts you to create.” On a lighter note, she described Yaddo’s grandeur with its fountains and motifs in reds, pinks, Tiffany glass and a particular fainting sofa as “the queeniest place on earth.”
Mr. Gurganus closed the program reading from one of his early essays. It takes place in the 1980’s in New York City, when his gay male friends were becoming sick and dying at an alarming pace. Alternately heart rending and mordantly funny, Mr. Gurganus described a pledge to a his hospitalized friend, Robert, to purge Robert’s apartment of anything that would shock Robert’s Swedish-born parents who were visiting from Iowa.
Photo by Nicole Alexander Photography
In making the apartment parent ready, he discovered an unending supply of adult toys – he lost count at 32 – which he stacked “knee-high, like cord wood.” Mr. Gurganus attempted to remove this heft of personal property using a knapsack, shopping bags, his waistband and pockets and to transport them back to his own apartment for safekeeping. En route, he heard an ungainly ripping sound which unleashed an army of used adult toys upon a street scene of unsuspecting, horrified New Yorkers. While most people cleared his path or gave looks of derision, one woman, emboldened by the circumstance, cried out, ”For God Sakes! This is a work day.”
And so went Tuesday night’s dazzling program at the Center. The Second Tuesday programs will resume in the fall.