Rotimi Fani-Kayode

The Photographic Work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Photographer Rotimi Fani-Kayode, the son of a chieftain of Ife, the ancestral capital of the Yoruba people, was born in Lagos, Nigeria in 1955, He moved at the age of eleven, with his family to Brighton, England, in order to escape the Nigerian Civil War. Fani-Kayode studied at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and later at the Pratt Institute in New York, where he earned his MFA in 1983.

After graduating, Fani-Kayode returned to England, settling permanently, to pursue a career in photography. A prominent figure in the Black British art scene, he was a founding member and the first chairman of Autograph ABP, the Association of Black Photographers, in 1968. During the height of the AIDS crisis and in response to the homophobia in both England and his home country of Nigeria, Fani-Kayode photographed images that called attention to the politics of race, dignified queer black culture and homoerotic desire, and explored cultural differences and identity.

Using ancestral rituals and multi-layered symbolism joined with archetypal motifs from both African and European cultures, Fani-Kayode depicted the black male body as the focal point to probe the boundaries of erotic and spiritual fantasy, and sexual and cultural differences. He saw his work as a way to explore the position of the black body in the imagery of the Western cultures and to contest the narrowness of the Yoruba mindset in terms of homosexuality. Fani-Kayode , using the dramatic lighting of chiaroscuro and the transformation of Yoruba mythological symbols and rituals, presented intimate moments of queer sexuality as a means of personal and political survival.

Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s photographs have been exhibited internationally since 1985, with numerous solo exhibitions in London, Boston, New York, and Cape Town. In 2003, his work was featured in the African Pavilion at the 50th Venice Biennale and, in 2011, in ARS 11 at the Kiasma-Museum of Contemporary Art in Helsinki, Finland. Fani-Kayode’s work is represented in the collections of numerous institutions and private collectors including the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Walther Family Foundation, Harvard University’s Hutchins Center, and the Kiasma-Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.

One of the most significant names in the history of black photography, Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s career was cut short by his untimely death at the age of thirty-four in December 1989. Many of his photographs were created in collaboration with his late partner Alex Hirst and are collected in the posthumous 1996 publication “Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex Hirst: Photographs”. His work is represented by Autograph ABP, London.

“My identity has been constructed from my own sense of otherness, whether cultural, racial or sexual. The three aspects are not separate within me. Photography is the tool by which I feel most confident in expressing myself. It is photography therefore – Black, African, homosexual photography – which I must use not just as an instrument, but as a weapon if I am to resist attacks on my integrity and, indeed, my existence on my own terms. — Rotimi Fani-Kayode, “Traces of Ecstasy”, Ten-8, Number 28, 1988.

Note: All photographic work shown was a collaborative effort by Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Alex Hirst. Images reblogged with thanks to Autograph ABP, London.

Caio Fernando Abreu: “At the Edge of the Open Sea”

Photographer Unknown, At the Edge of the Open Sea

“Then you come and come to me and invade me and take me and ask me and lose me and spill over me with your eyes always on the run and open your mouth to release new stories and again I complete like this, without urgency, and concentrate whole in the things you tell me, and so silent, and so submissive, I chew you inside me while you stab me with slow delicacy making it clear in each promise that it will never be fulfilled, that I must expect nothing but this colorful mask, that you want me because that’s how you are—

At the edge of the open sea ”

— Caio Fernando Abreu, Dragons Don’t Know Paradise

Born in September of 1948 in Santiago, Brazil, Caio Fernando Loureiro de Abreu, as a young man, moved to Porto Alegre where he published his first short stories. In 1967, he joined the Letters and Performing Arts studies at the Federal University of Rio Grande de Sul, and later its dramatic arts program. Abandoning both lines of study, Caio Fernando Abreu decided to do journalistic work in the central and southern areas of Brazil.

In 1968, Calo Fernando Abreu moved to São Paulo and joined the newsroom of Veja Magazine, a country-wide weekly news magazine. A frequent visitor of trendy bars, he became friends with singer and songwriter Agenor de Miranda Araújo Neto, better known as Cazuza, an openly bisexual man who helped change public attitudes about AIDS in Brazil. Abreu became a prolific journalist and literary writer, producing short stories, novels, chronicles and drama works.

During the middle of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1968, Calo Fernando Abreu was pursued by the Department of Political and Social Order, a repressive branch of the government, but found refuge in the São Paulo country estate of poet and novelist Hilda Hilst. In 1971, he moved to Rio de Janeiro, working as a researcher and editor for the magazines “Leia Livros”, “Manchete”, and “Paus e Filhos”.

Fleeing the military regime in 1973, Calo Fernando Abreu entered self-exile in Europe, living and subsisting on odd jobs in London and Stockholm, France, the Netherlands, and Spain. In 1974, he returned to Porto Alegre and resumed his literary career. Besides his own literary works, Abreu continued writing for the theater and for the press medium, with relocations to Rio de Janeiro in 1983 and São Paulo in 1985.

In 1995, while visiting in France, Calo Fernando Abreu found out that he was HIV positive. In a series of three letters called “Letters to the Beyond the Wall”, published in the newspaper “O Estado de São Paulo”, he revealed that he had contracted the AIDS virus. Caio Fernando Abreu returned home to Porto Alegre permanently to live with his parents. He enjoyed the last two years of his life gardening, before dying in Porto Alegre on February 25, 1996.

Caio Fernando Abreu’s narratives come from the subjectivity of a bisexual man in his mid-forties who has AIDS. The characters in his books live and function in the periphery of society; they are in many ways equivalent to queer characters in North American literary traditions. In his most famous, short-story book “Os Dragōes Não Conhecem o Paraíso (Dragons Don’t Known Paradise)”, the majority of characters are either gay or seem to be. A camp writer, Abreu’s works are full of examples of queer sensibility, and of multiple appropriations of mainstream heterosexual society into queer narratives.

The discourse of AIDS was already present in Abreu’s writing from the beginning of the epidemic in the 1980s. He is, along with his friend Cazuza and Brazilian singer and songwriter Renato Russo, one of the most recognize Brazilian artists to have died of AIDS.

James Baldwin: “…Bright as a Razor”

Photographer Unknown, ….Bright as a Razor

“Being in trouble can have a funny effect on the mind. I don’t know if I can explain this. You go through some days and you seem to be hearing people and you seem to be talking to them and you seem to be doing your work, or, at least, your work gets done; but you haven’t seen or heard a soul and if someone asked you what you have done that day you’d have to think awhile before you could answer. But at the same time, and even on the self-same day–and this is what is hard to explain–you see people like you never saw them before. They shine as bright as a razor. Maybe it’s because you see people differently than you saw them before your trouble started. Maybe you wonder about them more, but in a different way, and this makes them very strange to you.”

—James Baldwin, If Beale Street Could Talk

Frederico Garcia Lorca: “I Sing Your Restless Longing”

Photographers Unknown, I Sing Your Restless Longing

“I sing your restless longing for the statue,

your fear of the feelings that await you in the street.

I sing the small sea siren who sings to you,

riding her bicycle of corals and conches.

But above all I sing a common thought

that joins us in the dark and golden hours.

The light that blinds our eyes is not art.

Rather it is love, friendship, crossed swords.”

—Frederico Garcia Lorca

Poet and playwright Frederico Garcia Lorca was born on June 5, 1898, in Fuente Vaqueros, a farming village in the province of Granada, Spain. He studied law at the University of Granada, before entering in 1919 Madrid’s Residencia de Estudiantes to focus on his writing.

In Madrid, Lorca joined the “Generation of ’27”, a group of avant-garde artists which included Salvador Dali and surrealist film maker Luis Buñuel. This group introduced Lorca to the surrealist movement, which would later greatly influence his writing. Through this group, Lorca met and developed a long friendship with Dali, who would later design the scenery for the Barcelona production of Lorca’s 1927 play “Mariana Pineda”.

Lorca published numerous volumes of poetry during his career, beginning with the 1918 “Impresiones y Paisajes”, a prose work in the modernist tradition chronicling his sentimental journeys through Spain as a student. He often incorporated elements of Gypsy culture, Spanish folklore and ‘cante jondos’, or deep songs, in his themes of romantic love and tragedy.

Frederico Lorca’s two most successful poetry collections were “Canciones (Songs)”, published in 1927, and the 1928 “Romancero Gitano (Gypsy Ballads)”. “Romancero Gitano” was especially daring for the time with its exploration of sexual themes and made Lorca a celebrity in the literary world. In 1930, he traveled to New York City, where he found a connection between Spanish deep songs and the African-American spirituals he heard in Harlem.

Upon his return to Spain, Lorca co-founded La Barraca, a touring theater company that performed in town squares both Spanish classics and his original plays, including the 1933 “Blood Wedding”. Throughout the 1930s, he spent much of his time working on plays, including a folk drama trilogy: “Bodas de Sangre (Blood Wedding)” in 1933, “Yerma (Wasteland)” in 1934, and “La Casa de Bernarda Alba (The House of Bernarda Alba)” in 1936. Despite the threat of a growing fascist movement in his country, Lorca refused to hide his leftist political views, or his homosexuality, while continuing his ascent as a writer.

In the middle of August 1936, at the onset of the Spanish Civil War, Lorca was arrested at his country home in Granada by General Franco’s soldiers. He was executed, shot without trial, by a Nationalist militia squad a few days later. His body was never found.

Frederico Garcia Lorna, due to the inclusion of homo-romantic themes in his work, was heavily censored during his lifetime. Described as a ‘socialist’ and ‘participant in abnormal practices’, he was a target of the Franco-era government and had his work banned in Spain until 1953. Now considered one of Spain’s greatest poets and playwrights, Lorca, in a career that spanned just nineteen years, revitalized the basic strains of Spanish theater and poetry.

“Here I want to see those men of hard voice. Those that break horses and dominate rivers; those men of sonorous skeleton who sing with a mouth full of sun and flint.”

—Frederico Garcia Lorca

Gary Lee

Photographs and Illustration by Gary Lee

Gary Lee is a Larrakia artist, born in 1952 and raised in Darwin, the capital city of the Northern Territory, Australia. An anthropologist, artist, writer and curator, Lee has been an active participant in and promoter of Aboriginal arts since the early 1980s.

Prior to his studies at Sydney College of the Arts, Gary Lee worked alongside Andrew Trewin to produce a line of evening and cocktail wear, incorporating Lee’s Aboriginal designs and sold under the Trewin Lee label. Lee attended a year at Sydney College majoring in glass and painting, but left to pursue a career in fashion design. After a few years in Sydney, Lee returned to the Northern Territory where he began working as a trainee Aboriginal arts advisor with Chips MacKinolty at Mimi Arts and Crafts in Katherine.

This move brought Gary Lee in contact with a wide range of Aboriginal artists and led to his curating a series of shows of Aboriginal crafts and art. Working at Mimi Arts inspired him to undertake studies, firstly as a Cultural Heritage Management student at Canberra’s College of Advanced Education and later at the Australian National University, earning a BA with Honors in Anthropology. Lee also undertook internships at the National Gallery of Australia, becoming its first Aboriginal intern, and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies.

After five years of study and employment as a project manager for the Australia Council for the Arts, Gary Lee returned to his homeland as a Larrakia anthropologist in a research position at the Northern Land Council. During this time, he wrote a musical play based on his maternal heritage entitled “Keep Him in My Heart: A Larrakia-Filipino Love Story”, which premiered in Darwin and showcased Lee’s skills as writer and fashion designer.

In 1993, Gary Lee began working in the field of photography with his series “Nice Colored Boys”, an allusion to Australian film maker Tracey Moffatt’s classic short film “Nice Colored Girls”. It began as a project to reconnect Lee with the regions of Nepal and India, where he traveled in the 1970s. The film was designed to celebrate the physicality of the men in the area, to subvert Western male beauty stereotypes, and to explore nuances of Aboriginal art and identity.

In 1998, Lee’s street photography, portrait series “Bablu, Milk Boy” was published in Australia’s oldest and most respected photography magazine, Photofile. At the suggestion of Photofile editor Alasdair Forster, Lee produced the “Skin” series, placing himself in the frame alongside men from Nepal and India. Photographs from this series were later shown in the 2008 “More Than My Skin” exhibition, which focused on Aboriginal male photographers, at the Campbelltown Arts Center.

Beginning in 2005, Gary Lee’s photography came to reflect a combination of contemporary and historical Larrakia subjects. The catalyst for this was partly his involvement as co-curator in an exhibition celebrating Billiamook, who was a key Larrakia figure in the region’s contact history. In this exhibition Lee displayed a portrait of his nephew, Shannon, alongside a portrait of Billiamook by the colonial photographer Paul Foelsche, in which both sixteen year old boys exude physical prowess.

Lee’s venture into portraits incorporating his own family paralleled his work into other Aboriginal portraits, becoming an extension of his “Nice Colored Boys” series. To some extent, he had already been doing this as a way of documenting Aboriginal gay and transgender communities. From 2004, however, he began a discrete, ongoing series called “Nymgololo”, a Larrakia word for young man or bachelor, which focused on Aboriginal men in Darwin.

In October 2007, Gary Lee was in Canberra for the opening of the “Culture Warriors” exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia when he suffered a life-threatening stroke. While undergoing extensive rehabilitation in 2008, Lee experienced his busiest period of exhibition commitments including his very first solo exhibition, “Maast Maast”, at Darwin’s 24HR Art NT Centre for Contemporary Art. This exhibition was largely a selection of past work from the “Nice Colored Boys”, “Skin” and “Nymgolofo” series.

Gary Lee’s work has been published in books, art journals and magazines in Australia and abroad. His work can be seen in many major collections including: the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra; the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin; and the art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth.

Note: A book of note is author Dino Hodge’s “Did You Meet Any Malagas (Men)”: A Homosexual History of Australia’s Tropical Capital”, published in 1993. It is a collection of oral histories intended to tell a gay history of the Larrakia territory, recognizing local issues of sexuality, gender, colonialism, and race. It should be noted that Hodges’ friend Gary Lee was the first indigenous person to collaborate with the Northern Territory AIDS Council.

Ken Kesey: “Dragging Men Up by Their Hands”

Photographers Unknown, Dragging Men Up By Their Hands

“It’s like… that big red hand of McMurphy’s is reaching into the fog and dropping down and dragging the men up by their hands, dragging them blinking into the open. First one, then another, then the next. Right on down the line of Acutes, dragging them out of the fog till there they stand, all twenty of them, raising not just for watching TV, but against the Big Nurse, against her trying to send McMurphy to Disturbed, against the way she’s talked and acted and beat them down for years.”

—-Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Born in September of 1935, Kenneth Elton Kesey was an American novelist, essayist, and countercultural figure of the 1960s. Graduated from the University of Oregon in 1957, he began writing “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” in 1960, following the completion of a graduate fellowship at Stanford University in creative writing.

While at Stanford University, Ken Kesey participated in an Army-funded experiment at the Veterans Administration Hospital, which involved hallucinogenic drugs. The discovery of the effects of the drugs prompted Kesey to study alternative methods of perception. To further his study, he later made the decision to work as an orderly at the Menlo Park mental hospital in California, where he encountered questionable treatments for patients.

From these observations, Ken Kesey concluded that society makes ordinary people crazy and that society, itself, prevents people from functioning in it once again. This conclusion inspired Kesey to write “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, a book he considered to be a rail against the unspoken repressive rules of society.

“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” is one of America’s most challenged and banned novels. In 1974, residents in Ohio, considering the book pornographic and glorifying criminal activity, sued the local Board of Education to remove the novel from classrooms. Between 1975 and 1978, several school districts in New York, Oklahoma, Maine and Idaho removed the novel from the schools, with the Freemont High School in St Anthony, Idaho, firing the teacher who assigned it. Challenges against the novel being in school curriculums periodically occurred until 2000.

Note: The film adaption of the 1962 published novel “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”, starred Jack Nicholson and was directed by Miloš Forman. It was released in 1975 by United Artists. The film went on to win five Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Adapted Screenplay.

David Abram: “They Spill Rain Upon the Land”

Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Thirteen

“Each thing organizes the space around it, rebuffing or sidling up against other things; each thing calls, gestures, beckons to other beings or battles them for our attention; things expose themselves to the sun or retreat among the shadows, shouting with their loud colors or whispering with their seeds; rocks snag lichen spores from the air and shelter spiders under their flanks; clouds converse with the fathomless blue and metamorphose into one another; they spill rain upon the land, which gathers in rivulets and carves out canyons…”

—David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

David Abram is an American ecologist and philosopher best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology,the study of the structural experiences of the ‘self’, with ecological and environmental issues.

David Abram introduced the term “the more-than-human-world” in his 1994 book “The Spell of the Sensuous”, which received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. This term was gradually adopted by other scholars and theorists, and became a key phrase in the broad ecological movement. Abram has also referred to this concept more recently as “the commonwealth of breath”.

Abram advocated a reappraisal of “animism”, the belief system that all objects, places, plants, and creatures possess a distinct spiritual essence, as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview. He held that this view, a belief system of many indigenous people, is one which roots human cognition in the sentient human body, while affirming the ongoing entanglement of our bodily experience with the remarkable sentience of other animals, each of which perceives the same world that we perceive yet from a different perspective.

David Abram, a student of traditional, indigenous systems of ecological knowledge, gave voice to the entwinement of human subjectivity not only with other animals but also with the varied sensitivities of many plants upon which humans depend and the bioregions that surround and sustain our communities.

In 2010 Abram published “Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology” which was a finalist for the 2011 Orion Book Award and the runner-up for the PEN America Edward O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing. Using his knowledge of indigenous cultures, Abram explores our human entanglement with nature and shows that awareness, or the mind, is not an exclusive possession of the human species but a clear aspect of the biosphere itself, one in which we, along with other living things, steadily participate. This book has since become a classic of environmental literature.

Baker’s Dozen

Photographers Unknown, Baker’s Dozen

“Because bread was so important, the laws governing its purity were strict and the punishment severe. A baker who cheated his customers could be fined £10 per loaf sold, or made to do a month’s hard labor in prison. For a time, transportation to Australia was seriously considered for malfeasant bakers. This was a matter of real concern for bakers because every loaf of bread loses weight in baking through evaporation, so it is easy to blunder accidentally. For that reason, bakers sometimes provided a little extra- the famous baker’s dozen.”

—Bill Bryson, At Home: A Short History of Private Life

Haruki Murakami: “. . .From the Distant Past”

Photographer Unknown, From the Distant Past, Photo Shoot

“Most things are forgotten over time. Even the war itself, the life-and-death struggle people went through is now like something from the distant past. We’re so caught up in our everyday lives that events of the past are no longer in orbit around our minds. There are just too many things we have to think about everyday, too many new things we have to learn. But still, no matter how much time passes, no matter what takes place in the interim, there are some things we can never assign to oblivion, memories we can never rub away. They remain with us forever, like a touchstone.”

—Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore

Man and Flower

Photographers Unknown, Man and Flower

“The moon is beautiful partly because we cannot reach it, (the sea is impressive because one can never be sure of crossing it safely). Even the pleasure one takes in a flower — and, this is true even of a botanist who knows all there is to be known about the flower, is dependent partly on the sense of mystery.”

—George Orwell, Pleasure Spots, The London Tribune, January 11, 1946

C. S. Lewis: “What is Blinding is Clarity Itself”

Photographer Unknown, Clarity Itself

“He had no faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone, so that now he could say to them, one by one, not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘So it was you all the time.’ All that they were and said at this meeting woke memories. The dim consciousness of friends about him which had haunted his solitudes from infancy was now at last explained; that central music in every pure experience which had always just evaded memory was now at last recovered…He saw not only Them; he saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a man.”

—C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters

Fernando Pessoa: “Life that Wants Nothing Can Have No Weight”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Twelve

“Sit still with me in the shade of these green trees, which have no weightier thought than the withering of their leaves when autumn arrives, or the stretching of their many stiff fingers into the cold sky of the passing winter. Sit still with me and meditate on how useless effort is, how alien the will, and on how our very meditation is no more useful than effort, and no more our own than the will. Meditate too on how a life that wants nothing can have no weight in the flux of things, but a life that wants everything can likewise have no weight in the flux of things, since it cannot obtain everything, and to obtain less than everything is not worthy of souls that seek the truth.”

—Fernando Pessoa, The Education of the Stoic

Born in June of 1888 in Lisbon, Fernando António Nogueira Pessoa was a Portuguese poet, writer, literary critic, translator, publisher and philosopher, described as one of the most significant literary figures of the 20th century and one of the greatest poets in the Portuguese language.

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos, and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent, intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. Each of these heteronyms possessed distinct biographies, temperaments, philosophies, appearances, writing styles, and even signatures.

In 1905, Pessoa attended university in Lisbon, however, after two years he left, educating himself by sequestering in the National Library to read literature, history, philosophy and religion. He began writing short stories, some of them under the name “David Merrick”, as well as poems and essays, most often in English or French and occasionally in Portuguese.

A life-long outsider, Pessoa lived with relatives or in rented rooms, chain-smoking, writing, reading, and working as a translator for firms with overseas connections. Throughout his life, Pessoa grappled with the possibility of insanity, spurred on by his grandmother’s mental illness, but he was never able to draw conclusions about himself either way.

“I’ve divided all my humanness among the various authors whom I’ve served as literary executor. I subsist as a kind of medium of myself, but I’m less real than the others, less substantial, less personal, and easily influenced by them all.” —Fernando Pessoa, talking about his heteronyms

For a thorough and fascinating article entitled “Fernando Pessoa and His Heteronyms” by Carmela Ciuraru, please visit the Poetry Society of America located at: https://poetrysociety.org/features/tributes/fernando-pessoa-his-heteronyms

Tove Jansson: “Moominland Midwinter”

Photographers Unknown, Snapshots

“There are such a lot of things that have no place in summer and autumn and spring. Everything that’s a little shy and a little rum. Some kinds of night animals and people that don’t fit in with others and that nobody really believes in. They keep out of the way all the year. And then when everything’s quiet and white and the nights are long and most people are asleep—then they appear.”

—Tove Jansson, Moominland Midwinter

Born in August of 1914, Tove Marika Jansson was a Swedish-speaking Finnish author, novelist, painter, illustrator, and comic strip author. She studied art at University College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm in 1930-1933, the Graphic School of the Finnish Academy of Fine Arts in 1933-1937, and finally at L’ École d’ Adrein Holy and École des Beau-Arts in Paris in 1938. She exhibited in a number of shows during the 1930s and early 1940s, and had her first solo exhibition in 1943.

Besides producing artwork, Tove Jansson was also writing short stories and articles for publication, as well as creating the graphics for book covers. Starting in 1945, she wrote the “Moomin” book series for children, publishing books in 1945, 1946, and 1948 which were highly successful. For her work as a children’s writer, Jansson received the Hans Christian Anderson Medal in 1968. She later wrote six novels and five books of short stories for adults.

Tove Jansson worked as a cartoonist and illustrator for the Swedish satirical magazine “Garm” from the 1930s to 1953. She produced many political cartoons during that period which achieved international fame. In one of Jansson’s early cartoons, Hitler is seen crying in diapers while European leaders try to calm him down. During the 1930s, Jansson produced illustrations for Christmas magazines and several comic strip series.

Tove Jansson had several male lovers, including political philosopher Atos Wirtanen, a Finnish socialist intellectual and a member of the Finnish Parliament. However, she later met and developed a secret love affair with the married theater director Vivica Bandler, daughter of Helsinki’s mayor Erik von Frenckell.

In 1956, Jansson met her lifelong partner Tuulikki Pietilä, the American-born Finnish graphic artist and professor, who became one of the most influential graphic artists in Finland. In Helsinki, the two women lived separately in neighboring blocks, visiting each other privately through an attic passageway. In the 1960s, they built a house on an island in the Gulf of Finland, where they lived together for the summer months until Jansson’s passing.

Tove Marika Jansson died from cancer in June of 2001 at the age of eighty-six. Tuulikki Pietilä died at her home in February of 2009 at the age of ninety-two.

James Baldwin: “Giovanni’s Room”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Ten

“Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other’s faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.”

—James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room

Born in New York City in August of 1924, James Arthur Baldwin was an essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s, in the United States and through western Europe.

Disillusioned by the racial prejudice in the United States, James Baldwin emigrated in November of 1948, at the age of twenty-four, to Paris where he became involved in the cultural radicalism of the Left Bank, an area of artists, writers, and philosophers. In 1949, he met and fell in love with the young Swiss painter Lucien Happersberger, becoming life-long partners.

While staying at the Happersberger family chalet in Switzerland with Lucien during the winter of 1951-1952, James Baldwin completed his first novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain”, which was published in early 1953. Over the next two years, while living mostly in France, he worked on his second novel “Giovanni’s Room”. In 1956 after Knopf Publishers decided not to publish this second book, Baldwin allowed Dial Press to publish the novel, dedicated to Happersberger, in the United States, and publisher Michael Joseph in the United Kingdom.

James Baldwin made his home primarily in the southern section of France, but often returned to the United States to lecture or teach. In 1957, he began to spend half of each year in New York City. Baldwin and Happersberger lived together in their house in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, Provence, France, for many years until Baldwin’s death, with Happersberger by his side, from cancer in November of 1987. James Baldwin was buried at Ferncliff Cemetery in Hartsdale, near New York City.

“Giovanni’s Room”, with its complex narrative of love and desire, became James Baldwin’s most sustained treatment of sexuality, and a classic of gay literature. Due to its explicit homoerotic content, it caused great controversy when it was first published in 1956. The book is noteworthy for bringing complex representations of homosexuality and bisexuality to the reading public with artistry and empathy, lacking in most of the contemporary literary treatments, and thus broadening the public discussion regarding same-sex desire.

“Giovanni’s Room” focuses on events in the life of an American man living in Paris and his feelings, and his frustrations, in the relationships he has with other men in his life, particularly Giovanni, a bar keep at a Parisian gay bar. In this novel, Baldwin explores themes of social alienation, self-identity, masculinity, and manhood, expressed through relationships and learned public behavior. Though it is considered a gay novel, Baldwin has stated on occasion that the novel is not so much about homosexuality, but about what happens if you are so afraid that you finally can not love anybody..

For additional information from the National Museum of African American History and Culture:

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog-post/baldwin-switzerland

https://nmaahc.si.edu/blog/series/stories-chez-baldwin

Mark Helprin: “Winter’s Tale”

Photographer Unknown, Winter’s Tale

“Winter then in its early and clear stages, was a purifying engine that ran unhindered over city and country, alerting the stars to sparkle violently and shower their silver light into the arms of bare up-reaching trees. It was a mad and beautiful thing that scoured raw the souls of animals and man, driving them before it until they loved to run..”

—Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale