The Word is Sprawl

Photographers Unknown, The Word is Sprawl

Verb: sprawl; third-person singular present “sprawls”; present participle “sprawling”; simple past and past participle “sprawled”.

“There was no special place for him or his little affairs, and he was forbidden to sprawl on sofas and explain his ideas about the manufacture of this world and his hopes for the future. Sprawling was lazy and wore out sofas, and little boys were not expected to talk.”

—-Rudyard Kipling, Baa Baa, Black Sheep, 1888

“A shrewd blow, it caught him off balance, and after one ineffectual stagger he sprawled backward and lay for a moment staring up in blank surprise.”

—-Herman Whitaker, Cross Trails: The Story of One Woman in the North Woods, 1914

The Old English word “spreawilian”, meaning ‘to move convulsively’, has cognates, words having the same linguistic derivation as another, in the Scandinavian languages, such as the Norwegian “sprala”, the Danish “spraelle”, and the North Frisian “spraweli”. These words probably ultimately came from the Proto-Indo-European root “sper-“, meaning ‘to strew’. Usage as a verb meaning ‘to spread out’ is noted as early as 1300 AD. Usage meaning ‘to spread or stretch in a careless manner’ is attested to be from 1745 AD.

Mary Jane Oliver: “Wild Geese”

Photographer Unknown, Wild Geese

“You do not have to be good.

You do not have to walk on your knees

for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body

love what it loves.

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.

Meanwhile the world goes on.

Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain

are moving across the landscapes,

over the prairies and the deep trees,

the mountains and the rivers.

Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,

are heading home again.

Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,

the world offers itself to your imagination,

calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –

over and over announcing your place

in the family of things.”

—Mary Oliver, Wild Geese, Dream Works, 1986

Mary Jane Oliver was born in September of 1935 in Maple Heights, a semi-rural suburb of Cleveland, Ohio. She was an American poet whose work was inspired by nature, rather than the human world, which arose from her lifelong passion for solitary walks in the wild.

As a child, Mary Oliver spent a large amount of her time outside, walking or reading in the pastoral countryside. Writing poetry at the age of fourteen, Oliver was able, at the age of seventeen, to visit the home of the late poet Edna St. Vincent Milley, located in Austerlitz, New York. There she met the late poet’s sister Norma Milley, with whom she formed a friendship. Mary Oliver and Norma spent the next six to seven years at the “Steepletop” estate archiving Edna St. Vincent Milley’s papers.

Mary Oliver’s first collection of poems “No Voyage and Other Poems: was published in 1963 when she was twenty-eight. While teaching at Case Western Reserve University, her fifth collection of poetry, “American Primitive”, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1984, Mary Oliver became Poet in Residence at Bucknell University in 1986; Writer in Residence at Sweet Briar College in 1991; and later she held the Chair for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College, Vermont, until 2001.

Mary Oliver’s 1990 “House of Light” won the Christopher Award and the L. L. Winship/PEN New England Award ,and her 1992 “New and Selected Poems” won the National Book Award. For its inspiration, her work turns towards nature, and the sense of wonder it instillss. Oliver’s poetry is grounded in her memories of Ohio and her adopted home of New England, mostly centered around her life in Provincetown in the 1960s.

Influenced by Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Emerson, and Shelley, Oliver’s work is fulled with imagery of her daily walks, which refuse to acknowledge the boundaries between nature and the observing self. Known for her unadorned language and common themes, she has been compared to Emily Dickinson, with whom she shared an affinity for solitude and inner monologues.

On a return visit to Austerlitz, in the late 1950s, Oliver met photographer Molly Malone Cook, who would become her partner for over forty years. They settled largely in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where they lived together until Cook’s death in 2005. Oliver continued to live there until she relocated to Florida. She valued her privacy and gave very few interviews.

In 2012, Mary Oliver was diagnosed with lung cancer, was treated and given a good prognosis. She ultimately died of lymphoma on January 17, 2019 at her home in Florida at the age of eighty-three.

Christopher Isherwood: “The World Seems So Fresh”

Photographers Unknown,, The World Seems So Fresh

“A few times in my life I’ve had moments of absolute clarity. When for a few brief seconds the silence drowns out the noise and I can feel rather than think, and things seem so sharp and the world seems so fresh. It’s as though it had all just come into existence.

I can never make these moments last. I cling to them, but like everything, they fade. I have lived my life on these moments. They pull me back to the present, and I realize that everything is exactly the way it was meant to be.”

— Christopher Isherwood, A Single Man

Christopher Isherwood was a novelist, screen-writer, and playwright who used his expeiences as a gay man for the theme of some of his writings. Isherwood was born into a privileged lifestyle near Manchester in the north of England in 1904. He developed strong friendships during his boarding school years, later collaborating with school friend Wystan Auden to write three plays : “The Dog Beneath the Skin” in 1935, the 1936 “The Asceent of F6”, and “On the Frontier” in 1938.

Asked to leave Cambridge University in 1925, Isherwood took part-time jobs, briefly attended medical school, and progressed with his first two novels, “All the Conspirators” published in 1928 and “The Memorial” published in 1932. He moved to Berlin in 1929, where he taught English and explored his homosexuality.

Isherwood ’s experiences and developed friendships with Gerald Hamilton and Jean Ross provided material for his 1935 “Mr. Norris Changes Trains” and his 1939 “Goodbye to Berlin”. These were later published together as “The Berlin Stories”, which established Isherwood’s reputation as an important writer and inspired the 1951 play “I Am a Camera” and the 1966 musical “Cabaret”.

While living in Berlin, Isherwood often returned to London where he took his first movie-script job, working with Viennese director Berthold Viertel on the 1934 film “Little Friend”. He also worked on his book“Lions and Shadows”, published in 1938, a fictionalized autobiography of his education, both in and out of school in the 1920s. Traveling in January of 1938, Isherwood, accompanied by Wystan Auden, journeyed to China to write his 1939 “Journey to a War” about the Sino-Japanese conflict.

Isherwood and Auden emigrated to the United States in January of 1939, Auden to Manhattan and Isherwood to Hollywood, where he met and became friends with Truman Capote and British novelist and playwright Dodie Smith. On November 6, 1946, Christopher Isherwood became an American citizen. While living in California with photographer William Caskey, he and Caskey traveled in 1947 to South America, after which they published the 1949 “The Condor and the Crows”, with prose by Isherwood and photographs by Caskey.

On Valentine’s Day in 1953, at the age of forty-eight, Isherwood met eighteen-year old Don Bachardy on the beach at Santa Monica. Despite the age difference, this meeting began a partnership that, though interrupted by affairs and separations, continued until the end of Isherwood’s life. During this period they were together, Isherwood, with Bachardy typing, finished his 1954 novel “The World in the Evening” and taught modern English literature at (now) California State University, Los Angeles. The two became a well-known and well-established couple in California society with many Hollywood friends.

Isherwood was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1981, and died of the disease on the 4th of January, 1986, at his Santa Monica home, aged 81. His body was donated to medical science and his ashes later scattered at sea.

Note: Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel “A Single Man” is considered by many to be his finest achievement. The story depicts a day in the life of George, a middle-aged gay Englishman who is a professor at a Los Angeles University. In the novel, the professor, unable to cope with the sudden death of his partner Jim, encounters different people who give him insight into the possibilities of being alive and human in the world. The novel was adapted into the drama film “A Single Man”, in 2009, directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, and starring Colin Firth who, for his role in the film, was nominated for the Best Actor Academy Award.

Notes: An interesting, more extensive article on the life of Christopher Isherwood can be found at The Isherwood Foundation located at: https://www.isherwoodfoundation.org/biography.html

Third Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Christopher Isherwood (left) and Don Bachardy”, late 1970s.

Bottom Insert Photo: George Platt Lynes, “Christopher Isherwood”, 1935, Heliogravure, Private Collection

Fernando Pessoa: “Masquerades Disclose the Reality of Souls”

Photographers Unknown, Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Set Twenty-One

“Masquerades disclose the reality of souls. As long as no one sees who we are, we can tell the most intimate details of our life. I sometimes muse over this sketch of a story about a man afflicted by one of those personal tragedies born of extreme shyness who one day, while wearing a mask I don’t know where, told another mask all the most personal, most secret, most unthinkable things that could be told about his tragic and serene life. And since no outward detail would give him away, he having disguised even his voice, and since he didn’t take careful note of whoever had listened to him, he could enjoy the ample sensation of knowing that somewhere in the world there was someone who knew him as not even his closest and finest friend did. When he walked down the street he would ask himself if this person, or that one, or that person over there might not be the one to whom he’d once, wearing a mask, told his most private life. Thus would be born in him a new interest in each person, since each person might be his only, unknown confidant.”

—Fernando Pessoa

Ricardo Rico

Photography by Ricardo Rico

Ricardo Rico is a self-taught photographer working and living in São Paulo, Brazil. He is currently working on “The Lonely Project”, dealing with masculine beauty in physical and emotional forms. To date, there are nineteen issues of “The Lonely Project” available.

Ricardo Rico’s website is located at: https://www.ricardorico.com

The Lonely Project website is located at: https://thelonelyproject.com.br/revista/

Oliver Sacks: “His Real, Inmost Story”

Photographers Unknown, His Real, Inmost Story

“If we wish to know about a man, we ask ‘what is his story–his real, inmost story?’–for each of us is a biography, a story. Each of us is a singular narrative, which is constructed, continually, unconsciously, by, through, and in us–through our perceptions, our feelings, our thoughts, our actions; and, not least, our discourse, our spoken narrations. Biologically, physiologically, we are not so different from each other; historically, as narratives–we are each of us unique.”

—Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales

Richard Siken: “Unfinished Duet”

Photographer Unknown, Unfinished Duet

- At first there were too many branches
  so he cut them and then it was winter.
  He meaning you. Yes. He would look out
  the window and stare at the trees that once
  had too many branches and now seemed
  to have too few. Is that all? No, there were
  other attempts, breakfasts: plates served,
  plates carried away. He doesn’t know
  what to do with his hands. He likes the feel
  of the coffeepot. More than the hacksaw?
  Yes, and he likes flipping the chairs,
  watching them fill with people. He likes
  the orange juice and toast of it, and waxed
  floors in any light. He wants to be tender
  and merciful. That sounds overly valorous.
  Sounds like penance. And his hands?
  His hands keep turning into birds and
  flying away from him. Him being you.
  Yes. Do you love yourself? I don’t have to
  answer that. It should matter. He has a
  body but it doesn’t matter, clean sheets
  on the bed but it doesn’t matter. This is
  where he trots out his sadness. Little black
  cloud, little black umbrella. You miss
  the point: the face in the mirror is a pale
  and naked hostage and no one can tell
  which room he’s being held in. He wants
  in, he wants out, he wants the antidote.
  He stands in front of the mirror with a net,
  hoping to catch something. He wants to
  move forward into the afternoon because
  there is no other choice. Everyone in this
  room got here somehow and everyone in
  this room will have to leave. So what’s left?
  Sing a song about the room we’re in?
  Hammer in the pegs that fix the meaning
  to the landscape? The voice wants to be
  a hand and the hand wants to do something
  useful. What did you really want? Someone
  to pass this with me. You wanted more.
  I want what everyone wants. He raises
  the moon on a crane for effect, cue the violins.
  That’s what the violins are for. And yes,
  he raises the moon on a crane and scrubs it
  until it shines. So what does it shine on?
  Nothing. Was there no one else? Left-handed
  truth, right-handed truth, there’s no pure
  way to say it. The wind blows and it makes
  a noise. Pain makes a noise. We bang on
  the pipes and it makes a noise. Was there
  no one else? His hands keep turning into
  birds, and his hands keep flying away
  from him. Eventually the birds must land.

—Richard Siken, Unfinished Duet, Crush

Born in New York City in February of 1967, Richard Siken is an American painter, poet, and filmmaker. He studied at the University of Arizona, earning a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and later a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry.

Richard Siken is one of the co-founders and editors of Spork Press, established in 2001. Besides publishing its “Spork” literary magazine, the press produces novels and chapbooks, some of which were released in serial form. Siken received a Literature Fellowship in Poetry from the National Endowment of the Arts and two Arizona Commission on the Arts grants.

Influenced by the 1991 death of his boyfriend, Richard Siken wrote his collection of poems “Crush” which was published by Yale University Press.. A powerful literary work that is confessional, gay, and infused with eroticism, “Crush” won the 2004 Yale Younger Poets Competition, and received the Lambda Literary Award for “Gay Men’s Poetry” in 2005, and the Thom Gunn Award from Publishing Triangle in 2006. It was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Siken’s most recent work, his second book of poems, “War of the Foxes”, was released from Copper Canyon Press in 2015. With interwoven lyrics, fables, portraits and landscapes, Siken confronts the ways in which we look to art for meaning and purpose. The poems in “The War of the foxes” show the fallacies inherent in a search for truth, both in the world outside and within the self.

Richard Siken currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

Richard Siken: “I Am the Wind”

Photographer Unknown, I Am the Wind

“I am the wind and the wind is invisible, all the leaves tremble but I am invisible, blackbird over the dark field but I am invisible, what fills the balloon and what it moves through, knot without rope, bloom without flower, galloping without the horse, the spirit of the thing without the thing, location without dimension, without a within, song without throat, word without ink, wingless flight, dark boat in the dark night, shine without light, pure velocity, as the hammer is a hammer when it hits the nail and the nail is a nail when it meets the wood and the invisible table begins to appear out of mind, pure mind, out of nothing, pure thinking, hand of the mind, hand of the emperor, arm of the empire, void and vessel, sheath and shear, and wider, and deeper, more vast, more sure, through silence, through darkness, a vector, a violence, and even farther, and even worse, between, before, behind, and under, and even stronger, and even further, beyond form, beyond number, I labor, I lumber, I fumble forward through the valley as winter, as water, a shift in the river, I mist and frost, flexible and elastic to the task, a fountain of gravity, space curves around me, I thirst, I hunger, I spark, I burn, force and field, force and counterforce, agent and agency, push to your pull, parabola of will, massless mass and formless form, dreamless dream and nameless name, intent and rapturous, rare and inevitable, I am the thing that is hurtling towards you…”

—Richard Siken, Lovesong of the Square Root of Negative One, War of the Foxes

Richard Siken currently lives and works in Tucson, Arizona.

Sunil Gupta

The Photographic Work by Sunil Gupta

Born in New Delhi, India in 1953, Sunil Gupta is an artist, educator, photographer, and curator. He studied at the London’s Royal College of Art and completed his doctoral program at the University of Westminster in 2018. He has been involved with independent photography as a critical practice since the 1970s focusing on race, migration and queer issues. Gupta’s work has been instrumental in raising awareness around the political realities for international gay rights and the visible tensions between tradition and modernity, both public and private.

In the mid-1970s, Gupta studied under Lisette Model at the New School for Social Research and became interested in the idea of gay public space. It was during this period that he shot his early street series “Christopher Street, New York”, documenting the daily lives of gay men in lower New York City.

In the 1980s, Gupta constructed his “Exiles” series, consisting of documentary images of Indian gay men in the architectural spaces of Delhi, which with images and texts described the conditions for gay men in India at that time. His series with the fictional name, “Mr. Malhotra’s Party”, was shot twenty years later and updates this theme during a time in which queer identities are more open and also reside in virtual space on the internet and in private parties.

Gay nights at local clubs in Delhi are always sign-posted as private parties in a fictitious person’s name to get around Section 377, a British colonial law, which still criminalizes homosexuality in India. Mr Malhotra is is the ubiquitous Punjabi refugee who arrived post partition and contributed to the development of the city.

Among Sunil Gupta’s published works are the monographs: “Wish You Were Here: Memories of a Gay Life” published by Yoda Press, New Delhi in 2008; and “Pictures From Here”, published by Chris Boot Ltd., New York, in 2003. Along with photographer Charan Singh, whose work is informed by HIV/AIDS work in India, Sunil Gupta exhibited in 2008 “Dissent and Desire” at Houston’s Contemporary Arts Museum, which was accompanied by the book, “Delhi: Communities of Belonging”.

Sunil Gupta is a Professorial Fellow at UCA, Farnham, and Visiting Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, and was the Lead Curator for the Houston Foto-Fest in 2018. Gupta’s work is in many private and public collections including, George Eastman House; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Royal Ontario Museum; Tate Museum in London; and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Note: For those interested in Sunil Gupta’s work, a lecture at the International Center of Photography by Sunil Gupta on his life and work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aPdzwCKvP4

Bottom Insert Image: Sunil Gupta, “The New Pre-Raphaelites 3%”, 2007, Color Print. jpg

Michel Serres: “A Variety of Contingency”

Photographers Unknown, A Variety of Contingency

“The skin is a variety of contingency: in it, through it, with it, the world and my body touch each other, the feeling and the felt, it defines their common edge. Contingency means common tangency: in it the world and the body intersect and caress each other. I do not wish to call the place in which I live a medium, I prefer to say that things mingle with each other and that I am no exception to that. I mix with the world which mixes with me. Skin intervenes between several things in the world and makes them mingle.”

—Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies

Images reblogged with thanks to https://fuzzynavelfan.tumblr.com

Walt Whitman: “I Exist As I Am”

Photographer Unknown, I Exist As I Am

“I exist as I am, that is enough,

If no other in the world be aware I sit content,

And if each and all be aware I sit content.

One world is aware, and by the far the largest to me, and that is myself,

And whether I come to my own today or in ten thousand or ten million years,

I can cheerfully take it now, or with equal cheerfulness, I can wait.

My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,

I laugh at what you call dissolution,

And I know the amplitude of time.

—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, Part 20, Leaves of Grass

“Song of Myself”, one of the most famous of Walt Whitman’s works and a poem that represents the core of his poetic vision, was one of the original twelve pieces in the 1855 first edition of “Leaves of Grass”, published at Whitman’s own expense. Originally published without sections, the final edition consists of thirteen hundred lines arranged in fifty-two separate but connected works.

Like most of the other poems in “Leaves of Grass”, this poem was revised extensively, reaching its final form in 1881. “Song of Myself” is a sprawling combination of biography and poetic meditation, with Whitman using symbols and sly commentary to get at important issues. Composed in a series of vignettes with small, precisely drawn scenes, the poem is written in Whitman’s signature free verse style.

This poem did not take on the title “Song of Myself” until the 1881 edition. Previous to that it had been titled “Poem of Walt Whitman, an American” and, in the 1860, 1867, and 1871 editions, simply “Walt Whitman.” The poem’s shifting title is suggestive of the theme Whitman examined in this piece. As Walt Whitman, the specific individual, melts away into the abstract “Myself”, the poem explores the possibilities for communion between individuals.

Following its 1855 publication, “Song of Myself” was immediately singled out by critics and readers for particular attention, and the work remains among the most acclaimed and influential in American poetry. Public acceptance, however, was slow in coming. Social conservatives denounced the poem as disregarding norms of morality due to its obvious depictions of human sexuality.

Note: An interesting read from The Walt Whitman Archive is James E Miller’s “Sex and Sexuality” which deals with the themes of sex and sexuality in Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”. The commentary can be found at: https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_49.html

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