2009

ELIZABETH (2009)

There I was, my dears—

Entering the Gates of the

Here-After surely dying

There in a hospital—

Room conveniently via

Televised TV screen above

That’s when she appeared—

Elizabeth the Queen sharing

Her pleasure at my Existence

That was one of those—

Uncanny filmic moments

Sometimes haunting me

Elderly Fags in the Castro

THE CASTRO

The greatest expectation—

I suppose is that surely things

Will get better & better

After all, my dears—

DADT, DOMA & ENDA were

Successfully adjudicated 

And yet in The Castro—

The very Heart of our

Gay Push for Equality

The real estate creeps—

Are pushing out the Fags

For Silicon Valley Straights

Our Elderly SF citizens—

There in the Castro District

Usurped insidiously now

Harvey Milk would’ve—

Been driven out of business

Does the Castro have pride?

Great Expectations

GREAT EXPECTATIONS (1947)

Not a very pretty picture—

My dears, being a rather

Bitchy aging Miss Havisham

But then what other Flick—

Portrays my bitchy aging

So-called existence, my dears

So much for being Literati—

Look at the tawdry list of

NYTIMES Best Seller Fags

The Wilde Boys coagulate—

In the Style & Fashion section

Lovely Feuilleton Fuckers

New Quest for Corvo

NEW QUEST FOR CORVO:

AN UPDATED GAY BIBLIOGRAPHY

● ROLFE, WILDE AND BARON CORVO:

FLAMING FAGS OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE

● THE INSATIABILITY OF HOMO HAUNTS:

VENETIAN GONDOLIER SAME SEX DESIRE

● HAUGHTY HADRIANESQUE: BARON CORVO

AND VATICAN PRETENSIONS OF GRANDEUR

● FREDERICK ROLFE: THE CONTESSA MAGDA 

TERRIBILI-GONZALES OF VENICE SOCIETY

● QUEER QUEST FOR CORVO: SYMONS AND

THE MAJOR SECRET URANIANS 

● SMEGMA DESIRES: INTRODUCTION TO

NAUGHTY NASTY GAUCHE GONDOLIERS

● THE GAY VICTORIAN SUPERNATURAL:

OUIJA CONVERSATIONS WITH THE BARONESS

● CATHOLIC CONVERTS AND CUMLY POPES:

SWEEPING AWAY OLD VATICAN COBWEBS

● URANIAN VAGABONDAGE: EXPERIMENT

IN COTEMPORARY GAY BIOGRAPHY 

● LETTERS FROM VENICE: CONFESSIONS

OF A VENETIAN PROCURER OF PRICKS

● THOMAS MANN AND BARON CORVO: 

BEYOND TADZIO AND TOTO IN VENICE

● CORVO, CULTURE AND GAY SOCIETY:

BARON CORVO'S MALICE DEPICTING 

THE SALONNIER ALONG WITH LABORIOUS 

SMALL TALK, DISPLAYING HER LATEST 

CHOICE VENETIAN ACQUISITIONS 

__________

(For those readers attracted to the ornate scurrilities of the Baroness’ HADRIAN THE SEVENTH and THE DESIRE AND PURSUIT OF THE HOLE, may I suggest researching the ‘merry magenta’ Miss Nelson McTavish who paraded as the bumbling host of the Palazzo degli Incurabili—a sly allusion to the old fag hospital of the sixteenth century that rises above the Zattere between the Ca’ Torresella and the customs point. 

Or perhaps Miss Corvo’s rather naughty dishy malice depicting the Salonnier, along with her usual rather tres laborious Lotte Lenya ‘Contessa Magda Terribili-Gonzales’ chit-chat, procuring much-needed money from her latest wealthy visiting patrons—such as a German prince with lovely onyx studs who talks of young Venetian gondoliers as if they were young gods from Olympus, going on & on with excellent English.

Plus a blushing white and scarlet mincing crumpled-corseted Oxford Academician, a shy Uranian devotee of the faggy Forbidden Fruit with her cretin-esque cockney twang, such a pitiful despairing, dyspathetic featureless British aging queen… but she had money to throw away on her last Aschenbach-esque fling before she finally not so gracefully fucking kicked the bucket.)

Life on the Lagoons

LIFE ON THE LAGOONS: 

CORVO, CULTURE AND GAY

FIN DE SIÈCLE IN VENICE

More gracefully, perhaps though, how can one avoid being possibly or rather rudely intrusive in terms of all the exquisite gay biographies and papers of literary men fascinated by the Baroness Corvo— without at least taking a brief glance at this gay biographical gem— LIFE ON THE LAGOONS by Horatio Brown? 

It is Miss Brown who the Baroness Corvo despised and hated—basically because he was a man of means who could afford to take little for his writing and so spoil the market for the needy professionals. The long years in Venice financed by his fortune gave him an unrivalled sense of the place and its chicken, of the harmony and concord between the Venetians, their city, and the boys of the lagoons, of their perfect accommodation to each other. 

It’s not surprising that Miss Brown came to history through literature—in his Oxford days the Chairs of History and English Literature were often held by the same professor. 

Was Horatio Brown like J. Alfred Prufrock—not Prince Hamlet but merely a subservient attendant to the Venetian Queen Bees? Merely an assistant to John Addington Smonds—merely an entertainer, impresario and landlord of the great and eccentric? An object of Miss Corvo’s scorn and a subject for the casual allusions of other men’s biographers?

Venice was notorious for discouraging hard work, as Henry James observed. The seductive ambience of young handsome gondoliers and romance there on the lovely lagoons was much too much for many gay closeted writers like Symonds. 

Symonds saw himself as profoundly abnormal, even monstrous and dreadful. Unlike the Baroness, Miss Symonds hid his inner self—rather than flaunt his faggotry like grandiose queen bee Miss Corvo.  

Not so with Miss Horatio Brown. It is Miss Brown who sends Robert Louis Stevenson gay translations from ‘old Venetian boat-songs’ and brightens Miss Stevenson’s sick room in Davos with his own lovely LAGOON LULLABY. 

It is Miss Brown who waits with a gondola at the station when Havelock Ellis, fresh from a medical convention in Rome in 1894 takes a trip to Venice. 

To Miss Brown, the bitchy resentful destitute Baron Corvo was a sublime example of Venice’s self-portraiture beaming forth like a rainbow into new gay literature and thoroughly gay gauche gondolier romance. 

It was during that decade which consigned Wilde to Reading Gaol that many gay writers viewed their gay gift as an’incrable malady’—a deeply rooted perversion of the sexual instinct, uncontrollable, ineradicable, amounting to the Vatican-esque monomania of the Baroness who exposed all the more reticent closet cases to the rebuke and scorn of most society.

But then over time more and more homosexual intellectuals came to Venice, staying there either on a permanent basis or for short periods—including the aesthetes Jean Lorrain and Jean Cocteau, the poets
August von Platen and Alfred Edward Housman, the
Renaissance historian Miss Symonds and many others.

Some like the English writer Frederick Rolfe the Baroness lived on the lagoons leaving vivid descriptions of ow widespread and organized this gay tourism was. Not only were the Italian youths willing to satisfy foreigners’ desires with the prospect of earning some money, but in an illegal brothel where tourists could always find unemployed youths and hustlers “ready to be had” with everybody knowing about his lovely lagoon romance and business.

Hadrian the Seventh

HAUGHTY HADRIANESQUE 

“How exquisitely horrible”

—Frederick Rolfe, Baron Corvo, 

Hadrian the Seventh

It was truly exquisitely horrible—

That salient trait in my character

For so long the desire not to be—

Ungracious when dished by creeps

My readiness to be unselfish—

And self-sacrificing to cognoscenti

It had done me incalculable injury—

The world infested with greedy creeps

Uncultivated mediocrities with nothing—

Better to do than harass and bother me

Out of courtesy, out of kindness—

I used to always give way but surely

I tenaciously knew I had to cling to my—

Own original purpose, delay the enemy

I would invariably stand aside and let—

Myself be delayed and now it was too late

__________

I rolled another cigarette and smoked it—

Gazing into garret-guttered iron fireplace

Above the fireplace mantel I’d pinned—

Sketches of Hermes of Herculaneum

The terra-cotta Sebastian of Kensington—

Donatello’s liparose David & Verrocchio too

A wax model of Cellini’s Perseys and an—

Unknown Rugger XV, rare feline slinky pose

_____________

Picture postcards presenting youth like—

Andrea del Sarto’s young St. John and

Alessandro Filipepi’s Primavera plus a—

Page from a Salon catalog with wrestlers

An old Harper’s Magazine showing—

Olive-skinned black-haired Pancratius

Some literary agent visiting cards—

A cast of Cardinal Andrea della Valle’s seal

_________________

Some bottles of ink, pipes, morocco case—

A pair of glasses in a chagreen case

An old drawing-board of a large size—

Resting on my knees to write on

The board tilted with a stack of sheets—

Pages scrawled with my archaic scribbles

But tonight my mind was empty, blank—

Irritated by Hadrian-esque hauntings

_________________

I cultivated the art of looking—

As though I were about to say No

You always can say Yes after No—

But if you begin with Yes

Like I usually did, it prevented—

Me from ever saying No.

That’s why everyone swindled me—

I’d been too anxious to give it away

____________

I had to butch it and be ugly—

Ugly as my so—called colleagues

I had to pull myself together and—

Be neither vulgar nor common-place

I looked around the room seeking—

Something to read, something, anything

____________

Nothing too recent in my memory—

So I picked up one of my rejected novels

I remembered how dejected I’d felt—

My self-conscious pose and romanticism

It was a copy of THE YOUNG GONDOLIER—

My sense of beauty much more acute then

I suppose I had this gay predilection for—

Young lithe muscular gondolier studs

__________________

Reticent young gondolier lasciviousness—

Indelicate modesty desiring satisfaction

Once satisfied, the door to his favor open—

That was the way with the Venetian youth

Yet such a book as mine didn’t sell well—

Tens of thousands of copies my fervent hope

But the world feared and ignored my novel—

There wasn’t enough delicate male modesty

________________

I looked at my work and looked at my love—

The manner of my portrayal of youth

I deliberately set myself to dissect and—

Analyze the way I wrote about Venetian love

The normal type of European youth—

At Oxford and Eton simply disgusted me

Pater and Hopkins and the other queens—

Dithering away with Uranian closetries

___________

Their inadequacy and superficiality—

Making the young male tres omnipresent

Worshipping them mentally no differently—

Than pretentious gadflies worshipping Women

While my gondolier boyfriends were real—

They were quite used to being sucked off

It’s doubtful the Uranians even knew—

Anything beyond virgin little choir boys

_________________

I was struck with sheer annoyance—

Such elitist British cloying closetry

While my Hadrian-esque pertinacity—

Obliged me to persevere despite them

Oftentimes the influence of Venice—

Obliged me to pause and laugh

After long years of writing I’d realized—

Feline vigorous untainted Venice youth

_____________

Didn’t need any such thing as a novel—

A rolled cigarette, some money would do

Meanwhile I counted the split infinities—

In the latest boring Pall Mall Gazette

I languished at my predicament—

God had made me fairly intelligent

But impotent and inactive as a writer—

Should I do travelogues not novels?

____________

Novels must be done by writers—

But writers needed readers, publishers

The Uranians hid their scribbled poems—

Scuttling perfidiously, deceitfully faithlessly

Disguising their fawning fickle love—

Crying courage but we have to suffer

Like bashful bishops condescending—

Believe me, trust me, be closety

_____________

Yet down here in Venice there’s—

Room for indulgence & urbanity

The British sun lacks splendor—

While Mediterranean men are nude

Do I merit exile as a writer—

To be called a sinner, vile, shameful

While Oxford Uranians toil beneath—

The suffering Cross of Closetry?

________________

Yes, I dream of certain luxuries—

Wealth, cleanness, whiteness, freshness

But is that any kind of reward for the—

Luxury of young sexy Italian loinchops?

Should I simply enjoy my happiness—

And vigorous serenity all in secret?

All unostentatiously enjoying the only—

Success I’ll ever have silently, wistfully?

_________________

Why use success as a writer for myself—

And not share it with all the others?

To be all-denuded of the power of love—

Loving anybody, being loved by any?

Must I be self-contained and detached—

Apart from the world of publishing?

Isn’t loving handsome young gondoliers—

Enough reward for having escaped here?

______________

How often I’ve been told by them—

That I was wasting my talent writing

Such stolid stupidity forces me to pose—

As strange recondite haughty foolish

Gawd, I know what a sham I am—

How silly if feel begging for some love

But I lost all sense of modesty, my dears—

A long, long time ago in these fetid lagoons

______________

I worship, loathe as I please knowing—

A certain superb hard violent pitiless terror

They frighten me but I can’t avoid it—

They provide an image that I can worship

Therefore I pose for them whether it—

Pleases, displeases or strikes awe

Generally they never loathe it—

There’s nothing wrong earning a lira or two

_____________

It’s not wrong, very wrong anyway—

But what can I do but take them to bed?

Unmistakably and distinctly they tell me—

They tell me what I must do and I do them

I take them to bed and we make love—

There’s no rosary in their trouser pockets

That’s where I find the Lord in his Temple—

And then that’s where we fall asleep

________________

If they are meditating mischief like—

Some athletic and quarrelsome ones do

With an eye like a basilisk and a mouth—

Full of torrential Italian trumps to play

Mischief? What nonsense—

They habitually engage in mischief 

It’s a way of life, a tinge of destain—

For faggy foreigners greedy like me

__________________

But I can’t resist the young devils—

Going downstairs at once seeing him flee

I simply must confess I’m not perfect—

I don’t do things out of muddle-mindedness 

Nor out of vicious wanton cruelty—

But rather out of pride in my own powers

My powers of penetration and perception—

Or perhaps out of mere culpable frivolity

_________________

I confess I’ve been wanting in love—

Love, patience, sincerity, neighborliness 

Selfishness, self-will and a rather fatuous—

Desire to be distinct from other people

These desires nearly always unconscious—

I seldom deliberate on what I say or write

I suppose I have a bitter tongue and pen—

I make jibes at my publishers and critics

_____________

I’m impatient with mental natural weakness—

Unless of course it’s attached to a gondolier

I am insincere but sinfully not criminally—

I delight in bewildering others by posing

Sometimes as a font of complex erudition—

Other times playing the silly simpleton

I confess telling improper stories—

Not of the ordinary rather revolting kind

______________

But those which are exquisite or witty—

Or koprolalian-esquely recondite & smutty

I’ve never been prompt resisting temptation—

My desire for knowledge leads me to appreciation

I study the male nude, gondolier anatomy—

I never have found male beauty shameful

Ugly, yes, sometimes the uglier the better—

Especially the uncut rather large ones

___________

Do I love my neighbor, hardly my dear—

Most people are repulsive to me because

They are ugly in person and even more so—

They’re ugly in manner and mind as well

Do I love myself, hardly my dear—

But I don’t think it really matters much

I suppose I’m clever enough but—

Not half as clever as I’m supposed to be

_____________

I’m rather more a stupid ignoramus—

But as for myself, I despise myself 

I’m not very interesting to anyone else—

I simply despise myself, body, mind & soul

I’m just an irresponsible human imbecile—

Posing as simply and innocuously as possible

Don Renato

DON RENATO

“the work errs

on the side of

extreme distinction”

—Frederick Rolfe, 

Baron Corvo, DON RENATO

Please pardon me, my dears—

If my diction goes beyond baroque

And perhaps wanders extravagantly—

Into rather tres risqué racy rococo

What medieval fantasias overcome me—

When puffing away on my hookah!!!

My mind gets scrambled with macaronic—

Italian, Greek and Latin dizzy divagations

Concocting pretty words like progymnast—

I’m just a slave who performs contortions

Perturbed by pouty words like proterve—

Adjectives meaning “violent, wanton”

Pube-esque as male puberty arrives—

Hardly anything very prissy or modest

This day in Venice in our gondola—

Zildo awakes from his afternoon torpor

His palatial prick and ducal pubes—

Similitude to anguicomous Gorgons

I’ve developed a marvelous immunity—

Stung by his uncut exquisite fangs