Gay group as well as lesbians are now integrated in to mainstream culture to the grade that would once have seemed unimaginable. Television sitcoms underline happy dads proving they can be usually as cloying as their heterosexual counterparts. J. C. Penney, the department store not well known for outr conform or radical politics, hired Ellen DeGeneres, an open lesbian, as the mouthpiece as well as enclosed the page in the Mother's Day catalog featuring lesbian moms.
George Hoyningen-Huene, Courtesy of Rosenbach Museum as well as Library
Mercedes de Acosta in 1934.
ALL WE KNOW
Three Lives
By Lisa Cohen
Illustrated. 429 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $ 30.
In contrast, Lisa Cohen's "All We Know: Three Lives" plunges the reader in to the happy as well as lesbian universe prior to this assimilation: prior to Act Up, prior to lesbian feminism, prior to marriage equality. A universe in that homosexual acts were illegal, as well as group as well as women could lose their jobs if they were less than circumspect. A universe that one might consider would be grim, along the lines of Radclyffe Hall's downbeat lesbian classic, "The Well of Loneliness," that was found pornographic by an English justice in 1928. Yet as Cohen portrays it, this vanished universe is beguiling, the inhabitants members of the stylish, disdainful club. A unsure club, certainly. But in the tragedy in in between option as well as flamboyance in in between fitting in as well as a! cting ou t Cohen locates the start of "camp," that Susan Sontag defined as "seeing the universe as an aesthetic phenomenon."
Cohen concentrates upon 3 tastemakers who were active during the initial two-thirds of the 20th century: Esther Murphy, Mercedes de Acosta as well as Madge Garland. Although all weathered marriages to men, they preferred the erotic association of women. Each knew the alternative dual such was the close-knit nature of upper-class happy hold up as well as in in between them, they additionally knew usually about each important artist, writer, conform designer, architect, screenwriter, actress as well as director in New York, London, Hollywood as well as Continental Europe. Reading "All We Know," one feels assured that "gay culture" should simply be abridged to "culture."
As individuals, these 3 women could not have been some-more different. Murphy as well as de Acosta proposed out abounding as well as ended up broke. Garland began with less, done the lot, lost some, yet kept upon earning the conspicuous feat in the eyes of her independently rich coterie. "I was literally the usually person they knew who had ever warranted her living," she remarked.
Cohen opens with Murphy, whose family owned Mark Cross, the leather goods association that accursed her with enough income to avoid even remote exposure to the work ethic. She honed her weakness for bootleg hooch to one side alternative casualties of Prohibition like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who modeled the characters in his novel "Tender Is the Night" upon her brother, Gerald, as well as sister-in-law, Sara. By the mid-1920s, Murphy had assimilated the rest of her Lost Generation in France, where she flirted as well as fraternized with the likes of Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney as well as Janet Flanner, all the whilst incubating plans for the grand biography of Madame de Maintenon. But booze, banter as well as the weird marriage to Chester A. Arthur III, the pansexual fortune hunter, got in the way. Long after Murp! hy's dea th, her crony Sybille Bedford undetermined over her unprepared opus: "What's the make use of of being brilliant, if you lay during the cafe all day as well as are considered the greatest bore since you don't know when to stop articulate as well as never write anything down?"
At slightest Mercedes de Acosta excelled during something. She was "the initial luminary stalker." A distracted, mediocre screenwriter as well as memoirist, de Acosta was assumingly the focused, accomplished partner who counted Marlene Dietrich as well as Greta Garbo among her conquests. Garbo, however, was as well shrewd to bequeath evident showing off rights. When she sent de Acosta flowers, she left the greeting card blank. Cohen's section upon de Acosta climaxes upon April 15, 2000 some-more than thirty years after de Acosta's death, 10 years after Garbo's genocide with the opening of the sealed archive of Garbo's letters to her. This took place not in the little cheesy Hollywood air blower palace yet during the distinguished Rosenbach Museum as well as Library in Philadelphia. And the big exhibit was: nothing. "There is no concrete evidence that any passionate relationship in in between these dual women ever existed," Garbo's executor declared. There were the little weird objects, though, including the Bible in that de Acosta had pasted photographs of Garbo. It reminded Garbo's executor of her "11-year-old goddaughter's scrapbook devoted to Leonardo DiCaprio."
M. G. Lord's many new book is "The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness as well as We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice."
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