More LGBT books, art and culture for summer

 Some more cultural stuff for summer, with thanks to friends for pointing out a couple of items.

 

Book

I've got a book on my shopping list now, having just read a good review. It's Aldo Simeone's novel Isola dei femminielli, which I'd translate as Pansy Island. Femminiello is a very old Italian term, which I've mentioned here before, for a member of the MtF trans and gay community, especially in Naples. 

The book is set in the late 1930s and based on the very real weeding-out of LGBT people by Mussolini. He had a habit of exiling political and social undersirables to remote mountain villages or offshore islets. In the case of gay men or trans women, they were sent to the Tremiti Islands that lie in the Adriatic Sea off the coast of South East Italy. Stupidly for the instigators of the policy who tried to hide the fact that Italy actually had queer people in it despite the virile image fascism tried to cultivate, the islands became a sort of queer if rough holiday camp where the inmates no longer felt any need to hide their nature. Then the war came and most of them were then drafted into the armed forces, war being the best way of eradicating undesirables (just ask the Russian prison population today). 

There wasn't the distinction then that we make today between a gay man and a trans woman (a distinction which a lot of transphobes continue to refuse to make) so I think my translation using the catch-all British term pansy, which was current in the early twentieth century, seems about right. 

There's not much in the way of trans fiction and this is a general gay/trans novel, but there seems to be a leading trans character in it.

If I manage to find a copy in a bookshop, I'll report back in due course on what I thought of it.

Peter Tatchell

Peter Tatchell is perhaps the best known LGBTQ+ campaigner in Britain, having campaigned above all for gay rights. There is now a portrait of him hanging in the National Portrait Gallery in London, which is quite an accolade as it mainly houses ancient pictures of kings and princesses. Well, he might say he was an old queen, so why not?

Tatchell used to annoy me as youngster with his showman antics, but then I didn't associate my femininity with gay rights and my religious upbringing required me to suppress support for such rights. In the end, Tatchell won out and I have benefited and so I'm pleased to link to the Guardian article on this fittingly flamboyant new portrait. I can't paste the picture here for copyright reasons.

Thanks to Lynn of YATGB for alerting me to this.

Visual arts

‘No one can tell the story better than ourselves,’ proclaims a quote from artist-photographer Zanele Muholi as you enter this exhibition. Maybe so, but the Tate makes a decent fist of trying in this extended showcase of a visual activist who has spent more than two decades focusing their lens on the lives of the South African Black LGBTQIA+ community through vivid portraits and self-portraiture.

Thus opens the Time Out review of Zanele Muholi at London's Tate Modern gallery.

The Tate's description of the exibition here. 

And a review in London's Evening Standard here that ends:

By turns delightful and devastating, it is one of the greatest exercises in self-portraiture of this, or any, age.

That's some praise. 

I hope to be in London in the autumn and will try to catch this.

Thanks to Stella of Stellapix for alerting me to this.

 

Heat update

It's hot all right, made worse by being quite steamy, and it's quite hard to do anything. Incredibly, and very annoyingly, there are builders crawling under and over my flat installing someone else's air conditioning system. Why they didn't do it in the spring rather than waiting till it was really hot, I do not know. Time for that annual aestivation. The outdoor pool awaits...

Sue x