The Turn

Sunil Gupta in conversation with Saleem Kidwai in Gupta's Queer, (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2011)

SK: What about gay politics in NY?

SG: It had become purely gay. It was 1976, post-Stonewall and before AIDS. Everything was about hedonism and that was great. It was like the whole liberationist sexual politics had come to life. Everybody appeared to be practicing it.

SK: As documented in the film we saw.

SG: yeah, Gay Sex in the 70s. All of which I observed but was personally less involved in. Maybe I was using the camera to satisfy my curiosity.

SK: Yes, it was so much in your face, which was a shock for me three months out of Delhi. You didn't have to go to a gay bar. Gay men everywhere — in the bank and in grocery stores. They had created this sub-culture which you caught in your pictures of Christopher Street — all those men with neat moustaches and in tight jeans.

SG: It was very white.

SK: Yes, but there was also a black gay presence.

SG: But that was very little of it. It was hardly there at that time.

SK: Well there were many black men in the bars.

SG: Yes, that's true. But I didn't really encounter any personally. None or hardly any. I guess, in retrospect, New York had more absolute numbers of people of colour and the end result was more segregation. I didn't know then but I realize now that they were doing their own thing in a different place. But we never saw them. I think Indians by and large, and I was no exception, got assimilated into what we saw as the mainstream white culture. by doing the photography courses and not the business school I became even more cut off from immigrant culture.

SK: Which was all white?

SG: Which was largely white.

SK: But that changed, which was a new beginning.

And so for day 2345
15.05.2013

Extant: There's the Rub

André Alexis in My Vagina has a footnote that runs across the fold to occupy the space of two pages roughly in the centre of the essay. In this extended note, Alexis repeats the claim that in Latin the names for the clitoris were so vulgar that not even Martial or Catullus ever refer to landica. Wikipedia seems to be the crib for Alexis's note. But it is worth remarking that deductions are based on extant sources. What survives may not reveal the whole picture. Consider that the Wikipedia entry reporting the indecency of the term for clitoris references the work of J.N. Adams, The Latin Sexual Vocabulary and, for me, alerts us to a possible disjunction between linguistic form and discursive function:

The function of the clitoris (landica) was "well understood". In classical Latin, landica was a highly indecorous obscenity found in graffiti and the Priapea; the clitoris was usually referred to with a metaphor, such as Juvenal's crista ("crest").

We see that frankness does not always frequent frequency. And frequency itself is open to interpretation.

And so for day 2303
03.04.2013