The Incandescence of Memory: A Review of Did You Ever See A Horse Go By?

For several months now, your Head Trucker has been reading and re-reading a wonderful book, and struggling to find the words to describe it. The reasons for the struggle are various: for one thing, since late summer life here has been full of sundry and boring domestic, financial, digital, and physical crises that have kept me alternately upset or immobilized.  And then there was the election, for chrissake.  Sometimes life is just one damn thing after another, you know what I mean, fellas?

For another thing, despite the book's lovely, impeccable writing, it so often moves me to tears or makes my heart double-clutch with recognition that I have been able to read only a few pages at a time before having to close it up and set it down again. It's that good: them old Greek boys you may have heard something about in lit class between daydreams and snoozes held that art should be the mirror of life; and this book is a mirror indeed, polished to a high sheen and often casting a glaring, dangerous light into shaded nooks and crannies of the author's soul, and even into my own, it seems.

The book is Did You Ever See a Horse Go By? by my longtime truckbuddy Frank De Francesco, and though it is his first and only book to date, it is well worth the cover price: a little gem of a memoir that I recommend wholeheartedly to all my other truckbuddies and readers. Frank says, "While I'm not sure the world really needs another coming-out story, I feel deeply the need to tell it."

I think the world does need this particular story.  In her well-known essay "On Keeping a Notebook," author Joan Didion wrote that the reason for recording her memories was to "Remember what it was to be me: that is always the point."  Because, she said, "We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were."  And of course we know what happens to those who forget the past.

Frank's book recounts in exquisite detail the fears and feelings and fantasies, the loves and lovers, the guilt and shame, the confessions and repressions, the one night stands and the long-term commitments, the lost and the found, the hopes and the terrors of coming out at age 36, after many years of sheltering in a devoutly Catholic closet in New England. How odd, then, that his memories, feelings, regrets, and joys should so well parallel all that I went through in my fundamentalist Protestant closet down in the Deep South. And yet not so odd after all -- what Frank is really writing about here is not merely his coming out, his life, his memories, but the human experience of being gay and alone and afraid of so many things: censure, rejection, failure, despair, the acid drip of loneliness. All men and women since the world began have endured, or at least feared, these things, for such is the nature of sublunary life:  it is not good for the man to be alone.  But certain exquisite pains and torments are reserved for the gays, or were.

 And he writes about it all very clearly and concretely, with smooth, careful cadences that lead the reader through some fearsomely honest revelations, which normally one might confide only in one's closest friends.  But that's what this book is like:  a comfortable conversation with an old and trusted friend, patiently explaining the real reasons why he did whatever it was he did, trusting that you in turn will listen and understand, not laugh or turn away.

Frank is a very brave writer; I could never be so brave. It's not that I have forgotten anything, but that it's all still too close, too vivid in my memory. After all these years, the scars of battle on my soul and on my heart are still too tender to bear much touching. I admire Frank for the courage and the toughness of his writing, which I am sure was not easy. But somehow he was able to bare his soul to the reader, as all great writers must do sooner or later.

We who were born in the first decade or two after the last world war have been privileged to witness a remarkable period in human history, when homosexuality went from being "the love that dare not speak its name" to being publicly affirmed, even celebrated, by the President, the United Nations, and just about every major city and (who would have thought?) major-league sports team across the country, while same-sex marriage went from being a laughable fantasy to being enshrined in constitutional law by the Supreme Court:  truly a breathtaking phenomenon when you stop to think about it, and all within the span of one ordinary lifetime. Sometimes I can hardly believe it myself.

Frank says of his motivation for writing the book:

For me, the value in telling my story here, beyond the healing, is to preserve a tiny slice of collective history--to document what it was to be gay and to come out in a particular time and place. I want to remember all the others who were there along with me, creating our lives together and defining our sexuality as we went along. My hope is that others find some value in that as well.

I'm quite sure that everyone who reads the book will find that value. It's a fine book, beautifully written and deeply moving, which I hope will find its way into the hands of many readers.


P.S. I forgot to mention all the candid sex scenes, guys. Those are good too, yessir:  real Adults Only stuff.  No, I'm not putting you on; go buy the book and see for yourself.

Millions of Queers (Our Homo America)

There is no chief, sole reason for homosexuals. “God made them, as part of his universe” is still the best and blindest answer to “why”. Don’t call on an M.D.; knock at Heaven’s Gate for enlightenment. . . .

Why is there homosexuality? Because there is pleasure in it. Because it is natural. Because it always was and always will be, as part of the universe. Because God so wills.

--Allen Bernstein, 1940

The other day, while poking around the intertubes looking for something else, your Head Trucker stumbled by chance upon a remarkable document of gay history: Millions of Queers (Our Homo America), written in 1940 by Allen Bernstein, a 27-year-old Jewish gay guy from New England. Although it's a long read at 140-plus pages, I heartily recommend it to all my truckbuddies as a vivid time capsule from our gay past.

And yes, Bernstein uses the word gay, as well as gayness, exactly as we do today - proof positive that the word was indeed current among our kind in the 1930's, and probably well before that.

Why have you never heard of this work before now? Because although Bernstein wrote several essays and some poems on gay subjects, none of them were published in his lifetime. But after he was arrested and booted out of the Army in 1944 with a Section 8 (psychiatric) discharge, as was required by law at the time for anyone discovered to be a homosexual, he immediately wrote to Army authorities appealing the decision.  They turned him down, of course, but he kept on appealing for the next 37 years, until finally the Army relented in 1981 and granted him a retroactive honorable discharge. 

Along with his first appeal in 1944, Bernstein sent a copy of his magnum opus, which was of course ignored - and somehow ended up in the archives of the National Library of Medicine in Washington, D. C., where it was discovered in 2010 by Richard Sell, a professor at the Drexel University School of Public Health. The typescript was published on OutHistory.org last March, along with a biography by Professor Sell and an analysis by gay historian Jonathan Ned Katz.

Bernstein's life story is very interesting in and of itself: born in New Hampshire and growing up in Salem, Massachusetts, after graduating from high school he went on to college and after that to the University of Chicago, where he earned a master's degree in history in 1934. Somewhere along the way, he became familiar with

the nocturnal admirers of the juggling Jackson statue in front of the White House, the inhabitants of Boston's Public Gardens or Common, or of New York's or Chicago’s numerous parks, or the patrons of selected beer joints or restaurants in any large city, or the seatchangers in the grope theaters in every metropolitan area (viz. 42nd St.), many residents in Y.M.C.A. furnished rooms, . . .

and became what society would have called a practicing homosexual. In the introduction to his essay, he credits "a few close friends and many chance acquaintances whose phrases, experiences, or lives are included here."

But while he does limn the outlines of gay life in 1930's America, Bernstein also goes far beyond that. His wide research and reading in historical, literary, and legal sources shine from nearly every page of the typescript in quotations and references where he gives a broad outline of homosexuality in the Western world from ancient times to modern. As far as I know, such an extensive survey of gay life through the centuries was not attempted again until Katz published his landmark Gay American History in 1976, a work I have had on my bookshelves for many years, and I'm sure many of my truckbuddies have too.

Indeed, Katz himself in a review of Millions of Queers remarks:

Reading Bernstein’s rendering of homosexual American history in “Millions” I was personally and deeply moved to realize that he had found and consulted the same old, dusty bibliographies and quoted many of the same old documents that I had to rediscover three and four decades later . . . .

Bernstein's apologia has its flaws, though - as the much-marked typescript shows, it has the feel of a work-in-progress, a little rough around the edges and uneven in tone: sometimes erudite, sometimes slangy, and permeated with views long outdated now in light of our greater understanding of biology and psychology, and the progress we have made legally and socially. Katz observes:

Bernstein accepted many of the negative clichés about homosexuals, but argued that they should not be persecuted under the law. . . .

By calling “Millions” a homosexual defense I don’t mean that it’s a radical gay liberation manifesto of 1969, a liberal gay rights tract of the 1990s, or a 2014 critique of sexual neo-liberalism. Bernstein offers a libertarian argument that homosexuals don’t hurt anyone, should not be criminalized and stigmatized, and should be left alone to work out their difficult, non-conforming lives by themselves. Bernstein argues that the state (lawmakers, police, judges, and jailors), the medical establishment (doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists), the media, parents, and citizens, should stop harassing homosexuals.

Bernstein’s defense will disappoint anyone judging it against today’s dominant defense of homosexuals as “normal” exemplars of “mental health.” He takes seriously many of the damning judgments that cursed homosexuals in the U.S., in 1940. Bernstein’s essay documents an archive of bad feelings, the trauma of persons and a group despised and discounted, that he and other homosexuals suffered and had to transcend to survive

Thank goodness we got beyond all that; but this work, written long before "gay liberation" and all that followed from Stonewall, gives the reader a "You Are There" feeling - yes, you have all your modern ideas and attitudes about who you are as a gay man or woman, out and proud and a little bit loud sometimes - but would you really have felt the same way, truly, had you lived back in Bernstein's time? It's very, very hard to swim against the tide, to be the outsider, often isolated and alone, whom all the world hates and despises and quite literally damns to the fires of eternal hell - as some of us still remember from our youth, though the young people of today have no real clue about all that.

Bernstein married a woman in 1946, and told her when he proposed that he was gay; she accepted him anyway, and apparently they had a happy, harmonious marriage until her death in 1991. They also produced two sons, to whom Bernstein came out after their mother died, who have supported Professor Sell's research into their father's life and writings.

And there's an even happier ending to the story: Bernstein lived to age 95, and was able to see the progress of gay rights and even the first legal gay marriages in this country before he died in 2008. As Katz notes:

In 1940, speaking of the criminalization of homosexual acts and the imprisonment of homosexuals, Bernstein says:

It will probably be continued in most American communities for another century or three; let's be realistic, and stop day-dreaming about repeal of sodomy statutes.

Given his original pessimism, it’s nice to note that Bernstein lived long enough to witness the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2003 decision in Lawrence v. Texas, in effect, declaring U.S. sodomy laws unconstitutional.

But really, when you read between the lines of this cri du coeur, you see that, at bottom, Bernstein and his friends way back there in the 1930's felt pretty much the same way about themselves as we do - which I'll summarize as "we're not hurting anyone, what we do is none of your business, so leave us the hell alone." 

Well, enough prologue - go read the essay for yourself, a well-researched and candid contribution to gay history, which deserves to be part of the corpus of required reading for the gay generations to come.

Here's the link to the table of contents page at OutHistory, from which you can find the original typescript or, if you prefer, a cleaned-up, searchable and easy-to-read text version; Katz's critique is also listed on the table of contents. Enjoy.