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Madame John Dodt's Legacy #25...
by Jon Newlin, NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana

...or, Old Yeller

I was completely independent and content before we met...Surely I could always be that way again, and yet...I've grown accustomed to the trace of those evocatively sheened, nearly-gossamer-in-their-transparency yellow shorts so familiar to devotees of the Esplanade Ave. neutral ground. Ah, those shorts! Are they fulvous or saffron, chrome or canary, jaundiced or citrine, ochry or ecru? Does it really matter, in the long run? It's journalism and dog-Democrats that are traditionally yellow. Yes, of course, I refer to the ineffable Mr. Batson, the historian who lives in Lizzie Miles' old house, and whose attitude toward local Gay history becomes daily more proprietary.

Having worked with Mr. Batson and, I hope, having even modestly encouraged him in his historical endeavors in the past, I can't even take it really amiss when he tells me--as he has recently--that "Well, of course, you're not writing history...you're writing your memoirs," thus neatly (to him) trivializing what I have been doing over the last couple of years and consigning my efforts to some quaint little limbo (I can just hear him, "Limbo? I haven't done that since I was a little girl in that sleepy fishing village in Guatemala...") I suppose it isn't tidy enough for the Great Scheme of Things that he's devised since I think Elmo Avet is at least, if not more, important than the doings of the Gertrude Stein Society; well, it must be hopelessly frivolous, not worth bothering about, ne derangez pas, 'ti soeur, etc.

What Bob writes has always seemed stylistically--not factually--problematic, because he has always been so cautious and solemn about his subject matter, and never has seemed to want to have very much fun with it. (The Gay History Tour--a swell idea--is altogether different, at least the time I took the hegira down memory lane--or was it Mockingbird Hill?--and was filled with jokes and giggles and camp of a fairly high order; none of that ever seems to seep into the actual writing, an example mayhap of keeping personality and persona in separate little pigeonholes?) Now, much of what I have written here has been either Stuff I've Lived Through or is pure conjecture on my part. I'm not averse to that (no longer being subject to the tyranny of facts). Besides there is entirely too much about Our Gay Past that we simply cannot know absolutely in any philosophical sense, and thus we can't know it in any factual way either, and so what the hell.

I'm not especially interested in the argument knocking around Queer History about Essentialism vs. Constructionism (either queers and dykes have always been around in some form closely resembling the current one, or else they are mere social constructs created by the mores and pathologies of society) because it just seems like a tonier version of the old Nature vs. Nurture squabble which is always going to split on the rock of reality, i.e., it's the same for everybody only different.

But anyway, even my reservations about Batson's columns left me unprepared for his July 3 number...as a self-portrait. While the column ostensibly deals with the Upstairs fire memorial and the seminar on this tragedy, with a few scornful swipes at the Louisiana State Museum (now that Mr. Batson is in the archival racket, everyone else in said racket is an enemy and a dunce). "Claim-Jumping Our Past" he might have christened this installment-it is really one of the most revealing pieces about a writer's difficulties since Evelyn Waugh wrote about his nervous breakdown and writer's block in fictional form in The Ordeal Of Gilbert Pinfold. But, unlike Mr. Waugh, Batson's talk of "The Book" (which, presumably, only he can write) shows a peculiar fear and awe of books in general, a Cargo Cult attitude that only people who don't read them or even handle them much would have. It also shows a paranoid fear of his material: he's terrified that he won't have The Last Word. Some other factoid will crop up like a fairy ring after a good rain and then where will he be?

Without going into such weighty matters as whether Edward Gibbon worried about such things when he finally finished The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that nippy day in Switzerland a couple of centuries ago, I think Bob ought to cut bait or get off the pot. Take the plunge, stitch the columns together into a book--knit one, purl two--and be the first one out of the gate.

(I remember giving Henri Schindler similar advice centuries ago about his Mardi Gras book, to the effect that if you don't do it first there's a distinct possibility that someone else will do it and not nearly as well.)

Although it seems to be a feverish perennial in the secret garden of Batson's fantasy life, I doubt that covens of scholars are out there working to scoop Batson on the definitive New Orleans Gay History, and if so, so what? Batson has always been almost absurdly jealous about his research--doesn't he realize that research is something to be shared, that history is indeed, as he points out with enormous regret, something tentative and that there will always be a better one down the road? That's the point, bub. You don't get the last word, unless you write a book, bury yourself in more musty-fusty piles of yellowing clippings, snowdrifts and avalanches of crumbling documents, and revise, revise, revise, and then ten years later, bring out a New or Revised Edition of The Book. ("A work of art is never finished, only abandoned," said the French poet Paul Valery, who was in a position to know stuff like that, but presumably Mr. Batson would be shocked at the notion that art could even enter into such matters as fact or history. Readers still treasure and return to the great-if completely obsolete and superseded on a factual basis-narrative histories of the Old School, the above-mentioned Mr. Gibbon, Prescott's Conquests of Mexico and Peru, Francis Parkman's England and France in North America, Carlyle and Michelet on the French Revolution, or John Addington Symonds on the Italian Renaissance, because they tell great stories and tell them impressively and beautifully and fascinatingly. That's how people learn from them, not because any of these guys had The Last Word.) Besides, any good lawyer with a remote knowledge of intellectual property law will tell you that facts, as such, are not copyrightable; the law rewards creativeness, not pure research. Facts always have an a priori existence, and history isn't just A Book, it's gossip and hearsay and anecdote and random tidbits here and there, and the often prejudiced or cunning selective memory of people interviewed, and the entire vast realm of what used to be inelegantly known as chicken-shit information that chatters and clatters around everyone's mental attic. (I've mentioned before in this column that I, too, saw the Upstairs fire but I didn't know what I was seeing, a position analogous to those poor natives in the South Pacific who saw those mushroom clouds over Bikini and hadn't the foggiest idea what it could mean, except that t'ain't good, honey, t'aint good. What do you do with a useless piece of information like that?)

Recent books of Gay history--Charles Kaiser's The Gay Metropolis and John Loughery's The Other Side of Silence-are well-intentioned (Mr. Batson gets a faded laurel wreath planted on his brow in the form of a fulsome acknowledgment or two in the latter) but they're just a collection of the same old Mother Goose rhymes patched together with one or two interesting aspects (a sensational murder in Kaiser's book, the Newport raids in Loughery's) but still, basically, preaching to the choir. One problem is that they're too ambitious, trying to tell the whole story of Modern Queer History in a few hundred pages (better, more detailed and intricately planned books like George Chauncey's Gay New York or Allan Berube's Coming Out Under Fire succeed because they operate within self-imposed temporal and geographical limits, and of course because they tell the reader something new; Mr. Kaiser's book uses almost no primary sources) but any book about New Orleans will have as its sole drawback the unknowability of the earlier (and more interesting) days of sorority life here. This may not bother Batson and The Book, since he seems to have an odd conception that a community doesn't really exist before political organization--it's almost as if before the Anita Bryant fracas there was nothing much, as the preacher says in The Green Pastures, "There wasn't even no New Orleans," referring to that darkness before De Lawd separated heaven and earth. But Batson is a political animal, and thus can be forgiven this curious attitude. I just think he ought to write The Book, spare us his public ruminations about it until the glamorous series of author interviews that will no doubt follow, be generous with his research and to his archival colleagues, and stop trying to be The Cat That Walked By Herself...in yellow shorts.

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