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The Little Emperor
by Joseph R.G. De Marco
Caesar was dead. The little emperor who’d stolen all our hearts was gone after eighteen years and we were left with silence and memories. He wasn’t my first dog but he was the most memorable dog I’ve ever had the pleasure to call my friend.
His imperial name came from my little brother’s overactive imagination. But it fit Caesar’s regal personality which was clear even in the squirming puppy that he was when he entered our lives.
I was just a kid, my sister and brother even younger and we’d wanted nothing so much as we wanted a dog. It had been a long time between pets and our mother knew it was time for an addition to the household. With that hurdle cleared, the next step was easy.
Toccare il Fondo (To Plumb the Depths)
by Joseph R. G. De Marco
As my train pulled out of Milano's
grand and beautiful central station on my first visit to
Italy, I was filled with unexpected longing. Sitting in
my first- class compartment on a plush green-velvet seat,
I hungrily took in details of the station through the window
until I felt the tug of the engine on the car like an invisible
hand forcing me back in the seat. The train moved slowly
at first; I watched the station recede: the hawkers on the
platform shouting "Aqua! Panini!"; shapely young
men lounging on marble seats; pretty young girls and old
couples crying, laughing, waving to others on the train.
I memorized these people in whose swarthy faces and dark
eyes I saw myself, my history. They became smaller as the
train moved me away from the arching barn of the station.
That part of my trip was over and I was being pulled north
to Germany. At the same time invisible cords were bound
now around my heart insistently tugging me back.
This first trip had been for me a holy journey to sacred
ground, a time to touch a place that was in me and which
had made me, the place where my soul had been forged even
before I existed. This trip revived some deeply implanted
ancestral memory and rekindled an ethnic flame that had
burned down to a mere red ember.
As the train gained speed, images from my trip flashed through
my mind, the monuments and palazzi but especially the people.
The woman in the bookstore, a pert blonde who understood
my few Italian words and responded with a smile; the knarled
old man whose gravely voice was filled with kindness when
he answered my broken-Italian question; the little old ladies,
bent and wrinkled, whose looks were a comfort, beautiful
faces in every city whose swarthy good looks caused the
exquisite pain of desire to tingle through me. The faces
were like a homecoming. The whole of Italy had taken me
in like a long lost son.
* * *
Gay Racism
by Joseph R. G. De Marco
“There is a situation
that’s happened to me every time I’ve gone out.
White men will approach me. They assume I don’t know
anything. They assume I’m uneducated and stupid,”
remarks Jimmy J. “They don’t expect me to carry
on a conversation. But when they find out I can converse
and I do know something, then they’re not interested.
They walk away. They want their images.”
Jimmy is well- educated, a salesperson, and a Black man.
He is a victim of the vicious stereotypes which all black
people must confront every day.
Negative assumptions, images, and stereotypes are at the
heart of the matter; they are what racism is built upon
and continues to feed on. Such negative beliefs are what
people use to bludgeon each other in quiet and simple ways,
but the violence inherent in this type of racism is every
bit as real as the lynching, burning, and maiming that went
on in the post-Civil War South. People are scarred psychologically
by racism and because we all participate in this, we are
all ruined.
The Philadelphia gay male community has never really come
to grips with the problem of racism in its midst….
* * *
Strippers’
World
By Joseph R. G. DeMarco
Go-Go dancer have been fixtures
in gay bars and clubs for many years, but male stripping
only began to develop in the 1970s. It was then that the
sexual revolution was washing over society, and the male
body was being used to sell products in advertising just
as women’s bodies had been for decades. It was also
the era of the early gay liberation movement, and the male
body was becoming an object for erotic entertainment.
The first clubs to feature all-male strip shows were the
Gaiety and the Show Palace in New York, as well as others
in Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C. Today male
strippers seem to be everywhere – in big cities and
small towns, in the ultra hip bars of South Beach along
with the grungy neighborhood establishments in big cities
and faceless venues along suburban strips….
Read the
entire article in The Gay & Lesbian Review, vIX,
n2, March-April, 2002
www.GLReview.com
* * *
From
The Gay Sensibility Series
By Joseph R.G. DeMarco
Part
I: Hit or Myth?
“Yes, yes, my cock, my mouth, and my asshole are gay.
So are my fingernails, my big toe, my nose, and my brain.
I am not gay because of where I put my cock or who I sleep
with. I am gay because everything about me is gay….I
was gau long before I admitted my homosexuality to myself,
long before I knew what sex was…What separates me
from the straight boy is not just the things we do in bed,
but what our lives have been. When I meet an upfront gay
brother, I make a connection. I already know a lot about
him.” Wrote Gary Alinder in his article “My
Gay Soul” in After You’re out.
Alinder and other gays recognized a difference about themselves
that was more sexual, that ran through them like an underground
stream. They knew they were different and the knew they
could recognize that difference in others. But this sense,
this feeling was not quite tangible.
---- the rest of the article is available from the
author and will soon be in PDF format ---
Part
II: Looking at Life Through a Lavender Lens
“Gayness is a lens which focuses on different aspects
of the same things,” someone once told me a long time
ago.
A happy lens, then. A glass that is ground just so, enough
to pick out the beauty, the irony, the tawdriness, and the
loneliness that others cannot see. This gay lens also makes
clear those clues and signs encoded by other gays just for
each other.
---- the rest of the article is available from the
author and will soon be in PDF format ---
First published in 1986 in the Philadelphia Gay News (PGN)
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