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Madame John Dodt's Legacy #23
by Jon Newlin, NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana

Literary Chat

An acquaintance of mine, a waiter in one of the grander eat'rys around town who busies himself writing as-yet-unproduceable dramas when he is not slinging Ris de Veau a la Financiere or Chair de Crabes Ravigote - "platter's hot, dawlin," was sitting around one of my places of employment with me one near-sultry evening. We were making the most superficial of conversation and he asked me what novel I could think of that "really captured" the French Quarter.

I hemmed and hawed, and scratched my woolly old pate, and breathed eclair fumes on my dimestore cheaters and polished them for a long moment, and then said, "Well...Gaudy Image..." I tried to explain, being nonspecific about it, that Gaudy Image is a novel from the late 40s, published first and only so far as I can determine by the notorious Olympia Press in Paris (which also first published Lolita and some Beat stuff, as well as loads-no pun intended-of pseudononymous smut written by American and English belletrists down on their luck in Gay Paree) and which deals, in a peculiar poetic-realism way, with the lives of hustlers and drag queens in the Quarter in the Forties. If I recall aright, the action begins with a bang-literally-with one of the young protagonists getting butt-raped by an elderly boxer (not the dog breed, but close from the description) in an extremely decrepit and disreputable boarding house on Dauphine St. Whoever William Talsman is, the guy who wrote Gaudy Image, he knew the Quarter and he knew New Orleans and he knew his subject matter from the inside out. It's quite a performance. (I once forced this book on Mr. Batson who dismissed it as "so negative," and what's your point, bub? It was written in the late 40s after all, and you can't refract everything from the past through the lens of today, things don't work that way-it's like living in an eternal present the way my dogs do instead of looking down, looking down that old lonesome road called History. If all you do is re-interpret things from the past in terms of today, sooner or later you turn in on yourself, and you simply re-interpret your re-interpretations. Me, I prefer to be like the Rose of Washington Square-no future, but oh! what a past, etc.)

Anyway, since I knew my friend would never read or even probably find a copy of Gaudy Image, I quickly amended, "Well, Mr. Preen's Salon by Robert Tallant is pretty good, too...." And so it is. It's also from the same period, a charming little sophisticated sit-com about a man named Oliver Preen and the tenants of his house in the Quarter. Mr. Preen has a nice "cullud" servant and a lot of colorful chums and two of his tenants are a pair of lovers, one of whom is named if I recall correctly, "Mister Baby." (I've always assumed that Tallant-like his esteemed collaborators on the monumental Gumbo Ya Ya collection, Lyle Saxon and Edward Dreyer, the latter of whom murdered himself for love over a young man, which is pretty recherche if y'ask me-was a fraternity brother or sorority sister or what have you.)

If one is going to approach Queer History, there are of course a plurality of ways, just as in life there's always two sides to each coin or question. There's the history of everyday life and what makes it tick, that history of la vie quotidienne pioneered in France by people like the late Fernand Braudel where subjects like harvest yields and consumption of different foodstuffs and weather patterns (not to mention Vogue and Simplicity patterns) and import and export records are as important, and loom larger than stuff like who won which battle and which king married which king's daughter and what the marriage brought to the dynasty; social history, what people wore and ate and danced to and read and bought and sold, all of this has always been perceived as a stepchild to Real History: battles, kings and queens, conquest and empire, big stuff. When G.M. Trevelyan, a famous English historian, came to write his four-volume English Social History, which dealt with all of these things instead of all the stuff he had devoted most of his life to writing about, he was almost apologetic about it. The other side of this is the Great Man/Great Events school of history (which makes sense up to a certain point) where historical events are part of a restless movement, a Hegelian flow toward some culmination and thus no event is isolated since it is part of this endless march.

This Great Man/Great Events perception of how history works is being dismantled gradually by gender studies and queer studies and feminist studies because it's a perception that ignores the movement beneath the movements, and it dismisses the importance of what Real People were up to. (If I may draw an analogy from Gay newspapers, there is a perception-utterly misguided, uninformed, and erroneous-that Limpact is serious and AmBush is frivolous, whereas the real truth is that Limpact is conformist and AmBush is, well, different and glad of it.)

The only way we can begin to find out what Real People have done and said and thought is to record their words and stories, before they crumble to dust and ashes.

I remember when Carol Flake came to New Orleans to research her Mardi Gras book and she wanted to know who to talk to and I sent her to Old Lady Dodt and she spent an afternoon gabbing with OLD and came back raving, simply raving, darling. "He remembers everything, names and places and dates and times of day!" Well, somebody has to. (This tale, which I have no doubt recounted before, is just one of gazillions of reasons why it's a shame that Mr. Dodt is no longer Himself. Among other things, having been as close to Vivien Leigh during the filming of A Streetcar Named Desire--he had pictures to prove this-as you are to this newspaper, he could have vouchsafed to eternity such important things as What She Smelled Like.)

One of the things I was proudest of during my many years off (my rocker) and on at Limpact was a two-part story we did about the sublime Miss Fury, where we just let Fury talk about whatever she wanted to remember and talk about. Quelle raconteuse! (That's French for what a story-teller, gels.)

What other records are there? Newspaper accounts of vice raids? Invidious remarks scattered here and there about the preponderance of sissies in New Orleans in the past? Something like Jim Kirkwood's American Grotesque, which is as tragic as Agrippa D'Aubigne and like D'Aubigne's epic poem of the French Wars of Religion, is only half the story? The Picayune and Item's coverage of the Upstairs Fire, or any hundred queer-bashings and trick-murders disguised in the crime reports as other things entirely? (Even the Access Gay Guide to the USA has a particularly infelicitous example of the latter, a quote from Herbert Asbury's entertaining and utterly unreliable The French Quarter.) I am an inveterate saver of newspaper clippings that catch my eye and so my unorthodox filing system-stuck in appropriate books on my shelves-yields treasures like "Marine is booked in rape of man at Uptown apartment" (Thursday, 11/21/85, Times-Picayune) as well as those pictures the papers run when the weather gets hot of young men without shirts waxing their cars on Lakeshore Dr. and even a profile of a young aspiring actor and-ahem-Merv Griffin employee in the Fall 1996 issue of The Holy Cross Man (sent on by a well-wisher). But these are admittedly eccentric choices.

Sure, there are the several editions of The Bachelor's Guide to New Orleans, and Tennessee Williams' buddy Oliver Evans' book from 1957 (and much of what he reports hasn't changed that much), Lyle Saxon's Friends of Joe Gilmore (Joe Gilmore being the black manservant everyone has always assumed Saxon slept with for most of his life-a real job for some bright-eyed queer scholar would be to get a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities and get over to Tulane and gather up an edition of Saxon's letters, which are apparently a banquet of dropped hairpins, especially those to Weeks (Miss Thing) Hall, chatelaine of Shadows On The Teche, and one of those sissies of that era who knew Absolutely Everybody) with its luminous chapters on Mary Collins and Miss Dixie.

Miss Dixie has always wisely refused to reminisce, being a vigorous and vital woman of keen interests and humor and intelligence. (Many years ago, when the book by John Rechy was fairly new, there was a nonsensical rumor that the character of Sylvia-the owner of a hustler bar who was working out an earthly penitence by running such an establishment because she had cruelly rejected her Gay son, and was therefore making amends ever after-was based on Dixie; what a crock, to put it inelegantly-it might have been Wanda Stumpf or the Mom who read the Society Page, but Miss Dixie? Pliz! John Rechy's transformative powers aren't, and perhaps never were, up to turning Miss Dixie-whose last name means Carnival and she lives up to it-into some self-flagellating-with-a-secret-sorrow woman running a queer bar that, in Rechy's gloomy account, is about as lively as a mortuary or an opera performance in the time of Louis XIV, take your pick.

Personally, I see Dixie much more in the vein of Sweet Sue, the bandleader of the all-girl orchestra in the movie Some Like It Hot (played unforgettably by the endearingly brassy Joan Shawlee). Well, maybe Dixie with a couple soupcons of Ina Rae Hutton. Anyone who has ever given a listen to Dixie's wonderful album, "Sloopy Time," will see my point. And anyone who hasn't heard Dixie's lambent, hardboiled version of "I'm In The Mood For Love" just hasn't lived a normal lifetime in the time/space continuum as we know it.)

The problem with documenting our Queer History is a problem not just for me (I can pull stories out from under my velvet gown till the cows come home, or even till the cows put on my velvet gown, but I'm hardly the only one); it's a problem for all of us. (Unless of course we want to assimilate and be Just Like Everyone Else, in which case we can co-opt "their" History and pretend it is ours, too.)

Look at the problems faced through the years by people wanting to document the Upstairs Fire, that Black Hole Of Calcutta of local Gay history. Those who were there that evening just don't want to talk about it. It's haunted them all these years, perhaps, or perhaps they've worked out some personal way to exorcise the horror and tragedy. I saw the fire and, to my eternal and lasting ignorance, didn't even know what I was seeing at the time. I had been with David Richmond, a photographer who at the time had digs and darkroom and gallery on Exchange Alley. We were going there and-lo and behold- witnessed fire trucks and crowds and screams and smoke. And I, who had regarded myself as the Duchess of Iberville Street, or one of them, didn't even know that there was a queer bar at Chartres and Iberville-didn't know until I read the papers and saw the news and began to read S. Joslyn Fosberg's series of laments in the Vieux Carre Courier. The fact that witnesses and survivors don't want to get on a panel or submit to an unctuous tape-recorded interview and reminisce cozily about what must have been the most ghastly experience of their lives seems reasonable to me. Why not just go on Jerry Springer? The plurality view is, however: we need to know about this so it doesn't happen again. We need to know how they dealt with this, and if we don't hear it from the horses' mouths then all we will be able to do is speculate endlessly and fruitlessly about the circumstances of the event.

What all of this turns out to be-and sorry I have been so serious, this first blaze of hot weather has laid Mother low and she can't be funny every day, after all, she's only human though some would debate the pernt-is another plea to dig up some artifacts and some interesting stories to go along with them for the Pride exhibit in September which is-like prosperity-just around the corner. And Happy Stonewall to you, too.

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