The New Issue: Leo Lerman
Gray and Stephen at The Osborne, 2007.
AB: I have a question for you, but also if you could speak from Leo’s perspective – what is your opinion about the way gay culture has changed?
GF: I’ll tell you one thing – I liked it a lot better when it was secret. It was wonderful! Now it’s all over the place. It loses its cache, and its allure. I miss it. I didn’t mind being cautious or careful. I mean we weren’t throwing ourselves. Neither Leo nor I could stand boy parties. Everyone standing around, looking you up and down all the time, it was just boring. Leo said, “You can’t have a successful party without a woman or two,†because they really gave it a special flavor.
SP: I think this cuts both ways – and I’m speaking as an outsider, so you’ll have to correct me here – but I think Leo both enjoyed the discretion, the fact that it was something that was in full view, but wasn’t necessarily talked about. It was mysterious and it also, in a way, lent a certain flexibility that we don’t have [today]. I may be utterly wrong about this, [but] you read this book and there are an awful lot of married men, men who were involved with women, men going back and forth. I mean, you knew gay men who married women and married men who were involved with men. My own perception is that because it was less in public view, there was a certain amount of flexibility that we don’t have now.
AB: There wasn’t a binarism.
SP: It wasn’t a binary, exactly. There wasn’t this feeling that if you did this and people knew, well… It was a different thing if people knew; it would be a different type of scandal.
GF: It was sort of glamorous…
This book is terrific!
Thanks for that…and yes, read the book.
I loved the current pictures too!
STB
What’s pretty extraordinary about Lerman’s journals — aside from the thoughtful writing and personal honesty — is his first-person candid commentary about still-fascinating cultural figures such as his buddy Marlene Dietrich (who tells LL that she doesn’t like sex, but since men seem to expect it from a sex symbol, however old she’s getting, Dietrich just gives in to get it over with) and Maria Callas (who spills the beans about Ari Onassis’s preference for anal sex and how Jackie O refused to go that far). It’s like an insider’s guide to the realities behind 20th-century culture.