Tom Cardamone

The rock ‘n’ roll spirit–imported by Britain in the 50s and 60s and made that country’s own—infuses every page of House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row. The Beatles, the Stones, and Elton John, all dance through this delightful and compelling book, and though they’re the music makers here, all were styled by Tommy Nutter. Nutter, the book shows, cut the vibrant cloth of the zeitgeist.

From the Beatles’ suits for the iconic Abbey Road album cover (except George, in jeans of course), to the bespoke beauties worn by the flamboyant-yet-then-publicly-closeted Elton John, Tommy Nutter came of age during the age of great change. He shook up men’s fashion while jet-setting with the in-crowd. But House of Nutter is very much a story of brothers. David Nutter, just a few years older, was also gay. Through the bond they formed over fashion and musicals, they vaulted over their predestined working class jobs and toward futures of their own design.

Tommy conquered Savile Row, London’s storied street of elite tailor shops. As a photographer, David moved in all the right circles, eventually landing in New York City. Their separation launched a lengthy correspondence between brothers that David dutifully preserved: a record of an era whose queer influences are not overtly recognized, though individual contributions get their compartmentalized due, to a point.

The young Tommy Nutter comes across as a good-looking guy with taste and a penchant for occasionally outrageous behavior, who happened to be in the right place at the right time. But he made finding the right place at the right time an art-form of its own, excelling at socializing as well as designing. Tommy dated Peter Brown, best friend and assistant to Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager (Brown took on the role after Epstein’s untimely death). This gave him entrée into the counterculture elite just as his own career and business were taking off. With funding from famous backers, Tommy opened Nutters of Savile Row and promptly blew the doors off what had previously been a stuffy, conservative industry. An instant hit, garnering press galore, the shop fitted everyone, from the glitterati to businessmen. From an American customer:

“How can I say this? It made me feel that I was really dressed. Like I was a piece of art.”

Peter Brown decamped to New York City after the Beatles broke up, a dissolution that David captured on film as his reputation as a photographer grew. He traveled with John and Yoko to photograph their marriage in Gibraltar and found himself in the Big Apple headquarters in the band’s final days. The allure of New York had always been strong (both brothers obsessed over West Side Story in their youth) so David gave it a go, hooking up with Elton John’s entourage and indulging in the emerging downtown club scene.

Not that life was idyllic for either brother. In London, Tommy lost the business but was able to regain his footing by working at an established house hungry for new talent. Depression, drugs, and traveling within the dramatic orbit of a rock superstar took its toll on David. But as both brothers moved into the 1980s, each secured success. Tommy dressed Bianca Jagger and the like, continuing to innovate, he even designed suits for the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman film. (His clothes have subsequently been collected at the Metropolitan and Victoria and Albert Museums.) David published his photographs of Elton John on tour in a book.

Yet no matter how many times you’ve read about gay life in the second half of the prior century, with foreknowledge that the specter of AIDS looms as large and dark as anything ever on the horizon, when it hits, it still startles and destroys in a way both familiar yet freshly devastating. As the first deaths are reported, David falls perilously ill with what turns out to be hepatitis. This and a horrific assault and robbery made him much more circumspect, prolonging his life and making this book possible. A decade later, Tommy finds a dark spot on his ankle, what will turn out to be Kaposi’s sarcoma. In writing about Tommy’s illness and passing, writer Lance Richardson deserves the highest possible praise for his revealing compassion. So much has been written, so much has been lost, that the importance of getting it “right,” so to speak, cannot be understated.

For anyone looking to capture history, the lesson of House of Nutter is a simple one: act now. We are blessed to be in the presence of many of our fore-figures, those original rebels, the ones who made it happen in every conceivable way. Prior generations of gay activists, agents, artists, athletes, architects, athletes, authors, conductors, designers, DJs, doctors, filmmakers, journalists, lawyers, musicians, nurses, painters, playwrights, poets, politicians, publishers, researchers, sculptors, singers, and teachers have great stories, many untold, waiting for someone to reach out, and connect.

House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row
By Lance Richardson
Crown Archetype
Hardcover, 9780451496461, 400 pp.
May 2018

As the consummate memoirist, you would think Edmund White (My Lives, City Boy, Inside a Pearl) had left no page unturned, but then this diamond surfaces: The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading. Here is a multi-faceted account of superlative literary reflection, borne from the earthquake (life-quake?) of a heart attack. Here we have memories and discourse on a lifetime of books read, the texts that have influenced White’s art and thinking–books savored, books turned over again and again as new aspects reveal themselves, and most important: the people, the friends and colleagues who delivered these books into his life.

Edmund White suffered a heart attack in 2014, which left him for the first time in his life uninterested in reading or writing. Surreal daydreams swirled up to fill this void, and when this drought broke, he finished work on the novel Our Young Man (it was halfway done before the heart attack) and in reading again, began to consider the habits and desires that had filled his shelves with books. Readers of his previous biographical (both fiction and nonfiction) works will run into a familiar cast: his somewhat wacky mom gifting the young White a biography of Nijinsky, his close friends in young adulthood, Marilyn and Charles, swaying his impressionable taste with books and literary conversations. Boyfriends and crushes appear; his husband, Michael Carroll, once a young lover from Inside A Pearl, is now a published peer with clashing tastes and convictions. As White narrates coming into his own as a writer, The Unpunished Vice grows into a veritable avalanche of interesting books and talented folk: the early admiration of Nabakov, the friendship of John Irving and Joyce Carol Oates, just to name a few, are all described here with wit and candor. The Unpunished Vice itself is dedicated to Rick Whitaker (Assuming the Position, The First Time I Met Frank O’Hara, An Honest Ghost), a favorite author of mine, whose friendship is lovingly, rakishly detailed.

White visits his own books with the lightest of finger taps. Only when a solid correlation in another text, a stylistic point learned or a moment of inspiration, presents itself are we treated to the germinations of his own work, and then often with just a sentence or two. These moments, though fantastic, fall outside the thesis of tackling a life of reading, and those interested can find satisfaction elsewhere in White’s work, the Genet chapter in My Lives, for example, or specific author monographs in Arts and Letters and The Burning Library.

As a memoir, The Unpublished Vice also serves as an important document chronicling gay literary history (more on that later). The characteristically generous dollops of advice also place this book on the books-for-writers shelf.

I like to read great books not because I’m hoping to imitate them but because I want to remind myself how good you have to be to be any good at all. We won’t be read in the light of other writers in our zip code or decade but as we compare to Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov. History has set the bar very high, and one must jump over it, not do the limbo under it.

So simple it could be printed and taped up on the wall as permanent advice to an aspiring writer.  And then there are the frightfully inspiring observations:

I think in fiction we admire energy more than virtue-even in an energetic paranoid, like Kinbote in Pale Fire, who takes all the unbleached floss of experience and weaves it into a tight, gleaming knot. There is an energy, a force, in paranoia; the paranoid might be called a completist. He reassures us that creation follows a design, that things aren’t running down through entropy.

Don’t expect doctrine, but fluidity here. The running commentary on what makes a viable novel, and the conversation with himself as he reviews a lifetime of reading, is breezy and affirmative. And breezy is a compliment to his style, attesting to how enjoyable the ride is-the knowledge shared is just so artfully compact. The titles that pour fourth not only invite you to recall your own favorites, but more than once I dropped something into my amazon.com queue or checked online to see if it was currently available at the Strand. Expect to fall outside of your comfort zone here and there. I was lost when he discussed Russian novelists, not having covered much ground there. Conversely, I was relieved to see my opinions of 20^th century Japanese literature justified (though I enjoy Mishima’s novel-length suicide notes and White doesn’t).

I would like to politely chastise the reviewer elsewhere who complained that Ed spends too many compliments on literary friends in this book. Actually, the commentary on literary relationships elevates The Unpunished Vice. The stories of nourishing artistic and intellectual camaraderie make the gift of a particular book all the more meaningful, the lessons learned applicable to life, not just the trade of telling tales. Recounting these connections provides an important history of gay literary output, the intersections of which won’t be found anywhere else.

First and foremost, ours is a history of friendship.

*

For well over twenty years, I have committed myself to reading one author biography a year to better source the secret to being a successful writer (and the answer is a rather dull one, my friends: talent + time management). These biographies, however, big and small, all share a singular failing: they never fully plot out the reading life that makes a writer. Sure, the drama of relationships, the pathologies found in bottles of liquor and the like lend themselves to much more theatrical reading than, say, a list of books. Still, these wholly unique libraries should be cataloged for a deeper understanding of influence, of development, those secret competitions and thirsts that form a successful writing career. I’ve only encountered one such book, Thomas Wight’s estimable Built of Books, a celebration of Oscar Wilde’s reading habits. Surely there are others. (Though it’s worth noting that White clarifies my thesis toward the end of The Unpublished Vice by warning us not to judge a writer by his library, as favorites are passed to friends and shelves fill up with books to blurb and review.) This makes this book all the more valuable. Early on, he quotes his younger self’s Wildean pronouncement, “I may never be so well known as John Updike, but to my few readers I’m indispensable.”  Well that’s certainly changed, as attested by the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction that was bestowed on him earlier this year; Edmund White now is every bit as well-known as Updike or any of his contemporaries in American letters.

The Unpublished Vice is an exquisite, winding staircase though the rich and varied library of an important writer’s readings; one that, like the very best books, delivers the reader to secret but familiar chambers seemingly—if only—without end.

The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading
By Edmund White
Bloomsburg
Hardcover, 9781635571172, 240 pp.
June 2018

Fernando Rios was a twenty-six-year-old Mexican tour guide lured to his death by a group of Tulane students, who beat and robbed him in a shadowy French Quarter alleyway in 1958. Clayton Delery, the author of Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice, unearthed this crime while researching another travesty in his hometown, the fire at the Up Stairs Lounge. The fire, a monstrous act of arson, was, for decades, the largest single act of terror against LGBT folk in the US–that is, until the massacre at Pulse nightclub. News of that attack reached Delery as he was working on the Rios book, and in the introduction he records feelings of dread and sadness that filled so many of us that day. Though the response of public figures was markedly different than what the survivors of the Up Stairs Lounge fire had to contend with, just as the courtroom at the trail for Rios’ attackers erupted in applause at their acquittals, so, too, did certain people on the right cheer the bloodshed in Orlando.

To better piece together the story of Fernando Rios, the author first details the pervasive racism and homophobia of mid-century America, and the cultural milieu of New Orleans in particular, to put Rios’ death in dark perspective. He walks the reader through the streets of the city, lifting from then-contemporary letters to the editor and legal documents the community’s desire to purge itself of degenerate gays and keep people of color in their place–an anathema to its then-as-now reputation as an easy going place to drink and carouse. Local politicians struggled to outdo one another other with proclamations to curtail, punish, and shame gay activity in the bars. Discrimination against Latinos was compounded at the time by the wholesale deportation of Mexicans by the Eisenhower administration’s odious, murderous “Operation Wetback” program (and Delery draws a quick line to the current administration’s equally overt racist populism).

Concise summation and nimble observation keeps Delery from getting caught in the sand trap of all true crime books: the trial. Though much documentation was lost in Katrina, there’s no evidence in how the book is structured to suggest additional information would have bogged him down. This was a trial that ended in celebration, shouts of joy and applause filled the courthouse, as the three men who murdered Rios were found not guilty. Their youth constantly highlighted, these college students were portrayed by the defense and the press (who never referred to Rios by name, but always “the Mexican”) as the real victims of a sexual predator, a man who died, not because of the beating they delivered, but his own physical weakness. Delery delves into the communal heteronormative justifications of such a slaying:

“. . . a great deal of societal homophobia is related to societal misogyny; when a man is taken out of the role of the sexual aggressor and is made instead the object of pursuit, he is placed in the traditionally feminine role, a state of being apparently so horrifying to some men that they would do anything–including kill–in order to escape it. What could possibly be worse for a heterosexual man than to be treated the way that such men treat women?”

The ringleader of the killers, the one who originated the idea of “rolling a queer” and, after the others demurred, introduced the idea later in the night and acted as bait, picking up Rios at a well known gay bar and leading him into the alley and his death, passed away a month before the author attempted contact. One of the other assailants had also recently died, but his son gave an interview which closes the book with a poignancy not often found in the genre. The bar where Rios met his killer, Café’ Lafitte, is still standing. Fittingly, Delery had his book launch there, closing the circle, so to speak, as detailed in a recent interview with one of his fellow students from the 2016 Lambda Literary nonfiction workshop with Sarah Schulman. (Her adroit socio-political analysis is an obvious influence when the author deconstructs the tactical acceptance of this slaying by the community and press.)

#

The introduction to Out for Queer Blood made me recall the memorial/rally I attended in the days after the slaughter at Pulse. Thousands gathered in the park in front of Stonewall, spilling into the streets, the streets where just a few years prior raucous crowds celebrated marriage equality. Dusk approached. The governor launched into a hackneyed speech extolling the greatness of our northern liberal state; we were restless and angry. When a completely out of his element heterosexual pop star took the mic, anger erupted into chants of “say their names, say their names.” There was confusion behind the makeshift podium. The order of events was hastily reshuffled and the names were read.

Too many names.

Anger gave way to sadness and for some, a conviction that the activism that had won us the right to marry could be re-focused on the NRA and the Republican Party. The activist organization Gays Against Guns was formed.

As I finished reading Out for Queer Blood and set the book down, I habitually reached for my phone. A grossly familiar sense of alarm clawed at my stomach as I read the fresh headline about a school shooting in Florida. In the days that followed, as the deluge of horrific images and pathetic conservative responses surfaced, so too, did new heroes. A self-identified bisexual Latina high school student and survivor spoke truth to power in a way that has changed and charged the conversation about gun control. As these youths fervently demand action, I recognized parallels to ACT-UP. Who else can deliver radical change but those most nakedly at risk?

Queer folk in America are still murdered in the streets. Fernando Rios didn’t get a rally, he didn’t even get justice. Almost forgotten, he is now remembered. Author Clayton Delery can be confident that he has done his community proud by recording one of those moments in history that so many municipalities strive hard to forget, the recollection of which is a painful, healing victory for everyone.

Fernando Rios.

Out for Queer Blood: The Murder of Fernando Rios and the Failure of New Orleans Justice
By Clayton Delery
Exposit Books
Paperback, 9781476668840, 234 pp.