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[felis_ultharus]

Queer History

I came across Jim Egan again in One of the Boys, talking about his experiences as a gay man in the military in World War II.

This man is everywhere in Canadian queer history. From about 1949 to 1962, he was the Canadian gay liberation movement, writing letters to newspapers and so on long before anyone else, before the lobby groups and legalization.

In 1997, he won the biggest court battle ever for queer people in this country -- making discriminatory laws against us unconstitutional. Because of him, it became illegal to discriminate against us for housing and jobs, for pensions, etc -- and the precedent he set made same-sex marriage possible.

Sadly he never lived to marry his partner of 51 years, Jack Nesbit. He died in 2000.

And Wikipedia has no article on this guy. I was astonished. When I have more time, I'll do more research on his life so I can write a proper one.

Anime

We finished Gankutsuou yesterday. I haven't read The Count of Monte Cristo, which this anime is based on, so I can't say for sure what was in the original. But if it doesn't have a space alien destroyed by the power of true love (in the form of a guy-on-guy kiss), like the anime did, then it ought to have.

Comments

[montrealais.livejournal.com]

There is, however, an article on Egan v. Canada (I wrote it).

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Thank you. But I still find it frightening that we don't have an article yet on the single biggest name in queer rights in Canada.

When I have more time, I'll dio research. In the meantime, I should come up with some sort of stub. I'd need help to do that, though.

[jenjoou.livejournal.com]

But if it doesn't have a space alien destroyed by the power of true love (in the form of a guy-on-guy kiss), like the anime did, then it ought to have.

I agree and I'm sure that, just like the mecha, Dumas meant to imply this. ^_^

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

Certainly! And the tentacled manservant, too -- that was clearly implied on the page that implied the psychedlic outfits.

(I hope you're right that Dumas would've taken this version with a lot of humour. I can't shake the feeling he's spinning in his grave so fast that he could be harnessed as a power source.)

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

What is it with synchronicity this week? I just picked up a book by Stephen Fry which, as it turns out, is a modern re-working of The Count of Monte Cristo. There are so far no mecha and no space aliens, but about 50 pages in I have reached the conclusion that Fry is both brilliant and kind of cheerily demented.

I'll have to let you know about the boy-on-boy snogging. Fry is queer as a five-legged horse -- perhaps slightly queerer -- but none of the characters are so far showing signs of being so.

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

Update: Never mind, found teh gay halfway through the book. Still no mecha, though. ^_^

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I knew he wouldn't disappoint ^_^

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I've always liked Fry as an actor and political commentator, but I have yet to read any of his fiction. Is it good?

[yumemisama.livejournal.com]

It is, as he might put it, "bloody brilliant". And it's also, as he might put it, "well weird". He has a way of settling gently into a rather classical flow of writing, and then suddenly whacking you across the side of the head with an odd, appropriate and thoroughly modern metaphor. He's also turned his near-academic inability to keep his own voice out of the text into an advantage; in "Revenge", there's a faint undertow of snark no matter what's going on in the narrative that ties together the different viewpoints very well. (Just as a heads-up for your queer history studies, the gay character is one of the people that the modern-day Comte gets his revenge on, and it's not his homosexuality that's his downfall, it's the fact that he's a public figure who repeatedly and vehemently lies about it. Food for thought.) It is precisely the sort of writing you would expect from someone who managed to emerge from Queen's College, Cambridge, with both a 2:1 in English lit, and an intact sense of humor.

If you'd like to hear his opinion on basically everything, interspersed with wise-ass comments and useless trivia, I recommend going onto YouTube and digging up some QI, which is the comedy quiz show he hosts. I have never seen a human being nance with such dignity before. He calls people 'darling' when they're wrong and occasionally seems to forget he's hosting something on TV, when someone tells him something he doesn't already know, or he's gotten into explaining something random to a panelist.

I'm informed he has recently published an autobiography. If his fiction is a good indicator, I would lay good odds that he writes his non-fiction exactly how he speaks.