Kevin Kopelson

In​ New York in the 1960s, your first sight of gay pornography may well have been in public, looking in a sex shop window. If you were a gay kid, but closeted you would have reacted with pleasure, certainly, maybe even bliss – what Roland Barthes called jouissance. But there would also have been an inexplicable, almost sickening lust, and the fear of being seen looking. If you could...

I too​ was ‘a single man’ in the fall of 1999. And like the doomed protagonist, George, in the novel A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood, I too was gay; I too was an English professor (on a one-term sabbatical back then); I too was middle-aged (at 39 years old then, whereas George is 58); I too was living in Los Angeles (although my teaching position is in Iowa City); I...

Many people​ believe that Jesus, when alive, was both human and divine, or both mortal and immortal; many people, likewise, believe that God himself, of the Old as well as the New Testament, is both spiteful and forgiving, or both hateful and loving. And while we all believe such contradictory things about ourselves, about other people well known to us ‘in person’ (friends,...

I quote too much. Give me a good line – what am I saying? Give me a good paragraph – even a Proustian one – and I’ll shove it into my own prose regardless of how tiresome that is. Take my last book, on the satirist David Sedaris. Not only do you get more Proust than you’d ever care for, you get an awful lot of Sedaris – pure, unadulterated Sedaris. It’s not that I’m lazy. Or rather, it’s not just that I’m lazy.

To be fair to Alan Walker, I should confess that I’m an amateur pianist who loves playing – or trying to play – some of the virtuoso music Liszt both composed and, of course, performed: relatively easy pieces like Waldesrauschen and Un Sospiro, which are concert études, and also the three ‘Petrarch’ Sonnets. More difficult ones – like Gnomenreigen or the first ‘Mephisto’ Waltz – are simply beyond me. I’m also a sex fiend who loves the erotic myths that concern Liszt, the homoerotic ones in particular. There’s the famous one Liszt himself promulgated, known as the Weihekuss, about Beethoven embracing the 11-year-old prodigy at his Vienna debut. (It never happened; or if it did, it happened in the privacy of Beethoven’s home.) There’s the one about Liszt the lady-killer. In reality, Liszt was more of a Cary Grant than a Clark Gable, more Don Ottavio than Don Giovanni – although he did play the latter on stage. According to Charles Rosen: ‘With his international reputation for erotic conquest already set’, Liszt must have known that the public would take Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841) ‘as a self-portrait in sound, just as everyone had assumed that Byron’s Don Juan was an autobiography’. Then there’s the private myth about Byron: ‘I still feel the same liking, the same passion for L.B.,’ Liszt wrote to Countess Marie d’Agoult, his first mistress. ‘Hugo called Virgil the moon of Homer; when I flatter myself, I tell myself that I shall perhaps one day be B’s.’ I like to think, mostly on the basis of conservatory gossip but also because of the ‘physical aversion’ to women Liszt keeps mentioning in his correspondence, that this Byron fixation has something to do with bisexuality – which may mean that ‘Lisztomania’, Heine’s term for crazed female devotion to the virtuoso, had a lot in common with the ‘fag-hag’ devotion previously inspired by castrati. By, say, a singer like Farinelli. Both performers did seemingly impossible things, produced seemingly impossible sounds, and both were surrounded by an arousing nimbus of either passivity (hence the Cary Grant analogy) or lack of interest (hence Don Ottavio).’‘