queer lassics:

 

By Ernie McLeod

ot far into Virginia

Woolfs witty, gender-

bending classic, Orlando,
I came across a scene in which
the time and day are given as
“about six in the evening of the
seventh of January.” Realizing it
was the seventh of January, I
glanced down atmy watch: pre-
cisely six in the evening. Who's
afraid of Virginia Woolf‘? I am! I
told my boyfriend if he saw me
heading riverwards with rocks in
my pockets, he'd know Virginia's
ghost was hovering a tad too
close.

Fortunately, the spooki-
ness ended there, but in the past
few years it does seem Woolfs
ghost has been popping up every-
where. There have been film
adaptations of Orlando (with
Quentin Crisp as Queen Liz the
First — how queer is that!) and
Mrs. Dalloway, a play based on
letters between Virginia and Vita
Sackville-West (the woman who
inspired Orlando), an acclaimed
biography of Woolf by Hermione
Lee. and two novels which pay
homage to Woolf, one being
Michael Cunningham's 1999
Pulitzer Prize winning (and

 

queer-themed) The Hours. Add
this to the heaps already written
about Woolf and her milieu, and
she rivals Jane Austen for posthu-
mous overexposure.

As I noted in a previous
Queer Classics, Orlando was
published in 1928, the same year
as Radclyffe Hall's The Well of
Loneliness. Though both books
were milestone explorations of
the meaning of gender, Orlando
faced little of the venom or cen-
sorship that greeted Hall's work.
(Woolf was among those who

took the stand to defend The Well

politically during the obscenity
trial against it.) Unlike Hall's
fierce — and notably humorless —
polemic, Woolfs fictional fantasy
was viewed, rightly, as a literary
lark, its more subversive notions
playfully wrapped in layers of
linguistic levity, making it an eas-
ier pill for the reading public to
swallow. They did; it was an
immediate success.

Oddly enough, though
Orlando is Woolfs queerest
book, it's more straight—forward
and accessible than some of her
introspective, stream-of-con-
sciousness styled novels.
Conceived as a mock biography,
Woolf realized that for the satire

to work, the prose needed to be
clear and relatively simple. Not
that the result is simple: Spanning
some 400 years, with a main
character who abruptly changes
sexes midway through, Orlando
muses not only on the ambiguous
nature of masculinity and femi-
ninity throughout time but on
time itself, and art, and society,
and love.

Elizabeth Bowen, in an
afterword to one of the ‘editions,
described Orlando not as a novel

but as a “novelist's holiday,” fan-
tastic but psychologically sound.
Woolfs general biogra-
phy is well-known. She was born
in 1882, home-schooled as a
child, likely sexually abused by a
half-brother, greatly affected by
her mother's death when she was
in her teens, and then, later, by
the deaths of her step-sister,
father, and favorite brother. With
her sister Vanessa she was at the
center of an artistic circle (which
had several gay members, includ-

ing E.M. Forster) known as the
Bloomsbury Group. In 1912 she

_ married Leonard Woolf and in

1917 they formed Hogarth Press,
which published writers such as
T.S. Eliot and Katherine
Mansfield along with Woolfs
own works. She attempted sui-
cide in 1913 and was plagued by
depressions and debilitating
headaches throughout her life
until, in 1941 at age 59, dis-
tressed by world events, fearful
> continued on p 26

 

IN THE LIFE

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In an encore presentation, ITL
explores the Gay Financial
Network (gfn.com) in Power
Players with its President and
CEO, Walter B. Schubert. In A Day
In The Life: Joi Cardwell, /TL fol-
lows this "supermom" and popular

“disco diva" performer. From aban-

doned infant to Harvard Doctor of
Theology, Reverend lrene Monroe
addresses homophobia in the
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Outspoken Irene Monroe. ln.A Day «-

In The Life: Kate O'HaIan, M.D., a
leading expert in thefield of
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serve patients. In The Life,

America's award-winning monthly" V’

gay and lesbian cultural news-
magazine, airs on 130 public tele-

 

Faisal Alarn, founder of the gay
Muslim organization Al-Fatiha,
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in The Life, airing in February.

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