Howdy, Fudgie! I haven't thought of you for over four years! I'm surprised
your pile is still steaming after a four-year-old flame in response to
your homophobic denials about Mary Renault & Julie Mullard's life
together. It was nice you'd even heard of them; beyond that, you were such
a dork. You went all dubious that their fifty-year life-commitment was
gay, charged me with having an "agenda" for even alluding to it, & you
went so far as to misquote one of their biographers who you claimed said
they weren't gay.

Wrong, my dear. Totally wrong, which is why I ceased conversing with
you. In your haste to defend lesbianism you imagined I was attacking
same. As I suggested at the time, I don't think you read my posts at
all, and given the length of your own it's not surprising--you didn't
have time. I was neither attacking homosexuality nor suggesting that
Renault wasn't homosexual. What I was saying was that her books were
not "homosexual"--that is, that is not what they were primarily about.
Rather she simply included a homosexual element where it was dictated
by the subject matter or, in her later works, by history. If you take
a book like "Last of the Wine" or "Mask of Apollo", yes, there is a
gay element, but never more than is dictated by the situation and
characters---these are simply not "gay" books in the sense that
homosexuality is the prime focus or is being "preached". My objection
to your interpretation, and indeed Sweetman's, was that far too much
emphasis is placed on that element at the expense of appreciating
Renault's wonderful scholarship and literary artistry. This is indeed
my objection to the gay community generally---that they're so busy
being gay they often forget that they're also just people, citizens of
a community. (I think this point is made by Renault in "The
Charioteer" if I remember correctly). I wonder why gays are so
defensive that they see attacks where there are none.

(What he actually said was, in their youth together,
"did not think of themselves as lesbians because they thought what they
were doing was unique, that they had invented it. If asked, they would
have said they were bisexual. They often found men attractive, even if
they did prefer each other." Your denials were so moronic that I had a few
jests at your whiny expense, though only after you'd started acusing me of
a sinister queer agenda that you believed had nothing to do with books you
liked.

All sheer fantasy. As for the "queer agenda", yes, I think gay many
people tend to wish that everyone was gay, tend to try to prove that
even innocent statements contain a gay subtext. I've been in gay
company and heard such assertions--that the whole world is really gay
but they're all denying it. Piffle.


I would never have thought of you or that encounter ever again if Andy's
sigfile hadn't given you the horrors. But a google archive search reminded
me of the amusing long-ago encounter.

Same here. That's why I objected to it--because I thought I'd
forgotten you and it was so pleasant to have done so.

They were dykes, Fudgie. So neener. And cute dykes too:
http://niftynats.tripod.com/lesbians/renault.jpg

It was harder to be "out" in the 1940s & 1950s than it is now, & harder in
South Africa than in Paris or London. When time caught up with them in the
post-Stonewall era, it was still hard for a couple in their 70s to
suddenly be expected by their enormous gay following to come out to the
public, which was still risky, & neither Mary nor Julie ever wanted to do
that. Yet Mary was brave for her time. As Caroline Zilboorg notes in THE
MASKS OF MARY RENAULT, Renault's boldness was to write about homosexuality
in fictional contexts which made her less closeted than many of the time,
as "The classical settings allowed Renault to mask material too explosive
to deal with directly while simultaneously giving her an 'academic'
freedom to write about subjects vital to her--among them war, peace,
career, women's roles, female and male homosexuality, and bisexuality."

I'd think that after four years, if our exchange had even been worthy of a
second thought let alone your continuous hostile reflection, you'd've
ceased to be ballistic by now & just realized it was weird of you to find
those cute dykes' love for one another so unbelievable. Your sense of
disbelief in a favorite author's homosexuality was massively irrational,

Ha! Ha! Ha! Oh sorry. Did you really say the above? My disbelief in
Renault's homosexuality? Oh my dear, you couldn't be further from the
truth. I started reading Renault when I was 14, and at that age, as
often happens, I not at all certain of my sexual identity. (Look it
up; it's common). In fact I was drawn to the homosexual element; it
was a surprise and comfort to me. I thought the relationships between
Laurie and Andrew in "Charioteer" and Alexias and Lysis in "Last of
the wine" were beautifully drawn and in many ways the ideal of love;
there was not a homophobic bone in my body. Neither is there now. I
just object to gays interpreting eveything through a kind of "gay"
filter" that sees only the "gayness" of everything, often at the
expense of the humanity. The wonder of those books was their literary
artistry and sheer intelligence, not their gayness.


as Mary herself addressed it in her contemporary lesbian novel FRIENDLY
YOUNG LADIES (recently reprinted by Vintage Books), & she was even quite
out & open to her & Julie's personal friends, with correspondence since
published in which she is very open, as when she outlined to a friend how
she'd once encouraged Julie to date a man so that Julie would be
absolutely certain she had made the right choice with Mary, & admitted she
had worried that without Julie she might have ended up only a "Sister
George" type. Instead, she found true lifelong love.

This stuff gave you fits four years ago, so I ended up thinking of you as
Fudge Packer merely because it is so often the worst self-hating closety
faggots who become the most irrationally convinced even gay icons like
Renault, Gertrude Stein, or Tennessee Williams couldn't possibly be gay --
the denials part of their their own inability to admit their personal
interest is gay novels with gay subjects does in fact have something to do
with being gay. That my opinion still rankles you four years later is
simply you being loony. That you're worried I'm treated like a "sage"
(when the most recent three folks to quote me in their sigfiles seem more
to have regarded me as a commedienne) is still just your paranoia speaking
to you.

-paghat the ratgirl


Paghat, you're as far off the path now as you were then. If you've
interpreted Renault as well as you've interpreted me....well, that
explains everything.