A perspective on gay history in a park with a view

I spent the afternoon of July 3 in Dolores Park, two city blocks of sloping green grass dotted with palm trees and blessed with a stunning view of downtown San Francisco. My girlfriend Anna and I, along with a large chunk of the population of the Mission and Castro neighborhoods, were soaking up the summer sunshine on one of those all-too-rare city days when it's possible to leave the house in just shorts and a tank top. (True!)

As we contemplated the Berkeley Hills and perfect triangle of Mt. Diablo's distant summit (beautifully visible on such a clear day), I overheard a guy making a call on the next blanket over. He was directing his friends to the location of his picnic. "I'm up the hill a little ways, sort of to the right...you know, on the gay side," he said and clicked off the call. (The picture above is from Google; imagine more people--and more skin--to get a sense of the scene last Sunday.)

He was right, of course. The side of Dolores Park where we lounged was absolutely packed with fellow homos, most of them men cavorting (no better verb) in their swim trunks or underwear in the hot sun. (There were, in fact, a startling number of guys in their drawers, along with less startling coolers full of chilled wine, champagne, beer and snacks. We even saw one boy deliver a plate of Jello to the blanket next door). Such a display is nothing unusual for a summer Sunday in San Francisco in 2011. The city is special in this respect, but I have witnessed similar park scenes (albeit without quite so many exposed undies) in other cities from New York to Chicago to Austin. We're here, we're queer, we like hanging around in parks. And everyone, it seems, is more or less used to it.

Such a casual display of freedom made me think of E.M. Forster, who wrote A Room with a View, Howard's End, and other books that were best sellers in his lifetime and classic Merchant Ivory films in ours. I recently finished his latest biography, A Great Unrecorded History: A New Life of E.M. Forster by Wendy Moffat, a professor at Dickinson College and amazingly lucid biographer. In an unusual move, she examines Forster's life and work through the lens of his gayness, specifically the double life he was forced to lead as a British gay man in the 1910s-60s. It's fascinating and compelling choice. Of course, no biographer could ignore Forster's homosexuality, especially in light of the posthumously published Maurice (the first gay-themed novel with a happy ending), but Moffat chooses to make it the centerpiece, drawing explicit connections between the oppressive constraints of middle-class propriety at the heart of Forster's novels and his life in the closet. What emerges from the journal entries and heaps of letters (what will future biographers do now that no one writes actual letters anymore?) is a portrait of a brilliant, successful novelist and academic who, nonetheless, felt utterly hobbled as a writer by the homophobia of the time. Maurice is just the most famous of his gay-themed pieces that he never expected to be able to publish. Though he died at age 91 in 1970, the year after the Stonewall riots in New York sparked the gay rights movement, Forster believed throughout his life that gay men and women would always be reviled and despised by the majority population.

It makes me want to go back in time, grab Forster (tweed suit and all) and show him Dolores Park on a sunny day. Or buy him a rainbow flag and take him to any of the corporate-sponsored gay pride parades that took place nationwide a few weeks ago to widespread and chipper news coverage. He would be more than a little amazed. Even after a lifetime of intricate plots and memorable characters, Forster at his most creative could not fathom the world we take for granted every day.

This is not to say coming out of the closet has become angst-free. We still have a ways to go. But reading about Forster's life has given me a renewed appreciation for the milestones that have occurred and optimism about those still to come. It's easy to throw up one's hands at anti-marriage bills fueled by the religious right's persistent squawking, but Forster's story provides a peek into a truly great (and thankfully now recorded) gay history...and shows how much progress has truly been made.