Mazo 4, or, Glenn Gould, you say?

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My sweetie has gently suggested that a full week on an obscure-ish Canuck auteur is not a monster crowd-pleaser. So I moved on during my long weekend at the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association conference in Chicago (where it was hard to be really, really, really furious at last night's three-hour flight delay because Chicagoans were celebrating the dramatic end of a long drought)... but... you know there's a but coming... but Claude J. Summers of the GLBTQ Encyclopedia has returned my query about the online resource's silence on Mazo de la Roche.

Here's the inside dope: "Our practice is not to out people, either contemporaries or historical figures. Nearly all of the individual entries that we include in the encyclopedia, as well as those discussed in overview entries, are generally acknowledged as gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered, or queer. We have, however, on the basis of new scholarship included figures who have previously been assumed to be heterosexual. El Greco, for example.

"When the sexuality of a particular subject has not been authoritatively established by reputable biographies or other documents, we ask our contributors to confront the issue directly and give reasons for including the subject in the encyclopedia.

"A few of the entries that we have included are controversial. Errol Flynn, for example, has frequently been the subject of rumors that he had a number of sexual encounters with other men, and two of his recent biographers have attempted to document these rumors, but many of his fans (and other biographers) deny them. In our entry on him, the author examines the question of Flynn's sexuality and concludes that the rumors have a basis in fact, but that they cannot be definitively documented. He goes on to make a case for Flynn's importance to glbtq history quite apart from the rumors, and concludes that while Flynn probably did not identify as a bisexual, he probably was pansexual or polyamorous. After all, he proposed as his epitaph: 'If it moved, Flynn fucked it.'

"We certainly agree that denial of a person's homosexuality is not necessarily motivated by homophobia (though, of course, it sometimes is). The original version of our entry on Edith Sitwell identified her as a lesbian, but after her biographer contacted us, the author of the entry reconsidered her characterization and rewrote the entry, pointing out that there is no reliable evidence that Sitwell ever had sexual relations with anyone, though one of her most important emotional attachments was with a woman and she surrounded herself with gay men, many of whom were her collaborators.

"In any case, I think the greater problem is not that people are wrongly assumed to be gay or lesbian but that people are assumed to be heterosexual. We have even had gay scholars say that artists of the past could not be gay or lesbian because they were married and had children. (See the entry on Corregio.) Such assumptions are very naive and ill-informed. After all, the most famous homosexual of the nineteenth century --Oscar Wilde -- was married and the father of two children."

All homos see Wilde as gay. Bisexual makes much more sense, though. But bisexuality's too complicated for our gay psychic needs.

"The fact that Mazo de la Roche is not mentioned in the encyclopedia may be the result of a number of factors other than a belief that she was not a lesbian. If she wasn't mentioned in our entries on Canadian literature, that may simply be because the authors of those entries are not aware of her possible lesbianism rather than any considered belief that she was not a lesbian."

(I used the encyclopedia's search engine and found no "Mazo de la" within.)

"No one has suggested that we include an entry on her, but we are open to that suggestion provided that the potential author can convince us that she belongs in the encyclopedia.

"(We have an excellent article on Glenn Gould that we have not published because the evidence of his homosexuality is not convincing. He was certainly eccentric, but it is not clear that his eccentricities included sexual relationships with other men. We have decided not to publish this entry at this time, but if other evidence is forthcoming, either from our author or someone else, we will.)"


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