Some didn't survive the AIDS crisis, and countless others didn't survive the angst of knowing they wouldn't die, that HIV was a chronic, manageable illness, and so they dove deep into the darkness of crystal meth, alcohol, and the like, dancing their way into the arms of death. I remember all those beautiful masculine faces that grace the walls of my memory. Next year I will cross the half-century mark, and my mind wanders back through all those winding corridors of years in San Francisco, New Orleans, Key West, and New York. Good friends, work that I love and am passionate about, and-not the least-I am alive. As the noon sun is peaking just overhead now, my heart is full of gratitude, for I've been so lucky in life. I'm sitting on the patio in front of the weather-worn, shingle-clad cottage that my good friend, Randy, has rented for the summer in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where every summer evening he gives an entertainingly realistic performance as Cher to eager sun-drenched and alcohol-infused crowds. His depiction of shame intersects in remarkable ways with later attempts to assimilate the history of shame into the history of homosexuality.It's now late August and another summer is quickly slipping away.
An ancillary aim is to trace Godwin’s depiction of male shame in Fleetwood to the literature of sensibility in eighteenth-century Britain, particularly the Man of Feeling at his most ashamed state, which this writer exploited for his own literary and cultural objectives. And just as gender is the result of certain mannerisms and acts of cloaking, shame is another performative forged, as it were, by and through a continuous process of accepting and resisting the social roles assigned to us.
The principal point of this argument is that Godwin’s Fleetwood should be read as a queer novel not simply because it chronicles a bad marriage and the failure of heterosexual love to fully flourish and solidify normative bonds, but because the three-volume structure of Fleetwood, or the New Man of Feeling circles back on itself, ouroboros-like, in keeping with the cyclicity of male shame.
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