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The other evening I waited an hour and a half for a bus home from the library. It never came, casualty of a regional bus driver strike. But I didn't mind! Because I had Bruce Boone's Century of Clouds to keep me company, and I used the time to finish reading this ecstatic account of friendship, politics, and community in a 1980s summer camp for Marxist intellectuals. What a heady, giddy, digressive, and really quite poignant read. Boone uses every observation of nuanced social interaction as an opportunity to explore pithy relections on human nature, gossip, history, and power. For example, I love one character's camp theory about the continuity of iconography between aristocratic portraits and portraits of high Communist Party officials. Actually, I feel a lot of underlying kinship with Boone the narrator/character. His cerebralism, his sentimentality, his idealist possibly at times naive desire to change the world for the better, his status as a late bloomer in the romance & sex department. And his simultaneous attraction to traditional systems of knowledge (scholarship, theology) and radical politics. One of the climactic scenes takes place around a volleyball game, where Boone as gay man joins with the women attendees of the summer camp (all of them marginalized by the dominant straight male attendees) to stage a pivotal intervention during the game: they refuse to be pushed around & bullied any longer by the more aggressive male volleyball players. It's an eloquent micro-systemic critique of power relations: how can this band of Marxists hope to change the power structure of the world through revolution if they can't even reform their internal power structures as a community? The book concludes on a note of communal warmth and optimism, Boone flying through the clouds into a hopeful future. And this makes me sad, b/c as Rob Halpern notes in the preface, the hopes of many radical gay liberation activists like Boone in the 1970s were dashed by the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Those hopes were never fulfilled, or at least shelved for a long time while the community was forced to rally around a public health crisis. And this reminds me of when I first went to the Castro District in SF for a movie, this was when I was in high school in the early 90s, I went with friends to watch a Clark Gable film at the big theatre, and the whole neighborhood, it was like a devastated ghost town, a town where everybody had died or was dying or knew someone who was dead or dying. Really like walking into the aftermath of a war. Totally different from the consumer shopping district that is the Castro today. In the afterward to Clouds, Boone suggests that he may someday write a darker companion volume, one that will no doubt deal with this subject. And it makes me wonder what's happened on the communal level to the radical hopefulness that Boone describes in Clouds. Has it been resurrected? transformed? reborn in another form? Are we still waiting for its return?

2022-11-14 14:49