Casual Outings: Great Faces from the Annals of The G&LR

By Richard Schneider, Jr

As The Gay and Lesbian Review crosses another milestone-the publication of its 150th issue - we mark the occasion with a book that features some of the contributing artist Charles Hefling's best illustrations of the past decade.

Casual Outings brings to fruition a collection of illustrations by the brilliant contributing artist, Charles Hefling, who's been dazzling us with his caricatures and portraits for most of our 27+ years.

In that time, Charles has produced over 300 illustrations for the magazine, of which only ten percent or so appear in the book. These were drawn from what Charles calls his "A List," and they have something else in common: They were all artists and writers who were not entirely forthcoming about their sexuality, usually because their society forced them into the closet. Thus we are "outing" them in a sense, but in a gentle way, since the secret is long out of the bag. Hence the title: Casual Outings.

The 27 illustrations - which range chronologically from Michelangelo to Lorraine Hansberry - have been divided into five groups: novelists, artists, dramatists, composers, and poets. Opposite each Hefling is a short introduction to the person pictured as excerpted from a past issue of The G&LR by writers such as Edmund White, Diana Souhami, Martin Duberman, and Andrew Holleran. The focus is on the LGBT side of their life and work, and how they negotiated their sexuality in a hetero-normative world.

Richard Schneider Jr. received his PhD in sociology from Harvard in the early 1980's. He taught sociology and anthropology as an "itinerant scholar" for the University of Maryland's European Division for the next five years. He then returned to Boston to become the Director of Research for a Boston-based consulting firm, The Center for Strategy Research, where he remained through most of the 90's. He founded The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review in 1994 and has remained its editor and de facto publisher ever since.

Charles Hefling is a professor at Boston College, where he teaches the Great Books. He also draws caricatures for the Gay and Lesbian Review.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Schneider, Jr
• Release date: Apr 1, 2021

Richard Schneider, Jr

Richard Schneider Jr., editor, is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide (until 2000, The Harvard Gay & Lesbian Review), which he launched in 1994. Taking his doctorate in sociology at Harvard in the early 1980s, he was a university lecturer for the next decade before founding The G&LR as a sideline while working for a Boston consulting firm in the ’90s. The magazine has been his full-time job since 1999. He lives in Boston with his partner Stephen Hemrick.

Book preview

The Art of Charles Hefling

The occasion for this book is the publication of the 150th issue of The Gay & Lesbian Review, which sets up something of a cosmic joke. Since the book is essentially replacing the issue that’s being celebrated, that very issue does not in fact exist! Instead, this book of art and text is offered as a look back over the last 27 years as told by our Contributing Artist for most of that time, Charles Hefling, whose illustrations are featured along with a précis about each writer or artist from the annals of The G&LR.

The selection of illustrations was guided by a privately published collection of Hefling’s work titled No Straight Faces, which included many of the artist’s A List caricatures from the magazine (plus a few more). These were offered without text, usually two to a (horizontal) page, arranged according to the artist’s inimitable æsthetic. As an editor, my first instinct was to look for a narrative structure by which to organize these many faces. For starters, I confess I found the pairing of high culture and popular culture—Marcel Proust sharing a page with Lou Reed—slightly jarring, so this was the first line of demarcation. This book contains only those in the high culture category. (Stand by for a possible sequel.)

The artists and writers featured here lived in times and places that did not partake of the relatively enlightened attitudes that make it possible for someone today to live openly as an LGBT person. To the extent that they deliberately concealed their sexual identity or even denied outright what seems to us a clear case, the conclusion that they were gay in our sense, or even that they had same-sex desires, requires some amount of interpolation or reading between the lines on our part (often not much, to be sure).

Casual Outings thus refers to the fact that we are in some sense outing people who tried to hide their sexuality at least some of the time. We’re doing it in a casual way because the same-sex orientation of figures like Whitman or Tchaikovsky or Amy Lowell has by now been pretty well established, however much their biographers may once have tried to conceal it. The spectrum from complete closetedness to embracing one’s LGBT identity follows a roughly chronological trajectory, as documented here for the 150-year period that’s covered here (if we ignore Michelangelo); and this evolution is reflected in Hefling’s illustrations.

The bookends for this period are the portrait of the exceedingly buttoned-down and bespectacled Franz Schubert, circa 1820, and that of the T-shirt-clad and actually quite hot David Wojnarowicz in the 1980s. (Wojnarowicz is the one figure who probably doesn’t fit the outing criterion, as he lived and worked as an out gay man in the 1970s and ‘80s. But it’s just such a great drawing.) In between are figures who display a number of patterns of adaptation to existing social circumstances. There are those like Whitman, Proust, Mishima, or John Cheever who created gay personas in their work but could never quite admit the terrible truth in real life. Conversely, some artists and writers who were quite open about it as a personal matter were reluctant to come out in their work, like E. M. Forster (except in Maurice, which he suppressed), Langston Hughes, and Edward Albee. To be sure, a number of the figures presented here tested the limits of the prevailing sexual regime both in their private lives and in their work—Oscar Wilde, Radclyffe Hall, and Tennessee Williams come to mind—and they sometimes paid the price.

The 27 figures are organized here into five sections according to their major artistic endeavor: novelists, visual artists, dramatists (including Nietzsche, a minor stretch), composers, and poets. within each section the figures have been arranged chronologically by birth date to give a sense of the evolutionary process noted above. While they all addressed universal themes and appealed to a wide audience, our concern here is the specifically gay aspect of their works as well as their private lives. The descriptions on the verso side of each two-page spread are excerpts from articles by some of our many illustrious contributors.

Let me end with a brief word about the art of Charles Hefling—brief because I really think his work speaks for itself. The illustrations shown here appeared in The G&LR over the past decade in what might be called Charles’ modern period. For our first ten