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Written by Lisa Neff, Staff writer
Jun 17, 2010
James Lord, in his career as a biographer and memoirist, created revealing portraits of Gertrude Stein, Jean Cocteau, Pablo Picasso and Alberto Giacometti and a vivid documentary of life in post-WWII France.
Lord, who died in August 2009 at the age of 86, was an intimate of Picasso and Giacometti. He knew the Parisian arts community. The New York Times, in an obituary, described him as a “a kind of Boswell to the artistic and social elite in France.”
And how did he arrive on that scene?
That is part of the powerful story of Lord’s autobiographical “My Queer War,” which the writer completed shortly before his death. Farrar, Straus & Giroux published the book in April.
“My Queer War” is brutally honest – and occasionally brutal.
“My Queer War” is sometimes tawdry – and often tender.
“My Queer War” is Lord’s story of how he came to enlist in WWII and how he coped as an odd-man-out in the Armed Forces, a queer man in times that make the “don’t ask, don’t tell” military seem progressive.
Lord was an inexperienced but not necessarily naïve 21-year-old in 1942, when he enlisted and reported for duty in Atlantic City, N.J. He was a “tourist disguised as a soldier.”
“My Queer War” begins: “It all began beside the war-torn sea. In Atlantic City. Truly a queer setting – out of place for an epic adventure, let alone a good venue for making a young man ready to perform the daredevil feats of wartime aviators. Yet this second-rate, overbuilt resort had been dreamed up like the locus of a psychedelic fantasy by the U.S. Army Air Force for the basic training of would-be fliers into the wild blue yonder.”
There’s a Beat-feel to Lord’s prose; a passionate, poetic bop to a tough-guy tale about disillusioned young men, horny young men, beautiful young men; about the ravages and atrocities of the Good War, the thrill of love and the whirl of the modern art world.
Other reviewers have found Lord’s style contrived or fussy, pointed out such text as “slouched a sullen troop of soldiers.” Well, I enjoy extended alliteration and, after all these years of working in the gay press, feed on the dramatic.
With the effort under way to repeal the gay military ban and attention turned to gay soldiers, “My Queer War” is a timely tale. And it is artfully told.
