and never want to leave you, but part of love is recognizing growth and change in the one you love. I think I am changing; I want you to know about it. If I were on the desperate slide to addiction, would I be telling you about all this, asking for advice? What I am saying is that I donât think it makes sense for me to stay away from homosexuality, or homosexuals. This fear is based on a false notion, which I have already explained â that they killed me, or that I cannot control my feelings about them, or I do not understand what happened to me when I was so close with them. Itâs very clear what happened to me, and I have no desire to go back to where I was. Being obsessed with Dash King is not a signal through the flames, itâs not a signal of any kind, nor a hint, or a bad sign. Itâs simply an interest â thatâs all.
Here is Dashâs next paper (dated approximately one month after the last). The monthly missives emailed to his advisor were partly an academic duty â the pressure was on for Dash to write his thesis. And if he were to procrastinate, there was always the danger he would drift into the vast, uncharted desert populated by those who never finished their theses. (This happened, eventually, as he died relatively young, before he could finish.) So it was important for him to make contact with his advisor in order to not jeopardize his funding.
As we can see from these papers, several things were happening â not the least of which was that his scholarly writing was quickly disintegrating into personal memoir. At this point he wasnât completely cognizant of the process. It seems he felt that confiding in his advisor was somehow relevant, though obviously digressive. The material below is ostensibly about the Shakespearean authorship again, as King is speaking of his disappointment with his lack of success at organizing a conference. But it quickly meanders into confession.
Let me give you a little more background. I know the details of his personal life because I have communicated with a professor who was a student at the University of Toronto during Dashâs declining years at the turn of the century. He was an excessively beautiful and cheerful man who caught Dashâs eye. Now he is quite old â but still very cheerful â and seems to remember quite a bit about what Dash was up to. Apparently Dash had organized a small meeting of University of Toronto professors in an attempt to interest them in the idea of a Shakespeare conference. The conference was to centre on the subject of Shakespeare and sexuality, which was of course an acceptable area of inquiry at the time â in the context of the New Historicism (which quickly became old) of Orgel and Greenblatt. New Historicism purported to juxtapose literature against history, without insisting that history should necessarily be thought of as authoring literature. At any rate, there were all sorts of ways in which such a conference might have been justifiable and fundable.
Whatâs interesting about Dashâs focus at this time is that his interest in the notion of Edward de Vere as Shakespeare had clearly superseded his interest in Shakespeareâs sexuality. My talks with the cheerful academic who knew Dash (his name is Trevor) have been revealing. He and Dash were drinking companions. Trevor was friends with many attractive young male university students, as he was a graduate student when he first met Dash, and later an assistant in the âDepartment of Difference.â
Itâs interesting that these departments were named (even when they first came into being) in a manner that predicted the erasure of sexuality as a subject of study. They were such sad things â these departments of âDifferenceâ and âEqualityâ (there was even one in Brussels dedicated to âThe Othered and the Abjectâ). Of course, since sexuality as an academic pursuit would soon be
Here is Dashâs next paper (dated approximately one month after the last). The monthly missives emailed to his advisor were partly an academic duty â the pressure was on for Dash to write his thesis. And if he were to procrastinate, there was always the danger he would drift into the vast, uncharted desert populated by those who never finished their theses. (This happened, eventually, as he died relatively young, before he could finish.) So it was important for him to make contact with his advisor in order to not jeopardize his funding.
As we can see from these papers, several things were happening â not the least of which was that his scholarly writing was quickly disintegrating into personal memoir. At this point he wasnât completely cognizant of the process. It seems he felt that confiding in his advisor was somehow relevant, though obviously digressive. The material below is ostensibly about the Shakespearean authorship again, as King is speaking of his disappointment with his lack of success at organizing a conference. But it quickly meanders into confession.
Let me give you a little more background. I know the details of his personal life because I have communicated with a professor who was a student at the University of Toronto during Dashâs declining years at the turn of the century. He was an excessively beautiful and cheerful man who caught Dashâs eye. Now he is quite old â but still very cheerful â and seems to remember quite a bit about what Dash was up to. Apparently Dash had organized a small meeting of University of Toronto professors in an attempt to interest them in the idea of a Shakespeare conference. The conference was to centre on the subject of Shakespeare and sexuality, which was of course an acceptable area of inquiry at the time â in the context of the New Historicism (which quickly became old) of Orgel and Greenblatt. New Historicism purported to juxtapose literature against history, without insisting that history should necessarily be thought of as authoring literature. At any rate, there were all sorts of ways in which such a conference might have been justifiable and fundable.
Whatâs interesting about Dashâs focus at this time is that his interest in the notion of Edward de Vere as Shakespeare had clearly superseded his interest in Shakespeareâs sexuality. My talks with the cheerful academic who knew Dash (his name is Trevor) have been revealing. He and Dash were drinking companions. Trevor was friends with many attractive young male university students, as he was a graduate student when he first met Dash, and later an assistant in the âDepartment of Difference.â
Itâs interesting that these departments were named (even when they first came into being) in a manner that predicted the erasure of sexuality as a subject of study. They were such sad things â these departments of âDifferenceâ and âEqualityâ (there was even one in Brussels dedicated to âThe Othered and the Abjectâ). Of course, since sexuality as an academic pursuit would soon be
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