Morning Light XVIII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

"Don’t Fence Me In"

The following is excerpted from poet and essayist Thomas March’s review of Cathy Crimmins’ book, How the Homosexuals Saved Civilization.

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The only thing inherently gay about any of my tastes is that I require – I insist – that the person I am dating be male. As soon as we insist that a behavior or a taste or an attitude is inherently “gay,” we’re implying that it’s unavailable for a straight man to accept as part of his system of sensibilities. Establishing such a barrier restricts gay men, too – and promotes the same kind of thinking that reinforces negative stereotypes, not just the lovely myth of the well-groomed gay man.

Early in [her] book, Crimmins tells a story about shopping with her daughter and a gay teenage boy who finds her daughter a beautiful dress and then remarks about himself that he “fulfilled [his] function as a gay man.” He laughed, and I hope he really was being ironic. It looks like that kid could make a great personal shopper or have a very successful career in fashion. And good for him, if that’s what he wants. But there are many ways to fulfill one’s function as a gay man. We’re cops and construction workers, too; we don’t just dress up like them. A gay kid needs to know that if he wants to, he can be a good gay man without always helping people pick out clothes. As we’ve learned, it might be hard to be a gay cowboy, but the first step is to say, “Don’t fence me in.”

– Thomas March (The Gay and Lesbian Review, May-June, 2006)

Symbol of Enlightenment

The following is excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson.

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The hare is a symbol of enlightenment, not only of the spirit but of the dawn, the dawn of the day and the dawn of the year which we call spring.

The ancient Egyptian hieroglyph – a picture of a hare – stood for the auxiliary verb “to be,” but auxiliary verbs come late in the development of language and all are derived from words of independent sense. The Egyptian “to be” was associated with creation and had the senses of being, existing, and persisting, which are in mythology often represented by the hare.


Image: Mark Bakker.

Morning Light XVII

Subject: Simon Czaplinski.
Photographer: Paul Reitz.

Where the Mountain Hare Has Lain

One had a lovely face,
And two or three had charm,
But charm and face were in vain
Because the mountain grass
Cannot but keep the form
Where the mountain hare has lain.

W.B. Yeats

Image: Devon Biodiversity Action Plan.

The Domain of Eros

The following is excerpted from Brian Pronger’s The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex.

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Homosexuality, in our culture, rather than forming an identity, is best understood as an unusual way of looking at the world, a paradoxical mode of being in the world. The paradox presents a special sensibility through which some men understand themselves and the world they live in. It is a sensibility that they can employ at various times, depending on the personal and social circumstances. A homosexual man is not just someone who has had a certain number of objectively homosexual experiences. Nor is he someone whose life can be understood primarily through his homosexuality. He is a man whose paradoxical intuitions of the myth of gender have given him a special sensibility.

I [draw] a distinction between objective and subjective homosexuality. Objective homosexuality is merely a matter of two persons of the same sex engaging in sexual activity. Objective homosexuality describes observable, physical behavior. Subjective homosexuality, on the other hand, refers to the psychic dimension of sexual experience. This psychic dimension . . . is the domain of eros. So, subjective homosexuality is the psychic world of homoeroticism. It’s possible for two men to engage in objectively homosexual behavior and not experience it as homoerotic. This is often the case in boys’ schools, prisons, the military, and other exclusively male environments where men engage in homosexual acts without finding it homosexually significant; they don’t think of themselves as homosexual and often don’t consider their objectively homosexual behavior as a homoerotic expression. It is just a substitute for sex with a woman. This is not to say that there aren’t men in prisons and the military who experience a homoerotic dimension in their sex with other prisoners, soldiers, or sailors. The point is, the act does not necessarily define the individual’s psychic experience.

Homoeroticism lies in the individual’s paradoxical interpretation of the myth of gender. . . . One of the effects of being paradoxical, of being gay, is estrangement. Gay men are estranged from the culture from which they themselves have emerged.

– Extracted from Pronger, B. The Arena of Masculinity: Sports, Homosexuality, and the Meaning of Sex (St. Martin’s Press, 1990), pp. 81-82.

The Ghostly Mountain Hare

The following is excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart Evans and David Thomson.

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The mountain hare is not very much bigger than a large rabbit. . . . Its summer coat is an excellent camouflage especially in flowering heather or the mosses and course grasses of the moors. On bare stony ground and against the blue shadows of lichened rocks on a sunny day it is perfect. In summer too there are many places where hares can hide in long old heather or grass. But the winter coat is a terrible danger to the hare unless there is snow.

. . . When he lived in Nairn [in the Grampian Mountains of Scotland] as a boy, [Norman Halkett] used to borrow his uncle’s field glasses and bicycle out to the moors, usually alone, but sometimes with a friend, and lie down to watch birds and animals.

. . . The mystery of the white hare sometimes frightened him. He says that when it was sitting or lying down it looked as if it had been frozen to death or stuffed in a hunched up position like a cat that is feeling the cold. Its staring eyes were like glass eyes. Then watching through field glasses he would ask his friend to clap hands or bang two stones together. The hare would crouch even further in its form. They would approach it cautiously. It would watch them stilly until they were very near. The friend would run on towards it, and he would see through his field glasses how it leapt from the form with a twist of its hindquarters and land about ten feet away in order to leave no scent from its paws. Then it would bound in an easy regular gait, a series of smooth unhurried jumps that reminded him of a horse gently cantering, to the summit of the nearest ridge usually less than a hundred yards away. It would sit up there with its ears erect and look back to survey the danger.


Sometimes when it ran on more level ground it would seem like a puff of smoke rising and falling, blown by the wind. It would often vanish suddenly near a rock or high clump pf heather. When [Halkett] tried to imagine the Holy Ghost he thought of the white hare. The mysterious sin against the Holy Spirit was to kill a white hare.

– Excerpted from The Leaping Hare by George Ewart and David Thomson (Faber and Faber, 1972), pp. 36-37.

Tan Lines VII

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

The March Hare of Wonderland

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. “Very uncomfortable for the Dormouse,” thought Alice; “only, as it’s asleep, I suppose it doesn’t mind.”

The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it: “No room! No room!” they cried out when they saw Alice coming.

“There’s PLENTY of room!” said Alice indignantly, and she sat down in a large arm-chair at one end of the table.


“Have some wine,” the March Hare said in an encouraging tone.

Alice looked all round the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t see any wine,” she remarked.

“There isn’t any,” said the March Hare.

“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alice angrily.

“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the March Hare.


– Excerpted from Chapter 7 of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Image 1: Gwynedd M. Hudson, 1922.
Image 2: Arthur Rackham, 1907.
Image 3: Sir John Tenniel, 1865.

The Hare on the Bookshelf

Image: The Hare by Jill Mason on the Leveret’s bookshelf - November 2008.

Morning Light XVI

Image: Subject and photographer unknown.

Hare in a Forest

“A Hare in the Forest”
by Hans Hoffman
German, about 1585
Oil on panel

Following is how the Getty Center in Los Angeles describes Hoffman’s “A Hare in the Forest.”

“Nibbling on a leaf pulled from a stalk of Lady’s Mantle, an alert hare sits at the edge of a pine forest. Unlike the darkness one would expect to find in a forest, Hans Hoffmann painted a theatrically illuminated scene. Each plant and insect – snail, cricket, beetle – is seen in vivid detail. The finely wrought leaves of the thistle, the sprawling fronds of a plantain, and the bright blue flowers of the Hare Bell attest to Hoffmann’s meticulous treatment of the subject. In fact, none of these plants could have co-existed in the natural world. Hoffmann imaginatively combined numerous individual nature studies in a single painting.

“Hoffmann’s golden-brown hare is based on Albrecht Dürer’s famous and influential watercolor which, much like his Stag Beetle, shows a hare against a plain ground. Hoffmann had seen Dürer’s hare while in Nuremburg. Later, when he went to work in the court of Emperor Rudolf II, he helped the Emperor acquire the watercolor for his Kunstkammer. Hoffmann’s hare differs from Dürer’s however, appearing amid a striking arrangement of elegant plants and insects. At the time it was painted, this arrangement of nearly life-size subjects was entirely unique, not only within Hoffmann’s body of work, but also within the tradition of German nature study.”