MY WISCONSIN LGBT HISTORY: S and M, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, AND THE MYSTERIOUS THOMAS PYNCHON

 

This is an excerpt from ''A Scottish American LGBT History (in Preparation). It is set in late 1983 around Timothy Tillotson. who I met in Rod's Bar in the basement of the Hotel Washington, and a senior college in the military funded Math Research Center in the WARF building on the UW Madison Campus, I wondered at the time whether he was the mysterious Thomas Pynchon

(8) Timothy Tillotson (1947-2013). Publicly prescriptive LGBT activist. Said that all LGBT people should come out and show their strength in numbers. Advertised that all gay men were either ‘butch’ or ‘fem’. Advocated bondage and S and M.

Tim treated STDs in the Blue Bus Clinic for the University Health Service. He was also highlighted in his obituary for studying and analysing the works of Thomas Pynchon, in particular Gravity’s Rainbow, around which he organized local study groups, presumably for many years.

                                  

I first parleyed with Tim in 1983, over a late night supper in Café de Palms. He discussed the statistical content of Gravity’s Rainbow together with the deeply profane sexual and sado-masochistic content which had prevented the lengthy novel from winning the Pulitzer Prize.(See Perry’s Review of Gravity’s Rainbow, Goodreads, 23 September 2017). Together with more ghastly topics, Tim mentioned ‘controlling young men’ and ‘firing screaming young men into space chained naked to very hot space rockets’ as being part of Captain Pirate Prentice’s dream-like fantasy.

                                      

Tim concerned and alarmed me because in 1980 a pre-eminent statistical colleague at MRC (hiding away on the twelfth floor of the WARF building), who I suspected to be a closet case, had advised me that he was a close friend of Thomas Pynchon, and identified himself and me with the fictional characters Pirate Prentice and Teddy Bloat, while describing me as ‘well-situated’.

This notoriously misogynistic senior colleague and suspected academic gas-lighter, wasn’t one to show duty of care and didn’t like giving tenure to women faculty. I wondered at the time whether he was the elusive Thomas Pynchon himself, particularly as he made his male Ph.D. students clean his enormous mansion in Shorewood Hills and toil away as his secretaries and minions. A much put upon lad from the U.K. had to kowtow to him for seven years before he was permitted to graduate in 1990.

                                      

                                    

I still believe that the senior colleague, who encouraged real-life military applications of statistics as ‘lollipops’ for the generals, may well have written large chunks of Gravity’s Rainbow himself, utilising, for example, his expertise about subjective probability models which he’d acquired from a Taiwanese colleague and co-author. (One of the generals receiving lollipops advised us, while interrupting a military Statistics conference in Monterey in about 1982 that ‘a small amount of brutishness is worth lots of pity.’).

The senior colleague certainly ghost-wrote large parts of a glowing biography for one of his English wives about her father, the infamously evil statistical eugenicist, misogynist and white supremacicist geneticist Sir Ronald Fisher who, according to his similarly eccentric son-in-law, squeezed mice to death in his bare hands and once beat an obstructive beefeater at UCL with his walking stick.

                                

(9) David Clarenbach. Celebrated Democrat. Elected Madison Alderman and to the Wisconsin State Assembly in 1974 at age 21. Given credit for pushing through the 1982 Gay Rights Bill (see above) after a two year struggle. Elected Speaker pro tempore of State Assembly in 1983, a position he held until 1993. David seemed like an ordinary sort of chap. He didn’t boast about his accomplishments, and he was a delight to talk to.