Ode to All Gay Poets

Whitman’s shopping lists, Lorca’s night blossoms,
Dennis Cooper’s tender wolves, Thom Gunn’s night sweats,
long lines of calico princes in neon clubs dancing to diva songs,
Ginsberg’s personal ads for sex, Paul Goodman’s daily orgasms,
O’Hara’s interrupted lunches, Hemphill’s dead brothers—
the apple carts of San Francisco, relics of old Boston, freed slaves’
children blaring blues and disco in Chicago and Detroit—
somewhere there’s a gay poet who has just begun to be gay, and a poet.
Lightning presentiments from his elder, someday mentors encountered as
runes carved on black glass cliffs in Yellowstone and Blue Ridge,
shaping lust, memory, love, fear, passion, and promise
into tangoing fires of poems hung pulsing in air. Scanning every line:

roadtrips across the desert at 109 F driving naked sweating;
taking years to write his longest epic erotic poem,
because every several lines of stanzas he must break off writing
to jerk off, but that’s what happens when you write naked;
a thousand lovers queued into rhymes by city poets,
all dead, one way or another, all gone, emptied by time;
memories from boyhood summers of fumbling experiments
with neighbor boys, now consecrated and divinely glowing
because time can’t change them in memory anymore;
Black poets from Brooklyn and Jamaica whose
tropical mango and dirt fragrances died with AIDS;
Latino poets who only come out officially after mama dies;
Filipino man you sucked off in the truck’s front seat
one rainy California night in the supermarket parking lot
who wanted to come in your mouth—
some reverse-colonial psychological dominance maneuver
you kept encountering with Filipino men—
only you wouldn’t let him, a stranger after all, who
walked away in the rain, never seen again, then
you went in and bought your week’s groceries;
and all the litany of the dead, Assotto Saint,
sainted Hart Crane, sanctified Derek Jarman, and those still
living with their slow dying, fragmentary selves bound together
by meds, duct tape, and love; poems that come to you suddenly
an hour before sundown, never tame or avoidable;
poems coming suddenly over you like the bisexual nudist
you spent a day with, who when you were leaving told you
he liked to be tied up, maybe next time, who told you about
his first sexual night with a man in a car as you stood together
in the backyard pool, only half swimming,
then you went inside, he introduced his pet boa constrictor,
pulled you by hand to the living room couch for sweaty love,
him covering you with copious semen like poems, you cumming
on your own belly, him braced above you as you lay sweat-soaked,
covered in cum, you mixed fluids, rubbed them into your skin,
sacrament, lotion, cream of life, emollient;
young photography student who tried to flirt with the admired poet,
yet too shy to ask to photograph him nude, with books, with pen;
this same poet once had a lover who liked to stand naked and read
by the bookcase, loudly declaiming love poetry to each other
till both got hard and fucked, turned on by sensual language;

and poetry anthologies full of eros of all types, sensual gods,
Dionysus, Pythagoras, Hermes, restrained comments of Cavafy,
passions of Sappho and the anonymous ancient Greek Anthology,
humorous metaphors of Tokugawa samurai comrade lovers,
the Gulistan, Rumi and Shams, Wilde, Antler,
another endless list read and re-read till the clothes
come off, one hand propping the book open
while the other roams flesh, skin, nipple, thigh, heat of groin, cock,
suggestions and encomiums of poets, a thousand names known
and unknown, a thousand years, word-hoards only bards embrace,
orgasms of light inscribed as dark ink on yellow silk paper skin.

Erotic Journal

WARNING: This essay is an explicit personal memoir about my teenage awakening to sexuality as a person and a writer. I've never written any of this down before, to share with others. I've told some of these stories to some of my Radical Faerie and other gay friends. But if it's not your cup of tea, or if such memoirs offend your sensibilities, don't read this!

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I started my first erotic journal when I was fifteen. It contained mostly homoerotic poems that I was writing at the time. Some poems took more than one sitting to write, because while I was writing them, I would often become aroused, and pause in my writing to masturbate. I had already been seriously masturbating to orgasm for over a year by then.

I rediscovered this erotic journal amongst my other journals when I was organizing papers after moving house the last time. I also found some typewritten sex stories I wrote as a teen. I have scanned or photographed these papers, to preserve them digitally for myself, before putting them away again, with my other journals.

There was one long erotic poem, "naked boys," that I began writing when I was 15, that first appears in this journal, that I took out over time and added to, edited, rewrote, and changed, that took approximately 12 years to complete. It's a very long poem. The three or four longest poems I have ever written have been homoerotic poems. "naked boys" was a poem I would take out, write a section of, masturbate, orgasm, then put away for awhile. Honestly, it was impossible to write this poem without ending up masturbating; proof that words alone, and a good imagination, are enough to turn you on! I guess I've always been able to turn myself on by writing erotica. Sometimes I put the poem away for six months to a year, then got it out again to add to and edit; I might work on it, always erotically charged during the writing, for a few weeks, then set it aside again for awhile. This is the only poem that has ever taken me that long to rewrite, revise, or finish. I've written many other homoerotic poems over the years, especially since coming out, but none of them like this one.

"naked boys" was the poem in which I discovered, as a writer, about writing at white heat, about writing passionately, about making the writing itself as ecstatic and highly-charged with passion and energy as possible. Most of the revisions I made over the years were to heighten and refine the poem's energetic, passionate charge. This single poem taught me a great deal about ecstasy, about ecstasy in art and literature. It was only later, when I discovered ecstatic sacred poetry—from Sufi poets such as Rumi, from contemporary poets such as Harold Norse, Allen Ginsberg, and Antler, or from ancient Sanskrit love and devotional (bhakti) poetry—that I realized that "naked boys" was a poem about sacred sex. It wasn't really a pornographic poem, although it is very explicit at times, and very homoerotic, although I did masturbate during and after the writing. The poem can still inspire orgasms upon re-reading. It was a poem in which—without knowing yet that I was doing it, in my teenage questing, without having a conscious plan or words to describe my intentions—I was trying to celebrate sacred sexuality, the exquisite union of body-mind and soul. I had rediscovered for myself some of the core teachings about sexual energy from Tantric yogic practices, which I only later had names for. I published 'naked boys" as a very limited-edition chapbook poem some years later, a few copies of which I still have; I gave away a few copies to Radical Faerie friends who I knew would appreciate the poem, but I haven't ever before discussed this poem publicly. It is for me a personal sacred text, full of memories, full of my own sexual yearnings as a young man—not just teenage yearnings, since I was almost in my 30s before finishing the poem at last—and still a record of dreams, fantasies, actual sexual memories, and more.

A couple of years previously, probably the Christmas I was age 13, my parents had given my sister and myself identical Smith-Corona SCM portable typewriters. (My mother also received one, so I think this was a joint parental present in origin.) This was my first typewriter—like buying my first computer, this was an important milestone in my creative life. (I still have this typewriter; it became the foundation of my small collection of vintage and antique typewriters.) The SCM typewriter was in a large plastic and metal shell case. I got in the habit of typing sitting crosslegged on my bed in my bedroom. When you took the typewriter out of the case, set the case on the bed, closed it, and put the typewriter on top, it was a perfect height for me. On my typewriter I sometimes wrote erotic poems, and experimented with writing homoerotic stories, basically teenage porn about the neighbor boys, fantasies, etc. On hot, humid summer afternoons, with no one around, the door to my room closed, I sat on the bed crosslegged, naked, while typing. Naturally I became aroused; the only question was whether I sat down with an erection already, or developed an erection while typing. Needless to say, most of these writings took more than one session to complete, as I would masturbate, have an orgasm, clean up, and be finished with the writing for awhile. In some ways, I was just typing out my masturbation fantasies—but being an artist and writer already, I typed out my fantasies as poems, trying to make something other than simple porn.

During my coming-out period, both to myself and to the world, from my mid-20s to my mid-30s—I was in some ways a late bloomer, shy at core—I wrote in my regular journal as well, a journal which I have kept since I was in my 20s in college, some other entries detailing my thoughts about my own sexuality, about sex in general, about eros, the life-force, about mysticism, ecstasy, making love and making art. These are all tied together in my soul and mind. I still don't make distinctions between them: masturbation, sacred sex, mystical experiences, making love and telepathically achieving Tantric ecstatic union with my lover, etc. All of these are normative experiences for me, even in my teens. What I wrote in my journals was attempts to put these things into words. It was in my regular journal that I first admitted to myself that I was gay, that I liked boys more than girls, and always had.

When I was 14, I spent many weeks during the summer playing naked sexual games with the boy who lived across the street from me. Mike was between 2 and 3 years younger than me, smaller than me but already very grown up in some ways. When we first stripped our pants off to explore each others' naked bodies, it was his idea. He was the more aggressive player; I was still very shy at that age, a geeky awkward teen with glasses who wasn't athletic or popular, although I had already discovered my love of the outdoors. My love of the outdoors, in fact, was the root of our first encounter; we saw each other out in the fields behind our subdivision at the edge of town, on a hot sweaty afternoon, both of us already wearing nothing but the short gym-shorts boys wore in the 70s. We talked for awhile, walking through the fields. When we both became aroused, it was Mike who first took his pants down, then wanted to take mine down, too. We spent many afternoons naked together after that, always erect, no matter whether we were just walking in the woods or fields behind the neighborhood, which was on the northeast edge of town, or more engaging in sex play. (I had also played similar naked games with a neighbor when I was 11, and so was he; but that boy moved away.) The first time I ever had an ejaculation, Mike was lying on top of me, my penis between his thighs, one night out lying in the fields, while I rubbed his chest and groin as he lay on me, and together we looked up at the stars. (One of the long homoerotic poems I began, later in life, was about this summer of sex play with Mike; another long erotic poem, in this case still unfinished, as I haven't looked at the poem in years.)

Anyone who has read Kinsey or the reports of other sex researchers knows that what we did together that summer was very common, even typical, for teenage boys; if anything, our sex play was more innocent, even sweet, than many other stories in the research literature.

So a year later when I was 15, when I began writing these erotic poems in my erotic journal, and typing naked at my typewriter, I had already been masturbating to messy orgasms for a year or more. In fact, no doubt driven by teenage hormones, I think one reason I began to write homoerotic poems was to relieve the overwhelming sexual tension. The hormones needed to be expressed. So I began writing poems, doing my teenage best to turn sex into art. Looking back through the journal now, not all of these poems strike me as awful, or typically bad teenage poems. Even though I am bisexual enough that I was dating girls well into my 30s, including having two successful loving sexual relationships with women, one of whom is still among my best friends, all of these erotic poems in this journal were about boys. My erotic journal was entirely homoerotic. I didn't even try to make the poems androgynous, the way Walt Whitman attempted in some of his poems to at least pretend to be interested sexually in women. (Scholars have noted that these are among Whitman's least convincing poems.) I hadn't seriously read Whitman yet; that reading came later in life; but I was trying, as I said above, to evoke in poems that almost mystical sexual energy I was experiencing, not only in my body but in my heart and mind as well. Certainly, at that age, it was more lust than love, although I did love Mike, I believe. I certainly thought about him a lot, even after our summer of games had ended. I wonder if he too came out as openly gay later in life; looking back now, I think one reason we found each other that summer was an inarticulate understanding of what we shared in common.

I kept my erotic journal secret, from anybody and everybody, for a very long time. Not out of shame, not out of internalized homophobia—writing in this journal after all was one way I came out to myself, and it helped me with coming out to others, too—but rather, I felt the poems, like "naked boys," in this journal were too charged, too erotic, too powerful. I wasn't sure who I could ever safely share them with. The fear I still have about sharing any parts of this journal with anyone is fear of rejection: the poems were so personal to me, to my life and experience, that I could not be objective about them, as poems, for many, many years. I have since learned to get past several poetic-critical theoretical clichés about craft quality, objectivity vs. subjectivity, etc.: now I just appreciate these poems for what they were.

Keep in mind that I was a boy in my teens writing about having sex with other boys in their teens, my age or slightly younger. I was attracted to some men of my acquaintance, and some girls I knew, but writing in the journal was about boys my own age. This alone is highly-charged subject matter, in our culture of homophobia and sexual repression, our schizophrenic culture in which we sexualize underage children in pre-teen beauty pageants while simultaneously denying that such children are capable of expressing their sexuality, and punishing them if they do. None of that adult weirdness surrounding sexuality ever made sense to me when I was a boy—I was, after all, enjoying consensual, guilt-free pleasure with boys my own age—but I did already know how highly-charged the topic could be, and how hysterical adults could become about it. (Although I must give my mother a lot of credit: One time when I got caught playing naked games with a neighborhood boy, and was sent home in disgrace, when I was talking to Mom about why I had been sent home and finally blushingly admitted that we had been playing together naked, Mom's only comment was that maybe I should keep such games to my own bedroom in future. My parents were very progressive in some ways!) So I kept my erotic journal hidden and private. Keep in mind, once again, that I was a teenager writing about his sexual experiences and fantasies, as a teenager, with other teenage boys. It was a way to both privately express my thoughts to myself in art, and a way of recording some experiences, and also—perhaps dominantly, and most importantly—a way of relieving my own sexual tension via fantasy, self-pleasure, and eroticism. These days, with available new media technologies, teenage boys are taking nude photos of themselves with their cellphones and sending them to each other—how times have changed!

Writing Eros 2

whichever way the wooden lathe
turns from roller to printer
the emergent wave of light
returning text to line
image of love in words and paean
torso and sigh and simple passion

in word and sigh the end of love
beginning of forever

Are you a Gay Poet or a Poet who happens to by Gay?

And why does it matter?

These questions keep coming up. They are questions asked both by LGBT poets about each other, and themselves of course, and also asked by heterosexual readers, writers, and critics. The question is, perhaps, an attempt to define the nature of identity in art.

My reflections here were prompted by something poet Stephen Mills wrote recently: He had recently received a packet of poems and critiques from his last year of MFA in Poetry studies in Florida:

As I was ending my MFA, I was being nudged to write poems that didn't focus so much on gay identity and the domestic life of a gay couple, which was a lot of what I wrote during those three years. In the moment, I often took a bit of a offense to these comments and I partly chalked it up to the "heterosexual male factor."

Among the packet was a last comment by his workshop teacher, commenting that, yes, he did write a lot of gay-themed domestic poems at the time, and people would indeed get tired of it—but mostly because any one theme that ones writes about over and over and over is going to loose some readers, simply from monotony. To be clear, Mr. Mills adds that he did not feel any homophobia was in these critiques, nor does he feel any homophobia was in effect during or after the workshop period. Mr. Mills continues:

I still write mostly about sex and identity, but more of the outside world has entered those poems. The biggest difference between [his mentor] and me is that I don't see sex and identity as a narrow topic. It is a topic filled with things to explore and I could write poetry about sex and identity for the rest of my life and still have things to write about. There is always that notion that if you write about issues related to your minority that somehow you are being narrow. This may never change, but I hope to continue to push people to think beyond that notion.

It's an interesting issue, this opening out of subject matter, beyond a "narrow" topic, which is a topic tangled up with sexuality and identity. I've found that the line between "personal" and "universal" content in my own poetry moves around a lot. I write about everything; I write a lot of poetry that isn't "personal" or "confessional" but which can be considered impossible to separate from my self and my sexual identity. I began to write explicitly gay poems beginning in my mid-teens—and some of them were very explicit indeed—but I hid them from everyone till years later. I wasn't open about this poetry till much later in life. I've never done an MFA degree or workshop process, although I've been involved in poetry groups and private writers' workshops for several years; some other poems that do not hide the homoerotic nature of the relationships of the people in the poem have been through those workshops, but not those early, gay poems.

I feel that when my sexuality appears in my poems, it's most often in celebration, rather than overtly about issues political or psychological. Most of the gay-themed poems I've ever written have been celebrations of one kind or another. Not really political or issue-based—except of course that any gay-themed poem is still a political act in the current cultural climate of only partial acceptance of LGBT people and the art they make. Robert Mapplethrope and David Wojnarowicz and james Broughton are all still controversial, and not only because they were explicit in their art.

The three or four longest poems I've ever written are of this gay/erotic type: very sexual, very sensual, full of celebratory, life-affirming eros and ekstasis, written on a sustained level of white heat, and explicit about the acts involved in making love. Maybe it's the Midwestern reserve in me still, and it still seems daring to be explicit about who I love in a poem. These poems were explicitly, ecstatically sexual—that is, homosexual, pansexual, polysexual, panentheistic: erotic in the sense of life-force not just sexuality. Emphasis on the ecstasy. I have since published two or three of these poems as limited-edition chapbooks, for private distribution to friends and a few interested others. That's mostly because I just didn't think anyone else would be interested in such poems.

One thing I've never expected is that anyone would ever accept or like my poems; they've always been too outside the current poetic fashions. To non-poets and poets alike they break all the "rules," and not only in terms of content. To this day I mostly share these more explicitly homoerotic poems with my gay friends, rather than the general public. There are two reasons for this: They're very personal poems, not confessional but personal, and I didn't necessarily write them for anyone but myself. (In two cases that I can think of, in which the long poems accumulated lines over a few years, a bit added at a time, the poem set aside for a time then returned to later, the writing was also interrupted by self-induced orgasms: is it masturbation when your own sexual writing turns you on? I don't care. One difference between eroticism and pornography is that pornography turns into a job, and like any job, isn't a turn-on after awhile.)

The idea of what is universal in poetry is at the heart of the matter.

Does every poem have to be universal, or have universal appeal? No, not at all. But just because you write in a poem about gay relationships, sex, and community, does not mean you're not touching on universal human themes—quite the contrary, as can be seen in poems by Thom Gunn, Constantine Cavafy, james Broughton (a celebratory poet if ever there was one!) Dennis Cooper, Federico Garcia Lorca, Kenneth Pitchford, and many others, to name only a few.

Mr. Mills also writes: There is also a notion that if you write about gay issues you are automatically writing "confessional" poetry. Confessional has many other issues and is really grounded in a particular period and moment in poetry. I don't personally consider my work to be confessional.

The post-confessional lyric has become one of the dominant genres of contemporary poetry, in competition with Language Poetry and neo-formalism—in part because of the lyric poem's dominant place in poetry workshop teaching. Yet writing about the personal need not be "confessional" poetry. I tend to view confessional poetry as that which puts one's own personal biography of wounds on display, publicly revealing personal and private issues, be they psychological or sexual or whatever. There is always a feeling of the poet airing his or her dirty laundry in public in "confessional" poetry:—public "confession" always contains a hint of private "shame."

The usual argument heard from poets on the "poet who happens to be gay" side of the question is that they don't want their poetry to ghettoized, or limited in any way. They write about more than just being gay, they write about universal human concerns. Even gay poets who don't want to be identified solely as gay poets carry the assumption, it seems, that sex and identity are narrow topics: There is always that notion that if you write about issues related to your minority that somehow you are being narrow.

That I’m gay and a poet (and composer, etc.) is not hidden. It’s self-revealing in my writing (and even more so in my photographic work). This also opens the question of "gay sensibility," the idea in identity politics that no matter what you write about, your essential self as a gay person affects all the art you make, even the art not overtly about gay themes. There is some truth to this gay sensibility concept, although it is contested terrain.

I tend to agree with those artists who admit that no matter what there art is about, it is infused with their life's experience of being different, of being Other, of being gay. When you're a cultural outsider, you learn at a younger age than most how to step back and observe your own culture objectively. When you're bullied for being different, you learn to "read" people and situations very quickly, and you develop a survival instinct. Those instincts go deep, even if they don't rule you in later life.

Thinking all these questions through again, at the moment, I find myself on the side of “gay poet” rather than the "poet who happens to by gay." Yes, that's an explicitly political statement—although it's not necessarily myself who politicizes that statement. The presumption that a “poet who happens to be gay” might write more universally-appealing or universally-ranging-in-topic poems is based on the assumption that gay-themed poetry is somehow inherently less “universal” in scope than non-gay-themed poetry. I object to that strongly, now, because it feels like just another form of ghettoization, even of internalized homophobia—even when it comes from openly gay poets who want to present themselves (perhaps to win wider acceptance among the more conservative masses?) as “poets who happen to be gay.”

What makes a poetry universal is the shared human experience involved. We all love, we all suffer, we all live and die. The universal experience of falling in love, and living with someone, and dying, well, it doesn’t matter who that is. So a gay-themed love poem doesn’t have to be less “universal” somehow than either a heterosexual love poem or a love poem in which the genders are all indeterminate.

And why would readers want to know if I’m a gay poet anyway? I mean, I am, and it’s no secret. But if a straight person wanted to know, I would want to know why they wanted to know. To just put the poet into another categorical box?

Yes, this is personal/political, definitely, for me to declare myself a "gay poet" in many circumstances. The "poets who happen to be gay" have a different politics than mine—bluntly, a seemingly more conservative, assimilationist politics. I think of writers who have explicitly stated that they prefer to be thought of as "poets who happen to be gay"—Michael Cunningham, Mark Doty, John Ashbery, etc. Others come to mind as well, some of whom are still in the closet, perhaps because they fear loosing work opportunities if they come out. Well, that remains a valid fear, even decades after Stonewall. Many of these writers are people I respect as artists, if not for their stances on this question.

Maybe there's something generational to this, as well; one thinks of the generation of avant-garde composers of the mid-20th C., many of whom were gay, but never publicly said so. An earlier generation, even after Stonewall, never felt comfortable about publicly coming out.

Therefore I sometimes feel that this question can be used as a marker for figuring out an artist's political leanings, since in several examples I can think of, “poets who happen to be gay” also have taken more conservative and assimilationist stances on other LGBT issues. A lot of their political stances are "don't rock the boat" stances, or otherwise anti-radical stances. For example, the fight for gay marriage rights is an assimilationist program, because most of the rhetoric breaks down into "we want to be just like you, only different." I am all for equal rights, but gay marriage is not now our most important issue, and never has been, except to the more assimilationist gays among us. DADT was more important. Far more pressing and important is the prevention of gay teen bullying and suicide. What causes we choose to give our time to is a political choice itself. Just to be clear, I'm glad that LGBT activists are working for all of these various civil rights, including gay marriage—I want everyone who wants to get married to have the choice available to them—and make no mistake, these are civil rights issues. My problem with gay marriage is primarily that the entire institution of marriage itself is problematic and anachronistic.

I can also see some situational aspects to the question of "gay poet." I could foresee myself not objecting to being announced, in certain venues, as a "poet who happens to be gay" rather than a "gay poet." I can foresee public performance and/or reading situations where that would be appropriate; not because of fear, but because sometimes you have to pick your battles. And because in other performance ventures, my sexual identity just isn't necessary to the performance—say, when I'm playing a jazz gig. I do feel that my gay sensibility does permeate everything I do, including my jazz gigs, but that's partly because my muse is a male, not a female. I play even jazz more intensely, more personally, if my muse is present in the listening audience.

Then there is the related issue of opportunism. Perhaps, to get an artist's award or grant, or to be even considered, you have to not "advertise" your LGBT status. Perhaps on some occasions you end up not talking about it because it torpedo your chances of getting recognition, or reward, or an award, or something similar. I sincerely feel that some "pots who happen to be gay," like some artists of earlier generations, have chosen their stance because being more "militantly" gay would deny them opportunities, or lose them gigs. This is an understandable fear. We all need to make a living.

But how far dare we go to (mis)represent ourselves in order to get something? How far does having an open identity go towards living and integrated and authentic life, and where would we sell that in order to gain some kind of advantage? In other words, this is at root about prostituting oneself in order to get ahead in one’s artistic career.

For my part, I'm perfectly willing to prostitute my art: I like getting paid for my creativity. I've had grunt jobs where I was an interchangeable cog in the corporate machine. And I prefer to be paid to exercise my mind, my creativity, and my sense of humor—because it's more fun and interesting for me. (I'd say that's pretty "universal" a sentiment.) But while I am willing to prostitute my art, I'm not willing to prostitute myself, my identity, my essential nature, just to get a gig. If they can't deal with me being gay, I probably don't want to work with them anyway. It's a big ocean, and there are always more fish to be caught. So I might not make a grand announcement that I'm a gay artist; but if it comes up, I'll quietly and proudly affirm that I am gay.

Honestly, in artistic situations that has mostly come up when my coming out in that artistic venue was a matter of setting the record, ahem, straight. Of being true to myself, and not being hidden. I recall one poetry discussion panel where I came out because the discussion was about an Allen Ginsberg poem, and to make a point, I needed to let people know my take on the poem. (Which was "A Supermarket in California.") I already thought everyone knew I was gay, who was there, so I didn't even think I was coming out to anybody there; although it turned out I was.

So I affirm that I'm a "gay poet." I may not broadcast it all the time. I make plenty of poems, and photographs, and music, that is not explicitly about being gay, or has openly gay content. And I do feel that my gay sensibility is never absent in anything I do, because it's an essential part of whom I am. My muses are other men. My inspiration in my art, the life-force energy that is the power under life, that supports and enables life, that life-force, which I often explicitly discuss in my art, is eros, is life-force itself. Or call it prajna, ki, ch'i, the Tao. There are many names. What I do know is that it is always in my art, whether or not my art is about it or not. And because my eros is directed towards same-sex affiliation, I am a "gay poet."

Not that it matters. And not that anybody should care.

Writing Eros