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.

Untitled by David Wojnarowicz

Untitled (One Day This Kid. . . ) by David Wojnarowicz, from 1991

This seems particularly relevant to post these days. And to remind everyone that this great, disturbing artist once lived, who made controversial art about his own sexuality and that of other gay men, and who died of AIDS. This piece has become famous as a postcard, and it seems like it's time to send it out to the world as a postcard again. Now more than ever its message needs repeating.

•

Update, just a few days later:

Interesting story: I reposted Wojnarowicz' art as here, along with the above, and other, comments about the artist, elsewhere on a gay social network website, and got some real flak for it. From New York City fags who believed it was old-fashioned and irrelevant to the present day! When I pointed out the continuity between this and the current spate of gay suicides around bullying, it created a firestorm.

It's like people already want to forget about bullying. Which is something I've written about before: the bullies shout loudly that there is no bullying, and try to shut you down if you say there is. But only the bullies want to "move on" from the bullying and suicide issues. (And why are so many of them avowedly conservative and/or Republican? Just a coincidence?) The fact is, the suicide and bullying issue is one that needs to stay in the public eye. I haven't been an activist in awhile, and I find myself becoming one again, lit on fire by this very issue.

Becoming a Gay Artist

At what age do you become a gay artist?

Is being a gay artist something you always were, something that permeates every aspect of your being, a permanent filter through which you view the world? That's the essentialist argument, argued in the same way, and for similar reasons, that women see the world differently than men, that blacks see the world differently than whites, that Asians see the world differently than Latinos. Many of civil rights arguments are based on essentialist assumptions; many other civil rights arguments area based on our essential Oneness rather than our (essential?) differences. The "gay gene" idea, that being gay is genetic and not determined by choice of will, is an essentialist argument; however, although it is supported by documented research and scientific study, it remains controversial even in LGBT circles because it's not a definitive proof. There remain apparent exceptions. (And we don't really know enough yet about the human genome to be able to be definitive.)

Is becoming a gay artist something you choose, some stance or methodology you learn or adopt, something that is transmitted culturally via role model and learning? That's the constructivist, or cultural, or social/environmental, argument, which views every human behavior as a choice constructed by the individual, a matter of free will and elemental decision. The constructivist argument, of course, is the one that is always used to deny civil rights to LGBT people: since gays and lesbians can choose to be straight, they should. Such is the rhetoric of the religious right, and of some of the more ideologically repressive factions of the psychological profession. Never mind that those psychological theories have been thoroughly discredited, they are still cited by the "ex-gay" movement, which itself has been thoroughly discredited, yet retains followers for ideological and superstitious reasons. (Morals are inherently ideological and tend to be externally proscribed; ethics are inner-self-generated and tend to be pragmatic.)

There are elements in the essentialist camp who use their arguments to shut down discussion and dissent: "That's just the way it is, so shut up about it." As a response to the constructivist anti-LGBT-rights camp, that seems a valid response; the constructivists after all have used their argument to undercut civil rights. But when essentialists direct the "shut up" argument at their own numbers, as a way of quashing dissent, it can cross the line into ideological fascism. The essentialist argument is a strong argument for civil rights, yet it does have some limits, in that free choice cannot be entirely removed from the human equation. The truth is a mix.

In my experience, both of these viewpoints have some validity, and both also remain largely theoretical, neither completely supporting the observed data and relationships. The distinction between these arguments has often been framed as: "Are you a gay artist, or are you an artist who happens to be gay?" Endless discussions, arguments, and dialogues have gone around and around that distinction, never satisfactorily resolving it.

I'm not sure it matters.

For myself, in my own practice, it's best to just go ahead and make art, and not worry about it. For one thing, being gay or not doesn't directly matter, either way, to my making art. I make art, no matter what, whether or not I happen to be thinking about LGBT issues at the moment, and whether or not the art I'm making at the moment contains explicit or implicit elements of gay imagery, iconography, or cultural references. I enjoy photographing the male nude, and I enjoy working with nude male models to achieve the photographic and artistic elements of expression I seek. And I also enjoy making photographs of mountains, sunsets, flowers, trees, buildings, pets, typewriters, and beautifully-arranged furniture displays. Does everything I photograph filter itself through the lens of my gay experience? Does it matter if it does, or doesn't? The more fruitless aspects of identity politics all involve arguing (rather Scholastically, one might add) about one aspect of my life as if it were the only important aspect, or the dominant aspect.

Being gay may well be a dominant aspect of my life, and my art-making, but it is never the only aspect—when I make art, all aspects of my whole self are engaged, focused, involved—and sometimes not the most important aspect. At the same time, I can never fully remove being gay from my art-making, because it is an aspect of my whole self—all aspects of whom are present and engaged, focused and involved, when I'm making art, or when I'm just doing my chores. For myself, I accept this both/and way of looking at the issue as being fundamentally true; where I might typically quibble is where and how much each aspect of the whole is present, or exactly when.

Gay artists have always been able to produce non-gay art. An artist, self-identified as gay or not, who produces homoerotic art will also produce art in which gender identity and sexual orientation have no measurable presence. Is a still life drawing of a vase, an orange, and a pen an inherently gay? The essentialist argument would say, yes it is—when drawn by a gay artist. The essentialists typically raise the issue of "gay sensibility" at this point, which is basically a way of saying that, because you're gay, everything you do is gay, therefore all of your art is produced through a gay sensibility. As though even my most abstract piano music—which is much more directly influenced by Debussy, Messiaen, and Takemitsu, that entire French-Russian-Japanese lineage of influence in contemporary music; rather than by known-to-be-gay composers such as Britten, Corigliano, or Noel Coward—is still gay abstract gay piano gay music. You can see the circularity of this reasoning: the essentialist viewpoint assumes a priori that everything a gay artist will ever do is filtered through a gay sensibility, so everyting you is gay, because you're gay, and because everything you do is gay, then you must be gay. By contrast, the constructivist argument allows for the artist to be able to make a choice about whether to utilize the gay sensibility, or not. Yet I do not entirely embrace the constructivists, nor do I entirely reject the essentialists; again, the truth is both/and.

I do believe that there is a "gay sensibility"—although it's a fuzzy set, whose contents are always-changing and not always clearly known, and it has changeable boundaries that are complex to the point of being fractal. I do believe that my own "gay sensibility" is in operation when I make art that contains homoerotic themes, imagery, or other content. I do believe that my artistic "gay sensibility" probably does add some coloration or shading to even my non-homoerotic art-projects; for example, would I write the abstract piano music that I do if were not who I am, which includes my being gay/bi? There is some truth, I believe, to the idea that a "gay sensibility" leads to art-making that is often more exploratory, experimental, more tradition- and rule-breaking; in part because being gay means being a cultural outsider, or insider/outsider: when you've been positioned as non-normative to the culture, you tend to go looking for yet more non-normative ways to dialogue with and express the culture. Camp and genderfuck are all about mirroring back to the normative culture ways of being non-normative; they are ways of performing the Other, as if in a funhouse mirror.

At the same time, my own "gay sensibility" cannot account for all aspects of my art-making, nor its contents. I am not a stereotype; even within the gay subculture(s) I am not easily categorized into any of the familiar types or stereotypes. Yet I am quite certain, at this point in my life, that my "gay sensibility" of being Other and non-normative deeply affects my creative process, that it has led me to look at the world from subject-subject consciousness rather than subject-object consciousness. It is one root of my empathy, both as a person, and as an artist. In other words, my being gay affects how I go about making art. It affects my approach to making art. At the same time, it does not determine the contents or materials that I use to make art. My being gay might steer my art-making process—and indeed, it seems at times to be so innately bound up with the why of my art-making that I can't easily separate the two—yet my being gay doesn't determine what art I make, what kind of art I make, nor does it determine what genre of art-making I might be working in at the moment. (I practice crop rotation between music, visual, poetry, photography, calligraphy, land art sculpture, woodworking, etc.) So, my being gay seems to affect the why and how of my art-making, but not the when, where, or what.

So perhaps what it is true is that there are aspects of my being gay that are innate, that i was born with, that I have no choice about. At the same time, I have choices I can make about how to express those innate aspects of myself. I have the power to choose what I do with that innate part of myself; and I have the power to choose how I enact, express, present, and perform that innate part of myself, in public and in private. I am gay, and I can choose how I want to act gay, and how gay I want to act. In terms of art-making, then: I am gay, there's no doubt of that, and yet I can choose how "gay" my art is made to be.

Of course, some anti-LGBT constructivists try to hedge their ideological position of moral condemnation by claiming to, in their own words, "Love the sinner, hate the sin." In other words: we don't hate who you are in your inner nature, in your heart, we just hate your attempts to act from your inner nature, from your heart. Your soul is pure, but yet it's not pure because if you do act from your soul we can't approve of it. This variety of ideological hedging is utter bullshit; it communicates an extremely mixed message. It is not unconditional love precisely because it places conditions on loving behaviors.

And then there is Kinsey's continuum of sexual behavior, his infamous seven-position scale, which implies that most people are innately bisexual and choose an identity and orientation based as much on their ideas of who they want to be as upon clinical observation of who they really are. Kinsey's scale leaves the door open for self-delusion, in other words. It allows a man to claim to be completely heterosexual even though he had sex with other boys as a teenager, and still occasionally does so. it allows a woman to claim to be completely lesbian, even though at one point in her life she was married and had children.

Where do you find an artist on Kinsey's scale? Or are they separate axes of knowledge, as I believe they are? They do converge and overlap at points—we are whole beings, not collections of particles—but they don't fully account for one another, and neither is determinative of the other. Where do you find artists on Kinsey's scale? Everywhere.

Perhaps the known exceptions to the essentialist arguments, such as presented in the "gay gene" theory, can be explained by viewing sexual orientation as flexible and fluid rather than fixed. Conventionally, physical gender and sexual orientation may be viewed as biologically fixed, or innate, but gender expression and sexual identity are not. Kinsey's research seems to imply that fluidity in orientation may be the norm, and may change over the course of a lifetime—despite all our attempts to permanently fix an orientation upon ourselves by using a label the way an entomologist might use pins to affix moths to a bulletin board. The labels make us seem more fixed and permanent, more solid and unchanging, than we really are. Since everything is always changing, nothing is immune to change or independent of the ripple effects of changes going on around us. We change, we evolve, we learn, we develop; or we resist change, we fight against it, we deny the possibility of development or personal evolution. Some of the loudest and most repressive voices in the essentialist camp are those who want things to be permanently fixed, always just-so. (Fear of uncertainty and/or change is what often drives the totalitarian impulse.)

In my own experience, although I did not openly come out as gay until I was in my 30s, I have always been more physically and emotionally aroused (excited, if not erect) by viewing naked men than naked women. Yet some naked women do turn me on; and I have had two serious, successful (at the time) loving sexual relationships with women in my life. Nowadays I identify as gay, mostly because it's the easiest of several fuzzy gender-and-orientation categories that one might identify as, but I never forget that my identity as gay is part-innate, part-constructed. What is innate is that I am more sexually attracted, on average, to the male of my species than to the female; what is constructed is everything else. I have never forgotten the formulation of a gay/bi friend, an artist and therapist, whose life and desires and experience were similar to my own; he said to me once, in conversation about the topic of sexual identity, "I tell my straight friends that I'm gay, and I tell my gay friends that I'm bi. It's true, anyway, and it keeps them on their toes."

In some ways, it's more interesting to ask of myself: When did I become an artist? rather than When did I become a gay artist? I can honestly say that I've always been an artist, in that I've always had the instinct for art-making. Regardless of whether it was a childhood crayon drawing or a contemporary computer-assisted musical composition process, there has never been a time that I can recall when I wasn't Making, or if not able to be Making then at least wanting to on some deep level. Making is compulsory: if I'm not able to make something today, a pressure builds up deep inside me, until it can be released as art-making, or some other creative channel. I learned about myself at a very early age that I must let out that need to Make, or it will drive me crazy from the inside out. So, on days I can't make art, or music, or a poem—which are culturally-recognized and -approved, if only marginally -supported) modes of creating tangible art-products—I might peel an orange as beautifully as possible, or rake leaves with full artistic intention, or stack boxes of nails with artistic precision. The content or end-result of what is Made isn't what satisfies the need to make something, it's the process of Making that does.

There's a lot to be told about becoming an artist. At what age did I become a gay artist? At what age did I become an artist?

To be continued.