Open Up the Windows

Because of recent powerful, life-changing events—my illness, first surgery, and recovery, principally—I've been thinking over again what I want to do here. I've decided that I'm going to continue to publish my LGBT related materials here, for the most part, although with a few other goodies, but I'm going to drop my reticence. I'm going to open up the windows and doors and let in all the fresh air and sunlight that I can.

I'm going to be more explicit here, and more personal. I need a place to organize some more personal writings, even some sexually explicit ones, both old and new. More precisely, some personal writings that do not censor themselves with regard to sexual and psychological and spiritual matters. I have a need, at this time, to write through my present life, with nothing held back.

For me sexuality and spirituality are deeply intertwined, and always have been. I want to write more openly and publicly about these, now. I have things to say, some of it no doubt radical and controversial, especially the spiritual materials, which are always more controversial than the sexual, but they need to be said, if only for my own benefit. This process of illness, surgery and recovery has profoundly (and predictably) affected me on many levels, and is in the midst of permanently transforming my life. That process is still ongoing, although I've already sorted out a few things that are really important to me from those that no longer seem so important. Modesty and self-censorship don't nearly as important as they used to; I don't believe I've suddenly become more courageous as a writer, rather I've become less willing to spend any effort on editing myself so as to not offend family and friends.

I need to keep writing the poems, notes, essays, and other pieces that fall under the umbrella of what I am now calling The Surgery Diaries. Last year I began with The Anemia Diaries, but these writings about my medical journey have now become a much deeper, more engaging project. i intend to include here writings and artworks all pertaining to my medical journey, the long chronic illness, the surgery process which I am not done with, and my recovery. I need to write these things for my self first. Not all of it will be pretty, but all of it will be honest. I know I don't have many followers here, yet I do want feedback on this, of whatever kind becomes manifest. I will be posting here more frequently than I have before, no doubt.

As for honesty and explicitness, it really comes from having lost any sense of privacy or personal modesty already. I've previously been a very private person, although I've never been that personally modest.

Consider this scenario: You're in your hospital room the days after surgery, wearing one of those gowns that open in the back. The surgeons and nurses all left up your hem to look at your wound, to change your dressing, occasionally to give you a sponge bath, or check your epidural. You're not wearing anything under the gown. Lots of people see you naked, scarred, vulnerable, and exposed. And you're far from the only patient the nurses and doctors see naked and wounded every hour of every day. There's no point in even trying to be body-shy. You need all your energy for your healing, so wasting energy on inconsequentials drops right off the radar.

I've never been that body-shy anyway, though. As an adult man, I've always had more of a "Body by Buddha" than "Body by Charles Atlas" thing going for me; I'm nothing special, so I don't worry about it. But even as a small boy, I'd never been all that modest about nudity, full or partial. There were summers in my early teens when the only item of clothing I wore for days on end, for as long as I could get away with it, was gym shorts and sneakers. I rarely wear clothes around the house, especially when on my own. With some of my closest friends, my apartments and homes have been a clothing-optional zone for years, anyway.

When I was first home from the hospital, and the home-visit nurses were first getting to know me, one asked me if I wanted privacy for showering, which I do during the process of changing the ostomy bag, which I couldn't do by myself at first. I laughed and said, Look, this is a process in which privacy and body modesty have already gone by the wayside, and as for dignity, well that was pretty much a lost cause right now, too. We all laughed, I dropped my shorts, took a shower, dried off, put my shorts back on, and we proceeded with changing the ostomy bag. At this point, they've all seen me nearly of fully naked anyway, so there's no point in pretending to be shy.

The process of illness and healing has re-sorted my attitudes and priorities. I'm far more likely to answer the door nude than I ever have before, although I do keep clothes on hand. I'm nothing special to look at, as I know only too well, especially now that I have to wear an ostomy bag all the time, and I don't inflict myself on the unprepared. But in truth I don't care anymore: I'm just being polite. If it were an urgent medical matter, I wouldn't bother putting the shorts on first, I'd just answer the door. It's all about priorities.

One major life-lesson that has come out of this process is that what really matters in life is who you love, how you love them, and how you live your life. Everything else is pretty much unimportant by contrast, and not worth spending much energy on.

So I plan to go back through the random notes and jottings I've been writing here and there, from last year's near-death experience from anemia, from the time right before my surgery, up to the present. A lot of these are going to be more like diary or journal entries than I've ever posted before; but I want to organize and edit and present them in an organized manner, mostly so I can keep a log of the changes I am going through. I want to collect and compile what I'm going through, for no other reason than to gather it all in one place.

I used to use my long-standing Road Journal and Road Journal podcast archives for this purpose, but I realize now that the way I write and present this material has changed. My approach has changed. I don't feel like I've abandoned the Road Journal, although I'm way behind on updating it. That's an ongoing memoir project that still has value to me. At some point I still intend to bring it up to the present date. But even the Road Journal left some things out. I was always aware that it was a public forum, with a fairly large following, so I didn't talk too personally about some topics. That's all changed now. I don't feel the need to avoid any topic, for the duration of my illness and recovery.

Still, I find myself regarding The Surgery Diaries as a separate writing project, like a chapbook of poems on one theme, separated out from the general run of writing. That's my approach, here and now. And I intend to be more honest and explicit than ever before, regarding both the good and the bad in my life. I need to do this, as I said, as a way of tracking my own progress as I go through this extended healing process. I want to be able to sort things out in my own mind, and writing about them, and making art about them, remains one of the best tools I have for that.

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!

Reading "Howl" in the Men's Room

Evan J. Peterson reads Howl in the men's room of a Seattle gay bar. What better place for a poetry reading?

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.

Happy Birthday, Allen Ginsberg

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does.
—Allen Ginsberg

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A memorial for Peter Orlovsky, Allen's longtime companion.

Thinking of Walt Whitman

Whitman photographed late in life, at his home in Camden by artist Thomas Eakins

Walt Whitman's 190th birthday was yesterday, May 31. Whitman was city-born and city-bred, apprenticed to a printer, made his living largely by working in publishing and the newspaper business. He lived many years in Brooklyn, and later in Washington, D.C, and ended his life in his home in Camden, NJ.

Yet Whitman is also the poet of the open road. His multitudes include those who live in the countryside as well as the city. His poems extol the open air, the beauty and virtue of the country life. He encompasses all of North America in one of his famous lists in his poems, in which he says how he is in all these places, and has traveled in person to many of them. I feel this directly for myself: I've now traveled to many places in North America, enough to have a feel for all its varied climates and terrains, its open lands and various kinds of people. It's a big continent, and I'm not done exploring it—or making photographs of its beauty—but I feel as though Whitman is a fellow-traveler, a road-companion, whenever I journey off on another distance-eating roadtrip.

One section of Song of Myself is a set-piece of young men bathing in a stream in the countryside. The nude bathers are observed by a young woman, who caresses them with her gaze as though she physically moved among them:

Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,
Twenty-eight young men and all so friendly;
Twenty-eight years of womanly life and all so lonesome.
She owns the fine house by the rise of the bank,
She hides handsome and richly drest aft the blinds of the window.
Which of the young men does she like the best?
Ah the homeliest of them is beautiful to her.
Where are you off to, lady? for I see you,
You splash in the water there, yet stay stock still in your room.
Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.
The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.
An unseen hand also pass’d over their bodies,
It descended tremblingly from their temples and ribs.
The young men float on their backs, their white bellies bulge to the sun,
they do not ask who seizes fast to them,
They do not know who puffs and declines with pendant and bending arch,
They do not think whom they souse with spray.
—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself (1855)

It's not hard to imagine that the young woman in the poem is standing in for Whitman himself: as observer, as viewpoint character for the moment, as one whose eyes caress, and who would touch also with fingers. Why did Whitman present himself as a woman in the poem in this way? It is one common way gay that writers have always coded their artistic work: by presenting it as being heterosexual, by simply flipping gender. And rather than using the personal "I" as he does in so much of Song of Myself, the poet also codes a third-person viewpoint into this watching woman, thus stepping further back into coded acceptable literary norms. Yet I also think of the gender-blending that gay men experience in themselves: the mix of masculine and feminine aspects of self in their spirit and flesh alike. This section of poetry was the direct inspiration for Thomas Eakins' well-known painting The Swimming Hole.


Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole (1885)

One edition I own of Whitman's Complete Poems is decorated with this painting on its front cover.

Walt Whitman is my fellow-traveler. He accompanies me on this journey—not least because he is the poet of inclusion, of taking into himself all of life, all of experience, all masculine and feminine, and embracing them equally—not least for all that, but also because I am a reflection of his lifelong quest to express, artistically, his love for other men. We are alike, or rather I follow in his footsteps, in our love of men and our use of art to depict that love. We seek similar inclusions. I cannot but reflect his art in my own.

I wrote over a year ago my own Ode to Walt Whitman, which says what I feel about Whitman right now, still, better than I can say in prose. Maybe these sorts of thoughts need to be poems, not essays. I will struggle with this for now, and maybe turn to poems later.

And there remain mysteries, perhaps visionary, even mystical parts of life and art, in Whitman's life and work:

One of the parts of Whitman's life-story that I have been thinking recently about was his visit to Louisiana, sometime before ora round his first publishing efforts. We don't have a great deal of information about this trip to the deep south; Whitman himself didn't discuss it much. It has been speculated that the poet underwent a personal crisis there and then, which led to his own opening up—spiritually, sexually, and as a writer. It was the 1850s when Whitman came into full flower as a physical (sexual) and mental (artistic) person. After the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, which was the single most expanded edition in the book's publishing history, there was a turning-inward, a self-censoring of the fearless sexual openness of the 1860 edition, represented in the two sections called Children of Adam and Calamus. Starting with the 1867 edition, Whitman rewrote some of the poems to be more covert about their homosexual content, and dropped many entirely. But what draws me to the 1855 edition over all the others is this very open sexuality, this male-male sexuality; of course I'm not alone in this. What happened to Whitman in the south? Was it a mystical experience? A sexual awakening? An artistic explosion? Some combination of all of these? The only real clue we have is what Whitman himself says, obliquely, in one of the best-known of the Calamus poems:

I Saw in Louisiana a Live-Oak Growing

I saw in Louisiana a live-oak growing,
All alone stood it and the moss hung down from the branches,
Without any companion it grew there uttering joyous of dark green,
And its look, rude, unbending, lusty, made me think of myself,
But I wonder'd how it could utter joyous leaves standing alone there
without its friend near, for I knew I could not,
And I broke off a twig with a certain number of leaves upon it and
twined around it a little moss,
And brought it away, and I have placed it in sight in my room,
It is not needed to remind me as of my own dear friends,
(For I believe lately I think of little else than of them,)
Yet it remains to me a curious token, it makes me think of manly love;
For all that, and though the live-oak glistens there in Louisiana
solitary in a wide in a wide flat space,
Uttering joyous leaves all its life without a friend a lover near,
I know very well I could not.

Homosexual literature has often been coded; what remains startlingly contemporary about Whitman was how often he could be explicit rather than coded, especially in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, the most expansive, sexually-inclusive edition of the several that Whitman published in his lifetime. There are layers of meaning in this poem, it seems to me, that refer to love, to bonding, to not only sexuality but spiritual companionship and connection with another. I view it as a poem of marriage, in a way.


Whitman with Peter Doyle

Of course, Whitman did have several longtime companions in his life; Horace Traubel was the last one; but Whitman was often photographed with or wrote in letters about his other close friends, his comrades, his serial beloveds.

What I feel connected to, in Whitman—and what I wrote of in my own Ode—is this very comradeship he speaks of. It moves in cycles in my own life, which has often been virtually celibate and monastic, but rarely lonely. I too see the tree uttering joyous life without a friend or lover near—and I too know that I want that friend or lover near, as Whitman does, whether or not I can survive alone or not. There is surviving, and there is living. I want to live. I want to live on the open road, and return to my small town, as I have done before, changed utterly by my travels, yet still myself, to return to my small-town homeplace enriched by experience, enriched by wisdom in describing experience such as is found in Whitman's most homoerotic poems.

Book Reviews: Sex, Music & Poetry

An ongoing series of short reviews of interesting LGBT books from my personal library.



David Guy, The Red Thread of Passion: Spirituality and the paradox of sex. (1999) This book covers a lot of psychological terrain, and asks many questions important to us all, LGBT or otherwise. About half of the people profiled, interviewed, or examined are queer or bi or openly affirming; including Walt Whitman, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Kramer, and Alan Watts. Basically this book revolves around a key question: is sexuality the enemy that must be subdued before one can have a powerful spiritual practice? or is it rather a vehicle for enlightenment, as well as a powerful creative force in its own right? There are no simple or definitive answers to these questions—but there are long-enduring traditions of spirituality that accept sexuality and harnesses its power, ranging from Tantric rites through affirming literature. The author responds to the question by focusing on his own life and spiritual practice, and by examining the lives and work of people who were pioneers about affirming that sex and spirit are not-two, but one. Sex workers are discussed as well as poets and meditators; this is no cerebral, academic book. There is understanding that the reconciliation of sex and spirit will always be paradoxical, as is recognized in the examples of several Zen masters who were promiscuous rather than celibate; and in the Zen koan that gives the book its title: "Why is it that the most clear-eyed monk cannot sever the red thread of passion between his legs?" It's part of the paradox, not surprisingly, that there is a great deal of mysticism around sex: the sexual experience itself can be a mystical experience, with all that that entails. Very highly recommended.

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John Gill, Queer Noises: Male and female homosexuality in Twentieth Century music. (1995) One of the first of its kind, and still one of the better ones, this book looks at a wide range of composers, performers, and musicians, all queer, all famous. The book is easy and fun reading without being fluffy; Gill can be very opinionated, and ask hard questions. Some of the names covered here in the book's 18 chapters: Benjamin Britten, John Cage, Boy George, Pet Shop Boys, Gary Burton, Bessie Smith, Billy Strayhorn. Some of the chapters are studies of the impact of queer people on specific musical genres—but Gill also examines the gay cultural response to performers who were inspired by gay subcultures, or inspired them in return, by emphasizing sexual ambiguity or metrosexuality: David Bowie, Madonna, Miles Davis, Sun Ra, Janis Joplin, etc. There is also extensive reporting on pop music's connection to civil rights organizing, LGBT activism, and queer political responses to social problems; the book actually grew out of political activism, which accounts for some of its tone at times. Nonetheless, there's lots of meat in this book, even as the writing style is breezy and quick. It's the sort of book LGBTs into all kinds of music will greatly enjoy, and probably learn something they'd never known about before.

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David Rees, Words and Music. (1993) David Rees was an influential critic, gay author, and reviewer in Britain until his death just as this book was published. What we have here are almost two dozen longer review-essays, most never published prior to this book, covering both music and literature. Sometimes Rees is a bit harsh in his opinions, but in many ways I think his critical assessments are right on target. (He explains just why Edmund White is overrated as a gay fiction writer; an assessment I've always shared, but could never articulate why exactly, before Rees explained the problem.) What I like about Rees is his ability to separate the artist's reputation from the quality of each individual work: where a writer succeeds, Rees can show why, and where a composer may have in fact done something completely original, you find out why; simultaneously, weak spots, weak books, bad compositions, are not ignored but called what they are. Fans of certain writers and composers will no doubt feel some ire if one of their idols is chastened in one these 20 essays; but you'll also be introduced to assessments of the artists in question from a gay perspective, which was completely new when Rees was writing, and is still a fresh viewpoint.

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Gary Schmidgall, Walt Whitman: A gay life. (1997) The first and still singular study to look at Whitman's life and poetry from an explicitly gay perspective, explaining the powerful connections between Whitman's life as a lover of men and his legacy as a landmark, paradigm-changing poet. There are four major sections in the book, roughly chronologically showing Whitman's growth as an artist and person. But there is also a personal essay from the author that tells of the impact of Whitman on the author's life; and a section devoted to exploring the similarities and differences between Whitman and Oscar Wilde, who Schmidgall has also written about. This is a very long book, citing its material rigorously if not tediously. It draws extensively from Whitman's correspondence, private journals, and poetry; there's no doubt material in here you've never heard of before. Schmidgall's argument is compelling, and well-supported by the documents: that Whitman was a very sexual man, ardently pursuing his love affairs which in turn fueled his creative energy: ecstasy pursued and achieved in worlds both personal and literary. I won't say that this is the easiest book you'll ever read about Whitman, but once you get into it, it's a real page-turner, very engrossing. Highly recommended.