A new queer world: how poetry remade gay life [long read]
A new queer world: how poetry remade gay life [long read]
In San Francisco and Boston after the Second World War, gay and lesbian poets came together to build a new queer literature and a new queer world. They came together both as activists and as poets. When activism failed, or visibility was denied, poetry provided a through line with a deeper and longer sense of queer history, real or imagined, from Whitman to Wilde, Sappho to Gertrude Stein. The underground status of early queer activism was matched by the DIY publishing ethos of the poetic avant-garde associated with the ‘New American Poetry’, an umbrella term for a diverse set of writers brought together in a famed anthology edited by gay San Francisco writer and editor Donald Allen. Passed from hand to hand, smuggled into bookstores or in private mailing networks, the semi-samizdat activity of little magazines, small press pamphlets, and beautiful letterpress editions matched the distribution models of early gay and lesbian publications like One and The Ladder.
It was a poet who published the first public coming out essay in modern American letters. Written by poet, anarchist, and esoteric scholar Robert Duncan,’ ‘The Homosexual in Society’ appeared in 1944 when he was in his mid-20s. The poem was more a universalist critique of upper-class white gay male identity than it was a simple affirmation, using sexuality to challenge the established order of capitalist society, and this radical strain was essential to the work of the poets among whose Duncan’s work was central. Duncan was part of the self-declared ‘Berkeley Renaissance’, a group of anarchists, bohemians, and activists in California. Duncan and fellow poets Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer rubbed shoulders with a young Philip K. Dick and anarchist theorist Paul Goodman, as they created their own vision of a queer poetry that would reinvent ideas of love, sexuality, and human society.
Over in Boston, these poets had links to the so-called ‘‘Occult School’’, another group of gay poets who ha’d emerged amongst the scenes of sex work, bohemia, and queer love on Beacon Hill, a neighbourhood under early threat of gentrifying destruction. Circulating among queer bars, on the fringes of academia, and in the radical collective education experiment of Black Mountain College, poets John Wieners, Stephen Jonas, Ed Marshall and Gerrit Lansing gathered around queerness, magick, Aleister Crowley, and jazz. They produced their own magazines, reading groups, and ‘magic evenings’, reading and living poetry in an atmosphere of underclass solidarity, in the face of the police and the mental health institutions that sanctioned medical torture such as electroshock therapy. As the ‘50s became the ‘60s and the great social movements for race, sexuality, and class grew, some died, some disappeared, some kept writing.
At Howard University, Judy Grahn participated in the Civil Rights movement and discovered lesbian feminism when her teacher, Nathan Hare, showed his students the lesbian magazine The Ladder as an example of comparative activism. Moving to the Bay Area, where Hare had helped set up the first Black Studies department in the country on the back of student activism, she and others were involved in solidarity actions for the Black Panthers and consciousness raising groups, out of which emerged Bay Area Women’s Gay Liberation.
As it had for the gay writers of the Berkeley Renaissance, poetry proved central to the emerging lesbian movement. Grahn’s ‘The Common Woman Poems’ were printed and bootlegged on fridges, tacked to walls, and handed out on the streets. In this era, it was poems as much as speeches, manifestos, or novels that provided the movement with its theory and its practice. The Women’s Press collective, and gay magazines like Gay Sunshine in San Francisco and Fag Rag in Boston published with an open, anarchist-leaning focus. Anticipating the abolitionist goals of today, in 1972 Fag Rag presented a radical list of demands to the Democratic National Convention including prison abolition, the disbanding of the military, and recognition of gender fluidity.
Poetry and poets were at the centre of community-building institutions, whether through small presses such as Kitchen Table Press, through public readings or private discussions. The African American socialist feminist group Combahee River Collective pioneered intersectional analyses, organising around serial murders of Black women in Boston, with the support of Audre Lorde, who came down from New York and wrote her great and moving poem ‘Need’ in support. Lorde’s ‘sister love’ Pat Parker spoke out firmly in San Francisco. Good Gay Poets, the small press associated with Fag Rag, published the first book by an out gay Black male poet in the States, Adrian Stanford’s criminally ignored Black and Queer, alongside work by Combahee associate Stephania Byrd and Native American poet-activist Maurice Kenny.
As with the Civil Rights Movement from which it emerged, as queer institutions achieved mainstream success and legal gains, the emergence of a middle-class and of those in positions of power too often overlooked those from whom the movement had grown: the grass roots, the underclass, the poets, the junkies, the homeless. Poetry was a place for them to have a voice, against respectability politics and against selling out. In Boston, Fag Ragger Charlie Shively symbolically burned his bible, his Harvard degree, and his insurance card at a protest against the homophobia of the church and state. In San Francisco, the White Night Riots broke out after the murder of Harvey Milk, providing a symbol of resistance as the cultural backlash against a decade of gains from feminism, Black Power, and gay liberation, set in under the new cowboy president Ronald Reagan. Poets were at the centre of coalition-building efforts such as the Left Write conference in San Francisco, which brought together writers from diverse communities to challenge the rise of the far right.
In the midst of all this, the community was hit by a fresh crisis. At first little known or understood, the spread of HIV-AIDs gave weight to the Reaganite backlash and exposed the sharp divisions of healthcare provision that marginalized communities have always suffered. As AIDS became inescapable, poetry reflected the crisis, giving vent to what Douglas Crimp famously described as the twinned goals of “mourning and militancy”. Poetry (as well as song) testimonies became a central way for the community to gather and reflect at the all-too-frequent funerals and memorial ceremonies. In a recent book, poet Pamela Sneed describes her role as what she calls a “funeral diva” seeking to remember the dead and to inspire, exhort, and comfort the living. Bruce Boone, one of the co-founders of the San Francisco queer writing tendency known as ‘New Narrative’, worked as a carer at the Zen AIDS center run by Zen master and former drag queen Issan Dorsey.
As the joyous momentum of the gay liberation era was lost, others sought to retain the transgressive edge of early activism. Another New Narrative writer, Robert Glück was involved in the first act of civil disobedience against the government’s handling of AIDS. This action emerged from the Affinity Group movement of non-violent civil disobedience against the arms industry and the military industrial complex. Blockading the road near the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a nuclear weapons research lab, the Enola Gay Faggot Affinity Group—punningly named for the plane that dropped the A-bomb on Japan—staged a ‘Blood and Money‘ ritual, pouring blood on the road and chanting “money for AIDS, not war”. New Narrative writers wrote some of the great books of the AIDS era: Dodie Bellamy uses the metaphor of the vampire alongside cut-ups and snapshots of bohemian life in San Francisco in her Letters of Mina Harker; Kevin Killian’s Argento Series stages the pandemic through the giallo movies of Dario Argento; Glück’s own recent About Ed memorializes his former partner, the artist Ed Aulerich-Sugai, ending with an astonishing fifty-page sequence constructed from years’’ worth of Ed’s dream journals.
It’s easy to say that, now AIDS is relatively under control for white middle-class gay men, we have entered a new era. But, while these gains are very real, they are unevenly distributed. Today the victims of AIDS are overwhelmingly the poor and people of colour in the States, and across the African continent. The Military Industrial Complex continues apace, in bloody wars and the provision of arms for dictatorships and corrupt governments worldwide, as the Cold War positions of the past fifty years reassert themselves in new form. The poets of the past, and their inheritors today, refuse to be misled by superficial gains, producing writing that continues to remind us of the costs and inequalities of gay liberation. We live in a world of staggering inequality, an inequality revealed by the uneven handling of the Covid pandemic, and by the concentration of the majority of the world’s wealth in an ever-smaller percentile of the world’s population. The queer- and trans-phobic backlash in the United States continues apace as books are banned and the battleground shifts from the discourse of sexuality to that of gender, a replay of the old culture wars fought in the Reagan Era. Meanwhile, cities so central to gay liberation literature like Boston and San Francisco, have been transformed almost beyond recognition, with the surging wealth of big tech—and its ties to the Trumpian right—occurring just a few kilometers away from the worsening effects of the opioid crisis.
As gentrification continues to alter the communities and neighborhoods from which activism emerged almost beyond recognition, the poetry of the Berkeley Renaissance, the Occult School of Boston, Fag Rag, the Combahee River Collective, New Narrative and so many more accesses a different timeline, a different way of looking at history, a different embodiment of what it means to exist and to fight for another world. This poetry is no historical relic but a guide for how to survive and a spur for how to fight in the present.
Featured image by Roger W. via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0.