IN PLATO’S Symposium, Phædrus maintains that love is the quality “most powerful to assist men in the acquisition of merit and happiness, both here and hereafter.” In gay American love poetry, one does find happiness, even in a world determined to undermine all expression of joyous gay union. We find renegade love poems and those about settling down with one life partner. Recently we see poems delineating the many challenges of interracial gay relationships. And we find, as Assoto Saint reminds us in The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets, “sensual pæans to defiant sex and love in the era of AIDS.”
If poetry anthologies are any indication of what various segments of society are thinking about at a given moment in time, gay anthologies show not only the importance of rendering visible a love continually at risk. They also trace an arc of how our concept of gay love has changed over time. The first gay male poetry anthologies, which began appearing with the 1973 publication of The Male Muse followed by Angels of the Lyre (1975) and Orgasms of Light (1977), contain many poems that show gay men’s search for an identity. Their narrators were mostly looking for love in all the wrong places (bars, locker rooms, bath houses, rest stops) and ending up with all the wrong people (hustlers, soldiers, navy recruits, underage boys), but these books created a gay male presence in the post-Stonewall literary world as editors and publishers risked job loss, family censure, and even physical danger to bring them to light. By the time The Son of the Male Muse appeared in 1983, the poems showed a wider array of subject matter and a greater degree of self-realization—bolstered by the non-trivial fact that each poet’s photograph appeared alongside his poems. If, as Pausanias maintained in The Symposium, “a love which courts no concealment is reckoned among us nobler than a love which shuns observation,” then this step away from anonymity was a step up in nobility. Of the many influences to appear in these early poems, none is more prominent than that of Walt Whitman. His presence can be observed not only in the use of titles such as “Letter to Walt Whitman” and “Some Notes on Whitman,” but also in the bold stance these poets—and their successors—have taken toward homosexual love. Walt Whitman In this, the sesquicentennial year of the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, it is amply clear that American gay love poetry was conceived and executed with breathtaking precision by Walt Whitman. Yet his most famous love poems—the tender “We Two Boys Together Clinging,” the barroom cruise poem “A Glimpse,” the Civil War elegy “Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night,” and even overtly sexual poems such as “The Sleepers” and the “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore” section of “Song of Myself”—pale in comparison to a poem that Whitman did not publish in its entirety in his lifetime, “Live-Oak, with Moss.” While his other love poems did lay the groundwork, especially in relation to the use of open-form style and the unabashed treatment of homosexual love themes, “Live-Oak, with Moss” presents in twelve linked sections a wide range of experiences common to gay relationships, including their spiritual, emotional, intellectual, and physical dimensions. And since he considered himself a universal man, his experiences in male love—from longing through joy, sexual passion, affection, and fulfillment to bitter isolation upon being rejected—is probably familiar to many of us today. “Live-Oak, with Moss” is a poem so intimate and explicitly homoerotic that Whitman published only some sections of it in his lifetime, leaving the complete poem in a notebook that wasn’t discovered until the mid-20th century. Lines like the following show why: What think you I have taken my pen to record? Critics from Whitman’s time onward have tried to downplay the homosexuality in his work, but it’s obvious that he’s describing more than mere friendship in “Live-Oak, with Moss.” The poem concerns the love Whitman had for a man who left him for reasons that may only be surmised. The man was probably Fred Vaughan, whom Whitman apparently met at Pfaff’s, a bohemian (read: “gay”) bar once located on Broadway between Houston and Bleeker Streets in New York City. From 1856 to 1859, Whitman lived on Classon Avenue in Brooklyn, domiciling there with Vaughn during some of this time. This period corresponds to the years during which Whitman appears to have written not only “Live-Oak, with Moss” but many of the Calamus poems as well, which contributed to his reputation as a writer of what was then considered “obscene” verse. Vaughn entered into an unhappy marriage on May 3, 1862, but not before exchanging with Whitman a series of passionate letters (compiled in Calamus Lovers by Charley Shively, who says point blank that “Fred inspired Whitman to write the Calamus poems,” of which sections from “Live-Oak, with Moss” are a part). Indeed the poem itself may be read as a series of love letters. The twelve sections describe a trajectory of emotions, by turns ecstatic and painful, for a type of relationship that society had yet to define. In acute detail, Whitman examines a gay relationship nearly half a century before the period during which Michel Foucault believed that the concept of “gay identity” came into existence. In “Live-Oak, with Moss,” Whitman shows that, as early as the 1850’s, he was aware of his homosexuality. As critic Robert K. Martin stated in his 1979 classic The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, “Prior to Whitman there were homosexual acts but no homosexuals.” “Live-Oak” proves Martin correct, for in the opening section the poem tells us that as “the flames of me … burn … for his love whom I love,” Whitman will “seek my life-long lover.” He goes further in section II by indicating that he cannot be fully alive and whole without his lover, wondering, when he sees an oak tree standing solitary in a field, “how it could utter joyous leaves … without its friend, its lover—For I knew I could not.” He breaks off a branch and wraps a bit of moss around it, emblematic of the erotic pose of twining one’s legs and arms around another’s body, and states that this image “makes me think of manly love.” Here there is no question that Whitman defines, and throughout the poem struggles with, his self-identity as a gay man. By the poem’s third section he’s waiting with great anticipation for his lover to arrive. Nature is shown as a projection of Whitman’s happiness at the prospect of reunion with his lover, for we find him “inhaling sweet breath,” “wander[ing]alone over the beach, and undressing, bath[ing], laughing with the waters.” The interaction between the waiting lover and nature suggests Whitman’s conception of his homosexual relationship as a natural variant of its heterosexual counterpart. Then, “at evening, came my friend”: And that night, while all was still, I heard the waters roll slowly continually up the shores The speaker’s anxiety concerning the previous absence of his love has now been resolved—at least for a single night. In the next section we find Whitman “sit[ting]alone, yearning and pensive,” perhaps in recognition of his minority status. For the America he loves and believes in would, he knows, berate, condemn, and perhaps even jail him for his desires. This leads to the logical progression in section V and a major theme of “Live-Oak, with Moss”: that Whitman will choose love over fame and stop writing poems. Given Whitman’s determination to become “a bard … commensurate with a people,” this willingness to throw in the towel may strike the reader as shocking. But that is what we have in section V: Take notice, you Kanuck woods—and you, Lake Huron—and all that with you roll toward Niagara—and you Niagara also, We know that Whitman’s continual obsession in his lifetime was the eight or nine (depending how one counts) editions of Leaves of Grass, to which he was fully devoted from the early 1850’s until his death in 1892. Here in this poem, if we take him literally, he contemplates quitting writing in order to devote himself entirely to loving another man: “I am indifferent to my own songs—I am to go with him I love, and he is to go with me,/ It is to be enough for each of us that we are together—We never separate again.” Yet just as soon as Whitman made his choice of life over art, his lover severed the relationship and departed, thus saving the greatest book of American poems. This breakup had severe repercussions, and in section VIII we find Whitman uncharacteristically depressed, “heavy-hearted,” “leaning my face in my hands. … For he, the one I cannot content myself without—soon I saw him content himself without me.” While enduring “[s]ullen and suffering hours,” Whitman speaks the intimate thoughts of a man who, like many men after him, recognizes that he’s gay. And while it’s clear that Whitman struggles with his sexual orientation, he ultimately accepts it: “I am ashamed—but it is useless—I am what I am.” He goes on to ask himself a question many gays, upon similar realization, ask themselves: “Is there even one other like me—distracted—his friend, his lover, lost to him? … Does he see himself reflected in me? In these hours does he see the face of his hours reflected?” In classic Whitman stance, he speaks directly to later generations of gay men and anticipates future gay poets, directing them to include in their poems both gay subject matter and everyday speech. “Live-Oak, with Moss” was lost until Fredson Bowers discovered Whitman’s notebook and published the complete poem in his 1955 Whitman’s Manuscripts: Leaves of Grass (1860). By the 1994 publication of W. W. Norton’s American Literature, Volume 1, the poem finally received its proper acclaim when the editors introduced it as “a gay manifesto.” It cannot be denied that even without the publication of “Live-Oak, with Moss,” Whitman’s influence on gay poets has been inestimable. We see it, for example, in the poetry of Allen Ginsberg, whose long-lined style, frank inclusion of gay themes, and frequent mention of Whitman established a direct line back to America’s first poet of homosexual love. Allen Ginsberg Whitman’s influence on gay love poetry may be seen in writers from various post-WWII schools, including the Black Mountain College group, the San Francisco Renaissance group, the Harlem Renaissance-influenced poets, the New York Poets, the Boston-based Confessionals, and the Beat Generation, of which Allen Ginsberg was a part. It may be argued that Ginsberg is Whitman’s primary 20th century inheritor, but let me start by mentioning a different poet, Hart Crane, for comparative purposes. Of those who followed Whitman, we may note two primary divisions, one represented by Crane and the other by Ginsberg. Crane, who was essentially a non-denominational religious poet, was “the overt Whitmanian,” in Harold Bloom’s words, who had a “personal project, in renewal of Whitman’s: to fuse the myth of America with a realized homoeroticism.” Crane reconstituted Whitman’s elegiac mode found in such masterpieces as “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” and, as we have seen, “Live-Oak, with Moss,” creating what Crane calls in a letter written in 1922 “interior form.” In imbuing “words themselves with a peculiarity of meaning,” he writes what one critic terms “a poetics of privacy.” He takes Whitman’s elegiac mode and writes in a decidedly un-Whitman-like style, highly metaphorical and associative, in his great love poems, such as “Voyages I–VI,” and in a work called “Episode of Hands,” a clearly homoerotic poem that he did not publish in his lifetime. Crane basically hid his homosexuality from view through his associative method—and never came to terms with it in his private life either, committing suicide in 1933 by jumping off a ship. This method, which was the antithesis of political expression, traveled from Crane through the “language poets” of the 1970’s and on to those poets today who emphasize architectural construction and the material nature of words over clarity of expression. On the other side of the æsthetic divide we find Allen Ginsberg. There are not, thankfully, many recent poets, alive or dead, whose work has led to the arrest of their publisher (though if we hold our breath the “Patriot” Act could begin to produce witch hunts reminiscent of the 1950’s). But that’s what happened in 1957 when City Lights published Ginsberg’s Howl. The exuberant energy found in Whitman is raised to maniacal heights in Howl and other poems that continued Whitman’s project of opening the way for direct, risky, political, desperate, and sonically evocative American poetry. Of the large number of Ginsberg’s love poems published in 1984’s Collected Poems: 1947–1980, one of the most provocative and moving is “Many Loves” (not to be confused with a poem of that same title included in Straight Hearts’ Delight: Love Poems and Selected Letters, by Ginsberg and his lover Peter Orlovsky). “Many Loves” is a brilliant, multi-layered exploration of Ginsberg’s deep affection for and sexual attraction to his fellow Beat, the hunky Neal Cassady. Withheld from publication until 1984, Ginsberg tells us in the preface to his Collected Poems, “for reasons of prudence and modesty” (was Ginsberg capable of either of these qualities?), “Many Loves” is a poem of spiritual and sexual energy—and one of the great gay love poems of the past quarter-century. Taking a line from Whitman for his epigraph—“Resolved to sing no songs henceforth but those of manly attachment” (found in the first Calamus poem, “In Paths Untrodden”)—Ginsberg tells in proud, uncensored detail of his “first erotic encounter with a lifelong friend”: Neal Cassady was my animal: he brought me to my knees What Ginsberg does after this provocative setup, with its equal emphasis on Cassady’s body and his mind, is to give us anything but a simple sex poem. The two men lay on a cot that was obviously too small for them both, and Ginsberg “huddled and balanced on the edge, and kept distance” from the primarily heterosexual Cassady. We find Ginsberg “withdrawn” both emotionally and physically, on account of not being able to love the man of his dreams. But Cassady, “seeing my fear stretched out his arm, and put it around my breast/ Saying ‘Draw near me’ and gathered me in upon him.” What follows is described as a moment of “sexual tenderness,” as Ginsberg’s “soul melted”: So gentle the man, so sweet the moment, so kind the thighs that nuzzled against me smooth-skinned powerful, warm by my legs The poem ends with Ginsberg, giddy, “naked at long last with angel & geek & athlete & hero and brother and boy of my dreams,” telling us he “[t]ook up his hard-on and held it, feeling it throb and pressing my own at his knee & breathing showed him I needed him.” The mind, conversation, the soul, male-on-male tenderness, and the need that arrives at the penultimate line—all make this poem a complex exploration of male bonding, placing it in the company of Whitman’s “Live-Oak, with Moss.” In its explicitness, “Many Loves” continues where Whitman left off with his suggestive “that night I was happy,” and also hints at the despair Whitman expressed, since the union Ginsberg appeared to have had with Cassady occurred once or twice only, leaving him despondent and lonely during the ensuing nights “without a friend, a lover, near.” Paul Monette Since Ginsberg, the most important force to shape gay love poetry has been AIDS. In response to the unrelenting tragedy, gay men wrote an enormous number of highly accomplished and harrowing poems, many of them published in anthologies such as Things Shaped in Passing: More ‘Poets for Life’ Writing from the AIDS Pandemic (1997), edited by Michael Klein and Richard McCann. These poems testify not only to the profound love men feel for each other, but also to the extreme rage we expressed at mistreatment by some sectors of society and by a government that tried its best to ignore us. Two words that I associate with Whitman’s “Live-Oak, with Moss” seem to capture the poetic reaction to AIDS: devotion and engagement. They apply especially to the early years of the calamity, epitomized by Paul Monette’s Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog, arguably the best book of poems to emerge from the epidemic. Published in 1988, these rageful and tender poems not only chronicle Monette’s loss of his lover of eleven years, Roger Horwitz, but also capture, in moments of supreme emotional, physical, and spiritual engagement, the immediate experience of the epidemic—the longing and despair at being left alone, the bitter isolation due to society’s neglect, the modicum of hope sparked by the “sudden noon photograph/ the two of us arm in arm in the cloister” in the book’s final poem. The opening poem, “Here,” is an anguished cry of lament from the early AIDS years. It takes place in the cemetery after Horwitz has died: everything extraneous has burned away… Death has already severed the writer’s life in two, and his California paradise, complete with Jaguar, Laurel Canyon home, swimming pool, pet dog, and two successful careers, has been lost to the ravages of disease. From this searing opening, we find Monette bereft, with nothing to lose, in a stance of defiance, as if daring death to come one step closer. The poem rises to a fevered cry as Monette converses with his dead lover. “Rog,” he asks, “who will/ play boy with me now that I bucket with tears/ through it all when I’d cling beside you sobbing/ you’d shrug it off with the quietest I’m still/ here.” In speaking to Horwitz (with the reader overhearing), Monette could be King Lear howling for naught against a brutal storm, or Achilles lying face down in the dirt where his lover is now buried. What’s left is the realization that Monette too will die, the only satisfaction being that he then will lie beside Horwitz, a sentiment conveyed in the poem’s brutally ironic final lines: but it doesn’t These lines may be seen as a reconfiguration of Whitman’s “Hours continuing long, sore and heavy-hearted,/ Hours of the dusk, when I withdraw to a lonesome and unfrequented spot, seating myself, leaning my face in my hands.” Each feels deserted by a lover and faces only “sullen and suffering hours.” Monette’s National Book Award-winning Becoming a Man opens with an epigraph from Whitman beginning, “I hear it was charged against me that I sought to destroy institutions,” and ends with the establishment of “[t]he institution of the dear love of comrades.” Monette recounts how his doctor suggested that he write about Horwitz and AIDS. “Two weeks later,” Monette says in an interview, “I was sitting in the cemetery before I went back to Massachusetts to visit my parents, and I realized that if the plane crashed, I would have left no record of Roger and me and what we’d been through. So that day, in the cemetery, I wrote a poem which was the first poem of Love Alone.” Monette’s love poems shattered the stereotypes of men being unable to stay together for better or worse, replacing it with a riveting example of an abiding love between men that continued beyond the grave. JUDY GRAHN once said, “Poetry predicts us, tells us where we are going next.” These are words to ponder as anti-gay hate crimes rise and the religious Right organizes to ban same-sex marriage, as states like Florida end official support of gay events and counties in Maryland and Georgia ban gay-straight alliance clubs. Even against this alarming backdrop, a number of younger gay poets are writing hyper-lyrical poetry involving sleek, flippant word play. During these times, one would wish that our poetry could be more, not less, confrontational, that it could push for more engagement with society. Some recent books—David Groff’s Theory of Devolution, Brian Teare’s The Room Where I Was Born, and Aaron Smith’s Blue on Blue Ground come to mind—do encourage us to choose public involvement over clever language play. We now have the option of writing about many forms of love, including our desire to be married, the joys of raising kids, and our respect for the female body. But where are our poems about loving Iraqis as well as Americans, Palestinians as well as Jews, Muslims as well as Christians; or about our rage over homophobic judges like William H. Pryor and politicians like Marilyn Musgrave, who defames gay lives by comparing same-sex love to polygamy and beastiality; or about our rage over the greed at the root of global warming? At its best and most useful, poetry levels the playing field, a lesson Whitman taught us. Despite the startling number of recently published poets, both gay and straight, who seem determined to remain safely sequestered outside the realm of real life, opting instead for empty rhetoric and ironic poses, it remains true that poetry reaches us where we’re at our most human. Can there be any doubt but that the religious Right and the current Administration are creating policies that discriminate against us? The question is, can we turn the tide and stop it? And can poetry play a role in telling us what lies ahead? Richard Tayson’s first book of poetry, The Apprentice of Fever, won the Wick Poetry Prize. His essay on Whitman’s Preface to Leaves of Grass appears on-line at The Academy of American Poets website.
Not the battle-ship, perfect-model’d, majestic, that I saw to day arrive in the offing, under full sail,
Nor the splendors of the past day—nor the splendors of the night that envelopes me—Nor the glory and growth of the great city spread around me,
But the two men I saw to-day on the pier, parting the parting of dear friends.
The one to remain hung on the other’s neck and passionately kissed him—while the one to depart tightly prest the one to remain in his arms.
I heard the hissing rustle of the liquid sands, as directed to me, whispering to congratulate me, —For the friend I love lay sleeping by my side,
In the stillness his face was inclined towards me, while the moon’s clear beams shone,
And his arm lay lightly over my breast—And that night I was happy.
And you, Californian mountains—that you all find some one else that he be your singer of songs,
For I can be your singer of songs no longer—I have found him who loves me, as I him, in perfect love,
With the rest I dispense…
and taught me the love of his cock and the secrets of his mind
And we met and conversed, went walking in the evening by the park
Up to Harlem, recollecting Denver, and Dan Budd, a hero
And we made shift to sack out in Harlem, after a long evening,
Jack and host in a large double bed, I volunteered for the cot, and Neal
Volunteered for the cot with me, we stripped and lay down.
That my body shudders and trembles with happiness, remembering…
I first touched the smooth mount of his rock buttocks, silken in power, rounded in animal fucking and bodily nights over nurses and schoolgirls,
O ass of long solitudes in stolen cars, and solitudes on curbs.
and yet I can lie on this hill just above you
a foot beside where I will lie myself
soon soon…
matter now how long they last or I
the day has taken you with it and all
there is now is burning dark the only green
is up by the grave and this little thing
of telling the hill I’m here oh I’m here
