SONG OF MYSELF
by Arnie Kantrowitz
Sentinel Voices. 448 pages, $24.95
Arnie Kantrowitz was a gay pioneer; the first vice president of New York City’s Gay Activists Alliance when it formed soon after the 1969 Stonewall riots; author of Under the Rainbow: Growing Up Gay in 1977, an early memoir by and about an openly gay man; an educator who was one of the first in America to teach gay studies as an English professor. “Arnie,” as everyone called him, was also a lifelong fan of another gay pioneer, considered to be America’s greatest poet: Walt Whitman. In Song of Myself, titled after Whitman’s best-known poem, Arnie’s posthumously published novel tells the fictional story of Daniel Dell Blake.
Raised in upstate New York in the years before World War II, Blake flees his father and his small town to join the military and ships off to the Pacific, where he spends time as a Japanese prisoner of war. “Service” takes on new meaning as Blake avails himself of ample opportunities to provide relief to stressed soldiers. Back in the U.S., the following decades find Blake crisscrossing the country with stays of months, sometimes years, in New York City; Portland, Maine; Provincetown; Pittsburgh; Chicago; Minneapolis; San Francisco; and Seattle. You could say he literally sleeps his way across the country.
What keeps Song of Myself from simply being a record of Blake’s sexcapades is his devotion to the poetry of Whitman. “Ever the missionary for Walt Whitman” (like Arnie himself), Blake quotes passages from Leaves of Grass throughout the book, applying Whitman’s poetic wisdom to the latest predicament in which he finds himself. Arnie frames Blake’s story within the larger developments that comprise LGBT history, from the secretive and subversive “Friends of Dorothy” days long before Stonewall, up into the dark AIDS years of the 1980s. Song of Myself is an engaging, often funny, frequently sexy, and even educational reading experience.
John-Manuel Andriote
