as gay in the industry, he wore flamboyant clothes and called other gay menpansiesto demean them and to imply that he wasnt oneof them. He sometimes dated women as beards, such as former child actress Margaret OBrien, to disguise his homosexuality. He smashed actress Dyan Cannons finger while touring in How To Succeed, because he thought she was upstaging him. Years later, at the Golden Globes Awards, she screamed at him: You sick bastard. Mallon writes of Kallman that ambition stuck out like a cowlick or a horn. Mallon manages to create empathy for his subject, though, so we take pity on him as his own worst enemy. Mallon is adept at recreating the showbiz aura and the anything goes atmosphere of the late 50s to the mid-60s, as well as the trials and accommodations needed to survive being gay in that milieu. Mallon suggests that Kallmans deep need for love, which he never found, contributed to his aggressive, ingratiating personality. One revealing incident hinted at how damaging homophobia could be. When Kallman attended the legendary 1961 Judy Garland concert at Carnegie Hall, Mallon writes about the mostly gay audience: Whatever was broken in these guys was reaching toward and sparking whatever was broken in her in him [Kallman] there had been something broken, but whatever it was had been soldered over, annealed in a way that left it unreaching and unreachable. Mallons investigation of Kallman reads like an autopsy, even though the reader is warned that his story is inspired by actual events considerably altered by the authors imagination. Yet theres an authenticity thats both frightening and compelling. Mallon has pierced the heart of darkness at the root of Kallmans soul. Kallman might deserve to be forgotten, but Mallons portrait of a sad thwarted tragic talent as a sour parable on ambition is unforgettable. TO THE BOY WHO WAS NIGHT Poems Selected and New by Rigoberto González Four Way Books. 262 pages, $17.95 Rigoberto Gonzálezs latest book (hes published twenty) is a new and selected volume of his poetry. These are brooding reflections on suffering, sickness, shame, loneliness, and grief; on sexual and romantic frustration, family violence, and poverty; on the aches of childhood andthe sad architecture of abandonment. González, who was born in California but grew up in Mexico, writes about hungerthe hunger for food, for justice, for dignity, for a voiceand the longing for tenderness in a world where tenderness seems absent. In a poem like In the Village of Missing Fathers, he depicts a desolate Mexican landscape where the womenhave traded their silks for meats, their kisses/ for bolts on the doors, the curves/ of their hips for a place to carve out/ the names of the dead. González, a professor of English at Rutgers, is candid about the psychic damage done to a child who had to maintain a secret, who knew that male-male affection wasnt make-believe even as he had to hide it from the gaze of others. While he still lives with the deep emotional wounds of his earlier closeted lifethe frock of scars and bruiseshe resolutely declares his resilience and endurance: You are/ solid rock, he proclaims. And he is not immune to moments of beauty in the world: the beautiful monarch butterflies in his native Michoacán or the magic of a child/ who can bite into a cherry and roll the world inside his mouth. There are poems about the beauty of the body (my left nipPOETRY BRIEFS ple like a rose), about the taste of a tangerine, about the palm of a mans hand wiping juice / off another mans chin. PHILIP GAMBONE SO LONG: Poems by JenLevitt Four Way Books. 88 pages, $17.95 In her first book, The Off-Season, JenLevitt described feeling askew in the world and trying to imagine an openly lesbian life. So Long expands the self-scrutiny with evocative riffs on loss, including the death of a beloved father and the abrupt departure of a romantic partner. Felt loss becomes poetry in distinctly observed everyday encounters. Levitt teaches high school in New York City, and the title poemSoLong depicts trips to Connecticut to be with her seriously ill father. When he dies just shy of eighty, she is devastated, but different sentiments come into play, as multiple meanings of the phrase so long suggest. On the one hand, the phrase recalls the finality of Woody Guthries 1935 Dust Bowl ballad, while, on the other hand, a casual so long maymean only brief separation. Alternatively, the words can evoke amazement, as when the writer tells her (by then deceased) father: Soon,well have to find another way to meet, as moonlight/ makes the river glow, & look how lucky Ive been, for so long. Levitt brings other people into her poems by reflecting on her roles as daughter, lover, sister, aunt, teacher, and friend. Letter to My Father from Provincetown, for example, recalls seaside summers when her father taught his children to play poker. In the poemDunes, the writer struggles with the brisk unravelling of a passionate affair but resolves to take up a new kind of noticing. The willingness to risk failure for the possibility of love. SoLongis filled with unfussy poems of candor and insight, drawn with energetic attention to ordinary life. ROSEMARYBOOTH ROMANTIC COMEDY: Poems by James Allen Hall Four Way Books, 89 pages, $17.95. James Allen Hall reminds me that every successful poem is a little triumph, a victory over the vast indifference of the universe. Gay people know better than most that their identitiesindeed, their very existence have had to be forged against an array of forces seemingly aligned against them. Even granted this, however, the poems in Romantic Comedy document an unusually hard-won battle against homophobia, rape, drugs, suicidal impulses, and negative body image. If Hall were not a gifted poet, these poems would simply constitute a litany of horrors. However, in his hands, these adversities are steadily transformed into moments of quiet, beautifully articulated power. As Hall elegantly puts it in Swimming Lesson: I flip my body,/ propel it into the past, into the wake/ of its own trek. He also asks, soberingly: Is it a love story when the desire is unspeakable? In aworld in which, as he posits, desire and destructionare just different abutments/ of the same bridge, this collection, which was selected by judge Diane Seuss as the winner of the Four Way Books Levis Prize in Poetry, admirably depicts the different shores, as well as the struggle to bridge them. DALE BOYER 40 TheG&LR Brian Bromberger is a freelance writer who works as a staff reporter and arts critic for The Bay Area Reporter.
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