“Follow Your Inner Moonlight; Don't Hide The Madness.”

Have you ever spent time with a book you loved so much, you didn’t want it to end? I started to slow down my pace with Just Kids, Patti Smith’s recollection of her time with Robert Mapplethorpe, when they were young, inseparable, perfectly bohemian, & completely unknown, just to have it linger. Smith recounts how when a couple of tourists in Washington Square Park spotted them on an autumn day in1967 & argued if they warranted a snapshot. The woman thought they looked like artists. The man dismissed: “They’re just kids.”

Smith & Mapplethorpe walk through a snow storm to Times Square on New Year's Eve 1969 & witness a huge John & Yoko peace billboard. Later, on her own, she runs into Allen Ginsberg at the automat, where he helps her buy a sandwich after mistaking her for a boy. They became lifelong friends & he was a profound influence on her work & future.

 Ginsberg photograph by William S Burroughs

Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born on this day- June 3rd in1926.  Like Patti Smith, he was raised in New Jersey. His father, Louis, was a successful poet who walked around the house reciting poetry. His mother suffered from paranoia & was in & out of mental hospitals. 3 years after her death in 1958, Ginsberg wrote Kaddish for Naomi Ginsberg.

Allen Ginsberg was a social revolutionary, a protest poet & a longtime & committed activist. He beat the drum for the Beat movement, lauding nonconformity & new kind of poetry. Ginsberg’s works captured this anti-establishment groundswell & helped serve social change.

Ginsberg was tried & acquitted of obscenity charges related to his most celebrated poem 1956’s- Howl’s homoerotic content. A judge found that the poem had "redeeming social importance. Howl became a reference case for free speech cases in the1960s & 1970s.

Ginsberg gave us the term "flower power," which encouraged protesters to engage in nonviolent rebellion. He was kicked out of Cuba for saying Che Guevara was "cute”. His frank writing about homosexuality made an important contribution to gay rights.

“America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.”

In 1954, Ginsberg met the man who would become his life partner, Peter Orlovsky. Orlovsky was an American poet & experienced the mental illness of a family member. The relationship lasted 43 years, until Ginsberg’s death in 1997.
Ginsberg received:  the National Book Award, a Robert Frost Medal for distinguished poetic achievement & an American Book Award for contributions to literary excellence. In 1993, the French minister of culture awarded Ginsberg the Order of Arts & Letters.

Considering Walt Whitman On His 192nd Birthday

When I write about individuals from history that were homosexual, I avoid using the term- GAY, because for me, there was no GAY before the 20^th century, until I consider Walt Whitman on this, the day of his birth. Whitman was GAY, using the 20^th/21^st century definition.

Has there ever been a poet so thoroughly a man of this nation than Walt Whitman?  Whitman’s book of poetry- Leaves of Grass, holds the essence of being an American. It also reflects the ways in which America ideals have been sacrificed. Walt Whitman's personal life suffered much at the hands of the American taboo against sex.

Whitman is this country’s greatest embarrassment, if what he says about democracy is true, the American ideal of universal equality must embrace homosexuals, & same sex love. Whitman is a subversive & radical poet & American school children for the past 50 years have been carefully protected from exposure to America's greatest poet. I have always been an avid reader, & I did not read Whitman until I was finished with college, when my mother, of all people, gave me a volume of Leaves Of Grass as a gift.

A leaf for hand in hand;

You natural persons old and young!

You on the Mississippi and on all the branches & bayous of the Mississippi!

You friendly boatmen and mechanics! You roughs!

You twain! & all processions moving along the streets!

I wish to infuse myself among you till I see it common for you to walk hand in hand.

Walt Whitman was a true bohemian. He never gave into having a regular job occupation, & he was a singularly solitary man, probably not by choice. In 1819, Whitman was born in Long Island, NY. He did the usual things until he was 11, when he quit school. He ran errands for a lawyer & doctor, & then became an apprentice typesetter for a Brooklyn paper.

He taught school in several small villages in NY, & contributed articles to newspapers. In 1841 he left country life for the big city. In NYC he worked for newspapers as typesetter, reporter, feature writer & editor. Whitman took a life of theatre, cafes & nightclubs.

He went to art exhibitions, museums, the opera, watch the ships, & walked among the masses in the great city. His favorite activity was to sit near the hot, young, rugged carriage drivers, & cross back & forth on the Brooklyn ferry to mingle with the rough deck hands.  Because he was repressing his sexuality, he was a loner in a crowd, a spectator rather than a participant.

Sometime after 1855, when Leaves of Grass was first published, he experienced some sort of emotional crisis that transformed him from journalist to poet. In the manner so many gay men in NYC & San Francisco of late 1970s, he gave up being a dandy & became a hyper masculine clone.

Crowds of men & women attired in the usual costumes, how curious you are to me.

  On the ferry-boats the hundreds & hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose
 
& you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are more to me, & more in my meditations, than you might suppose . . .

I was one with the rest, the days and haps of the rest,

Was call'd by my nighest name by clear loud voices of young men as they saw me approaching or passing,

Felt their arms on my neck as I stood, or the negligent leaning of their flesh against me as I sat,

Saw many I loved in the street or ferry-boat or public assembly, yet never told them a word.
Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

Once I pass'd through a populous city imprinting my brain for future use with its shows, architecture, customs, tradition,

Yet now of all that city I remember only a man I casually met there who detained me for love of me,
 
Day by day & night by night we were together — all else has long been forgotten by me,

I remember I saw only that man who passionately clung to me,

 Again we wander, we love, we separate again,
 
Again he holds me by the hand, I must not go,

I see him close beside me with silent lips sad & tremulous.
Once I Pass'd Through A Populous City

Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,

Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking & breeding,

No sentimentalist, no stander above men & women or apart from them,

No more modest than immodest.

Unscrew the locks from the doors!
 
Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!

Whoever degrades another degrades me,

& whatever is done or said returns at last to me.
 
Through me the afflatus surging & surging, through me the current & index.

I speak the pass-word primeval, I give the song of democracy,

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.
Song Of Myself

When Whitman is taught in school as part of the canon of American literature, there is still much resistance to identifying him as gay, despite some fairly well documented evidence.

I share the midnight orgies of young men . . .

I pick out some low person for my dearest friend,

He shall be lawless, rude, illiterate, he shall be condemned by others for deeds done,

I will play a part no longer, why should I exile myself from my companions?

Whitman's notebooks of this period are filled with descriptions of bus drivers, boat men, & other "rude, illiterate" men that he picked up is really in the streets of Manhattan, & "slept with," often keeping notes of their home addresses. Excerpts from his Notebooks have been collected in Charley Shively's Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados:

Peter — large, strong-boned young fellow, driver. . . . I liked his refreshing wickedness, as it would be called by the orthodox.

George Fitch — Yankee boy — Driver . . . Good looking, tall, curly haired, black-eyed fellow

Saturday night Mike Ellis — wandering at the corner of Lexington av. & 32d st. — took him home to 150 37th street, — 4th story back room — bitter cold night

Wm Culver, boy in bath, aged 18

Dan'l Spencer . . . somewhat feminine . . . slept with me Sept 3d

Theodore M Carr — came to the house with me

James Sloan (night of Sept 18 '62) 23rd year of age — plain homely, American

John McNelly night Oct 7 young man, drunk, walk'd up Fulton & High st. home

David Wilson — night of Oct. 11 '62, walking up from Middagh — slept with me

Horace Ostrander Oct. 22 '62 — about 28 yr's of age — slept with him Dec 4th '62

October 9, 1863, Jerry Taylor, (NJ.) of 2d dist reg't slept with me last night weather soft, cool enough, warm enough, heavenly.

This is the 19^th century version of John Rechy’s Numbers!

As I have been noting the protests of the right wing & religious fundamentalists to the recent legislation adding references to gay people in history to the curriculum in public schools of California, I consider how liberating it will be for young gay people to acknowledge that the most American of poets was not just a homosexual, he was gay.

I recommend the excellent & very readable- Walt Whitman: A Gay Life by Gary Schmidgall

Born On This Day- March 3rd... American Poet James Merrill

He was a beautiful man who wrote beautiful & accessible poetry. His work was autobiographical in source & theme, but not actually confessional. James Ingram Merrill was born into a life of privilege. He was the son of the founder of Merrill Lynch , & his father published his son’s first book of stories & poems himself, when James was just 16 years old. He was taught German & French by his Prussian nanny. He had the money to go where he wanted, study where he wanted, & to meet the best people.

His poetry never shied away from his life as a gay man. Merrill won every major American prize for his poetry: 2 National Book Awards, Library of Congress's Bobbitt National Prize, Yale's Bollingen Prize, & the Pulitzer Prize.

Merrill's partner of more than 4 decades was the writer David Jackson. They had a famed house in Stonington, Connecticut, &the couple spent part of each year in Athens. Greek themes, locales, & characters occupy a prominent place in Merrill's poetry. In time, Athens was later replaced by Jackson's home in Key West.

In his 1993 memoir A Different Person, Merrill gives candid portrait of gay life in the early 1950s, & his relationships with several men including writer Claude Fredericks, art dealer Robert Isaacson,&  David Jackson. Later Jackson & Merrill lived in a relationship together with actor Peter Hooten.  For over 30 years of Merrill & Jackson used Ouija board sessions for Merrills writing, the sessions brought gods & ghosts into Merrill & Jackson's lives, & also into Merill's brilliant book length poem- The Changing Light at Sandover. Later in life he discouraged other people from using or playing with the Ouija board.

.
James Merrill died in 1995 of a heart attack, connected with AIDS complications, while vacationing in Arizona , just a month before his 69th birthday.


But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation
& every bit of us is lost in it...
& in that loss a self-effacing tree,
Color of context, imperceptibly
Rustling with its angel, turns the waste
To shade and fiber, milk & memory.

Born On This Day- February 21st... Poet W.H. Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden, Christopher William Bradshaw Isherwood, Sir Stephen Harold Spender

Photo by Howard Coster

If you have stopped by my little spot on the Internet, you know that I am fascinated & fully engaged by his circle. He was a British poet in 1907, but he chose the USA as his home. In the 1930s, he once lived in an apartment in Brooklyn with gay artists Carson McCullers, Truman Capote & Benjamin Britten. A friend & contemporary of Christopher Isherwood, W.H. Auden’s work has perhaps the widest range &the greatest depth of any English language poet of the past 3 centuries. Auden wrote in a voice that addressed readers personally rather than as part of a collective audience. His styles & forms extend from ballads & songs to haiku & limericks to sonnets, prose poems, & constructions of his own invention. His tone ranges from spirited comedy to memorable & profound, often in the same work. His poems manage to be secular & sacred, philosophical & erotic, personal & universal. This poem- Funeral Blues opened new interest in Auden’s work when it was featured in the film Four Weddings & A Funeral:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos & with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.


Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crépe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.


He was my North, my South, my East & West,
My working week & my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,
I thought that love would last forever: 'I was wrong'


The stars are not wanted now, put out every one;
Pack up the moon & dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean & sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

He wrote much erotic poetry, most not published in his lifetime, & by erotic, I mean dirty, really dirty:



We aligned mouths. We entwined. All act was clutch,
All fact contact, the attack & the interlock
Of tongues, the charms of arms. I shook at the touch
Of his fresh flesh, I rocked at the shock of his cock.

I plunged with a rhythmical lunge steady & slow,
And at every stroke made a corkscrew roll of my tongue.
His soul reeled in the feeling. He whimpered "Oh!"
As I tongued & squeezed & rolled & tickled & swung.


Then I pressed on the spot where the groin is joined to the cock,
Slipped a finger into his arse & massaged him from inside.
The secret sluices of his juices began to unlock.
He melted into what he felt. "O Jesus!" he cried.


Waves of immeasurable pleasures mounted his member in quick
Spasms. I lay still in the notch of his crotch inhaling his sweat.
His ring convulsed round my finger. Into me, rich & thick,
His hot spunk spouted in gouts, spurted in jet after jet.
(written in 1948)

Born On This Day- September 8th... British Poet Siegried Sassoon

Suicide in the Trenches

I knew a simple soldier boy

Who grinned at life in empty joy,

Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,

& whistled early with the lark.

In winter trenches, cowed & glum

With crumps & lice and lack of rum,

He put a bullet through his brain.

No one spoke of him again.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye

Who cheer when soldier lads march by,

Sneak home & pray you'll never know

The hell where youth & laughter go.

The grueling years of WW I gave a harsh education in the devastation & futility of war to 300,000+ young British men, including those who grew up in privilege. One of these was the gay "war poet," Siegfried Sassoon.

Brought up in the leisured life of a country gentleman, Sassoon enlisted in the military just as the war was beginning. His poetry reflects the change of his attitudes towards war, beginning with a vision of combat as reflecting glory & nobility, & finishing with muddy, bloody realism & bitter recrimination to those who profited from the destruction of young soldiers. His later war poetry is filled with the ugly realities of the brutality & pointlessness of wars between nations. His later work retains a rather romantic affection for the average soldier, who does his duty with bravery, even when he does not understand why.

 With a cool & savage irony, Sassoon condemns the corrupt old men of government, military, & business, who profits from a war while sending young men off to die. In his poem Base Details:

If I were fierce, & bald, & short of breath,

I'd live with scarlet Majors at the Base,

& speed glum heroes up the line to death...

& when the war is done & youth stone dead,

I'd toddle safely home & die in bed.

Sassoon's friends, including early feminist author Robert Graves, sensed that his anti-war sentiments could get him into trouble & arranged for him to be hospitalized for shell shock. Always a loyal comrade,Sassoon could not stay away from the front while others fought, & he returned to battle. In July 1918, he was sent back to England with a head wound, & he remained there until the war ended.

Sassoon came of age during the1st golden period of modern homosexual culture. His friends & lovers were some of the best known writers, artists, & thinkers of the period (most of which I have done blog posts about on their birthdays): Evelyn Waugh, Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, J.R. Ackerly, Ivor Novello, Robert Graves, T.E. Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, Noël Coward, the Sitwells, & members of the Bloomsbury group. He had a long sexual relationship with William Park ("Gabriel") Atkin, a British painter & illustrator. During the 1920s & early 1930s, he engaged in several affairs, including a romance with the future Nazi Prince Philip of Hesse, & a long relationship with poet & decorator Stephen Tennant.

He died in 1967, 7 days before his 81st birthday of stomach cancer. In 1985, Sassoon was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner. The inscription on the stone was written by his former lover & fellow War poet Wilfred Owen. It reads: "My subject is War, & the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

 
This was the photograph that started my collection of vintage photos of men being affectionate. It was the opening night gift from a fellow cast member. This image started me thinking about the work of Sassoon. I wonder if these men made it home, & possibly had a life together. Haunting.

Sassoon, post-war.