Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America

by Christopher Bram

  At first I didn’t think about Heinz at all. Or tried not to. I felt like a house in which one room, the biggest, is locked up. Then, very cautiously, I allowed myself to think of him in little doses—five minutes at a time. Then I had a good cry and felt better. But it is very hard to cry, when you know in advance that crying will do you good.

  The book could have ended with the high drama of losing Heinz, but doesn’t. It’s not only an experiment in truth telling but an experiment in realism, without melodramatic endings. Life goes on, Isherwood goes on. He and Auden go to China, where they witness a brutal war, and then to America, where Isherwood falls in love again. The book ends with the old “I” telling young “Christopher” that this new love won’t last but he will eventually meet “the ideal companion to whom you can reveal yourself totally and yet be loved for what you are, not what you pretend to be.” But he won’t meet him right away.

  He is already living in the city where you will settle. He will be near you for many years without your meeting. But it would be no good if you did meet him now. At present, he is only four years old.

  The book is dedicated to that former four-year-old.

  Christopher and His Kind was reviewed warmly in the New York Review of Books by Isherwood’s friend, Gore Vidal, in a smart, informative, generous essay. “There is no excess in an Isherwood sentence. The verbs are strong. Nouns precise. Adjectives few. The third person startles and seduces, while the first person is a good guide and never coy.” Peter Stansky, a literary historian who was gay, reviewed the book more temperately in the New York Times Book Review, yet he too was full of praise. There were bad reviews in Britain, where Isherwood was still attacked for sitting out the war, but the American reviews were generally respectful. However, more than one critic complained that Isherwood misrepresented himself by putting too much emphasis on his homosexuality, that the book reduced him to “only” a gay man. Which is nonsense. He includes his entire life: his family, his politics, his writing. He says more about himself as a writer than he ever had before. The whole man is here, and in the right proportions.

  In one of the most moving passages of the book, before he arrives in America, Christopher wrestles with the sum total of his beliefs, beginning with his pacificism:

  Suppose, Christopher now said to himself, I have a Nazi army at my mercy. I can blow it up by pressing a button. The men in that army are notorious for torturing and murdering civilians—all except for one of them, Heinz. Will I press the button? No—wait: Suppose I know that Heinz, out of cowardice or moral infection, has become as bad as they are and takes part in all their crimes? Will I press the button, even so? Christopher’s answer, given without the slightest hesitation, was: Of course not…. Thus Christopher was forced to recognize himself as a pacifist—although by an argument which he could only admit to with the greatest reluctance.

  He goes on to examine his other principles:

  What had actually begun to surface in his muddled mind was a conflict of emotions. He felt obliged to become a pacifist, he refused to deny his homosexuality, he wanted to keep as much of his leftism as he could. All he could do for the present was to pick up his ideas one after another and reexamine them, ring them like coins, saying: This one’s counterfeit; this one’s genuine but I can’t use it; this one I can keep, I think.

  One particular coin had special meaning for gay readers. Christopher and His Kind tapped into a new growing readership. Sales were excellent, and Isherwood received bags of fan mail, far more than Tennesse Williams had for Memoirs. There was the sexual and jokey (a fifteen-year-old English schoolboy sent his photo and wrote on the back, “My tits are on fire”), but also serious, heartfelt letters, full of gratitude for his work and his example. When Isherwood came to New York and signed books at the Oscar Wilde Bookshop, long lines formed outside on the sidewalk, on the very street where police and gay demonstrators had confronted each other a few years earlier. Later Gore Vidal teased him, “They’re beginning to believe that Christopher Street is named after you.”

  12. Love Songs

  Perhaps it is not possible to fit into American Life,” wrote art critic Harold Rosenberg. “American Life is a billboard; individual life in the U.S. includes something nameless that takes place in the weeds behind it.” Rosenberg was talking about the lives of intellectuals, but he could have just as easily been talking about that of gay people. Gay life happens in those tall weeds. So does love, and so does poetry.

  The most visible gay male poet of this time was Allen Ginsberg. As indicated by his last two appearances, at the Chicago riots and Stonewall riots, Ginsberg did not have the traditional career of a poet in the years after Howl and Other Poems. He didn’t live like T. S. Eliot or even Robert Lowell (who spent more time in mental hospitals than Ginsberg did), but used his energy and talents more freely. His mother, Naomi, told him in a letter that he later incorporated into a poem, “get married Allen don’t take drugs.” But he did take drugs. And he went to India, three times. Like Isherwood, he studied Hindu religion, but looser, more subjective forms than Vedanta. He also explored Buddhism and politics. He became more prophet than poet.

  By 1969 Ginsberg had gone from being the poster boy for the Beats to the poster boy for the hippies—he was literally on posters in college dorm rooms. He received endless fan letters asking for advice, help, manuscripts, even clippings from his beard (to be auctioned off by a high school literary magazine). He was world famous, yet people rarely quoted any of the poetry written after his first book. And they never talked about his sexuality. Jane Kramer wrote a lively profile for the New Yorker in 1968, later published as a book, Allen Ginsberg in America, full of details about his drug use but very coy about his love of men. His longtime lover, Peter Orlovsky, was described as “his roommate of the past thirteen years.”

  It wasn’t as if Ginsberg were closeted. The mainstream simply didn’t want to talk about his homosexuality. Ginsberg himself regularly mentioned his sex partners in interviews, and he wasn’t shy about propositioning male fans, gay and straight. (Until recently there was a Facebook page called allen-ginsberg-hit-on-me.) When he came to William and Mary for an anti-Nixon rally in 1971, he stayed at the house of a friend of mine and took a three-hour bath with a frat-boy student-newspaper editor from another school. My friend was annoyed, but only because it was the sole bathroom in a very crowded house. Ginsberg still loved Peter Orlovsky and, as said before, the two men shared a wide-open relationship, with Orlovsky sleeping with women as well as men. (Charles Shively, who had sex with both, suspected Orlovsky only pretended to be bisexual in order to keep Ginsberg interested.) Orlovsky now wrote poetry, too. His Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs was published in 1977 by City Lights. Winston Leyland of Gay Sunshine later assembled a collection of love poems and letters from Ginsberg and Orlovsky titled Straight Hearts’ Delight chronicling their life together. The mainstream ignored the book’s existence.

  Ginsberg was the favorite bohemian poet of straight college boys who wanted to transgress, and of gay college boys who were not yet ready to come out. Yet he was a poet who was no longer famous for his poems. This was just as well, since his work after Howl and Other Poems is wildly uneven. The strong, memorable work is rare. There is “Kaddish,” of course, his amazing 1959 poem about his mother, not so much a poem as a verbal breakdown, an avalanche of words without rhythm or shape. It succeeds as a flight from sense, an escape from the pain of his mother’s madness. It’s powerful but it’s not quotable—and poems endure by being quoted. Among my own favorites are a lovely nature lyric, “Wales Visitation,” a 1967 vision of Britain that mixes Blake, Wordsworth, and LSD, and a sexy little poem about the heart as an erotic organ, “Love Replied,” which uses obscene frankness to look beyond sex to love.

  Why do you eat

  my behind & my feet

  Why do you kiss

  my belly like this

  Why do you go down

  and suck my cock crown

&nb
sp; when I bare you the best

  that is inside my breast

  The rest of his work isn’t bad, but it’s not very exciting. Many poems read like song lyrics written on automatic pilot. Their long-breathed lines are so relaxed and easy that they simply slide away.

  Ginsberg faded as a poet at the very time that he succeeded as a public man. Maybe his life was too public and he had nothing in reserve to express in verse. Or maybe he was too happy to write memorable poetry anymore.

  One of Ginsberg’s best later poems is “City Midnight Junk Strains” from 1966, written to Frank O’Hara shortly after his death. It has more gritty specifics than most of Ginsberg’s work, as if some of O’Hara’s sand had gotten into his verse.

  I stare into my head and look for your/broken roman nose

  your wet mouth-smell of martinis

  & a big artistic tipsy kiss.

  The poem builds to a lovely yet mocking image of poets after death.

  I want to be there in your garden party in the clouds

  all of us naked

  strumming our harps and reading each other new poetry

  in the boring celestial

  Friendship Committee Museum.

  Frank O’Hara grew up in Massachusetts, served in the navy, and went first to Harvard and then to graduate school at the University of Michigan. (He was the best-schooled writer we have discussed so far.) But his life didn’t really begin until he came to New York. He worked art-related day jobs at museums and magazines while writing poetry on the side. He seemed to toss off poems with deceptive ease, published them in small magazines and collected them in slim volumes like the evocatively titled Lunch Poems, put out in 1965 by City Lights in the same Pocket Poets series that began with Howl. He shared various apartments with his good friend Joe LeSueur (whom he occasionally slept with), while falling in love with various boyfriends. He was surrounded by artists who frequently painted or drew his portrait: Larry Rivers, Fairfield Porter, Alex Katz, and Don Bachardy. Wynn Chamberlain did a witty double group portrait of O’Hara and friends—LeSueur, Joe Brainard, Frank Lima—first in white shirts, neckties, and frowns, then nude and grinning. Ginsberg must’ve had the painting in mind when he mentioned the “naked garden party.” Acquaintances later said O’Hara had a bitchy side, but it doesn’t appear in the poetry.

  The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara, published posthumously in 1971, marks his arrival as a gay poet. For all his matter-of-factness, O’Hara’s sexuality could not be freely discussed until he was dead. It was an open secret, but his gayest poems, such as “At the Old Place” or “Homosexuality” (“So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping/our mouths shut?”) were not published while he was alive. In Love Poems (Tentative Title) he didn’t name his beloved, dancer Vincent Warren, in the poems or dedications because Warren was afraid his mother might see the book. As Joe LeSueur wrote, “To live in fear of matriarchal disapproval, all you have to be is gay and not necessarily young and naive to boot. We all know about E. M. Forster and his mom, and then there’s the more recent case of Roland Barthes, who waited until his mother’s death in 1978 to make a gesture toward coming out.”

  Yet it was all there in O’Hara’s poetry, gay sensibility and gay experience, casually dispersed in the dailiness of what he called his “I do this, I do that” poems. O’Hara wrote regularly about favorite gay topics: old movies, Lana Turner, James Dean, Billie Holiday, classical music. Once readers know that homosexuality is there, it’s impossible to ignore. “Having a Coke with You” is the most laidback love poem ever written, and perhaps the most honest because it is so laidback. “Having a Coke with You/is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irun, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne…” It’s like a parody Coca-Cola ad in a magazine. One happily pictures an illustration of two grown men grinning together at a soda fountain.

  Unlike Ginsberg, O’Hara’s long lines are relaxed without ever becoming slack. They have the slangy rhythm of American speech and are full of surprise and wit. Ginsberg and O’Hara were good friends, and Ginsberg’s example helped O’Hara escape conventional form and find his own voice. But he did something different with his freedom. To describe what he was doing, O’Hara wrote a humorous manifesto about his style, which he called “Personism.”

  It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing a poem, and so Personism was born.

  A poem is like a phone call? No wonder O’Hara’s work is so cheerful and sociable.

  In contrast to the unbuttoned verse of Ginsberg and O’Hara, the poetry of James Merrill was neatly buttoned in meter and form. The man himself was well-buttoned, too, coming from money and privilege, the son of Charles Merrill, cofounder of the brokerage house Merrill Lynch. Merrill’s background is sometimes held against him, as if it’s easier for a rich man to write poetry. But how many wealthy men or women have used their well-financed leisure to produce first-rate works of art?

  Merrill was already writing poetry by the time he attended Amherst. He published his first book at sixteen, paid for by his father. Kimon Friar, his teacher and lover, introduced him to Anaïs Nin in 1947, which is how Merrill first appeared in this story: when he and Gore Vidal wrote letters to the New York Times defending Nin. Merrill kept his distance from Nin—she nabbed his roommate instead—and traveled to Europe. He published his first book of poems with a major publisher in 1951.

  He met and fell in love with another writer, David Jackson, who also had an independent income. Jackson wrote fiction. He published short stories but was never able to sell the three novels he wrote. The two men lived simply, teaching and traveling (mainly Greece, which was very cheap), and setting up house in the top two floors of a big, nondescript shingled building in Stonington, Connecticut, on Long Island Sound. (Truman Capote stayed in Stonington one summer, but the town was too small for him; he made too many enemies and did not return.)

  Merrill was a pale, lean, aloof young man, cool and cryptic, full of courteous formality. (In some photos he looks like a suave extraterrestrial.) His poems, too, were cool, cryptic, and formal. He was a wonderful wordsmith, his taut verse full of formal devices and double and even triple puns. His work has the literate wit of Alexander Pope, W. H. Auden, and Cole Porter. It was always elegant and beautiful, but for a long time it came to life only when he wrote about childhood. It was closet poetry, as Merrill himself admitted in his autobiography: “I never doubted that almost any poem I wrote owed some of its difficulty to the need to conceal my feelings, and their objects. Genderless as a fig leaf, the pronoun ‘you’ served to protect the latter, but one couldn’t be too careful.”

  Inspired by the example of the Greek poet C. P. Cavafy, whose glimpses of sensuous young men (“Days of 1896,” “Days of 1908,” etc.) are remarkably ahead of their time, Merrill wrote his own “Days of ___” poems, and more of his life entered his work. In new poems about his childhood, “The Broken Home” (about his parents’ divorce) and “Days of 1935” (about a poor little rich boy who daydreams of being kidnapped like the Lindbergh baby), he quietly evokes a gay man’s childhood. Then in “Matinees” he wrote about his love of opera from childhood to the present, a warm, witty, self-mocking portrait of an opera queen:

  What havoc certain Saturday afternoons

  Wrought upon a bright young person’s morals

  I now leave for the public to condemn.

  The point thereafter was to arrange for one’s

  Own chills and fever, passions and betrayals,

  Chiefly in order to make song of them.

  You and I, caro, seldom

  Risk the real thing anymore.

  It’s all too silly or too solemn.

  Enough to know the score

  From records or transcriptions

  For our four hands.


  His beloved “dear” is indicated by the masculine form of cara, yet the gay sensibility of the poem is already so strong that this subtle identification of a male lover seems almost beside the point.

  It didn’t take much for Merrill to give life to his enameled words. All that was needed was a little truth, a little emotion. Edmund White met Merrill in the 1970s and was present at the creation of one poem. White has written about the experience twice, first as fiction, then as nonfiction. Merrill read a new poem to him and David Kalstone. They were impressed but shyly wondered if maybe it were a little too cold. Merrill slapped his forehead and said, “Oh, God, I left out the human feeling!” He went back upstairs and returned a half hour later with a new draft that was warm and alive. People have doubted this story, wondering if White were exaggerating or if Merrill had been putting them on. But I find it perfectly plausible. Merrill’s poems are ingenious assemblies of phrases and metaphors that can sometimes just hang there like pretty mobiles. But the slightest breath of emotion—it doesn’t take much—can set the lines swinging and dancing.