Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, Part Four

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Gay Male Poetry: Post Identity Politics?

This will be the first of two posts regarding the panel I chaired at this year's AWP conference (the second that I've attended), which was, like last year's, wonderfully exhilarating and utterly overwhelming. I lead a very isolated life here in Pensacola, so to have the chance to hang out with so many writers was an amazing experience. The trip has practically bankrupted me (I will never stay in a Hilton again), but it was worth it.

As I noted in my previous post, my panel at AWP was called "Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics." The presentations of my panelists made me decide to add a question mark to that title.

This post will present an expanded version of my remarks at the panel. I have asked my panelists to send me copies of their presentations, and a subsequent post will discuss their wonderful contributions to the panel.

1

When I told a friend about this panel, he said, “No one sent me the memo that racism, heterosexism, and class struggle had ended and thus we can now put that silly business [of] the politics of identity behind us.” I told him he should check his mail more regularly, as lots of people have sent out that particular memo.

But in consideration of his quizzical response, I’d like to emphasize that the “post” in “post-identity politics” doesn’t mean “We’re over all that now,” though there are various people who do say such things. It just means that gay identity politics has happened, more than once and in more than one form (gay liberation, gay civil rights, Queer Nation, just plain queer). My friend also asked, "What does post-identity politics mean?" That’s one of the questions this panel is intended to address if not answer: Where are we and what do we do, what (or who) are we doing, now?

2

A large part of gay identity, at least for men of a certain age, and for men who didn’t grow up in major metropolitan areas (or did but were too shy, awkward, repressed, or just too young to strike out on their own in the big city), has been the product of books and magazines. My gay identity was formed by books like C.A. Tripp’s The Homosexual Matrix, Dennis Altman’s Homosexual Oppression and Liberation, an anthology called Out of the Closets (which included photos of men dancing together in a bathhouse! wearing just towels!), and another called Lavender Culture. And by issues of Blueboy and Playguy I bought on the sly during my ninth-grade lunch hours. For me, the gay world was a world of words and pictures in glossy magazines.

Gay male literature may be divided into pre-Stonewall riots and post-Stonewall riots or, to put in another way, closeted (or at least taking the closet as a given) or uncloseted (or at least informed by the realization that the closet door had been opened). Despite the presence of predecessors such as Robert Duncan, James Merrill, Frank O’Hara, and even Walt Whitman, the emergence of openly gay male poetry is concurrent with the emergence of the gay liberation movement in the late Nineteen Sixties and early Nineteen Seventies. Such poetry was dedicated to the affirmation and celebration of a newly articulate gay male identity in the face of a massively homophobic society. Such poetry made possible the emergence and development of a gay male poetry that took such an identity as a starting point, not a conclusion or goal, let alone a given.

My sense that there was or could be such a thing as gay male poetry was largely shaped by groundbreaking anthologies like Winston Leyland’s Angels of the Lyre and Orgasms of Light (whose frontispiece featured a drawing of a huge, erupting penis), and Ian Young’s The Male Muse, which didn’t have any pictures at all. But while I was very turned on by poems like Allen Ginsberg’s “Sweet Boy, Gimme Your Ass” and “Please Master,” even at sixteen I was aware that they weren’t good poetry. Someone I was on a panel with at the old Outwrite gay writers’ conference in Boston over ten years ago talked about not feeling able or allowed in his youth to write poems about the boys on whom he had crushes. I never had that problem. My problem was how to take those feelings and turn them into things I could recognize and respect as poems. I wrote a poem in college called “A People Without a Language Cannot Be Free.” That was my one “gay liberation” poem, the one time I consciously wrote as “a gay person.” I threw that poem away a long time ago, and I don’t even know what the title assertion meant, though I have at various points read things about the possibility or necessity of a gay language. I don't know what that means either.

3

A column rather provocatively called “Gay? Who Cares?” that appeared last November in the Los Angeles Times reported that “‘Society is beginning to say that being gay is not such a big deal,’ [demographer Gary] Gates says. ‘What that means for gays is that homosexuality won’t have the centrality to their identity it once did. Being gay then becomes one of a variety of an individual’s competing identities.’”

This has always been true for all gays, and is true for all identities as such: no one has only one identity, at any one time or over time. It’s something, though, that gay men who don’t fit the mold of the financially comfortable, buff, fashionable white man have always had to be consciously aware of. Certainly for black gay men, gayness has not only been an identity distinct from their other identities but often in conflict with or contradiction to them.

Though I don’t think that writers or their work should be defined in terms of social identities or subject positions, I have much less trouble being considered a gay writer than a black writer. This is because being gay was a chosen identity for me (I may have been born homosexual, but I decided to be gay), whereas being black was an imposed identity, and one that came with a great deal of unpleasant baggage. Perhaps because I was rather out of touch as a youth, I had no such negative associations with being or becoming gay. Quite the contrary—the gay world I read about in books seemed infinitely preferable to the world of the Bronx ghettos in which I grew up. And I’ve definitely had a much easier time as a gay person than as a black person, even as a writer: the expectations placed on a gay writer are much less restrictive and eagerly enforced than those placed on a black writer.

For a writer like James Merrill, a white upper-class man, and thus as central as can be in American society and representation, homosexuality is a displacement, a marginalization, and his poetry enacts the negotiation of that displacement of centrality, that forced march to the margins (though he takes his sense of entitlement with him). But for me, as a poor black man, and thus the incarnation of otherness and marginality, the adoption of a homosexuality imaged, by both black people and white, as “white” was a move of displacing displacement, a move towards centrality and “self-ness”: a difference from difference that did not quite (any more than my education did) make me “the same.”

4

The Los Angeles Times article I quoted above goes on to say that “As the challenges associated with coming out diminish, so does the primacy of the identity that that act of self-discovery and self-assertion once forged. It means that the culture once associated with gay identity becomes less distinctive from the mainstream.

As the recent spate of state referenda banning gay marriage demonstrates, homophobia is alive and well in these united states. But nonetheless, we are living in a very different world than the one in which Robert Duncan, Frank O’Hara, and Jack Spicer, or James Merrill and William Meredith, to take poets from opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum, lived, or that in which pioneering gay liberation poets like Antler, Paul Mariah, and Charley Shively, or less explicitly political though quite explicitly gay poets like Joe Brainard, Ed Cox, Kenward Elmslie, and John Giorno lived. “Gay” is part of the texture of daily life, and there is a disparity between the still-prevalent political rejection of the idea of gayness and a widespread quiet acceptance of gay people themselves, even in Pensacola, Florida, where I’ve lived for almost seven years on what’s sometimes called the Redneck Riviera. I like to call it Redneckistan. Just as one can live an openly gay life (or at least a relatively openly gay life) in a number of ways and places than would have been possible even twenty years ago without making it a statement of identity, similarly one can incorporate one’s gayness into one’s writing (however one would define either gayness or the incorporation of that gayness) without making that the definition of one’s work.

So we come back to the questions in the panel description: What does it mean to be a gay male poet today, after gay liberation, the somewhat domesticated gay rights movement, the revived radicalism of Queer Nation, the AIDS epidemic and ACT UP, and intellectual interrogations of “queerness” and identity itself? Contemporary gay male poets can take their gayness for granted on several levels. They also can explore, question, and even explode that identity. This panel explores just what the words “gay” “male” “poetry,” in themselves and in conjunction, mean to four smart and gifted writers.

Against Identity Poetry, For Possibility

As a black person, as a gay person, I am other to the social norm of heterosexual whiteness. Poetry, a stereotypically exalted and also, or therefore, marginalized realm, is often seen as other to the abjection, social and psychic, that blackness and gayness too frequently represent in our society, a debasement too often acted out on black and gay bodies. Poetry is also other to the utilitarian, means-end rationality of capitalist society. Poetry’s otherness enacts an escape from or a transformation of racial and sexual otherness: it embodies an otherness of inclusion rather than exclusion, of possibility rather than constraint. Poetry presents the possibility of an otherness that is liberating rather than constricting: it offers the prospect of an alienation from alienation. In his great essay "Lyric Poetry and Society," Theodor Adorno proposed that poetry presents the alienation of language from its alienation in everyday use: by turning language away from its use as a mere medium of exchange, poetry returns language to itself. Poetry’s otherness to my own multiple socially defined othernesses is a space of freedom, where lack becomes pure potential.

For this reason, I have always intensely disliked what I call identity poetics, the use of poetry as a means to assert or claim social identity. The impulse to explain poetry as a symptom of its author's biography or its social context is pervasive these days, including among authors themselves. But that has always seemed to me a form of self-imprisonment, neglecting or even negating the possibilities poetry offers not just of being someone else, anyone and/or everyone else, but of being no one at all, of existing, however contingently, outside the shackles of identity and definition. Poetry is, among other things, a way of opening up worlds and possibilities of worlds. It offers a combination of otherness and brotherhood, the opportunity to find the otherness in the familiar, to find the familiar in the other. The various (though not various enough) constructions of identity poetics shut down the multifarious possibilities poetry offers in favor of mere self-reflection, and at that, reflection of a reified, simplified self much less complex and interesting than the several selves we each are at any given moment and through the course of the various lives we live simultaneously. As the poet Thomas Sayers Ellis has urged, “Admit that there’s more than one of you, and surprise and embarrass all of yourselves.”

Ideally, one writes poetry as an act of exploration, as a venture into the unknown. (As Yeats wrote, out of what one knows, one makes rhetoric; out of what one doesn’t know, one makes poetry.) Too often today, though, writers want simply to “express” the selves they have decided that they are or have, and readers demand to see themselves (or what they imagine as themselves) reflected back to them. In Ann Lauterbach's incisive words, “The idea that the act of reading expands and extends knowledge to orders of unfamiliar experience has been replaced by acts of reading in order to substantiate and authorize claims and positions which often mirror the identity bearings of the reader.” Identity poetics is boring, giving back the already known in an endless and endlessly self-righteous confirmation of things as they are. It is also constraining, limiting the imaginative options of the very people it seeks to liberate or speak for. If one follows the assumptions of identity poetics through, saying “Here are the gay poets, here are the black poets, here are the straight white male poets, and everyone just reads the poets who match their demographic classification,” not only could a white person have nothing to say to a black person, or a straight person to a gay person, but a black person could have nothing to say to a white person, or a woman to a man. So there would be no reason for a white person to read anything written by a black person.

I have never looked to literature merely to mirror myself back to me, to confirm my identity to myself or to others. I already have a self, even if one often at odds with itself, and if anything I have felt burdened, even trapped, by that self and its demands, by the demands made upon it by the world. Many minority writers have spoken of feeling invisible: I have always felt entirely too visible, the object of scrutiny, labeling, and categorization. Literature offered a way out of being a social problem or statistic, a way not to be what everyone had decided I was, not to be subject to what that meant about me and for me. But even if one has a more sanguine relation to selfhood, Picasso’s admonition should always be kept in mind: art is called art because it is not life. Otherwise, why would art exist? Life already is, and hardly needs confirmation.

I seek from literature an image of who or what I could be, of what the world itself could be, an image of the “as if” rather than of the “as is.” The greatest literature has always engaged in the generation of new realities, not the reiteration of the same old given reality. I think most literary minded people, if asked, would agree with such a statement: and yet black writers are held (and many hold themselves) to a different, double standard. “Write what you know” becomes a trap, as if there were a fixed terrain of what one can or should know, and as if the possibility of writing what one does not know might not be the most exciting of all. As Stephen Owen writes, “We have been informed that we are radically ‘of’ our age, or culture, or gender, or class, [or race], and not of another; we can go elsewhere only as tourists, cultural voyeurs. If we believe such a story, we will accept our assigned places, submit to our limitations, and repress the hope that we can go back to where we were, or stay where we choose, or even change and become other, except as we are driven hopelessly forward by history’s inertial machine.”