No Apologies, running for a half-dozen issues from 1983 to 1985, published mostly Bay Area ‘New Narrative’ gays/queers, some of whom have been going on lately towards something like, if not canonization, then a journey towards the center of literary prestige (the Paris Review, NYRB etc hoopla).
I have a long essay about why I think this is a bad thing, particularly in the case of Robert Gluck, who was probably the most accomplished member of this crowd and is today imitated and admired notably by Paul McAdory (who wrote that essay in Gawker hating on Ocean Vuong and “gay sincerity” novels, a take recently reheated by someone else to once again dunk on the strawman of boring woke trauma lit in favor of empty frivolous queer sexclownery—these are not the only choices!)—but I also have an essay about my soft spot for less successful member Sam D’Allessandro, so I will keep reading that garbage.
No Apologies was founded by Brian Monte, in collaboration with bisexual mullet-wearer Kevin Killian (who gets a fawning chapter on him in Dennis Cooper biographer Diarmuid Hester’s new book on queer spaces [lol])—Monte is still alive and even has a new journal, where he’s posted memories of running NA.
There’s hardly any point in founding a literary magazine if you’re not going to use your editorial discretion to publish your own worst stuff, as Monte and Killian did. For instance, here’s Monte in a couple of bad poems memorializing Harvey Milk’s boyfriend, who killed himself—and trying to do a Thom Gunn celebration of SM:
Oh sex is like religion? Politics is a crooked game? I’m hearing about this for the first time.
In contrast to these boring discoveries, Killian goes for silly-lurid scenes, here combining the studiedly glib fangirling of O’Hara (whom we can just imagine on gay Twitter today Lana Del Rey has collapsed! Get off Ozempic Lana we love you) at his most sniggeringly effete with the grand guignol routine of Cooper—that said I did get into the Dynasty portion of this poem, which I assume is referencing that Cummings poem about the dissenter, “I sing of Olaf…”, and does capture the atmosphere of a bunch of queens watching TV together (and who will write the history of that? it’s news to me for instance that gay bars would show Dynasty in the 80s, although I’ve read about viewing parties for AbFab at gay bars in the 90s, and of course lived through the harrowing years when you couldn’t escape DragRace [just kidding I even watched the last boring season—Nymphia performing for Tsai Ing-Wen has been a real redemption arc for homonationalism; suck on that, Jasbir Puar!]):
Well ok this is funny! although also trifling piffle playing around with the worst gay stereotypes—what do you expect from a bisexual (kidding! love y’all!)? Monte, in contrast, means to be serious, to DO SOMETHING FOR THE COMMUNITY both with his poems (saying something—although I have no idea what—political in the Lira tribute) and the magazine itself, supposed to kick off the “second-generation” of gay literary magazines, after the recent end on Manroot and Mouth of the Dragon (some of the contributors to the latter appear in No Apologies, either directly or cited as models—for example Jack Spicer; which makes sense, this is all still Bay-Area networking):
But most of his contributors, like Gluck collaborator Bruce Boone, and Steve Abbott founder of similarly-spirited Soup magazine, do pointless po-mo riffs on celebrity culture and pastiches out of literary history—stuff that, as I’ve said before, wasn’t hardly interesting in the 60s when O’Hara/Warhol and Barthelme were doing it, and is alarmingly trivial in the context of AIDS.
Watching old movies and reading old books, fruitily… well it’s funny when Boyd McDonald does it in Cruising the Movies, but generally the ‘gay culture is when you consume straight media with your pinky in the air’—the line, I take it, of Halperin’s How to be Gay and appears, lesbionically, even in new monographs—strikes me as just our own dumb riff on media theorist Jenna Maroney’s notion of “normalling” (pretending that shopping at Bed Bath and Beyond is actually a transgressive and interesting kink), that is, as a pretty pathetic evasion of realities like, in this moment of the early 80s, AIDS.
AIDS does come up though, in this story by admittedly not anthology-ready but by no means bad story Stan Leventhal—whom I’d never read before. Here’s the start:
Leventhal, born in 1951, died of AIDS in 1995. Body(,) party.