AIDS! It's a Body Party

1984-5

Before we get bleak, as gay poetry is catching (up with) AIDS, here are a couple more pitiful attempts at inter-generational connection, following from the previous post. First, Samuel Steward aka Phil Andros, publishing for some reason in 1984 his two-decade-old poems imitating A.E. Housman. Steward explains:

It’s a bit embarrassing to have been into Housman—let alone identifying with him—in the middle of the twentieth century, but I guess America in those days was maybe in many ways still Edwardian England. And Housman is himself pitiful, closeted, stilted, dying of reserve (his parody of classical scholarly translationese is worth more than all his poetry), but ok, we take what fathers we stumble on, the question is what we do with them, having stumbled. Here’s Steward trying to serve Housman:

You can see why he had to change his name!

Even more tragically, Michael Lassell, then editor at LA Style (and now expert on Disney on Broadway lol), wrote this long, humiliating poem about having a crush on Richard Howard, which I can only hope the latter never saw:

He’s channeling Howard channeling Crane channeling Whitman, and channeling Cavafy too, but he seems to have learned nothing from any of them. Obviously such a big terrible needy poem would be a turn off, even if Howard weren’t by then already partnered to the painter David Alexander, to whom Howard was giving, first in The New Republic (in 1980, when it was of course more excusable and may have seemed the height of sanity) and then reprinted in this 1984 volume, some terrible advice (that luckily didn’t kill either of them):

It’s difficult for me to accept Howard reprinting this in the middle of AIDS—which otherwise doesn’t appear in this book, although at least the cover art has the right tone:

Maybe Howard’s circle were still hoping it would all blow over soon. Certainly Ed White, writing his vicious roman-a-clef about Howard and Sontag, Caracole (which is the only entertaining book of his I’ve ever read!), totally ignores AIDS, transforming New York into a sort of dusted-off Old Venice/Vienna whose decadent cultured elites live comfortably under occupation by a foreign power (White’s later AIDS-in-New York memoir Farewell Symphony also has an extended and mean portrait of Howard, whom I guess White never forgave for having helped him get Forgetting Elena published. Maybe that explains White’s fascination with the theme of ‘gay betrayal’ in Genet, it taking one to know one).

Well, speaking of AIDS, some poets were facing it—one of whom gave us a gay Spoon River Anthology, which just goes to show I was talking out my ass the other day when I said there wasn’t one. Now it’s not exactly good, but it does exist, and confronts both the topic of AIDS and a problem of appropriate form for what was being revealed already as an increasingly mass death. Robert Boucheron (who is still alive! and took Elizabeth Bishop’s poetry class at Harvard, according to this website) explains:

The poems themselves are uh Steward-esque (another point, this time in Howard’s favor, that I have to raise here is that he tried to emulate the Victorians in certain respects, particularly in the moments when they stretch poetry towards the affordances of prose—something Howard also admired in Ashbery’s movement from Double Dream of Spring into Three Poems and Self-Portrait—to make it sound epistolary, conversational, expansive… but he did not try to write as if had been born in that era) in their pastiche of verse gone by, but not without a certain humor and pathos:

Thom Gunn, inspired by Yvor Winters, would do this sort of classicizing thing better, but I admire Boucheron for the attempt—it was an ambitious project, and it wasn’t quite a flop.

Poets by these years were already dying of AIDS, although it wasn’t always acknowledged as such. For instance Ching Ho Cheng’s preface to his friend Gregory Millard’s book of poems about ‘Geechies’ (an Afro-indigenous community on the Texas/Louisiana border—the poems were not my cup of tea) screams but doesn’t say ‘AIDS’:

Eileen Myles in the Paris Review says Millard died of AIDS, and cites a tribute to him by Michael Lally:

The world is all around us, even at night, in bed
in each others arms
distilled & injected into the odor we leave on each others
backs & thighs, between the knots & shields of all we lay
down in the dark to pick up in the morning
I like your brown eyes when you talk

Please readers give me a better elegy when I die (although of course I plan to outlive you).

Cheng himself seems to have for sure died of AIDS in the late 80s. A visual artist who did genuinely cool work, he’s been rediscovered lately, because for whatever reason the last few years have been seeing a real gaysian artist moment (Julien Nguyen, Martin Wong, Oscar Yi Hou, and Tommy Kha [to whom I lost my virginity not quite two decades ago; when it was over—each of us was expecting the other to top—he said “I think I prefer girls”]).

And fair enough for them people (although now everyone seems over Ocean Vuong, so I don’t know how long gaysians have to enjoy their place in the sun… I hope before the coming of dusk there’s still time to canonize Winston Tong of Tuxedomoon!). But does David Zwirner gave to get the worst gaysian (and I’m including Kevin Leonardo) to curate Cheng? Simon Wu, in his curatorial statement says:

To me, Cheng’s works, while not explicitly queer, suggest something radical about the interconnectedness of our bodies. How multiple we really are, if we begin to learn, as Cheng did, of our capacity for spiritual rebirth, but also how interdependent, if we ponder the multitudes of bacteria, fungi, and elements living, dying, and reproducing within us. It’s a body party.

No you retarded bitch a gay guy dying of AIDS is not a radical suggestion of queer interdependence and it is certainly not a body party! This sort of cruel disgusting stupidity slithering around ‘representation’ and ‘recovery’ of gay/queer figures is I guess part of the paradox of our current cultural moment that has me fleeing to the archives and seething on here (and The Chronicle of Higher Ed). On the one hand, gay artists who died of AIDS—and living ones! from minority groups even!—are centered, celebrated, etc—and some of them who get the spotlight genuinely deserve it, however weird it is that their work gets taken doubly up into building a Potemkin village of wokeness and making money for the robber barons of art. On the other hand, they can only get this attention by being transformed not just into commodities, which, sure, that’s Art, that’s America, but into such objects of this kind of curatorial-critical commentary that is so stupid—performing such erasure I might wokely say—as to be, I mean it literally, evil. It’s a body party is an evil thing to say.

I want a squad of Guerrilla Gays to protest up shows that talk this retardedly about fag shit.