From the early 80s to the early 00s, The James White Review, published out of Minneapolis, was a leading publication for gay men’s poetry, fiction and book reviews. Of course, as with any lit mag, there was a lot of crap (say 90%)—and as with any gay publication, there was a lot of faux-edgy kitsch and failed pretension:
Holleran’s not the only gay getting inspiration from Yeats I guess—it’s “Leda and the Swan” meets Mala Noche!
Other disasters include:
There’s a lot of such not-even-hot silliness, which is probably the level gay male art falls to when not serving PC positive representation. Worse, JWR introduced readers to Alexander Chee, launching him on his career of tenderqueer diasparoid loserdom:
Ok, girl. It is funny though that Chee, whose work is so much hapa reeee-ing about whiteness, gets his start heavily breathing about German crusaders being gay for each other in some medieval version of the first ten minutes of The Damned (or all those Richard Attila Lukas paintings of fascist skinheads in love). Sproing-time for Hitler…
JWR also unfortunately gave space to Karl Tierney who’s now been rediscovered and celebrated by doofus Patrick Nathan for “his cynicism… sharp enough to see how consumerism reduced gay men… [but he was] also compassionate as he watched the men around him participate in their own diminishment, buying their way into misery, isolation, and sickness.”
Gosh I hate it when dumb young guys have sex with me… really says something about capitalist America don’t you think? My critique of the gay mainstream is cynical but compassionate! And above all, good poetry.
Thankfully it’s not all crap at the JWR. I like these cute Roland Berger woodcuts:
And this poem about creepshots that recalls the extended passage in Gerald Manley Hopkins’ “Epithalamion”* where he forgets he’s supposed to be talking up heterosexual marriage and rhapsodizes about spying on boys at swim:
Fristscher, by the way, was an editor at the leather magazine Drummer, and a google image search suggests he’s not beating the creeper allegations.
Some of the unknowns that JWR thought would become something and didn’t are interesting (as Dan Savage says, “for me”). Take these creepy-sexy-abject poems by a pseudonymous poet introduced by Mark Doty:
Bring me a kleenex! Well, your mileage no doubt varies, but I was curious enough even after cumming to email Doty and find out this guy was a then-MFA student, and since has become a writer under the name “A. Loudermilk”… although a ‘writer’ in barest technical, most unsuccessfully professional sense, with fluffy wokeish pieces in Popmatters and a sad autofictional story about being a precarious writing instructor at a shithole school. It’s a cautionary enough tale to make me consider getting a real job!
*As Hopkins hornily puts it:
…we hear a shout
That the hanging honeysuck, the dogeared hazels in the cover
Makes dither, makes hover
And the riot of a rout
Of, it must be, boys from the town
Bathing: it is summer’s sovereign good.
By there comes a listless stranger: beckoned by the noise
He drops towards the river: unseen
Sees the bevy of them, how the boys
With dare and with downdolphinry and bellbright bodies huddling out,
Are earthworld, airworld, waterworld thorough hurled, all by turn and turn about.
This garland of their gambols flashes in his breast
Into such a sudden zest
Of summertime joys
That he hies to a pool neighbouring; sees it is the best
There; sweetest, freshest, shadowiest;
Fairyland…