Across all four poems the mon theme is how hard was beg gay or a lbian. They jt show how was om them dividually. In “Commments” by Essex Hemphill, the thor explas how if you see him pictur he looks and seems like a regular guy, which he was. To me a…
Contents:
“GAYS AND LBIANS FAI: POEMS”
Always tryg to be who they want to be, both always up short wh fay expectatns due to the fact that they are gay. Everythg that mak up his personaly is nsired too gay to even do, so the grandmother mak up a list. Bee the grandmother saw the signs that the young man might be gay, so she is gog to strip his inty so that n save her the huy.
Blan’s poetry and wrg is tobgraphil nature, narrative and lyril and directly om that impulse to exprs his attempt to meld his past wh his prent, his gay life wh his fay’s expectatns.
I also found myself turng to even earlier “fai of choice”: my high school iend, the novelist Jane Haton, an ally of queer people, allowed me to clu a sectn om her novel of gay male adolcence, The Short History of a Prce; my high school/llege girliend, Lorae Edwalds, gave me permissn to publish scen om her mil and dramatic piece about the Michigan Womyn’s mic ftival, as viewed through a set of lbians who had, like Lorae and her wife, attend for several s; my iendship, which go back as far as middle school, wh the queer NY sculptor Peter Lane gave me the lovely image that grac the book ver. Some intify as queer (or e a parallel term, such as gay or LGBTQ+) and are lookg for opportuni to study a systematic way how their own experienc are nnected to broar histori and issu of “queerns” general. It was que mon, durg much of the twentieth century, to divi human sexual inty and experience to a neat bary: heterosexual-homosexual the se of genr; there have been and ntue to be bari cltered around such opposnal terms as “male-female” or “mascule-feme, ” pairs that trans people and their alli ntt and terrogate.