<p><strong>Jt Gowers: </strong>A lifelong champn of outsirs, Betjeman wrote humoro, tolerant poetry that marks him out as a gay hero</p>
Contents:
- WALT WHMAN IS OUR NATNAL POET, AND A GAY IN
- WHY JOHN BETJEMAN IS A TE GAY IN
- ‘THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME’: OSR WIL AS A GAY IN
- WALT WHMAN—PATRTIC POET, GAY INOCLAST, OR SHREWD MARKETG PLOY?
- WALT WHMAN: PATRT POET OR GAY IN?
WALT WHMAN IS OUR NATNAL POET, AND A GAY IN
What Is the Grass thor Mark Doty and Pulzer Prize wner Jericho Brown discs the gay poet's legacy. * poet gay icon *
Apparently Walt received a lot of mail of this kd — letters om manly men who would never a ln years have thought of themselv as homosexual (Stoker married and had a son) Real Guys would have been appalled to thk they were sharg timate thoughts wh a man who would one day be lled the rnerstone of gay lerature.
WHY JOHN BETJEMAN IS A TE GAY IN
* poet gay icon *
More:Whman@200: NJ, NY and PA pay tribute to Walt Whman wh hundreds of events"You uld say he had gay fan mail for several s, " said Gary Schmidgall, thor of "Walt Whman: A Gay Life.
‘THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME’: OSR WIL AS A GAY IN
" and "When Lilacs Last the Dooryard Bloom’d" have been routely tght to schoolchildren sce the 19th the same time, he's been a fort and spiratn to generatns of closeted gay men — probably Stoker was one of them — to whom poems like "We Two Boys Together Clgg" and "A Glimpse, " would have spoken achgly personal terms.
WALT WHMAN—PATRTIC POET, GAY INOCLAST, OR SHREWD MARKETG PLOY?
" ("A Glimpse")"Obvly gay rears of his poems saw somethg them that what Walt Whman lled his 'civilian' rears didn't see, " Schmidgall said. Thgs that say one thg to the gay rears, and somethg more trivial to heterosexual rears. No one need to rebrand him as a gay in.
Te, Stonewall — the rebelln, celebratg s 50th anniversary June, that kick-started the gay rights movement — did help brg Walt further out of the closet.
It's a rare Gay Pri Para that don't feature Uncle Walt a sign or a stume. "I was the Manhattan gay pri para, eher the late '70s or early '80s, and we were marchg down Fifth Avenue, and we all had the plards wh gay wrers: Walt Whman, Rimbd, " relled Brad Gooch, a poet and wrer who teach Whman at William Paterson Universy Wayne.
WALT WHMAN: PATRT POET OR GAY IN?
"When we got the New York Public Library steps, we went up the steps and waved the gay wrer posters, " he, llege urs, operas have all taken on Whman's sexualy. Gay poets, om Allen Gsberg on, proclaimed him their patron everybody has always known about pla sightIn 1855, cric Ruf Griswold — remembered, by fans of lerary trivia, as Edgar Allan Poe's character assass — took "Leav of Grass" to task for obsceny, particular for "that horrible s, among Christians not to be named" (the term "homosexualy" wasn't ed until 1868). Mencken wrote: "Whman's first partisans were not terted poetry; they were terted sex, and perhaps pecially homosexualy.
One thg may have been the kd of gay man Whman 19th century — the Victorian era — was a sentimental age. "The affectn he felt toward the soldiers, his scriptns, seem to speak to a gay rearship, " Gooch said.
He might have been might have been, secretly, should be add that Whman muddied the waters about his own sexualy, and scholars still bate today — though pretty much everyone regniz the strong homosexual ponent his verse. He was what, morn gay terms, would be lled a Bear. Cavafy is a 20th century Greek poet, known for his highly homoerotic and sexually explic poetry.