<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. 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.
" 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. " ("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.
WHY JOHN BETJEMAN IS A TE GAY IN
* poet gay icon *
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. "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.
‘THE LOVE THAT DARE NOT SPEAK ITS NAME’: OSR WIL AS A GAY IN
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.
While he remaed mostly obscure durg his lifetime, he's now e to be revered as one of the great gay poets of the past hundred years. Ifti Nasim was a gay Pakistani-Amerin poet who moved to the Stat to pe persecutn for his sexualy back his hometown.
WALT WHMAN—PATRTIC POET, GAY INOCLAST, OR SHREWD MARKETG PLOY?
Baldw is known as one of the great, proud gay artists of all time.
Walt Whman is one of the great poets of all time, and a champn of homoeroticism the lerary form. But for the award-wng gay poet Doty, textual analysis of the great Amerin bard required a personal analysis, which necsated this kd of spirual ntact. "Labels like gay, queer, or bisexual were nonexistent Whman's era.
WALT WHMAN: PATRT POET OR GAY IN?
I am proud to be volved the petn; for me, Betjeman is, among other thgs, a gay in who helped to liberalise attus towards homosexualy through his poetry. But what mak Betjeman a gay in? And why do he enjoy a large gay followg?
"The poet of Middle England" was appalled by society's treatment of gay men and ed his poetry as a vehicle to exprs his sympathy for their plight. Betjeman enjoyed the pany of gay men – most of his iends belonged to eher the church or "the Homtern". He once wrote to a gay iend, Patrick Balfour, remendg the roller-skatg rk at the Alexandra Palace as a cisg ground: "There are no ls than five hundred cups of tea there and an troductn n be effected at once.
" "Cups of tea" was Betjeman's own Polari-speak for men; Betchy may not have actually trolled Alexandra Palace himself, but his affy for gay slang shows how fortable he felt around gay men. Whatever his sexual preferenc, Betjeman was temperamentally gay. He had lightfully silly nicknam for iends and he often employed humoro verse to appear ivolo about the, when Paris Hilton is chosen as the new gay in, you know that the label has bee meangls, but Betjeman tly serv his inic stat and the affectnate admiratn of gay people for his shg example of tolerance and rpect.