Books
Get to know queer literary icon Adrienne Rich
New bio presents her as vibrant, 3-dimensional human being
āThe Power of Adrienne Rich: A Biographyā
By Hilary Holladay
c.2020, Nan A. Talese
$32.50/478 pages
āPoets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,ā declared the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Many who love poetry believe this to be true.
Yet, few would argue that poets, apart from queer bards Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman, are household names.
Except for Adrienne Rich. Rich, the lesbian poet and essayist who lived from 1929 to 2012, was as famous as a rock star. Her death was front page news. A queer icon, Rich was beloved by poetry aficionados and all who worked for justice. (Rich donated $1,000 to Split This Rock, a poetry organization that works for social change.)
āI contain multitudes,ā Whitman said.
Rich gave Whitman a run for his money. During her life, Rich, born in Baltimore, was many things: a poet, scholar, teacher, married woman, radical feminist and an out lesbian. Baptized and confirmed in the Episcopal Church, Rich later in life discovered her Jewish identity.
Richās fans ranged from renowned hetero poet Robert Lowell to lesbians and gay men who stood in line to hear her read. Looking into her eyes as Rich signed your book at a reading, you felt as if this distinguished, awardāwinning poet cared about you.
āThe Power of Adrienne Richā by Hilary Holladay is the first biography of this iconic poet. Writing a bio of an icon is a tall order. How do you present your subject with their talents, heroic qualities and failings without falling into hagiography or smackdown?
Holladay, a biographer, novelist, poet and scholar of modern and contemporary American literature, deftly pulls off this daunting hat trick. With the skill of a novelist, she illuminates Richās life from her birth in Baltimore in 1929 to her death in Santa Cruz, Calif, in 2012.
From early on, Rich had a life filled with privilege and success. Her father Dr. Arnold Rice Rich was a prominent Johns Hopkins pathologist. From early on, Dr. Rich considered his daughter to be a ābaby genius.ā By age 4, she was playing Mozart on the piano). She wrote a small volume of poems when she was six.
Rich graduated from Radcliffe in 1951. Queer poet W. H. Auden chose her first poetry collection āA Change of Worldā (published in 1951) to be published in the Yale Younger Poets Series. Soon after receiving this honor, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was studying at Oxford.
She taught at universities and colleges ā from the City College of New York to Swarthmore and wrote more than 24 poetry collections and six volumes of prose. At the same time, she engaged in political activism. In 1997, Rich refused to accept the National Medal of Arts, the U.S. governmentās highest award for artists. In her letter declining the award, she deplored the āincreasingly brutal impact of racial and economic injustice.ā
Richās husband, Alfred Haskell Conrad, killed himself shortly after he and Rich separated. Rich came out as a lesbian in the 1970s. Her poems āTwenty-One Love Poemsā were among the first lesbian love poems to be widely read. Iād wager that every lesbian remembers where she was when she read them when they were published in 1978. Later, Rich became a staunch supporter of queer men who had AIDS. Rich and the late writer Michelle Cliff were partners for more than 30 years.
In the midst of her complex and busy life, Rich, who for most of her life had rheumatoid arthritis, endured pain and surgeries.
The many honors Rich received include a MacArthur Foundation āgeniusā grant in 1994, a National Book Award in 1974 and the National Book Foundation medal for distinguished contribution to American letters in 2005.
Like everyone, Rich had her quirks. She could be imperious. Sometimes Rich drank too much or abruptly dropped friends sheād been close to.
Poetry for Rich āwas as close to a religion as anything she would ever know,ā Holladay writes.
In the āPower of Adrienne Rich,ā Holladay helps us to know a queer literary icon ā not as a god, but as a vibrant, three-dimensional human being. Amen to that!
Books
āThe Loves of My Lifeā is not for prudes
Edmund Whiteās thoughtful read about pursuing pleasure
āThe Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoirā
By Edmund White
c.2025, Bloomsbury Publishing
$27.99/256 pages
Celebrated author Edmund White is just as prolific with men as he is with books. āThe Loves of My Lifeā is a steamy memoir about his decades-long sex life. Now in his 80s, heās had, in his own words, āthousands of sex partnersā and this book recounts many of them, including some many amusing, some poignant, stories.
A warning: this book is not for prudish readers. White describes his encounters in lovingly explicit detail, fondly recalling his partnersā equipment and their skills. Some were shockingly creative: one partner belonged to a āfisting colonyā where another member once inserted a football into a man, requiring surgery.
White began early, as a teenager sleeping with other boys at his boarding school, neighbors, and the son of his motherās lover. Later, working for his fatherās business, he picked up male hustlers. He would take these predominately āstraightā men to cheap hotels for one-sided, quick affairs; many kept their socks on during. Some threatened violence afterwards, demanding more money or that White spend more time with them.
As an adult, a sex worker he took to a country home to help get clean spent nearly all his time alone in the bedroom, leaving only to pick up meals.
White lingers on his experience with Stan, āmy first husband.ā They met in college, at a play Stan starred in. Moving to New York, they lived together off and on as Stan found acting work. He became involved with a group led by a former Marine, who kept the party going with drugs and orgies. Thankfully, he would later leave and get clean.
White had many memorable adventures abroad. Visiting Puerto Rico, he and his partner went home with two men they met on the beach; the natives laughed during, speaking mostly Spanish. In a park in Spain, he encountered a man who robbed him after propositioning him. Because homosexuality was illegal, he couldnāt go to the authorities, although they had a quickie afterwards. Years later, he rented a house in Madrid with a younger, Spanish lover, who took him to āgeezerā clubs, but who threw tantrums if White spoke to any men there. He felt like a housewife, keeping the home spotless and prepared to satisfy his partner anytime, only once visiting a museum.
The bookās tone is generally humorous, although White recounts how, when he was a young man, many gay men saw themselves. Most only wanted to sleep with straight ātrade,ā which carried the threat of violence. Even successful professionals thought they were āsick.ā White saw a therapist hoping to become straight. While the communityās self-image has improved considerably, there are still plenty of hang-ups. Whiteās younger friend Rory, for instance, Asian, athletic, and intelligent, only loves white men and feels depressed if one doesnāt return his affections.
He surprisingly doesnāt talk much about his husband, Michael, apart from him walking in on White with a lover and an airplane encounter. It might be useful to hear how they met, and their arrangements with other partners. Perhaps their relationship was off limits.
Mixing self-deprecating anecdotes with insights into writing and literature, āThe Loves of My Lifeā makes for a fun, yet thoughtful read about pursuing pleasure.
Books
Thom Gunn bio explores joys, complexities of modern gay life
āA Cool Queer Lifeā presents authorās humanity, poetic genius
āThom Gunn: A Cool Queer Lifeā
By Michael Nott
c.2024, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$40/720 pages
A confession: Until reading āThom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life,ā I hadnāt known much about the accomplished, controversial gay poetās life or read many of his poems. But this first biography makes me feel like I know him and his large body of work intimately. Michael Nott, coeditor of āThe Letters of Thom Gunn,ā draws on interviews with friends and family, as well as Gunnās letters, notebooks, and diaries, to tell the triumphs and tragedies of his life.
Born in England in 1929 to journalist parents, when he was 15, he and his younger brother Ander found their mother dead from suicide. He would not discuss this tragic event in his poetry for years, including one of his last poems āMy Motherās Pride.ā He published his first book of poems, āFighting Terms,ā while still an undergraduate at Cambridge University.
At Cambridge, Gunn met his life-long partner, Mike Kitay, an American studying theater. Gunn followed Kitay to America, studying poetry under Yvor Winters at Stanford University. At one point, Kitay, doing his military service, was investigated as part of suspicion of homosexuality among his unit. Gunn wrote to friends of his worry both of what might happen to Kitay as well as to himself. While nothing happened, the event reminds us of the precarious state in which gay men lived until recently.
Eventually, they settled in San Francisco, which Gunn loved. Even when he became worldwide famous, he enjoyed the anonymity of the cityās gay bars, where he could pick up men. He taught at UC Berkeley for 40 years, one term every year so he could concentrate on his poetry. His and Kitayās home was filled with friends and sex partners, usually of Gunn. This arrangement seems common for many gay men of the time, reminiscent of Dan Savageās idea of āmonogamish,ā where committed gay couples might have other side partners.
In San Francisco, Gunn discovered leather and drugs, both of which he took to readily. He caused a stir by appearing in his British publisherās conservative club in leather gear. Toward the end of his life, he became a crystal meth addict, frequently using with other addicts whom he also slept with. In 2004, his housemates found him dead from substance abuse.
He explored leather, drugs, and gay sexuality frequently in his poems. His collection āMolyā (named after the drug in The Odyssey protecting from the witch Circeās magic), looked at the appeal and downfall of drugs. The Man with Night Sweats, perhaps his most famous collection, dealt with the AIDS epidemic, the painful death of so many friends and lovers. He won the MacArthur Foundation āGeniusā grant afterwards.
The biography presents Gunn in all his humanity, from his poetic genius to his insecurities. After each book came out, he struggled with writerās block, which led to hookups and drug use. As he aged, he worried about finding āgerontophilesā who would sleep with him. I hope this book encourages readers to discover or revisit his work, filled with the joys and complexities of modern gay life.
Books
A rabid fan’s look at the best and worst of queer TV
āRainbow Age of Televisionā a must-read for viewers
āThe Rainbow Age of Television: An Opinionated History of Queer TVā
By Shayna Maci Warner
c.2024, Abrams Press
$28/304 pages
Wanna hand over the clicker?
You don’t want to miss the season premiere of that show you binge-watched over the summer. You’re invested, a fan who can’t wait to see what happens next. You heard that this may be the last season and you’ll be sad, if that’s so. Is it time to start looking for another, newer obsession or will you want to read “The Rainbow Age of Television” by Shayna Maci Warner, and find something old?
Like most kids of the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, Shayna Maci Warner spent lots of time glued to a television screen, devouring programming before school, after school, and all summer long. For Warner, that programming eventually led to a revelation. They saw people that looked like them, for which they formed “a personal attachment.”
It was “life-changing.”
It didn’t happen all at once, and some of TV’s “milestones” are forever lost, since broadcasts were live until the 1950s. Shortly after shows were taped and preserved, homosexuality became a “source of worry and blunt fascination” but certain performers carefully presented gently risquĆ© characters and dialogue that nudged and winked at viewers.
Some queer representation appeared in the 1960s, but it wasn’t until the 1970s when dramas began to feature more gay and lesbian characters, however subtly. It took a while for “the ‘rest’ of the alphabet” to be represented in a meaningful way and ā despite that āStar Trekā and its many versions included gender-diverse characters ā it wasn’t until 1996 that an intersex infant was featured on a regular television drama.
Since Ellen DeGeneres came out practically on her namesake TV show and āWill & Graceā became a wild hit, queer representation on TV has ceased to be an unusual thing. And yet, programmers and writers know that caution is still warranted: sometimes, “there can still be hesitation around pushing the envelope and fear that a queer character who burns too brightly just won’t last.”
Quick: name three after-school TV shows that aired when you were in fourth grade. If you can’t do it, one thing’s for certain: you need “The Rainbow Age of Television.”
But get ready for some argument. Author Shayna Maci Warner offers a rabid fan’s look at the best and the worst queer representation had to offer, and you may beg to differ with what they say about various programs. That makes this book a critique, of sorts, but Warner offers plenty of wiggle-room for argument.
Tussling over the finer points of queer programming, though, is only half the fun of reading this book. Microwave a box of pizza snacks or mac-and-cheese, demand “your” sofa seat, and dive into the nostalgia of old TV shows, most of them from the later last century. Yep, your faves are here. It’s like having an oldies channel on paper, and in your hand.
This is a must-have for former kids and current TV addicts who are happy to see themselves represented on TV. If that’s you, who brought the chips? “The Rainbow Age of Television” will just click.
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