- 1 My gratitude goes out to those who have gossiped with me about Duncan and “The Homosexual in Societ (...)
1New Narrative is commonly recognized as a queer avant-garde founded in San Francisco in the late 1970s, a mostly-gay writing scene with a characteristic proclivity for delighting in sex, Marxist politics, and pop culture.1 Writers associated with New Narrative include its founders, Bruce Boone and Robert Glück, as well as a clique of experimental multi-genre authors, including Steve Abbott, Dodie Bellamy, Sam D’Allesandro, Kevin Killian, and Camille Roy. However, the lineage of the group is capacious; writers such as Dennis Cooper, Eileen Myles, Aaron Shurin, kari edwards, and many others are often spoken of as New Narrative writers with varying degrees of accuracy. Given the ongoing influence of New Narrative on several generations of writers dedicated to blurring the lines between poetry, prose, and autotheory, conversations about New Narrative have often focused on the group’s legacy. Less common is criticism that examines the origins of New Narrative, especially outside of the dialectic that represents New Narrative’s formation as a function of Language Poetry.2 Often New Narrative is characterized as the (heroic) queer antagonist to Language Poetry’s staight, impersonal, theory-laden, anti-narrative program, and certainly the relationship between New Narrative and Language Poetry is important to the former’s self-understanding. However, New Narrative is directly inspired by Donald Allen and The New American Poetry, as well as Robert Duncan. New Narrative criticism, therefore, might also value the group’s collective body of work in conversations with the postwar queer modernism of the New American poets and as a unique, critical link between the past and present of innovative (queer) writing of North America.
- 2 These connections include interviews, publications, and social ties: Steve Abbott and Aaron Shurin (...)
2There are many points of connection between Duncan and the group of younger writers who played a role in the formation and practice of New Narrative. Duncan was instrumental in the early careers of the New Narrative writers, providing an authoritative contrary position to the rising Language poets and also passing along Glück’s first book of stories Elements of a Coffee Service to Donald Allen, who published the volume through his Four Seasons Foundation. Other examples are abundant.2 And yet, despite a rich history of mutual support and engagement between New Narrative and Duncan over the last decade of the elder poet’s life, it can be difficult to pinpoint the significance of Duncan’s influence on New Narrative. In this essay I look at the history of one of Duncan’s most important essays, “The Homosexual in Society,” to show the explicit and implicit connections between Duncan and New Narrative. Both Boone and Glück wrote appreciatively about Duncan’s 1944 essay, and their reflections on “The Homosexual in Society” suggest a shared suspicion about gay separatism, identity politics, and the commodification of (gay) culture. But the history of “The Homosexual in Society” also affords the opportunity to consider how, and under what conditions, gay literary culture has been permitted.
3Throughout this essay I use the idea of gossip to stress the informal, ephemeral ties between Duncan and New Narrative, as well as the underlying threat of speaking of homosexuality. Given the context of “The Homosexual in Society,” Duncan’s essay would profitably be read alongside the work of Gavin Butt. In Between You and Me Butt argues that gossip plays a dual role in the queer history of art, especially in the decades immediately following World War II. As outlined by Butt, gossip has a direct effect on history during this period, when homosexuality was becoming increasingly legible to the public. An understanding of homosexuality as a cultural code initiated paranoia and suspicion about the proximity of those sexual outsiders who would be targeted by McCarthyism and the House Un-American Activities Committee. Gossip is thus a key concern of Cold War history – both a manner of participating in a flourishing subculture of sexual deviants and a means for silencing those seen as adversaries of American normalcy, whether fairly or not. Gossip also queers the definition of historical evidence – challenging norms about what matters and how to properly make an account of history. Gossip often relies on context, audience, tone, and slang. How seriously should it be taken? To what extent should it be considered or ignored? Both aspects of gossip – that is, its historical and theoretical values – inform my analysis of Duncan’s essay.
4“The Homosexual in Society” is brief, surprising, and complex, and Duncan returned to the essay throughout his life, alternately clarifying, refining, and completely altering the essay’s arguments through footnotes and interviews. In the original, Duncan makes it clear that he is not part of the sexual majority and that homophobia amounts to an oppression of all people – not just homosexuals. Still, Duncan adamantly refuses to support the political organization of homosexuals and often derides what he sees as a nefarious “cult of homosexual superiority.” In “Queer,” Glück offers a summary of Duncan’s position:
- 3 Duncan never provides a definition for “jam.” According to Gay Talk, edited by Bruce Rodgers, “jam, (...)
A modernist through and through, Duncan makes a public announcement of his homosexuality, and at the same time comes out against camp, the cult of sexuality and its contempt for ‘jam,’ along with the Beat contempt for the square, the Jewish contempt for the goy – in favor of a common humanity. He sees an allowing and disallowing homosexual elite. He reminds me of the young Karl Marx writing about the Jews’ lack of integration, and blaming the Jews for it. (Glück 2016b, 351)3
- 4 In Young Robert Duncan, Ekbert Faas draws the scene of Duncan reciting an early version of the essa (...)
5Duncan argues that the cause that must be won is for all human beings – a complete human freedom that, critically, cannot be achieved without reckoning with the repression of sexuality and unmaking all minority associations, including homosexual identity. This will include the open discussion of homosexuality in literature, and Duncan names Herman Melville and Marcel Proust as examples of authors who wrote about (their own) homosexuality but ultimately transcended homosexuality as a theme.4 Including the founders of New Narrative, later admirers of Duncan were keen to embrace Duncan’s courage in writing the essay, even as they ignored or merely set aside the challenge his message put to the political efforts of Gay Liberation and later articulations of sexual politics.
6Today, depending on their access to different versions of the essay and related commentary by Duncan, contemporary readers have the luxury of gaining from “The Homosexual in Society” a number of overlapping and potentially even contradicting messages about homosexuality, society, and what it might mean to be “in” it. In this essay, I first trace the history of “The Homosexual in Society”, from Duncan’s composition of the essay, through his written commentary of 1959, and his reflections with younger gay poets in the 1970s. Then I attend to the reception of Duncan’s essay by Boone and Glück, before suggesting two related fields of inquiry for future analysis. Throughout his life, Duncan reframed “The Homosexual in Society” to the extent that it is difficult to isolate the fact of the essay from Duncan’s gossip about it. My hope is that revisiting “The Homosexual in Society” and its attendant archive might open up Duncan’s essay to new meanings, thereby continuing the process of gossiping about this already very storied essay.
7“The Homosexual in Society” has served a number of purposes for Duncan and his interlocutors over the decades. As for what the original essay’s purposes might be, Duncan proposes his essay as a discussion “of a group whose only salvation is in the struggle of all humanity for freedom and individual integrity” (Duncan 2014, 7). His goal is to assist the liberation of all of humanity by championing, on the one hand, the unrestricted truth of human nature and sexual desire, and on the other hand, the abolition of all minority statuses that might separate individuals from a greater humanity. Duncan offered this summary of the essay’s argument in 1959: “my view was that minority associations and identifications were an evil wherever they supersede allegiance to and share in the creation of a human community good – the recognition of fellow-manhood” (Duncan 2014, 5). It is this nuanced ideal of a greater “human community good” that supports Duncan’s seemingly paradoxical decision not to identify himself as a homosexual in the essay. Though “The Homosexual in Society” is often read as Duncan’s statement of “coming out,” this is precisely not the case, and by design. As Duncan explains in a 1959 footnote to the essay: “I could not say ‘I am homosexual,’ because exactly this statement of minority identity was the lie” (Duncan 2014, 17). In Queering Cold War Poetry, Eric Keenaghan aptly identifies Duncan’s strategy as a “fierce antinomianism that rendered homosexuality, like any other identity, a merely secondary concern” (Keenaghan 88). The metaphor of the closet does not fit Duncan’s purposes here, as the poet intentionally defies revealing himself to be a homosexual in favor of admitting his feelings and his experiences, modeling for his readers the third position he espoused, somewhere outside of a binary of “out” or “in,” “homosexual” or “straight.”
8What “The Homosexual in Society” means to offer, then, is not so much public testimony of the truth of Duncan’s (sexual) identity, but, instead, an authorized account of an alternate reality of homosexuality. Duncan is no fan of this alternative, a parallel universe seemingly alienated from the rest of humanity, and he registers the depths of this pain. “Faced by the inhumanities of society,” Duncan writes, “I did not seek a solution in humanity but turned to a second outcast society as inhumane as the first. I joined those who, while they allowed for my sexual nature, allowed for so little of the moral, the sensible and creative direction which all of living should reflect” (Duncan 2014, 10). Duncan’s ambivalence about this homosexual world of camping prattlers and tittle-tattlers is extreme though at times strangely rhapsodic:
They offered a family, outrageous as it was, a community in which one was not condemned for one’s homosexuality [...]. In drawing rooms and in little magazines I celebrated the cult with a sense of sanctuary such as a medieval Jew must have found in the ghetto; my voice taking on the modulations which tell of the capitulation to snobbery and the removal from the ‘common sort’; my poetry exhibiting the objects made divine and tyrannical as the Catholic church has made bones of saints, and bread and wine tyrannical. (Duncan 2014, 10)
9What Duncan also calls a “cult,” the company of homosexuals he moves with, and even temporarily embraces, provides him with a refuge from a society that would otherwise violently disown him and grants his poetry a potency so strong that it matches that of the eucharist. Though Duncan leaves “one of those salons where the whole atmosphere was one of suggestion and celebration” with the “desolate feeling of wrongness,” abruptly curtailing the possibilities of this separate world, his essay nevertheless provides evidence, secured by Duncan’s signature, of an otherwise secreted world of festivity and communion, free expression, and fraternity. Despite Duncan’s condemnation of these outcasts, there persists his description of that other world, something possibly even utopian, which makes “The Homosexual in Society” gossip for those who need it.
10Whatever Duncan’s “The Homosexual in Society” might be said to be about, perhaps the most important aspect of the original essay is that the young poet signed his name to it. Duncan wrote to the editor of politics, Dwight Macdonald, that “the whole thing has no meaning if it not signed. I would put my finger prints to it if it were necessary to make it clear that I would stand by the first necessity of action, to declare one’s purposes. It is only by my committing myself openly that the belief and the desire of others for an open and free discussion of homosexual problems may be encouraged” (quoted in Faas 150). Duncan’s signature ensured that he would become the subject of gossip. And, as I discuss later, he did receive praise, scorn, and retribution for his essay. In 1959, however, Duncan saw his authorship of “The Homosexual in Society” as a manner of internal conflict, a way to challenge some blasphemous double that lived within himself:
The involved disturbed syntax that collects conditional clauses and often fails to arrive at a full statement suggests that I felt in writing the essay that I must gather forces and weight to override some adversary; I have to push certain words from adverse meanings which as a social creature I share with the public to new meanings which might allow for an enlarged good… I had a likeness to the public and shared its conflicts of attitude – an apprehension which shapes the course of the essay. (Duncan 2014, 6)
- 5 Duncan’s practice of re-making “The Homosexual in Society” also mirrors his “admitting” his early p (...)
11This sense of embattlement is crucial to understanding all of Duncan’s commentary about this essay following 1944. “The Homosexual in Society” is not merely an argument but a social, political, even spiritual arena in which Duncan would come to better understand his evolving self, a special entry in Duncan’s mythopoetics.5
12The essay received a mixed response, including some glowing affirmations from readers. Ekbert Faas writes about those who showered Duncan with support:
One wrote that the only criticism he had was that the article was not long enough. Another reported that he had transcribed ‘The Homosexual in Society’ into Braille at the request of a blind man in Wisconsin, demanding a list of the author’s other publications for the same purpose. Finally, the Marcel Rodd Publishing Company in Hollywood suggested that Duncan write a book on the subject. Duncan replied that he was already working on a related series of essays, but nothing came of it. (Faas 151)
13In contrast, “The Homosexual in Society” upset members of the vulnerable minority of homosexuals who would later become emboldened by the privacies afforded within metropolitan cities following World War II. Faas also recalls the words of Parker Tyler, who wrote a letter to Macdonald: “Mr. Duncan’s article gradually develops into a confession of a more or less personal guilt-feeling, what might be called a ‘natural revulsion’ from the author’s own milieu. It should be evident from this alone that as yet he is no fit partisan of a social program” (Faas 151). Whether accurate or not, such criticisms clearly stayed with Duncan. By 1971, however, Duncan could recall in more jocular mood that “Virgil Thomson had one remark after the publication of this piece. He said, He barely gets invited to a party and he starts writing about being in society?” (Duncan 1971).
- 6 In fact, 1959 is a year of great coincidence with respect to “The Homosexual in Society,” a year th (...)
- 7 Duncan’s 1959 commentary was first published in an issue of Andrew Schelling and Ben Friedlander’s (...)
- 8 In his notes on the publication history of the “The Homosexual in Society,” James Maynard summarize (...)
14Duncan wrote “The Homosexual in Society” years before the publication of Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male or the founding of the Mattachine Society, or his involvement with Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer during the Berkeley Renaissance. Instead, after the essay’s publication in 1944 he complemented his essay with footnotes, anecdotes, origin stories, and historical correspondences so that the essay continued to have an evolving relationship to contemporary attitudes about homosexuality, art, and politics. The first of these elaborations was prompted by Seymour Krim, who asked Duncan to reprint his essay in 1959 as part of an anthology of Beat writing.6 For this purpose, Duncan wrote an introduction, a reflection, and added several footnotes to the essay. In the end, Krim elected not to reprint “The Homosexual in Society” and the revised essay and Duncan’s commentary would not be published until 1985.7 But regardless of Krim’s choice not to reprint the essay,8 his solicitation of “The Homosexual in Society” suggests the extent to which the Beats were already commonly understood as a “gang” of sexual outsiders – nonconformists, queer rebels, and those unrepentant homosexuals who refused to be recuperated by respectability politics or silenced by pathology and normality. Duncan was certainly a member of this gang, though he, along with other writers associated with the Beats following the publication of The New American Poetry, protested the Beat moniker.
15Written a year before he would meet greater fame through The Opening of the Field and Donald Allen’s anthology, Duncan’s 1959 commentary lays out his scathing opinions about the Beats and their idealization of the homosexual as social pariah. Duncan’s main concern is with the solipsism of these poets, whom he unsparingly damns:
It is my sense that the fulfillment of man’s nature lies in the creation of that [public] trust; and where the distrusting imagination sets up an image of “self” against the desire for unity and mutual sympathy, the state called “Hell” is created. There we find the visceral agonies, sexual aversions and possessions, excitations and depressions, the omnipresent “I” that bears true witness to its condition in “Howl” or “Kaddish,” in McClure’s Hymns to St. Geryon or the depressive “realism” of Life Studies. (Duncan 2014, 12)
- 9 In his 1971 commentary about “The Homosexual in Society,” Duncan seems to take back some the vitrio (...)
16It’s easy to see how Duncan’s criticism might be read as sour grapes, targeting some of the most consequential names in poetry at that time. But Duncan’s criticism is not only bitter, it is also meant to be quite specific. As Duncan made clear in later commentary, one of the themes of “The Homosexual in Society” is the commercialization of (gay) culture. The celebrity and success of other poets, then, is precisely Duncan’s point. By 1959 the publication of “Howl” and the obscenity trial that followed had guaranteed Ginsberg’s status as one of the most famous homosexuals in the world. On the other hand, Robert Lowell, whose Life Studies would go on to win the National Book Award, was meanwhile also turning a profit on his representation of the homosexual-as-social-extreme. In his essay “Poetry as Confession” that inaugurated the genre of confessional poetry, M.L. Rosenthal singles out Lowell’s poem “Words for Hart Crane,” complimenting Lowell’s poetry for shedding the mask of sexual deviance that Rosenthal believes even Crane had failed to do. In the 1970s, Duncan will make the anti-capitalist politics of his essay even clearer. But for now, written on the verge of his big break, Duncan’s 1959 footnotes constitute part of the archive of his development as a writer and his changing relationship to different poetic schools and discourses of homosexuality.9 Duncan’s experience of a separate homosexual social reality inclined him to believe in both the anti-establishment and revolutionary power of resisting a normative sexuality (and by extension the social conformity of the Atomic Age), but he also imagines that anti-social attitude reaching, at its limit, Hell itself.
17If a reader were looking for some choice words about the gay literati, Duncan’s 1959 commentary dishes it out in spades. And yet, another fascinating aspect of “The Homosexual in Society” is the essay’s refusal to gossip properly – that is, Duncan refuses to name names. In the original essay, Duncan even laments: “But names cannot be named” (Duncan 2014, 8), and his unwillingness to gossip properly persists even into the 1959 footnote that follows this lamentation. In this footnote, Duncan provides ample insight into the effects of institutionalized homophobia. If “The Homosexual in Society” slyly offers a view onto a utopian otherworld, this footnote glances in the opposite direction, permanently attaching to “The Homosexual in Society” stories of two literary authorities who refused to advance an open discussion of homosexuality.
18The first man, an “eminent poet,” declines Duncan’s offer to write about his poetry in relationship to homosexuality, citing his precarity as a homosexual teacher during the 1940s. Duncan doesn’t (yet) reveal who this poet is, but he does explain his anger for the necessity of such anonymity: “My own conviction is that no public issue is more pressing than the one that would make a man guilty and endanger his livelihood for the open knowledge of his sexual nature; for the good of humanity lies in a common quest through shared experience toward the possibility of sexual love” (Duncan 2014, 15). The second man, an “eminent editor,” withdrew his offer to publish Duncan’s poem “An African Elegy” as a direct result of the publication of “The Homosexual in Society.” In his footnote Duncan quotes extensively from the anonymous editor’s letter to Duncan:
I cannot agree with you that we should publish [“An African Elegy”] nevertheless in the name of freedom of speech; because I cannot agree with your position that homosexuality is not abnormal. It is biologically abnormal in the most obvious sense. I am not sure whether or not state and federal laws regard it so, but I think they do; I should not take the initiative in the matter, but if there are laws to this effect I concur with them entirely. There are certainly laws prohibiting incest and polygamy, and with which I concur, though they are only abnormal conventionally and are not so damaging to a society biologically (Duncan 2014, 16)
19Today, the curious reader will find the names of the vulnerable poet (W.H. Auden) and this homophobic editor (John Crowe Ransom) in the notes that accompany Duncan’s Collected Essays. However, Duncan seems to have intentionally omitted these names in 1959. While his comments from 1959 reflect a more emboldened Duncan, they also remain somewhat limited in their revelations about the active curtailment of certain careers for trespassing against established norms. As a gossip and a poet, Duncan was an intermediary between several spheres, drawing back the curtain on a homosexual underground and the various economic and institutional challenges that worked against those who would speak freely. But as much as Duncan is willing to evince for his readers the extent of the problem of institutionalized homophobia, his unwillingness to name names suggests the dangers that still threatened anyone who spoke too freely. In 1959 Duncan drew back the curtain – but only so far.
- 10 This reading was held at the Poetry Center in San Francisco and organized by Paul Mariah, who was c (...)
20This changed in 1967 when Duncan donated his exchange with Ransom to the Washington University Libraries in St. Louis, Missouri. According to Faas reports in The Young Robert Duncan, Duncan saw the exchange as “an interesting particular record [...] of the problems my generation faced as writers with the editor of Kenyon Review. And it was in extension the opposition we faced with Partisan Review, Hudson Review, Southern Review, Sewanee Review” (Faas 154). In subsequent years Duncan would often speak about Ransom’s response to “The Homosexual in Society” and his refusal to publish “An African Elegy.” These were the years of Gay Liberation, when writers and readers sought to unearth historical precedents for a “gay sensibility” and develop a tradition of gay writing that connected the present to the past. As awful as the Ransom episode had been, it also bolstered Duncan’s image as an iconoclast with a record of challenging the (straight) establishment. By 1971, Duncan was even making light of Ransom’s threats of sterilization. At the first-ever Gay Liberation reading on a college campus,10 Duncan spoke about the most heated part of his exchange with Ransom: “He said he didn’t know what the law was, but he felt that homosexuals should be [...] altered was the word [...] to prevent breeding of that type. God! A Southerner – [the] first thing he wants to do is cut your balls off. I said, Well, I don’t think – I would willingly take a pledge. I’m not going to breed this year. But just leave me with my equipment, could you?” (Duncan 1971).
- 11 In his interview with Robert Peters and Paul Trachtenberg, Duncan says, “Well, come to think of it, (...)
- 12 For a tremendous reading of Duncan’s influence on Gunn, see Brian Teare’s essay “Our Dionysian Expe (...)
21But what were gay people to do with Duncan, author of the courageous “Homosexual in Society” essay, which was, at best, ambivalent about the political possibilities for gay identity? Some chose to gloss over the obvious limitations. Fag Rag reprinted “The Homosexual in Society” in 1973, which was introduced by editor Charley Shively: “Robert Duncan published this article almost thirty years ago in Dwight MacDonald’s movement magazine, Politics. Duncan is one of America’s gayest and greatest poets; he now has over a dozen books published. We are reprinting this article now only because it is a neglected part of our historical heritage and because it is so prophetic but also because it raises issues still unresolved today” (Duncan 1973, 5). Even as late as 1976, however, Duncan still resisted calling himself gay.11 Despite such protests, Duncan was quickly assumed into the ranks of gay poetry anthologies. In 1979, Robert K. Martin included Duncan in his The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry, and Thom Gunn presented his “Homosexuality in Robert Duncan’s Poetry” at that year’s Modern Language Association conference. By this time, the story of Ransom’s refusal was completely out in the open, and Gunn’s essay lays out both pieces of the story in quick succession: Duncan’s “unusual article” and Ransom’s “extraordinary complaint” (Gunn 118). After 1967, the story of “The Homosexual in Society” would always carry with it the story of Ransom, The Kenyon Review, and the editor’s refusal to publish “An African Elegy.”12
22Still, Duncan found more to say about “The Homosexual in Society” in interviews with younger gay writers – with Robert Peters and Paul Trachtenberg in 1976 and Steve Abbott and Aaron Shurin in 1978/1979, the latter of which would be published in Winston Leyland’s Gay Sunshine and Abbott’s own New Narrative magazine Soup. In the 1976 interview, Duncan gives a more revealing glimpse into that famous party of camping queens, claiming it as the inspiration for his essay:
My remarks were generated by a party I attended for Edouard Roditi [poet and Oscar Wilde specialist] given by one of the Guggenheims. The latter had presented Roditi with a “Vie de Soiree Dress,” which he wore. Everybody, all those society people, were “darlings” and kissed one another a lot. Another poet of that society was Philip Lamantia, a very beautiful young man three of four years younger than I was, who was trying to make this gay scene, mixing a high society voice with affectations borrowed from the gay world of the 1930s. I was confused and upset, for Philip’s voice was very effective, and I had been most attentive to camp and other gay and high artistic society voices. (Duncan 1998, 100)
23This party also comes up in the Gay Sunshine interview, though in that telling there’s little of the festivities ornamenting the scene. Duncan says, “‘The Homosexual in Society’ article of 1944 arose from my reaction to a fashionable gay party and seeing a young poet, seeing what I feared I might be too, in his affected voice” (Duncan 2014, 90). Duncan’s use of “effective” and “affected” to describe the voice of the young poet is revealing. Taken together, these words suggest Duncan’s criticism of homosexuality as a potentially falsifiable performance that can be emulated and commodified. Duncan’s renewed interest in homosexuality as a effective/affected performance clarified, once more, and with a difference, the political ends of his essay. In 1944, the essay speaks to the need to talk openly about human experience, including sexuality, while arguing against the minority statuses and subcultures. In 1959, Duncan criticizes Lowell, Ginsberg, and the Beats for participating in a spectacle of homosexuality for the sake of profit. In the 1970s, the politics of “The Homosexual in Society” are subtly altered once again.
- 13 Agee’s descriptions of pianist Hazel Scott are particularly deplorable (Agee).
24At least according to Duncan in the 1970s, “The Homosexual in Society” is an essay about capitalism, specifically the commodification of identity. Of the origins of the essay, Duncan says that he was prompted by James Agee’s “Pseudo-Folk,” an essay published in Partisan Review in 1944. As Duncan remembers it during the Gay Liberation reading of 1971, Agee’s “very caustic piece,” which decries the commercialization of Black culture in vividly racist terms,13 reminded him of “people very much closer to my own world, who were very acceptable provided they were funny, who were very acceptable providing they were really just [...] lost their minds and who were not yet capable of meeting the world, straight on.” The implied need to protect one’s self and one’s art from the compromises of commerce rings true with the expansive humanism of the rest of Duncan’s vision in “The Homosexual In Society,” as does the implied critique of an economic system that would reward individuals for obscuring their individuality and their culture. Traces of Agee’s inspiration can be found in the essay’s opening paragraph. “I propose to discuss a group,” Duncan begins his refrain, “whose only salvation is in the struggle of all humanity for freedom and individual integrity; who have suffered in modern society prosecution, excommunication [...] who have been willing rather than to struggle toward self-recognition, to sell their product, to convert their deepest feelings into marketable oddities and sentimentalities” (Duncan 2014, 7). Duncan does not mean this metaphorically. Similarly, in The Years as Catches, Duncan writes, “I saw my own personal life belonging to a larger human life that was foreign to the society into which I had been born, to the American way, to the capitalist ethic with its identification of work with earning a wage and of the work with a saleable commodity, and with its ruthless exploitation of human energies for profit” (Duncan 1966, vii). The extra context of Agee’s essay, which appears nowhere within Duncan’s essay or even his 1959 commentary, suggests that the process of legitimization that must be critiqued is coextensive with an economic system that transforms individuals and cultures into commodities. This seems like a stunningly apt warning from Duncan to the poets of Gay Liberation, and further builds some connective tissue between Duncan and New Narrative, who advanced a sexual politics informed by Marxist critique.
- 14 Boone’s notion of the “gay band” refers to Jean-Luc Godard’s film Band à Part and the “gay band” of (...)
25Following Duncan’s interviews with gay writers during the 1970s, the next wave of interest in “The Homosexual in Society” came from New Narrative, when Boone and Glück celebrated Duncan and other gay writers in their essays of the 1980s and beyond. In “Robert Duncan and the Gay Community,” first published in a 1983 special issue of Ironwood dedicated to Duncan, Boone echoes Shiveley’s ambivalence when he finds himself compelled by the horizon of Duncan’s sexual politics: “The strategy question is this: can sheer oppositionality, so important once as a technique for breaking up the massive uniformity of the 50s (still) be effective in a no-longer-conformist, pluralist 80s? The corollary for gays: how to go beyond separatism without negating its advances?” (Boone 331). Boone’s generous reading is somewhat surprising given that “the gay band,” a latter-day avatar of “the homosexual cult,” was so central to New Narrative’s pedagogy and self-understanding.14 But, as Boone suggests, “Duncan’s ideal sexual community is a program of inclusiveness that hopes to be exhaustive” (Boone 332). Thus, “the common humanity” Duncan idealizes seems essentially, universally beyond reach. To contemporary readers, Duncan’s idealism might resonate with José Esteban Muñoz’s opening assertions from Cruising Utopia: “Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We many never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality” (Muñoz 1). Utopians themselves, Boone and Glück do not dismiss Duncan on the basis of this idealism. Instead, they take care to mark both the essay’s historical character and choose to learn from Duncan’s vision.
- 15 See also Robbie Dewhurst’s article on Gay Sunshine (Dewhurst).
- 16 By coincidence, Boone’s insights dovetail with Duncan’s arguments in his 1959 footnotes about Auden (...)
26Through a number of gossip-laden interviews with Duncan, New Narrative extended the historical work of Winston Leyland and Gay Sunshine, which had tended to be more coarsely essentialist in its attitudes about gay identity and sexual politics.15 Though it is infrequently cited as such, New Narrative was also, if unintentionally, a historical project. Much like its aesthetic tendencies, however, New Narrative’s historical project was never evenly applied, so its effects are difficult to measure. Nevertheless, New Narrative’s scholarship has modeled what is to be gained by attending seriously to gossip about (gay) authors’ personal lives, thus challenging dominant notions of what was dismissed by critics as “gossip” to begin with. In “Gay Language as Political Praxis,” for example, Boone argues that the issue of Frank O’Hara’s sexuality and its relationship to his poetry is not only an issue of historical accuracy, but it also, and more urgently, the difficult matter that the process of legitimization had to ignore, mute, or otherwise excise. That is, by returning a text to its historical context, the critic can examine those aspects of the text that needed to be omitted in order for the dominant culture to accept the work as legitimate.16 For Boone, the gossip of O’Hara’s poetry is not mere idle talk but evidence of the repression that language innovated around by necessity. Taken as an expression of New Narrative historiographic principles, Boone’s “Gay Language as Political Praxis” inspired the gossipy historical work of a number of later New Narrative scholarship, including Lew Ellingham and Kevin Killian’s biography of Jack Spicer – which was dismissed by one gay critic as a bunch of “faggot gossip” – and Glück’s elegies and tributes collected in Communal Nude. Glück’s portraits are full of idle chatter, constructing portraits of his peers and heroes that are fragmented and associative and downright juicy.
27The most famous bit of gossip about Duncan and the New Narrative writers is, of course, that he slept with some of them. Glück writes of their affair in his essay “Tribute: Robert Duncan,” which was delivered following Duncan’s death in 1988:
Robert fell in love with the younger poets. Aaron Shurin for one. Someone in Australia I believe. Me later. So there was quite a bit of negotiating. We handled it in our different ways. I simply carried on as though nothing was different, and finally Robert protested, rightly, that at least his feelings should be acknowledged. What did it amount to? – some caresses, a kiss or two. Aaron has a more human story. (Glück 2016c, 257)
- 17 On the beginning of Shurin’s relationship with Duncan, see Jarnot 334-335.
28The details of these encounters and their significance have been woven into the fabric of elegies, essays, biography, and poetry—most recently Brandon Brown’s Work. It is not difficult to notice a bit of flirtation in Glück’s poem “R. Duncan,” which begins, “The schemer encloses his desire in a riddle [...]” (Glück 1989, 37). But, as Glück suggests, the more substantial story belongs to New Narrative fellow traveler Aaron Shurin. Lisa Jarnot’s biography of Duncan offers exquisite details, many quoted directly from Shurin, about the love affair.17 For Duncan’s version of their time together, readers have the pleasure of reading Duncan’s “Enthralld”:
It is just this afternoon just this hour
yet how entirely life races
in the blue of the sky my eyes find themselves
feeding sight
as in the arousal of your body thriving
the long embrace, repeated mouthings
the mounting thrill in one shared trunk,
one spirit shining
filld with the sense of you
still the flesh sings [...] (Duncan 2006, 248)
A response of sorts, an echo can be read in Shurin’s poem “In The Long Grass,” which concludes,
[...] – his story that he told to me, his reawakening in my
waking him – of the dry tubes then the wet tubes and the
time-lapse and the hunger machine and the indignities eased
in his beautiful naked grief in my youth where he grazed in
the long grass in the beautiful hot glare like a new blank page
open flat in the sun [...]. (Shurin 20)
To all of this beauty, I will only add some final words from an unpublished essay of Shurin’s from 2012 and that he was kind enough to share with me:
A brief note about the interview Steve Abbott and I did: it took place over three days in 1978/79 in my apartment in the Haight where I lived for 35 years – and by the way from which I am being evicted by a greedy new landlord, so if anyone has any housing ideas… Christopher [Wagstaff] tells me it was the longest interview Robert ever gave. My own grounding in early gay liberation and feminist theory provided the safe space for Robert to discuss things he’d never before aired. He and I were already friends – with a couple of benefits I have to add in full disclosure – but I drew the line at a couple (glory only went so far). So when Robert arrived at my house for this Gay Sunshine interview, it was my co-interviewer, Steve Abbott, who was firmly in his sights. When I wrote, in the introduction, “There is Duncan with his white tufted hair at either side of his commanding eagle-like face – one eye holding you down and one roving” what I really meant was one eye was pinning me to my seat like a silver stake while the other went roving all over Steve Abbott. Nevertheless, for three days he talked and we chirped in a few questions, which he either batted away (mine) or answered under heavy, smoky lids (Steve’s). The whole document, of which the book only reprints a small part, represents one of the most comprehensive statements on art and life Robert ever made. For all the lids and stakes and bats and rovings, the experience was a revelation and the overarching feeling was one of unbounded generosity. Though thoroughly exhausted from over-stimulation, I considered myself an incredibly lucky young man. “Rend open the heat [...]. Plough through it.” Let’s say my objective for ardor had been wildly awakened – and I was rent open for good. (Shurin, unpublished)
29With this essay, I wish to honor New Narrative’s relationships to Duncan as a mentor, peer, and a catalyst by gathering up the swirling commentary that Duncan and others have produced in response to “The Homosexual in Society.” I also mean to take this tribute further by suggesting two distinct but related themes that now can also be drawn from “The Homosexual in Society”: the (in)commensurability of race and sexuality and the rejection of homo-fascism. With respect to the latter: it is not at all apparent from Duncan’s original essay that the “cult” of homosexuals he meant to excoriate is that of homosexuals such as Ernst Röhm, who cultivated the primordial homosocial ooze from which the Nazi Party would emerge. And yet, during the Gay Liberation reading of 1971, Duncan offered a striking clarification about whom he meant by the “homosexual cult.” Intercut with his reading of the essay, Duncan added,
Let me make a footnote about the cult of superiority. Homosexuals were a very important element of the Nazi party. It was their first actual political expression, and it revolved around various superstitions that homosexuals were clearly superior to other people. This kind of superiority is, I think, we now understand, a part of the in-built structure of all people who are made to feel inferior. (Duncan 1971)
30Without the extra context of Duncan’s 1971 commentary, responses to Duncan’s condemnation of the “homosexual cult of superiority” have tended to translate the poet’s politics in terms of separatism of the Gay Liberation era. Sadly, Duncan’s essay might actually be more immediately relevant to the political situation of today, which has witnessed a declining incompatibility between same-sex desire and authoritarianism.
31The broader historical context that informs a reading of “The Homosexual in Society” as an anti-fascist text would include the defining features of World War II, the fascism, genocide, and global carnage still unfolding as the essay was written, as well as Duncan’s pivot away from Ezra Pound, who had early been an inspiration to a young Duncan. This context is an important supplement for understanding the anti-fascist politics Duncan suggests. It’s also worth pausing over Boone’s intuition about the horizon of Duncan’s “cult of homosexual superiority,” as it affirms the benefits of using gossip as historical evidence. In the previously mentioned “Robert Duncan and Gay Community” Boone manages to sniff out the traces of Nazism by chance – and a virtuosic rush of gossip, suggestion, and guess work. Boone names Duncan’s teacher at U.C. Berkeley, medievalist Ernst Kantarowicz, as “a member of the inner circle of George-Kreiss” (Boone 315). Boone then describes Stefan George’s circle as “a homosexual cult [...] dedicated to preserving the memory of the Master’s dead teenager lover, Maximillian” (ibid. 313). Because Stefan George did have an early influence on the Nazi party, it’s possible to say that Boone intuits what Duncan cites in his reading. The homosexual cult represents not only a siloing of a fuller human potential but also the very real danger represented by fascism – in which homosexuals had truly played a part, lending it the powers of their sexuality and, notably in the case of George, their poetry. It is my hope that future scholars will consider “The Homosexual in Society” as an anti-capitalist, anti-fascist text based on Duncan’s later commentary about his essay. But I also want to highlight how Boone’s tangle of associations suggests why scholars should be sensitive to historical gossip, which, in this case and by a circuitous route, nevertheless arrived at the same urgent message: gay identity can be made compatible with even the most abhorrent ideologies.
32Whereas the significance of “The Homosexual in Society” for sexual politics changed over the decades following its original publication in 1944, the significance of Duncan’s essay for rethinking the politics of race remains underdeveloped. In “The Homosexual in Society” Duncan speaks about race to the extent that he compares the political situation of homosexuals to that of “Negroes.” In accord with the rest of the essay he believes that homosexuals, unlike Black people, have failed to “[join] openly in the struggle for human freedom” (Duncan 2014, 8). Nonetheless, given that Agee’s essay motivated Duncan’s response, it’s interesting to note that the entire episode surrounding this essay involves Duncan relating sexuality and race, relying upon a commensurability of minority statuses, specifically homosexuality and Blackness. Not only does Agee’s argument in “Pseudo-folk” remind him of the situation of homosexuals, who must deform their culture so that they might become acceptable to society by way of commerce, but there is also the poem that occasioned the entire debacle with Ransom and Kenyon Review: Duncan’s “An African Elegy.” If Duncan was able to forever attach the story of Ransom and “An African Elegy to “The Homosexual in Society,” it may yet be possible to continue the project of gossiping about Duncan’s essay, making connections within the jumble of what Duncan has said about this essay and encouraging new scandals. As Glück writes in his “Long Note on New Narrative”: “Did we believe in the truth and freedom of sex? Certainly we were attracted to scandal and shame where there is so much information. Shame is a kind of fear, and fears are what organize us from above, so displaying them is political.” (Glück 2016, 13)
- 18 Given that Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts premiered on Broadway in 1934 and, according to (...)
33Duncan is rather shameless, but his poem “An African Elegy” might yet seem like a shameful entry in Duncan’s oeuvre. In his interview with Abbott and Shurin, Duncan reveals that he actually sees himself as the racialized other of this poem. Particularly telling of Duncan’s myopic self-referentiality, Duncan’s realization follows the reading of “An African Elegy” that he gave to “the original cast of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints.”18 As Duncan recalled,
And when I came to the “Negroes, negroes, all those princes” and I finish this whole thing and I’m in rapture, all those faces beaming at me, and then this great big gorgeous hunk of a black stud says “Do you have any par-ti-cu-lar black gentleman in mind” [Laughs.] and I thought, God! I didn’t have any particular fellow in mind [...]. It was Othello that was on my mind but it was a dream scene and I was moving it and going forward to what I was seeing. In fact, in that one, I find I am that figure. (Duncan 1982, 87-88)
34In “An African Elegy” Duncan participates in an Orientalism that transforms genuine social differences into a palette of exotic self-estrangements for the purpose of exploring his own seemingly foreign and unknowable psychic geography. Consider, for example, these lines from the poem: “I know / no other continent of Africa more dark than this / dark continent of my breast” (Duncan 1966, 34). The self-estrangement that Duncan describes in the poem mirrors the moment when this anonymous “black stud” asks the poet to account for particularity (and it’s only too perfect that he over-annunciates “par-ti-cu-lar”), and Duncan can only point back to himself as the universal subject. This universalism that nevertheless returns to the norm of white masculinity seems of a kind with the structural anthropology and psychoanalysis that helped to shape Duncan’s poetics. In this version of Duncan’s reflection on “An African Elegy” vis-à-vis “The Homosexual in Society,” the poet fails to sufficiently answer for how sexuality and race are not, in fact, commensurate, or acknowledge that different people may benefit from different poetics to liberate themselves into that state of common humanity Duncan describes in 1944.
35Alternately, in his interview with Peters and Trachtenberg, Duncan suggests how everything – Ransom, Nazism, homophobia, and race – is connected without being commensurate. In that interview, he wrote, once again, of Ransom’s refusal of “An African Elegy”:
He came back with a letter, and in that one he returned the poem. He was ignorant of the law, he said, but he believed that homosexuals should be castrated to prevent their breeding more homosexuals. Then I came back, not with a biblical argument, but with an argument from the very Nazi argument that homosexuals contribute to the degeneracy of the race. Then I realized that this very Southern gentleman, Ransom, was poring over a poem, and in it saw that negroes were no longer symbolic; they were actual negroes. There was a big black HE, and that sent Ransom up a tree. He was right as long as he took the figure as a symbol, because that was my intention when I wrote it. It didn’t dawn on me that these symbols were hiding anything covert. So you see that if you fully acknowledge in yourself, and if everyone around you acknowledges your homosexuality, you’re not making an annoucement. You still create covered images because they stand for depths in yourself. (Duncan 1998, 105)
36Duncan suggests to Peters and Trachtenberg a unity between “The Homosexual in Society” and “An African Elegy.” There are no minority statuses, just unacknowledged depths. However, according to Duncan, what frightened Ransom the most was “a big black HE” who speaks and desires, a Black intelligence gazing back at the New Critic through the ink on the page. As Boone suggested in his essay on Frank O’Hara, New Criticism famously suppressed “context,” focusing on form and technique as a way of limiting the significance of biography, history, identity, social difference, and politics. What Duncan’s “An African Elegy” episode illustrates is that Ransom was willing to accept Black bodies and homosexual desires, but only on the condition that these bodies and desires were symbols – depths that remained depths.
37Since the first publication of Duncan’s essay in 1944, the poet returned to the essay regularly to clarify, refine, extend, and re-imagine the essay’s political and poetic message. As we have seen, the essay is variously about the need to acknowledge homosexuality while critiquing homosexual separatism, a denunciation of fellow poets who would profit from a certain representation of the homosexual as social pariah, praise for gay authors whose work engage with but ultimately transcend homosexuality, a condemnation of the practices of the literary establishment that continue to stymie any admission of homosexuality, and an indictment of the New Critics’ hypocritical practice of close reading, which sees homosexuality nowhere and everywhere. In offering these glimpses upon the two Black men who manage to become a part of the history of “The Homosexual in Society,” I hope to continue the challenge begun by Duncan and continued by New Narrative to resist securing meaning by way of excluding certain stories as extraneous gossip.
38Whether one is inclined to see Duncan’s commentary as the clarification, refinement, extension, or re-imagining of the original essay determines one’s sensitivity to Duncan’s fidelity to or contradiction of his original text. It may be, however, more profitable to look forward to what else might be gained by returning to “The Homosexual in Society” today, as a series of related texts and paratexts that powerfully object to some of the most sinister systems of oppression of their day. In the case of “The Homosexual in Society” the ephemerality of historical matter has always been a condition of Duncan’s ability to speak of this oppression. To experience history as gossip is to be forced to recognize the polyvocal and contradictory, even palimpsestic nature of a past that can never be fully recuperated. In this way, queer history is no different than any other story about experience. However, as Duncan’s “The Homosexual in Society” argues, history will never be complete without an account of the special history of queer people and their struggles to produce language, art, and community as members of the totality of human experience. As Boone and Glück recognize in their reflections on Duncan’s essay, this totality is an ideal, another order of reality that, perhaps, no one – gay, straight, or otherwise – might achieve. In our everyday lives, poetry is merely gossip about the world, but in Duncan’s utopian outlook, the world is merely gossip about Poetry. The goal of Duncan’s essay is a utopia, a place that does not (yet) exist, where every human desire and truth might be spoken of freely.