R.M. Vaughan: “A Smile Pulled from the Eyes”

Photographers Unknown, But, Once You Start Living, It Never Ends

“Mais, une fois qu’on a commence’ de vivre, ca n’en finit plus.”
-Anne He’bert, La Robe Corail

yes, I could be transparent, have no more than 2 meanings
for every sentence, smother the small inhalations
in duck-lined beds (instinctual)
but I am not

tired, only some part of me, the corner of intellect
reserved for newspapers, educated company, family fights
won’t shut up, won’t misread for me, play blind man’s bluff or
any game with kissing and shut eyes won’t say – this means
nothing. I am safe-

from harm, I take baby steps      dangle limbs over balconies
sit on cane back chairs made for light men in linens      even dance
fat-legged, convinced of rhythm      but from love all manner
and logic, knoves if necessary      nothing closes me, nothing

to danger, a smile pulled from the eyes, where smartness lives
or a wrist, the left, folding surrendered air in cross-cuts      language
for events microscopic, just as loud      but to love
no tricks no practiced feints of hip or cape, no tangles of scarves
to swirl over the very idea      because love happened, once, and
like anything charming      love was just another language, another dress,
a sneaky link of party half-grins      spread chair to chair, room to room
sogning the trickster from his mark

–R.M. Vaughan, Untitled, Invisible to Predators, ECW Press, Fall 1999

Born in the city of Saint John in New Brunswick, Canada, in 1965, Richard Murray Vaughan was a poet, novelist, and playwright. He earned both his Bachelor of Arts degree in Creative Writing and his Masters of Arts in English from the University of New Brunswick. Openly gay, he was playwright-in-residence for the years 1994 and 1995 at Buddies in Bad Times, a professional Canadian theater company. Originally focused on staged adaptions of poetry, the company became dedicated to the promotion of queer theatrical expression during the 1980s.

RM Vaughan published many works in his career, including fiction, poetry, anthologies, stage plays, and journalistic articles for such publications as the digital digest Utne Reader, the digital LGBYQ2-focused Xtra magazine, and the print newspaper The Globe and Mail. Vaughan’s memoir about his struggles with insomnia, entitled “Bright Eyed”, was published in 2015.

Vaughan has written many poetry books and chapbooks. Some of his most successful works include “A Selection of Dazzling Scarves” published in 1996 and “96 Tears (in my Jeans)” published in 1997 by Broken jaw Press. The most recent collections of his poetry include the 2004 “Ruined Stars” and “Troubled: A Memoir in Poems” published in 2008. His single poems have been included in over fifty anthologies.

As a novelist, RM Vaughan’s work includes “A Quilted Heart” in 1998 and “Spells” in 2003; as a playwright, his work includes the 1998 “Camera, Woman” and the 2003 “The Monster Trilogy”. Vaughan’s short narrative and experimental videos have been exhibited in many Canadian and international galleries and festivals, and are represented by V-Tape and the Canadian Filmmakers’s Distribution Centre.

RM Vaughan’s works often touched on queer stories of coming-of-age and eroticism. He had a taste for the supernatural and macabre, and was captivated by the world of the celebrity. Vaughan published the book of essays “Compared to Hitler” in 2013 which featured many of his opinions on contemporary culture.

While working as writer-in-residence at the University of New Brunswick, located in Fredericton, RM Vaughan was reported missing on October 13th of 2020. His body was reported discovered ten days later on October 23rd; his death was not considered as foul play.

Note: A collection of six poems by Richard Murray Vaughan can be found at Canadian Poetry Online, located at: https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/vaughan/poems.htm

César Moro: “Like a Road That Vanishes”

Photographer Unknown, Like a Road That Vanishes

“The same as your non-existent window
Like a hand’s shadow in a phantom instrument
The same as your veins and your blood’s intense journey
With the same equality with the precious continuity that ideally
reassures me of your existence
At a distance
In the distance
Despite the distance
With your head and your face
And your entire presence without closing my eyes
And the landscape arising from your presence when the city was
only, could only be, the useless reflection of your slaughter
presence

In order to better moisten the birds’ feathers
The rain is falling a great distance
And it encloses me within you all by myself
Within and far from you
Like a road that vanishes on another continent.”
—César Moro, The Illustrated World

Born in Lima in 1903, César Moro, birth name Alfredo Quispez Asin, was a Peruvian poet and painter, whose only fond memory of his Jesuit childhood education was his learning French. He changed his name to César Moro, at the age of twenty, after a character by author Romón Gómez de la Serna. After years of unbearable parochialism and hostility towards any form of poetic expression, which characterized Lima between 1920 and 1930, Moro traveled to Paris in 1925 to pursue dance and art; but later poetry and art became his focus.

Moro exhibited in group shows in Brussels in 1926, and in Paris the next year. He became a member of the Surrealist movement and exchanged ideas and art with such figures as poet Paul Éluard, writer and poet André Breton, poet Benjamin Péret, and outside the surrealist group, painters Henri and Simone Jannot. Moro promptly adopted French as his second writing language and became the only Latin American poet to contribute to Andre Breton’s surrealistic journals of the 1920s and 1930s.

While living in Paris, César Moro continued to publish his work in Latin America, including the Peruvian periodical “Amauta” whose April 1928 edition printed Moro’s poems “Oráculo”, “Infancia”, and “Following You Around”. He was active in the Parisian political protests through his contribution to the writing of the 1933 manifesto “Mobilization Against the War is Not Peace”. Moro added a note to the manifesto condemning Peru’s dictator Sánchez Cerro’s violent suppression of an uprising of sailors who were protesting against cruel discipline and poor nutrition.

Moro returned to Lima in 1934 and continued to write against those in power. The police of Peruvian dictator Benavides entered his home and confiscated copies of the clandestine pamphlet, CADRE, which supported the Spanish Republic. As a result of continual police harassment, Moro fled Peru in March of 1938. He traveled to Mexico City, his residence for the next ten years, and befriended other progressive artists seeking haven, such as Austrian painter Wolfgang Paalen, photographer Eva Sulzer, surrealist painters Remedios Varo and Gordon Onslow Ford and British painter and novelist Leonora Carrington.

With assistance from Wolfgang Paalen and André Breton, the modernist avant-garde artists of Mexico City organized the 1940 International Exhibition of Surrealism at the Galeria de Art Mexicano. This large exhibition followed two others exhibitions staged by Moro, the earliest in 1935 with Chilean artists Maria Valencia, Waldo Paaraguez, and Carlos Sotomayor. Moro became more closely associated with Wolfgang Paalen and his international literary and art journal “Dyn”. This journal gave Moro the opportunity to publish his French-language poetry, and allowed him to expand on his exploration of indigenous culture as subject matter.

César Moro was prolific in his output during his stay in Mexico, where he also published in the periodicals “El Hijo Prodigo (The Prodigal Son)” and “Lettas de México (Letters from Mexico)”. He also translated the surrealist poems in the periodicals and a poem of his, a tribute to Breton, was published in the “Letters to Mexico”. As a result of his association with Paalen, Moro published two collections of his poetry, “Le Chateau de Grisou (Firedamp Castle)” and “Lettre d’Amour (Love Letter)”, and many translations of his surrealist and avant-garde texts.

César Moro, who was gay, led a self-described scandalous life quietly and privately. Many of his fellow surrealists were unaware of his homosexuality, which he embraced for the first time in Mexico. While his love poetry written in France is tortured; the poetry written in Mexico City for his collection “The Equestrian Turtle”, an oblique chronicle of Moro’s relationship with army lieutenant Antonio Acosta, is openly homoerotic. Throughout 1939, Moro wrote a series of letters and poems which expressed the totality of his feelings for Acosta as being the sum total of his life. This totality of love lasted the duration of Moro’s residency in Mexico; even after Acosta married and became a father. Moro appears to have played an almost godfather-like role in the life of Acosta’s son.

The intensity of Moro’s relationship with Antonio coincided with Moro’s rift with Breton and the surrealist movement after the publication of Breton’s 1944 “Arcane 17”, a work combining memoir, poetry and political treatise in which Breton cited that heterosexual love was the only legitimate one. Moro denounced, not without reason,the shortsightedness of Breton who had placed himself as the ultimate champion of freedom. From then on Breton, who could not accept love between members of the same sex, no longer had as great an impact on Moro’s artistic development. Moro turned instead to figures such as Paalen for direction in his work.

In 1948 César Moro returned to Lima, where he wrote poetry for the periodicals “The Magazine of Guatemala” and “Dwellings”, taught French at the Leoncio Prado military college, and met his future partner and lover, the French writer André Coyne. In 1954, he made his last public appearance at a conference on Marcel Proust, where he delivered a paper entitled “Passionately Loved and Admired”. César Moro died of leukemia in Lima on January 15th of 1956. His death went unnoticed by “Bief”, the surrealist main publication at that time. A large part of his prose and poetry was collected and published posthumously through the efforts of his lover and literary executor André Coyné.

Notes: César Moro’s 1939 collection “Le Tortuga Ecustre (The Equestrian Turtle)” contained an editorial and introduction by poet Américo Ferrari as well as an epilogue by Moro’s lover André Coyné. In his epilogue on page 88, Coyné noted that the title of the collection is an erotic symbol derived from their 1934-35 experience in Lima of seeing two turtles copulating in a park.

On the Asymptote Journal site, there are three poems from “TheEquestrian Turtle” that were translated by Leslie Bary and Esteban Quispe. These poems are located at: https://www.asymptotejournal.com/poetry/cesar-moro-the-equestrian-turtle/

More extensive information on the life of poet César Moro can be found at JSTOR’s online library located at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/90024968?seq=1

Matthew Hittinger: “In Strings of Is and Os”

Photographers Unknown, In Strings of Is and Os

I have been here since on other dates but it’s your ghost
still hausts this place. Or should I say duppy?
Can duppies cross the wide Sargasso sea?
or are they bound by the roots of the Banyan tree?

I won’t lie. A Jamaican ache. You seduced me
before you knew me, reading from a blank
sheet or receipt the words scared in that space
behind iris and cornea. And days later

when we met, when my boot heels clicked down those steps,
when
the March air blew me through that door, I gave
a wave to your perched chair. You would later
recount your disbelief to Richard that the man

who wrote you, who you thought a kindly old gentle
man, was an anagram and rhyme. Come now.
Did you really think me other than those
words you surely googled? I do not remember

what we drank, but I remember the direction
the wood grains went–yes I knew Erna’s work,
I studied with Lorna, and Walcott’s knot
was a year of my life. That landscape long dormant

woke again in me that night, your accent a chant,
your eyes brinning with island light, your skin
a song on my lips. Started, we parted
on opposite sides of the tracks, you Brooklyn-bound

me, Queens. I knew you, but not convinced of bamboo
clues I missed the hint, lint trapped in lucite.
The modern courting of email ensued,
the story of your name, our chat-box-poems exchanged

in strings of Is and Os. And that April surprise
to come home to find dew on my bed. Hi.
Hello. Hues conjured. There for me? For you?
for something we both felt and knew needed to bloom?

Matthew Hittinger, “71 Irving Place”, Smite and Spoon Project, 2017

Born in 1978 in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Matthew Hittinger is a poet and a printmaker. He earned his BFA in English and Art History at Pennsylvania’s Muhlenberg College in 2000 and his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Michigan in 2004. Hittinger is married to Michael Ernst Sweet, a Canadian writer, educator, and photographer known for his oddly-framed street photography.

Hittinger is the author of the poetry collections “The Masque of Marilyn, The Erotic Postulate” and “Skin Shift”, which , in 2012, earned him recognition as a Debut Poet from Poets & Writers Magazine. He has also written three chapbooks: the 2007 “Pear Slip”, winner of the 2006 Spire Press Chapbook Award, and two volumes published in 2009, “Narcissus Resists” and “Platos de Sal”.

Matthew Hittinger received the Helen S. and John Wagner Prize from the University of Michigan, the Kay Deeter Award from the literary journal “Fine Madness”, two Best of the Net nominations from Sundress Publications, and eleven nominations from the literary Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared on the web poetry anthology “Verse Daily” and in over fifty journals including American Letters & Commentary, the Michigan Quarterly Review, and StepAway Magazine, an award-winning online literary magazine. Hittinger’s work has also been featured in The Academy of American Poets.

Matthew Hittinger has also collaborated on projects with artists of other disciplines, such as the Canadian painter Kristy Gordon, American painter Judith Peck, composer Randall West, and New York City-based John Glover. Glover’s art song based on Hittinger’s poem “8:46 AM, Five Years Later” was included in the 2012 Five Borough Songbook, a book celebrating the five New York boroughs’ music festival.

Matthew Hittinger’s website is located at: https://matthewhittinger.com

Porfirio Barba-Jacob: “The Blind Hope”

Photographers Unknown, The Blind Hope

Pintad un Hombre joven, con palabras leales
y puras, con palabras de ensueño y emoción;
que haya en la estrofa el ritmo de los golpes cordiales
y en la rima el encanto móvil de la ilusión.

Destacad su figura, neta, contra el azul
del cielo, en la mañana florida, sonreída;
que el sol la bañe al sesgo y la deje bruñida;
que destelle en sus ojos una luz encendida;
que haga temblar las carnes un ansia contenida;
y el cándido mirar, y la ciega esperanza,
compendien el radiante misterio de la vida!

Paint a young man, with loyal and pure
words, with words of reveries and emotion;
and give to the strophe the rhythm of a cordial tone,
to the rhyme, the variable charm of illusion.

Outline his figure out against the blue
of the sky, in the flowery, smiling prime;
let the sun bathe it leaving it burnished
and his eyes sparkling with a burning flame.
Let a restrained yearning make his flesh tremble,
and the torso, the brow, the sinewy arms,
and the candid look and the blind hope,
compound the splendorous mystery of life!

—Porfirio Barba-Jacob, Retrato de un Jovencito (Portrait of a Young Man), 2006

Translation by Nicolás Suescún

Born in July of 1883, Miguel Ángel Osorio Benítez, best known by his pseudonym Porfirio Barba-Jacob, was a Columbian poet and writer of the Post-Modernist period. He was born in Santa Rosa de Osos, a city located in northwest Columbia; however, given to his grandparents soon after birth, Osorio spent his younger years in the countryside in Angostura. He did not receive a typical formal education but was self-taught, learning from his readings and experiences.

As a young man, Miguel Osorio was recruited by the Columbia government to fight in the Thousand Day’s War, its last civil war which ended in 1902. After working briefly as a teacher, he relocated to the capital Bogotá where he founded and managed, under the pseudonym Marin Jiménez, the literary magazine El Cancionero Antioqueño. Relocating in 1906 to Barranquilla, Osorio adopted a new pseudonym Ricardo Arenales in homage to Ricardo Hernández, a companion in his youth. Under this new name, he published the 1906 “La Tristeza del Camino (The Sadness of the Road)”, and the 1907 “Campiña Florida (The Countryside of Florida)”.

In 1908, Miguel Osorio traveled to Mexico which became his adoptive homeland and the major source of his lyrical work. A period of writing and relocations began after his move to Mexico, with journeys through Central America, Mexico and the United States. During this time Osorio contributed writings for many journals and magazines, and in 1917 published a work of fiction entitled “El Terremoto del Salvador (The Salvador Earthquake)”.

As a result of supporting the politician Porfirio Díaz during Mexico’s political crisis, Osorio was forced to flee to Guatemala; but after disagreeing with Guatemala’s authoritative Manuel Estrada Cabrera, he had to relocate to Cuba. In 1918, Osorio returned to Mexico and resumed his writings until 1922 when he was expelled by Mexico’s new president Ivaro Obregón. His flight this time took him to Guatemala. It was there in 1922, Osorio took a new pseudonym, Porfirio Barba-Jacob, which he would use on all further work.

Miguel Osorio, after being expelled in 1924 by Jorge Ubico, one of the more oppressive Guatemalan dictators, traveled to El Salvador where he was deported for his work by its dynastic president Alfonso Quiñónes Molina. This resulted in a three year journey through Honduras, a period residing in New Orleans, and a trip to Cuba. In 1927 Osorio journeyed back to his Columbian homeland for the last time.

During this Columbian stay, Miguel Osorio published writings in the journal “El Espectador” and two collections of poems: the 1933 “Canciones y Elegías (Songs and Elergies)” and the 1937 “La Cancio de la Vida Profunda y Otros Poemas (The Song of Deep Life and Other Poems)”. Osorio returned to his adopted homeland of Mexico, where in January of 1942, he died of tuberculosis in Mexico City at the age of fifty-eight.

Due to his anti-authoritarian writings. Miguel Osorio who identified himself with Ahasverus, the mythical immortal wanderer, lived a restless and bohemian life chased from cities and countries. Remaining open about his gay sexuality in that era’s puritanical society, Miguel Osorio was a perfectionist, who kept revising his work to achieve the lyrical quality and symmetry he desired. Essentially autobiographical but covering universal issues, his poetry tells of his love for his birthplace and nature, the issues of social justice, his relations with others, the darker aspects of human pain, and his own anguishes and vices.

A small collection of eight poems by Porfirio Barba-Jacob can be found at the Poetry International Archives located at: https://www.poetryinternational.org/pi/poet/7100/Porfirio-Barba-Jacob/en/tile

Randall Mann: “The Pool Shark Lurked”

Photographers Unknown, The Pool Shark Lurked

Like eelgrass through a glass-
bottom boat on the Silver River,
I see the state, obscured yet pure. Derision,

a tattooed flame crackling
underneath the lewd, uncool
khaki of an amused park worker.

I was the sometimes boy on a leash,
my sliver of assent in 1984 —
as if it were my decision.

The I-75 signage, more than metaphor.
As if I had the right to vote.
The slumber parties then were hidden wood;

the tea so sweet, the saccharin
pink and artificial, like intelligence.
The science sponsored in part by chance.

I made my acting debut with the red
dilettante down the street, “Rusty” Counts,
in Rusty Counts Presents: Suburbs of the Dead,

straight to VHS. My parents phoned a counselor.
A palmetto bug read Megatrends on the fold-
ing chair by our above-ground swimming pool …

The pool shark lurked, but not to fear.
The end unknowable, blue, inmost, and cold,
like the comfort of a diplomatic war.

—Randall Mann, Florida, Poetry, October 2015

Born in Provo, Utah, in January of 1972, Randall Mann is an American poet, the only son of Olympic medalist Ralph Mann. He spent his younger years in Kentucky and Florida, a time in which he was encouraged to read a wide range of literature. In his senior years in high school, Mann’s teachers supported his writing of poetry which he continued into his college years. Mann graduated with a BA and a MFA from the University of Florida. Since 1998 he has lived in San Francisco.

Randall Mann’s poetry is mostly influenced by the English poet Philip Larkin, whose poems are most often reflections of plainness and skepticism, the 1980 Pulitzer Prize Poetry winner Donald Justice who shared his insight into loss and distance, American poet Elizabeth Bishop whose work is formed with precise description and poetic serenity, and Chilean poet Pablo Neruda whose two-volume “Residencia en la Tierra” made him a renowned international poet.

In his work, Randall Mann explores the themes of loss, expectation, brutality, attraction, and the unabashed experiences of living a gay life. He is accomplished in the formalist design of the poem and has a witty sense in where he places his line-breaks. Mann projects a wide range of emotions in his work which is emphasized by the word choice he uses to set the poem’s tone. Usually set in the countrysides around San Francisco or in Florida, his poems often reflect the contrasts between the countryside beauty and the serious social problems inside city life, which includes the spreading of homelessness and random criminal attacks against the gay community.

Mann’s collections include the 2004 “Complaint in the Garden”, which won the Kenyon Review Prize in Poetry; “Breakfast with Thom Gunn”, published in 2009 and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry and the California Book Award; the 2013 “Straight Razor”, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, and “Proprietary” published in 2017 and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award and Lambda Literary Award.

In addition to his poetry collections, Randall Mann is the author of “The Illusion of Intimacy: On Poetry”, a 2019 book of criticism in which Mann applies his attention to language, fearlessness, and sharp wit to a collection of musings, reviews, autographical sketches, and readings on the art of poetry. Mann also co-authored the seventh edition of“Writing Poems”, which was published in 2007.

A small collection of Randall Mann’s poetry can be found at the Poetry Foundation located at: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/randall-mann#tab-poems

James Merrill: “Joyously Assimilate the Sun”

Photographers Unknown, Joyously Assimilate the Sun

“One summer—was he eight?—
They gave him the seed packet
Along with a 2’ by 4’
Slice of the estate.

To grow, to grow—grim law
Without appeal!
He, after all, kept growing every day. . .
Now this redundant chore.

Up sprouted green enough
For the whole canton, had one know to thin it.
Michaelmas found him eye to ey
With a gang of ruffians.

Not askable indoor,
Whose gaudy, wooden attitudes
(“Like pine cones in drag”)
There was scant question of endorsing

—Much as our droll friend, their legatee,
Would rap from them over the years. For instance
Think twice before causing
Just anything to be.

Then: Hold your head high in the stinking
Throngs of kind,
Joyously assimilate the Sun,
Never wear orange or pink.”

—-James Merrill, Alessio and the Zinnias

American poet James Ingram Merrill was born in New York City in 1926, the son of investment banker Charles E Merrill, co-founder of the Merrill Lynch brokerage firm. Brought up in wealth and having had interest in languages since early childhood, he attended St. Bernard’s, a prestigious New York grammar school. As a teenager, Merrill boarded at the Lawrenceville School, where he began to write poetry and became friends with the future novelist Frederick Buechner. During his attendance at Amherst College, his studies were interrupted when he was drafted for service in the US Army during World War II.

After his return to Amherst College in 1945, James Merrill had his first collection of poems “The Black Swan” published in 1946 privately in Athens, Greece, by his English professor and lover Kimon Friar. Merrill wrote his thesis on the French writer Marcel Proust, and took Proust’s themes of nostalgia, loss, and memory as his own. The fusion of archetype and autobiography became the basis his work; Merrill’s self awareness grew, through the writing of verse, within each successive collection of his poems. Although centered on the self, his poems displayed no urgency to reveal what is hidden and, in that sense, are not considered as confessional.

Merrill graduated from Amherst College with honors in 1947. After spending a few years traveling abroad in Europe, he met writer and artist David Jackson in a New York City comedy club. He and Jackson, who would be his partner for thirty years, settled in Stonington, Connecticut, in 1955. Although he was wealthy his entire life from a trust made early in his childhood, Merrill lived a modest life. Understanding the plight of many artists and a philanthropist in his own right, he founded the Ingram Merrill Foundation in 1956, a permanent endowment that subsidized the arts and public television with grants directly to writers and artists.

Already established in the 1970s among the finest lyric poets of his generation, Merrill started incorporating extensive occult messages into his work. With his partner David Jackson, he spent more than twenty years transcribing purportedly supernatural communications during séances using a ouija board. Merrill’s 1976 ouija board narrative cycle “The Book of Ephraim” appeared in the collection “Divine Comedies”, which won the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for poetry. Further installments included the 1978 “Mirabell: Books of Number”, which won the National Book Award for Poetry, and the 1980 “Scripts for the Pageant”.

A writer adept at wordplay and puns, James Merrill was a master of traditional poetic meter and form but also wrote many works in both free and blank verse. As he matured, his early polished and concise work changed to a more informal, relaxed and conversational tone. Often compared to W.B. Yeats with whom he shared an interest in mysticism, Merrill published, in three volumes between 1976 and 1980, his epic poem of 560 pages, “The Changing Light at Sandover”. A postmodern apocalyptic epic, it documents, partly in verse forms, the extended conversations of Merrill and Jackson with their spirit guides over the course of two decades. The poem, winner of the 1982 National Book Critics Circle Award, covers the joys and tragedies of man’s powers and the importance of our efforts to make a good life on earth.

After the publication of his epic poem, Merrill returned to writing shorter, whimsical and nostalgic poetry. These included the 1985 “Late Settings”; a 1988 collection of poems, prose poems and a play in verse entitled “The Inner Room”; and in 1995 his last book “A Scattering of Salts”. Merrill also wrote a memoir “A Different Person” in 1993; this book covers the writer’s block he suffered in his early career and his experiences of gay life in the 1950s, where he describes his friendships and relationships.

James Merrill served as a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, from 1979 until his death and was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In addition to his Pulitzer Prize and two National Book Awards, he also was awarded the Bobbitt Prize from the Library of Congress. While wintering in Arizona, Merritt died on February 6, 1995 from a heart attack related to AIDS; his longtime partner David Noyes Jackson died in July of 2001. Merrill’s ashes and Jackson’s remains are buried side by side at Evergreen Cemetery in Stonington. Jackson’s former wife and Merrill’s friend, Doris Sewell Jackson, is buried behind them.

Rob Jacques: “This Rustic Eden”

Photographers Unknown, This Rustic Eden

. . .hills are turning
curved green against the astonished morning
sneeze-weed and ox-eye daisies
not caring I am a stranger
—-Audre Lorde

A pilgrim moving through on my way
to Wherever or Hereafter, I pull off I-90
into a town whose trees are flushed gold
with autumn, whose one white church
is washed honest and pure in stark fall light,
whose main street is paved with nostalgia,
and I park beside a roadside apple stand,
D’Arcy Spice, Irish Peach, and Silken
in bushel baskets above broad wood boxes
of Granny Smith, Gloster, and Ruby Grand.

I’m 17 again and just as innocent and good
as this rural town. A lanky, blond boy
with ice-gray eyes adds spice to this miracle
of a day, his face youthfully beautiful, and
I smile my greeting as I pick several Pippins
from a box in front of him and think I’d be
blessed to live free in this rustic Eden
without a care from urban storm and stress
as this boy turns away spitting, “Faggot!”
into autumn’s sacred, apple-fragrant air.

—-Rob Jacques, Every Traveler Has One Idaho Poem

Currently residing on a rural island in Washington State’s Puget Sound, Rob Jacques was raised in northern New England, after which he graduated from both Salem State University and the University of New Hampshire. He served as an officer in the US Navy during the Vietnam Era and has completed a civilian career as a technical editor and writer for the US Navy and the US Department of Energy.

Jacques has taught literature courses at Northern Virginia Community College, Olympic College, and the United States Naval Academy. Strongly influenced by the works of Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost and James Merrill, his poetry explores the metaphysical aspects of life and love, which include the paradoxes that develop as flesh and consciousness interact through one’s lifetime.

Jacques’s “War Poet”, published by Sibling Rivalry Press in 2017, is a collection of poems related to his experiences while on active duty in the US Navy. Full of erotic and martial intensity, the poems create a lyrical memoir out of the poet’s time serving as a gay man in the military. Exploring the complex intersections between violence and sexuality, Jacques’s poems alternate between wild abandon and formal rigidity. His work recognizes the self as a primary center of conflict, a body which is charged with understanding the conflux of love and war.

Rob Jacques’s second book of poems, “Adagio for Su Tung-p’o: Poems on How Consciousness Uses Flesh to Float Through Space/ Time”, was published by Fernwood Press in December of 2019. Jacques uses Su Tung-p’o’s poetic lines as epigraphs to introduce his own metaphysical work which looks at the human issues, addressed by poet Su Tung-p’o in the eleventh century, with a twenty-first century perspective.

Rob Jacques’s poetry has appeared in regional and national journals, including Prairie Schooner, Atlanta Review, American Literary Review, The Healing Muse, Poet Lore, and Assaracus, a quarterly print journal which features the work of a wide representation of gay poets.

Note: For readers who are interested in LGBTQ fiction and poetry, I recommend the publisher Sibling Rivalry Press, the home of the Undocupoet Fellowship and a sponsored project of Fractured Atlas, a nonprofit arts service organization: https://www.siblingrivalrypress.com

Tennessee Williams: “Curiously Stirring”

Photographers Unknown, Curiously Stirring

“So successfully have we disguised from ourselves the intensity of our own feelings, the sensibility of our own hearts, that plays in the tragic tradition have begun to seem untrue. For a couple of hours we may surrender ourselves to a world of fiercely illuminated values in conflict, but when the stage is covered and the auditorium lighted, almost immediately there is a recoil of disbelief. “Well, well!” we say as we shuffle back up the aisle, while the play dwindles behind us with the sudden perspective of an early Chirico painting. By the time we have arrived at Sardi’s, if not as soon as we pass beneath the marquee, we have convinced ourselves once more that life has as little resemblance to the curiously stirring and meaningful occurrences on the stage as a jingle has to an elegy of Rilke.”

—Tennessee Williams, Where I Live: Selected Essays

Widely regarded as one of the greatest playwrights in American history, Thomas Lanier Williams, known as Tennessee Williams, was born in Columbus, Mississippi in 1911. He was the second of three children born to Cornelius Williams, a crude talking manager of a Saint Louis shoe company, and Edwina Dakin Williams, the daughter of a minister and an overbearing mother. The troubled home life of the young Tennessee Williams became a source of many characters and themes of plays in his later life.

Williams started his writing early; at the age of thirteen, his first article “Isolated” was published in 1924 by the Ben Blewett Junior High newspaper and, by high school, he had two articles published in national magazines. In 1929, Williams enrolled in the University of Missouri’s journalism department, but was forced by his father in 1932 to leave and take employment. He continued to write while employed and finished two plays that were staged in 1937 by a Memphis theater group: “Candles to the Sun”, a drama dealing with Alabama coal miners unionizing, and “The Fugitive Kind”. The latter play introduced the character who would inhabit most of Williams’ future plays: the marginal figure who, through no personal fault, is a misfit in society but who demonstrates an admirable will to survive.

Williams enrolled at the University of Iowa and graduated in 1938 with a degree in English. In order to submit plays to a New York competition, he changed both his birthdate and name, which from that time on became “Tennessee Williams”. It was this period of his life that he began a habit of traveling and, also, came to the understanding that he was homosexual. In New York City, Williams joined a gay social circle which included fellow writer and friend Donald Windham. Between 1940 and 1948, a series of relationships, often tempestuous and ultimately failing, developed between Williams and men he met in his travels. After returning to New York from Rome in the spring of 1948, Williams met and fell in love with Sicilian actor Frank Merlo, with whom he had an enduring relationship that lasted for fourteen years until drug abuse and infidelities on both sides ended it.

Tennessee Williams’ first professionally produced play, the 1940 “Battle of Angels”, debuted in Boston: however, it failed at its tryout with the audience. The play was withdrawn after Boston’s Watch and Ward Society banned it on the charge that it dealt with such topics as racism, suppressed sexuality, adultery, corruption and murder. Even though Williams rewrote his play several times and worked on it for 17 years, the 1957 rewrite “Orpheus Descending” was also harshly criticized and widely considered a failure.

Williams’ breakthrough hit “The Glass Menagerie”, filled with characters based on his own troubled family, opened in Chicago in 1944 to great reviews. It moved to Broadway the next year and won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award in 1945, becoming the first in a long run of successes for Williams. Two years later in 1947, Williams’ drama play “A Streetcar Named Desire” opened, surpassing his previous success and giving him the status as one of the country’s leading playwrights. This play earned him a second Drama Critics’ Award and his first Pulitzer Prize.

Tennessee Williams wrote three more successive plays which brought him critical acclaim: the Pulitzer Prize winner for Drama “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof”, a 1955 three act play and Williams’ personal favorite, featuring motifs of social mores, decay, sexual desire and repression; the 1959 “Sweet Bird of Youth”, a play written for Williams’ friend Tallulah Bankhead, telling the story of a gigolo and drifter who returns to his hometown as the companion of a faded movie star; and the 1961 drama play “The Night of the Iguana”, based on a previous short story and centered around misfits dealing with their sexual tensions and personal struggles, the central therm being goodness in which lost souls offer each other solace and understanding,.

After Tennessee Williams’ breakup with Frank Merlo in early 1962, Merlo was diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer. Williams returned and cared for him until his death in September of 1963. In the years following Merlo’s death, he descended into a period of nearly catatonic depression and increasing drug use; this resulted in several hospitalizations and commitments to mental health facilities. Williams was never truly able to recoup his earlier success, or to entirely overcome his dependence on prescription drugs.

William’ later plays were unsuccessful and closed to poor reviews. As he grew older, he felt increasingly alone; he feared old age and losing his sexual appeal to younger gay men. In the 1970s, when he was in his 60s, Williams had a lengthy relationship with Robert Carroll, a Vietnam veteran and aspiring writer in his twenties. The two men broke up in 1979, but remained friends, with Carroll receiving one of the only two bequests in Williams’ will.

On February 25, 1983, Williams was found dead at age 71 in his suite at the Hotel Elysée in New York from a toxic level of Seconal. Although writing in his will that he wished to be buried at sea near the spot that American poet Hart Crane died by choice, his body was buried, by the arrangement of his brother Dakin Williams, at Calvary Cemetery in Saint Louis.

In his career, Tennessee Williams also wrote two novels, “The Roman Spring of Mrs. Snow” in 1950 and”Moise and the World of Reason” in 1975, poetry, essays, film scripts, short stories, and an 1975 autobiography entitled “Memoirs”. In his will, Williams left his literary rights to the University of the South in Tennessee, the funds of which support a creative writing program.

Bottom Image Insert: Tennessee Williams and Frank Merlo, Date Unknown, Tennessee Williams Collection, Rare Books and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Assotto Saint: “Shadows Also Shrinking Early”

Photographers Unknown, Shadows Shrinking Early

between
solitudes of illness
& beatitudes our lips utter
evening settles in this exile of senses for our surrender
one more friend’s death has clocked the day like a tolling bell
biding time we are shadows also shrinking early into destiny
let us gather our pills & swallow all regrets with a kiss
cover each other then weave
dreams of another day
to come.

—Assotto Saint, Life-Partners

Born in Les Cayes, Haiti, on October 2, 1957, Assotto Saint was an American poet, publisher and performance artist. He was a key figure in the LGBT and African-American art and literary culture of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Saint, whose birth name was Yves François Lubin, moved to New York City in 1970 where he enrolled briefly in the pre-med program at Queens College, after which he pursued an artistic career. He adopted the name Assotto Saint for his career, choosing ‘Saint’ in honor of the revolutionary hero Toussaint L’Ouverture, who fought against France for Haiti’s independence, and ‘Assotto’ which is the name of the ceremonial drum used in Haitian Vodou rituals.

From 1973 to 1980, Assotto Saint performed as a dancer with the Martha Graham Dance Company. In November of 1980, he met the Swedish musician and composer Jan Holmgren, who would become his life partner and a collaborator in his artistic career. Saint, along with Holmgren, founded the Metamorphosis Theater company, and Xotika, an electronic pop music group. His theater performance piece entitled “Risin’ to the Love We Need” won second prize from the Jane Chambers Award for Gay and Lesbian Playwriting in 1980.

Assotto Saint became a United States citizen in 1986, after which time he began publishing poetry in anthologies, including the 1986 “In the Life: A Black Gay Anthology”; “Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time” published in 1988; and the 1987 chapbook “Triple Trouble”. He soon founded his own press, Galiens Press, which worked to publish black gay poets. Included among the many works by Galiens Press are “The Road Before Us: 100 Gay Black Poets” in 1991 and two of Saint’s own poetry collections, “Stations” in 1989 and “Wishing for Wings” in 1994.

Assotto Saint won a 1992 Lambda Literary Award in the Gay Poetry category as editor of “The Road Before Us” and, in the following year, was a nominee in the Gay Anthology category for “Here to Dare: A Collection of Ten Gay Black Poets”, al work published by his Galiens Press. In 1994, he was a nominee in the Gay Poetry category for his own collection of poems “Wishing for Wings”. Saint also received a fellowship in poetry from New York’s Foundation of the Arts and the James Baldwin Award.

After both Saint and his partner Jan Holmgren were diagnosed HIV-positive, Saint became an AIDS activist and one of the first African American activists to publicly disclose his HIV status. Before his death, Saint appeared in Marlon Riggs’ 1992 film noir “Non, Je Regrette Rien (No Regrets)”, covering the self-disclosure of five HIV-positive black men coping, through their difficult journeys, with the personal and social destruction of the epidemic. Jan Holmgren died on March 29, 1993, and Saint died on June 29, 1994. The couple are buried alongside each other at the Cemetery of the Evergreens in Brooklyn, New York.

An autobiographical collection of Assotto Saint’s work entitled “Spells of a Voodoo Doll: The Poems Fiction, Essays, and Plays of Assotto Saint” was published by Richard Kasak at Masquerade Books in 1996. This compendium of Saint’s work was collected by Assotto’s friend and literary executor Michele Karlsbert who wrote a brief and heartfelt introduction to the book.

For those interested, the preface written by Assotto Saint to his 1992 anthology “The Road Before Us” can be located at: https://zocalopoets.com/tag/assotto-saint/

Mutsuo Takahashi: “Clean as Leather, Lustful as a Lily”

Photographers Unknown, The Parts and Pieces Making a Whole: Set Eleven

“Sleeping Wrestler
You are a murderer
No you are not, but really a wrestler
Either way it’s just the same
For from the ring of your entangled body
Clean as leather, lustful as a lily
Will nail me down
On your stout neck like a column, like a pillar of tendons
The thoughtful forehead
(In fact, it’s thinking nothing)
When the forehead slowly moves and closes the heavy eyelids
Inside, a dark forest awakens
A forest of red parrots
Seven almonds and grape leaves
At the end of the forest a vine
Covers the house where two boys
Lie in each others arms: I’m one of them, you the other
In the house, melancholy and terrible anxiety
Outside the keyhole, a sunset
Dyed with the blood of the beautiful bullfighter Escamillo
Scorched by the sunset, headlong, headfirst
Falling, falling, a gymnast
If you’re going to open your eyes, nows the time, wrestler”

—Mutsuo Takahashi, Sleeping Wrestler, Poems of a Penisist, 2012

Born in December of 1937 in the Fukuoka Prefecture of Japan, Mutsuo Takahashi is a poet, essayist and writer, known especially for his open writing about male homoeroticism. He spent his early years in the countryside of Japan. At three months old, Takahashi lost his father to pneumonia and was left, along with his sisters, by his mother in the care of his grandparents. After his mother returned from mainland China, the family moved to the port town of Moji, just as the air raids by the Allied Powers of World War Two intensified. It was at this time, watching the war in action with his classmates, that Takahashi became aware of his sexual identity, which became a common subject in his first book of poetry published in 1959.

Takahashi graduated from the Fukuoka University of Education, after which he moved to Tokyo in 1962. He continued writing poetry while employed at an advertising company. His first book, published in 1964, was “Rose Tree, Fake Lovers”, an anthology that described male to male erotic love in bold and direct language. Takahashi sent the collection to novelist Yukio Mishima who helped promote Takahashi’s work; a close relationship and friendship resulted that lasted until Mishima’s suicide in 1970.

During the 1960s and 1970s, there was a large existential trend in the literature and culture of Japan, which included an interest in eroticism. In collaboration with his two friends, surreal poet Chimako Tada and poet Shigeo Washisu, Mutsuo Takahashi created the literary journal “The Symposium (Kyōen)”, named after Plato’s famous dialogue.

Written in free verse through the 1970s, Takahashi’s poetry used homoeroticism as an important theme. An example of this is his long poem Ode (Homeuta)”, an epic one-thousand line erotic fantasy poem published by Winston Leyland. He also started writing prose at this time: the 1970 “Twelve Views from the Distance” about his early life, a 1972 surrealistic novella based on his trip to the gay underground of New York City entitled “A Legend of a Holy Place”, and the 1974 “Zen’s Pilgrimage of Virtue”, a homoerotic and humorous retelling of the Buddhist legend of Sudhana.

Traveling through the world, Mutsuo Takahashi broaden his themes by incorporating his knowledge of the history of world literature and art, often including poems of homage to important writers in his collections. In 2010, he produced a small book of poems to accompany an exhibition which presented the work of American assemblage artist and filmmaker Joseph Cornell. Still actively using free style verse,Takahashi also wrote traditional Japanese verse and novels, Nō and Kyōgen plays, works of literary criticism, and a libretto written for an opera by composer Akira Miyoshi.

Residing presently in the seaside city of Zushi, Mutsuo Takahashi has been the recipient of a number of literary prizes in Japan, including the Yomiuri Literay Prize, the Takami Jun Prize, the Modern Poetry Hanatsubaki Prize, and, in 2000, the prestigious Kunshō Award fo his contributions to modern Japanese literature.

Hanya Yanagihara: “A Little Life”

Photographers Unknown, A Collection of Seated Men

“He steps back, still looking. In the painting, Willem’s torso is directed toward the viewer, but his face is turned to the right so that he is almost in profile, and he is leaning towards something or someone and smiling. And because he knows Willem’s smiles, he knows that Willem has been captured looking at something he loves, he knows Willem in that instant is happy. Willem’s face and neck dominate the canvas and although the background is suggested rather than shown, he knows that Willem is at their table. He knows it from the way that JB has drawn the light and shadows on Willem’s face. He has the sense that if he says Willem’s name that the face in the painting will turn toward him and answer; he has the sense that if he stretches his hand out and strokes the canvas he will feel beneath his fingertips Willem’s hair, his fringe of eyelashes.

But he doesn’t do this, of course, just looks up at last and sees JB smiling at him, sadly. “The title card’s been mounted already,” JB says, and he goes slowly to the wall behind the painting and sees its title – “Willem Listening to Jude Tell a Story, Greene Street”-and he feels his beneath abandon him; it feels as if his heart is made of something oozing and cold, like ground meat, and it is being squeezed inside a fist so that chunks of it are falling, plopping to the ground near his feet.”

—Hanya YanagIhara, A Little Life

Born in Los Angeles, California in 1974, Hanya Yanagihara is American novelist, editor and travel writer. A fourth-generation resident of Hawaii, she graduated from Smith College, a private liberal arts women’s college in Massachusetts, in 1995. After graduating, Yanagihara worked as a publicist in New York for several years and, later as writer and editor, for the Condé Nast Traveler magazine. In 2015 she became a deputy editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine.

Yanagihara’s first novel “The People in the Trees”, published in 2013, was a fictional memoir of a scientific researcher who, after discovering a turtle with life-prolonging qualities, is convicted of child sexual abuse. It received praise as one of the best novels of 2013.

Hanya Yanagihara wrote her 2015 “A Little Life” over a period of eighteen months. A lengthly novel, it follows the lives of four friends in New York City through college to middle-age, with a focus on the character Jude, a lawyer with a mysterious background and unexplained health issues. A closeness develops between Jude and Willem, one of his three friends, which soon evolves into an intimate relationship troubled by Jude’s hidden past.

“A Little Life” is divided into seven distinct chronological parts, with flashbacks inserted throughout the narrative. The central focus is on the social and emotional lives of the four men, which, through these inner lives, discusses the strengths and limits of romantic love, friendship, and the relationships among men. Seen through shifting first-person perspectives as the story evolves, the narrative eventually focuses on Jude’s own traumatic personal experiences and his interactions with this small group of friends.

James Baldwin: “The Child is Filled with Darkness”

Photographer Unknown, The Child is Filled with Darkness

“In a moment someone will get up and turn on the light. Then the old folks will remember the children and they won’t talk anymore that day. And when light fills the room, the child is filled with darkness. He knows that every time this happens he’s moved just a little closer to that darkness outside. The darkness outside is what the old folks have been talking about. It’s what they’ve come from. It’s what they endure. The child knows that they won’t talk any more because if he knows too much about what’s happened to them, he’ll know too much too soon, about what’s going to happen to him.”

—-James Baldwin, Sonny’s Blues

“Sonny’s Blues” is a short story written by James Baldwin, originally published in 1957 in the Partisan Review, a small circulation quarterly New York City magazine dealing with politics, literature, and culture. Written in the first-person singular narrative style, the story presents the memories of a 1950s black teacher in Harlem as he reacts to his brother Sonny’s drug addiction, arrest, and recovery.

Baldwin’s story is set in New York City of the post–World War Two era, when an important political and cultural change was occurring. A diverse array of artists from all over the world, learning and borrowing ideas and techniques from each other, converged in the city and made New York a new cultural capital. Despite differences in style and subject matter, these artists were responding, through their work, to what they believed was America’s unique cultural and political crisis.

While the art scene in New York was rapidly expanding, thousands of African American soldiers were returning home from the war and heading north toward communities like Harlem. Instead of finding new job opportunities and equal rights, the returning men found newly constructed housing projects and vast urban slums. Hundreds of homes in Harlem had been leveled to build these housing projects, which would eventually become symbols of urban blight and poverty,. This experience would be faced by thousands of other African-Americans in the years after the war’s conclusion.

Although America in the 1950s was generally more conservative, the groundwork for the 1960s radical political movements was being laid. The civil rights movement, which had begun in the South earluer in the decade, had started to rapidly spread across the country as millions of African Americans began to seek equal rights. Written at this critical juncture in history, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” is a testament to the frustration of life in the cities of America and this frustration’s eventual transformation into a political and artistic movement.

Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues” was adapted for a short film of the same name by Gregory Scott Williams Jr for his second year project at New York University’s Graduate Film Program. Written and directed by Williams, the short, seventeen-minute film was produced by Seith Mann and starred actor Charles Parnell as the narrator-brother David, and New York-based poet and verbal stylist Saul Williams in the role of Sonny. The cinematography was by Cybel Martin, featuring the music of Gil Scott-Heron and Ray Charles with an original score by composer and pianist John Bickerton. The film can be found in its entirely at YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y9CDEfnKvQ

Timothy Liu: “Tiny Flares Corkscrew Up the Sky”

Photographers Unknown, Parva Scaena (Brief Scenes): Photo Set Twenty-Two

Faces sludging forward on the esplanade
to where we are. What we are is energy—
our bodies angled skyward as fading blooms
parachute towards the earth, the crowd
a spent militia—torn blankets left behind
as we march to the riverfront where
tiny flares corkscrew up the sky to release
delayed reports. The night gives up
its ghost—wreaths of smoke crowning floral
cornucopias that spill a motherlode
of fire onto both sides of the shore,
hoarse voices bellowing out rote words
learned in grade school that take on
meaning in a country of peace where
thousands scream through the dark, waiting
for that twenty-one gun salute.

Timothy Liu, A Boston Fourth, Poetry, July 1996

Born in 1965 in San Jose, California, Timothy Liu is an American poet and author residing in New York City. He earned his BA in English at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, and his MA in Poetry at the University of Houston in Texas. Liu also studied at the University of California at Los Angeles and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, where he met his husband, the artist Christopher Arabadjis.

Liu considers poet and critic Richard Howard, Welsh poet Leslie Norris, and American writer and literary critic Gordon Lish as his mentors. His poetry, based formally on the meter of syllables, explores the themes of identity, violence, sexuality, with the narrator as witness. His works also deal with cultural taboos and situations largely left out of poetic writing.

Timothy Liu’s work includes: the 1992 “Vox Angelica” which won the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; “Say Goodnight”, published in 1998 and winner of the PEN/Beyond Margins Award; the 2004 “Of Thee I Sing” winnerof the Poetry Book of the Year Award from Publishers Weekly; the 2005 “For Dust Thou Art”; “Don’t Go Back to Sleep” in 2014; and “Tin House” published in 2018..

Liu’s most recent works include “Luminous Debris: New and Selected Legerdemain 1992-2017” published in 2018 by Barrow Street Books and a finalist in the 2019 Thom Gunn Awards; and his twelfth book of poems, “Let It Ride” published in 2019, which explores how the necessities of life and art join to provide a path forward at midlife.

Timothy Liu has served as a core faculty member at Bennington College’s Writing Seminars and is currently a Professor of English at William Paterson University in New Jersey. His journals and papers are archived in the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library.

For more information on Timothy Liu, including books and poems: https://www.timothyliu.net

John Rechy: “The Coming of the Night”

Photographers and Artists Unknown, The Coming of the Night, Gay Film Gifs

“Did those “new gays” spinning about like giddy tops in discos care to know that dancing with someone of the same sex was punishable as “lewd conduct” then? Still, a club in Topanga Canyon boasted a system of warning lights. When they flashed, lesbians and gay men shifted—what a grand adventure!—and danced with each other, laughing at the officers’ disappointed faces! How much pleasure—and camaraderie, yes, real kinship—had managed to exist in exile. Did those arrogant young people know that, only years ago, you could be sentenced to life in prison for consensual sex with another man? A friend of his destroyed by shock therapy decreed by the courts. Another friend sobbing on the telephone before he slashed his wrists— Thomas’s hands on his steering wheel had clenched in anger, anger he had felt then, anger he felt now. And all those pressures attempted to deplete you, and disallow— “—the yearnings of the heart,” he said aloud. Yet he and others of his generation had lived through those barbaric times—and survived—those who had survived—with style.”

—John Rechy, The Coming of the Night

Born in March of 1931 in El Paso, Texas, during the Depression, John Francisco Rachy is a writer, playwright, essayist and literary critic. He attended Texas Western College, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in English. Rachy continued his education at the New School for Social Research in New York City, studying under Hiram Haydn, a Random House senior editor. Rachy’s semi-autobiographical works explore the world of social and sexual outsiders and draw upon his gay sexuality and Mexican-American heritage.

John Rachy’s writing career began with the short story “The Fabulous Wedding of Miss Destiny”, a gay-oriented story which received the Longview Foundation Fiction Prize in 1961. His first published work, the largely autobiographical novel “City of Night”, was published in 1963 by Grove Press. The novel chronicles the journey of a young Mexican-American from the border town of El Paso into the gay underworld of Times Square, Hollywood Boulevard and the French Quarter of New Orleans during the 1950s. Selling sixty-five thousand hardcover copies, it remained on the New York Times best-seller list for twenty-five weeks and became an international bestseller.

Following the success of “City of Night”, John Rachy has written a large body of work, both fiction and non-fiction. Among his fiction works are: the “Numbers” published in 1967;; “Rushes” published in 1979; the 1999 “The Coming of the Night”; and the 2017 “After the Blue Hour”. Rachy’s non-fiction works include the 1977 “The Sexual Outlaw”, an account of three days and nights in the 1970s sexual underground of Los Angeles, and the 2004 “Beneath the Skin”, an anthology of his essays and literary reviews from The New York Times, Evergreen Review, The Nation, and other publications..

The first novelist to receive PEN-USA-West’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997, John Rachy is also the recipient of the 1999 Bill Whitehead Award for Lifetime Achievement presented by Publishing Triangle, an American association of gay men and lesbians in the publishing industry. He is currently a faculty member at the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California. In 2018 Rachy’s 2017 novel “After the Blue Hour” won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.

Note: An interesting read is biographical author Charles Casillo’s 2002 “Outlaw: The Lives and Careers of John Rechy”, a book which examines the dichotomy of John Rechy’s life as both a respected author and professor, and a hustler on Hollywood Boulevard, with insights from Rachy himself and his family, friends, and colleagues.

E. M. Forster: “Madness is Not for Everyone”

Photographers Unknown, Beguiling the Senses and Enchanting the Mind: Photo Set Fourteen

“Madness is not for everyone, but Maurice’s proved the thunderbolt that dispels the clouds. The storm had been working up not for three days as he supposed, but for six years. It had brewed in the insecurities of being where no eye pierces, his surroundings had thickened it. It had burst and he had not died. The brilliancy of day was around him, he stood upon the mountain range that overshadows youth, he saw.”

—E. M. Forster, Maurice

Born on the first of January, 1879 in London, Edward Morgan Forster was a fiction writer and essayist. After his father’s death of tuberculosis in 1890, he and his mother moved to Rooks Nest in Hertfordshire until 1893. This house would serve as the inspiration for his future novel, the 1910 “Howard’s End”. An inheritance from his great-aunt Marianne Thornton in 1887 would enable Forster to live comfortably and pursue a career as a writer.

E. M. Forster attended King’s College Cambridge between 1897 and 1901. There he joined the discussion group known as the Apostles, whose members later constituted the Bloomsbury Group which included Leonard and Virginia Wolff, Giles Lytton Strachey, Clive and Venessa Bell, and artist Duncan Grant. After graduation Forster traveled through continental Europe, visiting Greece and Italy before returning to Surrey, England.

In 1914, by which time he had written all but one of his novels, E. M. Forster visited Egypt, Germany and India with fellow Bloomsbury Group member Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, the British political scientist and philosopher. During the First World War, Forster, a conscientious objector, served in the British Red Cross in Egypt as a Chief Searcher for missing men. Returning again to India in the early 1920s, he became the private secretary to Tukojirao III, the Maharajah of the state of Dewas; the story of which was told in his 1953 non-fiction work “The Hill of Devi”.

After his return to London from India, Forster completed the last of his novels published in his lifetime, the 1924 “A Passage to India”, for which he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. During the 1930s and 1940s, Forster became a notable broadcaster on BBC Radio and became associated with the British Humanist Association,which opposed censorship and advocated for penal reform and individual liberty.For his published work, he was awarded a Benson Medal by the United Kingdom’s Royal Society of Literature in 1937.

E. M. Forster was open about his homosexuality to his close friends, but not to the public. He had a number of male lovers during his adult life; but he was at his happiest during a two-year relationship with the young policeman Bob Buckingham, who later married. After Buckingham’s marriage, both Buckingham and his wife continued to be included in Forster’s social circle. Others in his social circle included writer Christopher Isherwood, the poet Siegfried Sassoon, composer Benjamin Britten, Belfast-novleist Forrest Reid, writer and editor of “The Listener” J. R. Ackerley, and socialist poet Edward Carpenter and Edward’s lover George Merrill.

Forster’s “Maurice” was written between 1913 to 1914, revised twice in 1932 and 1959, and finally published posthumously in 1971. A tale of gay love in early twentieth-century England, it follows the protagonist Maurice Hall from his school days into a relationship in his older years. The novel was inspired by the cross-class relationship between poet Edward Carpenter and his working-class partner George Merrill, both of whom served as the models for Forster’s gay characters, Maurice Hall and Alec Scudder.

After completing a first draft by 1914, Forster tentatively showed the novel to select friends, and continued to do so over the forthcoming decades, reworking it as time passed. The openly gay novelist Christopher Isherwood saw the draft in its various revisions on a few occasions, and repeatedly implored Forster to publish it. However, Forster continued to insist on it not being published.

Despite the passing of time and of individuals, to whom he felt the revelation of his homosexuality would hurt most, Forster believed there had been no profound progression since the days of Oscar Wilde’s conviction, an incident that flooded the papers when he was sixteen, and thought that public attitudes had only incrementally shifted, from, in his words, ‘ignorance and terror to familiarity and contempt’. Instead, he bequeathed the manuscript of “Maurice” to Isherwood, and, a year after Forster’s death, the novel was finally published.

E. M. Forster was elected an honorary fellow of King’s College Cambridge in January of 1946. He declined a knighthood in 1949 and was made a Companion of Honor in 1953. Forster was honored in 1969 with membership in England’s Order of Merit, and, through his lifetime, received nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature in sixteen separate years. E. M. Forster died at the age of ninety-one of a stroke on June 7th, 1970 in Coventry, Warwickshire. His ashes were scattered in the rose garden of Coventry’s crematorium, near Warwick University.

Note: E. M. Forster had five books published in his lifetime, one published posthumously, and one, “Arctic Summer”, never finished. His work included “Where Angels Fear to Tread”. published in 1905; the 1907 “The Longest Journey”; “A Room with a View”, published in 1908; the 1910 “Howard’s End”; “Passage to India” published in 1924; and his “Maurice” published in 1971. Although Forster was against having his work presented in any form other than literature, all his books, with the exception of “The Longest Journey”, his personal favorite and most autobiographical, have been made into either plays, films, or both.

An article by Professor Kate Symondson on E. M. Forster’s gay fiction can be found at the British Library’s site located at: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/e-m-forsters-gay-fiction