Who’s Yer Daddy?: Gay Writers Celebrate Their Mentors and Forerunners

Botticelli Boy

266 Rick Barot 1 Here are two im­ ages of in­ flu­ ence. In the first, pic­ ture some­ one walk­ ing in the gal­ ler­ ies of a mu­ seum in a Eu­ ro­ pean city. He is feel­ ing what the other tour­ ists in the mu­ seum are feel­ ing: just a bit bored, but also an­ tic­ i­ pat­ ing a mo­ ment of rev­ el­ a­ tory sight. Or­ nate re­ li­ gious ­ scenes, clas­ si­ cal­ scenes on can­ vases the size of the sides of ­ houses, still lifes, kings and­ queens. And then he sees the paint­ ing: the paint­ ing of the boy. The boy is so par­ tic­ u­ lar, so him­ self, that he stops the tour­ ist in his ­ tracks. The tour­ ist seems to be the only one ex­ pe­ ri­ enc­ ing this. ­ Around him, the oth­ ers pass by the paint­ ing, then move on to the next paint­ ing, then on to the next. But the tour­ ist feels fas­ tened to the paint­ ing, to the mo­ ment. This is the ex­ pe­ ri­ ence that the days of the trip have led up to: this one paint­ ing of a boy. A ­ five-hundred-year-old boy. And this is an­ other image of in­ flu­ ence. In the class­ room, in the under­ grad­ u­ ate semi­ nar on ­ American ­ poetry, the stu­ dent is lis­ ten­ ing to the dis­ cus­ sion about Walt Whit­ man. He ­ doesn’t get it. He has done the read­ ing, he has writ­ ten the re­ sponse paper. But the poems don’t mean any­ thing to him: they are sac­ cha­ rine, loud like cer­ tain happy un­ cles, in­ suf­ fi­ ciently dark. What the stu­ dent wants is dark ­ things: dark poems, dark re­ la­ tion­ ships, dark ­ weather in his mind. Whit­ man goes past him, Bot­ ti­ celli Boy Botticelli Boy 267 as un­ ac­ knowl­ edged as a sunny day. Years later, many years later, he is read­ ing Whit­ man again. This time he is in an­ other semi­ nar, a grad­ u­ ate semi­ nar. Read­ ing the thick vol­ ume of ­ Whitman’s poems, he feels like that tour­ ist in the mu­ seum: bored, but open to being moved. And then there is the poem he flips to: the poem about the dead ­ things roil­ ing under­ neath the green grass of ­ spring. The poem is so un­ ex­ pected, so black in its mood, that he re­ turns to it for weeks and ­ months af­ ter­ ward. The poem is like a worn photo­ graph or an old ­ ticket stub kept in a wal­ let: it goes with him every­ where. 2 Whit­ man was his voice. It is this voice we know when we know Whit­ man. Part aes­ thetic pro­ gram and part so­ cial the­ sis, his bar­ baric yawp in­ flects his ­ poems’ in­ to­ na­ tions even when the poems are at their quiet­ est. At the start, the voice was ­ pitched as it was be­ cause it was the­ outsider’s call into the si­ lence ­ around him. Young, doing odd new ­ things in his ­ poetry, with no au­ di­ ence he could see, Whit­ man was loud be­ cause the loud was a spe­ cies of ­ self-motivation; the zeal was born out of being at the mar­ gin. Later, with his place as­ sured, ­ Whitman’s voice ­ stopped being the ­ outsider’s bold salvo and be­ came the great ­ poet’s coun­ sel to the au­ di­ ence he loved. He had be­ come ­ Wordsworth’s def­i­ ni­ tion of the poet: “a man speak­ ing to men.” Among the many ­ things that it is, “Song of My­ self ” is a song. But if it is voice that is the rec­ og­ niz­ able given of ­ Whitman’s ­ poetry, to me it is the qual­ ity of his see­ ing that gives ­ charge to the most lin­ ger­ ing of his poems.­ Glimpse,gaze,cat­ a­ logue,jux­ ta­ po­ si­ tion,pano­ rama,­ close-up—­ Whitman’s see­ ing has a ten­ sile va­ riety that is co­ in­ ci­ dent with the many tex­ tures of his think­ ing. ­ Whitman’s voice can be tire­ some, which is to say that his per­ son­ al­ ity, bluff as a ­ salesman’s, can...