Vulnerable Households: Cold War Containment and Robert Duncan's Queered Nation

His early essay "The Homosexual in Society" (1944, revised 1959), the same-sex erotica of his early collection Caesar's Gate (1972, originally published 1955), and his undaunted use of homosexual themes throughout his oeuvre concretize Robert Duncan's formidable contribution to a gay male American literary tradition. As friend and fellow poet Thom Gunn remarked in 1979, he should be regarded as the "chief originator" of "a way of speaking about homosexuality" even though he produced "the work of a poet, of a homosexual poet only secondarily" (159). Gunn's observations give an insightful point of entry into what is especially remarkable about his friend's poetry and its commitment to representations of homosexuality: it is a secondary concern. What Duncan pioneers, then, is the capacity for American letters to include and frankly address homosexual content without elevating it (or denigrating it, depending on one's perspective) to the motivating force behind his poetics. Rather than sexuality, per se, his work brings to light the significance of erotic attachment and relationships, no matter the form they may take. Gunn cites Duncan's homosexual themes as proof of the "inclusiveness" that makes modern poetry suitable for providing "evidence of the many ways in which people live their lives, of the many available ways in which people love or fail to love" (159–60). Universalism is suggestively equated with the revolution in consciousness promulgated by poetic discourse.

Despite the topicality of same-sex love in much of his work, Duncan continuously disidentified with gayness. Decades before Stonewall and the subsequent gay liberation movement, his essay "The Homosexual in Society" was written for the journal Politics as an espousal of anarchism and universal civil rights inclusive of homosexuals rather than a homophilic activism, per se. As such, it caused consternation among Parker Tyler and other "gay literati" because of its attack on the cliquish and bounded nature of U.S. urban homosexual communities following World War II.¹ "I could not say 'I am a homosexual,'" Duncan recalls in his annotations for the essay's 1959 republication, "because exactly this statement of minority identity was the lie" (46). "The lie" of which he writes is not what has been referred to since Stonewall as "the closet," a condition in which the gay subject refuses or is unable to reveal same-sex desire publicly. Rather, Duncan associates dissimulation with allowing one's desire or political leanings to be constrained by one identity imposed from without, perhaps even by the minority group itself. As he decrees in the same set of annotations, "one must disown all the special groups (nations, churches, sexes, races) that would claim allegiance" (47, Duncan's emphasis). His steadfast position against minority enclaves would not change; in 1976, during the heyday of gay liberation, he even would publicly announce, "Well, come to think of it, I don't see myself as gay at all" (Interview [1998] 95).

Gunn points us in the right direction, then, when he urges us to recognize the importance of Duncan's universalism. Nonetheless, we must resist the urge to read what he notes as "inclusiveness" as indicative of a mere reclamation or appropriation of the mode of romantic love for the male homosexual. Such a move still would preserve a heteronormative narrative structure, even if Duncan's version allows for a shift from heterosexual conventions to same-sex content. As he himself conceived it, poetry—straight and homosexual alike—needs to free itself of the constraints of "group language" whose codification inhibits "creative life and expression" oriented "toward the liberation of human love, human conflicts, human aspirations" ("Homosexual" 47). A humanistic universality is not so much at issue as is a deep concern with the communal, in a sense much different from understandings of community or communitarianism that are presumptive of established forms. The common paves the way for the realization of an anarchic possibility, a singular freedom that can only be discovered through the narrative structures and conventions which we share and which form the basis of our literary and cultural heritage.

For Duncan, boundaries should serve...