Cruising Devotion: On Carl Phillips

The most beautiful bathroom in America is located at 208 West Thirteenth Street in New York, on the second floor of Manhattan’s LGBT Community Center. In 1989, just nine months before he would die of AIDS-related complications, the artist Keith Haring covered the bathroom’s walls with one of the great works of twentieth-century visual art, a mural entitled Once Upon a Time. In his cartoonishly thick black lines, Haring created a joyously obscene phantasmagoria of unleashed gay male promiscuity: men fucking each other and sucking each other off, but also men with penises for hands and feet and heads, anthropomorphic penises sprouting their own arms and legs, men riding huge cocks like rockets, their arms raised in triumph, a group of four men climbing—or maybe they’re humping it—the long neck of a penis-dinosaur. Male bodies penetrate and are penetrated in possible and impossible ways, to such an extent that it’s often difficult to know where one body ends and another begins. There’s no protection; everyone rides bareback. Men are ejaculated from penises, parthenogenetic, engendered by jouissance. The mural is often seen as an ebullient celebration of sexual liberation, and of the defiant, resilient, heroic sexual communities that would be decimated by and survive AIDS, and it is. It’s also a celebration of gay male folk art, pornographic bathroom graffiti as dreamed by Picasso and Dalí. But it’s not only a celebration. It’s also a lament, as signaled by its title, equal parts fairy tale and elegy; it’s also a nightmare. The space around Haring’s penises is filled not just with his usual wavy lines signaling motion or vibrating energy, but with drops of semen, which shoot out of cocks maybe a little like machine gun fire (though are those bullets or hearts?), and by gargantuan tadpoles of sperm, at least one of which has a single X for an eye, that stick-figure sign of death; a sign too, surely, of the viral load it bears. The human figures are ecstatic, bacchanalian, enraptured; they’re also, at least some of them, sacrificial, as agonized as any lost soul in Bosch; whether they’re suffering transfiguration or disfigurement, it’s hard to say. A work of joy, yes, and also a work of rage, at the fact of AIDS and at America’s criminal indifference in the face of it, which would ensure, which continues to ensure, the deaths of hundreds of thousands; and also, it has seemed to me, a work of terror in the face of desire itself, which both exalts and deforms us. As one stands in the little room they adorn, the initial shock Haring’s images may cause is replaced by a profound feeling of awe, of being face to face with something bottomless, overwhelming, infinite, something that at once dwarfs us and shows us the immense scale of ourselves. Many gay men I know call the bathroom at the LGBT Center our Sistine Chapel, and that seems to me pretty much right, both in the company it claims for Haring’s genius and in the sense of the sacred I feel there. The terror Haring’s mural captures is a religious terror, I think, its joy a religious joy, by which I mean that they respond to forces that exhaust our reason and master our will.

Over more than three decades and thirteen books of poems, Carl Phillips has been conducting an inquiry into intimacy, especially sexual intimacy, that is as daring, as wild, and as reverent—as unflinching—as the inquiry I read in Haring’s mural. Central to this inquiry has been an analogy drawn repeatedly between what one might call marginalized sexual practices, especially cruising and gay male promiscuity, but also sadomasochism, and religious devotion. This analogy is made in several ways, at least three of which are evident in a famous early poem, “Hymn,” from Pastoral, Phillips’s fourth book. The first mode of analogy is the drawing of what we might call imagistic likenesses, which I think we see in...