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My Radical Dads
- University of Wisconsin Press
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161 David Groff Yeah, Walt Whit man. Yeah, W. H. Auden. Yeah, Frank O’Hara. Yeah: great grand daddy, grand daddy, daddy, along with a bunch of other sperm do nors gay and straight. But as a queer poet, I think my true daddy is Bette Mid ler. I con fess that my knowl edge of the Mid ler oeuvre is highly in com plete, and that her voice can make my skin crawl— though not as much as Barbra’s. My diva gene is, sadly, re ces sive. But Bette en com passes for me two of the three per so nas of the queer sen sibil ity, as sum ing that there is such a thing as queer sen sibil ity. (As critic Jeff Wein stein once said, “There is no such thing as a gay sen sibil ity, and yes, it has an enor mous im pact on the arts.”) In our cul ture as in our lives, there is the Bette of So phie Tucker jokes—bawdy, ironic, take no pris on ers, sub ver sive, trans gres sive. There is also the Bette who is CC Bloom in the movie Beaches, all em bod ied pas sion, syrup, and need—the woman who bleats about the wind be neath her wings. Now, blend the DNA of So phie and CC with that of the cu ra tor of the West ern cul ture mu seum—say, Ca vafy but with out all that sexy nos tal gia—who winces del i cately at men tions of bod ily func tions like sex, but whose bow tie spins when he be holds great art. Now you have the triune god of gay ness—and gay poetry, or so I al ways thought. My Rad i cal Dads David Groff 162 As a poet I have long wres tled with my mad moth ers So phie Tucker and CC Bloom, as well as that crys tal line, im pec cable if in fer tile dad-curator. The great gay poets loom and lower, too. I have been bom basted by Whit man, got ten my face ground into the grit by James Merrill’s Wee jun, coughed as Auden puffed his dis mis sive cig ar ette my way, felt the spit tle of gro pey Allen Gins berg, been dissed at the gal lery open ing by the pas sion ately droll Frank O’Hara, found my self teased and tongue-tied by Ash bery at din ner, and judged my self un worthy to lick Thom Gunn’s boots. My dad dies all de mand dif fer ent, contra dic tory du ties. If my heart be longs to daddy, which one? Even though I had done the MFA thing, I came of age not in the poetry scene but in the New York book-publishing world. Ex cept for re mote fig ures like Whit man and Auden, I wasn’t read ing that many gay poets—or rather, I wasn’t ed u cated to read them as par tic u larly gay. In grad school, one straight pro fes sor avowed that Whit man died a vir gin—that his men were meta phors of yearn ing, his car nal ity thwarted, theo ret i cal. Only later, as I loi tered look ing for sex on the same down town New York streets that Whit man wan dered, did I re al ize that here was a man who had done a lot of hands-on re search. Like me, he even kept lists of his tricks. As for any pa ter nal fairy dust waft ing onto me from en coun ter ing real live gay poets in New York, I might as well have been in Iowa. I never met Gins berg, Ash bery was a face on West 22nd Street, and Mer rill was the elfin and im pos sibly eru dite reader of poems at the 92nd Street Y. James Schuyler might as well have lived in Mar ra kech rather than in the Chel sea Hotel that I glimpsed from my bed room win dow. With the ex cep tion of straight male teach ers like Stan ley Plumly, Ste phen Berg, and Larry Levis, I was find ing most of my ex em plars gay and straight on the page—Auden, Wal lace Ste vens, Louis Simp son, Eliz a beth Bishop, and maybe a...