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On Episode 3, we’re going to hear and discuss the following:
Two iconic poems by gay poets named Frank: the first, “Homosexuality” by Frank O’Hara published in Poetry Magazine in 1970, a few years after his tragic death on Fire Island Pines; the second, “Queer” by Frank Bidart published in 2012.
Audre Lorde’s views on the transformative powers of language & action, given that Silence=Death (ala ACT UP’s insurgent sloan) vs. that of what Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility points to do as the co-occurrence rise of trans visibility and anti-trans violence. Is representation inevitable, necessary, enough? What if it’s a trap?
Shoutouts to James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room; Mattilda Sycamore Bernstein’s The Freezer Door, one of my favorite experimental memoirs; trans/nonbinary figures like Tiresias (mythological) and Public Universal Friend (historical as well as my namesake); Claudia Rankine’s Just Us: An American Conversation and much more.
Plus personal reflections on my resistance growing up to queer identity as an aesthetic category, even as my favorite writers were decidedly homosexual, full of unbridled-if-covert faggotry.
Homosexuality
by Frank O’Hara
So we are taking off our masks, are we, and keeping
our mouths shut? as if we’d been pierced by a glance!
The song of an old cow is not more full of judgment
than the vapors which escape one's soul when one is sick;
so I pull the shadows around me like a puff
and crinkle my eyes as if at the most exquisite moment
of a very long opera, and then we are off!
without reproach and without hope that our delicate feet
will touch the earth again, let alone “very soon.”
It is the law of my own voice I shall investigate.
I start like ice, my finger to my ear, my ear
to my heart, that proud cur at the garbage can
in the rain. It's wonderful to admire oneself
with complete candor, tallying up the merits of each
of the latrines. 14th Street is drunken and credulous,
53 rd tries to tremble but is too at rest. The good
love a park and the inept a railway station,
and there are the divine ones who drag themselves up
and down the lengthening shadow of an Abyssinian head
in the dust, trailing their long elegant heels of hot air
crying to confuse the brave “It’s a summer day,
and I want to be wanted more than anything else in the world.”
Queer
Frank Bidart
Lie to yourself about this and you will
forever lie about everything.
Everybody already knows everything
so you can
lie to them. That’s what they want.
But lie to yourself, what you will
lose is yourself. Then you
turn into them.
*
For each gay kid whose adolescence
was America in the forties or fifties
the primary, the crucial
scenario
forever is coming out—
or not. Or not. Or not. Or not. Or not.
*
Involuted velleities of self-erasure.
*
Quickly after my parents
died, I came out. Foundational narrative
designed to confer existence.
If I had managed to come out to my
mother, she would have blamed not
me, but herself.
The door through which you were shoved out
into the light
was self-loathing and terror.
*
Thank you, terror!
You learned early that adults' genteel
fantasies about human life
were not, for you, life. You think sex
is a knife
driven into you to teach you that.
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