The First Time I Met Frank O'Hara: Reading Gay American Writers

Frank O'Hara-whose acquaintance Whitaker made through his poetry, not in person-is just one of the gay, lesbian and homoerotic writers Whitaker (Assuming the Position: A Memoir of Hustling) pays homage to in this literary scrapbook of essays combining biography, accessible literary criticism and personal memoir. Each of the selected writers exhibits a gay sensibility, Whitaker writes, which he defines as "original and fresh...clever, scornful of laws, introspective, energetic, and sexy...with a degree of irony, and wit; and...almost always a background of melancholy." Of 19th-century writers who fulfill these criteria, Whitaker "broods on" Thoreau ("proto-gay"), Melville (who had a "powerfully homoerotic" imagination), Whitman, Dickinson and the flamboyant Fitz-Greene Halleck. The author groups Oscar Wilde into a section entitled "The Gay Century" (the 20th century), along with Gore Vidal, Andrew Holleran, James Baldwin and David Wojnarowicz. Poet Henri Cole and travel writer Tobias Schneebaum, a personal friend of Whitaker's, exemplify "The New Century," an era of assimilation for gays and lesbians. Whitaker infuses biographical information and literary analysis with his personal reminiscences in an effort to underscore the writers' relevance to readers seeking a kind of life-affirming guidance, or "techniques for becoming and being oneself." The author points to Thoreau's Walden, for example, as a paradigm for living a life free of cultural demands and expectations. "Man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone," writes Thoreau, and for Whittaker, this includes living a life free of "gambling" and "taking drugs for fun." Though his writing can be incongruously confessional ("I've been drawn to older men (some of them much older) since my teens") and vague ("Everyone in a gay culture strives to be unique in a particular, emphatic way"), Whitaker nevertheless offers a collection of literary observations and musings that may be refreshingly germane to both gay and straight readers who have "suffered the vicissitudes of difference."
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